Archive for the ‘IT in India’ Category

Blackberry to launch Playbook this month

June 13th, 2011

After mobile phones, the competition is hotting up for “tablets” in India with BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) all set to launch its PlayBook in the country later this month to face the likes of Apple”s iPad and Samsung”s Galaxy Tab.

The Canadian firm will launch PlayBook in Indian markets and some other countries this month, sources said. According to the company”s website, the PlayBook is scheduled to be launched in 16 countries, including the UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, UAE and India.

“The price is going to be competitive with the other products and in line with the global pricing as well,” they said.

The price in India could range between Rs 22,000 and Rs 32,000, depending upon its storage capacity, from 16 GB to 64 GB.

Globally, PlayBook is available at USD 499, USD 599 and USD 699 for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions, respectively.

Since the launch of Apple”s iPad, the tablet market is witnessing huge competition, with new contenders launching their devices. A tablet PC, though smaller in size, has PC-like functionalities.

Apple”s rival in the computing space, Dell had launched the ”Streak” last year in India, while homegrown telecom handset makers like Spice and Olive have also launched similar devices at much lower price points.

The BlackBerry tablet has received a mixed response from the markets where it has been launched. According to reports, unlike rival iPad, which sold like hot cakes on its launch in April last year, the PlayBook just sold 50,000 copies in the first week of its launch on April 19 in the US and Canada.

BlackBerry has over one million users in India and RIM would target them.

The PlayBook is a seven-inch tablet that runs on a new operating system built by QNX Software Systems — a RIM unit that makes software used to run everything from cars to nuclear reactors.

On a PlayBook, users can go online only using a Wi-Fi network or by synchronising the device to their BlackBerry smartphones.

According to analysts, sales in the tablet PC segment in India are expected to touch one million units over the next 12 months.

With 3G (high-speed internet services) being rolled out aggressively, the opportunity has only expanded, they said.

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How to protect our personal data from hackers

June 13th, 2011

Computer hackers have an ability to cause chaos by using personal data that they have stolen. But the theft can be prevented if people are careful with their information.

Personal finance expert Carmen Wong Ulrich shared advice during a talk on ‘The Early Show on Saturday Morning’ on how to protect personal information and what to do when hackers get their hands on it.

“The first line of defense is always your passwords, and the information on your computer,” CBS News quoted Ulrich as telling co-anchor Betty Nguyen.

“Make sure you go right to your computer, change your log-in information and password information on everything from your credit card accounts to where you shop through retailers and your email, as well because, as we saw-Google and Yahoo – the hackers are coming in from everywhere,” she said.

Ulrich, author of ‘The Real Cost of Living’, said almost three-quarters of us use the same password on several accounts.

“Please stop doing that! Protect the banking part as much as you can, because the hackers will come in from the company side. But they’re coming in on your side, too,” she implored.

“Also, use one computer, if you can, to do your banking. I know it’s hard (with everyone using so many different devices). Try to do it all on one computer. That limits exposure.

“And, never, ever do banking or do transactions online on an open Wi-Fi. It’s very tempting because it’s so easy. You could be sitting in a coffee shop or the airport or wherever you are. Squatters will sit there and scour that Wi-Fi. So definitely don’t do that.

“And don’t use your debit card online. This runs counter (to conventional wisdom), because credit cards, people say, are bad. But a credit card protects you and your cash.

“Of course, there’s (a) liability (limit) with your debit card. But who wants their accounts emptied of cash? Instead, use your credit card online, so at least you don’t expose yourself, cash-wise,” she stated.

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Mobile Web or Mobile Apps?

June 13th, 2011

With the continued advancement of HTML5 technology, marketers and publishers are beginning to debate the necessity of investing in mobile applications, as mobile websites become increasingly sophisticated. Why develop for numerous platforms – such as Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, for example – when you can develop just once in HTML5?

Speaking at the OMMA Mobile conference in New York City this morning, however, Louis Gump, VP of mobile for CNN, suggested attempting to choose between the two strategies is “like asking which wheel you’d rather have on a bicycle.”

Acknowledging that it would be “great” to develop just once for a range of devices, Gump stressed that consumers continue to consume media and content through both channels. “Start with the consumer in mind… If you’re trying to decide between mobile web and apps the answer is both, and both are going to continue to grow, we believe,” he said.

Despite that outlook, Gump did suggest a tipping point would eventually be reached, and implied mobile web could eventually replace the native application. “If history is any guide, mobile web will have some major event that helps it come around, he said.

For a publisher such as CNN that approach makes complete sense, as it attempts to cultivate the largest audience it can, regardless of platform. According to Ken Harlan, co-founder and President of mobile ad network MobileFuse, however, the mobile web holds greater ad promise than apps.

