SPDY: Protocol that will make web 2 times faster.

Its Google again, all set to make the web at least 2 times faster. SPDY (pronounced as SPeeDY) is the research project that it has taken up to make this happen. As Google puts it “SPDY is an application layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimum latency.” In simple terms, it aims at making the interaction between browser and server faster.

It creates a session between the HTTP application layer and the TCP transport layer, above SSL (Secured Socket layer) and uses several techniques to make the interaction between browser and server faster:

• Multiplexed Streams: It permits multiple and concurrent streams over a single TCP connection, unlike HTTP. Streams are bi-directional flow of bytes across a virtual channel with in a SPDY session.
• Request Prioritization: Using this technique a client can request as many items as it wants from the server and assign a priority to each request.
• HTTP Header compression: SPDY compresses request and response header, which results in fewer packets and fewer bytes to be transmitted.
• A major enhancement to HTTP is server initiated streams, which is not found in HTTP. Server initiated streams enables the server to transfer content to the client, even when client does not make a request. This is done in two ways:

1. Server Push: Server pushes data to client via the X – Associated – Content header. This header informs the client that server is sending the information to the client before the client asked for it. This will remarkably increase the initial – page download speed.
2. Server Hint: Using X – Subresources header, server suggests the client that it should ask for certain resource. Server will wait to send the resource until the client asks for resource.

So far Google has developed a prototype SPDY enabled Google chrome browser and an open source web-server. After conducting a test by downloading top 25 web sites 10 times, it was found that the download speed increased by (up to) 55%. The browser and the web server have to be upgraded, where as no changes are required in web pages.

After testing under lab conditions, Google has a major task to make it work in real-life condition and make it compatible with other browsers like internet explorer, Firefox.

Google comes up with Google Commerce Search

Google Commerce search is a product that is hosted on cloud and is a software-as-a-service offering aiming at online retailers. When a consumer visits an e-commerce portal, searching for a product or a number of products is one of the basic and most widely done tasks.

Hence, in order to make it a pleasant experience for the consumers to find a product, collaboration with Google search technology for the same, makes it fast and customizable.

Let’s have a look at the features of Google Commerce Search:

• Visitors to the online shop can take the advantage of parametric search i.e. sort their search by category, price, brand and on many similar criterions.
• It provides automatic spell-check, advanced synonyms and stemming option coupled with Google speed, search quality and ranking capability.
• Site administrator has the privilege to manage product promotions and in this capacity he can promote specific products, vendors or product categories at the top of the search results.
• You can change the look and feel of both your search engine as well as search results and can integrate search results into other application using the XML API.
• As it is a software-as-a-service offering, the deployment and maintenance is very simple and economic. As soon as there is an enhancement that is developed, it would be available to the online retail enterprise. There is Google Commerce Search support for assistance in case of any difficulty.
• Use of integrated Google analytics enables the enterprise to have customized      reporting and statistical analysis.
• Google Commerce Search being a hosted solution, it ensures the continuity of good quality search experience even there is a sudden rise in site visitors specially  during the holiday period, hence it provides immense scalability.

It’s working:

After signing up for Google Commerce Search, the steps to be followed by a site administrator are:

1. He must submit the product data to the Google Merchant Centre and Google Product Search and upload the items through www.google.com/merchants via data feeds, direct upload or API
2. He should log into the administrative console to manage product promotions, upload synonym dictionaries and control parametric search option.
3. He can get an idea about the site usage and effectiveness using Google analytics.

Its pricing model is based on the number of products in your data feed and the number of search performed on the site each year.

Also, check out the video at YouTube :  Google Commerce

Check out http://www.google.com/commercesearch/# to have a real experience of the latest product from Google which is right in time with holiday season approaching.

Motorola Droid : The latest Android phone

Motorola droid is one of the most hyped and talked about smart phones that is going to make its way to the market on 6^th Nov 2009. The phone is powered with the Android version 2.0 and is expected to show a noticing leap in the over all performance as compared to other android mobile phones. This CDMA phone comes with Verizon wireless network. Let’s see what makes it better or at least at par with other smart phones.

The Tech-Spec:

• The processor: Arm Cortex A8 (600MHz, OMAP 3430). This brings a significant improvement in the speed specially while switching from one app to another.
• It possesses 256MB RAM and 512MB ROM.
• Screen: 3.7 inch touch screen with a resolution of 480 x 854. It is not a multi- touch screen, a point worth noting.
• Keyboard: It sports both a physical and an onscreen QWERTY keyboard. The sleek slide out physical keyboard has a toggle bar similar to RIM’s Blackberry trackball where as there are no enhancements in the onscreen keyboard.
• Camera: It is coupled with a 5 megapixel camera having 4X zoom, dual LED flash, automatic focus, image stabilization, real-time colour effects, scene modes, location tagging, and videos can be captured at 740 x 380 resolution, upto 24fps and playback up to 30fps. It also has image editing tools.
• Connectivity: It has Stereo Bluetooth Technology v2.1, WiFi 802.11, micro USB connector, provides support for Corporate calendar, email and contacts( Exchange 2003 and 2007), Google contacts, calendars, Gmail, Facebook contacts
• Battery power: Up to 385 min of usage time and standby time up to 270 hrs.
• Messaging: Includes email (corporate, Gmail, IMAP, POP3, Attachment and browser document viewer), MMS, SMS, IM (Gtalk), Voice mail.
• Navigation: It has come up with beta version of new navigation service that tells us the real-time direction, turn by turn in collaboration with Google maps. Google provides a good combination of its satellite, map, traffic and location info with text to speech directions. This is considered as one of the major enhancements.

With droid being the first mobile loaded with Android v2.0, it is a much awaited smart phone. Let’s wait and watch how well it grips the market.