Archive for the 'Internet' Category

Curated computing: jargon (sometimes) is a good thing

May 16, 2010
This is supposed to *herald* curated computing. Nonsense.

This is supposed to *herald* curated computing. Nonsense.

Curated Computing: Fancy cynical analyst term. Here is Forrester Research declaring a new era (‘Post-iPad’, no less).

A consumer can do anything with a Windows PC or Mac… the iPad operates very differently. [It] works more like a jukebox than a desktop — consumers choose (and pay for) applications from a predetermined set list. Each of those applications is, in itself, also curated; the publisher selects content and functionality that’s appropriate to the form factor, just as a museum curator selects artworks from a larger collection…

Rubbish. ‘Curated computing’  has been Apple’s design philosophy for all this decade – that’s only now making its way into industry consciousness.

But it’s a good thing.

If anything, it indicates mobile manufacturers hitting reality. In the short years after the realization that people wanted to ‘do more’ with their phones, manufacturers packed in as many features as they could. A few really took off (cameras, music players, even email), and most others just didn’t (bluetooth, mobile office packages, bar-code readers).

In another way, it’s a sign of the industry beginning to mature. Even as hardware has gotten more capable (faster processors, storage, memory, larger displays, touch-screens) and networks have invested massively to build capacity, there’s a discernible trend to do less better. Manufacturers are (belatedly?) realizing that a mobile device isn’t a smaller personal computer, but something ‘very personal’. And that very personal is very different from personal.

Which is also why everyone in the industry wants ‘vertical integration’ – control over the hardware, operating system, software platform, applications/content, and network. It’s so that having bet on what (limited) tasks a device will perform, a manufacturer has greater control over the quality of what the customer experiences.

Expect, in the next couple of years, for all major smartphone players (in addition to Apple, RIM, Google) to create (curate?)  really great out-of-the-box experiences for the 20% of tasks that matter most – email, web browsing, facebook/twitter updating, maps, and playing music/movies (yes, better than what we’ve seen). Expect  new devices to ship with fewer radios and sensors, and very few basic applications out-of-the-box. All other features and applications will be available via an App Store, to which there will be a prominent link on the home screen.

If this sounds very much like what Apple’s been doing with iPhone all along, of course you’re right. Forrester’s just woken up, declared it a trend and slapped on an alliteration.

Footnote: also, this isn’t as global, industry-churning a movement as Forrester would have you believe: the Japanese, for the most part, like cellphones crammed with bells and whistles (TV, bar-code readers,credit cards, suchlike). And this doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

About Yahoo!'s home page redesign this week

July 23, 2009

Yahoo! just redesigned the Yahoo.com home page, its crown jewel for a decade. The big change is a bar on the left with widgets that display updates from Facebook, Gmail, New York Times and some 60 other sources. The company made a big deal of it, but on the whole it’s failed to impress.

I won’t regurgitate the bucketfuls of painstakingly-written criticism of the redesign itself that I’ve read over the past few days. In any case it’s too early to measure the impact of this change. I think the problem with the lukewarm, even negative reviews was with how Yahoo! announced the change to the world. In other words, this was a communications, not an execution problem.

The new Yahoo! home page

Why everyone said “Ho-Hum”
The verdict is that this is old hat, and too little to make a difference – and there’s reason to be skeptical. The web has seen at least two major paradigm shifts since the late 1990s (first search and then social media), but Yahoo! has persisted with the original portal paradigm – making money off visitors to its home page by keeping them on its properties. But Yahoo! now ranks 2nd behind Google as the most visited property on the web – and Google makes money by sending people away from its search page!

Yahoo! is under tremendous pressure to 1. innovate and 2. stay relevant in the future. Any move by the company needs to score very well on these two parameters. Redesigning a home page, however dramatically, is not such a move.

Let your users say how great it is
Any pragmatist at Yahoo! would have anticipated that news of a home page redesign would not be seen as game-changing by itself – either by Yahoo’s users or by its advertisers [1].

