#1
Annarakkanna Vaa
Bhramaram
Estimated Views: 380,000

#2
Anuraga Vilochananayi
Neelathamara
Estimated Views: 261,000

#3
Pichavecha Naal Muthal
Puthiya Mukham
Estimated Views: 245,300

#4
Sagar Alias Jacky Reloaded Theme Music
Sagar Alias Jacky Reloaded
Estimated Views: 229,000

#5
Kunnathe Konnaykkum
Pazhassiraja
Estimated Views: 142,741

Watch them

#1
Annarakkanna Vaa

#2
Anuraga Vilochananayi

#3
Pichavecha Naal Muthal

#4
Sagar Alias Jacky Reloaded Theme Music

#5
Kunnathe Konnaykkum

Note: Multiple uploaded versions of the same song were counted. Versions with less than 1000 views weren’t counted.
View counts are as-on March 7, 2010.

Among cities, Delhi topped the chart, surpassing 2008’s topper – Mumbai (now 2nd). But Maharashtra managed to keep the ‘top state’ title.
Let’s face it. Every single stat is interesting and there is just no “quick look” possible. Download a copy and savor the stats. It’s well edited and void of clutter.

Kerala isn’t among the ‘top buying’ or ‘top selling’ spots, but when buying and selling is taken together, we rank 12th. Not bad. And it’s gonna rise up for sure. Though online shopping haven’t gone mainstream yet, it’s strongly catching up. Efforts by the banks in demystifying online shopping myths is doing a lot of good. But the traditional media (read: newspapers & magazines) is not that encouraging about this, spitting out slick scam stories and the like. But hey, that doesn’t matter

Getting into the stats,

• the Kerala youth is grabbing a lot of consumer electronics, mainly mobile phones.
• We sell a lot of TVs!
• We sell natural remedies, dietary supplements, health and beauty products to international buyers, mainly in U.S., Australia, Israel, Sweden!

As evident, the stats are very interesting and quite surprising at places.

Even though ‘e-commerce’ has been around for so many years, it is yet to go mainstream in Kerala. But have no doubts, it will. (I’m talking about flipkart-like shops, movie reservations etc. Yes, you almost said it: Geez, there are a LOT of wonderful things we’re yet to see/build)

She says

I spent a year in 2008 travelling around the world, including 3 months in India which was our (she and her partner’s) favourite country. We had many wonderful experiences in Kerala, and as there aren’t many websites offering independent advice about travel there I was inspired to set up Keralaindiatravel.net.

And it’s wonderful. Level of detail and the strong passion is evident from the posts. A few examples:

• Top 10 reasons to visit Kerala
• A full blown “the essential guide to Kerala Houseboats“
• Guide to Munnar
• Quiet alternatives to Munnar
• The “Which Kerala Beach is right for you” series
• “How to find quality accomodation in Kerala” series

That’s not all. She continues:

In a few weeks my partner and I will be leaving the UK to travel indefinitely. We are starting in South America but will definitely return to India soon as it is calling us back =) I will be continuing with the Kerala blog as well as blogging about our travels at www.neverendingvoyage.com (coming soon!).

How awesome is that!

It was such a pleasant surprise to find a bunch of nicely written articles about Kerala and travel among hundreds of blunt, keyword stuffed and promotional tourism articles and guides. Thank you Erin, for making something this lovely for our homeland. We’re so glad that you loved the place and hearty welcome, once again.

This is completely community-driven (just like many other awesome stuff on web) and the success lies in the magnitude of participation. It is with this objective “Mapping Parties” are organized. Interested people come together for a day or half and do the mapping of some particular place, decided in advance.

The first Mapping Party in Kerala is to be held in Thiruvananthapuram, this February.

• Date: 5th February 2010, Friday
• Venue: Hotel Residency, TVM
• Details & Registration: http://sites.google.com/site/tvmmappingparty
• Seats: 100 seats. First-come-first-served.

