Buying and Selling Among Friends

Gone are the days when giving away your old stuff involved getting in the car and hauling bags to the local Salvation Army. Now, with a little Web know-how, you can find a number of ways to turn your trash into someone else’s treasure — from companies that send you prepaid shipping materials to people who will pick up the items from your house.

But even though you can use these services without leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site — one you wouldn’t necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren’t exactly online destinations.

Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of “friends.”

That’s right, I’m talking about Facebook. Tuesday, the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace, Facebook.com/marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause; Give it Away; and Ask for It.

Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set up with test accounts so that we could see one another’s fake Marketplace items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for sale when they’re just pretending, like one person who offered to sell everything on a colleague’s desk when he was out.)

Facebook’s original iteration of Marketplace started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs. The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.

It still lacks a built-in electronic payment system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause, the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a listing. But there’s no guarantee that the seller will actually do this. Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.

Every posted item can include a location, description, category, photo and an explanation of why it’s in the Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle’s fraud-detection program, which looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.

One example of Marketplace’s newly detailed organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific items including “Home & Garden,” “Baby & Kid Stuff,” “Tickets” and “Musical Instruments.” Items that don’t fit into these 12 categories are put into an “Everything Else” category.

Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook’s familiar format, like having its own online “wall” where questions and comments appear. If you’re looking for something in Marketplace by using the “Ask for It” option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item shows the seller’s profile photo, a link to all of the person’s listings and a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as “3 listings in the last month.”

The integration of charitable causes into Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how many items you can buy or sell to support it.

Privacy is a natural concern in online marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous — they’re listed as “Facebook user is selling a bike,” for example. In that case, the only way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for the seller to respond.

People who aren’t members of Facebook can see your listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can’t post, comment or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren’t on Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.

All user notifications — messages indicated in red at the bottom right of a Facebook page — will reflect friends’ activities in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really want to know about all your friends’ activities in Marketplace.

Four color-coded icons represent activities in Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause, for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.

The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is straightforward and well organized, and if you’re a Facebook user, its format will be familiar. If you’re not, and you’re looking for a way to sell or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made a lot easier with electronic options.

Is this the end of eBay???

Are Plug Computers The Next Big Thing For Your Media?

 

Marvell electronics is all set to push what it thinks will be the next big thing in household computing: plug computers. Since we’re all generating and storing so much digital content in the form of words, video, and photos from our digital cameras, netbooks and cellphones, traditional storage and management systems are becoming old-hat–and that’s where Marvell’s plan fits in.

The company is promoting what it’s dubbed “plug computers” as a perfect solution. The idea is that you’ll have an ultra-small computer plugged into an electrical socket: It’ll be about the size of the socket itself, and yet pack in enough processing power and network connectivity to manage and serve media stored on an attached thumb-drive or hard drive. By accessing the plug computer over your home network, you’d be able to get at your files from wherever you needed in your house, or over a Internet connection when you’re out and about. 

Marvell’s contends that we’re all storing our personal media in a dispersed style–files on cellphones, desktop PCs, and notebook computers, and this is both inefficient and risky. Losing a laptop PC or phone carries the risk of permanently losing a precious photo, or perhaps a sensitive one.

It’s not a new idea–Apple’s Time Capsule acts a little like a central repository for data by wirelessly backing up all your connected Macs, HP’s MediaSmart Servers are designed to do what it sounds like, and there are a host of “smart” external hard drives that connect to a PC via USB and both store your media longterm, and serve it to connected TVs and audio systems without needing the PC’s intervention.

But Marvell’s idea is to miniaturize all this tech, and make it small and convenient. And it’s also pushing the eco-friendliness of the plan. Plug computers will apparently draw less than 5W of power, that is significantly lower than leaving a PC running to act as a media server.

Marvell, a company that makes communication chipsets for a host of devices, thinks the technology is now achievable on a small and economic-enough scale, and it’ll be sourcing the chips while partner companies make the hardware and software. The company’s targeting a $50 price point. And that’s actually what makes this idea interesting, and differentiates it from other tech solutions. I have a similar set-up at home, using a router and connected hard drives via an iMac which acts as the server–and though it works well, this is an expensive solution. If I could use a suite of $50 plug-in devices instead, I probably would. The tricky part will be selling the idea in an accessible manner to the average home PC consumer.

Powering Google Search using Green IT????

In response to Harvard’s article regarding searching Google generates around 0.2 g of CO2 , Google official posted following in their official blog:

Not long ago, answering a query meant traveling to the reference desk of your local library. Today, search engines enable us to access immense quantities of useful information in an instant, without leaving home. Tools like email, online books and photos, and video chat all increase productivity while decreasing our reliance on car trips, pulp and paper.

But as computers become a bigger part of more people’s lives, information technology consumes an increasing amount of energy, and Google takes this impact seriously. That’s why we have designed and built the most energy efficient data centers in the world, which means the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.

Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses “half the energy as boiling a kettle of water” and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

We’ve made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use. In 2008 our philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies. And last summer, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative (RE<C), we created an internal engineering group dedicated to exploring clean energy.

We’re also working with other members of the IT community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group which champions more efficient computing. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That’s a lot of kettles of tea.

I couldnt agree more about the attempts made by companies in Silicon valley to provide “Green IT”

Share a cab ride using GPS on Android

In response to the recent post in Tech Crunch saying that MIT students develop projects in 13 days, we students at SJSU have a lot of potential to create some exciting next generation Mobile Apps. I along with my project partners Naing and Htay took one mobile course(Cmpe 277) under Dr Shan to develop one promising concept. Unfortunately we couldn’t convert it into commercial project but developers can take fresh ideas from it and make a revenue out of it.

