braindead_in

Unfortunately, there's a thing called Lawful Interception [1]. It's a requirement for telecom companies, not only in India but even in western countries. What DoT is doing is asking BBM to adhere to this. This also the reason why VoIP and Skype are still not allowed in India.

The real issue here is the misinterpretation of this requirement. Lawful interception methods can be easily be circumvented and it does not make sense to apply it everywhere.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

About -> press leads to a 404.

The video player popup moves with mouse on Firefox 6.

Is there a direct link to the demo video? I couldn't get it to play on the site.

In fact Yahoo mail has more subscribers than Gmail. Hotmail is the biggest among the three.

How does it work? It's not a virtual machine, right?

Nuance is speaker dependent. You have to train the system to understand the speaker's voice. This is speaker independent which is much harder.

I am confused about the Franchise Tax. If I'm a internet business, with no office in Delaware, do I need to pay franchise tax?

I don't know about AdMob, but AdSense and others prohibit the ad URL being opened in another tab in their TOS. Basically when the ad is clicked the user should be led straight to the advertiser's site in the same browser window/session. That can become an issue if you're using a web view.

CPM based ads might work better.

What's the cunning part? I skimmed the article and it seemed to have everything other then the technique.

I wonder how CouchSurfing managed such issues. I am sure it must have happened with CouchSurfing too. I know that they have ratings for members and past history. I guess you can get an impression of the trustworthiness. But then this sort of thing can happen too.

Reminds me of I Robot. Someday these C programs will group together and develop the ability to think independently.

I used this to file my wife's tax return the other day. The experience was quite good (going by Indian standards). Few things based on my experience.

1) There should be a flowchart explaining the steps. Something like Enter information -> Generate ITR V -> Send it to CPC. I was lost when I was asked to post something somewhere and had to look up the process of e-filing on the net.

2) While entering information each text box/textarea has a information on the relevant field of Form 16. That should link to a pic to sample Form 16 highlighting the field. Somethings were ambiguous.

3) More information on what types of Tax Filings are covered. I had to ask you guys to ask about self employed tax filing (and you guys responded very fast, which was great) because I didn't find a FAQ.

4) Information on when do you have to pay and how much. I was never asked for any payment. Which is good, but I'm still kinda confused how that happened. :)

5) The step where it was submitting the information to the income tax website kept timing out. I guess it was maybe because the endpoint was not responding. I tried it the next day during working hours and it went through. You can maybe automate this by giving users an option to automatically retry.

Few questions I had after using it was.

1) Will you guys add support for digital signatures? 2) Will you also allow someone to apply for a digital signature and get it? 3) What is your business model? Do you charge a fee for each filing?

Overall I'd give you a rating of 4 (on a scale of 5). I wish there were more such utility services in India.

It won't work. There are hundreds of other file sharing websites you can't block them all.

Well I just wanted to check the website. So it's no bother.

However contacting the ISP again is a bad advice. They allocate dynamic IP addresses and can't do much if an IP address used by a spammer was one day allocated to me. Checking the IP address to determine whether the computer is part of a botnet is a flawed approach. It's not as simple as that.

"Your computer or another computer on your network is compromised with a virus. This allows online criminals to use it as part of a botnet to send spam and attack websites." Very disturbing message. The details says that my IP Address is associated with a Zombie computer and sends spam. The only suggestion is the run the Anti Virus. Very unhelpful since there are no Windows PCs on my home network.

Is there a good overview of websockets? I just glanced at the spec and it looks quite complex. Especially the part about framing. Do websockets have any relation to TCP sockets? If over TCP, why do they use their own framing?

Inspiring. "It won't work" should be on the checklist for every entrepreneur.

To know why Indian Muslims have been left out you have to go into the colonial history of India. It all started with the 1857 rebellion, The Sepoy Mutiny. The rebellion was primarily started by the Muslims soldiers with support from Hindus. After the rebellion was quelled the Britishers ostracized the Muslims and the Hindus were given preferential treatment. All the best Civil Service jobs, the licenses, etc. went to Hindus. Hindus had better access to education compared to Muslims. After independence the bureaucracy continued this discrimination. (As an aside, this was one of the reasons why Muslims flourished in Arts; Bollywood being a good example).

The trend however has largely been reversed because of vote bank politics. The political parties today are trying to woo the Muslims (and Dalits) as best as they can. The ruling political party, Congress is viewed as pro-Muslim. The Economic liberalization has also opened up the possibilities for Indian Muslims. The corporations do not discriminate when it comes to a customer. Indian Muslims have the same access to loans and credit as the Hindus (and all other religious groups). Schools don't care about religion as long as somebody can cover the tuition fees. As an anecdote, in Bangalore majority of auto-rickshaw (three wheeler transport) drivers are uneducated Muslims. But their kids all go to English medium schools, not Madrassas.

Rural India however is still divided along communal and caste lines. Caste and religion play a huge social and economic part of the rural fabric and change there is slow. But the Muslims there are as discriminated against as the Dalits, if not more.

Nice and clean design. I think the pitch here is the perfect pitch to put up on the website given that your primary audience are developers. Also some information on it's integrated into a website would be useful.

Gtalk.

I feel sorry that they have to put up with abusive behavior. Just hang up and move on. But can you really just ignore abuse? It must be leaving a mark somewhere. I have also had abusive users and customers and I also ignore them. But can't get it out of my head sometimes. It keeps bothering me.

rpoddar

Another problem is lack of angels who can feed off from seed funds like YC. There's a gap. The startups who come out of seed funds are not yet there to qualify for VC funding.

Looks interesting. I guess Bangalore needs a new spark too.

I used to be a regular at the Bangalore circuit few years ago at TiE, Barcamps, MoMo's, Headstart etc. It got a bit monotonous; same people, same stories etc. Then the downturn happened and I also got busy. The events still are happening though. Barcamp 10 dates are out. On Meetup there are a few tech related events in Bangalore too; MySQL, PHP, etc. Don't know how active they are.

There has been an ongoing debate in the industry about the services vs the product approach. Services have been big success story whereas there has been no big product success yet. The services people highlight that fact and hype it up. It leads you believe that there is no future for product development companies in India, which really is not true. The services market has saturated and people are starting to look at product driven companies now. You'll hardly find any startups in services business these days. It will take some time to move on from the services mindset, but it's starting to happen.

Are all Google's share's on the market? I think the IPO was only for a part of the company, right?

This was something that I ran into when when looking for people for my first venture. People aspire for brand names and with brand name comes the status. In a way it's amusing when people say that "I can't join your startup because I'm planning to get married in a year or two". Once one guy turned down my offer because his sister marriage was on the cards and it would have reflected poorly on his family. It happens.

Another problem is you can't directly access the div after the iframe is loaded if you want to apply styles to it. I had to use Javascript and look for when the div is loaded and then position it.

The 3P's have really been an early adopter of new technologies on the net before they became mainstream. It's a good sign for Bitcoin.