Spice Mobile gives India it's first 3D phone at Rs 4,299

Spice Mobile gives India it's first 3D phone at Rs 4,299: "Spice Mobile gives India it's first 3D phone at Rs 4,299View D will allow users to experience images and videos in 3D without the 3D glasses, making it convenient for a common user."

Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV, really

Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV, really: "

Yes, you heard this before. The Death of Cable TV. Yet, it hasn’t happened. But now, so many disruptions are happening in the video space, cable tv is really stepping towards the cliff. Don’t expect the cable industry to just give up.

We’ll get some new insights next week when the largest U.S. cable operator (23 million cable customers), Comcast, reports its Q3 earnings and subscriber count. Comcast cable customers dropped nearly 3% in Q2 compared to last year. In Q2 for the industry overall, a record 711,000 subscribers abandoned cable tv, and six of eight operators suffered their worst quarterly subscriber losses ever.

Just this month, a lot has happened:

• Google unveiled its Google TV platform less than 3 weeks ago. You can’t ignore Google. Hey, they just built a car that drives itself. But Thursday, in a battle that will likely become more frequent between old media and new, ABC, CBS and NBC blocked their programs from Google TV. MTV, Fox and HBO are still available, but that could change. Still, one TechCrunch post declared “I’ve seen the future and it begins on my sofa with Google TV.”


• Steve Jobs bragged this week that Apple has already sold 250,000 new Apple TVs. The first Apple TV shipped in 2007. It had its fans but didn’t take off like the iPod or iPhone. The second generation of Apple TV’s launched just last month. MG Siegler really likes the device, but admitted it’s not yet the killer device in the living room. To get there, he said, would require tv network subscription packages.


• “Watch Instantly” is booming at Netflix. A shocking statistic came out this week. 20% of Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S. is coming from Netflix.
  
  For more on Netflix’s plans, see Sarah Lacy’s interview with CEO Reed Hastings.


• Hulu Plus will be coming to the Roku box in the fall.
  
  For some, the Roku box may be the first step towards eliminating cable.


• Boxee announced the new Boxee Box will ship next month, both if you pre-ordered from Amazon or want to buy one in stores.


• Flurry reported Apple’s iOS Apps are responsible for the recent downward trend in TV ratings. The actual cause may be a bit broader.


• A TechCrunch post Friday suggested the future of TV is HTML5.

With all these alternatives, a J.D. Power and Associates survey released this month said consumers are less satisfied with the monthly pay-TV bills and cable subscribers are more likely to feel ripped off than telcom or satellite TV customers.

Why Does Cable TV Exist?

When cable tv first started in the 1940s, it was a disruptive technology. Community Antenna Television (CATV) solved a problem. Some homes, in mountainous regions, cities, and locations far away from the over-the-air broadcast transmitters couldn’t get a good signal. By setting up a large community antenna and retransmitting the signal on coaxial cables to those homes, the reception problem was solved. Some claim the first system was set-up in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania and cost subscribers $100 per hookup plus $2 a month.

As the industry grew, cable operators began to pick up distant signals, providing new programming choices for consumers. Even homes that could receive the over-the-air signals signed up for cable. And cable started producing its own exclusive, original channels. In 1975, HBO became the first cable network delivering its signal across the country, via satellite to cable systems, which then re-transmitted it to consumers. Ted Turner (“I was cable before cable was cool“), launched the first basic cable network distributed by satellite, WTBS, in 1976. Cable also offered local community programming, not available on the broadcast networks. I remember watching a news show at home produced at my junior high school. At the time, this blew my mind.

(Disclosure: I owe the cable industry for the first 14 years of my career, working at a place with a name starting with ‘Cable.’ But then I switched to the internet.)

What’s Changed

But all these once ‘cable-only’ benefits have changed. DSL, cable (yes, cable – more on that shortly) modems, and perhaps future fiber to the house mean video has many other routes to the home.

The once exclusive cable-only content is now becoming available elsewhere. At first, cable shows started appearing on DVDs after their first run on cable. But now, there are many more options. Cancelcable.com lists some non-cable ways to find your favorite shows. And local and user generated content now has a global reach and can be shared in a community of viewers with common broad or narrow interest.

There is one key stumbling block for getting more tv shows on the Internet though. Money. And it’s the reason for the network / Google TV dispute mentioned above. An AdAge article wisely pointed out

“The networks aren’t blocking Google TV because it’s Google. They are blocking Google TV because it is putting a web TV show, with web TV show economics, on a TV, which would be incredibly disruptive to their business.”

