KBC-4 gives its first 'crorepati'

Rahat Tasneem, the maiden contestant to win the prize money of Rs one crore in the fourth season of popular show 'Kaun Banega Crorepati' (KBC) is confidence personified, a trait which was even lauded by the show's host megastar Amitabh Bacchan. Coming from a small town of Giridih in Jharkhand, the 37-year-old says she played well utilising the options of 'phone a friend', 'double dip', 'expert advice' and 'audience poll' effectively.

Rahat said that she was confused initially and had to use the lifelines. "But, from the stage of Rs 3.20 lakh to Rs 50 lakh, I knew my answers and did not require lifelines."

"When Big B asked me where did I get my confidence from, I replied it stemmed from self-belief and the fact that I knew it all," she said.

Rahat won the crore sum by opting for 'double dip' to a question about which state did the first woman president of an African nation, belong.

"I was confused so I used my last lifeline (double dip)," she said adding she quit the game as she did not know the answer of the jackpot query of Rs 5 crore on the first heart transplant. "I did not have any lifelines left."

The lucky housewife had only Rs three in her mobile phone as balance when it began all, with a question on Hindu mythology on October 16. "I decided to take a chance and send the SMS," Rahat said.

World's Biggest Rangoli.........Happy Diwali-2010

A total of 120 girls, boys and women worked for hours to make what the organisers said was the world's largest rangoli at the SRK college ground in this Uttar Pradesh town.


The huge rangoli at SRK college ground in Uttar Pradesh's Firozabad
town made using 13 quintals of colour. (IANS Photo)

Praveeen Agarwal, secretary of the Indian Career Welfare Society which organised the show, said the rangoli was made on 12,000 sq feet of ground, using 13 quintals of red, yellow, green and black gulal.

"We also used white marble powder," Agarwal told IANS. The rangoli was opened for public viewing later.

Participants were trained for a week. Computer aided diagram and sketches helped the artists to work on 17 different blocks simultaneously. The figure was of a human face.

The next step, the organisers said, was to get a Guinness certificate.

Top 10 mistakes of Bill Gates

Bill Gates is considered as a great man. Many people look up to him. And a lot of people are inspired by his life. But then again like any other human being he also has his own mistakes. Here are the top 10 mistakes of Bill Gates.

The man created a software monopoly and in return he got so many lawsuits for it.Bill Gates is still fighting with lawsuits.The source on wikipedia clearly stated that
United States v. Microsoft was a set of consolidated civil actions filed against Microsoft Corporation on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and 20 U.S. states. Joel I. Klein was the lead prosecutor.The trial started on May 18, 1998 with the U.S. Justice Department and the Attorneys General of twenty U.S. states suing Microsoft for illegally thwarting competition in order to protect and extend its software monopoly.

Bill Gates did not consider opensource. His business strategies always counter opensource principles and paradigm.You may be interested in his open-source debate In a Fortune magazine he clearly says that
It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.


The Windows OS made Mr. Gates the richest man in the world. But its latest iteration is bombarded with lots of negative criticisms.
He allowed Windows Mobile to happen. Did he run out of innovative ideas so he settled for a miniature Windows OS for mobile phone. He could have put up a team to design the OS from ground up.
He let DOS die. It was a promising OS and a very stable one.
Bill Gates did not think of cloud computing probably because of his proprietary Windows OS. But this is definitely one of his biggest mistakes.
He allowed Windows Millennium edition to be released. The OS was definitely a reflection of the lack of talents from Microsoft. It failed the expectation of the people. It was premature.
He ignored search. Look what happened to Google now. Bill Gates already made some moves about search in the end of the 90s and it was definitely a mistake to trash it.Scobleizer once revealed in his post that
Look at my last post. Now read this one over on LiveSide. It’s a short report that Microsoft executives are bragging to MVPs that “we’re in it to win.”

I don’t think Microsoft is. The words are empty. Microsoft’s Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks (look at that last post again). If that’s “in it to win” then I don’t get it. I saw a bunch of posts similar to the one on LiveSide coming out of the MVP Summit. I didn’t post any of them to my link blog for a reason: All were air, no real demonstrations of how Microsoft is going to lead.

