Pandora - Created by the Music Genome Project

Music lovers will be delighted to experience this site. They provide free music, actually a lots of them. And that too without flouting any laws of the land. It's like your personal DJ - just tell them what you like and they will play songs and music similar to that. Their selection is excellent and you can help them build the station for you. None of my words can tell you what you will experience. Give it a try at  www.pandora.com/

Google working overtime on Gmail?!

Google has been rolling out new features in Gmail more often now. In the past 1 month alone they have added three major features - two of which were a necessity for it to challenge other major email players. The integration of Virus scan for all attachements sent or received by Gmail has been long pending. Google unveiled this feature along with RSS feeds feature as part of Gmail.

I'm not sure how effective this feature will be because, in the past few days I always miss seing the feeds that are displayed at the top. But the fact that they allow the users to customize the feeds makes it a good feature.

They have also added the long pending request to have contact groups so that you can send a mail to a group of people using a single address.

To top it all, Google has unveiled Mobile Gmail. Now you can access your Gmail account from your mobile phone or device. Just point your phone's web browser to http://m.gmail.com. Perhaps they plan to go live around April 2006.

Direct To Home (DTH) race in India

I'm waiting for the successful launch of Insat 4 A series on December 21, 2005 as scheduled by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as it will take the DTH race in India to the next level.

Currently there is only one major private operator offering DTH services in India - Zee. Doordarshan's DTH venture is more for the masses as it would be offering only free to air channels with absolutely no value add.

Zee which offered its DTH hardware for about Rs. 7500 (USD 180) till about 6 months ago has already taken the lead in the price war by slashing it to just about Rs. 4000 (USD 90) including one year subscription to all the channels on plate!

The Tata-Star venture (Tata-Sky) has finaly got the government approval. They have blocked transponders in Insat 4A which is currently set to launch on Dec 21, 2005. (It has been delayed by about 4 months now). Once the satellite is on orbit, Tata-sky will have the necessary infrastructure in place to start beaming in the Ku band. It is expected to launch with about 150 channels. It is expected to go on air by around April-May 2006.

Another major player waiting in the final rounds for approval is Sun Network. It is expected that they will take south India by Storm by their pricing and aggressive programming once they launch.

Anil Ambani's ADAE has also approached the government for DTH license. They should also get through.

But, much depends on the Satellite launches as all these players need them to in place before they can beam their channels.

Firefox 1.5 released

I've been using Firefox for over 10 months now. I'm quite happy with it as it takes less memory and loads faster than IE. Mozilla officially released version 1.5 yesterday. I hope a whole lot of people will enjoy this.

I automatically got upgraded to 1.5 sometime last week, even without my knowledge. That was superb. I had installed the 1.5 Release candidate 1 sometime last month and everytime they upgraded it, my browser automatically got upgraded.

There are still quite a few sites which don't look as they need to in Firefox. I use IE for them. Some of the banking sites will not allow you to login if you use Firefox - even though, Firefox is supposedly has superior security to IE. But with thosands of people working on it, I'm sure the world will embrace it faster.

There is a rumor that Google is working on a browser. I'm not sure if that will happen anytime soon. Perhaps they may have that launched in April, as they did Gmail last year. Until then IE has no other challenger.

Google Base Beta is live now

Google base beta is live now at http://base.google.com. I'm not sure what Google is trying to achieve through this but I guess it's an attempt to have people with absolutely no expertise in either hosting a website or blogging to have their content online. It allows you to upload just about anything online and make it available by search. And if the content is worthy of mention, it will also be part of the search results of Google.com.

I'm not sure if I will be using it immediately. I guess they will be adding more features to make it much more useful to the web users.

Yahoo Mail Beta

I still haven't got an invite to test the Yahoo Mail Beta. I'm not sure what the criteria to get selected. One of the criteria I know is that one must have .com mail ID and not the .co.in like IDs. I do have a .com ID but they clearly identify that I'm not currently in the US by tracking my IP. I'm dying hard to experience their beta after reading about it and having a glimpse of the screen shots. I hope that they open it up soon.

BTW, if any of you have been invited and have an option to invite others, please let me know.

