Palaces i want to go

Well i always wanted to share where all in the world i wanted to go. Its funny that i started using a Facebook App "Where i have been" and totally forgot about it. Suddenly today it poped-up in news feed and realized, long time back i had updated.

Just embedding the Map-

Multi-Channel Messaging is the Future of Email Marketing

I wrote this blog for Lyris sometime in Jan 2010, when i was contracting for them so just publishing here on my blog post here.

In marketing we talk endlessly about the best approach to reach prospects and how to convert them into customers. The email marketing industry has come a long way and we have become experts at optimizing email campaigns using advanced segmentation, trigger email, A/B and multivariate testing, and optimizing our email send time for maximum conversion.

However, email marketing is no longer just about sending emails. Marketers are thinking of creative approaches to engage their customers with email marketing by personalizing a lot more and integrating campaigns across multiple channels.

Over the past three months, I have been connecting with our customers to understand their current challenges, areas of focus for the near future, and how they think email marketing is evolving in their business.

Here are four key ways I have learned that marketers are hoping to use email marketing in the coming years.

1) Mobile friendly email marketing

With smartphone adoption sky rocketing, marketers want email service providers to automatically detect what kind of phone it is and render the email to meet the device specifications. Furthermore, marketers would love to dynamically localize email content based on the location of the phone. For example if Apple sends out an email marketing campaign for the latest Tablet, and you open that email on your iPhone, the email would show an offer related to your area and the address of the nearest Apple Store based on your current location, with a small map.

2) Video streaming in the email inbox

Social video sites are becoming more popular compared to TV among some generations for viewing their favorite shows on demand. With more than a billion video views on YouTube every day, now more than ever marketers want to reach their customers using video messaging. Marketers are looking for an email solution that can accommodate standard YouTube embedded code and video so that email recipients can view video streams as soon as they open their email. Let’s hope all the internet services providers catch up with this technology to render video streaming. Furthermore, marketers are wishing for video email to be friendly for major mobile email clients too.

3) Email that is social media inbox friendly

There are over 350 million Facebook users, 50M+ LinkedIn professionals,100M+ MySpace users, and millions of users on other social sites - and still astonishing social networking growth is occurring. Furthermore, consumers are spending more time on social networks than ever before, making it the perfect place for marketers to send personalized messages via the social site inbox. Marketers can’t wait to send targeted messages to all their Facebook fans right into their Facebook inboxes and watch those messages go viral.

4) Email integration with online optimization products

Email is no longer a single channel; rather it is multi-channel messaging over the Internet, so marketers are seeking dynamic content and targeting as well as multivariate testing of dynamic content across all the channels. Marketers are seeking tight integration with market leading online optimization products such as Omniture Test & Target, Google Web Optimizer and SiteSpect.

Wow that’s a dream come true for any marketer! I don’t foresee all of this happening in 2010, but with the evolution of mobile, social media and online optimization there’s no doubt that the email marketing industry will continue to evolve and grow well into the future.

Wish you a very Happy New Year from AppKettle Team!!

AppKettle wishes all our App users Very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2010!! and Thank you for your continual support, we really appreciate it!!

2009 was the year when AppKettle was born. On its first year AppKettle launched five applications on Android, three on Facebook and one on the iPhone. Darshana and I are pretty impressed with our outcome on first year. All credit goes to our Software Engineers (Arin, Gopal and Arun), Graphic Designer (Samtha) and Product coordinator (Nishant) who have been working really hard to get these application out. Thank you for all your support!!



Looking back at our first Application Shouldi - A polling app among friends, it had a pretty concept but with ok UI. As we built this App and launched, we learnt a lot what app users are looking for? what they like and started listening more closely. We got number of request from south American countries that they need this application in Spanish. So we built second app Deberia.


Deberia - Same polling app like shouldi in Spanish, catering to all Spanish speaking users. However, the adoption of the app was not as great we expected. So looking back what went wrong? Well status message, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook was way users get their friends comment on the questions or anything. So lesson learnt was unique value to user, which they cant get from other places and it should be really really simple and easy.


Learning from our first two application we built our third application on Android "Indian Railway Schedule". There was no App which was catering to indian train commuters. Furthermore, India has thousands of railway stations and hundreds of trains, that it just made lot harder to build the mobile App. We took-up this challenge to build a mobile App, which will allow android users to "very quickly and easily find the status of train arrival and departure". We built the app on this key principle and published it on Android Market. We got a great reception on the adoption of the App and the App has 5 star rating. We have received tons of great reviews on the App.

Special thanks goes to Darshana for building this App!!


As Darshana and I love Bollywood movies, we were using quite a number of bollywood apps on our iPhone and Android to know what latest movies, gossip and news in the bollywood world. We realized that we had to use two or three apps to get information. We found this fustrating, so we decided to build a bollywood app "Access Bollywood".

The key thing we wanted the app to do
(1) Get all bollywood information from movies, to gossip all at one place.
(2) Should be fun and intuitive to read bollywood gossip.
(3) Should be very simple
(4) Should have pictures rather than text.

