Apple is planning to greatly increase the number of stores selling its products in India, with a target of 200 stores by 2015. According to The Economic Times, Apple franchisees have revealed that the company has asked them to scale up their presence in India by opening more stores selling its products. Currently there are 17 franchisees in India that are running 65 exclusive Apple stores, known as Apple Premium Resellers, and Apple hopes to triple that number in two years time.

Apple has decided to fund the new Indian stores by reimbursing the total amount (estimated at Rs. 1 crore per store) to the franchisees over a year. iPhone makers will find it very difficult to open its own stores in India because of Government regulations. According to these regulations, any product being sold by the manufacturer through its own single brand store should either be made in India or should at least have 30% of its components sourced locally.

With the help of retail schemes that offer premium Apple products to Indian consumers through installments, and a bigger marketing push, Apple has managed to rack up a 400% jump in its total sales in India, as revealed by an IDC report released in February. The report also showed that Apple had jumped to the second spot in terms of revenue in the Indian smartphone market.

The highly awaited X Phone from Motorola has been leaked to the web. The image was leaked to GSM Arena by an anonymous source who may be working in the team developing the X Phone.

The source also revealed some of the specs 

•  The X Phone including a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor
• 4.7-inch display with a resolution of 1280x768 pixels and made from Gorilla Glass 3
• a massive 4,000 mAh battery. 
• Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) 
• May be IP57 certified (like the Sony Xperia Z) which will make it dust and water resistant. 
• The X Phone is also expected to have a large amount of internal storage and no support for microSD cards.

Apart from the X Phone, Motorola is also rumoured to be working on three other Android phones targeted at different price-points

A 17-year-old London schoolboy has made big news, after he sold his news app company to Yahoo, for an estimated £18m. Nick D'Aloisio hails from Wimbledon in south London, had created the app called Summly – which provides crisp summaries of content from various news sites. The total transaction value is understood to be £18m, assumed to be 90% in cash and 10% in shares at Yahoo. However, some reports suggested the total could go up to as much as £40m.

D'Aloisio, who learnt how to write code for apps when he was 12 years old, developed the Summly app at the age of 15. The application was made for the iPhone, and till the time it was pulled from the Apple App Store after the announcement of the Yahoo deal, had clocked 1 million downloads. The application had content deals with 250 news sources globally, including the Rupert Murdoch owned News Corp., and was managed by a team of 10 employees based in London.

This could be a big acquisition for Yahoo, as it aims to refresh and rebuild its offerings, after having lost relevance significantly, at least in the smartphone ecosystem. D'Aloisio, who is currently on a break from studies for a short period to give complete focus to Summly, will join Yahoo's London office. Meanwhile, he will continue with his education. "Technology has really been the driver behind this whole deal. I can't wait to see how it plays out at Yahoo", he says.

Google has started selling its Nexus devices in India. The 7-inch tablet, Nexus 7, has been listed on the India Google Play Store for Rs 15,999 and will ship by April 5, 2013. The Nexus 7 tablet was launched at the Google I/O in June last year and has since become a bestseller.

The one launched in India is the 16GB Wi-Fi variant of this tablet, which runs on Android Jelly Bean and is powered by the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor (clocked at 1.3GHz) paired with 1GB RAM. The tablet announced earlier was the 8GB variant priced at $199. But Google discontinued it last year itself and priced the 16GB variant at $199.

Nexus 7 is likely to give competition to the Apple iPad Mini, which is available for Rs 21,900. Google has not been selling its hardware in India but this development follows the recent visit of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to India, where he promised that Google will soon start selling Nexus hardware in the Indian market.

Samsung had last week unveiled the Galaxy S4 in New York and declared its official roll out with 327 operators across 155 countries with the official release date being April 26. Online marketing firm Tradus has started pre-booking of the latest smartphone in Samsung's Galaxy line - the Galaxy S4 - in India.

With the new Galaxy S4 smartphone, the company is increasing its rivalry with Apple. The phone boasts of a larger, sharper screen than its predecessor, the best-selling S3.

The Galaxy S4, which crams a 5-inch screen into body slightly smaller than the S III's, will go sale in the US sometime between the end of April and the end of June.

INTERNET users have been drawn into a row between two online businesses that has slowed internet speeds around the world. The global web problems came after a Dutch web-hosting company took umbrage at being dubbed a source of spam email, and retaliated by launching what has been called the world's largest web attack.

