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There are 8 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" Government okays Commercial IPTV.. But Will It Pick Up?The government has now given its nod to make necessary changes to the current downlinking guidelines for television channels. This has now eased off the commercial rollout of IPTV services in the country.
Presently, MTNL, the state-owned entity having presence in Mumbai and Delhi are already providing their IPTV services with a bunch of Free-To-Air channels. BSNL, the other state-owned entity having its presence in the rest of India have already announced their services, and will be implemented soon. The current downlinking norms, laid down by the government do not allow the TV broadcasters to share their channels with IPTV providers, reserving them only for Cable and DTH services. This effectively kept the private operators such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance in investing in these services. However, with the amendments that have been announced, it seems that the scenario is soon going to change. These amendments come after the country’s regulator TRAI submitted the recommendations for IPTV to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry a few months back. IPTV involves broadcasting television signals over high-speed internet lines. Similar to DTH broadcast, value-added services such as interactive advertising, time-shift TV can also be delivered via IPTV. This move by the government will now make way for some tough competition in the market, as the customer now has 3 choices to make - Cable, IPTV and DTH. Both Airtel and Reliance are already ready with their services in the market. Even though IPTV has a huge potential, it has failed to grab attention in the country. Back in May 2008, we brought an overview of IPTV industry.
Increase in FDI: In other news, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recommended that a higher Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) of 74 per cent is needed for the IPTV sector. Currently, the cable sector has an FDI cap of 49 percent. The regulator hopes that this will facilitate higher foreign investment in the IPTV sector. Talking about the amendments, Kailash Chaudhari, the MD of Aksh Optifibre, which provides back-end support for IPTV services for MTNL and BSNL said:
But will IPTV really pick up? Even today, broadband remains a distant myth for quite a many houses in the country. DTH on the other hand has penetrated owing to its ability to have a small wireless set up. Hutments in the villages, who barely manage to run a TV in the house have DTH installed for their TVs. It would be a while till the people become aware of the advantages offered by the IPTV service and start adopting to it. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Namaste India: iTunes Store mein aapka swagat hainNow that all the hoopla surrounding the Apple iPhone 3G launch in India is finally settling down, people are finally beginning to convince themselves that laying hands on the iPhone 3G is not going to be easy. Although Vodafone has reduced the prices down to Rs. 28,000 in the stores according to some reports, the price continues to remain a big deal for the masses. Quite a few sales have been made through the official carriers in India - Airtel and Vodafone, although the actual number of iPhones in the country is far more. There are quite a few features that are unavailable on the iPhone such as Visual Voicemail, iTunes Store etc, both of which are immensely popular in the western countries. Apple is now getting ready to officially launch the iTunes Music Store for India. Although the gates to the iTunes Store were thrown open just before the iPhone 3G launch in the US, the store only sells apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. We believe this hurried launch of the store in over 20 countries was only to facilitate people upgrading the firmwares on their iPod Touch gadget, for which apple charged $10 to each customer. Of course, they can also buy the apps using the store too. Now, the company behind the world’s largest and most popular online entertainment store is now set to launch the iTunes Music store for India which will offer songs, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks and iPod games. Although the company has sold over five billion songs through its iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) and rented or sold over 50,000 movies per day, it would be interesting to see how it caters to the Indian market. Presently, songs on the store are sold at $0.99 (which is approximate about Rs. 40). Not just that, the songs are DRM’d, which means that they can only be played on authorized devices only. You cannot share them with friends, nor can you play them on any other device. Most of the media that is distributed in out country is pirated and copied freely. It’s safe to believe that the store would be even less popular than the iPhone 3G itself. However, one great advantage of the iTunes store is the free content available through it. Occasionally, Apple releases free tracks on Tuesdays and there are thousands of Audio and Video podcasts available through the store. Spanning various topics, these media are a great source of entertainment at no extra cost. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Get Ready For More Banners! - Says IAMAI-IMRB ReportThe IAMAI-IMRB Report on ‘Online Banner Advertisements‘ was released today. According to the report online banner advertisement market would grow at 40% to reach 350 crores by 2008-09 from its current size of 235 crores [2007-08]. The study also stated that top 3 spenders on the online banner ads would be from the segments Banking and Financial Services Industry(BFSI), Online industry and ITES with 26%, 23% and 13% share of the total spend on banner ads in 2008-09. Check out the complete report below: If you are unable to view the above report download it here.
