http://www.watblog.com The Refreshing Blog on Web, Advertising and Technology in India! Fri, 16 May 2008 12:08:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Love Story 2050, Harman Baweja’s new movie is out for release. I just happened to be looking for details of the movie and landed on its Wikipedia Page.  What I saw was quite shocking. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and someone seems to have tampered with Love Story’s Wikipedia page ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/watblog-spots-harman-baweja-and-love-story-2050-attacked-on-wikipedia/ We blogged (2 weeks back) about Google Translate now being available in Hindi. Well you can add more languages to that list. 9 more languages are now being available courtesy Google. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.  In more language updates, Facebook has also just launched its ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/google-facebook-and-the-language-revolution/ When Facebook launched its advertising platform last year, there were a few issues  - ordinary members could create ‘Fan Pages’. So fans started creating pages around their favourite brands.  But there was a problem – when advertisers want to advertise with Facebook, they are requested to 1st create a fan page and ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/users-get-banned-for-creating-branded-pages-on-facebook-some-recommendations-for-orkut-groups/ Well we had termed the blog by Amitabh as a marketing gimmick by BigAdda and though amitabh had refuted claims that he was being paid for the same an article today in ET states that Amitabh Bachchan is reportedly paid Rs.100 crores to blog on BigAdda! And though some may ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/amitabh-bachchan-paid-100-crore-to-blog-bitch-about-shahrukh-create-controversy/ Madhusudan Mandyam has been appointed chief executive officer of Virgin Mobile India. Virgin hopes to capture 10% of the Indian Mobile Telecommunications Market. See what Mr. Mandyam thinks about how Virgin can do it and also see how Richard Branson sees this as a part of the overall strategy HERE.    In other ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/industry-movements-interaction-appoints-new-national-director-virgin-mobile-gets-a-new-ceo/ A few days back we wrote about Google’s Friend Connect and how it had partnered with Facebook to create what seemed to be like a happy marriage. Everyone was raving about the Internet becoming more Social – it still is anyway with networks opening themselves up and carrying information elsewhere.  How many ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/facebook-calls-it-off-with-google-it-will-not-participate-in-%e2%80%98friend-connect%e2%80%99-citing-privacy-concerns/ We had blogged about the impending launch of Web18's horizontal portal yesterday and now Its already been launched (thanks to anand and dinesh our readers for commenting and letting us know)   Its a two alphabet domain and one of our readers commented that it cost them 2 crores! I wont be ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/16/incom-is-web18s-horizontal-portal-incom-supposedly-cost-them-2-crores/ WATShow, this week caught up with Jaspreet Bidra, MSN India’s country manager and asked him about the portal’s obsession with Bollywood (some good insights with respect to Content Strategies). We also quizzed him on MSN adCenter. He speaks at great length about advertising models and the overarching philosophy of Digital ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/exclusive-watshow-with-jaspreet-bindra-country-manager-msn-india-on-bollywood-centric-content-and-msn-adcenter/ Yahoo! India has just announced it’s new search marketing platform, which has a few augmentations with respect to search marketing when compared to Google. They also have a few innovations on the front end, which will no doubt help advertisers track their advertising better and also deliver better, more relevant messages. ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/yahoo-launches-new-search-marketing-platform-special-emphasis-on-small-businesses-in-india/ As per Microsoft's posted timetable, it will show the exit door to its very popular Windows XP operating system.     This is despite Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's last month's widely-reported speech where he said that the company might reconsider the decision to end retail and large computer-maker availability of XP on June ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/microsoft-windows-xp-to-be-hanged-till-death-on-june-30-2008/ According to this article in The Hindu Business Line Shyam Telelink has been allocated the spectrum to start CDMA service in Maharashtra. Shyam Telelink is partly owned by Russian conglomerate Sistema.   Shyam already has the spectrum for the following 12 circles : Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh (East) ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/shyam-telelink-gets-cdma-spectrum-for-maharshtra-and-kerela-circle/ While this may not seem like great news to many of you – it did get me quite excited. I have always maintained that setting up a Wi Fi Mesh is not too difficult if the topography is not too varied and the Line of Sight is clear because equipment ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/indian-university-implements-wi-%e2%80%93-fi-mesh-to-form-the-country%e2%80%99s-largest-wi-%e2%80%93-fi-network-which-is-still-quite-small-more-on-wireless-mesh-networking/ Nimbuzz, a relatively unknown Dutch company that claims to have got funding from Mangrove Partners, the original investors of Skype has launched an all-in-one solution for free mobile VoIP calling, conference calling, instant messaging, chat and group chat, and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/nimbuzz-launches-mobile-voip-integrated-with-im/ Web18 Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd, the Internet arm of Network18 Media and Investments Ltd is set to launch a horizontal portal, said two people familiar with the development (according to Livemint).   A horizontal portal refers to an Internet portal site that offers a broad range of content and services. Exampels could ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/15/web18-to-launch-horizintal-portal-this-month/ David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect as plumbing for the rest of the web. Website owners will be able to use the hosted application to allow interactions with visitors from social-networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut, by copying and pasting snippets of code into their site. "The web ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/14/google-intends-to-flip-the-meaning-of-social-%e2%80%93-social-everywhere-but-beware/ Vivek Pahwa known for his less than 10 million sale of Desimartini to HTMedia has come up with another startup this time in the car space with Gaadi.com. This should be the 4th web startup that vivek seems to be involved with given that he has angel funded antya.com a ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/14/vivek-pahwa-of-desimartini-fame-launches-gaadicom-a-car-research-portal/ ‘Buzz Targeting’ is a product by Google that uses an algorithm to find videos that are likely to ‘Go Viral’. Videos could go viral due to a variety of means such as email, IM, bookmarking, social networks, blogs etc – due to the ‘transportable’ nature of YouTube’s videos.  So it’s not clear ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/14/youtube-introduces-%e2%80%98buzz-targeting%e2%80%99/ Facebook has announced support for chat via Jabber and XMPP. These are two of the primary standards for instant messaging protocol on the web. The new format will enable developers to integrate chat within their applications both internally and externally to Facebook. This update will also enable developers to update a user’s status via ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/14/facebook-to-launch-jabberxmpp-support-for-chat/ Bharti Airtel yesterday said that it is holding discussions with South African telecom company MTN Group that are aimed at "combining the strengths of the two leading emerging markets players and, accordingly, is veering towards possible structures to achieve this objective", Business Standard reports.  The company also made it clear in a ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/14/updates-on-bharti-%e2%80%93-mtn-deal-bharti-now-eyes-merger-option/ In a previous post, I had blogged on sneak-peek of Mobile Firefox prototype user interface where I had mentioned Opera Mini which is by peoples’ choice: world’s favorite mobile Web browser.   Today, Opera Mini graduated to release 4.1 & again the folks at Opera Mini have done a good job in ... http://www.watblog.com/2008/05/13/out-now-opera-mini-41-fast-furious/