Tell me those aren’t the best release notes you’ve seen for any app on the App Store.
Apple’s New TV Ad — Our Signature
So beautiful. So typical Apple.
Here’s the video that they played at the beginning of the Keynote yesterday.
Flipkart’s Flyte MP3 Store is Shutting Down
NextBigWhat is reporting that Flipkart will be shutting down Flyte, their online Music store for the Indian market.
Mekin Maheshwari, Head – Digital Media and Payments, Flipkart told NextBigWhat
“We have realized that the music downloads business in India will not reach scale unless several problem areas such as music piracy and easy micro-payments etc are solved in great depth. Which is why, we feel that at present, it makes sense to take a step back from Flyte MP3s and revisit the digital music market opportunity at a later stage.”
I wouldn’t say this is surprising at all. Indians paying for their music is like an Eskimo paying for ice. There’s plenty of free stuff around you.
Update: Medianama tells us why.
This is great stuff. The Share My Dabba (Share My Tiffin) initiative is a joint effort between Happy Life Welfare Society and The Dabbawala Foundation that makes use of leftover food from the tiffins and is shared with hungry street children.
Read more about the Dabbawalas here.
Delightful.
Mint Pepper for Panic’s Status Board
After Panic released the Status Board app for iPad yesterday, a lot of users, including me, have been waiting for a compatible Mint plugin that will let them view their Mint stats in Status Board.
Today, Maxime Valette, the creator of URI.LV has now released a Pepper for Mint that lets you add graphs for hourly, daily, weekly and monthly stats from your Mint installation to Status Board. He was kind enough to let me test it on my site and was quick to squash a few bugs. The installation of the pepper is simple and it even readily gives you clickable panicboard:// links that’ll automatically install the graph in your Status Board app.
You can download the Mint Pepper for Status Board using this link. Maxime has also open-sourced it on GitHub, so all you developers can get cracking if you want to customize it.
The Noble Houses of the Internet
I came across these Game of Thrones styled banners for the noble houses of the Internet last week. So brilliantly done.
“We Do Not Source”
How Google Managed to Up its Ante In India
Aatif Sumar, writing on UnleashThePhones, lists down 10 steps that Google has been strategically taking over the last 6 months to step up its game in India. If you look at all these as an Indian consumer, you’ll realize how much of a difference they actually make. He also makes a very good point:
Until Google has Operator Billing, all their efforts of making money from customers in India are in vain, since a vast majority of Indians do not have easy access to Credit Cards, or do not trust their Credit Card details being on the internet somewhere. In fact, most people don’t even have bank accounts in India. Using Debit Cards on the Play Store is hit and miss. Operator Billing is the perfect fit in such a market since all mobile users trust their Service Provider enough to purchase something that gets added to their mobile phone bill, or gets cut from their balance.
Consider the approach Samsung has been taking in India — fill the market up with phones for every price slab, offer different combinations of features and introduce their special “Duos” (Dual-SIM) phones. Today, almost every other smartphone you see out there in this country is a Samsung. And then combine this fact with the improvements Google has been bringing to Android lately.
I’m from the Apple “fanboy” club, but I’ll say the Cupertino giant has lost this race before it could even begin.