Amazon’s Echo device can also be used to order a pizza or book a cab from Uber.

Amazon Echo, the wireless speaker and voice command device from Amazon.com, can now also add events to the Google calendar by voice.

Amazon’s Alexa would add the event to the calendar if asked to do so.

For instance, you can prompt Alexa by saying ‘Add date with Lucy to my calendar for Sunday at 10AM.’

The new service by the Amazon comes only few days after the American electronic commerce and cloud computing company announced that the Amazon Echo, an expertly tuned speaker will officially support Swedish commercial music streaming, podcast and video service Spotify.

Amazon’s Echo device can also be used to order a pizza or book a cab from Uber.

The Washington-based company had also launched new KidsMD skill recently that can help the parents decide to call a doctor for their children on symptoms like fever, cough, headache, rash, vomiting, sore throat, diarrhoea, fatigue or shortness of breath. By using KidsMD on once’s Alexa device, the people would also be able to ask for dosing advice based on their child’s weight or age.

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Micromax Canvas Spark 2 Plus smartphone sports a five-inch WVGA (480×854 pixels) display and is backed by a 1.3GHz quad-core processor paired up with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of inbuilt storage.

Domestic consumer electronics company Micromax has recently unveiled its new Micromax Canvas Spark 2 Plus smartphone in India. Priced at Rs. 3,999, the company claims it to be the cheapest ‘Marshmallow’ smartphone in India. The smartphone is exclusively available for purchase via Snapdeal.

The smartphone sports a five-inch WVGA (480×854 pixels) display and is backed by a 1.3GHz quad-core processor paired up with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of inbuilt storage. The smartphone gives the option to expand the inbuilt storage to further 32GB via microSD card slot.

Commenting on the launch, Shubhajit Sen, Chief Marketing Officer, Micromax, said: “With the launch of the Canvas Spark 2 Plus, we are offering first time users, with a smooth transition at a wallet-friendly price. Our objective is to convert feature phone users into smartphone users, and synthesize technology and affordability in for this device. Through our partnership with Snapdeal for exclusive Spark series, we have very successfully expanded the overall entry smartphone market and created a favourable impact in the e-commerce channel capturing over 11 percent of the exclusive online market last year.”

Gurugram-based Micromax was established as an IT software company operating in the embedded devices domain and it later entered the mobile handset business. By 2010, it was one of the largest domestic companies making handsets in the low-cost feature phone segment in India. As of Q3 2014, Micromax is the tenth largest smartphone vendor in the world.

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ZTE ‘Blade A910’ and the ‘Blade V7 Max’ are priced at Rs 13,300 and Rs 18,400 respectively. (Reuters)

Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and systems company ZTE has unveiled two new smartphones, the ZTE ‘Blade A910’ and the ‘Blade V7 Max’, in its ‘Blade’ portfolio. The smartphones are priced at Rs 13,300 and Rs 18,400 respectively.

The dual-SIM supporting ZTE Blade V7 Max features a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080×1920 pixels) resolution display with 2.5D curved glass and is powered by an unspecified octa-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz, clubbed with 3GB or 4GB of RAM.

The smartphone also sports a 16-megapixel rear camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and LED flash along with an eight-megapixel front-facing camera.

Headquartered in Guangdong, China, ZTE operates in three business units – Carrier Networks, Terminals and Telecommunication.

ZTE’s core products are wireless, exchange, access, optical transmission, data telecommunications gear, mobile phones and telecommunications software.

ZTE is one of the top five largest smartphone manufacturers in its home market and in the top ten worldwide.

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Snapchat was created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown when they were students at the Stanford University.

Image messaging application software product Snapchat has added a new update, which allows the users to ‘face-swap’ with pictures in their camera roll.

The new feature allows the users to swap their faces onto someone else’s body or vice versa, the independent reported.

One can use the feature through an update. It’s already available on iOS and would gradually roll out on the Google Play store as well.

Snapchat was created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown when they were students at the Stanford University.

According to Snapchat’s published statistics, as of May 2015, the app’s users were sending two billion photos and videos per day, while Snapchat stories content was being viewed 500 million times per day. In November 2015, the number reached six billion sent videos per day.

The company has a valuation of USD10-USD 20 billion, depending on the source.

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The two Swiss pilots taking turns to fly a solar-powered airplane around the world said Sunday the endeavor is not only a demonstration of the importance of renewable energy but also of the many challenges the human body can endure.

Pilot Bertrand Piccard completed a risky, three-day flight across a great expanse of the Pacific Ocean while sleeping only 20 minutes at a time inside the plane’s tiny cockpit with no heat or air conditioning and while having to keep constant contact with the Europe-based control center.

”You have interviews, navigation control, communications with the control center in Monaco. You have health checks, a lot of health checks,” Piccard said. ”It’s very active, there are a lot of things to do, but you can nevertheless enjoy it.”

Piccard said he uses self-hypnosis to keep his energy up and puts heating pads inside his shoes and gloves for warmth. He said he has no complaints about the ready-made meals he can warm up with a special heat packet and that can include risotto, chicken curry and potatoes.

On Sunday, special guests, many of them with Google, which is sponsoring the project, had a first look at the plane inside a huge white tent at Moffett Airfield. The guests also mingled and took photos with Piccard and fellow Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg.

Piccard landed the Solar Impulse 2 in Mountain View, in the Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, on Saturday night following a 62-hour, nonstop solo flight from Hawaii without fuel.

The landing came hours after Piccard made a fly-by over the Golden Gate Bridge as spectators below watched the narrow aircraft with extra wide wings.

Piccard and Andre Borschberg have been taking turns flying the plane on an around-the-world trip since taking off from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, in March 2015. It made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China, Japan and Hawaii.

The trans-Pacific legs were the riskiest part of the plane’s travels because of the lack of emergency landing sites.

”We have demonstrated it is feasible to fly many days, many nights, that the technology works” said Borschberg, 63, who piloted the plane a five-day trip from Japan to Hawaii and who kept himself alert by doing yoga poses and meditation.

The project has helped to show that ”as a human being you can be sufficiently sustainable to be able to fly at least five days in such a plane.”

The aircraft faced a few bumps along the way.

The Solar Impulse 2 landed in Hawaii in July and was forced to stay in the islands after the plane’s battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan. The team was delayed in Asia, too. When first attempting to fly from Nanjing, China, to Hawaii, the crew had to divert to Japan because of unfavorable weather and a damaged wing.

A month later, with better weather conditions, the plane left Nagoya in central Japan for Hawaii.

The plane’s ideal flight speed is about 28 mph, though that can double during the day when the sun’s rays are strongest. The carbon-fiber aircraft weighs over 5,000 pounds, about as much as a midsize truck.

The plane’s wings, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night.

Solar Impulse 2 will make three more stops in the United States before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe or northern Africa, according to the website documenting the journey.

Borschberg said the plane will again take flight this week, and the next stop could be Phoenix. But that will depend on weather.

The project, which is estimated to cost more than $100 million, began in 2002 to highlight the importance of renewable energy and the spirit of innovation.

”I think innovation and pioneering must continue,” Piccard said. ”It must continue for better quality of life, for clean technologies, for renewable energy. This is where the pioneers can really express themselves and be successful.”

Solar-powered air travel is not yet commercially practical, given the slow travel time, weather and weight constraints of the aircraft.

”Maybe it will be boring in 20 years when all the airplanes will be electric and people will say `Oh it’s routine.’ But now, today, an airplane that is electric, with electric engines, that produces its own energy with the sun, it can never be boring,” Piccard said.

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Mansoor Ahmed, who lives in Gachibowli in Hyderabad could not hide his smile, when a traffic police officer stopped him at Begumpet, while he was on the way to his office, and asked for driving licence (DL) and registration certificate (RC). He simply took out his smartphone and showed the documents saved in a mobile app. Ahmed, who had been fined twice last month for not carrying the complete documents, said, “Carrying all the necessary documents in a mobile app that can be easily accessed online and offline is a great relief for people at large.”

In order to reduce the burden of physically producing of vehicle documents like DL, RC to enforcement authorities, the transport department of government of Telangana recently launched a mobile app called ‘RTA m-Wallet’ and officially declared it as valid during any enforcement drive undertaken by the police. The app allows a user to download digital copies of vehicle documents which could be shown to the police and RTA authorities when demanded. “The idea is not to provide one more mobile app to the people. Basically the goal is to move towards digitalisation and provide a paper-free ride experience to the citizens,” Sandeep Kumar Sultania, transport commissioner, government of Telangana told FE.

But the question remains, is it really a paper-free ride for people? Perhaps not, as other than DL and RC, other two key documents—insurance policy documents and pollution-under-control certificates—are yet to be fully integrated with the m-Wallet application. Senior officials at the transport

department said that for the integration of these two documents work is already in progress, and soon, it will be part of m-Wallet. An official informed that there is a slight delay in the government getting information from the insurance service providers. The latest insurance related data will be

updated soon on the app.

To use the application, one needs to download it from Android or from iOS platforms. Once a person registers with an email address and phone number, all the records in the database corresponding to the registered phone number automatically get fetched into the account and more could be added by simply pressing ‘Add new’ button. In fact, a user can add multiple vehicles owned by him and fetch transport related documents in a single app. Documents once downloaded will be saved permanently and could be used when the phone is offline. Interestingly, when they share the vehicle with their friends and family members, the government has integrated a ‘RC share’ feature that allows the user to share the RC with family and friends which can be used in their respective apps.

So far, the RTA m-Wallet app has been downloaded over one lakh times on the Android platform. Currently it ranks 71 in top apps on Google Play Store for India and it is the only government app in top 100. Since the launch on March 30, 2016, more than 2,83,814 vehicles have been registered, over 1,80,651 DLs and 2,42,831 RCs have been downloaded.

A close analysis of the application on the Google Play Store points out some common anomalies. While many people appreciated the government effort, several other have apprehensions. Although the state of Andhra Pradesh has bifurcated into Telangana and the residuary Andhra Pradesh, there are a lot of people whose car RC belongs to Telangana RTA but have a DL issued by the authority in residuary Andhra Pradesh. They are still wondering how to get best out of this innovative app, as only the data from Telangana RTA is available in m-Wallet.

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Kaura said advanced criminal attack groups are now echoing the skill sets of nation-state attackers. (Reuters)

With more and more people worldwide preferring online transactions, cyber criminals are using the ‘fake technical support’ model to steal consumer data, says a report by security software firm Symantec.

According to the report, fake technical support scams saw a 200 percent increase globally in 2015.

“With close to 5 lakh attacks last year, India ranked 11 amongst countries targeted the most by tech support scams… The countries targeted the most by tech support scams were the US, the UK, France, Australia and Germany,” Symantec Director Solution Product Management Asia Pacific and Japan Tarun Kaura told PTI.