Last night, internet users found web browsing was taking longer than usual. In many cases it was impossible to watch online movies. Users of intensive applications such Netflix are thought to have been particularly badly affected. The interruptions came after Spamhaus, a not-for-profit spam-fighting group based in Geneva, temporarily added the Dutch firm, CyberBunker, to a blacklist that is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam.

CyberBunker is housed in a five-storey former NATO bunker and famously offers its services to any website "except child porn and anything related to terrorism". It has often been linked to behaviour that anti-spam blacklist compilers have condemned. Its response was to mount a huge 'denial of service attack'. This works by trying to make a network unavailable to its intended users, overloading a server with co-ordinated requests to access it.

Internet speeds around the world can be impacted by such large-scale DNS amplified DDoS attacks because the Internet relies on DNS to work — major interference with DNS can have consequences for services not necessarily being directly targeted by such an attack. Internet Service Providers should implement technologies that prevent hackers from spoofing victims' IP addresses. Second, network administrators need to close any and all open DNS resolvers running on their network.

"Anyone that's running a network needs to go to openresolverproject.org, type in the IP addresses of their network and see if they're running an open resolver on their network," said Prince. "Because if they are, they're being used by criminals in order to launch attacks online. And it's incumbent on anyone running a network to make sure they are not wittingly aiding in the destruction of the Internet."

The phone as tweeted, will possess a MediaTek MT6577 Dual Core processor and will come with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box. When we asked Micromax about the product, the company avoided and did not provide any information. It will be still interesting to see what 3D will be stuffed in Canvas A115.

Specifications of Micromax A115 Canvas 3D :

• Dual core MediaTek MT6577 1 GHz Processor .
• 5 inch 480*800 resolution display.
• Android 4.1.
• 8 MP rear and 2 MP front facing Camera.
• 1 GB RAM.
• 4 GB internal memory.
• 3D Imaging and Playback.

Apple has also begun implementing a two-factor authentication system for all Apple IDs. The two-factor authentication system requires two pieces to verify the identity of the user, one a password, and the other a physical object on you, in this case the phone.

Once enabled, a 4-digit code is sent via SMS, or the Find My iPhone app when a user successfully signs in with their Apple ID and password on the My Apple ID website, or when making an iTunes, App Store, or iBookstore purchase from a new device. Users are given a 14-digit recovery code to use if they ever forget their password or lose access to their authorized devices. Apple does clarify that even with the two-factor authentication in place, it is the user’s responsibility to keep their log-ins and physical devices secure.

Here is the process to Sign in at My Apple ID.

• Select "Password and Security" and enter in the answers to your security questions.
• Under "Two-Step Verification," select "Get Started" and follow the instructions on screen.
• You should see the devices you're using. If not, enable "Find My iPhone" on your device (Settings > iCloud). Click "Verify" and it'll send you a four digit number.
• In the next step you'll get a recovery key. Print or write this down and keep it in a safe place. This is the only way to regain access to your account if you lose it.
• Confirm your recovery key, and then click "Enable Two-Factor Authentication."

Facebook announced on Monday it is rolling out a new feature so users can reply directly to comments left on their page. Finally.

Followings months of testing, the social network aims to make navigating through conversation threads easier with the new Replies feature. This means that, instead of having to leave a response to a friend's comment way after new ones have been added, you will be able to address each individual comment. Responses will be posted under the original comment too.

The site is also prioritizing comments based on engagement — the most active and popular ones will surface to the top of your posts. This will be especially helpful for pages with thousands of followers. For now, threaded replies will be automatically applied to profiles with more than 10,000 followers and opt in for brand Pages until July 10, 2013. To opt in, visit the Replies option through the Page admin panel.

"At launch, this feature will only be available on desktop and we plan to make it available in the Graph API and mobile in the future," Lavrusik added.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt uses a BlackBerry! May be too surprising, but it's true. 

"I am a BlackBerry user. I like the keyboard of BlackBerry," said Schmidt answering some rapid-fire questions from the Editor of a British daily at Google's Big Tent India -- a forum to discuss internet and its impact on economy, governance etc.

BlackBerry is a technology rival of Google's operating system Android-- an open software-- which is used in many makes of smartphones, like Samsung Galaxy.  BlackBerry's operating system is BlackBerry OS. Schmidt also categorically said there isn't any plan to converge Android and web browser Chrome and Apps divisions.

"No is the answer, we don't make decisions based on who the leader is, we make decisions based on where the technology takes us," he said when asked if the three will be merged.