This report is a n outcome of both primary and secondary research with more than 65000 individuals across 12000 households in 30 cities being surveyed for this report. Another interesting insight from the report was the consumer perspective in which 80% of those surveyed had clicked on an online ad which indicates higher awareness of ads. BFSI and Jobs topped the mind recall when consumers were asked which kind of banner ads do they remember seeing. On the whole this report throws up many insights on the banner advertising space in India and though on the whole banner advertising is set to grow by 40% the report also throws up insights which may work against ROI or conversion driven ads. Those users which were surveyed 65% of them said that an online ad was less likely to make them purchase. 58% said that they ignore online ads. And a sizeable 47% said that they feel online ads have misleading information. These responses are surely a cause for concern and possibly the biggest roadblock for the growth on online advertising. I guess steps should be taken to counter this negative attitude of consumers towards online ads before its too late. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Ushering in the Era of Command-Line Applications with Mozilla Ubiquity!
So, What is Mozilla Ubiquity?Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension, from Mozilla Labs, that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web.
Ubiquity is designed to help ordinary people create something like mashups and to do it on a personal basis instead of in the form of a public Web page. The commands that users type in Ubiquity, such as “map” and “e-mail,” find resources on the Web and can gather information from those sources in one place. Why does the concept sound familiar to me?
Using Slices, you can view friend’s status from Facebook, Monitor ebay items, track the buzz items from Stumbleupon, get the news headlines, track the weather and much more. How powerful can Ubiquity be?“Pretty much” is how I’d like to answer. If you wish to write an email to your friend “jono”, all you need to do is fire up the Ubiquity command-line and type away. You can search through the whole of Wikipedia without even visiting the encyclopaedic giant for once! Search for the weather of the city you plan to visit, just by typing out a few characters. Found anything interesting to share on the web? Do that in a zap, even faster than you can say “Ubiquity”.
You can even publish a map mashup pointing directions to the nearest pub or coffee shop right into the email you send to the friend!
So, what do you think? Does all this sound titillating enough for you to download the extension and test ride it?If you want complete list of the user commands available, do not forget to visit the tutorial page. Ubiquity has the potential to usher in a whole new way of interacting on the web, and I'm glad an open source organization like Mozilla is pioneering it.
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Pune Slated to be The First 3G Enabled Indian City while DoT Delays the Bidding
The drama around the 3G rollout in the country hardly seems to be over. The pre-bid conference for receiving the requests for proposals for the designated agency was scheduled for today. However, the pre-bid conference has been deferred till August 27 and the opening of bids has been deferred to September 22 from September 3 as decided earlier.
The opening of covering letter and selection of bidders, who meet the eligibility criteria, is now also on September 22. Qualified bidders make presentation on September 24 and government will also open technical bids on this date. The financial bids of technically qualified bidders will open on September 26 in lieu of 19 of that month.
According to Express India, BSNL has spotted 10 3G hot spots in the city and has planned to roll out services at 56 cities in Maharashtra, once the 3G spectrum has officially been auctioned off. According to BSNL, “The cost of the services will depend upon the auction of the spectrum. The number of people opting for 3G services will also matter, but it will still be expensive if the spectrum is auctioned at a high price.”
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult The WATBlog List of Top Social Media Platforms to Roll Out Your Web 2.0 PlansAs an initiative to build on WATblog as a resource center for anyone involved in digital media and new media marketing, we present an almost complete list of all the platforms available for your social media plans. This post aims to provide you a place to start of with in terms of the back end of your web 2.0 plans. So if you are surprisingly late to get on the neo web bandwagon and build a web home that leverages on the wisdom of the crowd funda, this post is for you. Social Networking:A few days back, we reported on how Rediff might be launching its new social network with Sociali.com, lest it deter you even you can build a handy social network with these tools:
These and a lot more social network enablers have been reviewed in detail by Techcrunch, so head there to get a better idea on each of them and little more. Blogging:The rise of blogging has sort of defined the rise of web 2.0 in the past few years. From being a journal of daily life to information hubs, blogs have changed the dynamics of corporate communication and perhaps even altered the flow of thought leadership. And with it of course we have had an enormous flood of blogging platforms, each claiming to be better than others.
