StartupDunia

So says a global study on social media done by Universal McCann.

Results from the study indicate that Internet users in the US and Western Europe are passive participants on social media sites. Meanwhile, users from Asia and South America rank big on creating content on social media sites like blogs, social networks, video sharing etc.

While only 25% of US Internet users have uploaded a video to YouTube, 68% of Brazil’s Internet users have uploaded to video to YouTube.

Several other interesting highlights in the story here.

Lipik.in, which I’d covered earlier, has just launched several new, interesting features. To begin with, they have added support for Punjabi, Kannada and Tamil and several other languages are planned for this year. They have also added support for searching the web using multilingual queries - a super cool feature. Below is a screenshot showing search results for the term महात्मा.  They have also added support for Blogger - so, you can directly post your Indic content, authored on Lipik, to your Blogger account.

I’m a firm believer in localization of content to Indian languages, and I think Lipik is taking the right steps in that direction. Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts.

Meanwhile, IndyaRocks keeps its innovation engine humming. They’ve released a mobile version of the site, which can be accessed at http://m.indyarocks.com. Almost all the features of the online version - people search, browser profiles, friend requests, messaging, graffiti wall, SMS - are available in the mobile version too. Meanwhile, they also launched friend updates (friend feed) for the online version.

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TRAI released quarterly report for the quarter ending December 2007.

Some highlights:

• Wireless market grows 11.74% and total wireless subscriber base stands 233.62 million
• Internet subscriber base reaches 10.36 million
• Broadband subscriber base reaches  3.13 million users. Rate of growth in this quarter is 17.23%
• There are 57.83 million wireless Internet subscribers (capable of accessing Internet through mobile handset (GSM/ CDMA))
• 54% of ISPs failed to meet the benchmark of service provisioning/activation within 2 weeks

The results from the recently concluded ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are out.  St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) secured the first place, MIT came in second, followed by Izhevsk State Technical University (Russia) in the third place.

The list is dominated by Russian, East European and Chinese universities.

The first Indian contestant (IIT-Madras) appears way down the list at position 47, where it is tied with Chennai Mathematical Institute.

I wonder why we cant see any Indian colleges higher up in the list. Are Indian colleges just ignorant about the presence of this competition and not participating or does the quality of our education need to seriously improve ?

Just something to ponder about.

TechTribe is one of the first professional networking sites to be launched in India. Last year, they secured funding from Canaan Partners, amongst other VC’s.

I’d hardly visited their site ever. Till yesterday, that is. Yesterday, it came to my attention that they are engaging in shoddy act of content piracy - not just content from StartupDunia but lot of other blogs as well.

Here’s how it works - registered users can sign up to blog feeds as part of their profile/dashboard. And instead of showing a small summary of the blog feed, TechTribe displays the entire story in such a spurious manner that it seems as if the TechTribe user has published the story.

See the screenshot below for an example. One of my recent blog posts shows up as if its “published by” some Ranvir Batra.

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As per a CNET story, MySpace India will be launching later this week. This follows its public launch of MySpace Korea.

The India launch will be accompanied with a developer hackathon in Bangalore and a rock concert in Taj Land’s End Amphitheater, Mumbai. And MySpace India beta will launch as English only site.

I just checked the MySpace India page and it is live here.

So, what do you think ? Will the MySpace India launch cause a dent to Orkut’s domination and Facebook’s rise in the Indian market ?

Or is Myspace India too late in the game ?

Quality of life in Bangalore has deteriorated horribly over last few years. I witnessed it myself during my recent India trip - from the traffic woes to pollution to parking chaos to noise. Majority of the folks turn a blind eye to all these issues and move on. Civic issues are taken lightly and life goes on as normal.

CitizenMatters is a new startup that hopes to highlight and address these civic issues and bring them into the limelight.

To quote them,

Our in-depth stories on the civic issues of Bangalore and coverage of our city’s vibrant arts and culture scene will not only help you understand the changing nature of our city, but you will also be provoked to get involved and shape Bangalore for the better.

The site has some pretty compelling content, especially if you are a Bangalore resident. Issues ranging from ‘Auto rate hike’ to ‘Metro work slows’, the site does a really good job at highlighting some of these issues affecting majority of Bangloreans. They also have an arts and culture section and list Bangalore events.

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First of all, apologies for last week’s absence - if there’s one word to describe my schedule last week, it’d be ‘maniacal’. I was traveling for most of the week and hardly had time to take a breather. Wonder how the consultants / mobile road warriors manage to travel every week.

I digress. Coming back to the title of this post - One of my favorite weekend activities is to read news stories and articles on global as well as the Indian business, technology, society etc. while sipping my morning cup of tea. While I have no problems in discovering some great quality content on NYT, Portfolio, NewsWeek, Economist, NPR, Salon etc, I find it incredibly difficult to uncover good reading stuff related to India. Besides BusinessWorld and BusinessToday, I cant think of any business-technology focused sites writing about India. For some of the most interesting humor, pop-culture, analysis etc. I read Indian blogs. In fact, I read more Indian content on blogs than on mainstream sites. Mainstream media just cant seem to get past bollywood, cricket, babies with 2 faces & 4 eyes.

I understand that I belong to a minority niche, but I’m pretty sure there are several others who feel the same.

So, in the quest to discover new, good Indian content, let me ask you this - What sites do you frequent for quality Indian content ?

Leave a comment with your top reading list for India. Hopefully, it would help us discover some really good sites, which go beyond the normal realms of bollywood and cricket.

Nilesh has compiled an amazing set of graphs from the latest payment statistics released by Indian Railways IRCTC website for the month of March 2008.

For the uninitiated, this data is pretty interesting because IRCTC happens to be India’s biggest e-commerce website. This data can be used to extrapolate and get an insight into the e-commerce statistics in India.

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iBibo owned Dwaar has launched a travel aggregator, which gets flight information from different airlines and OTA’s. They crawl data from various airline sites, Ezeego, Cleartrip, Travelguru, MakeMyTrip and Yatra but since the last two days, MakeMyTrip and Yatra have blocked their crawler. After displaying the results, users are redirected to the parent site for booking the flight. While the site works fine in IE, it failed to render correctly in Firefox.Its good to have such additional meta engines in the Indian travel market, which has been flooded with airlines and OTAs. I used ixiGo extensively during my recent India travel and was pretty darn pleased with the whole experience.