Ray-Deo

The Don launches India’s 1st ever online multi-player action game

Hungama and Excel Entertainment along with Shahrukh Khan, India’s biggest movie star, have launched
India’s first ever online multi-player game based on the movie Don.
Speaking at the launch, Shah Rukh, an avid gamer himself, said, “I am a
great fan of video games, and this DON game is just fantastic. I jumped
at the very idea of this game and have already tried my hand at it…
mind you, it’s just as exciting as the movie itself but only here, you
get to be part of all of the action, in fact, do all the action
yourself.”

This is the first time a Bollywood movie based game will be launched on
the Internet and that
too in a multi-player gaming environment. The game is being promoted
exclusively on India’s only multi player gaming portal www.gaminghungama.com.
Gaming Hungama is
the 1st Indian website dedicated solely to gaming. The site is the only
Indian Multi-User Gaming site with original content, a pioneering
effort in a fast growing market.

The graphics of the game bear a close resemblance to the special
effects style of the movie, this gives it a contemporary look
and the action sequences are just as slick and stylish. “The Hungama
creative team watched the movie rushes including car
crashes in Kuala Lumpur, sky diving and some of the fight sequences and
have incorporated all those hair-raising stunts in the game,” said
Farhan Akhtar, director of the movie. “Shahrukh Khan, an avid gamer
himself, also showed keen interest in the
game’s development and we are extremely happy that the movie’s evolved
as a terrific virtual reality too,” he added.

To take part in this breath-taking action adventure and do the same
bone crunching moves that the Don has become (in)famous for simply log
onto www.gaminghungama.com and let those latest action moves rip.

technorati tags:online, games, gaming, casual-games, Don, gaminghungama, XBox360

BlueTie Launches Free Ajax Email Suite

New York based BlueTie released a very nice hosted Ajax email suite last week. This is a polished product - the company has been in business since 1999 and has hundreds of partners, like ISPs, that already distribute this software to their customers. The new product is a customer-facing email solution, with both a free and premium version.

This is a crowded space, with products from Zimbra, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Goowy, Foldera and others. BlueTie says that people spend an average of 4.6 hours on email every day, and many people spend far more time than that. More than any other application, email is the center of the work flow in a business.

None of the competing services listed above, except Office Live and Zimbra, currently offer the breadth of services (email, calendar, contacts, instant messaging, file storage) of BlueTie, however, and Zimbra is not a hosted application (you must install it on your server). Foldera will have these features but is yet to launch.

Many individuals and businesses will like the BlueTie offering: It’s free and battletested.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Email, Free, Ajax, BlueTie

Vox Lifts Off and You’ll Love It

Six Apart announced last night the launch of its newest social networking site, Vox (Vox announcement here). The company that owns LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Typepad has done a lot of things right with this new site. The benefits of having waited for consumer desire to mature before launching a social networking site are clear in Vox.

The service developed a reputation among some people during its beta period as a social network for artsy San Francisco elitists - but everyone needs a beta testing group and that’s a pretty good one to have.

Besides all the basic features of a social networking site, Vox includes extensive privacy controls, a tag cloud for blog posts and a beautiful WYSWIG composition page. 

Profile pages can’t be edited directly at the code level, but there are a number of layout options and more than 165 sharp looking themes. There’s also easy mobile browsing and posting. Media elements can be placed into Vox pages with ease and the site integrates with YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, iFilm and iStockphoto. Several of these are competing companies and it’s great that they are all available to users. 

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Vox, SocialNetworking, Intenet, SixApart

Yahoo Bookmarks Enters 21st Century.

Yahoo is unveiling an entirely new Bookmarks product, new.bookmarks.yahoo.com - new interface, new back-end, looks like new everything. A screencast created by Yahoo developer Tom Chi is here which gives an excellent overview of the service (Chi also created the background music for the screencast). Compare that to the existing Bookmarks product and it’s clear how significant the overhaul is.

Yahoo Bookmarks, while invisible to most cutting edge web users, still claims around 20 million active users (compared to only 1 million for del.icio.us).

Until today, Yahoo Bookmarks (which is a separate product from del.icio.us and My Web) stored only the URL, title and comment for a particular bookmark. The new product caches all text on the page, stores a thumbnail view, and allows both categorization (folders) and tagging of each bookmark.

The new Bookmarks product is also integrated with a new version of Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer, allowing for one-click bookmarking. Searches on the Toolbar search bar also auto-complete to suggest bookmarks stored for that user.

The new product has been moved to the same platform as My Web, with the sharing and some other features stripped out for now (look for del.icio.us to also move to this platform in the near future, while keeping it’s unique look and feel).

