In India, the iPhone wait is over. Nah, the iPhone wait has just begun.

Take a deep breath. This will surely blow your heads.

What? Vodafone has launched the Apple iPhone 3G in India.

So? They have priced it at Rs.31,000. That's US $708.

Big Deal? Nah, just that India has no 3G operator yet.

India, the low-cost market where US companies outsource their work because it offers them cost advantage. A market with a middle-class population that surpasses the total population of Europe and is a wonderful place to do business. One might think targeting the masses here would make a very good business sense, but looks like Vodafone and Apple marketing crooks have something else in mind. Apple has also tied up with Airtel to sell iPhone in India.

A column in Economic Times read:

Interestingly, the move to partner Airtel and Vodafone marks a major shift in Apple’s global strategy of ‘one country-one operator’. With India emerging as the fastest-growing cellular market, Apple wanted to maximize its exposure here as Airtel and Vodafone have a combined subscriber base of over 120 million.

This is a huge opportunity for Apple, but as you might have guessed it already, these companies might actually goof up on this one - they are operating on EDGE network and not on 3G. This will lead to a lot many dissatisfied iPhone users. Not that there are few - iPhone users in US are already frustrated since the phone does not work properly when 3G is enabled. The iPhone has got serious reception problems and one of the main reason behind it must be an antenna free design.

Price Skimming at Work

What is price skimming? A concept of introducing a product at a higher cost and slowly decreasing (skimming) the price. Most electronic companies do this. Take your LCD displays for example.

Here's a new Price Skimming poster for marketing case-studies in Indian B-Schools. The Apple iPhone.

Surely this is not the come with the latest version of the iPhone OS. The latest version is iPhone OS 2.0.2 and it still has issues with 3G networks.

If you were waiting for this phone to hit the market, take my advice and wait for a few more months as these marketing crooks are only applying Price Skimming to iPhone's price tag. I wonder why wouldn't you rather buy a smuggled one and unlock it?

Here's the email I received from Vodafone:


People who really care about managing their expenses should know that the iPhone is not worthy of a $708 price tag. I personally wanted to get an iPhone - only because I need to start developing applications on it, but seems like my wait for iPhone is far from over and has just begun.

Yahoo! Mail is Down! - Error Code 15 - Joins the infamous failed services

After recent failures of GMail, Amazon Web Services, Twitter, and few others, Yahoo! has felt the urge to join this infamous elite group.

I am unable to access Yahoo! Mail and while accessing my account I am taken to a screen which tells me about Error Code 15.



Here's the message:

Sorry for the inconvenience.

You've stumbled upon a temporary problem we're having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing.

• Try pressing the Reload or Refresh button on your browser, or signing out and back into Yahoo! Mail. Hopefully that will take care of things.

  If that doesn't fix the problem, please try again shortly. The fact that you're reading this page means we've been automatically notified of the issue, and chances are we're working on it now.

• If you think you've been more than patient and tried the tricks above, feel free to contact Customer Care about Error Code 15.

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Mail Team

I hope these companies knew how to run services without any hitches but that does look like a distant possibility. Would you have problems in trusting these services for running your business or for hosting your emails?

Is it too hard for these companies to protect a production environment from failing? Heck, I thought they tested it thoroughly before final deployment.

[removed] Celebrating Independence Day

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[removed] Why ColdFusion?

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[removed] Hello World 2.0

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Hello World! Hello Beijing 2008!

Hello World! Welcome to Codecurry. It is a privilege to post the very first entry for Codecurry, a blog focused on providing technical briefs on Rich Internet Applications, software technologies, computers and communications.

My name is Sameer Gupta, I'm an Adobe Certified Professional and an entrpreneur. I work with Atos Origin and my tenure with them ends on 14th August '08. I am looking forward to give complete focus to my business plans and a lot of time to Codecurry.

My twin brother Sagar Gupta, again a Certified Adobe ColdFusion MX 7 Advanced Developer [and technology entrepreneur] will also share his thoughts on Adobe technologies in this blog. He has worked on many ColdFusion and Flash projects, and is currently heading the development of JustTring.com - Flex RIA which will enable video calling.

Atos Origin, if you are not aware, provides infrastructure that powers Olympics and since the Game opens today, it must be obvious why Beijing Summer Olympics for a Hello World introductory post.

Beijing Olympic Games videos are available on Beijing 2008 channel in YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/beijing2008. You can also visit http://www.nbcolympics.com/, to the catch the action LIVE.

Sagar and I chose yesterday this day as the launch day for Codecurry because it is very special to a lot many people. In fact, the summer Olympic Games in Beijing began on 8/8/8, at 8:08 p.m.

The date is not just catchy but has a lot meaning to the Chinese. Fame and good fortune is more often associated in China with eight, a number which is associated with positive meanings in Buddhism and Taoism, as well as in Japanese Shintoism.

Jack Tresidder has an entry on eight in his books of symbols: The eight sided form of the Christian baptistery is a symbol of rebirth to eternal life. The octagon was perceived as a form of mediating between the square and circle which represent the earth and the heaven respectively and therefore implying a spiritual rite of passage. In the arcane of numbers, eight was itself a symbol of renewal... The Chinese pronunciation for eight (ba in Mandarin and paat in Cantonese) sounds similar to the word for prosperity (fa in Mandarin and faat in Cantonese). Numbers play a large role in choosing a date for any special event in China (as well as in India).

Numerology is a big hit in India. Tough we aren't into any numerology we decided to launch Codecurry on this day since a lot many people are hoping to bring them luck. Just think about this, 8/8/8 will witness more marriages than any other day in China this year. Those couples are putting so much hope on the 8/8/8. The Chinese planned and scheduled the Olympic Games on this day and began the Opening Ceremony exactly at 8:08 p.m. So, it does make a lot of sense to align yourself with such hope for success and good fortune.