China Mobile boss gets death sentence for corruption case...

Source: WF

Mr Zhang Chunjiang who is a former Vice Chairman and Executive Director, China Mobile has been handed a death sentence, in the wake of a bribery conviction. The sentence stands suspended for two years while it could also be commuted to life prison pending good behavior.
Zhang was found by the court of the Hebei province in North China, to have taken bribes amounting to $1.5 million during the period 1994-2009

In India, for ministers, officials taken bribes around $2 billions and now enjoying in the 5* jails. The 'Raja' & others are just living like 'rajas' with all facilities. Wish they have capital punishment or mandatory life sentence in India too..

7th call to M1 and I guess I broke all my records of holding time

Today I've to call M1/Mobile One again, regarding my Fixed voice. If I can summarize the problem with Customer Service is that they don't know what they have to do. They are pretty good guys, not rude and you can get the line within 5 to 8 min holding period. But the number of handovers and 'holdings' will kill you. I'm not sure the story is like, ok guys lets go for a coffee and put the customer on hold.

My request was 'on hold' for 40 mins and the problem is Customer officer "trying" to find how to register my e-mail ID so that I can get "E-Bill". Strange. These days ebill should be pretty basic and when I look at SingTel and SH, they've been doing it for years. What I can think is, M1 just started rolling out services in Fiber broadband without proper homework/preparation. I suspected this when I received a bill with wrong first name and last name as well as service description...

Hope the darling of stock market will be the darling of customers..;)

Google Plus or Google+ invites. Please drop your request in comments with email ID

As the subject says.. I've some left now. I guess Google expanding their server capacity fast. In the first week, after sending 5-10 invitations the link went off. Now after inviting 200+ still seems to be active.

No wonder they managed to hit 10 million subscribers. If they open to public, I guess the number may hit 100 mil pretty fast.

India lunaches PSLV successfully.

Source: Economictimes

Go India, Go. Atleast ISRO made us proud by being the only (or one of the few) public sector firm who can have some success stories.

PSLV is the work horse and after 15 continuous successful launches, time to go for GSLV and show the world. Still its a long way to go but need to start soon. Hopefully I can see Indian flag on the Moon in my life time.

Just got an invitation for Google+.. Exploring now..

First impression is Google did put lots of effort in Google+. I didn't like Buzz in the first look, but the Google+ seems interesting concept.

Does this hurts Facebook? I am not sure, still this is pretty new stuff and takes quite a while to understand. The best part of Facebook is, its not only for 'chat', sharing photos but lots of 'occupying stuff' like games, personal analysis etc. I see people randomly clicking on "photos circle, voting, astrology" in Facebook. This not only generate traffic, but keeps people hook to the site. For Google, the approach is rather different and it may find some people (germans perhaps) who shunned facebook because of privacy reasons. Also it may potentially replace orkut in countries like India, Brazil (Orkut is still the market leader there). 

Anyways, hopefully I'll understand how to send "invitations" first & understand the privacy options. I don't want to share my picasa albums or chat or other stuff with the entire world. So first lock down all the content, then trying to change one by one. So please bear with me guys for the invitations.


Update#1. PICASA Storage limits reset to reflect the new feature. i.e. For the pic less than 1024x768, the space is not counted. Great to see this.. :)

You are currently using 0 MB (0.07%) of your 1024 MB. Upgrade Storage

©2011 Google  Terms - Launch Picasa - Privacy Policy - Developer - Blog - Google Home

Good summary on TD-LTE

Good summary presentation here.

This was shared during the LTE Summit_2011.

http://www.hettingconsulting.com/new-td-lte-presentation-available-61-5.html

I was told, that Bharti (India) will be looking to launch LTE within this year. Actually, the biggest issue I see today is the device availability and spectrum. I am quite optimistic about the Mobile Broadband story in India. However the volume may not be high and it'll be used primary in urban/metro areas.
Rural areas are still afar from any 'real need' for internet at homes. Indians tend to 'speak' rather than 'chat' or 'sms'. So the current 2G network meets the needs. However for LTE/Data SP's & Vendors need to be creative to push to rural areas.

May be Indian version of "taobao" or amazon :)

Money remittance to India - Singapore

Most of the Indians (NRI's) use the remittance services atleast once during their stay outside. Due to the unique family traditions where even adults depend a lot on family, and take responsibility of family this is almost a a given that one uses the remittance service.
There used to be only one service from ICICI (money2india) covering US, Singapore, Australia & middle east. Now there are a bunch of them covering almost the globe. Personally I've used money2india, HDFC Quick Remmit before. I was told SBI remit is good, but the process is terrible. I've to go to their bank branch to get an ID card with a number. I don't think I am going to do that as I am not a frequent user. They do offer better rates than the rest and I guess for a frequent user they are more suitable.
Below is a comparision or summary of the remittance services. of these three services

1. Money2India.


Pros:


First mover
Best website design, tracking functionality, ease of use
Faster transfer (2 working days typically) to ICICI Branches.

Cons:


Bad conversion rate. Often changes (in banks favor) after you complete the transaction
Terrible service

2. HDFC Quick remit

Pros:


Good conversion rates.
Acceptable service

Cons:


Slower transfer times (min 3 biz days and normally 5 days)
Bad site design, user experience

3. SBI eRemit


Pros:


Best conversion rates among the service providers
SBI is the largest bank and most of the town's or villages does have a SBI branch.

Cons:


Bureaucratic and processes of 'self centric' rather than customer focus.
What is customer service

Individual experience could be different and for some money2india could be the best while some swear on them. Overall in my experience/observation I found HDFC offering a balance between better rates & service/ease of transaction. I wish SBI does the same :)

Vennela Veta by Yarramsetti - Any idea where to find it..

I've been trying to find this novel. Its a classic and I tried to find it in India (Visalandhra, etc) but couldn't get it. I was told Amazon had it but right now no stock..
http://www.amazon.com/Vennela-veta-Yarramsetti-Sayi/dp/B0000CPWEV/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309698818&sr=8-1

Hopefully they will ship it soon :|

LinkedIn Down today 01-Jul-2011

After trying for 15 min, I realized there is a problem with LinkedIn.

The weird part is the interface/front end is up but the authentication seems dead. So it simply doesnt accept the password. I thought this must be some 'password' leak issue, and quickly clicked on 'forgot password' to reset.

Then I realized that there is a problem with LinkedIn. It simply says "500 - page not available".

Hopefully they will bring it back soon..