The recent Solar flare

A large solar flare, in astrophysicist's terminology, class X2 flare has happened in last few days  and it has already caused serious disruption on electronic communications in China, particularly those that require some assistance from Earth's ionosphere, like direct TV broadcast or Sat-communication. However scientists say that we actually survived from direct effect of the flare this time. http://www.spaceweather.com/  shows some stunning pictures from NASA of a Jupiter-size sunspot that was the reason for this flare. 
But scientists do believe there are more to come since Sun is entering an 'active phase'.
Solar flare is caused when high-energy plasma escapes the electromagnetic field on sun's surface and jets out huge plumes of plasma and high-energy photons. If the flare directly reaches Earth's atmosphere, it can burn all electronic equipment that gets exposed. Thanks to Earth's magnetic field, most of those energy gets diverted. However the northern and southern areas get most of the residual effect. In the next few days, Scientists predict that this flare will produce spectacular Northern Lights displays that would be visible in Tasmania.
A series of large solar flare can have a long-term effect on Earth's atmosphere and if you listen to what scientists say, that risk has increased. Why?
Dr. Paul Francis from ANU explains,"The sun has an 11 year cycle so it has quiet periods when you know you are not going to get any (flare) and then the more active periods and it comes and goes every 11 years. We have just been through the quietest period for many decades and it looks like it is coming back towards the solar maximum as it is called. So if we are going to get big ones it will be over the next few years.."

Nokia Mobile Strategy: news is out

As forecasted, Nokia announced their new Mobile platform strategy on 11th Feb and proved my prediction wrong! These are the salient points of the new strategy:

1. Nokia will tie up with Microsoft to use Windows  mobile platform as the new primary Nokia smartphone platform
2. They will continue to use symbian and expect to sell 100 million more units.
3. Meego, the vaunted new platform is expected to become open source mobile OS project.

Details can be read in the Nokia news bulletin
In the hindsight, the decision looks consistent. There are couple of points that I missed to reckon earlier. Tie-up with Google was not going to be win-win for Nokia. Android has proved to be disruptive and Google wants to bring down the Total Cost of Ownership for Smartphones by giving Android free. They are not expecting revenue from selling their OS, they are creating future revenue channel of mobile advertising. They have lot to gain from the tie-up while Nokia has lot to lose. On the other hand windows is not an open source OS, Microsoft wants to earn money from selling their OS and Nokia's revenue source is entirely from selling smartphone. In other words Nokia and Windows are from old business school: earning revenue by selling product. in the scenario of Google's disruptive strategy, both, Nokia and Microsoft have lot to gain by working together. Contrast this with HTC and Motorola approach: they are selling both Android-based and Windows-based smartphones.
Question is this: smartphone volume market is growing and is already quite large in all emerging markets. This market is more price-conscious and more socially active. Can Nokia address that market without joining Android bandwagon?
Well, this time I am going to wait and watch!

Update from 2012

It's more than a year since the Nokia took that strategic turn to move to Windows. People as expected, have started to evaluate what that decision gave to Nokia. I have few very interesting  articles from an ex-Nokia executive to add here:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/03/the-ceo-insane-how-to-rescue-nokia.html
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/03/brutal-truth-about-lumia-cannot-sustain-even-1-to-1-replacement-of-symbian-windows-phone-strategy-do.html

Fact is Samsung Galaxy [android] has won the market hugely and Nokia Lumia does not figure in the 'to-have' list of average smartphone buyers, neither the Nokia stores are particularly interested to demo it for you even today. So, I guess people decided already but as I said, let's not judge. Let us wait and watch how Nokia CEO manoeuvres from here. Will he finally abandon Microsoft OS? Will he promote both Meego and Microsoft OS? Or will he pull the magic from his sleaves to make Lumia a winner? If one follows his rant about Nokia Sales, it does not look like he has abandoned Microsoft OS as yet.

