Here’s the latest from our deal ol’ Delhi Transport Corporation, or more correctly, the Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System Ltd.:

After going the digital way with on-board GPS, the DIMTS fellows have now gone a step further by creating an Online Bus Information System that will help Delhi citizens plan their bus journeys, effectively cutting the wait-time at bus-stops to a minimal.

Citizens can now track buses on Delhi roads in real time though DIMTS’ “Online Bus Information System”. Both AC and Non-AC buses plying on selected BRT routes and all the AC buses on different routes in Delhi can be tracked using this system. Rest assured, it won’t be long before the system is extended to ALL the routes & buses!

Click here to View the Estimated Time of Arrival of Buses on the Bus Stops

Click here to View Route-wise Expected Time of Arrival of Buses on Delhi Map (Google Map Integration!)

Click here to View the location of Buses on GIS Map of Delhi (Roll-over mouse on each stop. Green pointers are buses (incl registration numbers for ID)

This is awesome stuff..and an example for others!

More info can be found on the DIMTS website!

via audiencematters

A TNS global survey entitled Digital
World, Digital Life, probing online behaviours and perspectives shows
that, on average, people across the 16 countries surveyed are spending
close to a third (30%) of their leisure time online.

It appears we like our 30% digital time regardless of how much free
time we have.

Digital World, Digital Life found that respondents with
up to 2 hours leisure time each week day, spent the same proportion of
their leisure time online as respondents who had between 7 and 8 hours
of leisure time on a week day.  This means there is no direct link
between the amount of leisure time we have and how much of it we spend
online.

What are the top 5 activities that people undertake while online?
TNS asked people to identify a range of activities in the month before
they took the survey.

A total of 81% had used a search engine to find
information; 76% had looked up the news; 74% had used online banking;
65% had looked up the weather; and 63% had researched a product or
service before buying it. These activities are all inherently very
practical.

The highest ranking classic leisure activity – “watching a
video clip” – only came in at number 8, with half (51%) saying they had
done this in the past month. Another leisure activity – “listening to
an audio clip” – came in at number 10 (44%).

Arno Hummerston, Managing Director, TNS Global Interactive, said:
“If our leisure time is so precious, then why do we on average spend
almost a third of it using the internet? We believe it is because we
are making more efficient use of our valuable time, specifically by
using the internet – thereby allowing us to fit more into our lives.
Being online helps people fulfil certain tasks and activities quickly
and efficiently. By spending productive time online, we are actually
making more time for leisure. With more social and entertainment
activities available online, it is also easy to understand why our
lives are becoming more digital.”

Who and where are the most avid onliners in the world? Younger
people under 25, as might be expected, are seriously engaged with
online life. The under 25s surveyed in the report say they spend well
over a third (36%) of their time online. On average, Chinese
respondents under 25 spend half (50%) of their leisure time online.

If the world is to take its lead from Japan and Korea – countries
that are seen as being innovative and pioneering in the online world –
then we can expect to spend even more time online. In those countries,
respondents say they currently spend on average around two-fifths of
their leisure time online.

There are particular groups of people that are more avid users of
the internet than others. For example, across the 16 countries
surveyed:

students spend 39% of their time online.

US Housewives spend 38% of
their leisure time online while in the UK, this was even more pronounced
with almost half (47%) of housewives spending their leisure
time online.This might be explained by the rapid expansion of online
food shopping, particularly in the UK where online shopping expenditure
in general now tops £1 billion per month (Source: Mintel 2008).

The Digital World, Digital Life survey also underlined that mobile
handsets are frequently used to connect to the internet.

Worldwide, 1
in 10 respondents surveyed say they connect to the internet once a day
via mobile handsets. But Asia’s adoption trends imply significant
growth prospects. Among the Japanese and Chinese respondents to the
survey, for example, over a quarter of people access the internet over
mobile connections at this once-a-day frequency.

Courtesy: googlesystem blog

Google’s new experiment that lets you reorder and annotate search results is now live. Google SearchWiki should be available automatically if you are logged in to a Google account and it can be recognized by the visual clutter added to the search results.

Next to each result, you should see three new options: a way to promote a web page at the top of the results, an option to remove results from the page (they’re still visible at the bottom of the page) and a feature that lets you share public comments about a result. After promoting a result, Google shows some unnecessary information about the other people who promoted the result.

It’s important to remember that all the changes are saved to your Google account and they won’t affect the search results for everyone, at least not directly. If you want to see an aggregation of all promotions, demotions and comments, go to the bottom of the page and click on "See all notes for this SearchWiki". This is the real wiki built by Google and it’s easy to access by adding &swm=2 to the URL of a search results page: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google&swm=2.

Comments are not very useful, although you could find insights for some obscure queries. The absolute number of people who promoted a search result is not very useful either, especially when you’ll see big numbers like 314,159,265.

SearchWiki’s main idea is to give users the opportunity to manually customize the search results and make them more predictable. Since many people repeat common searches like [mail], [weather], [news] and Google’s results are constantly changing, it’s nice to pick your favorite results and display them at the top. If you can’t find a site you like, click on "Add a result" and manually add a page in the list of top results.

