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Showing posts from 2008

In recession – Cut Costs: Microsoft India Shows How

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The one thing i keep hearing everyday is cost cutting that is going on everywhere. Layoffs are more drastic of these cost cutting measures. Our company has also done its own bit of cost cutting (without firing anyone yet!).. Microsoft India has launched a website - http://www.controlcosts.com/ that can help enterprises cut costs. The site showcases prominent Indian business leaders at the site. To start, you just choose the scenario that you think is creating cost bloat in your organisation and the site will recommend tools and technologies that will help you streamline that process. At the site you can also pre—order the CFO toolkit that contains 10 ways to control costs. In addition, the site features a bunch of case studies from customers who have experienced cost savings. If one wanted to setup a discussion on cutting cost with an expert within Microsoft, they can do the same at the site. In the current times, this is an excellent move by Microsoft to help the customers

Microsoft launches Answers website in BETA

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Consumers worldwide now have another way of seeking help from peers. Microsoft has today launched Microsoft Answers BETA: http://answers.microsoft.com/windows for providing community support for Windows Vista. If you have an issue or want to learn a few things about Windows Vista, this may be your destination. Microsoft Answers Website is: · A rich, interactive community self-help experience moderated by Windows Vista support engineers. · One place for consumers to quickly and easily find Windows Vista support content from Microsoft and the community. · A site built with consumers in mind—from content to tone to aesthetic. Till The landscape for Windows community support has been dominated by 3rd party communities e.g. neowin, winsupersite. If you are in India, there is an option that you may want to explore. The community at www.merawindows.com has been active for more than 2 years and has an impressive base of over 6000 users. The forums are extremely active there and

Technocratical Society

In the past days, I haven’t been blogging. A lot has happened in that time – terrorist attack in Mumbai, MNS lost track, global recession set in and Congress advanced in the country. Here’s an ode to the state of the society as viewed by my nephew, Shantanu Chandra who is in Class XII, Amity International, Gurgaon. The lines below capture the times prevailing and the need for us to drop the “chalta hai” attitude but with caution: This techie world of gizmo and gadget This eerie feeling of incongruous widget Which gives us pleasure and takes pain Along with it makes us insane; Absurdness to such a horizon from where one would never fall And still people call you “Microsoft—…That’s all” A teen like me can’t do without a mobile-call Even though I know it is killing my brain cells, after all; This techie world of gizmo and gadget Makes a non-techie guy weird and hollow The bureaucrat are more concerned about their Sunday meal Than to serve the poor people whose w

Students in India Get all MS Development Tools for FREE!!

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One of the biggest grouse that I had heard from community was that MS development tools were very expensive for people in India. Specifically, students mentioned that it was impossible for them to get the products due to them being expensive. In the first step, Microsoft made available Express edition of the development tools freely available for everyone. And now, hold ur breadth, it is making the development tools (full editions) available for FREE for students. The products now being made available for FREE are: Operating System: Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition Development IDE: Visual Studio 2005/2008 Professional Edition XNA Game Studio 2.0 and 12-month trial academic subscription to the XNA Creators Club Designer Tools: Expression Studio 2 (includes Web, Blend, Media and Design), Database: SQL Server 2005 Express, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, What is great is that Microsoft is making available the entire stack from Operating System to devel

Watch Bill Gates talk about innovation in India

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  Bill Gates, the prodigious Founder & Chairman of Microsoft is in India. Tomorrow he is going to be talking about the innovation opportunities in India and how Microsoft is going to be supporting the same.. the talk is scheduled to be in IIT Delhi from 2:00 PM… I am going to be attending the event. I have clicked a photo of my exclusive pass here :).. BTW, if u were a member of Delhi Bloggers you could have had an opportunity to attend this as well… If you are not attending the event live, you needn’t miss out on the fun. The event will be broadcast live. You can watch with me as he speaks (over webcast). Simply click on my pass image to register and watch starting 2:00 PM tomorrow…. When Bill Gates talks, he talks BIG… I am sure that I would have a lot to share after the event. So keep watching this space. Technorati Tags: bill gates , india

Teaching Kids to Code: BASIC Reloaded

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What it the first programming language you learnt? If you are my age, chances are your first programming language was GW BASIC that you learnt in class 5. But I soon learnt that to do anything serious I had to learn Pascal or Cobol. Microsoft is now reviving the old magic with new technology fuelling the programming paradigm. They have announced – “Small Basic”. This programming language that comes with its own development studio is placed as the first programming language that is easy to learn and uses only only 15 keywords. However, the technology behind it is state of the art .NET framework 3.5. The development environment is simple but has friendly features like Intellisense and context sensitive help. The language and development tools are available for FREE: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx The tools are supported by forums and a team blog . To get the kids started you have a “ Get Started Guide ” too that can simply be printed and shared with stud

