If there one thing that is really booming in India right now, recession or no recession, its SMS - Short Messaging Service. The boom is evident straight from Twitter - Twitter users have grown phenomenally in India in 2009 especially after Twitter securing an SMS deal with India's largest mobile-service provider, AirTel at 110+ million userbase.

With the Twitter model, its easy to subscribe to updates. Google recently joined the race in SMS at Google India Labs : SMS Channels. Both these services require users to subscribe before any updates can be sent.

With SMS solutions becoming a major player in India, various SMS service providers have sprouted quickly.

General facts on SMS solutions :

1. Most of these SMS Solutions have a 160 or 320 character limit and cost 1 SMS credit for every 160 characters.
2. Most of them support all networks : All India GSM + CDMA Coverage including BSNL and Reliance IndiaMobile & TataIndicom.
3. Some support international networks as well, but for USA, delivery to some mobile networks is not a guarantee. It instead ended up in my brother's inbox when I tried to send to his Chicago number. This varies from operator to operator and unlike in India, operators may charge for incoming messages ! If international SMS delivery is important, either send a support ticket asking which mobile networks are supported or you can directly opt for an international gateway provider like Clickatell.
4. Short Codes for 2 way SMS are normally at an additional cost. The additional cost is not for the Short Code itself, but for a keyword that is used in the message when replying to the short code to identify your account / campaign. Most of these providers provide an unlimited number or a large number of short code keywords.
5. In order to avoid being responsible for SPAM, an SMS API is not something that providers are eager to give away so easily. Most providers will either charge an amount or require documents, application for API usage which are screened thoroughly for an approval process. Some may further require an official letter to prove your brand trademark or a latter claiming responsibility for unfair API usage, incase of any.
6. Official Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's website is trai.gov.in
7. The National Do-Not-Call Registry has a database of mobile numbers which have been registered for Don-Not-Disturb. Legally you'll need to cross-check the recipient's number at the DND Check. So far there is no official API for bulks checks, so this is something you'll have to process manually once a while. Do-Not-Call = Do-Not-Disturb = No SMS please.
8. List of mobile service providers : http://www.trai.gov.in/serviceproviderslist.asp
9. Since February 2009, TRAI has made it mandatory to prepend 2 letters and a hyphen with the SenderID thus reducing it from 11 letters to 8 letters for a name. The first letter stands for the mobile service operator's name and the second letter for the location of the SMS being sent from. You can find this list here.
10. Direct tie-up with a mobile operator requires a minimum monthly commitment that runs in lakhs of rupees, approx Rs 60 lakhs a month from one source. So some of these SMS providers may be resellers of bigger SMS providers.

Here are some useful SMS solutions for your business to market and promote your brand.

IndyaRocks / SMS Gold

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.25 per SMS down to Rs 0.08 per SMS. Price exclusive of 10.3% service tax.
• Validity : Unlimited
• Payment Options : Net Banking, Wire-Transfer, Demand Draft
• API : Not available for all. Free, only on request for their Rs 8,000 package customers after strict screening and approval on official documentation on API usage.
• SenderID : Yes. Free for now. Requires documentary proof and will be activated only after the authentication process which may take upto 7 working days.
• Free SMS : Yes. Unlimited SMS. 140 character limit appended by -Indayrocks at end of message.

SMS Country

• SMS Country is more for the more business minded. They charge for SenderID, API and deliver to 200+ countries (international rates vary).
Price : Starts at Rs 0.15 per SMS till Rs 0.06 per SMS for delivery in India. Price inclusive of tax.
• International Coverage : 200+ countries at different rates. Does not cover most USA mobile networks.
• Validity : 6 months from the last date of purchase
• Payment Options : PayPal, Credit Card, NetBanking, Wire-Transfer, Cheque, Demand Draft, Money Order, Cash Deposit, ItzCash
• API : HTTP (GET / POST), XML, SMTP, COM. Requires a fixed IP address of server using API. $145 for setup and $131 annually with 2 sendernames and $78 annually for no sendernames.
• SenderID : Yes. Rs 1500 or $40. Validity of Sender ID is for 1 year.
• Free SMS : 10 SMS Credits.
• 160 by 2 is a new initiative by SMS Country with currently 6+ million users. It provides FREE SMS service even to selected International networks. Right now its mainly to Middle Eastern countries and South East Asia. The catch is that its supported by 80 characters-limit ads which are appended to your 80 characters-limit message.

