When I came to Mexico about two years back, I was a completly lost guy. I didnt knew what I have here for me. Neither was I sure what will I get there. But one thing I was sure.. I will get an adventure.. an experience that I wont get it again in my life!! Now standing at the cross roads after 2 yrs, I realize that the experience was infact more thrilling than I anticipated.. and its fun!!

The story goes like this.. a guy coming over to a new country (for the first time in his life travelling across so many continents and oceans) is lost... a new culture, a new language, a new way of living..The only thing he has is a knowhow and a desire to build his destiny in the way he wants to (without knowing what is available out there). I was expected to start a team of 3 people, where 2 of the folks who would be working were already selected. I didnt get a chance to talk to them before coming over, so obviously a fear factor, as to how those guys would be. I was informed that this is a place where communication in english is a rare phenomenon and the struggle would be imminent. But thats the fun right ? After all without the fun part, why work ?

We started the work... The desire to win and to strive ahead was so much that, I wanted these guys to work very hard.. and I did made them work hard.. result, it was awesome. We were able to drive a key project, which gave us additional positions and more people. Slowly I realized, my team had started to grow.

We grew from 3 to 10 within a matter of 10 months. I think it was a fairly good, because we didnt get the skillset readily available in the market and we were generating the skills by training freshmen.

But, while this was happening, there were other things that were also happening. On the professional front, I was moving from being a project leader to taking up key responsibilities like metrics reporting, resourcing and compliance. The initial days were tough, as the center lacked people who knew the process. That turned out to be good advantage, but yes.. it involved a lot of work.. sometimes there were crazy working hours of more than 18 hrs a day and they would continously be like that for about 1 or 2 weeks.. after that a small break just to begin with the same routine... Sustainment of that momentum was one of the toughest thing to do in my life!! I still remember those days and probably cannot forget them also.. that period continued for more than 6 months.. After all, if there is a lot of work that needs to be done, some body has to do it right ??? But as the time flew, I learnt the art of delegating and moving things around in a smoother way, to make my life a little more comfortable and to bring more people into responsible positions.. Built in my own teams and gave them knowledge, responsibility and power as appropriate to make the decisions.

Eventually, I did the same to my project team as well. Shifted the project leader responsibility to some local associate, whom I was confident of managing the team well. He is doing a great job and I am really proud of him.

What did this give me ? A new area where I didnt get a chance to explore much. It was on resourcing. I got a full fledged chance to explore areas where I get to recruit people on their skills and matching with the current requirements. It was fun .. definitely with the power that you have and besides looking at the way different people approach you for the job. Sometimes, they have been very funny to see, what people do to get a job. Those are some thoughts, some experiences which cannot be documented in a blog, but I am sure you folks would get my point. The only one thing which I was careful about that was not to slip away into delicacies of this position and power. Any small mistake, would ensure all the good work done till date is gone to dust. The ultimate exercise and precaution exercised during those days, have been pretty helpful.. in my overall learning curve. But the biggest thing which I learnt was people management - their aspirations, their skillsets and not to be deceived by what they say...something which I will cherish through out my life !!

As some one said, you cannot be promoted, if you cannot be replaced. After a stint in that role for about a year, I decided to find a replacement. Interestingly I did found and he has been pretty good in that role for now. So what does this give me .. more bandwidth, more availability and new areas to look for fun!!
As the business realms keep expanding, the need for Information would keep growing. Information Management is critical to business growth and there is an invisible string that ties them together in a partnership. For new enterprises, the agility is higher and technology pretty much keeps up with the business expectations, but same is not true for older enterprises as they keep struggling with legacy issues. Delivering the right data on time to business for the decisioning & other reporting purposes is the biggest challenge for major enterprises and hence Information Management is the hottest topic. Data Integration, Data quality, time to market are critical measures for success of CIO. Particularly in US Banking and Finance industry, OCC and other regulators are pressing hard to get details around exposures (Mortgage Debt, HELOCs, Credit Card, Commercial Loans) with a much quicker turnaround time than previously. Additionally Regulatory agencies are enforcing penalty if there are errors discovered on the final reports that are being submitted. Hence, the line of business is under tremendous pressure to deliver the reports on time and with quality. At the same time, introduction of new government mandated programs for mortgages/Helocs products, there is an increased flux of changes in the business processes. These changes again come with stringent timelines for implementation.

