The Spider-Man movie merchandise has really matured. Finally, after all this waiting, one of the most central villains is coming to the movie version.

Yes, Spider-Man 3 will most likely be centered around Venom, the arch-nemesis of Spider-man. Venom is the name given to Eddie Brock’s villanous merging with an alien symbiont which gives him extraordinary powers.

Can’t wait. Venom is my favorite Spidey super-villain character.

ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright talks about how the success of a customer’s adoption is imperative to the success of an online service that operates in the SaaS business model.

Compared to standard permanent-license, on-premise implementations of enterprise software, SaaS definitely seems to be the correct solution to common woes.

Apart from all the inherent benefits of online delivery, one of the key differentiators is that in an on-premise software license model, the customer has typically paid for the software (The License) before it enters his premises. The software must then be customized to his business application, maintained, his users must be trained on it, and finally his entire Enterprise supposedly “shifts” to using it live.

In all my years in the software technology industry (I’ve been around) I’ve never really seen an implementation really “succeed” this way. At least from the point of view of the end customer, they never really got what they expected - a solution to their problems. What they got were endless delays and, if they were lucky enough to have paid for it, they got technical support.

The SaaS model is pretty much diametrically opposite to all this. In the online delivery model, the customer “checks out” the application (typically himself/herself), decides to try it out, brings in a few key users, and tests the system, directly.

SaaS providers should realize this (just as the Service-now team has) and welcome these early customers. It is in the interest of the provider to ease the entry of the customer into the platform and facilitate the adoption of their service.

As customers begin to use the service, the more benefit they realize from it, the more they will encourage adoption from their organization.

It really is this simple - a SaaS service can only succeed if it’s customers do. And as the service-now VP of sales says, each and every customer of theirs is referenceable.

What your customers (existing and otherwise) say about your service is always going to influence your presence in a market much, much, more than what any PR, advertising or promotional activity can get you.

A customer’s success is vital.

Rob Luddy should be proud. And justly so.

Digg Labs launched today with two new visualizations of Digg activity.

The Stack and The Swarm

 
(Click to see full size screenshots)

These delightful (and overloaded, at the moment) apps showcase the dynamicness of the Digg website.

You can click on a URL (yes, each of those circles in the swarm and bars in the stack are URLs!!) and they’ll expand up to show the story and the digg pattern like this:

All put together, very interesting viewer apps. Beats the Digg spy any day.

Oh, and Kevin says he’s putting up some more servers to handle the load on the apps.

I wonder when (if?) these will get to the main Digg site.

I keep ranting and raving that Google is primarily a search company. But nobody listens, Google least of all, it would seem.

I’ve been looking for an online aggregrator and comfort of reading and simplicity led me to use Google Reader. For quite some time, now. It’s quite a breeze to:

• Add new feeds

• Read them in one of the most Ajaxely done interfaces out there
• And it’s fast. Really, really, fast.

But when I wanted to refer a friend to an article I read recently, and I went to Google Reader to search it, I find this stupidly ironic interface staring back at me and I mumbled to myself,

“Google is a search company. I use Google’s Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds. Google lets me search for new feeds, search the entire web, even.

But it will not let me search the feeds I subscribed to for content that I know is there. I don’t remember what blog it was on, I don’t remember what date it came out (sometime last week) and I really want to tell this friend of mine about it, because it should prove to be quite useful to him.”

It looks like I now have several things I can do:

1. Give up stressing on the fact that Google is a search company.

   In any case, they only like to search for new content because content that is “read” and discarded in my Google Reader is of no consequence to Google, anyway.

2. Go manual

   Manually go through my read entries, one-by-one till I find it. And then “label” it something (Eureka! would be good) so that I can retrieve it later.

3. Give up using Google Reader.

   I’d lose the read status on my subscribed blogs, but hey, at least I’d be able to search, in some other online aggregator like Rojo. (I hope - they aren’t really a search engine company). I’ll take my .opml export, and I’ll move on.

4. Give up abusing Google Labs’ betas.

   Their betas suck. I shudder to think of my experience with Google Notebook. Google Labs keeps their betas in beta until forever anyway.

