Source Bits BitSpace 2011 Issue 1

8/6/2019 Source Bits BitSpace 2011 Issue 1

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SourcebitsThe Leader In The World of Mobile Apps & Games


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evolution ofMobile phones

introducing theSourcebits Labs

8Social Media

sense & simplicity in

Managing Careers14

stop being aDesigner12


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Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of the successive generations and our belovedmobiles have come a long way in evolving to what they are now. Lets see how, due to

technological advancements and research, they have evolved through the times, especially in

the last 3 years.

MOBILE PHONESEVOLUTION OF


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Like space-ships, rockets, submarines and atomic bombs,

the mobile phone was also an invention originating from

war. RadioPhone was invented for communicating during

the second world war. Not too long after that, commerciali-

zation began, wherein Motorola took the first steps and and

came out with a consumer-centric 'mobile phone'. Ill call

this the talking anvil it was so big, you could possibly

use it in battle fields to kill soldiers.

Initially, there were two kinds of mobile networks one

comprised of users having their radio gear in cars and

trucks while the other has users carrying the talking anvil.

The talking anvil networks then slowly evolved to satellite

phones. As the network coverage wasnt so awesome back

then. There were giant phones, not as big as the talking

anvils , but more or less resembled a brick. Moreover, back

in those days, people needed something to protect them-

selves from wild animals so they started carrying the brick

phone. I still see some traffic cops carrying this phone, so Id

like to think that this is to scare you into coughing more

money. The universal Chai Paani mantra. The next genera-

tion of phones that came out varied significantly in shapes

and sizes. But mostly, quite a few of them were quite bulky.

There was a new war brewing, mainly between Nokia,

Motorola and Siemens. These phones all had an antenna kind

of thingamajig, sticking out from a corner. When this was

invented, mobiles started to penetrate all corners of the world.

The Candybar form factor started gaining popularity, which was

like smaller than the famous Nokia 1100. Pretty much every

Jack, John and their wives started owning a mobile phone. The

competition started to become fierce and other companies

added a whole lot of features to try and sell phones.

Then came along the Nokia era,

where when you said mobile

phone, it was assumed you

meant a Nokia phone. Nokiahad taken the mobile phone

OEMs by storm, Mobile phones

with color screens started being

manufactured while their

physical size started to reduce.

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Sony Ericsson came up with the Walkman series phones and

then Motorola came out with the Razr. Companies started to

come up with innovative designs. There was the flip phone

which could be folded in half. Slide phone which slides to reveal

the keyboard, there was the turn phone which you rotate to

show the keyboard.

Amidst all this competition, Steve Jobs at Apple

was brewing his own special cup of coffee. In

2007, to everyones surprise, Steve came along

and introduced a "widescreen iPod with touchcontrols"; a "revolutionary mobile phone"; and a

"breakthrough Internet communicator" device,

something we all know today as the original

iPhone.

No keys, minimal buttons and no hardware keyboard. The rest

of the industry simply ignored the release and kept creating

variations for the phone hardware. Everyone was ignoring the

developer offerings. Most of the mobile developers back then

were doing a lot of work and had to spend nights to reduce size

by 10 bytes to fit apps in memory. Not long after this, Google

too started with the Android project.The iPhone was a big

success along with Android. Although android had a lot of

issues with its software and mobile manufacturers initially,

other companies started to see that see that the mobiles are

evolving towards touch inputs and started to give Android the

backing it deserved.

Today, the phones being manufactured are minuscule in sizes.

Pretty soon we'll have credit card phones. Manufacturers

today have awesome developer base which means more

applications for users. Mobiles today have come a long way.

They show time, they schedule meetings, they play music,

they play movies, they drive F1's, they turn lights on. There is

almost nothing they can't do.

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Darshan


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SOURCEBITS LABS"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a

follower" - Steve Jobs

This quote above aptly summarizes the reason why companies

like Apple and Google have, and continue to dominate the

tech industry. In fact, innovation and creativity are the two

most essential ingredients for a company to continue walking

on its success path. At Sourcebits, we always believe in pushing

the envelope with our cutting-edge solutions. Our developers

have consistently churned out the best productsfor you. It was

thus obvious for us to come up with something which would

foster creativity in our company. In line with the same spirit, we

have decided to launch an initiative were calling Sourcebits

Labs. Sourcebits Labs would be our own playground to come

up with some really interesting projects and research works.

Confused? Lets get to know it better.

INTRODUCING THE

Sourcebits Labs provides you the opportunity, a platform if you

may, to come up with some brilliant and innovative projects,

big or small, which would be shared with the general public.

These projects can be anything like interesting games, Mobile

and Desktop Applications or even some scripts that can boost

productivity. You can use any language to develop your

projects. The only requirement is that your projects should be

So, what exactly is Sourcebits Labs?

