Ford has been one of the biggest car makers globally and today it launched the second generation of its popular hatchback car, Ford Figo. The all new Figo comes with a number of upgrades and nifty features and is built on Ford’s latest global platform. It is also the only car in its segment to offer standard driver airbag across all variants and the only hatchback in India that offers six airbags for extra protection. The new Figo is basically the hatchback version of the recently announced sub-compact sedan Figo Aspire and just like the sedan the new Figo hatchback looks sleeker and more refined since the first generation.The car will be coming in standard 1.2L petrol and 1.5L diesel variants with manual transmission and a petrol automatic transmission as well. The company claims that the petrol variant will offer fuel efficiency of 18.16Km/L and the diesel variant at 25.83Km/L. President and MD, Ford India, Nigel Harris commented “With the new Figo we are focusing on providing a complete package at an affordable price which will include great looks, cutting-edge technology, practicality and most importantly, safety. “The in-car tech department of the new Figo is quite interesting as it will offer MyFord Dock a first of its kind feature that will allow you to mount and charge smartphones, MP3 players and GPS systems to integrate with car’s entertainment system. The car will also be loaded with Ford’s popular in-car connectivity system, SYNC with Ford AppLink which allows drivers to control their phone, entertainment and app all hands-free via voice commands. While the system still needs more local content, users in India will get access to navigation via MapMyIndia and get cricket score updates with ESPN Cricinfo. The new Figo also features Ford MyKey technology which lets owners program the car’s keys with restricted driving modes like limiting the car’s top speeds, regulating the audio volumes, etc. to enourage safer and responsible driving.Price for the new Ford Figo are as follows:Diesel1.5-litre Base: Rs. 5.29 lakh1.5-litre Ambiente: Rs. 5.62 lakh1.5-litre Trend: Rs. 5.97 lakh1.5-litre Trend+: Rs. 6.22 lakh1.5-litre Titanium: Rs. 6.72 lakh1.5-litre Titanium+: Rs. 7.40 lakhPetrol1.2-litre Base: Rs. 4.29 lakh1.2-litre Ambiente: Rs. 4.56 lakh1.2-litre Trend: Rs. 5 lakh1.2-litre Trend+: Rs. 5.25 lakh1.2-litre Titanium: Rs. 5.75 lakh1.2-litre Titanium+: Rs. 6.40 lakh1.5-litre (Automatic) Titanium: Rs. 6.91 lakh
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The new age phenomena of technocalamity could change the world order. Naseem Javed analyses what this could mean for India.
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By Shubhi TandonHow often does it happen that you want to watch just that one video on YouTube, but the ones in the related videos tab are just too enticing to pull away? Well, this is what YouTube won an Emmy for in 2013 - for having a recommendation system that makes people want to spend more time on it. In a one-on-one with Businessworld, Cristos Goodrow, Engineering Director at YouTube, explains the origins of the recommendation system and how YouTube plans to be the hub for content discovery.About 80 per cent of views on YouTube come from outside of US. Asians are watching more hours of online video now than ever before. The number of hours Singaporeans spend on YouTube has doubled (110 per cent) in a year.Surfacing the right content for the users is a key task for YouTube as a content discovery platform. When Mr Goodrow joined YouTube in 2011, the company had launched a machine learning system to improve the recommendations system. "The objective of this system was to maximise the number of video views. So it took more views as a part of deciding recommendations," he explained.Why Focussing On Views Is WrongHowever, there was a catch in the system which focussed on views, that the team realised after the launch. "When we launched this in 2011, it was great as the views went up a lot and we were very happy about that as views were the metric that we had focussed on then. But as we started to look at the sessions, we noticed that some sessions would have more views, but actually, seemed to be the worst experiences for the viewers," Mr Goodrow explains.Many people would remember the days of related video suggestions on YouTube which looked very enticing, but were not the videos they expected them to be - as the headline and the image would be very misleading. Giving an example, Mr Goodrow explains, "We were looking at a session in which a user would have searched for a boxing match. At the top of the search results, they found what looked like a video of the boxing match. The thumbnail was very compelling - but when you click it what you saw was not the actual video of the fight, but someone talking about the fight. The user would watch the video for a minute or 30 seconds, and realise that this video would not have any footage of the actual fight."These videos found