EraThink EraPalm 5-inch tablet PC runs Windows 7, looks like a handheld game console

Today on the ongoing China Consumer Electronics Fair ( Shenzhen ), EraThink Technologies company from Shanghai showed off a very interesting device, with a very unique look we’ve never seem before on a tablet PC. From the design, it looks just like a handheld game console, with a 5 inches display, and joysticks for playing games. It comes in side-slide form, and a QWERTY keyboard would appear after you slide out the display.

But from the specs it’s pretty much a mini netbook, equipped with an untold Intel Atom Z processor and 5-inches 800＊480 capacitive touchscreen, with support to 1080p videos. It even gets a Ethernet port to allow wire Internet connect. It also gets HDMI, VGA, USB ports, and support 3G connectivity and GPS. No words about the price and time of availability.

[Source:newpad]

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DigiColle 2010: Akiba’s Univ Students Present Their Research Results & Works

Digital Hollywood was founded in 1994 by Dr. Tomoyuki Sugiyama[J] who had worked as a visiting researcher at MIT Media Lab, and later then it became a university that has grown out of a vocational school.   The university holds an annual conference, which is named DigiColle[J] after Digital Hollywood Collection, to show up research results chosen from many applications by their students.   This year’s one was held in early March.   I’m afraid I’ve been concentrating on catching up the quake-related updates and missed to write about it for almost a month.

At the conference, I could see ten interesting ideas that future techpreneurs were presenting.   Let me expose them to the eyes of the international tech community.   The conference was recorded by the university’s professor and ad planner Takuya Kawai a.k.a. Himanainu[J] (meaning a boring dog) and is available on Ustream.

Timecode (starting at)	Presentation
00:11:00	A Story of Bump & Concept by David Oshima (3D CGExpression Lab) He studied a technology that converts 2D dot images to 3D images and animate them.   His view on the changing of computer graphics technologies is worth to listen.
00:24:00	Sustainable Social Business in A Rural Village of Bali Island by Kumiko Kobayashi For over seven years, she has been involved in founding business in the rural village of Timble, Bali, Indonesia.   In order to grow her business up to a sustainable social business, she compares it with the successful business case of Irodori[J] in Tokushima Prefecture.  For your reference, Irodori is a community-based company producing decoration leaves especially designed for Japanese dishes.   The community used to suffer from depopulation, but the company helps elderly people make a living with their highly intelligent marketing efforts.
00:42:00	Phone Concierge Service for Chinese Travelers Visiting Japan by Chen Yang  He got an idea of a phone-based concierge and interpretation service called eTravel, which intends to remove language barriers from Chinese travelers during their visit in Japan.   eTravel, an online travel concierge service for Chinese visitors to Japan
01:07:00	Investigating  Causes on Why Featured The Two Movies Were Hit by Toru Kawana and Yohei Miyazawa (Hit Content Lab)  By comparing KPIs from movie-related blogs, roadshow promotions and ticket sales, a team of the two guys has investigated the reasons why the two movies of Red Cliff and Ponyo[J] were hit in timeline from their pre-roadshow date to post-roadshow date.   They believe the method is efficient to analyze blogsphere effects spreading out to various content businesses.
01:26:00	Saving the production process and time of CGI (computer graphics imagery) with Wirless Virtual Camera by Takashi Kitada (@kitada3_frame) Using a motion capture facility enabling high-speed and accurate detection of a digital video camera, it shows composite motion images on a screen of the camera.
01:33:00	Using ARG (alternative reality game) for Promoting New Movies by Nami Ikeda (Media Communication Lab) This is a joint project with Warner Entertainment and Domino Pizza.  She studies how social media can deliver positive effects on promoting new movies.
01:49:00	E-Sports Training App by Kotaro Tsukuma and Toshiki Kakehata (Console Game Produce Lab) A team of the two guys are developing an iPhone app that intends to train e-sport skills.  (not yet released on the Appstore)
02:05:00	Developing a Character Business in Shanghai for Promoting the city’s Sightseeing Business by Zhu YuanFang As China develops in its economy, more people pursue their mental richness.  Character business draws the people’s attention in the country.   In partnership with the city’s local government, he would like to develop new line-ups of souvenirs using the character.
02:21:00	Designing an E-Publishing Flow of Drawing Books for Kids by Yoshiro Kosuge and Chieko Mori Drawing book authors are mostly not familiar with e-publishing.   A team of the two guys worked with those authors and succeeded to create a new type of drawing books that had been never introduced.
02:39:00	Torao[J]: Helping the Primary Sector of Industry Promote By Social Media Marketing by Masahiro Takeda He visited  a town of rice fields in Akita Prefecture and worked with young farmers for promoting their direct online sales of rice products with social media such as Twitter. His website Torao[J] is named after	the nickname given to guys using tractors for cultivating rice fields.

