Paypal to Resume Bank Withdrawals in India from 3rd March

In a recent update from Paypal it will resume the much anticipated Indian bank withdrawals for plenty of businesses who uses Paypal for their services and goods from 3rd March'10 onwards. Noticeably Reserver Bank of India (RBI) has allowed Paypal to continue local bank withdrawals after Paypal made changes on how to move money to India as per Indian regulations for foreign inward remittance.

Apparently on March 1st will get the needful instructions from Indian regulatory bodies and most probably from March 3rd 2010 Paypal India users can withdraw their money to their Indian bank accounts. However as part of the changes Paypal will ask to fill out a new field entitled 'Export Code' whenever you request a withdrawal to your bank accounts, which will identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions to Indian banks.

Also, Paypal reports that after making all these changes into their system, PayPal will set to be more powerful engine for exporters in India. With purpose codes for export transactions and FIRCs (Foreign Inward Remittance Certificates), one will also get the export related benefits.

Yahoo & Microsoft Begins Search Alliance (against Google)

In a major step towards the alliance of two big internet companies - Microsoft & Yahoo, they announced that they have received clearance for their search agreement, without restrictions, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, and will now turn their attention to beginning the process of implementing the deal and the deal which is considered as more of united alliance of two major competitors of Google so as to consolidate their resource as one and start work to give real tough fight to Google.

Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days with transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft and Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns. Yahoo will be the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

The alliance will start working in atleast US by the end of this year combined into a new unified search marketplace, with audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.

Google Brings Magical Goggle to Search the Web

Imagine a situation - you are seeing a thing that you don't know anything about, say for example a restaurant menu in some foreign language or a historical monument but you know very little about it or a painting and you can't even search it on Google because you can't describe it in words than you think there needs to be a device which instantly get you all the information you need just in time when you seeing it.

It might be very futuristic like that of a sci-fi movie but Google Goggle is a new app (although a prototype) that lets you use pictures taken with your mobile phone to search the web, no need to type or speak your query all you have to do is open the app, take a picture, and wait for your search results. The best thing is its translation feature that translates the texts in picture taken into any desired language you want, right now this technology only works for German to English translations.

However, the Google Goggle is available to just Android enabled smart phones with auto focus feature and QVGA screen available in Android market also the smart app is in its early stage infact its the first prototype Google showcased in Mobile World Congress, Barcelona and Google is still keeping it in their experimental labs.

Translation demo of Google Goggle

Now Sify to Offer Cloud Storage Services

Better late than never and thus Sify's consumer Internet and Enterprise services in India announced launch of its SLA driven utility based On-Demand storage services and the platform is powered by Hitachi Data Systems. Sify offers a 99% availability guarantee on the storage system.

The availability of Cloud storage services will affect the hosted services by the Sify itself however the Amazon S3 services competitive rates and trusted & used services and other old and trusted Cloud storage services is the main barrier to any new services in the same sector.

however, the question is how the Indian cloud storage services is beneficial?, so - For Indian hosted services that is hosted servers that resides in India, it will give boost to all the hosted customers who uses Indian hosted servers which is considered as less preferred because Indian hosted IPs are more spammers. Bringing in more cloud server storage systems will allow consumers to opt for Cloud storage systems that resides in India only as Amozon S3 do have some limitation on where your parent host resides.

Google Released Chart Tools & its API

Google has released Chart tools and APIs that will enable anyone to add live & interactive charts to any web page for free of-course. Google chart tools is an attempt from Google to consolidate all of Google's charting tools and put it in one location.However, there are no new code or new APIs its actually a consolidation of already available Google Chart API and the Google Visualization API.

What is new for developers that will be much more comfortable and interesting to work with are documentation and new feature such as -

• Revised documentation and a new page that lists all parameters on one page and a new page for each new chart type.


• Added a new chart playground for developers that lets you modify a chart URL and view changes as you type.


• POST requests are now supported, enabling chart URLs up to 16K characters.

