Apple takes a dig at Windows 7

With Windows 7 released on 22nd October 2009, Apple has taken a shot at Windows 7 in its new Ads.

Following Ad shows people queuing up at Windows 7 launch to upgrade from PC to Mac coz it is Number 1 in customer satisfaction.



Following Ad focuses on false promises made by Microsoft at each of its earlier launch.

Info Edge India Ltd. (Naukri) posts 6.3 percent increase in Profit Before Tax at 21.95 Crore for 2Q 2009-10

Info Edge (India) Limited posted a 6.3 percent increase in Profit Before Tax at 21.95 Crore for 2Q 2009-10.

Quarter Ended September 30, 2009
• Total Income in Q2 of FY 09-10 at 64.51 Crore, a 10.8 percent drop over the corresponding quarter in FY 08-09. Operating income is 56.16 Crore, which is 14 percent lower compared to the corresponding quarter last year.
• EBITDA is at Rs 23.51 Crore compared to 22.39 Crore being 5 percent higher as compared to the corresponding quarter in FY 08-09. Operating EBITDA is at Rs 15.16 Crore which is 2.17 percent lower as compared to the corresponding quarter in FY 08-09.

Ambarish Raghuvanshi, CFO and director, Info Edge India, has said, “The hiring environment continues to improve, albeit gradually. The drop in topline revenues and operating income reflects the changed scenario from the last year and is in line with expectations. However, the improvement is reflected in growth based on sequential quarter.”

About Info Edge (India) Ltd
Info Edge (India) Ltd (NSE: NAUKRI) is one of the largest internet company in India. Info Edge owns and manages Naukri.com - India’s no. 1 job site, Jeevansathi.com – India’s fastest growing matrimonial portal, 99acres.com - India’s No.1 real estate portal, Shiksha.com - an education portal, Quadrangle – an offline executive search firm, and Naukri Gulf – its foray into the Middle East market. Info Edge also owns Asknaukri.com, a career guidance site and Brijj.com, a professional networking site and Allcheckdeals.com, an online brokerage firm.

Info Edge has ventured into newer businesses and territories and attracted investments from leading venture capitalists. Formerly an ICICI Ventures investee company, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures have also invested in the Company. Info Edge raised Rs. 1,703 million through an IPO in the month of November 2006. The company has attracted a very high quality list of institutional shareholders and had a total of 10,664 shareholders on Sep 30, 2009.

With its headquarters in Noida (NCR), the company employs over 1450 people and operates through 53 offices in 34 cities in India and overseas offices in Dubai Riyadh and Bahrain catering to the Middle East market.

Big Boss 3 Videos

Big Boss 3 is already drawing highest TRP thanks to Mr. Amitabh Bachchan and after yesterdays stunning fight by KRK (Mr. Kamal R Khan) the TRP is expected to reach new heights.

Following are videos of KRK's fight on 21st October 2009







Currently most of the videos of Big Boss 3 are available on YouTube however on http://biggboss.co.in one may get to see video of each episode.

Indian celebs too Tweet on Twitter

We all know how Twitter craze is spreading worldwide like a wild fire. Twitter today is being used by Hollywood actors, Football teams, Sportsmen, Celebs as a platform which allows them to interact with their fans on a daily basis. Going by the following list 1 thing is for sure, Indian celebs too are not far behind. Enjoy the following small compilation of some Indian Celebs on Twitter....

A R Rahman @arrahman
Aamir_Khan @Aamir_Khan
Aishwarya Rai @aishwarya_rai
Amrita Rao @Amritarao17
Barkha Dutt @bdutt
Celina Jaitly @CelinaJaitly
Chetan Bhagat @chetan_bhagat
Dino Morea @DinoMorea9
Emraan Hashmi @emraanhashmi
Gul Panag @gulpanag
Imran Khan @1mrankhan
Jacqueline Fernandez @jacquie_furr
Karan Johar @kjohar25
Konkona Sensharma @konkonas
Kunal Deshmukh @kunal_deshmukh
Lara Dutta @DuttaLara
Lisa Ray @Lisaraniray
Madhur Bhandarkar @mbhandarkar
Mahesh Bhatt @MaheshNBhatt
Mallika Sherawat @mallikala
Neha Dhupia @Neha_Dhupia
Pooja Bhatt @PoojaB1972
Pritish Nandy @pritishnandy
Priyanka Chopra @priyankachopra
Rahul Khanna @R_Khanna
Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep
Rajeev Masand @RajeevMasand
Ram Gopal Verma @rgvzoomin
Ranvir Shorey @ranvirshorey
Riteish Deshmukh @Riteishd
Rohan Sippy @rohansippy
Shashi Tharoor @shashitharoor
Shekhar Ravjiani @5hekhar
Sonam Kapoor @sonamkapoor
Sujoy Ghosh @sujoy_g
Uday Chopra @udaychopra
Vir Sanghvi @virsanghvi
Vishal Dadlani @V1SH4L

