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There are 7 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" Kindle 2 Finally Unveiled by Jeff BezosKindle's younger brother Kindle 2 is surely anorexic. Its 1/3rd of an inch! Jeff Bezos unveiled the e-book reading device at a press conference (press release here) in the Big Apple's Carnegie Library which had Author Stephen King as a chief guest (who even read a story he had written, on the device). So what's new?This one's faster by 20%, will stay charged 20% longer and comes in 16 shades of grey, an upgrade from 4 in the previous edition. Kindle 2 also has about 7 times the storage space Kindle had and can store up to 1500 books. It also has a built in dictionary with 250,000 words and can be charged using USB cables apart from the usual charger. Also, using their Whispersync technology you can synchronize across Kindle 1, Kindle 2.0 and share the exact position in the book you were/are reading at. This will probably be available across other mobile devices in the future. It costs the same as the Kindle 1- roughly 360 USD. The entire list of specifications can be checked out on their website here. At the same time with all the "its thinner than the iPhone" talk I can't help but wonder if Amazon is also trying to specifically market the Kindle to the iPhone/iTouch loyalists. So what's next?A colour Kindle? Probably not, as Bezos says in this interview with the Seattle Times, saying "I think it’s actually multiple years away." He also hints that he would like to bring the Kindle Books to netbooks/mobiles saying "That's what WhisperSync is about. We want to make Kindle a bookstore - the largest e-bookstore in the world, with 230,000 titles and growing. We want to make those titles also available on a bunch of different devices and then synchronize them with Kindle." So is everything goody goody? Not everyone is of that opinion. People are already whining about the lack of a SD card slot or removable batteries. The device will be shipped Feb 24th onwards. For a thorough comparison between the Kindle and the Kindle 2 do check out this website. Related Posts Also Check Out: Microsoft picks up minority stake in the SMS2.0 firm AffleMicrosoft reportedly picked up a minority stake in a Singapore based SMS 2.0 firm Affle, the press release from the Affle reports that it has established a strategic relationship with Microsoft to strengthen its mobile media business where in Windows Live Search and MSN content services have already been integrated and deployed on SMS2.0 in India and have witnessed unprecedented results. What exactly is SMS2.0? Affle defines SMS2.0 as an upgrade to the SMS/Text Messaging application on the mobile phone and resides as the default messaging application on the handset. It offers users personalization and instant messaging type features on SMS. However, the most unique aspect of this upgrade is that it unifies messaging, content browsing and a search experience on the default text messaging screen itself. Users thus have access to the best of rich content services on the default messaging screen, thereby significantly boosting consumption of mobile media. It should be noted that Affle's SMS2.0 is not a SMS protocol standard, but rather it is leveraging the existing standard in a unique way. Affle acurrently operates in five countries including Singapore, India Thailand, Malaysia and UK, and have tie-ups with the mobile operators like Airtel, Idea and spice in India and claims its product SMS2.0 is a big hit and has already become the largest mobile media in India delivering over 120Mn monthly targeted impressions Related PostsAlso Check Out: A (Very) Brief Introduction to Web StandardsLast week WATBlog featured an interesting post asking whether you would wait for more than 4 seconds for a site to load. Though we didn’t specifically get into it site load times and its display and layout in general are all part of the idea having standardised web development and design practices. This idea is what we find going about as Valid Code, and Web Standards in discussions and articles about a better web ecosystem. What are Web Standards?Web Standards are essentially recommendations of the W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director. W3C recommends the wide deployment of its recommendations. So for whatever Web Standards stand, they are certainly not bound rules to follow while building your cherished website. Nevertheless, they relate to best practices followed in building websites. These practices when followed renders a website seamlessly across access platforms and deliver the content regardless of who is accessing the site (able/disabled/Dial Up/Broadband/etc. ). Besides the standards also look at decreasing cost and time involved in web development and maintenance. Web Standards as a term talks about:
Now, a standards compliant site goes beyond fast loading and good looks. It has its advantages beyond a lot of obvious points. Some of these are: Search Engine Optimization: Google is known to be partially in indexing standards compliant websites. And the effect of a good Google ranking has been ranted often for me to add tot he clutter now. Scalability and Access: The browser wars have just begun with each taking a big chunk of loyal users with them. A business can’t afford to cater to just one of these big chunks, unless you are a browser make of course (sometimes not even then). Your customers would want to access your site from anywhere, IE, Safari, Opera Mini, iPhone. Standards make sure that you look the same to every eye. Marketing and Buzz: I have found a lot of new websites and tools through CSS galerries where their trendy websites were listed for excellence in design. With the rise of the blog republic you are looking at more people citing examples of good work. The buzz can be as surprising and the link love as mesmerising as the ..well can’t find anything analogous to it right now really. Alright, I am not a designer, but I have often been intrigued by good web designs and discussions on standards and validation is something I often come across in my browse time. And when I see a lot of popular sites, (government ones the most) fill up my window with trashy tables of HTML, it strikes me hard that despite having the advantage of hindsight we don’t adopt better site development and maintenance measures. Hopefully, we can cover standards and good design practices more often here with some expert advice which perhaps will also push better design practices. OR at least a checklist of sorts. Related PostsAlso Check Out: Event Update: Startup Saturday - This Valentine’s Day!If you are the kind of person whose first love is his/her startup then this valentine’s day it might be a good idea to attend Startup Saturday which is happening across 5 cities. So whether you are in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore or Hyderabad you can attend a startup saturday happening in your city. Here are the agenda’s for the different startup saturday’s this valentine’s day!
