Indian Government has just released the results of 3G auction. Here is a pictorial representation of winners sector wise.

Click to Enlarge.

PayPal is a great service to make and receive payments worldwide. But it has been recently facing many problems with Indian RBI rules and regulations. Unverified PayPal accounts have some transfer and withdrawal limits. India Banks being recently hit by the worldwide recession have stopped offering new credit cards to customers, thus some fresher’s in online banking are unable to verify themselves over PayPal.

Whenever you click on “Get verified” button, PayPal asks you to enter you credit card information. It is likely that not all everyone has credit cards as they are not so easy to obtain in India at this particular time. Or some users will not feel comfortable entering raw credit card numbers over the internet.

• To confirm a PayPal account an alternative way which usually go un-noticed is linking any Indian bank account.
• Simply login to your PayPal account click on “Add/Edit Bank Account” and fill in the bank details it requires. If you are unsure about any of the fields specified there, give a call to your Bank Branch and get it from them.
• When you are done with it, PayPal will soon transfer two very small amounts via NEFT to your account in next 2 working days.
• Next step is to enter the exact amount PayPal transferred to your Bank Account. Make sure you enter them exactly as they appear in your Bank Statement.
• And you’re done.

This not only verifies your Bank Account with PayPal but even your accounts limits get lifted as your PayPal account also gets verified without entering your credit card information. The good thing is if you have enabled for Internet Banking facility for your Bank Account. You can check the statements and verify instantly as the transfer is made.

Facebook powers a great feature known as Facebook lists. These lists not only let us organize our friends but can be used to personalize your overall facebook experience. This is a very simple technique which can help you save lots of time.

A day comes when your Facebook friends count reaches in hundreds and you scrub your head watching the ever growing chat list and friends activity stream with useless updates. We don’t have to chat with those hundred friends but we have to add them just to keep in touch with them sometime in future. While adding Facebook contacts if you have been organizing your friends, its great but if not start doing it right now.

I have nearly ~200 friends in my Facebook account and sometimes chat list show up to 50 persons online at the same time. This creates a big trouble to search for the person you really want to chat with. Now all you have to do organize this clutter is to categorize you friends in lists. I prefer organizing it separately for Photo Sharing, Chat and Updates Stream so I have created three lists in Facebook for each. As there might be cases where you have to share photos with someone while chat with the other.

Chat with Selective Friends, Appear Offline to the Rest

Now when you are done with the lists just add your friends to the lists as per your need. After the friends have been added all you have to is click on “Friends List” in chat window, it will show you all the lists over there. Untick all of the other lists except the “Chat” one. And you’re done. You will only be able to chat with the people you want and for rest of the Facebook friends you will appear offline always. You can anytime make changes to the list to add or remove friends. This gets the power in your hand to chose which friends should appear where on Facebook.

Share Photos only with your close Friend

Same is the case with Photo Sharing. Creating a separate list and putting in your those buddies in it with whom you want to share your personal pictures. This again helps you a lot in maintaining your privacy over the social network.

Hide Useless Applications, Clear the clutter from your Stream

Most of our buddies enjoy farming, planting and so many useless apps like FarmVille, MafiaWars, etc. These applications pushes lots of updates in the user’s stream which is basically useless to others. You can hide updates from a particular application or a particular friend. All you have to do whenever you see a useless update from an application hit the “HIDE” button. Facebook then asks you to either hide all updates from your friend or hide all the updates from particular option.

Cool! We knew all this, tell something better…

You may say these are some basic things which everyone knows. Let me remind you once every one is a beginner to everything and this post is completely meant for Facebook first-timers. And most of the people are unaware of these simple ways on how you can organise your social life on Facebook. So basically if you have been facing lots of clutter at Facebook get organized or if you are new to it, its better to start organizing from day one.

HTC and Sprint has a announced a new beast of smartphone’s – The HTC EVO 4G. An android powered phone topped with delicious HTC Sense UI, a 8MP back Camera, 1.3MP front camera. The phone has the biggest battery available in any smartphone yet, and the core beats on 1Ghz Snapdragon processor (the same which powers HTC Desire and Nexus One).

The body build is almost same as of HTC HD2, and 4.3 inches screen gives up a charm to this handset. Another attraction to this phone is the HDMI Port (though you will require a small adapter to make it really work with your HDTV. The phone sports 1Gb of memory and 512mb of ROM to make the android apps run at their best.

