HP announced a number of new products in India on Wednesday (28th October 2015) which includes laptops and desktops in the consumer as well as the commercial range. The consumer range consists of the new Pavilion 13 x360, Envy 13 and Pavilion 15 Star Wars Special Edition while the ProDesk 400 G2, ProOne 400 G2 AiO PC and ProBook 430 G3 were announced for commercial use. All of the new products will be running on Windows 10 and the 6th-generation Intel processors making HP one of the first brands to usher in the new processor range by Intel.
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Mala Bhargava If the students of IIT Delhi have recovered from their star-struck state, perhaps they could give the “funnier” questions put to Mark Zuckerberg at his Q&A there some serious thought. One that drew quite a few laughs and delighted applause was the question that sounded too obvious to have been asked – so much so that it seemed staged. Why are you showing so much interest in India. Answer Honestly. Easy answer, and Zuckerberg jumped in like he was just waiting, which he definitely was. The smiling Facebook CEO desperately wants all one billion of those poor guys in the outback who haven’t discovered the internet yet and who won’t know the difference between the internet and Facebook. Heck, even Zuckerberg is confusing the two, as he tries hard to defend and push his pet project, Internet.org, now called Free Basics, ironically the name fitting much better what it’s all about. Those who can’t afford the expensive connectivity the rest thrive on today are being offered free access, all of it controlled by Facebook. To those people, the internet will actually become Facebook. They will be too bedazzled to know the difference as Facebook begins to serve more and more of their needs. Forget the newbies, those of us on the internet for years are finding Facebook pulling in everything into its universe – video, search, news, photography, messaging, calling, and more and more each day. Facebook is so obviously swallowing up the internet that even the person considered its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, is horrified, warning everyone to say no to internet.org. But Mark Zuckerberg has been a whiz at making Facebook sound like a massive altruistic movement to connect the people of the world. And he makes internet.org or Free Basics sound like extending a helping hand to those who don’t have access to the internet and can’t better their lives without it. Zuckerberg also incessantly repeats that Facebook is a big supporter of Net Neutrality, making it sound like it’s Facebook and its users against the establishment and greedy companies. What goes unmentioned is the massive data that Facebook knows and is collecting on each of its users, a commodity it collects with equal greed and which it puts to good use benefiting itself. Not only does Facebook throw advertising at you threaded through its DNA and “personalised” to yours, but it has cosy research labs figuring out how you behave online and tweaking it to suit itself. Every so often, a Facebook study is uncovered that shows the extent to which the platform can control how you think and feel. So students can give over feeling awe struck and honoured at the Zuck’s visit. He’s not taking his eye off of India anytime soon – and that’s what should worry us.
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In yet another move to make it easier for brands to connect with consumers, Facebook is now testing a ‘shop’ section on its website. This will be an additional tab alongside News Feed, Pages and Groups, unlike the ‘buy’ button the company introduced a few months ago for ads.Facebook said the purpose of this tab is to have “a single place for people to more easily discover, share and purchase products”. According to a survey by Facebook, nearly half of the people on it, actively look for products, with a majority of them discovering new products in News Feed, Pages, and Groups.The company said in a blog post, “This behaviour — that’s already happening on Facebook — gives us a chance to make people and marketers’ experiences better. We want to build native experiences that make it easier for both people to discover products on mobile and businesses to drive more sales.“Facebook is currently testing the feature with a limited set of small businesses in the US who are also testing the ‘shop’ section on Pages. Over time the company will explore incorporating additional content into this experience, such as items listed for sale on Groups.Matt Idema, vice-president of Monetisation Product Marketing, Facebook said in an official statement, “People are increasingly discovering products on mobile and Facebook, yet the shopping experience could be better. What we’re doing — with proven products like carousel ads and new products we’re testing — is making it easier for people to discover products on mobile and businesses to drive sales.”Brand BuzzInstant RecallA day after Twitter announced Jack Dorsey as the new CEO, it unveiled Moments. The feature allows users to see the ‘best of Twitter in an instant’.Moments is a new button that will help users follow the latest news stories. Users can also swipe through topics such as entertainment or sports.Launched initially in the US only on desktops, Android and iOS, Moments will be updated as new information or great Tweets become available. Users can also follow it for live sporting events or awards.DIG THE DATAComing Out On FBAccording to Facebook Research, over the past year, approximately 0.8 million Americans updated their profile to express samegender attraction. Further, not only has the total number of Americans who have come out on FB risen dramatically, but so has the number of coming out each day. Fan pages for LGBTrights groups acquired over 150,000 new fans in five days after the June 26 Supreme Court ruling.Net FearsOf 2,000 millennials surveyed by Intercede on data security, less than five per cent feel their data is “protected”. Sixty-eight per cent believe the more you are digitally connected, the higher is the risk.LEADERMohamed A. El-Erian@elerianmChief economic adviser, Allianz“At 6.9 per cent, China growth is higher than many expected — yet lowest level in 6 years &, importantly for policies, below official 7 per cent target”Suhel Seth@suhelsethAuthor“Why doesn’t the SHIV Sena have a Helpline which we can call if we want people beaten up, painted or shouted at?”(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 16-11-2015)
