Blogging India

Hi all,

This is the age of information. We get all information we require at the click of a few buttons or keys. And this information age lead to the rise of online news portals like Google News, Yahoo! News etc.  These portals enabled live access to news, from anywhere in the world, for free!

Yes, we’ve seen, experienced, and enjoyed the various news services… So when Arun started talking about Taazza during the BarCampBangalore5, held at IIM B, I thought I was in for a boring 1 hour… Boy, way I wrong!!!

Taazza, I found, as did the 30 others in the room, was not just a news portal, but it was a news portal of our dreams! Taazza combined a jazzy, Web 2.0, live look with hard hitting news organised and presented in a refreshingly new manner!

Fresh News, Refreshing Perspective. Their tag line proudly says. And I’ve got to admit, its pretty right! The service is updated as soon as one of the hundreds of news websites are updated. With a unique algorithm, they have taken into consideration several factors which define which story should come first.

The news has been tagged as Places, People and Quotes. This is one of the highlights of Taazza. Its pretty cool to do research! Imagine you have a story with, say, Mr Osama Bin Laden. But you’re a beginner, and you don’t know who Osama is. So, when you’re reading the story on Osama, you see in the People tab, "Osama Bin Laden". Click on that link, and it takes you to a page with background material on the person, previous stories, and pictures. How cool is that?!!

But you’ve think you’ve seen it all? Wait till you experience the Newsmap view! Click on the small icon with two rectangular boxes( ), and experience the master of all views! Experience the joy of reading a newspaper, just as it is, but in a live form, with the most relevant headlines selected automatically and placed according to relevance. You get news accurate to 2 minutes. You get references to blogs, to Wikis, to social networking sites. All mighty fast, thanks to their back end based on Ruby On Rails.

So what do you think? Why don’t you go ahead and check it out? Leave them a few comments as well! They’re planning to introduce new features, include personalisation, and start a web forum. I say, HatsOff to the Taazza team!

[tags]taazza, news, news portal, refreshing perspective, india news[/tags]

Hello all,

I wish all my Indian readers, and friends, a very happy Diwali!

Enjoy a Diwali filled with happiness, joy, togetherness and firecrackers

Cheers,
Mohan

[tags]diwali[/tags]

Friends, Netizens, Countrymen,
Lend me your ears…. (uh, eyes…)

I’m a very happy man today to announce that Blogging India has officially broken the 10,000 visitors mark! Yesterday, the 10,000th visitors visited our site, and broke the mark Please note, it aint the 10,000th page view, but the 10,000th unique visit. The page view count has zoomed past 65,000.

Its just been 3 months, and I’m too happy about this all

On this occasion, I would like to say a very BIG THANKSto you, my dear dearest readers!

Hi all,
    The Union Cabinet (of India) has given approval for setting up of an Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) soon. It also approved an initial investment of Rs 2700 million and an annual recurring cost of Rs 400 million.

    The Daily India reported this news.

“The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)
has been experiencing severe shortage of highly talented graduate and
post-graduate scientists and engineers during the last few years to
take up the challenges of research and development in the areas of
space science and technology,” a Cabinet release said.

The IIST
being set up on the lines of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs),
will provide high quality undergraduate and postgraduate education and
research programmes in space science and technology.

It will
also offer integrated Masters in space science with customised
curriculum to meet the high technology requirements of the ISRO.

The
courses are proposed to commence from the academic year 2007-08, at an
alternate campus in Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.

The campus and other infrastructure facilities will be put in place within 24 months, the release said.

The
institute will offer 150-200 seats annually. The entire expenses of the
course will be supported by ISRO in the form of scholarships and
assistantships, and the brighter lot would be directly absorbed by the
ISRO.

    I deem that this is a positive step towards developing the space technology in India. India had been in the space research fast track during 2006 and 2007. The ISRO had made indigenous space launching vehicles, and satellites. Earlier, Dr G Madhavan Nair, the Chairman of ISRO, had announced in a public event the concept of the IIST. It seems that ISRO had been planning the IIST for a long time now.

[tags]indian, space, research, iist, isro[/tags]

Hi all,
    UnWired View reports that Motorola, one of the leading mobile manufacturers, tried out Digg and Del.icio.us for promoting their new mobile, Moto Q 9h( earlier called Moto Q g9 ).

    There are buttons on the Product page which say “Digg This” and “Save this page to del.icio.us”.

    While UnWired View reported that the product had only “1″ Digg, today, after about 1 day and 9 hours of its releasing, there are 197 Diggs (196+1 mine=197 ).

    So are corporate giants eyeing the online newsbuzz to promote products? Like the blogging revolution, will there be a Digging revolution too? Gotta wait and watch!

[tags]motorola, digg, del.icio.us[/tags]

Hi all,
    Some guy Digged about a WWF Awareness Campaign which featured a series of pictures showing the amount of exhaust released by a car daily!