Links:

Early Reviews of HTC Evo 4G: HTC Press Release, Huffington Post, Engadget, PC World. Engadget has got a picture comparison between the Nexus One, iPhone and HTC EVO 4G.

Our Take:

We truly have loved this phone (who won’t?). Android, Double Camera’s, HDMI, 4G (though 4G is very limited today, but you can say this phone wont be old in coming future) and its backward capable with 3G too. So we would call this as the father of all phone’s out there in market yet.

Price and Availability:

No details on its price and availability are available as of now. This phone is basically launched for the Sprint customers and will be available around July 2010. In India this phone is not expected to launch any soon as the phone is launched in partnership with Sprint, however HTC is expected to come up with a unlocked version of this phone for other parts of the world.

Indian Telecoms keep struggling a lot to beat each other. Bharti Airtel has announced to double the speed of all current broadband customer by the end of July 2010. Users wont have to pay any extra amount and this upgrade will be available for free.

According to Mr. K. Srinivas, Joint President-Telemedia Services, Bharti Airtel:

We are massifying the broadband experience by enabling users to access higher speeds at affordable rates. Our data shows that more and more customers want higher speeds. Average usage per customer has also increased by 40 per cent.

Therefore, we are redefining broadband speeds in India by upgrading all our subscribers to 512 Kbps even as the telecom regulator defines broadband as 256 Kbps.

Airtel has also launched new 4Mbps unlimited plans ranging from 899 to 1799. The complete details of the new plans are given  in the table below:

Over the past six months, telecom players have got engaged in a battle for speed. Recently a Mumbai-based Internet Service Provider –Tikona launched a 2Mbps speed connection priced between Rs 299 and Rs 1,249 depending on the download usage. Tata Teleservices Maharashtra had introduced a 100 Mbps line in Mumbai, while State-owned BSNL is offering 24Mbps connection for Rs 9,999.

Links:

The Hindu Business Line, Theitechblog.

As per the rumours by many websites yesterday, Google has finally launched Google Buzz, a social networking platform integrated into current Google services. You can access Google Buzz inside Gmail below the Inbox tab.

Google Buzz packs in features like sharing of Video’s, Pictures, etc. It can also be integrated with your current Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube and more Streams. It gives you control to share with your content with whole world or just selected friends. Your current Gmail buddies or frequently contacted Gmail Clients are automatically added to the Buzz stream.

Google Buzz is also available for Mobile Phone’s. Another great feature of Google Buzz is geo-tagging capability. You can tag your location using the maps and even see the location of your friends in their buzzes.

Isn’t It Another Facebook / Google Wave?

Yes a lot of features matches the one already we see in Facebook. Though this is a more streamlined service by Google and some features are unique, such as integration with Maps for geo-tagging, etc. On the other hand Google Wave can be call as a future of the “Social Working”. By Social Working, I mean it is more directed towards collaborative working, rather than the usual Social networking which includes sharing updates from different services. Google Wave could be integrated as a sharing service in Google Buzz on a later stage but as of now these service are totally different from each other.

Introductory Video (by Google):

Here is a quick introduction video, which explains about the available feature’s in Google Buzz:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio

Reaction from Yahoo:

Here is a tweet from Yahoo within an hour of launch of Google Buzz:

Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/

P.S. Google is in a process of rolling our Buzz to all users. You will soon find the "Buzz" tab in Gmail.

Airtel has announced a special offer for its all Fixed Line Customers. All Airtel Fixed Line Users will enjoy free calls to other Airtel Fixed Line Customers on 7th, 14th, 21st Feb 2010 (i.e. The upcoming 3 Sunday’s). The usage of Fixed phone have been heavily affected by the recent price drops of calls rates on mobile phone’s. Most of the fixed line operators are now depending on broadband users.

Valentine’s Day is also round the corner. This move proves to be fruitful for the fixed line customers of Airtel. So go ahead and enjoy endless conversations with your valentine’s or closed one’s on these Sunday’s.

Webmasters, Blogger, Authors are usually excited about knowing how there content is being is getting feedback over the Internet. Most popular way to do so is to track in-links to their site from the web. There are a bunch of sites which offer the same, but what better than a search engine. Scanning search engine’s index is one effective way of tracking back links. We have reviewed the top search engine methods on how to detect back-links to a site. Here are some of the queries we have tested over a while:

Using Google Web Search:

Google provides a search filter known as “link”. It is basically designed to show the sites in google index that link to your site. A example link query is shown below:

Query: link:www.lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.lifebaker.com

You can even create a Google Alert so that you get informed every time a new update is added to Google’s index.

