Comdex India snippets

IndiaPlaza.com (www.indiaplaza.com), an Internet retailer of Indian products has announced that it will start the new concept of theme-based retailing on its site. "An example of theme-based shopping," said Davinder Luthra, Chief Technoloy Officer, IndiaPlaza.com, "might occur if I were planning a wedding. There would be a variety of tasks that I would have to take care of, including catering, invitations, gift registries, etc. It will be our endevour to satisfy our customers’ needs at a single one stop source, IndiaPlaza.com.

The company of date has about 50 thousand products that are available from the site. These include CDs, DVDs, books, watches, cameras, gold jewellery, diamonds, furniture, luggage, perfumes, etc. It plans to increase this number to a lakh by the end of this fiscal. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, US; London, UK; and Mumbai and Bangalore in India.

IndiaPlaza.com has tied up with a number of vendors and manufacturers of various products for supplying the goods. As of now, the mechanism of buying in India is payment on delivery, but once the cyber laws are passed and implemented, online credit card payments will be allowed. Apart from targeting the end-users through this site, the company also offers merchant affiliate programs in the Asian Indian online Web market. As of now, there are 500 affiliates of the company. This number is expected to increase to 1,000 in the coming fiscal. Under this affiliate program, IndiaPlaza provides its transactional infrastructure and e-tailing expertise to online retailing sites.

Nucleus launches Mobile Banking

Nucleus Software, a company which is into banking automation and other software solutions, has recently launched its Mobile Banking solution. This solution enables banks to extend the financial applications to remote users, giving access anytime, anywhere on any Short Message Service (SMS) and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) device.

With Mobile Banking, users will be able to access Web-based interactive information services and applications from the screens of their mobile phones. These include corporate solutions like e-commerce transactions, stock updates and trading and banking services. Mobile Banking is a part of the Enterprise Platform launched by Nucleus.

NDS, a company that provides open solutions for the secure delivery of entertainment and information to TVs and PCs, has launched its Provider Business Applications subscriber management system in India. Provider Business Applications allows multiple, multiple accounts and multiple payment methods for each customer. Provider allows you to package subscription products with ease and in pay-per-view. It can support a number of products at any one time.

With Provider, broadcasters can insert messages in the electronic program guide which can be delivered to individuals or groups of subscribers. Subscribers can check their account, authorize payment and even order programs using their PC and the system’s Internet interface. Pay-per-view and interactive services like home shopping, banking and gaming are standard in Provider Business Solutions. NDS is also on the lookout for Indian partner/s for co-development and localization of Provider.

Motorola ING has launched Motorola’s two new multi-service access routers–the Vanguard 6435 and Vanguard 6455. Convergent Communications India Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based networking solutions provider will distribute, market and provide the technical support for the products in India. Tesla Lee, Regional Country Manager, Motorola ING made the announcement at IT World ’99 Comdex India.

Vanguard 6435 and 6455 are designed to handle multiple serial protocols with voice and LAN traffic over dedicated or switched connections. The routers support voice over IP as well as voice over frame relay. Soon these routers will offer ATM and ADSL capabilities as well. Besides voice over IP, they also provide RTP header compression as well. According to Venkat Kedlaya, MD, Convergent, "These routers deliver 15,000 packets per second and with 100base T connectivity as an option, provides the best price to performance for customers looking for flexible but high performance applications." The routers with basic configuration start at Rs 3 lakh and go as high as Rs 7-8 lakh.