(click to enlarge)

    The message was clear… Stop using cars for a day, and relieve the Earth of so much Carbon Mono Oxide. Lets join the club!

[tags]wwf, awareness, car exhaust, carbon monoxide[/tags]

Hey all,
    TechCrunch has a brand new article about a brand new service named Fotowoosh, which is said to make a 2D image into a 3D visualization!

 
(Please note that these images were copied right from TechCrunch, and not tested by me. Oh, dont worry Arrington, not hotlinked )

    It is a service from Maryland based startup – Freewebs. Fotowoosh will turn ANY image (better with outdoor images) into a 3D visualization. The 3D image is constructed in Virtual Reality Modeling Language(VRML), a format which may require you to have a VRML reader, but hopefully later browsers will integrate it into their systems.

    A good VRML client(or the only one I could find) is Cortona. Its free to use, and the 2MB extension is available for all major browsers – IE, Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc.

    I’ve applied for a beta tester invite… Hope I receive it so that I can really check this thing out Meanwhile, you can check out the demos they have on their site…
   
    Freewebs raised $11 million in venture capital last August. I’ve used Freewebs before, and found it to be crap Fotowoosh might be a great venture to bring up their reputation among the more experienced cycle, and not just newbies.

    TechCrunch also reports that Microsoft has been working on something similar, christened Photosynth. Ofcourse, this has been in the news for around 1 and a half years now

[tags]fotowoosh, 2D to 3D, techcrunch, photosynth, freewebs[/tags]

Yo!
    Here’s yet another invention for all couch potatoes out there. Or rather for mouse potatoes…

    Wikisky…

    This little site is like Google Maps, but with a BIG difference. Google Maps is for the Earth… This little guy, is for the skies!

    Yes! This site claims to provide you the map of the sky, like it looks from, from above your home! Type in your location including lattitude and longitude, and there displays a great map of the sky, complete with constellations!

    Very much reccomended for people who want to catch the sky without leaving their PC, or for astro-nuts who want to spot constellations prior to the original thing.

    Anyway, in my opinion, its pretty cool, but absolutely useless. Check it out anyway… If you ask me, I rather climb the stairs, lie on the terrace, breathe the fresh air, and look wholeheartedly at the real thing…. Especially when you’re supposed to be studying…

[tags]wikisky, sky map, constellations, google maps, from your home, sky above, night sky[/tags]

Hi all,
    A startling news release by Detroit News reveals that last week, President of USA, George W Bush, nearly killed kimself, his wife, and the CEO of Ford Motors, Alan Mulally, by almost plugging in an electric supply into the Hydrogen storage tank of a hydrogen-electric plug in hybrid car, at the White House.

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”

    Woohoo! Great to know that even the Prez of the most powerful country in the world can make “accidental” mistakes. If I had been Mulally, trust me, I wouldnt have bothered, I would just have run away from the scene and witnessed the inferno from a safe spot
[tags]bush, george bush, president, usa, kills, killed, nearly, ford, hybrid, hyrdogen fuel, mulally, saves, white house[/tags]

Hey all,
    In yet another positive approach towards Mozilla Firefox, the most acclaimed web browser out there, James F. Beckner, a freshy computer info systems major, is busy spreading the FireFox word all around his campus, in the Appalachian State University.

    The Appalachian Online reports that James, in order to spread the word, hosted a raffle on his site where Firefox users could win T-Shirts, and a grand prize, which was a Firefox backpack(valued at $70). The raffle will run till midnight April 15th and is completely free for Appalachian affiliates.

“The purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness of Firefox and to get people to switch over to Firefox,” Beckner said.

    James is also educating people. He opinions that the security in Firefox is a lot  better compared to Internet Explorer, and that users can experience less viruses and spyware, while also being extremely customisable with themes, addons and plugins.

    Other benefits of Firefox are commong knowledge – the fact that thousands from all over the world are working on the browser, making it extremely secure and up to date that most other browsers.

    Meanwhile, James, it seems, is a hardcore Firefox nut. He’s hoping that the campaign and awareness programmes could get enough students to form a Firefox Club…

“It would be nice to have a place where students can come together to talk about Firefox,” Beckner said.

    But on the other hand, Thomas M Van Gilder, director of technological support services, said that they would continue to use IE for a few sites, which do not support Firefox. He said that theres no universal standard for web development, which made some browsers better than others for particular websites.

    My friend, Bill Creswellnet, mentioned to me once that Safari is the best browser out there, in terms of site support. He opinioned that Safari supports most of the sites. Since I’m not a Mac user, I do not know how far it is true, but usually I trust Bill’s opinions…

    So anyway, good luck to you James in completing a Firefox campus! Meanwhile, we at Blogging India, use Firefox for the “effect”. On one of our sister sites, Blog For Peace, whenever a user visits with an incompatible browser(IE 5.5 or lower) a huge “Use Firefox!” banner is displayed

[tags]firefox, mozilla, spread, appalachian state university, james beckner, firefox campus[/tags]