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Market News:
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01/30/2008:
The demand and popularity of
Social Networking
is growing day by with new website promising more features and less ads.
Only time will tell who will come out ahead. Recently a new social networking site,
BigAdda, was launced packed with features like send friend requests on the wireless,
have discussions in as many as eight different languages, plus more. Will BigAdda
give a new challenge to already established social networking websites like
Orkut and Facebook?
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01/22/2008:
Founder of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia, recently announced the launch of a new service
within India called
SabSeBolo.com
. SabSeBolo.com will be India's first free
audio conferencing reservation system. In order to use the service, a user will
log on to SabSebolo.com and enter your email id and password and in return will
be given a permanent conference id and a pin. Then user call +91 223980 4444 and
using the conference id and pin can start the conference.
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01/15/2008:
Today at the annual Macworld Expo, Apple Inc's Chief Executive Steve Jobs introduced a
Ultralight MacBook called MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is 0.76 inch thick
at its widest point and comes with 1.6 or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo,
2GB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive and just one USB port with prices to start at
$1,799. He also announced that iTunes will allow users to download movies
from all major studios for a charge of $3.99 for new releases and $2.99 for old titles.
Once downloaded the movies can be watched on iPod/iPhone and your PC, the movies are
valid for 30 days to start watching once downloaded and 24 hours after that to finish.
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01/14/2008:
BSNL, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, is a state owned telecom company in India.
BSNL is pronding thoughts of an IPO at around 10% stake in the company which
is valued at around $10 billion (Rs 40,000 crore) for later this year.
The company is currently valued at $100 billion (Rs 400,000 crore).
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01/11/2008:
Motorola will acquire Soundbuzz, Singapore based pan Asian music provider,
which will add Motorola's MotoMusic service to India, South East Asia,
Australia, and New Zealand. The MotoMusic service is currently being provided
in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Soundbuzz provides consumer ability to downloads
music to mobile device using the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) digital rights
management (DRM) technology. Currently Soundbuzz has extensive music libraries
and through licenses from Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music International, and Universal Music Group
and many others independent record labels within Asia, USA, and Europe.
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01/08/2008:
Microsoft has offered to buy Fast Search and Transfer (Fast), a Norwegian enterprise search company,
for $1.2 billion. This will place Microsoft in a good position of enterprise
as it try to become one stop shop for the enterprise with its wide range of products.
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01/07/2008:
Today at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic
unveiled a 150 inch HD plasma TV, making it the world largest TV to date. Its
screen is equivalent of nine 50 inch sets and features 8.84 million pixel image resolution.
Panasonic has also has a 103 inch version, which cost $70,000 when it was launched.
The price for the 150 inch has yet not been set. Panasonic also releaved a ultra thin 50 inch
panel that is less then an inch thick. Panasonic also plans to intergrate
Google Inc.'s YouTube and Google's Picasa, photo sharing site in future
versions of it TVs.
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01/07/2008:
Today, marks the enterance of a new way of searching. Jimmy Wales, cofounder of
online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and his team have launched
Wikia to
give the online community a new way to search for information. Will this
new search engine hurt the established search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN
and the others? Only time will tell. It will take sometime for Wikia to
reach the online community and enchance Wikia. The concept behind Wikia is
similar to encyclopedia Wikipedia and hence will allow the online community
to help better the search engine experince and put the results best suited
for a given query in front of the searcher.
Wikia has been backed by the funding from Amazon.com, venture capital firm
Bessemer Venture Partners, Netscape Communications cofounder Marc Andreesen,
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Lotus Development founder and
Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder Mitch Kapor.
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World News:
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03/06/2008:
The fight is on. Two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla
have developed a online game named Scrabulous. And now the companies, Hasbro and Mattel,
that own the board game Scrabble are fighting to get Scrabulous shutdown.
Scrabulous
is a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game and this is not
goning well with the companies. Hasbro and Mattel seem to be have been caught
sleeping at the wheel. They had their chances to get their games online long time
back, but they waited and now some smart enterprenues beat them to the punch. Now
the two companies are negotiating with two brothers. Only time will tell how much
the two will get, hope it worth their trouble.