He added that the difference now is that scammers send fake warning messages to devices like smartphones to prompt people to call attackers directly in order to dupe them into buying useless services or even install malware.

“In total, Symantec blocked more than 100 million tech support scams last year (globally),” he said.

Kaura said advanced criminal attack groups are now echoing the skill sets of nation-state attackers.

“They have extensive resources and a highly-skilled technical staff that operate with efficiency,” he added.

Asked what consumers can do to protect themselves, Kaura said they should use strong and unique passwords for their accounts, which are changed every three months.

“Also, they should think before clicking. Opening the wrong attachment can introduce malware to users’ system. Never view, open, or copy email attachments unless you are expecting the email and trust the sender,” he said.

Kaura said users should also not disclose personal information or account details to someone calls claiming to be from a financial institution or tech support.

“Also, users should be wary of versions of software that claim to be free. These could expose them to malware. Social engineering and ransomware attacks will also attempt to trick users into thinking their computer is infected and get them to buy useless software or pay money directly to have it removed,” he added.

Besides, users should try and limit the amount of personal information they share on social networks and online, including login information and birth dates.

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The airline also partnered with Abu Dhabi Airports Company, enabling guests to navigate their way around Abu Dhabi International Airport using indoor maps, a first in the Middle East. (Source: Company Website)

The United Arab Emirates national flag carrier, Etihad Airways has launched a mobile app for the iPhone that enables guests to organise and manage their journey with ease.

Guests will enjoy 10 percent off on flights, and members of the airline’s loyalty programme, Etihad Guest, will receive 250 bonus miles for every booking made through the mobile app before May 30.

The app is simple to use, providing comprehensive trip management capabilities by taking full advantage of the latest innovations in mobile technology. Guests can organise their journey including booking tickets, checking-in and viewing the status of their flight.

The airline also partnered with Abu Dhabi Airports Company, enabling guests to navigate their way around Abu Dhabi International Airport using indoor maps, a first in the Middle East.

The mobile app also incorporates high resolution enhanced seat maps, giving passengers a detailed layout of the cabin and their chosen seat.

The app allows passengers to check in for their flight by using their mobile phone to simply scan their passport page.

Guests can also pay for their tickets by scanning their credit card, eliminating the need to enter passenger details and payment information manually.

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Having trouble seeing items on your phone screen? Now, a team of researchers has come up with a smartphone application that projects a magnified smartphone screen to Google Glass, which users can navigate using head movements to view a corresponding portion of the magnified screen.

They have shown that the technology can potentially benefit low-vision users, many of whom find the smartphone’s built-in zoom feature to be difficult to use due to the loss of context.

“When people with low visual acuity zoom in on their smartphones, they see only a small portion of the screen, and it’s difficult for them to navigate around — they don’t know whether the current position is in the center of the screen or in the corner of the screen,” said senior author Gang Luo from Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass. Eye and Ear.

Luo added that this application transfers the image of smartphone screens to Google Glass and allows users to control the portion of the screen they see by moving their heads to scan, which gives them a very good sense of orientation.

In an evaluation of their new technology, the researchers observed two groups of research subjects (one group that used the head-motion Google Glass application and the other using the built-in zoom feature on a smart phone) and measured the time it took for them to complete certain tasks. The researchers showed that the head-based navigation method reduced the average trial time compared to conventional manual scrolling by about 28 percent.

As next steps for the project, the researchers would like to incorporate more gestures on the Google Glass to interact with smartphones. They would also like to study the effectiveness of head-motion based navigation compared to other commonly-used smartphone accessibility features, such as voice-based navigation.

“Given the current heightened interest in smart glasses, such as Microsoft’s Hololens and Epson’s Moverio, it is conceivable to think of a smart glass working independently without requiring a paired mobile device in near future,” said first author Shrinivas Pundlik. “The concept of head-controlled screen navigation can be useful in such glasses even for people who are not visually impaired.”

The study is published online in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

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More than one million people are now connecting to Facebook through Tor “dark web” — which maintains privacy and leaves no digital trail — every month, media reports said on Saturday.

According to Facebook, the growth of Tor over the past few years has been “roughly” linear, noting that some 525,000 people who accessed the service via Tor in June 2015 rose to more than one million in April this year.

“This [Tor] growth is a reflection of the choices that people make to use Facebook over Tor, and the value that it provides them. We hope they will continue to provide feedback and help us keep improving,” TechCrunch quoted Facebook as saying.

Tor allows anonymous web browsing by sending data through multiple encrypted steps rather than making direct connections that shields the identity of its users.

Facebook created a dedicated address for Tor access in October 2014, making it easier for users to connect via Tor and give them privacy.

Facebook also expanded its Tor support at the start of this year by rolling out support for the Android Orbot proxy, giving Android Facebook users an easier way to use Tor. Apple’s iOS platform still does not have Tor support.

Confirming Facebook’s claim, a spokeswoman for Tor said in a statement: “When using Facebook website over Tor, Tor Browser is in charge of that data, so it is anonymous. Of course, someone may post a status update saying that they are at some restaurant, for instance, and that would de-anonymise them.”

Tor could be used in countries where internet access or use of Facebook is blocked or censored, the Tor statement added.

“Many people use Tor in countries where the internet is censored, not in order to be anonymous. Tor allows them to access the uncensored internet, including reaching Facebook. In Iran, for instance, Facebook is blocked. So people use Tor to get onto the internet and browse and from there they can reach Facebook,” it read.

Privacy activists, hackers, activists and journalists use this “dark web” to communicate securely.

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US-based construction power tools firm DeWalt has unveiled its first smartphone ‘MD501’ that boasts a tough look and even though it is a full touchscreen device, user can work on it with gloves on.

The smartphone is water resistant and can work in temperatures from -20 degrees up to 60 degrees Celsius, The Verge reported.

The device is manufactured by Global Mobile Communications, a mobile communication solutions company for DeWalt.

The “MD501” has LTE/4G support, a 13MP camera, 1.3GHz processor with 2GB RAM, 5-inch 720p display, 3,950mAh battery, wireless charging and runs on Android 5.1 (Lollipop).

DeWalt has added an amplified loudspeaker to the phone for clearer speakerphone calls at noisy work sites.

The “MD501” is expected to cost around $544 (US price) when available.

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According to Yelp, the service has gone live on iOS and Android platforms and will soon be available to Twitter on internet. (Reuters)

In a fresh bid to recover from the stalled users’ growth and declining revenue, micro-blogging website Twitter has joined hands with business listing and review site Yelp to supply location services for Japan and Britain inside its app.

The Yelp integration will give Twitter users in Japan and Britain an option of selecting places provided by Yelp when they tag a location in their tweets, technology website TechCrunch reported on Saturday.

According to Yelp, the service has gone live on iOS and Android platforms and will soon be available to Twitter on internet.

“Twitter users in the UK and Japan can now simply tap the location icon to add Yelp geotags to Tweets,” Chad Richard, senior vice president of business and corporate development at Yelp, posted.

When users click on particular places, they will see a separate card with businesses’ Yelp ratings, locations, and even a direct link to Yelp’s app.

When Twitter users click on places when reading tweets, they will get a separate card with more details like address and Yelp rating, along with a link to go directly to view that venue on the Yelp app itself, the report added.

More location data can help Twitter lay the groundwork for a new advertising unit based around locations. It can also potentially sell that on to the companies that are being flagged in the tags.

However, Twitter users in the US will keep receiving venue suggestions from search and discovery service mobile app Foursquare after tagging the location of their tweets.

The Yelp integration for Japan and Britain also gives the micro-blogging site some more staying power with users to let the interest grow. It is also another move to expand the functionality of its platform, TechCrunch added.

According to the micro-blogging website, it now has more than 300 million active users, far less when compared with Facebook’s 1.5 billion users making it more popular, faster, and the choice of more marketers.

Twitter reported 305 million monthly active users for the fourth quarter this year, compared to 307 million in the third quarter that excluded SMS-only followers.

In an attempt to bring tweets to more people across the globe, Twitter is planning to introduce an algorithmic timeline like Facebook. The timeline will reorder tweets based on what Twitter’s algorithm thinks people most want to see.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has made several moves, including cutting jobs and naming Google’s former chief business officer, Omid Kordestani, as Twitter’s executive chairman.

Under Dorsey, Twitter has released a news curation feature “Moments” and the company is reportedly working to extend Twitter’s identifying 140-character limit to 10,000.
Twitter is also set for a major overhaul under Dorsey to revive the company’s fortune with some of the high-profile executives putting in their papers.

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The US Justice Department on Friday dropped its effort to force Apple Inc to help unlock an iPhone 5c in a drug case in New York after someone provided authorities the passcode to access the device.

In a letter filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, prosecutors said that investigators late on Thursday used that passcode to access the iPhone at issue, and as a result “no longer needs Apple’s assistance.”

The letter marked a sudden end to a closely watched case, in which the Justice Department had been appealing a ruling by a federal magistrate judge holding that he could not force Apple to assist authorities.

The case gained further significance after prosecutors in March dropped a similar effort to force Apple to help access an iPhone used by one of the shooters in December’s San Bernardino killings, after a third party provided a way to crack it.

Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said the cases have “never been about setting a court precedent; they are about law enforcement’s ability and need to access evidence on devices pursuant to lawful court orders and search warrants.”

An Apple spokesman declined comment. Previously, the company had argued in court that prosecutors had not provided any evidence to bolster their claim that they had exhausted other methods to get data from the phone. Apple said it was not even clear that they had asked the suspect and his associates.

Though officials said the passcode had just come to light, the development marks the second time the federal government has dropped a contentious fight over the extent of its power over private companies after Apple pressed it to say what methods it had tried.

Prosecutors had been challenging a Feb. 29 ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein holding he did not have the authority to order Apple to disable the security of an iPhone seized in a drug probe.

The case predated the government effort to force Apple to help access the phone of Rizwan Farook, one of the two killers in the San Bernardino massacre, which left 14 people dead and 22 wounded.

While the Justice Department dropped that bid after a third party provided a way to access the San Bernardino phone – apparently for more than $1 million – it continued appealing Orenstein’s ruling.

FBI Director James Comey has said that the method used on the San Bernardino iPhone 5c would not work on other models, including the iPhone 5s, the type in the Brooklyn case.

The phone belonged to Jun Feng, who has pleaded guilty to participation in a methamphetamine distribution conspiracy, which prosecutors are continuing to investigate.

Unlike the phone used in San Bernardino, Feng’s phone had an older operating system, iOS 7, which is not protected under the same encryption technology, which is why Apple could access it.

