Microsoft, Yahoo and Google

The MS- Yahoo! deal finally came off! That makes Microsoft Bing the no 2 search engine. Apparently it has something like 15% of the market. between Yahoo! and Bing this share is expectyed to go up to 30% or better and start challenging Google who's sitting on more than 65% share.

With this one move Microsoft moves to number 2 position. Yahoo! gives up search business and saves on the R&D expenses. Yahoo woyuld server up ads on the Bing search results and have a sharing arrangement with MS. Look like it is quite win-win for both of them.

Is Google worried! Te gap is so large, if they maintain theinnovation periodically, they should be oki. But, for consumers it is good to have a number 2 challenging number one. The number one is likely to get complacent over time.

Android is Moving into Sub-laptop Space

When Android came out on a cell phone, it was quite a sensation. Within a couple of years now, it seems to be moving into these small formfactor laptops. Gartner reported from Computex 2009 in Taiwan that Android is set to move into this space certainly. Computex showed quite a few exaples of these products that used Android.

This space actually includes couple of types of products. The netbooks, 10 inch display with Atom on the inside kind of products that are primarily aimed at being a net aid. These products are actually PCs with scaled down performance, being the same Wintel combination. In fact lot of people are seeing these as truly affordable laptops.

The other product category in the same display format are called smartbooks as these use the processors used in smartphones and giving you similar net access on the small notebook format.Thees are predominantly ARM processor based.

Examples on both kind of platforms were seen on the show floor, coupled with the fact that Microsft is not going to port windows 7 onto ARM, there's enough incentive for Goole to fill that vacuum. Additionally ports to MIPs also were shown. Acer is even doing a x86 port of Android. So, what's going to stop Android! Let's watch and see, this is going to be interesting.

Embedded Center of Excellence!

I'll be embarking on teaching a course this coming semester starting end Jul/beginning Aug. I hope I am able to do a good job at it. More than anything else though I'd like to set up something that'll give students a practical orientation.

Setting up an embedded centre of excellence would be a nice thing to do. Bsides offering students the practical orientation, it'll also provide the institute opportunities at industrial collaborations. If things work out properly it can even be a collaboration center for off-shore projects too.

I am trying to intriduce some changes in the student projects this year. I'd like the faculty too to make their hand dirty and participate in the projects themselves too. Not only forces them too learn practical ideas, students too would like the leadership. Rigorous tresting is another thing I'd like to introduce so that software projects create products rather than yet another data acquisition system!