In a briefing today, Yahoo said they may eventually begin integrating user Bookmarks directly into search results (they integrate My Web bookmarks in a very minimal way already). This could pose a competitive problem for new search startups like Wink, which already combine traditional search results with user-generated bookmarks.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Yahoo, Yahoobookmarks, MyWeb, del.icio.us, New, Product, ComparitiveSearch

Mozilla Firefox 2 Released

The Mozilla Corporation has officially released Mozilla Firefox 2 for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Coming just days after the launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7,
Firefox 2 offers a refreshed user interface, anti-phishing protection,
improvements to the built-in search feature, tabbed browsing changes,
the ability to restore an interrupted session, better support for Web
feeds, inline spell-checking, support for microsummaries and a number
of other enhancements.

The first thing users will notice is the the updated default theme.In
addition to refining the look of the buttons and other visual elements,
the new design tethers the Go button to the Location Bar and adds an
equivalent action button to the Search Bar. Several clickable buttons
(for example, the feed icon in the Location Bar and the search engine
icon in the Search Bar) have been refined to make it more obvious that
they are interactive.

Firefox 2’s Phishing Protection feature was developed from the Google Safe Browsing feature of the Google Toolbar for Firefox
using code donated by the search giant.

Firefox 2 enhances the search features built into the browser. The most striking addition is support for search suggestions:
as text is entered into the Search Bar, the selected search engine can
optionally send back a list of suggestions to be displayed in a menu,
similar to the Web-based Google Suggest technology demo but built into the browser. Several search engines distributed with Firefox 2, including Google and Yahoo!, support this feature out of the box.

In addition to Apple’s ageing Sherlock search engine plugin format, Firefox 2 also supports search engines defined in the OpenSearch plugin format developed by Amazon’s A9.com search engine. OpenSearch is also backed by Microsoft, so OpenSearch plugins created for Firefox 2 will also work in Internet Explorer 7.

OpenSearch
defines a mechanism to allow browsers to auto-discover search engine
plugins. When visiting a site that advertises an OpenSearch plugin, the
Search Bar icon will ‘light up’ and users can install the search plugin
from the search engine selection menu. Firefox 2 also adds a feature
for managing installed search engines, allowing engines to be easily
reordered or removed.

Tabbed browsing has also been improved in Firefox 2. In response to usability testing of Firefox’s tabbed browsing,
the close button has been moved from the end of the tab bar to the
actual tab. By default, all tabs have a close button but if many tabs
are opened the close button is just shown on the current tab to save
space. Any user who has closed a tab accidentally will appreciate the
new Undo Close Tab option on the tab bar context menu and the Recently
Closed Tabs submenu of the new History menu (which replaces the Go
menu).

Changes have also been made to the way large
numbers of tabs are handled. Each individual tab still gets smaller and
smaller as more tabs are introduced but there is now a minimum size
after which arrows appear at each end of the tab bar, allowing users to
scroll through their tabs. A menu at the far end of the tab bar allows
users to quickly switch to any open tab.

The new Session
Restore feature aims to reduce the frustration caused by losing work
due to a crash. When Firefox is restarted after being unexpectedly
closed, a dialogue offers the user the option to restore their previous
session: windows, tabs, text entered into forms and in-progress
downloads are all brought back.

Firefox
2 adds a built-in spell checker to allow text entered into Web forms to
be easily checked. This works much like the similar feature in
Thunderbird

Live Titles (also known as Microsummaries)
allow bookmark titles to be more dynamic and useful. For example,
rather than just displaying a static title, a bookmark for a news site
could display the latest headline. This data is then periodically
updated, providing a useful and non-intrusive summary of the current
state of a bookmarked page.

For the Complete write up visit here

PS: Firefox 3 is scheduled for a 2Q 2007 launch. Can IE stand this sudden onslaught? Do comment.

technorati tags:Firefox, Firefox2, Internet, Browser, IE, IE7, Release, New, Latest

Idio: A Personalized Flash Mag on Music and Design

Idio is a Flash magazine launching tomorrow that will deliver personalized content and rich media advertising regarding design and music.

Here’s how it will work. Users are asked to identify themselves demographically and use sliders to express their varying interests in subjects like music genres. Idio will then select from professionally licenced and user generated content to create a personalized Flash magazine for each user.

While reading Idio, users will be asked to rate particular articles in a simple up down fashion. That data will further contribute to determining what articles are displayed for different readers.

Bloggers and other writers whose contributions are selected will be paid by revenue sharing from ads. Contributions can come through direct submission or a resyndicated RSS feed. The company says that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for microsites and rich media ads embedded in the magazine and so the revenue shared will be substantial. It will be very interesting to see who the first advertisers are.

