Mapunity an Indian based GIS/ MIS and Mobile based technology company has brought a 'real time' traffic details in form of Maps (optimal directions, routes, location tracking of buses and trains) and this live traffic information service is for four cities - Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. Thanks XploreDotNet. Mapunity has led the development of Urban Transport Information Systems for the above cities via different inputs namely teledensity data from Airtel's mobile telecom tower network, video images from police cameras, location-tracking of buses and taxis to create real-time knowledge of traffic conditions in cities. These are then made widely available through Airtel's mobile telecom network to city residents, accessible on web and mobile both. As per Mapunity the development would be stretching further, as website describe: Mapunity is also building a free mobile-based navigation system that will help people access data from its traffic information systems on their phones. A few other related applications have also been developed. These include a carpool partner-matching program for regular commutes and a vehicle tracking application for taxi and bus operators. Mapunity is also building administration platforms for transport management authorities in different functions. Moreover, the service also have traits of networking for people such as ...

Socialmedian is a social news network that connects people with personalized news and information, by enabling users who share topical interests to collaboratively filter news for each other. Users can feed in news from any number of sources i.e. websites, blogs, bookmarklets, email or directly on the site. Also the social news network is based in Pune, India other than two of its offices in New York. Interestingly one can also submit news to SocialMedian through Twitter which is I haven't seen on any such website or news portal which have user generated content and let user submit stories/ article or URL through Twitter. People in SocialMedian can create or join networks and users with common interests can track stories aggregated from multiple sources, and submit, share and comment on stories of interest with each other. Although the concept of social news network is not new as its already been done at Digg to some extent and Mixx.com is also one such example to greater resemblance, nevertheless its simpler (and faster) user interface and pages can give some edge to user though what really matter in such type of model is larger number of user base. SocialMedian followed by alpha verion period is set ...

Wired has prepared a tool to play with your famous quotient on web, i.e. how famous are you on Internet. Wired Celeberity Meter checks URLs on web and scores internet fame based on - backlinks, friends across social networks (Twitter and MySpace for now), WIRED will be adding more social networks gradually in this Celebrity Tool Project to come up with full fledged tool. The Tool/ Project by WIRED is work which has been already initiated at Google Social Graph where you will find similar Example applications although there are no such rating/ number/ meter thing as WIRED is trying to do. Traackr is also one such website that let you find out - how famous are you on 'Web', the social graph is fast catching up to poise or untangle the social connectivity on web.

A new entrant in social networking space of India, quite good in usability and features to lure audience, this is one social network I would IndiaHangout.com in category - "Secondary Social networks" likewise to third World Countries in political scenario, the primaries would obviously be - Orkut, Facebook, BigAdda in Indian social networking arena. The community portal provide plenty of features like other portal of similar category do, along with features such as radio, free SMS, chat rooms similar to that of Yahoo messenger, applications such as games, videos, polls and events. The portal is convincing enough and few tweaks can bring it in line with what Hikut and Friendster doing in India. In my opinion advertisements is too early for IndiaHangout.com, one should learn from Orkut, inspite of being a google's offshoot, the social network in India started Adsense advertisements a year later before getting buzzword in crowd. The advertisements obviously distract users from being observed by users/ visitors sometime and could even annoy visitors. BPOVoice is one social network exclusively for Indian BPO aka call center employees, the portal is just opened this month for public release. The founder of portal is from BPO background himself and tried to put the ...

If you are visiting any city in India and you are a blogger, you can now find accommodation for free to stay and the place would be another blogger's home. This is a sort of barter exchange being propagated by Indian website - ExtaBed.in. At ExtraBed.in, bloggers are being asked to participate in this Blogger exchange program where bloggers offer extra bed to a fellow blogger or who visits blogger's city. And in return, when you travel to his/her city, you have a place to stay. This seems to be out of track and at the same time a way to bind and create a blogger's network 'offline'. If you want to host a blogger you can go to ExtraBed.in select the city you live in and add your contact details and If you are planning for a trip out of your city than find the the state name, click on it and find out the city and get in touch with bloggers who welcome other bloggers as their guests. Also going ahead in this offline blogging network, the website ask bloggers to treat fellow bloggers visiting their city with pleasant hospitality along with a 'Gift' and a photo snap of both host ...

