Notes on tech

We've moved

2006-09-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

The unimaginable happened. I got sick and tired of the blogger platform (this site is currently hosted on blogger) and moved lock, stock and blog to Wordpress. My new blog is located here: http://anandjain.wordpress.com/

MTNL to launch WiMAX in India

2006-09-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Business Standard reports that MTNL will launch WiMax enabled land line phones in India by 2007. WiMax cellphones will be launched by 2008.

MTNL is also launching IPTV, which will offer internet, voice and TV on a single line. At present, MTNL has 4 million landline subscribers and 3 lakh broadband subscribers.

I use MTNL broadband here in my office in Mumbai and am quite happy with their service. Just that they need to come up with unlimited usage plans.

Cellular connections touch 2.5 billion mark

2006-09-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

Currently there are about 2.5 billion cellular connections the world over. Most of the growth is coming in from emerging markets. It took 20 years to reach the 1 billion connection mark, and just 3 years to reach the 2 billion mark.

The top ten countries for volume of new connections over the last year were China, India, Russia, USA, Pakistan, Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Between them, they account for over half of the growth in the world cellular market over the last 12 months.

A quarter of the growth is coming from China and India. China’s market is still expanding at more than 5 million new connections per month. India has moved rapidly up the top ten list, with the rate of new connections quadrupling over the last 18 months to reach a level very close to China’s.

Source: Geekzone

Gateway of India

2006-09-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, we took a cab down to the Gateway of India. Finally, got a chance to see this marvelous piece of art. The place was shoddy and crowded, however. Nothing much to do there, except to stare at the the magnificent structure. We then took a stroll and then a cab to the station and headed back.

Munnabhai lage raho

2006-09-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

Watched Munnabhai lage raho twice in two days. Its hilarious. Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi continue the laugh riot, so much so that it is much better than Munnabhai MBBS.

I wont spoil the fun with any spoilers, but take my word. Go watch it. Then, watch it again!

Updates

2006-08-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Its going very busy at Burrp!. Last week, I flew down to Ahmedabad to meet up with family, but fell ill with viral fever. Returned back to Mumbai yesterday. Have recovered 85% or so. Hope to be 100% by the weekened.

Currently reading - The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson.

15 websites that changed the world

2006-08-15T04:27:00.000-07:00

Guardian Unlimited has an article that lists the top 15 websites that changed the world. Here is the list:

eBay.com (Auction and shopping site)
wikipedia.com (online encyclopedia)
napster.com* (file sharing)
youtube.com (video sharing)
blogger.com (blog publishing system)
friendsreunited.com (school reunion site)
drudgereport.com (breaking news site)
myspace.com (social networking site)
amazon.com (online retailer of books, dvds etc)
slashdot.org (tech news and forum)
salon.com (online media)
craigslist.org (no frills classifieds)
google.com (search engine)
yahoo.com (internet portal)
easyjet.com (low cost airline site)

* Other than napster (which was illegal), all other sites are still in business. Napster tried to launch in a legal avatar, but hasnt been as successful as earlier.

How to get the new Yahoo Mail Beta

2006-08-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

If you are like a Yahoo mail user like me, but didnt get invited to the new Yahoo Mail beta party yet, despair not. Here is a way to get invited to the party ;)

Login to your regular Yahoo Mail account
Click on Options
Select Account Information (from the left hand panel)
Click on "Edit" Member information
Goto General Preferences
Click on Preferred Content
Change it to "Yahoo UK"
Save your changes

When you go back to Yahoo Mail, you'll now see a page that says "It's the New Yahoo! Mail Beta... and you're invited." Click on "Try Beta Now". Voila!

I love new slick AJAX Yahoo Mail interface.

*Are wondering whether you can switch back to your Preferred Content after getting invited? I just tried it and I can still see the new Yahoo Mail interface.

mumbai.burrp.com is live now

2006-08-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

I apologize for my sporadic posts here. Been really busy working on Burrp!. Finally, we had the first public release. Check it out here.

Tata SKY DTH service launched in India

2006-08-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

Tata and Sky and Tata have finally launched the the launched Tata Sky service in the Indian market. They have launched the service simultaenously in 300 cities, offering 55 channels including Star, Sony, ESPN, Disney, National Geographic, NDTV, Asianet, and TV Today. The cost would be around Rs. 200 per month.

Its been quiet

2006-08-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

Its been eerily quiet for some time now. There is nothing spectacular happening around us that is worth blogging. Or maybe it is just me who is working on Burrp! heads down. Nothing earth shattering happening, other than the usual hubbub related to pesticides in colas, ganguly, politics, terrorism, rains, indian economy etc... Just the same old same old.

Thanks, but we dont need OLPC

2006-07-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

Atanu Dey does a fine job of explaining why:

The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids will become computer savvy and what not.
....
Tens of millions of children don’t go to school, and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards and in some cases even chalk. Government schools—especially in rural areas—are plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a major barrier to girl children.)

Search marketshare in June

2006-07-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

Here are the search market stats for the month of June. Google is the clear leader here. Surprisingly Yahoo is at 23%, while MSN is a long way off before it can claim some respectable share.

