What is the best non-Chinese budget smartphone?

Samsung Galaxy M21 6 GB RAM\128 GB storage memory is the best non-chinese budget smart phone right now (July 2020). Read on for further detailed answer and justifications!

I have been searching for best budget mobile phone to buy since couple of month (all brands) , the top contenders which came were Samsung Galaxy M31 , Poco X2, Redmi Note 8 Pro. All of these come around Rs. 15000 to 18000. On doing extensive research and comparison of various Youtube videos I realized it is best to go for Samsung M31.

However there was a new launch as well from Samsung with Samsung M21. M21 offers 3 rear cameras against 4 offered by M31. The primary lens is 48 mega pixel in M21 against 64 megapixels in M31. The price gets cheaper by 2k for M21. It's a bargain and the difference in specs do not account to much unless you are a professional photographer (who will have a DSLR anyways).

Both Samsung Galaxy M31 and Samsung Galaxy M21 are successors for Samsung Galaxy M30s, which was immensely popular and huge hit due to it's monster 6000mAH battery. Samsung stuck with the big battery theme and continued to provide big battery in subsequent budget phones as well (M31,M21).

Samsung has identified the success formulae for Indian mass consumers by providing a big battery, descent camera and a very competitive price. Samsung has roared back in the mobile phone market in last 2 years. Remember there was complete Chinese dominance 2 years back, with Vivo and Oppo and Redmi taking more and more market share.

Another best thing about Samsung is, Samsung creates displays and camera lens in-house, so what it means is, a Samsung mobile will have display and camera lens of Samsung brand (most of the time). This makes a lot of difference against chinese brands where they use different brands display and cameras. Example a Redmi phone may use display of Brand A, and camera lens of Brand B, and Redmi is brand C. It makes a big difference in look & feel, hardware compatibility as well as usage & durability if the mobile phone has maximum same brand components.

Finally, we all know the reputation and brand name of Samsung. The history of Samsung in mobile phone industry right from the days of 2G networks around 10 years back. All this adds up to go for Samsung more and more!

P.S. There is a common notion & perception that a big battery makes a phone heavy & not easy to use. Well I have actually played with Samsung galaxy M30s, and it does NOT actually feel bulky, as Samsung has done a great job to balance weight distribution & has a great form factor.

Cricket, Kabaddi & Technathon!

To start with cricket, India tour to West Indies is going on. The ODIs and T20s are over and its now time for the test series. Test series is said to be the toughest form of cricket, I have heard cricket commentators and experts say the same since childhood. Only recently when I was paying 'World Cricket Championship 2' game on my mobile, I realized why it is called the toughest form of cricket. It takes lot of patience while batting, and you really need to work hard and play with batmen psyche to get their price wicket!

 Coming back to India - West-indies Test series. India won the first test comprehensively. It was definitely a pleasure to watch too on my big screen TV in HD. India won by an innings and 92 runs, Virat Kohli the skipper continuing his wonderful form to lead with the bat with a double century! All the Indian bowlers did a good job in dismissing the host 2 times with a consistent disciplined performance. The second test match started today, West-indies are batting first after winning toss, 3 wickets out pretty soon!

  Moving on to Kabaddi, the 2 semi-finals were played yesterday in Hyderabad. This is the 4th season of the Pro Kabaddi league.The first semifinal match was between Pune and Patna.  Patna are the defending champions from last season, Pune had never reached the PKL finals. It was a very tight match, Pune were giving Patna a tough fight, especially their skipper Manjit Chiller was in great form tackling Patna raiders. Patna team won 4 super tackles, which eventually made the difference in their 37 - 33 win.

 The second semifinal was between Hyderabad and Jaipur, it was north vs south.Being in their own den, I thought Telugu titans would have the advantage. However, Jaipur team showed their class, dismantling the titans to storm into the finals, 34 -24 the eventually score in favor of Jaipur. The final should be a cracker between 2 champion teams. Jaipur had won the first edition of PKL, Patna are the defending champions winning the 3rd edition which happened last year.

 Finally lets talk Technathon. I took part in this Hackathon at my office. We had to select next gen technologies, We had taken up IoT. This was my second IoT hackathon and fourth hackathon overall. We also attended prep training on IBM Bluemix, there was also Microsoft Cognitive services training.We decided to use Bluemix, we also used a raspberry pi 3, a light detector. Team worked really hard, we were able to install raspberry OS, and connect light sensor and test it. However we faced problem registering the device on ibm internet of cloud things website. There was not much technical support and it was an unknown area for us.