their way to the top of the related videos list because of the system relying on the number of views as the metric. "The user clicked on four videos before he finally got to the actual video about the fight," he adds.This got the team re-evaluating the recommendation system as they realised the system actually caused this as it put more such obstacles between the viewers and what they were looking for - because each one of them got counted as a view and thus led to maximising the views."We were so focussed on the views. This system was like catching a rocket booster for your product and whatever direction you point it in, it was going to go much faster in that direction. So if you have not pointed it in the right direction, you are going to be way off very quickly and that is where we were headed," Mr Goodrow opines.If Not Views, Then What?While rethinking the metric for the recommendation system, the team landed on the notion of 'time spent' by users on watching a video. "People's time is precious to them and if they are spending more of their time on YouTube, it is an indication that YouTube is more important to them and is providing more value to them," Mr Goodrow asserts.In March 2012, YouTube took the gamble of moving its metric from views to time spent - which Mr Goodrow remembers was a scary moment. "The whole company had applied its focus on this metric earlier and how we got them to go up. Now we were going to purposely drop them by a very significant amount in one day because we now wanted to focus on something else," he adds. The views fell by almost 20 per cent in a day (as the graph below shows).But ultimately the gamble paid off as YouTube witnessed the second largest increase in watchtime (the first one was when the company changed the Search system to Google). Most of the videos that had misleading thumbnails and titles also started to disappear.On Competition & Rise In ViewershipWhile YouTube has changed its focus on views as a metric, there has been a lot of talk in the past one year about Facebook's video platform increasingly catching up. Interestingly though, Facebook's statistics are focussed on the number of views it has - which stand at four billion daily video views.YouTube, however, has not released the number of daily views since 2012, but its official figures do highlight a growth in watch time."The competition is surely growing, but remarkably this growing competition in the video space has led to a growth for YouTube. It has been a great thing for us - but we can't relax, we must work as hard as we can," said Mr Goodrow.The number of hours people spend watching videos on YouTube is up 60 per cent year-over-year, the fastest growth for the company in two years. The number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40 per cent year-over-year since March 2014. The number of users coming to YouTube who start at the YouTube homepage is up more than three times year-over-year.Once users are on YouTube, they are spending more time per session watching videos. On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40 minutes, up more than 50 per cent year-over-year. The number of hours people spent watching videos on mobile is up 100 per cent year-over-year."In the past year, the overall viewership on YouTube has not only increased, but it has accelerated. We are in a very competitive market and the competition has increased and so has the growth of our viewership," he added.Mr Goodrow attributes the growth to the recommendation system and also the revamping of the YouTube homepage to make it more compelling. "In the past year, the number of people who came to YouTube, had just opened it up or turned it on and without having to search clicked on a video on the homepage itself - that has increased almost three times. So I think that also plays a role in increasing the amount of viewership as we know that users who come to YouTube directly tend to watch a lot more," he said.YouTube Of The FutureThe video platform works on the premise that the platform has a 100 hours of content for every person, and Mr Goodrow feels it's the job of his team to make sure that people find it. "Our aspiration is to be the Holy Grail of recommendation systems," he says.Mr Goodrow's team is now looking to have YouTube suggest videos, that users have not shown an interest in before, but would like to watch. "The thing that keeps people from watching more YouTube is that they can't imagine all the great videos that are there on YouTube - it does not occur to them that YouTube would also have videos on other things they are interested in," he says.He concludes, "Somehow we have to figure out a way to help viewers find videos that they didn't even know would be on YouTube. We don't know how to do that very well yet - but that is where our aspiration is - how can we make the platform so that the user does not have to put in any energy and yet somehow we show them some suggestions that they actually love."
