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and now Joost. The tag team of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis have created yet another disrupting technology.

Their first was Kazaa. Although Napster was one of the first peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Kazaa was using a protocol that could connect to many computers to download the same file and spread into one of the largest file sharing networks.

Their second hit was Skype. It was the first truly user friendly VoIP client, it just worked right out of the box, no configuring firewalls, ports, etc…When you called other Skype users it would connect and the voice quality is amazing for using such a small amount of bandwidth (4-5 kbps) per call.

Now comes Joost, which promises to change the way you watch TV, free of the schedules and restrictions that come with traditional television. Combining the best of TV with the best of the internet.

Yes it’s true, I’ll be on vacation for the next 3 weeks on my honeymoon. After a gap of a month between the wedding and the honeymoon, we are really ready to get the fu!#$ out of Bombay for a well deserved break.

I’ll have several pre-written blog entries that will be appearing over the next 3 weeks on technology and the building of this blog. Stay tuned.

Normally, I could care less about the Indian film industry known as Bollywood, but when Steven Colbert chimes in on the supposed feud between Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan it’s worth a listen.

Great quote – “If Preity Zinta is there, you better fu#%ing show up”

Due to the lack of any real business news in India, all the newspapers continue to plaster the headlines with day to day updates on the Hutch buyout. The numbers being thrown around for Hutch are hugh – USD 20 billion, justified? Compare the ARPU’s (average revenue per user) between US carriers and Indian carriers:

The merger in 2005 between Sprint and Nextel was around USD 36 billion and was supposed to result in a wireless powerhouse with a strong ARPU. Sprint expects revenue to hit between $41 billion to $42 billion for 2007. The company anticipates reporting $41 billion in revenue for 2006. When the merger was proposed, Nextel’s ARPU was USD 69 (Rs. 3105) while Sprint’s was USD 63 (Rs. 2835), Verizon’s USD 52 (Rs. 2340) and Cingular’s USD 50 (Rs. 2250).

The ARPU numbers for the Indian wireless carriers are much less, even when you talk about the numbers of users in India they are still much less then US carriers. The latest July-September 2006 quarter figure for Airtel’ ARPU is USD 9.73 (Rs. 438) while Hutch’s ARPU is USD 9.33 (Rs 420). You do the math.

Hutch is the brand name of Hutchison Essar, which is a joint venture between the Ruia’s Essar Group and Hutchison Telecom which is a part of Hutchison Whampoa.

The Times of India has a front page article about the above video causing an outrage with the Indian government, in particular the I&B (Information and Broadcasting) Ministry. So much so they want to ban YouTube, hahahahaha. I love how these officials throw around such retarded ideas, first they wanted to ban Orkut (unsuccessfully), then they shutdown blogger.com for a couple days till the outrage was unbearable. Then there was the Google Earth episode, where the government wanted Google to stop photographing India because of terrorism issues, which is a valid point. But then a couple weeks ago Bombay had a major pre-planned water outage to fix some water pipes and they printed out the ENTIRE map of the water supply system of Bombay in the Times of India, doh!!

Anyways the video is lame, it’s done by Gautham Prasad a comedian by profession.