 On the second day we got an ibm contact to help out, but it was too late by then. We were already tired and sleepy. We decided to go ahead with the demo with whatever was done. Not many teams had taken IoT theme, and none we know of were able to complete the solution.The demo went alright, not great nor as bad as we were fearing. There was not much weight to completion anyways in the score-sheet. Lets hope for best, we will get results next week. Like any hackathon, me and team got to learn a lot. It was a fun filled experience and we did enjoyed a lot.

Google I\O 2015 Keynote

It’s 4:45AM in the morning. I am still in night shift mode in my long weekend. I had ordered July month Digit and got it yesterday. It has the 2 hour key note of Google I\O 2015 in its DVD, one of the major reasons I ordered the July issue.

I have massive respect from Google since long time. If you read my ‘Technology’ label posts here, you could easily infer the same. I have read The Google Story, and got really impressed by their ideology and values. I\O 2015 keynote started by a note from the VP of Sales, who unsurprisingly is an NRI, key takeaways were there are currently 4000 different Android mobile models in the world, 8 out of 10 mobile phones shipped last year were Android, and another very impressive thing which we take for granted is Google is same for everyone. A student in rural India and a professor in MIT USA can both search google search engine and get the same results. Another highlight was there are 1 billion plus users each of 6 top Google products currently, really impressive all this!

Second note was on the Android M Developer Preview. M is the next major Android version (after the current L implying lollypop). There are not going to be major UI changes this time around, they have rather focused on removing maximum bugs and making it as clean as possible. There are 6 main areas of focus in M. First is App Permissions. Now permissions won’t’ be asked while installing, but after install when you try to access a feature like voice, permissions would be asked one time. You can also revoke or grant any permissions for the app from app settings. This is really nice feature from security point which was missing from Android. One of the experts in my hackathon prep session had highlighted this last year.

Second was Web Experience. They have introduced a feature called the ‘Chrome Custom Tab’. What it does is when you click on any links inside you app, it opens the link in chrome maintaining the theme of the link’s original app. The loading is very fast as the app is able to pass the information to Chrome ahead of time. The dev version of this is currently available; commercial release is Q3 this year.

Third was ‘App links’. It mainly involves linking multiple apps. This is essentially a security feature of sort, when you click on a link in one app, the android platform will verify from the server the authenticity of the link and open the link in the respective app providing security and convenience. 

Fourth feature is ‘Android Pay’. Using Android pay you can make payments using your mobiles at stores. A good step in convergence I believe. No more need to carry wallets!  Android pay is simple, secure and has choices for users. To make payment all you need to do is just unlock you phone and expose to NFC reader, simple indeed! When you add your credit card to Android pay and new account number is created, and your credit card number is not shared with the store, thus secure.  You can register for this via Google, via banks or via you carrier, so secure in that regards. Android pay will work in 700 stores to start with in US. Android pay will also be integrated for in-app purchases.

Fifth new feature is fingerprint support. Devices have been providing this since 2011 but with their own application. With M, this will be standardized across all devices, as it will be integrated in the OS. Fingerprint supports will be useful for 3 main purposes: Device Unlock, Play Store purchases and Open Authentication APIs. The last one is mainly for developers, where they can easily integrate the feature in their apps. 

Last but not the least was Power and charging. There is a new smart feature for managing power called ‘Doze’. What it will do is if there is no activity for long period of times, like say when we are sleeping, the device would go in a deeper sleep state. This will enable longer battery life, however all features like alarms and incoming messages over the net would still be active. Compared to L, M devices were tested to last 2 times longer in standby mode. For charging they have developed a new USB Type C standard. Charging would be 3 to 5 times faster, the chargers would be flippable, so you could insert it in your device socket either ways. Small, but very insightful and important change.

There are loads of other new useful features like easy word selection, floating keyboard toolbar, direct share,  Flex storage, App standby, etc.. Official release of M is in Q3 2015. And guess who would get it first? Hell yeah.. the Nexus users!!!

Next note was by David Singelton, Director of Android wear on Android wear, obvio maan! Currently there are 1500 watch faces. As of May 2015, the latest watch LG Watch Urbane also comes with new features like Wifi. Features like GPS and offline music are already there. Seems eventually this will replace mobile phone in few years’ time for basic computing, entertainment and communication.  The latest release of Android wear will have always-on feature. No need to shake wrist or push button to check time. This feature is extended to apps to integrate on home screen. Examples include a grocery list or a map will stay on the screen till you want.

