Well not only for girls, for everyone it is a hectic to carry bags and then themselves.
In simple terms it is like Hindi saying ‘credit card swap karo, aish karo’.

Come, lets get acquainted the modern shopping online shopping trend.

The Reverse

The first online shopping on web was created by Tim Berners Lee back in 1991. After that it was Pizza Hut which started its online business in 1994 along with the German company Intershop. Then appeared the famous Amazon and eBay. It was from Amazon and eBay that this business flourished and the rest you can see it yourself; every other day you get another mail.

What do you need?

• A Computer/Laptop/Application with easy access to internet.
• A Debit/ Credit Card (as very few e-shops allow cash on delivery)
• And some time (to choose from the huge variety of items.)

Consumer network

Though till the past it was so believed that the customers to this B2C shopping on web were in general the people with higher level of income, education and occupation. But with the evolution of networking the customer network has expanded.

How it works?

Here once the customer logs into the account he can choose the items and store them in a virtual ‘shopping cart’. Cart is a place where the items selected by the customer is accumulated and then when the customer checks out, he finally chooses among the items selected those that he actually wants to purchase. At this stage (or after the checking out, for some sites) the customer feeds in the payment details. Then the customer is intimated about the progress via SMS and E-Mails.

Payment

Most of the shopping sites take payment via Credit cards and Debit cards; but due to security reasons the customer isn’t comfortable to give the details of his card on web. So for such group there are sites which take payment on delivery (better known as ‘cash-on-delivery’ with extra charges) or the billed amount is added to phone bills.

Is it secure?

Security is what the customer and the merchant is worried about. It can be the concern both ways. The customer is at the risk of leaking his credit/debit card number. And the merchant is at the risk of fraudulent purchases from stolen credit cards.

Identity threats and phishing and stealing of data from the merchant’s site via spamming is very common. (That is why you see those jumbled numbers and alphabets, called captcha).

The way out..

To overcome the problems, standards must be set for all the websites. The sites must be rated based on assessments, quality, service and anonymous feedback, to ensure that the consumer and the merchant both are safe.

Well, its the festive season. Happy Shopping!

Some suggested sites:

• www.amazon.com
• www.ebay.com
• www.flipkart.com
• www.olx.com
• www.homeshop18.com
• www.snapdeal.com

Event: Cinematheque 2011
Organized by: Xaverian Film Academy
Date: 8th and 9th of March 2011.
Venue: Auditorium, St. Xaviers’ College, Kolkata.

What is the event, Cinematheque 2011, all about?

The Xaverian Film Academy of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata will be organizing a national level film festival CINEMATHEQUE 2011 on 8th and 9th March, 2011.

Young filmmakers and media enthusiasts from all over the country will be visiting St. Xaviers’ College, Kolkata for this grand event during the two days mentioned above. People from all across Kolkata and country will be witnessing films in a competitive & non-competitive category made by student filmmakers. It is sure to generate a lot of Cinephilia among the youth of Kolkata and India during this time.

Who is Organizing the festival?

Xaverian Film Academy, a students based community of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, brings to you the grand film festival. The community focuses its attention to the media world and films in general. They believe in both viewing and making films. Hence the concept of a film festival just like CINEMATHEQUE satisfies their identity to a massive extent.

Tentative Programme of the event

• Day 1: The films from the DOCUMENTARY section will be screened where FIVE short listed films will be shown followed by a rare non fiction film which will be screened in the non competitive category.
• Day 2: There will be the screening of the competitive section of SHORT FICTION films where FIVE short listed films which will be shown followed by a non competitive fiction film for the audience.

• For more information visit www.sxcfilmstudies.com
• REGISTER ONLINE for the event.
• To view the Rules and Regulations of the event, click here

What’s surprising is the fact that the press seems to have completely waived off it’s responsibility in publishing such an advertisement. The fact that an advertisement like this has actually made itself to the print edition of such a premiere newspaper explains why we need more attention towards monitoring of advertisements in the country. Surely, such an advertisement would be laughable if it ended up on the frontpage of the New York Times, perhaps followed immediately by a lawsuit. Why should things be different in India?

