UK based 3rd Space has tied up with Reliance Communications to bring video content to Reliance phones. The video content will be ad-funded – ads coming up in between the content just like your TV.

The service will be free of cost to the user. The content will be funded by the ads that will be displayed in between.

It will also offer premium content such as ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’, Bollywood songs and films along side the world’s leading sporting content, available on every data enabled handset within the Reliance network. (Business Standard)

Music and music downloads are already a big hit in India. If we add video to it then that might be a killer combination. I have no doubts about the success of this services. My only reservation is about the speed.

Reliance has recently tied-up with BBC to bring its audio content to Reliance phones. It has also tied up with ICC to bring the T20 world cup matches to the mobile.

It is surprising that no one else is moving ahead in the video space. Reliance already has an advantage with its GSM+CDMA operations. Only Tata has that distinction. If Reliance continues to move in the video space may be it will leave everyone else behind.

Looks like ad-funded things on mobile are gaining traction. There was an announcement only few days back that Blyk – Uk’s ad-funded free mobile operator is mulling India entry.

Ads and video on mobile are the new flavors of the month.

State owned Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) will buy bandwidth for international traffic from the broadband biggies – Reliance and TATA.

"The vendor (Reliance and Tata) has to extend the requisite bandwidth within two weeks of the issue of the work order by the field units," the notice said. (WSJ)

MTNL will buy 4109 million bits per second from Reliance and 1761 million bits per second from Tata at  the price of 2957 rupees  (per mbps) for its Delhi operations.

For its Mumbai operations, MTNL will buy 3850 million bits per second from Reliance and 1650 million bits per second from Tata for 3108 rupees (per mbps) for its Delhi operations.

Interesting thing to note is MBps stands for Million bytes and not mega bytes.

Total international bandwidth available in India is 18.6 TB. Most of it on the east coast through Chennai, Cochin and Tuticorin. Reliance, Tata (VSNL), Airtel and BSNL are the only players controlling the international bandwidth.

Why would MTNL buy bandwidth from Reliance and TATA when it has its PSU buddy - BSNL?

BSNL has 2 submarine cables one an Indo-Sri Lank cable with the landing station in Tuticorin and another cable i2i with docking station in Chennai. Only Reliance (Falcon) and Tata (SMW3w) have submarine cables with landing station in Mumbai.

That is the reason (I think) behind MTNL buying the bandwidth from Tata and Reliance even though BSNL has its own bandwidth.

PS : Submarine cables or undersea cables are the cables which provide us the broadband. A lot depends on them and when they are cut all hell breaks loose like it did late last year.

PPS : Labnol has a nice animation of how undersea cables are repaired. 

PPPS : Submarine cables are like gas pipelines between countries. One carries oil and the other carries data - two main ingredients of the knowledge economy. Neither can be disrupted.

*image credit

We have seen pizza ordering on TV and we have seen job search with an SMS. Now, we can search for a job using a TV. Dish TV has partnered with Monster for providing interactive job search on Dish TV. Shah Rukh would be so happy now – wait, he already has a job. He is the owner of KKR.

New service called as MonsterJobs Active is the latest value added service from Dish TV. It already has a portfolio of VAS in ICICI Active, Active Games and Active Bhakti

Dish TV on Thursday announced its partnership with online job portal Monster.com for powering its Value Added Services (VAS) platform ‘MonsterJobs Active’. (Business Line)

With MonsterJobs Active a monster subscriber can enter his username and password and search for jobs and apply for it.

Dish TV has a 5.5 million subscriber base and is expecting 10-15% of the base to use this service to search for 45000 jobs on Monster.

This looks like an extension to searching and applying for a job with SMS. The caveat here is – a Dish TV subscriber is also a Monster subscriber. That looks like a tiny percentage may be less than 10% of what Dish expects. Another assumption is that a user already has a monster account.

What kind of a serious job seeker would use a TV for sending his resume`?

Lord Venkateshwara located at an altitude of 950 meters on the hills of Tirumala is by far the most famous god and if the estimates are to be believed he is the richest god in the world.

Tirumala is the definitely the richest temple in the country with Sai Baba’s temple in Shirdi coming in as the second richest in the country.

Millions of devotees pay visit to the god and it is customary for them to offer money to the god. These offerings by the devotees snowballs into an estimated 1 crore rupees per day. And that is a minimum.