IndiMMS: The New Voice in Town

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After being a blogger for a long time, I have additionally decided to venture out in the podcasting field. I am happy to announce that I am launching a new podcast series called “IndiMMS Kand”.. the podcast is proposed to be weekly and should be around 10 mins long.. If you wanted to bookmark the site where the podcast will be available, it is: http://www.indimms.com/ The preferred mode of listening to podcasts is through podcast catchers. And they need to be fed the RSS URL: http://feeds.indimms.com/indimms You can find the inaugural podcast right here. Take a shot at listening to the inaugural episode (only ~3 mins)…   In this podcast, we cover: The things we plan to be covering in the podcast The naming of the podcast & The inspiration for doing this podcast Since this is just the beginning, I know that i may fall short of the quality that i wish to achieve. I promise to get better with time. Your feedback and comments on what u would like to see in the podcast o

Community Tools for Microsoft Developers

Microsoft Technology Developers constitute one of the largest technical communities in the world. A significant number of these communities are hosted by external parties other than Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft itself hosts a number of these communities. Recently, I was invited to deliver a session on community tools that Microsoft developers can benefit from at Delhi User Group . I took sometime looking up these communities and was astounded by the sheer numbers of these Microsoft hosted communities. While I made all efforts to include the ones i could find, I am sure that i may have left quite a bit of them as well. If you know of something that i may have left, please leave a comment here for everyone’s benefit. I haven’t covered the 3rd party communities in the presentation below. Also, the most obvious resource for technical info on MS technologies – MSDN & Technet have been left out. If you are someone working with Microsoft technologies, spend a minute looking a

Live Maps comes to India

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Live Maps from Microsoft is a good product.. and till now it was only good in US.. Microsoft has finally made Live Maps available for India (news via LiveSide.net ).. it is still not comprehensive for small cities in India and only has Street Maps for 9 major Indian cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur. I took the maps for a spin asking for directions from MG Road in Gurgaon to India Gate in Delhi. The result (seen below) are exactly the route that i would take. Amongst other features are Local Search, driving directions and business listings. The Live Maps seem good as a start but i need more time to verify the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the map data.. hope it meets my criteria :) Check out your city on Live Maps: http://mapindia.live.com and let us know what you feel about the search..

First Look on Zune 3.0

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Zune , the iPod rival, has released its version 3.0 .. the release further enhances the utility of the hardware available on the device.. Zune distinguishes itself from iPod by including FM tuner and WiFi ability at the same price as iPod.. the v3 release includes additional functionality for FM tuner and WiFi.. “Buy from FM” This feature lets you download the song that u hear on the radio of your Zune.. this download will happen the next time you sync your device.. i am not sure if this will work for Indian FM stations.. wud check this feature soon.. “Browse Zune Marketplace wirelessly” You can download music directly to your Zune from any wireless hotspot at home, at a café or wherever else.. earlier u cud only stream wireless music within ur home network.. if ur in US, you can wirelessly sync ur Zune at any McDonald's restaurants.. Games Zune 3.0 come preloaded with Texas hold 'em and Hexic. you can now play games on your Zune.. in addition, if u want to create new games fo

How to make your Windows Mobile speak Hindi

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You’ve seen numerous Windows Mobiles in the market from makers like Motorola, HTC, imate, Samsung (in fact only Nokia doesn’t have a Windows Mobile phone!!).. what you have NOT seen is the Windows Mobile displaying local Indian languages like Hindi.. watch these screenshots from my HP Windows Mobile phone:      Watch the day of the week in Hindi alongwith the name of the month. Even the appointments have the days mentioned in Hindi. So why hasn’t Windows Mobile been able to show Hindi fonts? While Windows Mobile supported Unicode, the core issue was the font engine in WM did not know (was not built) how to render complex characters. The reason why it was not done for WM, was that made the font engine heavy and OEMs didn’t want to increase memory footprint for that. Also, there were no fonts natively for Hindi on WM. All that changes with this application install that enables the following features. An inscript Hindi keyboard: Any WM application that supports Hindi fonts

