SMS GupShup has been winning accolades for its superior messaging infrastructure and the capability shown by it in attracting user generated content. The site claims to have some 20+ million users and has earned respect for its business model despite bleeding severely in short-term by repeated interest shown by VC’s.
In a recent development SMS GupShup has announced its current tie-up to power the messaging platform on Facebook India, which would enable the use of its seamless infrastructure in messaging arena. This would certainly help Facebook users in India to truly experience mobility in interaction with the social network.
To Enable Facebook on their Mobile:
User can Visit www.facebook.com/mobile to activate mobile text features to receive and send updates.
Users can then update their status by sending a message to 92-FACEBOOK (9232232665).
Users can also reply to their friend’s messages by simply replying to the incoming SMS.
The availability of SMS feature was first launched for Tata Indicom users and now allows Non-Indicom users too. It would certainly proliferate the use of Facebook in India and it is also rumored that Facebook would soon be launching Indian office to derive separate focus on growth markets like India.
Microsoft recently launched online tools for Small and Medium Sized Businesses. The sales pitch - Online E-mail, Calendar, Collaboration, Productivity Software can Reduce IT-related Costs by Upto 10% to 50%. In a press release, Microsoft stated that all customers can log on to www.microsoft.com/india/onlineservices and experience the online service. The commercial launch is set to be on October 20009. Microsoft Online Services is a part of Microsoft software plus services strategy which provides flexibility and choice of accessing and using software on premise and on Internet as a service.
Mr. Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Microsoft Business Division said “Over 80 percent of the businesses in India are SMBs that are increasingly looking to use world class IT for better business productivity. With tools such as email and collaboration becoming increasingly a must-have in this segment, the pay-as-you-go affordability and freedom from IT administration, Microsoft Online Services offers the much needed respite from financial and logistical hurdles. We encourage businesses to make the best of the free trial opportunity we are launching – and experience the powerful impact of Microsoft Online Services.” The list of products is here.
Through this, Microsoft’s strategy is seen as embracing cloud and promoting its Azure platform. Microsoft seems to be going cloud in a big way, with it also launching Office Live (possible competition to Google Docs). However, Office Live, as commented in this article holds little promise for Medium and Large based customer services and contains several hidden costs.
Right from its multi million dollar launch advertising budget to its controversial/edgy name, Bing has been making quite a bit of noise on the web. In fact it is really pushing the envelope on a lot of aspects of web search, including monetization. Therefore, it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that Bing in its own small way is beginning to have an impact on online search and access. Enough anyway to question whether it will have an impact on webmaster and SEO best practices.
The first and foremost reason why we need to consider this question is obviously traffic. Since its launch Bing has been gaining traction as a source of traffic for a variety of websites. Especially in the niches that it promotes its decision engine e.g. shopping, travel, health etc.
Once this obvious point is done with the real reasons of why it might have a bearing on site optimization comes through. It’s different approach to presenting content in the search result through categorization. Bing’s selling point at least the one that they blow their trumpet time and again is that it is a decision engine. Which makes the contextual relevance required in a search result far higher than say a Google’s SERP.
For instance, it is far important for an e-commerce site to be on the top searches in the shopping category than the all results one.
The whitepaper that MSN has for Webmasters clearing things out for SEO though doesn’t touch up on this aspect. It simply suggests that the bot and crawling it did as MSN search has not been changed much, and most SEO best practices remain the same for better indexing in Bing. However, like many in the field of optimization point out, this is just a list of on site or on page work while the impact of optimizing for Bing might probably lie outside of it.
I don’t know how important this news is really to a lot of people, but personally this can be a godsend and so this post goes out to the few people who want better control over their to do lists. So what’s the dope? GMail has taken a lab product and made it better and more accessible for all users with the new Tasks feature.
From today whenever we log on to our Gmail we will see a small feature lying in between Labels and Chat Box. Welcome Tasks to your inbox.
According to Google, one doesn’t need to turn it on through labs anymore and can be accessed straightaway. And they haven’t spared a lot of features while doing this, this is what the Gmail blog had to say,
We’ve been continually improving Tasks since it first launched in Labs. We believe simple and fast is best, so we’ve been working to make Tasks more responsive and get basic interactions working better: we’ve added mobile and gadget views, made improvements to task editing and management, launched in more languages, and integrated with Google Calendar. We’ve also added a printable view for those people compelled to do things away from their computers or mobile devices.
Personally, mobile and gadget views, and Calender integration to go with the email integration when Tasks were first introduced in labs last year are the most killer features. Check the video Google has put up to know more about tasks.
