Indicast Podcast Network - Mother Feed

The highlight of this episode was the JesusPhone (some call it iPhone too) and the announcement of the features that would be in its upcoming firmware upgrade. Meanwhile in India, Symantec has ranked India as the 3rd most spamming country in the world. Bebo, a little late to the game, has announced its entry into India. Other topics in the episode include, Facebook bug revealing your private data, launch of IE8, Yahoo Flickr announcing a deal with Getty Images, and the Pwn2Own Contest.

Cut back to your school days when on the sports day, the entire class would split into two halves to play the tug of war. It was a fun PT period for us at school. But not so much for the RBI which is trying hard to pull with all its might against both inflation and deflation. Recently, RBI cut the repo rates and the reverse repo rates to boost the economy. Ritika gives us a run down of what these jargons mean. The Federal Reserve has shown its benevolence to AIG again with its third bail out package. Citibank announcing a quarterly profit was some good news at BiziNation after a long time.

India celebrated Holi just like any other year, but this time with some organic flavour. After the bomb blasts less than a fortnight ago, Pakistan is confident of hosting cricket matches by the end of this year. Aditya opines that Pakistan has bigger problems and that list is endless. India is not making any healthy headlines either. A 19 year old lost his life to careless college ragging. In cricket, India beat New Zealand and Sehwag became the fastest Indian to score a century in an ODI. May be that's the only good news that we've read in the papers for a long time now.

The technology news on the Indian shore included the selection of companies to managed the much required Mobile Number portability and delay in launch of Bhuvan, a desi version of Google Earth being developed by ISRO. Other news included Microsoft finally providing users a tool to remove windows components including IE8, Blackberry's App World, Flock divorcing Firefox, Google Docs being careless, Flickr opening up videos for everyone now. We also have Godaddy as our sponsor for TKM.

The interim budget was as bland as Russian food. But Pranab Mukharjee spiced it up just in time for the elections. With the benevolent excise duty, service tax and a few other rate cuts, the consumer will have to spend less on mobile phone bills, buying an LCD TV, etc. In the corporate sector, after the Satyam debacle, SEBI has asked for full disclosure from the promoters of companies who pledge their shares to raise more money. In cricket, the multi million IPL season will kick off very soon. On other side of the world, in England, Sir Allen Stanford, the man who sponsored the million dollar T20 tournament in West Indies has been booked for fraud.

Pakistan cricket must have stepped closer to its grave with the recent brutal attempt to assassinate the touring Lankan team. Taliban, like a malignant tumor is spreading across Pakistan and the government seems helpless which does not bode too well for India. Back home, the election dates have been announced, but India doesn't surprise the educated world by coming up with options like one Ansari who has a string of legal charges going against him (or for him) on his resume.

Saket eloquently puts its in this episode that everybody and their aunt is coming up with an App Store in response to the announcements made by Nokia and Microsoft at the Mobile Web Congress. But before that we talk about the computers at Ministry of External Affairs getting hacked and the new various amendments to the 9 year old IT Act of 2000. The other topics that we covered this week include the Hotmail's Captcha cracked, facebook TOS revolt, Last.fm handing user data to RIAA, Norway's revolt against IE 6, and the pirate bay Trial.

And we are back after a pretty long time, but nothing much has changed since we spoke about bad news that surrounded the world economy. In fact, things have only gone downhill. Layoffs have begun even in India. The US economy is reeling and is hoping under Barack Obama's slogan of Hope, not fear. The US congress has approved the $700 billion odd stimulas package. In other news from India, Subhiksha, the ailing retail chain is fighting hard to survive bankruptcy.

The Indian scientists at the Nationation Institute of Dairy cloned a buffalo cafe but unfortunately it couldnt make it beyond 4 days and they same will be said about twitter if it doesnt find a revenue stream. We talk about a possible revenue stream and hope that twitter makes it throug the current turbulent times. Google also continued its product release spree with announcing PowerMeter along with another location based feature. Microsoft also announced the upgrade policy for its awesome Windows 7 operating system which we try to explain.

This week saw the much talk about $10 laptop from India disappoint the whole world and sort of embarass India. The supposed laptop had neither a display nor an input device! The week also saw NDTV launch a new hullu like website currently having around 50000 video from its own network. Stories from the usual suspects, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook also came up during the discussions.

While Obama took office in the US, the Indian politics was having a ball of a time in amusing its citizens. What is the former Indian captain, Azaruddin doing in Indian politics, you may ask, but when Sanjay Dutt's wife Manyata is rumored to contest for Samajwadi Party, nothing seems weird. On a more hopeful note, our martyrs were awarded Ashoka Charkra on Independence Day for showing unparalled courage fighting the terrorists. Slumdog millionaire has made it to almost all possible award ceremonies and now it's time for the big one - The Oscars. But we are not too happy with the film makers for paying peanuts to the three young stars of the film who still wake up in their thached huts and hae nowhere to go. In another news, Qutub Minar is tilting and the authorities are doing everything to save the monumentfrom collapsing!

