It’s Monday morning and time to do a quick wrap-up of the posts published on trak.in last week. If you were offline last week for any reason, this is a great way to catch up with all the tech-buzz!
Contents
Internet/Tech/E-Commerce
In an ‘urgent’ security update released last week, Intel has said that every enterprise PC powered by Intel, sold in the last 10 years, is vulnerable to hacking. This is serious, and most probably biggest security failure reported and admitted by Intel.
In a move to simplify its User Interface, WhatsApp is reportedly working on a new feature to make chatting more convenient and lucid. The new tweak to the application will allow users to plug the favourite conversations at the top of the chat tabs.
It seems Snapdeal’s bad days are refusing to subside. Even as the proposed merger with Flipkart is stretching into eternity, vendors are getting restless over unpaid dues. After a series of police complaints and summons by Court, another vendor from Bangalore has filed another police complaint against Snapdeal over unpaid dues.
For the 2nd time in India, a Whatsapp admin has been arrested because of objectionable content shared on his group. Krishna Sanna Thamma Naik, a 30-year-old auto driver from Uttrara Kannada district in Karnataka, is an admin of a Whatsapp group named The Balse Boys’.
World’s largest social network: Facebook and India’s largest telecom provider Airtel joined forces to deploy 20,000 WiFi hotspots across India. Under Facebook’s Express WiFi scheme, this is India’s largest such partnership, which can bring accessibility to thousands of new Internet users, in India.
Business/Startups
As an entrepreneur, your biggest role is to create a sense of trust in the service/product that is offered by your organisation. The customers and potential customers need to know that there is value in what they are buying and that it is matched to their requirements.
Patanjali has just declared emphatic victory over other traditional FMCG players, by clocking Rs 10,216 crore revenue in 2016-17. This is 100% jump in revenues, when compared with 2015-16 fiscal, when they clocked Rs 5000 crore revenues.
The internet giant, Google, has taken the ride-hailing giant, Uber, to court over the allegations that it designed a “cover up scheme” for stealing the trade secrets of its self-driving arm, Waymo.
Election Commission of India (ECI) has been vehemently denying about any security issues or hacking in EVMs, all this while. In order to prove such accusations wrong, they have announced a unique hackathon in the last week of May, wherein anyone can participate, and try to hack the EVMs.
Arnab Goswami, the star news anchor who, very publicly, had left Times Now in November last year, is now back on TV. His brand-new news channel, called Republic, was launched today, with an explosive expose of former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad Yadav.
Telecom/Mobile/Gadgets
As per recent scoop into the patents filed by Apple in US, it has been found that they have filed a patent for “Wireless Charging and Communications Systems With Dual-Frequency Patch Antennas”, which translates into Wifi based charging system.
Now, Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications have come up with their own offerings to combat this Airtel’s and Jio’s new tariff plan.
This time, it is Jio, who has launched a preemptive strike against Airtel’s advertisements and offers. In a strongly worded letter addressed to TRAI, Jio has described Airtel’s offers as ‘misleading’.
Spreadtrum Communications, a Shanghai-based semiconductor company has disclosed that it is working on reducing the starting prices of its 4G capable chipsets by at least 50% to make 4G feature phones priced around Rs. 1,500 a viable proposition.
Jio’s new campaign is to increase the count of its JioFi dongle users. With this new JioFi offer new customers can get 100% cash back on their purchase of a new JioFi device, or Rs. 1,000 worth of 4G data under various offers.
The speed for BSNL broadband subscribers will be increased to “a minimum of 4 Mbps initial download speed (before the FUP-Fair Usage Policy quota is reached),” announced BSNL in a press release.
Going by its naming convention followed in its earlier smartphone, the “t.phone”, Smartron has aptly named the new smartphone as srt.phone. Here “srt” stands for Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, the cricketing legend, who is one of the investors in the country.
Telecom Department last Tuesday has launched – Tarang Sanchar – an online portal that allows people to track radiation emitted from mobile towers within their proximity. The platform lets users to also check their compliance with the specified standards.
According to latest data (as of 1 April 2017) from TRAI’s MySpeed portal, Jio’s average download speed reached an average of 18.487 Mbps by the end of March 2017.
Telecom Regulatory of India (TRAI) has out rightly rejected the demand for minimum call rate, as demanded by Airtel, Idea and Vodafone, after Jio devastated their market, and forced them to incur huge losses.
As per App Annie, over 1 trillion hours of global app usage has been recorded by them in 2016 and India has emerged as 5th biggest user base of mobile apps, all over the world.
In an effort to tighten its leash over the telecom operators in the country, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has decided to launch its own call quality-rating app, MyCall, which will work on a crowd-sourcing platform.
Others
Govt of India has reconfirmed their plans to go full ballistic for electric cars. An announcement which will make Elon Musk and patrons of electric vehicles super happy, India plans to allow sale of only electric cars by 2030, which is just 13 years away.
[Sponsored] – It is famously said that an average Indian spends one-fifth of his lifetime’s income on a wedding ceremony. And if we observe the numbers and the emotional/sentimental importance attached to a wedding ceremony, then we will find this statement not too far stretched.
Govt. of India has now decided to extend the scope of Aadhaar Card, and introduce it in Air Travel as well. Under the new premise of ‘Digi Yatra’, translated into Digital Travel, all you would need is your mobile phone to travel anywhere in the country, using air-mode.
Centre for Internet & Society (India), a leading Bangalore-based think tank on multidisciplinary research and advocacy has revealed that more than 13 crore Aadhaar numbers and 10 crore bank accounts linked with Aadhaar have been leaked online, available for anyone and everyone to exploit.
In order to flush out shell companies, bogus identities and to end money laundering, Govt of India will soon change Companies Act and make all filings under it as Aadhaar linked. This means that directors and founders of 16 lakh registered companies will be required to mention their Aadhaar card numbers while filing any declarations under Companies Act.
Govt. has now ordered that starting August, every new vehicle would be required to equip with new RFIDs, called FasTags. As per the order from Road Transport Ministry, as soon as the vehicle would be only allowed to come out from the showroom, when the new RFIDs, compatible with the e-toll technology is pasted on the windshield.
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