Smartphone Generation

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blackberry still has not learnt anything

 

The latest joke on the internet now is Blackberry Priv. Its a joke because it is one of the priciest phone using the free Android operating system. Even after their debacle, they still have not learnt anything about affordable devices, and have announced a price tag of USD 699 for their technologically inferior Priv devices.

The Martian - Second best movie of the year

 

Jurassic World is the first, obvi :-) .I got to finally watch this movie in 3D, and must say it tells a very realistic and believable story of Robinsonade on Mars. I guess it will be best enjoyed by scientists and engineers, people who solve technological problems every day, and even by anybody who has ever fixed a bike or plugged a leak. The director, Ridley Scott, has made movies across genres and timelines, but has been steadily delivering big budget duds, like Exodus and Prometheus. But in the Martian, he had decided to tell a simple story of engineering problem solving, and a man's resolve to survive.

First things first. Matt Damon, as the astronaut  stranded on Mars, nails it. He gets the best scenes and dialogues. And the supporting cast also does a good job. Matt's space cowboy role is much better written than Cooper from Interstellar, and the astronauts from Gravity. But thats mainly because he is still on solid ground (Mars) and has better equipment and state of mind. Instead of saving the world like Cooper, he is focussed on saving himself, wanting a little bit of spotlight on himself. He is also very logical and plans his actions without emotions getting in the way. While this means he approaches problems scientifically, I think it stops from his character development. And this is my biggest problem with the movie. During the entire 500 sols on the red planet, we never even once see/hear Mark Watney talk about his family, his friends, his hobbies..and what he misses the most on earth. 500 days alone without even a way to hear a human voice. It can mess things up. But Mark does not go crazy or suicidal. He works it out like a robot.

In Interstellar, decades have passed on earth after Cooper leaves and he is desperate to return to his kids. In Gravity, Stone wants to get back to her family and daughter. But Mark was no one close. Even in the end when Mark is safe on planet earth and is now teaching, he is seen alone, without a shot of his home or a partner, or what kind of music he likes. The only thing we get to take away from the movie about Mark's personal life, is that he prefers coffee. The book (which I am reading) tells us a lot more about Watney, that he grew up in Chicago, and likes beer, and that he is sick of potatoes. The movie does not describe his loneliness and isolation while being stranded 250 million miles away.

There are some spectacular shots of the Mars horizon in the movie, you gotta watch it in 3d. And the rescue sequence in the end is awesome. The ships are not overdone, they look functional and well designed. The equipment of the crew is what modern astronauts have. There is not too much jargon in the talk , on hindsight, this is unexpected. And there is almost equal coverage of the actions on earth and Hermes spacecraft to the scenes on Mars. But they could have done a little more, IMHO.

Gravity on Mars is only about one-third earth gravity (actually 68%). So it should have been visible on the planet. But the Mars visitors walk around like they do on Earth. Weird.

There is a huge time lag for electronic communication between earth and mars. Max 22 minutes. Even light,the fastest thing in the universe, would take 22 minutes to travel from earth to mars. But in the final rescue sequence, the crew at Houston is shown listening on the rescue in real time.

Mark does not fall sick, or injured during this 500 sol stay. After the injury from the debris, the staples himself shut, and there is no show of infection or side effects. Except for the passing out on the Mars Ascention Vehicle in the end, he is in excellent health ! Prolonged exposure to low gravity environments  should have shown effects on this health.

Mars is a low gravity planet very far from earth. Relativity tells us that time on Mars will be slower that of Earth time. What effect does this have on communication, and aging ? Nothing addressed.

But these are minor issues. The movie does justice to the book. Clearly the movie is about surviving odds. And solving problems. And team work. All in all, positivity. I am sure at least a few young minds will be inspired to take up astronomy as a career prospect after watching this movie.

Origin of the name "Google"

 

 

From time to time I read or hear stories of the origin of the search engine and company name "Google" that are incorrect, which prompts me to write this brief account, based on my understanding of the genesis of the name. The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine "BackRub," named for its analysis of the web's "back links." Larry's office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year.

Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word "googolplex," and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, "googol" (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as "google.com," which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name "google.com" for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).

'Recalc Or Die': 30 Years Later, Microsoft Excel 1.0 Vets Recount A Project That Defied The Odds

 

Mike Koss, Jabe Blumenthal, Doug Klunder and Jon DeVaan with Excel 1.0.

Microsoft has recently been making lots of apps for iOS and Android, despite the fact that those platforms are rivals to its own Windows operating system. But this is actually not a new phenomenon at the company.

Mike Koss runs Excel 1.0 on a 512K Mac this week.

Just ask Doug Klunder, the lead developer for Microsoft Excel 1.0, who quit his job after Bill Gates and other Microsoft leaders decided to shift the original Excel project from MS-DOS to the Apple Macintosh more than three decades ago.

Klunder ended up coming back to Microsoft and finishing the project, after an ill-fated stint as a farm worker in the lettuce fields of California. But even today, with Excel still going strong, he isn’t convinced Microsoft made the best choice.

“I’m still not entirely sure it was the right decision,” he said this week, laughing with his former Excel colleagues. “In some ways it worked out well, but it did put us years behind, because we shipped on the Mac and gave Lotus that much longer to consolidate on the PC platform. I still think we could have taken them on.”

Klunder was one of four members of the Excel 1.0 team who joined us to record a podcast (below) at the GeekWire offices this week, reflecting on the creation of one the most important products in Microsoft’s history.