On its official blog, YouTube has announced that a whopping one billion people visit the video streaming service each month. That’s roughly one in every seven people on the planet.

A hacking attack on the servers of South Korean broadcasters and banks originated from an IP address based in China, officials in Seoul said, raising suspicions the intrusion came from North Korea. An unnamed official from South Korea's presidential office was quoted by the Yonhap news agency as saying the discovery of the IP address indicated Pyongyang was responsible for the attack. 

The attack brought down the network servers of television broadcasters YTN, MBC and KBS as well as two major commercial banks, Shinhan Bank and NongHyup Bank. South Korea raised its alert levels in response.   


"We've identified that a Chinese IP is connected to the organizations affected," a spokesman for South Korea's Communications Commission told a press conference.  It took the banks hours to restore operations. Damage to the servers of the TV networks was believed to be more severe, although broadcasts were not affected.

About 32,000 computers at the six organizations were affected, according to the South's state-run Korea Internet Security Agency, adding it would take up to five days to fully restore their functions. North Korea has in the past targeted South Korea's conservative newspapers, banks and government institutions.  The biggest hacking effort attributed to Pyongyang was a 10-day denial of service attack in 2011 that antivirus firm McAfee, part of Intel, dubbed "Ten Days of Rain". It said that attack was a bid to probe the South's computer defenses in the event of a real conflict.  

Samsung made itself the brand to beat in the crowded smartphone space by backing Google's Android software -- 96 per cent of the South Korean company's shipments ran on the platform. Now, it's planning a high-end smartphone powered by Intel-backed open-source platform Tizen.

Growing competition from Samsung as a maker of high-end smartphones has already turned Apple from its most-valuable customer to an increasingly bitter rival. Samsung's efforts to lessen its reliance on Android by designing its own software Bada - 'the sea' in Korean - haven't yet produced a credible alternative. Nor have phones powered by Microsoft's OS.
 
The new phone, out as soon as August, is good news for those geeks and independent-minded consumers of the tech zone who are crying out for open-source gadgets. Maybe less so for Apple and Google , who face another, challenger in the battle to dominate the platform for global mobile communications. 

Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that the company doesn't plan to integrate Chrome and Android operating systems into one product. "The two serve different purposes and will remain different products," Schmidt said at Google's Big Tent event in Delhi.

Earlier Google handed over the control of Android team to Sundar Pichai, who also heads Chrome division, leading to speculation that the company is planning to integrate Chrome and Android into one product. Commenting on India's internet scene he said that the company's virtual world looks like what the US had in 1994. He said that there was enormous opportunity to grow and that India should invest in fiber lines to bolster its communication infrastructure.

"The telecom industry here is under-capitalized. I feel you should run fiber-optic cables under every road," he said.

Schmidt also denied that he was leaving Google. After he decided to sell 42% of Google shares that he held, there were rumours that he was planning to leave the company. "No, I am not leaving. Google is my home," he said. He added that he was not looking for any government role.

Supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad appear to have hijacked the Twitter account for the BBC's weather service.

The hackers identified themselves as members of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group that has carried out a string of web attacks against targets such as Al-Jazeera, which it sees as sympathetic to Syria's rebels.

A series of messages posted by the BBC Weather Twitter account on Thursday ranged from political to anti-Semitic to comical. A further message claimed Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered terrorists to launch chemical weapons at civilian areas in North Syria.

Google is easing the woes of GIF addicts with a filters that will make it easier to narrow down searches specifically for animated images and transparent images.

The company announced starting Tuesday users can click on the "search tools" button below the search box and select "animated" under the "any type" dropdown menu to refine their results. Users can also select "transparent" under the color filter.

The GIF search filter should hopefully make the hunt more efficient than slogging through thousands of image search results for the best fit. 

State-run BSNL topped the list of spam sources in a study which found that about 50% of all junk mail, while the most crime-ridden network was Spectranet in Nigeria as 62% of addresses controlled by that ISP were found to be sending out spasm with criminal intent. 


Of the 42,201 ISPs studied about 50% of all junk mail, phising attacks and other malicious messages came from just 20 networks, Moura found. Many of these networks were concentrated in India, Vietnam and Brazil. Moura found networks involved in malicious activity also tended to specialise in one particular sort of malicious message or attack. The study showed that majority of phising attacks came from ISPs based in the United States. "By contrast, spammers tend to favour Asian ISPs. Indian ISP BSNL topped the list of spam sources in the study," BBC said. 

