Most of us are familiar with Google Urdu Transliteration Service that converts Roman Urdu sentences into Urdu fonts.

Here we got this Wordpress Plugin, which can enable your blog comments Google Transliteration ready, meaning that commenters will be able to type in Roman Urdu while output will be served as Urdu Fonts, and that too automatically.

Once installed and activated, this plugin will offer an option of Enabling Google Transliteration.

Hats off to Reza Moallemi for developing such a useful plugin – which is going to be very handy for those who blog in Urdu Fonts.

Administrators will have to set a default language, out of 13 available languages to be used for the comments. Other than this, you can enable Google Transliteration by default or let the reader select it if required.

You can download the plugin from here: [wordpress.org]

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Google is one of the biggest companies on the Internet; between search, IM, email and everything else, they have a huge user base. Though, with that comes the worry of how much user data they’ve collected; to remedy this, a tool has been announced, showing users that exact data.

Google has an extremely vast range of services. When you put your mind to it, a person who uses Google products over the competition, when given the choice, would give the company the chance to know about their emails, those they talk to on IM, the things they search for, the videos they watch on YouTube, the documents they’ve shared and stored online, and even the RSS feeds they’re subscribed to (not to mention that’s only a small selection of services, too). That’s a hefty amount of data from one person, and there are some individuals who are seriously concerned about it. Google’s way of dealing with this is Dashboard, a simple service that collects everything together, from YouTube history to Google Docs, and puts it in one easy-to-read feed, displaying all of your interactions with the other tools. You can remove data, if desired, as well as change data collected (such as disabling saved web search history) in order to keep privacy at a maximum.

Google Dashboard will require you to log in again, despite being already logged into Google.com (or whichever international site you use), helping keep things secure. Also, all services aren’t quite added yet, according to MacWorld, so don’t get your hopes up. If you want to give this a shot, head over to Dashboard and have a peek at what Google knows about you

Link

[www.google.com]

via neowin

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In a bizarre alteration of examination rules, the Danish government has taken the bold steps of allowing pupils full access to the internet during their final school exams, according to the BBC’s technology page.

Currently, a total of fourteen schools in the country are piloting the scheme and all schools are invited to do the same by 2011. It seems like a great deal of trust is put into the students themselves not to cheat. BBC News journalist Judy Hobson describes the Danish exam hall at Greve High School, south of Copenhagen as a strange place:

“On the morning of the exam, the exam room the floor is covered in cables. IT experts are busy helping the teenagers set up their laptops, making sure they all work. At five to nine, the room falls silent. CD-roms and exam papers are handed out together. This is the Danish language exam. One of the teachers stands in front of the class and explains the rules. She tells the candidates they can use the internet to answer any of the four questions.”

The candidates may access any website they wish, including Facebook, in order to answer the questions, but are not allowed to contact any individual outside or within the exam hall. According to the Danish government, the internet is such an intrinsic part of an individual’s day-to-day life now that it should be included in examinations and classrooms. For some time now, Danish students have been allowed to type up answers to exam questions on computers, having the use of the internet in examinations is logically the next step, but is it a step too far?

According to the BBC, Sanne Yde Schmidt, who heads the project at Greve, says: “If we’re going to be a modern school and teach them things that are relevant for them in modern life, we have to teach them how to use the internet.”

Minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder, says: “Our exams have to reflect daily life in the classroom and daily life in the classroom has to reflect life in society. The internet is indispensible, including in the exam situation. I’m sure that is would be a matter of very few years when most European countries will be on the same line.” He says he is proud of the fact Denmark is leading the way and believes other countries will adopt this system.

The main issue with this groundbreaking examination method is cheating. Despite communication being “banned” there is actually no way a student can be stopped from cheating using this method; however severe the consequences of doing so. Ms. Schmidt says they rely on the integrity of the pupil and the threat of expulsion if they are caught. “The main precaution is that we trust them. I think the cheat rate is very low because the consequences of cheating are very big.”

According to the students at the school, cheating is too hard with the new types of exams. Instead of simply regurgitating facts, they are now required to sift through, and analyse an amount of information.

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Last Wednesday, The Indus Entrepreneurship Conference was hosted at Sheraton Karachi in collaboration of Torque (SoL). It was a one-day networking and learning opportunity for all those who wanted to find the entrepreneur streak in themselves by taking inspiration from engaging with successful entrepreneurs.

The day started with the session titled ‘Tales from the Trenches’ where the leading entrepreneurs presented their tales to the audience. If I had to review each in a one-liner then it would be this way. Puzzle by Adil Moosajee, Owner of Ego, was all about, to quote him, ‘Either find a way or make a path of your own. Work with happy people and others should be OUT.’ Reboot by Jawwad Farid, CEO of Alchemy discussed about learning from failures because ‘Before you can win, you have to lose’ and to be an entrepreneur, it is important being comfortable about what you are therefore looking behind is okay unless you don’t get obsessed about it. Adversity by Sameera Raja, Owner of Canvas Gallery, talked about her Breast Cancer Adversity and conquering it while managing her life. She emphasized on scheduling not only your work but how you present it to your audience. Appetite by Shahzad Ali, CEO of Student Biryani talked about how his father through his resilience from his humble beginnings made Cafe Student to a brand Student Biryani. The only favorite story for me was of Jawwad Farid because it talked about starting up a new venture and its hurdles. Others had stories which was about evolution or say an effort to sustain the previous family businesses.

