Don’t know what happened to Goog stock today, but look at the today’s low on both Yahoo finance and Google finance. First image is from Yahoo finance showing Google stock. The day range shows starting from a penny! Was that real?

Google at penny

Showing 0.01 looks like a bug/glitch on yahoo finance, there were real trades at around $200! Unbelievable!

Google stock on Sep-30-2009

No wonder Google finance is still in beta… after this problem, I came across another one today.

Next time some firm has a big financial crisis, they should consult Google to help them boost the share price That’s of course a joke, but look at what they did with Wachovia. Looks like an issue with finance.google.com since the company has been taken over by Citi, or maybe they’re just making fun of it?

Wachovia Share at 500

Ok, another update since I saw the previous problem…

Now they have fixed it to show the price at $10 (which was previous days close) with no activity. However from market open to 12pm, they show the price as $500. Someone at Google needs to go delete the bad data

Wachovia - Google still shows 500 price

I am trying to simply access “finance.google.com” (to look at the price of my company stock, which is doing terrible today :() and Google is adding to my pain by telling me that I am a spyware or a virus. And it happens repeatedly!

Google Finance error

So I installed this wordpress app and this my first post using/testing it.it is also supposed to support offline mode which is great for ipod Touch users like me!

I am looking forward to using this to blog during my commute to and from work. Right now I am hoping it works when I tap on publish

We have lately been seeing a few interesting developments in the area of Software-as-a-service (SaaS). Though the concept has been around for a while, what has really brought focus to this area is Amazon’s offering of cloud computing, Hardware-as-a-service and SimpleDB, which is essentially Database-as-a-Service (DaaS), as discussed here.

Recently, LongJump.com, a California based company, announced it’s Database-as-a-Service offering. This has been built using Java layer on top of MySql database that exposes REST and SOAP based APIs to store, access and manipulate data. They also provide a web based administrative console that let’s users model the data and create data access policies and validation.

From users’ point of view, this takes away the complexities associated with having a database infrastructure, DBA, monitoring and so on. This is great news for smaller firms and startups who would rather like to focus on building the core functionality and time to market instead of handling these peripheral issues.

More companies entering this field is a great news. I think once these offerings start to mature, the next big thing in SaaS model will be to create standards (something like Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), for example) that would let users change the providers without having to change code, but these technologies have to go a long way and prove that this model works before this becomes a serious issue. I don’t really think big firms are going to be interested in these products anytime soon, but they sure could be a boon for smaller firms.

What’s your view on the potential of Database-as-a-service offerings? Do you think they are here to stay?

Found a good video on Semantic Web that was worth sharing.

Amazon said that MacBook was the highest selling computer this holiday season. In fact 3 Mac models have made it to the top 10 list this time. This must be a great news for Apple and for the first time today Apple’s stocks crossed $200.

However, as Macs get more and more popular, I think it may possibly cause some sort of problem for Apple in future.

One of the important factors why many buy Macs is their urge to be different, to not follow the crowd and so on… With so many Macs that we see around us, a Mac owner’s sense of having an unique product is going to diminish. So this may be a problem for Apple, though it’s a problem that they would like to have!

What’s your opinion on the impact of Mac’s popularity on future sales? Do you think your Mac buying decision gets affected by the fact that there are many people who own Mac around you?

Amazon said that MacBook was the highest selling computer this holiday season. In fact 3 Mac models have made it to the top 10 list this time. This must be a great news for Apple and for the first time today Apple’s stocks crossed $200.

However, as Macs get more and more popular, I think it may possibly cause some sort of problem for Apple in future.

One of the important factors why many buy Macs is their urge to be different, to not follow the crowd and so on… With so many Macs that we see around us, a Mac owner’s sense of having an unique product is going to diminish. So this may be a problem for Apple, though it’s a problem that they would like to have!

What’s your opinion on the impact of Mac’s popularity on future sales? Do you think your Mac buying decision gets affected by the fact that there are many people who own Mac around you?

We recently heard about “w00t” being chosen the word of the year by Merriam-Webster. Now “Facebook” has been added to the Collins English Dictionary.

This has been added both as a noun meaning “a popular social networking web site” and a verb that means to search someone’s profile. In fact the Collins guys are so impresed by Facebook that they have even added another meaning to the word pimp, it says that to “pimp” one’s profile is “to make one’s profile page on a social networking site appear more attractive by adding graphics, video, music, etc”.