Google disappoints Indians. No Diwali Doodle

While earlier this week the US President, Barack Obama celebrated Diwali and lit a cermonial lamp at the White House to 'symbolize victory of light over darkness', Google seems to have given Diwali Doodle a skip. Google amongst many things is known for its Doodles. Over the years Google has celebrated important events, birthdays, holidays and festivals but what is disappointing this year is the fact that Google seems to have given a miss to Diwali (Festival of lights) celebrated by Indians across the globe.

While last year Google had celebrated the festival, this year it seems to have ignored it. (Image shows Diwali 2008 Doodle)

Following is comparison between Google Doodles for China and India this year till date.



The above clearly depicts absence of certain important events for Indians worldwide most of all are the Republic day and Independence day.

Bharti Airtel + Twitter = Choo Tweet

Social networking and Micro-blogging service Twitter has partnered with Bharti Airtel India’s largest mobile operator to enable its Indian users to send and receive tweets.

Following details are the details available on Airtel website
New User
• SMS Signup to 53000 @ Re 1 per SMS
• Follow instructions to go ahead and complete the registration

Existing User – Wanting to link their device to the Twitter A/c
• SMS Start to 53000 @ Re 1 per SMS
• Follow instructions to complete linking your Airtel phone to your Twitter A/c

Airtel is believed to have 4 weeks exclusivity for the same during which only Airtel consumers will be able to use the service on SMS across the nation.

Following are the details available on Twitter Blog
Twitter is committed to fostering the open exchange of information because we passionately believe it can have a positive global impact. When people can exchange information freely and publicly they are able to accomplish great things. As powerful as the Internet has become for the democratization of information, its range is limited when compared to mobile texting—a format uniquely native to Twitter. There are over one billion people with internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS.

We have seen people use Twitter to help each other during fuel shortages, track the spread of wildfires, check in during earthquakes, organize major charitable events, spread urgent news efficiently around the world, and much more. In many of these scenarios, texting has been the key. People exchanging information quickly and efficiently with the device that has become essential to everyday life, their mobile phone. In many parts of the world people do not have Internet access but they can text—and that means they can access Twitter.

As we grow, we seek to partner with organizations that share our vision for positive global impact. Our partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, means a huge population of people can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. Bharti Airtel is offering people in every city, every village, every remote taluk and even the smallest panchayat the opportunity to connect to Twitter and enjoy the open exchange of information with no added fees. We are proud to have Bharti Airtel as our partner. Give Twitter a try with your Airtel phone by sending START to 53000. And spread the word!

Google Squared improvements

Google Squared has made a number of improvements to the amount and quality of information one can find with Google Squared as well as added new tools to sort and export the data.

At launch, Google Squared at most offered 30 facts. Now, squares display four times as much data — up to 120 facts. For example, instead of seeing only five presidents and three categories, now one can see a table with 20 presidents and up to six attributes.


The quality of the information offered is much better coz ranking is now based on both relevance to a query and availability of high quality facts.

In addition searchers can now sort columns, so one can rank, group and compare items. Squared will even convert units in the background to make sure the data is sorted properly.

Google Squared now also offers the ability to export data from Squared to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file.

Google Flu Trends available for 16 additional countries

As we all know Google has been working on project "Flu Trends" if we may call it in which they were monitoring flu related searches on Google. Through experience they have managed to achieve a high level of accuracy in identifying the true flu activity in a country.


All this while Google Flu Trends was available in the United States. One of the most important aspects of Google Flu Trends is that they filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news or read about them in newspaper but these may not be the people who actually have flu symptoms. So in the recent outbreak of Swine flu, they do not use in their models terms like "swine flu" since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it.

Since the model has fair level of accuracy, Google has announced the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries and is now available in 37 languages. So Google Flu Trends is now available for Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States

In November 2008 Google Flu Trends was launched in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. This was achieved by tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries which now successfully estimates the level of flu in near real-time.