Good things about SearchWiki:

- you can now adjust Google’s results for your typical queries and save time when repeating the searches

- use Google instead of bookmarking web pages

- for unfamiliar queries, check the wiki to find a different ranking and potentially useful comments. Try to avoid the wiki for queries that are likely to be spammed.

Bad things about SearchWiki:

- visual clutter. The only way to remove the additional icons displayed next to each search result is to log out.

- your changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: [google.com] in addition to [google]). That means you can’t remove a web page or a domain from all search results

- comments are public and there’s no option to write private notes (Google removed the option to annotate results in Google Notebook)

- an obvious feature would be to get a permalink for your edited results, but Google doesn’t offer this yet

- there’s no option to toggle between your edited results and the standard results (you’ll have to log out)

- it’s difficult to reorder results, since the only action allowed is to place a web page at the top, after all the other promoted pages. If you promote the page again, it will become the first result.

Google has always used people’s clicks to improve the quality of search results, so the new options could influence the ranking algorithms in different ways. "At this time we aren’t using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future," said Marissa Mayer. "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they’d like to see their search results. You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control," suggested Cedric Dupont, product manager for SearchWiki and Google Knol.

BarCampDelhi5

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

BarCamp Delhi is proposed to be a camp where enthusiasts get together and discuss/ brain-storm/ share opinions/ information/ wisdom about anything. Be it Web Technologies, technology related trends, Mobiles, Hacking, Blogging, Vlogs, Social Media etc. that interests the people.

When?

11-12th October – Barcamp Delhi 5 has tentatively been decided to hold on these dates.

Where?
How to register & Volunteer?

* Click on BCD5Campers to register yourself.

* Barcamp is your event. Help this event by Volunteering in some or the other tasks: BCD5Volunteers

Proposed Talks/ Sessions

See the list of sessions planned and/or add your talks: BCD5Sessions
IIT Delhi

On the History of Barcamp, please read here.

In the midst of the Chrome Launch, Adage has this interesting viewpoint on Internet advertising and the implications that new browsers bring on to the table…

Latest Microsoft Browser Fuels Fear

IE8 Gives Web Surfers More Power to Block Ads and Cookies

By Beth Snyder Bulik
Published: August 28, 2008

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) — Microsoft’s newest bro

wser is still only in beta, but it already has the advertising world in a tizzy. Its “InPrivate” set of features on Internet Explorer 8 out this week has publishers, marketers and industry advocates worried that it could block their ability to distribute, track and even monetize what the Interactive Advertising Bureau values as a $21.2 billion-plus internet-ad industry.
But Microsoft Internet Explorer general manager Dean Hachamovitch advises to remain calm. “The point isn’t to block content or ads. The point is to put users in control of what they’re sharing,” he said, adding he has read and heard many misconceptions about what InPrivate can and cannot do.
Stealth surfing
For instance, the InPrivate Browsing feature — already slang-termed “porn mode” — only allows a user to hide single browsing session activities from “over the shoulder” viewers such as family members. It does not block ads from being served to the user or from advertisers counting views or clicks.
It works, and got its nickname, by letting users surf porn sites (or any other content, for that matter) without caching any content such as a list of URLs visited, cookies or other data. That could mean no cookies on your computer — as well as no cookies for future use by marketers or publishers, although only during selected InPrivate sessions.
However, it is the InPrivate Blocking feature that seems potentially more worrisome for advertisers. InPrivate Blocking acts to inform users about sites that consistently track and collect browsing histories. In fact, when a user opts into an InPrivate session, it will automatically block third-party content if it detects that the third party has “seen” the user more than 10 times. So, for instance, if the third party is advertising.com and it is serving ads across 10 sites a user has visited during an InPrivate session, it will begin to block advertising.com tracking codes and possibly content on the 11th website.
Cause for concern
Mike Zaneis, VP-public policy for the Internet Advertising Bureau, said while he is encouraged that InPrivate is never a default option on Internet Explorer — meaning that users have to manually opt in each time — he still has concerns.
“With IE’s market share, will so many people activate that so that it could affect the revenue side of the industry?” he asked. “Any content from anywhere that appears as third parties, whether advertising or stock tickers or news feeds, all appear as third parties, and in theory their content could be blocked.
“And if you’re blocking all third parties, you’re also going to block all analytic companies,” he said. “You’d be blocking the companies that do the auditing of ad delivery.” He’s particularly concerned about the potential disruption to the entire accounting system of internet advertising.
Mr. Hachamovitch concedes that IE 8 has no way of knowing if the content is an ad, a stock tracker or a newspaper column. It can only tell if it is third-party content. So that does mean that any content, say, ads, analytics and more, can be blocked. However, he repeated that the user must select InPrivate every time. And users can create “allow” and “block” lists, so-called whitelists and blacklists, to always allow content from trusted sources. Consumers can also subscribe to lists of acceptable content created by others.
Microsoft itself has tips for publishers and advertisers on how to get third-party content and ads seen. Publishers, for instance, can serve the ads directly from their site (making them first-party content) or they can make third-party content look like first-party content, he said.
Letting consumers decide
Ultimately, the point of InPrivate is not to block anything, but instead to give consumers control of the online information they chose to share, or not, Mr. Hachamovitch said. “In a world of well-informed consumers who expect choice, we all need to be thoughtful about how we conduct business,” he said. “To me, this really starts the conversation. IE8 Beta 2 starts us thinking about the expectations people should have about what they share and how.”
Of course, Microsoft is hardly anti-advertising, and in fact, depends on ad-servicing revenue from its own sites like MSN. In May 2007 it purchased for $5.9 billion aQuantive’s three businesses — Atlas, DrivePM and Avenue A — as a means to build out a massive ad platform, and it had pursued Yahoo in a bid to gain more display-ad leverage. Microsoft, moreover, is a longstanding member of the IAB.
“From the Microsoft perspective,” said a spokeswoman, “we’re right there with the rest of the crowd in that we think there is a lot of benefit in targeted ads. We just believe consumers have the right to know it’s happening and to opt in.”
JupiterResearch analyst Emily Riley said the industry upheaval may be moot soon enough anyway, as ad targeting has come under serious scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission. She said she believes the many different industry factions will come up with — by force or free will — guidelines and standards that are acceptable to consumers and regulators.
“In the short term, though, I can understand how it could be scary for advertisers, because ad targeting is so valuable,” she said.

