Its rainy season here, and iPhone season in US. But if you are anywhere in Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Ahemdabad, Hyderabad then you will be able to lay your hands on a touch phone with commendable technology from HTC on Airtel. HTC is a Tiwanese corp, making smart phone. This phone priced at ~Rs20,ooo/- is boasting of a revolutionary Touch FLO technology which will be able to identify between stylus and finger. I dont think it would be multi touch, but would be running on Windows Mobile 6. This handset/PDA would be having one touch clicks for SMS, Email, Call, Callendar, E-Mail.
Specs are as follows

• Dimensions: 99.9mm (L) x 58mm (W) x 13.9mm (T)
• Weight: 112g with battery
• 1GB microSD storage card included / 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM
• 2.8" LCD touch screen with backlight, 240 x 320 dots resolution with 65,536 colours
• Battery Life: Rechargeable Li-Ion battery with a capacity of 1100 mAh
• Standby time: Up to 200 / Talk time: Up to 5 hours
• Camera: 2.0 mega-pixel CMOS colour camera
• Windows Mobile 6® Professional with Direct Push Email and HTML email support
• Wireless Connectivity: GSM/GPRS/EDGE Tri-band: 900, 1800,1900, Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth® 2.0
• Choice of two colors at launch - elegant soft black or alluring wasabi green
  

If you are taking it specs by specs and compare it with iPhone then you would be pretty happy to have this.
But as rumor mill(via: Engadget) is saying that Apple would be declaring a launch date of a 3G iPhone for European market, and that too on various carriers, I would suggest you to wait for an Asian release and then invest into high end mobile, though tentatively people are hoping for an early 2008 release, but I think Christmas or Diwali release can be on cards.

Source: Airtel official release. here.

Amount of hype(for good reasons) is already bringing Facebook some new members. I now have 9 friends in Facebook and 8 are new. Pretty interestingly Facebook is also showing a revved up performance in India all over. Globally also Facebook is seeing a rise in daily traffic. Which is pretty much clear from this graph.


One very interesting thing which can be seen is that Facebook's graph is showing an increasing trend where as other two are quite static. Though F8 can not be pointed as a specific turn around point but indeed it caught my attention. What Facebook did in F8, is now being sought by MySpace, that is, they want to open up themselves.
Hey, enlighten me, didnt we had third party apps, finely integrated in Myspace profiles, adding up lots of clutter and feeding a big parallel tertiary market. MySpace is already quite open, and its openness have already been utilized by few intelligent miscreants. To mention Facebook is like orkut a closed network, where you have to login before watching any kind of profile, they are not available as web pages.
So all in all as it seems from thousand of miles away from the place where few people are burning fuel to make MySpace more open is nothing but surfing. Surfing? yes they too want to ride on the wave of openness, want to gain some media mileage by telling every one that they are more open. Though there is high scope for opening up, but as history tells me, Myspace gets irritated when there is some high traffic gainer app on the profile page of various MySpace users. Bye the way, MySpace is being thrashed all over the park, just like Sachin did yesterday in Ireland, after they created a Youtube clone.
Orkut presently enjoys 2nd position in India as most visited website and facebook is on 29th. So there is lot of catching up required for Facebooks where Indians only constitute 0.8% of visitors. and this percentage is as high as 15% on Orkut.
At present Orkut is boring me a great deal, and the social networks which needs some opening up or some major overhaul is Orkut. And till then I will be resending invites to my friends so as I get more friends on Facebook.

PS: All the data is from Alexa.com

I also feed on feeds and and Google Reader acts as my dinner table. And let me tell you that feeds are addictive, though I dont have any scientific or medical proof for it, but yes I can say that from my very own experience. And anybody else who is using some kind of reader must be feeling same. I use firefox as my browser, and there are three things which I open as soon as I get online.

• Orkut
• Google Reader
• Blogger/Wordpress

One can easily understand that there is one thing common in all the three items, and that is social connectivity. The crux is that any thing which connects you with others, and with connection if that thing provides you with infotainment then that thing is going to be addictive. And history is full of examples. And a feed reader does all these things quite handsomely.
One thing which bugs me about the reader, and in particular with google reader is that it does not have any kind of interaction facility. Often there are posts, on which I would love to comment, but I wont, as I have to click and then wait for next page to upload. By the time I decide, I am already on next post.

By the way this is an echo post, and the post which inspired me to write this is here.


And below is an interesting video of Robert Scoble telling about his reading and filtering skills.