5. Give up on Google, altogether.

   Their search engine is the most gamed thing on the net, anyway, isn’t it? I think I’ll shift to Live search for a while.

   Gmail is pretty much of a POP3 thing for me. I hardly ever use/see the online interface.

   Google Talk: I gave up a long time ago, on that one. Slick and cool, it got close, but it didn’t work out. Don’t ask.

   Google Checkout: I wanted to have a look, but they wouldn’t let this Indian sign up, even. And it’s one of their few products which isn’t in beta. Maybe it has something to do with my being too much of a curmudgeon, or something like that, I guess.

   I think I’m going to try to be Google-free for some time now.

StarTrek.com just announced the eleventh movie in the franchise. The movie is slated for a 2008 release.

The StarTrek store also has a free set of 3 wallpapers and 3 IM avatars.

What I like about the wallpapers is that they emphasize on the nature of the colors of the StarTrek Federation uniform. One wallpaper’s blue for science and another’s got the color for StarTrek command posts.

The first wallpaper has shades of both colors and IMHO is the best.

And if I’ve not convinced you that I’m a self-confessed StarTrek fan, I don’t know what will.

Geekism is:

1. When you regularly get approached (by friends, relatives and strangers) with questions like, “Which one of these thingamajigs is better?”
2. When you know what the difference between a SAN and a NAS is.
3. When you land on a web site and have to first try and login to see if you already made an account there.
4. When your backpack contains enough cables and electronics to make every metal detector and X-Ray scanner go berserk every time it passes through.
5. When it takes you anything from an hour to a couple of days to explain what you do to another Geek.
6. When it takes you 5 seconds to eplain what you do to a mere mortal.
7. When you ask people to email you what they just told you.
8. When people point to your web browser and say “What is that?”
9. When you walk in to office around 3 PM and leave around 3 AM. And vice-versa of course.
10. When you can type better with your eyes shut than when you’re looking at the characters pop up on the screen one-by-one.
11. When you can figure out the logical, technical and business flaws in an application faster than most people can say “Hello, World!” in it.
12. When you run out of space to plug in hard disks in your home computer.
13. When people begin to ask you if you want to store the data that they just downloaded so that they can delete it when they want to.
14. When you click on “Settings” before you click on “File->New”.
15. When you have people on your MSN Contact list who begin a conversation with a URL instead of a “Hi!”.

Want more?

Dante	Randal	Kevin

I found Dante and Randal on MySpace. I found Kevin too. 2 Clerks and a Director/Actor who doesn’t seem to speak much.

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about then you haven’t watched one of the movies in my must watch list.

Clerks.

Go see it now. And then head straight to the chaotic, All-your-base-belong-to-us world of MySpace and check out their profiles, add them as “friends”

And if you still don’t get what I’m talking about then you need to check these links.

And visit the official site. I just can’t wait to watch the movie.

I just discovered Adobe’s new JamJar application, via Digg of course.

It’s a very interesting demo of the kind of user interface one can
build with Adobe’s Flex2 development platform. It’s also a shining
example of how a new interface can totally confuse a user when it comes
to figuring out how the thing works.

I have to still try out the rest of it but I did have a go at their
“Photo sharing” workspace and the interface seemed clunky, at best, to
me. And noisy.
Every button you hover on makes a uniquely disturbing sound. The
adjoining picture (click on it for a full size screenshot) is what
around 5 minutes with Jamjar resulted in.

With the kind of possibilities that are available when you’re making a
user interface in Flex, it’s kind of surprising that Adobe didn’t do
better. There’s a vertical Google Adsense advertisement strip on the right, which
takes up a lot of screen space in an application where it’s at a
premium. Using an ugly wide skyscraper strip in what is essentially a technology demo is quite disconcerting. I simply don’t get why Adobe has to sabotage it’s own early stage demo
like this. If I were in their Jamjar team I’d make sure to kept it free of advertisements, I’m sure Adobe can afford to.

Yes, I know that this will probably cause a flame war or something. Bring it on.

