It looks like Apple can never run out of surprises for us. When the whole world is busy speculating on rumors around iPad 3, Apple announced that the next version of their OS X, Mountain Lion is coming this Summer. If Lion was 1st base between iOS & OS X, Mountain Lion is pretty close to the 3rd base with things like iMessages, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Airplay Mirroring, Sharing Sheets & Game Center baked right into it.

Lets have a glimpse of the touted features:

While iCloud is a downloadable feature in Lion, it will be baked into Mountain Lion. It will work exactly in the same was as Lion with the feature setting up your email, calendar, contacts & documents as soon as you sign in with your ID and keeps them in sync.

Messages is a new app in Mountain Lion which replaces iChat. In addition to AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger, Messages will also support Apple’s iMessage service. So users of Mac can now message with users of iOS 5 and above all over the world. The app is also available as beta for current versions of OS X and can be downloaded from here.

The reminders app syncs your iCloud reminders with OS X. Also lets you create lists of reminders.

Take notes like you do on iOS. This one lets you add images & attachments to your notes. Syncs with your notes in iCloud.

See all your notification in one neat place by swiping to the left. Notifications also pop up subtly like growl notifications.

The popular share button is iOS has now made it to OS X. In Mountain Lion, the share button (called share sheet) can be found in many apps and can be used to share stuff to twitter, messages & via email.

Twitter is baked into Mountain Lion and is going to be integrated into many of its native apps. Sign in once and you can tweet from any of the apps which integrate twitter.

This one is big. Game Center will now support OS X games. Note that developers will still probably have to make their games Mac enabled. But the fact that Mac users will be able to play multiplayer games with iOS users is huge. iOS is the largest portable gaming network in the world. And Apple is milking it by adding Game Center to the Mac.

Despite having many 3rd party apps for airplay from Mac, people have been waiting for Apple to come up with their implementation. Mountain Lion will sport Airplay Mirroring over WiFi to Apple TV. However, not all Macs will be supported.

Gatekeeper is the firewall for Mac which keeps your computer safe from malicious software and internet threats. It is possible that it a strategic move by Apple so that they can target enterprise customers which demand a secure OS.

Mountain Lion will also come preloaded with multiple china specific features like integration with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider.

Apart from all the above features, we can expect Apple to come up with a few more surprises. A much anticipated feature will be Siri, which, if integrated into OS X, will revolutionize how we interact with personal computers. Imagine asking Siri on you Mac to send an email with some photos attached all at the command of your voice! It can very much be a reality with Siri’s accuracy in voice recognition.

We will keep an eye on Mountain Lion news and keep you updated. Stay tuned.

We have reasons to believe that Flipkart’s digital media store in India will be called “Flyte” and might launch shortly. Earlier today, between 730pm & 8pm IST, when I opened flipkart.com, I was able to see a new category titled ”Flyte Digital Store”. It looks like someone opened the flood gates a little too early, but realized soon enough and pulled the new feature soon enough.

Flipkart’s foray in to the digital media commerce is inevitable. Considering that the ecommerce company bought Mime360 – a digital media distribution company and also acquired rights to chakpak’s digital catalogue late last year, their plan to launch a digital media store in India is all but a secret. In an interview with Medianama, Flipkart also expressed their intentions to complete their digital distribution rollout by the end of 2012.

It looks like they are going to start with digital music sales. It is unclear what kind of pricing model flipkart is going to introduce to be successful in the Indian market flooded with piracy, however, we are ready to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is a reason why their ecommerce site is so popular in India – they understand what Indian consumers want. I hope they have done their research and launch a pricing system which is suited to Indian needs and offers worthy benefits over, you know, free pirated stuff.

UPDATE: I was able to dig into my browser’s history and grab a screenshot. Here is how the new store will blend in the site (click to enlarge):

The URL points to http://www.flipkart.com/mp3-downloads?_l=bHs8IQkU9dt2ezV_fG09nQ–&_r=n_2yuAC4xgh0SZTuulvAtw–&_pop=mheader which is currently redirecting to flipkart’s home page.

We will keep an eye on this and let you know as soon as we find something.

Corrigendum: The author mistakenly called the new store “flyout”. The correct name of the new store is “flyte” and has been corrected in the article. Apologies for the error.

PluggdIn is reporting that India’s leading ecommerce site flipkart.com has acquired letsbuy.com. Letsbuy was Flipkart’s biggest competitor in the consumer electronics space. Flipkart has seen tremendous growth in online sales of books & media sales. However, letsbuy has enjoyed a much better place in online sales of consumer electronics with a much larger catalog and all India shipping – things where flipkart falls back. With this acquisition, flipkart aims to become the leading online retailer of consumer electronics in India.

