There are many unlit roads and curbs in Bangalore and other places. I have had lots of near-miss accidents while turning into a dark curb or alley. The reason for this is that the headlights on a car and bike don’t light the way in the direction of your turn. Let me explain with a diagram.
Image courtesy bmw.com
Given above is a diagram of traditional car headlights. The red cone represents my field of vision when I am about to turn and the green cone represents what I should be seeing. When I am turning right, I need to see what’s on my right, along with what is in front.
Given that we use a steering wheel in a car and handle bars on a bike, both motion based electromechanical systems which control indicators and speed, why not make that work for lights as well?
Well it turns out, only BMW comes with an optional feature for this, called adaptive headlights. I don’t know if it is patents that is holding back other companies from doing this, but like seatbelts, this needs to become essential for all vehicles on the road. Here are some thoughts around this:
1. It is important for a car/bike to let the person coming in front know that he/she is about to turn. We have indicators but when people drive on Dip lights, it’s hard to spot certain sleek looking indicators. One design improvment can be to automatically switch lights to the dim mode while turning or after switching on indicators. Serves two purposes: firstly, the person on the oppposite side can see the indicators, secondly, because of the DIM mode, drivers will natually slow down while taking sharp turns.
2. Another possible implication of having lights that spread to the side of turn is that you might blind the person coming on that road. The automatic dimming of the lights should stop that as well.
If any of this doesn’t make sense or if I have missed out on something, please let me know. Here is a video of the BMW adaptive lights in action. Isn’t this something that should be available by default?
Picking an effective domain name for your web product/service/company is currently at the top of on my list of the hardest things to do for a web startup. For a web startup, domain names can make or break a business. You don’t want a name like expertsexchange (figure this out). Here is a simple checklist for picking a good name:
Sit with 3 people at least, preferably from different backgrounds. They will tell you what a shortlisted name signifies to them. FlagTrue, the name of my company was picked by a biased set of Computer Science students, but we did it specifically to appeal to the computer science audience. I had a hard time explaining it to my mom.
Use a bulk name checker instead of trying a single one each time. It can get annoying and demotivating trying out individual names. GoDaddy has a Bulk Search option. Works well but doesn’t store stuff.
Every domain name you can think of will be taken. Domain squatters are the plague of this earth, but you cannot do anything. Don’t fret. Try combination of words or clever plays on words.
A good domain name is one which is short (preferably under 10 characters), sticky (meaning people will not easily forget it), unique in the line of business and something that conveys what the product is about. Keep a score board of all these attributes for each domain name you pick.
Do not use numbers or short forms. People won’t know whether the number is a number or characters. For ex: If I saw level3.com on the phone, the other person might think it is levelthree.com. If you are going with the name level3 then ensure you buy levelthree also and redirect it back to the original name.
Same goes for names in languages other than english. When we picked the name Samparkh, we aded the trailing ‘H’ but a lot were expecting the domain to just be Sampark. These minor cultural differences can send traffic to a totally different website. A classic example of this is to spell “Agarwal”.
Check if there are any premium names that squatters are selling for a good deal. It might be worth investing in a good domain name if it can mean better reach. Also, it’s better if you can negotiate something before your product/service/company launches and makes some noise.
Try to get a .COM as most people and browsers default to it. Del.icio.us with its quirky and confusing name was still a hit.
Once you decide on a name, disable auto transfer and buy it for 2 to 3 years. Most popular domain provider’s mails are borderline spam and you might miss important renewal mails. It is always good to add a reminder on your calendar about 10 days before the domain expires.
These are just suggestions. This template is what has helped me and many others pick a good name for their web business. Best of luck!
The advancement in robotics is breathtaking. Take a look at these two videos, the first one show a robot that flies like a bird.
This next video is what I have nightmares about. A humanoid robot that runs at 6 Kms per hour. Reminds me of the Terminator series.
Watch this TED talk where Robert Full explains robots that can climb walls, navigate underwater and practically tread any surface or obstacle. He also ends his talk by saying that we must conserve ecology to ensure these secrets from the biological world are not lost.
I ordered my first Android phone, the Google Nexus S about a 4 months ago. Part of my phone was paid for using the prize money I won for building our Augmented Reality Android application.
This is my first smart phone and I thought I should share my experiences around my phone.
Google Nexus S
I live in India, a country with an abundance of power outages in the name of load shedding and repair. A feature that I never thought I would use came to my rescue during these dark times. The Wifi hotspot tethering feature. With my 2G connection, on multiple occasions, I was able to connect my laptop to the internet to do some just in time work.
I also use Twitter a lot, so without question the Twitter android app has probably been my most used application. I was able to use applications like FourSquare, PicPlz etc to post pictures and to check for tips and tricks at a given location. My wife and I went to this place where I ordered a dish from a FourSquare tip and loved it.
