Flex Trainer

Contact me if you have any flex training requirement. Having realized the scarcity of good flex trainers in India, I have decided to be available as a trainer for a short period of time . Just to give a brief introduction of me; I have got more than seven years of experience in Flash platform. I have been developing Rich Internet Application (RIA) for large enterprises for quite sometime. Being one of the early adopters of Flex, I have extensive knowledge of training, mentoring and helping Java/.Net developers to pick up Flex. Apart from flex framework, I am also comfortable in Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, Cairngorm Microarchitecture, unit testing framework . I have also had the privilege to conduct numbers of in house flex training sessions for the organizations I have worked.

Note: I will be available for a limited period of time.

Mass migration from orkut towards facebook by the elite crowd of India?

I have joined facebook few days back after receiving tons of invites from my friends/contacts.I have noticed with all my surprise that lots of my friends have migrated to facebook from orkut.Alexa has already ranked facebook No.22 in India.By opening the APIs facebook has created a platform which empowers the developers to plugin features into facebook and get noticed by 30 million people connected to it.

Doug McCune has already added the flex based ShuffleBored app to facebook.

Here is a screenshot of my friends on shuffleBored:




Some facts about facebook:

General Growth
• More than 24 million active users
• More than 100,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
• An average of 3 percent weekly growth since Jan. 2007
• Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept. 2006
User Demographics
• Over 47,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities
User Engagement
• Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States*
• More than 40 billion page views per month in May 2007
• More than half of active users return daily
• People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily*
Applications
• No. 1 photo sharing application on the web*
• Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined*
• More than 1.8 billion photos on the site
• More than 6 million active user groups on the site
International Growth
• Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 2.5 million active users
• The U.K. is the third largest country with more than 1.4 million active users
• Remaining Top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Norway, Australia, South Africa, Lebanon, Egypt, Sweden and India
-Source

Jooce in India: strategic philanthropy

Before delving into a discussion on Jooce in Indian context, let us consider some of the available statistics on Indian internet users:

• Less than 5% of India’s populations are online
• Home PCs at 3.5 million out of a total of about 210 million homes
• “India has the fastest growing Internet user base in the Asia Pacific Region" -IDC report
  
• The Internet & Mobile Association of India predicts that internet users will grow from the current 39 million to a 100 million by 2007. A majority of these users will be accessing the Net from cyber cafes

I have traveled and stayed in almost all of the big cities in India and have noticed the ever increasing crowds of the cyber-nomads around the cyber cafes. Most of them are young generations addicted to social networking sites .Due to this increasing number of net users, internet service provider Sify’s iWay Cyber Cafe Chain already crossed the 3100 mark in India.

Jooce, a Paris based startup is targeting those cyber-nomads. They are coming up with a flash based webOS and sharing platform. Jooce has got that X factor in its user interface.

Jooce could be used as a private online desktop with public file sharing capabilities. It is a online space to keep, view, listen to – and instantly share files, photos, music and video with friends.

Considering the large number of cyber cafe users, I can see a bright future of Jooce in India



I can feel the pulse of their marketing strategy just looking at their blog. The proper term to describe the strategy would be ‘grass root level penetration’.

I could not resist myself from quoting jooce’s blog where they say,

“As we prepare to launch private beta it is worth reminding ourselves that potential applications for internet platforms are not always obvious to those of us in the western world who own several laptops, PDAs or PCs.”

So true!

“If a community believes a product is going to contribute to the education of the next generation and create a brighter future for them, they will find the money to pay for it,” said Dan Shine, Director of the 50×15 Initiative, speaking in the “Connecting the four billion” session. “If you spend time in any one of several developing countries, you soon start to appreciate that it is standing room only in cybercafes. There are huge market opportunities that are largely untapped.”

I agree on the above “strategic philanthropy”. I wish if we can come up with a product something like jooce in our own. I hope some day Indian MNCs will realize the potentiality of Indian market and work on it rather then focusing on outsourcing work only.

Good luck jooce!

Web 2.0 Entrepreneurship: business ethics and yaari.com

All this started few months back when I had started getting mails from my friends and contacts to join yaari.com, an India focus social networking site but I have never acted upon that. My inbox was getting flooded with mails from my contacts to join that site. Out of my surprise, I noticed that I was getting same mail again and again from the same contact. All these days it was limited to my contacts only. So it forced me to think that it came from my trusted contacts only. But when I received the same mails from two of the technical groups I belong, I could not resist myself from expressing my frustration out there and I came to know about a cheap tactics of generating traffics by the people behind yaari.com. One of the members of the group mentioned about the privacy policy of yaari.com. It says in its policy that the user will allow yaari.com to use his/her address book. It also forces the user to enter his/her gmail/yahoo id and password. It’s very frustrating to know the terms and condition of yaari.com mentioned in their privacy policy. Very few people read the terms and conditions while signing to any site and the after affect of it could be worst then just spamming the inbox. Websites like yaari.com and mushrooming web 2.0 sites are so desperate to increase the member base that they often forget the moral and ethical aspect of business. Some time they don’t even have a privacy policy in place. Personally I don’t provide my email address and password to any site which I don’t believe but instead of that I do get spam mails everyday.