Flipkart + Letsbuy can be a winning combination if the resulting company has a catalogue as wide as letsbuy in electronics & follows the processes of flipkart. Letsbuy has a sloppy delivery and customer service, whereas flipkart has an awesome self delivery and a customer service which actually listens to you and understands your issues. Together they have the potential to become a solid ecommerce player in India and give a healthy competition to any new player (domestic or foreign).

We will keep our fingers crossed.

[via PluggdIn]

I am not sure if there is any official terminology, but in my opinion, a premium customer to a telecom company is one who is ready to try their new (and expensive) services, pays bills well within due date, subscribes to ebills & pays bill online (as it saves logistic costs for the company). There may be more criterion, but these are the basic ones in my opinion. By this logic, most software professionals (including me) will be premium customers to the telecom sectors.

If I were running Airtel (or any other company for that matter), I would make sure that I do not piss off my premium customers. However, it looks like Airtel has no interest in retaining such customers. Here are a few examples indicating why I feel this:

Example 1: Annoying non targeted alerts

I am subscribed to Airtel’s 3G data plan which offers me about 3 GB of data per month at a monthly charge of ? 675. Airtel has this check in place for each subscriber, that if their data usage is high, they send SMS to the customer warning them of the same. Now any sane & logical person will apply the check on the percentage of data the customer has used. However, people at Airtel seem to have applied the check on certain pre-defined values. Now, even if I am at 20% of my usage, I start getting annoying messages everyday informing me the same and suggesting me to upgrade my 3G data plan.

The problem is that Airtel seems to have applied the check on usage above certain MBs. This will be fine for most of their subscribers (who subscribe to 500MB to 1GB plans mostly). However, it is super annoying to subscribers of upwards of 2GB plan. Since the number of those subscribers are few, Airtel doesn’t seem to feel the necessity to create a proper alert for them.

Apart from the obvious fix of applying the check on a certain percentage of data usage, another simple solution is to enable USSD based data balance check as they do for prepaid balance check. The least they can do is to enable subscribers to turn off these alerts.

Example 2: Billing issues & awful customer service

I was a subscriber of Airtel’s 8Mbps broadband plan. I recently switched to BSNL due to Airtel’s billing issues & super awful customer service (more on this fiasco in another post). After a few weeks of disconnecting my connection, I got an email from them stating that they “miss me” and that if I re-join their network, as a gesture towards our long standing relationship, they will offer me an “exclusive” bill plan and also “upgrade” my plan to 2Mbps !

Now, if they really miss me and valued the so called “relationship”, I would at least expect them to know what plan I was using and that shoving a 2Mbps plan onto my face and calling it an “upgrade” will just add insult to the injury. They also had the audacity of mentioning that the “offer” is only valid for the next 15 days.

The reason is simple. Airtel lost a lot of its Broadband customers in this period because of the same reasons as mine. Out of these, only a handful would have been the subscribers of plans greater than 2Mbps. Hence, Airtel chose to ignore them and decided to send a generic hardcoded email to all their lost subscribers. It is another example of Airtel not caring about their premium subscribers. After a few days, their twitter account went crazy tweeting the same message every 2 hours and pointing to a web based form where users can register for re-joining the network.

To make matters worse, Airtel doesn’t give any credit to customers who have been paying their bills regularly on time. Imagine how you will feel if you have been diligently paying upwards of 2 – 3k to a service provider and then, due to some billing issue at their end, you pay part of the unjustified bill and they give your number to crappy collection agents who call you every now and then and ask you to pay your dues in the rudest possible way. They fail to understand that someone who has been paying them on time regularly doesn’t usually start defaulting unless there is an issue with their services. In their opinion, their services & billing systems are perfect.

Example 3: Ignoring existing customers

Airtel has multiple plans available. Many plans have the same speed, but different FUP quota. They keep changing these plans. Sometimes, they offer more FUP with same speed for the same price, sometimes, they offer more speed with same FUP at the same price. I can understand that they probably have some really smart market analysts who suggest these changes. However, what Airtel fails to do is inform their existing subscribers that they might get a better plan with the price they have been paying. I am pretty sure most subscribers will be happy to migrate to a new plan if it offers them better value for money. It looks like Airtel doesn’t care once you are onboard their network. They only care about roping in new subscribers.

Example 4: Bad broadband coverage

Another major failure from Airtel is their inability to provide all plans at all locations. I can understand that they might not have the best of the equipments required to handle high speed plans in all locations, but I know a friend who has been trying to upgrade from a 2Mbps plan to a 4Mbps since the last year. Every time he places a request, Airtel performs a feasibility study and then say that they do not have such high speed plan in that area. I am taking about a super posh sector in Noida (Delhi NCR).

I have another friend who has been trying to get his connection shifted to a new address in the same city since the last few months.

I am sure there are more examples.

Airtel seriously needs to do something if they want their brand to have the same level of respect it had a couple of years back. Otherwise, they will keep loosing customers like this.

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.