Nokia at the inflection point

Sujoy forwarded an article that quoted an internal letter from the CEO of Nokia and I remembered myself commenting months back about Nokia losing the cellphone game. Not that I was prophetic, fact is many people outside Nokia realized that Nokia is missing its steps in the fast-changing handset technology market. For those in hurry, let me try to bulletize what the boss of Nokia has said.
He acknowledged that:

1. Nokia lost the high-end smartphone game to Apple
2. Nokia's symbian strategy failed in delivering its promises
3. Nokia is losing at both the mid-tier phone market and low-end phone market 
4. Nokia was caught sleeping while Android and Chinese OEMs have captured the segment fast

and finally he forewarns of a drastic change in Nokia's handset business segment. There is another article that talks about the possibility of removing the entire management team of handset business wing.
He is going to announce his new mobile strategy on 11th i.e. today. While we must accept that he has got his facts ruthlessly correct, the difficult question is: what option has he got to change the game so late. Nokia is quite badly sandwiched between Apple's iPhone and low-cost very affordable and gizmo-friendly chinese phones.
He said that Nokia's mobile platform is like a burning ship and only way to survive would be to jump out of the ship. He sure knows his turf well. But will he be able to swim over the rough sea after jumping out? We will have to wait for the answer.
But from an outsider's perspective it looks like that he is going to join android platform. 
Why? 
For an answer, we would have to start with another question instead: what was the reason people loved Nokia phone for? People bought Nokia because 1. it used to be sturdy, 2. it used to be predictable 3. it used to be user-friendly and 4. affordable. You could drop it, it would still work without any fuss. We got used to Nokia's tactile keypad, very intuitive, even a kid could use. Those all changed with the advent of smartphone. Suddenly you have emails, music, camera - all component to use and Nokia's core competency did not cover any of those areas. They brought symbian and made it their central platform. However developer community was not exactly enthusiastic about. To top it all, ever changing web-technologies brought different ways of "connecting people" and those apps were not very symbian-friendly.
In addition, Nokia's internal quality system suffered fast deterioration. With the pressure of integrating external technologies, it had to bank on 'generic' test methodologies rather than 'full-knowledge product verification methods' that Nokia used before symbian. The result was that many of the apps were integrated badly, had many glitches, sometimes unstable and very unintuitive. The product flaws that were almost unheard of with Nokia's early phones, became commonly acknowledged issue. Nokia smartphone crashes too often; may be Nokia thought that, well, MS Windows crashes too and it still sells! But Nokia does not enjoy the almost monopoly that Microsoft enjoys. In short the very durability and user-friendliness that used to be hallmark of Nokia were severely compromised. Customer recognized that lot faster. Enterprise users moved to Blackberry. High-end users who care about the experiences moved to Apple, and low-end customers found cheaper alternatives in Chinese made phones. Chinese OEMs in that sense really brought a disruption in a market that was otherwise controlled by western companies.
Series 60 has become a dead product platform, too cumbersome and complex for fast development. Nokia needs new platform and only platform that has won over its competitors is Android thanks to Google's patronage. Nokia knows that by joining Android bandwagon, they will be able to come back to mainstream. They would be able bring down the development cost quite a lot and could compete Taiwanese, Chinese OEMs credibly. They would be able to focus on their winning MMI which created differentiator for Nokia phones in thr first place. So what I think? I think they are going to announce a tie up with Google and thereby strengthen Google's position as most popular mobile OS. But I also think that I spoke enough!
Now let's wait to see what Mr. Stephen Elop actually unfolds in next few weeks. I, personally believe Nokia will come back, Nokia has proved itself to be a great survivor in the past, they changed their main business 17 times in their long eventful journey so far. They cannot be eighteenth time unlucky..shouldn't be!

Giant Ring of Black Holes

There are few times, a picture becomes so eloquent that it makes all subtexts entirely unnecessary. For decades, people spoke about blackholes but could not find a proof of their existence so much so that many astrophysicist openly expressed their doubts if blackholes at all exist!. Things changed after Stephen Hawking postulated about blackhole radiation and now with Chandra telescope, science has surpassed that barrier. Now almost every alternate day a blackhole source is getting discovered. But of all those pictures, this recent picture [mapped to recognizable colours] from NASA is a milestone by itself. This is the first time that we saw multiple blackholes in a single frame. Since I cannot copy the image here, I provided the link to the picture below.
Giant Ring of Black Holes
You simply cannot help but be awed by the great masterpiece of the Universe.