Meeting the formidable Microsoft User Group Leaders

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“Microsoft community drives Microsoft products” – a statement that would make you roll with laughter, isn’t it? it did for me too till i attended the User Group Leads meet organised by Microsoft. it is here that i witnessed the seriousness with which the user group community goes about its job (i had earlier tweeted about this). User Groups is the life blood of the Microsoft communities (other community avenues include blogs, forums, webcasts and events) in India…  there are more than 40,000 known users spread across India in numerous professional user groups in various cities (there are another equal nos. in student user groups)… the bangalore user group can alone boast of more than 10,000 users (truly amazing)..  with more than 71 user group sessions in the last year alone, u can’t be far away from one happening in any large city of the country. The user group leads were a very attentive and enthusiastic bunch who met the MS folks with great deal of passion and feedback. the

Live Mesh Comes to India

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Live Mesh technical preview has expanded to include Canada, India and Ireland (English only). So what is Live Mesh you might wonder? Live Mesh is supposed to be a platform on which anyone would be able to build applications using the basic services of synchronization across the devices done over internet. Mesh, true to its name, will enable users to reach their information and applications irrespective of the machine they are currently working on (think entire Office running on any computer you log on without having to install app on every machine)… As of today, Live Mesh team has made only some of these experiences available. These experiences are: Files that automatically get syncronised on all the machines that run this program (sort of Foldershare) Online file storage (sort of Skydrive) Online group collaboration (sort of Groove ) Remote Desktop Viewing (sort of SharedView) The cool thing here is the seamless implementation of Software + Services. The clou

Independence Day

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Congratulations Countrymen! May peace and sense prevail..

How to report software piracy in India

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Software piracy is bane to all the software developers in the country and ultimately hurts the reputation of the country on the world stage. in order to establish ourselves as respected, India needs to tighten its laws & enforcement against software piracy. I have always believed that any law enforcement has to be done on a citizen - govt. partnership (see my trafficviolators.com initiative).. A citizen plays an equally important part in this education and enforcement. Microsoft has now enabled people to report its software piracy. If you are in India and observe any software piracy of Microsoft software  you have the option of reporting the same in the following ways: Method 1: E-mail piracy@microsoft.com . Method 2: Call the Microsoft Hotline  at 1800-111100  (from MTNL & BSNL landline) or 1800-1021100 (from Mobile and  Airtel)  Method 3: Fill out an online reporting form . More details are available here: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/howtotell/report

The dangers of joining the iphone party

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This post is thanks to the meeting with an iphone enthusiast over the weekend. Now this iphone enthusiast isn’t from India and has been using an iphone for some time alongwith his Mac. While checking out the cool interface of the iphone we casually started to compare the features of his iphone with the HTC Windows Mobile we were carrying. this is more relevant as airtel and vodaphone are planning to come out with iphone 3G soon in India (for airtel the launch is fixed on Aug 22nd)… while the pricing is not yet disclosed, i would assume that they may cost around 30K in India. and the irony is that in India there isn’t a single 3g network and the ones most likely to get are the govt. carriers like BSNL :) What follows below are some discoveries we made in that friendly comparison: iphone has cooler interface than Windows Mobile. Agree. One of us has tried to include a iphone shell (iPhonz) on Win Mobile but the quality of that shell was really bad and the phone had to be rebooted.. i

Book Review: Blogger – Beyond the Basics

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Blogging is easy – blogging right is difficult! A little help is always useful if you are planning to blog right.. The book “ Blogger – Beyond the Basics ” by Lee Jordan proved to be my bridge from blogging to blogging brilliantly .. The book is for users who have just entered the blogging field and would like to create a name for themselves in the blogosphere. The book quickly ramps you up from beginner to an advanced level user with ability to derive maximum out of your blog. This book is for those who want to use Google’s Blogging platform – Blogger . However, many tips in the book go beyond blogger and are generally useful for anyone. This is the first book that i have found in the market that covers blogging. Frankly I have also thought about writing a book on blogging but never went beyond the initial TOC. The key to blogging (as you may have heard) is content . Without appealing content, a blog will not get readers. This book is about getting the platform right so that