Movable Type though included in social networking as well is actually a blogging platform. IT is included in both categories because its latest launch Movable Type Pro has made an effort at bridging the gap between a blog solution, a CMS and a social networking site. Read WATBlog’s view on this latest launch and how it is changing the way communities will be made and run on the web. Social Bookmarking:Social bookmarking has been the cornerstone in shifting the search monopoly over the years in terms of sourcing traffic. Digg, Delicious, SU have become common terms in social media lingo and have pages upon pages documenting how to strategically target bookmarking traffic. Social bookmarking has essentially followed two technically different paths in terms of its growth. One that constitutes the Digg family of democratic news and the other pure play social bookmarking based on tagging like Delicious. Digg like: Delicious Like: MicrobloggingMicroblogging, or an SMS long blog post has caught the fancy of a lot of people over the last 1 year, including yours truly. Big names like Google and Digg have entered the market very early, and this shows the promise that micro blogging seems to hold in taking social media and web 2.0 further. Being new, we only have two platform applications available to create one of our own: WATBlog had reviewed Laconica some while back and gave it a thumbs up then. And here is one on Yonkly. Wiki:From “Google it” to “Go to Wikipedia”, wikis have changed the way information is sought, collected and distributed. These days many organizations have their entire information centers built around wikis and most open source documentations are on wikis. Though there are numerous platforms available, some of the most useful and popular ones are: There is a much more comprehensive guide to various wiki platforms at Editthis.com, and is a valuable resource page. Forums:Forums are one of the few relics of Web 1.0 that survived the coming of neo web. Survive would be a wrong word to use considering, forums are the original community platforms and have been since before the world saw the growth and potential of web 2.0 and the social aspect of the web. Starting of as message boards to fully functional marketplaces now, forum systems have come a long way: The Forum Matrix to my mind is an excellent place to see reviews and opinions about these and many other platforms. Check it out at www.forummatrix.org Word of HonourContent management systems like Drupal, Joomla have also played a key role in the growth of social media and web 2.0. Drupal in fact goes beyond being a CMS and is a framework in itself, and is powerful enough for you to build a social networking site, a social bookmarking site, a blogging platform, a forum and even wikis. We hope this list serves the purpose that it has been made for and comes handy for people looking at some place to start their research. Image courtesy Calcanis.com Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Canaan Partners Upbeat On Investing In VAS Space (Read to Know Why)Canaan Partners the Venture firm that has funded the likes of BharatMatrimony (Now Consim Info) and techtribe is now looking towards the VAS space with high expectations with its new fund ready for investment. The mobile space has seen some action lately with the likes of Mkhoj, Smsgupshup raising funding. Canaan raised about 650 Million $ fund in february this year to be invested primarily in India and Israel. On the prospects of the VAS space Mr.Harish Gandhi of Canaan India said, "There is a lot of excitement in mobile VAS [anything other than voice and SMS] space. It gives us a great opportunity to invest in companies with good technology platform and content" Its no surprise that Canaan looks so upbeat and the reasons could be no further than the Telecom numbers than keep growing month on month. Just last month i.e. June numbers had shown a 8.9 million addition to the mobile subscribed and come July that number has risen to 9.22 million subscribers taking the total mobile subscribers tally to 297 million subscribers with 218.9 with GSM players and 77 million with CDMA players according to this article. And its not only the mobile subsctibers even the VAS market is set to boom in 2009. Check the graph below: Check out the entire report below: Last year there were quite a few deals in this space.. Here is a list (via Livemint):
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult A tête-à-tête with Chris Osbourne, Founder & CEO of FeedZa
Most often than not, it is the smallest of necessities that spark great inventions and discoveries. The term “blog” has become quite a common place these days and it if you happen to be a part of this web revolution 2.0, it often becomes tough to make your folks understand what you are up to. It was the search for a better platform that offers quality cooking blogs for his mother that led Mr. Christopher John Osbourne to the idea of FeedZa (Here’s some detailed dope on FeedZa). Well, I wouldn’t really call it a revolutionary product. FeedZa had almost always been around in the form of Digg, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz and also a few more avatars. However, what strikes a chord in the grey cells is that FeedZa is probably the only community voting site around that actually promotes the brand value of a site, in whole, as compared to individual stories, in the cases of Digg and the likes. I can see the potential of this concept being used in promoting individualistic brand values too. If Mike Arrington, Darren Rowse and the likes ever decide to put their Twitter status updates’ RSS feed on FeedZa, I can very well envision users fighting to vote their favorite superstars to the top. WATBlog (WB) decided to catch up with Chris, Founder of FeedZa, and shoot him a few questions. Here is a little excerpt from the interview.
