In the wake of the Supreme Court verdict in the Ayodhya title suits (also known as the Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid title suits), the government has banned bulk SMS and MMS services — defined as more than 10 messages a day for individuals and 100 for companies — until Sept. 30. This decision effectively shuts down SMS GupShup, an SMS-based social messaging network with 36 million users.

On Sept. 23, the Allahabad High Court deferred its verdict on the Ayodhya title suits, a 60-year dispute between Muslims and Hindus regarding a religious site, until Sept. 28. Violence between Hindus and Muslims flares up around such events in India, and intelligence agencies believe “anti-social elements” and rumor mongers could use text messages and SMS-based networks like SMS GupShup to incite rioting.

A Home Ministry official told The Hindu that intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials would be monitoring SMS and MMS to seek out those fomenting tensions. On Sept. 24, a 24-year-old man was arrested for sending an inflammatory SMS about the verdict under the name of a Muslim member of the Legislative Assembly — this is in addition to the incarceration of 8,000 anti-social elements in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

The privacy infringement of the Indian government’s actions is chilling enough, but the practical fallout is incredible as Indian mobile users employ SMS for everything from train reservations to banking transactions. Besides telecoms, enterprise messaging solution companies and IT companies are taking a financial hit from the ban.

This seems unimaginable in the U.S….

The Indian tablet forgoes a hard drive for a  memory card and actually has an optional add-on solar recharging unit (like WALL-E?) for India’s less developed regions. It ain’t fancy: the tablet can pretty much do word processing, web browsing and video-conferencing.

And check out that no-smudge screen! Wait a minute…

In addition, the government will subsidize the cost for students, bringing the tab down to $20. According to a human resource development ministry spokesperson, several manufacturers are interested in putting the device into production, but no deals have been signed.

I’m sure Apple is shaking in its boots — can you imagine if this thing got out of India? The horror…

Don’t count HP out of the game yet — apparently rumors of the Windows 7-powered tablet’s demise were grossly exaggerated as HP Personal Systems Group Vice President Todd Bradley told the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference yesterday to expect Slate with a Microsoft OS later this year. Only it’s going to be aimed at the enterprise market… Sorry consumers.

But don’t bury your hopes yet: Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm, which was acquired by HP earlier this year, told Fortune that version 2.0 of Palm’s webOS will also be released later this year. So does that mean webOS-enabled HP mobile devices will arrive soon after? Must you keep us in such suspense, HP?

Finally, enjoy this highly irreverent CGI take on Apple’s iPhone 4 trials and tribulations, brought to you by NMA News from Taiwan. It’s not in English, but it’s almost better to imagine what kind of crazy voiceover goes with this bizarre rendering. More videos, such as hilarious CGI coverage of Justin Bieber and Al Gore, can be found at the YouTube channel.

“ByIndia.com continues to grow beyond all of our expectations and the fact that we’ve grown more than 700 percent each and every week for three months really shows that we’re starting to get traction in the Indian internet community,” says Bill Mobley, CEO of Web2Corp, in a press statement. “We’ve also been seeing a lot more people going to our blogs and video sections, taking advantage of our new Web 2.0 products.”

To ensure consistent growth and traffic, the ByIndia folks are launching a $5 million sweepstakes promotion in a few weeks, where new subscribers will receive virtual tickets and be entered in a monthly drawing for an ultimate prize of $5 million.

“We provide the Indian community with a one-stop shop that has all the functionality of a lot of other sites like MySpace.com, Blogger.com, YouTube.com, and eBay.com,” added Mobley. “That convenience and power matters to user, but so does the fact that ByIndia.com is made for Indians, by Indians.”

Well, according to Vinod Bhat (pictured), co-founder of on-demand video service BODVOD, the answer is simple: Bollywood’s presence and distribution is for the most part lacking through the vital media outlets, including cable, online and print.

We’ve seen ZTV, ITV and EchoStar Indian-related programming, but what the New York-based entrepreneur and his cohorts found was that Bollywood films and music were scant or sorely lacking in the digital space, while being relegated to a handful of screens in mid to large markets nationwide.

With that in mind, Bhat & Co. set in motion a strategy to bring Indian movies and music to the masses, first by not only hearing the needs of Bollywood producers, but with the digital content providers stateside. Several meetings and a couple of years later, the result of their discussions and brainstorming was BODVOD, a service which holds exclusive rights to movies, music and TV shows from India, and redistributes the content to cable on-demand, Internet and mobile platforms. Currently with over 30 major distribution affiliates, BODVOD, which counts New York/New Jersey, LA, Houston and Dallas as the largest markets, has not only signed deals with major cable providers, but with online powerhouses including Google Video.

