The Super Hero Revamped !

The time has come to unveil the Superhero. The contest attracted
countless entries and our team had a very tough time choosing the winner. The
various entries we received showcased iXiGO as a paper plane, a travel globe,
a frilly design, even a magnifying lens. Our team had a fun time
reviewing the designs.

But before the announcement of our winner, we would like
to thank all our participants and applaud them for posting their
creative designs.

Few Notable Mentions from the Entries

- Chosen by Team iXiGO

By: Achal Aggarwal

By: Venkat Adduri

By: Bhavesh Dhupar

By: Navonil Sarkar

By: Shaurya Rawat

Our Heartiest Congratulations to the winners!
We look forward to your participation in many more of our exciting contests!

iXiGO.com makes it to NASSCOM EMERGE 50 !

We are proud to announce that we have been chosen as one of India's 50 most exciting tech companies in the startup category today by the National Association of Software & Services Companies, NASSCOM.


The NASSCOM EMERGE 50  is a prestigious annual shortlisting of 50 most happening technology companies in India. The EMERGE 50 listing has quickly built credibility as the definitive listing of companies to watch for in India !

A big thanks to all our iXiGems, partners, iXiGOers and evangelists who have supported us and helped us gain this very prestigious recognition. We will keep working hard to make your travel searches easier and more meaningful and to live upto this reputation we have built over the last 3 years.

Aloke

The Legend

A year back over this weekend, the world lost a legend who had touched so many lives and hearts that he was called a king, the King of Pop. Thousands of articles and maybe millions of blog posts have been written about him, so there is nothing much I can serve here that hasn’t already been seen. Yet, this enigma’s story is inspiring, scary, humbling and most importantly, it’s real and not a tale from a movie.

With a collection of songs buzzing in my ears, I am struggling to find words because just the thought of listening to his music that is going to live for years to come is humbling. One among a huge family, a childhood that was sugar coated with the sweetness of music yet burdened with the hardships of earning a livelihood. Rumors of an abusive father and a broken home abound, yet when he stood there and said ‘Beat it’, the world stopped! The childlike innocence that would surface more often than not looked as though a child in there was raring to be one yet the years had long gone and there was no going back. His meteoric rise to fame, fortune and glory was like a dream and we all wanted him to sing and entertain us. We could not get enough of him being ‘Dangerous’, a ‘Smooth Criminal’ and going after his ‘Dirty Diana’. We all wanted those insane concerts and music videos that would push our imagination and take us to places we never knew existed. We wanted him to heal our world and yet stood there and watched as he drove down the slippery slope.

Like many of us, he was nothing less than a demi-god for me yet when I sit back and listen to his music, I wonder who really was the person behind that mask. Did anyone really ask? Even if they did, it was because an interview was in the anvil and no channel could miss a MJ interview. There is no bitterness but deep sense of sorrow on the loss of a creative guru par excellence who could have given us so much more had we listened to him and not just heard him!

RIP MJ, ‘It doesn't matter who's wrong or right. Just beat it, beat it’!

Krishna Iyer
twitter: @thetantrik
Team iXiGO
twitter: @iXiGOrocks

Mussoorie - Queen of the Hills

Views of Mussoorie a hill-station approximately 270Kms from Delhi - situated in the Shivalik ranges

A lovely lookout point close to Lal Tibba - the highest point in Mussoorie

View of Mussoorie city from Gun Hill, the 2nd highest point in Mussoorie

Gun Hill accessible by cable cart from Mall Road

Kempty Falls - amidst the hilly terrain, with water rushing down from an altitude of 4500 ft

A stream from Kempty Falls

Kempty Falls derives its name from 'Camp-tea' as the tea parties organized by Britishers

Bathing spots developed for tourists to take a dip in the cold waters

On the way to Mussoorie from Kempty Falls

A picturesque drive back to Dehradun

The future of the web (browser)

Most of the time spent on computer for most of us are on a web browser and there is no disputing that fact. Whether it’s browsing websites or reading mails or editing photos/documents or writing blog or connecting on the social network - the list is endless. Virtually everything which was done by a desktop application, now has a web based service which allows you to do the same thing. What is the advantage of this? Well there are many advantages. The first being that you don’t need to store your data or application on any specific computer because the application itself is available as a web service. That’s where the world is heading. All your computational needs would now be hosted as a web service. And all the data you need to store would be stored in the cloud with each of the computers you use having a local copy of that data. What this means is that there would rarely be a need for installing a million application or backup and restore your data from an external backup device every time you install your OS. That’s all very nice. But. Here is the problem. Everybody has their own web service for everything and there are millions of cloud based storage services and zillions of browsers to use those web services. So where is this all heading to? Well the answer lies in convergence.

Less than a couple of decades ago people talked about convergence of technology and about the ultimate convergence device - the mobile phone. Well that has happened to a large extent but the problem is you cant really heat a room by a candle light, can you? So people have realized that what a camera does better can’t be achieved by a mobile phone at least till date. And a device which has been made to do just one thing nicely is also supposed to be more user friendly (ergonomic, form factor etc etc), especially for the masses - the geeks would always go for the all-in-one device. So if you really want to play 3D games or browse the net or read emails or watch movie, the iPad is probably better than the iPhone and the iMac is probably better than the iPad and so on.