The money is again re-invested in the well being of the devotees along with developing the temple premises and providing amenities to devotees. Some part of that money goes into making TTD self-sufficient.

One such initiative is the solar steam cooking system installed in Tirumala. This is supposed to be the largest solar steam cooking system in the world which can cook 15000 meals per day - until a larger solar kithchen came up in Rajasthan.

The solar cooker works on a automated technology which moves along sun’s direction and collects the rays for 2 hours during noontime.

Tirupathi also has solar water heaters installed in most of the guest houses which provide 1.63 liters of hot water per day. This in turn reduced the power bill by 22.5 lakh units per year. Quite an achievement from the biggest consumer.

Suzlon Energy has installed 10 wind turbines each generating 10 MW of power. Installation of each turbine is worth 4.5 crores. This wind turbines has reduced the cost of electricity from 4.4 rupees to 1.99 per unit.

Enercon India has installed 2 units which generate1.1MW. This was done free of cost by Enercon.

Other cleantech efforts include :

1. Replacing incandescent bulbs with CFL
2. solar power street lights
3. Trading in carbon credits

 Efforts at Tirupathi should be a model for the existing buildings and the new buildings. Using the natural lighting, installing wind turbines and solar panels are the least new buildings can do. Sears tower is renovating itself to become energy efficient by spending $350 million. I don’t see a reason why other buildings can’t do it.  (source)

PS : The news might be 2 years old as the article I found was in SEP 2007. But, the information could still be relevant. The wind turbines are there when I went last year. Though, I did not go near them. Next time I might get some pictures.

mCheck and accell have pioneered contactless payment or near field technology to make your mobile as a wallet.

If successful mobile could be a bank and thus increase the financial inclusion of 70% rural population of India. That of course is directly tied to the 40% penetration of mobile phones.

Suggested Reading : Mobile banking – will it take-off?

Here is how it works :

This visual representation comes from mChek. You can follow them on twitter.
Update 1 : Airtel is not involved in the pilot for mChek’s contactless payment.

Oh! boy the resemblances are so uncanny. Microsoft ruled the 90’s with its monopolistic ways of bundling browser with the operating system and not adhering to the open standards for its documents. Google is ruling the current generation with its open standards and (almost) free stuff.

With the announcement of its new operating system Chrome OS, Google has officially entered Microsoft’s turf. Google soft launched its operating system entry with its mobile operating system of Android. Chrome OS is for netbooks.

Microsoft still leads the market share in operating system but that is about it. It is no where close in the search and internet market where Google still rules. Microsoft launched Bing its new search engine which is fast gaining market share but it is a tad too late and it wouldn’t take a whole lot from Google to reverse this trend.

Now, with its Chrome operating system Google is wooing almost anybody with a computer or computing power to use its product. That is quite a compelling case which Microsoft cannot ignore.

Google already has all the things needed for an operating system through its plethora of applications. The only thing missing is the link between those apps. With this Chrome OS that link is established.

Beta was the shield or garb which Google uses to test its products in public. Sometime the beta tag is carried so long that people really do not notice when it comes out beta. It just pulled few of its products from the beta tag. Chrome OS whenever it is launched will be in beta. I guess beta is Google’s way dealing with releasing additional patches – where Microsoft usually becomes a butt of jokes.

Where does Google stand against Microsoft? It is a neck and neck right now but Google operates at the pace of a startup and Microsoft doesn’t.

The other difference between Google and Microsoft is - Google is doing it with open standards and Microsoft has done it in Microsoft ways.

If Microsoft dominated the 90’s Google will dominate the next 10 years. And twitter might just be the next Google but not quite there.

PS: Ironically Microsoft is trying to eat Google’s search market pie with Bing and Google is trying to eat the operating system pie with Chrome OS.

PPS : India and netPC’s could be Chrome OS’s biggest market.

With close to 70% of its oil requirements imported from more than 8 countries, India is a net importer of oil. The rest 30% is provided by the domestic oil production.

India’s oil consumption has increased and the production almost remained the same. This did not take into account the recent findings of Reliance in KG basin. Even if they did find some other reserves the graph is not likely to be changed in the future.

Starting in 1996 India’s import’s exceeded its production. India’s production has been fairly consistent.