Next feature is wrist gestures. This one I like especially. Flip your wrist to go through notifications. Their moto is wearable app should be glanceable, actionable and effortless. Awesome indeed. He also showed the hordes of features available in wearable devices now, those include microphone, haptic motor, accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, barometer, heart rate monitor, and GPS. Whao!! Dint imagine all this in a watch!! You can virtually do anything with the watch now, if you can dream it, you can build it is the message for the developers. All the code would run independently inside the watch, another big add on. Currently there are already over 4000 apps specifically for Android wear.

Next was announcement of ‘Brillo’, the operating system for IoT. Next ‘WEAVE’ a communication channel using which devices could talk to each other. Brillo would be available from Q3 2015, and WEAVE from Q4 2015. Another great feature in M is ‘Now on Tap’. This is google now going epic in NLP and smart use of 30 level neural network of Google! Just tap on the Home button anywhere, and see Google Now unlock the magic!

Next was introduction of brand new product ‘Google Photos’ by Anil, another Indian, we were in majority, hell yeah!! Lot of kool new features of sharing, searching and editing in there! Awesome indeed. Great feature is backup and store unlimited fotos and videos for free. Up to 16 Mpx for fotos and 1080p HD for videos!!Google Photos is already available.

After this there were announcements specifically for developers community on new products, and new features in existing products for developers. It was a wonderful event, I felt really inspired. The major takeaway was domination of Android in world market, and use of Android in Brillo stack, something of a major takeaway for me indeed!!

Downfalls of Digital and the Internet Age

So it is 5AM in the morning. I am in night shift. Today is my second day of night shift in the new company. No this is not the downfall I will talk about; I am fine working in night. I accept it, what I want to talk about is the disconnect among ourselves, and among our friends and family which has come along with the addiction to social networking.

I am an avid facebook user since long time. I won’t say I am addicted to it, but I use it often. Technology like any other Science can be a boon as well as a blessing, depends on how you use it. Like you can use Nuclear power to generate electricity to power cities, you can also use the same nuclear energy to destroy cities. Same is with facebook, I use it for constructive purpose, to stay up to date with the latest in technology and also the happenings around the world. Also getting an update on friends, but one must remember to be in touch with friends on other mediums apart from facebook, and I imply digital mediums on a bigger scale.

I did not have WhatsApp till last year. I had a Bada OS mobile of samasung, and they did not have WhatsApp for it. I switched to Google Nexus 5, and started using WhatsApp, first couple months were those characterized by novelty of something new, I confess I used to ping a lot of friends and waste lot of time. Then I started using it only to stay in touch with close friends and family. Important thing is how much time you can afford to give to such things, and how much time you actually give. I do not spend more than half hour a day on WhatsApp.

Few more things I am proud of are living without a TV for over 3 years, and that too happily, living without a mobile for more than a month. I am in the business of IT, and I have passion for IT. However I am not addicted to it, I can live without it. I like the real world more, I enjoy the sunrise, I used to do that first thing in the morning in Magarpatta City apartment. I enjoy travelling, I enjoy partying with friends in real life. Yes there are a lot of downfalls of the digital age, but it is up to you on how much you can control yourself, and how much you can utilize the technology, rather than technology utilizing you!!!

Ye Hain India Ka Tyohaar!!

So the world cup got over with Australia winning it comprehensively. Barely a week later IPL starts. This is the 8^th edition of IPL. This one is a bit special for me and I am enjoying it too. Having lived without a TV for over 3 years, it’s like a novelty indeed!

Today is third day and third match between Kings XI Punjab and Rajasthan Royals. First two matches were good. KKR beating Mumbai Indians at home comfortably, and Chennai winning a last ball thriller against Delhi Daredevils, and that too by just one run. Delhi have been very miserable in last two seasons, wining only 5 matches  total, hopefully they would do better this time.

Today’s match is between Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab. It is Punjab’s thundering batting vs Rajasthan’s potent and plentiful bowling attack. Rajasthan were struggling with the bat, James Faulkner salvaging them with a useful knock at the end. Currently the score is 121 for 5 for Punjab chasing 163 odd; ball seems to be in Royal’s court as of now!!

What else, new job is going well. My onboarding will happen in project coming Monday, things will get busy hence. Today was a fun day in office, we played game in office. A lot of people participated there were 4 teams, with 5 members in each team. Aim was to throw maximum balls in a bin from a distance. Eventually our team won, had fun and got chocolates as prize! Team name was MAVERICKS, guess who suggested it!!

Big news of today was Snapdeal.com buying freecharge startup with $400 million. The founder of freecharge is just 35 years old, has a B.A. in Philosophy and is a MBA dropout. He is from a business family, but if you think his concept was very novel, very useful, and instant hit. Definitely deservers it and he said in an interview today in TOI, he is still going to continue and keep improving and expanding freecharge website.

