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Glad news to all Indians, we got our First Local Search Engine, launched by two Delhi IITians, with a commitment of USD seven million from a leading Indian venture capital firm. It’s called ‘Guruji’ and the domain name is http://www.guruji.com/. Two young Indians, Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, ex-IIT Delhi alumni with significant Internet and search experience - returned from the Silicon Valley - have started guruji.com, after Sequoia Capital India provided seed funding to the venture.

I just browsed this site myself and I was amazed about the functionality. A Google like search engine for India by Indians. Here is a screen shot.

The site is multi-lingual you could search in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. I have seen many sites which are multi-lingual, however they need the fonts to be installed in your local machine. The unique part of Guriji is that you don’t require the fonts to be in your local machine. I have done a search myself in Tamil language and it has an easy to use interface and it’s very cool. Here is screen shot of the same in Tamil and Hindi.

Another cool feature of Guruji is that you could do a local search. Say if you want to search for a Thai Restaurant in Bangalore you could do that… here it is..

The thing that I love about this site is, it displays useful facts about India whenever the home page is refreshed.

YASU Technologies is a privately-held company based in Hyderabad, India, with sales offices in USA. Founded in 1999 with no venture capital funding, YASU launched the first version of QuickRules BRMS (Business Rules Management System). It’s really neat to see an Indian Company in this space.

I have worked with many Consultants that are specialized in BRMS products but none of them seem to have an idea about the product by YASU technologies. YASU Technologies is a well-kept secret in the business rules market. An Indian firm, YASU has quietly built comprehensive rules platforms based on Rete for both Java/J2EE and .NET. The major advantage of the BRMS product is that it’s well integrated with the Java/J2EE environments (.NET as well) and the builder is eclipse based. I have worked with BLAZE before however the builder is not eclipse based. Here is an overview of the product and it’s advantages.

Rule Capture
The QuickRules Builder provides features required for performing the tasks involved in capturing (defining and authoring) business rules from requirements documents - so far none of the BRMS products had such a feature.

Rule Implementation
Import Java classes or XSD documents (XSD - SDO based SOA applications could easily integrate with YASU) into the rules project.
Use already imported Java classes / XSD Elements in business rules.
Create executable units for business rules.
Author business rules; create and manage complex rule execution sequences diagrammatically. (like Rule flows )
Chain rules to meet complex rule requirements.
Add context-specific metadata to business rules.

Rule Deployment
The QuickRules Builder allows exporting business rules to databases for secure storage:

Rule Governance
The QuickRules WebEditor provides the features required for performing the tasks involved in managing change
Add/edit/delete business rules at runtime.
Add/edit/delete rulesets at runtime.
Add/delete business objects at runtime.

To conclude, I was really impressed by the fact that the product could be well integrated with XSD (SDO). It has well positioned itself in a SOA based architecture.

This might be a relatively old article by Forbes, it recently caught my eyes when I was at the Doctors office today. This article is published at Forbes magazine. It’s a detailed review about Tata’s ambitious plan of selling a car for $2500. I came home and surfed the internet to get the online version of the article and here it is (Link).

Read the full story here.

LONDON: Britain has suspended its online visa application facility from India after personal data of thousands of Indians was compromised prompting the government to order a probe into the security lapse.

Four hundred and seventy thousand Indians applied for visas to come to Britain last year and around 50,000 had applied online.  Read the full story here.

Hyderabad based company Pramati announced its product Dekoh in the Java One Conference 2007. Immediately I downloaded their application last week end and had a look around it. Dekoh’s goal is to bring the web and the desktop together and to give developers the ability to create applications on top of that platform. Those applications can be shared and deployed anywhere in the network. It’s a great goal, but there are more flexible desktop technologies on the horizon like Apollo and Silverlight in the market right now.

(Hyderabad-based Pramati Technologies’ co-founders, Mr Vijay Pullar (left), Chief Technology Officer, and Mr Jay Pullar, Chief Executive Officer, at the company’s stand at JavaOne in San Francisco, where they launched the company’s new product, Dekoh )

That said, there are definitely parts of Dekoh that don’t exist in other places. Dekoh is built on Java and you can move seamlessly between online and offline mode thanks to an embedded web server. When you create an account, you’re given a Dekoh portal, something like yourname.dekoh.com and you can add buddies, install applications and share your desktop. It adds an interesting twist of social networking to the webtop space and in the example I saw, you could share photos or invite your buddies to play a game.