Its a real big news for me. One can easily estimate how big this news is by knowing the fact that my exams are going on, and in the midst of heavy schedule I am taking some time out to photo blog about my new camera. It is SONY snap shot camera, DSC W-32, a 7.2 mega pixel camera, quite minimalistic in features, but nice picture quality.These photos were taken from my Nokia 5200 music phone.

Previously I had a film based snap shot camera, which was much bigger than this and presently my hands are trying to get feel of this new small baby. All in all I liked the way it is performing.

Here are few photos from the 35. These are two photos I shot while experimenting with its macro option.

If you can point out my mistakes in shots then please feel free to comment.

I am on Orkut, and at present its the only social network that keeps me busy. But there is something in Orkut which always tell me to look elsewhere. I also have an account on MySpace, but for MySpace isnt interesting enough. Recently after the F8 media hype (hyped for good reasons) I though to give Facebook another try. I had a pending friends request for months, I clicked on it and now I am on Facebook. And at present it seems it is something where I can rest of my time. I have repeatedly felt that quality of social network is not that important when compared to the number of people on it. An avalanche effect takes place when few friends of same mixed group joins a social network.
If I join a network, and so does my friend, then when we both send invitation to our common friends, then there is more initiation force on that third person. And when the number of friends cross a limit of certain value then the number of new friends joining that network increases quite rapidly. But for that to happen, the new social network has to be really interesting.
With Facebook opening their API, the innovation quotient has gone few steps up. And now onus of innovation is on whole community, and developers. Few of the new applications are interesting enough to become a social network on their own. And when such kind of things are being added on a regular basis, then it marks a question in your head, 'Whats Next?' And this is something Orkut is missing, where most of my friends resides.
Orkut and Facebook can be easily compared because both are doored networks. By 'doored', I meant that, to view any profile you have to login. This is a nice options for those who dont want their profiles to be a part of Google search.
So far I am quite impressed by Facebook, last time when I tried to join facebook, it did not had that innovation feel and was more closed. But later they opened their doors to everybody and not only to .edu based schools and colleges( that seemed idiotic to me). But this F8 phenomenon really impressed me, and latest addiitons are quite interesting.
As I have mentioned that I am on Facebook, you can check my Profile here. You have to be on Facebook to watch my profile and add me as your friend.

One thing which this post will be shouting loud is, that user media s indeed becoming more and more prominent and strong.
Those jibing Mac v/s Windows advertisements, shown by Jobs were hit of some sort among the Mac-o-holics, and they really have strong sense of humor...If they had sense of humor then what does these advertisements contain...and they are not even by NOKIA.

They are just plain facts...



Having something in the same way you gave it, can sometimes become bit difficult to swallow. But Apple can thanks almighty that its not an official campaign.



I dont think that these ads are in any way going to harm the ongoing iPhone frenzy, Jobs just create such a beautiful aura around his products that people in general never feels it essential to look elsewhere. He is a pure maverick. On any given day, or night and at any moment I can say three cheers for him.



What would be interesting to know in future is that who will leas the pack, Nokia N95 or Apple iPhone.

Special Mention : Great job by these people, who made this video. Though conceptually they copied but they took it to another level on there heels. Nice job, and a healthy way of advertising also, because many will just follow the links which they give at the end of each clip. I some how managed to stop myself.... ;)

After seeing multi million deals surrounding social network, one can marvel the fact that none of them were a technical breakthroughs. So what made them such a hit?
I am talking about, the major social networks like MySpace, video sharing site like YouTube etc. More often than not it is being at right place and at right time. Social networks were there way back before MySpace, Facebook or Orkut came. But still only few are raking moolah. The most important thing behind the success of a social network is the initial crowd which surrounds it. But why am I talking about it, when we all know about it somewhere inside our brain?
The thing which prompted me to write about this is the arrival of new phenomenon; having a social network of own. And the avalanching force behind this post; social network surrounding Mashable, a very popular blog, and probably the best when it comes to pure social network news. Mashable recently got a social network of its own and woila it got zillion members already. Now thats ok for a Mashable but that not be ok for you, cause you must have a sizable network to start with, either from good advertising or from your connections. And, from my little expireince I can tell you, when it comes to creating a social network, any publicity is not good publicity, and bad publicity is really a bad publicity. I will try to explain it in my future post. And let me tell you, My mom is asking me to leave my laptop and get into the world of my course books, as I am having my Physics examination of second semester on Monday.