Microsoft India finds its leader

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Recently, Microsoft India lost its General Manager – Neelam Dhawan to HP. Now Microsoft India has found her successor in Rajan Anandan from Dell India. Rajan was until recently VP and Country GM for Dell India (appointed on May 17, 2006).. Recently it was reported that he had returned to US .. A brief profile of Rajan is available at: http://www.indianangelnetwork.com/memberprofile.aspx?id=29 and is reproduced below: Rajan Anandan is an active angel investor in the US and in India. Rajan focuses on early stage investments in education, clean technology, internet, software and healthcare. Rajan has invested in several IAN companies including Authorgen, Druvaa, Eurekha and Viedea. Rajan's professional career has spanned across high technology and management consulting. Most recently Rajan was the Vice President and Country General Manager of Dell in India where he grew the Dell business from $250million to over $800 million and made Dell into the leading player among corpo

Microsoft makes breakthrough in community software – Offline Forum Reader

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In this era, the importance of social media can’t be undermined. Forums are community avenues where people converge and discuss issues of relevance to them. Forums were preceded by BB software and newsgroups. India, however, jumped this technical cycle and moved directly to forums. The main advantage that forums presented to users was access using browser over internet and searchability. however, the drawback was that you have to be connected to internet to read the forums. Google acquired DejaNews that used to make newsgroup posts available over internet. There are a lot of forums in existence today and most likely you have been to one of them already. Microsoft for the first time has released a preview (CTP) of Offline Forum Reader for its MSDN/ TechNet Forums. This software is dependent on the APIs exposed by the forum and hence only works with the same. This combines the benefit that newsgroups provided of offline access with the traditional forum. Currently the beta s

Live Search Gets a New Face

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Today I went to http://search.live.com (BTW, for all my non-technology searches I use Live Search) and was surprised by the new look of the site. This is however only implemented for US.. Take a look here: It has a pleasing picture on the main screen. Not only that, when you casually move around your mouse, it shows interesting tits bits of information about the picture… very very NICE! NOTE: if you want this look too, click on the country name located on the right top of the page and select US (English)..   I think Live Search does a MUCH better job of searching images and videos. And yeah, i have used the cashback feature (that let’s you get back money on every purchase online) of Live Search. It has saved me some money and would save you too if you intend to go shopping online. Compare this to the standard Google page: This is outrightly boring :(.. Google searches are good for technology searches.. but in the rest (esp rich media), google lags behind!  

The new “old” Operating System from MS - Mojave

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Let’s get started – how do you rate Vista from (1 –10).. mostly people would say around 4.. and the loudest would say 0… or maybe even –1.. And now we present a new Operating System from MS called Mojave… What do you feel about it? most of you would be curious to know how it looks like and then move into what it can do? and this will be primarily driven by what do you use your PC for most of the time? what is likely to be your rating after you’ve seen this – around 8.. well i didn’t make this up! this is what researchers found out when they conducted interviews with people with the same methodology.. and guess what they were shown as Mojave – Windows Vista! Vista may not be getting the WOW it deserves primarily driven by perception issues…   and the good thing is that researchers documented their study at: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/ Get there to watch videos of people before and after they saw “Mojave”.. What do I gather from this: Many people gather their opin

Getting RunAs to work in Vista

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If you are a Vista user who wants to let someone run a single program on your PC with his/ her user credentials, then you are out of luck. Vista by default doesn’t provide you with that option. Sysinternals however does have a tool at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc300361.aspx that lets you get the same functionality. here is what you got to do to get the “runas” back to your context menus: Download the zip file from the above URL and extract the file to location on your hard disk (e.g. c:\program files) Open Command window (Start –> Run –> cmd) Change directory to where you saved the program file in step 1 Type “shellrunas /reg” in command window This will add “Run as different user” in your context menu Right Click on any executable to get this option Technorati tags: windows , credentials , runas

Microsoft provides unlimited support for Vista SP1 users

If you have been having issues getting that driver to work with the Vista SP1, help is at hand. Free, unlimited installation and compatibility support is now available for all customers using Windows Vista SP1. If you are in India, you will get email and phone support. the phone support is available from 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM from Monday to Friday. All good things must come to an end and so does this offer that will end on March 18, 2009. More information on this offer is located here: http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?LN=en-in&prid=11274&gprid=500921&x=6&y=2 So get your Vista SP1 issues ironed out today! and yes if you do use this facility, drop in a comment here on how it felt interacting with Microsoft Support Services.

Windows Vista – Underestimated?