“We definitely feel that’s going to be where a large portion of the traffic is over time. We just don’t know when that’s going to be,” Harlan told ClickZ, adding “We’re servicing both channels, and I’m not going to make that bet, but we’re not focusing on apps.”

One important distinction between the two channels remains the issue of tracking and targeting, however. In-app measurement remains far more effective than that on the mobile web, thanks largely to the fragmented way in which mobile devices handle cookies. Despite that fact, Harlan believes his network’s strength in mobile web sets it apart from its rivals. “Mobile web is probably 65 percent of our traffic. We’ve concentrated more on mobile web than anyone else,” he said.

For agencies and advertisers, however, those metrics are essential to justify continued investment in the channel, and many focus their media buys on the app space as a result. “In-app is easier than mobile web to measure. We can get pretty accurate and similar metrics to those we would get online,” explained Paul Gelb, VP and mobile practice lead for Publicis-owned Razorfish.

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Smartphones Preferred Over Computers for Web Access

June 2nd, 2011

More than one-half of smartphone owners (55.9%) say they prefer using a smartphone to a computer when accessing the Internet, according to a new survey from Prosper Mobile Insights. Moreover, some 52.9% of smartphone owners say they use all of the functions of their smartphone, so much so that “it’s their life.”

Another 30.4% of surveyed smartphone owners say they use the basic functions of their device plus a few apps, whereas 16.7% use their smartphone just for calling, text messaging, and email.

Below, additional findings from a report by Prosper Mobile Insights, based on a survey of 102 smartphone users who completed the survey via smartphone.

Asked which device function they can’t live without, most smartphone owners cite texting (21.6%), accessing the Internet (16.7%), or sending/receiving email (15.7%). Fewer users can’t live without calling features (7.8%), GPS (6.9%), access to Facebook (5.9%), or apps (4.9%).

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IPv6 is here. How does this affect email?

June 2nd, 2011

IPv6 will change how we use the internet, again. To the typical user, there is no difference; web sites work the same. But email is a different story.

When using IPv6, addresses are allocated in a different manner. Most end-users today get one IP address, which is shared between multiple machines using a Network Address Translation (NAT) router. In IPv6, each user gets an address block – a /64 – of address space. This is great news, because end-to-end application on the Internet will work much better, and there will be no NAT in the way.

A /64 is a huge amount of space – 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses, to be precise. Looking at it another way, each end-user will get more than all of the address space available on the existing IPv4 internet. 4 billion times more!

That means that each of the devices in your home – your computers, phones, tablet computers, game centers, etc – all have their own address. There is no configuration required for this – it just works.

Unfortunately, this is also going to make it easy for spammers. Today, we can block spam by refusing mail from the IP address it is coming from. With more than 150M computers sending spam, this is hard – but we can do it.

With IPv6, the spammers can change. Because they get a block of addresses, they can send 1,000,000,000 spam messages each second, each using a different IPv6 address, for 500 years before they have to re-use an address! And, when they run out, they can just disconnect their modem, re-connect it, and get a new address block to do it all over again.

We’ve come up with the technology to deal with this, and will be making it available as IPv6 use increases over the coming months.

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YouSendIt Hits 30 Million Users, Bests Dropbox

May 30th, 2011

File-sharing service YouSendIt.com recently shared some impressive numbers with us: The Campbell, California-based company surpassed 30 million unique users in the past 12 months. The news prompted its PR team to send out a self-congratulatory note to journalists featuring the provocative subject line, “Dropbox who?”

The goosed growth comes on the heels of YouSendIt’s partnership with Yahoo Mail, which helped add a million users in roughly two months. But the uptick also comes at a difficult time for file-sharing services, which have been joined by more and more competitors eager to enter the lucrative cloud space.

From hot startups like Box.net and Dropbox to industry giants like Amazon and IBM, the cloud is increasingly becoming a large part of the lives of consumers and integral to enterprise clients.

With 60% revenue growth in 2010, however, it appears YouSendIt is defending its market position well in the wild, wild west of the cloud industry.

Still, while YouSendIt has chosen to highlight total unique users, the real proof of a company’s success is its registered and premium usership. Currently, YouSendIt has 400,000 paid subscribers and 18 million registered users–by comparison, Dropbox boasted of reaching 25 million registered users in April.

In other words, it’s cloudy in Silicon Valley.

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Google’s NFC-Powered Digital Wallet: Room For Your Shopping Lists, Credit Cards … And Complete Trust

May 30th, 2011

We’d heard several rumors, each adding a little detail, but now we know it all: Google’s just revealed its digital Wallet solution, based on near field wireless tech in its Android-powered smartphones. It’s not just about reinventing the good ol’ plastic magnetic strip credit card, it’s actually about changing nearly everything about shopping–”tomorrow’s next best shopping experience.” It’s a partnership with Mastercard’s PayPass system, with Sprint and Citibank along for the ride, and it should be a workable solution all around the world for users, wherever PayPass is accepted.

