India is celebrating its 63rd Independence Day today. In these 63 years, India has achieved remarkable feats in various areas, be it sports, science or technology. When it comes to technology, time and again India has proved itself to be a super power. Adam Tablet PC- the iPad killer from India, and the recent $35 tablet computer are some of the examples to substantiate this claim.
Even in World Wide Web, India has made its presence felt by coming up with decent alternatives to the already present services.
Indian E-Mail Client
This needs no introduction. Everyone must have heard about rediff, and many of you must even have an account on it. I started with rediff and still have that account active, though I no longer use it for sending e-mails. Interestingly, I subscribed to DW through my rediff id some 2 years back. 🙂
However rediff is no longer the preferred e-mail client now, because it failed to compete with new features introduced by Gmail.
Link: Rediff
It is a relatively new e-mail client, which offers you shortest possible e-mail id of the form [email protected] along with 10 Gb of storage space. It also has some unique features that Gmail doesn’t have presently. One such feature is “Future Mail” which lets you send a mail at some future date and time. Another cool thing about mail.in is the concept of in-browser tabs that opens e-mails in new tabs within the website.
If that wasn’t enough to lure you to in mail, it also offers some cool applications like Gmail Preview which shows you a feed of latest 20 unread mails in your Gmail account.
However the compose mail box needs some more refining if it wants to give real challenge to Gmail.
Link: Mail.in
Indian Search Engine
This is one area where we are yet to come up with something unique. Though there are quite a few Indian search engines present, they are either based completely on Google or they are not competent enough.
Still if I have to go for an Indian search engine, I’ll prefer Khoj.com. It has clutter free homepage and since it is powered by Google, it provides relevant search results. I tested another popular search engine Guruji with the same search query that I used for Khoj but the results relevancy was no where near to that of Khoj.
Indian Web Browser
The latest addition to Indinized web is the Epic browser, which was launched on 15th July 2010- the same day when India got a new symbol for Rupee. Epic browser, which is developed by Bangalore based startup Hidden Reflex, is based on Mozilla platform and has most of its features, tailored to suit Indian mind. It supports a long list of Indian languages and comes with a sidebar that supports over 1500 applications which matter to Indians- such as Facebook, Orkut, Gmail, BookMyShow and lot more.
Link: Epic Browser
Let’s hope that in the time to come, Indians will come up with alternatives to other web based services too- maybe a blogging platform that has the best features of WordPress and Blogger?
Today, instead of using the regular web services, I’m using their Indian versions. This is my way of celebrating Independence Day. 🙂
Have you ever used any of these services? Do you think they stand a chance against the already established players?
10 Comments
Its a good post but I feel that this post don’t do justice to the Title “India on World Wide Web” This topic deserves a much broader post.
These are just some few examples…..You could’ve add some more relevent examples to do justice to the title (As Nabeel Told)..
@ Nabeel and Rajeel
The idea was to show Indian alternatives to common services used by a layman. More examples could have been added but that would have gone out of scope, since there is no end to such examples. But I do agree that the title should have been something else, as this title deserves more coverage. A mistake from my side.
Today only I came to know about Khoj, Guruji Search engines. 🙂
There are other search engines too, but these are the most popular ones. 🙂
A correction..”India is celebrating its 63rd Independence Day today.” It’s 64th. 🙂
true. Thanks for the correction.
My bad.. I meant to say “India is celebrating 63rd anniversary of Independence today”. This is 64th Independence Day but 63rd anniversary of Indepenence.
Nice post Anshul.
Well comparing with khoj, guruji is primarily a music search engine and was recently in the news over copyright infringement done using their search engine.