Some facts (and not opinions or hearsay) about Vista: 1. Worldwide Reach: Over 140 million licenses sold to date. 2. Adopted as fast as Windows XP: Millions of enterprise seats deployed, and growing on pace to deploy at a similar rate to Windows XP among businesses. 3. Enhanced Security : Less than half the vulnerabilities of Windows XP; a machine is 60% less likely to be infected with malware vs. Windows XP 4. Hardware Compatible: Over 79,000 devices and components are supported out of the box – 47,000 more since RTM. 5. Application Compatible: Over 200 Line of Business applications unblocked, 99 percent of top selling consumer applications are compatible. 6. Solid Performance: In recent tests, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was noticeably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP on several common business operations. 7. Total Cost of Ownership: Reports show $251 per mobile PC per year in cost savings. 8. Energy Efficient: Energy savings of $38.3 thousand p

Recent Indian Celebrity Bloggers

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Reading in TOI online today that Priyanka Chopra wants to blog but doesn’t know when or where or how to blog. So Priyanka, get in touch with numerous blogging groups in the country and ask them to help you.. i am pretty sure that they would be willing to help.. well i can recommend delhibloggers.in to you..  This is an interesting thought that i believe many other celebrities would also be having (after many celebrities took to blogging). Some of the Indian celebrity bloggers i know of (for your reading pleasure): Aamir Khan: http://www.aamirkhan.com/blog.htm Amitabh Bachhan: http://bigb.bigadda.com http://blogs.bigadda.com/ab/ Ram Gopal Varma: http://rgvarma.spaces.live.com/ Karan Johar: http://mynameiskaran.com/ Rajdeep Sardesai: http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/author/1/rajdeepsardesai.html Now, if you know of more, please add to the list by leaving a comment here. Technorati tags: celebrity , bloggers , delhibloggers

TitsBits on blogging

Going through a BusinessWeek quiz, i some to know some interesting factoids that i would like to share: Forrester says that 25% US adults in US read a blog. However, only 11% publish a blog at least once a month. And amongst online youth 21% publish a blog and 37% read a blog. 112 mn blogs are currently being tracked by technorati and could be the universe of blogs. it is estimated that 120,000 new blogs are created everyday. However the active blogging universe could be closer to 13 million blogs. On the earning potential of blogs, top 10% of Federated Media Bloggers income per month is around USD 50000. here are some more names worth knowing from the Social Media space: Caterina Fake - creator of Flickr David Sifry – Creator of Technorati Dave Winer – Creator of Podcasting Bob Lutz, VC of GM blog is Fastlane The one trend that is coming up is the blurring of lines between main stream media and the bloggers. Today every major media publication has a blog.

Day 1: Blogging Workshop at IHC, Delhi

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The room is full! Get us some more chairs.. that is how the blogging workshop at IHC Delhi began. We started with expecting 60 people to attend and ended with around 200 instead! The interest in blogging is clearly increasing day by day.. The workshop was organised by IBNMS in collaboration with their Delhi Chapter – www.delhibloggers.in .. The session started with Ajay talking about the society and how is it helping people adopt to blogging. The keynote speaker for the workshop was Mr. Madhavan from Hindustan Times who shared his views on why and how of blogging. He started by contrasting the organised march of the mainstream media to the blogs that are unruly in nature..  sort of army discipline versus civilian anarchy! his advice to the blogging rookies was to clearly define the objective they want to achieve via their blogs. The objective can be reached by providing content with a personality of the author. Learning the tools for blogging shouldn’t be an end in itself as it

There is a Baby in house!

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DISCLAIMER: This isn’t a technical post but a personal one. The occasion warrants it! I haven’t being writing a lot of blog posts lately. Simply ‘cause I am now a father! I see this as a promotion that God has made for me to make me a better person.. The little boy was born on June 6th in Gurgaon. And ever since that day I have been learning a new trick everyday. Few of my blogger friends got innovative and gifted the little one a new domain name – www.juniorkant.com .. thanks amit, ashish and abby . And we haven’t named him yet! The astrologer says that his name should begin with “H” and so the hunt for a name is on. If you really ask me I am waiting for an inspiration to help me choose a name. Do you have a suggestion? I am going to get regular with my blogging from now on. So stay tuned for more of what this blog is all about microsoft technologies in india…

Silverlight 2: BETA 2 Releasing

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Silverlight 2 BETA 2 will be releasing later in this week. Silverlight 2 improved over Silverlight 1 by incorporating .NET CLR in it thereby immensely improving the usefulness.. The BETA 2 now takes Silverlight 2 to “ Enterprise Ready ” status with a commercial go-live license available… Some improvements included in BETA 2 are: New and improved controls (over 40 new controls - button, check box, date controls, gridview, layout, TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort) Networking improvements (cross-domain networking support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications) Data handling Improvements (can now provide one way or two way databinding to any number of data sources including LINQ) Improvements in error handling, reporting and development experience Updates to Deep Zoom and animation  (XML-based file format

