Nokia Launches Ovi Music Unlimited In India; Enables Bluetooth Sharing

Nokia has launched its Ovi Music Unlimited (OMU) service, alongwith plans to launch of its X2 handset in India in the third quarter of 2010. Following the Apple model of using the service to sell the device, OMU makes available to customers who buy a Nokia OMU enabled device like the X2, 4 million legal digital tracks, free for a year.

The Unlimited subscription model was first launched by Hungama with BSNL last year; Hungama.com was later launched separately at Rs. 99 per month. We haven’t been able to install the OMU software at first attempt, hence couldn’t ascertain whether Nokia also allows users to purchase a subscription; indications are, it is unlikely, which is disappointing and limiting.

The content available covers tracks from 19 genres, including Rock, Rap, Hip Hop, Pop, Bollywood, Sufi, Indipop, Indian Classical, Devotional, Ghazals, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi and Bhojpuri, among others, in partnership with over 150 local music labels and publishers, including the Indian Music Industry (IMI), and “Hungama, which represents major labels including Yash Raj, Tseries, Eros; and SIMCA (South Indian Music Companies Association), amongst others.” That statement almost makes Hungama appear like an industry body.

What I find most interesting in the announcement, is the introduction of an element of portability, and customizations made for the Indian market: Nokia will allow OMU users to share tracks with other OMU users via Bluetooth. Additionally, users get to keep all their downloaded music forever. However, note that music can still not be written to a CD or transferred to those without an OMU subscription.



They also claim to have reduced the size of the Ovi client from 60 MB to 3MB (post installation on my PC, the software required 23 mb of space), allow multiple PC access to address issues of low PC penetration (frankly, given that this is Nokia that we are taking about, the approach should be “mobile first”), and expansion of search parameters to include actor, actress and movie names. The Indian music industry is largely around Bollywood and films.

What’s missing? In terms of localization, while Nokia has the software in several international languages, they don’t appear to have bothered with Indic scripts/language interface.

Cloud Printing: How Google Plans To Revolutionize The Way We Print

A big question of any cloud-based OS is how it will handle local tasks such as printing. Today, that question is answered.
Google’s Chromium blog goes in depth and gives two viable ways that printing will be handled in the cloud and through the cloud.
Traditional printers will work on a “through” basis, where the request will be sent to the cloud, then come back to a local printer. Conversely, cloud-aware printers would use a model where the data is pushed to the printer from the cloud.

More after the jump.
There’s some discussion as to whether this is the most efficient manner, and of course some are concerned with security. But when it comes to those of us who spend the vast majority of our time using online applications, this is a breakthrough.
Cloud printing would also allow for wireless printing from mobile devices, such as Android-based phones. Further, you could access your email or documents from any Internet connected computer and print your documents to an approved printer in a location of your choice.
Of course, Google being Google, we have a lovely graphic to help explain things:



Sounds to me like Chrome OS is going to change the way that travelers and road-warriors do white paper.

5 crucial stages in designing your viral loop

Designing a viral loop has multiple stages
Viral loops have been featured in mainstream media and there’s even a book coming out on it – but the step-by-step design of creating a new loop remains obscure, and for good reason. I’ve come to believe that creating viral loops is akin to building a software project – at best, it still comes down to a great team, a strong understanding of the tools available, and relentless iteration. There’s no recipe at the heart of it which guarantees a viral process every time, the same way that you can’t guarantee that any software project will result in market success.

There are no silver bullets in viral marketing
In fact, the core of virality ensures that there will never be a dominant “recipe.” If everyone knows how to build a viral loop around social network invites, then everyone will do it, resulting in consumers will become desensitized, which finally leads to lower response rates. Thus this causes the viral loop to unwind, which leads to long-term disaster.

The only way to combat this is to build a viral loop around the core of your product – something that no one will seek to duplicate, unless they are a direct competitor. These viral loops are incredibly effective because they are lasting and sustainable.

I wanted to jot down a couple thoughts on the different stages that viral loop design go through, so that the entreprenurs reading through this can imagine deeply ingrained, user-aligned ways for their products to gain distribution.


Strategize: Stage 1
The first stage of a viral loop is developing the core strategy around the loop. This requires the viral loop designer to think through, step-by-step, how a user will come to find their product and how they will ultimately pass it along to their friends. If you’re lazy, there are lots of recipes to follow from the Facebook ecosystem like quizzes, “find your friends,” and gifts. As discussed above, these opportunities are already becoming less effective every day.

