Airtel launches free Twitter access on Mobile!

Airtel today announced that it will be offering free twitter access to Airtel mobile users till 1st March 2012.

This announcement will enable over 170 million Airtel mobile users to enjoy free Twitter access via mobile.twitter.com. Additionally,  they can also use SMS shortcode 53000 to sign up for Twitter and even Tweet or receive Tweets from specified users.

Due to the fact that Airtel has enabled use of Twitter via SMS Shortcode , millions of Airtel customers who do not have GPRS or have basic features phones can still enjoy free Twitter Access!

How to access Twitter using Airtel service

• Using Twitter mobile website:

Visit mobile.twitter.com (with or without GPRS subscription), follow simple sign up process by entering your mobile number and start using!

• How to new account on Twitter on SMS:

SMS ‘START’  to 53000, upon receiving reply – SMS ‘SIGNUP’ to 53000. Next, type a username (unique and less than 15 characters) and send that to 53000. Once Twitter approves your username, you will get a confirmation message, prompting you to SMS a chosen password to 53000. On completion of this process, your Twitter account will be created. Sign up is only required if a user wants to tweet!

• Follow specific Twitter users on SMS

To receive updates from a specific user, SMS ‘Follow <username>’ to 53000. Users can follow others on Twitter on SMS even without having a Twitter account of their own

• For Existing Twitter Users

Existing Twitter users can now view their timeline, find and follow accounts, post new Tweets, see Tweets mentioning them, and reply to other users and retweet their Tweets – all for free on Airtel from now till 1st March 2012.

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I think this is going to be a trend moving forward – Earlier, Mobile Operators used to compete on just one thing – pricing. However, they have realized competing on pricing isharming them more. There is a definite shift, where most mobile operators are now concentrating on offering Value Added services like these. In longer run, Value Added services offered by these telecom providers will be key in increasing and retaining their customer base.

5 Indian brands that top Facebook performance!

When we talk about Indian brands that top Facebook performance, we’re not really talking about who wins the race with statistics such as number of likes, hits, traffic build up et al. We’re talking about the strategies that they’ve got right and what they’ve done to hit the nail on the head.

Let’s check out a few popular & successful Indian brands that top Facebook performance, in no particular hierarchy.

Top Brand #1: Tata Docomo

The melodious jingle of Tata Docomo instantly caught on with the Indian audience from the very day the brand was launched in 2008. With credentials like being the GSM arm of Tata Teleservices Limited and the pioneer telecom brand to launch 3G services in India, Tata Docomo has taken the cake from other telecom providers in engaging more than 4 million users on Facebook.

In fact, the Docomo Facebook page even hosted a special graphic for thanking their fans to help them cross the ’3 million mark’ for Facebook Likes. Tata Docomo’s singular Facebook strategy has been linking all their posts with their products – whether it is a Diwali greeting or the recent F1 race. Their call to actions are extremely in-your-face and strong.

Check out a sample from their Facebook posts:

"When you wanna catch your favourite match but don’t have a TV will your operator provide you the best sports experience right on your phone?"

Top Brand #2: MTV India

If there is a brand that focuses entirely on Indian youth, it’s MTV India. It’s surprising that in so many years, not a single other brand has been able to develop engaging content for Indian youth.

With MTV Roadies, MTC Unplugged and MTV Splitsville topping the charts amongst many other MTV reality television properties, its brand engagement with the audience too is finding an increased scope. Offering the latest in youth issues, Bollywood, cricket, contemporary music and reality TV, MTV India has crossed the mark of having more than 2.9 million Facebook Fans and a daily average of thousand new likes.

Check out a sample from their Facebook posts:

"Cricketer Yuvraj Singh throws a googly! The cricketer has tied up with sports brand PUMA for #love12 – an ecosystem for PUMA, Yuvi and fans to reserve the 12th of every month, starting 2012 to having fun, being creative and making a positive impact"

Top Brand #3: Kingfisher India

It isn’t very surprising to see this inherently social and friendly alcohol product to be one of the popular Indian brands that top Facebook performance. Generating extremely casual content to interact with its beer loving customers, you’ll see flippant questions like ‘What do the Good Times mean for you? or ‘What would you do if you were denied entry to a party’ or some such. Well, chatty banter and models on the beach is what the brand is all about, right?

