Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

T he business newspaper Economic Times (Hyderabad edition) carried an interesting front-page article yesterday on successful Indian software products coming out of India . Over two-and-a-half million people worldwide, half of them in the US, are using word processors,creating slide-show presentations and doing their sums with the help of an online suite of software products built by technology start-up Zoho, located in Chennai. In Bangalore, InMobi,a company that builds technology for mobile internet advertising,is helping global advertisers and publishers reach 175 million customers every month across Asia,Africa,the UK and the US. ... while it took Infosys Technologies 18 years to record its first $100 million in revenue,product start-ups such as InMobi expect to do so within five years. In Kolkata, FusionCharts,a graphic data visualisation tool created by startup Infosoft Global is used by 1,500 organisations across the globe, including the US government. ..Webaroo’s SMSG...

A lthough I manage to speak decent Telugu (one of the twenty-two scheduled languages of India & spoken by over 74 million native speakers), I have to confess I'm poor at reading it (Why? That's another story). So for long, I wished there was a way to read Eenadu (the largest circulated Telugu news daily in Andhra Pradesh with over 13.5 million readers) in English. My wish has been granted, thanks to a Firefox extension called Padma , a Transformer for Indic Scripts, built by Nagarjuna Venna and Harshita Vani Padma can understand a variety of fonts used in the popular Telugu-based news websites & convert them to RTS (Rice Transliteration Standard for Roman Transliteration of Telugu) Here are the steps to read content from the online version of Eenadu (or Andhra Jyothy, Andhra Prabha, Vaartha newspapers) in transliterated English 1) Install the Padma extension in Firefox & restart the browser 2) On the Eenadu site , select content you wish to read in English ...

I came across a nice article on a Silverlight 4 application that does real-time face detection (without having to spend a dime on commercial licenses to any APIs) on the Coding4Fun site which features unusual but interesting applications built on the .NET platform. It's amazing how today's tools & technologies can provide "eyes" to the computer & process faces in photos, mostly for free. Newer versions of the popular photo organizing & editing software Picasa & Windows Live Photo Gallery now have a face detection & tagging feature which finds the people in your photos so that you can add a name to the face. Once you add the names to faces in one photo, the software matches similar faces automatically in your entire photo collection & organizes photos by the name tags. When Picasa is not sure with the face detection, it provides suggestions that require a manual confirmation.  Also see: Digital Photography Tips & Tricks #551