A Year & Many More to Go!! Congrats!!

Well its been a year and I’d like to thank all you Indian fringsters for making this possible. My assosiation with fring as a local blogger for the fring India blog has been a good run. Its been a real pleasure working towards informing my fellow Indians and seeing adequate participation from regulars at the blog. Wish to continue my stride with the blog and hopefully increase our numbers to help the fring community.

Blog stats stand as, with over a 100 posts and similar number of comments, with 1,793 spam comments protected via Akismet.

Congrats to the fring blog team!

fring German blog completes a year! Guess Whose Next :P

Sebastian over at the German fring blog, completes a year blogging for us.

Reportedly since it’s introduction back in 2007 the German fring blog has kept readers informed and entertained with more than 100 posts. During this time Sebastian also received 194 comments and Akismet blocked 1091 spam comments. This is a great accomplishment for Sebastian and for the German fring Blog.

Well about guess whose next! It is very much my good friend Simon of the South African blog but not before me. I will soon be joining Sebastian in popping a bottle of champaigne & we will together await to congratulate you on the same accomplishment.

Orange Dance Charge!

Orange has come out with a charger that will provide that extra juice for your portable electronics. It has been released in accordance with the music festival which will keep your feet moving and your hands swinging. The Dance Charger is a prototype kinetic charger. With assist by GotWind, the 4.25 x 2.5-inch / 180-gram velcro and elastic band converts your chemically-fueled, backbeat twitches into electrical current with the help of a system of weights and magnets. This in turn charges an embedded battery for topping off your portable electronics throughout the multi-day music festival.

Now this music festival isn’t happening in India but one can be sure to use this come December at Goa’s Sunburn trance festival. I find it pretty much applicable.

Digg-ing fring?

Mashable.com along with Ayelet Noff aka Blond2.0 recently embarked on a media tour of Tel Aviv, there was no bypassing fring on this tour and with a just little help from the fring team Ayelet compiled the interview below.

As you can see Ayelet really Diggs fring! If you also fringen Digg us, please show your support by following this link and Digging us today.

A chat with fring about fringAPI

We have Roy and Sagi talk about the new fring API.

This is so exciting considering the fact that India in the IT sector sees a lot of its business come in the form of outsourcing; especially in the field of software developers. This will help showcase personal talent from the country, internationally. Thanks to the fringAPI platform.

fringAPI & Developers can now share fringing freedom

The release of fringAPI has opened a new avenue for all ya’ll developer peeps out there.

fringAPI opens the fring core network and mobile client, letting basically anyone to come, develop & deploy almost any web application to the fring community. You can develop new apps/addons for fring which will be enhanced by the fring core functionality: including presence, talk, chat, file transfer, auto-roaming and all the rest of it. (i.e. the API provides access to fring client GUI with web browser extensions and basic phone functions).

Now isn’t that a great start!

To kick off this new avenue we’ve opened a new developer site where you’ll find the fringAPI documentation and a simple fringAdd-on™ example. You just need a working knowledge of XML and basic server-side language (e.g. PHP, JSP, ASPX) in order to leverage the API capabilities.

Important! in the coming weeks we will release several examples of fringAdd-ons for users to play with, the full catalog with all the new developed fringAdd-ons will become available around end of July (meaning any add-on you develop from today will be available for all the fring community for end of July).
Second, currently the fringAPI is available for fring client on the Symbian S60 9.2 only, more platform to come shortly.

It’s easy, its liberating and its fringing fun!

Good luck! Go mobile! See you on the other side!

The fringTEAM

Successors to the Successful, Nokia E66 & E71 Announced

Nokia announced the E66 and E71 mobile phones, successors to the successful E65 & E61i. They are sleek business phones; while the E66 sports a slider form factor the E71 sticks to its bar-type form factor with a QWERTY keypad. The E66 has been upgraded with A-GPS and Google maps along with its features getting a face-lift. The E71 on the other-hand has been tuned to deliver a much better multimedia experience, especially with its 3.2MP autofocus camera and LED flash assistance.