MQ Quiz by Kartik Vyas

1) MQ is what type of software?

a) Application Server

b) Web Server

c) Message Oriented Middleware

d) Database Server 

2) Which is the latest version of MQ as on October 2014?

a) 7.5

b) 6.0

c) 8.0

d) 8.5

3) Which of the following is NOT a MQ Series object?

a) Queue

b) Pipe

c) Message

d) Channel

4) Which of the following is NOT MQ API CALL?

a) MQCONN

b) MQCONNX

c) MQDISC

d) MQEXIT

5) Which of the following is NOT a type of queue in MQ Series

a) Local Queue

b) Remote Queue

c) Automatic Queue

e) Transmission Queue

6) Which command is used to create a Queue Manager?

a) create

b) create mqm

c) crtmqm

d) crtmqm mqm

7) Which of the below is MQ super user?

a) system

b) mqm

c) mq

d) mqsys

8) MQ uses both Stacks and Queues data structure

a) TRUE

b) FALSE

9) Which of the following is NOT a feature of MQ Series

a) Predictability

b) Ascynchornicity

c) Transformation

d) Message never lost

e) Routing

10) Which is default value of MAXSMSGS?

a) 500

b) 10000

c) 2500

d) 5000

Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal...which is the best??

 So I am a voracious online shopper. I can pretty much compare these 3 and couple other sites which I have used for online shopping. To start with, online shopping is great thing, you get lot more choices, you get best deals and you get home delivery. Not only that you can return the product if you don't like with no questions asked.

 Let me directly get to the point now. Amazon is the number one e-commerce site in India for me. It offers best prices, and what makes them stand out is their awesome customer service, and after sales service. They are the ONLY site who would deliver to your home, if you have given office address and are not available in office at time of delivery. They are the ONLY site who would do full refund of your product in case of any issues, even after the return period is over (which is one month usually). I have personally experienced all of this, and always go to amazon first for any shopping. They are a giant company, they are pioneers of this concept, still they are excellent and awesome. Not money-centric at all, totally customer-centric. Kudos!!

 This leads me to discussing about money-centric e-commerce sites, who don't care about anything else but money. Consider flipkart.com. They were a pretty nice site too, they were pioneers of e-commerce in India. I remember they started with books only, and I had ordered few engineering books during my study days from flipkart. But recently they have gone crazy, they had a Big Billion Sale recently, they earned 600 Crores in 10 hours. But there were hundreds and thousands of complaining users, they earned money, but they lost huge customer base. However they are not the worse yet...keep reading.

 Meet Jabong.com The ultimate useless good for nothing site. They have the worst customer service. Once my cell was down, and I wanted them to contact me on my friends number for a product return. I called them 3 times, and sent 2 emails giving alternate number details. Still the order was never picked up, I am still holding a defective product, no use contacting their useless customer service as well. I wish they all rot in hell!!

 I am really surprised by the growth of snapdeal.com. They are also a flipkart level site now. You can get a lotta great deals at shopclues.com too. However I would recommend always use Amazon! 

Nexus 5 - Ultimate Gaming Collection!

 I have been a gamer since childhood. By gamer I mean an avid gamer, not a pro gamer. I loved and still love playing games. It all started with Brian Lara Cricket on my cousin's computer. It was long back, they had a black and white monitor, and the computer was used only for playing that game. After that I got a computer and used to play Quake 3, and many other small flash games. I also had a sega gaming console before, playing Contra and other games, we all have done that.

 I was however lucky enough to own a PS2, and I played a lot on it. Mostly NFS series, and sports like Cricket, FIFA, F1 and Lawn Tennis. I had and still do have many car and bike racing DVDs of my PS2. After that I got a Nintendo Wii from US, that was good for work out, however controls are not as smooth as you would expect, it is still a pre-mature technology. And then...Nexus 5 came in ma life!!

 My last blog related to gaming on Nexus 5 was on May 1. A lot has changed since. Believe it or not, I have 26 games on my Nexus 5 currently, compared to the 9 which I had then. To start with I installed a lot of word games, I am a voracious writer, and words are my poison. I have got Wordament, Snap Attack, 5 Clues, 4 Pics 1 Word, Word Search and Vocabul Jumble to play with. This is something good, you learn along with having fun. Another terrific games I got is Quiz Up, this is amazing. You can play quiz agianst anyone in the world, as well as your friends on over 500 topics. My favorite topics are Computer Science, and Cricket. I can proudly say I have beaten the best in Computer Science from Italy and Poland, and many others which I am proud of!