As requested by someone, here’s what the advertisement reads:

• 2GB memory card
• 3.0″ TFT Screen, MP3, MP4 & FM Radio
• Breakthrough internet device
• 2 Mega Pixel Digital camera
• Touch screen & hand writing
• Dual sim cards working same time
• Shake function
• Bluetooth, support T-flash card & GPRS system.

Each èphone has an unique IEMI No.

Facebook has become very popular in North America over the last few years whereas Orkut is extremely popular in India. Facebook has an origin at the Harvard University and was launched in February, 2004 (just a month after Orkut was launched). Orkut is run by Google and was named after Orkut Buyukkoten (Its creator).

The picture below of the Alexa traffic graph shows how Orkut and Facebook are going in opposite direction. If the circumstances continue to be identical, I bet the day is close when Orkut may close its doors and is scared out of its wit.

DESIGN

Facebook is a great deal professional looking networking website where as Orkut looks to some extent unfinished and the themes make it cartoonish. In Facebook everything is closely integrated in the home page from messaging, to friends update, invites, status update, news feed, links, suggestions, highlights, requests, chat, events and Etc where as in Orkut everything is limply coupled which made it less likable compared to Facebook. There is an issue that – ‘Facebook has a little entry barrier for new folks…’, rather I would like to comment that FB has a simple and professional user interface to which an intelligent user can easily understand at first glance. Though I found ease of accessibility, simplicity in the design and quick access through all the pages within the profile earlier at Orkut, but recently when Orkut introduced its new feature of ‘Themes Library’, I personally started disliking the site on the issues of speed and appearance. Users could change their interface from a wide range of colorful theme library and this lead to slower downloading of the whole system.

APPLICATIONS

With over more than 10,000 application in numbers, Facebook Apps are much better than Orkut. Despite the fact that Orkut was head of Facebook in the beginning it failed to provide new features and updated apps that Facebook provided in the longer run. I’m not astonished to find Orkut ripping several features and ideas from its competitor product in utter despondency. Another annoying thing what most of the user don’t like and Google did not refrain by displaying it is- ‘Bad Bad Server, no donut for you!’ dialogue. It seriously irritates anyone.

STATUS UPDATES

Facebook, much similar to Orkut has a micro-blogging feature of “status updates” which allows users to inform their friends of their current whereabouts, actions, or thoughts. Nevertheless, Facebook proves to be far improved than the latter here again for it allows the people in the network to post their comments and express their likeness towards the post by clicking on ‘like it’ option. Above all, ‘What’s on your mind?’ preference at Facebook let the user share photos, videos and links through attachments within their networks itself.

SECURITY

The security feature is more powerful in Facebook compared to Orkut, On FB one is able to view the profile of others only when the latter is among your connections. Within Orkut you can view people’s profiles details, communities joined, photos, friends, etc regardless if they are a ‘friend’ or not. Open scraps and profiles hence owes to less security.

CHAT

Just as Orkut allow its users to integrate Gtalk within their interface, as of 23^rd April, 2008, Facebook Chat was released for the entire FB user base enabling chat with friends on a one-to-one basis. Though both Facebook and Orkut has the feature of chat within their site, well again Facebook is better at this aspect too on the point that it has the facility where one can be invisible to an individual or a group of people.

ACCOUNT NAME

One of the most important reasons why I love Facebook and give full points to it is the directness and the reality that they expect from the user when asking for the ‘Account Name’ or the profile name as one may say. Worst part about Orkut as I mentioned before is that it seems to be more like a cartoonish thing to me. At times it is really difficult or an impossible task to decipher the actual owner of the account from the disgusting and irrelevant profile names they have (above all the profile picture is uploaded of a celebrity and the list of communities and friends are endless and indescribably weird).

