a2z Information: 2013-04-07

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Facebook Home hits Android today Chat Heads first

Today is the day that Android gets Facebook Home – but at this very moment, the big changes exist outside the final Facebook Home app, inside Facebook Messenger and the basic Facebook app instead! What you’ll be seeing inside Facebook Messenger is a push to what’s effectively Chat Heads. Chat Heads is a bit more of an aesthetic change than it is a change to your whole going-about of things.
With Facebook Messenger’s newest update you’ve got a row of “Heads” above your display that you can easily flip through to speak with different Facebook users. While before you’d have had to tap a couple of times before switching to a new person to chat with, now you’ve got but a swipe. Perhaps most important of all is Facebook Messenger’s new ability to appear on top of any screen – if it’s on, it’s everywhere.

Internet search engine Google has invited a new feature that would let people to contribute to its Map service.

Google launched its Map Maker tool in the UK, allowing people to add local information such as building outlines, hiking trials, rivers, railways and more to Google Maps.

According to Map Maker program manager Jessica Pfund, users can edit and update anything from historic buildings and streets to agricultural land, the Independent reports.

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler - Olympic rowers, nemeses of Mark Zuckerberg - are laying claim to a new title: Bitcoin moguls.

The Winklevii, as they are known, have amassed since last summer what appears to be one of the single largest portfolios of the digital money, whose wild gyrations have Silicon Valley and Wall Street talking.

The twins, the first prominent figures in the largely anonymous Bitcoin world to publicly disclose a big stake, say they own nearly $11 million worth.

Topeka analyst Brian White today issued a new research note summarizing his thoughts on the phone he calls the iPhone 5S, expected to be released this summer. Most notably, he seems to have reversed his prior assertion that the next iPhone will have multiple screen sizes, noting that at a trade show in China there was a consensus amongst his sources that the screen size will be unchanged from the iPhone 5. He claims the left side volume and mute buttons will be arranged differently, in line with a parts leak from yesterday, and says the rumored fingerprint technology will be the differentiating feature for the 5S, like what Siri was to the 4S. White also shares some additional thoughts about the rumored cheaper iPhone he expects this summer:

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 takes the mid-sized mobile market that Samsung’s had covered for several years with successive Galaxy Note tablets and adds a pen. With Samsung’s newest iteration of the S-Pen, a quad-core Exynos processor under the hood, and this rather thin form-factor, this is easily the best tablet effort in this category the manufacturer has ever offered. In this 8-inch size, Samsung has also created what many will find to be the ideal size for carry-along entertainment and notes.
Hardware

The 1.5 lakh employees of Infosys will once again have to play the guessing game as to when they will get increments for financial year 2013-14. "We are changing our compensation structure and will communicate directly with the employees," was all chief executive SD Shibulal had to say on the issue at a press conference.

Their new human resources head Srikantan Moorthy said while promotions will happen in April as expected, the numbers are yet to be finalised as salary structures are getting altered.

Nine states and one union territory today signed tripartite agreements with the Centre and Bharat Broadband Network to lay optical fibre network for providing broadband services at gram panchayat level.

The states which signed the pacts are: Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Nagaland, Odisha and Punjab. The union territory of Andaman and Nicobar islands also signed the pact.

IT major Infosys said it added 1,059 employees in Q4, up 8.62% compared to same period last year, taking the total headcount to 113,794.

In the third quarter of FY13, the number of non-billable employees was 115,826 (persons month data).

The gross hire has been 8,990 employees less than last year in which the company's gross hire stood at 10,676 employees.

Professional networking website LinkedIn is paying about $90 million to acquire Pulse, which makes an e-reader platform used on mobile devices.

More than 30 million people worldwide use Pulse's e-reader applications on devices running both Apple and Android-based operating systems. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were students at Stanford University.

Vishal Sankhla, an Indian engineer, is among those at the center of a storm over how to fix the nation's immigration system.