Software developer Mike Koss, the unofficial historian of the original Excel team, brought an original 512K Mac running the first version of Excel on floppy disks, a “Recalc or Die” motorcycle jacket and shirt, technical documents and other memorabilia from the Excel 1.0 era — mementos of a landmark Microsoft product.

“Microsoft really bet its future on two programs at right about the same time: Excel and Windows,” Klunder said. “If both of them had failed, Microsoft wouldn’t be here today. Both of them succeeded. It really helped cement Microsoft’s role.”

This weekend, many of the original Excel team members are getting together to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the software’s release, along with others who have been involved in Excel over the years. (Members of the extended Excel family should email excelis30@outlook.com for info and to RSVP.)

Doug Klunder, then and now. He’s now a lawyer who does privacy work for the ACLU.

Thirty years later, their passion for the project still runs deep — as evidenced by Klunder sticking to his guns on the company’s Mac vs. DOS decision. It’s clear that one of the main reasons Excel beat out rivals such as Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc was the determination and ingenuity of the original team.

Of course, there were other factors, as well.

“It’s important to point out that largely it was a matter of ripping off really good ideas from other products,” said Jabe Blumenthal, who was Microsoft’s first program manager, working on the Excel team. But he quickly noted, “Doug will take exception to that because he did some really cool original stuff.”

Klunder said, “We certainly ripped some stuff off, but we also did some things that nobody else had done at the time and probably hasn’t done since — some of which are really insane, and some of which turn out to be pretty handy.”

Mike Koss, a member of the original Excel team, is now a software developer at Google. He has been an active member and organizer of Seattle’s startup community.

This is where “Recalc or Die” comes in. One of Excel’s features was “intelligent recalc,” created by Klunder, which gave Excel an advantage over Lotus 1-2-3 by being smart about the way it recalculated cells in a spreadsheet.

Rather than recalculating all the cells when one cell was changed, it selectively recalculated cells affected by the change — making the program more efficient and improving its performance on the limited hardware of early personal computers.

This feature was important enough that Bill Gates took a special interest in it. “Bill was very interested in the recalc problem,” Koss said. “I remember having meetings with him into Excel 2, Excel 3, where he was very interested in getting an optimal recalc and doing better.”

But the significance of the feature was also a risk, because Klunder was the only one who knew its secrets.

“Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California,” Blumenthal said, laughing with the group. “It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments.”

Jabe Blumenthal, Microsoft’s original program manager, is now focusing on climate and clean energy advocacy, including work with Bill Gates. He taught high school math and physics after leaving Microsoft.

Excel was a learning experience for everyone. Blumenthal, for example, recalled initially being skeptical about his colleague Steve Hazlerig’s idea to “print” a document to the screen as a way of checking the output before printing to paper. Blumenthal couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that. But he recognized that he could be wrong, and that Hazlerig had more experience with printing than he did. And so he let the feature live.

“I’m so, so glad that I don’t go down in history as the person who killed Print Preview,” he said.

Blumenthal pioneered the position of program manager at Microsoft, and the way he handled the Print Preview situation was characteristic of the best program managers, said Jon DeVaan, another Excel 1.0 team member, who would go on to become a high-ranking Microsoft Windows and Office engineering executive before leaving the company in 2013.

“The best program managers do what you just said,” DeVaan told Blumenthal during the conversation this week. “The people that struggle more in the job are the people that want to be in charge, and that doesn’t work out so well. The reality is, everybody is really passionate about what they do, and they want to have a voice in how things turn out. The best way to handle that is to allow the expression to happen, and come up with a good decision.”

Jon DeVaan went on to become a key Microsoft engineering executive for Office and then Windows, before leaving the company in 2013.

Among other tidbits, they shared the fact that the product almost didn’t end up being called Excel. “Odyssey” was the code name, and product names that were considered included “Master Plan” and “Mr. Spreadsheet,” before a professional naming firm came up with the final brand.

Many of the original Excel team members still use the program today — the RSVP sheet for this weekend’s party is an Excel Online document — and take pride in the software’s impact on the world.

“It’s been so much fun,” said DeVaan. “Everywhere in the world I’ve ever been, people know what Excel is, and can tell their stories about how it empowered them, and it’s just awesomely cool.”

“It’s not like there wouldn’t have been a dominant spreadsheet in the world had it not been Excel,” said Blumenthal. “It’s always important to start these things off by saying, the brilliant invention was the invention of VisiCalc. But it’s so cool that I got to participate in this thing at such a ridiculously young age with a whole bunch of really fun and inspiring people to work with. Every day I thank my lucky stars for having had that experience.”

“The world, I don’t think, looks any different than it would if we hadn’t done it, because somebody else would have done it,” he said. “But that’s OK. We got to participate in something incredibly fun.”

Nokia 1100 is Still the Biggest Selling Handset in the World

The world’s best selling phone is not the iPhone but something very old and not a smartphone at all? Remember the classic old Nokia 1100, the phone we all perhaps began with? While the iPhone 6 may have sold 71 million units in about three months, the numbers have nothing on the Nokia 1100.

 

The Nokia 1100 was an entry-level handset that came out in 2003. At the time it was perhaps the best thing to ever hit the mobile market. Lets consider this a 2003 post and talk of the specs that makes the phone a true badass. The handset does not come with two cameras, a curved screen or a snapdragon processor. What it does feature is a torch-light, a pair of no-slip grips, dust-proof case, monochrome graphic with, wait for it, 96 x 65 pixels, monophonic ringtones (36 pre-installed, 7 user-made), interchangeable covers, and an unbreakable will (we mean it).