COMMUNITY & GROUPS

Groups and communities found on Orkut are most of the time repetitive and have untold figures of duplicates (that too existing together with the same community name). Facebook on the other hand maintains a feature of unique groups and communities. From my personal experience I add that at Orkut people are more concentrated at number and quantity but Facebook strives for the quality. All the more in Orkut beyond 80% of the communities are a waste and are filled with craps of ideas and classified advertisements from individuals as the forum topics within the community with no relation with each other from anywhere. Orkut has now become a mere place of advertisement, unhealthy entertainment and exponential spamming.

Some of the applications and elements to which I give a share for actually making FACEBOOK a fun and the ultimate leader in the internet social networking race are as follow:

MINI FEED

Facebook’s Mini Feed Feature (notifications) is useful in viewing a quick snapshot on the latest happenings within the network.

MYORKUT

The application named as ‘myOrkut’ connects the Orkut profile of the user to Facebook Profile, so that one can see his/ her Orkut friends and read scraps right from Facebook without actually logging into their Orkut account.

GIFTS

This is a virtual gift feature that Facebook added to its website in February 2007. With the help of this application friends could send gifts to each other along with a small text message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient’s wall with the message of the giver, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately.

MARKETPLACE

With the launch of the application named as ‘marketplace’ in May 2007, Facebook allowed its users to post free classified ads.

EVENTS

‘Facebook events’ is an application that helps the user inform the people in the network know about the upcoming events in their group and to organize social gatherings. Events can be open, closed, or secret depending upon the event creator.

VIDEO

Facebook video is an application built by the Facebook developers for sharing videos on Facebook, Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature.

URL CHANGE

The most recent and the last change on the Facebook website was ‘URL Change’. Facebook introduced this feature in June 2009 that allowed users to choose a Facebook username to make user location easier. The user is able to direct others to their page through a simple link such as www.Facebook,com/username rather than an otherwise complex URL. This feature spread very quickly on Facebook, with more than 55,000 users registering URL change within 24 hours after the launch.

CAUSE OF REAL DECLINE OF ORKUT

What I feel to be the main reason for the downfall of the ORKUT in India was its sudden gain of popularity among youth. Yes, it’s shocking to accept, I know. Since Orkut had once become the talk of the teens and young, the site started flooding with new members. Having a registered account on Orkut became a must. Above and beyond Orkut started facing very peculiar problems of fake profiles, flooding, spamming & even track of criminal activities going over the interface. Owing to the deactivation of the jail system and high number of profile counts, the unnecessary profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated easily. Such profiles were normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It was not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds..!!

Another signpost to the collapse of the networking site, Orkut, was Floodtudo (a freeware program made in Delphi in August 2005, by a Brazilian developer). A big spam wave struck Orkut soon when this program which was specifically meant for flooding Orkut was massively used by thousands of spammers all over. There are several more causes for Orkut losing against many other networking sites like Facebook; but aforementioned are some of the points that I feel to be the root cause.

According to me Orkut had earlier proved to be dominating and better than all other networking sites in every aspects for it be in ease of accessibility, GUI friendliness, up to-date apps and softwares, strong security & Etc. But Microsoft’s cunning plan to suppress Google’s such domination over internet by heavily funding Facebook at the right time helped Facebook to get good data centers, and boost its overall performance (finally resulting in the victory of Facebook in the tariff race among the social networking site)

I think that Google really needs to work hard on Orkut to regain the part of market share it actually deserves. It would not be very tough for Google to do so because it already have the user base, all it needs to do is to pull the uses back to Orkut. Also, if the fall of orkut continues it is destined to have the same face as Yahoo! 360 degree which have already called it’s service a close on 13 July, 2009. Wishing that Orkut does not follow it’s lead because after all I have an account at Orkut

Best of luck, Orkut (I think it needs a lot of those)!

Michael Jackson

The sudden and recent death of MJ had made me curious which instigated me to do a bit of search over the internet. I also glanced through his autobiography, Moon Walk by Michael Jackson (1988) which clarified a lot of my doubts about the great artist.