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03/01/2008:
Prince Harry
was taken out of the front line in Afghanistan after the
the media leaked his presence in Afghanistan. The British authorities became concerned for
his safety and the safety of those around him and hence decided to send the
Prince back home after he had served his country until February 29, 2008
as a battlefield air controller.
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02/08/2008:
Air India today launched the first non stop flight from Delhi to New York over
the North Pole. Air India is using the newly developed 238 seater aircraft Boeing 777-200
Longer Range aircraft which is configured with 8 seats in first class, 35 seats in executive class
and 195 seats in economy class with fully flat beds in the First and Executive Classes.
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01/04/2008:
Reliance Power Ltd (RPL) will be offering its initial public offering this month and
which will be the largest by any Indian company to date. The IPO was announced by
Chairman, Mr Anil Ambani. The IPO will raise as much as Rs 11,500 crore of capital
with the issue opening on January 15 and closes January 18. RPL is a subsidiary of
Reliance Energy Ltd (REL) and owns 50 percent stake in the company. Part of the raised
captial will be used to build six power projects across India.
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12/27/2007:
Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, was killed after a campaign rally
in the city of Rawalpindi where she had just finished giving an address to
her supporters. She was taken to Rawalpindi General Hospital where surgeons
were unable to save her. The attacker first fired at her and then blew himself
up, killing Bhutto and 15 to 20 other bystanders. Bhutto had recently returned
back to Pakistan after her exile.
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Technology News:
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03/14/2008:
Acer announced the avaliability of Acer Aspire 5315 in India. The new laptop will
be priced at Rs 22,219 and is powered by Intel Celeron M550 and comes with the
features like Linux operating system, built-in CrystalEye Webcam, Intel Wireless WiFi,
3D Sonic Sound System, 15.4-inches WXGA Acer CrystalBrite TFT LCD display,
120GB HDD, 1GB RAM, DVD super multi 8x double layer and ePowerManagement.
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02/19/2008:
Has Sony finally won the much known DVD war? Today, Toshiba announced that it
is dropping the high-definition DVD battle and hence will stop production of its
HD DVD players and recorders. And this may signal a victory for Sony's Blu-ray format.
Recently Warner Bros', WalMart, UK retailer Woolworths US chain Best Buy,
and US online retailer Netflix have backed Sony's Blu-ray format and hence
could have forced Toshiba into it's decision.
Blu-ray’s was backed by Sony and Philips while HD DVD was baked by Toshiba and Hitachi.
This may be good news for consumers in that they have only one format to choose from, but
it will also make consumers that bought the HD DVD players anger, since they will have less
choice of films to watch on their player. What do you think?
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02/16/2008:
Will Apple be annoucing a new version of the MacBook soon? Many major reseller
are showing back order of more then a week on the Apple's current MacBook Pros.
Does this mean that production is slow for the current MacBook or a new Apple
MacBook is around the cornor. Intel has recently announced a new chip called,
Penryn, which has been used by large number of PC companies.
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12/12/2007:
Ask.com announced the availibility of AskEraser, a privacy control
that erases information about users' search queries within a few hours.
With AskEraser enabled for a given users, all Ask.com cookies including
IP address, user ID and session ID cookies and complete text of search queries
are erased across the Ask.com search areas but cannot delete it from from the
servers of third-party companies. But the side effect of AskEraser
being enabled is that some of the Ask.com personalization options will not
function.
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Entertainment News:
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Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone a couple?
Date:
02/26/2008:
It has been reported that during the 53rd Fair One Filmfare awards function
while waiting for their turn to appear on stage,
Ranbir Kapoor
and
Deepika Padukone
exchanged some 'I Love You's which has been picked up my the media as an announcement
of their relationship beyond freinds. Since just recently Deepika was connected to such
talk with cricketer
Yuvraj Singh
.
What are your thoughts on the new Bollywood pair?
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Taare Zameen Par Shines At Filmfare Awards
Date:
02/24/2008:
Taare Zameen Par
got the best of the awards at the 53rd Annual Filmfare Awards
that was recently held at the Yashraj Studio in Mumbai, India. A lot of Bollywood
stars had gathered to be at the awards. Taare Zameen Par (TZP) won the award for
best film, best directory (
Aamir Khan
), best actor, best story and lyricist (Pasoon Joshi). While 11 year old star
Darsheel Safary
from Taare Zameen Par won the Critics Award for the Best Male Performance.