The Microsoft Zune is a mistake. A lot of money poured into its development but yet it did not yield enough profit.John Biggs from Crunchgear had a poetic post on “Who killed Microsoft?”.Some of the extract are as follows:
Who killed Microsoft? Why did all those jobs get lost?

“Not I,” said the Zune fanboy, “I got Zune, I’m no iToy Sure it didn’t do too much and too bad my girlfriend bought a Touch now we’re iTunes all the way what else do I have to say?”

The Xbox on the other hand is too pricey for a gaming console and because of this; people go for other brands- the cheaper ones.This is only reason why Xbox price set to drop in war with Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo’s top-selling Wii. Those are the top 10 mistakes of Bill Gates. These might be some of the negative side of the guy but these will never take away his greatness.

Gold Vending ATMs May Become a Reality in India

Indians might soon get a chance to buy gold from ATMs, as Germany's Ex Oriente Lux AG is in talks with Indian entities for setting up gold dispensing automated machines in India. Ex Oriente Lux AG, which also operates an online shop for the yellow metal, is the maker of gold vending machines. A company official said that talks are going on with interested entities in India to set up gold dispensing ATMs in the country. "We are currently in talks with many interested parties from all over the world, also from India... the door is still open for further applications," the Ex Oriente Lux AG's Director (PR & Marketing) Joe Dreixler told PTI from Germany. However, the official did not provide details about the ongoing talks. The Gold ATM, known as 'Gold to go', made its debut in Abu Dhabi earlier this year. It can issue up to ten different products and their real time prices are updated every ten minutes, according to the company's website. Other features include the option to see a selected product before making the purchase decision. Currently, such ATMs are there in four countries -- the UAE (Abu Dhabi), Germany, Italy and Spain. Most of these machines are located in Germany. "At this stage, we have nine machines on air (in use). Further, locations to be opened soon," Dreixler said. Going by the website, "Gold to go originated as an opportunity born out of the turmoil of the financial crisis". Ever since the global financial meltdown in 2008-09, gold prices have been on the rise, as more investors are seeing the yellow metal as a safe investment. According to the official, response to these ATMs have been overwhelming. "Thomas Geissler's -- inventor of the world's first gold vending machine and CEO of Ex Oriente Lux AG -- motivation is to make it easier for normal consumer to purchase precious metals in safe and easy way and at fair prices," Dreixler added.

Consumer Fee Charges for Nothing

Fees, fees and more fees fill up your monthly statement as banks, credit cards and service providers insist on charging consumers for basic functions. Shruti Srivastava takes a deeper at your losses. Ridiculous it may seem, but service providers levy a host of charges that border on fleecing. While it is not known how much such charges add to their toplines, surely they pinch your pockets.

These days it costs to pay your own bills; even if you do it before the due date, and cash down! That's what New Delhi based Vijay Kumar realised when he faced problems with his Internet banking and chose to pay his Standard Chartered Bank credit card bill in cash at a branch near his place. The teller at the branch informed him that paying the bill in cash would cost him Rs 120. To avoid it, the teller said, he could make the payment through cheque or Net banking.

Ridiculous, it may seem. But banks and other service providers levy a host of charges that border on fleecing. While it is not known how much such charges add to their toplines, surely these pinch your pockets and more than anything else leave behind a feeling of harassment and helplessness.

As far as banks are concerned, till 1997, the Indian Banks' Association used to keep a check on service charges and fees levied by banks. Later on, individual banks were given discretionary powers to decide charges. However, after a flood of complaints by consumers, banking regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) set up a working group for assessing the ` Reasonableness of Bank Charges' in 2006 for standardising the service fee charges for basic banking services. The RBI also asked banks to display the service charges for all the normal banking transactions on their websites.

The RBI's move was also a result of strong arguments made by several consumer organisations, claiming that bank customers in India are mostly "captive" because of the difficult procedure in changing their banks even when they are not satisfied with the services offered. Customers forced to pay the absurd charges have found support in an unlikely place -the Internet. A page called `I'mtired-of-ridiculous-charges-and-fees-from-mybank' has been set up on social networking site Facebook! Though sectors like telecom and aviation are regulated by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and Director General of Civil Aviation and Airport Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA), the loony charges by these sectors remain a sore point with customers.