I have also started fulltime on my own software venture. With my Android, I have been able to stay on top of all the important emails that I get. Helped me a lot when I was meeting investors and prospective customers; Blackberry wielding folk who prefer Email to texting or calls.
I cannot forget Google Maps, that has helped many a times when I was lost in the outskirts of Bangalore and Pune(A city which I knew nothing about, direction wise). I also downloaded an app to control PowerPoint slides which I used once. And thanks to that critical Rackspace app that I once used to restart a cloud server in distress. Special mention to Shazam and SoundHound that I use ever so often to identify those familiar sounding tunes I overhear.
Now with the new Ice Cream Sandwich launch, I am really excited about the reworked OS and can’t wait to get it on my phone.
Panacea was the first android application that I helped envision and build. The obnoxious sounding name stems from the fact that we were trying to solve a lot of problems using the application. The team comprised of Navneet, Manohar and Nikhil and I. Here is what the application does.
“Panace is an Augmented Reality application that uses real time face/image recognition technology, and provides for Contacts Management and HyperLocal communities inside an Enterprise.”
You can find the presentation about Panacea below, or find it on Slideshare here.
The core idea behind the product is that, inside a closed community, it should be really easy to exchange contact and schedule information. Just like how inside an enterprise there is a Global Address Book and also shared calendaring. Panacea extends that by associating a facial identity with each person in the closed community. I mention closed community a number of times, for even I cannot fathom the privacy implications such an application will have in the public domain. We used Face.com‘s face recognition technology to aid in Face Recognition and used OpenCV’s face detection algorithm by accessing their compiled libraries via JNI calls on the android platform.
Scenario 1: You meet a colleague in your organization or at your local community meet. You need exchange contact information. Now, instead of exchanging visiting cards, you could just switch on our app, point the camera at the person, wait till the algorithm recognizes the person, and then add the person’s contact information via a single click. Better explained by a video demo of the solution.
Like any pattern matching algorithm, face.com’s algorithm is also a trained algorithm. Better the sample set or the reference set, better the matching. To make the algorithm work consistently, we need to train the service by sending at least 7 to 8 different photos of the person and associate a unique identifier for that set. When a candidate input is presented, the image clicked via the camera on the phone is sent to face.com and we get back that unique identifier with a matched probability score. Now, this unique identifier could be anything from your corporate id or your twitter handle. The important thing is that there is a backend system which you can query using that unique identifier and retrieve contact details associated with that id.
There is a problem though – I cannot ask every person in the community to upload 10 mugshots to our system to be included in the training set. I would need a more scalable solution. We solved this problem by providing a training mode in the app itself.
Scenario 2: If you realized that one of your colleagues or friends isn’t registered on the service, you can switch on the app and switch to training mode. Start the training by pointing the camera to the person and associate the unique identifier for the person. You can then fill in the contact details yourself or fetch it from the centralized contacts store. Follow the progress bar in the training mode and wait for the training to complete. Once done, any user of the app can now add your recently added contact using the mechanism described in scenario 1. Adding a new user to the application & service is crowdsourced. Again, better explained with a Video demo.
Now that we had sort of envisioned this technology and its working, fleshed out some initial prototypes, we brainstormed about how this technology can be used to solve other problems. I was also in the market to buy a smart phone myself. I did some research and found out that smart phones in India, with Assisted GPS support, started at around Rs 12,000. But high resolution camera phones were selling as low as 6. Also, I was fascinated by the whole location service apps like FourSquare and Gowalla. It turned out that only 13% of all smart phones sold in the world were location aware. This means there was a big market for location based services for non GPS enabled smart phones. This is how we tried to crack this problem.
Scenario 3: You have a smart phone with an internet connection but no GPS. You want to use a location based service to get some deals on items, check into the place, or just give some feedback or tips for other travelers. Our application defines what we call as a PlaceMark, a unique image of some sort which is linked to a location in our service. To perform any of these functions, open our app, point to the place mark and wait for the location features to load up. You will now get a feed of past conversations, tips, tricks shared by people at that place. The owner of the location can also target people by providing them deals for checking in and giving a social recommendation of sorts. You can even use these as mechanisms to receive feedback, complaints or engage in a Q&A at a large conference. The possibilities are endless. The example video shows a distributed discussion happening on the wikileaks issue. You can join this discussion by using our app and start conversing. The app even sends notifications to your phone when new messages come in.
This was mostly what we came up with. There are plenty more things that can be done with this application, and this, or a similar technology, can be used to solve many other problems. We also want to take this product to the market and see what responses it receives. Feel free to leave comments.