Michael Jackson is a very popular artist in India. If we would compare MJ with any other popular international artists like Presley, The Beatles, Westlife, Eagles, Backstreet Boys or other such popular international entertainers, most (over 90%) of Indian population knows MJ but a very lesser population (mostly restricted to youth) would be aware of various other artist. I would not go into giving you general details about MJ, but would like to share my thoughts on the various of his aspects.

MJ holds the title of “Most successful Entertainer of All Times” (as of today) with 13 Grammy Awards and 13 number 1 singles. But, his success was attached with lots of controversial happenings, aqusitions and rumors. I would like to throw some light on a few controversies:

Moonwalk, was MJ the inventor?

No, MJ was not the first one to perform moonwalk. Billy Bailey, a foot tap dancer, stars in the oldest record video of moonwalking. MJ had moonwalked in a video song, Billie Jean (Album: Thriller) which lead to many such performances of moonwalk. MJ was not the inventor of mookwalk, but he perfected it in his own way.

Is 1984 fire accident at Pepsi commercial a true story?

Yes, it is confirmed by various news sources (click here to read an article from The Telegraph) that the accident actually took place on 27th January, 1984 which left second and third degree burns on MJ face and scalp. The video had unearthed recently but the news of such accident rumored for over 2 decades now (Rahul had informed me of the incident quite sometime ago). Pepsi had paid MJ a sum of $1.5 million which MJ donated to a burn centre named after him.

Did MJ undergo skin lighting treatments?

There are many articles (click here to read one from MTV) which are published over the internet which states that MJ underwent skin lightening treatments and use to bleach his skin. This, to my knowledge, isn’t true as it was confirmed that MJ suffered from vitiligo and lupus which was the cause of change in MJ’s complexion.

In 1986, there were images revealed of Michael sleeping in a oxygen chamber which during that time was claimed that he did so to slow the ageing process. Apparently, later it was found that it was done so to treat the skin disorder he was suffering from.

Were the sexual abuse allegations on MJ true?

1993: The most controversial question of MJ’s life, which was the prime reason for the decline of his metal peace, public image and to some extent, his career. However, there are many comments on the topic with the recent rumors that Jordan Chandler (the child who accused MJ) has confirmed that he had then lied (click here to read one of them). But, there have been no such announcement by any news (or other such dependent) sources. Anyways, with the amount of resources present, I would infer that the charges were false because the description provided by Jordan of MJ’s genitals didn’t not match (as a result of 25 minutes strip search). Also,the financial condition of Jordan’s father, Evan Chandler, also indicates that it was a way to extort.

MJ had settled the case out of court because of health issues with a financial set back of $22 million ($20m to Jordan and $1m to each parent).

2005: Gavin Arvizo, 13, accused MJ for sexual abuse which dragged him into People Vs Jackson. He was accused for four counts of intoxicating a minor, one count of abduction, and one count of conspiring to hold the boy and his family captive. The trial began on 31st January, 2005 and the vertict was announced on 13th June, 2005 by Superior Court of the State of California. The jury determined that he was not guilty of any charges.

Did Michael convert into Islam?

No, though there are articles (click here to read one from The Telegraph) on the internet which state that he converted to Islam but there is no official confirmation from MJ that he did.

Was Michael killed or did he suicide?

(Still working on this section, please contribute)

All the above are very controversial topics and everything mentioned is purely my view on them. No matter what the case may be but 1 thing is absolutely clear, MJ was used as a object to gain publicity by people like Evan Chandler, Gavin Arvizo, Press & Media and many others. Media had always highlighted the darker side of him and created negitive ripples amongst neutral audience. MJ, at a point of time was so frustrated with reporters that he stated:

Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, “I’m an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,” people would say, “Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He’s cracked up. You can’t believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.”

I can keep on writing about him for ages but now, I would close by just wishing that his soul rests in peace.