Recently, ADOTAS chatted with Vinod about the state of South Asian media in the US marketplace, the way BODVOD is setting about to change it, the advertising implications, as well as BODVOD’s own branding strategies for 2007.

Hi, Vinod. So what’s the background and strategy of BODVOD?

In terms of what the company does, we hold exclusive rights to a basket of movies and music primarily coming from India—primarily Bollywood music and movies—and we package, distribute and market that on pretty much all digital platforms. Mostly cable video-on-demand, anything delivered using IP protocol—Google Video, iTunes, etc., as well as services run by mobile carriers and also mobile devices.

To date, our distribution is actually in about 11 million households, on all of Time Warner and all of Cox. We’re covering probably around 70% of the South Asian population in the US today. We got into this business really for a variety of reasons. I think when you look at the South Asian market in the country today, it’s probably the most affluent group out of any of the ethnic or even non-ethnic groups that exist. I think the median household income is $68,771 according to the last census update. When you look at education levels, about 61% of them have a college degree. Then on top of that, they’re overall Web and tech-savvy with 81% of them having broadband access in their homes.

It’s a pretty attractive demographic, numbers between 3-5 million people, and tends to be mostly concentrated in or around urban areas—but just across the country entirely. It’s a focused audience, and it’s fragmented when you look at it in terms of the entire audience.

In terms of this audience behavior, Bollywood is the content piece that really transcends all age groups. So it’s not really an older-skewing thing or a younger-skewing thing, it appeals to everybody in the demographic. The primary motive by which people consume this content has been theatrical releases, but there are only about 80 screens in the country that really show Bollywood movies today. But what you’ll notice is that oftentimes, a Bollywood movie will be in the top 20 of a weekend box office gross. It’ll be like #18 or #19, but on a per-screen level, you’ll see that it has among the highest engagement numbers in the industry. So if the average screen pulls in, say, $2,000, the Bollywood movies would be at close to $5-6,000.

The other issue is that the theaters tend to be in down market. So oftentimes, while people might be interested in the content, they don’t necessarily make the trek out to theaters, but they just kind of avoid it entirely. The other aspect of this is really with DVD distribution, and DVDs are not available in a lot of mass-market retail locations like Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy…just because of shelf space issues. Then, the content really isn’t widely available on television at all, and most of the television content like ZTV and Star that have content mostly do a lot of serialized programming—soap operas, sports programming, fashion shows, cooking and other general entertainment. There are certainly movies, but not to the extent that we’re focused on.

What happens is most of these channels are delivered over satellite and not so much available on cable. So, we saw an opportunity that, given the attractiveness of this audience from a demographic perspective, and given the issues with the way in which they currently consume this content, there’s this whole other realm of new media—cable video-on-demand, Internet and mobile, where there was a relative absence of South Asian content. So we wanted to fill that gap.

The New York-based BODVOD distributes content over cable, broadband and mobile, and specializes in redistributing South Asian video for non-Western markets. With the Google deal, the Indian company is the first Bollywood distributor to specifically distribute to North America on a digital on-demand basis.

Google Video distributes both paid and free video content produced by pros, amateurs and folks at home. “Our deal with Google helps us expand into a new market, and it also helps us support our existing cable operator and mobile carrier affiliates,” said Vin Bhat of BODVOD in a statement. “Given Google’s undisputed leadership in search, we will be able to uncover new audiences for the best of Bollywood and other South Asian content.”

While no names or deals were announced, the report points out that like Microsoft before it, Yahoo is intensely eyeing India as an online market and a vital area for the company’s future direction.

Yang stated the obvious to journalists late Thursday evening in Delhi saying, “India is going to be big. In the next five years, India will be among the top three Internet markets.”

Semel added, “We have a strategy of build, buy, and partner globally. In India, we continue to follow the same [strategy]. In the last two days, we have met with many companies for all three strategies, including potential acquisitions.”

The Indian interest follows Yahoo’s well-publicized $1 billion stake in Chinese portal Alibaba.com. But unlike China, Semel said it will be a slower climb to India’s online success.

Yatra offers the standard online travel fare to consumers via its Web site and mobile devices, including reservations from airlines, hotels, car rentals and trains—but it plans to capitalize on a booming Indian travel market that is expected to grow 20% each year within the next five years. According to Reuters, in 2006 the Indian travel market will be worth nearly $40 billion; by 2009 that number will have risen to $50 billion. And by 2015 we can expect to see revenue from foreign travelers sitting at about $24 billion—four times more than is currently the case.

Yatra’s $5 million in funding is the second major influx of cash into the Indian travel market of late: last year, makemytrip.com received a larger $10 million investment from the Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund Partners.