Apple has some 70 times before the Brooklyn case emerged helped authorities access data on iPhones, according to court filings.

The company changed its stance last year after the New York magistrate invited them to argue whether the Justice Department was stretching the more than 200-year-old and very general All Writs Act, which compels help executing warrants, to include more active assistance.

Apple said prosecutors were going too far, especially since Congress had more recently limited what communications providers could be compelled to do.

Magistrate Orenstein agreed. Though prosecutors have continued to push for mandated cooperation, in many cases under seal, Apple has been objecting and appealing.

The New York case has drawn less attention than the one in California, but the fact that a ruling favorable to Apple has been allowed to stand gives it more significance going forward.

While the FBI is continuing to fight in other courts, more attention has turned to a draft bill by leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee that would force all manner of companies to turn over unencrypted data when served with a court order.

The majority of the technology industry bitterly opposes the measure, arguing that requiring back doors would make all communication more vulnerable to hackers and that U.S. citizens and companies would simply get their encryption from providers in other countries.

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The Chinese government has not issued any statement on the matter either. (Reuters)

People using Apple’s iTunes Movies and iBook services in China have sought refunds for the purchases after reports of blocking of these services surfaced, a media report said on Friday.

Cupertino-based Apple is yet to issue a broad statement to its customers in China about the status of the services but several users said that they have been unable to connect to the movie service and iBook since last week, Los Angeles Times reported.

“We hope to make books and movies available again to our customers in China as soon as possible but would not elaborate on why the services were unavailable,” a Beijing-based Apple spokesperson was quoted as saying in the report.

The Chinese government has not issued any statement on the matter either.

Meanwhile, Apple’s technical assistance and account service representatives in China said they have not received any official notice from the company that the services had been blocked or shut down. But they offered to arrange refunds on purchased content, the report added.

On September 30 last year, Apple launched its music service as well as iTunes Movies and iBooks in China.

The company introduced Apple Pay in China in February.

The iTunes Movie service allows fans to rent or purchase movies while on iBook a variety of free and paid books are also made available.

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Even as the move is expected to benefit operators wanting to offer VoLTE services that will help them decongest their networks in metro areas, Tejpal said that the adaptability of the technology will only depend on the development of device ecosystem that supports VoLTE. (Reuters)

Analysts believe that the move is expected to clear the path for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Voice of Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) services, which the upcoming operator Reliance Jio Infocomm plans to offer on its countrywide 4G network.

“Earlier restrictions around interconnection between IP-based and CS (circuit switching) based networks would limit Reliance Jio (RJio) users to call users on other networks, and that’s why they were tying up with other operators to route the voice calls through their network. This move would now open doors for RJio users to call users on other networks and vice-versa,” said Rishi Tejpal, principal research analyst, Gartner.

VoIP technology is capable of transporting voice and data packets over the same network. Unlike circuit-switched networks, the service doesn’t require a dedicated connection for an entire call. Voice signals are converted to packets that are sent across the network and reassembled in the correct order when they reach their destination, Gartner has said.

“Interconnection between the networks of different licensees for carrying circuit switched traffic … and for carrying IP based traffic … shall be within the overall framework of interconnection regulations/directions/orders issued by the Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India)/licensor from time to time,” the DoT’s Access Services Division said in a notification dated April 19.

Even as the move is expected to benefit operators wanting to offer VoLTE services that will help them decongest their networks in metro areas, Tejpal said that the adaptability of the technology will only depend on the development of device ecosystem that supports VoLTE.

“It is definitely an interesting move for operators, which are looking to offer IP based voice services. As of now one limitation, which is there is the handset availability supporting VoLTE, and because of that Reliance Jio will also have to wait for some time as there are not so many handsets in the market, which support VoLTE,” Tejpal said.

However, the DoT’s move do not throw any light on the issue of interconnection charges for termination of an IP-based voice call. It is understood, though, that the government may soon approach sector regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to recommend separate call termination charges for these services.

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The company claims it employs more than 10,000 people and is the world’s first video company to go public with a market capitalization of more than billion. (Representational image)

Chinese technology company LeEco conducted a mega event in Beijing during which it launched its driverless concept car, three superphones and televisions.

LeEco, formerly known as Letv, is a global internet and technology company founded in November 2004 by Jia Yueting and Liu Hong.

The company claims it employs more than 10,000 people and is the world’s first video company to go public with a market capitalization of more than $12 billion.

Headquartered in Beijing, China, it has regional headquarters in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.

The highlight of the event was the driverless concept car named LeSEE that drew gasps from the audience when it was slowly driven onto the stage.

The gasps turned louder when the car parked itself into a corner without any human help. LeEco says the concept car not only has fully-automatic driving functions but can also learn on its own, with facial recognition, emotion recognition, system recognition and path recognition.

LeEco’s founder Jia Yueting with Le Supercar’s co-founder and global deputy president Ding Lei, revealed the first model of the concept car.

The company also launched three new phones- Le 2, Le 2 Pro and Le Max 2 with USB Type-C audio port featuring CDLA (Continual Digital Lossless Audio) technology to offer high-quality uncompressed audio. This means goodbye to the conventional 3.5 mm headphone jack. Le 2 has a 5.5-inch full HD (1080p) display and is powered by MediaTek’s Helio X20 tri-cluster deca-core processor paired with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage.

It is equipped with a 16-megapixel rear camera of aperture f/2.0 with PDAF and LED flash, and an 8-megapixel camera up front.

Le 2 Pro is powered by MediaTek’s Helio X25 deca-core chipset paired with 4GB of RAM and 32GB and 64GB internal storage variants. It comes with a resolution of 21-megapxiel in the rear camera and has a front-facing 8-megapixel unit.

Le Max 2 has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor paired with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage.

All the phones run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system wrapped under LeEco’s customized EUI 5.5, according to a release issued by the company.

The event also witnessed the launch of three fourth generation super televisions- Super 4 X50 Pro, Super 4 X50, and Super 4 X50 CSL. LeEco says all three televisions have 50 inches, 9.9 mm ultra-slim metal bodies along with the TV flagship chip Mstar6A938, 3GB RAM plus 16/32 GB eMMC5.1 high speed flash drive, and support MEMC dynamic image processing technology, as well as HDR technology.

Another noteworthy feature of the event was the launch of the Ecological UI system — an upgrade to the EUI — EUI5.

This permits a 9-channel direct stream allowing the user to watch nine games at the same time. LeEco said it also allows a user to watch a single game from nine different camera angles.

(Travel for this report was sponsored by LeEco)

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China’s first robot security guard today made its debut, an electrical anti-riot device that can be activated through remote control in case of a threat. The 1.49-metre-tall, 78-kg “AnBot” unveiled at the ongoing China Chongqing Hi-Tech Fair has a maximum speed of 18 km per hour. It can patrol at speed of 1 km per hour and has battery capacity of 8 hours.

The security robot is capable of autonomous patrol, intelligent monitoring, emergency calls, auto recharging and has optional modules for environmental monitoring, biochemical detection and clearing explosives, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

An electrical anti-riot device can be activated through remote control if a threat is detected.

Shouting for help in the patrol area or pushing the robot’s emergency button will alert the police immediately.

Breakthroughs in low-cost autonomous navigation and positioning as well as intelligent video surveillance have contributed to the development of the robot, said Xiao Xiangjiang, director of the Institute of Electromechanical Engineering and Automation of the National University of Defence Technology.

Other highlights of the robot include its ability to react during emergencies, according to Xiao.

Wei Quansheng, an officer from Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, said the robot guard can be used in many public places such as airports, stations and subways to help with police officers’ anti-riot missions.

The robot is jointly developed by the National University of Defence Technology and a robotics company in central China’s Hunan Province.

The university began researching robotics theory and technology in the 1980s.

The school is hoping to continue to build up China’s intelligent security service robots to promote development of the robot industry and upgrades to the country’s security industry, Xia said.

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Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google have reached a deal to withdraw all the regulatory complaints against each other, the companies told Reuters.

“Microsoft has agreed to withdraw its regulatory complaints against Google, reflecting our changing legal priorities. We will continue to focus on competing vigorously for business and for customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email.

Google, in a separate email, said the companies would want to compete vigorously based on the merits of their products, not in “legal proceedings”.

The companies in September agreed to bury all patent infringement litigations against each other, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

“… Following our patent agreement, we’ve now agreed to withdraw regulatory complaints against one another,” Google said on Friday.

Google’s rivals had reached out to U.S. regulators alleging that the Internet services company unfairly uses its Android system to win online advertising, people with knowledge of matter told Reuters last year.

The European Commission also accused Google last year of distorting internet search results to favor its shopping service, harming both rivals and consumers.

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Government is likely to exempt iPhone and iPad maker Apple from mandatory local sourcing rule, a move which would pave the way for tech giant opening single-brand retail stores in the country. (Reuters)

Government is likely to exempt iPhone and iPad maker Apple from mandatory local sourcing rule, a move which would pave the way for tech giant opening single-brand retail stores in the country.

The company had given a detailed presentation to a committee headed by DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek on April 19, on its products, technology, innovations and camera.

By early next week, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) would send the proposal for final approval to Finance Ministry, sources said.

“The panel has looked into the detailed proposal. The committee feels that it is a fit case for exemption of the mandatory sourcing norms,” they added.

The US-based company has sought approval from the government on setting up single-brand retail stores in the country.

As per the foreign direct investment (FDI) norms, the government may relax the mandatory local sourcing norms for entities undertaking single-brand retailing of products having state-of-the-art and cutting edge technology and where local sourcing is not possible.

The government had set up a committee to decide whether a product is state-of-the-art and can be eligible for exemption from the mandatory local sourcing applicable for FDI single brand retail trading.

At present, 100 per cent FDI is permitted in single-brand retail sector but companies are required to take FIPB permission if the limit exceeds 49 per cent.

The company sells its products through Apple-owned retail stores in countries including China, Germany, the US, the UK and France.

Apple has no wholly-owned store in India and sells its products through distributors such as Redington and Ingram Micro.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has also submitted an application to open stores in the country.

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India is expected to overtake the US as the second-largest smartphone market next year with robust annual growth, says a Morgan Stanley research report.

India is expected to overtake the US as the second-largest smartphone market next year with robust annual growth, says a Morgan Stanley research report.

According to the report on global technology and telecom, the country’s smartphone market will grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 per cent through 2018 and would account for 30 per cent of the global growth during the period.

“We expect India to overtake the US next year as the second-largest smartphone market by units. India will grow nearly five times faster than the world’s largest smartphone market China, where growth has decelerated,” the report said.

