Technology

Do you think a social media application can help stop the spread of malaria? Could a mobile alert system help warn citizens of a looming natural disaster?  Can a mobile phone be used to detect vascular diseases like sickle cell anemia and type 1 diabetes?

These are just a few of the projects designed by students competing in the Imagine Cup, a global technology competition focused on improving education, healthcare and the environment. These students all have one thing in common; they are going to change the world!

Starting from a field of over 325,000 competitors from all over the world, only 400 have made it to the final stage and will attend the Worldwide Finals in Poland this summer. You can learn more about their projects, watch their videos, and vote to support your favourite team at www.imaginecup.com.  

Open to students around the world, the Imagine Cup is a serious challenge that draws incredible talent, passion and perseverance. The event spans one year, beginning with local, regional and online competitions. The finalists go on to attend the Worldwide Finals held in a different location every year.  The intensity of the work brings students together, and motivates the competitors to rise above challenges and make an impact on the world.

And let’s face it; the world could use a little changing.  We live in difficult times with a ton of problems raining down on people every day.  The real question is who is going to step up and do something about it? We think it’s you. Be sure to tune into www.imaginecup.com on July 8^th to see who emerges as the “People’s Choice” champion.

Today I received a mail from Google Inc. It was really exhilarating to read each and every line.  The mail goes as mentioned below.

Hello everyone,

As you all are aware, Got The ‘App’titude Challenge concluded on February 28, 2009. In the days that followed, we reviewed the accrued usage data and are now ready to announce the much anticipated winner.

Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, have won the challenge by demonstrating the highest usage of Google Apps products. The XLRI team working on Google Apps implementation was led by Prof. Ashish Pani. The other members are “Hariharan R, Chintan Agarwal, Pal Singh and Srikanth Thunga”. The team showed great enthusiasm and managed to stay on top of the challenge from the beginning. They named this initiative XL CONNECT, ran a pilot and implemented Google Apps within a month from the day they secured approval from the college decision makers. They also conducted marketing campaigns to inspire students to find innovative ways to use Google Apps services. 

Alliance Business Academy - Bangalore, Birla Institute of Management Technology - Delhi, Jaypee Business School - Noida, Mudra Institute of Communications – Ahmedabad, Zakir Husain College of Engineering & Technology- Aligarh Muslim University, and National Institute of Technology - Calicut are some of the other colleges which had very high Google Apps usage. These colleges now join the elite group of colleges including Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad and National Institute of Design - Ahmedabad that are using Google Apps extensively.

In addition, over 100 colleges in India participated & implemented Google Apps as part of this challenge. Our thanks to those teams also for taking the lead in improving communication & collaboration capabilities in their college.

Thanks

–
Got The "App"titude Challenge
Main Site: http://www.google.co.in/apps/gottheapptitude

For me the best part in Winning this is the prize :). Below mentioned is the prize we will be getting.

• A case study to be featured on our Google Apps website as well as a video testimonial featured on our Google Apps YouTube channel
• A letter of recommendation from FMS and Google
• An all expense paid trip for your team to visit one of our Google India offices

I would write more about improvements on this.

Related Posts

1. A Small Sense of Satisfaction
2. Students testimonial – Update from Google
3. Google Truly Brilliant – Amazing Move

I have created a photo gallery, it was quite easy for me to do with the aid of Google Picasa. To check my photo gallery , Click the Photos link in the top navigation bar. I have made the slide shows with the auto code generated by Picasa. Followed the steps mentioned below.

You can embed a Flash slideshow of any web album. It’ll be automatically updated when you make changes to your album. Follow these steps to embed a slideshow:

1. On the My Photos page, click your album.
2. Click Link to this album on the right-hand side.
3. Click Embed Slideshow.
4. Choose your slideshow settings, such as image size, captions, and autoplay.
5. Once you’ve chosen your settings, copy the resulting HTML code (Ctrl-C).
6. Paste the HTML in the source code for your site (Ctrl-V).

- Google Help

This feature is very helpful having easy galleries instead of Static Image Folders which according to me is not an attraction in this Web 2.0 Era. Have a look at my Photo Gallery and you decide Static Image Folder Gallery Vs Flash based Slide Shows.

