Microsoft anticipates a boost to its profits, from the new service it flagged off on Thursday, offering customised domains for the huge market of young Indians, a decade after it acquired Hotmail. The free mail service, coolhotmail.com, uses the same Hotmail platform but will offer over 200 personalised domains to choose from.

Nearly half of India's 1 billion people are below 25 years of age and the country boasts the world's largest English-speaking population spurring dramatic growth in the computer software industry. Internet usage monitoring agency, comScore Networks, in its latest survey found a major surge in the number of Internet users in India in the last year.

More than 21 million Indians above the age of 15 years were using Internet at the end of last January, compared with 16 million just a year ago, comScore said. That 33 percent leap compared with growth of just two percent in the United States.

Economic boom helped lift India's personal computer sales by 32 percent to 5,04 million units in the year to March 31, 2006, according to the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology.

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