Even if you decide to use an existing recipe, here are some higher-level strategy questions that should be answered before proceeding:

* How does this viral loop fit into your core product?
* What is the fundamental value proposition you are presenting to your users?
* If your loop is successful, will users transition to your core product or will they bounce when reaching the switchover point?

As you might imagine, most of the discussion here is qualitative and there’s very little A/B testing involved.

Implement: Stage 2
The next stage is the rapid development of the core viral loop. This part should hopefully take days or weeks, not months. It will also certainly be wrong. The best advice I can give here is to follow agile development models and to build the smallest number of features and pages to create the initial flow of pages.

As mentioned before, the best implementations are strongly tied to the core product – as a result, if you’re a video site, it’s best if you can somehow involve videos. If you’re a dating site, you probably want to involve dating.

The other implementation advice I’ll give is to treat the viral loop code as an iterative, protoyping process. So copy and paste all you need, keep it in a separate codebase, and make it easy to refactor. You’ll need to do a lot of messy stuff like changing the order of pages or page elements later, and once you develop your own recipe, it’s easy to rewrite it in the “right way.”

Launch: Stage 3
The next step is to beg, borrow, or steal traffic :-) The easiest way is often to pay for it, $50/day or so, just so you have a trickle of traffic coming in.

Optimize: Stage 4
As you get a flow of incoming traffic, this allows you to deeply optimize the experience. This will involve building out some basic infrastructure to do A/B testing, or using Google Web Optimizer, and otherwise. The key thing here, of course, is to measure whether or not the $50/day you’re spending results in traffic above and beyond what you’re paying for – the more the better, and eventually you’ll cross the threshold where traffic scales infinitely.

In this stage, there are a lot of common fixes that you’ll want to consider:

* Shortening the flow of pages (can you shrink a 5 page funnel down to 2?)
* Rearranging UI elements to emphasize next steps
* Testing different value propositions for going through the flow
* Increasing the # of people invited

This optimization stage creates great conflict for product and customer-oriented people. Oftentimes, to get a number to move from 10% to 30%, there’s temptation to do things that users may not be happy with. This might include things like asking for invites multiple times throughout the initial session, presenting an opt-out process for selecting friends, etc. These are all bad and need to be fixed in order to create a long-term sustainable viral loop.

This optimization step can take a very long time (months is not uncommon) as you zero in on the dozens of small and large changes needed to create a viral loop.

After months of work, two outcomes can result:

* You don’t reach your goal, and you’re stuck on traffic
* You reach your goal, and your traffic is going bananas!

If you don’t reach your goal, then it’s time to stop your optimization process. Often the changes that result are just too small to drive substantial increases in metrics. Instead, you’ll have to rework your entire value proposition, which means to either go back to Stage 2 or possibly Stage 1. This means you’ll want to stop A/B testing and start building out a deeper featureset.

Refine: Stage 5
If your optimization step was successful, your work is probably not done. The final step is polishing your viral loop.

This includes figuring out issues like:

* Making your loop as user-aligned as possible
* Building a pleasant user experience and removing unnecessary flows or page elements
* Refactoring the code to move it from prototype to production
* Integrating it into your core product in a way that makes sense

A lot of people are tempted to skip this polish step, but don’t do it! Skipping this step means that your initial product experience will suck, or be offensive.

In fact, when there’s “excess” virality, that’s a great opportunity to make changes to the viral loop that make it nicer or friendlier. In general, if you are getting exponential growth, it’ll be great even if it’s a slower exponential. What’s more important at that point is spendfing your extra growth towards changes that positively impact long-term retention.

On the other hand, if your product is just meant to be short-term mad money, then by all means skip this step :-)

Traditional Indian Games

Traditional Indian Games Traditional Indian Games are exciting and intriguing. When you begin to play an Indian traditional game, you will loose track of your time and simply can stop playing. Pachisi is delightful game which can be played with a board and some cowries or shells. Ashte -Kahste is another Indian traditional game which can be played with either 2 or 4 players using a 7 by 7 board and four cowries. Ganjifa cards were in the olden days used by kings and other noblemen. Ganjifa card pack used by rich and nobles were made of ivory, tortoise shells and contained precious stones too.
While shopping for traditional Indian Games, do check out the attractive dasavatara ganjifa cards, moghul cards and collectible cards. You will also come across chess sets made out of wood, handcrafted and magnetic chess sets too. Chess sets which are handcrafted and painted have an extra edge over the ready made or plastic chess sets.