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday (28 October) said his company is committed to net neutrality but supported zero-rating plans which have been criticised by many as violative of the principles of free Internet. Speaking at his first Townhall in India, the young billionaire said the world's largest social network is working both in terms of supporting regulations around that principle and building an open platform for developers. When asked if Facebook supports net neutrality, Zuckerberg said: "Absolutely. Net neutrality is important principle. We do a lot to support both in terms of regulation and in our own work building an open platform that any developer can build something for regardless of who they are if they follow the basic rules." Facebook's Internet.org, which aims to bring free Internet access to the developing world, has faced backlash with activists alleging that it violates network neutrality, the idea that all online traffic should be treated equally. "Internet.org and Facebook are 100 per cent supportive of net neutrality, we lobby for it across the world, we build an open platform with no filtering but at the same time we also need to make sure that we continue to push for access," Zuckerberg said. On his second visit to India in a year, he was quizzed by some of India's brightest young minds at a question and answer session at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, as he attempted to deepen Facebook's links with a country that provides its largest group of users outside the US. He said providing free Internet to everyone in the world is expensive and telecom operators spend billions each year bringing Internet to users. "What we are really trying to do is to use Free Basics (previously known as Internet.org) so that any developer who can give low bandwidth services for free can be zero-rated. That has been powerful, and provides a neutral platform without any filters," he said. If, however, a telecom operator tries to press its own services on the users and it hurts people, then net neutrality is needed, Zuckerberg said, who is learnt to have met Bharti Enterprises CMD Sunil Mittal. On zero-rating plans of telecom firms like Bharti Airtel, Zuckerberg said: "But to those who advocate against zero- rating I say look at a student who wants free access to the Internet for her studies. "Who gets hurt by that? Around the world, all the regulations are honouring this principle. Prioritising zero-rating is necessary to connect everyone to the Internet. Facebook and Internet.org support net neutrality 100 per cent, but we also need to push for access."(PTI)
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How it is secretly costing your organisation and its employees, writes Vinay PradhanThe frantic pace of technological change continues to have a major impact on businesses of all sizes and from every sector. Most companies, however, have yet to realize that their workers, now more than ever, need to adapt their digital skills to these rapid changes. A number of concepts that were merely talked about yesterday - Generation Y, Web 2.0, SaaS (Software as a Service), BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), the Cloud - are the realities we must all face today. Employees are at the very centre of these changes, finding newer and faster ways to work, whenever and wherever needed. Until only recently, employees used just 20 basic functions in the most representative software programs on the market, which was enough to demonstrate the ability to perform over a hundred different tasks. Today, they have more than 50 basic functions to learn across 50 software programs, apps, web services, and other devices, which amount to 2,500 basic skills to master.The percentage of skilled youth in the workforce is less than 5% in India, a need for change that has been stressed upon by the government and the industry alike; especially with PM Narendra Modi specially focussing on the Skill India initiative. The shortage of digital skills in the current marketplace is unprecedented. A Capgemini report on 'The Digital Talent Gap' estimated that over 4.4 million IT jobs would have been created around Big Data by 2015; while only a third of these were expected to be filled. Nearly one in five millennials in the modern workplace perceivably lack crucial analytical skills. According to a CRISIL report, India is set to become the largest contributor to the global workforce with India's working population likely to increase to 962 million by 2030.A June 2012 study by IDC shows that inadequate digital skills lead to a significant amount of loss of time and productivity. This equates to 21.3 percent of loss in the organization's total productivity, also calculable to $19,732 loss per worker per year. Organizations face these concerns with millennials as well. Capgemini's survey comprising of over 800 middle to upper management executives from over 50 industries shows that nearly one in five millennials in the modern workspace are perceived to be lacking analytical skills. A similar story can be heard in the United States, where McKinsey, the consulting firm, estimates this loss to be valued at $1.3 trillion. An organization with 1,000 people would therefore spend as much money addressing the skills gap issue as they would hiring 213 new employees. The reasons driving this skills shortage are not hard to identify. The usage of mobile, social and analytical tools is permeating the length and breadth of every function across the organization. Human resources and training managers are grappling with the problem of not being able to adequately measure either the amount of time wasted or the costs associated with their employees' lack of digital skills. The idea of using technology to deliver training has been considered