Check out a sample from their Facebook posts:

"Seems like Diwali came in a night early with the Indian team bringing out the fireworks last night! Victory. Redemption. Good Times."

Top Brand #4: Fastrack

This is one surprising name to appear on the list of Indian brands that top Facebook performance. Since this brand’s launch in 1995, it has constantly developed new products such as backpacks, hobos, sunglasses, sling bags, messenger bags, duffels and gym bags.

And more importantly, since 2005, they doubled up on their internet marketing with Facebook with a million fans by 2010. Fastrack organizes a one day sale on Facebook and relies on word-of-mouth to be the sole communication strategy to promote sales via the internet. With their F***CK one day sale strategy, they ended up being completely sold out with sales over more than Rs. 2 crores. Currently they are riding high with close to 2.2 million Facebook Fans!

Check out a sample from their Facebook posts:

"All the talk is about Pole Positions these days and we at Fastrack have our own take on that….We say forget the cars, the best pole position is all about the grind!!"

Top brand #5: Vodafone Zoozoos

Vodafone Zoozoos are the perfect example of a well laid out advertising campaign that in turn influence online marketing strategies. Crossing the 2 million mark of Facebook users, the Zoozoo Facebook page too, cashes in completely on the ‘cute’ factor of the Zoozoos with casual banter related to current events and cartoon images of Zoozoos related to a specific post.

With contests and games galore, this Indian brand has held itself high as one of the top performing brands on Facebook.

Check out a sample from their Facebook posts:

"Super Zoozoo hovered above the track in the clouds and enjoyed the race. Did you follow the race?"

Wow! Google offers Free Website with .in domains – Grab Now!

Google is really taking Indian Market very seriously – According to an announcement today by Google has launched -India Get Your Business Online – initiative that will offer Indian Small & Medium sized Businesses completely free website along with a .in domain name.

Additionally, this initiative offers businesses free Email Addresses backed with 365 day support. Essentially, everything that you will need to get your business online.

Given the potential of growth in India – Google has played a master-stroke here by making it absolutely easy for Indian Businesses to come online.

How to avail free Website / domain offer from Google

Just head over to India Get your Business Online website, choose your domain name, fill up a form giving some of the details and you are done.

What all things do you get?

• Free: It’s free to set up your website. The domain is free for 1 year, and it’s free to maintain your website for 12 months.
• Quick: The website tool takes 15 minutes from sitting down to being found online
• Easy: You don’t need to be a tech whiz to get started. All you need to start is your address, phone number, TAN/CIN or PAN to verify you as a business
• The website is simple because customers are looking for simple information online
• Gives you your own .in domain
• Other features include photos/logos, integration with social media platforms
• You get a Google Apps account – free personalized email ids
• If you want to make your website work harder, you’ll have access to steady stream of free tips and tools from the Getting Indian Business Online team and a free coupon of worth Rs. 2500 INR advertising trial from Google AdWords to help promote your site.
• After the first year, SMBs can choose to pay a monthly pay-as-you-go to maintain their website using hostgator.
• At the end of the first year, they’ll have to pay a nominal charge if they wish to renew their domain name. They can cancel their website at any time.

India get your business online program is also supported by Federation of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), popularly known as FISME. FISME, the non-profit organization will work with Google India to help SMBs get online through direct customer outreach and events.

All in all, this is a great initiative by Google! What is your take?

OurMobilePlanet.com – Comprehensive Mobile Insights from Google & others!

Penetration of Mobiles and specifically smartphones have changed the way we communicate and collaborate with the world. Infact, it has changed our lifestyle to a very large extent. Our reliance on mobile phones is growing day-by-day.

