Web does not exclude anyone. While most web 2.0 sites/services are targeting the young, BigscreenLive brings a special service for senior citizens.
UI challenge of creating an interface for seniors is big. We had a great time working with BigScreenLive team in developing it. For developers on the project, putting themselves in the user’s shoe was not easy. After all an apparently simple task might be challenging for seniors. The touch screen interface was also a new for the team. Pramati team had good learning on how to make software interface easy to use. The BigScreenLive team was great to work with on this very interesting project.
Another highlight of the project was use of Ruby on Rails. ROR came very handy in this case where the requirements were extremely loose. It helped us iterate very fast, quick to and fro, and sometimes bring changes in less than 3 days.
Pramati Technologies recently signed an OEM Agreement with NETGEAR, Inc. Under this agreement Dekoh Media Sharing Platform will be shipped with ReadyNAS product targeted at home consumers market. Home users who are experiencing explosive growth in their digital photo collection can buy ReadyNAS ($399 on Amazon now for 500GB) and they will get easy-to-use ReadNAS Photos, which is rebranded and customized Dekoh Photos.
Users can easily import, organize and transfer photos on their PC to their NAS storage for lifelong archival and also sharing with friends or family. Dekoh Photos will enable users to selectively share photos with who they want and no software installation is required for those who would see the pictures and they would be served directly out of NAS.
For those of you technical, who would like to know why Dekoh, here are a few key points:
Dekoh simplifies setup required to make NAS content accessible from outside internet, even when the NAS is behind firewall or DSL (no static IP address). Earlier, home users had to install additional open source software, obtain dynamic IP, open ports, etc.
Dekoh gives better user experience with its Ajax interface, which today’s web 2.0 users have come to expect. NAS by itself has limited CPU power and memory for sophisticated user tools.
More in my next posting on Dekoh architecture and how it can play a central role at digital homes where device-PC-Web should come together for better user experience.
More and more, hardware vendors are finding that Web 2.0 technologies can be a good way to improve the end user experience of their devices…read posting by Om Malik.
Web as a platform is an interesting topic for most people in the software industry. Marc Andreessen (Ning) recently made an attempt to classify this platform in his post The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet. In the follow up analysis posted by Josh on ReadWriteWeb Platforms on the Web are Platforms on a Platform, this classification and value of different platform levels is questioned. Before I state my views on this, let me capture Mark’s classification in a summary below:
L1 platform. Loosely coupled REST/SOAP based API integration. Example: Flickr API.
L2 platform. More deeper integration of developer’s application injecting into the platform UI. Example: Facebook API.
L3 platform. A runtime that hosts developer code. Example: Ning.
Marc’s argument that L3 platform are the best, is certainly questionable and Josh makes points in this line. While a scalable web platform with Social Networking API is a powerful one, expecting others to bring their users and user data to your hosted platform is not in the best interest of the company/group that wants to add those features to an existing site/application.
A better solution could be a add-on social networking platform with API which the company/group can co-host and integrate. They get to keep their users and user data and can achieve better integration.
This is like a “Web 2.0 Application Server” as shown in the picture below. Deployed alongside the current Web 1.0 website and can provide social networking features overlayed on top of it.
Would this be more acceptable to those currently on using web as a Web1.0 platform and would like to add social networking among their users (use web as a Web2.0 platform)?
Technorati Tags: Platforms, SAAS, Web Services, Web 2.0
Rajesh Setty has published my interview with him Behind the scenes – Dekoh; Interview with Vijay Pullur. I have talked about several topics like our history, why Dekoh?, how is it different from Adobe Apollo and Google gears, enterprise and SaaS ISV use cases for Dekoh etc. Thanks Rajesh for interviewing me and publishing it.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced at JavaOne a new product called JavaFX. In simple technical terms JavaFX is a easy to use scripting language for writing Swing and Java2D applications. Writing Swing based applications is considered complex by most developers and JavaFX should make it simpler.
With JavaFX coming up now there are more options for Java developers to write dsesktop-web integrated applications. Dekoh, supports writing desktop applications using web standards like JSP, Servlets, AJAX and Flash. JavaFX supports scripting for Swing UI.
Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is catching on very well. It is easy to appreciate the need to have an integrated desktop – web experience for all the good things such applications can bring.
However, in building RIA, two things from the web development experience become important:
Being cross-platform and not to exclude anyone (as the web does not do it)
Refactor and reuse what exists (skills, programming/deployment models, code-base, tools, and more)
With the kind of popularity enjoyed by Java and related open-source products makes us to think that Java-driven RIA may just be the best way to go. RIA platform like Dekoh combine many familiar technologies, products, API, making it easier for web developers to address desktop oppportunities with ease.
Those of you who will be at JavaOne in the next few days, are welcome to come and see Dekoh at Pramati Technologies booth #812 (right at the entrace, just after Intel).
Today we ended the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco with a great feeling.
For Dekoh this show was an important milestone, the unveiling of the product to the public for the first time. We reached a thousand downloads on just the first day.
The feedback and interactions with a wide cross-section of people was very useful and were happy about the positive reception the product received. People who dropped by our booth and saw the demo included bloggers, techies, university students, media people, analysts, critics, social networking fans and of course the co-exhibitors at the expo.
Ryan Stewart dropped in to check out our demo and we had the live UStream TV interview with Robert Scoble.
The size of the show was phenomenal. I don’t know the official count, but should be close to 10,000. Web 2.0 is thriving!
Dekoh is starting public alpha program to get feedback from larger community.
We are very excited to show to people at the Web2.0 Expo (San Francisco) starting tomorrow. If you are at the show, drop by at booth number 330 for a demo or discussion with us.
Here is a quick look at the applications we will be demoing.
Jay Fortner wrote this article Dekoh Challenges Apollo As Desktop/Web Platform on Read/Write web. One observation he made was “…makes it hard to describe what Dekoh is in a sentence”. He is probably right to some extent because Dekoh offers several different things, at a first glance it appears it is doing too many things. That got me thinking about how Dekoh evolved…..Here is the story.
In middle of 2005, few of us at Pramati were discussing about development skills needed for desktop applications development and web applications development. We started to think why should it be so different? How about creating something to merge the two. Chandru played a prank, he created a one-page brochure (pdf) of a product called “Butterfly” that did everything we were thinking and sent it the next day to Jay (CEO). That was the first seed of Dekoh. We made a quick prototype (project codenamed Butterfly)….and story continues. Now coming to the point of one sentence description…
The problem statement we started with was a single sentence “Creating platform to provide seamless user experience for desktop and web applications”. This is stated in the press release. Now, trying to create the platform required bringing the best features of desktop and web together which people are used to, I have explained it in this post. When you try to create a platform, it needs to be beaten up by developers to put the right features in and make sure it is usable. We don’t have the luxury of existing developer base as Adobe, nor can we convince ebay to try our platform before it is popular. So we started eating our own dog food and started writing applications (like photos, music, books, calendar…). Another reason to write such elaborate applications rather than eye candy demos is to make it usable to end users. I am sure developers who adopt Dekoh will come up with smarter and cooler applications, but for initial users Dekoh applications are very compelling.
I made my first attempt at recording a video! The demo shows Dekoh photos application features. This is a AJAX application running on the desktop. Some highlights:
1. Tagging, commenting, sharing features come as part of the platform, it is not coded in the photos application. Dekoh portal API and widgets are used to get this functionality into the Photos application
2. The personal server running on the desktop is bound to local port. No one can connect to your desktop from anywhere directly, even if you had a public IP address, opened all ports or had another machine on the same subnet. So it is fully secure.
3. Front end is Javascript and AJAX. Backend is Servlet/JSP/Java. Application size is about 2mb to download and on disk after install about 4mb.
4. Tagging saves tags onto the picture IPTC/EXIF block. So if you upload the picture to Flickr, you can still see the tags.
5. Unlike a traditional web based application, you can see that Photos application has access to local filesystem (see import feature, tag/meta data editing).
6. Photos application runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. On IE, Firefox and Safari browsers. I heard there are some browser issues on Linux at this point.
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