royans

I'll be honest. I didn't know who or what "Mary Meeker" was until last year. The data I saw then and what I saw in her latest post is beyond fascinating. She (and her team) has put a lot of effort in collecting and analyzing interesting trends from all around the world. The end result is a deck like this one . I'm sure different people see different things in the deck... I picked the two slides below as the ones most interesting to me. The first one is about tablet growth. If you had time to see just one slide, this one would be the one. It shows the trend around what people are buying. Its very clear that notebooks took over desktops in 2009, but what I didn't know was that tablets are exploding in a way no one anticipated. It should be noted that average lifetime of the desktop is way longer than notebooks, and tablets/smartphones probably have the shortest lifespan. But even if you take that into account, the growth of tablets/phones is nothing short of a r

 Took this shot a couple of weeks ago using my Nexus 5.      

It has been a while since I got my hands dirty writing code. So here is a tool I cooked up last night. Share Quickly  is a chrome extension which takes a screenshot of the active tab and uploads it to a public website which makes screenshot sharing a one click task. I plan to make these images disappear from cache after some time to save on storage... haven't figure out how to expose that yet. The files are hosted on Google's App engine using cloud storage and the front end for that service is on Google Compute engine. I choose to write this in PHP instead. Interestingly the backend storage is not limited to images only. You can actually use  http://sharequickly.appspot.com/  to save and share arbitrary pieces text. Note that none of this is pretty, so be warned. Feature requests and general comments are welcome.

I compiled a list below of all the chrome devices which are sold today or were sold in the past. I did this primarily to understand the device trend. Interestingly the average price for a chrome device is around $340 US on Amazon 16 GB Flash is most common, but some devices have 32 GB option There is only one device I know off which comes with a real harddisk, but that's not listed in this chart. 2GB RAM is still popular, but more of the recent devices come with 4GB Average weight is around 3 pounds Average screen size is just over 12 inches for laptops Average battery duration is around 7.5 hours on single charge Note : This information was collected from various sources (including wikipedia and  chromium.org  and Amazon website) and may have unintentional errors. URL: http://goo.gl/zyTBqN

The idea of "ubiquitous computing" most people dream about doesn't usually include the troubles of patching them every week. It doesn't even mention that there would be new bugs found daily and that most of the fixes would be available weeks if not months after they were discovered. Windows XP has been in news recently because Microsoft has finally pulled support for this aging OS. 30% of all active desktops  are still on XP and now we know of a  new security bug , which would never get fixed for these users. XP may eventually become the epitome of unpatched buggy software because of the visibility this issue got, but I feel this may just be the tip of the iceberg. For every XP out there, I bet there is one or more unpatched networking device just waiting for someone to exploit it, and this number is growing very fast. Some of these bugs are just that... bugs, but I suspect most of them are due to  less then reputable code/design quality.  Its a wild-wild-west out th

If you have used Chrome OS in a school or an enterprise network, you would have noticed how helpful the management piece can be. Using this tool you can quickly setup and deploy policies to make things easier for your users. This is the authoritative source of all policies available on Chrome today. Pay special attention to the "Supported on" section. If it mentions "Google Chrome OS", then the policy is supported on devices and most of them can be set using Admin console UI. There are essentially two different types of policies one can set on Chrome OS. User policies The "user policies" are those policies which can be set for an individual, regardless of which machine they are using Chrome from. A good example of a user policy is the "Screen Lock". An enterprise admin could enforce users to have an idle screen lock enabled automatically to protect internal company data. Similarly, there may be organizations which may want to disable "Brows

If you have used Chrome OS in a school or an enterprise network, you would have noticed how helpful the management piece can be. Using this tool you can quickly setup and deploy policies to make things easier for your users. This is the authoritative source of all policies available on Chrome today. Pay special attention to the "Supported on" section. If it mentions "Google Chrome OS", then the policy is supported on devices and most of them can be set using Admin console UI. There are essentially two different types of policies one can set on Chrome OS. User policies The "user policies" are those policies which can be set for an individual, regardless of which machine they are using Chrome from. A good example of a user policy is the "Screen Lock". An enterprise admin could enforce users to have an idle screen lock enabled automatically to protect internal company data. Similarly, there may be organizations which may want to disable "Brows

One of the salient features of Chrome OS is its ability to do transparent updates with little or no interaction from the user. This not only ensures the user is always protected, it also improves performance and features over time. If you administer a fleet of chrome devices, I recommend you read  this support  on how to correctly configure this. It goes through all the autoupdate (AU) terminologies and suggests best practices which will help you in long run. How to check if AU is properly working in your network I'll strongly recommend to enable reporting using your admin console. This will allow devices to send its OS version to the reporting engine. Then use the  Admin SDK APIs to generate reports for devices in your domain, grouped by major version. I recommend you write your own scripts, but you can try third party tools like these to understand what the APIs are capable of. If you have lots of different networks, try to generate separate reports for devices in different net

One of the salient features of Chrome OS is its ability to do transparent updates with little or no interaction from the user. This not only ensures the user is always protected, it also improves performance and features over time. https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/QtavfiBOv_g&source=uds If you administer a fleet of chrome devices, I recommend you read  this support  on how to correctly configure this. It goes through all the autoupdate (AU) terminologies and suggests best practices which will help you in long run. How to check if AU is properly working in your network I'll strongly recommend to enable reporting using your admin console. This will allow devices to send its OS version to the reporting engine. Then use the  Admin SDK APIs to generate reports for devices in your domain, grouped by major version. I recommend you write your own scripts, but you can try third party tools like these to understand what the APIs are capable of. If you have lots of different networks, t

Educational institutions, particularly the K12 are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They are always in search of ways to open up newer technologies to students, but don't want to give up their ability to manage and filter what students can see or do. As a father of two I approve that. While Chrome OS does take security very seriously and tries very hard to discourage "man in the middle attack", it does provide an industry tested feature to allow educators to filter web content for students in its recent version of Chrome OS. To understand how it works in Chrome OS, I'll first explain how the Chrome OS works internally. Chrome OS devices, as most of you already know, has two distinct components. The Chrome browser is what provides most of the UI, but deep inside it also has an operating system built on top of linux. Among other things that OS is responsible for, auto-updates and security are two of the most important.  The web filtering feature which Chrome OS pr

Educational institutions, particularly the K12 are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They are always in search of ways to open up newer technologies to students, but don't want to give up their ability to manage and filter what students can see or do. As a father of two I approve that. While Chrome OS does take security very seriously and tries very hard to discourage "man in the middle attack", it does provide an industry tested feature to allow educators to filter web content for students in its recent version of Chrome OS. To understand how it works in Chrome OS, I'll first explain how the Chrome OS works internally. Chrome OS devices, as most of you already know, has two distinct components. The Chrome browser is what provides most of the UI, but deep inside it also has an operating system built on top of linux. Among other things that OS is responsible for, auto-updates and security are two of the most important.  The web filtering feature which Chrome OS pr