Google Analytics not accepting new users...for now

As expected, there has been a deluge of sign ups to Google Analytics and they had to stop accepting new users! I realized this when I tried adding a new profile. They are doing something similar to the initial GMail registration where they take your email ID and promise to get back. I hope that this doesn't take too long to accept new users. I'm sure all adwords subscribers will still be accepted. Only those who want to have it free will have to wait. I'm sure it will be worth the wait. I only hope that they also allow free personal websites to enjoy this service.

Google Analytics

Google which bought the web analytics firm Urchin sometime back, as usual, is offering it as a FREE "web service" to everyone. I was so thrilled and tried signing it up for my personal website on Yahoo Geocities. But, it is not accepting the geocities URL. I'm not sure if they don't accept free websites. I have written to them on this and expecting some help from the support group.

It's simple to set up and install Google Analytics. The best part of it is it doesn't add any ads or banners on our pages. All we have to do is add a small javascript to all the pages we want to track and google takes care of the rest.

For more information, visit http://www.google.com/analytics

Got 5 minutes? It Could Save Your Life

WebMD is one of the sites I visit very frequenty. They have great content on almost all aspects of health and it is worth spending a few minutes a day on their site. This article gives some tips on analyzing our health in not more than 5 minutes. Read it...it could save your life.

http://www.webmd.com/content/Article/113/110880.htm

Give others happiness...

You will not be able to give anyone happiness by means of your wealth, so do it by means of a cheerful countenance and good humor.
-The Prophet Muhammad in Qushayri: al-Risalat al-Qushayriyya

Chennai Rains

It rained in Chennai... at last! And it poured! It is by God's grace that Chennai received unprecedented rains in a matter of a few days bringing cheer to the water starved city. It has helped increasing the ground water level and all the lakes that supply drinking water to Chennai are receiving good inflows. Daily piped drinking water supply has been restored.

As always, there is another side to this story. A lot of low lying areas are still inundated with water. The government is trying its best to make them comfortable but it takes time.

My takes on email and IM

I would rank Yahoo Email on top of others for its ease of use and the features it offers. I've almost stopped using my Hotmail because of the number of junk mails I've been getting there. Too much! Gmail is a innovative one but still doesn't offer much of what Yahoo is offering. Any how, they are still in beta and these guys deserve more time. Till then, it's Yaaaaahoooooooo!

I really can't differentiate between MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger with respect to their features but I use Yahoo all the time except when I use voice chat. Yahoo has an issue when we do voice chatting. It doesn't allow simultanous talk. That is both the callers can't talk at the same time. If one speaks the other has to wait... It's so difficult for people who just cut short the others while talking! I've not tried using the recently released Yahoo messenger with Voice for voice chatting yet as my friends haven't yet downloaded it. Till then it's MSN for voice chatting and of course the newly launched Google Talk. I tried voice chatting with Google talk and find it good. Let it evolve. BTW, Yahoo updated its messenger today.

I still like Yahoo Messenger

I've been using it for the past few days and find its voice quality better than Yahoo and on par with MSN. But, I still like Yahoo messenger for all its "completeness" (if that's a word I can use). In fact, Yahoo came up with an update to its very recent update "yahoo messenger with Voice". I'm not sure on this new update with regards to its features. Will have to study that. It's all exciting to see this competition between Yahoo, Google and MSN.

IM, Mails and Search are the three mostly used internet applications and with each of these three competing fiercely with each other, I'm sure the end users will benefit more.

Google Talk - The IM from Google

I was one of the earliest person to lay hands on Google Talk. My Yahoo RSS picked up a link that gave the path to Google Talk and being in India (when the western world was still sleeping), I immediately installed it and tried it out.

It's a primitive messenger with limited features compared to Yahoo Messenger or MSN messenger. But, it serves the basic purpose of sending messages and voice chatting.

The best part of Google Talk is that the voice chat works even if you are behind a proxy. Neither Yahoo or MSN support that yet (at least they don't work in my office). So, I would definitely have it apart from yahoo and MSN.

As Google is increasing its portfolio one by one, I'm waiting for its own browser to debut by early 2006. Who wouldn't want to try Google's browser?