---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Chennai landscape like that of any other city is filled with numerous hoardings. They are fast becoming or maybe it is proper to say already become a part & parcel of our lives. Whether it is while traveling over the Anna fly-over or overlooking the busy traffic signal at Kathipara junction, hoardings are here to stay.
Well that is not exactly what I have in mind. I have no objection to MNCs putting up hoardings all over the city. I would just like to refer to one particular hoarding that grabbed my attention a couple of months back. “Indiatimes e-mail. With APIC advantage, for the first time in India.”, screamed the hoarding with models in trendy clothes to drive home the point. I was intrigued. I went to the Indiatimes site & registered for the free mail account they were offering. It comes with the normal 6 MB of free storage space. The logging in time I found was much faster than any of my other accounts. Thus I assumed that the acronym APIC had something to do with increasing the server throughput. Why hadn’t anyone else thought of this before? Guess nobody was smart enough. But one should never assume or guess with technology.
Recently a fellow blogger brought to my attention the expansion of this much hyped APIC & I was left astounded. APIC, my friends, stands for Auto Phrasing & Instant Chatting. These are features provided by almost all of the free e-mail services. Hotmail provides an excellent but at times irritating Auto Complete feature. Again with Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger & ICQ which have a flourishing user community backed by excellent user interfaces who needs Instant Chatting.
The audacity of Indiatimes to take us for a ride by using aggressive advertising tactics is quite shocking. Who are they trying to fool? Just by wrapping a candy of inferior quality in a colorful wrapper they can sell it to hundreds maybe thousands of people but soon the word is going to be out. The speed just attributes to the fact that there are very few people currently using their mail service compared to the giants Hotmail & Yahoo. With the amount of traffic flowing in and out of their servers it is amazing that we can connect at the speeds that we do.
So people, my sincere advise,(from this particular experience). is that you shouldn’t let the ads fool you. If you find a term that you don’t understand then look it up in Google. Just remember, “Technology can be a real double-edged sword.”
Happy surfing people.
No comments:
Post a Comment