Weekly news

Get a Tata Nano in Exchange for a

Two-Wheeler

• Tata Motors has launched a new offer to boost sales of its ultra-cheap car Tata Nano. Now two-wheeler owners can walk into any Tata Motors showroom to exchange their two-wheeler for a car. “2 wheels for 4” scheme has not only raised customers interest in Indian market but has also boosted sales for the company since Nov 04.

• "If you want Nano through our exchange offer, just go to any Tata Motors dealer and get your dream car on an attractive EMI," said Vishal Vashishta, a company manager. For the exchange offer, the company has tied up with the State Bank of India (SBI) to provide hassle-free loans offering EMIs as low as Rs 1960, Vashishta said. For increasing the market share, the company is also opening up new Nano access points for test drives in order to attract more people. Besides, Tata Motors has also tied up with 25 banks across the country to offer loans.

• Moreover, Tata Motors has also tied up with twenty five banks all over the country to provide loans to its customers. In the meanwhile, the company has begun its campaigns for Nano concentrating on tier II and III cities and also on the rural areas. Recently the company has also put forth a solution in the form of ‘Tata Towers” project to provide a solution to the on-road congestion.

IPO limit for individual investor

enhanced• The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has

doubled the limit for maximum application for individual investors from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakhs across all public issues. However, there is no increase in the percentage allocation.

This helps investors invest over Rs 1 lakh in an initial public offer (IPO). The market regulator, SEBI, has permitted all investors who apply in public offers for shares worth Rs 2 lakhs or less to be treated as retail investors. In the non-institutional investor category, the number of applications in the size of less than Rs 5 lakhs is negligible. This suggests that retail individual investors who have the capacity and appetite to apply for securities worth above Rs 1 lakh were constrained from doing so because of the Rs 1 lakh limit. They could not make an application under the non-institutional investor category because the allocation there is limited to 15 percent as against 35 percent for retail individual investor category.

Blekko - the new Google killer

launched• A new Internet search engine called which relies on

recommendations from other users, has been launched and hailed as a ‘Google killer’. It filters out poor quality and irrelevant websites, which its founders claim have overrun the web and dominate search engine results, reports the Daily It works by using humans to pre-select the most useful sites on key topics and then limit searches to those alone.

• So-called 'content farm' websites, which are manufactured to score highly on searches but have little real information will be weeded out, as will pornography and spam.

• According to Blekko’s founder Rich Skrenta to goal is no less than to ‘clean up web search and get all the spam out of it’.

• On Blekko users can search using a word such as ‘global warming’ and come up with results as per usual.

• Where it differs is with the use of ‘slashtags’, or different words separated by a slash.

Blackberry Storm 2, Bold 9700

Get OS Updates

• Owners of the Blackberry Bold 9700 and the Storm 2 9550 have some good news this Diwali. An official OS update-5.0.0.979 to the Bold's Blackberry OS 5, has been made available in the U.S. which means that the update release is also imminent in India. Its not very clear what the update entails but what we do know for sure is that it isn'tBlackberryOS 6. RIM has also not been very forthcoming about whtherthe Bold 9700 will ever see an OS 6 update although a couple of days back, a leaked version of OS 6 for the Bold was available on the Internet.

• The other phone for which an OS update is available is the Storm 2 9550. However, unlike the Bold 9700, the Storm 2's update isn't official but is rather a leaked version of the OS which brings it to 5.0.0.1015.

Google Limits Facebook Access to

Gmail Contacts• Google Inc. is launching a salvo against Facebook Inc., saying it will no longer allow the

social network to grab information about Google users' social and professional contacts in Gmail, Google's email service.

• Google has always allowed Google users to transfer data, including their contacts, to other websites. Until now, new Facebook users could find out whether their contacts on Gmail also had Facebook accounts, simply by typing in their Gmail user name and password as part of the Facebook signup process.

• That Google policy has helped Facebook grow because it helped new users instantly create a network of friends on the site. Unlike Google, Facebook doesn't allow its users to export their contacts data to other websites.

• With Google becoming more and more interested in social networking and internally developing a competitor to Facebook, people familiar with the matter have said, it has called on Facebook to provide more access to user information

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