Entries from November 2007 ↓

The draft is complete, and the first round of editing is going on. And I can’t wait for it to get out!

I am working with Packt to publish my book on Mobile Web Integration. The book is for web developers who want to develop mobile web applications, and integrate them with messaging, voice, payment gateways and more. The book takes you from the basics of mobile browsers, the difficulties in dealing with the variety of screen sizes and browsers, guidelines and best practices for mobile web development, XHTML MP, Wireless CSS to building solutions that adapt the output according to the mobile device.

After you have a good grip on that, we move to messaging - SMS, MMS and the whole loops of sending and receiving messages. I also cover VoiceXML and building voice applications for mobile. There are dedicated chapters for mobile payment and mobile AJAX.

I feel the book will be a great help to any web developer wanting to port their current project to mobile, or starting a fresh mobile site.

I am looking forward to it!

Economic Times had a nice article on Seven ways to avoid the growth traps for startups. Ashok sent the article, and the article is adopted from Forbes.com, but it’s interesting read nonetheless.

Here are the traps:

1. Burning cash too fast, not having enough cash to sustain till the big sales come in
2. Mis-allocating capital on non revenue generating assets
3. Going on an acquisition spree
4. Forgetting rules of good customer service
5. Refusing to delegate authority
6. Relinquishing too much equity too soon
7. Founders pocketing a few perks before the time is right

If you are a startup, or are planning to start one, go ahead and read the full article!

If you are building a web application that allows people to store documents and files, you might want to just outsource the storage! It’s a headache to maintain storage on your own server when the number of users grow. You have to worry about not only the speed of download but also the bandwidth used on your server. So it is wiser to use a third party service to store the files.

And it’s the age of APIs! If the storage provider gives easy to use APIs to store and access files, what better than that!

ProgrammableWeb has a roundup of 10 Online Storage APIs. Pick the one that suits you!

Who’s Sandy? Sandy is your personal assistant! Uhh? You don’t have one? How about having one? For free?

Sandy is your virtual assistant. You send her emails and she will remember things for you and remind you when you ask her to. She will even do some research for you if you want.

It’s beautiful, I mean, the idea is superb! And the creators have done a good job of understanding text commands and organizing things to make sense of it. Sandy can remind you via email / SMS. The commands remind me of the iGTD plugin for QuickSilver, and they are easy to learn. Once you have started working with Sandy, you will really like her!

So get her, would you?

o3 is a FREE electronic publication distributed in PDF format. It focuses on the use of Free and Open Source (FOSS) software in Enterprise and Business environments. Now what’s special about o3 is that it even uses FOSS! The entire magazine is published using FOSS tools - Scribus, OpenOffice.org and Gimp. Yes, even the pictures and page layout is done using open source software.

o3’s content is good, techy and the publication is maturing well. I like their focus on a particular topic, giving a whole lot articles on the cover story. The current issue talks about publishing with open source tools. And they had superb coverage on setting up enterprise email infrastructure with encryption, webmail and even text to speech voicemail in the last issue!

Check it out!