in the past and has been not embraced enthusiastically on account of several reasons. These include the discomfort of trainers and the trainees to train without the physical presence of each other, high initial investment, and limitations of technology led training in delivering training in technical subjects or where physical acumen is required, ability to personalise training and assessment methods to determine the competencies of the learners. Businesses must work harder to scale-up on their digital skills or risk losing competitiveness in the global marketplace. As the BYOD trend is becoming more widespread, CIOs are forced to allow company employees to use their own personal devices. Perhaps one of the main reasons for the renewed digital skills gap - which businesses thought to have bridged in the past decade - is the consumerization of IT and the misalignment between the technologies available for personal use and companies' ability to update their computer equipment.Companies today have to surrender to the cloud and its paradigms (telecommuting, multiple devices, etc.). This new reality is dawning on businesses and governments alike, as major players across industries are pledging to create a more digitally educated workforce. Organizations need to tap into newer platforms for acquiring skills while also accelerating the pace of skills development. They need to understand that traditional skills and approaches are not going to help them in the digital age. Under these circumstances, how can companies be sure that their employees have an excellent command of the programs, web services, or other apps they use on a daily basis? How do they give them the tools they need to stay productive while using their office applications?A simple answer could be to have an enterprise learning solution that lets your employees enhance their digital skills at their own time and pace, your L&D managers monitor the performances to ensure alignment with business objectives, and enables your IT team to easily integrate it into their infrastructure. Organizations across the globe have started doing this for their employees to meet their desktop and new technology training needs. Small businesses seeking to train their employees, or large corporations in need of wide-scale training solutions are moving towards integrated platforms like Vodeclic. Ease of use, quick integration and deployment and highly effective teaching method should be the core of such platforms.To stay competitive, the solution is for companies to wake up to the digital skills gap amidst their employees and proactively implement regular training to ensure their workers acquire the required skills. The content and devices need to be responsive and adaptable. This is significant in the Indian context as over the next few years, with the momentum for digital India picking up and internet access becoming feasible throughout the country, most employees will have devices of various kinds and forms that can be connected to and access online training on demand and with ease. Digital skills requirements vary from one organization to the other based on their digital maturity and transformational capability. Key focus areas will depend on individual business requirements as well as availability of resources. Organizations need to define a vision, identify future skill requirements, undertake a comprehensive skills gap assessment, take steps to bridge the gap and finally initiate actions to constantly evaluate progress in their journey to develop digital skills.1. Give everyone access to trainingAs cloud-based software and applications evolve at a breakneck pace, the common challenge among all will be to keep our skills up-to-date, or else be left behind. For this to be possible, companies should adopt a user-centric solution that is both mobile and flexible, giving users the ability to improve their digital skills when and where they need it, via an intranet or dedicated portal, on their tablet, mobile phone, or personal PC, in the office or at home. The outdated, ad hoc training model, lasting 1 hour, 3 hours, 1 day or 2 days, is no longer relevant! In order to survive, firms must break away from the constraints of traditional training and consider how people learn within their daily work flow.2. Promote employee self-relianceTraining should allow workers to have the freedom to educate themselves whenever and wherever they want. Not only should training be accessible, organizations must encourage employees to be self-reliant and pave their own career path through skill-building courses. The solution should also be very intuitive and user-friendly in order to ensure that employees don't need to be trained excessively on how to use the solution itself.3. Reduce IT Helpdesk's work loadHR and business unit managers aren't the only ones affected by their employees' lack of digital skills. The help desk is too. It is therefore in the best interest of both departments to care about these issues and work together on a solution. Organizations can help reduce costs with the help of training solutions that reduce the number of calls to help desk, thus enabling help desk to take over the role of a tutor. Ultimately, the effectiveness and success of a solution depends largely on the involvement of the interested parties, from selecting and testing to deploying the solution.4. Measure ROI and control costsThe adopted solution must give CEOs the ability to measure the ROI of training activities, ensure business alignment and take whatever steps are necessary to get more value from the money invested.5. Keep up with the software updatesWith the advent of the cloud, leading software publishers have dramatically increased the frequency of their updates. A flood of announcements are released every day. The answer is to proactively implement a future-proof training solution that is flexible, agile, and mobile.6. Design the training solutions around the technologies usedFirms must adopt and implement a one-size-fits-all training solution that works on any device and is developed with a "responsive design" approach to enable viewing on any screen size or resolution. But one