This smooth handset can also store up to 50 contacts and 50 messages (25 sent, 25 received) and gives a whopping 400 hours standby time between charges. But the one thing that really tied this phone together was Snakes II and Space Impact – those 8-bit games that were played by 250 million people around the world.

We say 250 million because that’s how many units of the Nokia 1100 were sold by 2008, becoming not only the world’s best selling phone, but also the best selling consumer electronics device. There are many reasons behind why the 1100 was the craze at the time. For one thing, the phone was highly affordable at about $100 with all the features mentioned above, which were all that one needed at the time.

The phone was discontinued in 2008 because of the next wave of phones that were coming in, However, in 2009, the obsolete device became something of a collectors item as they were being sold for obscene amounts of money – say $32,000 a piece.

But if you thought you had seen the last of the Nokia 1100, think again. There are rumors that the classic handset might come back with a technological makeover. In March this year, the Nokia 1100 was seen in a GeekBench’s database and suggested that the 2016 Nokia 1100 will feature a quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT-6582 processor and will reportedly run on Android 5.0. However, this could all be an elaborate ruse by Nokia to use an old model since under the terms of its deal with Microsoft, Nokia cannot offer a new smartphone under the last quarter of 2016. It would be fun, though, to see what the 1100 would look like fitted with all the new toys today.

The long awaited death of Google plus

 

 

The buzz on the interwebs is that Google is in the process of shutting down its current social network Google Plus. This will be the newest addition to a quite a long list of Google Failures. But unlike previous cases of services shutdown, this time, no-one seems to be complaining. In fact, I would say people are delighted ! I certainly am.

When they were shutting down Google Reader, netizens put up protests and petitions to keep it alive.  But with Plus shutdown, people are actually happy.

I always had a loathing for any page on the internet where they asked for my date of birth and mother's maiden name. I understand they need this so I can recover my account, but can't they just let ME frame a question to which only I know the answer ? Anyway, social networks have scared me, because people end up putting their darkest secrets and precious moments there for anyone to see. And I liked the anonymity the internet provided me. I never joined Google plus, used to opt out on any service they needed my Google Plus profile. I never joined Facebook , for that matter. I am pretty happy being social in the real world where no one can poke me publicly or post things on my home wall. But Google's plus scared me. It was forced, unfriendly, and to put it simply, a cheap copy of Facebook.

The first thing they got wrong was to force people to use their real name on the network. It made sense to use real names for interaction, but other networks always provided the flexibility to change these. Then they forced Plus accounts for Youtube comments. But all their forced rules could not hide the fact that Plus did not have anything special about it. It was just like any other network.All this fanfare and then they developed something that in the end was quite ordinary.

So, I am now waiting for the the last nail on the coffin. Off to history for you, Google+. I just need a free service to check my e-mail, don't force me to create circles for that.

 

Here is a list of other Google failures.

 

Microsoft Thinks The Smartphone Is Over. It's Wrong

 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company would be scaling down its mobile phone hardware business. Nadella called the company’s dramatic course change a “restructuring.” He used phrases like “effective and focused” and “long-term reinvention and mobility.” But make no mistake: Today’s announcement (7,800 layoffs and a $7.6 billion write-off, mostly related to Microsoft’s phone business and its purchase of Nokia last year) is a letter of surrender.

The battle for smartphone supremacy is over. Actually, it’s been over for a while. It should surprise no one that the smartphone market is all but set in stone. Give Nadella some credit for seeing the writing on the wall, though to be fair it was basically written in huge letters and lit by floodlights.

Microsoft is hoping the age of the smartphone is over, and it's almost certainly wrong.

And give him yet more credit for working swiftly to bring the company’s most indispensable services, like Outlook and Word, to the devices people already use—devices like the iPhone, which now stands virtually alone at the top of the smartphone heap. As Samsung, HTC, and others have found, competing with the iPhone on its own turf is pointless; even if you make a phone as good, it won’t sell. Most people who want that sort of phone just buy iPhones. You can go big like the Galaxy Note 4, or you can go different like the Galaxy S6 Edge, but the default answer to the question, “which phone should I buy?” is the iPhone. It just keeps winning.

The rest of the world—and the dramatic majority of the market—has been completely overtaken by Android phones, which have somehow managed to get both cheaper and better, simultaneously and at ridiculous speeds. The Moto E is terrific, and it’s $129 unlocked. Companies most people have never heard of, like Alcatel, OnePlus, and Blu, make excellent phones almost anyone would like. Microsoft makes a few phones that are even cheaper, like the Lumia 520, which Microsoft has said before was the best-selling Windows product on the planet, period. But all you have to do is look at the chart of price and quality of Android devices, and you can’t help but think we’re weeks or months away from a kickass, $50 Android phone that no Lumia can hang with.

The Future of Surface

To be fair, Microsoft isn’t totally out of the phone game. Microsoft will probably make a Surface Phone, or something like it. Nadella even teases the idea in his memo, mentioning giving “Windows fans the flagship devices they’ll love.” And Surface, by all accounts, is still important to Microsoft. But whatever flagship device does come out of Redmond is almost certainly going to be something like Google’s Nexus program, made not to sell in any volume but to give developers something to build with. And, hopefully, to inspire just enough envy in its hardware partners that they build something awesome. Don’t expect huge marketing campaigns or gigantic global carrier rollouts. Microsoft wants its partners to build hardware that runs its software. That’s what it’s always wanted.