It added, “We estimate a 23 per cent CAGR in units in India, compared with 5 per cent over the same period in China. By 2018, we estimate 192 million smartphones will be shipped to India, or 11 per cent of global units.”

Morgan Stanley said there are only 225 million smartphone subscribers in the country, accounting for 18 per cent of the total population.

“The improvement in demographics, as measured by declining age dependency, has been one of the most important factors supporting higher potential growth in India… We expect consumption to maintain a relatively high growth rate, driven by an increase in per-capita income growth and an emerging middle class,” it noted.

On consumption of data, the report said the country is on the cusp of significant growth in data traffic driven by rising data users as well as growing data usage per user.

“We expect India’s internet penetration to reach 50 per cent by 2018, up from 26 per cent last year, driven by rising smartphone availability and affordability, online content and changing user behavior,” it said.

The global consultancy estimates 4G smartphones will account for 75 per cent of 170 million shipments by the next year, which currently has less than 1 per cent subscriber penetration in the country.

The report, which is based on 2,600 urban smartphone buyers, said the respondents paid an average of Rs 8,500 for their smartphones and plan to spend 40 per cent more on their next phone.

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Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a ”coordinated effort” to make the chatbot known as Tay ”respond in inappropriate ways.” To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! (Image: Twitter)

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks.

Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a ”coordinated effort” to make the chatbot known as Tay ”respond in inappropriate ways.” To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh!

Well, he didn’t really say that. But computer scientist Kris Hammond did say, ”I can’t believe they didn’t see this coming.”

Microsoft said its researchers created Tay as an experiment to learn more about computers and human conversation. On its website, the company said the program was targeted to an audience of 18 to 24-year-olds and was ”designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation.”

In other words, the program used a lot of slang and tried to provide humorous responses when people sent it messages and photos. The chatbot went live on Wednesday, and Microsoft invited the public to chat with Tay on Twitter and some other messaging services popular with teens and young adults.

”The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you,” the company said.

But some users found Tay’s responses odd, and others found it wasn’t hard to nudge Tay into making offensive comments, apparently prompted by repeated questions or statements that contained offensive words. Soon, Tay was making sympathetic references to Hitler – and creating a furor on social media.

”Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways,” Microsoft said in a statement.

While the company didn’t elaborate, Hammond says it appears Microsoft made no effort to prepare Tay with appropriate responses to certain words or topics. Tay seems to be a version of ”call and response” technology, added Hammond, who studies artificial intelligence at Northwestern University and also serves as chief scientist for Narrative Science, a company that develops computer programs that turn data into narrative reports.

”Everyone keeps saying that Tay learned this or that it became racist,” Hammond said. ”It didn’t.” The program most likely reflected things it was told, probably more than once, by people who decided to see what would happen, he said.

The problem is that Microsoft turned Tay loose online, where many people consider it entertaining to stir things up – or worse. The company should have realized that people would try a variety of conversational gambits with Tay, said Caroline Sinders, an expert on ”conversational analytics” who works on chat robots for another tech company. (She asked not to identify it because she wasn’t speaking in an official capacity.) She called Tay ”an example of bad design.”

Instead of building in some guidelines for how the program would deal with controversial topics, Sinders added, it appears Tay was mostly left to learn from whatever it was told.

”This is a really good example of machine learning,” said Sinders. ”It’s learning from input. That means it needs constant maintenance.”

Sinders said she hopes Microsoft will release the program again, but only after ”doing some work” on it first.

Microsoft said it’s ”making adjustments” on Tay, but there was no word on when Tay might be back. Most of the messages on its Twitter account were deleted by Thursday afternoon.

”c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx,” said the latest remaining post.

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Google is investing heavily in creating business tools and products, driven by open source technology and machine learning to help companies use computing in an affordable and faster manner.

With a vibrant startup ecosystem and lesser legacy systems, India will play a key role in Google’s strategy as it looks to take on Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure in the global enterprise cloud services space.

“India is a pretty exciting place because there are so many companies growing so quickly over there and the fact that these companies do not have legacies (systems) is pretty exciting.

“And they can just start in the cloud. You have seen Sundar take a deep interest in India and so, Google overall is very interested in India,” Google cloud chief Diane Greene told PTI.

She added that there is a pool of talented manpower as well and overall, “its vibrant and it’s important to be there (India)”.

Google is investing heavily in creating business tools and products, driven by open source technology and machine learning to help companies use computing in an affordable and faster manner.

“As a primary thing, we have sealed up the infrastructure, and now we are opening it up so that every business across the world can use it,” Pichai, the India-born CEO of Google said at the Google Cloud Products (GCP) Next 2016 conference here.

He cited the example of an animation studio in Mumbai which is using the services to produce a movie, underlying the importance of emerging markets like India.

Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who was also present at the event, said the use of crowd sourcing, machine intelligence and rapid evaluation will create huge new platforms for companies, IPOs, wealth and “great new things in the future. Its a great time to be in cloud.”

Google, which has customers like Spotify and Disney, said it is also focussing on ensuring compliance, support and integration with existing IT investments to help clients use public cloud services to accelerate their business.

“We’re combining the 15-plus years of ground-breaking, applied computer science in distributed computing, data management and machine learning that powers Google with the capabilities businesses need to safely adopt cloud today,” she said.

The VMWare co-founder said Google will use machine learning and big data analytics to help customers.

“We are doing a lot of work on our roadmaps. We have roadmaps for engineering, customers and partner enablement marketing and communicating with the world.

“We often get asked if Google is serious about enterprise and our answer is we are totally committed to this, we have invested billions of dollars on this to bring our innovation and technology to companies,” Greene said.

Asked how Google plans to catch up with players like AWS and Microsoft as it was a “follower”, Greene said the company will use differentiating factors like deep learning and open source innovation.

“We are not a follower. We were in the cloud 16 years ago. We got into enterprise after a few of these other companies decided to.

“But in terms of our product differentiation and strategy, we are not a follower. We have machine learning, open source, so we are a very different cloud with a lot of differentiation,” she said.

Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have a sizable presence in the cloud infrastructure market, capturing billions of dollars that businesses are spending to outsource their computing and storage needs.

“For our customers, cloud means no longer having to think about data centres, servers, storage and networking. Instead, they’re able to focus on creating amazing applications, products and services for their customers knowing that Google is taking care of the infrastructure powering their business,” Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google, said.

He added that the company has announced two new locations in Oregon, US and Tokyo, Japan and both will get operational later this year.

“These are the first two of more than 10 additional GCP regions we’ll be adding to our network through 2017,” he said but declined to comment on whether it would include India.

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Google doodle on Holi 2016: Google has come up with a vivid interactive doodle to mark Holi festival. The doodle shows different colours being spattered on the letters that spell “Google”, once you click on the “play” button.

Google doodle on Holi 2016: Google has come up with a vivid interactive doodle to mark Holi festival. The doodle shows different colours being spattered on the letters that spell “Google”, once you click on the “play” button.

The festival of Holi is celebrated over two days, the first one being celebrated as “Holika Dahan or Chhoti Holi and the second day as the main festival or Rangwali Holi, Dhuleti, Dhulandi or Dhulivandan.

The festival signifies the victory of good over evil. In tune of the tradition, Google is showering its logo with gulaal on the home pages of 11 countries around the world. Google has posted an animated Holi GIF doodle on its home pages in India, Canada, Sweden, Latvia, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia.

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Back in the eighties and early nineties, much before satellite television entered our homes, music used to be the prime source of entertainment. A deck music system that could play audio cassettes or CDs was considered a prized possession among many people in those days. That was then. Nowadays, people tend to store their music in their mobile phones and all that they require is a good pair of headphones to channel the music to their ears. Still, I personally believe that a full-fledged stereo system is needed if one wants to enjoy rich, vibrant music at whatever volume one desires to hear.

Recently, the Korean consumer electronics major LG Electronics sent us their OM7550D Portable X Boom Thunder music system for a review. On the basis of its fortnight stay with me, I can confidently say that this system is all you need to stay entertained in the comfort of your home. It can play DVD/CD music tracks, you can connect it to your laptop, smartphone or your tablet to enjoy the music; you can even tune in to listen to your favourite FM radio station. That’s not all. You can enjoy karaoke evenings to the latest songs in your voice across formats—MP3, WMA, CD etc. It can even connect to a LG HD TV to bring all your favourite movies and music to life. The LG X Boom Thunder system retails for Rs 30,990 and is available at select LG Brand shops.

Out of its elaborate packaging, the LG X Boom Thunder will surprise you with its trendy design. This powerful home audio system resembles a mini bar—if I may take the liberty to describe it—one that is found in high-end hotel accommodations. Installation is pretty smooth, just connect it to a power source, though I would strongly advise to read the instruction manual in order to enjoy this Hi-Fi system to its fullest.

Switched on, you can play your favourite music from your smartphone, laptop or tablet on the LG X Boom Thunder by wirelessly streaming via Bluetooth. I connected the LG X Boom Thunder with my mobile phone and played some soul-stirring soundtracks, such as Where do I begin by Andy Williams from Love Story, the 1970s American romantic drama film written by Erich Segal. I also played What if, the debut single by English actress Kate Winslet, There You’ll Be song by Faith Hill— the output was rich, vibrant sound. In other words, a combination of deep, rich sound with wireless freedom and long-listen comfort. More than that, the music system’s LED lighting enables you to experience the sound visually as the X-Flash light changes as per rhythm of the music.

The LG Portable X Boom Thunder features a DVD/CD player for you to spin your favourite play lists as well as enjoy the tracks on the discs your friends bring over. The system gives out an impressive 1000 wattage RMS powerful sound. It supports multiple formats including DVD, CD, Xvid, MP3, and WMA. The Hi-Fi system’s multi-connectivity option gives you the freedom to connect almost any music device whether it’s your laptop, smartphone or your tablet. Just plug in and enjoy the music. It supports the standard 3.5 mm mini-jack, RCA JACK, Mic, HDMI, and USB. With its FM Playback feature, one can tune in to listen to their favourite FM radio station with 50 station storing capacity.

With its Vocal Fader feature, one can enjoy karaoke evenings. This feature (fader) allows you to reduce the audio level of the original singer vocals with original background music, so you can enjoy latest songs in your voice across formats—MP3, WMA, CD etc. The Thunder’s Sound Sync feature allows you to link your LG audio system with your LG HD TV wirelessly via Bluetooth. Hence, it cuts down on cable clutter.

There’s Child Safe Mode feature too; this function helps prevent sound shocks in case the unit is turned on with the volume set at a high level. In Child Safe mode, the volume increases gradually. This feature can be easily turned on by pressing and holding Enter/Set on the unit when the volume of the unit is “Min”.