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A latest research, conducted by Warc, with The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), found that 75 per cent of Indian marketers are assigning 10 per cent or less of their budgets to mobile as compared to 66 per cent of Asia-Pacific marketers. However, majority of Indian marketers expect budgets to rise by 25 per cent this year. The industry reveals that around 47 per cent audience believe that mobile as a marketing channel is effective and that it will benefit the brands and hence, education becomes extremely crucial at this stage. Findings also showed location-based marketing is seen as the most important mobile technology today, and will remain so in 2020. It’s expected to rise from 84 per cent to 88 per cent by 2020. The Telecom sector is thought to be the most innovative in India at present, with 39 per cent of respondents deeming it such. The report concluded that multi-screening is recognised as the most significant consumer trend in India, along with mobile payments and streaming video. Consumer behaviour in India with regards to mobile usage is dramatic with 68 per cent of consumers opting for multi screening. With regards to Mobile Marketing, content has become the king with most marketers focussing on content, search and app development. “It’s clear from the study that there is still a long way to go before brands and agencies in India understand the full potential of mobile for reaching consumers,” said, Edward Pank, Managing Director at Warc Asia Pacific. Other findings from the survey revealed that Hindustan Unilever is regarded as the most innovative mobile brand in India, followed by brands like Flipkart, Samsung and Amazon. The availability and reliability of performance metrics was flagged by 40 per cent of Indian marketers as the greatest obstacle to the success of mobile marketing. Social media is the most used channel and over half use mobile as a supporting channel. “For brands to really see the impact of mobile on their operations, they need to focus on three I’s ; Investment, Innovation, and Integration. Instead of looking at mobile in isolation as a marketing channel with a certain set of capabilities, brands need to leverage its unique features to innovate and push their creative limits,” said Rohit Dadwal, managing director of Mobile Marketing Association Asia-Pacific.(BW Online Bureau)
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A venture capital fund backed by Reliance Industries Limited and a US-based technology firm have signed an agreement to bring into India cutting-edge software technologies that analyse complex, dynamic systems through physics-based pattern recognition. Reliance-backed GenNext Ventures and Ecorithm's partnership was announced on the sidelines of the inaugural India-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue. Ecorithm's powerful suite of technologies can be applied to build systems and various other enterprise solutions to improve operations, optimise systems and minimise energy use, a media release said. With 400 million sq ft of Class A Buildings in India and over 100 million sq ft under construction (Cushman & Wakefield, Marketbeat Office Snapshot Reports, 2015), India presents a significant opportunity to scale Ecorithm's technologies, it said. "We have evaluated multiple energy management technologies from across the globe, and Ecorithm is clearly the next generation in building energy management," said Vivek Rai Gupta, Managing Director, GenNext Ventures. "As we bring Ecorithm into India, we are keen to deploy the technology to optimise the energy efficiency of our buildings and raise the standard of environmental design and operation for buildings and enterprises to global levels," he said. The global research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan recently awarded Ecorithm with their 2015 Visionary Innovation Leadership Award.
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VSN International, a silver partner of Microsoft, is on track to grow its business by more than 200 per cent over the next 12 months. This growth will be powered by adoption of Microsoft Office 365 by its customers. Office 365 offers SMBs productivity tools that help customers to increase collaboration amongst employees without the hassle of managing expensive IT infrastructure. Some of the applications available under Office 365 include Exchange Online for email; One Drive for data storage and Skype for Business for video conferencing, in addition to office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.VSN International has been building on its cloud capability with Microsoft, offering enterprise-grade, highly secure and scalable Office 365 services to SMBs that can enhance business efficiencies and collaboration. As per a recent research commissioned by Microsoft and conducted independently by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm and a leading advisor on business strategy- SMBs that decided to take the IT plunge created more new jobs and more revenue growth over the past three years compared to SMBs that trailed in this regard. The BCG study, ‘Ahead of the Curve: Lessons on Technology and Growth from Small Business Leaders’ found that if more SMBs in India adopt the latest IT tools, there is potential for this sector to grow revenues by $56 billion and create as many as 1.1 million new jobs.“Technology provides significant opportunities for SMBs to achieve their business goals and make use of self-provisioned cloud solutions to meet their IT needs. Our pay-as-you-go model of cloud availability benefits SMBs from a scalability and affordability perspective” said Manohar Hotchandani, Director, Business Development, Microsoft India. “We are committed to work closely with our partners to enable customers be more productive, and will continue to enhance the capacity and capability of our partners to help them deliver superior value to customers”, he added.As per a report by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), Government of India, Madhya Pradesh is one of the ten leading states in terms of enterprises, with 19.33 lakh registered MSMEs. Supported by the right technology, these enterprises have immense growth potential in the country as well as globally. Recognizing this potential, Microsoft is enabling its partners to help them embrace the latest in technology. It is also training and up-skilling its partners like VSN International to help them in their business journey.Amit Bidasaria, Managing Director, VSN International, said, “Organisations recognize the need for a robust IT infrastructure to scale up their business to gain competitive advantage. With Microsoft Office 365, we have been able to address the IT needs of diverse verticals over the last year and we see tremendous potential for businesses in the upcoming year as they take their first step in the cloud.”Microsoft partners have the most complete cloud portfolio and are in a position to offer a holistic cloud solution addressing all the business needs of their customers. This offers significant value to customers as it provides them the flexibility to plan, purchase, deploy and manage their entire IT roadmap with the help of their trusted local partner. Partners are enabled to ‘do more’ for their SMB customers by exploring the potential of bringing in enterprise grade Microsoft cloud services to them at an affordable cost.
