The most awaited event of the year at InfoBeans is mega outing in which entire InfoBeans team along with their families come together for 4 days holiday. This is when all offices across geographies are not operational.

This year also InfoBeans Pune team along with their families went for Mega Outing to land of beaches Goa often called as "Pearl of the Orient" and a "Tourist Paradise".InfoBeans Pune team had a scintillating time there and enjoyed the holidays at the fullest.

Check out some photos of our Mega Outing 2011.

At InfoBeans, CSR is considered as not a responsibility but an ideology that got imbedded in the culture of InfoBeans. The founders are strong believers of the concept and motivate the entire team to participate in various initiatives at organization and society level.

InfoBeans team participated in AMITY CSR Conclave 2011 and it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have won the award for CSR Excellence (Small  Scale category).

Kudos to the entire IB Care team and all of us for making conscious effort to give back to society.

The most awaited event of the year at InfoBeans is mega outing in which entire InfoBeans team along with their families come together for 4 days holiday. This is when all offices across geographies are not operational.

This year also InfoBeans team along with their families went for Mega Outing to Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan. Check out some photos of our Mega Outing 2011.

In a continued effort towards propagating environment friendly initiatives and Go Green activities , InfoBeans IB Care organized a Tree plantation event in Shankar Nagar, Indore. IB Care committee took the first steps in transforming a garbage strewn piece of  Public land in Shankar Nagar (Near Rafael Tower, Indore office) in to a Community Garden. The event was organized in cooperation with the local community members.

The committee went to each and every household distributing pamphlets and inviting the community members to be part of this event. The aim was to drive home the message of working towards a Greener tomorrow starting  at home and in our local community. The garbage was cleaned out and the garden has a proper fence now, with trees and plants planted along the periphery.

The initiative bought the local community together in a bigway and many of them have vowed individually to  adopt at least one plant and keep on planting more and more trees. It has also motivated them to work on other community based initiatives as well.

Hopefully it will continue to flourish with the community while being a symbol that small steps can lead to big changes.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that InfoBeans has won the award for Talent Management at the Asia's Best Employer Brand award held in Singapore recently. Attached are some pictures. We received the trophy and certificate this morning.

I want to congratulate the entire team with special reference to the HR team and Ambrish for taking the initiative on this and applying at the awards.

It is a proud moment to be a part of the InfoBeans family. This is just the first step in our endeavor to not only make InfoBeans as the best place to work, but have the world recognize it as well.

Excellent achievement!

A news report quotes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo “A native photosharing experience will be rolled out to 100% users over the next couple of weeks”.

This entails into user not having to leave the Twitter website to view pictures or videos. For app developers, they do not have to worry about integrating the images/videos in their app to some third party service to show them on Twitter timelines.

Twitter has partnered with Photobucket to bring this service on board. Photos and videos posted by users would be wearing a badge ‘Powered by Photobucket’.

This news also rebounds that Twitter would float most popular videos and images in a dedicated section on their website. With the wild guesses on, it means the API from Twitter could be made available that provides all the Latest/Top Tweeted/Most Retweeted/Most Favorite pictures and videos.

What all of these means to different stakeholders?

Developers could see this as an opportunity of topping up their apps with host of new features…

Rich and substance-full content browsing for users with the help of top viewed pictures/videos/tweets…

For mobile users, I think the experience would pretty much be the same. Its just that instead of a link now they might see a thumbnail of the content. Its all same after tapping that thumbnail…a full screen display of the media content.

Some questions…

What it means for services like Twitpic, Yfrog, Lockers etc who provides these libraries to developers…Are they somewhat out of business?

If the images are tagged with “Powered by Photobucket” badge, who owns the copyright to the image? Twitter, Photobucket….User?

Would Twitter provide a separate sharing link to images or videos posted OR users just can do away with the link to that Tweet?

Should existing apps change their service and switch to the default ones…soon to be released by Twitter?

Please do share your bit in the comments section on what you think about this new service. What could be some new interesting cool features to top up the host twitter apps?

Please share…

BTW:

Link to Twitter's blog post

Here is the official video from Twitter for the introduction of this new service

As we promised, we’re revealing who has won the iPad2 right this instant. Before we actually reveal who won though, we’d just like to thank everyone for participating in this contest & appreciate you stopping by our booth at CTIA.

We received a little over a thousand entries. It took us a while to look over each one making sure the rules were followed. Of those hundreds of submissions, we randomly selected one winner.

We’re now delighted to announce the lucky one!

And the winner is: Earl Epstein

Congratulations! Earl, A brand spanking new iPad2 will be shipped to you shortly.

Thank you all for taking part in this competition!
 

Last week @ CTIA many attendees & exhibitors participated in “Win an iPad2 contest @ InfoBeans booth”. I hope it was a good show for you and your business.

Thanks for overwhelming response for this contest & trying your luck to win iPad TOO!!..