Having said that, IT systems have challenges and scalability issues. Struggling with legacy issues, the various business processes run in disparate applications managed by multiple IT Groups and the applications have convoluted dependencies with each other. With challenging deadlines, the IT groups struggle to inform other groups on how one application might impact the business process on other applications. Some of the applications have moved to cloud based applications (Salesforce - Case Management, CRM).

As the data continuously changes in the source systems and no appropriate data monitors in place, maintaining a unified metadata for the data as it flows through multiple applications becomes difficult. This impacts the overall data quality and hence the reporting

The other bigger issue is around humongous data growth. The regulation requires that the account holder information is maintained in system for 7 years. For some of the deeper trending analysis, it is required that the data be maintained forever (E.g. Reports that require to provide details of losses at borrower and loan level, fees that were charged to customer during life cycle of a loan). With the demand for improving the time to market increasing due to regulatory and compliance issues, archiving the data to tapes and retrieving for reporting is costly. This means, data sources would have to maintain historical and transactional history online.

Consequently, the data would keep exploding at all levels, starting from origination, underwriting, fulfillment, servicing, modifications, post closing, bankruptcy, and foreclosures. The regulators have also started requesting the immediate availability of pertaining loan documents at each of the loan processing stage to verify if the processing was carried out per the rules. This implies the size of the data would also grow and this would define a limit for compressing the data for storage purposes. This would mean increased load on the IT systems to have these being immediately made available and the collective data stores would be ~50 PB and this would keep accumulating. 

But this is not just regulations which are driving these changes. Banking and financial industries have realized that they are sitting on pile of data and consumer events would be able to reflect customer's ability to pay back debt. If you look into the graph below, the data of which was compiled in recently indicated a trend of bankruptcy vs. foreclosures. There is close correlation between Bankruptcy and foreclosure. If this data was compiled and analyzed at the right time, probably the mortgage crisis could potentially have been prevented. 

Similarly, there could be potential correlations between delinquencies, liquidations and customer's credit score changes. Such data would need to be thoroughly analyzed. There are other situations where we would need to analyze if a loan despite getting modified under the provisions of law still becomes delinquent. The analytics would have to foresee some of these situations and should be able to raise alerts accordingly.

Similarly, unstructured data sources like social media, feedback captured in web sites, customer support discussions can help gain foresight of the customer issues and could also help predict the impact of a new product or changes on existing products. Such analysis is critical for organizations to ensure the customer issues are being managed and escalated properly within the organization to ensure speedy resolution.

But this data is HUGE and this would keep growing and data mining to extract key business insights would become more challenging. The entities would also keep on expanding as there are new data sources and the hence current approach for data analysis may not be able to scale up. If we try to bring all the transactional data for Loan Origination, Fulfillment and Underwriting on a single platform for reporting, stability becomes an issue.

This gives a perfect business case for Big Data products and leveraging its power analytics for the business benefits. In 2012, there would be increased demand for predictive and real time analytics capability. I read definition of "Big Data" as - Big Data technology applies the power of massively parallel distributed computing to capture and sift through data gone wild – that is, data at an extreme scale of volume, velocity, and variability.  This is where the open source Apache Hadoop helps which offers advanced analytics using Distributed File systems for analyzing structured and unstructured data.  But Hadoop alone doesn’t provide database services. We would need to couple them with NoSQL  databases which would facilitate the map-reduce framework which otherwise would be very cumbersome to implement in Java, C++ or Python (Imagine writing 10 line of code for select count(*) query).   There are few other relational databases which implement the Map Reduce framework (Eg Teradata AsterData) which have demonstrated the ability to be able to crunch huge amount of data and provide analytics. 

How can hadoop help to deliver value in the rapidly changing business process environment-
Hadoop should be used to build out a centralized hub (Operational Data Store) for storing and managing the transactional data, but keep the master and reference data in their current database platforms. The transactional data should include the loan application movement from Origination, Underwriting, Fulfillment and servicing. The other miscellaneous transactions should include other critical events such as fees, credit reversal, loan modification related. Additionally, the other consumer transactions - Deposits, Cards, Trading Transactions, and High value investment should also be brought onto this centralized hub.

These transactions would be huge in size and Hadoop by virtue of its huge data crunching ability would be able to maintain and manage this data. This platform would have to evangelized across different groups and would serve as Data as a service for the multiple applications. The current application would not have to migrate onto the new application and can continue leveraging their current database platform. For transactional data, they would be able to connect onto the Hadoop platform and their current ETL and analytical framework would not have to be modified. With all the transactional data at single platform and analytical power provided by Hive, HBase over the data, organizations could look to transform the data into actionable business. 

