Tech Ka Masala

We have a lot of hardware oriented stories ranging from tablet PC devices, mobiles phone to even "Made-in-India" super computer called Annapurna developed by the Institute of Mathetical Sciences.Other stories include Make My Trip IPO, Blackberry getting into trouble with several countries, Yahoo Japan signing up with Google and Google shutting down Wave. Manan Kakkar joins in as a guest contributor for this podcast.

After the $10 laptop debacle by India, the latest $35 laptop initiative seems to be a much better effort. HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, showed off the touch screen device and announced that more innovations will follow. We take a look at the specs of the machine. In other stories, we talk about the Lenovo's LePad, Google discontinuing Nexus One, Microsoft giving up on Kin Phones and giving out free Win7 phones, Dell's $100 mn payoff and other stories.

This show is the most "Indian" episode with ALL stories coming from India. The telecom market has been kept on toes by Tata ever since the price war cry by Tata DoCoMo. They have further launched a new internet to TV product called Dialog. The other conversations are around the bunch mobile handset players that have entered India, Google launching metro routes on Google maps in India and a special "dumb" Nexus one being planned for India.

Recently, India's Internet had its own Epic moment when Hidden Reflex, a Bangalore based software startup, has launched a browser targeted at Indian audiences. Saket downloaded it and gave it a quick test drive and shares his experiences. The other stories include muslims planning to quit facebook, Apple iPhone 4 rejected by Consumer Reports, XXX to be a TLD, and Maharashtras DTE website turns into rubbish.

Its been quiet a week in the technology world with a mix of product announcements - Apple iPhone 4, India's 3G auction completion, Google sniffing its into trouble, and Hotmail releasing a new feature for India to enable access hotmail via SMS. Need less to say that Apple iPhone 4 stole the limelight this week. Saket is impressed by the display and I like the front facing camera for FaceTime. We also talk about iPhone coming to India. Things are a bit hazy and we discuss the expected pricing.

Apple does it ones again. It boots out around 5000 apps that apparently had too much skin but decided to leave the Playboy App in its store. Google has started to feel the heat for being too big but hints at Microsoft having something to do with it. The updates include 3G auction in India, Paypal India outage.

Major announcements happened this week but none of them turned out to be revolutionary. Twitter released its intention about monetizing its platform with "Promoted Tweets" which is just a different way of saying ads in your twitter timeline. Apple also continued its fascination with "i" branding by announcing the iAd, a confusing ad platform for iPhone.

Another 40 mins of Tech Ka Masala is here for you. Manan and I talk about Infbeams 2000 crore MoU with Gujarat Govt to e-nable rural Gujarat and help them set up their stores online. The sheer value of the MoU is staggering from an e-commerce point of view in India. They obviously see something that Manan and I cant. We also spend enough time talking about Microsofts seriousness about the Windows Phone 7 Platform given the mishaps and lack of updates to the platform and also, about LinkedIn reaching 100 mn users in India and why the phenomenal service is so undervalued. Other topics include the iPad 2 launch, layoffs expected at AOL India and XXX domain being cleared.

We have barely completed 2 months of 2010 and we already have 3 major product announcements. At 53 minutes, this episode is the longest ever for Tech Ka Masala but with the announcement of iPad and the controversy, Google Buzz and WIndows Phone 7, we thought it deserved the extra time.

A slight goof up has led to this delayed release. Saket & I recorded this episode on the 26th of Jan but is being released almost 5 days later. Blame me. More details will follow in the next episode. In the episode we cover IPL 3 live broadcast on Youtube, updates ont he Google-China story, Apple get cozy with Microsoft (again) and it seems like using patents to sue each over out of business is becoming fashionable.