Sankhla got a master's degree in electrical engineering nine years ago from the University of Southern California, followed by a job at Cisco. He eventually launched his own startup that attracted $4.5 million in financing from Silicon Valley investors.

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), led by IIT and IISc, will move to a massive open online course platform, which may be provided by Google's Coursebuilder or Harvard and MIT-promoted online course platform edX, or both.

The three courses have been developed in association with IT firms TCS and Cognizant, which are giving inputs for the course material. Also, their centres across the country will also be available to NPTEL for conducting the final exams. Nasscom is supporting the venture and Infosys and Wipro are expected to join soon. Faculty from seven IIITs are helping with the course material.

In the latest Twitter news story to surface today, sources have told the folks over at AllThingsD that the rumored Twitter music app we’ve been hearing about will be launched this Friday, with another stating that it will be launched at Coachella some time this weekend. This follows an announcement on Thursday by We Are Hunted that it was acquired by the microblogging service.

Twitter still doesn’t have anything to say on the music app, but the sources say that it will be launched during Coachella, a giant music festival in California. Multiple sources provided the information, none of them named and all said to be familiar with the situation. Considering the timing of the alleged launch and the announcement a few hours ago that Twitter has, indeed, aquired the We Are Hunted music service points to the affirmative.

Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn't want to go back to college to study computer science.

Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the programme last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more than twice his previous salary.

Indian Trains Search on Mobile gets Simpler

iXiGO.com, India’s leading travel planning & search engine, announced the launch of its much-awaited trains search app - Indian rail & trains. This app which is an android-first, simplifies the lives of travelers by allowing them to get real-time information for all Indian Railway trains at their fingertips. Developed by iXiGO.com’s in-house travel technology experts, the Indian rail & trains app is an extremely fast & useful mobile app that takes the pain away from finding train tickets.

There must have been times when you do not wish to share the password of your Wi-Ficonnection, but have to share it. And if sharing the password is your biggest concern, then here is the perfect solution for you.

There was an instance when my neighbour barged into my room and asked if he could use my internet network. It looked like an emergency, so I could not refuse. Since then, I have been trying to find a way to share Wi-Fi network without sharing password. And below is the best way that I have come across.

Struggling with declining margins amidst sluggish demand, domestic steel makers need to invest in securing raw material security to ensure long-term success, Accenture India said in a research report.

Steel firms need to sharpen capabilities in four other areas -- capital project management, becoming more customer-centric, securing human capital and building differentiated supply chains, said the IT firm, which also provides consultancy services.

Start-up firm AmidRay Technologies, based here, has launched a community Android application "Blockout Traffic", which informs people of choked traffic within a 25-30 km radius, the creators of the programme said.

This is being billed as the country's "first free-and-easy traffic mobile application" for those on the move.

AmidRay Technologies is a start-up firm incubated at Technopark and Startup Village, Kochi, by four youngsters.

Smartphones like HTC Butterfly and BlackBerry Z10 allow users to pick a few photos you have taken and add a song in order to create a video. Even if you do not have such top-end smartphones, you can create personalised videos with images and audio of your choice right at your desktop that too without paying anything.

Here are two easy ways to create videos with images for free.

Method 1

Google has formally submitted a package of concessions to the European Commission to try end a two-year antitrust investigation, the Commission said on Thursday.

The world's most popular search engine first offered proposals at the end of January following a spate of complaints from rivals such as Microsoft which triggered off the Commission's investigation in November 2010.

India's top young entrepreneurs can now hope to visit and connect with like minded counterparts, mentors and seed investors in the Silicon Valley, California, with the creation of a 'Startup Corridor' between India and US.

The 'Startup Corridor' is the brain child of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Asha Jadeja Motwani, wife of late Stanford Professor Rajeev Motwani, a mentor to the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and a key architect of the algorithms that power Google today.

Indigenous smartphone manufacturer Micromax has announced its latest budget offering named Canvas Viva in the country. The device runs on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) operating system, which was released over two years ago, and costs Rs 6,499. At this price point, the new Canvas Viva is among one of the cheapest phablet in the Indian market.