I am trying to list down few of the critical impact that leveraging Hadoop as Big Data Product would help.

a. Data Management: Better profiling of the customer data and related activities enabling 360 degrees of the borrowers' current financial health which would provide critical business sensitive insights. For Eg, if the FICO score is reducing and so is the deposit available is also reducing then it is an alert that borrower's financial condition is deteriorating.  Correspondingly if the outstanding debt (including cards & mortgage) is higher than a threshold value, then IT systems might be able to provide an alert to the corresponding Line of Business to communicate with the customer, understand his needs and accordingly plan for next steps.

Impose security & data governance to ensure the data (even though centralized) is only available to appropriate users of the data. 

Big Data based solutions can help interconnect the disparate data sources as well as cloud based solutions through a solution integrator approach (Informatica, IIS) or direct connectivity through adaptors.

b. Data Governance and Enterprise Risk Management: Enterprise Risk can be better managed and organization wide exposure can be adequately identified. E.g.  Fraud detection can be centralized and set up as shared service across the different LoBs. In most of the banking and financial services, these are NOT yet centralized as it is very difficult to have so much data amassed on a single platform to perform the right analytics.

c. Analytics & Reporting: Pre-determined scenarios can be quickly programmed through Hadoop and appropriate views can be built out of an internal ETL framework in Hadoop / HBase / Hive. These views would in turn help for business reporting and raising alerts when an event requiring attention occurs.

By building self learning algorithms for analytical purposes of the huge data, data analysts and engineers would be able to automate several analysis and the system would in-turn be self sufficient to discover, quantify, and predict business conditions.

c. IT - Cost and Time to Market: IT system stability is achieved quickly as the investment is minimal as compared to other databases like Teradata, Netezza, Oracle, SQL server or DB2 which would otherwise require lot of scaling up for continous data augmentation. In the big data architecture, the existing DW platforms can still be leveraged and Hadoop based products need not get integrated with the core architecture. They can remain external and act as service providers to internal IT systems and can be leveraged on need basis. The major DW platforms like Teradata, Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server have started applying Map Reduce framework and they can integrated with Hadoop based products using SQOOP (Open Source solution which connects different databases to Hadoop) or custom connectors (There is Teradata Hadoop connector which ships free of cost along with Teradata Asterdata to connect with Cloudera Hadoop based solution. For SQL Server, there is a Hadoop connector being made available which connects with Hadoop solution).  

On the reporting side, major Microsoft BI tools, Microstrategy, Cognos also offer ODBC driver connectivity to Hadoop/Hive so that the reporting becomes seamless.

If the enterprises are able to build a strategy to have the Reporting Structures pull in modeled data from warehouse platform while leveraging Hadoop based platforms for sourcing in transactional data, the overall cost of managing data would come down drastically. With the tools being made available in both ETL & reporting side for Hadoop based platform and with the right migration strategy to move the data onto Hadoop based Operational Data Sources would help provide the latest insight to the data for business reporting purposes.

There are challenges in implementing Hadoop products and integrating them in the current architecture. The current open source setup does not help the big enterprises as they would have to customize the product to fit in with their enterprise architecture strategy. Enterprises would have to develop on top of Hadoop to ensure it complies with the enterprise security standards, data modeling, work load management, job scheduling etc. However, this skillset is rare and the technology resources (architects, developers & testers) who would lead the implementation would be difficult to identify.

The alternative is to identify and implement enterprise compliant products like Teradata Asterdata, Hortonworks, EMC) and have them integrate with the current DW/DM architecture. The transactional data would have to be migrated over from other databases to Hadoop products which require investment in terms of resources and knowledge acquisition.

The technology knowhow for Implementing Hadoop based solutions is critical to success. Taking the existing IT staff and train them onto Hadoop products is definitely a challenge. But if there is a right strategy in place, this can be achieved. 

Security and Governance would require radically different approach as the volume is huge and conventional security & governance strategy might not work. Data profiling, Metadata management would have to change and scale up for the large data that is being stored and managed. Metadata tools would find it difficult to continuously scan the data for any updates and populating the metadata dictionary. Given that the Hadoop / Hive would store transactional data and would be subject to rapidly changing source applications, data integrity would also be challenge. Data Quality Monitors as many DW/DMs have started installing which would raise alert when the data goes out of sync and loses its business value would also become difficult to implement owing to the size of the data. There are few solutions like splunkGanglia help with the data monitoring, but the suitability of the tools in a particular business environment would have to be decided by a proof of concept.