We built the App on the key principles and launched the App on iPhone AppStore, Android Market and Facebook on Thanksgiving. Just over a month since we launched the App, the App has been well received by the bollywood fans. We got ton of Feedback on what more Access Bollywood users want in their app. I really want to Thank you for your Feedback and i want to tell you that we are working on the request and in next coming months you would see your most requested features implemented.

It was very nice year for AppKettle and we are very thankful for your support.

So what's coming in 2010. A lot more new apps for user and also enhancements to existing apps.

We wish you all a very Happy New Year!!

Vishal

Follow us on Twitter
@AppKettle
@vishalchordia

MS SQL Server Managerment Objects (MS-SMO) - Using SMO

The SMO namespace is implemented as a .NET assembly using which you can include all SMO functionality in your .NET application. The SMO namespace is Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO and is located by default in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\SDK\Assemblies” directory. It is installed with the client tools of SQL Server 2005 and requires Common Language Runtime (CLR) to be installed as well. The assemblies required to work with SMO in managed environment are:

• Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo
• Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo
• Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoEnum
• Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlEnum

Other assemblies present in SMO can be used as and when required.

SMO can be used even in an unmanaged environment, as there exist the COM wrappers around the SMO classes. The SQLSMO.dll and SQLSMO.tlb files enable the SMO to be used with unmanaged code.

SMO Classes

The SMO Object Model Contains two types of classes: Instance Classes and Utility Classes. Each of them is discussed below in details.

Instance Classes

SMO Instance Classes contains the SMO Objects in a hierarchy that matches the hierarchy of a database server. At the top of the hierarchy is the Server Instance class that represents a SQL Server instance, and under it there are other classes in hierarchy representing the other objects of the database such as databases, tables, columns, indexes, stored procedures, etc.

A sample hierarchy of Instance Classes is depicted in the figure below:


Utility Classes

SMO Utility Classes are meant for performing some specific task, being independent of the SQL Server Instance. Lists of tasks, which can be performed using these utility classes, are:

• Generate Database Scripts
• Backup / Restore Databases
• Transfer Database Schema between database instances
• Administering the Database Mail subsystem
• Administering the SQL server Agent
• Administering the Service Broker
• Administering the Notification Services

Thank you iPhone & Android Access Bollywood users!!

Thanks for your support guys!

Stay tuned with us on Twitter

@AppKettle
@vishalchordia

Access Bollywood for all Bollywood Lovers

Last Thursday on Thanksgiving, we launched our Bollywood Gossip App “Access Bollywood” on iPhone, Android and Facebook platforms.

Access Bollywood is an app for all those Bollywood fans who love to know about the latest gossips going around the Indian Film Industry. The app enables users to peek into their favorite Bollywood Actors and Actresses stories. Apart from News it also gives updated information on the Box Office and New & Upcoming Releases of Bollywood.

With Access Bollywood, we tried to provide users with an elegant interface to browse through the latest stories, movies and Pictures of their favorite celebrities. In brief, main features of the app include:

• Access latest Bollywood Gossip and easily share with your friends over social networks

• Know the latest movie releases, upcoming movies and box office list

• Browse thousands of Bollywood celebrities pictures and download your favorite pictures right on to your phone

• Read the latest Bollywood News in quick to read news format

If you are a Bollywood fan and want to be updated with all Bollywood happenings it's the right app for you to download.

For all iPhone lovers you can download the App at AppStore or by searching “Access Bollywood” on AppStore.


For all Android lovers you can download the App at Android Market by searching “Access Bollywood”.



For all Social Media freaks, download the Facebook app “Access Bollywood”.

I hope you enjoy the app!!

MS SQL Server Managerment Objects (MS-SMO) Introduction

Microsoft has introduced Server Management Objects (SMO) with SQL Server 2005 that enhances the capability of Distributed Management Objects (DMO) of the earlier version of SQL Server. In SQL Server 2005, DMO is abandoned in favour of SMO. It allows managing the database server programmatically, and is compatible with the earlier versions of SQL Server (2000 and 7.0). However, SMO cannot be used to manage databases with compatibility level 60 and 65. The only functionality that SMO doesn’t offer as compared to DMO is that, replication objects are not included in SMO. Instead, there is separate Replication Management Objects (RMO) that exists for replication in SQL Server 2005.

To enlist few of the tasks that you can do with SMO are:

• Connect to Database Server
• Create Database
• Drop Database
• Backup Database
• Attach / Detach Database
• Copy Database Objects
• Create / Edit / Drop Objects (Tables / Views / Indexes / Stored Procedures / etc.)
• Create / Edit / Drop Relationship between tables
• Generate Scripts
• Handle HTTP and SOAP requests using EndPoints objects

The list still goes on. It’s almost everything that you can do in a Server; you can do it through SMO. In addition, the Capture Execution feature in SMO is an interesting new feature that allows capturing scripts for later execution. For example, suppose you have a section of your code that creates a database or table, adds an index, populates data, for example, in an installation routine. After testing, you can actually use SMO to capture this as a script for later execution, or on a separate server.

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