Over 70% of people use their credit cards online for shopping, said Google’s VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius, a situation radically different from just a few years ago, but e-commerce is still just 8% of overall retail even while it’s due to surpass a trillion dollars in 2013. Real store shopping rules the roost, then, but actual shopping is just not a “magical experience” and needs rebooting.

Google’s idea goes beyond replacing a credit card in your wallet with a wireless system in your phone–tallying with everything we’ve predicted about NFC-enabled shopping. Wallet, Google hopes, and the accompanying Offers system is “mobile, local, personalized, serendipitous, and open.” Giving an example of walking into a grocery store, Tilenius demonstrated that a Google Nexus S phone could pop up a grocery shopping list because it’s detected where you are. When you’d collected the goods, you’d pay at the checkout merely by tapping your phone to the sensor, and the transaction happens instantly, along with loyalty point awards and so on.

The system supports multiple cards (by default Citibank to start with) but there’s provision for other providers cards which are all securely stored along with PIN data, and there’s also a Google pre-paid credit card which you can “top-up” by using other payments systems. Special offers are also targeted at you, based on your previous shopping history at the store–a trick which leverages Google’s vast databases and expertise in targeted advertising–and ultimately Google thinks you’ll put “everything” in its Wallet, including digital editions of your driving license and car keys. Google stressed this is a real system, not a proof of concept, with over 300,000 PayPass installations and retailers integrating the tech right now. (Jack Dorsey, are you listening?)

And then comes “Offers,” a system to partner the Wallet and add in the extra functionality that makes it a real reinvention of shopping. Offers has been around for a few months and is, basically, Google’s attempt to steal Groupon’s–and maybe Facebook Deals’–business. While much of clients’ interactivity with Groupon happens at home, on a PC with printouts for vouchers and so on, Offers is going to be more about being mobile and tapping into the rich data stream generated by your shopping habits–Tilenius noted Offers would be delivered as a daily email (very much like Groupon) but also through apps. And unlike Groupons coupons it all happens in a single move when you pay for the product you’re saving cash on, via Wallet. Plus, as Google demonstrated onstage, there are novel new shopping ideas enabled by this system, like NFC-tagged posters which you’d tap your phone on to collect a coupon.

To appease security and privacy worries, Google’s Nexus S phone has a hardware level secure encryption chip, and to prevent your card data from being scanned just when you’re walking along (a very 21st Century version of pickpocketing) there’s no transmission of your data until you’re at a cash desk and have “unlocked” your Wallet app. How this translates to Google’s plans to make Wallet “open” for other systems to interact with, we’re not sure.

And, again, it’s likely no accident this all comes on the heels of Square’s upgrade. And we could always speculate that Google’s announcement on an average May day has something to do with Apple’s plans for NFC in its upcoming 2011 smartphone, plans we can only guess about.

Update: As part of it’s Q&A session, Google’s confirmed that field trials of Wallet will happen in New York and San Francisco before a bigger roll-out, and you can sign up at the Wallet website to learn about availability. It’s also highlighted that it’s taking a back-seat role in the transactions, and never gets your credit card details–that all happens between you, the retailer and your bank.

Plus you actually don’t have to have an NFC phone to use the free Wallet app…which leaves us bemused as to how that tech will work. That won’t be too much of a problem for long, because Motorola, HTC and Samsung all have Wallet-compatible NFC phones on the way.

Launch retail partners include The Container Store, Bloomingdales, Subway, Guess, Footlocker and others using Google’s “SingleTap” system, and Coca Cola, CVS Pharmacies and a few more using PayPass.

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EBay, PayPal sue Google over trade secrets

May 30th, 2011

NEW YORK (Reuters) – EBay and its online payment unit, PayPal Inc, on Thursday sued Google Inc and two executives for stealing trade secrets related to mobile payment systems.

The two executives, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, were formerly with PayPal and led the launch on Thursday of Google’s own mobile payment system in partnership with MasterCard, Citigroup and phone company Sprint.

The suit highlights the growing battle by a wide range of companies from traditional finance to Silicon Valley trying to take a major stake in what has been described as a $1 trillion opportunity in mobile payments. The mobile phone is seen as the digital personal wallet of the future.

The eBay suit said Bedier worked for nine years at PayPal, most recently serving as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. He joined Google on Jan. 24 this year.

Tilenius was at eBay from 2001 to October 2009 and served as a consultant to the company until March 2010. The suit says Tilenius joined Google in February 2010 as vice president of e-commerce.

Bedier is accused in the suit of having “misappropriated PayPal trade secrets by disclosing them within Google and to major retailers.”

