Sony PlayStation has launched its second Indian game Desi Adda: The Games of India. The game can be played on PS2 and PSP is available in four languages: English, Hindi, Punjabi and Tamil. GameShastra, an Indian game studio, took 16 months to develop this game for Sony. The game is available at Rs. 499 for PS2 and at Rs. 999 for PSP. (More on Livemint)
Orkut Gets A Facelift
Facing tough competition from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, Google has revamped Orkut, integrating it with its other services. The new Orkut loads faster, and promises a user-friendly interface and some new features. Orkut at present has around 80-100 million active users. (Read more at IBT)
New MSN Portal
Microsoft Corp. has redesigned MSN website to get users to use its new search engine Bing more. Bing which was launched in June remains third in search after Google and Yahoo. The old blue background and stack of menus has been replaced with a white background and simpler links across the top. In a column on the right-hand side of the page, Microsoft displays Hotmail e-mails and status updates on Facebook, Twitter and its own “Windows Live” service. This improved Msn.com is rolling out to a small percentage of U.S only and won’t appear for everyone until early 2010. (Read more here)
Ericsson On India
Communications network provider Ericsson is betting big on multimedia business in India. Ericsson has been witnessing a growth of around 20-25% in this segment globally. (Read more at The Financial Express)
MapmyIndia ties-up with Survey of India
MapmyIndia, a GPS navigation services provider, has announced a tie-up with Survey of India. As per the terms, MapmyIndia can use and provide value added services to Survey of India maps. Survey of India already has a similar tie-up with Hyderabad based GPS provider and competitor to MapmyIndia, SatNav, as reported by Medianama in August, so the deal was not exclusive. In an industry as choked by issues as GPS is in India, will these deals with the government help push things along? Or will the services be launched and fall flat for lack of device support?