Gmail!! now in Indian Languages

Here is some good news for all you Indians out there who always wanted to email your friends and family in your native language. Google has launched a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type out emails in Indian languages. When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you will now see an icon with an Indian character. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go to the “Settings” page and enable this option in the “Language” section. Gmail currently supports five Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam — and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon. You can pick from the following:

Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, UK English, US English, Ukrainian, or Vietnamese.

To change the language view in Gmail, you have to do the following:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Select a language from the Gmail display language: drop-down menu in the Language section.
4. Click Save Changes.

Internet Explorer 8 out today!!

Although we happily use a combination of Chrome and Firefox in the office, a new version of Internet Explorer is still big news. Of course, it’s been in open beta for the last year so none of its new improvements and features are big breaking news – especially as most of these changes will be old news to anyone who has been used Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari in the last few months. That said, if you’re in an office where Internet Explorer is the only authorised browser, then there’s quite a lot to be excited about. Well, maybe not “excited about”, but it should make your day slightly more enjoyable at least. So, what kind of features are in Internet Explorer 8? Well there’s a lot under the bonnet to begin with – better security and malware protection mainly. External sources have estimated that IE8 catches two to four times as many malware attacks as other browsers, which is a really impressive step forward for a browser that has always been seen as vulnerable. Another, more tangibly testable, feature is Microsoft’s claim that the new Internet Explorer is the fastest browser on the market. Of course there are two caveats to that – firstly that we’re talking the difference of a fraction of a second, and secondly that with all the major players working on new versions of their browser this lead may well be short lived.

Listen to music online for free using SingsBOX

Want to know where you can listen to music online for free? Want to listen to classical music online? Or want to listen to country music online? Whatever, you want to listen to online, there are a number of ways you can listen to your favorite music online without having to download MP3s illegally.

I’ve previously written about other online music listening services, such as Songza, a great way to listen to music online that includes the music videos along with the song. I also wrote about SeeqPod, but it didn’t have a good indexing of foreign music in it’s database.

SingsBOX is another service for listening to music online that looks promising. It’s very similar to Songza in that it finds just about any song you can look for. It also works great on finding songs from foreign artists, such as Hindi music, etc.

Tata Teleservices set to launch GSM

CDMA telecom service provider Tata Teleservices will roll out GSM services by the end of this year on an investment of $2 billion, the company said on Monday.

“We have already got spectrum (2G) for most of the circles and will roll out the services by the end of this year hopefully,” company managing director Anil Sardana said. Tata Teleservice is also planning a pan-India launch of its services.

The Tata Group company trails Reliance Communications (RCom) in CDMA subscribers, boasting of a 31 million wireless user-base at November-end, making it the sixth largest service provider in India, where the bulk of users are on GSM networks.

RCom has launched GSM services in 11,000 towns, which would be extended to 22,000 towns in the next few months.

Reliance to Offer Nationwide GSM Service

Reliance Communications, the largest CDMA operator in the country all set to launch its GSM service nationwide. With this launch the mobile sector is sure witness some intense competition amongst GSM operators.

Until now Reliance offered its GSM services in eight circles, which Kolkata, West Bengal and Assam. The current GSM service launch will cover 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages, making it the widest one-time launch. Reliance had received the start-up GSM spectrum for the remaining 18 circles in January 2008 and within a span of 11 months, has managed to set up the required infrastructure.

Reliance claims that unlike the aging mobile networks prevalent today, its new age GSM service brings a number of innovations which include, next-gen electronics for super digital voice clarity, seamless coverage on major railway routes, national and state highways and nationwide enhanced EDGE for fastest internet access speeds.

With this launch Reliance will be the only private player to offer both CDMA as well as GSM services across the country. Reliance’s GSM customers will be able to use a wide range of GSM handsets and can also avail of international roaming in more than 200 countries.

Airtel’s all in one Internet Portal

Airtel Telemedia Services, India’s largest private broadband and telephone service provider on Sunday announced the launch of ‘airtellive.com’, its new all-in-one internet portal for the customers. Customers, with airtellive.com, will receive free access to the company’s popular Google Apps messaging and collaboration suite, which includes Gmail email services, Google Docs for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Google Calendar shared calendaring, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page. Airtel claims it has also partnered the likes of shaadi.com, 24×7guru, and naukri.com to offer exclusive deals and discounts on its portal.