The suit accused Tilenius of recruiting Bedier, thereby breaking a contractual agreement with eBay. It also claims Bedier attempted to recruit former colleagues still at PayPal.

Ebay said PayPal and Google worked closely together for three years until this year on developing a commercial deal where PayPal would serve as a payment option for mobile application purchases on Google’s Android phones.

It said Bedier was the senior PayPal executive leading and finalizing negotiations with Google on Android during this period.

It also claimed Bedier transferred up-to-date versions of documents outlining PayPal’s mobile payment strategies to his non-PayPal computer just days before leaving PayPal for Google.

“By hiring Bedier, with his trade secret knowledge of PayPal’s plans and understanding of Google’s weaknesses as viewed by the industry leader (PayPal), Google bought the most comprehensive and sophisticated critique of its own problems available,” the suit said.

Google spokesman Aaron Zamost said the company had not yet received a copy of the complaint would not be able to comment until it has had a chance to review it.

Google and PayPal have done battle in the recent past in online payments via computers with the launch of Google Checkout in 2006, but Checkout has had a minimal impact on PayPal’s market dominance.

The suit was filed at Superior Court of the State of California, county of Santa Clara, Case No: CV20l863.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, additional reporting by Jennifer Saba; Editing by Gary Hill, Bernard Orr and Matt Driskill)

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Acer Iconia Tab A500 is High Performance, Android Honeycomb Tablet

May 30th, 2011

Iconia Tab A500 is one of the few tablets that run on Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The tablet comes in both 3G and WiFi only version with some good features.

Hardware and Looks

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 has a 10.1 inch touchscreen that offers 1280×800-pixel resolution.

On the front you will also see a 2 megapixel camera for video calling. However, on the front you won’t find any physical buttons.

The normal home and back buttons of any Android device are replaced by virtual buttons on screen. You can see the buttons in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

The advantage of this placement is that if you shuffle between portrait and landscape orientations, the buttons are always on the lower left-hand side of the display.

There’s another button at the lower left corner which gives access to all recently used apps.

On the back of the tablet you will see a 5 megapixel camera. The built quality of A500 gives a cheap feeling because they have mainly used plastic.

There is an orientation lock key and volume adjustment key on the top edge of the tablet. The device also features a Micro SD card slot, a SIM card slot, micro-USB port and micro-HDMI port.

On top of A500 is a headphone socket. The tablet is 13.3mm thick and weighs 765g. That means its 164g heavier than the iPad 2. The A500 runs on the Tegra 2 processor and has 1GB of RAM.

Display and Camera
The 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 TFT LCD of A500 is a visual delight. Another plus point of the display is its viewing angle.

You can position the tablet at any angle and still the readability remains very good. Though the readability reduces significantly under sun, it performs pretty well indoor conditions.

The 5 mega-pixel rear camera takes nice photos under a bright sky and front camera is just ok. But the main problem is that cameras lose the focus if you try to capture anything away from it and produces blurry images. Despite the 720p HD video capturing capability, the captured video quality is not good at all.

Software and Performance
Acer’s Iconia Tab A500 runs on Android 3.0, a specially customized OS for the tablets and it certainly works like a breeze.

A500 features a great browser with Flash support. You can open multiple tabs and multi-task. The Honeycomb on screen keyboard is a delight. It supports multi-touch, so you can touch type.

You can also hold down the shift key or number key to get quick access to certain characters. The Gmail client, music player, calendar, photo browser, chat and maps application works brilliantly.

The apps in the Android Market for the Honeycomb devices are not so many and Google should look into this matter as the common Android apps can not utilize the screen space of the tablets. The tablet runs on pair of 3260mAh batteries and offers almost 7 hours of battery life.

Final Verdict
The overall performance of Iconia Tab A500 is good. But there are some negative points too. It’s a very heavy tablet, battery life is little poor, and compared to some tablets its price is bit high.

While ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is priced at $400 with almost the same facilities, A500 is priced at $450.

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iPhone 4 to hit Indian store shelves on May 27

May 27th, 2011

After an year-long wait, Apple’s iPhone 4 smartphone will finally be available in India on Friday. India’s two top telecom operators Bharti airtel and Aircel announced Wednesday that they will be launching much-awaited iPhone 4 smartphone in India on Friday, May 27th.

Apple’s iPhone 4, the next-generation version of the popular smartphone, was rolled out way back in June in the United States followed by other countries around the world.

Apple iPhone 4 coming to India
Making its debut in the world’s fastest-growing mobile phone market, the iPhone 4- the fourth-generation variant of Apple’s smartphone, will be sold in Indian markets through mobile service providers Aircel and Airtel.

Popular for its high-speed internet and mobile software capabilities, the iPhones will be available in 16GB and 32GB models, with a price tag of 34,500 rupees ($763) and 40,900 rupees respectively.

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