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There are 6 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" Holy! India Brings Out the $10 LaptopJust saw this bit of news on Rediff that India has unveiled its much talked and blogged about $10 Laptop, and apparently the ministry of HRD has kept its promise with this price. After Ratan Tata laid claim to the cheapest car ever with the Nano last year India has its hands on the cheapest laptop if this story remains confirmed. India first announced the plan to make these ultra cheap laptops in the summer of 2007 almost two years back, and had said it would take around 2 to 3 years before it can come out with the product. With this launch we have even stuck with the time lines surprisingly. The laptop is expected to hit the market in 6 months time. The $10 laptop has always seemed a very unlikely aspiration on part of the Indian government and was only seen as an ego battle against Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop part of the OLPC programme which India had refused to be part of. The announcement was met with a lot of skepticism in the blogosphere and there were contradicting reports that the the government actually meant $100 instead. However, laying aside all the rumours the project has finally been unveiled and the price is expected to be anywhere between Rs.500 to 1,000. “The mission was launched at a huge gathering of academicians and the officials from across the country including thirty vice chancellors of central and state universities at the campus of Sri Venkateshwara University Tirupati.” This is a rediff quote, the only thing that sounds amiss here is that if it was such a huge gathering why aren’t there any other report on this matter yet? Anyway that is just a curiosity more than an acquistion. S K Sinha, joint secretary in the ministry for education, gave a demo to this packed audience though as of now we have no report on how the product looks or any concrete specs of the laptop. The laptop has 2 GB onboard memory with wireless Internet connectivity. It seems a little too good to be true even now, and I am waiting eagerly to know what this thing looks like. If it holds on to its quality like the Nano did then it will most certainly be a proud moment for a nation whose contribution to computing began with a simple Zero. Fingers Crossed. Related Posts Also Check Out: Yahoo And IIIT to Shake Hands for Cloud ComputingInternet giant Yahoo! has tied up with International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad to promote research on cloud computing. Through their research they plan to enrich cloud computing. "We will also address the problem of performance monitoring. It is not possible to manually monitor the performance of these machines. We need to have technological solutions to identify the capabilities of the machines. This will help us predict failures," Prof. P.J. Narayanan, Dean of Research, and Dr Vasudeva Varma, Associate Professor, at IIIT, told a popular business daily. One of the major focuses of the group (of 5 researchers who will be working on this project) will be to work on the crucial aspects of scheduling (of tasks given to machines that attend to the users' queries) as well as security. Cloud computing as we all know is providing real time resources as a "service" to people over the internet where the hardware belongs to some other corporation (Ex Google Docs). Yahoo has been actively supporting cloud computing since the early 2007. One example includes letting colleges use their infrastructure (such as a 4000 processor computer) to conduct software research. And then in 2008 it joined hands with CRL of the Tata's to work with them on cloud computing research using the EKA, the 4th largest supercomputer in the world. To know more about Yahoo's initiatives in this domain, check out Cloud Computing section on their website. Most Commented PostsAlso Check Out: Will Mobile Internet Users Surpass The Number Of Traditional Internet Users In India?
It doesn’t seem logical! Internet itself is in its infancy in our country with just a 3% penetration. PC penetration itself will take time to hit 20%. How possibly can mobile overtake the traditional form of accessing the internet? I’d written a post nearly 2 years back on - What is going to increase GPRS usage in India… Social Networking would be the key I’d said and that’s exactly what is happening. I’m hooked to Facebook and Twitter via my phone and so are a lot more people. Micro-blogging is a growing phenomenon. There is a constant need to tell all your friend what you are up to? Having coffee in a CCD, savouring a sizzler in your favourite joint, caught a beautiful sunset at Marine Drive - people are tweeting/fbooking this constantly. In my opinion, entertainment will be limited to the PC. Though youtube is available on mobile phones and 3gp versions of videos can be seen, the usage is still limited. Flash is not supported on most phones. So unless we get Flash/Flex compatible smart phones at a cost of Rs 5000 and 3G/WiFi connectivity everywhere, entertainment will never really be that huge on the mobile in India. But where Mobile is really having its impact is Email. Working professionals are constantly checking their mail. Mails often tend to have links and these links are the ones which get clicked. A lot of textual content is getting consumed via mobile phones. Local Search though not tremendously popular is slowly making its mark. Because of services like Guruji and JustDial, one can find the telephone no. of almost any eating joint or movie hall on the go. The future will see heavy usage of ticketing applications. Applications which are built around convenience. Mobile booking of movie tickets etc. Here are some international figures to ponder on: In November, 34 percent of mobile phone owners in Western Europe who visited social networking sites accessed social media exclusive of all other mobile Web content. With 12.1 million users in Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K.), mobile social networking grew 152 