Revenue per viewer-minute is much less online vs. broadcast. This could change as more ads appear on the web distribution and they become more targeted and interactive. Also, show or channel subscriptions could solve this problem.

The one thing that cable does have going for it is: its relatively easy to use. Make a call, someone comes over to your house and hooks it up, and then you control it with your remote. (Well, you may have waited for hours on hold for someone to answer your call and then waited all day for the installer to arrive.) Up to now, you had to be a tech savvy person to cancel cable and hook up your own system. No one from Google, Apple, or Netflix is going to come to your house and help you hook the new devices up. As Danny Sullivan found out, hooking up your Google TV is not quite ready for prime time or the masses. But, expect it to improve. And other offerings, such as Apple TV, are making it easier. The cable alternatives are moving from technologies only early adopters use to ones the broader market can figure out.

Cable Has Faced Competitors Before

The cable tv industry is no stranger to competition. Cable survived competition from the DVD rental store. (Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Apple just killed the optical drive in its new laptops.) Satellite TV providers DirectTV (18.7 million customers in the U.S.) and Dish Networks (14.3 million customers) have some loyal customers, but haven’t been able to stop cable. But, the internet will be a tougher challenge.

The Cost of Cable

One of the biggest problems for the cable industry is its high cost. Growing cost was the biggest reason one study reported one in eight consumers said they would eliminate or scale back their cable, satellite or other pay-TV service in 2010. The cable industry tries to explain that the cost of cable is going down. Check out this graph on Price Per Viewing Hour, on the National Cable & Telecommuncations Association website



Yeah, right. That’s not going to convince any cable subscriber looking at their monthly bill.

The cable industry has resisted “a la carte” pricing, allowing customers to pick and choose which channels they watch and pay for. Cable networks make part of their money from subscription fees paid by customers to the cable operators and then to the networks. So smaller networks could go out of business under such a pricing plan. There’s also a debate over whether “a la carte” pricing would save or cost consumers money. Internet TV already offers pick and pay pricing options. New media can handle this much better than old media. For my money, I think I’d come out with a big savings under an “a la carte” system.

Cable Fights Back

While the cable industry is losing basic cable subscribers, they are still doing fine financially. Comcast stock is up 15% so far this year, vs. 9% for NASDAQ. Comcast’s internet business (cable modem users) is growing. Comcast, teaming up with Time Warner cable, is also pushing TV Everywhere, which puts TV channels online and behind a paywall only cable subscribers can view. And of course, Comcast is planning to merge with broadcaster and cable network giant NBC Universal in a complex transaction. But the new joint venture won’t include Comcast’s cable systems. The deal still needs regulators approval, and the FCC has asked the companies how the merging of the biggest broadband provider and major content firm will impact the distribution of online videos.

There’s also speculation that cable boxes could come with ‘Google TV’ built-in for an additional fee. But, would consumers really choose to pay the higher fee and keep their cable box, when other options will be cheaper?

The Immediate Future

The Death of Cable remains a hot topic. Next month, a panel at Streaming Media West will discuss “Cutting the Cord on TV: Will Online Video Really Lead to Cable’s Demise?”

I actually still have cable. I’m inches away from dropping it, but there are still a few shows not available elsewhere that my wife enjoys. But, it’s hard to imagine those shows won’t be available elsewhere in the near future. I know a lot of folks who keep cable for live sports, but cable surviving as a sports-only service is hard to fathom.

More than a year ago, writer and entrepreneur Paul Kedrosky wrote “Many people are coming to the correct conclusion that in the age of Hulu, Boxess, Bittorrent, etc., that cable TV is an over-priced relic of another entertainment age.” Now that the likes of Apple, Google, Netflix and others are aggressively joining the game, the days of that over-priced relic seem even more numbered.

Information provided by CrunchBase

Now You Can Follow Stocks On Twitter. Stocks, Not People.

Now You Can Follow Stocks On Twitter. Stocks, Not People.: "

I’ve got to admit it: When it comes to financial advice, I just don’t trust my friends. And I certainly don’t trust random people on Twitter or other social networks. I don’t think I am alone. Most social finance sites have yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Just look at the pivot kaChing just did by renaming itself Wealthfront (and focusing on professional money managers instead of amateurs who outperform. It’s not that I think amateur investors are untrustworthy, it’s just that I don’t know who to trust.

For that reason, among others (I don’t trade stocks), I haven’t really spent much time on StockTwits either. But StockTwits just turned on a new feature a few days ago that finally made it click for me. It lets you follow stocks on Twitter, not just the people talking about them. All of a sudden, it is not about trying to figure out who you trust, it is about getting all the buzz on the stocks and companies you care about in realtime. This ability to follow stocks instead of people is a perfect example of how to take Twitter’s interest graph and put it on steroids.

