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Saturday, August 16, 2008

WATBlog Update "LifeBlob.com Secures 1 Million $'s in Funding from SeedFund" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"LifeBlob.com Secures 1 Million $’s in Funding from SeedFund" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

LifeBlob.com Secures 1 Million $’s in Funding from SeedFund

lifeblobLifeblob.com the startup that presented at proto.in recently has closed 1 million $’s in funding from seed stage angel fund Seedfund which is led by the founder of Pinstorm Mahesh Murthy. (Source: Livemint)

Here are the details of the deal:

1) Its a traunched investment based on milestones
2) The deal was being discussed since march this year and got verbally confirmed prior to proto.in.
3) The termsheet and agreement was signed post proto.in

More details when we have an interview with the Founders up tomorrow.

We had caught up with Pranav and his Lifeblob team and did a WATShow with them during proto.in. Here is the video of them explaining their startup idea:

We had earlier reviewed Lifeblob on WATBlog and given it a thumbsup! Check out our earlier review.

Incase you are a startup and want to be reviewed on WATBlog send us a mail on info @ watblog.com

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Friday, August 15, 2008

WATBlog Update "�The long-term winner will be free, ad-supported films� - Jaman.com Founder & CEO - Gaurav Dhillon" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"“The long-term winner will be free, ad-supported films” - Jaman.com Founder & CEO - Gaurav Dhillon" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

“The long-term winner will be free, ad-supported films” - Jaman.com Founder & CEO - Gaurav Dhillon

Just yesterday we blogged about the tie up between NDTV Lumiere and Jaman.com. Regarding the same news story we caught up with Gaurav Dhillon the founder and CEO of Jaman.com and quizzed him about the tie up and Jaman.com’s India strategy and the future of online video. But before we go to the interview here is a short profile of Gaurav Dhillon: Current founder and CEO of Jaman: Prior to founding Jaman, Dhillon served as the chief executive officer for Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), a Silicon Valley company that he led from a startup idea in 1992 to a leading software enterprise with customers and operations around the globe and more than a billion dollars in cumulative revenue. Dhillon led Informatica through its initial launch, an IPO in 1999, its expansion into Europe and Asia, and through the establishment of alliances with major technology and consulting companies by the time he left in 2004.

Gaurav Dhillon CEO Jaman

Here is the interview:

Q1) What is the objective behind the tie up with NDTV Lumiere i.e. Who are you targetting with their content?

NDTV Lumiere is well respected name and we are dedicated to aggressively growing the Jaman library with titles from the world’s leading distributors and studios.  (In May, we announced a partnership with Eros International to put a number of their titles online).  With this deal in particular, we are expanding the title collection for our audience in South Asia, which is our largest community of film fans on Jaman.

Q2) Your thoughts on Online Video Penetration, Its monetization and its future? (Please also give an India Perspective)

We are excited about India's dynamic broadband growth, which spurs demand for online entertainment.  Jaman offers viewers the option of downloading films for rental or purchase, or viewing them streaming, free, ad-supported.  We believe the long-term winner will be free, ad-supported films.

Q3) Does Jaman.com have an India Strategy?

We continue to see terrific enthusiasm for Jaman in India and are growing our library and delivering a quality technology platform to delight users in the region.


WATBlog Analysis: Though Gaurav may be optimistic about the future monetization model through ads eMarketer’s recent report on online ad revenue seems pessimistic. Infact they seemed to have corrected their projection for total video ad revenue from $1.4 billion for 08-09 which it predicted in february to 505 Million $ in its latest report! That makes it a correction of over 64%! Internationally there has been more than 8 billion that has been pumped into the online video segment and this news certainly wont be music to the investors ears.