Google along with Market Research firm Ipsos and Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) have put together an excellent interactive site – OurMobilePlanet.com – that allow users to create many customized reports on smartphones usage trends across the globe.

I personally spent about 30 minutes creating some custom reports and users can really get lot of insights and reports on smartphone usage. From simple reports like Smartphone penetration (given below) to complex reports about Smartphone Apps downloads and their usage can be be generated in matter of seconds.

Smartphone Penetration

Smartphone Apps installation and usage

This is a great initiative by Google – Infact, lot of information available on OMP is not available free anywhere, but Google is bringing them to us completely free of cost. Spend some time on OurMobilePlanet.com and let us know the reports that you have created.

Currently there are about 30 countries listed, but over a period of time I guess the data will grow and can serve as a central repository for anything that you may want to know about Mobiles and their usage.

Thanks Google for bringing this to us!

Reliance to bring 4G tablet with Datawind for Rs. 5000!

Reliance Industries could probably team up with Aakash tablet maker, Datawind to bring a 4G tablet. Not just a 4G tablet but possibly the cheapest tablet by a big brand available commercially.

The ambitious target of both Reliance and Datawind is to sell a TD-LTE device at half the price of the tablets currently available. Both the companies seems to be in agreement with a price tag of Rs. 5000.

There is a popular Reliance 3G Tab, which is made by a different Reliance, the Reliance of Anil Ambani. The 4G tablet will be from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance. In fact, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is the only company to have a pan India TD-LTE license.

Reliance is planning to start its 4G operations in 2012 and it will not be launching its services without appropriate partnerships. The current crop of devices are not ready for Indian consumption because of their expensive nature. Reliance is not known for selling expensive stuff. From that perspective, the Datawind deal makes all the more sense.

If Reliance offers its 4G tablet at the price promised, India could leapfrog all the consumer devices ever produced to access the Internet and land straight up on tablets.

TD-LTE will offer better speeds and a cheap Reliance 4G Tablet probably leapfrog India’s connectivity option in a way Broadband, Mobile and 3G together could never achieve.

PS : This is a speculation. And we comment on market speculations. That’s what we do. Along with other things of course.

What Happens When Google Goes Down!

No, the world does not end!! But, if I go by my twitter feed a google outage might be a sign that the world might be coming to an end. BTW, if you did not know Google just had a major outage and pretty much all services were down including the search engine Google.com. Google services are now back atleast for me!!

Wonder what chaos ensues when Google goes down!!  The current outage might have been a minor one but lets see what happens when google goes down!

What happens when Google Goes Down?

Chances are you hear it first on Twitter or if you are a software developer like I was in my past avatar, you realize your work comes to a standstill. Bad jokes apart, panic sets in as the digitarti discovers that Google services they rely on so badly is not accessible. Think Google Search, Google Mail / Apps, Google Docs and a range of Google services used widely by people.

Here is a list of things that can happen when Google Goes Down

• Twitter goes down as well. Well, more like folks tweeting "Is Google Down" and others responding with "Yes, Here As Well" set off a chain reaction and the virality of Twitter becomes its Achilles heel and you are hit by a #failwhale. Ouch!
• Coders and IT Managers Get Frantic. It might be self-deprecating but it is true. Thousands of coders working in software companies are hit by a sudden realization that they have lost their coding skills all of a sudden. No google means there is no search and that means there is no easy way to find out what is the solution to the darn bug you are getting.
  IT Managers on the other hand being the considerate type they are, realize the obvious hindrance and start thinking of way to push the deliverable deadline. God forbid, if Google goes down for more than a day or two they will have no answer as to why no work is getting done
• People discover something called ‘Bing’ exists. Oh yeah! Microsoft’s awesome search engine ‘Bing’ that never seems to give me decent search results, ever. If Google goes out for a full day, expect a press release with the title ‘Bing traffic explodes, Microsoft’s investments paying off’
• Google Announces It’s Time To Materialize Its Evil Plans. Unlikely and scary, but imagine Google decides that the ‘Free’ era is over and announces the outage was an intended move. Anyone who wants to access Google services now needs to give an arm and a leg to be able to use Google’s services or it is over. I cant imagine a headline saying ‘Google’s World Domination Has Begun’
• Robert Scoble Is Not Able to Bash Twitter, On Google+. Well, if you have been active on Google+ you will know what I am talking about. With Google services down, where will Robert Scoble diss twitter and the fact that Twitter is not innovating at all

