India Magazine

Reliance Communications yesterday launched two new 20 paisa per minute on-net promotional offers for all its GSM and CDMA subscribers.

With a Rs 27 recharge Reliance subscriber can call any local reliance phone at 20 paisa per minute for 30 days. Similarly both STD and local calls at 20 paisa per minute to Reliance numbers with Rs 77 recharge with a validity of 30 days.

Indian Telecom Industry is becoming more and more competitive as mobile service providers are coming up with more attractive tariff plans every day for their survival.

As per the data released this week Idea displaced BSNL in Nov 09 and now is third largest GSM provider in India. Bharti Airtel and Vodaphone are in the first and second position respectively.

After the success of Simply Reliance Plans, Reliance also trying to woo more customers with attractive tariff plans with this new offer.

Telecom, mobile phone 20 Paisa Offer, Reliance, Reliance Offer, Reliance Prepaid

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released it’s Nov 2009 telecom subscription data. Indian Telecom Industry reported a 3.3% month-to-month growth in Nov 09.

• 54.3 crore people in India with a Telephone connection
• Tele-density at 46.32
• 1.76 new wireless connections in Nov 09
• Broadband Subscription at 75.5 lakhs

Indian Telecom Industry in India has reported robust growth in 2009 despite global economic slowdown thanks to the affordable tariff options and attractive offers from different mobile service providers.

16.9 crore new phone connections have been added in last 12 months period – a 45.19% growth. Wireless segment reported 50.57% growth in the period but Wireline connections decreased by 2.34% in the period a major setback to BSNL and MTNL which holds majority of Wireline connections in India.

Aircel, Tata Teleservices and Idea reported highest growth in the last 12 months period.

In Nov 2009 Tata Teleservices added more number of connections (18.84%) followed by Bharti Airtel (15.85), Vodaphone (15.74%) and Reliance Communications (15.7%)  a clear signal that subscribers are more inclined to attractive tariff plans.

Reliance made a major improvement in Nov 09 (15.7%) compared to Oct 09 (12.56%) due to the Simply Reliance attractive tariff structure. BSNL also advanced in Nov 09 may be due to the introduction of its 3G services in some cities.

One thing is very clear from last few months data – customers are looking for attractive tariff plans and cheap call rates, they cannot be fooled with just some simple freebies like extra talk time or an extended validity offer. December month data may give more clear picture as Uninor started its operation in India in Dec 09 with a very simple packages with lowest call rates.

Prior to Tata Docomo’s entry Mobile service providers in India were attracting customers with simple freebies like talk time offers, extended validity, cheap calls to same provider numbers, low night talktime etc while holding the actual call rates at very high levels.

But that things are the past. Now customers have so many options. Customer is the King now. Providers have to come down to earth to survive in this highly competitive telecom market in the world.

Telecom, mobile phone Aircel, Airtel, BSNL, Idea, Reliance, Tariff War, Telecom Industry, vodaphone

Similar to Twitter, world’ most popular video sharing site Youtube announced its own URL shortening service – youtu.be.

URL Shortening, a service popularized by micro-blogging site twitter.com is a technique to reduce the length of the URL to make it simple.

For eg a lengthy URL like http://www.zonshare.com/magazine/2009/12/speed-up-your-windows-with-readyboost/ can be converted to http://bit.ly/5wxp7h.

To use the new youtu.be service simply replace the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= with http://youtu.be/ .

For eg after converting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14swhcMkMqA will become http://youtu.be/14swhcMkMqA.

Unlike popular URL shortening service sites like bit.ly and tinyurl.com, youtu.be will work only with youtube.com urls.

Internet, Technology Twitter, url shortening, video sharing, youtube, yutu.be

Is Google the most preferred Internet brand in India ? It seems like that as Google services are dominating in India by more percentage compared to its worldwide levels.

Google is the undisputed leader in Search Engine world but in India Google’s market share is more compared to other major countries.

Similarly in Social Networking Indians prefer Orkut, but internationally it is dominated by Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc.

Now the latest trend is Google Chrome (google’s own browser) is gaining popularity among Indians.

As per the statistics by statcounter.com 11.32% of its users from India used Google chrome to browse the web in December 2009, compared to 5.3% worldwide.

Both in India and worldwide Internet Explorer is still the leader in Browser Space but it lost  17.8% market share in last 12 months.

Firefox is still growing in India and Internationally and registered a 27% year to year growth.

Source: StatCounterStats – Browser Market Share in India

Google Chrome reported massive growth last year – 338% growth worldwide and 189% in India.

