Many of us have a distributed work force which often leaves people wondering what others are doing. Twitter is a great service for updating status. Unfortunately twitter if often down these days. Also there is a privacy concern. Ideally you would like to host such a service yourself and also be able to restrict access to the site to ensure privacy.
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I am faced with the task to evaluate between several strongly competing product ideas in Web 2.0 space. It is not an easy task to evaluate strong competing ideas, each with a reasonable business model, in this space because of unpredictability of the market. So I asked this question to my highly experienced peers in my LinkedIn Network. I received excellent ideas and suggestions from the group. Here are the full details:

My question was:

I am looking at few strong competing product ideas for our next product. The factors I am already looking into are:
1. Expected short term and long term business potential
2. Competitor products, their market and platform valuations
3. Barrier to entry for new competition
4. Key applications where this platform can be applicable

The IP is probably not defendable but I will anyway check with my lawyers.

I am having a hard time evaluating proper business potential of an idea in Web 2.0 space.

How would you generally compare ad based revenue model with subscription based web service model?

Does that look familiar? Read on…
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One of the main challenges of managing multiple dedicated web / database servers is the ability to centrally monitor and manage them, automate tasks which requires out-of-band access like rebooting the server or find out if the server is dying and arrange for replacement ahead of time etc. Unless you are a very big web service provider, chances are you are using dedicated servers from one or more of dedicated web hosting providers. For example, I use two dedicated web servers from LayeredTech (not recommended) & EasySpeedy.

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The basic idea of RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is to combine multiple small, independent disk drives into an array of disk drives which yields performance and recoverability exceeding that of a Single Large Expensive Drive (SLED). Redundancy is also provided (unless RAID 0) which allows easy and often automatic recovery from hard disk crash. With the reduction in price of ATA and SATA drives it is often a good idea, even for desktop computers, to setup a RAID 1 system to allow you to function in the event of hard disk failures. In RAID 1 two harddisks (or portions of them) mirror each other. RAID 1 is essential for our environment. I have tested both Windows software RAID facility as well as Linux RAID capability. Linux RAID support is way superior to Windows and should by itself be the reason to switch to Linux. I have given 4 reasons to support my claim below.

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I gave a presentation on IT entrepreneurship at National Institute of Technology Durgapur to MBA students and local entrepreneurs in summer of this year. The presentation was in my laptop which I finally got a chance to open today. The presentation may be slightly cryptic to some as there are not much notes to go by. However overall it provides a good summary of possibilities of IT entrepreneurship landscape in India and lots of ideas to learn more about and move forward on. I briefly touched upon BPO, Software Outsourcing, Software product development and finally funding options.

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Lately whenever I am checking my blog stats in PubSub, I am getting "blog.taragana.com" has not been active in the past 30 days.. blog.taragana.com has been very much active during this time. On a hunch I tried to find blog activity of popular blogs like Scobelizer or GoogleBlog. They too haven't been active in the last 30 days according to PubSub!

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I am talking about setting up a full featured website for your small business or personal use with your own domain and receiving your emails@your-domain.com address.

You can setup emails for yourself and your employees. It comes with high quality spam protection. You have unlimited bandwidth on your website and potentially unlimited disk space. You can IM between your employees at remote locations. You and your employees can setup one or more calendars which can be shared. You can also sell your products for free.

There is no catch. You do not have to pay more than $5.99 per year and you do not have to display any ads or other advertisements on your site or anywhere else. And if you own a domain then it is all free. Interested?

Contents

1. How to get your domain name?
2. How to register your domain name?
3. How to get free website and email addresses for your domain?
4. How to create your free website?
5. How to setup your free email accounts?
6. How to setup IM for your employees & company calendar?
7. How to reliably accept payments online?
8. Summary

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Oracle has continued its push into business intelligence analytics by releasing PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9. The release adds broader enterprise planning and compliance management capabilities, as well as more features specific to higher-education institutions, including a Campus Solutions Warehouse module.

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Five reasons, without the satire, for using PostgreSQL open source database.

Availability on multiple platforms
PostgreSQL is available on every modern Unix-compatible operating system, windows, and ports are also available for Novell NetWare and OS/2.
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Google Launched Google Checkout today. It appears to be a surefire PayPal killer.
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