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

WATBlog Update There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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Life of A Social Media Junkie

Social networking is fun. At least, it used to be. When Orkut started, it used to be a real good time pass for jobless people like you. New friends kept poring in, very old acquaintances, who were out of touch for a long time, started sending you teasers, meeting plans were hatched on Orkut and you, being early users, started creating communities on a lot of your passions. I was joining a new college at that point of time and I used Orkut extensively to connect with a lot of my seniors to ask a variety of questions. Alas! It was back then…

As time slowly passed, you started wondering what to do on Orkut. People kept asking you the same silly questions on your scrapbook over and over again - “Hows lyf “, “How are you doing” , “What’s up” and other similar trash. Moreover, every time you replied to them, you could always come up with the very same set of answers, “I am fine”, “Nothing much” and the likes. If somebody had asked you this question after a year, you could have told him something but what do you tell a guy who had asked the same question two days ago. [Especially when you lead a normal life. Not everyone is Calvin, after all!]

You, finally, realize that you have nothing left to explore on Orkut and it’s an utter waste of time. You have already dug up all your chuddy-buddies and ex-flames who are on the network. The communities, which you had both joined and created, are all dead with the last thread on their forums posted about a year ago and your scrapbook is filled with questions like those above.

What do you do then? You make a quantum leap and jump to Facebook. Although in your country, it hasn’t become a rage yet and very few are on it, every blog (be it on social media or business ) just can’t seem to get enough of it. Anyway, you jump into the bandwagon and struggle to find your fast friends. Well, as they say, jobless people are everywhere. Very soon, you find your entire group of your friends out there on it and you start adding them up, painfully describing how you know each of them and even getting those pieces on info confirmed.

There is one great thing about Facebook which distinguishes it from Orkut (no more, though). Even if you don’t have friends, there are also a lot of cool applications for you to waste your time on. You can use iLike to browse your favorite music or you can use Flixter to review movies and find reviews by others too. For some studs, there are also applications like “How sexy are you “, “What does my name mean”, “Which Godfather character are you?” to make them feel good about themselves. You browse through these applications to make your profile look cool but later realize what an idiot you are. So, you quickly remove them and add the few sensible applications which you find on Facebook. Some of them are -

  1. Flixter Review and rate movies and read reviews of others.
  2. iLike Browse for your favourite music and artists. Get information on the latest concerts and albums and dedicate songs to others
  3. iRead Just the same as Flixter but here it is all about books.
  4. Causes If you are interested in doing a bit of good in the world (yeah, yeah…it’s John Mortimer ) then this is the place.
  5. Fans You happened to watch a match of ‘Manchester City’ by chance and just loved that player on the right wing. You are dead sure you are not going to see a match of this club again. What do you do? You visit this application’s page and become a fan of him. :-P

By this time, you realize that Facebook is beginning to pick up in your country and more of your friends are joining in every day. You are back to the phase you were in at the start of Orkut but only this time on a different platform.

The world is definitely round, ain’t it?

Shāyon Adds : You must be perplexed to read a post like this on WATBlog, ain’t it so? Well, isn’t it Independence Day? So, even WATBlog took the liberty from breaking free from its regular tone of news reporting & analysis and decided to come up with something very fresh.

The reason why this little post caught our fancy is because the author has actually managed to capture almost every Indian’s foray into online social networking pretty beautifully. It’s a pity that we got no name or face to attach to the post.

While talking about social networks and the nature of repetitiveness that they are slowly garnering, I thought it would be an opportune moment to mention Facebook’s wonderful and commendable efforts to keep their users engaged within the site as much as they can manage. Of course, various apps, fan pages and feeds  about your friends’ activities do help a lot to retain users. In addition to it, Facebook has again launched a new feature that allows users to decide which feeds s/he likes more and which ones should rather be reduced to the minimum. For more info on the same, do chack out this fine post by Mike Arrington on the same.

And with that, we wish you all Happy Independence Day! Peace!!

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The Social Age of Blogging: Movable Type Pro Launches with Social Networking Features

I have used Movable Type and I must admit I am not their biggest fan. However, I have always given it to them for having pioneered the open source blogging systems, I sort of have a job because of that. :P

And much like the early part of this decade MT has come up with the direction for blogging platforms to move ahead. Yesterday the MT blog announced the launch of Movable Type 4.2 and Movable Type Pro. While ver. 4.2 claims to have cured MT’s chronic slowness and offers easier customization it is the Pro that really means some serious business.

It brings 3 of the current main drivers of the web publishing business on one system. MT Pro integrates blogging, content management and social networking together to come up with the most complete publishing platform.