While building a plan to transition to big data infrastructure, CIO would face a daunting task of when and how to leverage opportunities created by transforming the business processes. The challenges would include the right opportunity selection, gathering LoB support, ROI assessment, Right Hadoop vendor, and Resource training and skill upgrade, Change Management. 

Even from line of business perspective - Even with Hadoop as technology solution to help as data store, another problem of data deluge starts to shape up. With Data sourced in to single platform. Identifying right set of people who have sufficient business understanding, intuition and insight are tough to find. But with the way Google, Amazon, Capital One have been able discover the true essence of data they hold, it goes beyond a point to prove that it can be accomplished. Again, this needs a well thought over strategy & persistence that is specific to the enterprise overall vision & culture. 


Mortgage business is the oldest line of business for banks and hence the legacy issues still persist as the cost of opportunity to convert them to newer architectures have been high throughout. But given the changing business landscape and the urgency to improve the time to market, there has been dire need to improve the overall Information Management technology strategy to meet the needs of business. 

Introducing Big Data Products is a major IT overhaul and there are bound to be challenges and every situation is unique to the respective group. Even within an organization, a IT solution/architecture which works for one group may not fit in with the other group. Even within the mortgage business, it may not be possible to have all the transactional data sourced into a single platform because of complex business interdependencies. However, CIOs would have to understand how these challenges interplay and ensure business and technology teams collaborate to deliver the true value to the organization. 

Happened to watch a video of Martin Jacques where he has been illustrating why China's rise is imminent and how its growth will shape up the 21st Century.. He elucidates the same using 3 building blocks:

1) It has been able to maintain the ancient culture till date and able to keep itself united despite the challenges being thrown upon.
2) It doesnt go with the conventional norm of Nation state which is a western concept
3) The government even though the west perceives that  it is authoritarian, enjoys pretty much the legal state and enjoys more support from public than the democratic govt in west.

Some of those points are valid and applicable and in this blog I want to take some of these points to see which ones can be applied to Indian context. We were the "Golden Bird" till 15th Century and that is why every body in west was seeking India.. Columbus was in pursuit of India and he found US... There would have been countless expeditions just to find India.. Alexander himself, who came to conquer India, got fascinated by the culture and the wealth and went back only with good memories and experiences. There was always something unique about this country and it continues to have.

Similar to china, we have been largely successful in maintaining our ancient culture through many ways..My childhood went by reading through many of the Indian Mythology stories published in comics and books... making us realize of the wonderful past we had. The same acts as a unifying thread across the nation which has been able to keep us together. However the aspect which pulls us back is the caste system (which I am not sure why was it created).. This can be fairly equated to race and this has largely created lot of differences among us and lot of inefficiencies in the nation system. Chinese enjoy superiority on this ground as they have single race system.. (well 90% of the population belongs to one race).

But on the other ground, I have no doubts in saying this loud that Indian system is way far more chaotic than most of the democratic nation systems out there. We are a crowd of 1.2 billion people and if each one of us contribute effectively, we would have been a super power by now. But that didn't happen.. why.. ? Because we as a nation never had a strategic vision (till recently).. China is literally run like a corporate by this government, setting targets for its internal departments, policies channeling growth at all quarters..Chinese Government runs as if it is entrusted with ensuring continuity of Chinese culture at a larger.. They sponsor entrepreneurship and ensure their guys move across every place in world.. I have been to mexico, US, and have been in airports of South Africa, Brazil too .. and everywhere I could notice we have at least one Chinese restaurant.. How many Indian restaurants do we have across the globe?

We as a nation still lack this endeavor..The drive to make an impression onto the world.. No doubt with our IT skills, we have been able to build several landmarks, but let us remember we still dont have any Google or Microsoft or any other major entity carved out of India. We have done good, but not enough.