I checked out each and every feature of this LG audio innovation and I was satisfied with the takeaways. It is truly a versatile home music system that enhances the audio from your devices, giving you a whole new level of enjoyment. Highly recommended for music buffs.

Estimated street price: Rs 30,990

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Let me confess. I was not really impressed by my first sighting of the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge. I thought the new flagship looked a bit too much like the old flagship, the S6 edge. But first impressions and hands-on reviews from launch events are half-baked at best. I have now used the S7 edge for well over a week and I have no doubts about this phone. Here are my impressions about the new device.

I am using a 32 GB version of the S7 edge for the review. Yes, the phone is not very different from its predecessor, except for the always-on screen which I think is a good addition though not revolutionary in any way. The phone feels good in your hands, and though it has not yet slipped from my hand that is a constant fear at the back of my head. From the design point, the one noticeable change is the fact that camera bump has been pushed into and is a much thinner protrusion than before.

What is good

Like with most Samsung phones you don’t have to wait for the screen to awe you. No one does it better than this Korean company when it comes to screens, be them small, be them big, be them curved. The S7 is not different and everything looks unrealistically good on this screen, even your own selfies. The S7 phones also have an always-on black lock screen which display a lot of basic information like time, missed calls, new messages and the like. Thankfully, this feature doesn’t seem to be sapping the battery much, which is good.

The edge screen is not improved and more effective. It is almost like an extra homescreen layer that you can access whatever you are doing on the phone. It does add to productivity, if you can remember to use it. The S6 series had a great camera, and I would have thought it was difficult to better that. But Samsung seems to have done just that, especially when it comes to low-light photography. I tried all kinds of stuff in the dark and the camera was really impressive, in fact even a notch ahead of the Apple iPhone 6s Plus.

The regular stuff is great too and the phone offers amazing detail when the light is great. And the focus adds an extra layer of fun and richness, making pictures look as if they were shot with a DSLR. The camera app is also much improved with some unique modes like Virtual Shot. But the Pro mode should be enough to satisfy our creative needs.

The sheer performance of this phone is hard to match. You can try everything from multitasking to gaming and ultra-high definition video, and this phone will not break a sweat. It is among the coolest flagships I have seen and that is saying a lot as high-end phones usually tend to be a bit hot under the collar.

Also, despite the performance the battery is dependable. I got 12 hours of life with very heavy use and that too over a 4G network. Reduce the brightness of the screen and you should be able to squeeze in a few more hours. In fact, I once used the phone for an hour with just 5% battery left.

What is not that good

The fingerprint scanner on the phone is a pain and has a very low success rate. You will eventually get in, but that might take some serious tiddling of the thumbs. This is a quirk that Samsung will have to fix without delay. While I love the low light photos that the S7 can click, you shouldn’t really bother zooming in on the photos too much. I noticed a lack of detail when you start going deep into these photos. Not such an issue since no one blows up this pictures that big.

Do you need the edge?

The edge is a great extra feature to have. But you will need serious presence of mind to use it. Also, it is, at least for now, just another way to do some stuff and there is nothing that can be done exclusively using the curved bit of the screen. So decide whether you want to spent extra to get this real estate on the sides. The S7 is a great device even without it.

Should you buy?

The S7 and S7 edge might not be really innovative, but what Samsung has done is make the phones almost near perfect by making it bugless—if you can overlook the fingerprint scanner. That is innovation in itself, if you ask me. If you ask me there is no better phone to upgrade for Samsung fans who are now on S5 or under. For them this phone takes the experience to a whole new level. For sheer performance and camera, this is the best Android phone you can buy at the moment.

However, make sure which phone you want—the S7 or the S7 edge. They are both great, but you might just be happy with the S7, without the edge.

Estimated street price: Rs 56,900

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To strengthen its position in the fast-growing affordable smartphone market, Vivo India has recently launched Y51L, a handset assembled at the company’s Greater Noida assembly plant. This facility was launched in December last year with an initial investment of Rs 125 crore. Priced at Rs 11,980, Y51L comes with a 5-inch HD IPS display, long battery life, powerful performance and a smooth user interface. Let us explore the finer details of the device.

Out of the box, the device looks and feels somewhat similar to other devices from Vivo. The body is made of plastic with metal strips running along the top and bottom of the rear along with a sleek glass back cover which add elegance to the handset. The display is sharp and colourful. In fact, adjustable to light condition, you can even read in direct sunlight without much difficulty and also adaptive display works well indoors.

The front also houses a camera on the top, while three capacitive touch keys are placed in the bottom. There is space for a 3.5 mm headset jack on the top edge, while the bottom edge has space for speaker grille and micro USB charger. With the thickness of 7.52 mm and weight of 143 gms, the device is neither too slim nor too heavy. It is comfortable to hold and operate, and is non-slippery at the same time.

The Y51L runs on Android 5.0.2 and its entrails are powered by 1.2 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, Quad Core processor. During the review period, the device handled multitasking and graphic intensive games quite smoothly. Overall, it offers a decent performance.

On the camera front, Y51L comes with a 8-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. The camera division has inbuilt features such as face detection, geo-tagging, face beauty, panorama etc. Both the cameras are decent and takes pictures with average quality and fine details in regular light. However, the images were little dull and less vibrant in low light conditions.

The Y51L supports 4G LTE connectivity, Wi-Fi, 3G, 2G, Bluetooth and dual standby SIM. It is packed with a replaceable 2350 mAh battery which offers decent standby time and could last between 5-7 hours with multitasking and continuous data usage.

Overall, the Y51L is a decent 4G enabled budget smartphone with good design, slim body and offers smooth operation.

SPECIFICATIONS

Display: 5-inch ( 960 x 540 pixels)

Processor: 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410

Operating system: Android 5.0.2

Memory & storage: 2 GB RAM + 16 GB internal storage (expandable upto 128 GB with microSD)

Camera: 5 MP front; 8 MP rear

SIM type: Dual SIM

Battery: 2350 mAh, replaceable

Estimated street price: Rs 11,980

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The theory of shopping as ‘retail therapy’ is far more pronounced in a world dominated with the ubiquity of mobile. The portability of such devices makes them compelling windows into experiences that were never possible previously. Ease of access, superior user experience and ultimately a way to kill time for many millennials; retailing is indeed a therapy. Mobile users, who window-shop on e-commerce apps to kill boredom, end up purchasing products. Push-notifications, offers, a customised feed for each individual are all ancillary functions that help personalise experiences for a user. In all, apps and mobile browsers are growing rapaciously to capture mind share. To personalise these experiences, e-commerce companies are hungry for data. Are you a male, female? How often do you check for clothing? This data helps marketers serve better products to a consumer.

Only a few of us are aware of the fact that’s staring right at us. We all grant direct access to our personal and sensitive data to a dozen or more e-commerce companies. Ever signed into a food delivery or shopping app with your Facebook account? Now, your data breach just got compounded. If you lose your Facebook password to hackers, you are likely to compromise your dozen other accounts. The interlinking of these sites helps consumers get rid of the tedious process of signing up. But it also presents a case for vulnerability, should any one of the companies fail to protect their data.

We forget that with every new log-in and online transaction made, we are one step closer to security hazards. No wonder, nearly 75% of retailers are investing in threat management, vulnerability and data security solutions, according to a survey report of retailers by Happiest Minds Technologies.

Omnichannel security— The trap

As marketers, we come up with newer technologies to be incorporated in the process of customer engagement. Be it festive shopping, or the peak sale season, customers are constantly provided with multiple options to shop online and offline. How many of us eagerly scout for ‘flat discounts’ or ‘upto 50% off’ in retail stores and e-commerce sites? To consistently provide the best of the best, industry players have to reinvent and reshape multiple platforms. In fact, 40% of the multi-channel retailers we spoke to said that they have enabled customers to engage with brands in a true omnichannel manner, where they provide digital experience in physical store while being online.

Such technological advancements have helped retailers explore this industry to target offline customers through online mediums. As a matter of fact, 33% retailers surveyed in the report, strongly agree that they have the capability to recognise in-store customer when he/she shops online.

Today, there are many tools that help brands understand their customers in order to sell personalised products. This information is either stored in the form of Big Data analytics or via feedback forms at the physical stores. There is so much competition to personalise products in the retail industry that customers have the option of switching from channel to channel according to convenience. This rush to offer newer technologies has increased the risk of security and compliance in this industry. On one side, we expand into different platforms, while on the other, security issues grow as a haunting shadow.

Connecting the dots

Omnichannel retailing has definitely put IT in the spotlight, but it has equally posed high security risks for the retailers. Since hackers have the capability to build malwares to device-specific, the retail industry must manage risking sensitive data. For this, it is crucial to protect the multiple channels that are exposed.

This is an ever-growing issue. One cannot permanently avoid security threats as hackers invent newer malwares on an everyday basis to attack the industry. But, we can definitely control the risk of being exposed. We need to start implementing IT solutions that enable protection. Also, retailers need to be prepared with the right strategy to ensure zero or minimum loss.

Written By: Gunendra Patil. The writer is VP—retail, travel & entertainment industry head, Happiest Minds Technologies

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Interestingly, Street View is not available in India. The company had launched the service in 2011 in India, but later suspended it following an order from the police. (Reuters)

Tech giant Google today launched the Street View imagery of Sri Lanka on Google Maps that will allow users to view and experience 360-degree panoramic imagery of the country from their phones, tablets and computers.

With addition of Sri Lanka, Street View is now available in 76 countries, including the US, Japan and South Korea. Street View allows users to see how a city or a place looks like in real. Using cars and bikes fitted with cameras to collect imagery, Google collects and stitches the photos accumulated together to make the 360-degree panorama.

Interestingly, Street View is not available in India. The company had launched the service in 2011 in India, but later suspended it following an order from the police.

“Google began driving in Sri Lanka in December 2014 and finished collecting imagery in February this year. From the bustle of downtown Colombo, to the cool tea plantation hills, Sri Lanka’s landscape is as beautiful as it is diverse,” Google Public Policy Manager Helena Lersch said.

“To capture this imagery, Google drove close to 50,000 km across every state and province so you can virtually explore this beautiful landscape from coast to coast,” she added.

She, however, did not say if and when the service would be launched in India.

“Sri Lanka is already a popular tourist destination, and we hope Street View will make the country even more accessible to people interested in exploring and visiting here. We are delighted to bring imagery of Sri Lanka to Street View on Google Maps,” she said.

Sri Lanka has become a burgeoning popular tourism destination, with the numbers of tourists heading to the island nation growing by almost 20 per cent each year. In 2015, 1.8 million tourists visited the country.