YouTube made clear that a particular kind of Flash content, beyond Flash ads, can mean big money. Of course advertising is already flush with Flash. There’s also something about Flash that tends to feel relatively constrictive as a user. None the less, a personalized web magazine with Flash ads embedded inside seems a solid strategy.

It’s one thing to build a beautiful vessel, as it appears that Idio has, but it’s another to come up with quality content on a regular basis. Even with the initial focus of design and music, Idio will face a serious challenge in satisfying niche users that have no shortage of other options available to them. If revenues are significant enough to compensate contributors well and pay for high quality licenced content then the challenge could be met. How many thriving examples of revenue sharing with individual content producers exist online now? Not very many at all. It’s something that many people are trying, but for some reason most efforts fail to gain critical mass.

Will Idio appeal to readers? James Yu has a long article on Idio at BuzzShout where he says that the company describes its product as a “glossy RSS feed” and says that his personalization needs are filled by his own RSS reader.

Good visual design in a fluid medium can be very compelling. If Idio can land the sponsorships and content they need to create a meaningfully personalized experience I think the company could be a big success.

technorati tags:Idio, Flash, Magazine, Personalised, RSS, Feeds, Music, Design

This is a hilarious viral (atleast that is what I think it is). Ms Dewey is the latest entrant into the serach space (that is if she is for real). The only screw-ups are she is bloody slow, repeats her actions with feverish regularity and keeps throwing a lasso or a fishing line for some vague reason. Take a look for yourself, not when you want a result in a jiffy though.

technorati tags:Viral, MsDewey, Search, Google, Live, Slow, VisualSearch

A First Look at Windows Vista

Microsoft plans to introduce its new operating system to consumers in January. Is it worth upgrading?

From Technology Review

technorati tags:Windows, Vista, Microsoft, Release, Upgrade

PPTShare: Compress PowerPoint Files Up To 95%

PPTShare is a Windows desktop client that compresses large PowerPoint files by as much as 95%. Huge PowerPoint files have long been a problem, and if the medium is going to see extensive use in the future it’s going to need some way to be usable on platforms like the web and mobile applications.

Starting at $45 for an individual license through $17 per user for between 250 and 500 users, this is largely intended to be enterprise software. There is a free trial download available, but it expires after less than 10 compressions.

Five compression levels are available: normal, extra, high quality, mobile and custom. In most cases the compression rate is between 65 and 85% but on very large files it can reach the advertised 95% mark. 

PPTShare is a product of Ontra Presentations, an enterprise PowerPoint competitor from New York. In addition to the compressor, the PPTShare site also offers a slide organizing program.

If you’re someone who wants to email slide decks around a lot this could work well for you. It’s very easy to use, with easy installation, a drag and drop file loader and drop down menus to compress the files.

PowerPoint files are notoriously large; Microsoft’s own page of advice on the issue recommends watching out for 9 different factors that could be contributing to file bloat. Microsoft says there are limits to PowerPoint’s magical powers and that their 9 tips can help “squeeeeezzzze” more information into a lean and mean file. It looks like Ontra has come up with another layer of magic.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:PowerPoint, Compressor, Share, PPTShare

No plans? Meet New People via Activities

No plans this week? Or, ever found yourself with an extra ticket to a concert or sporting event, but didn’t have anyone to go with? In the past, your solution was wading through Craigslist postings or calling all your friends. Well now there are two web-based services that allow you to find others to do things with — Who’s Going and MatchActivity.

Who’s Going is simple and very well thought out. The business model works like this: Posting activities are free and then people that “want to go” to an activity, pay an amount if they are chosen — if you aren’t chosen, you get your money back. Note: Your friends can apply/attend for free.

The site has social networking features — allowing you to browse profiles, add friends, message people, add people as favorites (to learn of any activities they post), post photos to your profile (people can comment on them if they are a friend), and post photos/comments to actual activities. They also provide widgets that you can embed in your blog or MySpace profile to promote a specific event or all your events.

MatchActivity has a dating spin to it — focused on finding activity partners for singles (but anyone can respond to any activity, whether they’re seeking a male or female). By becoming a premium member ($7.99/month), you achieve 3 things:
1) You are able to post Private Activities that only go out to buddy’s in the system that you select.
2) You can send specific 1-on-1 invites to other members; and
3) You get 3 points added to your Reliability Rating

It’s tough to say whether either of these sites will make it — they need participation. The widget offerings by Who’s Going could virally spread the word a bit faster.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Who’sGoing, MatchActivity, Online, Meetup, Dating, Activity