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From TOI: Indian Railways plans to provide Internet connectivity in passanger trains in India. The facility will be first provided in premier trains like Rajdhani and Shatabdi and will be later rolled out to other Express and Mail trains as well. So the day is not far when you can use your laptop and be connected to the world while travelling across the length and breadth of the country in Indian trains.

In some ways Indian Railways has pioneered the ecommerce boom in travel sector by being the largest revenue generator in e-ticketing. Lets hope that with this project, they kick start an era of ubiquitous Internet connectivity in India.

As the About section of this blog says, the aim of this blog is to provide news and analysis of the latest happenings in the industry, I realized I have been mostly doing the second part i.e. “analysis” more than the “news” part. From today I am going to start publishing top news in “weekly digest” format. Once every week, there will be roundup from last week on the latest and the greatest happenings in the industry. And then there will be regular “analysis” type posts commenting and speculating on the consequences of the happenings. I think this should provide the readers with a good overall grip on whats going on right now and whats coming in the future. In addition to this, I will also keep updating the Resources section which will be sort of a one-stop shop for looking up info about the current companies and startups. Please comment what you feel about this format and if you would rather like to see something else or in some other format.

Alright without any further ado, here’s the buzz from last week:

BusinessWeek has an excellent article on the resurgence of tech entrepreneurs in India in its last week’s issue. It comments on how the number of startups springing up is increasing every day since the last dot com bust. And why will this not happen when all the top VCs from Silicon Valley and other places are lining up to fund the best of the best companies. The article goes on to give examples of a lot of new startups and in the end also cautions that we need to invest more in research in academia and produce at least one big winner (e.g. Skype) to keep the party going. Read the full article here [free registration reqd].

Interesting war of words between MonsterIndia and Naukri. MonsterIndia president claims in a interview with BusinessStandard that they are bigger than Naukri based on certain figures. Naukri responds back saying how those numbers do not exactly mean that.

ContentSutra reports MakeMyTrip raises $10-$15 million in funding from Helion ventures, Sierra and SAIF partners. Once again proves how hot is online travel segment getting. Check out the resources section - in travel sector we’ve got all the big VC’s, including Sequoia, KPCB, Norwest, Reliance cap, etc.

More VC money flowing in. Web18 group (moneycontrol.com, commoditiescontrol.com, cricketnext.com, compareindia.com, jobstreet.com, yatra.com, tech2.com has raised $10 million from Tracer Capital.

MIH India launches a new social networking portal called ibibo. This is another sector that has just too many players (check out the complete list here). It will be interesting to see who emerges as India’s MySpace and Facebook.

Rediff has an interview with Mahesh Murthy, entrepreneur and CEO of Pinstorm. He talks about entrepreneurship, search marketing and growth of Internet in India.