Vodafone Effectively Halves Data Prices; Promises Launch of 4G Services By Year End!

Vodafone Effectively Halves Data Prices; Promises Launch of 4G Services By Year End!

With Bharti Airtel launching their 4G services commercially in 296 towns and cities in India, it is time for other telecom operators to gear up for intense competition, especially in mobile internet space. Vodafone yesterday announced that they will now be offering double data on pre-paid data recharge packs, effectively bringing down the prices of their data offering to nearly half. Currently, this offer is available in Mumbai only, but is expected to be launched across India.

One cannot help but think that this move has something to do with Airtel’s 4G commercial launch. The announcement has come on the same day as Airtel’s 4G launch. Airtel is offering 4G speeds at the same rate as 3G, and it is obvious that many subscribers from other telecom operators may move to Airtel due to their 4G offerings. By doubling the data on the pre-paid data recharges, Vodafone now becomes quite attractive to heavy mobile internet users!

Ishmeet Singh, Business Head-Mumbai, Vodafone India said, “This offer is our way of gratifying our pre-paid customers for choosing Vodafone as their preferred mobile internet provider. We are offering them double value and encouraging new data users to explore the wonders of the internet using Vodafone’s better 3G service”

We think that the “double data” offer has been launched in Mumbai because data ARPU in Mumbai is the highest, and Vodafone does not want to risk losing customers to Airtel. Also, Vodafone has big share of subscribers in Mumbai – they have over 4.8 million data users of its overall 8 million customers in Mumbai circle alone,

When is Vodafone 4G coming?

Airtel’s launch has now pressurized other to launch their 4G services in a hurry. In the 4G auctions held earlier in the year, Vodafone bagged nearly 5 MHz of spectrum in the 1,800 MHz band for Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karnataka and Kerala. Singh confirmed that Vodafone will be launching 4G services by the end of the year. Vodafone is currently conducting 4G trials in all these 5 circles.

With Reliance Jio approaching the market aggressively in 4G services arena, both in terms of offerings and as well as price, it is going to be tough for the incumbents to hold on to their mobile data market share. We are surely in for some intense competition between various telco’s in India.

courtesy of : trak.in

Android M is Android Marshmallow, Here is How it Tastes!

Android M is Android Marshmallow, Here is How it Tastes!

You have been hearing about Android ‘M’ for a long time now, but always wondered what does that M stand for (or which is the next sweet it will it be named after?). It’s out now. Google has revealed the latest Android 6.0 as Android Marshmallow. This version supersedes Android Lollipop, which was a Android’s biggest update till date.

It is interesting to note that Google has given it a full version, and not a point version. Most of the people were expecting it to be five-point-something, which it is not!

Lets look at what Marshmallow brings on table for Android user, more so, how tasty is it going to be.

Android Lollipop was a huge upgrade to previous, probably the biggest till date that Android has seen. Marshmallow will not be that significant an update, but it does bring some nifty additions to somewhat already matured mobile OS.

The official post on Google Developers blog does not give too many specific details, however, it seems that final Android Marshmallow version will be out sometime later in the fall (that’s couple of months from now)

Here are few of the features that we are aware of and you should know:

App Permissions

This feature has been improved so you can choose which functions to allow an app access to. You can soon disable the location function with the new Android Marshmallow. In the new format, the apps will ask from permissions when needed, rather than asking them when you first install the app. The total number of permissions are limited to eight.

Quick Finger Print Access.

Use this to unlock phone and log in to Google Play Store or other apps that require log in. No need to type a password on the screen just to get in because your fingerprint is enough. And yes, do not compare it with earlier fingerprint apps that never worked – this one really works…they say atleast 9 out of 10 times!

Power Saving

Device battery will be more efficient in Android Marshmallow. The new power saving features and Doze mode that can reduce processes in the background.

Track Memory

Determine which apps uses the most memory, this way, you can know what app to close. The Memory tab will tell you how much memory each app is taking up on your phone or tablet.

Auto Backup on Google Drive

In Marshmallow, you can back up all settings and app user data automatically into your Google Drive account up to 25MB per app. (Now that’s really cool!)