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unique. We are not looking for another jQyery Slideshow or a

tic-tac-toe game. It should be something which is innovative

and fun to use or try. These Lab projects would be featured on

the Sourcebits website as well. This will allow users to try out

our new projects and technologies and give feedback on them.

We would then further develop our projects based on user

reviews. And if everything goes fine, some of these projects

might evolve as our major products!! We would also be includ-

ing a "Research" section in Labs. This section will feature

in-house research papers and tech articles of the highest

quality. We would be broadly focusing on the these research

areas Algorithms, Machine Learning, Image Processing,

Game Development, Cryptography, Programming principles &

methods and Information & Coding Theory. You can also come

up with new topics related to Theoretical and Applied Com-

puter Science.

The infrastructure for Sourcebits Labs is still under develop-

ment. However, we can give you a brief overview of how its

going to work. Every Lab Project begins with you! Submit your

innovative projects to us and then we will have some brainstorm-

ing sessions to polish it further. Moreover, youre always welcome

to share your ideas or give us any suggestions regarding Labs.

Your project would be then hosted on Labs page. Obviously, you

will get the credit for your project. Thereafter, users will give

feedback and ratings on your project. We would be regularly

monitoring the feedback for every Labs Project. Critically

acclaimed projects would be then be taken up for advanced

development. The same process would be followed for research

papers and tech articles.

Yes, it will be!!! We are looking forward to host some of the

most innovative projects and research papers on the web.

Moreover, Its an opportunity to showcase your creativity! So,

make the most of it! We would be launching Labs in early 2011.

You would soon be getting detailed information regarding

Labs in the coming months. So, take out your thinking caps

and awe us by your creativity!

How will it work?

But, will it be awesome?

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Adit Gupta


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Has someone ever poked you?

Do the letters RT in RT: The world is a stage make any sense?

Have you ever StumbleUpon a web page?

Do you Digg news content?

Have you ever been tagged?

Do you think you need a SecondLife?

Have you ever thought that this is a world of warcraft?

If you have scored above 3, you may continue

reading this article. If you score is below 3, you will

be severely penalized if you don't read this article!

For the uninitiated, Social Media can be described as a

social instrument of communication. Lets look into

some amazing facts:

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Social Media exhibits some or all of the following

characteristics:

Participation: being social means getting involvedthrough feedback and contributions in the form of

articles or opinions.

Openness: being open to feedback and participation

to all intersted participants. It can be in the form of

voting, comments an sharing information.

Conversation: It involves dialogue, two-way

conversation as opposed to one-way information

distribution used by TV, newspapers etc.

Community: allows like minded individuals to form

communities for effective communication.

Connectedness: makes use of links to various sites,

resources and people to drive further participation.

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The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on

Facebook.

Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.

Twitter started as a simple SMS-text service.

Oracles Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Epstein, was

headhunted for the position via his LinkedIn profile.

80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.

You would need to live for around 1,000 years to watch

all the videos currently on YouTube.

YouTube uses the same amount of bandwidth as theentire Internet used in 2000.

There are currently 133 million blogs listed on leading

blog directory Technorati.

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Now lets delve into the basic forms of social media. We

can group most social media content into one of the

following:

Social Networks: these allow users to build web pages

containing personalized information and connecting with

friends to share content and for communication. Eg:

Myspace, facebook

Blogs: these are online journals written by individuals

usually expressing their opinion on a subject. Eg: WordPress,

LiveJournal, Blogger

Wikis: these websites allow users to add content as well as

edit existing information. These pages usually act as a

community whiteboard. The most famous wiki is wikipedia.

PodCasts: users can access audio and video fi les through

subscription via services such as apple i tunes, nokia ovimusic.

Forums: these are specific areas of online discussions. The

discussions are usually around specific topics and

interests and each topic of discussion spawns a thread (a

complete discussion on a particular topic)

Content Communities: these organise and share specific

kinds of content anong users. The most popular forms of

content being photos ( flickr, deviantArt ), bookmarked

links(del.icio.us, StumbleUpon), videos ( youtube, vimeo )

MicroBlogging: this is a miniature form of blogging where

small amounts of content are distributed online or through

mobile phone network. Twitter is a major player in this field.

With such a vast variety of resources at hand, no one can

ever say My opinion doesn't count.! If you still think

otherwise, hop onto the social media band wagon.