It’s different now, though, than it was with PCs in the ’90s. Android is free to use, it’s a technically and aesthetically excellent operating system, and it has unstoppable momentum around the world. The same partners Microsoft would need—HTC, Sony, Samsung, and LG—have until now showed almost zero interest in the platform, and this announcement doesn’t exactly make it sound like there’s been closed-door progress.

Even with the full force of Microsoft’s resources behind making a dent in the market so thoroughly sewn up by Android and iOS, Windows managed only low-single-digit smartphone market share. Now that it has so ruthlessly and completely stripped away those resources, how can it even pretend to compete?

It can’t, and soon enough, it won’t. That’s a huge problem for Microsoft, whose whole case for Windows 10 hinges on its ability to be a single platform across many devices—including, critically, devices that fit in your pocket. If no one builds Windows phones, and it now seems safe to say no one is going to, then that whole idea collapses.

What Nadella’s memo implies is that the smartphone war may be over, but Microsoft sees many more, equally disruptive revolutions upon us. The company is also focused on the Internet of Things, augmented reality, cloud processing, and virtual assistants. Those things are the future after phones, and Microsoft is positioning itself well in all of those places.

Unless, of course, your phone isn’t about to go away, but is instead about to become the centerpiece of everything—the remote for your lights and coffeepot, the engine for your virtual reality experiences, and the microphone in your pocket you use to talk to your assistant. That looks more and more like the future that’s just around the corner. And that’s a future without much room for Microsoft.

The Greatest Story Ever Told [Where It All Began]

 

 

Apollo 11 - 46th anniversary

 

Sadly, no one is talking about this.

 

 

 

Twelve of these astronauts walked on the Moon's surface, and six of those drove Lunar Roving Vehicles on the Moon. While three astronauts flew to the Moon twice, none of them landed on the Moon more than once. The nine Apollo missions to the Moon occurred between December 1968 and December 1972.

 

 

Forty six years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two people to walk on the Moon, and Armstrong snapped this iconic photo of Aldrin (and of himself, too—that tiny little astronaut reflected in the visor is Armstrong). But it wasn’t until today that Aldrin finally gave it the perfect caption.

 

 

Strange facts:

 

1.You would expect that when NASA asks you to be the first man to walk on the Moon that they would consider the possibility of things going wrong. Well for Neil Armstrong he couldn’t afford the life insurance policy for an astronaut. However, along with Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin he wasn’t alone. All three astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission decided to create a plan of their own to support their families if something bad was to happen. Before the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 when all three astronauts were in pre-launch quarantine, they signed hundred of autographs and sent them to a friend. If anything was to happen to the astronauts during their mission, the entrusted friend was to send the autographed memorabilia to each of the astronaut’s families. This way they could make some money by selling the signatures of the Apollo 11 crew.

Neil Armstrong can smell the moon dust after the first moonwalk. (Image credit: Buzz Aldrin/NASA)

2. One thing that surprised the astronauts who visited the Moon was the strong odour of the lunar dust which they were only able to smell when they got back inside the Lunar Module. While conducting experiments on the surface of the Moon the astronauts’ spacesuits gathered the moon dust in the creases of the suit, once the crew returned to the LM and removed their helmets the dust got everywhere even on their hands and faces (some astronauts even tasted it). After coming into contact with oxygen for the first time inside the Lunar Module, the four billion years old moon dust produced a pungent smell. As most of the astronauts had a military history they could compare the aroma to that of gun powder. Neil Armstrong described the dust’s scent as similar to to wet ashes in a fireplace. This distinct smell remains a mystery as moon dust and gun powder have no similar compounds and the exact explanation remains unknown.

Suit for a moonwalk (Image credit: NASA)

3. There’s no doubt that the people behind the Moon missions were smart and skilled. The kind of expertise required seems beyond our general understanding. The spacesuits that the astronauts wore in the Apollo 11 missions were made by little old ladies, a bit like the ones in the Shreddies advert. NASA approached the International Latex Corporation (ILC) to produce a suit alongside the aerospace company Hamilton Standard. However Hamilton Standard became wary of the ILC and designed their own suit which after being submitted to NASA was refused. Hamilton Standard blamed the ILC causing the fashion company to lose their contract.

However, that wasn’t the end of the International Latex Company as a few years later NASA advertised a competition for a new suit. A handful of retired ILC employees saw their chance and broke into their old offices, stealing back their original suit designs that had previously been overlooked. After a lot of hard work the employees submitted their design to NASA who were impressed. They choose the ILC’s suit as the competition winner and deciding that Hamilton Standard would provide the oxygen tanks for the suit which we can only imagine may have been a little awkward given their previously rocky relationship.

Since their success with the original space suit, the ILC has supplied NASA with numerous items for space exploration. Along with the new next generation Z-1 suit and the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) suit used on the International Space Station, the ILC also designed the airbags that enabled Spirit and Opportunity, the two Mars rovers, to land safely on the Martian surface.

4. As you can imagine, in the microgravity of space, there are a few things you would have great difficulty with. I’m not talking about things like typing with those thick gloves or attempting to get dressed when one sock wants to head left and the other is determined to go right. Well as you can imagine everything in microgravity floats and when I say everything I mean everything…therefore going to spend a penny in space is not easy.