Microsoft launching marketplace for Experts

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Microsoft has seemingly launched a new site - http://taskmarket.com/ that is meant as an exchange for freelancers and experts. It is in the lines of international sites like elance.com , getafreelancer.com , guru.com and limeexchange.com At the site, you are required to register with a unique username and provide your paypal ID. The site offers the options to:   Post a Job   Search for Jobs   Subscribe to e-mail alerts to be notified when jobs you are interested in are posted Fill out your profile page The site is very new (most of the jobs posted had the date for 3 June i.e. TODAY).. by industry sources this market may be as large as $10 mn by 2010. This is especially relevant to India as most of the technical jobs are done here. The no. of freelancers are only set to explode in the coming days! Technorati tags: microsoft , taskmarket , freelancers

Notes from an Internet Marketing Seminar

These are my notes from an internet marketing seminar I attended. Read through to see if you can figure out who delivered this and i promise you would be surprised :) Topic: Web & New Media: Emerging Trends 183 bn emails sent a day 49 mn internet users in India 7.5 hrs spent on internet/ week (18-35 Males) 1.2 bn searches / month- search increasing at 80% 80% online shop Online Time Spent in India: 23% – TV 30% Internet 26% Print 21 % Radio Advertising Money Spent: 41% TV 1% Internet 40% Print 12% Radio 1.4 bn online out of 6.6 bn in the world mobile is the next huge thing... computing cloud is the current stage after PC being personal era.. web is not US centric.. 211 still the largest.. inspite of the company being so "open source".. the presentation consistently says Confidential & PROPRIETARY .. paradoxical.. the presentation laptop from google is running Windows XP.. sweet.. and oh! the presenta

Eggs in a basket: Lessons on reliance

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Twitter was down for few days. The micro-blogging soothsayers had nowhere else to go but wait for the service to come back online. However, twitter is simply a service (and prone to failures).. for now, inspite of the numerous times it keeps throwing the cute error messages, people are willing to forgive the outages. my observation to this episode is if the whole “micro-blogging” ecosystem could go down based on a service, aren’t we putting all our eggs in one basket? if micro-blogging has to go main stream, can one only rely on a single service to deliver the same? Where are the alternatives? oh yeah, u might start thinking of 3jam, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Jooopz, Jyngle, Loopnote, tumblr, plazes, Pinger, pownce and Swarm-it but none really have achieved the status or ubiquity that twitter has.. the other reason why this is more important for social media is that all of these services are online. and online services are prone to disruption more than any other thing (self inflicted or ma

Buy Microsoft Outlook 2007

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One of the most important products of the Microsoft Office suite is Outlook 2007. This email software is basically an email management software but can also act as calendaring software, task, note taking software, contacts manager or conversation tracking software! And in case you want to buy one in India, it isn’t exactly a simple thing as i realised when one of MVPs asked me that question. It goes that the cheapest option to buy Office 2007 in India is the Office 2007 Home and Student Edition that costs INR 5039/-. But that doesn’t come with Outlook 2007! The next option is to buy an Office Small Business edition that costs INR 15,990… You can explore these buy options from the Original MS online store . But the MVP mentioned that he wanted to be able to buy Outlook 2007 only. However, there is no option of buying a retail Outlook 2007 box from the online store! The next simple way would be to buy it from “Dial a Software” partner. However, you can get this in few cities in Indi

Internet Marketing: Microsoft experiments with User Generated Content

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In any internet marketing or Web 2.0 conference (e.g. BlogCamp Delhi ), case studies are often quoted of how great user generated content is. The case studies are mostly geared around how brand X led generation of videos that provided the next BIG idea to the company! Now Microsoft has delved into this internet marketing by launching a video contest at: www.ultimatevideorelay.com . The idea is to finish a story for which Act I has already being done. Budding filmmakers are then encouraged to pick up the story and submit their scripts for Act 2. The contest community will then vote to determine which scripts will become finalists and those filmmakers will be presented with the equipment needed to make their film, including Sony HDR-SR11 camcorders, Falcon laptops, Windows Vista Ultimate, and Pinnacle editing software. Finalists' videos will then be voted on to determine the winner! The process will be repeated for a third act and then end result will be a three part film crea