Goes without doubt that we have all the ingredients that are required to be the world number one. Many people suggest we lack  a strategic vision, leader who can ensure we all can collaborate effectively to build out our nation, but in this web 2.0 era, why are we still hanging onto the old convention of having some one like Sardar Vallabh Patel to help unify the nation again.. ? Learning from the Egyptian revolution which started with one page in Facebook, led to collaborative efforts across the nation to overthrow a dictator who had ruled the nation for over 30 years in a matter of few months.. We dont need a revolution to overthrow a ruler here, just equal and effective contribution from each and every one of our citizens in building our nation.. Some things to start would be to ensure we keep strict monitoring of the development projects that are in and around us and sharing the info as they come out... Coupled with the power of RTI, web 2.0 can do marvels for us, just that we have to start engaging ourselves onto it with a vision in mind..
As I enter 2011, I look back into my past and get reminiscent of the things on how I have traversed through various challenges to arrive into a state what I call "Today". While not trying to be pessimistic, when I look upon my past, I remember there used to be a fight for everything which I wanted to do, which I wanted to accomplish.  Today I get reminded of the efforts that I had undertaken during my early college days to learn Java. I didnt had a PC of my own and i skipped my college classes to go and work in my friend's PC to learn Java on Notepad (Not even IDE like Eclipse). We didnt had access to internet, so it was not possible for me to download any code samples and try them out. So I used to access the net cafe by travelling 7 KMs to Roorkee town, some times write the code down in a notepad and then bring them back to my college PC and try it out. Of course, I had internet at home, but I frequented my home only once in a month or 2 months. But I did ensure I made a good use of the weekend nights I spent at home to try what I wanted. For every new Java API jar I wanted to try, I had to wait till I go home, download them on a floppy and bring them back to hostel and many times the floppy would fail to keep the data safe while I reach back to Hostel and those used to be most frustrating moments. Nonetheless, the step by step process of overcoming the challenges did reap in benefits including award winning "My Messenger" and final year project "LAN RADIO".

Now here I am, having access to Internet on my PC, Captivate (Samsung) anytime anywhere, but I am NOT using it so exhaustively as I would have during those days or would I have? Was it the quest of knowledge which was driving me to do variety of things to learn Java or was it the sheer interest in breaking through the challenge or was it a combination of both? I agree, the priorities have changed, the perspective of life has changed enormously ever since I left college. The quest for knowledge still remains, just that the focus has moved on. Life has big mysteries waiting for me to solve and Java was just a part of it. Challenges appear in new shape and form and the struggle to break through them is still ON.

Nutshell, the challenges are part of your life and they help you grow. Fearing them or running away from them is not going to help either. Some of the challenges may require huge sacrifices (learning Java made me miss so many late night movies which my friends had watched and some of the great moments of my college); and so it eventually boils down to CHOICE - if you want to break through it or leave it as is. In essence, I feel the blue pill, red pill concept as shown in MATRIX, is very apt in our life, wherein we as individuals are always offered two doors either of them would lead to a different future.
I went through one interesting blog posted in Wall Street Journal - http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/03/24/the-facebook-generation-vs-the-fortune-500/

The blog deals on how the facebook generation will determine the new age Management practices. It also illustrates why the management processes that are being followed right now in Fortune 500 will be outdated and be ineffective against the next set of Gen, who are born in this digital age, where Internet is no more "Its out there" thing, but "Its in" thing. People would start breathing in the Internet.Believe me, its not just in US, but in metropolitan cities in India, having a facebook or Orkut profile determines your identity.  We are getting increasingly connected across the globe and a revolution is just waiting to happen.

With the 2.0 revolutions sweeping through the technology, can we assume that it wont make any difference to the Management Processes? Definitely yes, and I could notice that it has started making difference. With some of the experience which I have gathered while working as a leader in my current position and looking at them with the new perspective gathered after reading the above WSJ blog, I realize that Management 2.0 has already arrived.

# Give importance to contribution than credentials
If you look in sites like youtube.com, you always look at the video (contribution). The contributer gets rating based on the video that has been uploaded and not his profile.

Similarly, associates who contribute more to the team or to the organization will be given higher importance. Contributions of associates is being higher preference and the position in corporate ladder and/or experience level is losing its significance. 

# Leaders are here to Serve. 
If you are the boss, it doesnt necessarily mean that you will be there to command. The new generation will not obey you, unless you prove yourself as more competent and willing to help for any issues. Transparency is what people have started looking out for.

This again draws similarity to what happens in Web2.0 community based development. Sun Microsystems have been able to lead Java Development, purely because they prove their mettle with newer code and quicker bug fixes. The day Sun fails to maintain this, it will lose its lead on Java.

Joy of Accompalishment overcomes Money Factor (in most of the times)
The completion of a difficult task or project gives away a joy which can be overwhelming. People can give a lot of energy for such activities. This is necessary to tap into the raw energy of the younger brigade, which doesnt know where to flow. The thought of a contribution gives a direction to this energy resulting in higher productivity for the organization. As long as people think their work is important, they will be driven towards the goal. 

The same is exemplified with the growth of Linux (OS) and Wikipedia. Do you think both these would have happened if people are driven only with the money prospect? 

