India bans AXN

These days the Indian political establishment is quite busy watching television. So while our Finance Minister speaks about reality shows, the venerable, honorable ‘Information & Broadcasting’ minister bans the action channel AXN.

I have not seen Indian television for many years now, but what I gathered from media is that our minister was offended by a program aired by AXN, the “World’s Sexiest Commercials”. This proved too much for the taste of our minister and prompt came the order. Honestly, I am less surprised and more disgusted by the attitude of our successive ‘Information & Broadcasting’ ministers.

The minister termed the programs on the channel as “against good taste or decency and are likely to affect public morality”. He thinks it is against the Indian culture to have such shows on our television. If the minister thinks that Indian culture is threatened by so much as a pair of breast, then he should rethink on what he is trying to save? He talks about public morality, the same morality which was in full display when a girl was molested by the crowd in the most ‘public’ place of India, ‘Gateway of India’ in Mumbai. The same public morality, which he must be seeing, everyday, as he drives his car on the streets of Delhi. Crowds gathered across the world to welcome New Year and where no girl was molested; they don’t have public morality, so they can see AXN. The Indians can’t, because we have a hero, a savior of our public morality and culture.


If the minister’s taste is offended then he should switch off the TV and take a hike. Average Indians are not imbecile to be not able to decide what is good or bad for them. We haven’t given this right to our ministers. If the wants to be such a minister, then he can take a plane ride to Afghanistan. Same as his colleague in previous government did, and whose Broadcasting minister he is trying to emulate. Otherwise don’t try to be our moral guardian and cut back on hypocrisy, please!

iPhone - The journey ahead ..

The sun is finally shining over the skyline of Helsinki after many days. Except, it is not shining in the Helsinki stock exchange for the world’s biggest and popular cell phone manufacturer ‘Nokia’. Its share has slumped by 1.80% (as I write), after losing 1.17% yesterday in the New York Stock Exchange. The story is similar for Motorola and other cell phone manufacturers.

All because of the new, smart, cell phone launched by Apple Inc, called ‘iPhone’. It was show cased yesterday by Steve Jobs, spiking the shares of Apple by 8%. The new phone has lot of innovative features, iPod, camera capability and convergence of many other utilities. There are several questions to be asked. Is the knee jerk reaction in the stock exchanges justified? Is Apple going to hurt the top line of established cell phone manufactures in any significant way?

The ‘smart’ cell phone of Apple is not the one which is driving businesses for Nokia or Motorola. The maximum revenue of Nokia these days comes from developing geographies and not from US. Markets of China, India, and African countries are where the top line of Nokia gets the numbers and Apple is no where going to reach there anytime soon. The customers, who are really defining success of Nokia in China and India, are not the ones who are fascinated by iPod, camera or Google search capability. They are using cell phones due to telecom revolution and not due to gadget revolution. The same can be said about emerging markets in Africa, like Kenya. Will this phone be of any great value for those who don’t use or own iPod(people like me). It will take a long time for them to afford or really appreciate the ‘smart’ phone of Apple. Anyway Apple is going to launch its phone in Europe and Asia only in 2008, at present it is very much for US market.

Secondly, the sale of mobile phones in US is tightly related to the service provider. The cell phone of Apple is tied to Cingular (AT&T). I don’t think Apple has much of experience in this kind of marketing. It would be like iPod and iTune stores belonging to different companies. Moreover, Apple will need to tie up with other content providers as well; so here the only important point is not technology, or ‘coolness’ factor but also dynamic of relationships. Top of all this, as with any other consumer item, the sale of mobile phones in US is not going to drive the business of any mobile phone manufacturer.

The only real competition that Apple phone might give, right now, is to high end phone manufacturers like RIM(Blackberry) or Palm. Nokia or Motorola has a deep line of products, which Apple won’t be able to match anytime soon. The most established and world’s market leader in mobile phone manufacturing, Nokia, has for long being towing the vision of convergence and multimedia. They have been investing in research and development for long and have come out with equally good products. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, showcased in the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), couple of days ago, is one such product.

The initial hype and optimism is quiet understandable. At this point the biggest threat(so to speak) from this iPhone, to me, is to the iPods. There is a parallel in the history for it, the saga of Microsoft Vs Britannica Encyclopedia. If Apple can attack the value proposition the same ways Microsoft did, I don’t see other mobile phone manufacturers to be much concerned than having just another competitor in the market.

(Post written for academic interest in personal capacity)

Spam Mail, anyone ?

One of the major irritant of our daily life, these days, is the spam mails. Nothing can’t be more irritating than finding a bunch of them in your inbox, and then being unable to do anything about it. Many countries have made strict laws regarding spam mails, and these countries are the typically the one where most spam mails originate from. The measures have helped but not in any significant manner cause spammers are also evolving with time. What started from selling stuff, giving stock market tips, or lottery have given way to spam mails coming from social networking and viral marketing sites. In my personal opinion, the country with least regulation for spam is India.

The spam problem might not have worsened as much in US or Europe as it has been for India recently. There are reasons for it. Earlier there weren’t many servers for web hosting in India; even India didn’t have a country specific domain name. But now things have changed, there are many servers hosted in India and there is .in domain name as well. This all has resulted in spam mails being generated in huge numbers from India. Traditionally, the spam mails are also tackled by mailing service providers using filters, or the ISPs which constantly monitor the mail volume from the servers it provides access to.

In some cases few web based mails are exploited by these spam generators as well. Mailing service like Gmail, from Google, came up with innovative measures in good intent. In Gmail, one does not need to have the correct mail id, as in the format; for Gmail abcd.1234@gmail.com, is same as abcd1234@gmail.com or a.bcd1234@gmail.com. The charm of Gmail, initially, was to have the mail in a person’s name and spam generators know this well. Just use the common Indian names and you got a list without paying anything. The viral marketing and social networking sites send personalized mails, hence they easily evade the filters and keep landing in our inbox. The lack of prohibitive law means they are doing it fearlessly.

Indian ISPs could still do their bit, but it seems even they are not interested. The ISPs can easily ask those host servers who are generating lot of email traffic to stop generating spam or risk taken offline. But I guess commercial interest gets priority. All these spam mails have the IP address of the server and a simple search will give the host name. If sending spams are made an offence then all these host servers could easily be reported and penalized. I just wish to do something about the job search site that sends me four emails everyday. Alas, any suggestion?

Update - After wading through bunch of proxy IPs, I finally manage to reach the real IP. From that I found the host and it turned out to be a hosting company of US based in Texas. I wrote them a strongly worded email, they got back to me with a promise to take action. Since then those particular spam mails offering me 'fresher' jobs in India, have stopped.

New Year, 2007

Wish you all a Happy New year. I am sure you all did welcome New Year with lot of expectations, hope, good wishes and of course fond farewell to the past year.

Time flies so fast, before I could even realise, it has been third New Year for me in Finland. Except the weather, there was not much difference in the festivities here. I did feel the fireworks were better this year. I could also feel the crowd to be more cosmopolitan than last year and people more sober.