 

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Awesome Jobs :Senior Software Engineer, Business Development Manager, QA [and more]

Hard core awesome opportunities await awesome candidates at PiStart – a place to start/find new opportunities.

Our featured employer, Network18 is hiring Senior Software Engineer in Mumbai.

Job Details:

• Lead the design, development and rollout of new features following thorough engineering practices.
• Write high quality, robust, scalable and extensible code.
• Participate in code reviews, refactoring sessions and discussions on product architecture.
• Profile and optimize various layers of application code.
• Interact closely with Design team to integrate design into code.
• Mentor junior members of the engineering team. Lead by example.

Job Requirement

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of hands-on development experience in Java.
• Solid hands on experience with Struts, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL and Linux.
• Familiarity with good engineering practices like revision control systems (we use SVN), bug tracking systems (we use Trac), code reviews, agile software development, build processes, code profiling and debugging.
• Experience with Solr/Lucene a major plus.

To Apply, send your CV to pi@burrp.com

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Senior Business Development at ZipDial Mobile Solutions Pvt. Ltd [Mumbai]

• At least 6-8 years experience in business development, sales and marketing
• Ideally experience at a marketing agency serving clients in the focus industries, especially FMCG, Retail, Banking & Financial Services, and Media
• Ideally experience selling SMS and other mobile services

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Software Engineer, Hibernate for 10W at 10wickets

We require a strong Java Developer with rich experience in a typical Web Application Stack. You should have thorough expertise in Hibernate, SQL and Design Patterns. You should be able to use Hibernate Tools(for Eclipse) to generate mappings, should be able to use Hibernate Validators, Annotations and reverse/forward engineer from/to a given DB Schema.

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Software Engineer at Borget Solution in Bangalore

• Born hacker, going the book way is not your way.
• Understand startup culture
• Worked on personal projects ( Web please )
• if you have Database background of MongoDB or other schema-free database would be great (not necessary).

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Lamp Developer at ZipDial Mobile Solutions Pvt. Ltd. in   Bangalore,

You are fit for the team if you:

• can write production level code in PHP like poetry.
• can understand HTML/CSS/JS well enough to help produce an efficient front end.
• have ability to design production level DB schema from product definition.
• can play with Apache servers without crashing them.

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Python Tech Lead at Borget Solution in Vashi, New Mumbai

• In-depth knowledge of and experience with Python (min. 2 years)
• Experience using MVC web frameworks
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL/MySQL and ideally NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB)

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Test Lead at Appcheck Solutions LLC in Bangalore

• 2-3 years of mobile software development experience on the Android platform with good knowledge of Android SDKs and knowledge of J2ME.
• 5-6 years of total software development / testing experience
• Must have understanding of Multi-Threading and memory management specific to mobile devices

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Delivery Manager and System Architect – Startup Company at Exelanz in Bhubaneswar

• Team building – hire software developers and other resources as needed.
• Manage software development services contracts for our clients. The tasks include interacting with our client(s) to understand business requirements and lead a team of onsite and outsourced resources to get the projects completed.
• Work with other outsourcing teams to get the software developed as needed. Our current development model uses a combination of our own developers and outsourcing development team(s) as required.

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Dev Lead at Appcheck Solutions LLC in Bangalore

• You will own the application for Android OS, Blackberry and Java.
• You must have a strong desire and passion to code, grow and flourish in these technologies.
• You will have to explore each and every aspect of these technologies as a programmer and researcher and hence must be experimental, innovative and open to new ideas.

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» Candidate: In the next few days, you will be able to apply to interesting jobs directly from the site.

