E-Pao! - a journey through 2008
- IX Anniversary -

"Hello everyone! Are you having a good time?"
A popular opening line often heard during a rock concert which many a Manipuri are already familiar with. The line was recently added into the Bollywood vocabulary too as the vocalist of the band in the movie mouthed these words as he steps into the stage for a performance.

E-Pao! would also like to ask you if you have had a good time with e-pao in the past year? We are hopeful that you did. Going by the sheer number of additions and updates we managed to pack in this year. And most of them are borne out of your suggestions.

For starters we had revamped the look of the site. We have moved into the tabs design to accomodate the ever increasing volume of information that e-pao carries. Thats again thanks to the many contributors. We have now moved the photo updates and the exclusive launches of e-pao into different listings from that of the hotspots listing. The three types of News (headlines, snippets and sports) are also organized into separate tabs. We are also in the process of changing the logo too. Last year, we painted the logo multi-colored as the first step to the change. We are open to suggestions as to what we should do on this task. Your design could be e-pao's logo.

We are extremely happy to bring you the news from the Huieyen Lanpao, one of the oldest newspaper in circulation at Imphal. Huieyen Lanpao has been running the meiteilon news daily for years. Recently, under a new management, they launched their English and Eyek dailies too. Both of them are now available to you through e-pao.net. The eyek news is a feather not only for Huieyen Lanpao but also for e-pao, as it is another milestone for us in our humble endeavour to do our bit to uphold our traditional eyek scripts. We still continue to bring you the news from "The Sangai Express" too and happy to note that many of you are pleased that your news basket is filled with choicest reportings from Manipur.

We are now working on an interactive and online presentation for all of us to get more familiar with the Eyek script. As we work frantically on it this year, we hope it'll be available for you by early 2009.

We launched a section dedicated wholly to the Manipuri film industry and we named it eRang after dabbling with names such as 'ImphalWood', 'emphalwood' and 'e-pao films'. We run profiles of all the players that make up the machinery of the Manipur's film industry apart from the publicly known faces such as the actors, actresses and directors. You could write review of movies and it can be featured here. The most popular film judging by the raves and reviews received about it is "Mami Sami".

The simple "eMing" application that went live last year got a major facelift in the phase 2 which is live now since March 08. You could log in (using eFrenz ID) to rate the names. Each rating by an user is also counted as a vote for the name. Three of the top rated names and most voted names are displayed on the eMing home page. As another bid to popularise the Eyek script with our web users, we have provided the baby names in the eyek script too. The database of this application is ever expanding. Here too, you, e-pao users, are responsible for this as it was you who contributes the names. We would like to put into record our sincere thanks to all contributors who have helped built a baby name database spanning across all topologies of Manipur. Nongdrei Khuman has been the number 1 contributor in 2008. The database is, of course, not closed and you are requested to grow it even bigger by entering the names that are unique to Manipur.

Many of you had opined that e-pao should add up RSS feeds and enable social bookmarking. We listened and now we are happy to add these services too. Please visit the RSS page to find out how to configure your Mail client or an aggregator application to receive the RSS feeds from e-pao.net. When you are reading any of the english language news, you would have noticed a tool bar on the right top corner. If you hover your mouse there, it will display various social bookmarking sites besides the usual "email a Fren" and "Printer friendly page". We have provided direct links to most of the very popular sites such as del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Redit, fURL, Technorati, Digg it, MySpace, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, MSN Live, NewsVine and Yahoo MyWeb.

A new subsite was also added to celebrate the golden jubilee of a school in Imphal. The school is none other than Little Flower High School - one of the most exclusive all-girls school situated at the Aiport Road. We supported their celebration by carrying news and pictures of the celebration reaching out to the school's alumnus. The sub-site can serve as a nodal point for news and updates about the school during their jubilee year and in the future. This is the second sub-site at e-pao celebrating a golden jubilee of a school. The first being the Don Bosco, Chingmeirong in 2007.

We continue to upgrade our applications. The simple Ooba of last year has been given a facelift and we have updated various videos and documentaries into it. The videos from the channel you select would be listed on a tab of the same name on the top right side of the screen. There are three more tabs along with this video listing tab. They are: Most viewed, Top rated and New. The "new" tab was recently added to be able to list all new videos uploaded for users to be able to easily identify them as they go live. You would also see a tab with listings of the "recently viewed" videos by users visiting the site. This will give you an idea of what other visitors are viewing. You can do a search on the tags, video names and descriptions. The results of which will be displayed on the "search" tab listing. As you pick up a video to watch, the system will also list related videos available at Ooba. The relations are established through the similarity of the tag names. You can rate the videos by logging in with your eFrenz ID.

If you are a webmaster of a site or have a blog, you would be able to embed the Ooba videos by pasting the "Embed code" into your page. These enbed code are found below the videos as they are being played. On your page, a player will be opened on which the selected video will be played. A direct URL to the video is also provided on the same page if you would want to share the same with your friends via mail etc.

