Google With Digital India: Android Will Have 11 Regional Languages; WiFi Plan Across 400 Railway Stations Confirmed

During PM Modi’s recent visit to US where he met top notch CEOs and founders of technological companies, several new and exciting updates were announced, which were in sync with Digital India vision.

Here are two major updates from Google, which were shared by their CEO Sundar Pichai during his meeting with PM Modi:

Android Will Have 11 Regional Languages

In order to spread the usage of smartphone among non-English speaking population, it is very important to deliver them content and functionalities in their regional language.

Sensing this need, Google will now provide Android OS in 11 regional languages of India. Although details were not shared regarding which languages are included, but Sundar made sure to make PM Modi happy as Gujarati is included in this list.

This is certainly one of the biggest decisions from Google, to help the spread of Digital India vision. We had earlier shared that Hindi content consumption is growing at a rate of 94%; while 37% of Internet users want content in their regional language.

Internet Across 400 Railway Stations: Biggest Public WiFi Project In India

Sundar Pichai confirmed their promise of providing high speed WiFi across 400+ railway stations across India. We had already shared this news earlier in September, when we had published some exclusive images of this project.

Sundar Pichai, officially announced the WiFi project via blog, where he said that Google, along with RailTel will provide Internet access to 10 million passengers a day.

To start with, they will roll out high speed Internet via WiFi across 100 stations by the end of 2015; which would be later expanded to 400 railway station.

Interesting part is that, this WiFi won’t be free after first 30 minutes. However, by paying for a service, rail passengers would be able to access unrestricted Internet in train, and the speed would be fast enough to download a movie in 5 minutes!

Once executed, it would be the largest public WiFi project in India.

As we had shared earlier, collaboration with RailTel is the master stroke which Google has played, as they are now not dependent on traditional ISPs such as Reliance and Airtel to provide WiFi. Due to this restriction, their earlier project of Google Fiber was not executed in India.

RailTel already has coverage of 63,500 kms of rail track, across 5000 railway stations; They have already laid fiber network across 32,500 kms, and work is in progress for 29,500 kms now.

After disappointments from Facebook, these new updates from Google are whole-heartedly welcomed because this is the true Digital India expansion: Fair and Quality Internet for all.

Courtesy of : Trak

Google Launches Online Courses and Scholarships in India with Udacity & Tata Trusts

Google Launches Online Courses and Scholarships in India with Udacity & Tata Trusts

Outside the US, India has the largest number of app developers. The community in India is growing widely, and taking a note of that, to empower these by giving quality education, Google is taking a leap to help these by training them massively.

The Internet giant along with Tata Trust have tied up with US based renowned online education platform Udacity to provide certification for the online courses.

Its an interesting course module, not like the existing ones we have lying all over the Internet. It is called Android Nanodegree. It will be of great help to developers who want to learn new skills but are out of resources. It is going to be of help to those who are working professionals as we have seen that it gets difficult to get out of your zone and take up a course when you need to ear for a living.

Another interesting facet to this story is that Google and Tata Trust will offer 500 scholarships each to candidates through the programme. This will again ease the burden of those who are not financially sound.

Here is an introductory video on Android Nanodegree

There has been a huge rise in number of smartphone users in the country since 2011, there are hence growing number of app developers coming up to cater to the growing needs of smartphone users, however, they haven’t reached the much needed mark of efficiency yet.

The course offered by Google will take about six to nine months and costs Rs 9,800 per month with Udacity refunding 50 per cent of the tuition fees upon completion. That’s a quite good deal.

Udacity is also trying its best to overcome the language barrier. “We are working on translations and captions for videos on YouTube. We have been already providing it in 12 languages across the world, but are yet to start working on Indian languages,” said Peter Lubbers, senior programme manager, developer relations at Google.

There couldn’t be a better online trainee for a country like ours which has a base of over 3 million software developers. At this pace, we are likely to overtake the US till 2018. However, these developers lack quality. Though they are plenty in numbers, not a single app from this Indian community is on the list of top 100 at the Google Playstore.

Google, hence wants to become the backbone of this workforce, strengthening them with pivotal knowledge, easily obtainable online, so that they are not just large in numbers but also good in quality of apps they create.

“With the launch of this programme, we want to bridge the gap by providing India’s developer community an easy access to learn and build high quality apps for the world. Today, only two per cent of apps built in India feature in the top 1,000 apps globally and our goal is to raise this to 10 per cent in the next three years,” said Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director, Google South East Asia and India.

