http://oslutions.com/blog about computers? it's all about the people anyway Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:57:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en i have been volunteering now for 2 weeks at the Institute for Indian Mother and Child (IIMC) in Kolkata, and really enjoy it. IIMC is an NGO that provides medical care, education and micro credit to villages south of Kolkata. i spend my time between building a contact management system for ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/04/13/teaching-basic-computer-skills/ i was at BarCampMU3 yesterday -- good exchange, interesting folks. here are my slides about my talk on open source communities. http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/03/09/barcampmu3/ approximately 40 per cent of Indians lack access to formal financial services. the biggest barrier is cost of penetration. last week, i met with Shan Shank Chowdhury, VP at A.Little.World, a mobile software business in Mumbai who has developped a microbanking platform called "ZERO". the platform relies on Custom Service Providers ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/03/01/alittleworld-zero-platform-for-rural-banking-in-india/ I got a chance yesterday to visit the OLPC (one laptop per child) pilot in Khairat, a rural village close to Mumbai. The pilot started last October with 20 XO laptops. photo courtesy of Parimala It was great to see the students playing/working with their laptops: they impressed me by how confident/comfortable ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/02/27/73/ Yahoo announced it is running the world's largest Hadoop application, a 10,000 core Linux cluster producing data used by the Yahoo! Search Webmap.". the numbers are really impressive: number of links between pages in the index: roughly 1 trillion links size of output: over 300 TB, compressed! number of cores used to run ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/02/20/worlds-largest-hadoop-application-producing-data-used-by-the-yahoo-search-webmap/ today at the Indian embassy in Bangkok, i met this desperate US guy that was short on 2200 bahts (~$67) to get his visa for India, so i lent him the money. then followed a nice conversation, and after chatting about the elections, i said: "you know what would make ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/02/18/i-donated-to-obama/ Acer just announced that they would develop a low-price sub-laptop. some might see it as a competitor to the OLPC laptop. i prefer to argue that the OLPC laptop is such a good concept that other companies (like Intel, Asus, and now Acer) are now doing the same. i have been ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/02/16/another-competitor-for-the-olpc-laptop/ it's now been 4 months that i travel through Southeast Asia. i stayed mostly in rural areas, or small cities. so many faces, so many smiles... people always starting a conversation -- sometimes in the hope of making a few ruppes, sometimes just to share a smile, or talk about ... http://oslutions.com/blog/2008/02/12/coming-up-online/ processing holds true to its premises: imagine, sketch, twist, publish. it becomes that simple... here's a little tribute to one of my favorite books as a kid (click to view animation) http://oslutions.com/blog/2007/10/08/petit-bleu-et-petit-jaune/ i just got back home in boston, with a new visa for my job at galaxyadvisors. we have big plans to bring social network analysis to the next level and help businesses and organizations use it. more to come soon... http://oslutions.com/blog/2007/06/08/back-in-boston/