We are continually looking for videos that can be shared on this platform while our technical team continues to fix bugs as they are found. You are requested to help us in both the regards too.

We receive a lot of press release type of materials and many of them are found to be of good information and of interest to Manipuris. we figured that we might as well open up a new section to cater to them. Now we have a Press Release section. The earlier release materials are also oranised by its year and have archived them for posterity. E-Pao! would, however, take the final decision of what goes into that section.

After a lull, we are agresively working on the Panorama section, collecting materials and stitching images. The images are now moved to a flash container from our earlier Java one. The new spots that we have rendered panorama include: Bir Tikendrajit flyover; Cheiraoching and Kangla Gate. Do visit the Panorama index to pick and choose your favourite spot to have a 360 degree look around.

Apart from the Panorama, we are also collecting pictures from not only Manipur but also all around the world from fellow Manipuri travellers. We now have a collection on the 'arts and dances' of Manipur, its 'landscapes' and 'festivals'. We also have pictures of rock shows visited by a Manipuri or even personnal collection of random shots. These, we believe, captures Manipur and Manipuris in a different light.

Yellout saw 3 new featured artists and 2 updates on an existing one. Korin-G is a new age Rapping Maring from New checkon, Imphal. Spoon 'n Fork a young ensembel who belives in rock n roll. Rewben Mashangva is the father of Naga Blues and sing songs of the mountains and its people in the folk setting. He has also improvised the Naga string instrument Tingteila to be able to accompany a wider range of western instrument. Uttam is a popular Manipuri meitei-language rocker. We updated his profile with new materials. Tarun Sharma's profile also got few information updates.

For the Mozilla users, we have a toolbar which gives you a direct link to various popular sections of e-pao.net right from your browser (Last release 3.0.1 Sept 08). It fetches the Headlines, Snippets and Sports and through a single click on your browser, you could go directly to the news item for a further read. The toolbar also identifies the top five most watched videos on the Ooba and the Last five updated videos at Ooba.

This year had been hectic with new developments, upgrades and updates. As we complete our journey with 9 years behind us, we are again reminded of all the contributors who made this possible. The poets, essayists, bloggers, critics, reviewers take credit for the growing number of contents at e-pao.net. There is a serious crop of these writers that can be found here and we take much pride in hosting their writings. We have taken extreme pride in speaking about the english language poets and their poems which we host here. With no further ado, we invite you to check out the individual poets's corners (who had been contributing regularly) and the random poets (who are not regulars but nevertheless great writers). There's also a collection of Eyek poems.

At the end of this report, as is customary now, we will leave you with some figures from the server statistics.
Please do note that these figures are only from the mother site www.e-pao.net.

1. Sessions / Visitors : 3,394,008 (nearly 3.4 million) 2. Page views : 23,657,304 ( a little over 23.5 million) 3. Hits : 81,261,828 (a little over 81 million) 4. Bytes Downloaded : 487.56 GB (this is excluding radio , galleries and efrenz data)

(You may refer to last year's report for explaination of terms such as hits and sessions as defined by our Stats Manager. )

You might have noticed that we now have 3 domain addresses. Apart from the mother site, We now have two more sites: e-paolive.net, where the radio streamings are handled from and e-pao.org, where the video streamings are coming from.

e-paolive.net handled a little more than 7 million (7,189,665) requests succesfully this year.
The four most popular collections on the radio are:
1. Manipuri Films - OST
2. Contemporary - All Genre
3. Bands of Manipur - Rock
4. Golden Hits - Classics

The top 10 songs streamed till date from the radio are:
1. Uttam - Uttam Eidi Ngoure (22,519)
2. Tapta - Missed Call (14,490)
3. Uttam featuring Jiangam & Sorri - Saagi Lamchat (14,367)
4. Roshibina featuring Sando - The Surrender (14351)
5. Various - Roop Raag - Ho Eema (12,652)
6. Nungi Thamoi Kunmalli (12,369)
7. Alvina Gonson featuring Dave - Thaomoinungda Leiriba (11,642)
8. Mathai Thaina (11,095)
9. Jit Leishangthem - Angel (10,950)
10. Deepak - Mikup khuding (10,355)

There are 83 videos on Ooba today. These have received 67,556 views from all over the world.
The 5 most viewed videos from Ooba (at the time of filing this report) are:
1. RK Nadeshwori's Pa gee param thirushii
2. Lai Haraoba performed by Laihui at New York
3. Pushparani's Tumba chaba khangdana
4. documentary on 'Kang shanaba'
5. The making of the Thangkhul film Hunphun.

As we step into the 10^th year of service, we hope that you will continue to support and contribute to your e-platform.

From all of us at e-pao, Wish you a Very Happy New Year!
Let Peace prevail!