Technology

21 Feb

Three Low Tech Game Changing Products Transforming the World

Posted by jotibasi in Emerging Markets, Poverty, Technology, World Hunger

While waiting for a flight to Seattle at the San Francisco airport, I decided to a grab a cup of chai latte from a Peet's outlet.  All the sudden a lady behind me started complaining how the joint was not actually a Peet's establishment but an authorized joint which was selling Peet's coffee and how it "pisses her off".  While I just smiled back at her, I was very much tempted to show her the pictures of three low tech products I came across at the San Jose Tech Museum helping poor nations fight poverty and have their basic needs met so that she can realize that her little problem was nothing to what this world is facing.  While she didnt' get to see them, I still feel that they are worth sharing so that next time if something so trivial pisses us off, we can appreciate what we are blessed with.  Below are the 3 products:

Foot Irrigation Pump 

One of the biggest challenges farmers in the third world are facing is not being able to water their crops because the irrigation pumps are too expensive .  They use hand pumps to water their crops but the biggest limitation human arms have is that you can pump only for an hour or two.  That is causing a huge food shortage.   The solution: A foot pump which you can stand on and paddle.  (the top picture).  While this is not fully solving the problem but it is taking them much farther than what they used to in the past.  Farmers can now grow more and the cost of a foot pump is at par with a hand pump i.e. it is affordable.

Education via Radio

21 Feb

First Hard Disk

Posted by jotibasi in Technology

Next time when you decide to whine about your laptop or any other device just imagine what the life would have been if you had to carry around your laptop with a hard drive of this size and it had only 5MB space on it.  If you wish to see this in person, you will need to make a trip to Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

11 Jan

Location based advertising is ready for the mainstream

Posted by jotibasi in Technology

According to this post on eMartketer, " the number of mobile social network users will more than double between 2010 and 2015, and adoption of location-based services will rise with it" .

06 Jan

Why do I like Kinect so much?

Posted by jotibasi in Technology

Kinect is real and it is a real gift to the consumers from Microsoft.  I am sure every other blog and news media has covered how cool the technology is or what kind of other cool things you can do with it.  There has been never a doubt that Microsoft wants to own your living room and rule the world of connected devices, and Kinect is just one step further towards it.  But what I really like about Kinect is that it is actually closing the generation gap between the casual gamers and has turned Xbox into a gaming platform which an entire family can enjoy together.  For example, I ended up playing games such as Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports with my 3 year old niece, my friends who were visiting me from Canada as well as my mother who is enjoying her retirement.  And I can still play my regular Xbox games.  Now when was the last time that a gaming console allowed 3 generations to play together?  The nearest contender is Nintendo's Wii but imagine trusting a three year old with a Wii controller and a $2000 LCD TV :)  Esenntially, Kinect is creating the real stickiness with the gamers from all walks of life.    I hope to see some of my favorite games such as Angry Birds (which I have on my iPhone and is damn addictive) eventually coming on Kinect ;)

05 Jan

PhoneGap vs Native SDKs for Mobile App Development

Posted by jotibasi in Technology

Over the holidays, I have spent some time evaluating open source app development platform PhoneGap vs the native SDKs for iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. Below is the summary of my analysis:
What is PhoneGap?
PhoneGap is an open source framework for building cross-platform mobile applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  It is essentially a wrapper which can be leveraged to build cross platform applications from the same source code. 
Platforms Supported

  • Android
  • iPhone
  • Blackberry
  • Symbian
  • Palm

I am assuming that soon there might be support for new Windows Mobile platform as well.
Advantages of using PhoneGap

  • You can use the single codebase for your cross platform applications.
  • You can leverage the hardware specific features such as Geolocation, Vibration, Accelerometer, Contact Support and Sound.
  • Open Source community is actively contributing new modules which can potentially save you time and money.

Disadvantages of using PhoneGap