Update: The event was nicely carried out and here are the photos from the event

Though the party will be a bit focussed on Mapping Thiruvananthapuram, demos & talks would benefit anyone interested in the concept (which is already a success). The party is expected to benefit the attendees a lot as they may organize local mapping parties at their places.

Little more..

Google is hosting Mapping competitions. The first one was the “Latin America Mapping Competition” which was concluded on 15th December 2009. And they’re now running a “Global Mapping Competition” with a prize money of $50,000 sponsored by UNICEF. The main objective of the competitions, apart from boosting overall mapping activity, is to map universities, schools, hospitals and medical clinics with high quality.

In a recent post at the official Google Map & Earth blog, the idea of landmarks based navigation was discussed. Quoting from the original post -

We discovered that street signs or names tend to be less important than landmarks such as civic buildings and gas stations. A friend giving you directions might tell you to “Turn left at the school” or “Go past the convenience store”. In India, we have a lot of great landmark data available through user-entered “Points of Interest” in Google Map Maker.

Our new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on visibility, importance, and closeness to the turns that you’re making. We now combine landmark data, counted turns (“the 2nd right”), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most relevant and useful.

More mapping parties means more mapping activity. More activity means more data. More the data, merrier gets the Google’s algorithm. Won’t you love to navigate around with directions like “take the 2nd left after you see a tree leaning over the road”

Thumbnail photo credit: bluman

Sponsored links and search-targeted advertising are mostly dynamic. That is, you’ll be shown ads related to what you searched. We searched for “Sagar Alias Jacky” and the pretty clever algorithm understood it as a name and threw up this ad.

What is more surprising is that the algorithm accommodates even typos (misspellings). Here they thought we made a typo for “Elias” (a common name) as “Alias”. Hmm, clever indeed!

And for those of you don’t know, Sagar Alias Jacky is a biggie blockbuster starring Malayalam actor Mohanlal as eponymous Sagar alias Jacky. It’s one of the few technically advanced and almost-perfect movie with versatile style, slick camera angles, brilliant DTS mixing and loads of color-grading (the reason behind the great great, real blue skies)

The translation is volunteered by tweeples having knowledge of a particular language that’s in the “to-be translated” list. Quoting the official text -
“We’re currently in an invite-only mode while we improve our tools, but may allow any Twitterer to help translate at some time in the future.”

It’s a honor to see Malayalam being regarded one among world’s major languages, thanks to the sizable population. There are a decent number of active twitterers from Kerala; so things should work smooth. All major Indian languages -  Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam – are included in the list. Out of the 49 languages in the list, 9 are Indian. Awesome!

More information about the translation programme and the sign up form is available at http://twitter.com/translate

150+ movies. 8 theaters. 8 days. And thousands of delegates. Now, coordinating something of this intensity is no cakewalk. But it appeared so. Thanks to the wonderful effort by the team at Azinova Technologies. They were the ones who managed the festival logistics with a robust and very efficient system.

It starts with a non-buggy online registration page designed with usability in mind. There was online payment option powered by Paypal. Now there aren’t very many events in Kerala you can really do that for registering.

Upon registering you’ll have a serial number and a passcode. These are to be used to login and make reservations. Easy, fast, simple reservation. The reservation system and interface was so awesome that people ‘reserved’ seats just for the pleasure of doing it!

Your pass/delegate card will have your serial number barcoded. If you’ve made a reservation for a particular show, you walk up to the barcode scanner and wait to see “Access Granted” flash. And you watch the movie, happily all through.

A Wordpress powered blog was setup at iffk.in/blog which served the purpose of a help desk too.
And an SMS Gateway was setup and you could reserve using it. It periodically pushed updates and notifications (like change in schedule).

We know, this ain’t some path-breaking technology that was taken fresh out of the labs. But it was really neat and must be the biggest event in Kerala with a niceness ranking this high!

(We’re sad that we couldn’t grab some screenshots of the stuff we said ‘was awesome’. But still.)