Monthly archives: July 2004

Reliance Indiamobile has heated the ‘VAS on mobile’ market with its Rconnect services which provides 144kbps Internet Access on its CDMA Mobiles. The Indian telecom operators are testing similar services and finding out the best suitable options through EDGE (GSM) or EV DO (CDMA)
Business Line India Reports :

CELLULAR subscribers can now get Live TV, watch videos and experience high speed Internet surfing on their mobile handsets with Idea Cellular and Hutch, on Wednesday, announcing the launch of EDGE (Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution) services. The service which has been launched for the first time in the country is capable of data downloads with speeds of 160 kilo bits per second compared to existing speeds of 40 kbps. Airtel is also planning a pan India roll-out by December.

While subscribers of Idea Cellular can avail the service for a flat fee of Rs 500 per month, Hutch users can avail the service for a monthly fee of Rs 100 plus additional charges for downloads. For example, every game downloaded would cost Rs 50 and a ringtone download Rs 10. Idea Cellular subscribers also have the option of paying 5 paise per kilobyte. Subscribers will need EDGE-enabled handsets also to avail the service.

What is EDGE ? (GSMWorld.com)

Further enhancements in data capability over the core GSM network will be provided with the introduction of Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution – known as EDGE*. This will achieve the delivery of advanced mobile services such as the downloading of video and music clips, full multimedia messaging, high-speed colour Internet access and e-mail on the move.

EDGE (or Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution) is a 3G technology that delivers broadband-like data speeds to mobile devices. It allows consumers to connect to the Internet and send and receive data, including digital images, web pages and photographs, three times faster than possible with an ordinary GSM/GPRS network. EDGE enables GSM operators to offer higher-speed mobile-data access, serve more mobile-data customers, and free up GSM network capacity to accommodate additional voice traffic.

What is EV-DO ?(Motorola)

1xEV-DO provides a true broadband service over mobile. With Peak Data Rate of 2.4 Mbps and Average Data Rate similar to wire-line broadband technologies, 1XEV-DO not only brings a superior end-user experience in wireless access to the Internet, but also enables a series of new applications and services

BusinessWires PR : Axesstel, Inc. (AMEX:AFT), a leader in developing, manufacturing and marketing high-quality, CDMA-based fixed wireless voice and data solutions, hybrid terminals and engineering services to operators worldwide, today announced that it began shipments in June to Tata Teleservices Limited (“Tata Teleservices”), India’s leading private telecom service provider. Operating with the brand name Tata Indicom, Tata Teleservices is one of the largest fixed wireless service providers in the world and has over 1 million 3G1X fixed wireless service customers in India. It is anticipated that up to $45 million in revenue may be recorded by Axesstel related to these shipments during the third and fourth quarters of the current fiscal year.

Mahesh Murthy gives us the example of one man global company.

LAST week I spent some time with a gent who runs a company in Mumbai that sells software to customers around the world. I had invested in them years ago, and for one reason or another we couldn’t catch up much in the middle, except to share notes on email.

Things were going well. He was not huge by global standards – about $250,000 in revenues, slated to double this year. Customers in more than 30 countries. Over 500,000 people around the world who’d tried his product. Over 5,000 of them who had paid for it and who use it. A well-known brand in its field.

The business was profitable. He reckons he is world No.3 in his niche. His product was acclaimed worldwide, reviewed by PC Magazine and such. All in all, it was a pretty good record – having survived through the worst downturns in the market, and still making it. And we were talking of how he’d done it.

It wasn’t that he was a coding or technical genius. The gent is actually a biology grad, and to my knowledge, can’t write code. But he’s always known what he wanted – and has figured out some inventive ways to get things done.

A forbes.com report spotted on Slashdot.

Avaya, Motorola and Proxim this week are expected to announce a co-developed handset and enterprise network gear that let mobile phone users roam between cellular networks and wireless LANs.

The combination holds the promise of cutting phone costs for business customers and making mobile workers more productive. It is based on a new Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based Wi-Fi/cellular handset from Avaya and Motorola, IP-based or IP-enabled PBXs from Avaya, plus new WLAN switch and thin access points developed by Avaya and Proxim.