Some of the features that Movable Type Pro brings to the table are:

  • full-featured forums, community blogs and group blogs
  • customizable profiles, personalized user pictures (avatars), and add friend feature for members ( Open ID support)
  • Content submission, review submissions, and the submitted posts show up on user profiles next to their activities …(hmm WATConnect..)
  • Ratings and Recommendations - powerful enough to create a voting community within the blog

Another crazy news they shared said,

Starting today the Movable Type Pro Blogger License is available for free to anyone and everyone not running an official business. With this license, users can have:

  • unlimited blogs
  • unlimited authors
  • unlimited community members
  • unlimited everything

That’s right, the Blogger license does not impose any caps upon its use and is free of the greatest barrier of all: cost.”

I am really liking MT right now, though I feel guilty of waxing its eloquent on a Wordpress powered blog.

The guys at Automatic, who make Wordpress have been trying to build a separate platform with Buddypress since quite a bit now, and with relatively similar features expected MT has clearly outdone them on this. I was looking forward to Buddypress since the time I came to know about it a good 6 months back, and had lined up a few personal projects to test it. And honestly I am tempted to go to MT.

However, it might be a bit early to judge because of a couple of not so enjoyable experience I have had with Movable Type. And to be honest, I am not too sure about the MT community.. the open source mavens of Wordpress who make the most mind blowing plugins and themes have my vote of confidence and perhaps that can be the deciding factor for many.

However, more importantly by launching the Pro, Six Apart has gone one up on Automatic. This surely is going to be another community showdown, which I expect will make both platforms a lot more powerful. When two quality companies go to war, the users get much better products.

All said and done, I am very excited to now these new developments at MT for this very reason. And no matter how bad or good the system actually turns out to be, just the whole set of features they have brought out is enough to give MT 4.2 and Pro a double thumbs up. This certainly sets the game up for more such developments and hence more powerful systems for us publishers. The uber-social age of blogging is upon us (uber considering blogging already is social…).

Also, there are quite a few features especially that of ver. 4.2 that I haven’t discussed here, for they are much better explained here. Do check them out and if there are any MT users among our readers then we would definitely like to hear what you have to say about Movable Type.

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WATBlog Update There are 7 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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Asian Major iProperty.com Acquires RealAcres.com as Part of the Rs.18 Crore Asian Expansion Strategy

IPGA Limited which runs the iProperty.com group of property websites acquired Indian property major RealAcres (Horizon Infoventures) for a reported AUD 5 million (around 18.8 crores in Indian Rupees). The acquisition of RealAcres.com sees iProperty.com adds to its market-leading online property operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines, and represents its latest in a string of acquisitions since its listing on 11 September 2007.

According to their release, the Group has committed to invest over 188 million INR (AUD$5 million) in its Asian expansion and India is a key part of the plan. iProperty.com sees itself continuing to make substantial investments in the Asian region and India will be a prominent part of its future plans. t is expected to invest close to $500,000 over the next 6 months as part of workforce expansion in 3 major metros, in return for 43 per cent stake of Horizon Infoventures in the first stage of the deal.

VCCircle reports that the management and the vendors of RealAcres.com have been retained and have entered into a minimum three year service agreements.

I guess it is obvious to believe Smita Thorat is one happy CEO, though "We sought out a leading Asian group to work with us to take our business to the next level and are excited to now be a part of iProperty.com Group and the iProperty.com network," all she had to say about the acquisition.

The Growth Sector

What this acquisition strongly suggests is the potential this niche holds, that a lot of people have speculated on since a long time. There is a reason after all that the Indian property market has seen some intense competition from players like MagicBricks, Makaan, 99acres, Indiaproperty.com all of which have powerful media majors backing them. etc. WATBlog had in fact analyzed the Indian property space over a year back and pointed out the immense growth potential in the sector. Interestingly RealAcres was not part of the list that we had surveyed then.