Welcome to the world of charges:

1. Penalty on deposit of cash in collector box

ICICI charges its customers Rs 100 if they deposit cash in a box meant for collecting cheques. The charge increases to Rs 300 in case the deposit amount is above Rs 500 and repeat instances of cash deposits through cheque drop box attracts an increased charge of Rs 500 for any amount. That means if you deposit Rs 600 by mistake in the collector box, the bank will charge Rs 300 on the transaction!

2. Free debit card

When debit-cum-ATM cards were introduced by banks, the idea was to encourage customers not to overcrowd banks for something as simple as withdrawal of cash. For those fearing technology, it was criminal to do so while for the more tech-savvy ones, it was time saving. Then the banks introduced the facility of using debit card for making several payments ranging from bill payments to shopping. However, banks like HDFC charge an annual fee plus taxes for debit card.

There is no pattern of charging for lost card or replacement cards with some banks like ICICI charging Rs 200 per card while HDFC charging Rs 100 plus taxes for the same. ICICI imposes a surcharge on fuel purchases at HPCL outlets. It is nil for transactions above Rs 400, while 2.5 per cent subject to a minimum of Rs 2 for transactions up to Rs 400. While at non-HPCL outlets, the charges is 2.5 per cent of purchase or Rs 10 per transaction whichever is higher. Booking of railway tickets through debit card attracts 1.8 per cent of the transaction value. Standard Chartered bank also charges the higher of a surcharge of 2.5 per cent on the purchase value or Rs 10 while using debit card at petrol pumps.

3. Charges for unsolicited services

Supriya was surprised when she got a debit card of a leading public sector bank without even asking for it. She called the customer care to report the same and was assured that it would be taken care of. But it has been a year and she has been charged for services on the debit card she never asked for. Many banks have been providing such unsolicited ser vices and charging for the same, thereby hassling customers. Though in many such cases the charges levied are minimum, but when added keeping in mind the number of branches and the reach of the bank across the country, the amount is staggering.

4. Foreign banks charging for inter-bank withdrawals from ATMS

Rina Prasad, a housewife, had to pay a transaction fee when she went to next door HSBC bank ATM to withdraw money using an SBI Debit card. As per the RBI guidelines, in a month, five withdrawals from ATMs of any other bank are free of service charges and after that, a fee of Rs 20 is charged. However, Rina was puzzled as this was her very first transaction from a bank other than SBI. While inserting the card, a message on the screen conveyed to her that HSBC being a foreign bank is not governed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines and hence she would be charged for the same.

5. Inter-bank fund transfer

Udita Bhattacharya went to a nearby HDFC bank branch to transfer funds in her friend's account, which is in another branch located some 15 km from her home. While depositing the money she was told that Rs 100 would be charged for transferring fund from one branch to the other. "But which bank does that?" she questioned. "We do", he said. Few banks have started the practice of charging their customers for core banking services like these. According to Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group, a con sumer organisation, core banking system (CBS) has become an excuse for many banks to cover up their faulty practices.

6. Account closure

As the consumer organisations have been rightly pointing out, a bank customer is captive. If you want to close your account within six months of opening it, you have to pay Rs 100 after the first 14 days of opening the account. HSBC charges Rs 1,000 for the same if the account if closed in less than 6 months of account opening and ICICI charges Rs 500 from 31 days to one year.

7. Charging erroneously

Not only are the charges loony, in many cases banks charge wrongly for a transaction. For example, according to a consumer organisation, a customer in Chennai was charged because his cheque bounced due to insufficient funds in his account. He was surprised because a few days back he had deposited Rs 50,000 in his account. On enquiring further and producing the receipt of deposit slip, he learnt that the bank had wrongly credited the entry in an another account. The victim is yet to get the money wrongly credited and the amount charged for the bounced cheque.

8. Customer care, a paid service

It may come as a surprise but Vodafone has started charging for its customer care services. So next time you call for registering a complaint or knowing your account balance or usage, you would be charged as per the extant tariff. Other services providers like Airtel are still doing it for free. But you never know when others might start following the trend.

9. Unsolicited calls & messages while roaming

Rajeev disliked caller tunes. But he was provided one by his service provider Uninor without even informing him. When he called up the customer care, he was told that he requested for it! Aghast, he gave the customer care executive a piece of his mind and asked them to remove the caller tune. Another problem which customers face is a torrent of unsolicited messages both from their service provider and telemarketer. Not only are these messages annoying, they also cost you when you are availing of roaming facility.

