Oh no! Web20 boom is over :(

By Vivek | March 18th, 2008 at 09:26 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Like a clockwork, one or the other media company claims every couple of months that Web20 boom is so over. It is a nice game everyone wants to be part of, so that whenever that really happens, the guy who called it up the last time will be declared a winner and you would hear the Yoohoo! I knew  it. I told you so. Didn’t you get my report?….yada yada yada. Latest in the series is Dow Jones/VentureWire, CNET and scores of other bloggers chiming in. Okay, so who is next in line to confirm the boom doom?

For more yada yada  bubble posts, you always have Google Blog Search. Click here for all the blog posts on this predication from last year.

According to me, Web20 is all about continuous improvement to the way we traverse the web. And to claim that the pace of improvement is going to falter is a very naive statement, when today we have the next billion Internet users in the increasingly globalized space ready to get their hands on the shiny apps Web20 delivers.

Who competes with BungeeConnect?

By Vivek Puri | March 16th, 2008 at 11:56 am ET     10 Comments »    

Couple of posts on BungeeLabs in the last 2 days that caught my attention. First by Techcrunch and the second by Venturebeat. Both the posts claim:

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. Actually not even anywhere near being correct. It’s like saying SAP competes with any Foobar ERP software development company. I am not saying the LongJump and Coghead aren’t great works of software development. But what they do and offer in no terms competes with BungeeConnect.

What BungeeConnect provides is an OOP based On-Demand Application Development Platform. BungeeConnet enables team based application development via it’s web-based IDE, and provides automatic scalability for your apps. In other words you dont really need to have your backend of web and app servers to take care off. There is lot more to BungeeConnect in terms of its OOP language BungeeLogic about which i will start writing in near future.

Now as to who might be actually competing with BungeeLabs. Well, Salesforce does compete in some terms with its Force.com venture. However the path to getting started and finally releasing an app with Force.com is so convoluted that you can do a PhD thesis on it. Anyway, for the actual application development in Force.com, you need to download a plugin(?) for Eclipse. Now this is something you dont have to do in BungeeConnect since they have a free to use and build web-based IDE.

Who else might be competing? Microsoft would be another good candidate with it’s Popfly venture. Having said that, Popfly competes mostly in concept but comes nowhere near the end-end feature set and integration offered by BungeeConnect. If there was a good integration of Popfly Concept + Visual Studio + SilverLight, that would have been the best competing product out there. However as things stand right now, it would be another 2 years before Microsoft reaches that spot.

Competition aside, Techcrunch claims that BungeeConnect is for “small-to-medium business market”. That is again not exactly true, since we are developing our social web application on BungeeConnect, and we dont think we are in the “small-to-medium business market”. In fact you can use BungeeConnect to develop apps for Facebook and other social platforms. As part of our PoC of BungeeConnect, we did an Facebook app in December. You can check it out at - http://apps.facebook.com/i-recommend

More on all the above soon.

As a side note, according to Venturebeat’s another post, iSkoot competes with Mig33. Again, i dont think that is a correct statement. iSkoot is a mobile VoIP company, while Mig33 is mobile chat+social networking company which also offer lower price point calling features that in technical terms can be similar to a calling card offering. iSkoot competing to with Fring, EQO, and Nimbuzz would be the correct statement.

Update 1: Heroku is a potential competitor for BungeeConnect. Heroku is RoR On-Demand enabler. Which means you get to deal with all the plus and minuses of RoR.

Amazon S3 encounters downtime

By Vivek Puri | February 15th, 2008 at 05:10 pm ET     7 Comments »    

As more and more startups, including us, start moving towards Amazon Webservices(S3+EC2), the service hit a snag today. Reading through the Amazon AWS forum for S3, the complete infrastructure has been now down for almost 3 hours for quite a few teams. Response from AWS team has been pretty fast(11 minutes after being first reported), but still in no way compensates for the downtime. Looks like AWS is joining the league of RIM.

Nice attempt NYT

By Vivek Puri | February 6th, 2008 at 08:58 pm ET         

I think this is the second article from New York Times in a month or so where they describe how painful the experience is for kids to get admission into schools in India. I wonder what can be the reason for this sudden interest from NYT in Indian education system. Can we get the real motivation for this article? Please I can bet the large number of Indian immigrants leaving US for the better life in India has rankled few somewhere who in turn want to use media and force the remaining back. More on screwed up immigration process and raw immigrant economics later.

Signup for upcoming Amazon SimpleDB now!

By Vivek | December 14th, 2007 at 09:24 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Quick post after quite a few days . Much expected and something that I hinted on before - Amazon SimpleDB is going to be out soon. According to the email I received, limited beta starts in the next few weeks. As for what the actual app will provide- “Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time.”

Can’t wait to get my hands on the service. Should work just perfectly with BungeeConnect.