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Your choice: get festive or financial!

For desi experience: An X-Mas e-greetings tool with videos of famous Indian churches and a lay investor’s finance search site.

Bangalore: The UNESCO-supported India Video web resource has dug into its library of clippings covering well-known Indian churches to offer an offbeat Christmas e-greetings tool this year.

Maybe you are tired of jingle bells, cute snow-covered sleighs, chubby red Santas and other stereotypical western images far-removed from the average desi experience. You might enjoy greeting your friends this festive season, sending short videos (of around one minute) capturing the charm of some of India’s most famous churches. You can choose video clips of St. Stephen’s Church, Udhagamandalam; St. Thomas Mount, Chennai or St. Philomena’s Mysore. You can also choose a montage of clips from churches in Kerala or Goa.

Kerala-based users are also able to select videos which feature extracts from the actual midnight mass or pathira kurbana at some well known churches in the State. The free resource ( www.indiavideo.org/greetings/christmas) is fuelled by the Thiruvananthapuram-based Invis Multimedia.

From Guruji, first Indian crawler-based search engine, comes a new service at year-end, angled at lay investors who want to keep track of stocks and share movements of interest to them without having to wade through a lot of information of interest only to professionals.

A simple search box allows you to get a quote for any traded company, while movements on global and Indian exchanges can be tracked in real time through graphics and numbers. No eye candy, no lectures from ‘experts’; only information, presented in stark simplicity.

Guruji co-founder and chief executive Anurag Dod says the aim is to help retail investors make their decisions, without overwhelming them with information. Try it out at http://finance.guruji.com/.

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