Furlango - New web service to find interesting things to do

I have been writing about cool things that I find interesting - but developed by others.
This time its new cool web app - that I am building with my friend.

www.Furlango.com - new web app that helps you find interesting things and activities on easy to use map interface. There are many other websites that lists events. But we think going through the list is very painful job. I personally like map interface - since it gives you good idea about where things are. Furlango is built on this idea of leveraging map interface.

We are still in early private beta stage, but soon will be launching full fledged service.

Stay tune for more news on Furlango.

For now check out this video and how our site looks.

Phishing trap with facebook, and YES, workaround on how to get out of it!

We are getting some very encouraging response on Back Benchers' Facebook fan page, and as as a side effect of that, may be, I am thinking lot about facebook in terms of its strategic value, and potential. And its very clear to me that Facebook and Facebook Connect in particular will be a huge platform. And I'll write more about it later on how Facebook will eat Google's lunch with fb connect. But right now - I just discovered the big flaw in Facebook Connect. I think its very very susceptible to phishing attacks. And as a user its important to be aware of this trap.

Lets see what Facebook Connect is - it is a way for fb users to login into non 'facebook' website using your facebook's login credentials. This is awesome, since with fb connect you no longer need to create your account name and password for every single new service. So as a user, you can login into multiple sites with your fb account, and thus becomes seamless web experience. As a web developer, fb connect is a great way to attract users, and provide personalized services without getting them to sign up on your site. And since virtually everybody has an account with facebook this is great for everyone. So far so good. However the way this mechanism works is where the loop hole is.

When you click on the "f connect" icon like this:



A pop up appears where you are asked to input your Facebook account name and password. If you do, you can login to that site using Facebook account. Pop up looks like this:



Question is, how can you guarantee that pop up is from facebook and not from some phishing website? One can easily put together fbconnect icon and following username / password page. Once you enter your information, attacker will store that info, and even can process 'real' fb connect from here. This is serious issue, one way to make sure pop is actually from facebook is to look at url and it will be from facebook domain. But reality is - this can be faked too. As more and more sites implement fb connect, risk of phishing attempts would rise.

This is serious problem. All your social data and your half drunk party snaps are at risk!

Now as a wanna be good blogger - I am going to provide a solution - well an actionable solution for you.

1. Open a new tab, login to your facebook account. Go back to fb connect and login! : Two things are happening here. If you are are logged into facebook, facebook will store session cookie in your browsers memory. When you open fb connect window from other non facebook site, its back end code, if legal - will have access to these credentials, and will log you in into facebook without explicit login info. If this whole thing sounds too technical for you, just follow as I said earlier - Open a new tab in your browser, login to your facebook account. Go back to fb connect and login! Once you do that fb connect popup screen would look like this (Note email address and password fields are gone):



2. Be vigilant - and follow these general simple guidelines as a rule of thumb. Really, don't go to sites that you dont trust. Or at least don't provide the login info on such sites.

That's it - Happy Surfing!

Bing + Alpha Even better!

Few months ago, I blogged about a niche new search engine Wolfram Alpha is serving and its product positioning within that space. Turns out, Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft management is moving into exactly that direction. Microsoft's Bing is licensing technology from Wolfram Alpha to serve niche results. This is even better! Now Wolfram Alpha is getting mainstream traffic and serving outstanding search results within its special niche, while bing will serve most other results. This is win-win case for brilliant technology of WFA and promising counter attack by Bing...

is facebook defying gravity?

Social networks usually have a very strong network effects. Meaning, I don't give a damn about ANY social network unless I have my friends/ family on the network. So I would not care about facebook otherwise, but since most of my friends are on facebook, I am on facebook and vice-a-versa. (Ok you can imagine other example of network effects, eg. Phone! I have a phone because other people have a phone and I can call them! ok enough of being pedantic..)

IMHO, establishing a new product by breaking these network effects is as good as defying gravity. I'd not put my money on such product/ service. But it's apparent to me that facebook is eventually going to beat Orkut in Indian market. Not long ago Orkut was the norm. Everybody is/ was on Orkut in India. But something happened, and suddenly people are moving to facebook. In my small test sample of my own friends, I have added 100+ friends on facebook in last 2 months who also happen to be my friends on Orkut. I have over 20+ wall posts on facebook, and have just under 5 'scraps' on orkut...

What you think? What could be the reason behind this kind of abnormal phenomenon? What is the secret sauce facebook have that orkut doesn't? After all, orkut is a Google venture!