TechCrunch a well known Weblog and now more than a weblog, a network cum organization of people obsessed with technology and start-ups led by Michael Arrington are visualizing a Tablet PC that will cost $200 and run nothing more than just Firefox - people's very own browser which just ended up making world record in number of downloads. The ultra slim Tabloid PC device would totally be based on Open Source i.e. free technologies right from OS (BSD/Linux), Desktop/ OnScreen keywboard (Gnome, again open source) and Google Gears for widgets / plugins. Techcrunch in its blog post says about its idea of the device: The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC. Though the concept is not very new and in words of one of a comments in TechcrunchIT its like reinventing the wheels. The famous $100 Laptop is ...

Last Week ChannelMine.tv, venture of TinselVision had launched to serve Hindi movies fans across the globe, it is a community portal with access to the films, television shows and videos along with letting its users to upload and share videos, chat with friends on the network, read blogs about upcoming films and their stars and play Bollywood related games. ChannelMine, a free online networking service fully integrated with its umbrella service TinselVision, combines the web's latest widgets and gadgets with premium free, interactive content, contests and games for a global community of Bollywood fans and Indian entertainment enthusiasts. Viewers can watch programmes on the portal via IPTV to PCs, laptops, TVs and mobile devices in India and other countries such as the US, UK, Canada and across the globe at their mother portal at www.Tinselvision.Com. TinselVision had also tied up with major film studios of Indian cinema arena for bring more Bollywood related content such as - Yash Raj Films, Shemaroo Movies and UTV as well as Zee TV, Star TV, Zoom TV, Ultra and B4U Networks. Source - PTI India

Kindo.com which basically deal with making your family tree and make network with rest of your family tree members has launched its Kindo Hindi version earlier this week and its believed to be first social network connecting families from India in 'Hindi'. The website let users build their own free family tree online, share it with the rest of family and learn more about who they are, their ancestors and family history. Kindo also has other features for families and genealogist that makes the networking site the meeting place for generations. Although I wouldn't call it a complete Hindi version reason being - as the whole websites do have Hindi texts all over but when users type in information, let say when register his/ her name the text that appear are in English anyway. Nevertheless the website dealing in making family tree and interacting with members in social networking way has come up with Hindi as language to be used by Indian users in their interface. Kindo also have the website in 16 other languages to target different countries. The website in true sense doesn't convince to be a pure social networking portal, eventhough it has some traits of being community driven portal but ...

RoamAbout is a plugin that delivers information on the web contextually. Users would not need to leave the site they are browsing in order to search for videos, music, pictures or share the things they come across with. This Firefox & IE plugin bring all these to the user by just highlighting the text any user want without leaving the web page they are viewing. One can get related information by selecting text and clicking the RoamAbout Icon in status bar also users can post to their twitter account, the selected text of a web page and post it directly their, without even leaving the web page actually. Similarly users can browse flickr photos, Google news, info from Wikipedia, maps from MapQuest and videos from YouTube and by just selecting the text in web page you are viewing and hitting the plugin's icons bar. User can customize the the plugin bar so as to limit the no. of Icons for different Web services or websites such as stock quotes, weather or games. Moreover, the company behind RoamAround Vysr do have the open platform that provides developers with any easy way to add and integrate services and networks that users can tap into as ...

SingleID.net which is a first OpenID identity provider in India (OpenID India Directory), is launched to promote usage of OpenID in India. OpenID, which is a global service to eliminates the need for multiple user-names across different websites and simplifying online web experience. OpenID which is supported by many websites including big names such as Microsoft, AT&T, Firefox, WordPress, Technorati, Digg and many more, is targeting more usage on worldwide scale in all kind of services, websites and online products that require user registration. In India SingleID would be the first to provide this service and offer user IDs as - http://< Username >.SingleId.net/ SingleID is initiative by company - DataTics, a Digital Identity and Authentication Service Provider, yet another startup from Pune, India. The company will also offer other authentication service in future such as - Virtual Cards, for more secure authentication, allowing the use of user specific domain name (e.g. vardaan.tiwari.name)