2009 has started off with what might turn out to be the largest scam in India Inc's history. Raju revealed how ordinary people can do extraordinary things just like Satyam's website mention. But the week had some positive news with AR rahman winning at the Golden Globe for his work in SlumDog Millionaire. Talking about people in Bollywood, SRK has been listed as the 41st most influential person in the world and Sanjay Dutt has finally decided to contest the Lok Sabha elections on a Samajhwadi Party ticket. We end the episode talking about Pamela Anderson's letter to BMC about being kinder to the stray dogs.

As we get into the new year, we look back at 2008 and talk about the significant events that took place. Sadly, the negative events dominated 2008 and we really had to look for something that cheered us up in the year gone by.

A wounded tiger is far more dangerous than a hungry one. India has lived this cliche for a long time now, but only to the extent of being hungry and wounded. It is far from dangerous; in fact, if you listen closely, you might hear some whimpering. It has been a fortnight since the terrorists ripped through Mumbai. Since then, the Taj has been rebuilt; Trident announced that it will be reopening soon, the CST is back to being a host to millions of people daily and our politicians do not have any concrete answers about why it all happened, what steps should we take now and whether it will happen again. Aditya, who travels through local trains in peak time, shares his observations about how his fellow passengers now double up as detectives and how daily traveling has become an unfortunate adventure.

It's an epidemic of sorts now. It struck again. It lasted for 60 hours. Mumbai bled. As viewers stitched to the TV set like umbilical chords, it was psychologically draining to watch the footage of Hemant Karkare readying himself to take control before he was shot dead with two other ranking cops Salaskar and Kamte, to see the deserted CST station daubed in red, to stare at the burning Taj as the our men with woefully inadequate infrastructure brought it to an end. Amid the chaos, journalists became household names whose voice, sometimes desparate, sometimes hopeful blared through our TV sets. While some sensationalised it, a few others acted responsibly. Yogita Limaye is one such reporter from CNN IBN who clocked two nights straight near the Taj runing relentlessly on adrenalin and in this podcast, she gives us an on-ground perspective of the events that unfolded.

"They can have it in any colour they want as long as it is black," Henry Ford's arrogance back in the 19th Century was justified when he was selling his cars and telling consumers what they NEEDED because he didn't believe that the customers knew what they wanted. Given a choice, Ford's customers would have demanded a faster horse, but he built the Model T anyway. CUT TO 2008. The swaggar which the auto makers had gotten used to is now reduced to a limp. With people shoving their hard earned money under the mattress, today, a sleek sports car is no more than a gas guzzling peace of metal meant for the foolish few who are skating on thin ice. With the auto industry consistently posting losses, it hope to get a 25 bn USD loan from the treasury to fix a few things. We talk about the mess and some dope from the aviation industry in India as well.

With companies going bust and countries filing for bankruptcy, newspapers are hunting for less cliched headlines. One story from NYT caught our attention. It claimed that pets are not recession proof. People who cannot afford to pay their rents are now forced to abandon their pets! In Sports, Sachin Tendulkar gave us a reason to celebrate his world record of scoring the highest number of runs in test match cricket. We cheered for Arvind Adiga who won himself the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his book, 'The White Tiger'.

Two years after TATA announced the one lakh car, argubly a revolution of the magnitude of Henry Ford's Model T, the car industry's most binouculared project is yet to lay its foundation stone. After elaborate protests, some violence and lots of confusion, TATA took the painful call of relocating to another state. A week later, all the newspapers carried a picture of Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat shaking hands with Ratan Tata. This podcast is more about our thoughts on how politics can ruin capitalism. We want to know your take on this one. In another news, HCL is set to acquire Axon, an SAP consulting firm and TCS has bought over the back office arm of Citigroup.

It's been about three years now and it has been fun all along. Here's a huge shoutout to all you folks out there from across the world who have stayed with us and helped us through your comments (both nasty and encouraging!). Until this episode, we didn't know how countries could go bankrupt. Back home, Maharashtra government decided to sort of legalise the live in relationship model where the woman will be eligible for limony (conditions apply, of course!). Our beloved dada, Saurav Ganguly has announced retirement from all forms of cricket, but Aditya is still hopeful that Ganguly might reconsider it. Look forward to your comments in this podcast.

The American stock markets are in the mood for some adventure. On their way down the cliff, they brought the Indian Sensex to one of its all time lows in the past two years. While in one news, India is all set to sign the Indo American nuclear agreement, in another, the Government has declared a nationwide smoking ban in India. Mamata Banerjee successfully tests Ratan Tata's patience and gets the better of him. The One lakh car project gets delayed. India which has been known for its religious tolerance is giving away as communal riots erupt in different parts of the country.