After coming up with India’s first Conditional Access Module cards to let any DTH user to migrate to DishTV whilst keeping their set top box from another operator, reports are coming in that DishTV is launching Dish trueHD+, an innovative way to enable all their existing subscribers to upgrade to DVR (Digital Video Recorder). Instead of launching another set top box with DVR features which their customers would have been needed to purchase, DishTV has released a software update for their existing HD set top box which lets users plug in their USB HDD (hard disk drive)/flash drive and record live TV on that.

Despite the fact that a user has to purchase an HDD/flash drive for this purpose, this setup is actually pretty awesome considering:

• User can buy desired capacity of HDD thereby enjoying the freedom of recording as many TV shows as possible.
• When a user’s HDD is filled up, they have an option to buy a new one instead of relying on the operator to offer an upgrade program (which, BTW, is not offered by any operator in India currently).
• Users can keep multiple HDDs with their favorite TV shows recorded and can plug them to the STB whenever they want to watch them.
• Users can keep their current HD set top boxes (which would have otherwise been exchanged for peanuts, if they had to upgrade).

However, I do see a few issues with this arrangements:

• Typically, DVRs have two physical tuners so as to let users watch one channel while the other is being recorded. This will not work out in this case if the HD STB has only one tuner.
• There might be limits to the file system and size of the HDD one can plug in the DVR. Also, I am pretty sure that we won’t be able to use these HDD with our computers.
• If a user plugs in a wore down HDD, the recording performance might degrade.
• Users will still need to change their remotes as the current ones they have will not have record & playback related buttons.

However, considering everything, this is a pretty smart move from DishTV. This will surely help them rope in new customers.

After much speculation, Amazon has launched in India as junglee.com – a shopping service for Indian customers. Contrary to what people had been hoping for, Amazon is not directly selling products in India. Instead, they are maintaining a catalog of about 1.2 crore products being sold online in India by multiple e-retailers and lets users search for them, read the reviews and then buy them from whichever site they choose to. In addition to product reviews, junglee.com will also have seller reviews so that users can take an informed decision. Interestingly, amazon.com is also listed as a seller. However,it might not be worth using it to purchase anything other than Kindle.

In my initial analysis I found that most products listed on junglee.com are overpriced compared to what they are priced at other popular ecommerce sites in India.

In my opinion, Amazon needs to do a lot more in order to establish properly in India. And I believe that they are planning to launch their own online store in due course of time. An interesting thing to note is that India’s top three online sellers – flipkart, letsbuy & Infibeam are not listed with junglee.com. They are the biggest online sellers in India and offer the cheapest prices on everything they sell. Another thing to note is that once someone has a good experience shopping online at a certain site, the person is more likely to trust that site for future purchases unless some other site is offering a significantly lower price. This means that junglee.com seller reviews will be most useful to first time online buyers, many of who might choose to rely on word of mouth reviews from their tech savvy friends instead of junglee.com. This makes all this effort more or less redundant for now.

I hope that amazon opens up their store soon. Although the current ecommerce sites are doing pretty well for now, however, everyone knows that everything goes down the toilet without healthy competition.

Facebook has filed for an IPO of US$ 5 billion. The whole process is expected to make many Facebook employees millionaires.

In his letter to the SEC, Mark Zuckerberg states that Facebook was not created to be a company, but to serve the “social mission” of making the world more open and connected and that they hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Facebook has more than 800 million active users and caters to 2.7 billion likes & comments every day. It is also the most popular photo sharing site on the web with 250 million photos uploaded everyday.

The full text of Zuckerberg’s letter can be found here & other artifacts can be found here.

Everything is getting smart these days. So, why not your good old headphones? Parrot (a company which makes awesome bluetooth gadgets & the famous parrot AR drone) has introduced a pair of over the ear headphones which are smart. The headphones, named Zik,  have bluetooth, accelerometer & NFC chip on board which can be used to:

• Swipe the right touch sensitive panel vertically to set the volume, or swipe it horizontally to skip music forward/rewind.
• Automatically pause the music playback when you remove the headphones (this one is my favorite)
• Pair the headphones to your NFC compatible phone by just bumping them together
• Stream stereo music from your A2DP compatible phone over bluetooth
• Stream music over NFC (if your phone supports it)

The headphones have active noise cancellation (which requires battery). However. if you ever run out, you can use them as standard headphones using wire, without the awesome fancy features. Also, they are designed to reproduce sound as if it is coming from front of your, instead of from your side. Apparently, this produces some concert like listening experience.

Here is a short video demonstrating the headphones:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TCDlyYbzE

The headphones are coming this year. No word on pricing yet, but we are pretty sure they won’t be cheap. Just like all other Parrot’s awesome products.

[via The Verge]

ESPN Star Sports, the body which owns the two first 24×7 sports HD channels in India (ESPN HD & Star Cricket HD) have signed a deal to allow select cable operators in India to show their HD channels. The channels are available to 3 cable networks – Incable, 7Star in Mumbai & UCN in Central India. Subscribers of these digital cable operators can now enjoy these HD channels by upgrading to a HD set top box.

All the cable operators in the metro cities are required to go digital by March 2012. This will be followed by digitization of the entire country’s cable system by the end of 2014. This should give the cable operators in non metro areas to educate their subscribers and start supplying HD compatible set top boxes to them. In the metro cities though, operators will have to launch lucrative schemes and high quality DVR enabled set top boxes at cheap prices if they want to rope in subscribers, as their DTH competitors already have a good infrastructure in place for this.

Nonetheless, this is great news for subscribers. In addition to HD channels, digitization of the cable industry will also enable service providers to offer high speed broadband connections to customers. A segment which desperately needs a healthy competition in India.