Politics at its peak - Tuesday Nov 3rd midterm election

I have been following the upcoming mid term elections passionately. But its just me, only my close friends know why :) This election is extremely important for Californians in general, but more importantly for everyone who supports participatory politics. I believe in it and support the Open Congress foundation which is bringing the full truth to us. Since election is just hours away, you can use Open congress website and its tools to make informed decision.To find who your current senators and representative are, use our zipcode look-up tool

1) RaceTracker  - See who the candidates are, learn about their positions, and get a snapshot of the fundraising race. This is a collaborative wiki project, so if you have information about a particular candidate, this is a great place to add your knowledge and share it on a fully-referenced, free and open-source platform.

2) AdTracker  - In the wake of the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision allowing outside groups to spend unlimited money on campaign ads, it's more important than ever that we have transparency in how these ads are affecting the election and exactly how they're funded. AdTracker is a wiki project for tracking and watching all the ads in congressional races across the country and providing background info who's sponsoring them. It provides a unique view into the advocacy work of low-profile independent political groups.
3) Voting Records  - We typically find out about candidates' voting records when they are being spun by their competitors, but on OpenCongress it is possible (and easy) to look at the actual vote data yourself. From your senators' and representative's profile pages, click the "Votes" tab and search for any topics you're interested in. Looking at the actual data gives you a more accurate picture of how your lawmakers really voted on the issues that matter to you. To find more votes, check out our one-of-a-kind listing of Hot Bills by Issue Area

 4) Compare Votes  - In this election more than in most, independence from party leadership is considered an especially important trait. Our head-to-head vote comparison tool gives you a view of party loyalty that you can’t get elsewhere. Compare the voting records of any two senators or representatives to see how often they vote with their colleagues and on what votes in particular they agree or disagree.

5) Bill sponsorship  - In addition to vote records, it's important to look at the bills your incumbent candidate has proposed. From senator and representative profile pages, click the "bills" tab to browse or search all sponsored and co-sponsored bills. Even more than votes, the bills lawmakers support are indicative of their overall vision and ideology.
6) Money  - Last but not least, take a second to look at your candidates' campaign funding sources. Time and again it's been show that campaign finances are directly related to how members of Congress vote. Click the "Money Trail" tab on your senators' and representative’s profile pages to see which industries and special-interest groups have donated to them. This is who they'll likely owe favors to if elected to Congress in the next session.   Thanks for supporting OpenCongress. 

Big Data is less about Size and more about Value

Big Data is the talk of the town, specially in the Silicon Valley start-ups. As far as I know Big Data is around for a long time at least for last 5 years. Companies like eBay and Amazon had massive amounts of user's data that they were using for their advantage. Credit card companies have been mining the huge customer's data for their competitive advantage. So what's up with Big Data now, that every small startups as well as Big enterprise companies want to jump on this. With my background in data warehouse and business intelligence and little research of what some of these new startups doing, its easy to summarize the reason for the big push for Big Data:

•  Big data is democratized by advances in cloud computing - Start ups do not need to have expensive hardware and software to crunch large amount of data. They can use cloud provide and get large number of clusters running in a matter of days with low cost. Open source software like Hadoop and HBase paved the way for creating applications cheaply. Flightcaster is an excellent example of a startup which processes massive amount of data to predict Flight delays.
• Big data is less about the size and more about the value - Matured companies like eBay, Facebook and Google showed the world, how to unlock the potential of massive data they create and store. Once infrastructure becomes easy to setup, everyone wants to get the real value out of that big data. Trending Topics is a good example of the project undertaken by an individual, that process such a huge amount of data.  AdKnowledge uses predictive analytics on big data to connect advertisers to the consumers. Cooliris uses hadoop and coverts your web browser into a place that is cinematic and fast. You can browse photo and videos on web as well as from your local computer. Datameer provides big data analytic solutions for big businesses. Deepdyve is the big data mining solution for large scientific community for journal and article search. Enormo generates and filter real state listings based on huge data. Gumgum does image analytics to provide In-image advertising and plenty more... These start ups are all about getting unique value out of big data.

Going forward, it will be interesting to watch and learn from how big data apps in the cloud can be commercialized. Hope some of my "big data" professional friends will share their thoughts by commenting here.

101010 - Whats your story?

101010 or October 10, 2010 was celebrated as largest day of positive action on Climate change. People around the world have shared their stories, posted videos, blogs and more at,
http://www.1010global.org/uk

Other news stories of 101010:

• Baby girl arrives at 10:10 a.m. on 10-10-10
• Thousands of Couples Marry in Las Vegas on 10-10-10
• computer club celebrates 'nerd holiday'
• Chicago Marathon held on Sunday 10-10-10
• Leicester boy turns 10 at 1010 BST on 10/10/10
• and last but not least Ubuntu 10.10 released on 101010

My story? I posted this blog at exactly 101010 10:10 PM :-) What's your story?

Make World's best presentation and win big

If you think, you win your audience's heart by your presentation, here is a chance for you to big win prizes. Slideshare and 3M are currently having a World's Best presentation contest 2010.

IBM Developerworks survey: Cloud and Mobile apps development are going to dominate

Happy 11th Birthday to Developer works. I have been following and making use of this unique technical resource since it was started in September 1999. Then, I was  a Java consultant for Analysts International in Minneapolis MN working to enable legacy applications for web using latest technologies available back then. Developer works has evolved and improved 100 times since then and remained my favorite place for finding hands-on articles on any software and system development topics. Recently DW added Cloud Computing and Industries as new categories on their website. Today DW is not just a repository of technical contents but also serves as a portal that guides and mentors a new comer to this field with vast and rich resources and also sets trends in software industries with surveys and results with help of the huge community build around it. Recently DW published a result of 2000 IT professional surveyed online which shows the growing influence of Cloud computing and Mobile application development in the IT industry in coming years.

Based on this survey results published by Michael O'Connell, the founding Editor-in-chief and editorial director of IBM's developerWorks:

• Cloud Computing will overtake the existing way organizations use to acquire IT

In response to the first question "How do you rate the potential for cloud computing to overtake on-premise computing as the primary way organizations acquire IT by 2015" , about 90%  respondents agree that its likely to take over, including 35% who strongly believe it will happen. 

How do I know more about what cloud computing means for developers?

DW is hosting a 2 -day online event called Cloud computing for developers that you can register for and participate in free. 

• Mobile apps development to dominate

Majority of survey respondents said that there will be more IT applications developed on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad and more Android based smaller platforms) than those developed on traditional IT platforms in next five years. I do not strongly agree with this one because, I think mobile devices will take time to mature and majority of apps development will still happen on traditional operating platform. At the same time, I believe organizations will try to shape up strategies for mobile platform and keep investing in this area. 

Whatever happens, as a software professionals, we will have to acquire emerging skills in both of these areas and keep ourselves ready for the brand new challenges and opportunities. I am sure DW will be there celebrating 15th and 20th birthdays and may be more !