My SMS Mantra

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.30 per SMS down to Rs 0.04 per SMS. Price exclusive of 10.3% tax.
• Validity : 3 Years
• Payment Options : PayPal, Cheque, Demand Draft.
• API : HTTP (GET / POST)
• SenderID : Yes. Free. Approval from mobile service provider in a few hours.
• Its 2 way SMS has a "Toll Free SMS" feature, where website visitors can send SMS to your mobile number at no cost. The Website owner pays for incoming messages from these visitors.

FOO SMS

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.25 per SMS down to Rs 0.05 per SMS. Price inclusive of tax.
• International Coverage : Yes.
• Validity : Unlimited
• Payment Options : Wire-Transfer, Cheque, PayPal.
• API : HTTP GET, SMPP, XML
• SenderID : Yes. Free. Approval from mobile service provider in a few hours.
• Free SMS : 10 credits on request.

Gateway4SMS

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.15 per SMS down to Rs 0.06 per SMS. Price exclusive of 12.36% service tax.
• Validity : 30 / 60 / 120 days
• Payment Options : Wire-Transfer, PayPal
• API : HTTP GET, SMPP, XML
• SenderID : Yes. Costs additional Rs 500. Takes upto 24 hours on receipt of documents.
• 2 Way SMS : Yes. Starts at Rs 3500 per month.
• Free SMS : 5 credits

Snowebs

• Snowebs, originally a desktop application that connects your mobile to your PC to send messages, now has a web interface as well.
• Price : Starts at Rs 0.60 per SMS till Rs 0.30 per SMS. Price inclusive of tax.
• International Coverage : Yes - USA, UK, Australia, South Africa, UAE and Germany
• Validity : 30 / 60 / 90 / 180 / 365 days
• Payment Options : Wire-Transfer, Cheque, Cash, DD, PayPal.
• API : HTTP GET.
• SenderID : Yes. 5 Free. Additional SenderIDs at Rs 75 each.
• Free SMS : 2 credits.

Go For SMS

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.60 per SMS down to Rs 0.28 per SMS. Price inclusive of tax.
• Validity : 7 / 15 / 30 / 45 / 60 / 180 / 270 days
• Payment Options : Wire-Transfer, PayPal, Eazy2Pay.
• API : HTTP GET
• SenderID : Yes. Free. Requires documentation for approval process. Default SenderID is GoForSMS
• Free SMS : Yes (delivery is not guaranteed)

ZNI SMS

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.90 per SMS down to Rs 0.15 per SMS. Price inclusive of tax.
• Validity : 60 days
• Payment Options : Online, Wire-Transfer
• API : HTTP GET, XML
• Free SMS : No
• SenderID : Yes. Free. Requires documentation for approval process. Default SenderID is SMSALERT

SMS Junction

• Price : Starts at Rs 0.25 per SMS down to Rs 0.08 per SMS. Price exclusive of service tax.
• Validity : Monthly SMS Usage/Consumption
• Payment Options :
• API : HTTP (GET / POST), SMPP, E-Mail
• SenderID : Yes

Full2SMS

• Full2sms is a desktop application that sends messages from your PC via the Internet
• Price : Starts at Rs 0.12 per SMS down to Rs 0.06 per SMS.
• Validity : 45 days to 3 years
• Payment Options : Wire-Transfer, DD, Cheque, Cash, PayPal.
• API : HTTP (GET / POST)
• SenderID : Yes.

I just couldn't help noticing - two of the biggest broadband companies in the world have their logo themes in inverse.

I was on my way back from CARBO XXIV recently and I got a shot of a dog-catcher (animal control) putting away stray dogs at Ahmedabad station. This video I got a shot of was at the reservation counter.