Next up was ‘Investing in Change: Empowering Social Entrepreneurs’ by Batool Hassan, Business Development Manager at Acumen Fund. This was the most fruitful of all. She discussed about the idea of Philanthropy 2.0 where the products don’t need to be free but affordability and dignity should be brought into the market. Examples of Khuda ki Basti, Saibaan and other creatively planned projects were shared to illustrate that businesses can be run for social development and you don’t only get your capital back but reasonable profits can also be generated, if you are not running after the greed of money. She was kind enough to answer our questions even during the lunch break.

TieCon Debate was honestly more about pulling legs of each other. The topic being ‘Conventional Wisdom is becoming increasingly irrelevant’ itself had its flaws. In my honest opinion, any kind of wisdom can be relevant if you know how to mold and use it for your good. Personally Shahjehan Chaudhry stood out because he played the game pretty intelligently and fairly. Unilever representative at the against panel, was all rhetoric and made less sense, still won the debate and as Hassan Rizwan of Prymus Technologies rightly commented that surely ‘our education system is flawed.’ Sadly, people usually like how things are presented than the actual content. Next time it should be a discourse instead of debate. Thankfully lunch came in as a relief.

After lunch it was very apt to have a musical performance when people would usually go into the snore zone. Alan Simon from Taal Karisma introduced his Percussive Fusion Band and gave the people an insight on how band indulges in different beat cycles which haven’t been explored much before. Their each track was a delight and body percussion that they presented was pretty decent as a lot of people claim about the art but their performances eventually come flat. Ustadji their debut single is up on the radio and a must listen.

Skype helped with video-conferencing where Jahanzeb Sherwani, Founder of Jugaari shared his i-phone app experience with techies.

Birds of a feather featured Breakout sessions on various aspects of entrepreneurship skills like Bootstrapping, Branding, PR, Team Building and Social Media, where participants divided into their respective interest groups. Small focused groups surely brought a lot of ideas and learning on board.

Dr. Umar Saif who is Associate Professor at LUMS talked about pitching ideas to VCs. He gave an impression that VCs don’t pay much heed to your product, vision or technology but they invest more on the quality of team. Therefore it is the time when project becomes fund-able, as in at the point of take off, that it needs to be pitched else it would be too early or late. This was followed by Adil Saleem of Seen Report who shared his experience of making dream of this portal a reality which was also incubated by Dr. Umar Saif.

Last up was Asad Umar, CEO Engro Chemcial who talked about Making Your Move! The talk highlighted that once you start running your project, your business model should keep on updating and your passion should be supported by intellect whereby you know how to probe questions on achievements and move forward.

Every speaker highlighted about asking yourself that is it really your dream to become an entrepreneur?, if yes then one should not wait for being experienced as it would never be enough. Moreover an entrepreneur should be reading to take the tough part and learn from the mistakes. Social Media was also discuss at length which become a low or no-cost tool for marketing the businesses. Next time it would be great if Social Entrepreneurship takes the lead or maybe a whole conference can be dedicated on the subject.

Kudos to Sabeen Mahmud, the president of TiE to come up with an interesting line of speakers in such trying times and Shireen Naqvi with her Torque team for managing the conference on such high standards.

PS: The food was really good =D
PSS: I love the conference logo and badge.

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A few months back, I wrote about a wonderful tool that Google had released to the masses by the name of “Google Transliteration“. Put very simply, the tool allowed users to convert Roman Urdu text i.e. Urdu words typed with English alphabets, (e.g. Mujhe is waqt bhook lagi hai.) into a myriad of Asian right-to-left languages including Urdu, Punjabi, Gujurati and Hindi among many others. With the simplistic user interface that Google tools and apps are well known for, the tool became an instant hit with blogs and websites with content in these local languages and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it made transliteration a piece of cake.

Today, I am introducing to you the Google Transliteration WordPress plugin which adds this powerful tool right in the comment area of your blog. Reza Moallemi has done an excellent job with the plugin, especially the latest 0.8 release.

Once installed through the WordPress Plugins manager, the plugin puts a check box in the comment area which you can activate by enabling it. If not activated, simple English text shall be entered. Once activated, all text entered shall be transliterated to the language selected on the Plugin Settings page. And if you’re a keyboard guru like me, you can simply toggle between the two states by pressing Ctrl + g.

On the Plugin Settings page, the administrator can choose which language to select for transliteration to. If the option “Enable Google Transliteration by default” is activated, all text entered in the comment area is converted to the language of choice by default and in order to write in English, the user would have to manually disable the option before typing.

The only improvement I can think of at the moment is to put a drop-down list of languages right in the comment area.  This would allow users to select their language of choice themselves, rather than restricting it to the single language allowed by the blog.

Do try out the plugin in the comment area below and let us know what you think about it and whether you can come up with any suggestions for further improvment.

I must say that it is definitely encouraging to see innovation in this area. This not only gives bloggers and publishers the power to publish content in local languages but also allows readers and users to interact with each other in the same medium, thus enriching the whole blogging experience.

Plugin Homepage: [www.moallemi.ir]

Plugin Page at WordPress: [wordpress.org]

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