Almost the day lively came, I had mentioned earlier as Lively is bit lively But…May be for Children to Enjoy. Of course this was totally away from Google’s innovative product line. Finally the day has been marked by Google itself for Lively to be on Dec 31 2008. A good move by Google I would say, not to manage products which does not has any market.

Related Posts.

1. Lively is bit lively But…May be for Children to Enjoy
2. Google Enters - A new area not thought of

The following is from the Google Got the aptitude challenge website.

Please check here to read about other college testimonials(Click this Link –>Student Testimonial)

XLRI Transforming with XL Connect

Google’s ‘Got the Aptitude’ challenge has given us the opportunity to transform our communication system. After registration, the first thing we did was to implement Google Apps in our existing test server. We named this initiative ‘XL CONNECT’ because the services provided by Google Apps will help the XL community stay connected 24/7. We then came up with a working model to increase Google Apps awareness and market its advantages in campus. The presentation created by Google came in handy to explain the benefits from Google Apps to our faculty members, IT admin and student committees. Since Email was a default application we focused on the other Google Apps products like Talk, Sites and Docs. Our main selling point was Google sites which would be very helpful for our student committees. As every committee wanted a group site, it was easy to make the sale and obtain approval from our IT admin. The contest deadlines really pushed us to stay focused. We are excited about the launch and we have already started increasing Apps awareness through teasers, posters and some merchandise. We also plan to create some use cases on how effectively Google apps can be used.

- XLRI Team Members: Hariharan R, Chintan Agarwal, Amrit Pal Singh, Srikanth Thunga, Prof. Ashish Pani

Today at XL, we have completed the shift of our Students mail server to Google Apps Education Edition. I am a member of Systems Society of XL– better known as

SOCRATES – Society for Rapid Assimilation of Technology and Systems

My love for technology and systems made me apply only for this students committee. I was very happy when I was selected for this committee because I consider being with this society was not an extra-curricular activity but an opportunity to be in touch with my interests. I always believe technology can make our life simpler and our energy can be utilized for better needs to care for people. Actually I should learn this, caring and concern for people which I most of the times miss it which I am struggling to get it.

At XL we were using an internal mail server for students which had the age-old Squirrel Mail. We provided a 100 MB limited space for every student. This year my agenda was to bring in a change for the betterment of everyone in any are which I am comfortable. Finally, I had a chance to suggest a change for shifting the internal server to Google Apps Education Edition. Google of-course provides 7 GB of mail box each and also a gamut of services bundled like Chat, Sites, Docs and Calendar. Google provides the basic edition for free which is far better than the system we had.

Suggested this change on October first week to the IT administration. After a set of permissions ,approval and testing finally today we went live after complete migration from the legacy server. Now we call the new gamut of Google Apps service as XL Connect. This change will be of great use to the students community to be in touch with every one easily using the internal chat now , also I hope the Docs and Sites will serve further for team projects and committees. I am happy that some change I wanted is visualized, though a small change but a Satisfaction for me. This would not have been possible without the help of my committee secretary Chintan Agarwal and the Help Desk guys at XL who really did the actual implementation.

Next :  The one I felt a great thing done by a great institute is MIT OCW. This one will be my next agenda. Hope this comes true soon.

(1) Ease in creating Tables, Views, Procedures, Functions.
(2) Once while you should have given Grants , Created Sequences, Indexes and Synonyms
(3) Queried and seen at least once the Oracle Data Dictionary
(At least to understand what it is)
(4) Written some Queries with Joins.
(5) Tried Creating some Packaged Procedures and Functions
(Public and Private) , with a little use of Cursors.
(6) Used some basic oracle functions for computing (Like Count, Sum etc)
(7) Dabbled a little with different Triggers
(8) Knowledge of Dependencies.
(This you can get even if you have programmed in any language)
(9) Hands on with any IDE, Most Preferable will be the command line Interpreter SQL *PLUS.

Hope the above 5 points may help you in clearing this small carrier goal, if you have set this in your career path. All the Best for all those who is going to give the exams after reading this

I could see many hits for this post and some of my friedns where asking for the SQL Fundamentals Guide book also in e-book format as I have given for the 1Z0-147 exam. So you can download from here. Hope this helps all those people who reach here

Update : (02nd Jul 2008)
I am not sure whether this is the best post I have written as I am seeing the highest traffic only for this post. If you find this useful please leave a comment on how useful it was so that I can improve in my future post.