10. Seat assignment by airlines

Did you know that your coveted seats with more leg space costs you a bit extra? Low cost airlines such as SpiceJet and Indigo charge around Rs 300 per passenger for seats in the front row or near emergency exit points, which have extra leg space. If the passenger wants a seat allocated before check-in, he has to pay Rs 50 extra.

Apple gets anti-sexting patent

Apple has been granted a patent that allows parents to prevent their children from sending and receiving sexually explicit text messages.

The patent was granted Tuesday by the US Patent and Trademark Office and allows parents or other administrators of mobile phones to set definitions for banned texts. Messages containing the offending words could be censored or deleted before reaching the recipient.

Parents could also opt to receive an alert whenever a text message containing a banned term was used.

The patent also could be used as an educational tool in which parents could control the language that texts are sent in, and their spelling. Parents could set quotas for texting and reign in or revoke texting capabilities if the standards are not met.

"The content of such a message is controlled by filtering the message based on defined criteria," the patent says. "The criteria may be defined according to a parental control application. These techniques also may be used, in accordance with instructional embodiments, to require the administered devices to include certain text in messages. These embodiments might, for example, require that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish."

Ahmedabad, the best Indian city for SME businesses

Bangalore: The growth of any country’s economy is backed by the strength of small and medium enterprises (SME) in the country. The SME sector contributes atleast eight to nine percent of India’s GDP and employs more than four crore people.

Now the question is which city is the best to start an enterprise? In a recent report by Ernst & Young (E&Y) and Franchise India Ahmedabad is the frontrunner in the list of cities for successfully running small scale businesses. The city has a good scope in the pharmaceutical, leather footwear, textile machinery parts, gems and jewellery health and wellness services. Gujrat is known for being the best state for entrepreneurs and it has seen micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) growing. 

Bengaluru, which is the ideal city for B2B services, ranks second in the list. The city is known for supplying hand tools, auto component and hosiery sectors and it ranks second in the list of all cities for electrical goods and apparel manufacturing.

Mumbai, the commercial capital of India ranks third in the list as it serves an ideal environment for machine tools, electronic goods and B2B services.

Hyderabad, which is ideal for information technology-enabled services (ITeS), offshore services, bulk drugs, and leather tanning has been ranked as India's fourth best city to start a business.

New Delhi is rated as the fifth best city to start small business in sectors like rubber, auto components and food processing. It ranks 5th among the best Indian cities to do business in.

Some of the other cities that could find a ranking in the chart are Chennai, Surat, Faridabad, JAipur and Gurgaon. 

Bunty out of Bigg Boss-4, On Very First Day!!!

After hurling abuses at Bigg Boss, Davinder Singh asked to leave the house for not following rules on Day 1

Davinder Singh alias Bunty chor, one of the 14 contestants of Bigg Boss 4, was asked to leave the Bigg Boss house on the very first day because of unruly behaviour. Bunty became popular after the movie Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! that was based on his life was released in 2008. 

Davinder Singh alias Bunty chor

He was asked to leave the Bigg Boss house at 11.15 pm yesterday after he hurled abuses at Bigg Boss, tampered with the camera and the microphone, behaved violently with the other contestants, and did not adhere to the rules of the house. 

Sources from the Bigg Boss team said that he abused Bigg Boss with Teri maa ki ..., teri ... and many such obscene words. He put socks on the cameras inside the house and did not go to the confession room, even after being summoned thrice by Bigg Boss. 

We bring to you a blow by blow account given to us by the sources within the Bigg Boss team as to how the incident worsened for them.

First day: On the very first day, Bigg Boss had asked the contestants to vote for one of the contestants. Thinking the voting was for elimination, everyone voted unanimously for Bunty. However, Bigg Boss made him the Head of the House and he got to stay in the Delight room with a refrigerator, separate bathroom, cushioned bed, and other such facilities, with the responsibility to make the other contestants follow the rules. 

7 pm: Bunty was asked by Bigg Boss to vacate the Head of the House room, as he spent the entire day sleeping without participating in any work or getting the work done.

7.30 pm: He slowly started packing his bag to get out of the Head's room.

9 pm: He started abusing Bigg Boss on the mike using foul language like Bigg Boss ki maa ka... etc. 