Bizedia is new entrant in India's B2B (Business to Business) online services with being a directory to various business offshoots, be it Exporters/ Manufacturers, Importers/ Buyers, Real Estate, Restaurants or any other organization. Basically, Bizedia provides business leads via listings, classifieds and act as B2B search portal for finding any kind of business unit or organization via its interface. Currently Bizedia is offering free listings, classifieds for business owners in various categories and subcategories along with option to map your business listings. Registered members can check enquiries by visitors and members in their inbox provided by Bizedia. The B2B portal Bizedia is brought by a New Delhi based Web Solution company Vinove. Currently, Alibaba and TradeIndia.com are major B2B portal as far as Indian web is concerned, though there are few others portals also but users have addicted to google in this too, searching for same via http://local.google.co.in/, where they find more choices and options and get desired results much better in terms of quantity and quite simple search interface as well. Still there are portals such Business.com that have pretty large stake in market when it comes to B2B search activity on web and here where Indian startups can look for, to ...

Finally, Google has launched its product for this category as well, where till now SecondLife has its major stake, google through its service Lively.com now offering people to build their virtual life by creating 'Avatars' as their very own clone, play with them and roam around in 3D virtual world, make friends and interact in real time with your friends' avatars. Be who you want on the web pages you visit, says Google official blog post, where user with google's Lively.com's service can create their own virtual world just like what SecondLife.com has done earlier. Through Lively users can create avatars, change its looks or wardrobe, be it your surroundings, environment such as furniture, nearby objects, rooms where your avatar put up and decorate your places etc. Lively is a outcome of Arizona State University social networking project where Google wanted to create SecondLife's rival. Eventhough in beta and asking for feedback, Lively.com is ready for all actions to download and give it a try against SecondLife

SneakCast, an Indian Video Search service that we have reviewed last year as - SneakCast: India’s First Video Search Engine is down for past 6 months or so. Now the company behind it has overhauled the search portal along with new revamped logo and new concept has drawn to make it more versatile. SneakCast, this time wants to be semantic video search engine in contrast to other generic search engines today. The company talk about bring about changes in video search globally in contrast to other search engines including google who just does textual based search along with tags, back-links relevance factors. On the other hand SneakCast bet on being most relevant search engine when it comes to video, so much so that company has apparently said: SneakCast has semantics, syntactics and video analysis to increase the relevance level to as high as 63 per cent (the highest ever attained in the video search industry). The company at present is based in UK working to finally launch the service and will relocate to Mumbai, India before getting close to final rounds of fundings. The video search service also have plans to run video advertising with approx. 30 sec. of ad clips in their videos ...

Posterous is a new service through which users can post just anything by sending email, its a kind of twitter like microblogging, but unlike microblog here one can put any content using smart auto embedding services of Posterous. The service lets post content from email and content could be audio, video, image, pdf, doc or mp3 and you would get 1GB of space for all this. One can use any email service such as GMail, Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo or any other to do blogging via email and for that you just have to send an email to post @ posterous.com unlike to other blogging services with WYSIWYG editors or so. The interesting and USP part in this is Posterous intelligently embed the files in different user interfaces like when you post a YouTube video link via email, it automatically embed the video player as such and when you post any audio files it will put a nice Posterous interface for that (see image below) and audio player when you post an mp3 file. Apart from this, when you send URLs, it will automatically create a link and when an image is send as an attachment it resize it to web friendly size, ...

Microsoft India has launched a community cum networking website WindowsandMe.com in order to improve and raise the level of experience of consumer with their PCs having Windows as OS. The site talk about how to make most of their PC experience with Windows. The website is still under construction and in Beta phase and more features and functionalities will be added as per feedback from users and from set of selected people who are subject matter experts on Windows, Amit Agarwal Pro Blogger of Digital Inspiration(labnol.org) is one of those few. The website seems to be one of the effort to sustain the public support for Windows Vista more than any other Microsoft's Windows Products. Windows Vista has been made the vital part of website to realize the consumers the caliber of same in a way of proving tips, tweaks, tutorial, Knowledge part and experts advice. The website runs on core part of exploring, discovering, sharing each others knowledge on Windows and end up with solution or improvisation of using Windows PCs along with advices, 'how tos' and tips from expert panel. As a signed up user one can get latest news, updates and tips of Windows knowledge base and throw queries ...