Nowadays astronauts staying in the International Space Station have a specially designed toilet that they can seatbelt themselves onto whilst a suction device can aid them with any waste disposal. However during the Apollo 11 mission, the solution to this all natural issue hadn’t really been solved yet and one astronaut in particular spent the entire mission on tablets that stop diarrhoea just to combat the problem. Michael Collins said himself that ‘The drinking water was laced with hydrogen bubbles’ which produced “gross flatulence…resulting in a not so subtle and pervasive aroma which reminds me of a mixture of wet dog and marsh grass.” He wrote about this in his autobiography, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey (1974), and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the most pleasant memories of the crew’s trip to the moon as they were crammed together in the Command Module for three days.

5.When the Apollo 11’s Eagle Lunar Lander was separating from the CSM Colombia there was a loud pop, a bit like the noise of a champagne bottle being opened. This was because the cabin in the LM hadn’t been fully compressed before the separation. Some claim that this minor fault actually pushed the LM four miles off from where it was originally supposed to land.

Aldrin climbing down the ladder. He was careful not to close the hatch. (Image credit: Neil Armstrong/NASA)

6. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were heading out to explore the Moon they both had to remember not to fully close the door on the Landing Module behind them. The door was closed to prevent heat escaping from the cabin but not completely in case any the cabin  was somehow repressurised, which could make it difficult to get the door open. Aldrin and Armstrong joked about leaving the door open:

109:41:28 Aldrin: Okay. Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. (Long Pause) Making sure not to lock it on my way out.

109:41:53 Armstrong: (Laughs) A particularly good thought. (Fromhttp://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html )

Since then some websites have claimed there was no outside handle to get back in as the engineers back at NASA thought that the weight of a handle would affect the calculations of the descent so decided to leave the door without one! Well there was indeed a handle on the hatch complete with instructions!

This diagram of the LM’s landing leg indicates that it was designed to compress up to 32 inches on landing.  Apollo 11 landed more softly than expected. (Image credit: NASA)

7. We all know the famous first words of Neil Armstrong as he stepped foot onto the moon, ‘That’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.’ However Armstrong’s first step out onto the Moon wasn’t small at all, in fact Armstrong had landed the Lunar Module so gently that the shock absorbers hadn’t compressed. So his first step out onto the Moon was actually close to a four foot jump onto the lunar surface.

Aldrin and Armstrong raise the Stars and Stripes rather too close to the LM. (Image credit: NASA)

8. Whenever you ask children what the astronauts who visited the Moon have left behind, the first hand up in the room always mentions the American flag. However, the fate of that flag is quite sad as it was later knocked over when Armstrong and Aldrin launched the Lunar Module back into lunar orbit to join with Collins in the Command Module. After Aldrin hit the button to begin the launch he looked out the window and watched as the infamous flag was blasted away with the rest of the material left behind on the lunar surface.

9. As you can imagine, the first men to land on the Moon was a global event, everyone that could, would be watching. Due to this, NASA asked the astronauts on Apollo 11 not to engage in any religious activities that could offend, insult or isolate the rest of the world. However, Buzz Aldrin felt the opportunity was too great to let pass by. Therefore once Armstrong and Aldrin had landed safely on the Moon and were waiting to take their first steps, Aldrin radioed back to Earth asking anyone who was listening to reflect on that moment in history. Aldrin gave thanks for the opportunity and produced a small flask of wine and a piece of bread which he then consumed whilst reading from the Gospel of John. From that moment Buzz Aldrin then became the first and so far the only person to participate in the Christian ritual of Communion on the Moon. Neil Armstrong watched on in respect but never participated.

The front section of the LM’s interior. The banks of circuit breakers are to the left and right (Image credit: NASA)

10. After gathering some Moon samples, taking some pictures and raising the American flag, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned to the Lunar Module, only to realise that a switch on a crucial circuit breaker had broken. This particular broken switch left them without a way to ignite the engine, so they tried to sleep while the mission control team at NASA tried to find a way to repair it. Eventually Aldrin decided that enough was enough and jammed his pen into the mechanism creating a make-shift switch. Surprisingly enough this quick-fix worked and launched both Aldrin and Armstrong off the lunar surface.

The leaden hand of bureaucracy or a joke? (Image credit: US Government)

11. As the Apollo 11 team arrived safely on the Earth, the crew were brought to Hawaii. Despite being the three most famous men at the time, as they had just landed on the Moon safely and returned, they were still asked to fill out a customs and declarations form at security. As you can imagine, in the section asking “Departure From:”the Apollo 11 crew had to write “The Moon”.

Plutonium goes to Pluto (How Plutonium got us to Pluto)

 

 

Losing the Signal - The Blackberry Story

 

There's too much work at office nowadays, I don't get any time to catch up on my reading. But every now and then, there is buzz about some new book and you just have to read it.  A few weeks back there was a general buzz in the news about Blackberry, formerly Research In Motion. It seemed that Microsoft was keen on buying the dying company. And two Globe and Mail editors were about to publish a book about the rise and fall of Blackberry. Two online newspapers had published excerpts from the book, and they covered the general theory that it was Apple's iPhone that brought down Backberry's smartphone business. The excerpts read like one of those TV documentaries were scenes were re-enacted and interviews explained them in detail.

I had to read this book. And so I did. I got myself an pirated online .epub version of the book and read it over the weekend. It was indeed a good read, and here is what I learned.