  Let's get to big games now. I got CSR Racing, which is an ultimate drag racing game. Similar to NFS series, you fight up against a gang, and beat the boss in the end. There are 5 gangs. You can upgrade you car, and compete in lotta other races too, to earn money for car upgrade. The music is scintillating, and game play is terrific too1

Then I got WWE SuperCard,I remember playing this in childhood, where you would have all cards with details of each wrestler like rank, chest, biceps, fights fought, figths won, etc, and you would have to win all the cards to win the game, this is just like that and really cool and addictive. I played from midnight to 4AM the day I installed it, and I am still undefeated with 36 wins!! :P

 Another big game I got is FIFA 14, having played FIFA a lot on PS2, this is not new for me. Only the AI has improved a lot, and new game modes, however this is over 1 GB game so you would need space on your mobile. Real Cricket 14 is another big game I have installed today itself, I am going to check it out, but based on screen shots, and reviews it does look promising. Stick Cricket Partnerships and Tennis 3D are still there from before. I got 3D bowling too now, I tried Pool, but I am not into it much.

 I have got a bunch of aircraft combat and simulator games. The best one is Rise Of Glory, it has really good dog fights and lot of missions. You start with a classic World War 1 wooden plane, controls are pretty simple and there is not much to complain about.  iFighter 1945 is a 2D but highly impressive game , really nice what they have managed to do with 2D only effects. Fly Plane - Flight teaches you how to fly a commercial jet, pretty neat, you get a feeling on how much reponsibility is there in the hands of the pilot, the landing is the toughest part I found. Space Agency is also still there from before, but I have stopped playing it, will retain it though!

 Spider Man Unlimited is the last notable game I would like to write of. It is one of the best game I have on my cell currently. Amazing graphics, gameplay and story line. So loaded with all these games in a 16GB model, along with a lot of apps, I guess I am using my cell phone pretty well and to the fullest.

TCP EXPLAINED

We all use the internet to do a lot of things. We use it to send email, to do social networking, to do online shopping and for various other purposes. However did you ever think or wonder how the internet works? What all goes behind the scenes and what infrastructure is involved in fulfilling all the requests you make on the internet; and enabling all the activities you perform online!

The internet architecture is a set of layered architecture. You act as a client, and your machine acts as a client system who is requesting services from various websites. The websites have various servers which cater to your requests. There are several logical layers which are involved at both client end and the server end through which your request passes. Imagine it similar to two buildings, you are on 10th floor of a building and you want to go to 10th floor of another building. You would go all the way to the ground floor, then walk or drive to the destination building, and then again go all the way to the 10th floor of the destination building.

There are various set of rules or what is technically called as protocols involved at each layer, which help in fulfilling your requests. One of such protocols is the TCP Protocol. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite (IP), and is so common that the entire suite is often called TCP/IP.  TCP provides reliable, ordered and error-checked delivery of a stream of digital information between two programs running on computers connected to a local area network, intranet or the public Internet. It resides at the transport layer, which is one of the layers of the internet stack. Web browsers use TCP when they connect to servers on the World Wide Web, and it is used to deliver email and transfer files from one location to another.

Transmission control protocol (TCP) is a network communication protocol designed to send data packets over the Internet. TCP is a transport layer protocol and is used to create a connection between remote computers by transporting and ensuring the delivery of messages over supporting networks and the Internet.

TCP makes it easier for computer programs to communicate with each other, typically over a computer network. When a program wants to send a lot of data, TCP is in charge of dividing the data, sending it through the network, and putting it back together correctly on a different computer. In the process, IP chooses which wires and "intersections" get used to send all the data pieces in the fastest way. It does this using packets.

If there are a lot of people using the network, it can get overloaded. Also sometimes weather, power outages, and other problems can make communication hard. Routers on the Internet use something called load balancing to try to fix some of these problems. But still, information can be delivered out of order, get lost, or even duplicated. TCP is designed to notice all of these problems and try to fix them. This can take a while, which is why the Internet sometimes seems slow. Once the TCP receiver has finally reassembled a perfect copy of the data originally transmitted, it passes that data to the computer program that asked for it. In this way, the program does not have to know about the network, and TCP does not have to know about the program's data.

We can relate what the TCP protocol does to the scenario when we order food from a restaurant. We request some food form the restaurant, the cook at the kitchen prepares the food, and the delivery boy delivers the food to our home. We again open the parcel, and enjoy the meal. The food is packed at the sourced and unpacked at the destination. Food is similar to the data which is passed over the internet from source to the destination. The delivery boy is similar to the transport layer, who ensures that the food is delivered in exact same conditions to the end point.