I am not going to get into another general shared-hosting review. Infact this is something in between shared-hosting and a VPS.

I signed up for 2 webfaction accounts - I was primarily looking for a VPS switch, for which I already decided on SliceHost.
But there are 2 challenges to SliceHost - one, it costs $20/month for 10GB/100GB space/bandwidth which is still pretty expensive for Indian standards.
Two, since its unmanged, a fair amount of linux sys admin skills is required to keep it up and running without downtimes.

WebFaction is mainly known for its Python hosting (previously python-hosting.com), but the best part is that you can run it like a VPS. The base install managed by the hosting company itself and the custom installs mananged by the customers themselves. For example, you can install another version of MySQL in your HOME directory and run it at a custom port (each user account gets a predefined range of ports for use in custom setups). And yes, you can install anything else not natively available in WebFaction. This is awesome, since you don't get the overhead of managing the entire server - instead you just manage what you install.

The other interesting fact about WebFaction is setting ACLs without the need of root.
Normally we would want a couple of directories (like user photos) writable by the web-server so that the web-interface can save to that directory.
In most shared-hosts, the only solution would be setting 0777 or 0755 permissions on a directory.

On my Ubuntu PC, I would do : (www-data is apache2)

sudo chgrp -R www-data <directory>
chmod -R g+w <directory>

In WebFaction they have a command-line script that does this for users.

setfacl -R -m u:apache:rwx <directory>
setfacl -R -m default:u:$USER:rwx <directory>

Con - no sendmail path defined - hence PHP's native mail() will not work. This was done inorder to avoid mail abuse. The general method of substitution in PHP would be to use a mail library like SwiftMailer to use SMTP to send out the mails.

A few months ago, I blogged about Yahoo! shutting down its Kisckstart service.
Well, off lately Yahoo! has been shutting down a whole lot of its services most notably Yahoo! 360 - soon in July 2009.

The other common services of Yahoo! that shutdown were :

1. Yahoo! Mash, a social networking service lasted for a year ended in September 2008.
2. Yahoo! Live, a real-time video broadcasting experiment ended after a 6 months stint in December 2008.
3. Yahoo! Content Match, a Google Adsense clone shuts down in Europe.
4. Jumpcut, an online video editing tool closed down just a couple of days back (15th June 2009).
5. Yahoo! Podcasts, a podcasting directory end after 2 years in October 2007.
6. Yahoo! Auctions, an eBay competitor ended in September 2008.
7. Yahoo! Photos shut down in September 2007 but got replaced with their better acquired service, Flickr.
8. Yahoo Briefcase, a free storage service ended after a decade in March 2009.
9. Geocities, the 90's most famous free static website hosting service is closing this year - but this one is not as a result of failure - after all it was one of the biggest success stories in the 90s - it just got worn off - retired - antique - much better ones available/evolved over the last 15 years.

Yahoo! may not be dying, but its definitely try to recover its No.1 position it had a decade-and-a-half ago.

With jobs cut stories being published everyday, more and more smaller companies are sprouting up daily. While on the quest for a job myself, most of the recent postings at various job portals like Naukri and Monster are from startups companies with 5 to 25 employees. I was going through various companies' websites and came across many more startup companies and related websites that seems very fascinating. I don't remember all the websites I've been through except for one which was uniquely enough to be rememberable - IonLab.

Big companies are now looking to aquire rather than hire. Google and Microsoft have been acquiring constantly in the recent years. But Google has pushed this even further with Google Ventures - a $100 million annual funding for startups and Google App Engine - web hosting on Google's high-end scalable servers. Commenting on Microsoft's Bing, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that :

"We have been wandering around looking at all of the different companies. With the big ones, we haven't come across anything we've particularly liked. We are definitely talking to a number of smaller companies but we've done that routinely. We primarily look for technology. It's a typical build versus buy"

But this isn't limited to big giants alone - even Twitter, (small company now with big money), bought Summize for their search part.

