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There are 4 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" IBM Aims At Rural VAS By Providing Talk To Web TechnologyThe proliferation of rural mobile in India is creating the next big opportunity in the VAS space, especially for the companies which are creating information and M-commerce solutions custom tailored for this market. Majority of rural mobile subscribers don’t use VAS services like SMS and the main reason being unable to read. IBM India has now unveiled initial rollout of one of it’s “Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years“, it’s latest innovation HSTP is surely going to change hundreds and millions of lives of rural mobile consumers not just in India but world over. What is HSTP? Basically HSTP allows users to create voice sites and enables voice-driven transactions that can span multiple cross enterprise voice applications providing a seamless browsing experience to the telephony user. “People will talk to the web and the web will respond. The research technology is analogous to the internet. Unlike personal computers it will work on mobile phones where people can simply create their voice sites,” IBM India Research Laboratory Associate Director Manish Gupta said. How are applications on HSTP implemented?
IBM has currently developed two applications a tele-grocery store and a tele-payment gateway. HSTP if rightly tailored for rural mobile is not only going to change the lives of rural consumers but is going to be the next big thing in the Rural VAS. Most Commented Posts Also Check Out: Jaiku Goes Open Source - A Look At Potential Of Open Source ModelsIn a time when there are so many avenues of monetization and a vast audience for web services we are also seeing companies shutting off their operations and going open source. Reddit and Mugshot did it earlier and now its time for Jaiku. It was in 2007 when google announced acquisition of jaiku when microblogging was just taking off, although it did add to the hype created by microbloging services like twitter. A few months ago came announcement of Google discontinuing or ceasing development of various services including jaiku and now as anticipated earlier, Google in a recent blog post announced the availability of jaiku's source code on google code,the code repository owned by google. Now when the jaiku's code is launched it would give rise to many white labeled micro blogging services either owned by individuals or marketers. This would in turn give leeway to many marketeers to launch their white labeled micro blogging sites to interact with their target audiences.
Why companies go open source? Today almost every new internet startup finds it difficult to survive despite decreasing server costs and even biggies are no different. The primary reason being that there are too many services already in the market and the one which attracts most attention through media gets the lead. The another reason is advertising cost remains high for startups not able to generate enough hype through social media and other sources. One more factor which adds salt to the wound is the low adoption of advertising by subscribers because users can flee instantly when they feel that they are being targeted by ads due to the free nature of the platform. This is the reason why even the likes of Youtube and Facebook are finding it tough to earn revenue inline with their web traffic. Companies then try to recover their cost or attain popularity with their app being made available as open source and attending to a large scale audience with paid support services even though free development is provided by open source community. As they say one men's loss is another's gain, the availablity of open source apps or click and install scripts are also giving birth to entrepreneurship mostly through various home portal ventures. These sites are cropping up in classified, job, news portals and in numerous fields. One may not be able to spot them as they are so well tweaked in appearances and programming. The main power of open source could be seen by development of laconi.ca,fondly known as open source twitter clone. This project has grown leap and bounds through their open source nature and provide even more features than twitter itself. We would like to know about your experience with open source technology and your view on white labeling of web? Related PostsAlso Check Out: Gmail Adds Preview Feature For Picasa & Youtube VideosA few months ago when google launched youtube preview feature for google chat, very few would have anticipated further development on that front. Now gmail the revolutionary mail service from google has gone a step ahead and launched the preview feature for various services in mails. The service works by converting links in emails to preview functionality. Currently this Gmail lab feature is available for YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews. To enable this feature go to settings—>lab—> and enable preview separately for each services. This opens up email to a great preview possibility just like snapshots and may even be extended to chats too. Here are few snapshots of the service: Picasa preview in gmail:
yelp reviews:
youtube videos:
At the same time google has also showcased the prowess of chrome internet broswer by bunching great javascripters to showcase their work on ChromeExperiments. This amazing app shows ransacked google homepage. Related PostsAlso Check Out: IE 8 Goes out of Beta - Microsoft Releases the Latest Public Version of Its Famed BrowserIt’s been nearly a year since we first heard of Microsoft and its IE 8 browser. And finally after all these months of Beta testing the browser is now live for public use. Internet Explorer 8 is available as a free download on Microsoft's Web site to licensed Microsoft operating system users. IE8 will run on computers with Windows Vista as well as Windows XP. The browser has 3 new features compared to IE7: Accelerators - Accelerators make it faster and easier to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Users can simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it. Web Slices - Web Slices makes information from dynamic/ constantly updated sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available wherever someone goes on the Web. Visual search suggestions - The Instant Search Box in Internet Explorer 8 enables rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people's own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information that saves time. As one can see most of these apparent new features are something more experienced web users like us have seen with Firefox, Opera, Chrome et al. These changes if at all might seem significant only for those majority of users still stuck in IE6 world. And for them to know about IE 8 Microsoft is using social media to spread the word. It also seems that Microsoft isn’t targetting any of the other browser users at all. For IE8 like its near predecessor doesn’t have a mac version and isn’t seemingly competing with Safari anymore. The features that are being projected as USPs are old functions in Firefox, so certainly they haven’t taken any pains to even intrigue Firefox users. Chrome with just a percent of world users perhaps isn’t on their thoughts at the moment anyway. On one hand this might seem as a lacklusture performance from the IE team and microsoft in general for the above reasons. But on the other I consider it a smart and efficient move, whereby they have significantly enhanced on IE7 and made just enough changes to encourage IE6 users to shift to IE8 and also promoting it in the right manner for people to make this shift. It is easy to understand that people who use IE don’t do it for the love of it but because it is standard with Windows and until knowledge sheds light on them they don’t know of any other browsers. Such a market also tends to be what I call the default setting republic. That is they tend to be the kind of users who use the default settings of a browser because either they are scared of tehnology enough not to make any changes or just don’t bother about the complications of customization. Now for Microsoft, this means a set of users who will use their default Live search tool on the browser, and quite frankly that is where the money lies for Microsoft to crank up new and better browsers time and again. It is not a far fetched thought if they believe Mac users to be slightly more advanced in terms of browser settings, and the same case being with users of Firefox, Opera and Chrome, for surely if they can find about other browsers, download and install them, they are sure to change their settings to their preference, where MS Live doesn’t favor the odds. So the best way, make a more efficient system and not target any of those who won’t bother building your business. So when bloggers say this one won’t switch back the switchers, perhaps Microsoft isn’t bothered about the switchers for obvious reasons. And yes, for all the horniness that we subdue online, like Chrome’s incognito mode even IE 8 has a inPrivate browsing mode for reasons that you very well know now. Related PostsAlso Check Out: More Recent Articles
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