For more information you may watch following video:

Quick view of PDFs in your Google search results

During your search experience on Google you would have come across many links with PDF extension a click on which would have resulted in your Adobe or other PDF viewer application getting opened and you viewing the file. The catch here is that if you do not have any PDF viewer application, Google offered you an alternative which was to view the file as HTML in the browser itself. This though was a faster alternative it lead to loss of the formatting from the original PDF, such as graphics, tables, fonts and other elements.

Today, Google has added a new link to "Quick View" PDF documents in your browser itself with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology that's available in Google Docs and Gmail. Google had rolled this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today they have added "Quick View" links to more than 50% of the PDFs in their index.

For example, here is a search result for the term "Form 16"

A click on "Quick View" will open up the PDF right in your browser with graphics, formatting and tables preserved. Following is what it looks like after opening:

YouTube has a New Logo : 1 Billion Views Per Day!

If you visit YouTube today you will see a small but unmistakable change on the site. Look on the Top Left and you will see a new YouTube logo. Its basically the same Logo with '1 BN' appended to it with a Tag line below it which reads '1 billion views per day!'

Now that's what you call ATTITUDE. It speaks volumes for this site which became extremely popular post acquisition by Google.

New Minimalist Google homepage

Google is supposedly carrying out experiment for its homepage showing only logo and search box. There will be no links appearing on top and bottom of the page until you move your mouse over the page.

To try out this experiment visit google.com and type the following into the address bar (Mind you it should not be your local google site viz google.co.in, etc)

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=abac7a90f5a3784b:LD=en:NR=10:TM=1254990196:LM=1254990236:S=uB6F4jDnMP_DuxtT;path=/; domain=.google.com");

After typing the above into the address bar hit return and reload the page.

Following would be the minimalist look and feel of your google.com

On mouse over the page following will be the normal look and feel of google.com

Internet problems plague India

There seems to be a problem with internet connectivity in India today. Since morning the speed of access strangely has been very slow. Though there is no official news on this yet but there is a possibility of another undersea cable cut.

As per Internet traffic report Asia's current index trend stands at 74 way below Global index trend of 84.

In the recent past we have seen number of massive internet disruptions due to undersea cable cuts.

Yahoo launches "Its Y!ou" campaign in India

Yahoo has lauched it "Its Y!ou" campaign in India with a bang. It has tied up with leading English language newspapers viz. The Times of India, Hindustan Times, DNA, Live Mint etc. to release an interesting front page print edition today. Its a huge yellow advertisement as can be seen on the left.

In an interview to Economic Times, Yahoo India’s MD Arun Tadanki said
"Through this campaign we want to clearly position Yahoo! as the centre of peoples’ online lives. Yahoo will be the focal point of everything that they do on the internet. It is important to see this not as a campaign or a burst of advertising but as a larger promise to users. What’s going to break in the coming days is the first step of an exercise spread over several years.

We are definitely not following any other major online brands in going for a revamp as in our case this has been in the works since the beginning of the year. We are doing this now because 2009 has seen a lot of internal re-energising of Yahoo! to make ourselves more relevant to consumers. The full roll-out will take place on October 5. Till such time, the changes are in the beta/trial phase."

Will Gmail sink in the Wave?

On 27th May 2009 Google publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. This product was touted as "the email of the future". With Google Wave, Google tried to reinvent the inbox, blend e-mail, instant messaging and many more features. The very basic premise on which this product was born was how email would look if it was born today instead of 50 years back.

Now that the baby is born and we are looking at the possible present form of email service, would Google go ahead and kill Gmail? In the long run it would obviously not make any sense for Google to run 2 different websites. Promoting 2 separate brands offering the same core value is always gonna be a costly affair. Look at Android, after launching it Google decided to have Chrome OS. Eventually it will just have Chrome as their standard OS for all the platforms.

Make no mistakes, I am not suggesting that Google will replace our email ids to xyz@gwave.com coz replacing millions of email ids would be a daunting task. What we may end up witnessing is a convergence of Wave and Gmail. To make Google Wave universally acceptable, Google may discontinue www.gmail.com and force us to visit wave.google.com for login. This maybe the only change, but this one change may be bring up huge opportunities for Google. It may help them beat Yahoo, MSN, etc. in IM service. It may help them manage the increasing threat from facebook and twitter.

So is it time to say bye bye Gmail???

Skype to be blocked in India?

As per reports in TOI intelligence agencies have asked the government to consider blocking Skype. Skype is a very popular IM and mainly known for its VoIP service. Using Skype one can call anyone across the globe for free on their PC or alternatively for a nominal charge can call anyone on a land line or mobile phone.

As per reports Skype has refused to share the encryption code that prevents Indian investigators from intercepting conversations of suspected terrorists.

