when technology is a part of the whole!

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

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

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

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

The success of a tool is determined by the no. of people using it :) .. i have two tools that i use everyday: IE7Pro : Internet Explorer quintessential add on. Feeddemon : An industrial quality RSS reader available from Newsgator (for FREE) Both the tools have been updated. While the latest version of IE7Pro is v2.3, FeedDemon RSS reader is at v2.7. if you have been using any of the above tools, update them now. And if you not been get them today (both of them are FREE)! Technorati tags: internet explorer , add-on , feeddemon , RSS

Everyone knows that blogs are an individual medium. And there are more than 60 mn bloggers in the world... The needs, frustrations, aspirations and thoughts of these 60 mn does have a remarkable similarity… and in delhi we collaborate together at Delhi bloggers & New Media Society (DBNMS): www.delhibloggers.in On Saturday, May 24th, the group in collaboration with IBNMS came together at BlogCamp Delhi to learn and share with each other. The event was conducted in the international format of a Blog Camp where the participants become presenters and attendees choose the sessions they want to attend by themselves! The venue of the event was the Microsoft Office in Nehru Place who graciously opened up their office to welcome the bloggers (though we started late at 10:30 only). Not only that they also let the attendees experience the XBOX 360 thunder via a kiosk put up there. Lunch was from the Golden Arch in form of burgers that were quickly devoured by the active folks there :)

Google Sites is now available separately from Google Apps suite. This means that you no longer need a domain name to set up a site for yourself. Your site will be available at: http://sites.google.com/[your-website ] The maximum size available via this service is not mentioned anywhere.. This is an excellent service for people starting up trying to setup a website for the first time. The site provide plain vanilla WYSIWSG editor. The types of pages you can create are Dashboard, Announcements, File Cabinet and List. Dashboard provides a page where one can host any google gadget. However, I would advice all the businesses to stay away from this and try Google Apps or Office Live . The trend these days for individuals looking for a web presence is to host a blog. Hosting a blog has inherent advantage of getting indexed faster and easy to author via variety of tools. My advice to individuals would be to use blogs if they want to make a beginning on the web via Blogger or Wordpress or

Today Live Skydrive got an update! And no there is no increase in space provided.. however the service does seem to be becoming more and more of Office Live Workspace :) Most updates seem to be related to adding more metadata to the documents uploaded. The 2 new features in this area are: i was able to add captions and descriptions to the files uploaded on the skydrive. Nice to be able to describe content to people esp. when u have more than one file in a folder. the second feature that got added was ability to comment on any file in the skydrive and see a view of all the recent comments users have left for you. very useful if you want to let someone know that you have accessed the file. The second set of features are related to navigating the file. The first in that series is the browsing widget that lets you scroll through the other files in the folder The second here is the larger photo previews so that you can see what is in the picture before you o

Welcome to real world interoperability that works - Interoperability 2.0. and we have an unlikely harbinger of this effort - Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft has announced that from Office 2007 SP2, it will start supporting other document formats including Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. This means that customers now don’t have to worry about what format they receive their documents in, they can work on it using Office 2007 SP2. The default format for MS Office remains to be OpenXML, a recently approved open ISO standard. However, a user will be able to change the default to ODF.. MS Office 2007 SP2 will have ability to open, edit and save documents in the Chinese national document file format standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF) as well. This makes MS Office 2007 suite the “ uber productivity suite ”.. The sceptics would already be wondering - “MS

Have you used the Vista SP1 or XP SP3 or IE 8 BETA 1 yet? I am pretty sure that you have an opinion on the same :).. Now, for your opinion you can win a prize! The contest at MeraWindows – The Windows Community for Indians is on! More details available on the  forum . All you need to do is to author a review (good or bad) for these products and submit it before June 15th. The forum admins also want you to be active on the merawindows forums having made 25 posts earlier there atleast.. On the stake is some very handy geeky stuff like 160 GB Hard Disk or Video MP3 players! My keyboard fingers are already twitching :) Technorati tags: merawindows , contest

Alongwith the Cashback program to encourage online shoppers, Microsoft has also introduced the Farecast search on Live at: http://farecast.live.com Using the farecast search, you can locate the cheapest fares on the web! it also provides comparison with other international travel sites like priceline.com, expedia.com.. If you are in India, there are other travel portals also available as yatra.com, makemytrip.com, ezeego.com, To give farecast a spin, I tried booking a flight from Delhi to Dubai on July 8th and return on July 13th. Here are the results: Farecast.live.com INR 17352 Yatra.com INR 17541 Makemytrip.com INR 17832 ezeego.com INR 18623   However another search on Delhi –> Seattle sector gave me INR 53679 (i.e. USD 1310) on China Airlines using yatra and USD 1568 on Continental using farecast. Farecast doesn’t provide cheapest price all the time! in additi