Update: !so Google - Orkut's response to stop the exodus to Facebook - stor from tech crunch

Digitizing Books One Word at a Time

UPDATE: Google buys ReCaptcha | official one

Original Blog
Continuing my curiosity with CAPTCHA's, I came across this amazing initiative here.

This project involves digitizing books using solved CAPTCHA's. Over 200 million CAPTCHA's (words) are decoded by real people everyday. So this novel idea involves using this effort to convert books into digital books. In the past we have used OCR (Optical reader) software. But OCR's are not accurate enough. Combining OCR + human intelligence with CAPTCHA's is a killer idea!

Similar efforts were implemented by Google to improve its image search results called 'Google Image Labeler'. But reCAPTCH project is taking social human intelligence to the next level.

What can be other ideas of using human effort to make meaningful contributions? Few ideas I can think of are - music tagging, video tagging, using spelling mistakes as a feedback to spell checkers.... What else? Any suggestions?

Related Blog: CAPTCHAS that make me feel illiterate

Kai Fu Lee and doing web business in China

Last week Google China VP Dr. Kai Fu Lee left Google to start his own venture capital firm to back China based high tech innovation. Last year as a student at Carnegie Mellon University, I had a chance to listen to his interesting lecture on Google's China strategy. I highly recommend watching his full lecture to anyone who is interested in understanding China's technology landscape, and how it is different. He shared some very interesting observations like -

In China - people do not have access to Wikipedia!
It is belied that to be successful in China one needs to take long term view, Google fully understands this -

"We will take long term view in China, China has 5000 years of history and Google has 5000 years of patience in China" - Google CEO, Eric Schmidt

Finally, the way Chinese users view a search page is far different than the way americans do - here are the results of an eye tracking study of a Goole search page!

Here is the full lecture -

Solving maths problems using Wolfram Alpha

Recently, I won a maths challenge (ok, I am kidding... but anyways), and the secret sauce behind my quick problem solving ability was - Wolfram Alpha.



Lets look at how it solves some complex high school maths problems -
1. Find LCM (least common multiple of 5, 21, 87) = LCM(5,21,87) = answer

2. Remember quadratic equations ? Lets give it a try, solve 3x^2 + 6x -15 = 35
3. Moving on - solving linear equations? Lets try to find values of x, y and z from following :
7x + 8y - 3z = 80, 2x - 3y + 4z = 35, 6x + 2y + 3z = 50 - here is the answer
4. Finally, (I was lost by this point) - remember chain rule for solving differential equations ? Lets try differentiating (4x + x ^ -5) ^ 1/3 and the answer (Tip: All steps included)

Btw, here is complete list of examples. Wish I had this cool tool when I was in school - and the case for not having one, and a smart get away.

Entrepreneurs

Last week two of my friends launched their own businesses - this blog is a tribute to their promising ventures -

My Carnegie Mellon friend Ankush Gupta - recently launched his venture Vigyaapan technologies - a targeted advertising product focused on leveraging social networks. Unlike most ventures of ad-targetting on social networks, Vigyaapan is building product based on social connections (network) formed over a "phone" network.. His venture was also featured under "top 10 hottest start ups" in India.


My high school friend Vipul Shah has also launched a very promising business - Trias Advisory - Firm aimed at providing financial advisory solutions. Vipul and his partners hold an MBA from reputed institutes and vital experience in wealth and financial management.

So, if you want to market your product, contact Ankush, or if you are rich and need a new and promising money manager contact Vipul. My best wishes to both these ventures...

Don't be afraid of polarizing people

I am not talking about Political parties here, but rather - designing products. Some products will appeal to most, but there will be certain products which polarize people. And more likely or not these products will serve 'niche' markets and can actually make decent money!

Google is being central in search engine space... But I always believed there are areas around this central space which should serve niche areas. yes Google is the best - but it only fulfills 80% of my needs - I need niche product for remaining 20%...

This week, I found one - WolframAlpha- they call themselves computational knowledge engine... Search Engine product designed to address computational queries. You can find more information here

If these guys manage to churn out successful venture - there will be more people going after more niche products. And that could be beginning of the end of Google's super monopoly. If not - I don't see any threat to Google in foreseeable future. So lets wait and watch the alpha launch...

Captchas... Kaptchas that make me feel illeterate!

Well, I know Captchas are an invention by Carnegie Mellon guy, and we all are so proud about it and all.... but hey look at these captchas... I just can not read them!





These funny things were originally designed to identify 'human' user from a script attack. Later people wrote scripts to crack these captachas. So programmers added more complexity to make them 'unreadable' to a script. Unfortunately, we have reached the stage, where even humans can no longer read the words in those capchtas!