On a related note, check out what Ebrahim Ezzy writes about Search 2.0:

What I'm calling Search 2.0 are actually third generation search technologies. To explain the generations:
First-generation search ranked sites based on page content - examples are early yahoo.com and Alta Vista.
Second-generation relies on link analysis for ranking - so they take the structure of the Web into account. Examples are Google and Overture.
Third-generation search technologies are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

Blogs unblocked by the Indian ISPs

2006-07-21T08:05:00.000-07:00

I've been watching this drama from the sidelines, first they blocked entire domains hosting various blogs and then unblocked them due to the pressure from the community.

Ah, well, now we are back in action. More power to the blogs!!

Google's top 20 properties

2006-07-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

Look at the above numbers. They speak for themselves. Google is and remains a one trick pony.

Top 10 outsourcing companies:

2006-07-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

Following are the top 10 companies of which 5 are Indian:

1. Affiliated Computer Services
2. Satyam (SAY)
3. Cognizant
4. Perot Systems
5. Infosys (INFY)
6. Patni (PTI)
7. TATA Consulting Services
8. HCL
9. GenPact
10. Mellon

(source: SourcingMag)

Currently reading: The Wisdom Of Crowds

2006-07-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading The Wisdom Of Crowds by James Surowiecki. So far it is a great read. I am on chapter 3. The author talks about how the collective wisdom of the crowds is more accurate in predicting stuff than just the opinion of an expert.

One thing that occured to me whilst reading this book is, if the so called individual stock market experts were truly experts in predicting the winning stocks, why does their opinion differ with other experts. If they are experts, they should almost have the same intelligence level and more or less the same thought process. Then why dont they all zero in on the same set of stocks always? Why have different opinion?

I guess, I'll find out my answer as I read this book.

Indian cos in the Fortune 500 list

2006-07-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

A total of 6 Indian companies made it to the Fortune 500 list this year. Here is the list:

IOC (Indian Oil Corporation) - 153rd
RIL (Reliance Industries) - 342nd
BPCL (Bharat Petroleum) - 368th
HPCL (Hindustan Petroleum) - 378th
ONGC (Oil & Natural Gas Commission) - 402nd
SBI (State Bank of India) - 498th

SBI is the latest entrant in the prized club. While Reliance did the single biggest jump from number being #417 to #342 this year.

The global top 10 comprises of Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, General Motors, Chevron, Dailmer-Chrysler, Toyota, Ford and ConocoPhilips.

Interestingly, the majority of the companies listed in both the above lists are oil companies.

Internet usage pattern in India

2006-07-10T05:11:00.000-07:00

The general belief is that the typical Indian internet user is a middle class English speaking user from one of the metros.

Well, Econimic Times reports that almost 8% of India's 25 million internet users regularly check out blogs. Nearly 59% of those users are from the middle-low income group and half of the users are from outside the top 8 cities. About 41% of the users prefer a Indian language site, with 17% wanting the sites to be in Hindi. Around 10% of the urban population gets online regularly. About 46% of the internet users access it from the cybercafes.

About 33% of the internet users bought train tickets online. Almost 25% of the internet users are using it to conduct net-banking.

Italy football champions - 2006

2006-07-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

Italy won over France in the penalty shoot-out. This is the fourth time in history that Italy has won the World Cup. In the past, Italy had won world-cup championships in 1934, 1938 and 1982.

The Myth of the New India

2006-07-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

A New York Times op-ed titled "The Myth of the New India" states:

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor.

This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.

Here is the eye-opener part:

Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

I would say that within this one geographic India, there are several socio-economic Indias. There are the ultra rich that drive Bentleys and there are ultra poor that cannot even afford the two meals per day. And everyone else falls in some vignette in between. Now having stayed in India for the past 6 months, I have seen that not everything is as rosy here as portrayed by the media (both Indian and foreign).

Re-entry into the blogosphere

2006-07-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Fellow readers,

I know I've been away from this blog for quite some time now. Its almost taboo in the blogging world to be away for so long. Ah well, sometimes you do what you got to do. Got my priorities straightened out. Got some work done. Check out the burrp blog to know what we've been upto lately.

Finally life seems to have settled down to the point where I can start blogging again. I need to get back into the rhythm of blogging. It will take some time, but I'll get back to my usual blogging self.

Thanks for your patience.

Yours truly.

Burrp press coverage

2006-06-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Somehow the word leaked and there was some press/blogger coverage regarding Burrp!. It was covered here, here and here as well as some other places (too lazy to provide a URL). The visitor count to our blog and the homepage shot up. So far so good. So now people are anticipating something to be released soon.

We are really busy setting up the office from scratch (ok, resist your first, create the universe jokes) and hiring developers. As of now, we dont even have internet connectivity at our offices. So that's why the posting on this blog is slow. But it will resume as soon as some of the dust settles and I get back to my regular schedule.

You can check out the burrp! blog in the meantime.

Slow posting

2006-06-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

Posting will the slow for the next few days. I am in Mumbai right now and dont have decent connectivity.

India has 100 million mobile subscribers

2006-06-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

At the end of May 2006, India had total fixed line subscribers at 47.40 million, while mobiles exceeded 101 million. India has a paltry 1.5 million broadband subscribers now. Here is a graph that shows the rate at which Indian mobile subscriber base is growing:

Here is the 100 million subscriber club:

China – 408 Million (March 2006)
USA – 170 Million (January 2006)
Japan – 141 Million (January 2006)
Russia – 130 Million (February 2006)
India – 101 Million (May 2006)

source: Metric 2.0