Canvas Viva has a 5-inch display with 800x480p resolution and runs on a 1GHz CPU. This device comes with 256MB RAM, 512MB onboard storage and microSD card support up to 32GB. A 3MP camera is strapped to the back of this phone, while a VGA unit is placed in the front. This dual-sim smartphone has a 2,000mAh battery that offers 7 hours of continuous talk time. Connectivity features of this device include 2G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and microUSB.

Samsung has expanded its Android smartphone lineup with the addition of Galaxy Mega series. The South Korean manufacturer has announced two phones under this range, namely Galaxy Mega 6.3 and Galaxy Mega 5.8. Both the smartphones run on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean), which is presently available on only a few devices.

Galaxy Mega 6.3, as the name suggests, features a 6.3-inch TFT HD display and is powered by a 1.7 GHz dual-core processor. This device has 1.5GB RAM and comes in 8 and 16GB memory options, with microSD card support up to 64GB. This phone can connect to the internet over 2G, 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi networks and transfer data via Bluetooth 4.0, microUSB 2.0 and NFC. The manufacturer has strapped an 8MP camera with LED flash on the back of the device, whereas a 1.9MP shooter on the front.

In the era of Snapchat and Poke, self-destructing messages on smartphones and tablets are the new fad. However, such self-deleting messages are not limited to handheld gadgets only. You can now send self-destructing messages via good old email too. Yes, there are a number of services in the market that let you send messages to others which get deleted once they read it.

Here are three online services that enable you to send self-destructing emails.

Nasscom, which recently launched its '10,000 start-ups' programme, announced inviting applications from innovative technology start-ups across the country.

The association has already received over 1,000 applications from budding start-ups since the launch of the programme and is expected to receive 5,000 applications in the next eight weeks.

Microsoft is developing a new lineup of Surface tablets, including a 7-inch version expected to go into mass production later this year, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the company's plans.

Microsoft executives felt they needed to keep pace with the growing popularity of smaller tablets like Google's 7-inch Nexus and the 7.9-inch iPad Mini introduced by Apple last October, one person told the paper.

BSNL will launch 4G-enabled internet services in Indore division by May and wi-fi-based "Internet on wheels" in the current financial year, a top officer said.

"4G-based internet facility allowing users to download the data at the high-speed of 8MBPS will be started by May next", BSNL general manager GC Pandey announced at a press conference here.

Gemalto Launches Private File Storage and Sharing App for Mobile Operators

Regulatory News:

Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO), the world leader in digital security, has extended its portfolio of end-user cloud services solutions for mobile network operators with an innovative private file storage and sharing application. LinqUs CloudnShare offers mobile network operators a fast-track to launch their own fully branded and secure OTT (Over-The-Top) application, or complement their existing cloud backup services in the fast-developing personal cloud market.

Japan's largest consumer electronics company, Panasonic today announced the elevation of Mr. Manish Sharma as Managing Director of Panasonic India. He will be responsible for the strategic planning, sales & marketing of company’s consumer and enterprise divisions with immediate effect. With this, Manish has also been appointed to the Board of Directors of Panasonic India.

Manish, in his previous role, was responsible for driving profitable growth across the entire portfolio of consumer products and has catapulted the Panasonic brand to make it a household name across the country. Manish’s elevation is a part of Panasonic strategy of streamlining business structures to increase competitiveness and profitability across the group.

An average user carries dozens of credit or debit cards with him or her. However, if a new system called PayTango gets accepted, you will just need your fingers to pay for any transaction. Designed to replace credit card terminals at retail stores, the startup founded by four Carnegie Mellon University students, and backed by YC Combinator, PayTango links cards to your fingerprints.

Is your IT team toiling with one foot pointed toward the exit sign? It's not always so obvious as an employee leaving a resume on the printer tray.

Recognizing the warning signs of unhappy employees is a vital IT management skill. When you see them, you can act before your employees -- and especially your best employees -- start leaving for other jobs.