From 2pm -6pm 1) Presentation by Vishal Chandra. He will be talking about “Startup Funding and Bootstrapping” 2) Demo by Shishir Jain from Netcellence (http://www.netcellence.in) 3) Discussion on the new IT Act and it’s implications on Indian Technology business From 10 -1pm 1) Knowledge Management through Collective Intelligence 2) Demo by Sumeet Anand, founder Kreeo 3) Talk on Collective Intelligence by Raj Dutta, GM, Knowledge Management, MindTree, From 11 am onwards 1. The Hysea products showcase event (the opportunity for startups) 2. ‘How we won our first customer’- Acuvate 3. Social Entrepreneurship/ Nitin Rao of E4SI. Also an entrepreneur
Also don’t forget its valentine’s day as well so if you have a loved one remember to wish them.. Related PostsAlso Check Out: Inviting You To WATBlog Panel On “Entrepreneurship In Digital Media - Opportunities & Challenges” On 20th Feb @ NMIMS University, MumbaiFebruary is a month of Entrepreneurship with the EWeek by NEN Currently going on from 7th to 14th of Feb. Hence going with the mood for entrepreneuship we are organising our 4th panel discussion and we are hosting it at Aamchi Mumbai. Check out the details below: WATBlog Panel on Entrepreneurship In Digital Media - Opportunities & Challenges is being organised at NMIMS College in Mumbai on 20th February, 2009. This is in association with the Ecell of NMIMS University. We aim to answer the following questions via the panel:
The panelists are:
Alok Kejriwal is a serial entrepreneur and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Games2win – his forth company. His previous ventures include contests2win.com – one of India's best recognized Internet brands, Mobile2win – acquired by Walt Disney in China and Norwest ventures in India and Media2win – one of the top 3 Interactive agencies in India. Alok is a child of the Internet and has built companies in India, China and the US. He has vast fund raising experiences, having raised VC money from the likes of Softbank, Siemens, ICICI Venture, Clearstone Venture, Nexus Capital and Silicon Valley Bank. Alok collaborates with like minded partners to start up companies and pavement pounds himself to create business traction. His signature is the ability to companies that capture tremendous value with minimal capital investment. Outside of work Alok collects Indian contemporary art and is an avid student of the Art of Living.
Beerud is a Co-founder & CEO of Webaroo. Prior to Webaroo, Beerud founded Elance, the pioneer of the world’s largest online services marketplace. He played various leadership roles at different stages of the company’s growth, including developing product and business strategies, product management, marketing & business development, and remains on the board of directors. Prior to founding Elance, Beerud worked in the financial services industry; modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and before that at Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning software agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology & a B.Tech in Computer Science IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.
