Lenovo revived its PC business when it acquired IBM in 2005 and further improved it when it took up the IBM server business in 2014. That was a great move by the company and thanks to the takeover the company has grown to become one of the largest PC maker globally. The company also has a respectable smartphone division and has now become the world’s 3rd largest smartphone maker ever since it acquired Motorola from Google in 2014.Today, the Chinese company announced that it has setup a new manufacturing facility in Sriperambudur, Chennai where the company will be manufacturing the Motorola Moto E and the recently announced Lenovo K3 Note smartphones. The company is aiming to produce 6 million units and has already started shipping the Moto E which will be followed by the K3 Note in the coming months. The facility is will include 1500 employees who will be taking care of manufacturing lines, quality assurance, product testing and so on.According to Amar Babu, COO, Asia Pacific and Chairman, Lenovo India, “The Indian Government’s thrust on ‘Make in India; has opened up a plethora of opportunities for organisations looking to conduct business in India.” He also confirmed that the new manufacturing facility will have separate manufacturing lines for Lenovo and Motorola products and the company plans to only produce mainstream and affordable handsets, no plans as of yet regarding the production of high-end smartphone models or any wearable devices. Lenovo also confirmed that the handsets produced at the facility will not be seeing any price cuts and assured that the quality of the products will be maintained.
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We have entered the age of the Intelligent Machines Filter, writes Atul Jalan Mid-conversation, when asked what I do, I stumble. Businessman? Technocrat? Entrepreneur? Coder? Yes to all. But then, given our cute little habit of slotting people into narrow grooves, I have hesitations. So for now, let me call myself a rambler. Welcome then, to The Wired Rambler. All I can promise you is that the "Wired" bit will not deal with technology alone. So, Siri-ization… History, rather than gradual evolution, is a series of spurts. We advance, hit a filter and then accelerate to the next. We are done with the Tool, Industrial Revolution, Automation and Business Intelligence Filters. I believe we are in the Intelligent Machines Filter currently - when machines are capable of building on the data provided, themselves, in the direction you want them to. Is this just a phone? Your phone already understands your voice (including individual accents and modulations). It uses Language Modelling for context. It then adds Machine Learning to customize itself for you (after a while it auto-corrects to words you use oftener). With Gesture Recognition, your phone understands your actions as well. Now add to this Emotion Recognition (this demands that the machine understand social, cultural and individual contexts) and you have an intelligent machine that understands you; maybe even better than you understand yourself. This machines understanding, combined with the power of cloud computing, advanced analytical sciences and Big Data can bring us behavioural insights into every individual on this planet. It does sound like Carl Sagan, but it is true. Siri-ization consumerizes knowledge. Soon retail organisations will identify emotions like trust, expectation, attention, interest or lust the moment a consumer’s fingertips hit a keyboard or from gestures and body movement. Apply analytics and behavioural insights to this knowledge and you can trigger the right information flow to the customer. Now comes the best part. No user needs to understand underlying technologies - but all, can use it. This is what I call Siri-ization. Till yesterday, the power of advanced analytics was limited to analysts and data scientists; the rest depended on recommendations that trickled down. With Siri-ization everyone can benefit from analytics - figure what their next individual course of business action should be. This is possible because the machine already knows your customer and business perfectly. It knows all possible business contexts. It knows competitor pricing. It understands categories and preferences. It knows this morning’s trends. It knows where the customer is, now. It knows Victoria’s secret. Ask the machine, and you will receive a recommendation, real-time. This is what we used to call Artificial Intelligence. I prefer to call it Synthetic Intelligence, though. We are not faking it; with all these technologies that are crossing our path, we are duplicating the neural pathways of the brain - to create machines that are intelligent. Intelligent enough, to understand a million contexts, dice, analyze and bring the right answers. To everyone. Siri-ization will lead to true augmentation. Post Siri-ization of all technologies, what will humans do? David Sarnoff once said that the human brain must continue to frame the problems for machines to solve. Which means that our tomorrow lies in discovering skills and practices where the quality of human involvement can be deepened. And together, man and machine will collaborate to create a consumer environment and experience that will be unparalleled. True, there are a lot of questions that machines cannot answer today. But I would like to believe that there are more filters for us to pass through. Till then, let’s ask and receive. The author is founder of Manthan
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Twitter is investing in its media partnerships function across the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions to accelerate its push for content partnerships across the news, politics, sports, TV and entertainment verticals.The company has promoted Rishi Jaitly to Vice President of Media for Asia Pacific and Middle East to lead the business strategy and build up the media partnerships function in these regions. His team will work with key publishers to prioritise Twitter as their first and immediate platform to reach, delight and engage with a mobile audience across Twitter's live, public platform, including the Twitter, Vine and Periscope apps.Based in Singapore, Jaitly will grow his teams in major digital markets including Australia, India, and Japan, while expanding his team into new markets in Greater China and Southeast Asia. For example, his new team in Singapore recently completed the TV partnership deal with MediaCorp to use Twitter's SnappyTV platform to exclusively provide high-quality video clips of the country's 50th National Day Parade via Tweets during the live event.Rishi JaitlyKatie Stanton, Vice President of Global Media, said, "Since joining Twitter in the fall of 2012, Rishi has done a tremendous job of evangelizing the power of Twitter's platform for our users, influencers and content partners in India and Southeast Asia, including