Going to police station to lodge your complaint, worry about uncomfortable interactions may be a thing of past for people of Hyderabad. 

Yes Hyderabad Metropolitan police now have introduced a new way to lodge your complaints or seek emergency assistance. Apart from the Dial 100 service, the police department is launching this new service.

Citizens can now alert police about Terror Alerts such a suspicious baggage, person. They can also use this service to report crime, pass information about wanted criminals, traffic and any other social nuisance. The following options have been publicized as of now and more may be added. So all you Hyderabadis, keep these handy.

Emergency number: 9010100100

Message Prefix Codes:

• te – Terror alerts and complaints
• t – Traffic Issues
• w – Eve Teasing, Harassment of women
• c – any other crime
• n – nuisance

Apart from these police department would send periodic messages to subscribers in different areas about wanted criminals, any alerts etc.

I think this is a very great step in curbing or at least enabling people to participate in crime control. My kudos to Police Department.

Popularity: 17%

When the Sensex swings wildly from day to day, and when the RBI and the Government takes measures to fight the liquidity crunch by cutting down Cash Reserve Ratio and decreasing the interest rates, a common Indian is bound to have questions.

Is it a good time to buy ? Do you think that stock prices will fall even further ? Sensex has taken a big hit, it has lost nearly 50% from its year’s highs – do you think this will continue or will it stop?

Our gut feel is that for long-term investors, now it is an outstanding time to buy. We can’t tell you where the market is going in the short-run. But definitely can assess an opportunity for the future. Unless you need to pull cash out of your account in a big way over the next couple of years, you should be buying.

Specifically, best-of-breed operators with healthy cash flows and strong balance sheets.

There are some outstanding, low-risk values out there today. Blue chips like Reliance Industries, Infosys, Reliance Communications, DLF, L&T, ICSA, Satyam Computers etc boast safe, sizable dividends that will pay you while you wait for the market to turn.

Why settle for a 6% yield when you could lock in a better yield on a blue chip with tremendous upside? It is difficult to believe that these blue chips will not give you more returns than an average Fixed Deposit over a 5 year period.

It takes nerves of steel to buy in this market, but remember that no great investor ever made their fortune buying high and selling low.

So keep making those buying decisions and resist the urge to stash your cash under your mattress. Years from now, when you look back on the decisions you made about your investments, you’ll be very glad you did.

Remember the old saying

Popularity: 18%

This time they are after shaking up the Internet and broadband market of India. Reliance Infocomm has forged an alliance with 5 hardware vendors to offer free laptops with Internet to their customers.The companies, which have entered into this agreement, are Acer, Asustek, HCL, Infosystems and Lenovo.
What we are referring to here is the brand new offer that Anil Reliance Infocomm wants to bring to table for India. 

Image Courtesy: Engadget.com

These devices are expected to have Intel’ ‘Atom’ processor. While it is still not very clear whether these would be a laptops or custom net books, it is very clear that they are soon hitting the market. Acer however seems to have confirmed that it providing net books for this deal.

Reliance believes that with only 12 Million Internet subscribers there is huge potential to take Internet penetration to next level. It is very likely that Reliance would create the sensation that it created in mobile market as this whole deal is priced at Rs. 1500 a month with a contract of 2 years.

While Reliance is doing this, certainly rest of the players in the market will shift gears to do something similar and hopefully consumers will stand to benefit from this.

Very eager to see whole country going Internet savvy! Go Reliance Go!

Popularity: 20%

Reliance Big Entertainment has acquired a majority stake in California based Willow TV.

Willow TV is the world’s leading portal for live Internet streaming of all Cricket events worldwide, and has been providing live streaming video of every major cricket series since 2003. Willow TV claims to have more than a million registered users worldwide.

Apparently the acquisition has been done for Rs.300 crore (approximately 70 Million Dollars)

I have been thinking why would Reliance buy Willow TV. The answer is simple.

Reliance sees opportunities of synergizing its Video Box service which will integrate cricket, movies and TV content in the markets where Willow TV has its presence – to start with in the US, of course. In future, it will also deliver Indian movies from its online movie service, Big Flix

Great news for Reliance fans. Yet another smart move by Anil Ambani !

Popularity: 19%

As I am writing this blog post, there are talks going on between Reliance’s BIG Entertainment and some of the BIGwigs in Hollywood – Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg and their company DreamWorks. They plan to raise 2 Billion dollars – partly in equity and partly in new movie projects. I think the split is a billion each.

Let us take a look at Reliance’s BIG Entertainment network. I will not be surprised if you are flabbergasted!

Online Gaming – Zapak.com

Zapak.com is a gaming portal launched in 2006. This site provides a wide collection of casual games, including those from PopCap Games and Playfirst. The site claims to host the largest collection of online casual games, compared to any Indian gaming website. In Dec 2007, this company made a bid to buy Sony Online Entertainment for about $300 mln

BIG Animation - Anirights.com

AniRights is a digital animation content creation company which forays into animation for theatres, TV, DTH etc.

Movies – Bigflix.com

This is India’s answer to Netflix.com. This is a subscription based movie rental-cum-downloadable site where you can search over 15000 titles and choose the movie you want which gets dropped and picked up as and when you like. A great value for money starting at Rs.299 per month

Radio - BIG92.7FM

The company plans to have a presence in 45 cities, 1000 towns and 50,000 villages reaching about 200 million houses.

Blogging – BIGadda.com

Aah ! This is my favourite adda. Full timepass. This is social networking-cum-blogging-cum-video sharing-cum-photo-sharing platform. This is where Senior Bachhan blogs

Others include

BIG Motion Pictures

Jump Games

BIG Music & Home Entertainment

Key Message

An Indian entertainment company taking on the world. Walt Disney, Sony Entertainment & Time Warner – Better watch out!!!

Anil – May your BIG DREAMWORKS come true !!!

Popularity: 15%