Vodafone-Hutch confusion

Vodafone-Hutch deal was one of the biggest deal along with TATA-Corus and Hindalco-Novelis to hit the business headlines in the recent past. But all has not gone well for Vodafone-Hutch.

Essar holds 33% stake, of which 22% is through foreign subsidary and remaining 67% by HTIL of which 12.26% is held by Asim Ghosh and Analjit Singh. The allegation is against the stake of Ghosh and Singh since it is funded by HTIL, which makes the overall foreign holding to 89%, beyond the regulatory limit of 74% . Reports say that Vodafone bought 52% stake in Hutch-Essar and another 15% as non-convertible preference share, which is excluded from FDI cap.

There has been more confusion about the stakes in this acquistion

Nokia N95

Alec Saunders tries his hands on Nokia N95. Some features include a 5 megapixel integrated camera phone, GPS and WiFi.
He has some pictures shot from N95. Check the whole report here

Gadget Updates

1. Microsoft Xbox 360 to have a QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard is added to support chat features available on the new dashboard.

2. Nokia released its much awaited N95, with 5 Mega-pixel camera the cellphone is no shy of being called as a digital camera. Om Malik has some report

Zoom to access data on mobile.

We all agree Mobile is next generation technology that will rule our data access. Accessing regular web kind of information on little tiny screens is painful for consumers as service providers didn't had any innovative method to deliver these information. This method of information access has found an end, Zoom function will begin to rule the world of information access on the handsets.

Microsoft labs is working on Deepfish which deepens (Zooms) onto the information as and when required by the user. This way user has a bird's eye view of the entire information but can pick a particular content available on the handset screen, dig deep into that content by just hitting zoom.

ZenZui is another company working on similar zoom product enabling easy access to the content

WEP encryption unreliable ?

A recent report on computerworld says WEP method of transmitting wireless data in Wi-fi network is unreliable and can be easily cracked.

According to researchers, it takes 3 seconds to crack a 104-bit WEP key using a 1.7 GHz Pentium-M processor.

Google can speak now

On the heels of upgraded mobile based search, Google comes up with a voice based search, more or less placing itself aganst Free411 and Microsoft's recently acquired Tellme.Google voice search can even send the results as a text message to your mobile phones.

Utterance recognition has been the major drawback in automated voice service, but it hasn't deterred these voice based service from loosing steam. Free411 hit about 100 million calls last November. In 8 billion market of 411 service in US, Google doesn't want to be left behined in the world of voice.

From the user perspective, experience with these voice based service can be bad when the service is not able to recognize utterance or if you are calling from a noisy place. In addition one is made to listen to the ads before using the free service. Technology in these voice recognition has lot left for improvement before voice based service becomes your personal assitant at every step of your life.

Michael Arrington's gimmick

Michael Arrington is the man who seems to be extremely confident in whatever he does, even when he was speaking high about those deadpool corpus. His latest gimmick is a web2.0 expo free pass to anyone who speaks truth (Mike understands, people lie him a lot).

No matter how good your product is, if you can't speak your customer's language you will end up in fuckedcompany list. Mike knows to sell himself. By speaking our language he is trying not to get into fuckedcompany.

Btw Mike, I don't need a web2.0 expo pass, all I need is 50% of your web traffic.