» If you are a company hiring smart geeks/product teams – do connect with us (ashish at pluggd.in).

» Startups, you can submit the job requirements directly from the site.

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From Collars To Buttons – Tailor Your Own Shirt Online At Peprismine

Ever taken your girl to a boutique and wondered on how they could be so particular about every thread and every sequin that goes into their apparel? Ever wondered if you could change only the sleeves of that fantastic shirt you window shopped. If you ever had such wishes, they will soon be granted.

Bangalore based Peprismine helps men customize every part of their apparel through visualization technology that gives you a WYSIWYG kind of experience. Available only for shirts currently, the site gives a list of every component of shirt along with the available customization options. The visualization is neat and details of the customization options have been worked upon quite well.

I tried designing a shirt for my self and it took me around 5-6 minutes but wasn’t sure if I should take the risk of ordering it without touching the fabric. The prices are reasonable and experience is decent. The team does seem to be working on the look and feel problem also but not sure if that is something scalable.

Customers can request fabrics swatch,
Order through phone,
Measurement taken at doorstep (for Bangalore),
For those who wish to have a fashion advise can call.

Though the effort is appreciable but I believe this should have been first tired as a feature on an existing e-commerce portal that has some decent traction. In the current state, if at all this doesn’t fly, the team might get confused whether their product is weak or the marketing.

The service should find traction with tier-1 cities where even a simple tailoring costs as much a ready made branded shirt of the same quality. I also see a possible outsourcing model for the developed nations working here. Though there are sophisticated visualization tools being used by some e-stores in the west, with life like avatars etc. but they are mostly like putting readymade apparels on a mannequin and not really making your own apparel.

What do you think of Peprismine? Any advices for the founders?

CornerStone was a similar attempt as an offline model but more from an inventory management point of view.

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How To Protect Yourself From Bad Software Design

Charles Hoare has rightly said -
“There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

Most often software development vendors will deliver you solutions that meet your required feature set. These solutions seem to do the work at the time of delivery, but on closer inspection, they are not built so that they may be strong and sustainable. Many users are also not in a position to make this judgment. As a result, the solutions deployed fail to live up to the changing needs of an IT service user and need to be replaced with newer ones again and again. This process is no-doubt tedious and expensive for the end user. 

However, with a slight understanding of the principles of good software design, all end users can save themselves from this trouble and can make meaningful judgments before accepting a vendor’s solution.

The easiest thing to do is to perform these tests and ask these questions:

• Check the Usability – Is the Interface easy to use and intuitive?
• Security Engineering – Is the system open to security vulnerabilities? Can it be easily hacked into? This may be hard to check on your own. Ask an IT expert or the vendor to run some XSS and security tests and make sure they pass.
• Scalable – Is the solution scalable? What if you need to provide parallel access to your system to many people at once? Is the solution built in a manner that it can be used in parallel?
• Performance Intensive – How much RAM and CPU cycles does the solution need to run smoothly? What if your server is overloaded? Will this solution fail to function?
• Modularity – What if you need to add extensions and build in more features into the system? Is the solution written in a manner that adding or editing code will be easy?
• Tests – Make sure the solution has enough software tests accompanying it, especially Regression Tests. This is the only sane way to make sure that existing functionality is intact when newer features are added to the solution.

This will go a long way in saving you money on software re-hauls and re-vamps from alternate software development vendors.

What’s your opinion?

[Guest article by Ritika Sanghi, ex-Googler who now runs Atlogys Consulting. The article has been reproduced from author’s blog.]

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App Review : Zomato

NCR based, Zomato’s App lets you search menus across 12000 restaurants in India. Spanning 7 cities – Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai & Hyderabad, Zomato lets you check ratings, reviews and discounts of all restaurants in your city. Zomato on Android is also location aware – it recommends you the best restaurants around your current location.

The app is currently available on Android Market and Blackberry App store.