Hope the above explanations and examples were clear and you got a fair idea about the TCP protocol of the internet. 

 *I had submitted this essay as part of the Coursera IHTS course of University of Michigan. I am publishing this now as grades are declared. Please do not copy for any future sessions of this course. 

My Internet History

I remember it precisely. The year was 2001; I had just finished my 10th grade board exams, never used internet before. I went to a local cyber café for the first time, and asked them to help me setup an email id. Rediff.com was pretty popular at that time in India. I signed up, my name is Kartik Vyas, I tried for an id like kartikvyas@rediffmail.com, it was already taken, and this is a pretty common combination. I tried some more combinations, didn’t work, finally I ended up  with myhearwiillgoonkartik@rediffmail.com...it sounds pretty funny now, but I was pretty new to the internet then.

As far as technology is concerned, we had dialup internet at that time, when I first got internet at home. In the cyber café I am not sure, may be they might have had cable connection, but still it was not broadband, I am pretty sure! I used to go a lot to the cyber café, Yahoo Messenger was a big craze then, going in to public chat rooms, and then trying to start up a conversation with strangers. I think the last I remember; I had around 120 strangers in my Yahoo friends list! J

Another thing I used to do a lot was search for wallpapers of cars, and cinema celebrities, and email everyone, I was one hell of a spammer then! I used to also send e-cards to friends and relatives. I was also using email to be in touch with my long distance relatives. There was no social networking back then, no WhatsApp or Facebook.

Also I had my first desktop computer at home in 2003 before I started undergrad studies, I think it had a floppy drive, which is not seen these days! I don’t remember the configuration exactly but I guess it was Pentium 4 maybe and 256MB of RAM. Comparatively I have a DELL mini monster laptop now, it has 8GB RAM, 750GB hard disk, 1 GB inbuilt video graphics, and second gen Core i5, I got this back in 2011, and it was my second laptop.

I started my undergrad studies in Computer Engineering, and I can definitely say the initial stint with the internet had a big influence on my decision, I had curiosity to know how things work, and I wanted to learn it all. During engineering I learnt programming, I learnt RDBMS, and many other courses, I used to use internet voraciously to do research related to my courses. In my university we used to have well equipped labs, but it was only for study purpose, only faculty had internet access, and they had broadband connection.

Social networking started for me around 2006, I started using Orkut, and I remember it was exciting and a bit addictive too. In 2008 I got an invite from a friend to use facebook, compared to orkut I found facebook interface of 2008, a bit less user friendly, but then slowly facebook started gaining ground and we all know the rest!

After I graduated I got a job in a big MNC, I worked for 3 major clients. Everything was online, we were working for big clients and dealing with a lot of sensitive data, and had a lot of responsibility. There were 3 level access till I could reaches my cubicle! J

One thing I am proud of is a failed startup I had back in 2010. Cloud computing was a novelty then, I had done some research, and was planning to build a startup to provide cloud based solutions for business users. I had commodity and retail market in mind. I also had registered a domain, and designed my site from godaddy.com. It was not in India back then, and I had paid them in dollars, they had a ton of tools to work with. Everything was there, only I was still nascent and could not build a working product. Eventually I thought of trying again later when I am more prepared and more experienced.

I used to do a lot of research at that time, wrote papers about Cloud computing and SOA. The passion and curiosity I had when I started using internet in 2001, I still had it in 2010 and I still have it now. Although due to time constraints of a full time job, I cannot do much research but I try to do as much as possible, I read a few papers and saw some videos on BigData last year, I also completed a course on coursera itself of the same.

So, this is my own history of the internet! Hope you had liked it!

*I had submitted this essay as part of the Coursera IHTS course of University of Michigan. I am publishing this now as grades are declared. Please do not copy for any future sessions of this course. 

Internet in 2034

To think about the future of the Internet, let’s have a look at the past. To predict the future 20 years from now, let’s get an idea how much we have advanced in the last 20 years. So, how was the internet really in 1994? Well in the 90s the internet was becoming more and more popular; it was having a revolutionary impact on means of communication with advent of electronic mail, instant messaging, forums, blogs and social networking. All these things are still pretty much there, however they have now become a basic necessity in everyday personal and professional life. Something which was a fantast or a novelty 20 years back has now become an integrated part of our lives.

Another major difference in the last 20 years has been the number of devices connected to the internet. Currently we have over 20 billion devices connected to the internet, which is more than 3 times the population of the whole world. This is an extra-ordinary change, and it clearly showcases the impact Internet has had on our daily lives. Also, the fact that these devices talk to each other and are super smart, has brought in a revolution with regards to convergence.

