TechGazing

Hidden Reflex, an Indian startup company claims to have come out with a web browser specially designed for India. Called Epic, the browser is built on the Mozilla Firefox engine and comes with some interesting features, including an inbuilt word processor and a sidebar that can hold shortcuts to apps and websites. Pretty cool, you think? Well, what actually has us grinning in delight is the fact that the browser actually supports typing in Indian languages. Every time you type something in Epic, you will be given the option to transliterate your text into one of 12 supported Indian languages. Now, that is truly Indian, as it lets a user do just about everything on the browser from chatting to sending e-mails, searching and making posts on their social networking sites in their own language - something that can be a bit of a pain in other browsers. Thrown in a stack of Indian themes and the fact, that being on the Firefox engine, Epic pretty much supports all Firefox add-ons and we think that Hidden Reflex might have a winner here.

We are downloading it and really think you should take it for a spin (or rather, a surf too). You can get it from http://www.epicbrowser.com/.

We have a serious economic crisis on our hands and, if the worst is to be believed, this is only the beginning. With money and liquidity suddenly the most scarce commodity going around, what will happen to Angel and VC funding so critical to innovation in the tech sector?

My take? Appetite for risk will be lowered, but funding will continue for good ideas. The tech industry has gone through some real bad phases all through, but we have seen new products and services being delivered without fail year on year. If you have a start-up in mind, bootstrapping may be a better idea to get the money out after you have taken it to a certain level. Of course, all predictions could haywire if the dirty stuff does not stop hitting the fan.

What do others think? Here are some thought leaders who shared their views with me: Continue reading »

I am happy to announce the launch of my long planned travel blog, Kunzum.com. Named after the Kunzum La, or Kunzum Pass, located at about 15,000 feet above sea level in the Lahaul Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh in India, I was inspired by this beautiful and lonely spot through which I drove last year.

The blog is primarily going to be focused on travel related stories, anecdotes and reviews from India, but a bit extra would be thrown in too.

Why don’t you check out Kunzum.com? The content is limited as I have just started but you can expect more in the coming weeks. But do read the story of Lakshmi, the leopard cub, from Ranthambhore.

If you would like to be kept updated on some scintillating travel stuff, you can subscribe here, take a RSS feed or follow my Twitter Feed.

YouTube may be big, but it seems a lot more is waiting to happen in the online video segment; it may well be the big story of the next couple of years. But while the Bulls may be riding on the future of video, the sentiment is still bearish on another front: how do you monetise video on the net?

Current formats of ads like pre-roll (where an ad plays before a video starts) seem to be intrusive and a turn-off for viewers. Who wants to be forced to see an ad before the actual video starts? Banner and text ads on the site tend to get missed as attention is on the video itself. InSkin, invented by Patrick Knight, may have resolved the debate by being able to frame the video player with an interactive ad, positioned in the consumer’s line of sight.

I got an opportunity to interact with Patrick, also the company’s Founder and CEO, at AdTech, New York recently. Excerpts of our chat: Continue reading »

If you are sitting on stacks of video content, it may be time to organize it better for some good reasons. One, there is always the risk of it getting lost or damaged. Two, you may lose out on an opportunity to strike gold: digital media is predicted to be the next big thing on the Internet, and content owners could well be the first to cash in.

And if you thought the whole process required high investments in hardware and software, you may have been right. Until now. A low-cost, user-friendly solution is soon going to be available: MediaBaron from Movico Technologies. Continue reading »

Your camera enabled smartphone can mean one gadget less to fidget with – you can do away with the webcam if you decide to use WWIGO from Motvik. The product is certainly on the upswing, going by what Motvik’s co-founder M.Thiyagarajan had to say in an exclusive chat with TechGazing. What he has not shared are how they plan to generate revenues. Excerpts:

How would you describe your product?
WWIGO (pronounced ‘vigo’) is our flagship product and stands for ‘Webcam Where I Go’ and also describes the nature of the service. It is a software application residing both on the PC and the phone that transforms a cameraphone into a webcam for use with applications such as Skype and YouTube. Our target user is anyone with a smart camera phone but currently the product is available with Nokia phones only. Continue Reading

Do you carry a projector when you go to watch a film? Or your own grill when out for a barbecue? So why carry a computer when you need to compute on the go? Especially when you can carry it in your pocket on any USB storage device – hard disk, pen drive, an iPod or even your mobile phone.

All you need is a Windows PC to plug this device into, and work as if it were your own PC. Without leaving a trace of what you did on the host PC after you log off. MojoPac, from RingCube Technologies, does this for you and lots more. “This will fundamentally change the way we use computers, just like Microsoft and Google did before this,” predicts Shan Appajodu, co-founder and CEO of Ringcube, in an exclusive chat with me when we met in Delhi yesterday. Bold words? Read on to decide for yourself

Mobile and online social networking portal Indyarocks.com may well have scored a first for a site in this genre: it will allow users to earn money for being, what else, social on the site. What is this program called? Social Money. Continue Reading…

More and more Indians may be going shutter-happy, but the fun may have been stopping after the pictures were taken. No longer. They can now not only print their pictures, but do on a whole range of gift items like mugs, collages and mousepads. All from their desktop at itasveer, the country’s first such truly world class service. (Tasveer means picture in Hindi).

Image Caption: itasveer’s four promoters (clockwise from top): Ashish Goel, Animesh Jain, Ankit Khanna and Nishant Kyal.

Here co-founder Nishant Kyal in an exclusive chat with TechGazing. Click here to continue reading the interview

Indyarocks.com says it is an online and mobile based social networking site for connecting Indians across the globe. It allows members to build and leverage their network of contacts in incredibly powerful ways. It is a place where you can invite, connect, share, speakout and have fun.

All promising, but will the cash registers jingle for this new kid of the social media block in India? The site’s founder Kalyan Manyam certainly thinks so. Here’s an exclusive interview with him on how brands must look at Indyarocks to reach out to the Indian youth. Continue to read the interview