Over a million of engineers graduate from India every year. Five percent of these train to become developers, and just one fourth of them become app developers. These figures clearly state how bad India needed this. Some rigorous training of international standards, and our developers would be well developed to aim at the stars!

courtesy of : Trak

BSNL Will Start Offering Competitively Priced 4G Services By March 2016

BSNL Will Start Offering Competitively Priced 4G Services By March 2016

The 4G mobile internet wars are heating up – while Bharti Airtel has taken a lead by launching their 4G services across 296 towns and cities in India, other telecom operators like Vodafone have announced that they will start offering 4G connectivity by end of the year. Reliance Jio Infocomm have also reiterated that their 4G services will be available by December of this year.

Now, state run telecom operator BSNL too plans to launch their services by March 2016 at competitive rates. BSNL Chairman and MD Anupam Shrivastava told ET, “We will launch competitive tariff plans to match Reliance Jio and other private telecom service providers’ pricing, be it 4G or 3G, by the end of this year”

BSNL has 20MHz spectrum in 2500 MHz band in 15 Licensed Service Areas (LSAs) where the 4G connectivity is expected to come up first. BSNL is also currently in talks with MTS to launch 4G services in 800 MHz, but no official announcement has been made as yet.

Most existing Indian telecom operators including BSNL are quite wary of Jio Infocomm’s aggressively priced 4G services. Jio’s 4G tariff are expected to be extremely cheap compared to other providers.

Shrivastava added, “We compete with each other and share infrastructure with Reliance Jio as well. In today’s scenario, it should not be seen as a competition as the objective is to serve consumers”. He also said that BSNL might take the Wi-Fi route to offer 4G services an are currently in talks with other telecom operators for Sharing of their spectrum.

Jio Infocomm has pan-India BWA spectrum in 2300 MHz band, and has also acquired airwaves in 800MHz and 1800MHz in the recently-concluded auctions.

It seems that BSNL also wants to play the price card, and may even launch 4G at rates below Jio Infocomm. According to BSNL sources, the rates for 4G connectivity will announced later in December this year.

courtesy of : Trak.in

Google Docs Adds Hindi Voice Dictation, Research Tool and More

Google Docs Adds Hindi Voice Dictation, Research Tool and More

This week has indeed been a busy one for those at Google. After having unveiled the new logo, Google has now introduced many new features, at the very right time when a new academic year for the Americans begins. The feature will now let users type an essay or assignment just by dictating.

The new feature is called “voice typing” and has been added to Google Docs. All you have to do to check it out is, just open a new document, click on the Tools menu and select “Voice typing.” Once done, you need to click on the microphone tab and get started. As per Google, this function will support 40 different languages. For the love of Indian users, it will even support Hindi.

To all up to all this, Google has even added some powerful new features to its cloud-based office suite. This step is certainly going to make some applications more appealing to those in the classroom. However, what we see as a negative here is that Google Docs word processor is not yet set in place for Android. The only way to access it is by desktop users who use Google Chrome’s browser.

Going ahead with the voice-typing feature, it will only type what you say. The drawback here is that it cannot tell you what punctuation marks are needed or where they are to be placed. As the user dictates the text in the content, he will even have to dictate where commas, periods and other punctuation marks are to be placed. This would probably be the ideal format for people who just take down running notes.

Google has also added some interesting updates to slides and sheets. The Android App of Google Docs will now allow you to pull in facts, quotes, images and more from Google search. Google Sheets also features innovative visualization tools for all of data display and the company has added pre-designed templates for Google Sheets, Docs and Slides.

The company states that the new feature is targeted towards classrooms. The ‘research’ feature will allow the user to surf the web, and while doing this, the user wouldn’t have to minimize the word processor application and switch to the browser.

This will indeed be a good add on to those students who do not use desktops or laptops, but tablets in classrooms. The population of such users is on a high currently because of the low budget tablets being widely available in markets. The SafeSearch would be on by default and only the images that are tagged as “licensed for reuse” will show up in search results. Now this one looks similar to the one that Microsoft employed for Bing search images from office suite.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information,” said Google Apps for Education product management director Jonathan Rochelle. “That is especially true for students and teachers.” The new benefits we believe will not only be of benefit to students, but a large audience who uses Google Docs as they can now give fingers a break!

courtesy; trak

Amazon Adds 7 New Fulfillment Centres Across India Taking Total Tally To 20

Amazon Adds 7 New Fulfillment Centres Across India Taking Total Tally To 20

Amazon India today announced that it has added seven new Fulfillment Centres (FCs) across India to meet the growing needs of its fast-growing seller base. The new New Fulfillment Centres have been opened in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Nagpur, Gurgaon, Pune  and Mumbai.

