With MySpace making its India launch, could YouTube have been far behind? The video sharing website launched its Indian version on May 7 with a localised home page and search functions that allows users to share and upload videos and discover clips most relevant to India.
YouTube India is reported to have signed agreements with content providers like UTV, NDTV, Rajshri Films, Eros Entertainment and the department of tourism.
The cacophony of India’s public tea auctions will soon give way to the gentle tapping of keyboards as the country’s tea markets are set to go digital. Jeremy Kahn in The New York Times:
Guwahati: Traders crowd around wooden desks in a huge dusty auditorium, poring over thick catalogs describing chests of tea. A broker seated at the front of the room calls out prices in a quick, rolling cadence as the traders shout and gesture, signaling their bids.
A sharp rap of the gavel closes each sale, and the process starts over - under the market’s rules, the auctioneer must sell at least three lots in a minute.
The scene repeats itself every Tuesday and Wednesday morning here at the Tea Auction Center in the state of Assam, heart of India’s famed tea country, wedged among Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and China.
In Mint, S Mitra Kalita on IIT Bombay’s ‘LAN ban’ and the effect it’s been having on an old student pastime — that of hanging out
At the stroke of midnight, like Cinderella stripped of her gown and glass slippers, students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai also lose something that defines their survival: technology itself.
Exactly one year ago, officials at the elite IIT Bombay began restricting the Internet in hostels after fearing high-speed access was impeding socialization, replacing talk with instant messaging, virtual gaming instead of the sweaty, heart-rate-quickening variety. Initially, the “LAN ban”, as it was dubbed, was between 4.30pm and 7pm, and then midnight and 7am. Participation in sports and extracurricular activities had dropped and “when we tried to figure out the cause of this problem, it didn’t take us long to find that these students locked themselves in the confines of their rooms,” Prakash Gopalan, the dean of student affairs at IIT Bombay, said in an interview back then.
In Slate, Anne Applebaum says shaky cell-phone videos from Tibet foretell doom for the Chinese empire
Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China’s Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border?
In Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin on blogger reaction and growing protests even as China blocks YouTube. Read that post here.
Finally, Kadfly is a tourist currently in Lhasa and has been posting despite problems with the Internet
Today people returned to the streets of Lhasa in droves. There are tons of Chinese police and army in the city but they are letting people wander without too much difficulty. Schools were also open today - hopefully all this means that there will not be any further escalation of the situation. Since the 14th things have quieted down dramatically - aside from a few booms and bangs we haven’t been able to hear much from where we are.
Sidin Sunny Vadukut in Mint Lounge meets some Indian editors of Wikipedia
It was the third day of what would become an infamous match in Test cricket: the second in the five-match 2007-08 Border-Gavaskar Trophy between India and Australia. Brett Lee comes up to bowl his 28th, and Australia’s 116th, over of the day. Harbhajan Singh slashes out at the third ball of the over. The ball balloons over slips and runs away for four. Singh walks up to Lee, taps him on the back with his bat and apparently says “hard luck”. At the end of the over, Andrew Symonds exchanges words with the Indian off-spinner.
Those few moments would later erupt into the most talked about international cricket controversy in recent memory.
ut, at the time, far from the very public glare of the media, a silent battle was going on between Indian and Australian fans. Not on the pitch, on the stands or in the streets. But on the Internet. On Wikipedia.
The cellphone from Spice has no flips, folds or slides - not even a screen. In International herald Tribune:
It looks a bit like a child’s toy, a walkie-talkie circa 1975, a cheap plastic throwback to the good old days when telephones were made for talking.
But to Spice Ltd., a telecommunications company in the world’s fastest-growing phone market, this new product embodies the latest, greatest innovation in cellphone technology today: a handset priced at less than $20.
Spice, which is based in Noida, India, unveiled what it is branding “the People’s Phone” at a wireless industry conference in Barcelona last month. The handset is an anomaly among mobile phones today: The number keys are big and bold. It is chunky and has no color screen - in fact, it has no screen at all. Nothing about it flips, folds or slides. It is, as Spice’s chairman, Bhupendra Kumar Modi, described it, “just a phone.”
On this sprawling campus three hours from Bangalore, new hires of Infosys Technologies Ltd learn business practices, programming fundamentals and social graces such as wearing a tie and using a knife.
The resemblance to college is more than coincidental. One recent graduate likened Infosys’ renowned four-month course to “getting a BS course in the US” in four months, versus the traditional four years in bachelor’s of science degrees.
India’s top software vendors pride themselves on retraining thousands of fresh college graduates to satiate demand for services; training centres such as this are called “software universities” and churn out coders and managers at the rate of more than 800 a day. But the pressure cooker conditions under which those hires must perform-and succeed to be placed in a job-appear to be taking their toll.
An American student takes a class in web-based technology at University of California San Diego from his desktop in Mumbai. From a UCSD news release:
Although the course is very interactive, Derek Lomas teaches it using various forms of web-based technologies, including wiki sites, video streams and e-mail. Lomas’ course, “Design for Development: Developing Technologies for Developing Economies,” aims to connect UCSD students to the problems of the developing world. It is a practicum class with a diverse set of undergraduate and graduate students whose varied majors include engineering, computer science, economics, biotechnology and art.
Lomas received his undergraduate degree in cognitive science at Yale University and currently is in the Master of Fine Arts program at UCSD, studying social design and art and science integration. He first traveled to India in July 2007 to work for QUALCOMM Inc., but stayed because he was inspired to teach the course from an international perspective.
If you happened to be searching for a video at YouTube.com Sunday afternoon, there’s a good chance your browser told you it was unable to locate the entire Web site. Turns out, much of the world was blocked from getting to YouTube for part of the weekend due to a censorship order passed by the government of Pakistan, which was apparently upset that YouTube refused to remove digital images many consider blasphemous to Islam.
According to wire reports, Pakistan ordered all in-country Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com, complaining that the site contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month. The people running the country’s ISPs obliged, but evidently someone at Pakistan Telecom - the primary upstream provider for most of the ISPs in Pakistan - forgot to flip the switch that prevented those blocking instructions from propagating out to the rest of the Internet.
The business of distance learning on the subcontinent is becoming so big that foreign universities and venture capitalists are taking note. Nandini Lakshman in BusinessWeek:
It’s a Sunday afternoon and class time for 39-year-old IT worker Seema Shetty. Her feet curled under her in a swivel chair, she sits in front of a computer monitor, adjusts a set of headphones, and scribbles in a notebook. Shetty, who works for consulting firm Mastek in Mumbai, is in a virtual classroom in the Vile Parle suburb, where a dozen computers link students to some of India’s elite management institutions. Today’s class is a three-hour general management lecture, part of the online education course conducted by the Xavier Labor Relations Institute in Jamshedpur, in the remote northern Indian state of Jharkhand.
Caroline McCarthy on the Hasbro-Scrabulous faceoff in her blog on CNet News
“I’ll go on a hunger strike!”
So said one adamant Facebook user in the wake of the news that game manufacturers Hasbro and Mattel were trying to do something about the wildly popular, unquestionably addictive online game known as Scrabulous.
The game, which rose to fame when its creators turned it into an embeddable Facebook application, is a word game that’s a whole lot like the classic board game Scrabble. It uses a playing board with “bonus” spots just like Scrabble. In fact, the rules are identical to Scrabble’s.
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