People on StockTwits use a convention similar to hashtags whenever they Tweet about a stock. They put a “$” in front of the ticker. So you can find what people are saying about $GOOG or $AAPL. Now you can follow each of those tickers as well, and any mention of those stocks is placed into your StockTwits stream, along with the Tweets from the people you follow on the service as well. You can even follow mentions of private companies such as $TWIT and $FBOOK (hey, those aren’t publicly traded stocks—not yet, anyway). As people start following stocks, you can see their watchlists. Here’s StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon’s followed stocks, for instance, and here’s mine.

Before now, StockTwits was about random and not-so-random people talking about stocks on Twitter. But unless you knew these people already, were you really going to take stock-picking cues from someone named BullzzEye or RaginCajun? No offense. Those guys could be the most amazing traders on StockTwits, I have no idea. I really don’t have the time or inclination to find out either—which could be more my loss than theirs. But again, I don’t think I am alone here in being wary about taking stock advice from random strangers on social networks.

Following stocks instead of people changes the whole equation in my mind. It is no longer about trusting people, it is about collecting data. If I am trading $AAPL or $GOOG, I may very well learn about a market-moving announcement first on Twitter than anywhere else. By following these “stocks” on StockTwits, it is really more of a realtime warning system for traders. In the stock markets, timely information is money. And by following these filtered streams, I get both financial information and product/technology news. So as a news junkie, it is a very interesting filter for me. Also by following Tweets about a specific topic (anyone Tweeting about $GOOG or $NFLX), over time I should be able to figure out who to trust based on the quality of their Tweets on the subject, and then I can start following them if I want.

StockTwits has been evolving for some time beyond being a simple front-end for Twitter, and this makes the service even more compelling. But I would rather consume these stock-specific streams on Twitter itself. How cool would it be if you could follow $GOOG on Twitter or any other interest stream for that matter? StockTwits would need to create accounts for each ticker symbol (if that’s possible), or perhaps some sort of set of Twitter lists that people could follow. But this really points to the next step for Twitter itself. It needs to make it easier to follow your interests, not just people.

CrunchBase Information

StockTwits

Twitter

Information provided by CrunchBase

Sony Retires the Cassette Walkman After 30 Years

Sony Retires the Cassette Walkman After 30 Years: "

After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player.

The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. Once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer.

The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman over the product line’s 30-year career.

Somewhat ironically, the announcement was delivered just one day ahead of the iPod’s ninth anniversary on October 23, although the decline of the cassette Walkman is attributed primarily to the explosive popularity of CD players in the ’90s, not the iPod.

Image courtesy of Flickr, FaceMePLS

[via Gizmodo]

Starbucks Stores in New York Now Accepting Mobile Payments

Starbucks Stores in New York Now Accepting Mobile Payments: "

Starbucks has seen sufficient success with its Starbucks Card Mobile payment pilot program in select San Francisco, Seattle and Target stores that its ready to extend the program to nearly 300 company-operated stores in New York City and Long Island.

Starbucks Card Mobile for iPhone and BlackBerry lets users pay for their coffee by holding up the 2-D barcode on their smartphone to the scanner at the counter. The application allows customers to manage and reload their Starbucks Cards as well.

Customers have responded positively to the mobile payment option, Starbucks reports.

“We’re seeing more and more customers using their smartphones as their mobile wallets,” says Brady Brewer, vice president Starbucks Card and Loyalty. “We’ve heard from our customers on My Starbucks Idea that they want a faster, more convenient way to pay.”

The ultimate goal of the program is to get customers to trade in their physical Starbucks Cards for the digital variety — it’s a time saving exchange for the customer and a cost saving exchange for the company. Already, one in five of all in-store transactions are paid for via Starbucks Card (mobile or physical), and more than $1 billion will have been loaded on to cards by year’s end.

The extension of the mobile payment pilot comes on the heels of the reveal of Starbucks Digital Network. Mobile is an increasingly important avenue for Starbucks. The company reports that more than 50% of all logons to its free in-store WiFi are made via mobile phone, and that of its smartphone-carrying customer base, 71% have an iPhone or BlackBerry device.

Image courtesy of gumption, Flickr

Steps recommended by Google to secure Gmail

Steps recommended by Google to secure Gmail: "

This Sunday, I am writing a slightly non-techie post but an important one. Recently on reading a post about keeping Gmail secure, I thought it would be important to share some important aspects of keeping your Gmail account safe.