With the launch of these new FCs, Amazon now has a total of 20 FCs operational across 10 states in India covering a total area of over 1.6 mln sq ft with a storage capacity of nearly four million cubic feet.

More number of fulfillment centers means better and faster service for Amazon India customers. The new FCs will also enable thousands of small and medium businesses in these cities to gain access to and service customers across the country at significantly low operating costs.

If you are not aware, a Fulfillment Centre is a warehouse, where online retailers who use ‘Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)’ services, stock their inventory. When using FBA, sellers across India send their products to Amazon’s fulfilment centres and once an order is placed, Amazon picks, packs and ships the order to the customer, provides customer service and manages returns on behalf of the sellers. Orders fulfilled by Amazon are eligible for Cash on Delivery, Guaranteed Next-Day, Same Day, Release Day and Sunday delivery.

Customers will now see far more products that will have “Amazon FulFilled” batch while shopping on Amazon site!.

Amit Agarwal, Vice President and Country Manager, Amazon India said, Sellers on our marketplace have been witnessing exponential growth with overall volume growth exceeding 500% in the latest quarter and largely powered by our Fulfilled by Amazon service  contributing more than 75% of total units. We remain committed to investing in our fulfillment and logistics capability to enable and empower sellers to serve customers nationally at lower costs and increase sales”

With launch of 7 new fulfillment centers, Amazon India now has FCs in states of Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and West Bengal. Amazon claims that they now have over one million products for immediate shipping through the network of Amazon’s FCs in India.

courtesy of :trak

Now Book New LPG Connection Online; or Simply Pick a 2kg One From The Local Kirana Store

Now Book New LPG Connection Online; or Simply Pick a 2kg One From The Local Kirana Store

Government’s Digital India initiative is flourishing more than we thought it would. It is leaving its prints in every sector of the society, not just sticking to e-governance and transparency, for what it was initially introduced. It has now introduced online bookings for new connections for subsidized cooking fuel. After having introduced a 5-kg cylinder back in 2013, it is now planning to launch 2-kg bottles at local kirana stores, for making things just more convenient.

“We are now planning to introduce a 2-kg cylinder that can be easily carried… this will be particularly beneficial for the rural people and poor who cannot afford to pay the price of a 14.2-kg or even 5-kg cylinder,” said Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

While speaking at the launch of online booking of LPG connections, Pradhan said, “Consumers can now book a new connection online. It will be verified within 48 hours and a person from the nearest LPG agency will deliver a new connection at the door-step in next 3-4 days,” he said.

The portal called Sahaj has been launched on MyLPG.in where citizens book an LPG connection and make payments for the connection online. This service will be available for citizens in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna and Pune for now, and will be launched across the country in the next few days.

The procedure of physical booking being taken online will make booking new connections a hassle free process now. Also, this will also help in better governance, as in physical bookings too, one has to fill pockets of officials to get their connections soon. Also, time-saving is a major plus point of this initiative.

In July, many initiatives were launched under the Digital India week, such as Digital Locker, Bharatnet, e-Sign and others. As fascinating as it may sound, over 20k villages are now connected by broadband. The government also has reached out to the education sector by launching eBasta.  Launch of online LPG bookings has just added up to its growing umbrella.

The portal interestingly states that it is maintained by the ‘respective oil marketing companies’.  It also has a link to the government’s Give it Up initiative where PM Modi had requested the well-off people who can afford to pay market price, to voluntarily give up their subsidy to help extend its reach to the most needy.

There is also a ticker stating that the scheme PAHAL has made it to the Guinness World Record. As we dig in for more, we see that the scheme to pay subsidy directly in bank accounts of customers, called the Direct Benefit Transfer on LPG, has been recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest cash transfer programme in the world. It has also eliminated middle-men and black marketers and ensured the fuel is delivered to right people.

The MyLPG portal is available on phones, tablets and computers. Users can book their cylinders, register for a new connection, track cylinder booking and delivery dates, choose the distributor, Aadhaar linking status, monitor LPG subsidy transferred to bank and surrender their connection online. It has been created by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas along with oil marketing companies like Indane, Bharat Gas and HP Gas.

A TOI report also states that after a new application for an LPG connection is received, the system will automatically detect a dealer best suited for the user and email or message them the customer ID number, within 48 hours of application. Once this number is received, the user can pay online, after which the system makes a duplication check. Post that, the dealer will deliver the regulator, cylinder and rubber pipe to a new user. Apparently, the whole process will take 6-7 days.