So now that it’s part of English dictionary, it’s grammatically correct to “facebook your friend”. In fact since the verb simply means to search someone’s profile, it seems even a sentence like “I was facebooking my friend on MySpace” should also be correct . Similarly, it’s probably no more a taboo for someone to say that he wants to be a pimp, since it may simply mean that he wants to be a good graphic designer?
Given the trend of words like w00t and Facebook making it to the dictionary, I am wondering if MySpace and Orkut are going to be soon added as synonyms of Facebook :).

We recently heard about “w00t” being chosen the word of the year by Merriam-Webster. Now “Facebook” has been added to the Collins English Dictionary.

This has been added both as a noun meaning “a popular social networking web site” and a verb that means to search someone’s profile. In fact the Collins guys are so impresed by Facebook that they have even added another meaning to the word pimp, it says that to “pimp” one’s profile is “to make one’s profile page on a social networking site appear more attractive by adding graphics, video, music, etc”.

So now that it’s part of English dictionary, it’s grammatically correct to “facebook your friend”. In fact since the verb simply means to search someone’s profile, it seems even a sentence like “I was facebooking my friend on MySpace” should also be correct . Similarly, it’s probably no more a taboo for someone to say that he wants to be a pimp, since it may simply mean that he wants to be a good graphic designer?

Given the trend of words like w00t and Facebook making it to the dictionary, I am wondering if MySpace and Orkut are going to be soon added as synonyms of Facebook :).

I often don’t look at the screen of my GPS since voice instructions are more than enough (I made sure the GPS tells the street names before buying it). In fact looking at that small screen while driving can’t be comfortable to anyone in my opinion. But what if you don’t like to listen to the voice either to figure out which turns to take? Sounds impossible? Not anymore…

A New Jersey based company is launching a product called “Virtual Cable”, that uses laser and a set of lenses to project a 3-D line in front of the drive showing which route and turns to take in order to reach the destination! The projected line seems as though it’s really over the road in front of the driver, so all the driver needs to do is to follow the line.

The company tells that it can either be pre-installed for around $400, or can be integrated with existing GPS in the car.

Here is a video showing how it looks. Pretty cool to say the least!

As all of us know, an application comprises broadly of 3 tiers, the presentation, the business tier and the database. The Web 2.0 phenomenon has had a huge impact on the way applications are designed and developed. The most obvious changes are on the presentation layer because that’s what’s visible, but the business tier has also seen major changes, mainly in terms of exposing data as API, RSS feeds etc in order to open-up the closed data and making it ready for reuse.

However, what hasn’t changed so much is the database layer. All the new Web 2.0 features are still built on top of existing relation database, be it Oracle, MySql, Sybase or any other similar product. In fact, even before Web 2.0 phenomenon kicked in, there were huge changes to the way applications are written (use of object oriented languages for example), but database layer has pretty much remained oblivious to all these developments over the last couple of decades. To be precise, companies like Oracle have been working hard to introduce some features that make database programming closer to object oriented paradigm, but I think most would agree that fundamentally RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) hasn’t changed a lot. The object oriented database approach tried to address this, but it wasn’t popular mainly because of mixing objects (which belong to business tier) with data layer, rather immature object query languages and performance issues.

RDBMS offers a lot of rich functionality which are not easy to replace with anything that’s available today. However, there are situations when the complex nature of RDBMS can actually lead to more cost especially if someone does not want to use all the advanced feature it offers. Amazon’s recent launch of SimpleDB is targeting such users and trying to fundamentally change the way data is managed and requested using Database-as-service paradigm.

The SimpleDB let’s you store data in “domains”. The domains can store information about an item as attribute than can have multiple values, so that does not exactly fit into thinking in terms of row/column that we are used to. Also, it let’s you store different set of attributes for different items, which kind of translates to having different number of columns for different rows in the conventional tables - it sure is going to take a while before people get used to it.

Amazon indexes the data behind the scene to make the search faster. The querying supports parameters like =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH, AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION.

In its current state, I don’t think any big enterprise will seriously consider this option but it can be quite lucrative for small businesses and startups. It takes away all the pains of acquiring hardware, hosting clustered RDBMS, hiring database administrators and high cost associated with all this. Amazon is offering data storage at $1.50 per GB per month with additional costs for bandwidth and CPU usage, but overall it’s definitely much cheaper than conventional options and it let’s companies to scale up as and when they need it! SimpleDB combined with Amazon S3 (for storing large chunks of un-indexed data) offers a very cost effective and scalable data storage solutions for small firms. This product seems very well planned and integrated with their other Software(and Hardware)-as-service offerings.

As the name suggests, it’s “simple” but I feel it still can have far reaching effect on how people think about managing and accessing data. This will also get many brains thinking about alternatives to conventional RDBMS and I think that’s great news!

What’s your take on this alternative to conventional databases?