several of our largest and fastest growing markets in the world. By promoting Rishi to lead our function across the Asia Pacific and Middle East, we can quickly expand into new markets with a winning playbook, build up our strategic alliances and audience engagement in major markets, and attract the best talent for our team that brings the best content in the world onto Twitter's live, public platform."Jaitly said, "The Asia Pacific and Middle East regions account for over half of the world's Internet, mobile and social media users today, so this is an exciting opportunity to connect with content partners to drive the global digital revolution from these markets. As many of our largest user markets are in these regions, my strategic priorities are to enable our content partners to grow their audience on Twitter, increase our engagement with emerging talent and digital natives, and bring more premium non-English content onto Twitter. Our goal is to make Twitter the first and best way to show you what's happening in your world right now."Prior to his new role, Jaitly was Market Director for India & Southeast Asia at Twitter, establishing Twitter's operations in India and growing content partnerships across India, Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia. Earlier in his career, Jaitly was head of public-private partnerships for Google in India and an Aide to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt in California. He is also the Chairman of Michigan Corps, a social enterprise based in Detroit, the Founder of microfinance platform Kiva Detroit, and a former Director at the Knight Foundation and College Summit.(BW Online)
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With tons of personal information and data being stored online every day, the chances of data theft is rapidly increasing. Passwords, pin codes, fingerprint scanners and even retina scanners have started emerging to ensure security, but even with the enforcement of such authentication measures, users are still vulnerable to hacking. This is where the two-factor authentication method comes in which the user has to enter the usual password at the login page and then has to enter another password that he/she receives on his/her mobile device. In the two-factor authentication method you need to register your mobile number with your email ID or any other login. Once that is done, it gets saved as an identity along with your login details. Every time you login to your account, you need to enter your login password along with that you also need to enter a special generated password sent to your mobile number as an SMS. This password, also known as OTP or One Time Password, is valid for a limited time period. This method is widely used in making banking transactions and online payments and has started making its way to secure emails, social media accounts and more. This is a neat way to ensure your passwords are safe, but there are times when you don’t have your mobile device on you, or there are delays in receiving the second password or the OTP on your mobile device. To improve this login method researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, have devised a more protected way to login to your account by relying on ambient sounds. Named as ‘Sound Proof’, when a user tries to login, the microphone on the user’s computer and your mobile device will be activated automatically and will start listening for ambient sounds. When the sounds on both of the devices match, it lets you login. The system only uploads and verifies the digital signatures of the ambient sound, and there is no recording that is saved or passed on, making it safe for people concerned about privacy. This method ensures that even if a hacker manages to get the second password or maybe gets his hands on one of your devices (laptop or mobile phone), he won’t be able to login to your account. Of course this method is not perfect either, as it requires both of the devices to be in same place at the same time and one would have to rely on mobile data connection if there is no Wi-Fi. Also if someone is in the same place or same room as you and has your password, there is a good chance that they can get access. There’s also the possibility that if someone is listening to the same song or maybe the same TV program, they might be able to verify the authentication. However, with some refinement and improvements, this could turn out to be a simple yet a secure way to keep your accounts safe.
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Every day a new fitness tracker joins the hundreds beginning to flood the market, but it’s more rare to see one that goes beyond counting steps and measuring heart rate and buzzing on the wrist to tell you this or that. Austin-based Chaotic Moon Studios has come up with a wearable with a difference, first reported on by TechChrunch. It’s focused on solving a real problem, in practical terms. Mala Bhargava“The purpose of technology is to improve people’s lives,” says the company’s Twitter account, “Say hello to the world’s first wheelchair fitness tracker.” Chaotic Moon describes itself as a creative technology studio that develops user-centred experiences for leading brands. It’s now been acquired by Accenture to enhance its digital design and innovation capabilities. On its own steam, Chaotic Moon has clients like Dell, AMD, Whole Foods, Yum and more in its portfolio. One of the things it does is to user research. The idea for a fitness tracker for someone who uses a wheelchair came from Tyler Hively, a person who works with Chaotic Moon and uses a wheelchair himself. He was speaking with his occupational therapist sister when the idea came up. The wheelchair fitness tracker, Freewheel, has a number of sensors such as a GPS, gyroscoptic sensor, and can track and measure speed, incline, movement, and other parameters. This may sound unexciting, but the idea comes into its own when you put the data to practical use. First of all, Bluetooth transmits all the data to a device. Now when users fitted with Freewheel on their chairs go about, information pours in to help map the routes taken by the users. Once this happens, you can map routes for various reasons such as which paths are safe for users, which should be designed differently etc This sort of mapping can be put to use for those not using a wheelchair as well but specifically for someone in a wheelchair, information about the route can help send audio alerts to the user, who doesn’t have hands free because they’re busy operating the chair. Warnings and navigation are an obvious use. FreeWheel has some similarity to the LeChal shoes that have been developed by Hyderabad-based Duceres Technologies and both these products are a wonderful example of how wearables will soon, in the not to distant future, address real-world problems instead of just being a good looking gimmick worn on your wrist.