That’s why it probably made more sense to simply spread awareness of the impending redesign than to generate buzz and create hype. CEO Carol Bartz called it “most significant change in our home page since the company’s inception”. So what? While the redesign effort was probably significant internally (money, time, CEO attention), it’s presumptious to assume users will find it just as significant. Bring out the tom-tom drums after your users have given you the thumbs-up.

As for advertisers, Yahoo! would probably have been far better off sharing metrics with them on a one-on-one basis after the launch. Display new targeting capabilities. Show user adoption rates. Show clickthrough statistics. Things that will bring a grin to advertisers’ faces, especially when they’re under pressure to get the most bang for buck with dramatically reduced budgets. Of course, all this is only if the redesign really works.

In other words, it’s time for Yahoo!, in an infinitely more transparent world, to put its money where its mouth is.

[1] No kidding. Tapan Bhat, Sr. Vice President at Yahoo, crowned himself Supreme Emperor of Unintentional Irony by declaring that the new home page would put Yahoo! at the “center point of people’s lives online.”

Why you (probably) won't be using Firefox a while from now

July 6, 2009

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:

“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.

Building a large Internet business in India (in the incumbents' face)

July 2, 2009

When it comes to the Internet in India, the low-hanging fruit has beeen picked, across sectors. Think Travel. Books. Jobs. Dating. Electronics. Money. In his post today, Rajesh Jain lists a few more: Search (dominated by Google), News (Rediff, NDTV, CNN-IBN), Email (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Rediff), Cricket (Cricinfo/ESPN), Video (YouTube/Google).

Online pioneers have lapped up the biggest brands and most popular goods: the largest cities, the biggest hotel chains, the most popular travel destinations, the widest marriageable demography, the most desirable gadgets, the most viral videos, the news everybody reads, the the matches everyone watches.

Now comes the hard part. The cities only a few want to travel to [1], the outliers for whom it isn’t easy finding a match [2] , books in regional languages, people with odd skills, niche but tremendously useful gadgets, highly technical videos. There’s a market for all those. In aggregate, they’re as large and lucrative as those that have already been monetized [3].

Then there’s an even larger market – for individual professional services. The mother of all yellow pages, with a location-based and rating-based component. One that connects me to the nearest puncture shop when my car has a flat on a stretch of highway (and takes Rs. 10 for that connection), directs me to the nearest ATM in any city, to the most reliable service center for my phone.

There is no technological barrier to setting up these businesses anymore (you really don’t need broadband for most of this – just plain Internet access, and in some cases, a cellphone). What makes this hard is convincing small businesses/individuals to sign on. Building trust and credibility. Selling to Jet Airways is much easier than to Pravin Puncturewalla on a random national highway. If you’re willing to tackle that, you have a successful business.

Finally, Rajesh has a compelling vision of the “now-new-near” web, which you should read. I think that “niche” is about as much the future as the others. I also think that “now” and “new” are synonymous for the vast majority of cases, so I propose that tomorrow’s web will be the “now-near-niche” web (built around the evolving Internet Operating System)

[1] RedBus.in is doing a spectacular job with that, by my estimates. Driving to work today I spotted a travel service that did a Hyderabad-Kolhapur (!) bus route. And hey presto, Redbus.in has that route listed.

[2] Secondshaadi barely scratches the surface, but hey, it’s a start.

[3] Yes, yes. It’s the same old tired Long Tail phenomenon. Let’s set aside discussions of how cool the phenomenon itself is and why it works, and explore how you can build businesses in India with it.

What you need to do to be the next Google/Twitter/Facebook

June 30, 2009

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

Internet Explorer 8. Why?

March 19, 2009

GigaOM announces the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

So far [Microsoft] has been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more.

So true, except that none of it matters to Microsoft. If it cared about  “simplicity, security and speed”, it’d install Firefox + extensions with every copy of Windows.

It’s become pretty clear that the only way you can make money off a browser is by driving traffic from it to a search engine results page with advertisements. That’s how Mozilla makes over 80% of its revenue – driving traffic to Google from its search box and its default home page.

