Ramkumar K R

• Be serious about your online identity such as a domain name or website. They are no more items made just to be shown on your business cards, they can bring business to you.
• As much as possible, try to maintain a reminder about domain renewal if you have paid for the domain for just one year.
• 10 years is the maximum duration a domain name can be registered for, for now. You may go for the maximum duration for your firm’s branded domain name, considering your firms operation for years to come.
• My advise is that you learn to register domain name yourself and to manage it. Domain name is an asset, gone are those days where it was nothing for SMEs.
• If you cannot do register and maintain domain name yourself, seek help of a trust able web design company and keep an agreement that they register the domain name mentioning you as the registrant and technical/administrative contact so that the notification about domain renewal reach you through the email id mentioned as part of these contacts. 

Almost everyone got a mobile phone with a decent cam, and often or not, use it to take snaps. do you really share with others? May not be..

How about an idea of setting up your photo blog and publish the snaps you capture from mobile onto a photo blog instantly?

If you liked the above idea, then read on..
You need

1. A blog
2. A mobile phone which can connect to internet / at least can send out an email with attachments.

I started my photo blog on blogger, and later pointed the blogger blog to my custom domain name.  

Method 1: Post photos directly to Blogger.

Creating a blog on blogger is free, and if you can you can buy a domain name and create a blog on it. I got into the passion of Mobile Photo Blogging recently and my Photo Blog has some snaps (some are crap, I do agree ).
Blogger and wordpress support emailing a post and publishing it online, that’s the feature ideal for mobile blogging as it’s quick, doesn’t eat up much of your time. If you are on blogger, under Settings > Email and Mobile, you can assign an email id to which you can send your posts and get it published.
This setup shouldn’t take up much of your time.

Now on your phone, after you capture a snap, just email it, adding a subject and body text to the same email address mentioned above, you are done! Your snap goes online within no time!!

If you are on blogger, your images will be saved in picasa, which has a limited storage of 1GB. I suggest Flickr instead of the above method.

Method 2: Post snps to picasa and then post to blog, all with single email

Flickr gives 100MB of storage every month on free accounts.

Image quality is better on flickr than the ones stored by blogger/picasa and the one which gets embedded automatically when you send an email post.

So the method is slightly modified if you want to use Flickr as storage.
Flickr has option where you can email a new snap in, also they have an option to post to your blog from flickr. So here we will not be using the email id of blogger, instead we will be using email id to post to flickr and blog automatically.

Head towards Flickr, go to your account settings, under email tab, you can find the email id to send to Flickr. Additionally, you have to setup Flickr to access to your blog and post snaps automatically.
So you will be sending your snaps to Flickr email, which gets saved in Flickr and your blog is updated with a new photo post..

Interesting?

3G is yet to be introduced in our country, but at least the hopes are alive that it should be available in at least 6-10 months from now.
BSNL, Reliance and Tata Indicom are already selling wireless data cards which can deliver speeds in the range of max 2-3.1 Mbps based on CDMA technology, Airtel was nowhere in this picture till now.

There is good news for Airtel fans, Airtel has started selling 3G data cards for a price of 4,250 Rs, but current limitation is that you will be getting max speed of only 256kbps as currently there is no 3G and it relies on Airtel’s GPRS/EDGE network.

I visited Airtel’s relationship center nearby to enquire about this, since there is no ads any where, it was only rumours. Obviously Airtel isn’t advertising since this isn’t working on 3G network yet and giving a smaller speed. The airtel relationship manager was happy to explain it to me. The max speed of 256kbps again depends on the network in any particular area, but since its Airtel I feel even 256kbps will not let you down.

Tariffs: He mentioned to me about two plans – 999Rs for unlimited usage and 599 Rs with a download limite (Sorry, i didnt hear this limit part properly as I was more keen towards unlimited packs).

To confirm, I asked whether this tariffs are going to change after introduction of 3G – the answer was ‘probably it could’. I do not have any complaints on this answer as 3G pricing is yet to be announced, there could be a number of factors to be considered before the final customer pricing is decided.

At the moment Reliance charges 1500 odd Rs per month for an unlimited plan with National roaming for their 3.1Mbps data card. I assume Airtel price might settle somewhere in the same range once 3G is in place.

Am I going for this card now? : Well, I might not, I have a broadband connection at home and have a spare Airtel SIM card to be used while roaming on their Mobile Office plan. I can go for a data card only when the speed and network reliability is good so that I can abandon my wired broadband connection at home. At the moment I cannot afford paying for both, I cannot discard my wired broadband connection at the moment since I work from home after returning from office and I am too much dependant on the availability of Internet. I can bet, other providers cannot give me such a reliability score than Airtel.

Hope Airtel launches 3G with a right price for customers like me, again not leaving the reliabilty factor so that wireless 3G becomes the one and only internet connection used than multiple connections .

Tariffs:

Well, you might have read about the test I conducted earlier and reviewed Aircel’s Pocket Internet Plan .

Today I did give another try to test the speed of Aircel Pocket Internet, surprisingly it gave speeds ranging from 47 kbps to 100kbps !!

http://speedtest.net didn’t open as I mentioned earlier, but I was able to check the speed with http://2wire.com .

So, the conclusion is for 98 Rs, Aircel Pocket Internet isn’t a bad option to be used as a backup internet or for light weight browsing / checking mails etc.

I connected my SE K750i to PC over bluetooth, dialled *99***3# (since Airtel Pocket Internet is the third profile on phone) , used a proxy address – 192.168.35.201 with port 8081 , I browsed few web pages to see the performance.

I have used Tata Indicom’s 64 kbps internet connection (worth over 400 Rs per month) , compared to that 98 Rs is a very much better option.

I can recommend this connection to students, job seekers etc who can browse unlimited but not for downloading any huge files. I tried downloading a 10 MB file, which took close to 25 minutes, isn’t very bad either.

Share your experiences as comments.

(This blog post is written using the Pocket Internet Connection from Aircel !)

My Sony Ericsson K750i is about 2 and half year old, and have fallen down many times that it had many damages to the casing. I decided to get it a new look by changing the casing. I enquired at few shops in Bangalore for an estimate only to find that it would cost anywhere between 1500 to 2500, well, I can buy a dual SIM mobile from ebay for that!

I searched Ebay.com for a good deal for SE K750i housing and bought one for about 8.95 USD from Hong Kong .

Next, no shop was ready to replace the housing with the one provided by me, because they weren’t getting the marging like what was quoted by them, so I decided to it my selves. This wasn’t so tough, thanks to a couple of YouTube videos!

I followed those videos and changed the housing myself! The operation was successful and the patient still alive. Following are some snaps from the entire process!