Moura's study was carried out to help fine-tune computer security tools that scrutinise net addresses of email and other messages to help them work out if they are junk or legitimate. "Such tools could make better choices if they were armed with historical information about the traffic that emerge from particular networks," BBC said. 

 
Benjamin Ho, the chief marketing officer for smartphone maker HTC, has slammed Samsung Galaxy S4, saying the new mobile by the Korean electronics giant 'offers nothing new' to its users. Ho said that with a continuation of a plastic body and a larger screen being the most obvious physical change, Samsung's new Galaxy pales in comparison to the all-aluminium unibody HTC One. 

HTC's customers want original cutting-edge technology, mouth-watering design and a premium feel from their mobiles, which is why the firm created the HTC One, he added.  

The new phone can sense a finger hovering over its screen and has a device that follows your eye movements and scrolls the page down automatically. According to the paper, these advances, along with a 13MP camera and a faster, eight-core processor, have reassured smartphone users that it marks a significant step up from last year's bestselling Galaxy S4.  

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the Mailbox service offering will be broadened, with new features, including support for more devices and email providers well as new features.

Samsung has just introduced its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S 4 to the world.
The Galaxy S 4 follows the spectacularly successful Galaxy S III, which sold over 100 million devices in 2012.

From a design point of view, the Galaxy S 4 iterated from the Galaxy S III, while still offering a more streamlined, refined design. The screen is now 5 inches but the body of the device doesn't feel much larger than the Galaxy S III. Moreover, Samsung made the device slimmer and stronger. Gone is the plasticky feel of the Galaxy S III; the Galaxy S 4 is light, but feels higher quality.

Specifications of Samsung Galaxy S IV :

• The 5-inch Super AMOLED display is 1920x1080, giving the Galaxy S 4 an eye-popping 441ppi resolution. It's covered with Gorilla Glass 3. 
• It has a 1.9Ghz quad-core processor or a 1.6 octa-core processor. 
• The Galaxy S 4 runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. 
• It has 2GB of RAM and comes in 16, 32 or 64 GB configurations and also includes a microSD card slot. 
• It has all the basic wireless connections, including Bluetooth 4.0 LE, NFC, Wi-Fi and GPS.
• Like the Galaxy Note 8.1, the Galaxy S 4 is equipped with an IR port and can be used as a remote control.
• Powering all of this technology is a 2600 mAh battery.                                                                                 

More About Galaxy S IV

Samsung has added some of the gesture and haptic features from its Galaxy Note line into the Galaxy S 4.

A new feature called Air View lets users hover their fingers over content in certain apps — such as Flipboard — and see a preview of the content before changing screens. Air Gestures are Kinect-like gestures that allow users to navigate the phone and even make voice calls without touching the screen.

Samsung also has new Smart Pause and Smart Scroll features that help users control content based on action. With Smart Pause, videos in enabled apps will pause when you are turned away and resume when turned back. It doesn't work by using eye-tracking, but instead uses facial recognition.
Smart Scroll lets users scroll through the browser and email without touching the screen. It uses your face movements and wrist gestures to determine when to scroll.

Availability

The Galaxy S 4 will be available on Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, U.S. Cellular and Cricket in the U.S. in Q2 2013.

Source : Mashable

Facebook is reportedly working on incorporating the hashtag into the social network.

A Twitter staple, the Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has plans to bring the hashtag to its service, offering users the ability to index conversations around a particular topic, just as they currently do on Twitter. Sources ”familiar with the matter” told the Journal that while Facebook is working on the feature, it wouldn’t necessarily be released anytime soon. Adding hashtag support would enable an expansion of that search functionality, letting users tune into public posts based around certain topics such as #Elections or #HarlemShake as well.

Hashtags are already incorporated into Facebook-owned Instagram. Hashtags seem like the natural evolution of Facebook’s newly-released Graph Search. The search is currently limited to information input by users on their location, friends, and Likes.

Defence Minister A.K. Antony on Wednesday called for a probe into the cyber security breach of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Talking to media here about the breach, Antony said: "Our intelligence agencies are investigating the matter."
  Meanwhile, cyber law expert, Pawan Duggal, said that this kind of hacking has taken place for the very first time in the history of the country. As Indian security experts began to track its origin they discovered, for the first time, that all the sensitive files stolen from the infected systems were being uploaded on a server in the Guangdong province of China. (ANI)

The company refuses to name who the partner is, but this is surely a big boost for BlackBerry. The new BlackBerry 10 operating system and the new smartphone, the Z10, were announced in late January 2013.

