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Showing posts from March, 2005

GIS & IT - Brothers in Arms

GIS (Geographic Information System) is a discipline which throws light on how the location component (Latitude, Longiude, Altitude) can be used in conjunction with IT (Information Technology) to make human lives easier. A misconception is that whenever we say CAD/CAM it's GIS. Actually it is not so!. GIS is a much broader field which uses CAD/CAM only as a basic level tool to provide solutions to nagging challenges in the areas of Environment, Agriculture, Telecommunications, Transportation and Logistics, Power, Water, Traffic Telematics & Navigation, Municipal & Government operations and many more. GIS can be used in busines of retailing to map a district and have an idea of the density of population for setting up a new retail outlet. It can be used by Transport companies for fleet tracking solutions (with the help of GPS). It can be used by the local government for making 3D city models and for further planning. Telecom companies use it for line of sight solutions, new

Microsoft's Competitive Strategy as I see it

Ten years ago, when Internet was booming, Netscape came up with the Netscape Navigator, Microsoft (MSFT) did too. Subsequently, MSFT killed Netscape by bundling its Internet explorer with its Windows O/S Licenses. History speaks, "The Anti-Trust Lawsuit that lasted for 10 years", which obviously hasn't harmed MSFT a bit, except for the fall in share prices for that period, a penalty to pay and a small change in the way it sold licenses. The major losers were the MSFT employees under the stock option plan, which MSFT managed to somehow mitigate, but the ultimate losers were the customers who did not have another choice for the net explorer as MSFT had succeeded in killing its rival Netscape. MSFT has been involved in a lot of such antitrust lawsuits and has a special cell to take care of such things, under its corporate governance structure. Today, 2005, when google is the search king, MSFT has now its own search engine MSN. And fortunately for MSFT, it is supposed to la

Just in for first day

This is the first time in my life that i am writing any kind of a log. I felt the necessity for the log to understand patterns if any...and also to use this as an archive platform.. I had been recently reading business world when i came across a few technology updates..which go as follows: First the Magic Ink from Magink (Manufacturing partner with Mitsubishi for Mitsubishi Sign), an Israel based company now in US has developed an ink (a blend of organic molecules) that produces a paste consisting of tiny structures resembling the DNA helix. Each helix is about one micron long and responds in a predictable way to signals from a control grid, when applied on plastic or glass substrate. Under white light, the helixes normally look red. But send a certain signal from a computer to a specific grid junction, and the helixes there change shape slightly and turn blue. Other signals produce green, yellow, or other hues. The screen can be repainted 70 times a second -- double the speed for fu