I just think that Adobe should have called it a demonstration showcase
or something for Flex2, instead of a “web2.0″ application that was for general
use. I don’t think that the general Internet populace, even the web 2.0
audience, is completely ready for it yet.

Oh, and don’t get me wrong. The underlying technology is nothing short of brilliant.
Think about multi-file, single action uploading with detailed progress
notification (via progress bars) and you know what the platform is
like. For Flex2 application developers, that is.

I do hope they remove the advertising. At least until they are in “Beta” phase. Or is that too much to ask?

Kevin Rose announced today, on the Digg blog, a new set of submission specs for websites wishing to integrate with Digg.

More interesting is a zip file containing graphical badges with the new Digg v3 look and a script block that’ll let website owners display the number of “Diggs” a particular URL received.

The badges are nice and the pro-active website integration offer is a welcome sight. Most bookmark services don’t realize why Digg is so popular. I believe that one of the key reasons is that a lot of popular websites (recent additions include all CNET blogs) allow their users to digg their posts! If only more social bookmarking sites offered integration kits like digg does, I’m sure they’d be more popular.

I am forced to recall the hours I spent creating a recent batch of icons for my Social Bookmarking template. I’m no graphics designer and resizing favicon.ico files to work properly in a web browser was quite menial, for me, at least. Of course it did lead me to a point where I can show off a nice bug in IE. Internet Explorer has problems rendering an 8 bit PNG (admittedly super-optimized, in Photoshop) that Firefox renders just fine. Three of the social bookmarking icons I spent so much effort on only show up in Firefox. And I noticed it only recently (I mainly use Firefox).

But I digress.

Kevin’s post goes on to hint on a new Digg API that’ll let you do even more with these 2 features.

Over the past year, Digg has become quite the source for “interesting” news, and I anticipate that things will only get more so at digg.com.

Digg on, indeed.

One Cynapsian gives birth to another. Anil is the proud father of a baby girl on the 6^th of this July. Upon witnessing the proud father and mother with their newborn, yours truly was quite overwhelmed.

I cannot but express my joy upon seeing life reassert it’s all important proclivity for renewing itself. It’s a beautiful sight to behold and one of life’s unique joys.

On this occassion I must tell you, ever Constant (and sometimes insistent) Reader a short fable about a wise man that might have been written by another wise one. (Or so I hope).

Read on…
The fable
A small child, who, as all children of that age are, was quite mystified by the machinations of life itself.

The child took his confusion to the wise man of his village, who, in his own wisdom, had decided to stay aloof from the rest of humanity and lived in quiet seclusion.

The wise man, as all wise men seem to ultimately do, spent most of his time contemplating upon such matters, but was deeply disturbed that a child as small as this one had approached him with a problem that he’d been thinking on all his life.

“Child, life is something that must be experienced to learn more about.”, he said to the child.

“I cannot even begin tell one as innocent as you about life. I learn new things about the meaning of it, every day. I cannot taint a beautiful mind with my own corrupted vision of it.”

“Life is about living. You must live. And learn. If you learn the lessons that life teaches you well, you will grow wise. Do not ponder over never-ending questions. There are no answers to questions such as those in your mind, now.”

“Learn to live the experiences you come upon, with zest, vigor and thoughtful courage and you may someday learn that happiness lies nowhere else but in your own self and your life’s experiences.”

The wise man then retreated into his own domicile and the child left.

The child felt disappointed, he did not feel that his questions were in any way answered in the wise man’s round about speech. He did take the wise man’s words to mind though, and tried to experience life rather than question it.

And many years later, the child did grow into a wise, happy person, indeed.

Or so they say, anyway.

A Moral
Every fable must have a moral and so does this one.

Do not seek purpose. Purpose will find you. Instead, concentrate on enjoying life’s experiences with the zest, and vigor of the small child in this fable. And happiness will find you as well.

Bus?
The title of this post (Another one rides the bus) is an oblique reference to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody on Queen’s famous Another one bites the dust. I tend to think of Weird Al’s parody more in the way of Another one climbs on to the bus, where the bus is more of a metaphor for life. But of course I’m thinking of the blue bus in The End by The Doors too, but then, that’s another story for another day.