As promised here is the video of the talk (Must say I look terrible 
):
Social Media and Crime from SMC Mumbai on Vimeo.
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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Is iPad a game changer for e-books?
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Apple’s iPad which released a few days ago promises to change the way we read digital books. Armed with a 9.7” touch screen display, it certainly looks capable of doing so. In comparison, the e-ink powered readers, like Kindle, look like black and white silent films in a color talkie era. But will the iPad really deliver on its promise?
Well there is no easy answer to that. I think it falls somewhere between yes and no.
While a number of commentators and analysts have been raving about how the color screen is what e-books have been waiting for, I think they are missing the point that most of the books published are predominantly black and white. So having a color screen isn’t really going make that much of a difference for standard fiction and non-fiction books. It’s true that you are going to get fabulous 3-D page turns, page backgrounds and all that other jazz, but given a choice between charging a device after reading say a book or two (10 hours) to practically charging the device once or twice a month, I think I would prefer e-ink any day, more so if I was going to use the device only as an e-reader. (In spite of the perceived shortcomings of e-ink devices that the press keep raving about) .
What’s going to really matter is readability – meaning how long can you read off the screen before your eyes tell you it’s time to do something else. Having read extensively off LCD monitors in the past, I know how painful it can be to read for long on normal screens. E-ink on the other hand remains a pleasure to read from, and so far I have had very low eye fatigue. So what remains to be seen is if the iPad’s LED display will match up to e-ink in terms of readability. (more…)
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The Rise of the 419′ers
Saturday, January 30th, 2010I gave a short talk on the prevalence and propagation of 419 scams through social media at the Social Media Club meet yesterday. The talk also covered a few examples of about how the police were leveraging social media. The slides from the presentation are there below:
I know the slides don’t make much sense, so watch this space for the video for the event. I promise I’ll post that soon.
Also those of you that did make it to the event, please do feel free to comment and let me know what you liked or didn’t like about the talk.
Update – 24 February2010
Following a complaint by PhotoSadhu, I have modified the presentation to not include his photographs. I hope this satisfies him.
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My take on the iPad
Thursday, January 28th, 2010Apple displayed its “latest creation” at the much talked about “event” yesterday. The device dubbed iPad (wonder which genius came up with that name), is basically a very large iPhone, without the phone of course. The device sports a 9.7” display capable of displaying a resolution of 1024X768-pixels. It’s got most of the iPhone’s features like capacitive multitouch, accelerometer, compass, flash memory storage as well as a speaker and a microphone. It supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G (3G plans from Apple’s beloved AT&T). Under the hood, it runs on a new custom, 1 GHz processor (the A4) that Apple developed and has a rated battery life of 10 hours with a standby time of about a month. And the non 3G version starts at $500. So with that price point it seems like a sweet deal.
Here’s my take on the device – Appearances aren’t everything!! (more…)
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Buyer’s Remorse ? Nah :)
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-reader, which released yesterday, filled me with jaw dropping awe. It looked extremely sleek, with page turn buttons just where I wanted them and a cool LCD touchscreen panel. It also featured Android as the operating system and allowed you to lend books, play MP3’s, buy books using Wi-Fi and 3G 
. And it cost just $259.
I almost suffered a giant case of buyer’s remorse over my recently purchased Sony PRS-300. Then after a little while, reality set in and the rose tinted glasses dropped from my eyes. Looking at the features a bit objectively, I noticed the following:
- 3G doesn’t work internationally. Wi-Fi only works in B&N stores, none of which are in India.
- The lending feature sounds cool, but in order to use it you need friends with the same device. Something that I feel isn’t going to happen soon for me.
- The device’s second LCD is going to drain some battery power. But that is a minor concern I guess, as it is, even 10 days on a single charge is a lot.
- Biggest drawback, only supports ePub, eReader and PDF (or so the website says). What? No RTF, TXT, DOC ? A big fail in my opinion. Looks like B&N is only interested in having users of its device read DRM’d content on it. On a side note, I feel that the very model of E-book retail needs to change, but I’ll save that for another post.
- And since I don’t listen to audio books and would rather prefer a dedicated MP3 device instead of in-built MP3, MP3 support isn’t that big a deal.
- Ditto for the 2 GB storage and card expansion. Doubt I’ll ever use up 512 MB let alone the 2 GB storage.
- RSS support is apparently limited to what B&N wants you to read. No web support as of now. However, with Android as the OS, I’m sure this will change in the near future.
So all in all, I’m still all for my humble Sony PRS-300. As they say the best camera is the one you have with you when the action happens, similarly the best reader is the one you have currently. For me, I’m better off reading on the Sony Reader now than waiting till next year to get my hands on the Nook.
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Sony PRS-300 Review
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009Many years ago, I read an article about this new experimental technology called “e-ink” which could potentially change how we read E-Books. Then in 2004, Sony announced the LIBRIe, the first E-Ink based E-book reader. And, yes I wanted one. But alas, Sony only made it available in Japan and that too at the hefty price tag of about $350-$400. Years passed by and I kept waiting for an E-book reader that I could hold in the palm of my hand. Then sometime in 2007 I learnt of Sony’s Reader (the famous PRS series). Its price tag was as large, but by then after years of painful reading on the computer screen, the price really didn’t matter. So, I was curious; would Sony consider selling this in India?