In 2011, Google had launched Street View service in India and had begun collecting images of streets by driving across the city in specially designed cars and trikes, (three-wheel pedi-cab) possessing high resolution cameras on top of the vehicle. The images were to be made available at a later date in Street View on Google Maps.

However, Bengaluru police had objected to the data collection by Google’s cars due to security concerns.

Certain reports suggest that the US-based company may relaunch Street View in India with certain riders, leaving out sensitive locations like defence installations, nuclear sites and some other high-valued spots as part of the service.

Google offers a virtual walkthrough across some tourist sites in India like Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Qutub Minar and Mysore Palace.

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The Apple invites for the March 21 event had the tagline “Let us Loop you in”. In all probability, it alluded to the venue of the event — 1, Infinite Loop — the location of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. But was Apple also, in a way, telling you they were in a loop of recurring themes?

The iPhone SE, without doubt the most significant of the announcements during the day, was a throwback, bringing back the once popular 4-inch form factor. Apple did that also with the new iPad Pro 9.7-inch, the size in which the Apple tablet was launched in and sold 200 million devices of.

Even as CEO Tim Cook started the event by announcing that he was ready for a long fight over encryption of Apple devices with the US security agencies, the event suggested that they were able to give in on some things, like price for instance.

In fact, the iPhone SE is the cheapest launch price for an Apple smartphone at $399. The story, for a while, got even better for the Indian audience as Apple initially announced that the 16GB version of this phone would be priced in India at a very aggressive Rs 30,000. However, the price was later corrected to a more Apple-like to Rs 39,000.

Analysts still see this as a good price. Rushabh Doshi of research firm Canalys told IndianExpress.com, that the phone addresses untapped potential in the 4-inch premium segment market in many countries. “The pricing, albeit lesser than the larger iPhones will appeal to the price-conscious, who are yet looking to associate themselves with a premium brand. While the iPhone SE is the most affordable iPhone at launch, its pricing strategy in markets outside the US will be important for the SE to be a popular choice for first time iPhone users,” he said.

While, Doshi said, the price in India has almost a 50% premium over the US pricing, “users will wait for subsequent price cuts before laying their hands on an SE, waiting for it to become more affordable”. He said that given the healthy ‘resale’ market status that Apple enjoys in price-conscious markets like India, the SE will have to compete against a resold iPhone 6 and 6S. The phone, which uses a chassis very similar to the iPhone 5s, has specs and components of the newer iPhone 6s, including the A9 chipset, 12MP camera and fingerprint scanner.

Tim Bajarin, president of US-based Creative Strategies, Inc, is positive about the new phone as it has “the same technology that is in Apple’s newest iPhones and is the lowest cost premium phone in their line”. “There is pent up demand for a 4-inch phone and one with this level of features will be a big hit and drive many who have been on the sidelines to finally upgrade if they resisted the large iPhone designs,” he added.

Bajarin said the new iPhone is “especially focused on their expanding into emerging markets and is the first iPhone they will use to start growing their market share in India”.

While agreeing that the price is still a bit high for some markets, he said, Apple is an aspirational brand and even in emerging markets there is interest in iPhones. “I see India as Apple’s next major market and over the next three years they will put a lot of time, money and energy into expanding their market share in India. And, they will eventually drive these prices down and make them even more affordable for all emerging markets and use it to grow Apple overall iPhone market share and ecosystem.”

The other significant announcement was the price cut on the Apple Watch. Despite being the most popular single smartwatch model in the world now, it hasn’t seen significant uptake in countries like India. With the new price, this wearable could find more adoption in emerging markets.

(Travel for this report was sponsored by Apple)

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Apple iPhone SE, the US technology major Apple’s latest bet to grab a bigger share of the booming Indian smartphone market will start selling in the country from April 8 for Rs 39,000, a price higher than that of existing models.

Beetel Teletech and Redington have said they will begin the distribution of iPhone SE, Apple’s lowest priced smartphone, from April 8.

Apple Inc had yesterday unveiled a new, smaller iPhone SE at a relatively low price tag of USD 399 as it looks to boost sales in high-growth markets like China and India.

The phone has a four-inch screen, comes in four stainless- steel finishes and incorporates a faster A9 processor. It sports a fingerprint scanner, 12-megapixel iSight camera, featuring Live Photos and faster wireless as well as Apple Pay, and at USD 399 it costs nearly 40 per cent less than the iPhone 6S’s USD 649 opening price.

However, the starting price at Rs 39,000 in India is higher than some existing models, which are available on the country’s online marketplaces, like iPhone 5s at Rs 25,000 and iPhone 6 at around Rs 32,000.

Supply chain solution provider Redington in a statement said it “will offer iPhone SE beginning April 8, in 3,000 retail outlets across the country”.

Beetel Teletech said that it will offer “iPhone SE, the most powerful phone with a four-inch display, beginning Friday, April 8, 2016 at over 3500 retail locations across India.”

iPhone SE will be available in space grey, silver, gold and rose gold metallic finishes in 16GB and 64GB models starting at Rs 39,000 from Apple Authorised Resellers and select carriers, Apple said in a statement.

Pre-orders for the handset opens March 29, it said.

“iPhone SE is packed with a stunning 4-inch Retina display, advanced 64-bit A9 chip with M9 motion co-processor, longer battery life, 12-megapixel iSight camera with True Tone flash, Live Photos, 4K video, faster LTE and Wi-Fi,” Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Philip Schiller said.

“iPhone SE is an exciting new idea — we started with a beloved, iconic design and reinvented it from the inside out. The result is the most beautiful and powerful phone with a four-inch display in the world,” Schiller said.

Apple Inc has unveiled a new, smaller iPhone SE at a relatively low price tag of USD 399 as it looks to boost sales in high-growth markets like China and India.

The 64-bit A9 chip, introduced in iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, offers iPhone SE customers two times faster CPU and three times faster GPU performance compared to iPhone 5s, all with gains in energy efficiency for improved battery life, the statement said.

iPhone SE users can browse, download and stream content even faster with wi-fi up to three times and LTE up to 50 per cent faster than iPhone 5s.

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Not only genes, even jobs may run in some families, and people within a family are proportionally more likely to eventually also choose the same occupation and this is especially true of twins, a Facebook study has revealed.

However, in absolute terms, the vast majority of kids strike their own path and choose a profession different than that of their parents or their siblings, the research added.

Facebook data scientists Ismail Onur Filiz and Lada Adamic analysed two related sets of data: one a sample of siblings’ choices of profession, and the other of parent-child choices.

The sample included 5.6 million parent-child pairs in English-speaking locales who specified a sibling or parent-child relationship on Facebook, along with filling in their occupations.

The study first looked at father-son occupations and mother-daughter occupations.

“The interactive visualisation shows that the probability of a child’s occupation falling into any given category does vary by occupation,” the team noted.

They first calculated the probability of a child having an occupation, given their father’s occupation like a lawyer-father having a doctor-son (5 percent).

“We then calculated how elevated this probability is relative to the overall proportion of doctors among sons. In this case a son of someone in the legal profession is 4.6 times as likely to practice medicine than sons in general,” Filiz and Adamic noted.

Fathers in the military are more likely than average to have a son in protective service.

Even though relatively speaking, a child may be much more likely to follow in his or her parents’ footsteps, the absolute percentage may still be quite low.

A son who has a father in the military is five times more likely to enter the military, but just one in four sons of a military professional does so.

For fathers in the dataset who work in farming, fishing and forestry, only 3 percent of their sons stay in the profession but this probability is 7.6 times the overall rate.

Nearly 20 percent of daughters of mothers who work in office and administrative support choose the same career. On the other hand, 8.5 percent of daughters of mothers in nursing also choose a career in nursing.

“We also see substantial cross-gender occupation “inheritance.” Scientist fathers have scientist daughters at 3.9 the overall rate, while mothers working in law have sons choosing a legal profession at 6.6 times the overall rate,” the team found.

A negative relationship, where a child is less likely to enter a profession due to their family background, is typically very small. For example for lawyer-fathers, the probability of their sons entering construction or maintenance or repair is about 85 percent of the overall likelihood.

Siblings not only share the same parent but sometimes, as in the case of identical twins, they share the same genes.

For the analysis of sibling occupations, the team considered a sample of 2.37 million same-gender siblings in the US who had filled in their occupations in their profiles.

“Nearly 15 percent of siblings share an occupation, which is higher than the 8.6 percent rate for any two same-gender, same-age individuals in the population. Twins’ tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7 percent, is even more striking,” the team said.

Overall, the study found that people are more likely to “eventually” choose the same occupation but overall the “vast majority” of children choose their own career that’s different from their parents.

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Andrew S. Grove, former chief executive and chairman of Intel Corporation who contributed immensely to the semiconductor giant’s success, passed away on Monday at the age of 79.

Both during his time at Intel and in retirement, Grove was one of the most influential figures in technology and business, writing best-selling books and widely cited articles, and speaking out on an array of prominent public issues.

His books High Output Management (1983) and Only the Paranoid Survive (1999) remain some of the most highly regarded management books.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove,” said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in a statement.

“Andy made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders,” Krzanich noted.

Grove was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2000. However, the cause of his death has not yet been determined, a spokesman for the family was quoted as saying by the New York Times.

Present at Intel’s 1968 founding with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Grove became Intel’s president in 1979 and CEO in 1987.

He served as chairman of the Board from 1997 to 2005.

Born Andras Grof in Budapest, Hungary, Grove immigrated to the US in 1956-57 having survived Nazi occupation.

He studied chemical engineering at the City College of New York, completing his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963.

After graduation, he was hired by Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher and rose to assistant head of R&D under Moore.

When Noyce and Moore left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968, Grove was their first hire, the statement added.

Grove played a critical role in the decision to move Intel’s focus from memory chips to microprocessors and led the firm’s transformation into a widely recognised consumer brand.

Under his leadership, Intel produced the chips, including the 386 and Pentium, that helped usher in the personal computer era.

Grove and his wife, Eva, were married for 58 years and had two daughters and eight grandchildren.

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U.S. prosecutors said Monday that a “third party” had presented a possible method for opening an encrypted iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, a development that could bring an abrupt end to the high-stakes legal showdown between the government and Apple Inc.

A federal judge in Riverside, California, late Monday agreed to the government’s request to postpone a hearing scheduled for Tuesday so that the FBI could try the newly discovered technique. The Justice Department said it would update the court on April 5.

The government had insisted until Monday that it had no way to access the phone used by Rizwan Farook, one of the two killers in the December massacre in San Bernardino, California, except to force Apple to write new software that would disable the password protection.

The Justice Department last month obtained a court order directing Apple to create that software, butApple has fought back, arguing that the order is an overreach by the government and would undermine computer security for everyone.

