Yantrakaal

Pokémon Go is a relatively new computer game that has, since July 2016, taken the world by storm. As far as its rules go, it is not really different from computer games that have been around for the last twenty years -- the player goes around locating and collecting objects of interest to earn game points. But the real impact is the introduction of an all new level of technology whose potential is yet to be understood by most of us. Unlike every other computer game that you can play from the comfort of a desk or a couch, Pokémon Go needs you to walk around the neighbourhood with your smartphone and “catch Pokémons”. The catch here is that the game merges the virtual reality of Pokémons with the physical reality of the neighbourhood Google Map. Since the game is aware of your location, you need to walk down actual roads, turn past, or enter, actual buildings and then, and only then, will you “see” the Pokémon in your smartphone. If you turn on the smartphone camera, the game cleverly ...

I was invited to Cypher 2016 - India's biggest Data Science conference organised by Analytics India Magazine at Bangalore where I spoke on Bitcoins, Blockchains and Cryptocurrency. Here is the slidedeck ( please see in full screen ) and here are the videos -- -- -- --

Better standards of living, that many parts of the world enjoy, are often traced back to the renaissance in Europe that freed man from blind bondage to belief and allowed him to fly free on the wings of rational inquiry. These standards of course are defined in terms of material comfort -- food, clothing, shelter, safety and finally the leisure to explore the arts and the sciences. This leads to technical and administrative competence and the emergence of good governance that in turn, loops back to create even higher standards of living. While every society desires this virtuous cycle, those that have aggressively adopted a scientific approach were the ones that have been successful in overcoming or converting others to their point of view. Spiralling out of Europe and reaching out into the depths of America, Africa, Asia and Australia, it has been the triumph of the rational way -- based on facts, axioms, logic and reason -- that delivers material comfort to the population. bo...

1989 was a watershed year for both the world in general and me in particular. I had just finished my PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas and had decided to break the jinx of the X+1 syndrome and return to India. Those who have been a part of the desi community in the US in the last century would recollect this strange yearning of those who had finally arrived in the US, not just physically, but metaphorically as well, to give it all up and return to India. Nostalgia for home, sprinkled with a sense of guilt for having abandoned it, competed with la dolce vita, the good life, that America held out to the F-1 visa community of graduate students and it was always that the good life that won out. Most of F1 crowd would eventually get the Green Card, permanent immigrant status, and then become US citizens but they would always keep alive the delusion that next year, X+1, they will wind it all up and move back to India. It was a delusion because India was still stuck in socialist q...

Steve Case is such a big fan of Alvin Toffler’s 1980 classic, The Third Wave, that when he pens his own memoirs he gives it the same title. In his seminal work, Toffler had identified three distinct waves in the evolution of human society as the world moved from agriculture, through industry to become a post-industrial information driven society. Steve divides Toffler’s third wave -- the information phase -- into three sub-waves and then examines the third of this third in greater detail. In addition to being his memoirs, that chronicle the rise and fall of America Online, the company that really got Americans hooked to the internet, there are two other distinct themes that Steve has woven into this easy to read book. First he wants to be mentor and cheerleader for the entrepreneur who has an idea to change the world and does not know how to go about it. The second, and this is pet theme, is the distinction between the first, second and third waves, or sub-waves, of the internet dr...

This blog post will show you how to create a fairly decent website at a guaranteed lowest cost and that too without writing any code. Take a look. This post was originally written for iot-hub and the approach is currently being used at  Yantrajaal as well. However, when Yantrajaal was created in 1999 , none of these technologies existed and I had to take a more expensive route, that you do not need today. credit The first step to creating your, or  your company's, digital identity is to build a website. Most people begin by purchasing web hosting services either from a web hosting company or from a value added reseller and have them build their own website. While this may be fine, a do-it-yourself approach will get you going at the minimum possible cost. This post will tell you how you can do this. 1. Purchase a domain name, from a domain registrar like TierraNet or any other similar company. This will cost you around US$ 14 / year. You can get an absolutely free ...

Hadoop is history and Spark is the new kid on the block who is the darling of the Big Data community. Hadoop was unique. It was a pioneer that showed how "easy" it was to replace large, expensive server hardware with a collection, or cluster, of cheap, low end machines and crunch through gigabytes of data using a new programming style called Map-Reduce that I have explained elsewhere . But "easy" is a relative term. Installing Hadoop or writing the Java code for even simple Map-Reduce tasks was not for the faint hearted. So we had Hive and Pig to simplify matters. Then came tools like H20 and distributions like Hortonworks to make life even simpler for non-Geeks  who wanted to focus purely on the data science piece without having to bother about technology. But as I said, with the arrival of Spark, all that is now history! Spark was developed at the University of California at Berkeley and appeared on the horizon for data scientists in 2013 at an O'Reilly ...