Oil is the second largest fuel after coal. Nuclear and renewables account to a mere 2%.  The figures should be slightly different for 2009 but not radically different ( a little increase in renewables especially wind). Even coal usage is a little alarming but we have some reserves. Not the same case with oil. From the graph above the production is constant.

India imports more than 70% of its oil needs from several different countries with Saudi Arabia and Iran topping the list.

These 3 pictures give a holistic view of energy consumption in India, its oil usage and imports. One trend is clear. The oil production is not increasing, but the oil usage is increasing. And oil is a major factor in India’s energy equation.

If Indian consumers has to realize what they are consuming then they should realize how much they should pay for it. Right now they are not and that is a problem.

Indian consumers are shielded from the global shocks thanks to the oil subsidies. This is not an incentive enough to bring in a behavioral change which is what we need to reduce our oil usage. (source)

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of planning commission is concerned about the leakages in the budget - so am I. Now, Planning commission is planning to introduce a tracking system to track the expenditure.

Quite intriguing that we don’t have such a thing or nobody even talked about such a thing in the first place.

Recalling former Prime Minister and late Rajiv Gandhi’s statement in 1987 that only 15 paise was reaching the targeted community out of every one rupee, he said that about 5-6 years ago the Planning Commission found that the ratio has improved to 50 paise.

“For some, it is an improvement, but for others it is still a leakage of 50 per cent, which is very high,” he said. (Business Standard)

I am in the crowd who thinks 50 paise is quite a lot. A remarkable achievement to increase the penetration by 233% in 22 years.

Budget 2009 is estimated to cost 10.21 lakh crores and it is the first time it crossed 10  lakh crores. As per the leakage estimates above - only 5.1 lakh crores will be put to use and the rest is leaked.

I don’t think the word leak does any kind of justice to a massive loss of 5.1 lakh crores. It should be gobbling up.

It is about time we have a system to track the expenditure in place. As the budgets gets bigger the leaks only get bigger.

The new system should be in line with recover.gov of the US government introduced by Barack Obama. It should give a full picture of what is happening to the 10.21 lakh crores allocated. Who does what? How much is spent and how much is left?

I don’t think it should be that difficult. With the amount of money we are spending on several schemes and subsidies spending a little more money to track that spending is worth spending.

Surprise! That is what environment and forest minister Jairam Ramesh has to say about paper bags. They cannot be an alternative to plastic bags because paper comes from trees and more paper used is more trees felled.

Plastic itself is a chemically inert substance, used world-wide for packaging and is not per-se hazardous to health and environment. Recycling of plastic, if carried out as per approved procedures and guidelines, may not be an environmental or health ha zard,” Environment and Forest Minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh said in Lok Sabha. (Business Line)

I think that is only fair. Paper bags cannot be an alternative to plastic bags. The minister is actually in favor of plastic bags. There is nothing inherently wrong with plastic bags as they not hazardous. If disposed properly plastic bags can be used.

In addition to the ‘running out of trees’ problem, there are other problems with a paper bag. It cannot be used for items like milk and the paper bags wont sag which means they cannot hold more.

The problem is with the disposal and not with the bag itself. I agree with that. In fact that would be the problem irrespective of whatever bag is used. Since we cannot dispose our waste properly we are looking for a waste which is bio-degradable or waste which takes care of itself - neat.

Thick bio-degradable bags and jute bags can be an alternative until we come up with a way to manage plastic bags.

Chandigarh was the first city in India to ban plastic bags without providing a viable alternative. I have seen Ooty using paper bags instead of plastic bags. This new statements from the minister should put these cities back to where they were.

What can be an alternative to a plastic bag? Or do we need an alternative to plastic bags?

We have seen the top 50 government engineering colleges. Now it is time for top 50 private engineering colleges of 2009.

BITS Pilani or Birla Institute of Technology and Science tops the list for second year in a row. It is followed by IIIT of Hyderabad.

The ranking is done in the similar fashion as it was done for the Top 50 Government engineering colleges.

Also look at Top 100  Engineering colleges of 2007

The 5 parameters which were looked at :

1. Intellectual Capital
2. Pedagogic systems
3. Industry Interface
4. Placements
5. Infrastructure and Support systems

Top 50 private engineering colleges for 2009 :

The report is first published in Mint.