Earning revenue from ads on Microsoft Live Search pages through IE traffic is the only imperative driving IE development. And its getting costlier by the day to keep up with the competition.

The combination that makes iPhone so compelling

January 25, 2009

iPhone is revolutionary not just because of its (multi-touch) touchscreen. There are, after all, other touchscreen phones on the market, and none have achieved iPhone’s popularity. Why?

iPhone is revolutionary not because of its Internet browser. Mobile Safari has limitations that other browsers don’t – most notably the lack of Flash support, no text search, no scrolling to the end, among others. But iPhone users are among the most heavy users of the web. Why?

It turns out that when you put both these features together, you end up with something very different.

The web browser is one of the most mouse-heavy applications on your (desktop/laptop) computer. Maintaining that experience on the mobile phone is tough when you have to manipulate physical keys. Open a web page in a browser on your computer and imagine moving the cursor using only the arrow keys.

Your finger on a touchscreen is the best proxy for a mouse on a mobile phone.

This is, in essence, what makes iPhone so compelling. There are awesome touchscreen phones with average browsers, and great browsers trapped in keypad-based phones. iPhone has managed to bridge that gap. And how.

Phone, meet IM

August 10, 2008

Being able to choose to be contacted by either voice, IM or SMS is an extremely attractive proposition. Using all three from the same device, though, is the holy grail of unified communication. With VoIP, smartphones and IM, we might be getting pretty close to that.

Right now, your instant messaging contact list, and your phone/SMS contact list are disparate and independent. Your contact’s IM status tells you nothing about where he/she is, or if he/she can take a call. Is it possible to

  • Integrate both contact lists into one?
  • Set one real-time status that all your contacts can check?

The answer will, very soon, be yes.

Same Network

A mobile phone is already capable of making calls, receiving SMSes and running an instant messaging client. But since phone calls and SMS are sent over one network type (Voice) and Mobile IM over another (GPRS/EDGE/3G), there’s no unification between these services.

However, when WiFi coverage is widely available, or when you can make and receive calls over your packet-data oriented 3G network, the line begins to blur, and then altogether disappear. Applications like Fring, which integrate your phone contacts list and Gtalk list, already make that possible. If you can make VoIP calls, you can talk to your contact by voice or text.

The Possibilities

At that point of time, your status message indicates you real-life communication status. One could, for instance, check if a contact is open to receiving SMS only, or having a short IM conversation, or receiving calls, or none at all. This goes beyond the “Available”, “Busy”, “In a meeting” statuses.

If you’re on a phone call, your IM status could indicate that automatically, so people getting in touch with you could leave you an SMS/IM message without having to first call you and check if you’re busy on a call. You could indicate if you’re driving, sleeping or having dinner and have it show up on your friends’ mobile chat list.

If you’re in a meeting, simply setting your IM status to “Busy” could automatically cancel all calls made to you and pop up an IM chat box on your caller’s phone so he/she can send you an IM instead.

Stretching this, implementing a multi-way voice conference wouldn’t be any different from a multi-way chat. Additionally, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text, some participants could write and read text, others could speak and hear voice – in the same conversation (say one’s in a movie hall, the other is driving – they’d never be able to speak with today’s state of tech).

Adding location to the mix throws up some interesting possibilities. If you can display your location as part of your IM status, your friends nearby could sign up for notifications and call you to meet up – all from the same device. Or if you’re waiting to call someone until he/she reaches office? Set an alert for when your contact’s location changes to his office locality.

Conclusion

Not only are we “integrating voice and data” – that’s been on the cards for long – but we’re also integrating people and devices, using features of one to enhance our experience with the other.

How long do you think it’ll be before we get here? Will telecom companies try to block this, given that they won’t be able to charge per-call any longer?

The Mobile Internet Lifestyle

August 9, 2008

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

Moving to an Online Life

April 14, 2008


So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

Gmail - Custom

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Google Notebook

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on WordPress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the WordPress plugins I use:

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.