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Three years ago Sony launched one of the most portable and powerful digital cameras in the market called the RX100. The camera went on to be a sensation and popular among consumers who wanted a feature packed camera that would fit easily in their pockets. It’s the year 2015 and today we have the fourth generation of the camera in the form of the RX100 Mark IV which has been carved out of year on year evolution from the first generation, but does it maintain its position of the best portable digital camera in the market today?The Mark IV does not look very different from the Mark III and maintains the same form factor and even the weight. You get the same 24-70mm lens which offers an impressive aperture of f/1.8 to f/2.8, a quick pop-up flash and digital viewfinder, a tilting 3-inch LED display, and a sturdy build. However, there have been some new additions to the camera that makes it a tad better than the last version. The new Mark IV can now record 4K video, shoot more frames per second (16fps compared to 10fps), and offer slow-motion video of up to an insane 960fps. Sony has always used a 20MP 1-inch BSI CMOS Exmor R sensor in almost all the RX100 cameras, but this time we have a stacked sensor called the Exmor RS which improves the circuitry and makes the image processing faster than before.Just like its predecessors the RX100 Mark IV can shoot some amazing sharp pictures and focusing is incredibly fast. On some occasions the auto-focus does not focus on the right subject, so certain situations require manual focusing which works smooth. The ISO range goes from 125 to 12800 but in the manual mode you can also go to as low as ISO 80 which is always handy when shooting in bright daylight conditions. The control are easy to use but since the camera is very compact, they feel packed very closely especially if someone is using this camera for the first time. The camera handles low light very well and even on high ISO there is still acceptable level of noise. The burst mode is insanely fast capturing 16 shots in a second, which goes beyond what most DSLR can achieve and is excellent if you happen to shoot some high-speed action like sports or a bustling street.The video department has been updated heavily and the Mark IV is the first of its series to record 4K video. The videos come crisp and sharp and even the colours are very accurate. However there are some issues that Sony would have to improve like the auto-focus which can take time to focus on the right subject. Another important issue here is that If you want to record 4K videos Sony suggests, well actually imposes, to use an SDXC UHS-I or II Class U3 type of SD card. This is because only these type of cards can support the format and the data speeds for 4K video. These cards are also priced higher than a standard SD card, so in case you are not using the above mentioned class of SD cards, you cannot record 4K videos and will be limited to 1080p videos. The 4K video recording also heats up the camera very quickly and after about 10-15 mins of recording the camera was unusable. Sticking to 1080p videos is recommended although the slow-motion video feature is also quite interesting and can really slow things down when you record at 960fps.The battery has not seen an improvement rather it has gone down and lasts about 280 shots according to CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association) standards which 40 shots less than the previous generation. On standby mode it lasts more than week or two which is not that bad. While connectivity options include microUSB for data transfer and charging, you also get a microHDMI port and NFC and Wi-Fi for wireless transferring on images. One crucial feature that is still not added is the ability to connect an external mic as users have to be dependent on the internal mic which isn’t very crisp while recording audio.With the RX100 mark IV, Sony has also placed the camera into a more premium class of portable cameras. The first RX100 was launched at a price of Rs. 34,990 this was followed by the Mark II at Rs. 42,990. The Mark III which was launched year was priced at Rs. 54,990 and the latest Mark IV sets you back at Rs. 69,990 which is entering the mid-ranged DSLR category. That is definitely a lot of money for a tiny camera.Sony has put in efforts to refine the RX100 yet again and it is bound to attract its targeted audience, but somehow the latest version is still not perfect. There are tiny issues that need to be addressed. If you are looking for an upgrade from the Mark III to the Mark IV, it is strongly recommended that you don’t as the most prominent new feature is the 4K video recording that come with limitations. An upgrade would make sense if you have the original RX100 or maybe the Mark II. Apart from the small issues, the camera is still the best portable digital camera in the market, and if quality with portability is your criteria then the Mark IV is an ace.
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