9.30 pm: He started tampering with the camera by putting his socks over them in order to cover them. 
Later, the inmates tried to explain to him that he should not be doing this, as it was against their contract. 

Between 9.30 and 10.15 pm: He was summoned thrice by Bigg Boss to the confession room, but he refused to go and abused Bigg Boss.

When Sameer Soni and Shweta Tiwari tried to explain to him, he violently told them to stay away, "Aap Jaiye aur apna kaam kijiye, aap hatiye." He said he cares a shit for Bigg Boss and wanted to leave the show.

11.15 pm: Bigg Boss announced that Bunty should leave the house for the previously mentioned reasons. 
A source from the Bigg Boss unit said, "He was removed as he could be a threat to anyone inside the house because of the way he was behaving. His contract may be terminated and he can be asked to go back. The whole drama will be aired today."

Japan takes another step in replacing humans with robots

Its makers, Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), hope the robot will be a step towards creating a model that can help ease greying Japan's looming labour shortage.

"We designed a working robot in the image of a lean but well-muscled track-and-field athlete," Noriyuki Kanehira, robotic systems manager at Kawada, told a news conference to unveil the blue-and-white "HRP-4."

Designed to help researchers develop models that could replace humans in repetitive manual labour, the latest "athlete" model in a near 10-year-old series updates the feminine, catwalk-strutting, karaoke-singing HRP-4C.

But the tone this time is altogether more serious, according to a joint statement from its developers.
"It is Japan's urgent task for the early 21st Century to develop robots that could carry out simple, repetitive works ... in a bid to complement the workforce in a country that is rapidly ageing with fewer and fewer children".

Standing at 151 centimetres (59 inches) tall, the robot in a demonstration Wednesday stood on one foot, twisted its waist, struck poses, walked in accordance to given voice commands and moved its head to track objects.

The HRP-4 boasts joints that move more freely than its predecessors and can run a range of separately-developed software applications, its makers said.

Kawada and AIST will start selling the robot to universities and research institutes in Japan and abroad from January 2011.

The price tag for what is described as a "low cost" model is 26 million yen (306,000 dollars) each. Its creators hope to sell three-to-five units a year.

Now, a smartphone app that can measure pollutants in air

University of Southern California computer scientists hope that as many users as possible download and try it in order to improve the software.

Currently, the download works for smartphones running the Android system and soon will be widely available on Android app sources. An iPhone app is in the works.

The basic principle of the Visibility app is simple, according to the paper documenting the work by USC computer science professor Gaurav Sukhatme.

The user takes a picture of the sky while the sun is shining, which can be compared to established models of sky luminance to estimate visibility.

Visibility is directly related to the concentration of harmful "haze aerosols," tiny particles from dust, engine exhaust, mining or other sources in the air. Such aerosols turn the blue of a sunlit clear sky gray.

There is one caveat ” It has to be the right picture. The visibility/pollution models are based on the viewing geometry of the image and the position of the sun.

The Visibility app works because modern smartphones contain a rich set of sensors that include cameras, GPS systems, compasses and accelerometers, in addition to the powerful communication capabilities that are inspiring a slew of intelligent phone applications ranging from personal health monitoring to gaming and social networking.

Sameera Poduri, a postdoctoral researcher in Sukhatme''s lab, explained that the accelerometer in the phone - the sensor that tells how the user is holding the phone, determining whether it displays information vertically or horizontally - can "guide the user to point the camera in exactly the right direction."

The picture must be all or mostly sky, which makes a contribution from human user judgment critical.

"Several computer vision problems that are extremely challenging to automate are trivially solved by a human. In our system, segmenting sky pixels in an arbitrary image is one such problem. When the user captures an image, we ask him [or her] to select a part of the image that is sky," noted the research paper.

The accelerometers and the compass on the phone capture its position in three dimensions while the GPS data and time are used to compute the exact position of the sun.

The application automatically computes the camera and solar orientation, uploading this data along with the image ” a small (100KB) black-and-white file ” to a central computer.

The central computer analyzes the image to estimate pollutant content and returns a message to the user, as well as registering the information. (User identities are anonymized)

The system potentially can help fill in the many blanks in the existing maps of air pollution.

So far the results are promising, but they indicate that several improvements are possible.

Sukhatme said: "We''re sure we can improve it if we get people trying it and testing it and sending data."