Post 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, intelligence agencies have been working round the clock to plug loop holes if any. 26/11 experience exposed the fact that terrorists are increasingly using VoIP services to make calls. The shift to VoIP service was prompted by the growing ability of intelligence agencies to intercept mobile and other calls.

In this service, VoIP operators send their signals under a specific code which makes it difficult for others to decipher. Without knowing the encryption code its not possible for intelligence agencies to decipher the conversation. As per reports Skype has shared its encryption code with the US, China and other governments but is refusing to accept similar request from Indian authorities.

Considering national security into account blocking Skype seems to be the only logical step available. However, it may not be a cake walk coz such a step may draw flak from number of users who use this free service to communicate and interact with their families and friends based abroad.

Google Sidewiki: A tool to help and learn from other users

Over the years Google has been synonym for Innovation and that's exactly what they did last week by launching a new gadget for online users viz. Google Sidewiki

As Google puts it, Sidewiki is a tool using which users can help and learn from other users as they browse the web. You and me visit tens and hundreds of web pages everyday and so do many other users across the globe who look for the same piece of information. In the process we would have come across many websites and blogs to which a small bit of additional information would have helped others users too. Google Sidewiki has been built around this very concept. If you have something to share about a website just pull on your Sidewiki installed on your browser as a sidebar and put your comment. This comment would be visible to anyone who visits that website or any other website carrying the same information. For example, an entry on a speech by President Barack Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote.

It is important to note that the entries in Sidewiki are not arranged in order recency but in order of relevancy. To achieve the same Google ranks Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.

Google Sidewiki is released as a feature of Google Toolbar (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and will soon be out for Google Chrome too.

Google remembers Mahatma Gandhi

Google is known for changing its logo (Google Doodle)and most often it marks an event of historic significance. More recently their logo signified Google’s 11th birthday before which they celebrated Chinese philosopher Confucius’s birthday .

So after celebrating its own birthday and birthday of a Chinese philosopher it was time to remember the Indian great and celebrate 140th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of India. Mahatma's face appeared as 'G' for Google and 'G' for Gandhi on the logo with a backdrop of Khaki color.

About Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi born on 2nd October 1869 was the pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon Ahimsa or total non-violence—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. Gandhiji is commonly known around the world as Mahatma Gandhi and in India also as Bapu . He is officially honoured in India as the Father of the Nation. His birthday, 2 October is celebrated worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence.

Google Wave Review

Following are 2 of the many reviews available online about Google Wave. There is a cool video too. Enjoy!!!

Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype
I just got my Google Wave invite. No, I’m already out, so I can’t send one to you, sorry.

But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity. Click here to read more


Google Wave: Early Impressions
.....Just be aware this useful and potentially nifty tool will probably not, in fact, change life on the planet as we know it. And if by some chance it will, it’s going to change it in a bland and practical way. In short: perspective would be nice. Click here to read more

More Google Wave invitations expected before 31st October 2009?

Lets first try and understand how Gmail invitations evolved over the years.

Gmail
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the software was available only internally as an email client for Google employees.

The project initially was known by the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.

For Gmail, Google started a unique way to offer access to public viz. through invites. To cut down on spam in the early days, Google used viral marketing by allowing only existing users to invite new users.

* On 21st March 2004 Google invited about 1,000 employees, friends, and family members to become beta testers.
* On 25th April 2004 active users from the Blogger.com community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing.
* On 1st May 2004 one round of invitations was sent out to all active users which they could extend to their friends.
* On 1st June 2004 another three invitations were given to all active members.
* By mid-June 2004, the number of invitations had increased, with many users receiving between three and five daily.
* On 2nd February 2005 the invitation interface was changed to make it easier to give invitations by simply entering an e-mail address.
* On 3rd February 2005 some Gmail users were awarded 50 invitations and later it was increased to 100 invitations
* On 7th February 2007 - It was made public and anyone could vist gmail.com and register for their Gmail account without the need for any invite.

Google Wave
Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009.

* On 28th May 2009 started allowing developers to send requests for sandbox account.
* By July 2009 Google Wave had over 6000 sandbox account.
* On 30th September 2009 Google Wave was extended to about 100,000 users. Each of these users can invite 8 more users which takes the total strength to about 800,000 users. However, these users who do not have a direct invite from Google will not be able to invite anyone else.

Now if we try and draw a parallel between Gmail and Wave invites, its quite probable that before end of October 2009 Google may grant additional invites to all the existing 800,000 users of Wave and such grants may be given every month.