The International Twist

It is interesting to see this news right after 99Acres tied up with US based SecondHome.com to attract foreign property investors looking at India. I wonder, if such an audience is also part of IPGA’s reasons to look at India. So that makes 2 property majors having a tangible international side to their business now, and we are still waiting for Consim, People Interactive and Times Group to make a similar move which seems inevitable at the moment. One might even think the fact that RealAcres doesn’t have a big media house running it being probably a major reason for iProperty to acquire them instead of a tie up with any other.

Consolidation?

We had reported long back on People Interactive Group’s plans to go public and use the capital for acquisitions in online classifieds and communities, by 2009. Now what I wonder is if the plans of acquisitions and the current tie ups lead to a consolidation in the sector. It would be interesting to speculate on the possible alliances and adoptions if that becomes the case. Sanjeev Bikhchandani of InfoEdge had in fact shared his views on acquisitions with Rajiv last month in an interview to WATblog, and is a good read to perhaps gauge an industry leader’s perspective on acquisitions.

WAT wishes the team at RealAcres the best.

Thumbnail courtesy Picture Taker

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Microsoft LIVE Search : Will It Steal The Show ?

Microsoft LIVE Search

WATBlog was invited to a selected screening of some of the new features on Microsoft LIVE Search today. I went hoping to find something interesting. More interesting than the algorithm-tweaks itself. And what I saw were just wonderful. Microsoft has nailed it right there. The usability changes done to the LIVE search are just wonderful. Add a lot of value to the user.

I always knew LIVE Search’s algorithm was as good as the other alternatives (Read:Google) - I had done enough trail-n-error to prove this - but users have been slow in adopting. There can be a plethora of reasons for this, one being users comfort level with Google. For users to migrate to Microsoft LIVE Search in a large number, a marginal tweak in the search algorithm will not do. A significant leap in the user experience is what is needed. Today, I witnessed something like that at Microsoft’s corporate office, here in Mumbai.

Here is what I saw -

Image Search

So there is no page 2, we were told. When you do an image search, thumbnail pictures are shown in a grid. You keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. The page updates itself, to show all your image search results right there on the first page. I liked it. It takes far less time than an entire page load-up so the results are visible to you faster. If anyone has ever searched for the right image to put in on a blog post, they’ll know what I mean.

There’s something called a scratchpad. So, while you are searching for the images, you can drag-n-drop selected images in a region called scratchpad. Scratchpad stores these images and shows it to you the next time you do an image search. This is maintained via cookies, so it’s machine specific. Helps you create a pool of images that you want to refer to again and again.

There was also image filtering. So, you can filter the image search resukts to show only the black and white images. Or images with faces. Or images with “head and shoulder” (yes).

An image preview is seen when you move a mouse over a thumbnail.

Clicking on the image opens a special window/tab where to the extreme left you have all the resulting images as a film strip and to the right hand side, in a different frame, the clicked image on its original page.

Video Search

OK, now here is where the most amazing feature comes in. Just go to www.live.com. Above the search bar, click on video. And do a search for any video that you want to see. Yes, you get thumbnails of the results. All well till now. Now, just move your mouse pointer over any one of the thumbnail preview and keep it there for a few seconds. What did you see? YES, the video starts playing, right there - out of a thumbnail preview. This demonstration had me going WoW ! Incredible! I mean, how cool is that! You don’t have to try and play each video to see if it’s really the one that you’re looking for (Tell me that has happened with you). This one feature is a very important milestone. Technically and from the usability perspective. Makes the life of the user a lot easier. Ravi Datanwala, Group Manager - Live Search, Consumer & Online International Microsoft India told us that this is something that emerged out of Microsoft Research. Very good work, I must say. Microsoft sure is innovative. Oh well, I always knew that. No waiting for the other camp’s response on this.

Local Search

Hmmm, three taps in my room were leaking today. Stuff in my room were floating. I wanted a plumber. Heck, I needed a plumber. I didn’t know just hours later, I;m gonna witness something which could have helped me. Googling for plumbers in Mumbai is hardly useful, as you might know. So, what ? Well, plumbers in Bandra is what I was looking for. This was exactly what was demonstrated to me by Ravi, today at Microsoft. Putting in a search query like this, gives you names and numbers of the relevant services in that area. I actually noted down a number.