There were many players that was offering tools & APIs (paid as well) for charts & data visuals however they necessary requirements restrict the use of same such as (Adobe flash, silverlight etc.) however Google Charts are free from such things run from client side using javascript.

The Google has finally released the Charts & visuals API in an organized and well-documented that could surely be a sweep stake in market where still many companies are offering paid version of their products having similar features.

Microsoft's New Data Visualization Technology Pivot is Impressive

Microsoft Live labs' at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach shows its new technology called Pivot. Its an experimental technology that allows to visualize the data and sort, organize and categorize it dynamically with dash of interactivity and at the same time informative and fun.

Pivot visually manipulate, sort, filter and examine related data that are anything from pictures, videos and maps to financials and business data into large collections. In this way, the data itself can help shape and inform the way it is presented.

Pivot’s most compelling feature is its ability to smoothly and quickly arrange collections according to common characteristics and then zoom in for a closer look, by either clicking on a particular item or filtering the collection to get a subset of information.

Via - http://www.getpivot.com/

See the video below -

oomfo is Powerpoint Add-in to Build crispy Charts & Visuals

Kolkata based InfoSoft Global has released a PowerPoint add-in called oomfo to add visual effects, charts, interactivity and animation from a simple GUI within PowerPoint. oomfo is powered by FusionCharts, an open source data visualization app for web applications.

As the visualization done is on top of flash technology omfo requires Adobe Flash Player 8 or above to view the chart, presently in beta its totally free and supports Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. The company plans to release the add-in app in standard and premium version and later being the paid one.

oomfo provides the ease to build animations, charts, data visualization as very easy GUI and within the PowerPoint which is as far as I can see the only product vailable for free so far with these kind of features, however RichChartLive is one other free product but lacks far more features, stunning visuals and crispier animation & visualization that ommfo does.

Paypal Services in India to be Turned on Gradually

Recently updates has been published on the official Paypal blog over annoying suspended services that Paypal has to follow under hard circumstances. In a recent blog post Anuj from the communications team says that - "We temporarily suspended these services to respond to enquiries from the Indian regulators, specifically questions on whether personal payments constitute remittances into India".

"We’re working with the regulators and our bank processing partners in India to get this resolved as quickly as we can. We realize that this is causing considerable inconvenience to our customers and I want to reassure you that this is a top priority for the leadership at PayPal"

The Indian regulators such as RBI (Reserve Bank of India) has recently revised licensing rules in India for online money transfers. Thus online money transfer has been suspended with online applications such as Paypal until they fully resolve the issues with regulatory bodies in India.

The main updates over  Paypal services situation in India are;

1. Personal payments to and from India will be suspended for at least a few months until we fully resolve the questions from the Indian regulators.


2. Customers should be able to withdraw their funds to a local bank within the next few days.


3. Restoration of money into the PayPal accounts of any customers in India who have initiated a recent withdrawal, so the money is safe in their accounts.


4. For payment for a purchase of goods or services, one should contact the sender and request to resend the payment.

Although this is temporarily suspension of Paypal money transfers to and from India, but the impact over the Indian consumers are high as most of the freelancers in India that constitutes major portion of outsourced work to India has been affected.

SimplyBooks.in - A new book portal launched

SimplyBooks.in is a new book portal launched today in World Book Fair'10, New Delhi. As the name hints the portal is online bookshop targeting Indian customers initially and at moment in beta stage. Simplybooks is launched by startup based in Gurgaon, India that also runs a Finance community portal called feeleminds.com

The portal carries the same traits and features like to those online bookshop already exist in market however some features and an impressive UI which is comparatively far better than Indian books portal we see such as Rediff books, Indiatimes, flipkart.com etc.  The portal carries features such as book search - by author, category, book title etc. The portal also offer related products such as CDs, Magazines and Journals in one domain as I dont see any one portal in India which provide all of these.

Keeping in mind the beta stage of portal Simplybooks.in looks promising in terms of number of books, user interface and more web 2.0 features than any existing in Indian market except that of flipkart.com. Morever, the entry of one more online bookshop portal will make the stagnant online book selling market to rise above, if changes due to competition is considered.