Amazon today launched Junglee.com in India today and, in its current form, Junglee is more like an online marketplace where you can quickly compare prices of books, electronics, music, apparel and other products offered by hundreds of online and offline retailers in India.

Several shopping stores in India – including Homeshop18, India Plaza, Shoppers Stop, Fabindia, Microsoft Store, Future Bazaar and many others – have added their product catalogues to Junglee so it becomes a little easier for the consumer to research product prices from one central place.

Is Junglee Cheaper than Flipkart or Infibeam?

As you may have noted, the two most popular shopping sites in India – Flipkart.com and Infibeam.com – are both missing from Junglee.com. These sites might have better deals to offer than Junglee so I have a written a simple bookmarklet that lets you compare prices of books on Junglee.com with that of Flipkart and Infibeam in one go.

Is Junglee Cheaper

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag the “Is Junglee Cheaper” button from this page to your browser bookmarks toolbar. Then open any book page on Junglee.com and click the bookmarklet to instantly know the price of that book on Infibeam and Flipkart.

The first version of the bookmarklet works for books only though I might expand it to other product categories later. Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how the Junglee bookmarklet works.

This story, Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart and Infibeam, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under Amazon, Bookmarklets.

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If you are to a buy a product from Junglee, you don’t buy it from Amazon.com (probably because of the FDI rules in our country) but will be redirected to the seller’s website. The seller is responsible for the shipping, they may have their own refunds and returns policies and each may offer a different payment mechanism.

Also see: Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart

Amazon in India

Thus, at this time, Amazon in India is mostly looking like a comparison shopping engine. There’s no universal shopping cart (you cannot buy products from multiple sellers in one go) though you can use your main Amazon.com credentials to log into Junglee.

I am still quite happy with this development though as it highlights the lesser-known online merchants in India and one can always use Junglee to get a better idea of the price of a product. It may not have an immediate effect on the business of Flipkart but going forward, that could change.

Full credit to BGR and MediaNama for breaking this story.

This story, Amazon Online Store is Live in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Amazon.

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To give you an example, if a blog’s address is abc.blogspot.com and you try opening that page from an IP address in India, Google will send you to abc.blogspot.in. A similar redirection is happening for individual article pages as well.

Original page: http://labnol.blogspot.com/language-translation.html
Redirected to: http://labnol.blogspot.in/language-translation.html

How to Prevent Google from Redirecting Blogs

If you are visiting a blogspot.com blog and Google is redirecting you to the country-specific blogspot.in domain, you (as the user) can prevent that redirection by adding /ncr to the blog URL. For instance, if the blog URL is abc.blogspot.com, the new URL would be abc.blogspot.com/ncr and it won’t redirect to any other address.

The Problem with Redirecting URLs

The above change is applicable only for free blogs that are served from blogspot.com and does not affect Blogger blogs that use a custom domain. Also, Blogger takes care of the redirection part so none of your existing URLs should return a 404.

That said, there’s one significant downside I can think of. All your blog pages effectively have two different URLs now and that could dilute your Google juice.

Site visitors in India will see your blogpsot.in URL while visitors outside India will be served the original blogspot.com URL. However, if another website links to your .in address and a visitor outside India tries to access your blog via that site, they won’t be redirected to your original .com address. And that’s bad for your site from the SEO perspective.

The other problem is that this change will completely alter your social analytics. If your original blog post got ‘n’ likes on Facebook, the new count will be ’0′ since the URL has changed. Thus social sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook and even Google Plus will see that redirected page as a new web page.

A Possible Solution

I have no idea why Google made such an important change in Blogger without even informing their users in advance [Update: see reason]. Anyway, a possible solution is that you add the canonical meta tag to your blog template and point it to your original .com URLs. Here’s how you do it.

Open your Blogger template, click the Edit HTML button and look for the following line between the <head> and </head> tags.

<b:include data="post" name="all-head-content"/>

If you are not using the standard XML template and the above tag is missing, just add the following line to your Blogger template inside the <head> tag. [Thanks Aneesh Joseph]

<link expr:href="data:blog.canonicalUrl" rel="canonical"/>

The above code is valid for the XML version of Blogger templates but if you are still using the Classic Blogger template, the code is a little different:

<ItemPage><Blogger>
 <link href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" rel="canonical"/>
</Blogger></ItemPage>

With this canonical tag, we are telling search engines that even if they encounter our blog page with a .in address, they should only consider the .com address as that’s the original source.

Also, Blogger automatically inserts the rel=canonical tag in your blog templates so you are effectively adding one additional tag will will appear above the original one in the HTML source. When Googlebot encounters multiple canonical tags on a page, they respect the first one so the generated tag would be ignored.

This is obviously a workaround and am hopeful that the Blogger team would come up with a better solution – one that preserves the Google juice of your blog.

Behind the Scenes

I was looking into the HTTP headers and it looks like Blogger is doing a 302 temporary redirect between .com and .in domains. However, no such redirection happens when you directly access the .in blogspot URLs even from an IP address outside India.

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: http://labnol.blogspot.in/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Tue, 31

<HTML><HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
   content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>302 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://labnol.blogspot.com/>here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>

This story, All Blogger Blogs Have a New Web Address in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 31/01/2012 under Google.

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Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:

Use Facebook without the Data Plan

Facebook India has partnered with Fonetwish to bring Facebook on every mobile phone without requiring any apps or even the Internet.

You dial the *325# number, then enter your Facebook username and password and you are in. You can then send number based commands to access various features of Facebook, chat with friends who are online, add new people to your friends list, and more.

I played with the service for some time and it was a nice experience overall. If there were a Unix-like shell interface for Facebook, it would be much similar. Fonetwish says that this service is currently available for Airtel, Aircel, Idea and Tata Docomo users in India.