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Mala Bhargava has a short but powerful laundry list of disappointments with the recently launched version Every year I give in to the temptation and “upgrade” my Samsung Galaxy Note device. But that innocuous word, upgrade, doesn’t mean you can do anything to your existing Note. It means you need to put a huge wad of cash to buy a fresh Note. I never pre-order because you never know what problems could come up: an overheating processor (happily unlikely in the case of the Note 5), a battery that doesn’t behave, and so on. So while I’m eager to get my hands on the Galaxy Note 5, I have a short but powerful laundry list of disappointments with the recently launched version. No Galaxy Note 5 Edge?You have a Galaxy Note 5, a Galaxy S6, a Galaxy S6 Edge, a Galaxy S6Edge+, but no Galaxy Note 5 Edge. If you use the Note as much as I do – basically all day – you may well decide to put your money on a device that’s proven its worth over the years and pay for that extra feature that looks good as well as has a slick roll-out of apps and information on the wrap-around screen. But that is not to be. The one really innovative feature on Samsung flagships (well, apart from the stylus) has been left out of the Note 5 series. No Change In CameraThis one is outright unreasonable because the Note usually has the same camera as the Galaxy S-something that precedes it but given Samsung’s decline, this would have been a good time to do something additional to the camera on the Note 5. While it’s probably the best in class, it would have been great to have a step-up. The one addition is a Live Broadcast button that allows you to send a video live or scheduled, straight to YouTube. But for a photography buff, pure image quality and optics is always a strong draw. No Storage ExpansionWith everything now using apps, an increased number on a device is a given. While you can use online storage, a lot of which is being freely offered from so many sources, it would have been nice to have external storage to stash away data, leaving internal storage free for apps. As things stand, one will have to get into the strong habit of putting photos ad data up in the cloud. While there is a rumoured 128GB version, it’s bound to be prohibitively expensive. Not Enough BatteryThe Note 4 has a 3,220mAh battery which is removable – one can swap or replace altogether, a move I am considering because of the heavy use I put it to. But the Note 5 comes with a 3,000mAh battery and is non-removable. Both have Samsung’s quick charging feature, but it would have been nicer to have an upgraded battery for a device that has a higher res screen and is larger and has a more capable camera.
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The company achieved double-digit growth in India over the last fiscal year, reports Arshad Khan Data recovery software company Arcserve is all set to enter domestic SMB market to expand its presence with its unified data protection (UDP) solution which has been adopted by about 10,000 worldwide customers since its launch in May 2014. Ganesh Kuppuswamy, director for India & SAARC at Arcserve said, "India is a key growth market for Arcserve in Asia Pacific and we are going to invest heavily by increasing headcounts, recruiting more partners and growing the market share in the next 12 months." Software data protection in Asia Pacific is close to $1 billion where India contributes 8-10 per cent. According to Nasscom, Indian SMB market will grow by 15 per cent annually, which will propel the IT spending in the sector to over $18.5 billion by 2018. It says the Indian SMBs are rapidly innovating and adopting technology solutions to enhance competitiveness in the global and domestic business environment. Kuppuswamy admitted that it is the right time for them to invest in SMB market to broaden their presence in India. Data recovery demand in the country has grown exponentially over the years and backup software market has become fragment with no one dominant player. At present, the backup software market in India is around $100 million. The software company also commissioned a survey to find to latest trend in software data recovery trend. The survey indicates that 35 per cent of APAC respondents are storing their data in tape, while 51 per cent are using disk based data protection. Cloud as a primary means of backup is still not gaining traction at the business level with only four per cent of the respondent using Cloud as the backup target. The survey also reveals that half of the respondents expressed willingness to change data protection solutions in the near future, primarily because of delay in data recovery. Kuppuswamy said, "The dynamics of business has changed. Data now forms a major component of business and delay in its recovery affects company's operation." He also added that all leading public banks in India use Arcserve service and they have grown in double digits after splitting from CA Technologies last year. The US based company has its Indian headquarter in Bangalore and a development centre in Hyderabad. The company also has its sales representatives in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.
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