The announcement on Monday that an unnamed third party had presented a way of breaking into the phone on Sunday – just two days before the hearing and after weeks of heated back-and-forth in court filings – drew skepticism from many in the tech community who have insisted that there were other ways to get into the phone.

“From a purely technical perspective, one of the most fragile parts of the government’s case is the claim that Apple’s help is required to unlock the phone,” said Matt Blaze, a professor and computer security expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “Many in the technical community have been skeptical that this is true, especially given the government’s considerable resources.”

Former prosecutors and lawyers supporting Apple said the move suggested that the Justice Department feared it would lose the legal battle, or at minimum would be forced to admit that it had not tried every other way to get into the phone.

In a statement, the Justice Department said its only interest has always been gaining access to the information on the phone and that it had continued to explore alternatives even as litigation began. It offered no details on the new technique except that it came from a non-governmental third party, but said it was “cautiously optimistic” it would work.

“That is why we asked the court to give us some time to explore this option,” a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Melanie R. Newman, said. “If this solution works, it will allow us to search the phone and continue our investigation into the terrorist attack that killed 14 people and wounded 22 people.”

It would also likely end the case without a legal showdown that many had expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. An Apple executive told reporters on a press call that the company knew nothing about the Justice Department’s possible method for getting into the phone, and that the government never gave any indication that it was continuing to search for such solutions.

The executive characterized the Justice Department’s admission Monday that it never stopped pursuing ways to open the phone as a sharp contrast with its insistence in court filings that onlyApple possessed the means to do so.
Nate Cardozo, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group backingApple, said the San Bernardino case was the “hand-chosen test case” for the government to establish its authority to access electronic information by whatever means necessary.

In that context, he said, the last-minute discovery of a possible solution and the cancellation of the hearing is “suspicious,” and suggests the government might be worried about losing and setting a bad precedent. But George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crime prosecutor, said the government was likely only postponing the fight.

“The problem is not going away, it’s just been delayed for a year or two,” he said. Apple said that if the government was successful in getting into the phone, which might involve taking advantage of previously undiscovered vulnerabilities, it hoped officials would share information on how they did so. But if the government drops the case it would be under no obligation to provide information to Apple.

In opposing the court order, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, and his allies have argued that it would be unprecedented to force a company to develop a new product to assist a government investigation, and that other law enforcement agencies around the world would rapidly demand similar services.

Law enforcement officials, led by Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, have countered that access to phones and other devices is crucial for intelligence work and criminal investigations. The government and the tech industry have clashed for years over similar issues, and Congress has been unable to pass legislation to address the impasse.

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Apple Inc’s new iPhone SE smartphone will be available in India from early April for a price of Rs39,000 for a basic 16GB version, the company said early Tuesday.

Apple Inc’s new iPhone SE smartphone will be available in India from early April for a price of Rs39,000 for a basic 16GB version, the company said early Tuesday.

The 4-inch screen sized iPhone SE comes with a matte-chamfered edge and in four metallic finish colours including one in rose gold. The handset runs on the 64-bit A9 chip, which also powers the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, and also promises longer battery life, and a 12-megapixel camera.

“Everyone who wants a smaller phone is going to love iPhone SE,”said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

Interestingly, Apple has also forayed into smartphone accessories this time with the iPhone SE launch. The company intends to sell Apple-designed leather cases in black and midnight blue for Rs 2, 900 each. It would also sell Lightning Docks in colour-matched metallic finished for Rs 3,700 each, the company’s statement added.

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Apple Inc’s new iPhone SE priced at Rs 39,000 has first-rate features, but its prospects in key markets like India and China may be limited by its diminutive size. At the product launch in Cupertino, California on Monday, Apple vice president of iPhone Product Marketing Greg Joswiak singled out China as a target market, saying four-inch displays like that on the iPhone SE were still popular with first-time smartphone buyers. Chinese buyers tend to start off with a phone with a 4-inch screen, just like the iPhone SE, he argued.

China, Apple’s second-biggest market, and India, one of the fastest-growing major markets in the world, are both seen as key for Apple, which expects overall iPhone sales to contract.

The Apple iPhone SE is seen as particularly important for India, where Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, expects the smartphones market to double to 200 million units in the next two years. But in India and China, smartphones are often the main connection to the digital world, and a big screen is highly valued, analysts said.

“(In India) the majority of the low-end, $100 phones have a five-inch display. The key reason being smartphone users are becoming more mature are preferring bigger screen size as many of them don’t own a tablet or laptop,” said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research based in Mumbai.  Only 10 percent of smartphones sold in India at the end of December had a four-inch screen, according to Counterpoint, and Apple accounted for only two percent of overall smartphone shipments in India last year.

And with nearly 70 percent of smartphones selling for less than $150 in India, the iPhone SE’s roughly $400 price tag may still be out of reach for most buyers there.  In China, analysts warned the iPhone SE could mirror the disappointing outcome of Apple’s iPhone 5C, which was launched as an affordable gadget three years ago. It was also less technologically advanced than the top phone at the time.

“The 5C was awful, no one wanted it. Everyone knew that if you bought it you had no money,” said Shanghai-based Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group.  “Just going cheap doesn’t mean it’ll do well,” he said.
Apple’s second attempt to enter the mid-tier smartphone market, crowded with Android devices by rivals like Samsung Electronics and Huawei, is seen as an improvement on the 5C strategy.  The iPhone SE is up to date with the latest processor, fingerprint scanner and Apple Pay, and at $399 it costs nearly 40 percent less than the iPhone 6S’s $649 opening price.

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The Latest on the FBI’s efforts to unlock an Apple iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, attackers. Apple says it’s premature to declare victory in the company’s dispute with the government because it’s possible that authorities could come back in a few weeks and insist they still need Apple’s help

Attorneys for the tech company also told reporters that Apple has no idea what method the FBI is now exploring to try unlocking the encrypted iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino mass shooters. The attorneys spoke on condition they wouldn’t be identified by name because the case is still pending.

While the company is hoping the government will tell Apple about whatever method they use to access the phone’s encrypted files, the attorneys said it may be up to the FBI to decide whether to share the information.

An ACLU attorney says that if the government has an alternative solution to unlocking the iPhone, that development would severely undercut its effort to order Apple’s assistance.

ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo, who helped prepare a legal brief supporting Apple in the case, says the law that the government is citing, known as the All Writs Act, requires that there be a strong necessity for the requested assistance.

Abdo also says it’s possible that the solution has been proposed by an intelligence agency or a private contractor that the government asked for help. Experts have previously suggested that the iPhone’s auto-erase function could be surmounted by making a copy of the phone’s flash memory. But that was raised as a possible solution three weeks ago, and the FBI has continued to say that Apple is the only party available to help unlock the phone.

A federal prosecutor’s spokesman says a much-anticipated hearing over the FBI’s demand that Apple help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers has been canceled.

Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, says Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym on Monday granted the government’s request to delay the hearing, which had been set for Tuesday.

He says Pym ordered the government to file a status report by April 5.

In a filing late Monday, federal prosecutors said ”an outside party” has come forward and shown the FBI a possible method for unlocking the phone used by one of the shooters in the Dec. 2 terror attack. Authorities say they need time to determine if the method will work without compromising data on the phone.

If the method works, the government said, it would eliminate the need for Apple’s assistance. Apple has fought the court order, saying the government’s demand for assistance would make other iPhones vulnerable.

Federal authorities have asked to hold off on a much-anticipated court hearing set for Tuesday over the FBI’s demand for Apple to help unlock an encrypted iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers.

In a filing late Monday, federal prosecutors said ”an outside party” has come forward and shown the FBI a possible method for unlocking the phone used by one of the shooters in the Dec. 2 terror attack. Authorities say they need time to determine if the method will work without compromising data on the phone.

If the method works, the government said, it would eliminate the need for Apple’s assistance. Apple has fought the court order, saying the government’s demand for assistance would make other iPhones vulnerable.

In a statement, U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Melanie Newman says the government is ”cautiously optimistic” that the possible method will work.

The dispute over whether Apple must help the FBI hack into a dead San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone is about to play out in a Southern California courtroom.

The hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Riverside is the first in the battle that has seen Apple CEO Tim Cook and FBI Director James Comey spar over issues of privacy and national security.

The case is likely to set a precedent regarding whether technology companies must assist law enforcement.

A magistrate judge sided last month with the FBI. The agency wants Apple to help it crack the iPhone passcode for the gunman in the Dec. 2 attacks that killed 14 people.

Apple says doing so would tarnish its brand and threaten the trust its customers have about the security of their personal information.

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The other day I was reading an article about Zilla Parishad elections being campaigned on social media. As far as the smartphone’s penetration by embracing platforms like social media is concerned, people in rural India appear to be adapting to it rapidly. We also have handsets which understand voice based instructions being sold by some brands in north India.Mobile manufacturers really need to think about what more can rural consumers do with the mobile phone. Entertainment services could be an option that addresses the needs of amusement-starved customers of the brand.

If one really analyses the psyche of a small town consumer, based on Accenture’s research, we find that she is interested in healthcare and education. A value added service that encompasses these two needs could be other opportunities for brands to entrench themselves in the minds of the target consumers. Targetting adults with local news would be another way of engaging them as they always want to keep themselves abreast with latest happenings.

Imagine farmers operating a water pump remotely, where they are able to switch it on and off at a particular time using their handsets. These remote tracking capabilities extended beyond phones to water pumps and two wheelers will help rural customers track their equipment. What is required is a shift in the mindset of the manufacturers where they start looking beyond selling just phones to selling solutions to meet rural consumer needs.

The needs of the small town consumer are fast converging with that of urban users but they are still unique enough to demand customised solutions. This gives the manufacturers an opportunity to understand the consumer better and provide handsets which are unique to their specific needs.

The stereotype of a quintessential rural customer — a poor man with basic needs represents only 40% of the rural population. There are 20% of aspirational climbers in rural areas working towards improving their quality of life. They don’t want to use local products and would rather go for something that gives them a social status. There are people who have amassed enough wealth in the recent years and may spend it to just show it off, to put it bluntly. Pride of ownership is important to them. Even if they are not fully conversant with the product usage they might still buy it to flaunt it. That could be one driver and this should be classified as a need. The vast majority, on the other hand, probably has more practical needs.

Marketers need to invest time to understand their consumers better and develop products that are not just stripped down, low priced versions of products from urban areas. It should carry appropriate features for daily use which will help the brand cut through the clutter. Until others catch up, such products can always command a premium over other brands.