 

1. The story of Blackberry is one of those untold or unheard of success stories of technology companies from the 1980s. Their story starts around the same time Microsoft and Apple started business, but never got the same kind of media spread. So they have been in business for 30 years, but they earned worldwide praise for their devices for only about 8 years, from 1999 to 2007, then they Blackberrys were the definition of a smartphone.
2. Mike Lazaridis (born Mihal), the founder and long serving co-CEO of the company, was an engineering genius. He used to fix broken things right from childhood, and helped out fixing stuff in his school, and this set the stage for his career in the emerging telecom industry. He was the son of immigrant parents from Istanbul, his family had limited means, and he did many odd jobs in his neighbourhood and school (selling self-made quiz buzzers at one point) before he found his calling in world of electronics and communication. He built his own oscilloscope ! When he started engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1979, they had one IBM 360 computer !Discouraged with the world of big business, he decided to be his own boss by starting a consulting company that designed computer solutions for local technology companies. He and his friend Doug Fregin dropped out of University weeks before the course completion and in an unintended nod to the many lessons they had yet to learn about running a business, Lazaridis and Fregin formally registered their new company under the name Research In Motion Ltd. on March 7, 1984.
3. At first, the company designed custom electronics for companies in Canada, and then they jumped onto the wireless communication industry designing & manufacturing pagers, the only cheapest way back then to transmit non-voice data. They worked with Ericsson to change the one-way paging system into two way, and then decided to do something about bringing e-mails to a hand held device. At the time, the only way to access e-mail was via a desktop or laptop computer. Palm was selling a wireless devices they called the Personal Digital Assistant, but it had no e-mail, only Contacts and Calendars could be shared. Mike Lazaridis himself used one, and wanted to bring these new technologies into their own range of offerings.
4. The name Blackberry was not coined by anybody at Research in Motion. Instead, they hired Lexicon Branding, a local company renowned for its gift of selecting memorable brand names, particularly for nerdy high-tech products like Intel's Pentium and Apple's powerbook. The codename for the new device was PocketLink, and most of RIM liked and wanted that name. Somebody at Lexicon had written soothing words on a whiteboard to throw around ideas for the new name, and the words included “summer vacation,” “melons,” and “strawberry”.Next to the name of the red fruit, one of the employees had scrawled “blackberry.” It was the 40th and last name considered for the new device and Laziridis liked it instantly.
5. The Blackberry was never intended for every user on the planet. At the time, network speeds barely allowed full HTML page browsing, and RIM wanted to sell their dedicated , encrypted e-mail services on the expensive phones to top executives who would appreciate the product. When other companies were designing multiple phone models for every demographic like age group, profession, language and country, RIM produced the same kind of phones with only a few differences between them. In 2001, they were struggling to meet sales demands for their phones, because no other manufacturer had any similar offerings. They had a plant in Waterloo in 2002 to make the phones, but they did not take the risk of opening more plants in other countries, specially third world countries. This was the main reason why their phones were priced high, and it is a mistake other companies did not make.
6. RIM had the technology to put a full HTML web browser on a phone for years, but US and Canada network operators prevented them from doing that, fearing it would clog up their network. Steve Jobs at Apple had full control of his company, and told AT &T that they would not be involved in the design of the Apple phone at any point at all, and that they would have to support full web browsing and multimedia on the network, even the licensing deals. AT & T had no choice but to take up the offer. This is the reason why the iPhone looked cooler when it came out, it boasted of all the features other companies were denied to put on their own phones.
7. RIM never considered Apple a threat, because while RIM was making sophisticated phones for the executives of the enterprise, Apple's phone was more like a multimedia device, and RIM predicted the new phones would clog up AT&T's network. It did. The network got so overloaded, people started complaining of dropped calls and slow internet. But what RIM did not predict was that the users didn't really care. Apple sold millions of phones in their first month alone,  more than the sales of RIM's Pearl in the last quarter. RIM took their time in responding with a touch device called the Blackberry Storm, but its touch-cum-press-down-screen proved to be a disaster, every one of the first phones had issues and had to be replaced. If RIM had designed a touch screen similar to that of the iPhone, things would have been different.
8. There were other issues as well. A few months before the iPhone launch, RIM was hit by a patent related lawsuit from NTP Inc, a shell company, which would reap millions off RIM's profits for years. RIM was in talks with Motorola for a takeover, but those talks fizzled because Motorola did not want to sell them their patents. Motorola went down, was bought by Google, and then sold to Lenovo. RIM also had a scandal regarding back-dated options for their stock.

 

However towards the final chapters of the book, what plays out is that the reason the company failed in the end is the same reason they had succeeded in the first place : exclusivity. RIM did not make phones for everyone, just the elite. They sold fewer phones than rivals all through history, but those were expensive phones for the enterprise worker. Sure they were built sturdily, had great battery life, and the unique keyboard and encrypted e-mail system, but these were custom made for those who needed it. Also, a big part of RIM's revenue came from loyalty, a Blackberry user had to buy the overpriced phone all right, but then they also needed to pay RIM a monthly usage fee to use the Blackberry network for secure e-mail. And this licensing fees comprised a big part of the companies revenue. Once a Blackberry user decided to ditch the service, that loyalty was lost. And so was the monthly fee. After the i-Phone, whenever the two CEOs had to discuss on the probable next steps they could take, the decision was always between maintaining Blackberry's exclusive and signature keyboard+service system and following Apple's lead of a large multitouch smartphone or licensing BBM to other vendors, and they chose exclusivity each time. This constant pattern of choosing the lesser of two evils eventually undid whole company.

All in all, it was a good read. Some really good investigative journalism, sounded too much like a documentary screenplay. But a great insight into the another part of the technology industry from the eighties.