percent from November 2007 to November 2008. (Source) I’m not sure if there are any reliable figures of Mobile Internet penetration figures in India, but here are some international figures: US - 19% Note - These are figures of Internet users who also access the net via Mobile. The major difference which we are going to witness in India is that because of our low PC penetration and high mobile penetration, we are going to get a lot of people who are going to be using only their mobile phone for accessing the internet. Another interesting fact: Related PostsAlso Check Out: WATShow With Kiran Gopinath Of Ozone Media On Ad Networks In IndiaWATShow spoke to Ozone media founder Kiran Gopinath and asked him questions around the USP of Ozone Media vis a vis other ad networks, slowdown and its impact on Adnetworks etc. Have a look at the latest WATShow You can check out more such exclusive interviews only on WATShow.com - India’s Premiere Digital Media Focused Video Destination Site. Related PostsAlso Check Out: Funding Updates: GETIT Gets 20 crores From Helion VenturesGETIT Infoservices (P) Ltd. GETIT a producer of yellow pages and directories in India which now offers integrated digital and print offerings in the local search and classifieds space has raised 20 crores in funding from Helion Ventures. The online site is accessible on Getit.in. Getit is primarily an offline company which is now spreading its wings online. One can compare Getit directly with the likes of Justdial which got funding from Saif Partners. GETIT currently publishes yellow pages, buying guides and business directories in over 35 cities. Its services are also available online, on WAP and through its 24×7 telephone information services across India. Again very much like Justdial. Commenting on the investment, Rahul Chandra, Director at Helion Advisors Pvt. Ltd who is now also on the board of GETIT said "GETIT is the clear leader in the print directories space. Coupled with its new digital offerings, we believe GETIT’s presence in the market place with thousands of advertisers is a key differentiator. Helion’s participation in GETIT is born of this belief that GETIT will be able to continuously bring to market innovative and scalable solutions." Our take on GETIT.in Classifieds is a game of plenty - GETIT.in would have to compete with the likes of Justdial which already boasts of amazing online traction. The differentiator can be an accurate, regularly updates and comprehensive database. Now all this can’t just be done via their offline yellow pages and hence I feel they would have to drive online submissions in a big way. Why no use of meta crawler? I sometimes wonder why online classifieds for products and business dont rely on meta crawlers to crawl websites and retrieve addresses. Given its a high cost but look at it this way once I track the company website any changes to the address or phone no would get immediately updated without the company logging in and doing so myself. Dont know if any of these classified players are still doing something like this. Given that they have millions of funding it makes sense to invest it in IP rather than marketing.. WAT Say? Related PostsAlso Check Out: AOL to Cut Staff Strength to Give Core Businesses More Air to BreatheAOL has announced its decision to cut its staff strength by 10% across boards and locations worldwide. The decision will affect nearly 700 staffers who will be given pink slips by the end of March in the company. AOL which moved from being an ISP to focus more on growing its Internet Advertising business after Time Warner took it over has been facing business pangs since some time now. It seems AOL takes the idea of fall winter quite literally having trimmed its workforce twice in the past 2 years around fall owing to restructuring of the business and slow growth. Things haven’t worked out quite well for the once premier email and Internet Access provider and its shift to online advertising hasn’t worked out well despite some optimistic growth expectations. AOL on its part has wanted to develop “the most sophisticated global ad network” and has been able to rope in and build some worthy publishing names in this quest. However, following some sound growth of other independent publishers and now the recession AOL hasn’t been able to take its flight yet. Late last year it finally split its business apart while its advertising partner Google acknowledged a loss on its $1 Billion 5% investment in AOL. In its bid to earn worldwide supremacy it had also launched its Indian arm and also brought it’s major advertising network to India last year. I had blogged about why AOL had the right mix to take the biggest share in the online advertising market in India, however it seems with marketers getting careful with their spends globally it has put its breaks on the Internet behemoth. According to the company, post the axing of jobs, the idea would be to concentrate investing on three key growth areas - advertising, publishing/websites and social networks. Now, what can AOL do to grow these areas? It already has a huge list of over 90 high profile websites in its stable and one of fastest growing social network in Bebo as well. However, with even bigger names in publishing reporting losses of nearly 40% and Facebook and MySpace still looking at that elusive social networking monetizing model can AOL really bring its core areas out of troubled waters? It’s India launch though created some initial buzz hasn’t really picked on while Web 18’s In.com has comfortable gone onto number 2 position despite being the latest entrant in the portal segment (though Web 18 also has taken a beating in terms of numbers). This despite AOL’s attempt to go local in a number of ways. It has also been looking for a merger since over a year with some of the leading publishing names, and it remains to be seen if it continues to pursue a similar strategy this year to leverage on wider advertising bases and cut costs. Related PostsAlso Check Out: More Recent Articles
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