Written By: Raghuram Devarakonda. The author is managing director, advanced customer strategy, Accenture Strategy

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The burgeoning smartphones user base in India, as per a recent report by Counterpoint, has overtaken that of the US, crossing 220 million users by the end of 2015. The top spot is occupied by Samsung, followed by three Indian mobile manufacturing companies, Micromax, Intex and Lava, in that order. A report released earlier this month by International Data Corporation (IDC) bets on tier 2 and tier 3 cities to fuel the growth of the Indian smartphones market in the coming years. The report further states that 21.3% of the Indian smartphones market is spread across 25 major tier 2 and tier 3 cities, with Indian vendors comprising more than two-third of the market.

Jaideep Mehta, managing director, IDC South Asia, credits this to increasing data penetration and reach of e-commerce that is helping a small town consumer be more aware and have evolved demands. “The coming 4G revolution is promising to trigger the next wave of smartphones growth, with 4G enabled devices already overtaking 3G devices as the largest smartphones category,” he says.

The adoption of latest mobile technologies may be happening in the urban centres of the country, but increasingly, tier 2, tier 3 and rural areas are where volumes are expected, over the next few years. This is where Indian mobile manufacturers have an advantage which they seem to have been leveraging successfully so far, with more hits than misses.

The battle, then, for the small town consumer’s wallet is being fought on the ground rather than being led by straightjacket brand communication.

The new normal

The further a vendor moves away from a metro, the more customised his product needs to be. Catering to a non-urban consumer takes away the advantage of dishing out more ‘standardised’ products. The need for having specific features and languages starts differing from that of an urban consumer as you can no longer adapt something that’s more of a global need and downsize it to a tier 2, tier 3 or even a rural market. Accenture’s Masters of Rural Markets: Profitably Selling to India’s Rural Consumers study is indicative of an optimistic approach towards smaller cities with 46% of executive respondents believing that profits can be higher in rural markets. 67% of respondents are planning to rapidly expand in rural markets with 29% being comfortable with the current pace. Only 4% are looking to slow down their rate of rural expansion. What this tells us is that cases can be made about the high operational costs required for such markets but in no way can a company bank on having a dulled approach towards these areas.

The brands with swag

Homegrown brands such as Micromax, Intex, Lava International and Karbonn are some of the top mobile manufacturers that are successful in smaller cities, perhaps, more innovatively than international players in the same market space. The differentiation, then, for players in the affordable mobile phones segment has to go beyond product pricing. Because the value a consumer ascribes to his/her disposable income might be higher even more so in a non-urban area given that such a consumer may not be willing to make purchases for trial purposes.

One such example is Intex, which is leveraging everything from its digital platforms to sporting events to on-ground events to reach its audience. The marketing budget for Intex’s mobile segment is around Rs200 crore for the current fiscal year. Keshav Bansal, director, Intex Technologies, states, “For ATL, Intex has seen a rise in marketing spends (from Rs10 crore in 2007-08 to Rs250 crore in 2015-16) and plans to take it to Rs700 crore in the next two years.”

In terms of customisation, Intex has offerings which provide dual-SIM, long-lasting battery, bigger screens, high-end processors, the Matrabhasha phone that enables communication in 21 Indian regional languages, has a big data saver function and a women safety app, ‘Sashakt’. The company supplements this with over 70 Intex Smart World experience stores spread over 50 cities. Festive occasions are leveraged by the brand for a more intimate and localised connect with the consumer. Intex’s ownership of Gujarat Lions is set to provide it with the platform to have a nationwide reach.

Or take Micromax, which is looking to further category adoption by aiding consumers in their transition from feature phones to smartphones — a painpoint not many international brands extensively cater to. Shubhajit Sen, chief marketing officer, Micromax, sees more upgrade opportunities in a tier 2 or tier 3 town than in a metro.

Micromax brought on Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman as its brand ambassador to fulfil its more global goals. For localised communication needs, the company currently has roped in Kapil Sharma and actor Rana Daggubati. Having them in ads using local languages and broadcasting them on regional channels seems to be helping the brand connect with small towns. The brand currently ranks second in both IDC and Counterpoint reports.

Shashin Devsare, executive director, Karbonn Mobiles, credits the company’s decision to start setting up its distribution at the district and taluka levels, when it comes to what has worked in Karbonn’s favour. He adds that a strong distribution and service network lends credibility to the brand in addition to providing the servicing capability. The company currently covers over 90% of tier 2 and tier 3 districts in the country, Devsare claims. Karbonn Mobiles has used radio extensively in the past with activities such as Karbonn Kamaal Ka Juke Box in Agra. Roadshows too are a means of connecting with audiences. The brand, as part of an initiative, had canter vans travelling across seven cities of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh to support the launch of the multimedia devices range. This, in addition to providing products supporting local language functions, tie-ups with online marketplaces and leveraging the festive buying season. Ad spends for the company for 2015-16 are Rs150 crore.

But are these efforts enough?

Elusive top spot

The efforts of the homegrown players seem thorough and focussed on small towns but the number one ranking still eludes them. One of the many things that costs them the spot is the very thing that makes them a popular option – affordability. Navkendar Singh, senior research manager, channels, IDC India, argues that it is more of a perception game. A strong point of such brands indeed is their affordability which gives people a product that is high on specifications but when compared to a global brand or a Chinese brand, the perception of an homegrown brand being of ‘not very high’ quality is still a weak point.

Chinese entrants, both with their pricing and strategy, are putting up a tough fight on shelves for Indian vendors. However, this is where distribution and service network play an important role. “Indian brands are creating point of sale visibility, in shop promoters, regional brand ambassadors and vernacular messaging. But what they are also capable of is providing better service support in comparison to the Chinese brands,” says Singh.

The argument then has moved past which brand can provide the best product at the cheapest price for small towns — even if it seems like it is early days on that front. Consumers are willing to meet manufacturers half way by upping their aspiration quotient, bringing their wants closer to that of a tier 1 city consumer day by day. The disposable income is going up — even if it is happening gradually. The consumer is not shy of spending big, provided a brand can convince them that not only will their phone do what is expected to but that it is ready to evolve beyond expected functions.

“Indian brands are creating point of sale visibility, in shop promoters, regional brand ambassadors and vernacular messaging”

Navkendar Singh, Senior research manager, channels, IDC India

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What if you could get high on your headphones? A new stress-busting music gadget is in town that stimulates nerves in the ear to trigger the release of feel-good hormones.

The device Nervana works by using electrical pulses, delivered via one of the headphones, to stimulate the vagus nerve in your left ear and the company claims it could help to “increase calm and reduce stress,” the Daily Mail reported.

The Florida-based firm behind the device recommends twice daily sessions of between 15 to 45 minutes, when using the Nervana, the name being a play on nerve and nirvana.

The Nervana has three modes of play – A ‘music mode’ that analyses the incoming signal from the users own music device to give music’s feel, an ‘ambient mode’ that uses an internal microphone to pick up sound from the wearer’s environment, such as at a concert, and the third option is a ‘formula mode,’ which stimulates the vagus nerve without music, using predefined signal patterns.

According to its makers, it has been tested on hundreds of people and it is proven to be safe. However, it is marketed as a consumer, rather medical, device.

On its Indiegogo crowd funding page, the firm explained: “When the left earbud is placed in the left ear and the Nervana generator is turned on, the electrical signal beats to whatever music is being experienced by the user, whether supplied to the generator through a user’s phone or through the environment, such as in a concert hall.”

It further read as “The electrical signal stimulates the Vagus nerve, which could result in the release of neurotransmitters. For most users, the results are increased feelings of calm and relaxation and stress relief.”

Dr Richard Cartledge, co-creator and co-founder of Nervana, said, “We wanted to bring the wellness benefits of Vagus nerve stimulation to more people in a non-invasive way that is easy for consumers to use on a daily basis. That’s what Nervana is all about: making people feel good.”

The device is currently available from 279 dollars and is expected to ship from this June.

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Apple event: CEO Tim Cook launched the smaller iPhone SE on Monday. The company says the smartphone is priced at $399. As far as India is concerned, iPhone SE will be available as early as April and be priced at Rs 39,000 for 16 GB version.

Apple iPhone SE is aimed at new buyers, especially in emerging markets and China, as the technology company looks to reverse a decline in worldwide sales of its most important product.

The new device, called the iPhone SE, has a 4-inch (10-cm) screen. It represents Apple’s second bid for the crowded mid-tier market after an unsuccessful foray three years ago. Orders start on Thursday, and the phone will be available next week.

The $399 starting price is well below the $649 for the current top iPhone model without a contract, which is beyond the reach of many. The new phone, with Apple’s vaunted A9 chip, is much faster than Apple’s previous attempt at an entry-level phone, launched in 2013. It also runs Apple Pay and comes in the wildly popular rose gold color.

Analysts had said before the event that a phone priced below $450 could be competitive with other mid-tier rivals, mostly running Google’s Android system, and make an impact in emerging markets and China, the world’s biggest buyer of smartphones.

Apple is hoping the cheaper model will stimulate overall iPhone sales, which it expects to decline this quarter for the first time since it essentially created the smartphone market nine years ago.

“There are people who want that smaller screen size,” said Bob O’Donnell of TECHnalysis Research, but he warned that it may not be a sure-fire hit.

“It’s a more attractive price point, but I don’t think it moves the needle in emerging markets,” he said. “You do a price cut when you need to drive the market a bit more.”

Apple shares fell in the afternoon and were down about $0.15 at $105.77. The stock is down 20 percent from its all-time high closing price of $133 in February 2015, as Wall Street worries that the company does not have any blockbuster products in the pipeline.

The company showed off new wristbands for the Apple Watch and a new iPad Pro tablet at Monday’s event, but it generated little excitement among investors.

“Apple is so big now that nothing seems to be earth-shaking anymore, and the strategy seems to be turning to offering complementary products like watch bands so they can maintain their sales momentum,” said Skip Aylesworth, portfolio manager of the Hennessy Technology Fund.

The more compact phone design comes after it expanded the size of the screens in its high-end iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones in 2014 to as large as 5.5 inches. That was broadly seen as an attempt to match rival Samsung Electronics with its large-screen Galaxy phones.

Before the launch at Apple’s leafy Cupertino, California headquarters, Chief Executive Tim Cook defended the company’s refusal to comply with a U.S. court order to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in a December attack in San Bernardino, California.

Apple has a responsibility to protect customers’ data and privacy, Cook said, adding that Apple “will not shrink from that responsibility.” His statement was greeted by applause from the audience.

The tech company’s dispute with the U.S. government has become a lightning rod for a broader debate on data privacy in the United States. The company is set to square off against the U.S. government at a court hearing on Tuesday, likely the first round in a long legal fight to avoid being forced to decrypt the iPhone.

Apple also announced a new scheme it called ‘Liam’ to take apart old iPhones and reuse the materials.

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