App Review: Zomato

By khanapurechait

Zomato’s web service that boasts of a humongous database of eateries has been a favorite of foodies in India for a while now…and now it gets even better with their android app!!!
Zomato provides a clean and easy sign-in process, allowing you to sign in with your existing Google account…and its just a click..thats it!!
The app is very clean and simple, much in keeping with their online service. You can discover a random restaurant by shaking your phone.
It also allows for a highly customizable browse function that lets you filter result by selecting simple options…a feature that is missing in many other food guide apps.
And of course there is the option of searching for a restaurant by name.
What is really impressive about the app (and the web service) is the sheer number of restaurants and eateries they have cataloged …and that too in great detail…You can call a restaurant just by clicking on the call button…unimaginably useful on a phone!! You can also browse through menus, ratings and reviews…whats more…see the restaurant on Google maps too…and if you’re interested, post a picture of the place…
All in all…a must have for foodies.

By prat1234

For foodies like me, Burrp has been the place to go to for some time. A few days ago someone told me about this app called Zomato on Android which was a great app for trying out new food joints. Now I am a sucker for new apps on Android phones and when he mentioned Food + App – I knew I HAD to try this one out.

I have a few apps on my phone which leverage location specific data to identify local places of interest. E.g. I use the Yellow pages app to get info about restaurants, shops etc – and I must admit it’s info is very useful – if not accurate at times. It is definitely better than many Google maps locations – which really suck especially in Chennai (my wife and I tried to drive through a wall although it was a clear nice road on Google maps – I was drunk, she is a sardarni and it was midnight – but lets keep jokes apart).

Coming back to Zomato – the first thing that caught my attention was the simplicity of the UI. They just give three options – Discover, Browser and Search. Discover gives you a random suggestion on the basis of your location. The default location was Delhi though – and I would have expected them to intelligently change it to Chennai. I therefore manually changed the location to Chennai. After that – the app suggested me to “shake” the phone to get a new suggestion. And that was it! No menu items, no 5 buttons to click – shake and see. It also logs you in using Gmail / FB into the app – just one more great utilization of existing identity verification tools rather than creating a login etc.

The second option was Browse – which has two sections – Delivery or Dine out. The buttons were slightly un-intuitive (is Red selected or is it not – considering an action button – Go was grey). It gave me a list of the usual suspects – but also allowed me to filter on the basis of cuisines and facilities. Their data needs to be updated though (E.g. Burrp shows me a few Bengali restaurants in Chennai – while theirs didnt) – but overall it was very easy and intuitive to filter to what I wanted to eat.

Their restaurant entries also list just the right number of variables that are needed – and nothing more. They have menus for some restaurants – the one I selected had an easily viewable one – although the information was wrong (mine mentioned pure veg – whereas I know they serve non veg – had lunch there earlier today).

Before I logged out, I discovered the small refresh lookalike button on Discover – which lets me define my location (actually the app does – after taking an inordinately long time though) and one cannot discover new ones till the location determination is complete.

Overall it seemed a very nice, usable application which served my purpose of finding a restaurant near my home. I think I will continue using this just for the sake of simplicity and actions I could do from my phone (e.g. directly call the restaurant etc.)
—

Via Appnomy.

[PS: If you are an app developer, do register on Appnomy, Add your App/Review other apps]

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Apply for Dalian-based CHINACCELERATOR Incubator Program NOW!

Chinaccelerator is a 4 month startup accelerator, based in Dalian/China and hosting its second batch in June 2011. 

 

The program is part of the TechStars network and offers extensive support for startups including seed funding, mentorship, and free office space. If you are ready to rock the technology space, it's time to APPLY NOW! Applications will be closing on May 15th.

 

This is the deal for startpus & entrepreneurs that join the program:

 

• 10,000 CNY per founder (for 3 founders at max).
• Extra budget of 10,000 CNY per company (for research, sales, marketing, product development, etc...).
• Intense mentorship from the best.
• Free space, some extra electronics and even some food.
• A chance to pitch investors at the demo day.
• All CA asks is some equity in return (4 to 8%).

Here is an overview of last years startups that participated out of which 3 already received follow-up VC funding: http://chinaccelerator.com/en/startups.

 

Below are 2 presentations with details on the program and an shapshot of what life is like at CHINACCELERATOR. Check it out.

Chinaccelerator - Enter the Dragon

View more presentations from Cyril Ebersweiler

Life at Chinaccelerator

View more presentations from Cyril Ebersweiler

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