• The first option allows users to minimize-to-Windows Taskbar. 
• The second allows users to have a create shortcut to access the search box. 
• The third option brings option to minimise the app to the system tray.

BBC Hindi has rolled out an Android app of the site. With the app, users can have faster and easy access to the latest news and events on BBC Hindi.

Adobe’s had the Creative Cloud subscription service running in the US, Australia and some parts of South Asia for some time now, but India has just been brought onto the bandwagon. As part of the subscription, a user can download any of the programs available under the Adobe Master Collection any number of times onto one machine within the period of their subscription. That means that for a monthly fee of Rs.2885, you can have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator as well as Lightroom, Premiere Pro and After Effects. Additionally, an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for Teams comes with 100GB of cloud storage to facilitate easy work sharing between team members.

Adobe yesterday announced the availability of the Creative Cloud Subscription service in India. Users can now leverage the full power of Adobe’s Creativity tools for a monthly fee of Rs. 2,885 per month per user. Adobe says that this is a promotional pricing valid till April 30th, after which the pricing will jump to Rs. 4,040 per month per user.

Adobe has been pushing for turning its service from a one-time-purchase top subscription based as it would make revenue more consistent. The current plan that can be had for Rs. 2885 per month per user is a promotional price, with the actual cost being Rs. 4040 per user per month. Interestingly, the same subscription in the US costs $49.99 per month per user, almost 40% cheaper.

Mozilla is not in the mood to show you any love, as Mozilla’s Vice President Jay Sullivan asserted that there will not be a dedicated Firefox browser app for iOS unless Apple adjusts its outlook towards third party browsers.

Sullivan isn’t happy how Apple forces developers creating browsers for iOS to use its own WebKit, which takes away from what Firefox is all about. Mozilla Firefox uses its own JavaScript and rendering engines to provide the kind of user experience

Firefox is known for, and Cupertino’s rules prohibit a browser app to use anything but its own WebKit. This isn’t the only problem though, as Apple also forces users to accept Safari as the default browser on the iOS devices, with no option to change the default browser to any other, unless you’re Jailbroken, and even then, it’s a buggy solution.

Some days ago sony executive revealed that company was planning to launch its first device powered by the new mobile OS. The Sony source further said that the company was working on adapting the Xperia E to run Firefox OS. The Xperia E is an upcoming budget smartphone from Sony that will run on Android Jelly Bean and sports a 3.5-inch display with a resolution of 320x480 pixels. The Xperia E also has a 3.15 MP camera and is powered by 1GHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB of RAM. While the Xperia E hasn’t been officially launched in India, some online retailers are selling it for under Rs. 10,000.

Mozilla unveiled the Firefox OS for mobiles at the Mobile World Congress recently held in Barcelona. At the event, Mozilla revealed that phones running its OS would be launched in Europe, Latin America and Asia soon and also showed off two handsets manufactured by ZTE and Alcatel that would be one of the first Firefox OS handsets to be launched. While Mozilla is expected to tie up with network operators in a majority of global markets in order to launch the handsets, in India, the Sony handset won’t be tied to any particular network operator.

According to the report, number of social media users in India had reached 62 million in December 2012. About 74 percent of the total social networking users in the country belong to urban areas. The report says there are 80 million active Internet users in urban India, out of which 72 percent (58 million users) access social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Among all social networking sites, users most accessed Facebook. According to the report, Facebook is used by 97% of all individuals, whereas the next places are taken by Google+ and LinkedIn. It is worthwhile noting that the professional networking site LinkedIn has the highest proportion among females and users above 25 years. In fact, LinkedIn has the second highest average time spent only after Facebook. The report also shed light on the top mobile applications used by the Indian users. As per findings, the most popularly used mobile apps are of Social Media (81%) and Entertainment (73%).

“Social networking through mobile phones is an ever increasing phenomenon observed today. With mobile penetrations reaching very high levels, and an increasing number of individuals owning feature-rich phones or even smartphones that allow Internet access, social networking is rapidly penetrating the India Active Internet user base. Affordable mobile Internet plans additionally serve rising usage levels,” notes the report.

Indian Government had sanctioned a reworking of the internet infrastructure of the country, requiring a push for the adoption of IPv6 protocol. The move was geared to help combat cybercrime, but in the process, also made it a lot easier for the ISPs to acquire IP addresses.