It may be too much work to read your Facebook news feed stories one by one but this is a good option to quickly update your Facebook status or for chatting with friends who are online. The price is reasonable too – you just have pay a subscription fee of 1.00 per day for unlimited usage.

Related: If you have an old mobile phone, you can search Google by SMS without requiring a data plan.

This story, Access Facebook on any Mobile Without the Internet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 12/01/2012 under Facebook.

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Which is the Best Mobile Plan for you?

The plan comparison service is available online at Komparify.com or, if you have an Android phone, you can get their mobile app. Read on.

Once you have installed the Android app, choose your region (or telecom circle) and your existing cellular operator from the available options. The app will read the voice call logs from the phone and based on the local / national (STD) usage, it will recommend you a list of the most cost-effective plans from your existing operator and other operators in your region. With mobile number portability (MNP) available across India, switching operators is easy so if Airtel has a better deal than Vodafone, you can quickly make the jump.

Alternatively, you may use the Komparify website to compare plans. Here you need to manually input details of your monthly voice calls and SMS usage and the service will then figure out a more cost-effective plan for your mobile phone.

If you really want to save on your monthly mobile bill but don’t have the time to analyze your call logs manually, don’t miss this!

Also see: A Good Site for Comparison Shopping in India

This story, Find the Perfect Mobile Plan and Save Money!, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 07/12/2011 under Google Android.

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Indian Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal recently had a meeting with executives of Google, Facebook and Yahoo and demanded that these Internet companies hire “human beings” to screen user-generated content before it is published on the Internet.

Heather Timmons writes in The New York Times:

At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi.  “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.

In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

Does our Indian minister know that 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Or that 250 million tweets are generated per day.

This story, India’s Unreasonable Demand on Internet Censorship, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 05/12/2011 under Censorship.

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Siri and the Indian Accent

One of the most talked about feature of iPhone 4S is the voice-assistant Siri (see videos) but some people who have used it say Siri doesn’t work with Indian accents [please see updates below]. It seems that Apple too has acknowledged that limitation, indirectly.

The iPhone 4S page on the Apple India website is now live and the page is exactly like the US version but for one difference – Apple doesn’t mention Siri anywhere on their Indian site. The screenshots and videos of Siri are all over Apple’s US site but the voice-assistant doesn’t even find a place in the technical specs of iPhone 4S in India.

Apple US page for iPhone 4S

Apple India page for iPhone 4S

As you may have spotted, there’s no Siri in the second screenshot. Thanks Theyagarajan S.

And, considering the kind of response that iPhone 4S is getting in India, it seems very unlikely that Siri would support Indian accents anytime soon. Siri is obviously available in the iPhone 4S that Apple is selling in India but they won’t officially support it.

Update: This story did invite some criticism on the web. Tushar Kanwar calls it a “strangely unresearched tabloid-ish article” while Atul says”you make it sound like India is being singled out, which is clearly NOT the case.” I have included all the comments here.

Thanks for all the comments. I do plan to do a follow-up on this topic. [Update] I recently tested Siri on iPhone 4S and got mixed results. You can check the video below while a detailed review is available at WSJ India.

This story, Apple India Website Puts Siri in Silent Mode, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 25/11/2011 under IPhone.

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This rough guide to Indian food by state is courtesy Zomato.com, an online guide to Indian restaurants. It does miss the Mughlai food of Delhi and the Biryani  of Hyderabad.

This story, The Foods of India by States, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 23/11/2011 under Food, Infographics, Wide.

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The disappointing bit is obviously the price – see chart. The 16 GB iPhone 4S would sell in India for 45k while the higher-capacity models exceed the 50k price bracket which is almost unimaginable for a mobile phone in India.

iPhone 4S has a better 8 MP camera but the one feature that has attracted the most attention is the built-in voice assistant called Siri. It seems to work like magic but based on what I have heard from people in India who already have an iPhone 4S, Siri does have trouble understanding the Indian accent. Satyan Gajwani added that “even with an American accent, Siri doesn’t grab Indian names well.”

Then there’s the battery draining issue in iPhone 4S that Apple is still working hard to resolve. Yes, these are issues that can be fixed with future software upgrades but when your spending $1000 on a phone, you expect more.

There are some worthy alternatives. Nokia Lumia 800 is expected to hit retails shelves in India in December and even John Gruber has some good things to say about this Windows Phone. Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus runs on Ice Cream Sandwich and The Verge calls it the best Android phone ever – this could again launch in India this year.

Update: The iPhone 4S has officially launched in India but thanks to the steep price tag, there were no queues spotted outside any of the Airtel or Aircel outlets.

Price of iPhone in India

This story, Got Cash to Burn? Buy the iPhone 4S in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 22/11/2011 under IPhone.

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Google Chromebook, the software-less notebook where you do all the work in the web browser and all your files are stored in the cloud, could launch India in the next few months.

Sundar Pichai, who heads the Google Chrome browser and the Google Chrome OS initiatives, told The Hindu that he would be surprised “if Chromebooks are not shipped in India by early 2012.” He didn’t discuss the price though.

Google notebooks, or rather netbooks,  are manufactured by Acer and Samsung and are available in both 3G and Wi-Fi versions. The Wi-Fi only Chromebook from Samsung is available online for $399.99 while the 3G + Wi-Fi model is available for $449.99.

The first Chromebooks hit the retail shelves in June 2011 and, after all these months, I expect there will be price drop before they bring these notebooks to India. Would you buy one?

This story, Chromebook Coming to India in Next Few Months, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 15/11/2011 under Google Chrome Os.

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