WB : When was FeedZa launched? How many monthly visitors, feed submissions and ratings do you get? Chris : We launched FeedZa yesterday.
WB : How do you think FeedZa might be different from Digg, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz and the likes? Chris : I think we combine both the voting on the best content that Digg has and the features of finding new blogs/content that Technorati offer.
WB : The site has an option of ‘thumbs up’ing a favored link. Why haven’t you incorporated a ‘thumbs down’ too? Chris : Right now we do not require users to register in order to vote, so we decided to remove the “thumbs down” option….not wanting people taking advantage of the system. i.e - we didn’t want a blogger giving their post a “thumbs up” while giving everyone else a “thumbs down” What 'The Ed’ thinks - This is a poor reasoning because the 'blogger’ always has the option of giving “thumbs up” to his own feeds multiple times and still manage the same effect without awarding negative points to other feeds.
WB : What if the same person hits the ‘thumbs up’ sign multiple times? Isn’t that as good as spamming? Has FeedZa taken any measures to curb misuse of the spirit of the community? Chris : As soon as this starts to become a problem, and we acknowledge that it will, we’ll have no other option than to require registration before allowing users to comment. The reason for the delay in requiring users to register is that we wanted to start building the community as soon as possible, and think that forcing users to register may hold this back. i.e - we think that it’ll be much easier for people to realize it’s worth registering once they see an active community on FeedZa than registering when there isn’t much action. What 'The Ed’ thinks - This is an ideal example of choosing quantity over quality. Being a start up ourselves, I understand the problems one face and the urge to become popular fast is always on everyone’s mind. However, I fear, in want of “action”, FeedZa just might end up compromising a lot on the quality of content that finally ends up at the top. Personally, I shall always choose a site with less number of participants but quality feedback over the vice-versa.
WB : If the users are expected to rate RSS feeds, then why do you offer snippets of single posts? The same blog can have both good and bad posts. Moreover, when someone clicks on a blog’s link, shouldn’t he be offered snippets of all recent posts of that blog, as compared to linking it to the single post itself, not even the blog’s home page? Chris : Our aim is 2 fold, to highlight great content bloggers are writing that don’t get the exposure they deserve (that’s why we list the most recent feeds on each category page first) followed by letting the community decide what content is best. I understand that not every post a blogger writes is their best work and that’s why we decided to display the new feeds first. As for the links, the title of the feed goes directly to that post while users also have the option to go to the bloggers home page using the URL link under the snippet of content text.
WB : Do you target only RSS and XML feed urls? How about Orkut, Facebook, Twitter Updates, Flickr Feeds of people popular on the web? Chris : There will be an added feature so that users can connect with bloggers on other social sites in the near future.
Well, although Chris has currently declined to comment on what he might have in mind as a part of FeedZa’s future plans, we leave it onto you to try out their system and let us know what you think of it. What’s your verdict on Chris’ concept?
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult More Recent Articles |
This public prototype aims to empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. Existing web APIs have been utilized to create on-demand and user-created mashups. Ubiquity runs commands based on bits of text entered into a command prompt. This has staggering implications for empowering the common web user to remix content more easily by controlling the flow of information around them.
Are you a MS or Internet Explorer fan? In that case, I do not blame you. Ever heard of “web slices” on IE8? It is the platform’s capability to take a portion of a Web page–like a stock chart on a financial page–and display it as a pop-up widget that’s called from the bookmark bar in the browser. Slices are built using a combination of protocols, including Microformats, RSS and new HTML tags that IE uses to demark Slices.
Despite the delay in the submission dates, the DoT has made it clear that there will be no delay in the date of identifying the agency. The bids will be finalized by September 30, in tandem with the original schedule. A Ministry spokesperson said that the delay was due to prospective bidders asking for more time.
Amidst all this, Pune is all set to be the 
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