The Rise and Fall of Nokia - My Tryst

 

 

Today I stumbled across these videos on youtube. They are about the meteoric rise and unexpected fall of mobile devices maker Nokia. I think the downward spiral of the Finnish company is now studied by marketting students in MBA courses, because here is an example of being the first in any industry or market simply does not guarantee everlasting success. In other words, becomming number one is easy. Retaining that position is the difficult part. Once this company was the leading telecommunication handset manufacturer in the world. It still is today, in a way, counting their number of feature phones or dumb phones as some pundits call it. But they lost the battle in the smartphone market, having theoretically  invented that market. Today the only devices where their brand name can be seen is on low end feature phones which do not run a complicated smartphone OS.

I have a personal tryst with this company. I have been (and still am) a Nokia fan. Because of their design. And because at one point I did get to work for Nokia. Well, not directly. I started my career in the IT industry in 2007 with a Accenture, the American IT outsourcing company. Accenture had a long-standing partnership with Nokia, and much of their Nokia projects where being run from the Indian city of Chennai. From 2007 to 2009 I was part of the team in India which designed and developed an all-under-one-umbrella CRM system for Nokia's numerous worldwide partners. It was my first project and the best learning platform I had. In 2008 I got the fairly early opportunity to travel to Nokia's headquarters in Finland to co-ordinate in the onsite-offshore teams. I travelled twice, and got to experience the notorious Finnish winter and the effect of the nordic sun (long days in summer). I travelled there a few months after Apple had launcher the first iphone. At that time, Nokia was world leader in terms of number of units sold, and they practically owned both the feature phone and smartphone markets. Apple's venture into the smartphone market with a single, expensively priced phone on an exclusive contract with a telecom network did not pose any challenge to Nokia. Instead, they took it as a joke.

Nokia immediately went into defensive and denial mode. In the company's internal networking forums, employees where actively discussing the unique features and coolness of the new iphone, and whether this posed any danger to Nokia. The company's technology leaders responded by announcing that the iphone was Apple's doom. In internal mails (which I no longer have a copy of) the company described in detail why the iphone could not replace Nokia. Apple had only a single model, priced ridiculously high on an exclusive contract, compared to the various hundreds of Nokia models. Apple wanted to sell the same phone to CEOs of companies and world leaders, and even to college students. Should CEOs have the same phones are students ? Nokia had various models customized for every type of user, and in every price range. The first iphone did not support multitasking, while Symbian coolly supported multitasking. Apple's desire to have the user's thumb for navigation on a small screen  was impractical, since a larger screen would mean a shorter battery life. While Nokia phones boasted of battery life of couple of days even for the high end models. And then there was the service network, Nokia had the world's best customer service network for their products. The project I was on at that point was developing new software to be used on this network globally. Apple had no such end customer support, nor global partner network.

The list goes on and on, every feature of the iphone was found by Nokia to have faults. The iphone, they predicted,  would only be used by the apple's user community, which was of course a minority. Anyone reading these internal mails would  be convinced that Nokia had many decades in them before they would lose their market share. My employer at that time was promised projects for many years and we were delighted to hear that ! During my second travel to Finland in 2009, Nokia had responded by releasing the ExpressMusic phone, which had a tilt-able touch-screen and full qwerty keyboard underneath running a newer version of symbian. It still did not have multi-touch, but scored high on all other points. Even as early as 2009, Nokia had prototype version of tablet computer and what they called mini-laptops lined up for launch. We came to know of this because we were asked to include these products in the CRM system we were developing.

I left the company in 2010, and moved onto other things, happy and confident that the CRM software we had developed would bring back the lost charm to Nokia. By 2011, the writing was clear on the wall. Worldwide sales of the company dropped, and Asian handset makers overtook Nokia in the smartphone market. The recession did not help either. Nokia had to layoff a majority of their employees, many people I had worked with during my project lost their jobs. I was really really hoping they would partner with Google and embrace Android as their new smartphone OS.  I even expected them to come up with a totally new Unix based OS. Meego was too late and did not count.  While Samsung and LG where shamelessly copying the iphone design for their devices, Nokia still decided to stay true to their European modular designs. They sold their symbian project to Accenture somewhere in 2009, and transferred many of that team. But Symbian was lightyears behind what iOS and Android could do. The developer community too waned, and programmers jumped onto the new OSs and started selling their apps on appmarkets. The only relief probably was that they where no the only phone company losing. RIM, the blackberry company folded first, and turned into a joke for the industry. At least Nokia could have learnt from other's mistakes. And when Stephen Elop decided to sell Nokia to his previous company Microsoft, that was the last nail on the coffin.

I guess without innovation, a technology company cannot survive for long. Nokia's failure to act on time and address competition was probably their biggest mistake. It is a lesson technology companies will brood over forever.

But for me, they still make the best hardware for phones. I have used their phones all my lift. Those handsets never woudl heat up during conversations, and were built to last. The N72 I had bought in 2007 served me faithfully for 8 years ! It had travelled with me to 7 countries and had weathered rain , sand and snow. I have used the sim cards of 5 work networks on it. The 3310 was my first cell phone. I was an expert on composing ring tone on that hone using the composer. I developerd the J2ME version of Sokoban for symbian during my college years to study the platform.My entire family use Nokia phones, even today.

So long, Nokia.

NOKIA - 150 years

 

NOKIA was founded on this date 150 years ago.

Sadly, even it's wikipedia page did not get any visitors for the occasion.