Popular Traditional Indian Games are:-

Chess:
The game of chess originated in India in the 6th century. Chess comprises of three animals- horse, camel and elephant, knight, bishop and rook in chess. Chess game has spread throughout the world and their name derived from the Sanskrit game Chaturanga.

Pachisi:
It is a board game that originated in ancient India. The name of the game ‘Pachisi’ has come from a Hindi word pachis, meaning twenty-five. The name of the game is also called Twenty five, as the largest score that can be thrown with the cowrie shells. The game is played between four players, divided into two teams. Players play with four beehive-shaped pieces in the color of black, red, yellow and green.

Pallanguli:
Pallanguli is played in the southern India. It is called the gambling game by men. The board has 14 cups with each player controlling seven. In each cup six seeds are placed. To play the game, players lift the seeds and distribute one seed in each hole. If the seeds are finished, the player goes on to his opponent’s side of the board. If the seed fall into a cup with an empty cup beyond, the seeds in the cup beyond the empty hole are captured by the player and put into his store.

Chess sets

Magnetic Chess Set

Dimension:
9 inches;

Chess game and chess sets are the most famous board game. Other board games do not carry that much interest and prestige that is associated with the chess game. Our site is a virtual treat for the people who love chess game. Any one who loves this game will surely have a desire to get the best chess sets. Our site feature the best chess sets for all the lovers of this great game.

Crafts in India offers a wide array of chess sets coming with numerous finishes, sizes and styles to match almost any room decor. Our selection also includes chess tables and board games tables. We offer the best quality wooden chess sets. These are the unique chess sets which are a wonderful combine of class and convenience.

Pachisi Set
Indian handicrafts are always rich in variety owing to great diversity in the cultural set-up of Indian society. The handicraft produced in far flung regions of India are unique and possess great historical traditions and artistry.
Be a proud owner of a handmade Pachisi, the Indian mind game of the Rajas. This royal game has evolved with time and has made its appearance as the modern day Ludo. However, the magic of the Royal Pachisi game can only be properly realised by a traditionally crafted Pachisi set that lets you sharpen your wits and enjoy every bit of the game.



Pachisi: The Mind Game- Traditional Indian Game

Dimensions : 42 (Full Spread) Inches

The origin of Pachisi, a traditional Indian four-player game can be traced to the 4th Century AD. It was the royal game played by the Maharajas, the nobility and the common men in leisure. The Mughal Emperor Akbar played the variant of Pachisi; Chauper on huge inlaid marble court employing slaves from the harem as his pawns/pieces.

The Pachisi board (shown in the picture) is made of cloth in a patchwork design. The four arms/limbs of the board are conjoined at the center called ‘Char Koni’. Each arm in the length of 17” has three marked squares in orange color called ‘castles’ to distinguish them from the maroon squares. The game set comes with a set of 12 beehive shaped wooden pawns in colors of yellow, black, red, and green. The players throw cowrie shells on the Char Koni and the move of the pawns are determined by the number of shells that fall with the open face. The objective of the game is to get all the four pawns allocated to each player from a set of 12 to complete the round of the board as fast as possible.

This lightweight potable Pachisi board also has a safety pocket for the cowries at the Char Koni area. The game comes in a cloth carry bag along with a booklet on the Rules of Games.

Today, variants of Pachisi like Ludo and American Parcheesi have become immensely popular. But if you want to savor the real mind game that once was the favorite past time of the Indian royalty then Pachisi is the best option to relax and of course sharpen your wits.

Board Games



Dominos Game

Dimension:
6.5x4 inches;

Indian handicrafts are always rich in variety owing to great diversity in the cultural set-up of Indian society. The handicraft produced in far flung regions of India are unique and possess great historical traditions and artistry.

Make the most of your leisure with traditional board games popular through ages. Vintage board games like the Dominos are available along with the modern day Ludo, a variation of the royal game of Pachisi. The mood and feel of traditional board games are retained by skilled craftsmanship and elegant designs of the games on show.

So browse our site and discover a completely new form of art and enlighten your home with these Buddhist Thangka Paintings.