The app is called Share a Taxi Ride. Generally in metro cities like San Francisco, New York where many business executives travel a lot can find this application useful especially everybody is using iPhone for their prime business communication. This Mobile application allows users to share a cab ride based on their current locations. It is about finding people to share a taxi based on source and destination points. Along with that, it can also be applied to many other cases such as going to and from special events, conventions, ball games etc. The typical functions of this portal are listed as follows:

•  Registration: It allows a first time user to register so that they can log in with their username and password during their next visit.
• Login: This allows registered users to access the mobile application along with the validation of their credentials
• User Profile Management: This allows registered users to create and manage their profiles access the mobile application. It also allows users to manage their preferences like Sex, Smoke or Contact (By Chat or Call)
• Sign Out: Allows user to log off the application session

These are some “Nice to have” features:

• User Account Management
• Manage Preferences (who you are and what type of people you want to share with)
• Save Destinations on phone
• Search people based on current location your destination and other criteria such as destination proximity, time, number of persons, etc.
• Prearrange the ride beforehand
• Display search result and communicate or exchange information with selected person(s) by email or phone
• Show people on the map (sometimes they could be a couple blocks away from you)
• Rating system (Rate, Comment, Filter search based on rating)

Application Snapshots

 1] Title Page: It is being displayed when the application is loaded for the first time

 

2] Registration: It is being displayed when user comes to the site for the first time

3] Login: It asks for the user credentials

 4] Based on the correct username and password, the system will navigate user to the Main User panel.

5] The cab request form is displayed when user requests to find the riders within defined proximity. Generally, the system will calculate user’s source address from GPS but for the simplicity we allow user to enter the address

6] Search Result

7] Give user ratings

 Here are the configuration details:

GUI: Android Development Tools Plugin for the Eclipse IDE, Android Debug Bridge (adb)  

Web Server: Tomcat Apache Server

Database: MySQL, SQlite

 

We were not able to create complete application within provided time limit but we explored power of Android as a Dev Platform…We found development of similar app on net called GCab

This could be a potential project but I am not sure whether this idea is already been practiced commercially…

Software Monkey

I am a big fan of orkut as I was going throgh some of the  videos in my friends profile, I encountered some funny stuff. The term is referred as “Code Monkey”.  According to Wiki, it refers to novice programmer who doesnt have more deep insight about the software methoodologies but programming skills.  If you google monkey related to this profession, you will find some interesting definitions:

Grease Monkey is understood to mean a low-level or non-professional automobile mechanic while Tap Monkey is referred to as low level audio engineers and computer machine room workers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Powder monkey is an extremely low-level sailor, often as young as 10 years of age, who kept cannoneers supplied with gun-powder, shot, and tamping material. Along with that, Web monkey is pertaining to web development which I consider my self of….

Checkout this video guys….

Commercial or Noncommercial

This is a very interesting post that I have encountered on Internet. I was doing research on enterprise community to get the real test of it. While different companies have provided their content mesh up to make their presence feel but I believe, there is still a long way to go. The funny thing is I consider blogging as one of my hobbies not just to create business model out of it but share and gain knowledge from tech nerds. Here it goes:

The title is something like: When Life And Work Blend, Everything Is Commercial Use By Mike

I was recently having a talk with a friend who was trying to determine what to do next with his life. He’s not happy with his job and wants a “goal” for the future — but isn’t really sure what he wants to do. I suggested focusing on a hobby in the short term and devoting plenty of time to it. He felt that was the wrong approach, because a hobby is separate from a job, and the two would never connect. While that could happen, the internet today has made it increasingly easy to turn a hobby into a job in some way or another. It’s not that you need to turn a hobby into a job. Sometimes it’s good for a hobby to just be a hobby. But, if you focus on what you’re passionate about, I think eventually different job opportunities start to come to you.

But it’s this blurring of “personal” and “work” lives that again has me pondering if there really is a meaningful distinction between “commercial use” and “non-commercial use.” Some of this debate first came about years ago, when some web publishers claimed that their RSS feeds were “for non-commercial use only,” but what does that mean? If I read your site as part of my job, have I violated that rule? If I learn information from your feed that allows me to make money, have I violated that rule? More recently, there have been proposals to separate copyright violations, such that “non-commercial use” is allowed. But, again, you quickly run into very questionable scenarios. If my personal blog has Google AdSense on it, is it commercial use? If I end up getting a job because of my “personal use” of your content, does it suddenly morph into “commercial use”? The questions get more and more confusing, and the mess would make less and less sense.

These days, it seems that the distinction between personal, professional, commercial and non-commercial are becoming increasingly meaningless — and that’s not a bad thing.

With that said, I have to agree with Gordon Haff over at News.com that Creative Commons is making a mistake in trying to better define the meaning of “commercial use” for its “non-commercial” licenses. I’m already struggling with its current definition. I’m working on a presentation for a conference I’m attending next month, and found some images that are under a CC license that allows non-commercial use. I’m not getting paid for the talk itself, but I am doing it as a representative of Techdirt, which is a commercial entity. Is that commercial use? The presentation isn’t about our business, though, but about what I usually write about here. Is that non-commercial use? I’m assuming it’s non-commercial use, but these days, I have a hard time understanding what the difference is at all, and Haff is right that it’s likely to lead to more confusion. The real answer is to simplify CC licenses, not make them even more complex.

I strongly agree with Mike by looking into my case especially. If I would have to put it into straight words: Its nothing but Royalty