 

 

Well, they remembered it at their own offices:

 

From paper to phones to acquisition by Microsoft and its recent revival, the story of Nokia goes back 150 years to May 12, 1865 when Knut Fredrik Idestam secured the permit to set up his paper mill in southern Finland. Idestam's second mill was on the banks of the Nokianvirta river. Nokia derives its name from the river. After diversifying into rubber, cables and electronics Nokia entered the world, that it would later conquer, of mobile communications in 1968.

 

In 1979 Nokia and Salora got together to establish Mobira Oy, a radio telephone company. 1981 marked a new era for Nokia when the Nordic Mobile Telephone service was set up. It was the world's first international cellular network and Nokia launched its first car phone, Mobira Senator, in 1982.

150 years ago, on May 12, 1865, Nokia founder Knut Fredrik Idestam secured the permit to set up his paper mill in southern Finland.

The Mobira Talkman, a giant 'wireless' car phone was introduced in 1984. Much of the weight was attributed to its battery.

In 1987, Nokia phones shed some weight with the launch of its first handheld mobile phone - the Mobira Cityman. The Mobira Cityman 900 weighed 800 grams and cost about 4,560 euros (approximately Rs 267,200). The phone got the nickname "Gorba", as the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was famously pictured making a call from the phone.

When the GSM network was rolled out in 1991, Nokia released its first digital handheld GSM phone, the Nokia 1011. The world's first first GSM call was also made using a Nokia device.

Nokia followed up on the 1011 with the Nokia 101 phone in 1992. The phone came with an extendible aerial.

Launched by Nokia in 1994, the Nokia 2110 was the first phone to feature the Nokia Tune as a ringtone. The Nokia Tune is derived from Gran Vals, a classical guitar piece, composed by Francisco Tarrega in the 19th century. The Nokia 2100 series went to to be a big success. Nokia had expected to sell about 400,000 units, but 20 million phones were sold the world over.

The banana-shaped Nokia 8110 was launched in 1996. This slider-phone found a place in popular culture when it was featured in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix.

The 1997 Nokia 6110 was the first device to feature the addictive Snake game. The game is available on about 350 million mobile phones. The hot-selling 6110 also boasted of some other Nokia firsts: infra-red port and menu icons.

Launched in 1998, the Nokia 8810 was the first mobile phone without an external antenna. The slider form of the phone also added to its appeal. By 1998 Nokia was the world leader in mobile phones, a position it holds till date.

2002 was an year of innovation at Nokia. The Nokia 6650 launched was Nokia's first 3G phone launched that year.

Also released in 2002, the Nokia 7650 was the first Nokia phone with a built-in camera. The 7650 was also one of the first Nokia phones to have a colour display.

Another 2002 innovation at Nokia was the 3650. The Nokia 3650 was the first phone by Nokia to be able to record video.

Nokia launched its mobile-phone-cum-handheld-gaming-device N-Gage in 2003. In 2009 Nokia announced that it will stop development of N-Gage games and would discontinue the N-Gage service by the end of 2010.

Nokia launched its Nseries phones in 2005. These entertainment-cum-communication devices form Nokia's top line of offerings. The N70, N90 and N91 were the first of the series to be introduced.

In April 2010, Nokia announced the N8, it's new flagship phone. The phone was launched in October 2010.

Faced with dwindling sales and stiff competition from Android and iPhone, Nokia ditched its ageing Symbian platform in favour of Microsoft Windows Phone software. Nokia hoped that this move would help it reclaim the smartphone crown and bring back its mojo. The company announced its first Windows Phone devices, Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 at the Nokia World 2011 in London on October 26.

To further strengthen its hold on the feature phone segment and get an entry into the entry-level smartphone market Nokia introduced its Asha range of phones in 2011.

At the Mobile World Congress 2012, Nokia unveiled its Nokia 808 PureView smartphone with a 41 megapixel camera usinng a new camera technology. Though the phone was not a success, it laid the framework for cameras in future Nokia devices.

In July 2013, Nokia introduced a new smartphone, the Lumia 1020, with a powerful 41-megapixel camera (last seen in the PureView 808) in a bid to catch up with rivals Samsung and Apple.

On September 3, 2013 Microsoft and Nokia announced that Microsoft is buying Nokia's devices and services business, and getting access to the company's patents, for a total of 5.44 billion euros ($7.2 billion) in an effort to expand its share of the smartphone market. Microsoft will pay 3.79 billion euros ($5 billion) for the Nokia unit that makes mobile phones, including its line of Lumia smartphones that run Windows Phone software.

Foraying into the phablet market, Nokia announced the launch of its first 6-inch smartphones - the Lumia 1320 and Lumia 1520.

Nokia introduced its fist tablet - Lumia 2520 - in 2013.

Nokia announced its first-ever Android-based smartphones early this year. The first three phones in the family - the Nokia X, X and XL - run on the new Nokia X software platform, that is based on Google's Android. These phones were later discontinued.

Nokia, on April 25, completed the 5.44 billion-euro ($7.5 billion) sale of its troubled cellphone and services division to Microsoft, ending a chapter in the former world leading cellphone maker's history that began with paper making in 1865.

In November 2014, Microsoft released the Lumia 535, the first Lumia phone without Nokia branding.

In the same month as the Lumia 535 launch, Nokia announced its plans to bring its brand back to consumers with a new tablet - the Android-based Nokia N1.

Last month, Nokia confirmed the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent to build up its telecom equipment business to compete with market leader Ericsson.

And as we post this on the 150th anniversary of one of the biggest technology brands, there are numerous reports on the imminent sale of Nokia Oyj's map business, Here.