needs to remember that it cannot be "one-size-fits-all" for all organizations. Recently, Procter & Gamble established a baseline for all its employees through a "digital skills inventory," and set proficiency expectations for specific roles and career progression. Pepsi launched its "digital fitness" program to keep its marketers' digital skills up to par.New technologies have the potential to transform productivity in the workplace. But, this potential will remain unrealized unless we empower the workforce with the digital skills necessary to take advantage. Scale, speed, quality and mass customisation can be achieved by imaginative use of technology in training delivery. Building digital skills is only a part of the overall digital transformation agenda. Organizations will have to continue working towards sustaining the advantage that they gain through these digital skills. This will require sustained efforts towards training and re-skilling. Acquiring digital skills is the first, albeit significant, step of a long journey to a successful digital transformation. Act quickly and your organization will reap the benefits.The author is country manager - India, Skillsoft
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Verizon Enterprise Solutions is adding HP and Verizon Cloud to its Secure Cloud Interconnect service, essentially doubling the size of its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region and increasing the number of cloud providers, giving clients a seamless way to connect, manage and secure their multi-cloud environments.In-region, Verizon now offers connections at 12 locations from five cloud providers. The company previously offered access to Amazon (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo) and Google (Hong Kong, Singapore) and Microsoft (Hong Kong) at six locations.Enterprises such as e-commerce retailer Giosis, - who markets under the name of Qoo10 primarily in the Asia Pacific Region - have been hesitant to move mission-critical workloads to the cloud due to security, performance and control concerns.Giosis uses Secure Cloud Interconnect to connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS) sites in Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney and Los Angeles to display its products on its website. Via Secure Cloud Interconnect, Giosis connects the AWS sites to its headquarters in Seoul for back-end processing such as billing, user authentication and data backup.“With Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect service we can now take full advantage of the cloud given the richness and reliability of the solution,” said Mok Jooyoung, IT director of technology division, Giosis. “Knowing Verizon’s Private IP network has an expansive Asia-Pacific footprint and its performance stellar made Verizon the ideal provider to meet our stringent requirements to provide our online shoppers with a first-class customer experience.”(BW Online Bureau)
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By Arshad KhanTelenor’s active Internet subscriber base has fallen and the company reported 22 per cent of its connections were active Internet connections for the quarter ended September 30. While the company hasn’t disclosed any specific number on Telenor’s active Internet base in the country, Telenor reports a total connection base of 40.855 million for the quarter. This translates to an Internet subscriber base of 8.99 million. The telecom operator had reported an Internet base of 10.36 million connections in the preceding quarter. Telenor witnessed one million net additions for the quarter, as compared to 1.3 million net additions in the preceding quarter. “Telenor added 1 million subscriptions in India during the third quarter. At the end of September, the subscription base was 19 per cent higher than the same quarter last year. The company continues to build on Internet users as part of Internet for All strategy and reported 41 per cent increase in data users’ year-on-year. Currently Telenor has over 22 of users accessing data services on its network," said Vivek Sood, Telenor (India) Communications CEO. On the financial side the Telecom group has reported total India revenues of Norwegian Krone (NOK) 1.41 billion (around Rs 1,083.74 crore as per current rates) for the quarter, registering an impressive 31.38 per cent growth from NOK 1.074 billion in the same quarter last year.However, the company reported a negative EBITDA of NOK 58 million for the quarter. It had reported an EBITDA profit of NOK 24 million in the preceding quarter and loss of NOK 136 million in the same quarter last year. Telenor attributed the fall in EBITDA to the rebranding exercise it undertook this September.
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Nvidia, on Wednesday (28 October) launched its Nvidia Grid 2.0 which can deliver even the most graphics-intensive applications to any connected device virtually, at VForum 2015 in Mumbai.Nvidia Grid 2.0 delivers unprecedented performance, efficiency and flexibility improvements for virtualized graphics in enterprise workflows. Employees can work from almost anywhere without delays in downloading files, increasing their productivity. IT departments can equip workers with instant access to powerful applications, improving resource allocation. Data can be stored more securely by residing in a central server rather than individual systems.In comparison to its predecessor, Nvidia Grid 2.0 offers twice the user density, allowing up to 128 users per server, expanding service to more employees at a lower cost per user and doubled application performance. Nvidia Grid 2.0 can now be run on blade servers — not simply rack servers — from leading blade server providers. Along with Windows OS, it also has expanded its support to Enterprises in industries that depend on Linux applications.Nearly a dozen Fortune 500 companies are completing trials of the Nvidia Grid 2.0 beta. Major server vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP and Lenovo, have qualified the Grid solution to run on 125 server models, including new blade servers.(BW Online Bureau)
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