                     Photonic Integrated Circuit.

Overview

Scientists have developed what they claim is a small scratch on a piece of glass, which could make the internet nearly 100 times faster and give users unlimited, error-free access anywhere in the world. Lead researcher at the University of Sydney Ben Eggleton while making the announcement said, initial testing of the technology showed it was possible to achieve Internet speeds 60 times faster than the current Telstra network. But if developed further, the circuit could reach speeds 100 times faster, he added.

What is ‘The Scratch’ all about?

“The scratched glass we have developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit. This circuit uses the ’scratch’ as a guide or a switching path for information – kind of like when trains are switched from one track to another – except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks…this means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity, we [now] use electronics for switching and that has been okay, but as we move toward a more tech-savvy future there is a demand for instant Web gratification,” Eggleton said.The University of Sydney has developed the scratch in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark and financial support from Australian Research Council.

How it works

The new device, called ‘scratch’, uses tiny scratches on a piece of glass to guide information along optical fibers rather than using electronics’ to do the same job.

Information travels through the internet coded through a series of light flashes which are generated by lasers.

These flashes are then converted into electrical signals which the computer uses to form what is seen on the screen. But there is only so much information the electrical components of a computer can deal with at any one time.

To get around this obstacle the researchers created a filtering device which uses tiny narrow lines to filter the light into 64 channels, delivering much more information in a way which doesn’t overload the electronics of the computer.

Scratch circuits would be installed where information is served from, such as on the computer of an internet service provider.

General view

According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University’s School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world. Eggleton said that up until now information has been moving at a slow rate, but optical fibers have a huge capacity to deliver more. The scientists have claimed that this ’small scratch on a piece of glass’ is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies “could revolutionize society…with this kind of computing power, future generations can collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,”

Conclusion.

The general opinion about the Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) is of a positive revolutionary turn in the world of internet. Networks that are potentially a hundred times faster than the already existing services without costing the consumer will positively change the face of the internet across the world.

. This ‘Scratch’ gives the world an opportunity to get a lot done in less then a second and can take business on the internet to sky rocketing levels, especially online marketing.

Resources

http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jul/10net.htm

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/HealthSci/A_scratch_to_make_net_100_times_faster/articleshow/

www.techworld.com.au/article/252361/photonic_switching_beckons_100x_internet_speeds

www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23995523-948,00.html

www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2411

kooladda.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/a-scratch-to-make-net-100-times-faster

Intel has completely revamped its initiative for the Indian youth, with the launch of Intel Youth Network (youth.intel.com)

Targeted at the tech-focused youth, the community focuses not only on technology, but also features information on exciting career options and some interesting on-site games to engage the audience. The youth Network is a one-stop shop for the youth to find interesting & relevant information, understand computing-related technologies, refer friends to win rewards, participate in exciting games & contests and  a lot more.

The network also offers an innovative web-based referral scheme, wherein members can pass on PC-sales leads that they may come across within their peer group/friends/family to GID’s (Genuine Intel Dealers) and earn exciting rewards upon closure! This in our opinion is one learn & earn program that is relevant, exciting and can be utilized with minimum fuss!

Bigger plans are afoot to make the website even more relevant & focused in the coming days.

Solutions|Digitas designed the new look and feel and worked with Intel in bringing in content partners. They also are managing the website and will be responsible for future updates, promotions et al. Solutions|Digitas’s involvement is not just limited to the online aspect of the program. They are also actively managing all on-ground promotions including those at colleges, malls & multiplexes.

You can join the network here!