Friday, March 27, 2009
USB 3.0
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Rajnikanth to star in Shankar's 'Robot'
The Britain-based Ayngran International, which has distributed more than 1,500 Indian films, and Eros Multimedia, distributors of films like 'Munnabhai MBBS',will produce the film. It will see the sure-fire combination of Rajnikanth and A.R. Rahman with Shankar.
The film will be in three languages, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. Speculation was that Shah Rukh Khan would play the lead role but now producers have confirmed it will be Rajnikanth, south India's darling.
The cast and crew is being finalised, a release from the producers said here Monday.
Director Shankar has been dreaming of making 'Robot' for a long time, with a big budget.
'Robot will be the grandest and most entertaining film ever made in Indian cinema and be produced in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi and be a high-tech film with the use of the state-of-the-art technology,' the release said.
Friday, February 27, 2009
World’s richest cricket body, BCCI, launches their website
Can you believe the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) did not have a website till now? In Nov 2007 BCCI invited bids for building their website,
Under this ITT (invitation to tender), the wining bidder will be required to perform the functions of designing, developing, hosting and operating the bets of breed web portal,’ Secretary Niranjan Shah said in the tender notice being published in newspapers.
The bid document can be acquired at a non-refundable and non-adjustable amount of Rs.500,000 from the BCCI headquarters at the Wankhede Stadium here from Thursday.
‘The project scope includes (but is not limited to):
- Exploiting existing content to create packages for driving subscription revenues,
- Creating new content,
- Hosting, production and ongoing operations of the portal,
- Generating traffic, users and revenues to the site,
- Maintaining the books of accounts and providing detailed information regarding all the revenues whenever requested by the BCCI management,’ says the tender notice.
The bidding price was approximately $50m for 3 years. “Experts” had estimated a revenue potential of $15m a year from the portal. One of the articles stated “None of the big boys - Reliance, Tata..were interested”. Finally Global Cricket Ventures (I could not find their URL, at least not easily) won the tender to build the website.
Looks like they have great plans and know what needs to go on website. But what about the domainname? bcci.tv !! What were they thinking? BCCI is the richest sports body in India and possibly one of the richest in the world. Could they not afford to buy bcci.com or bcci.in - both are parked domains.
I subscribed to their mailing list. It is smooth mainly because the mailing list part has been outsourced (to mailchimp.com). But were you aware BCCI is “D”ubai based 
? Well that is what you see on the confirmation pages of mailing list,
The look and feel of the site is simple and clean. I think it will please the readers. The mobile part seems to be completely missing. Reports say that the site has many errors (wrong links etc). I think that was very much avoidable but you can get away in the online world by saying it is “Beta” version
Kudos to Govt
Recently British Prime Minister Gordon Brown [Video] suggested that Sachin Tendulkar might soon be honoured with knighthood, making him the first Indian player to receive the title. That very night all TV channels went gungho about calling India’s favorite cricketer “Sir Sachin Tendulkar”. One of the topics of discussion was “Should India award its civilian awards to foreigners?” It was interesting to see what a British journalist had to say. He doubted if any of our Padmashree awards would have any value in UK. At the same time he said very few Britishers cared about the “Sir” title. Most Indians were not in favor of the govt waiving the import duty on his Ferrari car, he could easily afford to pay the tax.
I guess the Indian government was caught off guard, to avoid any embarrassment they quickly awarded the prestigious Padma Vibhushan to Sachin. Good to see other deserving people from sports being recognized by the Govt (Vishwanathan Anand).
Karnataka’s favorite icon, Mr. Narayana Murthy, too was included in the list. Hmm..he should check out the Rashtrapati Bhavan when he goes to receive the award. After all, isn’t that awesome building his next home
What is 3G? Does India need it?
Current WAP speed in India is nothing great but it has improved. I understand from my friends who are experts in telecom that you cannot improve the speed performance of WAP any further on a GSM network (which is 2G). I am told only 3G can improve things. So what is 3G?
Ex-Telecom Minister Dayanadi Maran was in the verge of releasing the 3G guidelines in India but he was shown the door. After the new Telecom Minister took over there was some talk about India going with 2.5G, which enables high-speed data transfer over upgraded existing 2G networks.