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Aurindam


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As designers when working on a project,looking for inspiration we often end up hitting

the wall and then we are stuck for ideas withall possible creative resources exhausted.Thisusually happens when we get so fired up aboutcertain ideas we fail to look beyond them. Aftersitting and brooding over them for hours onend we find it difficult to let them go. We go

hunting for inspiration but then what normallywould have been a great concept had we

realized it earlier, we try to fit it into the bottleof ideas we already have collected and end upthrowing it away.The easiest way to overcome this creative boxwe end up stuck in, is to stop being a designer.As designers we tuned our minds to think and

being a

designer


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Julian Wright

13apply our ideas according to our ground foundation of basic

design concepts. We take an awesomely cool idea then realize

"No this wont work! the color won't match" or "The perspective

won't suit" or "The style will be different" etc etc. And before we

know we've hit the wall and often end up repeatedly banging

our heads against it trying to bring out those elusive ideas.

Now this is where we need to stop being a designer sit back and

look at it from a 'non designers' perspective stop thinking

according to those rules we have well engraved in our

cranium. Have a 'non-designer' look at your work and critique

it and give suggestions. You will be surprised at the ideas they

can give you, because they are not thinking like you are, they

are not designers.

Now we need to start applying those design principles to those

ideas which we as designers would have discarded because

they don't fit into the design concepts we have learned. Cut,

carve,chisel or blow torch those ideas and then most likely we

will find a way to bend the rules just enough to make them

work into the design. So the next time we have that infamous

wall to climb, rather than trying to climb over lets just stop

look around, We might just find an open window to jump

through.


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ENSE & SIMPLICITYIN MANAGING CAREERS

Do you identify yourself with oneof these 3 executives: X, amarketer with superlative skillsand work habits, has to dragherself to the office because theculture at her company is full ofbackbiting, favoritism, andcliques. Y, a graduate ofprestigious business school, is ontrack to become a partner in areputed firm but hates his job.

Each day he has to force himselfinto a suit and tie and paste on asmile as he exits the elevator. Z isa senior manager at a successful ITcompany that was recentlyacquired by a large corporation.

He is amazed by how quickly themagic of the small business hasbeen destroyed!

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Are you spending your time trying to get

good at what you are bad at instead of

getting better at what you are good at ?

What are you best at doing?

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difficulties youve overcome in

your career?

Which of your skills are youmost proud of?

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it ought to be your career by now !

What do you like to do the most?

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Dont say none.

What talents do you have thatyou havent developed?

Do you see a disconnection ? Yes

there is one and it is like a virus which

spreads in the given complex nature of

work environments, where focus is

fragmenting, loyalty is decreasing &debates have devolved in to bytes. How do

you perform at your best under those

circumstances?

Millions of workers toil fecklessly in the

wrong jobs. They dont want to cause

problemsor risk losing their positionsby

complaining, so they simply do what they aretold. I have seen and heard several people looking

for tips on how to make their work life better.

And, time and again, it begins with that they must

first find the intersection of three spheres: what you

like to do, what you do best, and what adds value to

you and the organization. So what does it call for ?

Try assessing it through a set of questions.

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5 What do others mostoften say are your

greatest strengths?

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Well, if you find an

answer to this question, it

might lead you to take a

course, read a book, or

work with a mentor or

coach.

you may not value them since

they seem easy to you.

Which skills do youneed to develop

in order to perform

your job?

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Do you love to work with

highly organized, analytic

types? Do creative types drive

you crazy? Make up your own

categories.

www.myersbriggs.org can

open up a pandora of personal-

ity types.

What sort of people

do you work

best/worst with?

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Could you find a way to

be doing that now?

What were you doing

when you were

happiest in your

work life?

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Can putting in additional effort

here can pay you off ?

What have you

gotten better at?

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...dont waste any more time

doing them .

What can you just not

get better at no matter

how hard you try?

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I'd like to delegate these to someone.

What do you most

dislike doing?

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...and what could keep you

from realizing those hopes?

Following ones passion, values

& personal strengths is the

foundation of ones successful

career development. The only

way to create this foundation is

to know yourself. You have 3

sources of information for

What are your most

cherished hopes for

your future work life?

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knowing yourself : you, colleagues, friends & family and

formal tools of assessment. To use yourself as an informa-

tion source, look deep within yourself to identify key

themes. The people who you work withare often excellent sources of infor-mation about your work interests,values & abilities. Pick five or six people who youknow well and ask them for a feedback about you. The

bigger challenge here is your Emotional Quotient.

Career development is a process of assessing where youare in your work life, deciding where you want to be and

then making changes necessary to get there. It is

something that you can definetly manage with sense &

simplicity. Summing up, developing your own careers

begins with self knowledge of ones passion, values &

strengths/skills. What you are reading is ways of

discovering your passion & interest. If you are thinkingabout it, then its just the beginning to exploring next

steps values & skills !

Anita Menon

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Source Bits BitSpace 2011 Issue 1