So going by all the above, it is really difficult to predict how Internet would be 20 years from now, no one would have guessed 20 years back that we would be relying and using the internet so heavily today. However, here’s my 2 cents.

First thing I believe that might happen is division of networks. Currently we have only a WWW, which is common and everyone uses it. I believe slowly we would have multiple closely coupled and independent array of networks. For eg. We would have self driving cars, so there would be an independent network infrastructure dedicated just for that particular domain. This would have to happen because going by the numbers and the exponential increase we are having currently, it would be almost impossible to have one global network which would encompass everything.

Another major revolution I see is in the medical industry and its influence on wearable devices. We already have some wearable devices in the form of Google Glass, Smart Watches, we also have a Smart Band coming up. I believe in the future, the complete health of the human body would be monitored via a wearable device, it could be as simple as a watch or a wrist band, it would be connected to the health systems web and off course it would be smart enough to ensure I am in the peak of my health all the time.

We may also see shift in the basic architecture of how the internet is accessed and used. We already ran out of IPv4 addresses last year and we are now using IPv6 addresses to accommodate the staggering number of devices connected to the internet. We also see new and new concepts like Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, etc coming up. All this and more could easily change the fundamental architecture of the internet in the future.

I might as well start thinking of what we saw in fiction movies like Minority Report and Robot, and there is a fair chance that reality could be that in 20 years. Science, Technology and Internet are advancing and tremendous rate, I use a Nexus 5 smart phone, and I receive OS update and application updates very frequently. Also with regards to hardware, we have 3GB of RAM now available in smart phones, with octo core processors, something we could have never imagined, same goes with the internet, how and where it would lead us is difficult to predict!

*I had submitted this essay as part of the Coursera IHTS course of University of Michigan. I am publishing this now as grades are declared. Please do not copy for any future sessions of this course. 

Amdocs World Hackathon 2014

I remember in 2011 when I was doing my Masters from Purdue School of Science. I was the CS Rep for IEEE, and there was IEEE international 48 Hackathon which was going to happen. I had to be part of the organizing team, and I also wanted to take part in the event. I sent email to my class distro. No one replied. I approached a couple of guys, but even they turned me down. I was a bit disappointed then.Come 2014, and life has come a full circle. God provided me another chance with the Amdocs International Hackathon 2014. This time I did manage to build a full strength team and submit my entry. It was a 24 hour Hackathon.

The date was 16^th September and the time 8:30AM. I reached the center and the instructions overview session was going on. It lasted around half an hour. After that me and my friend took a stroll in the garden to do some brainstorming. The theme of the Hackathon was ‘Internet of Things’, so we wanted to be out of office as it would enable us to see more things  and think of possible novel ideas.

We went to the office after that and had meeting with the team and finalized the concept and the product we wanted to build. We also finalized the business flows we will implement. There is a saying, if you have 12 hour to cut a tree, use 10 hours to sharpen your axe! All plans ready, we made arrangements for laptops to be used, and at 3PM we were fully ready, and started working!

The team we had, we are all good friends, and there was going to be lot of fun for sure. The primary aim was to enjoy and have a good time, along with completing the product. We coded all night, and we did have a working product with 3 business flows working as expected without bugs. It was more than enough. We had built a smart internet of things system on the cloud in 24 hours. We had also added decision making skills to it using AI. We were very tired, but the happiness and satisfaction took over more!

It was a great experience for all 5 of us: Atul Tripathi (Atul ji, Behtareen, Dhurandhar, ATITT), Saurabh Hote (Jaykant Shikre, Hotteeeeee), Rahul Singh (Cheetah), Vinil Mehta (Vats) and myself Kartik Vyas.  Thank you guys for helping me in fulfilling my dream, your support was exceptional and this would not have been possible without you guys! I will definitely never forget those 24 hours of fun and coding!!

The 9 Games on my Nexus 5

In one of my previous posts, I had mentioned about the games I had loaded in my phones. At that time I had Subway Surfer, Hill Climb Racing, Asphalt 8, Stick Cricket Premier League and Tennis 3D. However, three have been a few changes now.

To start with I uninstalled Subway Surfer and Hill Climb Racing, as I did not find any interest in them after playing high graphics racing and sports games. I also installed some new games on my cell. As I was done with the Stick Premier League, I uninstalled that too, and I installed Stick Cricket Partnerships. It is a multiplayer online game, where you partner with other players on the net, and try to reach certain milestones and clear each levels. I also got the original Stick Cricket, but that is not that great, most of the things in that are paid!