Companies looking to reduce their IT costs and complexities are tapping into cloud computing. Ask any five IT specialists what cloud computing is, and you’re likely to get five different answers. So it is pretty evident that Cloud Computing Services means different to everyone. Patni Computers are one of them who are planning to set up labs in India and the US to place its applications and data on the internet. According to Patni’s CEO Jeya Kumar cloud computing will change the way people ‘use, apply and adopt technology’. Patni calls it the ‘Incubation of Technology’. They promise to offer consulting, architecture, development and deployment services to enable customers to exploit Cloud Computing and derive business advantages.
Wipro is also building what it calls the “enterprise cloud” Its nothing but a capability it plans to offer to clients who plan to outsource their hosting or infrastructure management activities with the company. HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar states that cloud-based enterprise services provide an opportunity to create new business models. Its not just another technology as it is a shift in the way IT delivers business capabilities by both corporations and service providers. Microsoft has sketched out a similar vision, in which it would provide extensions to Office for document sharing and collaboration, but that effort remains in very early stages.
What is Cloud Computing?
It basically refers to a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” over the internet. Thus, Cloud Computing should be capable of providing the end-user, services that have some or all of its characteristics. Cloud computing is still in the “innovation stage” according to IT experts. Hence its vendors will have to be as capable of withstanding IT audits as outsourcers are.
Besides being available over the internet, which apparently is a major advantage other than
Using pay-as-you-go payment model,
Highly flexible for user-specific requirements,
Highly scalable to adjust rise or fall in user’s demand of resources, without having any huge IT infrastructure.
What is Cloud computing usually confused with?
According to me the primary benefit of Cloud Computing is to making IT-enabled services economical in terms of time, resources and money. It’s been around for a while abroad, but now Indian IT companies are catching up fast on cloud computing and are betting big on it. One of its demerits includes that cloud computing does not allow users to physically possess the storage of their data. The exception being the possibility that data can be backed up to a user-owned storage device, such as a USB flash drive or hard disk. It does leave responsibility of data storage and control in the hands of the provider. While the concept of Grid Computing has grown in mindshare and relevance in the industry. Cloud Computing is very often compared to Grid Computing, Utility Computing and Automatic Computing, which doesn’t make any sense because they all differ from each other and they’re nowhere close to what cloud computing means. To perform large tasks from a composition of a cluster of networks is the major function of Grid Computing. While Utility Computing comprises computing resources packaged together as a service which includes computation and storage. And autonomic computing is nothing but systems created to be self-manageable.
SaaS is a type of cloud computing that delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a complex architecture. SaaS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators are already emerging. Computer World reports about Cloud computing not being ready for critical apps. Hence there are feelings of insecurities swirling all around. The cloud storage is a very broad term that incorporates a variety of technologies and business models.May be that’s when it comes to cloud computing, the experts fundamentally offer the same advice. This can be summarized by two very famous quotations, one an old Russian proverb that President Reagan liked to use - “Trust, but verify” - and the other by Intel’s famous former CEO, Andy Grove - “Only the paranoid survive.”
Tata Teleservices strengthened their alliance with Japanese telecom major NTT DoCoMo by launching their GSM Service in Karnataka. Prior to this Tata DoCoMo launched their GSM services in Tamilnadu, Orissa and Kerala. Their much awaited GSM Mobile service has been now rolled out in Karnataka and AndhraPradesh as well. The Prepaid Starter Pack comes for Rs.49 in both circle with Life time validity. They have also introduced their post-paid plans in detail so that users can choose according to their usage. So apparently they are entering the competitive market full of biggies in GSM services like Vodafone, Airtel and others. The Japanese telecom major had acquired 26 per cent in TTSL, Tata group’s unlisted telecom company, for around $2.7 billion in November last year.
The name for new brand will incorporate brand names of both Tata and NTT DoCoMo. Tata DoCoMo announced the introduction of the pay-as-you-use advantage for many of its Value-added Services, including all its voice portals, 24-hour music, cricket commentary and voice chat. The company is offering per second billing to prepaid customers at a rate of 1 paisa per second for all phone calls across India. Other commercial operations have now begun in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The GSM service in Karnataka will have and extensive coverage of 472 towns and 2,642 villages apart from the highways, railway lines, airports and places of tourist interests. The joint venture plans to conquer more circles and become a pan-India player in a battlefield-like GSM arena. They had made a promise that this would bring to the country products and services that will redefine the telecom experience. In a market that is cluttered with many operators that throw up confusing options, they will try to offer simplicity to consumers by being the country’s most transparent, innovative and liberating telecom brand. They target have targetted the South Indian Circles going live first. This will be followed by areas in East, West and Northern region.
For those who don’t know or have never used Rapidshare - Its a file hosting and sharing service that is popular around the globe. As per alexa India figures as the second largest traffic provider to rapidshare after China. Have a look at the traffic share below:
Now Rapidshare COO Mr. Bobby Chang is in India to promote Rapidhshare’s services. He sees great potential in the Indian market and feels that the Internet penetration in India is only going to grow thereby leading to need for services like rapidshare which can host data online for free.
