Free sms to any Indian mobile from your pc

This service has been launched by 160by2.com a new Hyderabad based venture. To use this service a person needs to get invitation from this page and will be required to register your mobile number which will be shown in every sms that he send. So you need to have an Indian mobile number where password would be sent. Get your Indian relative mobile to work for those not residing in India. ;) However the sms users will send is 80 characters long instead of normal 160 that is why company is named 160by2(.com).

Now some obvious questions arise like Is this an introductory offer? Will they charge for it later? If not then for how long this will continue as numerous other services were offering this previously either they are no more or turned into a chargeable model. Well this is a new advertisement based model from Hyderabadi entrepreneurs S.K. Yerramsetti and R.K. Yerramsetti. In this service the sms that a user send will have half of the normal sms space of 160 character reserved for advertisements. That means a user will be able to send just 80 character sms.

Now the question arises do advertisers have awareness for the sms medium? According to Mr Sanyog Jain, Director of business development the company has already roped in some big advertisers.

Few facts that could trouble this ad model
1)Most people with mobile in India who could register already have good sms packages with few hundred to thousand sms free locally or nationally.
2)Also most people send sms when they are on road or when its urgent for which they obviously won't wait to login to pc.
3)Pc penetration in India is quite low compared to mobile penetration.
4)In future if this model pick up then also why can't mobile companies directly offer this ad models to there consumers and share with advertisers. They will obviously have price advantage.

I think this service is mostly advantageous and should be focussed to large Overseas Indian community (currently not allowed to register)which pays a lot to text back home. Hope they allow overseas mobile registration in future.

Still a free service is always welcomed and i am enjoying it. :)

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Windows Live Writer Beta Review

Welcome to world of blogging!

I am not welcoming myself to this new blog just writing the first message i recieved on starting Windows Live writer Beta.

On installing it ask to have an account with spaces.live.com if you don't have any blogging account else just put in your blog address and authentication details. I was having blogger account so put them in and wooosh ..... also all major blogging script are supported whether it is hosted with blogger/wordpress or on our own hosting with any type of blog script.

Next it asks for whether you'll upload images along with blog or not and make you to traverse through your ftp account to the image folder ..... don't know how will it work for blogger hosted images. There I tried to made a new folder on my hosted ftp account for which option was given however it was not working (still beta). Then it was asking for path or the actual url of the folder.

Setup is complete so here comes the really cool interface with screen shot posted. I am really impressed with the WYSIWYG editor in tools there was option to ping the servers for every published post, option to use proxy, to auto save the draft and last not the least a option to get a preview of how my blog would look like with every other widget in place.

Also the best thing was the option to use widgets for many kind of things like embedding a flickr pics or youtube video or to put in an adsense for a particular post. Large number of widgets were available for use already considering it is in beta only.

Overall rate it at 8 out of the scale of 10 as I am not much fan of Microsoft product however I am really impressed with this clean interface.

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