Entertainment content provider, Hungama has announced TuneWiki application that provides real-time, subtitled lyrics of music and music videos.

TuneWiki provides subtitled and translated lyrics through a wiki which features more than 600,000 contributors. TuneWiki’s social music player combines subtitled lyrics with users’ stored music, internet streaming radio, and music videos. Lyrics are translated into more than 40 languages.

Users can access and download music from the Hungama storefront to enjoy a seamless music experience. This initiative will enable Indian music lovers to get the latest and the best in music complete with subtitled lyrics and social features.

Commenting on this initiative, Siddhartha Roy, COO, Hungama Digital Media said, “So far music has been driven by traditional media players in India. TuneWiki offers an innovative music player that simplifies the user experience and provides access to an enormous lyrics database. The use of data-intensive features, such as subtitled lyrics and lyric translation, requires a high-quality application that can seamlessly support these features, and TuneWiki is the partner that makes it possible to offer our users an even better mobile music experience.”

Users can access Tunewiki application via a subscription model at Rs 5 a day, Rs 10 a week, or at Rs 30 per month. This application is compatible with all Java enabled handsets that include major mass market and premium handset models making it a largely usable proposition.

Social networking is the most preferred activity of a majority of mobile users around the world who surf internet on their handsets, a survey has revealed. And, Facebook has come as a clear leader among all the social networking sites.

In India, Facebook is used by 42 per cent of mobile users but only accounts for 27 per cent of all mobile page views in the country. Facebook is also the second most popular site visited by Opera Mini users from India according to the ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report conducted by Opera Software.

“Only 27 per cent mobile page views for the 2nd most popular domain, Facebook, is not surprising. Traditionally Indians are known to spend their time on search and email related activities on the mobile web,” said Sunil Kamath, director of sales for India and SAARC, Opera Software.

“With the boom in the handheld-devices market, Indians have shown a major transformation in usage patterns. Today, availability of content and ease of access have catapulted a range of content-rich portals to rise up in the most visited domains list.” Kamath added.

According to the report, Facebook has witnessed 1686 per cent increase in its share since April 2010, while its competitor, Orkut’s page-view growth since then declined by 0.7 per cent in India.

Twitter has also seen and impressive 191 per cent increase in page-view since April last year.

Among the top 10 popular domains, download portals such as Mobile2day, Getjar and Zedge stand tall in the list. Other content-rich portals that are popular include YouTube, Wikipedia, Vuclip and search favourite Google.
Google.com was the most visited website by users in India on their mobiles, while Facebook, Youtube, Orkut, mobile2day.com, vuclip.com, getjar.com, Wikipedia, zedge.net, and yahoo.com comes in that order.

Google is set to reveal its digital wallet feature in New York on May 26. The digital wallet will allow users to pay for items through their Android phones. According to a Reuters report, the service will initially be available on phones from Sprint Nextel Corp.

The mobile payment system from Google will be powered by Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and will help users reduce dependence on credit cards for shopping. The technology enables mobile phones to transmit data to other devices from a distance of about four inches.

It allows users to pay for retail items by holding their phones close to a specialised reader at the payment counters of stores, theatres and other such commercial outlets.

Google will work with Mastercard and Citigroup to develop the system. The mobile payment system was first conceptualised about 10 years ago, and it is yet to become as commonplace as credit or debit cards are.

According to a Gartner Research Report, mobile payment systems using NFC are likely to reach $245 billion by 2014. As is typical of Google, the database generated by such payments is expected to be shared with retail businesses for generating targeted advertisements.

In India, the financial giant Citigroup had already conducted a field trial of the service way back in 2009 in partnership with Nokia, Mastercard, Vodafone and Vivotech in Bengaluru. Known as Tip and Pay, the pilot programme allowed users to make payments at department stores, restaurants and fast food chains, book stores, food courts and multiplexes.

Google’s effort, if successful, has the potential of making its way to India too considering Citigroup’s programme. Google in any case has a global footprint so its presence in India is a likely possibility.

Mango update of Windows Phones, which was launched recently, has brought several interesting features with it including the Bing Vision, which allows you to search for things using the device’s camera.

It looks like the human eye; users just need to tap it to scan something with the help of the phone’s camera. The feature is basically inspired by Google Goggles, though the user Interface looks better than it. Users can still see the search categories even as the camera keeps running, on a semi-transparent layer.

The difference with Google Goggles is, users could take pictures of any old object in Goggles, whereas Bing allows users to scan only visual codes which are associated with book, movie or anything similar.

Even after taking the pictures, users don’t need to wait, the search results just pop up quickly. But then, the results depend on the data connection quality as well.