There are number of other smaller features like new power supply feature, where other devices connected to the phone can get charged. Volume control settings and controls also get a revamp. Also, Android Marshmallow officially supports USB Type C connector.

Overall, Android Marshmallow is quite tasty, however the portion probably is lot smaller than it’s predecessor. If you are an Android developer and have got your hands on Android Marshmallow, do let us know your feedback.

How to Update to Android Marshmallow?

Obviously this is a developer version, so if you are not a developer, it is not suggested that you should do it. However, if you are braveheart and want to give it a try, here is how you do it (as per official blog post).

The Android emulator system images and developer preview system images have been updated for supported Nexus devices (Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 & Nexus Player) to help with your testing. You can download the device system images from the developer preview site. Also, similar to the previous developer update, supported Nexus devices will receive an Over-the-Air (OTA) update over the next couple days.

Although the Android 6.0 SDK is final, the devices system images are still developer preview versions. The preview images are near final but they are not intended for consumer use. Remember that when Android 6.0 Marshmallow launches to the public later this fall, you’ll need to manually re-flash your device to a factory image to continue to receive consumer OTA updates for your Nexus device.

India Post to Help Farmers Sell Their Produce Online; Will Add New Revenue Channel!

India Post to Help Farmers Sell Their Produce Online; Will Add New Revenue Channel!

The Internet has benefitted everyone from rich to poor. Guess who are the latest benefiters of it! The farmers. With the help of India’s postal department, farmers will now be able to sell paddy, cotton, pulses or any other farm products directly to the traders online that too without spending even a single buck on transport.

For this novel plan the postal department is going to launch a pilot programme first that will seek to help farmers sell their produce online. Based on the results of pilot project, the postal departments will then look on and take a call on extending the service across the country.

India Post will act as a facilitator amid the farmers and traders and the project initially will start in two locations. “The project will soon start in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana over the next couple of weeks,” said the chief postmaster general of the circle covering the two Telugu-speaking states, BV Sudhakar.

This project is clearly a smart move by the Indian post which will kill two birds with one stone i.e. put to use its vast network of post offices and employees into use at a time when the advent of e-mails and proliferation of mobile phones, instant chat apps and express courier services made its core service of delivering letters mostly irrelevant and also help the farmers sell their products to their traders.

“While it is free for farmers, India Post will collect a nominal fee from the buyers, apart from stipulating a condition that buyers should use the services of India Post for transporting the farm commodity to the required destination,” said Sudhakar.

Telangana we see is taking Modi government’s digital India campaign a bit too seriously. The move by the government is worth an applaud as it is doing its best by even providing Internet connection to each house in the state. They government has aims to make atleast one person in each family computer literate. This programme will too be one of the highlight of the Digital Telangana project. Also we see that the Indian Post is exploring new-age business opportunities to generate revenue.

This is how it will work

Postmasters will be appointed in villages to collate details from farmers about their produce and upload the data online for traders to read and make decisions.

They will also be given smartphones, so that they can take photos of the farm commodities and upload the details on a website that which will act as a trading platform.

The initiative seems to be an ambitious one, aimed at encouraging the postmasters in villages to be a part of the new initiative, thus generate more revenue.

With the advent of Internet and e-mail, the post offices in the country seem to be fraying off. This initiative by the Indian Post, is sure to get revenue to the Indian Post from the very source which killed its revenue a decade ago!

source: Trak.in

Twitter Finally Eliminates the 140-Character Limit for Direct Messages

Twitter Finally Eliminates the 140-Character Limit for Direct Messages

The pain to type in the boundary of characters like we did in the SMS era has been discomforting on Twitter. Users can now exchange direct messages privately of up to 10,000 characters – with the idea being that Direct Messages should seem limitless!

While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations about anything under the sun! Now, your private Twitter chats can be one liners, or even lengthy novels if you choose them to be. The 140-character limit on normal public tweets however, remains unchanged.