On the current traffic from India he stated
“Currently, we see about 2-3 million users from India every day using RapidShare everyday. We expect to see a 10-20 per cent increase in activity this year as we launch more services”
Bobby Chang was also in India for the RapidShare Lottery which was won by a 19 year old girl named Srishti A. from New Delhi. She was presented a cheque of Euros 50,000. Over 500,000 people took part in the prize draw by exchanging RapidPoints for raffle tickets.
The Dark Side Of Rapishare
Well for those who know rapidshare will also know that its notorious for hosting all kinds of files (pirated movies, music, software, adult mms clips etc). Ofcourse all of this is user uploaded and shared and if one does complain to rapidshare they do take down a particular file but when 1000’s of such files are uploaded its very difficult for a authentic content owner or even girls whose mms clips might be on the platform to report all of them. Hence rapidshare enjoys the traffic as not all illegal content is reported. One may argue that the same is the case with an UGC platform be it orkut, youtube or even facebook. While this might be true file sharing takes it to a different level as the file itself is downloaded by the user and now can be shared. Unlike youtube videos which cannot be downloaded that easily (Yes there are services for that too but not everyone knows about them).
So Rapidshare may be looking to increase its presence in India but before it does that it may want to relook at its services as many Indian publishers would not be happy with their content being shared for free and rapidshare making money out of the same. Rapidshare could be termed as the napster of the modern world only that its not P2P sharing but file hosting.
Google is developing an open-source operating system targeted at Internet-centric computers such as netbooks and will release it later this year, the company said Wednesday.
The OS, which will carry the same "Chrome" name as the company's browser, is expected to begin appearing on netbook computers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post.
It is already talking to "multiple" companies about the project, it added.
The Chrome OS will be available for computers based on the x86 architecture, which is used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and the Arm architecture.
Prototypes of Arm-based netbooks began appearing last month at the Computex show in Taiwan and Google's support for the architecture could give it a significant boost. Microsoft's mainstream Windows operating system doesn't run on Arm chips so many manufacturers were talking about using Linux or a version of Google's Android operating system. It's not immediately clear how much the two operating systems share in common code but Google said they are aimed at very different devices.
"Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android," it said. "Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web."
While Google is initially looking at the netbook segment of the market it might compete with Microsoft and Apple on larger, Internet-centric machines.
Chrome OS is "being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems," said Google.
Beijing (China) – Intel used the first day of the Spring IDF in Beijing to show off its Moorestown integrated processor, which is expected to replace the current Atom CPU and chipset later this year or early 2010. The company also introduced two new Z-series Atom processors.
It was the first time that a Moorestown chip was shown live to the public. What makes this processor special is the fact that it integrates graphics and all other chipset components on-die, which will make it substantially smaller and apparently less power hungry than today’s Atom generation.
Moorestown is promised to run at ten times less idle power than the current Atom platform. Intel declined to reveal how much power the chip will actually consume and, at least for us, it is difficult to estimate that number. Today’s Atom relies on a 45 nm processor as well as an older chipset design, based on an updated i915 version, which is called System Controller Hub (SCH) as part of the Atom platform. The SCH is manufactured in 130 nm and simply too power hungry and too large to be used in small mobile devices such as smartphones.
Moorestown is expected to become Intel’s second serious attempt to make an impact in the cellphone market – the first was the Xscale processor, a technology which was acquired by Marvell in 2006. However, this time, the CPU seems to be much more focused and could turn into an interesting competitor to ARM processors.
Intel also launched two new Atom processors with Silverthorne core. The Z550 is positioned on the very high-end with a clock speed of 2.0 GHz and support for a virtual second core. Intel said that the chip consumes a maximum of less than 3 watts and about 220 mWatts on average. There was no information on how expensive the chip will be, but we would expect this model to be a low-volume device that will replace the 1.86 GHz Z540 as the flagship of the Silverthorne family. We haven’t seen the $160 (including SCH) Z540 in any significant devices so far and do not expect that this will change with the Z550. The use of a $160 CPU+Chipset does not make a lot of sense in products consumers expect to cost less than $500 and system vendors have largely passed on it.
The second new processor is the Z515, which includes the company’s new “Burst Performance Technology” and allows the processor to run at 1.2 GHz, instead of just 1.1 GHz. Don’t expect these new Atom processors to become available anytime soon in netbooks, as they are exclusive targeted at (more expensive) MID’s where less power consumption is more important than more performance.
Intel briefly touched the topic of upcoming mobile Nehalem processors, which are scheduled for a H2 2009 launch. The company said that these CPUs “will be more powerful than their predecessors by including such technologies as Intel Hyper-Threading Technology and Intel Turbo Boost Technology.”
