Category: reviews

Indian Railways launches RailRadar web app for tracking trains realtime

As part of its technological advances, the Indian Railways have launched a web application at http://railradar.trainenquiry.com/.

This application uses google maps and tracks trains realtime with blue on time codes and red running late codes on the maps. It now gets very easy for finding whether a train is running late or note and where it is exactly !!

There is no mobile app for the same yet, but it could introduced soon for android, windows and apple iphones if railways can put their mind to it.

Tags: railways, bangalore, bengaluru, blog, railradar, app, web, rail radar, trains, timings, tickets, irctc, routes, desitnations, stations, late, early, timings, maps

Notion Ink Adam preorder now possible, but is it worth it?

(source androinica.com)

(source www.notionink.com)

The Notion Ink Adam is finally out for preorder. Fine. But the details have been so seriously sketchy that Indians have no idea about what exactly it costs in India, and how one can get hold of the Android tablet. On an average in the USA the notion ink adam costs roughly close to $450 or in Indian money a little over Rs.20000/-. As of now shipping to any country via DHL costs a whopping 50 USD or roughly Rs.2500/-. While this is ok for other countries, a product conceptualized, designed in India is manufactured in China and sold all over the world first.

I think the Indian government should seriously consider policing such product launches. Given the fact the person designing the product has an office in Bangalore, has studied in an enviable place like IIT and has been Indianized all long the way, this becomes unacceptable. Using Indian soil for product launches elsewhere. This applies to Apple in part too. Look at them, they have launched iPAD everywhere other than India. I can understand their sentiments. India perhaps is still not fully ready for a device like iPAD. But lets take Samsung for instance. They came, they saw the opportunity and they conquered.

Yes its a bit high in price no doubts, retailing at a whopping Rs.36,000 for a silly tablet running android. But then my iPhone is also the same price and I guess its justified if I own one over the other. However for people who were looking at affordable computing with a tablets – congrats folks, your dreams have just been shattered by Samsung. The only other way you can own one is to get into the infamous and dubious EMI trap and keep paying for years together.

Coming back to the Adam product, its flawless and most suited for today’s market if launched properly. But the distribution, returns and servicing strategy is not fully enlisted for both local and international users. There are no reviews of it with production quality hardware. The user interface looks great no doubt, but still not shown anywhere on the actual device. This makes the first set of devices questionable on their use. The keyboard looks fantastic and hopefully will allow for faster typing unlike other miserable touch screen devices like the Galaxy tab or iPAD even.

In summary one only hopes that Notion Ink shapes up its distrubution policy to be more transparent, ties up with banks in India and charts out a proper business growth plan for India. And yes please ship us the device for a 500 bucks instead of a 50 USD !

 

 

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ING Vysya Bank (Koramangala) : heralding the next revolution in banking?

We have seen many banks since a decade. With the pioneer Citibank deciding to set shop in India, its been no looking back for many banks since then to start enticing their customers in many different ways to retain them. The public sector banks too realized this down the line and banks like Canara Bank, SBI and Bank of Baroda have now quickly upgraded their service level to be both personal and professional to the extent that it matters.

If you have seen the Samsung advertisements their caption reads “Next is what?” This is the caption they have set as a vision to themselves to continually innovate all the time. So then can there be a banking experience similar to this? Today I had the pleasant experience of opening a savings bank account at ING Vysya Bank which I wanted to share with you for those whom it would matter. Read on.

I was an existing customer of ING who recently happened to close my account. I went to SBI to open a savings account. But the kind of reception I received there, and the kind of forms I had to fill put me back a little. I decided to give ING a try again. One has to understand that you can currently use your ATM card in other bank ATM’s upto 6 times a month free. But with ING’s Orange Savings Account and a minimum balance of Rs.10000, you can use their card at will at all possible ATMs for free unlimited number of times. Reason enough to try out ING again.

Now here comes the surprise. I walk into the branch. I stand next to counter 1 where there was some customer being attended to. Within ten seconds, the official asks me what I need and when I said Savings account, in less than a minute I am offered a seat, and a form to fill up. And if you thought I had to fill up thousands of details, you are wrong. I signed at relevant locations, gave him one photo, put in my nominee’s name and my mother’s name and bingo – its done.