But this method yields very few results, so I gave other queries a try and found the following one to work quite good for detecting latest in-links to your blog. It shows the latest links being indexed by Google which have back-links to your site.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*%20-site:lifebaker.com&tbs=rltm:1

Using Google Blog Search:

This is a very common method in use by many blogger but its accuracy has reduced over time. The in-links you find in WordPress panel are also found using Blog Search RSS feed.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=link:http://lifebaker.com

Feed Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=link:http://lifebaker.com&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

Using Yahoo:

Yahoo’s Site Explorer is another goog method for tracking in-links to your blog.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.lifebaker.com&bwm=i

Using Bing:

We can use the same query as we used above for Google to search inlinks using Bing. Bing even provides a rss feed for your queries if you add &format=rss at the end of the query.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com

Feed Link – http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com&format=rss

Using Technorati:

Technorati is one of the oldest service to provide in-links but its accuracy has decreased over time. You can find in-links to your blog from other blogs indexed by Technorati.

Conclusion:

There are a bunch of more services which offer the same. But mainly I prefer using Google Blog Search, Google Latest Web Search and Bing to track the links. Note: LifeBaker is a new blog. We have limited posts as of now, thus above link might not yield much results. Try it on some popular blogs and you will be able to note the difference. Image via Flickr.

India and some other countries users might be wondering where has the Yahoo Call button disappeared. Well in some countries government has restricted usage of VOIP and to secure itself, Yahoo has taken measures to disable PC-to-PC calls in these region by disabling calling features in local version of Yahoo Messenger.

However this limitation can be easily by-passed using a simple hack, well it cannot be called a hack even. All you have to do is un-install the current Local Version of Yahoo Messenger from your system and download the US version of Yahoo! Messenger. When you visit the Yahoo Messenger’s site, it automatically selects the local version to your country by scanning your IP address.

To bypass it you have to directly download the US version from Yahoo Server. We have provided the Direct Download link below. The step-by-step instructions for windows users are as follows:

1. Goto Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs.
2. Select the Yahoo Messenger from the list.
3. Click on Un-Install button.
4. Goto My Computer -> C: (or the drive in which windows is installed) - >Program Files.
5. Delete the Yahoo Folder if it still exist.
6. Now download the US version by the links provided below.
7. Install the downloaded file.
8. Run the newly installed Yahoo Messenger.
9. If you are still unable to see the Voice option, you must restart the system and then login again.
10. Enjoy.

Please Note: Un-installing Yahoo! Messenger will delete all your chat history. Also the local rooms and audibles of your country won’t be accessible in the US Version.

If it still not works for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users, you may also have to delete the following paths before installing the US version.

C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Yahoo

C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\LocalLow\Yahoo

C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Yahoo

Download Link for US Version of Yahoo Messenger

You can directly download 10.0.0.1102 US version by clicking here, or you may get the latest version from FileHippo.

Virgin Mobile in partnership with Tata Teleservices is raising the heat in Telecom industry again. A few months back industry was shook up with the pay-per-second plans. Now Virgin Mobile is all set to revamp the Indian Telecom Industry once again with its low calling rates.

Interesting part is Virgin Mobile uses the network of  Tata Teleservices and still being able to provide calling at such a low rate. So now you can imagine how telecom operators used to fool us with high charges an year back.

The group will start its services from southern region of India and other parts will be followed up till end of March 2010. Virgin Mobile will provide STD calling rates at 20p/min without any top-up packs, in order to capture the market space, however the other tariffs details are yet to be declared.

Not only this but they will also be offering itemised bills to all their customers at no extra charge. Also if the bill complaint is now answered with a span of 48 hours, the bill will become the liability of  Virgin Mobile. Now this generates a true win-win situation for the users.

The big players such as Airtel, Reliance are creating a no-match for the cheap rates provided by the new telecoms. Its interesting to see where this competition is going to end. ”India is the first country where Virgin Group will be offering both CDMA and GSM services” said Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group.

Number portability is also expected to launch by the same time i.e. March 2010 end, thus creating a new room for Virgin Group to grasp customers from other teleco’s.

How will you respond to this move – Stay with current 1p/sec plan (60p/min) or go with the new scheme as 20p/min?Leave your thoughts in comments.