Similar effects are seen on the web front as well. The web is the place where all service is suppose to converge. However, it seems that certain services are better handled with native OS applications rather than as a web service. I am sure everyone has a native email client and desktop based twitter client. The reason why you have this is very simple. No matter how fast or how easy a web based interface is, it cannot be as hassle free or as fast as a native application. The question basically is to converge or not to converge? There is however a middle path. What if you changed the browser to handle certain applications or tasks or services with built-in native support? This makes a lot of sense because if everything is supposed to converge on the web then there is only one convergence application - so a browser is to web convergence what a mobile device is to device convergence! However to do this effectively you would need your browser to talk to a cloud service for storage needs - since without data your application is not of much use. Which in turn means that the cloud services need to be formalized to allow seamless access via API or standards laid down by IEEE or an equivalent body in the computational space.

Once this problem is solved you can buy cloud storage from wherever you want without having to worry about how your applications/OS would be able to access your storage space. How this helps technologies converge is by providing your OS and browser to seamlessly provide all those services where data needs to be distributed. Imagine a browser which has a capability of storing all your bookmarks in your cloud storage so you don’t need to worry about those bookmarks when you are using your desktop or your laptop while on the move. This of course needs a single sign-on which recognizes you every time you open the browser. Now imagine this same single sign-on signing you onto to all your social networks and even better to your email account ? Lets take it a step further. What if your browser has native functionality built-in to read emails and how to provide you with contextual information on email address embedded in web pages or just copy a portion of a web page so you can send emails in a snap? What if it allowed you add the email link or a phone number embedded in a web page via a contextual link/button to your address book which again is stored in the same cloud and gets automatically pushed to all your devices? What if it automatically associated emails and links with twitter and facebook accounts of your friends on a web page? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use just one application which does everything for you - your favorite browser? Google’s Chrome OS is a step in that direction, but it aims to handle this problem for users of mobile devices like net-books and smart-phones. Its time the browser vendors start thinking in the same direction.

Stay tuned for my next blog entry on the future of mobile devices!

Rajnish Kumar
Co-founder & CTO
www.iXiGO.com

Nainital

Here are a few snaps from a trip to Nainital - a perfect weekend getaway to escape the scorching heat of Delhi.

Naukuchiatal - The quietest of them all

City of Nainital on the slopes of hills around the Naini lake

Aquarium in the middle of Bhimtal

Frog Point - on the way to Ranikhet

Colourful boats on the banks of Sattal

Sat Tal

(Ram Tal, Sita Tal, Laxman Tal, Nal-Damayanti Tal, Garud Tal, Purna Tal & Sukh Tal)

Khur Patal ("Horse Shoe") Lake

Mango shaped Naini Tal - Bird's eye view

Boating at Sat Tal is a blissful experience

View from the highest point in Nainital

-Yash

The Eventful Sunday !

Ding Dong!! The resounding jingle of the doorbell just caught my attention to find, the delivery boy with a bag full of freshly cut chicken. A 45-minute wait for my order from the local shop aptly named ‘London Meat Shop’ to give it a global flavour! Taking customer service to the next level, the shop had recently started quick home delivery, which was not very quick but helpful nevertheless! Life is different in India where the local shopkeepers are eager to keep up their service standards with phone orders, home delivery etc. These delivery boys pedal their way through the locality - ‘On-time’, unlike the western world where a delivery would always be on a motorized vehicle.

This reminded me of my stay in London, where I used to manage everything on my own from the purchase of raw chicken at the local market in Middlesex which involved a nice long walk but was worth it, considering the calories the chicken was going to pack in! Coming back to my kitchen my maid had already chopped onions and placed the required ingredients together for me to get my chef’s act together. Finishing with her chores she now was asking my permission to leave. Ah! Luxury of having a maid in India... I thought, and said yes. She left as though she had just won a free air ticket to London with a 4 nights 5 days hotel stay. Don’t know why I always mention London, may be fresh memories.

Now in little oil I put in all chopped onions, garlic, cloves and homemade garam masala. Why is it called garam? I suppose because it’s ‘Hot’! On low flame sauté the ingredients until the onion is fried and slowly turns light brown. Later, add one spoon turmeric powder, coriander powder, red chilli and continue stirring till the ingredients are just about to singe and followed by adding chopped tomato. Many tend to blend the onions and tomatoes the same time spoiling the richness of allowing the flavours to mingle individually.

Jai Ho, Jai Ho, Jai Ho, Jai Ho, Aaja Aaja Jind Shamiyane Ke Tale, Huh?! This shrill ring tone on my mobile was buzzing from my friend, guess where from? London J! He is the one with whom I spent a great deal of time in London. He was on a business trip to Delhi and was visiting me. A pleasant surprise indeed! I asked him about his whereabouts, He responded newdelhiairport.in, in his unusual lingo, adding .com and .in to everything; He is a geek! Anyways, I welcomed him and enquired if would like to stay overnight. My guess was right, he being a ‘high-flier’, he had a connecting flight back to London.

While I was on the phone, I smelt something burn and rushed to the kitchen to see that I had nearly spoilt the dinner and quickly poured little water to minimize the damage. The masala was cooked with the aroma just fine, I added the washed and cleaned chicken to the pressure cooker and with little stir I covered the lid for the flame to do its job now.

When things were rocking in kitchen, I packed my bags for my trip back to London early morning next day, good that I now have company to the airport. I was going for 3 months to a place where life is fast and delivery boys deliver on jets and not on cycle, where 80% of life is spent online- working, ordering, chatting and even to reserve my seat in a restaurant.

Whheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! There goes the whistle and I know it’s ready to dine with a glass of wine with my friend “. com”, that’s what I call him!!

- Nitin Gurha