India has become the unique example of telecom success in both GSM and CDMA. Indian operators have changed the equations of the telecom market. Earlier vendors used to always have the upper hand now they understand that they have to provide customized contracts and service and act as partners, cos India is a serious market and the opportunities are available starting from scratch – i.e at the level of Implementation phase. Thats why, you not only see implementations but India also becoming the test-bed or early implementator of some great telecom and broadband technologies. Every operator and vendor is now eyeing these ‘Value Addition’ technology and market and we will witness lots of new jargons in coming times like Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, EDGE, EV-DO, etc, etc.

The Indian telecom sector grew to 79.4 million customers at the end of May’04 – a 39 percent annual growth that came mainly by the doubling mobile users. A recent paper by Telecom.paper.nl estimates (paid subscription) that there are 0.4 internet, 0.2 broadband connections per 100 people in India.

The broadband sector is still at a very confusing stage since there is not a single technology which has stabilized, every vendor and every operator is singing a different tune. Even the discussion on connection to customer (medium) is divided into Wirelss / Copper / Fibre and Ethernet. The Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association (TEMA) has formed the India Broadband Forum primarily to provide technical, strategic, and marketing support to its member organizations venturing in the development of broadband products and services.

The next phase will the coming of foreign Telecom / Networking / Broadband services for the need of outsourcing i.e Remote Management and Monitoring and other services. For example a recent announcement from COLT telecom to move jobs from Germany and UK to India. India is not only providing the manpower in the services market but there are many companies like Notel, Lucent, Cisco, Qualcomm, Juniper, etc for which India has become the R&D base also, for both the software and hardware.

Veteran Bollywood comedian, Mehmood, has died in the United States at the age of 72

I am a great fan of Mr. Mehmood, he was the true and may be the first “King Of Comedy” in the hindi film industry. I still remember a very simple but hillarious scene of “Pyar Kiye Jaa” in which he narrates a horror story to Omprakash , he was awarded Film Fare Award for that. Most of the comedians in India just use one method and repeat themselves in all their movies. But Mehmood was the first person who used make-up, accent, props and variety in his comedy. He was also ahead of time making movies such as Kuwara Baap, Padosan, Bombay to Goa, Jinny and Johny , etc. Padosan is still a terrific movie to watch , everytime you see it you experience the same madness. There is no other example of a true “comedy” in the Indian Masala movie industry. There is also a legend about him that once upon a time he became so popular among the audiences that Heroes (a typical lead character in every indian film) used to fear his presence in the movie and started boycotting him. One can simply put faith in this since he was the only comedian those days who gott to sing and dance with her very own female-sidekick (Helen, Durga Khote, Aruna Irani) in all him movies.

Filmography of Mehmood as: Actor, Miscellaneous Crew, Director, Producer on IMDB.com

A Keralanext.com report :

At present, Bangalore has 1,60,000 professionals working in the technology sector and the number is the largest in one place on the planet.

While about 1,00,000 professionals work in IT companies, the remaining 60,000 are working in the ITES-BPO sector. The number of working professionals is expected to cross 2,00,000 during the year 2004-05 with many IT and ITES-BPO companies rapidly expanding their manpower.

Found via Slashdot a nice article (Unix’s founding fathers) on Economist.com about Dennis Ritchie who invented C and was one of the key members of the team behind Unix.

It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, “Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.” Dr Ritchie’s creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.

Newyork Times has a article on the reverse migration of Indians from US and other Countrie back to India due to a potentially vast & booming Indian economy.

apcmag informs about the new ‘personalization‘ feature of Google. :

Personalised search services collect information about the subjects which interest you, so a search engine knows in advance that you are interested in computers and not fruit. Google’s version of personalisation does just this. After completing a profile, searches made at http://labs.google.com/personalized produce not just the usual list of results but also a “personalisation slider” to apply your profile to search results.

Set the slider to maximum and all results are subjected to an analysis based on your profile. Select minimum and the results revert to Google’s standard service. Set the slider to somewhere between these two extremes and it will adjust the balance to reflect the placement.

The flipside for Google is that your profile also has the potential to allow it to charge more for advertising. At present, the profile is stored on users’ hard drives as a cookie and advertisers’ greedy mitts are kept away from its potential for targeted advertising.