99labels is founded by three partners; Ishita Swarup, Ankur Prakash and Anchal Jain, with Ishita as its CEO.

The venture works on an ‘event based sale’ module that revolves around sales that last anywhere between five to seven days wherein the ‘members only’ website will notify it’s users about upcoming sales a couple of days in advance. 99labels promises an interactive ‘online showroom experience’ where members can evaluate a product with options like zooming in, size matching systems and guide charts specific to individual brands with multiple payment options like cash on delivery, net banking and credit card payments.

Click here to get an overview of the module and service on offer at 99labels.

The ‘Reserve Now’ feature can be used for movies, plays, and documentaries that are under the ‘Available’ status in queue. Consumers that avail of this feature will receive the reserved title on the next delivery cycle, which is within one business day. Pankaj Chandra, Chief Lead-Online Movie Rentals, BIGFlix.com, mentioned, “There is always a continuous process involved at our end to understand the consumer mindset of what he is looking for, right from registration to consumption. It is with this effort that we have been able to launch this unique feature and we will continue to introduce many more features that make the overall movie rental experience personalized and exciting.”

Launched in 2008, BigFlix movie rentals is a subsidiary of Reliance Big Entertainment and has rapidly grown into a service that offers the biggest range of home video content across 13 Indian languages and various genres, offering close to 21,000 titles. BigFlix’s current membership base is around 80,000 within India offering their services via multiple interfaces like retail stores, online home delivery service and call centre. As far as physical locations (stores) go, BigFlix has roughly around 95 stores in 10 cities; Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata and Indore.

Q What was the purpose for creating a women centric ad channel, can you highlight potential clients/market segments?

With more and more companies from various industries especially FMCG, Consumer Durables and Retail moving a chunk of their marketing efforts online, we felt a need to create a women channel with a significant set of publishers to reach out to Indian Women online.

Q Can you take us through the websites within this channel and are they bifurcated into sub-categories?

We have aggregated women centric inventory and segmented it into Eva – Fashion, Eva – Home and Eva – Health collating sites which focus on fashion, style and accessories; family, cooking, parenting and children; health, hygiene, nutrition and exercise respectively. The channel includes some of the most popular sites in India including IndusLadies, IndiaParenting, SanjeevKapoor.com and Evesindia.com among others.

Q On the strategic tie-up with About.com & its contribution to Eva as a platform?

The Eva Channel has also forged a strategic alliance with About.com for exclusive inventory on its Web site for India. About.com is a Web site focused on delivering high quality, credible content, on a broad range of topics that are personally relevant to its users. The women channel of About.com generates millions of page views per month, and receives a significant traffic from India. This would be an attractive proposition for advertisers in the FMCG, consumer goods, healthcare and other industries who are looking at targeting women consumers through the internet.

Q Any international websites on the list?

We are in talks of adding international publishers as well. However, currently we have about.com as of now

Q What type of inventory does Eva provide?

Currently the inventory largely consists of banner ads. However, we would expand this with other options including Video as and when the opportunity arises.

Q What is Eva’s reach & projected growth in the near future?

We intend to build on the existing cluster of publishers under this channel and increase the reach to 8 million by the end of June 2010.

Saurav Chakraborty, Associate GM at Digital Direction took us through the nitty-gritties that helped the agency bag an award for their local execution of the multinational campaign.

Target Audience & Campaign Objectives:
The campaign was targeted to 30+Males, SEC A (Decision makers/Decision influencers) and revolved around three objectives – Awareness, Engagement, and Participation.

Inventory Used:
“To achieve all the three above, we needed to operate the campaign at the optimum Reach and Frequency levels. A combination of ‘Regular Banners’ and ‘Innovations’ was pertinent.”
The campaign was targeted at popular Indian and International portals that fell within the Business, News, Finance, Trading and Vernaculars categories. International sites such as Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Financial Times were used to target ‘high net worth individuals’ from India.

Key Tactics Employed:
* Yahoo Answers India (Q&A forum) ‘Environment Section’ was booked on a month long sponsorship which included a fixed banner on the ‘Answers Environment Home Page’ and 4 sponsored questions asked by Siemens on the forum.

* NDTV Advertorial Page was used on ‘World Environment Day’ with ‘call to action’ banners that led the viewers to Siemens’ Advertorial Page which comprised of articles on environmental issues, endeavors taken by Siemens to provide answers to such issues, online polls and a link to the Siemens India Website.

* Financial Express, a leading financial portal was booked for a 5 day Page Warp (all four sides of the portal will consist of the client’s communication)

The Result:
“The Siemens Answers Campaign generated 130 million impressions to the ‘Target Audience Set’ and induced 0.6 million audiences to visit the Siemens Answers microsite. The Campaign CTR was steadily over 0.40% with an average of 4+ minutes spent on the Siemens microsite.”

Google’s movie search service for mobiles is available in English initially and has commenced in Canada, United States, Ireland, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. To avail of the service, users need to access Google.com via their handsets, search for movies and enter the ‘more movies’ link according to Nick Fey, team member at Google Mobile. “From there, you can either browse a list of movies or select the ‘Theaters’ button to browse a list of theaters near you,” Fey wrote on the Google Mobile Blog.

