Facebook Blocks thousands of Indian users for using the word c*****

This is hilarious, but Facebook has blocked thousands of Indian accounts for using the word “chutia”, which is a Hindi slang. The worst affected are the accounts of subscribers belonging to the Chutia community of Assam.

“‘Facebook has blocked the accounts of all the subscribers belonging to the Chutia community of Assam thinking the names are false and fabricated. For Chutia being an abusive word in the Hindi language, Facebook authorities thought that the account holders are fake and fabricated. But, they are still unknown to the fact that Chutia is an ethnic tribe of Assam which has a rich historical background in the state history.” [All Assam Chutia Students' Union, Aacsu general secretary Jyotiprasad Chutia/source]

The history of Sutiya Kingdom

From Wikipedia, the Chutiya kingdom (pronounced sutiya) was established by Birpal in 1187 in northeastern Assam, with the capital at Sadiya. The Sutiya are an indigenous ethnic group that speak a Tibeto-Burman language. According to tradition, Birpal at first became the chief of sixty families.

The term chutiya is an expletive in Hindi language. The tribal name is pronounced Sutiya and not Chutiya.

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Understanding of local language/history gone terribly wrong? Facebook India team surely needs to give an explanation for this goof-up.

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IAN Invests in Online Hotel Booking Service, StayZilla

Indian Angel Network (IAN) has made an investment in Chennai-based ‘Stays only’ online booking firm StayZilla, that offers value-stays in any district (Zilla) through an inventory of 3751 hotels in 600 towns in India.

StayZilla is started by Yogendra Vasupal, who earlier launched Inasra in 2005 and later, rebranded the service to StayZilla in 2010. The online hotel booking service offers consumers a wide choice of hotels which one can filter based on several criteria like amenities/leisure options/cuisine etc.

An interesting aspect of StayZilla is that they offer you bundled services like pickup from railway station/airport etc, making it much easier to chose them over their competitors.

Last year (August 2011), Yatra acquired MagicRooms, a GDS for hotels floated by ex-Via cofounder, Niranjan Gupta. Unlike online aggregators, MagicRooms was in the business of  distribution of hotel room inventory to offline agents, online portals and corporates – i.e. a pure play GDS service.

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Nokia to shutdown Nokia Money Business (Globally)

Two years after launching its mobile money business, Nokia has decided to exit the mobile money business, as part of its drive to focus on the core key areas.

After several months of pilot, Nokia Money went live pan-India in the month of December 2011 and the service was independent of any particular mobile network, hence extending its reach to many previously ‘underbanked’customers (in partnership with with the Union Bank Money and Yes Bank Money). As part of distribution strategy, Nokia already started pre-loading the app on Nokia devices and its important to note that since the service is was a closed wallet, it didn’t require KYC documentation.

Nokia Money Timeline

- August 27th, 2009: Announced: Nokia Money – Your Mobile will turn into a Wallet

- Feb 15th, 2010: Nokia to Launch Mobile Money in India – In Partnership with Obopay/Yes Bank

- April 30th, 2010: Nokia Mobile Money Project gets approval from RBI

- July 2nd, 2010: Nokia Launches Mobile Money Service in Chandigarh

- December 14th, 2011: Nokia Money goes pan-India.

- March 12th: <eom>.

As per Hindu, Nokia will continue the service for 3-4 months to give enough time for subscribers to use up the money. Also, the handset maker will offer to refund the registration fee collected from the subscribers. It will also approach the Reserve Bank of India to surrender the licence it took for launching the service.

So far, there is no official confirmation on this matter.

Also see: airtel money goes live Pan India. Now transact across 7,000+ outlets

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Baidu: iPhone Now the Leading Handset Bringing Traffic to its Search Engine

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s most-used search engine, has revealed updated statistics showing that the iPhone is far-and-away the biggest driver of search traffic amongst mobile phones in China. Indeed, the iPhone drives three-times more traffic than the next most popular phone on the list, Nokia’s 5233. You’ll have to look down to fifth and sixth places to see any Android phones making an impact on Baidu’s search pageviews:

Comparing the Q4 2011 stats with those from Baidu for the same period of 2010 reveals that the iPhone has surpassed any Nokia device for the first year ever. The old numbers (below) show that Nokia’s influence is dwindling as a whole, but Android (formerly grouped together into just one bar) is slowly gaining strength in China:

Here are some other key stats from Baidu’s report, which was released earlier this month.

Smartphone versus feature-phone usage shows that users of China’s two smaller mobile telcos, China Unicom and China Telecom, are more likely to be searching on Baidu from iPhones or Android smartphones, in contrast to the prevalence of all other platforms (eg: Symbian, a mass of JAVA OS devices, etc) that tend to be feature-phones on China Mobile:

3G usage more than doubled this year, growing steadily as more people switched from the very slowest mobile data. Indeed, we know that China saw 80 million new 3G users come on board last year:

Android and iOS users much more likely to be on 3G, which is no real surprise since many feature-phones do not support it. Interestingly, such smartphones are also much more likely to be used on wifi networks:

Nokia and shanzhai phones are still the leading brands being used to search Baidu, as was the case in Q4 2010. A rag-tag assortment of cheap shanzhai phones still account for 20.4 percent of such pageviews in the most recent stats – but that number is going down at quite a speed. Note from the second pie chart how the numbers are shrinking for the Finnish phone maker as well, dropping 13 percent in the course of a year:

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Baidu’s stats are interesting, and reveal a lot of trends. We’ll check back in on these as new reports get released later in the year. I’ll admit I was astonished that Android wasn’t more prevalent on Baidu’s servers, as the last time we looked at smartphone usage figures in China (from another source) we saw that Android was more than twice as popular for web browsing as iOS.

Nokia’s supremacy shouldn’t be too much of a surprise though. Last summer we crowned Nokia as China’s web browsing king thanks to the humble Nokia 5230. But with Nokia’s sales figures tumbling so terribly in China, its glory days might be over. And this win by the iPhone is the start of that.

For the full PDF report – and others from 2010 and 2011 as well – head to the ‘Baidu Open Mobile’ page.

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China’s Supreme Court Promises to Pay Attention to the Internet

Wang Shengjun

Yesterday, China’s Supreme Court president Wang Shengjun gave the Court’s work report to China’s National People’s Congress. In it, he said something that has captured the attention of Chinese net users:

[...We must] place emphasis on listening to the opinions of the grassroots masses and other strata of society, we must place more emphasis on supervising public opinions about the news, we must pay more attention to the mood on the internet, respond quickly to the concerns of society, and unceasingly strengthen and improve the work of the Court.

It’s a short statement, to be sure, but in the eyes of a Hunan Supreme Court justice who spoke with the Beijing Times, it is suggesting that the Court will push for tighter controls on the internet but that it also may open up some information about high-profile cases in response to the demands of the net-using public. This seems to make sense given the amount of fretting the government has been doing about internet rumors over the past year; the Supreme Court is certainly in a position to squash some of the rumors that crop up with actual evidence, should it deign to release such information to the masses.

But clearly, the Supreme Court is not about to become the Court of Public Opinion. NPC rep Zhou Xiaoguang told the Beijing Times that public opinion was a serious obstacle to the administration of justice, an opinion that seems to be echoed in Wang Shengjun’s comments. It’s likely, then, that the government will take steps to further control internet public opinion.

As for the potential increased openness, we’ll have to wait and see. Increased transparency would be a great way to influence public opinion without censoring it, and I imagine it would be quite well-received online. But, uh, probably don’t hold your breath waiting for it. What people say at the NPC is one thing; what the government actually does is often quite different.

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