Three Fields, Three Rings, Troika

Finally started playing with this stuff (especially now that my employer replaced my laptop that died with a widescreen T61 Thinkpad). And one thing worries me a bit: the emulator is a memory hog (or is it?). See the screenshot below. What do you think? Given that it’s Java technology we’re talking about, it’s of course expected. Still, this coming from Google, famous for its fanatical adherence to the “lean and mean” maxim - this makes one think.

Exactly a week later, Google released the SDK for developers! Read here. Tomorrow I’ll download it and start checking it out… To get your hands on the SDK as well, download it here: http://code.google.com/android/

And here we already can witness some resistance to Android - read the BBC article.

US Dollar is falling with no end in sight. Overseas the managers of sovereign funds are itching to diversify their assets into other than weak dollars (think China with its $1.4 trillion in reserves).  Financial powerhouses deliver us bad news every day, if not week. Oil is inching towards $100 barrier.  Are we becoming the Argentina of 21st century???

For those of you who are really impatient and want to go down Aptana/Eclipse road later, you can download InstantRails - as explained on the project’s website, “Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.”

For those of you who were wondering, the official website for Google’s Android project is: http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/index.html

Stumbled on this: http://www.mscapers.com. Question: will they be part of Google’s Android initiative or not? How will that play out?

You know me, I’m a habitual dabbler in various technologies - I’m always curious what’s out there and what it looks like. So I again downloaded Ruby on Rails (for detailed instructions, see http://www.rubyonrails.org). Then I thought, hmm, I want to use my Eclipse as the IDE. So I did some research - and again Aptana comes to the rescue. Install Aptana as a plugin, then set up RadRails - heck, just go here: (Aptana)+Rails+(Eclipse)

OK, finally the moment has arrived. Tomorrow (November 5, 2007) Google will announce the Android software package designed for mobile devices.  Read this article by the ubiquitous CNET: http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9810358-37.html

Now, what are implications? We all know them: Google is now competing against Microsoft, Apple, Symbian, and others in the realm of mobile devices OSes.  What makes Google’s case strong is not the open source-ness of its software package per se, but the very might of Google’s software platform.  Google already has entered the social networks fray by announcing OpenSocial initiative.  Now, the timing by Google is just perfect: release the software needed to run mobile phones and also provide the API for developers to write apps for social networks as well. By connecting the dots between social networks, mobile phones, and its ever improving search engine (never mind other products such as GMail, Blogger, Youtube) Google is to reap huge benefits from this synergy developing here.

It’ll be interesting to see how that affects, if at all, the business models of the nascent search engine start-ups such as Endeca, Powerset, Hakia, and others…