Another game which I installed and I am playing a lot is 'Teen Patti'. It is the Indian version of Poker. I remember back in 2011, I played a lot of Zynga Poker on facebook. I had started with 10K chips and I had reached 2 Million, and hell yeah I am proud of it! Currently I have reached upto 175k starting from 10K, I have played only a week till now. I really like these games, they help you in developing your judgment and decision making skills.

What else, I have installed 4 more games. First is KBC, however I have never won more than 40K in it….the questions are just much tougher than what you get on the television. Second one is chess, which I din’t play till now…lol .

Third one I got is Pool Billiards, it is a good game to kill time, but I would enjoy the real pool more than the one on my cell. Finally I got a wonderful little game called 2048. It took me some guidance on how to play it, but once I learned, it is indeed a bit addictive! So there it is…the current 9 games of my Nexus 5: Tennis 3D, Asphalt 8, Stick Cricket, Stick Cricket Partnerships, Pool Billiards, 2048 Numbers, KBC 2014, Chess and Teen Patti.

Nexus 5 Fully Loaded - Tips & Tricks!

 So it's been over a month now. I am really happy and proud to own a Nexus 5. Why not? When you are using phone of the year 2013! Ne ways getting back to the subject, in this post I would like to provide tips and recommendations for any Nexus 5/Android user.

 To start with, the one feature Nexus phone users are proud to show off, is the Google hindi input. This feature is available by default only in Nexus devices, for other Android phones, you need to install 3rd party apps. When you enable the Google hindi input, you can input in Hindi in all the applications on the phone. To enable this feature go to Settings-->Language & input-->Check the box which says 'Google Hindi Input'. Also this feature may soon be available for other Android devices too, with the next Android update.

 Lets come to apps and games. So, I got a 16 Gigs phone, with 12 Gigs user available. A 4.95 inch display, 2 Gigs of RAM, a Snapdragon 800 chip set (fastest at that time) and a 2.3 Ghz of CPU. Well it was like having a million dollars, and deciding how to spend it lavishly!!! I was a bit apprehensive and cautious to install heavy games, but then I did it all.

 As far as games is concerned, I started with the humble Subway Surfer and Hill Climb racing. Played those for a week, then I got Asphalt 8! It is ultimate racing game to play on a cell phone for a gamer. I have played a lot of NFS's on my PS2, and the feeling you get of playing a game of same level of graphics and performance on a handheld device is simply amazing! Really enjoying this one, already reached Season 2 of it in a week. Only concern is, phone becomes a bit hot if you play for long times, so don't do that, especially for Nexus 5, as it is a fully sealed device.

 I also got the Stick Cricket Premier League. You can play 5 seasons of IPL or Aus equivalent. I started the IPL with Mumbai Indians team. You get some funds at start of the season too, to buy players/coaches. Apparently I have finished all 5 seasons, won the IPL trophy 3 times, came 2nd once and 4th once. Another wonderful and new game on the play store, which I installed is Tennis 3D. It took me some time to ace this one, around 30mins, but once I learnt some tricks it is fun. It is competitive, and I still need to learn more tricks to start winning Slams.

 So that was for games, lets come to apps. WhatsApp and Facebook were the first and basic installs.  After that I also got the Facebook Messenger, as the latest one lets you make unlimited free calls! Also installed Skype, as I use it for Video calls with family. I had not loaded music in my phone for a while, as my awesome collection was in Mumbai. I went home last weekend and got 4 Gigs worth of my favorite music synced to my Nexus 5. This phone does not come with a music player, you can play music from My Music app, but that is not that good. Got 'Rocket Player' for music, working pretty well, Good Easy UI, and some useful features too.

  I am happy and lucky to have lot of good friends who are experienced Android/Nexus 5 users. They also recommended me apps like 'Clean Master' and 'Digitally Imported Radio'. I tried a few stations, and 'Chillout' is the one I liked the most. There are several other crazy hard core Trance stations too, I got headache after listening them for 5 mins...lol.

 I am a movie buff, so I had also got the bookmyshow app in the first week. I follow cricket too, I tried the CricInfo app, din't like it much. Have installed CricBuzz now, which is also higher in rankings on the PlayStore. After installing all of the above, I still have 3.62 GB memory left. Not to mention, I have a 1.5 GB worth of a single game in the form of Asphalt 8, and 4 GB of music!

 Only concern I found was about the battery, and I guess not only for Nexus 5, this is applicable to all Android phones. It is more applicable to this sucker as it packs a very big punch, compared to most other lesser specs devices, but overall I am really really happy with my Nexus 5!!