In the month of August 2013, India added a total of 1.84 million new mobile subscribers, taking the total tally to 876.72 million as per the latest TRAI report. This is the 4th consecutive month that mobile subscribers have show positive growth.

Though we are a far cry from what India witnessed in 2010 and 2011, when average subscriber additions every month were over 10 million. Infact, many including myself thought that India would reach the magical figure of 1 bln by the end of 2012. But, in reality those numbers were only inflated numbers, as many inactive numbers were also getting counted.

Since, TRAI came up with the ruling that inactive numbers will not be counted, suddenly those numbers went out of the system and now the numbers reported are nearer to reality.

[Click image to enlarge]

Interestingly, active subscriber base grew quite sharply – Aug 2013 witnessed 4.48 million more active subscribers than previous month ( 735.88 mln in Aug as compared to 731.4 mln in July). The percentage of active subscriber base has now risen to 83.94 percent. This is nearly 10 percent higher than 74.49 percent in June 2012.

Telecom Subscription Data Highlights [Aug 2013]

- With an increase of 1.84 million in Aug 2013, total mobile subscriber base has increased to  876.72 million. India had 874.55 million subscribers by end of July 2013.

- Urban India witnessed an increase of 0.01 percent or 0.05 mln subscribers, while rural mobile subscriber base increased by 0.51 percent or 1.79 mln.

- Urban Teledensity decreased to 139.65 from 139.87 in July, while the rural tele-density increased to 41.05 from previous 40.88.

- Urban mobile subscriber share stands at 59.98% as compared 40.02% of rural subscribers.

- 2.37 million new Mobile portability requests were made in month of Aug 2013, taking the total tally of MNP requests since launch to 100.20 mln.

- Active Mobile Subscriber base increased from 731.40 mln in July 2013 to  735.88 mln in Aug 2013 taking the active percentage to 83.94 percent.

-  Broadband Subscription increased to 15.28 mln from previous tally of 15.24 mln.

- Wireline Subscriber base fell to 29.46 mln in Aug 2013 as compared to previously 29.58 million.

- India's total telecom subscriber base (wireless+wireline) has increased to 906.18 mln in Aug 2013, compared to 904.46 mln in July 2013.

Operator Wise Monthly Additions [Aug 2013]

Aircel has been on top for second month consecutively. In month of July they added 756k subscribers, and in month of Aug they were again on top with 876k new subscriber additions. On the other hand, Vodafone lost subscribers for 2nd month straight, however, it was not as steep as in July.

Unitech was the biggest looser in month of Aug, losing over half a million subscribers followed by Tata, who have been perpetually losing their subscribers over last year and half.

Bharti Airtel remains Indian telecom market leader with 21.93 percent market share, followed by Vodafone (17.60%), Reliance (14.46%) and Idea (14.37%).

Mobile Subscriber Numbers of Top 8 Mobile Operator [July 2013]

1. Bharti Airtel –  192,222,866
2. Vodafone – 154,337,363
3. Reliance – 126,755,483
4. Idea – 126,020,313
5. BSNL – 97,932,747
6. Tata – 63,690,505
7. Aircel – 62,602,380
8. Unitech – 32,253,714

Links To Previous Telecom Subscription Reports [2013]

[Download TRAI Report]

Way back in the year 2005, when Marissa Mayer (who is the CEO of Yahoo right now) was the VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google, she had written a blog post wherein she had emotionally declared that Google will never place any banner ad on their homepage:

It seems Google is abandoning this declaration and slowly turning evil.

It has been revealed that Google is planning to place huge banner advertisements on its homepage, for some specific branded queries.

For example, when one searches Southwest Airlines, here is the format of Google search result page which is being displayed:

Image credit: Search Engine Land

Hence, the Google search results which should actually display more of organic results and less of paid advertisements, will now show 80% paid advertisements and only 20% organic results.

The good thing is that Google is only targeting branded queries for this "full page advertisement" experiment.

Here is another such such search result, this time for "Virgin America"

Image source: SearchEngineLand.com

Earlier, the team at Synrgy had contacted few Google employees, and they unofficially stated that this "brand image experiment" is currently live with around 30 advertisers, which include Crate & Barrel ; Virgin America and Southwest Airlines.

