—STAR India has signed a 12 month alliance with Online Travel Agent (OTA) Yatra.com to offer air travel reservations, hotel bookings etc on STARs GPRS based mobile platform PLUS. STAR already has other OTAs - MakeMyTrip and TravelGuru already on board. Yatra has its own GPRS based application as well, so I guess it’s about being on as many locations as possible.

—Web18’s financial portal Moneycontrol.com has launched its own mobile application called Markets On Mobile. I’d tried to download the application yesterday (SMS MOM to 52622) but had some problems - the WAP site didn’t detect my phone (N95) and start the download like it happens in most cases, and I couldn’t find a link for downloading. I informed them, and it appears to be working fine today. The application itself seems spiffy, offering News, Markets Statistics, Indices, Market Outlook, listings of stocks and a watchlist via GPRS. However, the portfolio tracker requires a pre-existing moneycontrol.com ID to work - one can’t sign up and host a portfolio using the application. Reliance Money had also recently launched an application for financial information.