Although it’s not actually a unique feature. Asklaila has been doing it for ages now. And even Google local results can show you ones. Just that Microsoft LIVE search results were more relevant and they could be done right from the main Live.com interface. You don’t need to know of a different sub domain (like local.google.com) to perform the search. An incremental improvement.

LIVE Search Cricket

A very interesting India-specific innovation. Well, the feature is currently in internal testing. No beta as of now. But we got to see the tests. Searching for cricket updates don’t send you to third party websites about Cricket (cricinfo.com, etc). But what it gives is the cricket match score updates and cricket match schedules. Ravi told us that the feature will be covering many sports in the near future.  The feature was a little “hush-hush” as of now, according to Ravi, and you are probably reading about it first on WATBlog.

When available on mobile, this will be an interesting feature.

xRank is another feature where Live automatically ranks the celebrities. This is based on some internal algorithms. Although I didn’t find it much usable, but might be a good thing to play around for a while. For the record Katrina Kaif had an xRank 1 while Shah Rukh Khan had an xRank of 175. So, as I said, not much useful. The ranks are probably based on the queries about a particular celebrity.

LIVE SearchWAT’s Take ?
Well, MS is working damn hard to make it big in the search business. The efforts are visible. More so, now. And from what I have seen, their product is as good as anyone else’s. The search algorithm is good enough. Google’s search results are not significantly better than LIVE Search’s. The point here is perception. Google’s perception goes as the company with the best search engine around. And they have earned that respect. But now others are catching up, technically at least. Users, however are not too fast to adopt. Though Ravi pointed out that the LIVE search traffic in India has been increasing at the rate of 15% month-on-month, it’s still a long way to go. Currently, Google’s market share in search is 70.77% , while Microsoft’s is just 5.36% (Source : Computer World). To turn this the other way round, is gonna take up a lot of efforts. I am expecting a lot of users to turn to Live.com, at least for their video searches. It’s my default search engine for videos, that’s for sure. Even for images.

We would love to know about your thoughts on the new features in Live search. Looking for a live interaction in the comments.

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Indiatimes Launches Digg Like Hotklix.com - Ho.. Humm.. Yawn..

Indiatimes.com has a history of some pretty badly failed launches in the webspace. For starters think of Phatchicks (Sleazy chat service), o3 (The lost blogging service) and iTimes (bad social networking)! But the times group never gives up does it? So they have gone ahead and cloned Digg.com to launch HotKlix.com (What’s with times and sleazy names?)

hotklix

One look and you can say that there is nothing innovative about this baby and Times is probably the last one to launch such a site after all the portals like Yahoo (which acquired delicious which became more delicious recently), Rediff (Blogshowcase), Sulekha (Newshopper) and even the recently launched in.com which has news in the digg format.

There were rumours recently of how google might acquire digg.com so Im not surprised the Indiatimes guys finally woke up to the possibility of such a site.

On the whole this site will get traction primarily because its indiatimes.com which ofcourse even after its failed product launches it still garners a sizeable traffic to its main portal site which is linked to its news site economictimes and timesofindia.com. Its been around for a while and with the Times group media muscle will stay around forever if you ask me. But do you think this clone what is successful strategy will work for long? Whats your view?

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Microsoft SilverLight All Set to Shine - Develops SilverLight for Mobiles

Microsoft’s SilverLight has indeed come a long way since the last time WATBlog took a peek into the technology. I could not help but reflect on Ankit’s parting lines,

“knowing Microsoft, they might just deliver a killer product”

It’s been a few months since Microsoft launched the second version of SilverLight. The very highlight of SilverLight 2.0 is that it’s based on Microsoft’s .NET platform, as opposed to JavaScript in the case of 1.0. This makes SilverLight simplify development across multiple platforms and enables developers to build richer and more user-friendly functions, thus appealing to a wider audience on the Web.

The very next competitor to Microsoft’s SilverLight is a long reiging emperor, Adobe’s Flash. With almost every video and online gaming site fully embedded with Flash files, it’s going to take Microsoft a hell more than just a technology to dethrone them.