The next thing I know is I am seated with the manager Ms.Shweta, who introduced herself and after some talk, I am given a welcome kit – yes then and there all in a total of less than five minutes. Can you believe what all the kit had? You won’t if I tell you – it had the debit card, the cheque book, the ATM Pin, the internet username and Pin, instructions on all types of account charges, mobile banking Pin, customer ID and account number details, and a visiting card of the manager for further queries! 🙂 I was just DUMBSTRUCK at a loss for words. I could not believe that in ten minutes, I am walking out of the bank as an account holder with nothing more required than the details already provided.

One word – “Awesome!”. In the past ten years, never did I receive this kind of service from Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, SBI, Bank of Baroda, ICICI, Canara Bank – none. Well done ING. Your customer service requires a blog post. I am more than pleased to invite others to meet you.

And as we all know managers make employees, not the other way. Ms.Shweta is proactive, informal, and inculcates a sense of belonging into all the bank employees, who do things in a right way in a very involved fashion. This is what is called zero-effort marketing. ING Vysya Bank, Koramangala is definitely an example of a well managed bank branch.

I will stick with ING as long as I can, just due to this one experience with many more to come. If you want me to describe ING Koramangala in one word – PROFESSIONALISM. Check it out yourself. And with the experience I have had at ING, there is no doubt that they will not realize their mission statement specified at the top of this post! 🙂

You can contact Shweta here:

The Madikeri Sipayi is no more. Vishnuvardhan 1950-2009

Today morning, it was a shock to understand that our very own Kannada Superstar Vishnuvardhan was no more. He had died of a cardiac arrest in Mysore at an early age of 59 years. His movies are still etched in my memory right from my childhood and has brought cheer to many a fan in the state. No wonder then that his demise has brought about sudden shock to the state. With him, two superstars including Rajkumar are no more. Hopefully we will be able to educate our children about our great heroes of yesteryears!

You can read all about Vishnu here. Do listen to the song above, I really liked it as its not only great sounding, but also shows Vishnu in traditionality of Coorg in terms of dressing and choreography.

May his soul rest in peace.

Airtel, once fairTel, now unfairTel – shortly finishedTel

Its was winter of 1999. JTM was one of Karnataka‘s best networks. Outgoing call rates were Rs.10/- per minute and incoming about Rs.3 a minute if I am not wrong. I was one of JTM’s customers at that time. Slowly JTM was taken over by Bharti Teleservices. That was the birth of AirTel, a company which would grow to be one of India’s most admired telcos over a period of a decade. They were the best when it came to customer services, while the nearest telcos Spice and Hutch (what is Vodafone now) were by no standards near airtel be it in infrastructure or in customer treatment. Airtel pioneered many a revolution down the line and its venture into landline services made it even more popular.

Spice’s mismanagement and Hutch’s troubled history of having bad networks and bad customer services only made it better and better for Airtel quite inorganically. Over the period of the last couple of years though, India and in particular Karnataka has seen a flurry of entries from many a new telco who are all vying to take a share of Airtel’s pie. Airtel’s troubles have started very recently, and they are compounding it by not brainstorming on the potential failures that are waiting to happen. Some of the key things about Airtel that are beginning to go wrong include and is not limited to the following:

  • Peak hour call jams rendering the service useless

  • Call drops that occur very often leading to frustration amongst users

  • Caller tunes and the amount of agony it has been able to cause for people not really interested in them

  • Ineffective blocking of Telemarketing calls and SMSes that disturb thousands of people day in and out

Of late some more laurels can rest with Airtel:

  • Airtel’s mismanaged and inexperienced customer service centers

  • Don’t care attitude that has set in among the franchisees managing these centers

  • Low level executives making a mess out of technical situations which they are unable to understand or explain

  • Higher level managers who do not follow up on these technical problems that people have

  • Erosion of brand value due to the way these executives perform

  • Airtel’s arrogance in maintaining the same call rates even when competition is eating into its flesh day by day

So then why are people still putting up with Airtel or for that matter any other operator? The answer is very simple to say the least. Its because they want to retain their mobile number without changing it.