Private chat was never a thing on Twitter. Just and just due to the limitations. Twitter’s blog announcement that it will be eliminating the 140-character limit was a sigh of relief, and another way of messaging and private chatting could be added to the surface list. This new change gives power to privacy on Twitter.

It now gives users more space to express themselves more freely and getting rid of the 140-character limit is a step in the direction of improving user experience. Twitter is flooded with some mind-boggling content on a daily basis, or even hourly basis as such, from breaking news to live events. Through this initiative it aims is to create an experience that allows users to discuss powerful moments in an environment they’re comfortable with. They don’t have to fetch things and discuss them over other chat platforms anymore.

Earlier this year, Twitter launched Group Direct Messages, where multiple users could chat at once and any user could message another user privately irrespective of the fact that they might not be following each other.

To the many times we have split texts into 4-5 parts of 140 characters, this is cheerio moment. The update will rollout to 100 percent of users worldwide, who use Twitter.com, TweetDeck and Twitter-owned-and-operated applications. At launch Twitter will support reading and writing long DM’s for:

• iPhone
• iPad
• Android
• Web
• Twitter for Mac
• TweetDeck

It’s so cool to have Twitter finally address to one of its most annoying features. The app’s most defining limitation however stays the same. Well, that’s what makes Twitter, Twitter!

Ebay Sellers Can Now Get Collateral Free Loans Upto Rs 1 Crore From Capital Floats

Ebay Sellers Can Now Get Collateral Free Loans Upto Rs 1 Crore From Capital Floats

The marketplace model is now geared towards empowering the sellers so that the platform keeps growing. And the latest to join this bandwagon is Ebay.

In order to make their sellers more powerful and independent, Ebay has teamed up with Capital Floats, a digital financing firm based in Bangalore. Sellers on Ebay can now get loans upto Rs 1 crore, without any collateral.

Capital Floats provides short term capital loans to SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises), using technology as a platform. As per their website, their missions is to “bridge the current gap in the market with innovative and flexible credit products for SMEs, delivered in an efficient and customer-friendly manner.”

Technically, Capital Float is the trade name of Zen Lefin Pvt. Ltd., a non-banking finance company (NBFC) registered with the RBI.

While announcing this news, Pankay Ukey, Director, Seller Service and Technology Category, eBay India said, “Our association with Capital Float is an effort to support our sellers by providing them financial assistance and help them ship more,”

Capital Float has already teamed up with leading ecommerce players such as Snapdeal, Flipkart, Myntra, PayTM; and within a short span, they have distributed Rs 10 crore worth of loans to Ebay sellers.

At a time when there are around 3 crore registered SMEs in the country, there exists a demand for Rs 26 trillion worth of loans & credits to make them profitable. However, Banks are only capable of providing Rs 7 Lakh crore maximum as loans to these SMEs. This wide gap between the demand and supply of loans for SMEs is the space where Ebay and Capital Float, both are concentrating.

Once sellers and SMEs are able to procure short term loans using Ebay India’s platform, they will attract more SMEs and thus both Capital Float and Ebay can benefit.

Other Ecommerce Marketplaces Offering Credit & Loans

The trend of empowering SMEs within an online marketplace started last year, when Flipkart signed MoU with Federation of Indian Micro and Small and Medium Enterprises (FISME) and National Center for Design and Product Development (NCDPD) to help SMEs raise their bars and use technology for all round growth. Provision of loans and credit was made easy for entrepreneurs.

In June this year, Amazon decided to assist sellers on thier platform using their in-house credit service called ‘Amazon Lending’; which was open only for select SMEs who had shown excellent track record.

The same month, Alibaba announced a partnership with ICICI bank to provide fast and low interest based loan service for SMEs.

Last month, Snapdeal announced a unique credit service for their sellers called ‘Capital Assist’, which will approve instant loans within few days.

Digital Marketplaces now keen on empowering their sellers via easy and low interest loans is the best thing to happen to India’s entrepreneurial eco-system. This will not only encourage more entrepreneurs, but also enable more number of business transactions and deals.