The GSM and CDMA networks are classed as second generation while the defunct analogue network was the first of the mobile network generations.
3G, or third generation, is the generic term used for the next generation of mobile communications systems. The new systems will enhance the services available today and offer multimedia and internet access and the ability to view video footage.
With a 3G phone and access to the 3G network you can send and receive video calls, watch live TV, access the internet, receive emails and download music tracks, as well as the usual voice call and messaging services found on a mobile phone.
Technically, the main difference between 3G and 2G networks is how quickly data can be sent and received. 3G networks can send data up to 40 times the rates of earlier digital networks, which means that in addition to audio, graphics and text, 3G customers can also send and receive video content, in 3G coverage areas. They provide service at 5-10 Mb per second.
3G was introduced in the United States early in 2002. By late 2004, it was finally providing transmission speeds sufficient to handle full-motion video, albeit over short periods of time (15 seconds to three minutes, in most cases). The third generation technology used in the UK is called UMTS. These services operate at 2100 MHz. (2.1GHz).
Upgrading to 3G will be an expensive affair for all telcos. All telco hardware vendors would have another reason to drool in India!
While we are still not sure when India will get 3G, the technology has already moved on to “beyond 3G” or “4G”. A 4G system will be able to provide a comprehensive IP solution where voice, data and streamed multimedia can be given to users on an “Anytime, Anywhere” basis, and at higher data rates than previous generations.
For any telco to offer 3G the government has to allocate the spectrum. Allocation of spectrum is becoming a mess but ultimately it will be solved (after all it cannot be more complex than pleasing the Left in the govt!!).
I personally believe mobile users in India will have a far better experience after 3G becomes a reality.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Windows 7 MinWin - New Microsoft OS to have less system bloat?
Eric Traut, one of the head Operating System designers at Microsoft, recently demonstrated MinWin, an internal build of Windows 7 at the University of Illinois. The main talking point of the early demo was the fact that MinWin is far less demanding on your RAM and hard drive space, thus reducing the memory footprint of the future Windows OS.
ComputerWorld report Traut as saying:
“A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system, and that may be a fair characterization, I have to admit.”
“[So] we created what we call MinWin. It’s still bigger than I’d like it to be, but we’ve taken a shot at really stripping out all of the layers above and making sure that we had a clean architectural layer there.”
Comparing it to the current Windows operating system really shows how much Microsoft have tried to reduce the bloat. While Vista uses 5,000 files for its 4GB core, MinWin is just 100 files and takes up only 25MB.
Obviously this will be scaled up considerably over the next three years as Windows 7 is built around the system core. MinWin will be used as the basis of all upcoming versions of Windows, and the fact that Microsoft have seemingly put so much effort in to minimising the size and scale of the stripped down version, I’m quite hopeful this mindset will be followed through to the final products.
With the increasing popularity of Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu, it’s imperative for Microsoft to try and give consumers what they want. As far as I can tell, that is a core operating system which while offering ease of use doesn’t force people to put up with the system bloat of programs and tools they may never use. Is this too much to expect when Windows 7 gets released in 2010?
You can see a video of the MinWin kernel on the University of Illinois video download site.
GDrive is Here
Online storage companies beware: this is judgment day. It’s long been rumored that Google would eventually offer an online storage cloud for all your data, and now that fable is becoming a reality: the increase in Gmail storage for some users today was actually a precursor to the launch of Google shared storage.
The new storage service brings together your storage usage from Gmail and Picasa Web Albums, allowing you to upgrade for a fee. The fees are as follows, with payments made via Google Checkout:
-6 GB ($20.00 per year)
-25 GB ($75.00 per year)
-100 GB ($250.00 per year)
-250 GB ($500.00 per year)
Google Documents will most likely be the next Google service to become part of shared storage, while premium accounts like the one on Picasa are being replaced with this new system. It’s a move that takes the sheen off Microsoft’s SkyDrive, which is gaining coverage today. Meanwhile, we can surely expect Google to open the APIs on Google storage, making for a flexible storage solution that challenges Amazon S3, plus all the smaller startups.
May I remind you of the following GoogleZon video, created in November 2004: despite a few mistakes, its vision of a Google cloud storing your entire life is becoming more true by the day.