Another feature added to complement this new service is the ‘Mobile Movie Trailers’ page that lets users play trailers of the latest movies on their phones and select movies by genres, all while accessing important information about the film such as movie ratings etc. Fey mentioned, “Just touch the poster or movie title and you’ll see our new movie-details page that has a synopsis of the movie, a more detailed list of showtimes, the cast and crew, and pictures.”

Google’s continuous development has highlighted newer ways to deliver relevant search information to users as well as create lucrative advertising space while at it according to Vice President, Susan Wojcicki’s statement, “As we continue to think up innovative ways to give you the information you want, you’re likely to see even more ad formats until we pinpoint the most useful, relevant and engaging ones”

Facebook’s feed stories have a reduced number of images that appear by default from three images previously to just one, with the addition of a ‘See More’ link that allows users to expand all three images in line. This step was taken by the social networking website since they felt the previous module rendered spam-like feeds which were a world away from their own simpler feed stories. Since previously, most applications were utilizing three images at the maximum size permissible in a bid to attract clicks/views in the stream; the revised parameters also saw a reduction in image size to 90×90 pixels with approximately the first 300 words reflecting in the feed stream. Lastly, regarding status APIs, Facebook mentioned, “We will still publish stories that call users.setStatus and status.set, but encourage all developers to migrate to the stream publishing methods, as they let you set a user’s status easily.”

To keep yourself abreast with the latest changes incorporated, check the Developer Roadmap section.

The code, that was posted to the BugTraq mailing list on Friday has been reviewed by Vupen Security and is confirmed to have the ability to let the hacker install unauthorized software on the hacked computer. Symantec mentioned on its website, “Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 and we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future.”

The attack code is known to have worked on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 system running IE 6 or IE 7; however no one has been able to confirm if the attack works on Microsoft’s latest browser, IE 8. Symantec mentioned, “To minimize the chances of being affected by this issue, Internet Explorer users should ensure their antivirus definitions are up to date, disable JavaScript and only visit Web sites they trust until fixes are available from Microsoft,”

The ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop held in Chicago last Friday discussed such issues wherein IBM submitted one of the several papers presented on the issue, highlighting previous research on introspection as the best tool to be incorporated in cloud settings like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. J.R. Rao, Senior Manager, Secure Software and Services, IBM said “In clouds, the barrier to entry is lower, and the thing customers are most concerned about is their information. We want to make sure their information is handled in a manner consistent with their expectation of security and privacy,”

The research by IBM was conducted at its Watson Research Center and Zurich Research Lab leading them to develop a system called ‘introspection monitoring’ which enables the cloud with abilities to scan virtual machines, determining which operating system is being utilized and if its functioning optimally (frisking for malicious codes) Radu Sion, computer scientist at Stony Brook University added, “It works by looking inside the virtual machine and trying to infer what it does. You don’t want malicious clients to give you all kinds of malware in their virtual machines that you will run in the cloud. Today the cloud does not offer privacy, so we might as well use the lack of privacy for introspection”

IAmAGenius’ monthly winners are showcased on the ‘Hall of Genius’ section within the website and every participant that passes level 1 has the chance to become the member of a parallel digital world called ‘Digital Geniuses’. Launched on the 26th of September 2009, the digital world received close to 4000 hits a day and is meant specifically for the quiz contestants. When asked about the purpose behind the website, Dhananjay said, “Imagine how it would be if the able, interested, intelligent and knowledgeable like minded souls get to interact with one another freely. It would definitely make a world of a difference to the real world that we live in. Thekkiam and Digital Geniuses would definitely help bring this above said community closer to one another. This site helps one send & receive mails within the community, create and join Groups and Companies, make friends, Blog, 2weet, Advertise, inform events, hold their thoughts etc., – all under one roof. Also, DeeGees (digital money earned through ‘IAmAGenius’ contests) helps one determine their strength in the community.”

Dhananjay works as an online consultant for an advertising agency in Chennai and a BPO at Bangalore. Over the years the 40 year old Civil Engineer has worked in varied advertising fields (Mainline, Direct Marketing, Outdoors and Online) gaining expertise in Oracle 8.0, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, VB, ASP, XML, Adobe and Macromedia software. Both Thekkiam and Digital Geniuses are an independent project with merely designing duties being outsourced. As far as monetization goes he mentioned, “Presently, all the expenses for the sites have been borne by me as I’m able to afford my personal expenses and also the managing of the sites, I do not plan to monetize if this continues. But in due course, if the site expands and it grows beyond what I could afford, I might think of monetizing” Meanwhile the ‘one man workforce’ continues to develop newer projects ‘Parallel Time Zones’ and ‘Many More Lives’, both of which we will be looking forward to eagerly.

Adobe’s latest offerings (Flash 10.1 and Air 2.0) support multi-touch/gestures and have incorporated a global error handler enabling devs to write a single handler that processes all runtime errors. Adobe has also added the GPU acceleration for H.264 video (timed well with YouTube’s 1080p HD video release) unfortunately this feature will initially be available exclusively on Windows.

Air 2.0 beta has new bits like Open document API, Native process API, Mass storage device detection etc that help transform it into a software with better networking capabilities. Both the products (Flash 10.1 and Air 2.0) are available for free download at the Adobe Labs download section.