Have you used any such loan and credit facility from Indian ecommerce companies? Do share your experience by commenting right here!

courtesy of : trak.in

Twitter Transparency Report: Account Removal Requests Double, but Twitter Complies with None

Twitter Transparency Report: Account Removal Requests Double, but Twitter Complies with None

The Twitter transparency report for period between Jan-Jun 2015 is out – and according to it, account information requests by Indian Government to Twitter have seen significant rise. A total of 113 account requests were made during first half of the year compared to 41 made in second half of 2014. Government requested information on a total of 2,963 accounts compared to 1938 in previous six months.

However, Twitter complied with less than one-fifth or 19 percent of the requests made to them. At a global level the same percentage was around 58 percent.

Removal Requests

Interestingly, Government and other agencies had requested removal of 31 Twitter accounts, but Twitter complied with none, and no accounts were disabled or removed. Even 2 court orders did not convince Twitter to remove the accounts. Even requests for removal of certain tweets were not complied by Twitter.

In comparison, during the previous six month period, a total of 14 accounts were asked to be removed with 1 court order. Twitter responded with withholding 1 twitter account.

Global Transparency

Since Twitter first started coming out with their transparency report in 2012, the account information and removal requests have been steadily on the rise. At global level, 4363 account information requests were made and Twitter complied with 58 percent of those requests.

A total of 12,711 accounts were specified, out of which India had 2963 accounts.

USA remained by far the biggest country in terms of number of information requests (2435) and accounts specified (6324).

Twitter also release details about non-Government information requests – where at global level 125 requests were made and 30 percent were complied with.

courtesy of Trak.in

eCommerce Firms to Give Credit Score To Customers Based on Their Online Purchases

eCommerce Firms to Give Credit Score To Customers Based on Their Online Purchases

Say hi to the new kid in the eCommerce town! Credit rating mechanism is here to make online shopping easier (and difficult to a few) for Indians. The eCommerce giants in the country are putting up quite some innovative techniques. They’re creating models, which are running neck-to-neck to those in US, Europe and China, targeting young age groups of 22 to 28 years. There ways of banking and buying are way different from the traditionalists.

E-tailers and payment companies have now joined hands to work ways out wherein your online transaction history will be analyzed and credit scores will be provided which will enable you to get loans. Even to convert those purchases into EMIs, you need not worry of not having a credit card, as you can do it without even having one!

“EMIs will be restricted to high ticket price categories, for example on purchase of white goods, etc. In the instance when a customer does not have a previous credit history, we will evaluate their mobile phone bill payment for credit worthiness. We will only share the rating with banks and the user will be informed of the process,” said Amit Lakhotia, vice president — payments at Alibaba-backed marketplace and payment solution, Paytm.

In a similar move in China last year, Alibaba had issued virtual credit cards to its customers after having analyzed their transaction history. So this pattern basically works on credit system without having a credit card. This system would work great if they have apt modules to determine credit worthiness.

Tejasvi Mohanram, founder and CEO of RupeePower, digital finance services marketplace, said: “We are utilizing non-traditional data to match the right customer to the lending agency. We will analyse the credit history of an individual when they ask for a loan or EMI. It will be used by banks as a back-test where they will match traditional credit scores with the learning from non-traditional data.”

These services had first come up in US and Europe under interesting taglines like Bill Me Later. But after some mishaps, they shut down. Indians are being very cautious as it does involve some serious risk as much as it has the scope for booming. They also need to handle customer data and privacy with much caution and respect.

This will also result in people making more transactions than average to maintain a good score, especially those who do not own credit cards and are aiming to make big purchases using the system.

“Our product will give the customer a decision in 15 seconds flat on whether they are eligible for credit or not,” said Jitendra Gupta, founder of Citrus Payment Solutions. “We will assign credit scores to customers on our database, using our analytics engine. We will only tell the bank whether the customer is eligible or ineligible for the loan. Disclosing credit score will be unethical,” he added.

This baby in India will be having all new experiences. The credit rating systems of various companies will be judged and tested. A plethora of new choices and convenient payment options like these will lure the common man towards the bait, we can only hope he’s not trapped!

[Source: ET | Image: Shutterstock.com]