Till late we were seeing lot of third party applications that used to act like a proxy for your yahoo IM or Skype or Google. But this spring we saw two major players in this domain come up with their own iphone versions of their clients. They are Yahoo Messenger and Skype. Both have made debut to the app store in a big way, within a week both figure in the Top 10 free app list.Yahoo IM is at No 8 and Skype is at No 10. This shows the popularity of these instant messengers in general and yahoo/skype in particular. Both these apps have crossed a million downloads mark within the first week of their debut.

Now lets look at some of the key features of these two messengers

Yahoo

Features

What you don't have?

Skype

Features

What you don't have in here?

So, both have some disadvantages in terms of usage, but Skype's biggest selling point is the Call feature. Not sure why Yahoo, my favorite IM, are behind skype even here.Come on Yahoo, you could have done it this time atleast!!

Google opened up their App Engine for Java (which was earlier supported only on Phython) on April 8th for beta testing.What this means is that you can now run your Java web application on Google's infrastructure. Google App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache. App Engine uses the very popular Java Servlets & jsps architecture and it supports the standard WAR directory structure. Google has done some thinking on the way the JVM is allowed to run, it runs in a secured Sandbox environment for more security and availability. The sandbox authorizes JVM to perform only those actions that wil not interfere with the performance and scalability of other apps. Google has some billing model if the free infrastructure provided is in-sufficient. Check that model here.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. All applications can use up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month, absolutely free. When you enable billing for your application, your free limits are raised, and you only pay for resources you use above the free levels.

Some of the key features, as mentioned in the google code page are

    * Dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
    * Persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
    * Automatic scaling and load balancing
    * APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
    * A fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer
    * Scheduled tasks for triggering events at specified times and regular intervals

Complete tutorial and the app engine setup is google documented here 

To look at it, this looks like a awesome concept and all Java web app owners should be more than happy to hear this. But recently SUN's chief open source officer, Simon Phipp blasted Google's App engine after finding out that not all core Java classes were included in the App engine and only a subset of the core classes were made available. He writes the following in his blog
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The JRE Class White List - Google App Engine
Whether you agree with Sun policing it or not, Java compatibility has served us all very well for over a decade. That includes being sure as a developer that all core classes are present on all platforms. Creating sub-sets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden for a really good reason, and it's wanton and irresponsible to casually flaunt the rules.
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Link for the same can be found here.

Was google right in creating a subset of core Java classes without consent of Java maker? Personally I admire both the companies. Sun because they are the ones who taught the world to be open (sourced) and google because they showed the world that a company can still be profitable without selling anything directly to a consumer. Hope both these companies talk and resolve it internally.

Disclosure - This article has content copied from the original source , google code and Sun blog.

An update from one of the tech companies that was in news beginning this year. Satyam Computer Services, the fraud-hit Indian IT company has been bought by another Tech Mahindra Ltd(jointly owned by Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. and British Telecommunications plc) for $351 million or 31% stake.The offer of Rs 58  ($1.17) per share is about a 10th of what Satyam shares were worth about a year ago.The offer topped bids from Indian Engineering major Larsen & Tourbo, which offered Rs49.50 per share.L&T already owns 12% stake in Satyam. Tech Mahindra later plans to make offer for another 20% stake in open market.

The fraud of Satyam was widely reported world wide and was one of the major black mark for the tech outsourcing industry in India. It was covered in all newspapers/websites from Times of India to Newyork Times. Satyam was the bread and butter for more than 50,000 techies from India serving some of the fortune 500 clients worldwide. The fraud was country's biggest corporate fraud involving about Rs 8000 crore ($ 1.6 billion). Company had a market share of Rs 10,000 crore($2 billion) listed in Indian stock exchanges (BSE & NSE) and was also listed in NYSE. Indian Government and SEBI (the stock regulatory board in India) had to intervene and form a interim board at the peak of crisis.Satyam founder and the main accused in the fraud is behind bars ever since he admitted fraud and along with him, lot of other Satyam officials are also arrested.

The bid process was keenly watched worldwide and is also reported by all top news agencies. NYTimes reports here, CNN reports with this article and BBC reports like this.

Indian news papers/websites also covered this news with much excitement. Times of India, Indian Express, The Hindu and Rediff were few of the publications to report this. Every Indian including The Prime Minister were relieved after the successful bidding process that got completed today.Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Monday said he was glad at the successful outcome of the auction to sell controlling stake in Satyam Computer Services and hoped scams like that perpetrated on the company would not recur.The prime minister had called the fraud a “blot” on India’s corporate governance and said those responsible will be brought to book at the earliest.