Meanwhile, in a written response to Search Engine Land, Google has officially confirmed that, "We're currently running a very limited, US-only test, in which advertisers can include an image as part of the search ads that show in response to certain branded queries. Advertisers have long been able to add informative visual elements to their search ads, with features like Media Ads, Product Listing Ads and Image Extensions."

Over the years, Google search result page have undergone some tremendous changes. If we look at the search result from 2005, we can get an idea:

Image source: Arstechnica.com

As we can see, 80% of the screen is filled with organic results and the rest is dedicated to placement of advertisements. But over the years, Google has twisted and tweaked its design to accommodate more and more advertisement space and gradually decreasing the space for organic results.

This is the current search result page for "Samsung Galaxy S4".

More than 80% of the screen space in the first fold of search results is filled with advertisements. Now, as if this ratio was not enough, brand searches would now completely fill up the screen.

80 to 90% of Google's revenue comes from paid advertisements on its search results pages and content partner blogs and websites. Hence, it is pretty obvious that Google will want to highlight the advertisements more prominently in order to please the advertisers.

But this is not the case everytime. They are constantly evolving and incubating better and more informative results in the search pages. Some of those redesigns actually helped us to get the more relevant information right there in the first fold.

For example, the inclusion of Knowledge Graph results in 2012 or inclusion of rich snippets and special information right on the first fold, which they introduced last year:

The response to the recent banner related redesign to promote brands is not encouraging. Google shouldn't ignore the users who have made them so popular in the first place.

Here are some related comments curated from various forums and Google official blogs:

It would be interesting to observe how Google responds to this reaction. Whether they are choosing the marketing dollars or love of their fans; it would be a major decision from Google.

What are your views regarding this new change from Google? Do you want it to change? Do share your views!

Whenever we pass through a site where we have to book a ticket or perhaps we are creating an account, we all go through a small question- "Are you a human?" This question is supposed to be answered by giving a correct answer to probably one of the easiest questions you have ever faced since kindergarten.

Many of you might not consider it important. Why would you, it is so easy. A few might even consider it a time waste.

From the company's point of view however, it is one of the most important savior in the internet world. It is the wall that saves their servers from crashing every day because of fake entries.

Bots, as you might have guessed are not humans. They are programs generated by people that can work on a specific task repeatedly. For example, Google uses web crawlers to index the internet due to which we can get millions of pages for our queries. These web crawlers are bots.

Similarly, there can be bots that can be used to do other things including creating fake accounts and even paying for any ticket. Any process that can be repeated can be taught to a bot. It is like creating a macro in excel.

Unlike a human however, a bot (or a script) can be run over and over again and even multiple bots can run simultaneously. This means the bots can take up all the server time and even crash it.

Enters CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA! They add a simple layer of a question that can't be answered by a bot. Thus the process breaks and voila! All is well in the internet world. This is a question that changes every time, is simple enough for any human and very tough for bots. Read this whitepaper for the science behind it.

Currently the most seen is two texts – One is readable by both the bots and the humans while other is slightly distorted in a way that bots can't recognize it while a human can easily read it. Sometimes the first one is not present and only a single text is present (irctc).

While this has served us great so far there are two issues that are creeping up. First is that the CAPTCHA's are sometimes too difficult and distorted for the humans as well. The remedy for this is to refresh to get a new image so it is tolerable.

The second is that the AI (Artificial Intelligence) is becoming smarter at deciphering the CAPTCHAs.

In Google's words-

"Over the last few years advances in artificial intelligence have reduced the gap between human and machine capabilities in deciphering distorted text." Google's security team has been working to improve this situation.

Now, they have come up with an updated system that uses advanced risk analysis techniques. Instead of just the answer, the whole interaction of the user with CAPTCHA (before, during and after) is considered to determine whether he is human or not. This way, the question can be made easier as it serves not as the key but a mere medium to get information of user behavior. Thus, CAPTCHA will become easier for humans while becoming even more difficult for the bots to crack.

Google says that over the next few months, even more updates will be in order.

What is your opinion? Have you ever considered the importance of CAPTCHAs?