Both phones support Nokia’s Intellisync Wireless Email Platform apart from third-party email services. The E66 and E71 are based on Nokia’s Symbian S60 v9.2 and comes with feature pack 2 which has a slightly fresh interface. The phones will be available in the market come early third-quarter of 2008.

Motorola ROKR E8 Launched

Today we seen the latest in the ROKR series of handsets from Motorola launch; the ROKR E8. The handset boasts of lots of features to make it quite the music oriented handset. A touch-sensitive keypad, scroll wheel, and the keypad which reacts to the feature in use. Also, being a music handset it comes with 2GB of internal memory which can be further expanded via microSD slot. FM, Bluetooth A2DP, and a 3.5mm jack keeps the ROKR in-line with its USP.

We had the young Bachan, Abhishek the brand ambassador launch the handset at the Grand Hayatt in Mumbai. Also joining him on stage was Malcolm Dawe from Motorola who announced the Motorola Music Store which has over 350,000 songs which can be purchased via the phone as well as downloadable on a PC. For starters the Motorola ROKR E8 will be sold with a scratch card that will let you download upto 33 songs for free. The ROKR E8 is available in two packages; standard package for Rs. 13,999 and music package for under 15K which features the wireless stereo headset.

Wanted! fringing Olympics Commentators

Ever wanted the whole world to hear your sports play-by-play?

Ever thought to be a commentator but your tongue gets twisted when you try to talk too fast?

Now’s your chance to jump straight to the Olympics no less, even without a Sports Channel CV!

If you’re already booked to go to China to either participate (good luck!) or watch The Games (good for you!), then we may have an offer you can’t refuse. We’re looking for fringsters at the Olympics to share their experiences with the rest of us less-lucky folks who won’t see it live and who can’t be glued to our TVs while at work or running around all day!

We will happily provide the fring Olympics commentators with a 3.5G mobile phone with GPS, camera, local SIM card and (almost) unlimited data plan. In return, the fringCommentator will regularly micro-blog with quick updates & pictures (the winner, the loser, the cutest flag-bearer, the poor girl who lost her swimsuit, the poor guy who dropped the baton in the 4×100 meter final… you get the idea). If you’re a real sports enthusiast you may focus more on the records; if you’re more of a night owl, we may all live vicariously through your night-time escapades in the Olympic village - pics & videos most welcome!

Interested fringentators should apply here with a quick intro why you’d like to play and why you can share regular captivating microblogs from China with other fringsters worldwide. Remember to include your fring ID so we can discuss details.

iPhone 3G: Twice as fast & half the price!!!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone II better known as the iPhone 3G. It’s the basic iPhone plus alot of improvements and the obvious; 3G. What surprises the world is its pricing, which has been slashed by half the price of the current iPhone. The new iPhone is fast and comes with lots more improvements. Here I list a few that stand out; support for 3G, WiFi & EDGE networks, GPS, Multi-tasking with simultaneous voice and data communications, iPhone 2.0 software with SDK, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for over-the-air push email, and lots more.

Another talking point to the 3G iPhone is the all new ‘App Store’ that gives users access to a host of applications related to games, business, news, sports, health, reference, and travel. Overall, the 3G iPhone promises 10 hours of talk time on 2G networks and 5 hours on 3G, with up to 5-6 hours of Web browsing, 7 hours of video playback, and 24 hours of audio playback.

The 3G iPhone will be available in the US on July 11 for a suggested retail price of $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model.

Meanwhile, in India the iPhone is still coming along. Bharti Airtel and Apple have announced that they will be bringing the highly-anticipated 3G iPhone to India later this year. Airtel customers will be able to purchase the 3G iPhone at Airtel Relationship Centers. There has been no word on the pricing of the 3G iPhone in India.

Even Vodafone and Apple will bring iPhone 3G, first to Australia, Italy, New Zealand, and Portugal on July 11. Vodafone will then, later this year, make iPhone 3G available in other markets including the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, South Africa, Turkey, and yeah finally — India . Vodafone customers in India can pre-register online and in retail stores in the next few days. Apart from India, the 3G iPhone will be made available in 69 other countries later this year.