“The Search That Pays You Back” – is the promise of newly launched Cashback program from Microsoft Live Search. In this program a shopper on the internet can earn cashback on every purchase that he/ she makes on the web provided they used Live Search to get to the site. This is a MARVELOUS program and provides a great value for the consumer. for simply using a search engine, this is a very good return. Live Search definitely becomes search engine of my choice when going shopping… To give this program a spin, I searched for Zune 80 on the Cashback site and at one store was getting a 10% cashback… this means I get a Zune $ 24 cheaper than the market! all ‘cause of the site i use to access the shopping site.. The cashback would start reflecting in your account immediately but it will accrue to you only after 60 days – a mail-in rebate that works! One can request the money to be sent once the amount reaches $5.. while the money can be sent as a cheque, alternative payment mechanisms like

Microsoft has released its service pack for the Virtual PC 2007 software. Virtual PC is a Windows software that lets you “virtualise” computer hardware so that you can run heterogeneous operating systems on your machine – actually much better than dual booting option… If you followed my twitters, I had been trying to get a VPC running with Windows Server 2008 Standard Core. It was unsuccessful. Even after successful completion all i would get is a black empty window. With SP1 release now following OS support has been added: Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1) Windows Vista® Business Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1) Windows Vista® Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1) Windows Server® 2008 Standard Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 And now i have been able to create my VPC successfully.. SP1 is now available at Microsoft download . But before you go building ur VPCs here are few things i learnt (and you should too): I started with a Core 2 Duo mac

Since morning the twitterosphere has been abuzz with news of how wonderful MS Worldwide Telescope is. Jumping in with enthusiasm, the telescope amazed me a lot. to get the virtual telescope, you need to go to the telescope homepage . this is a resource that astronomy enthusiasts are bound to love. this virtual telescope presents images from various telescopes from around the world and in the space e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). the experience is very interesting as one can start from any guided tour of a region of the space and then continue to explore on one’s own will. you can not only see the visual interfaces but also X Ray view, hydrogen alpha view etc.. the software minimally needs Win XP SP2 or Vista and .NET 2.0. In addition, the software also needs a live internet connection as it downloads imagery on demand. to get started you can begin with Guided Tours menu

This qualifies as find of the day! Cayra.Net is a .NET based brainstorming tool that one can use to put down ideas and concepts in a graphical format. If you are a regular Windows user like me, then you have often wondered what tool would qualify as brainstorming tool? Most people end up with One  Note or Visio for that of thing… Cayra gives you a FREE option to capture brainstorming graphically… this is extremely useful if you are working in a team and especially in a distributed team spread geographically. In addition, I have found the mind map to be useful when I am preparing for a talk as well. Technorati tags: mind map , brainstorming

Today MS will be releasing Windows XP SP3 to web. After a false start, this one seems to be thought out well :). XP SP3 was pulled back at the last moment following discovery of a compatiblity issue between Windows XP SP3 and Microsoft Dynamics RMS.. currently a filter mechanism has been developed that doesn’t offer the update on Dynamics RMS customers.. A fix for this issue is already in testing at Microsoft and may be made publicly available this month. Windows XP SP3 can be installed from here .  Windows XP SP3 contains all the previously released updates for Windows XP and a few new features e.g. Network Access Protection.. More information on Windows XP SP3 can be found at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsxp P.S.: Automatic distribution of Windows Vista SP1 is also being resumed as well... Technorati tags: Windows XP , SP3

What are the 2 applications on my machine that are used most often: Microsoft Outlook 2007 Windows Live Messenger Practically i live in these two applications. anything that has to come in or go out has these 2 gateways… and so it makes sense for me to look for gateways into these applications from anywhere people want to connect with me..  and social networking sites are one of the main sources where people want to connect… of late Live Messenger has made available a lot widgets that one can embed in websites, blogs etc… you can see one on the right in this blog that let’s you communicate with me anytime I am online… here is a wonderful application that enables the same for facebook. so now when someone is casually browsing on my profile, he/ she can initiate instant communication with me from the facebook profile page itself by clicking on the “Begin a conversation” link.. and i will receive the messages sent from here in the Live Messenger that i am using… of cours