Wordpress.app on the iphone
Just got Wordpress.app for the iphone. Think it would inspire me to write more?
Attending Proto.in – Jan 18 & 19, 2008 in Chennai, India
I'll be in Chennai on Jan 18 & 19, 2008 attending Proto.in - will be scouting for companies to partner with my employer for the enterprise market.
You can get more info on Proto here.
Vijay Anand and team at The Knowledge Foundation have been working real hard on making Proto a success - I look forward to seeing this latest version play out this week.
Here are Vijay's posts on the subject on the Proto.in blog:
The Business Track
The Technology Track
The Proto Jingle
The Speakers - including my friend Gokul Gopalakrishnan!
Twitter Updates for 2008-01-04
- #Apple How addicted to Apple are you? http://tinyurl.com/yqlyft #
How addicted to Apple are you?
Twitter Updates for 2008-01-02
- Back in Mumbai, working today... #
Twitter Updates for 2007-12-31
- Ringing in the new year at 10 Downing, T. Nagar, Chennai, India with friends from school! #
Twitter Updates for 2007-12-27
- #telecom Indian DOT turns angel investor! $2.5 Bn fund! http://tinyurl.com/2dzad5 #
Twitter Updates for 2007-12-24
- The weather is great here in Chennai, India - course winter here is just "Not Summer"
# - Just a lil bit more effort and the blog's new theme should be set. Check it out: http://a.livelymind.in/blog/ #
- Am considering using google adsense on the blog... #
Great quote by Dr. Suess that was in October Special’s header
There was this great quote from Dr. Suess in the October Special theme's header...
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” - Dr. Suess
Twitter Updates for 2007-12-22
- Learnt that Snitter also consumes memory like there's no tomorrow... might be an Adobe AIR apps thing though - a general flaw #
- Yay! My twitter updates now go up on the blog too! #
- heading to the airport - flying from mumbai to chennai this evening - lets see how late the flight gets #
- great - i just finished typing that and JetAirways texts me to say that the flight is leaving 20 minutes late #
Changes
Lots of change going on lately, in personal life and on this blog...
After over a year using the October Special theme for Wordpress (Great theme by Derek Punsalan), I've started changing things around on this blog. The new theme is called Garden 3.0.
The nav menu is sitting over the search form, so guess there's some debugging to be done.
Also, rather than use the standard photo/image that came with this theme, I decided to use a panoramic shot of New York City at night, taken and stitched together by Ryan McGinnis. You can see his photostream here.
India’s economic growth also leads to significant growth in paper consumption
There's an article on The Economic Times from a couple of days ago that talks about how paper consumption in India is contributing significantly to the 12% growth rate in the manufacturing sectors.
Paper consumption set to double by 2015-Indicators-Economy-News-The Economic Times
Consumption of paper in India is set to double from the current 7 million tonnes per annum in the next eight years, according to Indian Paper Manufacturers Association (IPMA).
I'm concerned to see that while there have been so many initiatives to reduce paper consumption around the world (and encourage re-use through recycling), India is expected to double its consumption in the next 8 years. Here's to hoping that the paper industry also considers the environmental impact of such actions and plans for a renewable means of sourcing raw materials (wood pulp, chemicals, etc.).
Powered by ScribeFire.
Gokul’s question on the legality of 3pcc VoIP calls in India
I missed this earlier, Gokul had a question up on his blog asking:
Basically, let’s say that I have a Soft PBX making calls to two mobile endpoints and then connecting them ( A typical 3pcc call). Is this legal in India? The reasoning behind banning the VoIP termination on TDM was that the existing licensed vendors were loosing out which would make sense in this case as well. So is there a legal section that bans this as well?
I think the legality of the calls depend on where and how the Soft PBX hooks into the PSTN/GSM/CDMA world. If the Soft PBX has one gateway each in two different cities/zones (or circle in Indian telecom parlance) and establishes a call connecting the two mobile endpoints across these gateways then it would definitely be illegal. If its in the same circle and the connections are being made through a sufficiently legitimate method like an E1 from a particular operator instead of using a GSM VoIP Gateway with slots for SIMs, then there would probably be enough of a gray area for it to be argued as legal.
Either way, the service isn't gonna be free - the thing about voice is someone has to pay for the call. In this case its the guys providing this Soft PBX service who would have to establish two outgoing calls to connect the two endpoints - that alone might make such a service unviable in India unless they negotiate heavily for minutes.
Technorati Tags: VoIP in India, Soft PBX, 3pcc
Discovery Channel more popular in India than MTV!
The latest ratings by TAM Media Research on TV viewership in India shows some of great trends:
- Discovery Channel is the highest rated English language channel with a viewership of 13%... MTV is a distant 3rd.
- 60% of men watching TV watch Discovery Channel
- News channels, with all of them regurgitating the same news couldn't cross 5% each.
The Economic Times has an article about these results that I've quoted from below but these guys miss a few things:
- I have rarely seen ANY English content on MTV India - so does it qualify as an English channel???
- There's no analysis on the news channels' viewership except to say that "affluent Indians" seem to prefer watching an English movie to watching the news.
