Yahoo! has termed India as the "next big opportunity". Yahoo! India is gearing up for competition after its traditional US rival AOL launched India operations last month.

On the eve of launch of AOL.in, Yahoo! India announced two new service offerings and some organizational initiatives. Yahoo! officially launched beta versions of Yahoo! Our City and Yahoo! India Maps.
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AOL launched its India portal aol.in recently. It will be AOL's first portal in Asia, outside US and Europe.

The AOL India portal offers all the usual features like email, instant messenger, mobile services and video. It also has some India-centric content like CityGuide, Bollywood, Gurus and Cricket. While AOL does not plan to be an ISP in India, its portal content will be written in Indian languages.
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PC World India has announced the Best Indian Websites 2007 Web awards. In its first year, the award focused on 20 prominent categories with 126 nominees. Although the parameters for judging were not clear, popularity and traffic do not constitute part of the criteria.
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Sony has launched the PlayStation 3 in India, nearly six months after its release in Japan, Europe and the US.

Apart from gaming, PS3 offers playing of movies and songs as well as Internet access. But is that a good enough reason to price it higher by US$300 than rival Microsoft's Xbox? The price of the PlayStation 3 in India is Rs39,900 (US$975), while the Xbox is available in the range of Rs19,990 (US$488) to Rs27,750 (US$677).

The games for this console will cost around Rs2,799 per unit. Xbox 360 games cost between Rs1,499 and Rs2,510. One needs to pay an additional Rs2,990 for a SIXAXIS wireless controller and Rs1,990 each for a Blu-ray remote control and HDMI cable.
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The Government of India is planning to introduce free 2Mbps broadband by 2009 through government-owned telecom operators BSNL and MTNL. Similar to free municipal broadband in some US cities, the idea is to boost economic activity in general.

It expects to be able to achieve this goal by spending a portion of the corpus of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF). All telecom operators contribute 5 percent of their revenues every year to USOF. USOF is meant to subsidize BSNL/MTNL and other telcos for providing telephony in unprofitable rural areas. It is estimated that the sum not utilized from the USOF has touched Rs90 billion (US$2.15 billion) in March 2007.
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