However, what makes SilverLight a potential winner is because Flash codes are not search engine friendly at all, whereas SilverLight is. Today, despite increase in the available bandwidth for the general internet users, not many web site even dares to transform themselves into Flash-based portals for fear of getting lost from the search results. Such a scenario is a thing of the past now. According to Microsoft officials,

“Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines.  Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines.  Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well.  Silverlight applications also support "deep linking" as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data.  Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.”

Despite all the ogling over the desktop version of SilverLight, Microsoft doesn’t plan to stand still and is all out to conquer the mobile internet market too. After reports of developing the mobile version of Internet Explorer, it’s time for SilverLight to delve into mobile phones. Although it’s sad that the technology shall be available only for Windows Mobile, the very prospect of more competition might make Adobe sweat profusely. This is because there has already been a mobile version of Adobe Flash, christened as Adobe Flash Lite, enabling interactive content on mobile phones. What might be more disconcerting for Adobe is the news of NOKIA embracing the SilverLight technology in all its mobiles.

S Somesagar, head of Developer Division, Microsoft Corp, said

“We see the 2.4 billion global installed base of mobile phones as a major opportunity and intend using Silverlight to exploit it.”

The current mobile market seems to be all hot with news, with every mobile company worth its salt trying its best to dethrone the other from their obvious advantages. With the expected launch of the iPhone in the Indian market and also allocation of 3G services in the offing, it is saddening to know that iPhone’s Safari bowser won’t support SilverLight and might force many to miss attractive interactive content in future, just the way iPhone and PowerPC users had to miss live coverage of the ongoing Olympic Games in China.

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Online Tools for Personal Finance and Tax - Where and What to Look For..

It is said that if you want to manage something (Girl friend, Money, Relations, etc), you must be able to understand them first. In other words, if you can’t understand them properly, you really can’t manage it well. Your personal finances & tax also falls within the above concept. How do you know whether you are doing well with your finances or not? So there are tools and calculators available which can help you with a self analysis and provide a road map for your finance decisions.

Managing personal finance adeptly is the key to secure a bright future for your family. India, being a rapidly developing nation, is now open to the global market when it comes to investing money for the growth of business. Investment planning, Retirement planning, mutual fund & tax planning are the main parts of personal finance. Personal finance management has assumed all the more relevance at present market situation. To grab definitive information on personal finance management and personal finance tips we are providing some well known websites : myiris.com , moneycontrol.com , sify.com , content.icicidirect.com , icicilombard.com , icicilombard.com.

calculator

To calculate taxes:

First online tool for tax planning is Tax calculator. Almost each & every financial site whether it belongs to mutual fund Company, Investment Management Company or Life Insurance Company provides the above facility. Sites like Sify , moneycontrol provides wide range of calculators. Almost all sites provide Salary Tax Calculator but very few provide separate Capital Gains Tax Calculator also.

For your Insurance needs:

Second online tool is Insurance premium calculator as people from India still feels that Insurance is the safest way of investment. There are few types of insurance calculator ULIP calculator, premium calculator & most important Insurance calculator. Companies like Bajaj Allianz provides even Life Insurance Retirement Income Calculator which according to some people worst combo ever. You can find Premium calculator on each & every site while ULIP calculator on some sites & Insurance calculator on very few sites. Very few companies like SBI Life insurance provides.

Mutual Fund investments tools:

Third tool is Mutual fund calculator. These Calculators are designed to assist you in determining the appropriate amount. Due to this they have various types in it, such as Return Calculator, SIP calculator, Mutual Fund cost calculator, Networth Calculator, Returns Calculator.

For planning retirement:

Next tool is Retirement planning tool. These tools and planners might help you in getting broad idea about your financial planning. However it's always recommend that one must consult his Financial Planning Advisor before taking any decisions as this is not a Childs play. Companies like Birla Sun life , Bajaj Capital , Bharati Axa Life insurances provides it while some banks like SBI, ICICI are pushing Reverse mortgage as a new retirement planning tool.