Another major change happened in Dec 09 in browser space is Firefox 3.5 surpassed all major browser versions including long dominated IE versions and reached World’s Most Popular Browser position, a major achievement for Firefox and Mozilla.

In operating system section still Windows XP leads with 65% market share, but down 11 points in 1 year period.

In last 2 months Windows 7 doubled its market share and gaining momentum.

In Mobile Browser section Opera Browser is leading followed by iPhone Browser and Nokia Browser, obviously due to the popularity of Apple iPhone and smarphones from Nokia.

In the Mobie Operating System space SymbionOS and iPhone OS are far ahead compared to RIM, Sony Ericsson and other mobile operating systems.

For full details about Operating System, Browser, Mobile OS, Mobile Browser, Search engine, Mobile Search and Mobile/Desktop Comparison visit http://gs.statcounter.com/

Internet Browser, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer

What is Readyboost ?

Readyboost is a component in Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 which helps to configure a USB 2.0 flash drive, SD Card, Compact Flash or similar kind of USB drives to store system cache.

One way to improve your system performance is to add more system memory (RAM). But it is costly and in some Motherboards only 2 RAM slots will be available and if both are full then you can only replace the existing ones plus you need a hardware engineer’s help.

Even though Readyboost cannot guarantee same performance of a system SD/DDR RAM it can significantly improve your system performance especially if your system memory is too small.

To configure Readyboost you need a USB 2.0 compatible flash drive or minimum 256MB with a reading speed of 2.5MB/s and writing speed of 1.75MB/s.

In Windows Vista 32 bit the maximum capacity is limited to 3.5GB and in 64 bit version it is 16GB.

Windows 7 supports up to 8 Readyboost devices and a maximum of 256GB.

How to configure Readyboost ?

To configure Readyboost just insert your Pen drive/flash drive, right click on it and go to properties. Now click on the readyboost tab. It will show 3 options – Do no use this device, Dedicate this device to readyboost and Use this device.

If your flash drive is formatted to FAT32 then Windows will show you only 4GB as available space to readyboost due to file system limitations. If your drive is more that 4GB and want to configure for full space then reformat your drive to NTFS.

Some old flash drives may not meet Windows minimum requirements so Windows will display an error message saying that it cannot be configured for Readyboost.

Just select your required limit and click on Apply button to start using Readyboost.

Performance

If your system has enough system memory like 4GB then you may not see any significant improvement in overall working but Readyboost will show major improvement in system performance if your system memory is too small like 1GB or 512KB.

Hardware, Software RAM, Readyboost, System Performance, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista

World’s most favorite blogging software WordPress even got better with its new version (2.9) released yesterday. Undoubtedly WordPress is a leader in blogging software as it offers so many features compared to other popular blogging softwares and sites.

The latest version (2.9) of self-hosted WordPress (wordpress.org) is now available for download at wordpress.org. These are the new features included in this version.

1. Built-in Image Editor

Finally now WordPress comes with Image Editor. You can crop, rotate, flip and scale your images online without leaving the wordpress control panel with few clicks. This feature will be very useful for the people who regularly include a pictures from other sites. In normal case you have to download the picture, edit it and upload it. But now you can do all basic image editing inside WordPress itself.

To open the image editor click on the media link in WordPress Dashboard, click on edit link near to the image and then click on the Edit Image button.

In the Image Editor you can crop the image, rotate left or right, flip vertically and horizontally and scale image to a particular size. Also you can Undo and Redo your actions.

2. Easy Video Embed with oEmbed

In WordPress 2.9 you can embed a video by just pasting the one line video URL, rest things WordPress will take care.

For eg if you want to insert a video from Youtube then you have to just copy and paste the Youtube URL(youtube.com/watch?v=xxx) – no need to copy the entire embed code. With the help oEmbed API, WordPress will get full details about the video like height, weight, original url, author, provide etc.

3. Batch Plugin update

With this new feature you can update up to 10 plugins at once and with the new plugin compatibility check feature you can find out the compatibility of a plugin with latest wordpress releases.

5. Global Undo

Now with WordPress 2.9 you can Undo a delete and bring back a deleted post or comment from the trash so no need to worry about accidental delete.

These are some major features included with WordPress 2.9 in user point of view. Apart from these WordPress team included many internal technical features and bugs correction with this this latest release.

If you love Worpress then you will definitely like these features too. As per the WordPress blog features like Image Editor are just a beginning of a new wave so we can expect lot more from the undisputed leader in blogging software.

Internet, Software Blog, Blogging, Blogging Software, Wordpress, Wordpress 2.9