I will just quote two frustrated members of that site from flex India group

Oh... Sorry Debabrata and FLEX_INDIA team, I am sorry I don’t know how to stop this spam. Can any please help me? Or else we need to complain yaari.com about this

I am really sorry for this kind of mail. But trust me, "yaari.com" is among bad sites which I was not aware of. I had just registered/subscribed my account into it, just to know what this site is all about. But it has somehow taken all the e-addresses from my address book, and sends such a mail request/spam mail to all my email address. I would have never forwarded such mails to professional forums/professional people. I am unsubscribing myself from yaari.com. It’s just that I am one among who got caught by them. And I replied for letting all the members know about these bad/banned site "yaari.com". And please be aware of such sites (which prove themselves to be like orkut.com) and not to subscribe to it!! I am sure there must be many like me who might have got stuck by this yaari.com. O please unsubscribe from it, before something unusual happens. It has just has stolen all the e-mail address from my contact list and forwarded such kind of mail to everyone.

After reading all these posts in the list I started digging on the site and the people behind the site. I came to know that the people behind this initiative are not any ordinary people but having a strong academic background. Some of them are Stanford alumni.I think we can expect some sort of business ethics from them.

What people say about this site?
I have seen number of posts around the blogsphere expressing the outrage and frustration against this site.

1.Aalap.com
2.Startupsquad.com

Flex 2 Contracts:Contractor/Freelancer Rates for Adobe Flex 2 developers in UK

I came to this site which looked at the demand for Adobe Flex 2 developers in UK with a comparison to their application Development category. They have presented a study of the contractor/freelancer rates which have been offered in IT jobs that required Flex 2 skill over the last 3 month to 23 August 2007 with a comparison to the same period last year.

Do you have any idea how much a Flex contractor earns in UK?? The average rate of a UK based flex developers is as high as £306!!

Let’s convert those digits in INR :)
----------------------------------------------------
Daily:306.00 GBP = 25,130.94 INR
Monthly:3910.00 GBP = 753,901.05 INR
Yearly:46930.00 GBP = 3,853,794.93 INR
-----------------------------------------------------
United Kingdom Pounds India Rupees
1 GBP = 82.1179 INR 1 INR = 0.0121776 GBP
-----------------------------------------------------

I don’t have any idea about the Indian rates. Let’s calculate it using the simple formula: yearly Rate = Years of Experience + 1.5 lac

That means a guy having 5 years of experience in IT industry will earn 6.5 Lacs per year.

Flex India google group

I am really happy to see the revolution flex 2.0 has brought to Rich Internet Development. I can see the revolution has touched Indian developer’s community too.

Just have a look to the above graph which depicts the number of messages posted in the flex India google group over the last few months. I have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of messages and members within a short span of six months. Currently there are 375 members and the numbers is increasing.I hope by the end of the year it will be more than 1500(may be more than that).

Thanks Manish for creating this nice group and the contributors of the group to make this a helpful one.

Orkut : This is how google captures the virgin space of your mind

Orkut celebrates 60 years of Indian Independence!!

Getting on the Flex Highway:Flex APAC Seminars

Some brilliant guys from adobe India, Prayank,Raghu ,Harish are doing a great job in evangelizing flex in India.If you missed it,check out the Flex APAC Seminars at code.google.

I liked the last presentation “Getting on the Flex Highway – How to get up to speed with Flex” by Raghu

If you are a flex newbie or like to start coding in flex then this presentation will definitely give you a good start.

Orkut: Popular Social Networking site is in trouble in India once again

The popular networking site orkut is again on the eye of media.This time Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena (BVS), the Shiv Sena's student wing ordered cyber cafes in Mumbai to block the site alleging it contained 'matter defamatory to Chhatrapati Shivaji and Sena chief Bal Thackeray' according to MUMBAI MIRROR ,a Mumbai based popular newspaper.

Orkut is the mySpace of young indian citizens.Young generation of india is getting addicted to Orkut.I remember Abdul,the flash guru of India, deleted his orkut profile twice.You can read his share of reason here.I had to delete my first profile for more or less same reason but I could not resist my temptation to keep in touch with my long lost buddies and created my profile once again. The time of my parents and mine are totally different.My father and grandfather had not much of mobility. They have spent most of their time in the same country/state/city. We have much more mobility than them. My friends are scattered all over the globe .Our life style has changed dramatically.We live in isolated flats unlike them. So the social networking is the manifestation of our inner desire to keep in touch and socializing.It solves a very basic requirment of todays generation.

Technology has got both its pros and cons.Social networking has got its both sides too. But I don’t think banning of such site shall solve the problem.Whenever technology brings something new to us,it will keep creating its impact in our society. We, the building block of this society are responsible for how to use the technology.

Urgent Flex Developer requirement at Kanbay !!

Urgent Flex Developer requirement at Kanbay (Capgemini)

There are some urgent open positions for Flex Developers at Kanbay (Capgemini) with onsite opportunity!

If you are interested please send me your resume to dzacharjee[at]kanbay.com or deb.flash[at].gmail.com.