The nightmare scenario is having your Gmail account compromised. Most people use their email to subscribe to other services, store passwords and when it comes to Google use it for Google Reader, YouTube, Orkut etc…

Image Credit: FamilyHomeSecurity

Secure your computer

Like they say “charity starts at home” we can say the same for account safety. In this case it is your computer which you use for surfing the net.

• Check for viruses and malware with the latest anti-virus.
• Always keep your operating system upto date. If you are using Windows there are many people who put-off installing updates. This can actually be quite a bad idea.
• Make sure the programs you use are updated. This applies most importantly to your Anti-Virus applications and any email clients if you are running them.

Updated Browsers

The point is have updated browser versions. Most time an updated version which is stable is a good idea.

• Download the latest browser version. Most times you can update the browser from your browser itself.
• The other point often missed is plugins and add-ons are not up-to date. It is a good idea to have updated plugins for your individual browsers. Latest version of Firefox has an inbuilt feature which prompts you to update older plugins.

Your Account information

• Change your password regularly. This is important as you might be using the same password for many linked services. Like for Google you might be using the same password from using YouTube to Gmail. Changing passwords is often the most ignored aspect of online security.
• Check which websites are authorized to use your account credentials. If you are using Google, you can sign into Google Accounts Page. Here click on My Account >> Change Authorized Websites. This is where you can revoke access to 3rd party websites.
• Often Gmail prompts you to have a recovery option for your Google account. Make sure you have an alternative email address and secret questions.

Sharing is not caring

Do not think of your password as the keys to your house. Think of it as the keys to your safe deposit box at a bank.

• One of the key reasons people have their account hacked is because they use weak or predictable passwords.
• Often people share Gmail account credentials with 3rd party websites. This actually means you are sharing your password with a stranger. Avoid sharing your passwords with other people or other web services.
• Another major security issue is people do not sign-out once they are done checking their emails. Always sign-out even if you are using a personal computer.

I must confess that despite of being aware of all the steps here, I might have not managed to conform to all of them. I guess it is important to look up these points for a safer Gmail experience from time to time. What are your views on online safety? What are your steps to keep your accounts safe? Do let me know through your comments.

Link: Gmail security Check List

-- This Post Steps recommended by Google to secure Gmail is Published on Devils Workshop .

Infrastructure bonds to save more tax

Infrastructure bonds to save more tax: "ET explains how they work for investors looking for more tax deduction."

GDP to grow 8.2% in FY-11: Crisil

GDP to grow 8.2% in FY-11: Crisil

TCS, Infosys plan to hire 50,000 & 40,000 respectively

TCS, Infosys plan to hire 50,000 & 40,000 respectively: "TCS, Infosys plan to hire 50,000 & 40,000 respectivelyWith double-digit revenue growth returning to the $60 bn Indian IT-ITeS sector, top IT players, are stepping up their hiring plans for the next few quarters."

Google Hits a Technical Snag: Stops Updating its Index

Google Hits a Technical Snag: Stops Updating its Index: "

It won’t be an exaggeration to claim that Google Search drives most of the world wide web. Look around, and you will see that Google is the biggest (often by a large margin) source of traffic for a majority of the websites. So what will happen if Google breaks? Just the thought alone is enough to scare me as a webmaster.

Thankfully, Google has performed with admirable reliability over the years. However, it’s not easy managing a beast that is Google. Little technical snags are bound to occur. And it appears that Google has just hit one. According to reports, Google has stopped indexing numerous blogs and even popular websites, over the past few days. In other words, new content from several websites have stopped appearing in Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed the there is a technical problem that is preventing Google from efficiently indexing some websites. Here’s the message he posted in one of the Google Webmaster Central discussions.

I just wanted to provide a short update. This issue should be resolved soon, but it will take a several days for everything to catch up and for these changes to be visible. I’ll provide another update after the weekend.

In the meantime, there’s no need to make any changes on your side. Content from your sites will continue to be indexed during this time (though perhaps at the moment not as quickly as before in some cases).

Mueller has also clarified that the problem is entirely technical and not due to a change in Google’s algorithm.

I’ve been in contact with the indexing and diagnostics teams since your initial reports — we are taking your reports seriously and doing what is necessary to resolve this problem as soon as possible. We love sending users to your sites quickly after you have published something too :-).

Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible (it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though). You do not need to change anything on your side and we will continue to crawl and index your content (perhaps not as quickly at the moment, but we hope that will be resolved for all sites soon). I would not recommend changing anything significantly at this moment (unless you spot obvious problems on your side), as these may result in other issues once this problem is resolved on our side.