Mahesh Murthy - Founder and CEO of Pinstorm Founder and CEO of Pinstorm, Mahesh has 24 years of marketing and communications experience – of which over 14 years are in online marketing. After dropping out of college, Mahesh sold vacuum cleaners from door to door, worked with Grey in India and Ogilvy in Hong Kong, where he won notoriety and awards as a creative director on HP, The Economist, Pepsi and MTV - for whom he wrote and directed a spot voted "Asia's best commercial of the decade". He then moved to a Silicon Valley firm, CKS Partners (later, USWeb/CKS) as Creative Director, General Manager and Partner – where he helped launch the first commercial version of Yahoo in 1995 and the Earth's Biggest Bookstore campaign for Amazon.com in 1997. After a successful NASDAQ IPO, Mahesh moved to head marketing at iCat, an e-commerce firm in Seattle subsequently acquired by Intel. Mahesh then returned to India to run Channel V, a rival to MTV, till its sale to Newscorp in 2000 and then founded Passionfund to invest in startups. Some of his investees include Geodesic (a 300-bagger), Compassbox – acquired by Careerlauncher, Cypherix, Indiaproperties, EBS and Webdunia. Mahesh penned a reasonably infamous column in Business Today and Businessworld, and played the Donald Trump-equivalent role in Business Baazigar, a game show similar to The Apprentice, involving entrepreneurs and business plans. While running search marketing campaigns for his favourite charity in 2003, Mahesh believed there was a need for a pay-for-performance online marketing company - and set up Pinstorm in Bombay. With over 120 people across 7 offices in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Europe and the US, Pinstorm is today among the world’s leading digital marketing firms. Mahesh has a passion for early-stage investing and teamed up with Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob (ex-Infinity) in 2006 to set up Seedfund, today a leading early-stage venture capital fund in India. Seedfund already has 10 investments, including Carwale.com, Printo, RedBus.in, AFAQs.com and Vaatsalya.
Sameer is also an independent film maker with film festivals movies to his credit. He has a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Thapar University, India. He loves meeting people, travelling and reading. Sameer is very bullish on Indian startups and believes that 5 years from now startups will contribute to a significant part of the Indian Economy. He blogs at sameer.madhouse.in The panel would be followed by a Mixer and Dinner. There are limited seat so Register NOW! Previous WATBlog Panel's Looking to travel to Mumbai? Use Cleartrip to book your tickets! Related PostsAlso Check Out: WATShow with Ravi Narayan of Mentor PartnersWATShow spoke to Ravi Narayan , MD - Mentor Partners and Chairman of TES and asked him questions about the response the TES’ Bangalore chapter, his venture Mentor Square and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in general.
Head over to WATShow, the exclusive video channel of the Digital Media Industry! Related PostsAlso Check Out: Mobile User Growth Not Affected by Recession - Rural Mobile Markets Still BoomingStock markets are plummeting to never seen before lows, real estate plunging down, Nasscom lowered its expectations for IT-BPO to 16-17%, economists slashed the overall country’s growth forecast, period, amid all this the mobile markets don’t seem got affected but on the other hand reporting a record growth, especially the rural mobile market in India. The mobile operators are adding millions of subscribers every month. Reportedly the mobile-phone has industry recorded more than 10 million new subscribers in December, up from eight million a year earlier. The industry’s overall subscriber base grew 48 per cent in 2008 to 347 million customers and of the 25 million new mobile subscribers added during April 2008 to June 2008, 8 million were from the villages, that is more than 30%.The mobile subscriber base is growing without leaps and bounds. Bharti Airtel saw its profit in the three months to December 31 climb to 22 billion rupees , up 25 per cent from a year earlier, as it drew in a record number of new subscribers. Overall industry figures to be released later this month are expected to show that new subscriptions in January reached a record 11 million.The demand for cellphones is coming mainly from rural consumers, who typically earn less than $1,000 a year and a large majority of them don’t own a land and don’t have access to any of the land line networks, and the average usage of this cohort has also gone up by 10 percent over the past year to 8.5 hours a month and according to a recent study by US based Yankee group, 62 percent of all the handsets imported cost less than $50. With saturation in the urban market, growth in Indian mobile market is primarily driven by an increased focus on the rural market, aggressive promotions, and handset bundle offers. With a national penetration rate of less than 30 per cent as of December there is still a lot of untapped demand for mobile in India. With this un-precedented growth story of rural mobile what makes me muse over is what possibly could be a killer app for this market? Cheap music or something else, do let us know what you think could be a killer app for rural mobile. Related PostsAlso Check Out: More Recent Articles
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Alok Kejriwal - CEO Games2win.com 
Beerud Seth - Co-founder & CEO of Webaroo
Sameer Guglani - Founder - Morpheus Ventures 
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