The 'scariest search engine' on the internet has been revealed for peering in the darkest corners of the web and finding servers, webcams and traffic lights.

Shodan, dubbed the 'search engine for hackers', collects information on 500 million devices every month, CNN reports.

According to news.com.au, the search engine was named after the villain in the cyberpunk role-playing games System Shock and System Shock 2.

Polaris Financial Technology Ltd, a leader in products, solutions and services that enable unprecedented operational productivity for the global Financial Services industry, launched its 8012 FT Design Center - the world's first Center dedicated to Financial Technology. The Center was inaugurated by Michael Harte, Group Executive, Enterprise Services and Chief Information Officer, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, in Chennai recently.

He also delivered the first FT Thought Leadership series lecture as part of the inaugural program. The event was attended by banking and technology experts from across the globe.

Singapore-based e-horizon has delivered a new generation of products to a mobile operator in Asia, including a new type of app innovation called a mobile soft device. What distinguishes a mobile soft device from traditional communication apps is full integration with the core mobile network, which allows mobile operators to provide completely new types of services to subscribers.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated daily by smartphones, sensors, video cameras, smart meters, and other connected devices, adding to the huge store of information from traditional sources. This “data avalanche” represents a potential gold mine of insights, but a new study commissioned by Cisco reveals that IT professionals and businesses are challenged to extract strategic value from their data.

The additional personnel requirement in the IT sector of the country may come down by nearly 50,000 in the current fiscal as there is a large scale backlog of recruitments last year, IT-BPO industry bodyNasscom said.

"Last year we added 1.8 lakh jobs net. This year it will be 1.3 to 1.5 lakh jobs. Last year there was filling up back logs because we had shrunk our pipeline. We are still the largest employers ofwhite collar sectors of the country which has 3 million young people at the age of 27," Nasscom President Som Mittal told reporters here.

As the wrangling over immigration reform intensifies in the US Congress, the tech industry is lobbying hard to raise the limit on H-1B visas, which allow non-US citizens with advanced skills and degrees in "specialty occupations" to work in the country for up to six years.

Demand is so great that the annual cap of 65,000 was hit last week, just days after the application period opened. Technology companies support raising the H-1B quota almost five-fold, to 3,00,000, arguing universities are just not turning out enough American math and science graduates and they need to cast their net abroad to stay competitive.

Hewlett-Packard just had its most innovative moment in years. How do we know this? Well, the company has ushered forth a new creation under the Project Moonshoot banner, created a scripted webcast to accompany the product, and even had guys who would normally wear suits dress down in sports coats and jeans to model the product, thus underscoring its hipness.

What HP has built is a new server — the HP Moonshot 1500. It's special because it runs on Intel's lowpower Atom chips, which usually go into mobile devices. As a result, HP has been able to design an entire computer server that's about the size of an envelope and then pack hundreds of these together into a single system that basically functions as an ultracompact supercomputer. According to HP's stats, the new server uses 89% less energy, takes up 80% less space, and costs 77% less than more traditional server designs.

ZTE Corporation (“ZTE”) (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ), a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment, network solutions and mobile devices, today announced that it has been ranked No.1 for both FTTH CPE revenues and shipments for 2012 by telecommunications market research firm Infonetics.

According to an Q4 2012 Infonetics market share and forecast report entitled, “Broadband CPE and Subscribers: PON, FTTH, Cable, and DSL,” ZTE ranked No.1 for both FTTH CPE revenue and shipments in the past year, with a global share of 19.8 per cent and 30.9 per cent, respectively. ZTE also shipped more than 100 million broadband CPE devices by the end of 2012, the achievement cements ZTE’s place as a global leader in fixed network operations and large-scale FTTH applications.

You may be spared from typing pesky passwords in the future!

Instead of typing your password, you may only have to think about it, thanks to a new wireless headset device developed by researchers.

Remembering passwords for all your sites can get annoying. There are only so many punctuation, number substitutes and uppercase variations you can recall, and writing them down for all to find is hardly an option.

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

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