Archive for March, 2005

Virgin’s 3G radio player

Friday, March 4th, 2005

virgin announced their new 3g player for mobile users, anywhere where there’s a mobile signal. Russ blogged about it a couple of days back, and as he notes, this is a step that might trigger some more new innovations in mobile content delivery landscape. cool thing about virgin is that you dont need any subscription or some specific networks to enjoy these streams. down side is that you are restricted only to virgin’s stream (is that a downside?).
as reported at Russ’s blog, lot of users were able to hook onto the service without any issues, but there still are some issues with the player being installed on some Nokia phones (esp. with Symbian UI 1.0) like 3650.

i went on to the grab the sis file and install it first on my card memory on the 3650. installation went fine, but i couldnt find any application icon on the phone. time to install on the phone memory. still no applicationn icon. time to launch FExplorer and browse to the .app file for the player (SydusS60_VirginRadio.app ). launching this file gives a ‘System error’ and nothing happens. another thing that i noted was there was no application icon associated with this app file when seeing in the file explorer. now there were a couple of others who reported the same behavior, and it could be that the application works with Symbian UI 2.0 only, which would elminate 3650 and some other phones listed on Virgin’s site under the compatibility list.

as for virgin working on this, i had a brief email with james cridland @ virgin who in turn got me in touch with someone at Sydus, who developed this for Virgin. i am still to hear back from them.
UPDATE: Just got an update from Sydus and recieved an updated .SIS file for older Nokia S60 phones, which were not working with the release version. Mail me to get a copy of the .sis file.

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google in a tight noose?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

is there a tight noose on google lately? yahoo is already coming up with new ideas in an effort to bring the developer community together under its name, and msn is trying hard to get its new msn search to compete with google.
yahoo announced its yahoo search developer network (ysdn <--> msdn?). i remember google coming up with their web api’s some time back (> a year i guess), but this time yahoo has come up with something more than just text search. now you can search for multimedia objects like videos & images. russ cranked out a small jsp to search on the video catalog using the yahoo api’s. it looks like a good step towards some new ideas in the search engine landscape after google maps.

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Jal Mahal

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

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This is a majestic view of Jal Mahal, Jaipur-India. Taken Jan 2005. I dont think there is anything inside the palace now, but plans are to convert it into a luxury hotel. The palace is seated between mountains on 2 sides (back and front) and is on teh main highway between Jaipur and New Delhi. A must see.

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