The numbers are in, and contrary to many expectations, India’s number portability has actually ended up helping the big three incumbent operators — Idea Cellular, Vodafone and Airtel. As of March end, a total 4.2 crore subscribers have used India’s mobile number portability — 15 months after they were introduced in January 2011. The sheer […]
Days after Gartner predicted a 17 percent growth for the Indian PC market this year, CyberMedia Research has pegged the expansion at a more realistic 8%. The number of PCs sold in India had grown 6% in 2011, the Gurgaon-based firm said. The prediction is likely to disappoint some in the industry who were looking […]
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has approved Jairam Ramesh’s Rs 46,000 crore project to increase India’s forest cover. The plan, called ‘Green India’ Mission, aims to add 10 million hectares of “high quality” forest cover to the existing 40-45 million hectares, the ministry of environment and forests said. “The mission aims to achieve annual CO2 sequestration […]
With its latest Precise Pangolin release, Ubuntu — the most popular open source operating system — has become the first Linux-based operating system to support the latest desktop version from the Gnome community. The Gnome community project makes the look-and-feel software used by majority of operating systems based on open source software, such as Ubuntu, […]
You may soon get your Bisleri water through a pipeline. After telephones and power supply, it looks to be the turn of water supply and sewerage services to be privatized. Responding to a question in the Parliament, the Water Resources ministry has said that the draft new water policy recommends handing over of the water […]
It was the result of much effort and pain by the mobile operators in India, but going by the latest signs, the uptick in average call rates in the industry may not have lasted more than a quarter. According to the latest industry numbers, everything went up in the December quarter of 2011- right from […]
India’s crude oil import bill zoomed 40% in the last financial year, due to the rising crude oil prices, numbers revealed. According to government data, India imported crude worth Rs 3.58 lakh crore in the first ten months of the last financial year, 2011-12. The number excludes the crude oil imported for processing and re-export. […]
It looks like Japanese companies cannot have enough of India. Even as the Indo-Japanese mega industrial corridor between Delhi and Mumbai remains in early stages, the Japanese are pushing for a similar ‘corridor’ between India’s IT hub Bangalore and its export-manufacturing hub Chennai. Industrial corridors are comprised of newly constructed mini and mega cities that […]
Engineers prefer IBM, while non-engineers prefer Infosys, according to a new poll by a naukri.com group website. The poll, conducted among 2000 college students and recent graduates registered on one of its job portals, found that a whopping 43.7% of engineering students/graduates chose IBM as their most preferred employer, beating out competition from others like […]
New operators like Uninor (Telenor) and MTS (Sistema) will probably relook at whether they want to continue their India operations if TRAI’s latest recommendations on spectrum pricing are accepted, Kotak Institutional Equities has said. For traditional big operators such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone, the impact of the new prices would start from the year […]
India’s finance minister Pranab Mukherjee may like to complain about how selling diesel and LPG ‘below cost’ is bankrupting the government, but the numbers tell a different story. According to data submitted by the government in the Parliament today, the state and central governments earn much more from the sale of diesel, petrol, LPG and […]
India Against Corruption, the umbrella organization led by activists Arvind Kejriwal and Anna Hazare, has said that it seems to have foiled a ‘sting operation’ when it discovered Mufti Samoon Qasmi allegedly recording its meetings on his phone. It claimed that Qasmi’s reaction to the media — in which blasted the leadership for ‘turning communal’ […]
India’s biggest industry bodies urged the government of India to get moving on the stalled reform process, responding to global ratings agency Standard & Poor (S&P) cutting its outlook on India’s financial health. S&P also cut its outlook on at least six Indian companies, including Infosys Technologies, TCS and Wipro, following the country-wide cut in […]
Dish TV, the direct to home arm of the Zee group, announced it has crossed 1 crore (10 million) customers, becoming the first DTH player to do so in Asia and commanding an almost one-third share of India’s 32 million DTH market. Most of Dish TV’s growth happened in 2010 after the firm scapped its […]
Al Jazeera English, the Qatar-based news channel considered the best source of information on the Middle East, has tied up with DTH-operator Tata Sky, five months after it entered India with a tie-up with Dish TV. The channel was in the news recently after a ‘unfriendly broadcaster’ list submitted by the government in the Parliament […]
80% of LPG users in most parts of India do their cylinder booking through SMS, going by what the junior minister for petroleum and natural gas told the Parliament today. According to RPN Singh, in most of the cities, “more than 80% of the customers are using the system successfully whereas, it is more than […]
The western Indian state of Gujarat has pulled well ahead of others, including the long-time favorite Rajasthan, in investing in solar technology and projects. According to the latest industry numbers, Gujarat alone has a solar power production capacity of 200 million watts (200 MW) at peak (noon.) In comparison, India as a whole had a […]
India’s telecom regulator the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has refused to recommend any special consideration to telecom operators who wish to “surrender” their license and get their money back. Under the terms and conditions given in the telecom license, there is no provision for refund of the initial payment of Rs 1658 crore […]
Blackberry’s new Blackberry Curve 9220, priced at just Rs 10,990, will help the Canadian smartphone maker RIM to further increase its presence in India, Cyber Media Research said. Earlier in the day, Research in Motion announced that it was launching the Blackberry Curve 9220, targeted at the ‘mass’ market. Unlike the usual Blackberry, the Curve […]
Google Plus has expanded its ‘update and track via SMS’ feature to most of the countries in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. The feature, which lets you update and follow others’ updates on SMS on mobile phones, was initially available only in the US and India markets. Others like Facebook and Twitter already […]