- TAM - what does it expand to/mean??? Indians have this tendency to create acronyms and then assume the whole world knows about them! TAM expands to "Television Audience Measurement".
Discovery topped the share with 13 per cent in the first half year against eight per cent last year, followed by Star Movies and MTV at 12 per cent each.English news viewership lagged far behind infotainment with channels like NDTV 24X7, CNN IBN and Times Now managing a share of just about 5 per cent each.
There's the usual plug in the article to the Internet posing a major challenge to TV viewership.
Technorati Tags: TV in India, Discovery Channel, MTV India
6 million new Internet users in India in 2006-2007 but broadband growth rates are stalling
Its 2007, the "Year of Broadband" in India, but broadband growth rates are stalling! The dream was for 9 Million broadband (>=256kbps) subscribers by year end.
However the latest numbers show the number of subscribers at just 2.46 Million and the growth rate in May dropped to 0.04 million from 0.13 million in the previous month. See here for more details and how Indian operators believe that launching IPTV service will get 80 - 90% of subscribers adding this service.
Here's the article about the survey numbers on number of Internet users in India:
India added 6 million Internet users last year, survey finds - livemint
India had 30 million internet users in April, six million more than it had a year ago, according to a survey released on Friday, and 20 million of these users are on the Net daily. These are the findings of Juxt Consult Pvt. Ltd, a Delhi-based Internet research firm.
Another great one from this article:
Interestingly, the survey found that the Internet users who accessed the Net from home spent more time surfing the Net than watching television, reading newspapers or listening to radio.
I expected that one! Remember, most internet subscribers in India browse the Net through cyber cafes such as Sify's iWay and Reliance's WebWorld or at the office. Only BSNL's nationwide expansion project for DSL service can cause a resurgence in growth rates. And nothing beats providing rural connectivity for broadband - the dream and goal is broadband connectivity in every single one of the 600k villages in India by 2012.
Technorati Tags: IPTV, Broadband in India, TelcoTV
TRAI makes the case for femtocells and GSM phones with WiFi support
The TRAI has figured out something that I felt was obvious, that 60% of all calls on mobile phones are made when the caller or the called person is inside a building.
The Hindu Business Line : Mobile phone calls within buildings account for 60%
According to estimates made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), about 60 per cent of all mobile phone calls are actually originating or terminating when the subscribers are indoors within buildings such as offices, homes or hotels.
What does this mean for 3G? While 2G GSM coverage is hard to establish indoors without placing indoor antennas and/or repeaters, 3G's indoor coverage would only really be possible if there were pico and femto-cells. So what this estimate of TRAI's boils down to is that there is a recommendation for operators to adopt pico/femto cell architectures as well as investigate WiFi as an alternate means of providing indoor coverage.
Technorati Tags: TRAI, Telecom, 3G, femtocell, picocell
Indian bloggers most active in APAC says The Hindu
The Hindu has an article up regarding statistics on blogging in India vs the rest of APAC. What interested me the most was this nugget:
The Hindu Business Line : Indians blog to motivate others: Survey
While Australians blog to keep in touch with friends, Chinese to share knowledge skills and store important information, Indians blog to motivate other people to action and make money.
Another one:
More than half of Indian blog readers have been influenced by blogs in
experiencing a brand or service; the highest across all markets.
Technorati Tags: blogging in India, Internet, India, APAC
Telecom Professionals Group June 2007 meeting
The second meeting of the newly formed (i.e. May 2007) Telecom Professionals Group was held on Friday (June 22, 2007) at Park Sheraton in Chennai. Gokul has documented the minutes of meeting here.
Outside the official agenda of administrative issues with organizing the group, discussion topics were quite varied, a lot of discussions centered around VoIP and SIP - I even joked that the group is quite VoIP heavy
Chandra wanted to make sure he was photographed! So here is a photo of the 7 who attended:
From left: Chandra, Mahesh, me, Sharma, Venkat, Gokul and Vivek 
Technorati tags: telecom, Telecom Professionals Group
AT&T decides to wait for and invest in LTE
I shared this news item on my link blog earlier today:
Looks like AT&T is going to sit out the WiMAX deployment cycle and wait for Long Term Evolution (LTE) - the 4G equivalent of GSM. Engadget is linking to an article about this in Wireless Week and connecting this to the Sprint story on plans to reduce their WiMAX investment requirements by possibly partnering with other operators (read Clearwire) that are also deploying.
Good luck to AT&T subscribers who aren't seeing much of an improvement in service speeds for their HSPA network! See the Engadget article's comments for complaints about HSDPA service.
Engadget article: AT&T looks beyond WiMAX, headed for LTE
What is LTE?
Technorati Tags: AT&T Wireless, WiMAX, LTE, Sprint
Girls with a gadget craze – the new India!
Girls with as much (or more) of a passion for gadgets than guys in Surat, Gujarat (the diamond capital of India). Reading this article in the Economic Times today was really amusing... this is the new India!
So what has triggered this passion for gizmos among girls? While some opine that it's just a way of flaunting your latest possession, others believe high level of exposure could be the catalyst. Says Pooja Shah, 28, a resident of City Light Area, "Media, today, has become a window to the changing trends outside the city."
Technorati Tags: gadgets, India, surat