Real time Video Over Web (VoW)

This is an interesting space which I was tracking since 2000. I wanted to blog about it but some how couldn't able to find that time to write it...The reason that now I am blogging is because of the T20 worldcup cricket match, which just concluded recently in UK. It may sound strange but there is a close relation between cricket & VoW!

I am going to write a little lengthy blog, so I am going to use my programing style to write it in Step by Step.

Step-1: CNET Tech Videos
As a passionate technologist, I watched most of the tech video clips in CNET. I particularly was interested in then my CEO Scott McNealy, Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, Larry Ellision and few others because of their great ability to articulate technology/products and some times their sense of humor.

Problem: Short video clips instead of full videos.

Step-2: YouTube
Like everyone, it created my video interest beyond high-tech. The 2 notable one's are the cricket match highlights + some tamil movie clipings. I still had the full video problem.

Step-3: Proliferation of video sites and blogs
This solved my problem of full videos. But my expectation has gone up and was looking for real time videos.

Step-4: Paid Services
I haven't watched live cricket matches more than 10 years or so and as the VoW evolved, I was kind of curious to explore it on the web...found a website to watch the 2007 cricket worldcup matches. I payed $75 and quality was not bad. Indian cricket team exited in the early rounds and I lost interest in continue to watch. But my family watched some matches.

The end result was my $2k Sony Vaio laptop hard disk crashed for good. I then realised the "heat problems" with VoW.

So, paid service + loss of Sony Vaio laptop = lose of interest in real time VoW(again).

Step-5: YouTube & Desktop
We have a decent workstation at home and recently it is experiencing the heat problem + automatic shutdown. The reason is too many YouTube videos + other static videos. I think this may also crash any time. The thermal issue again...

Step-6:T20 Worldcup Cricket Final
My family is in India. Its a Sunday AM. My former colleague mentioned about a FREE Live website to watch cricket in Facebook. So, I turn on the desktop and watched the complete match live w/ NO PROBLEM!

At the end of the match, I said VoW = WOW!

The reason for my high quality, un-interupted no buffering live match experience was because of a P2P open source software called "SopCast". This time there was no commercial company and no fancy products for this live cricket video. I was really surprised and very satisfied.

But, still the heat problem is there in the client side desktop. I can see the fast spinning of fan and I wouldn't watch this match live on my personal MacBook!

Summary:
As you can see, the reason for my interest was mostly as a consumer of video but of course some technical interest too. IMO, at least after watching the cricket match live w/ no problem, real time VoW is reality. Most of the key issues of network, streaming, presentation and storage is solved. Or at least it looks like it works reasonably well w/o major issues.

They key issue is the heat/thermal problem in the desktops & laptops that need to be solved.

What do you guys think about the real time VoW & issues?

"India: A Glimpse of Past & Present"

I came across a nice presentation about past & present of India. The author has done a nice job of putting together this presentation. I came across this presentation in B.V.J's LinkedIn profile.

Click here for the Google link and enjoy it. I am not sure who is the author of the presentation...It reminds me that don't forget to put your name & email id in the presentations.

Useful Spam

I don't delete spam with out looking at the subject/name, just to make sure that there is no false positive. Today I saw a real spam message in my personal email with the subject as-

"Never Give up your dreams of!"

and it forced to me read the message. The message is,

"Believing in the Future is not delivered to the moments of crisis. It is to head up and continue their struggle in search of better times. It is not ever quit!"

I spend a minute to think about it and this is a useful spam!

State of Economy

It was a very busy last few months for me and wanted to blog about few things...but never got time to write. I was reading a blog and came across:

"bad 2009 and a weak 2010 and maybe a better 2011".

I agree with the above statement. I remember all the talks about V, U shape recoveries after dot-com burst but it took 2001-2003(3 years) to recover it. That was just one sector crash. Now the complete economy is in toilet. The question is how long it will take? 3 years or 5 years or 10 years?

I am not an economist but I agree with the above statement- 3 years. IMO, it doesn't matter whether it's a single sector crash or multi-sector crash, recovery takes time and it's the same.

Why Twitter went down today?

Today(Feb11, 09) Twitter went down in the middle of a busy work day. This outage was for an hr or so...The important thing is that just yesterday there was a news about Twitter planning to charge companies to generate revenue. Then it went down because of an infrastructure issue. How bad is the time...

As I blogged about earlier, the problem is that lot's of these web applications are built on top of 90's client/server infrastructure. Those infrastructure products can only scale on LAN but not on WAN.

This is like driving BMW on a dirt road. It doesn't matter how good is your car, your journey is going to be bad. ..

To answer my question, i don't think this outage is due to Twitter application problem. They are smart guys and know how to build scalable applications. It's because of an infrastructure component which failed them.

Web 3.0 = 3i (Innovation In Infrastructure)

The times are tough and economy is in pretty bad shape. But it will come back strongly. It will take time. We have gone through it before. We have to make some adjustments. We can't just keep spending. We need to work hard. We have to focus on education. As our president says, it's not months for recovery and it may be years...before we see the light at the end of tunnel.

Just a reminder: dot com burst took 3 years for recovery. (2001-2003)

Every recession has brought out some new technologies/companies. I am sure this one won't be any difference...

In the high tech world, we saw the emergence of "Web 2.0" after the dot come burst. Now the web has become part of our life. It's even safe to say that web is the 4th thing (many)people needs to survive besides air, water and food.

So, the question is what are we going to see in the high tech world after this recession? IMO, we will see lot's of 3i. (Innovation in Infrastructure).

The majority of web systems are built using very old client/server technologies with so called 3 tier architectures. They are expensive, complex and hard to scale. The web2.0 folks are fixing this mess big time inside their infrastructure. Already there is a new wave in web architecture is going on... HTTP has become the de facto standard from browser to all the way back to data storage.

The question is how many of those great engineers are available? 10, 100 or 1000? So, how about the remaining 90% of IT shops to come to the Web20 style on-demand scale infrastructure? This gives opportunity to new companies to build great (simple,scalable,secure) web infrastructure products for the masses. We saw the emergence of infrastructure companies like Juniper Networks in the Web 1.0 and will see lots of it again in Web 3.0.

Again in my opinion, Web 3.0 is not about semantic web OR mobile web. Those are already here and is working. It's about 3i.

Happy New Year 2009

I wish you all a very happy new year- 2009.

Uday.