Prakash Narayan

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Wednesday Oct 22, 2008

MyPicks U.S. Election update 2

myPicks U.S. Election update

myPicks U.S. Election 2008 is getting more users every day - as you can see on the chart to the right.

We have been adding new features steadily. I don't mean just additional poll questions or trivia questions. Here is a list of features that we added recently:

Included a Rest of the World graphic to indicate the preference for Presidential Candidate from users outside the U.S.A
Comments included by users in "Voice Your Opinion" are also tweeted. Follow @mypicksus on Twitter to see the stream of comments
The application is now available on MySpace. So, you can login to your MySpace account and run the application. The poll data is aggregated across both Facebook and MySpace.

What strikes me is the similarity in the data in the myPicks application and the CNN Web Site. I have included the two electoral charts below.

Electoral Map Poll Data from the myPicks application
Electoral Map Poll Data from CNN.com

Posted at 03:36PM Oct 22, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun | Comments[0]

Friday Oct 10, 2008

SOA Symposium, Amsterdam

I was in Amsterdam earlier this week (pictured at the Van Gogh Museum to the left)

to
give two talks at the 1st International SOA Symposium.

I was invited by the organizers to give a talk on SOA and Java EE (on account of the book that I have co-authored on this topic). I responded that I would really like to talk about SOA, Web 2.0 and building Social Applications. They asked me to give both talks.

The conference itself was well organized. It was held at the Amsterdam Arena (home to Amsterdam's AJAX football team). They had secured the whole stadium (pictured to the right) for the event over the two days. The stadium can seat 75,000 people. There were 500 people at the event. So, we occupied a part one section of the stadium! Nevertheless, the audience that attended were well informed and asked deep, probing questions.

A few things about the city of Amsterdam struck me:

The beauty of the city - with its canals and ancient architecture
The availability of public transport to travel around comfortably and easily (I never had to use a taxi!)
The fact that a lot of people travel by bicycle. There are separate bike lanes, auto lanes and tram lanes everywhere I looked!
The prevalence of smoking (I guess I am just not used to seeing so many people smoking in public!)
Admiration for people. They don't have much by way of natural resources - so their entire economy is based on their resourcefulness, ingenuity and engineering skills. Netherlands is home to two of the top 10 companies in the world - Shell and ING

Posted at 05:47AM Oct 10, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun | Comments[0]

Thursday Oct 09, 2008

myPicks U.S. Election 2008 update

myPicks U.S. Election 2008 update
Word about myPicks U.S. Election 2008 is getting out and more and more people are sharing their opinions on the various campaign issues in the U.S. Presidential election. Given how polarized the two candidates are, this is not surprising at all. It is good to see folks getting excited about it. We have also received some good reviews:

We are constantly enhancing the application (and fixing any issues). After we launched a week ago, we have added new features in response to feedback we have received. For instance, when you enter data for "What do your friends think", you can now include a comment that gets sent to the friend(s) along with the notification.

There are a few more features that we are working on which are quite cool. I don't want to "pre-announce" them here. I will be writing on the application's wall when these features get added. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you do have comments and feedback on the application, feel free to post them either as a comment to this blog, or on the discussion forum for the game or on zembly's getsatisfacton forum.

Posted at 04:08PM Oct 09, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun | Comments[0]

Thursday Oct 02, 2008

myPicks U.S. Election 2008

Close on the heels of myPicks Beijing 2008, the zembly team has developed a game around a topic that is on all of our minds - the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

This application is also powered by zembly and built by Pramati. This time we wanted to develop the game for both Facebook and MySpace users. A unique characteristic of the game is that it aggregates the data from both Facebook and MySpace users and displays this data at each location. This compelling game lets you voice your opinion on the Presidential campaigns and on the issues being debated by the candidates. You can invite your friends to participate in the poll by guessing their views on the various issues, and giving them the opportunity to agree, disagree and comment on the issues themselves.

In addition to the polls and discussion around the campaign issues, users can also participate in a game. You score points just by participating in the polls. There is also a Presidential Trivia that lets you answer questions on past U.S. Presidents. You can even donate points to your friends or seek donations from them.

Use the widget to the left to see how the candidates are faring in each state and then click on the Play button to be taken to the landing page for the game. From here you can navigate to either your Facebook or MySpace profile.

Posted at 02:44PM Oct 02, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun | Comments[3]