Intel today launched its ambitious “Connected Indians” movement at The Taj Palace, New Delhi.

Check out www.connectedindians.com!

The Connected Indians movement aims to be the catalyst for delivering the power of the Internet into the hands of a billion Indians. Intel states that its success will hinge on spirited public and private participation.

Over the next few months, Intel will mobilize people, resources & infrastructure to facilitate Internet adoption across India.

Over time, this collaboration will help build partnerships between people, Industries and stakeholders via a complete and connected ecosystem to accelerate the growth of Internet and its benefits to the society.

The Connected Indian web site is an innovation in itself wherein users can click on an interactive map to locate their co-ordinates, and then post their voice for an Internet-enabled India. Not only that, they can utilize the in-built feature to invite more of their friends and peers from their web contact lists to add in more numbers.

There is also an India Speaks section that highlights different areas where Internet is making a huge difference in the way people, processes, industries & services in India are progressing with the power of the Internet.

Intel is following up this movement on-ground with specially-designed “Net Yatras” wherein it will showcase Internet’s benefits to Indians using interactive tools & techniques.

This is one movement that has been designed with a specific cause in mind and Intel promises that for every 10,000 Connected Indians who register, the movement will donate a PC to selected government schools in rural areas.

Now that’s what we call a spirited initiative!

Know more about the movement here.

Join the movement here.

Join the Connected Indians Orkut Community here.

Intel’s partners in this venture include google, HCL, Zenith, Edurite, MAIT, BSNL, Reliance Communications, Tata Indicom, Acer, Intex, Novatium, Wipro, Asus, CII, e-zone, lenovo, NIIT, Tata Communications, Croma, NASSCOM etc.

It will be interesting to see the kind of products & services Intel will introduce to take this step further & forward. Here’s wishing Intel all the best for the initiative & hoping that more & more brands take such steps towards better propagation and acceptance of technology!

Knol, A Forum, A Blog or Wikipedia… Well, the mighty Google has come up with another marvel. I can see that Google creates stuff that can help people, and earn while the products are free to use.

This time, Google created something, that they call “a unit of knowledge”. In words of Google, a knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic. In first look, it might appear as a simple Blog. Here you create articles as you do in Blogs, but they are consolidated as in Wiki. There can be contributors, collaborators and community members. You can edit, or just suggest an update. Moreover, you can have revisions. You can review Knols, post comments and reply to comments. So this makes it more like forums.

What’s in the box?

Here you will find topics like Heart Attack, AIDS, Prostate Cancer, Name Verification, Installing UBUNTU and millions more. But that’s not all, you can add your own Knol and enhance the knowledge base.

How Authentic is the content?

Knols are pieces of knowledge, written by authentic people from respective fields. Moreover, Google verifies members, so anything they post is genuine. Besides, people can flag your content or update it as in Wikipedia.

What else?

If you think that this is a nice initiative, then wait for more surprise. Google has linked AdSense to it. Google allows you to link any existing AdSense account or create a new one on the spot. Then you are given option to display ads on your article. You can chose it for all Knols you publish or on selective Knols.

But the part, that interests me most is License. Google Knols offer three license types.

• Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
• Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
• All Rights Reserved.

And did I mentioned Collaboration Model. They are giving three collaboration Models…
• Open Collaboration model, where any signed in user may edit the Knol
• Moderated Collaboration model, where any signed user may suggest edits to the knol, but these needs approval from an author before being published (Now here they take over Wikipedia)
• Closed Collaboration model, where no outsider is allowed to play with your knowledge.

Still More…

You can import doc, xls, pdf, txt and other documents. You can have your profile page and there is still more to be explored…

Check out…

http://knol.google.com/

Remember our post on Piclens? Well, things have changed a bit over there…and we have a quick update from the Piclens Team at Cooliris:

Luna Yang wrote:

Hi Masala Digital Team,My name is Luna and I’m a Stanford intern at Cooliris. You posted about PicLens recently – thank you! Since you use and enjoy PicLens, we thought you might appreciate an update on our product as we’re releasing some exciting new features today.

One of the biggest changes is that PicLens will now be known as Cooliris. Not only is the brand of our product undergoing change, but so is our product. We are very pleased to introduce Cooliris 1.8 with a few new additions that will make the lives of our users easier.

• Sharing: Interact more within Cooliris by sharing cool content you find in Cooliris with your friends. All you need is their emails to send them the images and videos you find interesting. Your recipients don’t even have to be PicLens users to receive your content. And now with our new international content and Olympics channel, there’s even more to play with – share the gift of a 3D Cooliris Internet experience!
• Cooliris for Developers: Enabling websites has just become the work of less than 10 minutes with Quick and Simple! Even sites with complex media are now better served with Full-Featured Cooliris support. Our new Developer Forum is a quick way to find the answers to all of your enabling questions. We’ve got you covered for all of your enabling needs.

You can download Cooliris 1.8 at http://cooliris.com and find out more about Cooliris for Developers at http://developer.cooliris.com. We hope you and your readers enjoy Cooliris. I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have and look forward to hearing your feedback.All the Best,
Luna and The Cooliris Team

Ever wondered how agencies & clients alike are completely nuts about the “viral” phenomenon? Agency cant produce enough and clients can’t ask enough – anyone with an iota of an online marketing budget never fails to mention “can we have a viral along with the banner campaign”?!

What’s the deal here? How can you possibly “create” a viral? Aren’t virals supposed to be “ideas”, rather than brand communication? I thought a good communication “became” a viral basis its spread-quotient – and if its an eDM or a video, its just easier to spread around…

Anyway, so there is Webchutney, the supposed “viral pioneers” as they love to call themselves…with this new Center Fresh viral

While the overall concept is nice..crass, but funny nevertheless, the funniest part that definitely is viral-able is this:

Notice the URL?! I mean just obvious do they want it to be? Or are dumb customers expected to appreciate the fact that there “exists a viral”…a sure sign of “creative brilliance” & “amazing campaign roll-out”!

Ahem..don’t miss the “Kitne Aadmi the..” question in the Q&A session..going by their liberal use of the concept, it seems Webchutney must be paying a retainer to Mr. Sippy!

Webchutney and Center Fresh aren’t the only ones…there are a million campaign landing pages that have URL stating the obvious…”www.xyz.com/campaign/microsite”-like URL’s are pretty common..

I do hope that better sense will prevail sooner than later as far as such freaky phenomenons are concerned!