Making the most of the web for your financial goals:

Now days people use Social networking sites like Orkut , Face book to create virtual communities of common interested people & guide them accordingly. Right now many individual are handling these communities & in future we hope to see many corporate brands to come up with their own communities to attract new users. We had seen many QnA sites went wrong due to delayed irrelevant responses. None of the available QnA sites like Yahoo answer, Rediff QnA or ibibo Sawal provides real time financial answers or help in the form of chat. Financial Blogs are picking up greatly for the net savvy investors but all we can say that it's a double edged sword. It is great that awareness is spreading but sometimes wrong information gets picked up.

So ultimately, how much worth are these online tools?

Personally, after looking at the current market trend, I feel India still needs a well developed & sorted online tools for Financial & Tax planning. We still don't have most required Wealth management & portfolio management tools easily available in India. Only 2-3 companies provide it & to use it you have to follow their tons conditions. So, using these tools to understand your financial planning is good but never trust on them as results vary from one site to another.

Lastly what we need in India is standard online tools available for every financial sector & online monitoring authority for the same. As India becoming net savvy & most of the investors likes to solve their problem on a single mouse click, it will take some time but it's vital issue which can't be neglected so easily.

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NDTV Lumiere Ties Up With Jaman.com For Online Movie Download & Live Screening

NDTV Lumière the TV channel of NDTV Group that shows the contempory cinema in India has acknowledge the importance of online media has tied up with jaman.com a US based  video entertaintment portal which will now provide video downloads and live screening of NDTV Lumière’s content. Speaking on the tie up Dhruvank Vaidya, senior vice-president, new ventures, NDTV Imagine, said "The Internet is a growing medium and our target audience is comfortable with it. Also, they can access movies at their own convenience."

NDTV Lumiere

jaman

NDTV Lumiere’s movies will be available at 2$ per download which will be available to a set of asian countries. The other noteworthy player in this space is Rajshri.com which is not only providing movies for download and premiering movies online since sometime now but also started creating content for mobile videos called mobisodes. Also there is Bigflix which seems to be providing 14000 titles at 1$ for download. On the TV Channels and traditional companies front Shemaroo was one such player which announced the decision to put its movies online for download

We have always believed that online offline integration is the best way to leverage and scale media businesses in India as it provides both reach and interactivity at the same time. Just recently Hungama.com had tied up with Dailymotion to power bollywood centric content on their India centric video sharing site.  Also there is youtube which launched its India centric site. Closer to home Zoom tv tied up with Rediff ishare to showcase their tv shows. So this trend of US centric sites either coming to India or India centric Video content creators tying up with US centric online videos sites seems to be catching up fast.

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MTNL Slashes Broadband Tariff in Delhi - Launches MTNL-TV

Gone are the days when public sector companies were the most lazy ones around and it would have been all too easy to trump them in customer services. Mahanagar Telphone Nigam Limited (MTNL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigal Limited (BSNL) have come up with more aggressive pricing for their broadband offerings, starting from August 15, 2008. Yes, MTNL has cut its broadband charges by almost 50% in its bid to boost its user base in Delhi and NCR.

According to reports, the PSU has decided to offer its 2Mbps connection to the users at a minimal rental of Rs 99 per month, offering 150MB of free downloads, and Rs 149 for 400MB of free downloads. For the powers users, it has also slashed the rates of its unlimited downloads (night unlimited) plan from a decent Rs 899 to Rs 599 per month.

However, the reduced rates shall be open from the 15th of August for new customers and on September 1st for its existing customers. The company’s Executive Director (Delhi), A K Arora, said that MTNL planned to boost up its existing user base of 2.6 lakhs broadband users, riding on the reduced tariffs.

In the mean time, taking advantage of the automatic allotment of 3G services to the state-run mobile service provider, MTNL has decided to run more aggressively in the race and has already launched TV services for mobile handsets, christening the service as ‘MTNL-TV’. The service shall be available in Delhi and NCR for MTNL customers, both on Dolphin and Trump, at a nominal rate of Rs 99 per month. As of now, only 20 channels shall be available for viewing, not currently offering Fashin TV and religious channels. No details could yet been confirmed on which ones MTNL might be planning to offer as a part of its bouquet of 20 channels.

It seems finally Ankit’s dreams of getting television channels on the mobile are going to come true! :-)

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