Tech Ka Masala

Censorship seems to the be flavour of the week all over the world. China government has asked computer manufacturers to start installing the Green Dam Software on every machine that they build and sell in China. India joins the cencosrhip by blocking Savitabhabhi.com for mysterious reasons but in good news coming out of India, Nandan Nilekani joins as cabinet minister to help implement the National Identity card project. In other news, we talk about activisim against Microsoft Outlook, upcoming windows 7 release and Steve back on job.

Android is coming to India! After the browser wars, it's mobile OS from Symbian, Google, Microsoft and Apple battling it out. Also, 10 days ago, Opera announced that it was going to re-invent the web. 10 days later, hmmm not so much! In other news, we talk about Acrobat.com, Microsoft's IE8 campaign and the latest on Pirate Bay.

After years of battle with the European Union, Mincrosoft has decided to take IE out of Windows and leave it to the OEMs to put it in if required. Saket and I agree that this is a good move and microsoft should move on from browser wars to something that really matters to their consumer and seems like that's what they are doing by releasing a free anti-virus software.

We are back after a 3 week break and we start with a new service that Airtel might offer soon which will allow upto 10 number on a single mobile sim card. After the majestic failure of the $10 sakshat computer, India signed an agreement to purchase around 250000 OLPC giving the OLPC initiative a significant boost. The other topics include Micrsoft's Vine, Facebook opening up its API, Google Launching a tool to digg public data and Panda's cloud anit-virus. Also, why is google hiring goats?

The highlight of this episode was the JesusPhone (some call it iPhone too) and the announcement of the features that would be in its upcoming firmware upgrade. Meanwhile in India, Symantec has ranked India as the 3rd most spamming country in the world. Bebo, a little late to the game, has announced its entry into India. Other topics in the episode include, Facebook bug revealing your private data, launch of IE8, Yahoo Flickr announcing a deal with Getty Images, and the Pwn2Own Contest.

The technology news on the Indian shore included the selection of companies to managed the much required Mobile Number portability and delay in launch of Bhuvan, a desi version of Google Earth being developed by ISRO. Other news included Microsoft finally providing users a tool to remove windows components including IE8, Blackberry's App World, Flock divorcing Firefox, Google Docs being careless, Flickr opening up videos for everyone now. We also have Godaddy as our sponsor for TKM.

After the 3G announcement kabbadi, BSNL finally launched its services in Chennai and seems to be pretty affordable. Also, in news is a precedent setting law suit against Ajith D for being owner of an abusive orkut group. THe other topics discussed were Yahoo re-org, Safari 4 launch, Gmail going offline, Google joing EU's anti-microsoft campaign. Also, a very well-informed Editor of Medianama, Nikhil Pahwa, joined us as a guest on this episode.

Saket eloquently puts its in this episode that everybody and their aunt is coming up with an App Store in response to the announcements made by Nokia and Microsoft at the Mobile Web Congress. But before that we talk about the computers at Ministry of External Affairs getting hacked and the new various amendments to the 9 year old IT Act of 2000. The other topics that we covered this week include the Hotmail's Captcha cracked, facebook TOS revolt, Last.fm handing user data to RIAA, Norway's revolt against IE 6, and the pirate bay Trial.

The Indian scientists at the Nationation Institute of Dairy cloned a buffalo cafe but unfortunately it couldnt make it beyond 4 days and they same will be said about twitter if it doesnt find a revenue stream. We talk about a possible revenue stream and hope that twitter makes it throug the current turbulent times. Google also continued its product release spree with announcing PowerMeter along with another location based feature. Microsoft also announced the upgrade policy for its awesome Windows 7 operating system which we try to explain.

This week saw the much talk about $10 laptop from India disappoint the whole world and sort of embarass India. The supposed laptop had neither a display nor an input device! The week also saw NDTV launch a new hullu like website currently having around 50000 video from its own network. Stories from the usual suspects, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook also came up during the discussions.