On a more serious note, there is no denying our dependence on Google. Privacy issues and monopolistic strategy notwithstanding, Google has its users by the hook across a majority of its services. For me, a twitter outage itself makes me realize that something is missing so imagine what Google outage means.

Do share your thoughts on what can happen when Google goes down? How does it affect you.

PS: This was my not-so-good attempt at writing a humor style post. My intention was not to malign any brand or individual

Five Important Wall Street Q3 Results [Apple, Goldman, BoA, Citigroup, Yahoo]

Even as India Inc moves forward with its Q2 fiscal earnings, the top Wall Street companies are slowly oozing out with their Q3 results performance amid slowdown and deficit-reeling US economy.

While the global sentiment is mired by the unanimous downgrade of Spain’s creditworthiness by three credit rating agencies – Fitch Ratings, S&P and now even Moody’s; the Wall Street earnings have been no show-stealer amid mixed-bag of results with some banks doing well, while few others including Apple missing earnings forecast.

Let me summarize a few important Wall Street earnings performance over here:

Apple drags on lower iPhone sales

In a rare instance on missing its earnings forecast, Apple Inc reported a net profit of $6.62 billion (up 54% from $4.31 billion last year) on revenues of $28.3 billion, which came in a tad lower than Wall Street expectation of $30 billion, for its fiscal fourth quarter of this year.

At 17.7 million, Apple sold 21% more iPhones than last year during the July to September 2011 quarter, with no new next-generation iPhone and iPad releases. However, the iPhone sales fell short by 19% when compared with its previous quarter figures.

Goldman stutters with underwriting losses

Investment banker Goldman Sachs reported a quarterly loss of $428 million for the three months ended September 2011, run down by slump in its investment portfolio and fall in trading revenues. This was its second-ever quarterly loss in at least a decade, next only to post-Lehman era loss of $1.6 billion in Q4-2008.

Goldman’s net revenues came in at $3.59 billion, down 60% from $8.9 billion a year ago period. The Q3 results include $1.05 billion losses from investment in Industrial and commercial Bank of China. Its investment and lending business lost $2.48 billion during the quarter under review.

Bank of America prospers with one-time gains

Bank of America, the second biggest US bank by assets next only to JP Morgan Chase, posted a net profit of $6.23 billion. Revenues recorded a growth of 6% to $28.7 billion mostly led by one-time accounting gains related to debt valuations.

In the race to claim position of top-most American bank, Bank of America came in second with its $2.22 trillion in assets, behind JP Morgan Chase’s which reported assets of $2.29 trillion in this latest quarter.

Citigroup in the pink of health

Citigroup posted positive Q3 results with net income of $3.77 billion, up 74% from $2.17 billion in the corresponding quarter last year, backed by lower losses from loans and $1.9 billion from credit valuation adjustment gains.

Citigroup, which is fourth largest US bank, posted revenues of $20.8 billion, almost at par with its revenues clocked in the year-ago period. The bank’s losses from bad loans came down by 41% during the July-September quarter to $4.5 billion.

Yahoo beats estimates

Internet portal Yahoo announced its third quarter results with dwindling sales and profitability, led by growing prominence of social media platforms and Google search products. Yahoo Inc posted Q3 profit of $293 million, with search queries showing tepid growth.

Revenues for the third quarter came in at $1.07 billion, down 4.5% from $1.12 billion recorded last year for the September-end quarter. The revenues exclude traffic acquisition costs. The internet giant is aiming for more business partnerships to target growing monetization.