# Power comes from Sharing and not hoarding
The new generation always respects people who share their knowledge. That is the only reason as to why they would stick around with you.  To hold on to your position, it is imperative to exude and charm others with your knowledge and skills and that too quickly before some one else does. Knowledge is no one's property anymore. If you know something, or if you have an idea, share it fast. You may never know when some one else may share and get away with its credit.

# Create Internal forums for Idea Generation & Execution
Organizations feel the need for ideas coming from the associates for getting a fresh insight into their current business or for looking out for new areas which have been left unexplored. People come up with their ideas and bring to a common forum for discussion where it is further enhanced and moulded into a possibly good business plan. This also results in involvement of lower end associates into management decisions that are made at higher level resulting in total change of the organizational fabric.

Now do you see where are we heading to ? The businesses are adapting themselves to radical new ideas and building themselves to stay fit in the new era of competition and talent retention. They are adapting to the Management 2.0 principles. 

Interestingly, this is a common philosophy which is shaping up both the ends of the spectrum - Technology and Management and trying to bring them on the same wavelength. As we move ahead for Web 3.0, will we see another Management 3.0 ? Wait and watch.
Some of the new Web 2.0 based web applications that I could get my hands on 

1. Email on the web
A superb website, which allows us to send the entire webpage on email to anybody. Makes use of the google account (so you need to have one mandatorily) and it sends email enclosing the entire web page content removing all unnecessary ads and pop ups. There is no attachment to the email and so it cannot be removed by any firewall.

Check this out - 

The interface has to be improvised a lot, but the functionality is worth it. 

2. Temporary Inbox

Use this website to generate a temporary Inbox id, without any registration. This temporary Inbox ID can be used for any registration purpose without being hit by SPAM. Also this site will allow you to see the email, using the temporary Email ID.

If you look at the right top side, you have one temporary Email ID, which will be generated everytime you refresh this page. Use this temporary ID for any registration and then you can discard it :-)

Still on the development I guess, and they are planning to offer more features.

3. Shahi - A Visual Dictionary

This is a perfect mashup application which pulls the data from Dictionary, Flicker, Google and Yahoo Images. So if you search for a word, you get the meaning, a sentence as well as Images corresponding to them.

4. Yola - A quick Website builder.

I was pretty impressed with the features being offered by Yola. I can add any Google or other gadgets, add youtube videos to my Site. I can host the site free as well I can get a paid domain site. Check this site out which I developed in 10 mins flat.. without having any content in mind.

5. Bantora - Another innovative Start up

This site looks forward to being a single shop for all the event information across the world. Any event that happens, if it gets registered here,  every body wud get notified and the event gets widespread publicity for free. Not only the location of event, but we get Map of the event location as well (courtesy mashup from Google maps).

Check this site for more details. Nothing very interesting to see here now, but I hope it shapes up into a fine site in future.

Well folks, that is all I have for now. Will catch up with ya guys next time .. See ya :-)

Its been really some time (about 8 months) since I reviewed Web 2.0 apps.. I have been keeping myself a lot busy with all other activities and now I think its time to revive the thirst for knowing more about web 2.0.. 

To make a come back, I have been browsing through web and looking through some of the 
kewl things that have been making impact.. The one that caught my attention recently was ADOBE AIR runtime. Adobe is now trying to show that it too can be a big Web 2.0 player. Well, they deserve the credit, as the Adobe AIR is one of the coolest APIs that have rocked the web recently.

Some of the coolest AIR Apps that I found on internet and were very useful are as below. But before you try to download and have them installed, you need to install Adobe AIR runtime which is found in - http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

The best part of these utilities are that they are also platform independent and are much more faster than Java. 

1. Webkut:

This site allows you to save the entire or part of a webpage as JPG/PNG/GIF Image or as a PDF. You can also post the images to flicker.

Download this Adobe AIR App at - http://toki-woki.net/p/WebKut/
Rating: 3/5

2. Skimmer

This is another cool AIR app which integrates all key Web 2.0 sites and brings them to single desktop based application. You can check out your blogger sites, youtube videos, Twitter profiles all at the same time on a desktop based app. 

Check out how it looks like:
The only thing I found it was missing is that it doesnt allow Orkut access :( Otherwise one of the most koolest and handy utility that I should have it.

Rating: 3.5/5

There are other applications which are built on mashups around Flicker, Twitter and some on project management utilties. But I guess a lot of innovation is needed on that front to come with some thing which is really useful. I will keep you guys posted on what I get my hands on...

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