Shah Rukh Khan (SRK)
won the award for Best Actor Award for
Chak De India
. Chak De India also picked up the Best Cinematography and the critics award for the Best Film.
Kareena Kapoor
won Best Actor (Female) award
Jab We Met
. Rishi Kapoor received the Lifetime Achievement Award and his son
Ranbir Kapoor
got the Best Newcomer Award for his role in
Saawariya
. Another new comer
Deepika Padukone
won for Best Female Debutante and Fresh Face Award for
Om Shanti Om
.
Konkona Sen Sharma
and
Irfan Khan
won for Best Supporting Actor (Female and Male)
for their role on
Life in a Metro
. While
Tabu
picked up the Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor in
Cheeni Kum
.
A R Rehman
won for the Best Music Director for Guru. Shreya Ghosal picked up
award for Best Female Playback Singer for the song ‘Barso Re’ from
Guru
while Shaan won the Best Male Playback Singer for the song 'Jab Se Tere Naina’ in Saawariya.
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Jodhaa Akbar banned in Madhya Pradesh
Date:
02/22/2008:
Before Jodaa Akbar was released there had been a lot of protest by the Rajput community
on the events showen in the movie with what actually took place in history,
which still seems to be an issue after the release of the movie. A lot of cinema halls
all over the world did not show the movie and now the movie has been banned in Madhya Pradesh
by the Madhya Pradesh government. The movie stars
Hrithik Roshan
and
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
. There was also news that Nitin Chandrakant Desai owner of the N.D. Studio
would open his studios to the public to allow them to view the sets that were
created for
Jodha Akbar (2008)
.
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AskMen.Com Releases Top 99 Women Of 2008
Date:
02/05/2008:
AskMen.com has released the list of Top99Women of 2008. The list includes a lot of
celebrities from the previous years plus bring some new faces into the list.
The number one this year is taken up by Grey's Anatomy star
Katherine Heigl
, followed by super model
Alessandra Ambrosio
in number 2,
Kate Beckinsale
in spot 3. Indian movie star
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
was at number 27.
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Aishwarya Bachchan Kanya Mahavidyalaya
Date:
01/29/2008:
On Jan 27, 2008,
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
laid the foundation stone at a ceremony to launch a college for girls named
"Aishwarya Bachchan Kanya Mahavidyalaya" in Daulatpur village, Uttar Pradesh.
Others at the ceremony included her husband
Abhishek Bachchan
and father in law
Amitabh Bachchan
.
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Kim Sharma On Cover Of Maxim
Date:
01/19/2008:
Kim Sharma
will be the next Bollywood film actress to be on the cover of
Maxim India
. Kim will be featured on the January 2008 cover of 2nd Anniversay Mega Issue of Maxim Magazine
with many other picture within the magazine. Kim will join other Bollywood stars who
have already made there presence in Maxim India, and they include such stars as
Malaika Arora Khan
,
Celina Jaitley
,
Mallika Sherawat
,
Amisha Patel
Shilpa Shetty
,
Kareena Kapoor
and
Priyanka Chopra
.
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Karishma Tanna On Cover Of Maxim
Date:
01/02/2008:
Karishma Tanna
, TV actress, will be featured on the next edition of Maxim India.
Karishma has acted in TV series Kyunki, Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kkusum, and
has acted in Bollywood movie Dosti Friends Forever with
Akshay Kumar
and Bobby Deol.
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Kingfisher Swimsuit Calendar 2008 Launched
Date:
12/21/2007:
Kingfisher Airlines, CEO Vijay Mallaya and John Abraham launced the sixth edition
Kingfisher swimsuit calendar 2008
at a ceremony in Taj Hotel Mumbai. This year
the pictures were taken in such location like Ladakh, Andaman and Nicobar, Bay of Bengal,
Udaipur, Goa to mention a few. The photo were taken by India’s ace photographer Atul Kasbekar and
include pictures of India's leading models like Shruti Agrawal, Preeti Desai, Monikangkana Dutta,
Deepti Gujral, Sheetal Menon, Mesissa Mehra and Tamara Moss.
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Sport News:
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