Although most of the contest entries have already been compiled,  we are still consolidating all entries so that everyone has equal opportunity of being a winner of iPad2. Once all entries have been fully verified we will officially announce our winners, we expect within the next couple of days… probably coming Friday.

Thank you for your patience and your participation in iPad2 contest @ CTIA. Contest results will be announced on website & the winner will be notified by email too.

Good luck everyone!
 

After Start Private Browsing it’s now turn for Start Ad free Browsing. A new feature always imagined and now being worked upon by primary browser developers to ease life of carefree internet user.

Advertisers have always been following, tracking and studying users to know their exact needs. Behavioral targeting technique is often used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the strength of their campaign and jump up sales. This has helped them deliver their online advertisements to users who might be interested. But users who seem interested may not actually be and may end up getting annoyed by unnecessary sales calls. Such advertisement technique is not just restricted to ecommerce sites, but companies outside e-commerce marketplace have also started to display content more relevant to the interests of the individual viewing the page. Till this it is all good. The problem starts when ad agencies spy on users personal information. Trying to get someone’s mail id, phone number, postal address, birth details, family history, financial details and even social status without letting them know is too much. The bigger issue is not just the data being tracked, but it’s limitless retention and reuse.

An increasing number of concerns related to online data collection of personal data raised by various groups including government agencies has led browser giants to think of approaching opt-out online behavioral advertising from different directions.

Various news articles from last couple of days tell about Google and Mozilla developing tracking-protection tools that will work automatically to let people decline personalized, targeted ads.
Indeed a great step designed to guard privacy by browsers like  Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. This facility is believed to come in the form of downloadable browser plug-in that blocks advertisers most probably from ad networks or alternatively from self created lists of sites alias blacklists users want to block. Such tools shall be made available in not very far future browser releases to help users block advertisers from collecting information about them.

We had lots of privacy setting related features in the past. Most of them worked on the basis of cookies including flash and other plugin cookies. However cookies are also erasable. So with every cookie deletion, the settings fade away leaving one once more in an unidentified pool of websites and advertisements. Also most advertisers follow users around the web, tracking visited sites, clicked links, online purchases made, searches made, and in the case of mobile browsers even location of the user or his travel route. A search for more permanent ad blocking has always been on.
Imagine various unnecessary advertisement emails in mail box, various calls/SMS from unknown sources received daily can all go away with one browser feature turned on.

Hopefully proposed tools like Do Not Track from Mozilla and Adblock Plus from Chrome will be smart enough to restrict advertisers from collecting information about us.

Mozilla plans to create a new HTTP header that will allow Firefox and other browsers to shut off web tracking. The new header would offer a universal way to tell websites that a user wishes to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking. Apart from this Microsoft, Google and Mozilla's promise for stronger privacy support in getting developed a similar plug-in for other browsers as well.

But be aware that No more Tracking will definitely result in no more customized item information for us. So even if I am only interested in women apparels, I will get to see all gender clothes on the web, more huge ads will take over the home page, more floating questionnaires and interruptions will come since ad relevance will have gone away. So our online experience might  suffer. Still privacy is most important.

Happy Ad free Browsing.
 

Cloud has become such a buzzword lately that I have had a few non-technical friends of mine asking me what it is. Candidly, I will admit, I could not answer the question at that time. I did however read more and more about it which has made me an admirer of the very concept of cloud.

If I were asked today what cloud computing is, I would’ve said it is more of an idea than a technology. Roughly put, cloud is an environment where applications and data can reside and execute in a sandboxed host framework that performs dynamic resource allocation for its processes.

Before most people realized, cloud had indirectly become an indispensable part of their lives because of the online services they used. There are many organizations today which have already ventured into this territory or are planning to, in the near future. But beware, when you run to your boss about the cool idea of hosting your next application on cloud since technology giants like Google and Microsoft are doing it, he might correctly ask, why so. Alright, let’s try to find you an answer.

Servers have to be bought or hired keeping in mind the resources that the hosted applications will need or uhhh… eventually need during peak load conditions. Doesn’t this mean you are buying or renting resources you only use 5%, maybe 10% of the time?

From what I have come to understand, organizations, mostly depending on the scale of their requirement, may have different rationale behind switching to cloud. Larger organizations may need to host applications that need humongous amount of resources in terms of storage space, RAM consumption and CPU load. They benefit from the dynamic allocation capabilities of cloud where available resources are automatically scaled up or down based on the applications’ requirements.

This means smaller organizations should ignore cloud altogether and look somewhere else, right? Not at all. Small and even medium sized organizations may very well benefit from the pay-as-you-go billing system that many of the cloud providers have adopted. For cost conscious consumers, this means availability of powerful infrastructure for a fraction of the cost.

Since most of the cloud providers host your applications in modern data centers, you get access to an elite hosting infrastructure that’s highly available, powerful, may be even geo-redundant (and many more big words I can’t remember right now). That’s technology at a reasonable price for you, sir.

Sounds like a dream? It’s probably the right time to wake up to a cloudy day.