And start-up guru, Paul Graham who apparently hates running a startup has funded about 150 startups !

Startups in India are creating a buzz (read: Related Links) : StartupBuzz, StartupDunia, Pluggd In

There is a lot of hype on Wolfram Alpha that launched on 15th - a brand new search engine, from the company famous for its Mathematica software.
But this search engine is math based (no surprise) - which calculate 'answers' to your questions - or rather tries to figure out answers to the questions you are querying.

They even posted their infrastructure details - having the 44th largest supercomputer, mirrored at 5 different locations and can handle 175+ million queries a day.

I tried a little more than a couple of queries, most of which returned Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
I tried queries based on my hometown, Trivandrum, Kerala which I keep track of on the net from time to time. Given "Where is Trivandrum", it showed the map of India with Trivandrum marked. But it doesn't seem to know anything about kerala - one of the top 50 tourist locations in the world (National Geographic). If this isn't in their current database of 10+ trillion of pieces of data, its going to be hard for me to find information using it.

Then I tried input queries on stuff it could 'definitely' search on - maths. 10000! gave the first bunch of 35660 digits but you can easily extend the number of digits. But even expressions like "5+132!-59^5*sin(32)/5log(12)15" showed results with neat details. Over 20 years in the making of Mathematica, Wolfram would probably have the best number search engine. But "Knowledge" based ? It doesn't seem to have a lot of knowledge as of now.

After a while it just got tired of searching.

Everyone is curious about who or what will be the next Google. There is a big surety among many, even by Tim Berners Lee, that semantic web search will overtake statistical based web search (GYM). Wolfram Alpha is going to take a while to catch up, but results from statistical data is still more important to users with the current available data on the net. Right now, Wolfram Alpha is a really cool Internet Calculator.

Last year I worked with a client here in Mumbai for their online store, BombayElectric.in which is based on Magento, an open-source platform. My client was the national winner of British Council's Young Fashion Entrepreneur (YFE) Award 2009.

For the last 4 and so years I've always shyed away from a full-time job since I managed to get freelance work right after college. After a ring of uneventful events last year, I decided to shift base and take up the stature of an employee. Earlier last month, I finally took up a full-time job in an internet ad/marketing agency here in Mumbai. To my surprise, I discovered that the guy who runs this small unique company happens to be the national winner of British Council's Young Communications Entrepreneur (YXE) award 2009 !

Quite a Coincidence !

Update : I ended up quitting from this awesome advertising firm. This is the longest (just 3 months) I've lasted so far as a full-time employee. Back to job-hunting !

Its just over year since Yahoo! launched Kickstart in beta but as of now (probably just a few hours back), its already closed.

Kickstart was a Yahoo initiative to compete with Facebook, Linkedin etc but focused specifically on college students, alumni etc to connect them to jobs (professional networking space) to kickstart careers.

Right now, Kickstart shows "Thanks for trying Kickstart ! Please check out Yahoo! HotJobs for your job search needs." and links to their hotjobs site.
Given the economy slowdown, Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition disagreement, Facebook buyout failure and Y! 360 not catching up, they definitely seem to want to focus on revenue generating products instead.

So I've been real busy on Wednesday night. Believe it or not, on that night I was dodging bullets in colaba causeway at the bomb-blast site near Nariman House.
I at my client's office which is right next to the Taj hotel and had left office at about 11pm with my client. We were trying to cross the blast site that happened an hour before when all of a sudden there was firing and was in the middle of crossfire. Apparently the bullets were originating from the 3rd or 4th floor of Nariman House. Though this could have been easily mistaken for police firing back. I was literally running for life !
Q: And why was I trying to cross the blast site ? A: In order to reach my friend's house 1km down that lane for shelter as CST station was attacked too and there was no means to commute by train or taxi. Nor was any hotel taking in any new guests. Plus, the level of the intensity of the situation was underestimated at the time.
I dont know how the hell it happened, but my phone's camera got dysfunctional !

That proabably was my most terrifying 2 hours of my life. As Im typing this, Narman House encounter is almost one with !

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