With great expectations, I wrote to Sony, hoping that the Japanese corporation might deem it fit to sell me one. But no, Sony India was in no hurry do me any favors. And so the wait continued, and in the meantime I read books on Microsoft Reader, painfully sitting on a chair, chained to my computer, and wondering whether there was a better way of doing this.
Then one fine day Amazon announced their cute little Kindle (of course, its anything but little), and suddenly reading e-books turned fashionable. The always on wireless made getting E-books as simple as dialing for Pizza. Along with the Kindle, there was an explosion of E-book readers, from new offerings from Sony and iRex to newcomers like Foxit, InterRead etc. Suddenly, Readers were the new “IT” gadget of the season and the E-Book had arrived.
But, for some strange inexplicable reason, no company sold these in India. You could find one of these devices in the US, Canada, Europe, South-East Asia, Japan, China, even Australia. But when it came to India, the land of Nobel Laureates, Booker prize winners, and a few hundred million readers, not one company even tried to hawk their wares in India. So, for a short period I gave up the very idea of ever buying one of these.
Then Sony announced its new line for 2009.Readers starting at $199? Sounded too good to be true. So, I tried to find a way to get one for myself. I hit a vein of good luck, when I learnt that one of my friends would be coming to India in October. He graciously agreed to pick up one for me, and after a long wait finally it arrived – my very own Sony Reader Pocket Edition or Sony PRS-300. (more…)
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Will books be Napsterized or iTuneized ?
Sunday, October 11th, 2009A recent article in the New York Times highlighted one of the major concerns of the fledging e-book industry – Piracy. The article looked at whether the publishing industry could learn from the music and movie industries ongoing fight against piracy and thereby avoid some of the pitfalls they might face when going digital. While I agree with the general idea put forward in the article, I don’t think that the publishing industry needs to worry about e-books becoming “Napsterized”. Rather, they should be more concerned about how soon can they “iTune-ize” the e-book industry.
(more…)
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Yipeee !! Got myself an e-book reader
Sunday, October 11th, 2009Just picked up my e-book reader from Primus yesterday. After much thought, I finally went for the Sony Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-300) over the Astak EzReader PocketPro, mainly because the PocketPro wasn’t widely available. The entire package, Sony Reader and charger (yes the device does not ship with a charger, default option is USB charging), cost me about Rs. 12000 (inclusive of taxes).
So far haven’t played around with it much, but will start soon. My first impressions:
- The 5″ screen is actually larger than I expected it to be. Though, 6″ would have been ideal, but Sony stopped making a non-touch 6″ model and discontinued ones were a bit difficult to find.
- The build quality is fabulous. The reader actually feels very solid and is fairly light.
- The page “turns”, that 1 second back-flash when turning pages, isn’t as irritating as I thought it would be. In fact, it’s barely noticeable.
- Lastly, the e-ink screen is excellent. It’s everything that I expected to be. The standard font though isn’t all that great, but I guess I can live with it.
I will post a detailed review a couple of days later, as well as post pictures of it. So keep watching this blog.
PS: Primus, thanks a lot for this buddy !!
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Sony launches Reader Daily Edition
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009Sony recently announced the launch of the Reader Pocket edition and the Reader Touch edition, which will go on sale at the end of the month for $199 and $299 respectively. Sony had also hinted that a wireless offering along the lines of the Kindle may be in the pipeline. Yesterday, Sony announced the release of a wireless device called Reader Daily Edition. The 7″ touch screen e-ink device is expected to go on sale in December. It features an AT&T 3G modem for free wireless access to Sony’s bookstore. This means that if you are in the US, you can potentially use the Sony Reader on the go as well.
In a previous post, I had speculated as to how Amazon could use its Kindle technology to become the world’s biggest library. Turns out that the idea isn’t so far fetched and the concept has been used by a company called Overdrive for quite some time. Now imagine being able to access books from the collections of public libraries and millions of out of print books all on one device, along with titles from your regular bookstores!! The new Sony Reader promises just that. Sony has already partnered with Google to get out of print books on it’s devices. In addition to this it has partnered with the New York Public Library and Overdrive, to get content from libraries onto the device. You can now “borrow” a book from a supported Library, read it for the check out period and then “return” the book using the Reader. And here comes the kicker, the service is free. Yes, you heard me right, free !! Of course, you do need a valid library card to access the books, but the possibilities are amazing. Add a $399 price tag to all of this and I think we have a winner from Sony.
I think with this new addition, Sony will definitely be something to watch out for in the e-book reader market.
PS: I’m waiting for the reviews of the Sony Reader Touch Edition. Might just get one
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Easy stock quotes using Ruby
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009Some time back, while working on a project for my Computational Finance course, I needed stock quotes for prominent firms from the BSE stock exchange. I needed data for the last five years, and manually copying the data from online sources was going to be very tiresome. While Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and other websites let you export search results for a data range into a CSV (comma separated values) file, doing this for 20 stocks was going be to a boring and repetitive task. Then I realized that for Yahoo Finance, by manipulating the URL pattern I could request the stock quote for any stock and for any date range. Once I realized this, it was a matter of writing a small program in Ruby to automate the entire task.
(more…)
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I'm Elroy Serrao, a technologist, photographer, and part time blogger from India.
I love to design web sites, program in php and rails in my free time and of course go trekking and clicking pictures in the great outdoors.
I'm from Mumbai, and am an alumnus of Mumbai University and NMIMS.