Kindle, Mobile phone or what!!

Battle for the electronic reader has been going on for a while. The holy grail seems to be a book sized device that offers the same ease of page turning as book. Though Amazon's Kindle has been in the market for some time and there's a second version of it now out, nobody knows for sure if this is waht the readers at large need. Kindle offers additional advantage over a book in the sense that you can download a book anytime you want. It's like acrrying a library with you and picking one to read at any time. That's an advantage over a book. but not everybody is comfortable reading the electronic display however close to printed paper look like. Will electronic paper take over here! The verdict is not in yet. The yonger generation who grew up with electronic displays may look at it differenjtly. they may me far more willing to read a book in the electronic form.

Now with the Google service of making books available on mobiles, iPhone & Andropid phones for the time being, will that compete with Kindle like devices! Mush smaller displays here adds another disadvantage to the book reading on the mobile paradigm. But the comfort is unbeatable. It is available with you all the time. qwe are used to doing a lot of things with these little things. So would we like to read books on them too! Who knows!!

ASP, SaaS and Cloud Computing

Just before the dotcom bust many web businesses came up with this Application Service Provider model. Idea was to take the hassle of keeping the software updated out of the users hands and bring the advantage of use & pay to the end users. That looked like a pretty neat model. However there was quite a bit of resistance on the part of the end users about sending the corporate data onto somebody else's servers. Then came the bust and everybody forgot about it.

In the recent past, it made a come back as Software as a Service (SaaS) avatar. Selling points are the same, advantages/disadvantages are thye same in fact the complete model is the same. It's gaining currency alright. There are several examples already, some of them are quite successful too.

From there the next extension is a small step. What if just do everything on the cloud( the internet cloud) that we do on a PC ! It's something Google would love to do, the WinTel combine loses all the hold! Google has a infrastructure that can serve the model easily. Even Microsoft has visions of it. So is it coming? It definitely is. Questions are when will it become viable! How much of the computing will get done on the cloud versus the desktop/laptop!

It ceratinly feels natural, we already store a lot of things on the cloud and this will be truly convenient. All you need is a device that can provide you network access and a keyboard!(or some other input/gesture device and a display. The concern about data priovacy remains. Let's see how that unflods over time.