Facebook Buys IRCTC Website

 Realizing the fact that Indians end up making friendship with their co-passengers during train journeys, Facebook has decided to buy IRCTC – the train ticketing website of Indian Railways – to improve the network of friends of Facebook users.

The social networking website has offered 5 billion USD – five times it has offered to pay to Instagram  – to buy out IRCTC, which has been accepted by the Railway Ministry, sources say.

“Since train fares were not increased for most of the traveling classes, we thought this was the best way to increase revenues,” a source at Railway Ministry confirmed the deal with Facebook, “And we are just selling the website; ownership of the Indian Railways remains completely with the government.”

Post this acquisition, every user will need a Facebook login to book train tickets through IRCTC. In fact, he’d need to mention Facebook login details of every passenger who’d be traveling on that ticket.

The moment a confirmed ticket is booked, all the passengers traveling on that ticket will be added to the friend-list of those who would be traveling on adjacent berths.

“A user will get an automatic message from newly added friends like – Hi! I’d be traveling with you on the Side Upper seat of Radjhani Express next month. Let’s connect! – and they can start getting friendly so that there is no awkwardness during the journey,” a Facebook official explained the ‘benefits’ to the end user.

“Newly friended users can play card games on Facebook as rehearsal of what they could be doing during the actual journey, or they can just start chatting,” the official further enumerated the benefits.

The Facebook official clarified that a friend added through the IRCTC website can’t be removed till the train journey is completed or till either of them canceled their confirmed ticket.

“We are looking into cases where a passenger could exchange berths with another during the journey. We’ll make sure that the ‘right’ friends are added to a user network so that the train journey is truly enjoyable,” the Facebook official told Faking News.

The official rejected privacy concerns, claiming that passengers traveling by Indian Railways were already exchanging crucial contact details like email addresses and phone numbers at the end of the journey.

“We are just helping them stay connected,” he said.

Facebook is confident that the step will help them grown their reach in India and witness increased activity by thousands, maybe millions of users, who will be getting new friends each day.

“I am sure that Indian users will ‘like’ this feature, especially those guys who spend like hours at the gates of the railway coaches staring at the reservation chart to find out if any girl has been allotted a berth near to them,” an IRCTC official said.

From,

Smit


Thanks: http://www.fakingnews.com/2012/04/facebook-buys-irctc-to-promote-social-networking-in-trains/

IPL 5 will give Emraan Hashmi of the Match

In order to encourage people to buy tickets to watch IPL matches, BCCI has decided to award viewers in the stadium after each match. Five deserving spectators will be chosen after each match in IPL-5 for awards that have been named after some celebrities. In fact, these awards have been sponsored by these celebrities, who will be paying the sponsorship fee to BCCI, making it even richer.

A team of experts having an eye over spectators in various stands will be deputed and these experts will submit their report after every match, which will have recommendations for various awards. For now, IPL-5 will have the following awards for the spectators in the stadium:

Emraan Hashmi of the Match:this award will be won by the person, who will be spending more time ogling the cheerleaders than watching the match. This is expected to be the most competitive category, and most likely the winner could be a man, despite homosexuality being decriminalized. However, experts don’t rule out a woman winning the award in Chennai Super Kings matches, where one sees male cheerleaders. Sources say that the sponsorship amount will be paid by Mahesh Bhatt     to promote his upcoming movie Jannat 2.

Deve Gowda of the Match: the award will be won by someone who’d sleep off even during a Twenty20 match. BCCI clarified that their intention was not to encourage people to sleep off during matches, but the sponsorship amount was too lucrative for the board to ignore. Deve Gowda refused to comment whether he approached BCCI or some middleman approached him for this sponsorship opportunity.

Digvijay Singh of the Match: this will be won by the person who will come up with a conspiracy theory to defend the loss of the team he or she supported. Calling the cricketers of the rival team as RSS agents will not help anyone win the award as BCCI wants people to think out of box. Sources say that Vinod Kambli also wanted to sponsor this award but he couldn’t better Digvijay Singh’s offer. Apparently Kambli has asked BCCI to give the Digvijay Singh of the Match award to person constantly on phone, and name this conspiracy theory creator award after himself.

Suhel Seth of the Match: will be handed over to the person with a strong opinion on everything happening on the ground and around. The person, who’d always find fault with a captain’s team composition, field placements, scheduling of bowlers, etc. and would keep cribbing about ground conditions, flood lights, and dressing sense of the person in front of him would be favorite to win this award.

Shahid Afridi of the Match: the only Pakistani involvement in this year’s IPL will be this award, which will be handed out to a person claiming to have seen things that nobody else could see in the stadium. This is inspired by Shahid Afridi’s claim of watching Sachin Tendulkar’s leg shake while facing Shoaib Akhtar. People claiming things like, “abbey, did you see? That girl in the fifth row kissed her boyfriend!” would also be eligible for the award, BCCI clarified.

BCCI, which sold off TV rights to Star TV for a whopping Rs. 3,851 crore rupees, refused to divulge the sponsorship amounts of the above awards, but sources say that they will definitely help the board recover their office expenses and salaries of experts who’d keep an eye over the spectators.

Sources further claim that the board rejected the idea of a Manmohan Singh of the Match award for a spectator keeping mum throughout the match.

With Thanks : http://www.fakingnews.com/2012/04/ipl-to-give-emraan-hashmi-of-the-match-award-to-spectator-checking-out-cheerleaders/