For a moment lets then dwell into the case with other operators. Spice has gone one level up in capturing the youth market with a flurry of dual sim based phones and real low calling values. They are also busy fighting with their nearest and best rival Virgin mobile.  Airtel’s arch rival Vodafone is now one level ahead with its famed ZooZoo advertisements addressing the core values of branding in an effective way drawing huge crowds towards the service. Not to forget to mention their Pug ads were also so adorable. Vodafone’s prepaid plans now give you full talktime without any rentals or taxes even sometimes. Their low call quality and tower quality are now replenished to cover most of karnataka state.

Most of Vodafone’s calls don’t drop like before and their connectivity is at an all time high. Vodafone’s takeover of Hutch has only fuelled their appetite for competing with anyone coming their way to maintain their customer base.

With Aircel, MTS and Uninor into the picture now along with Tata Docomo, Airtel’s chances are only slimmer and slimmer day by day. Already Tata’s aggressive pricing plan has forced Airtel to realize its diminishing customer base though very late, and they have also launched the same per second billing plan to save their skin. With MTS being even more aggressive at 1/2 paise per second along with Uninor, Airtel has some serious competition breathing down its neck.

On the CDMA front, Reliance and Tata are ruling the roost and will continue to do so. The only thing then comes back to how to save your mobile number. With number portability in the offing at the year end, from TRAI, at a mere 19 bucks for a switch, its now very easy to retain your number and give your old operator a boot. This only spells more bad news for Airtel who are likely to lose their coveted tag of 10 million customers on India’s no more preferred network. Is it time then for Airtel, who were once FairTel, now unFairTel to go into history as a finishedTel ?

Only time will tell. And it will tell well enough.

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Big 10 Circle – going in a loop!

There was one thing missing in our local transport system, and that was a connectivity throughout the entire outer ring road or PRR or whatever they call it by now. There were buses from Banashankari to Hebbal, or from Hebbal to Mysore road, etc. But there was no Big 10 linking the points where other BIG 10’s deviated outside the city.  This is when I noticed the Big 10 Circle.

While I was wondering how different it is from the usual 500 series of buses (volvo and non volvo) that loiter around the ORR, I could only imagine that this Big 10 Circle might actually link all those roads where the other Big 10’s would intersect at. So now, I can always take a Big 10 to enter the city, and exit the city with yet another one, and just in case I decide I need a circular detour, can pick up where I left on Big 10 Circle. More information on Big 10 circle is available here.

So the link says 500 series is to go and about 200 odd Big 10 circle buses to operate. Now thats quite a lot, and one can expect a Big 10 circle bus every something like 10 minutes at this case. 200 buses on a 77km road mean something like 1 bus every kilometer at any point? Wow those figures will surely do a great deal of good.

But one last thing. I can get down from a Big 10 at Mayo Hall, but to catch an outgoing Big 10 towards north Bangalore, I would have to catch another at Shivajinagar. And hey people at BMTC dont be dumb to assume everyone can walk that distance. I request BMTC to please please move the buses coming in to shivajinagar further to Mayo Hall to just give that desperately needed connection which would make Big 10 a success Story.

Ok then, looking forward to a Big 10 Circle in front of my office every 10 minutes! 🙂

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Why I love my webhost . . .

 

Hosting is a tricky business. Especially for people like you and me. Not because we dont know how to host, but because we dont know when the host will run away overnight making you host all over again. Then again this is why there are websites that help you compare a plethora of webhosts who offer webhosting

I read as many reviews as I could and I saw that there were a set of famous five who turned up in every result of webhosting reviews. While all these were more or less of the same cost, it then all boiled down to just the features and reliability of a webhost especially with respect to them sticking around for a long time as well as their techsupport timeline. I found two webhosts who were worth mentioning.

Fat Cow – www.fatcow.com and JustHost – www.justhost.com .

FatCow was a bit more expensive but at that price did not offer the feature set that JustHost was able to manage at 20% lesser price than the former. Unlimited webspace, unlimited FTP, traffic (bandwidth), unlimited emails, subdomains, databases – and if you decided to withdraw from them, they entice you with a 50% off for another year, meaning you pay only for six months to be with them for another year.

Page loading times were fast, their control panel was added with more features than the usual.Tech support was an area where they were lacking. But then so did others. I found FatCow the best in technical support, they went that extra mile in what they offered to the customers. But Justhost was a near second and I have never really had any problems with them either. Offering one year of hosting at about $40 with all these features mentioned above, its then only natural to be with them.

I am loving JustHost and I believe they care for their customers a lot. Keep up the good work JH!

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