Idea has managed to convert only 2.6 million out of its 113 million customers to its 3G platform, more than six months after the services were launched, according to the March-end numbers released by the company today. That translates to a conversion of just about 2.3%, highlighting the difficulties operators in India are facing in […]
China has finally overtaken the United States as the world’s top smartphone market. According to numbers released by research firm Canalys, shipments in China doubled and overtook those in the US for the first time in the first quarter of 2012. In Q1, China represented 22% of global smartphone shipments, while the US accounted for […]
The Datawind Ubislate tablet, a more powerful version of the Aakash tablet, was launched by the Canadian company today. Thanks to its cheaper price — a difference of Rs 2500 — the Ubislate 7C, which has a capacitive display, is now the most value-for-money tablet in India. It is also the cheapest tablet in India […]
Broadcasters and their associations have questioned the right of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to frame rules restricting the number and duration of advertisements on television. In multiple responses, channels and associations have pointed out that the telecom regulator derives its mandate to regulate the media sector only from a notification by the […]
Digital research agency comscore today said Amazon’s Kindle Fire now accounts for more than half of all the Android tablets sold in the United States. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has seen its share tumble over the last three months, numbers revealed. Within the Android tablet market, Kindle Fire has almost doubled its share in the past […]
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 […]
Call it the 3G effect, or the result of a relentless and ruthless assault on call rates by leading operators in India: today, the contribution of call revenues to overall sales has fallen below the 50% mark for most Indian telecom operators. An analysis of numbers crunched by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of Inda (TRAI) […]
Worldwide unified threat management (UTM) revenue reached $1.2 billion in 2011, a 19.6 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $972 million, according to technology market intelligence firm Gartner, Inc. UTM is a primary network gateway defense solution for organizations. UTM combines traditional firewall into one single appliance: network firewalling, network intrusion prevention and gateway antivirus […]
Industry chamber Assocham has opposed the anti-tax evasion proposals suggested in the budget, including having retrospective laws and giving wide discretionary powers to tax officials. Assocham said issuing broad General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) — targeted at cases like the Vodafone-Hutch deal — without fine-print and safeguards is a recipe for disaster and may be used […]
TRAI’s decision to recommend steep auction reserve prices may have rattled the industry, but the telecom regulator had its own reasons for suggesting the relatively high price. It recommended a spectrum auction reserve price roughly double that of actual prices discovered in 3G auctions in 2010 for the 800-900 MHz band that has so far […]
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 […]
