After Google, Facebook to offer free Wi-Fi at Indian railway stations

Facebook isn't giving up on India. Roughly six months after the Indian government deemed Facebook's Free Basics program illegal, the company is already preparing a comeback. And this time it is taking a leaf out of Google's playbook to win Indians. 

Facebook said earlier this month that it's testing Express Wi-Fi in several remote areas of India. Now it seems the company also has plans to bring this service to railway stations and rural regions. The world's largest social media network is in talks with RailTel to provide internet services at railway stations, RailTel chairman RK Bahuguna told Economic Times. Bahuguna added that they have asked Facebook to bring connectivity to smaller railway stations and rural areas in their vicinity. 

Mashable India reached out to Facebook, but the company declined to comment.

RailTel offers internet facilities tapping the optic fibre cable that runs alongside railway tracks that cover almost 70 percent of the country. If the company's name rings a bell, that's because it also partnered with Google to launch free Wi-Fi services in 400 railway stations by 2017. The announcement was made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the Valley last year. Google says the service, which has gone live in 19 stations and is being utilized by over 1.5 million people. 

However, RailTel's partnership with Facebook could extend beyond railway stations. The project could bring data services up to a 10km radius from a connected railway station, Bahuguna said, adding that this range could be expanded up to 25km via additional access points.

Facebook's Free Basics (formerly known as Internet.org) received a lot of flak from privacy advocates in India last year. The service, which is operating in emerging regions such as Indonesia, offers users free access to select internet services for free. This wall-gardened approach had irked many resulting in Indians opting for no internet access than having some internet access. Google's free Wi-Fi service, on the other hand, has received appreciations from almost everyone because of its open and fair nature.

The world's second most populous nation India remains one of the biggest growth regions for any company. Of the 1.3 billion people who live in India, only about 300 million people are on the internet. However, analysts predict India could have as many as 730 million internet users as soon as 2020, which shows why Google and Facebook are leaving no stone unturned to ensure they reach out to them first.

Source : www.techgignews.com

Google Duo will be available later today on Android and iOS

Along with Allo, Duo is Google’s latest take on consumer messaging after many attempts. Solely focussed on video chatting, the service and the accompanying Android and iOS mobile apps will be available later today.

Unchanged from Google I/O, a phone number is still required to signup for the service. The setup process simply involves Duo sending a text message to confirm. The simplicity is a reflection of the app’s overall sparse, minimalist design and limited feature set. At the moment, Duo only supports one-to-one calls and no group calls.

The “Knock Knock” feature that allows recipients to see a live feed of the caller has the added benefit of having conversations start immediately after accepting, according to The Verge. It will only work with people saved in contacts and users have the option to turn off the feature entirely.

Duo uses WebRTC and is optimized for slow connections. Call quality is adjusted according to changing network conditions to maintain the call. The mobile apps can also switch between Wi-Fi and cellular data in the background without dropping. Unlike Allo, Duo calls are end-to-end encrypted.

Google is rolling out Due for Android and iOS today, with worldwide availability in the next few days. At the moment, the Play Store listing only allows you to pre-register for Duo.

Source : www.techgignews.com

Startups In India: Govt To Invest Rs.200 Cr On Scaling Up Existing Incubators

NEW DELHI: Government will identify 10 incubators out of existing 200 such centres and invest Rs 200 crore on scaling up their capacity, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant today said. 

"There are 200 existing incubation centres. We will scale up 10 best incubation by 10x. We have received 120 applications for the same. We will select 10 and to each incubator we will produce Rs 20 crore," Kant said at Startup India state's conference.

He said the government will invest Rs 20 lakh to support existing tinkering labs. 

"We are going to set up 100 new incubation centres this year. We have received 3,000 applications for it," Kant said. 

He said the government is soon going to start a contest to find out solution for problems in India. 

"Can we do a flyover, which takes 4-5 years, in 30 days and to my mind it is possible," Kant said. 

He said that challenge will include developing solution for farming to help farmer decide which seed should be sown in a particular season depending on soil and weather condition to get maximum output. 

The government will look at finding solution for sewage problem and solving water crisis as part of the contest, he said. 

"Grand challenge will be launched shortly. There is huge opportunity," Kant said.

Source : www.techgignews.com

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Its a online recruitment portal built by a start-up in Bengaluru , India.

These guys found out the problem what thousands of young , talented fresh graduates are facing every year i.e To get a job in spite of having the skill set.  

Having found the problem , these guys took the initiative to solve it and boom came GRADCREW.COM.

I have check this site personally. Its completely different from the regular job portal sites available in India.

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Yes , as and each and every site comes with its own Pros and Cons , they have few Cons which I hope they are working on , but I appreciate them for taking the initiative which graduates are facing and trying to solve it.

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Facebook launches OpenCellular – a noble cause or gimmick?

Social media giant Facebook announced the launch of OpenCellular, the company’s latest attempt at bringing Internet to everyone. According to Facebook, more than four billion of the world’s population is still not connected to the Internet and 10 percent of the world lives outside network coverage.

Facebook has an enviable user base of over 1.6 billion people. While that is an achievement in its own, the company has to keep asking itself, “What next?”. In order to bring in new users, the company plans to target the ‘Internet virgins’, as this is the only way the company can grow. The number of users have saturated in many developed countries such as US and UK, hence Facebook is looking for new ways to bring more people online from developing markets like India and Africa.

OpenCellular is a shoebox-sized device that can be attached to a tree or a lamp post, and it has the ability to support a variety of communication options including network in a box or access points for 2G or LTE. With constructing an entire network tower being too expensive, OpenCellular provides a cheaper alternative. An important feature of the device would be it’s ability to withstand harsh conditions, making it a reliable bet.

Source : www.techgignews.com

World's first 1,000-processor microchip: 7 things to know

A team of scientists from the US has created the world's first microchip with 1,000 independent processors. Called 'KiloCore' chip, it is also claimed to be the world's fastest chip ever designed at a university. The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

Here's all you need to know about the chip

The team

This microchip has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Most 'energy-efficient'

Bevan Baas, professor at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), who led the team that designed the chip architecture, claims that the chip is the most energy-efficient "many-core" processor yet. For example, the 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 Watts, low enough to be powered by a single AA battery.

Each processor core can run its own program

Each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others, which is a fundamentally more flexible approach than the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches utilised by processors such as graphics processing unit (GPU). Because each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed.

Fabricated by IBM

The chip has been fabricated by IBM using its 32nm CMOS technology. KiloCore's each processor core can run its own small programme independently of the others.

Cores clock-speed

Cores operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz, and they transfer data directly to each other rather than using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data.

According to the team, the other multiple-processor chips that have been created till now never exceeded 300 processors.

'Executes instructions more efficiently than many laptop processors'

KiloCore chip executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor.

Applications available

Applications already developed for the chip include wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and data centre record processing.

Source : www.techgignews.com

Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.

Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!

Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:

Developer experience matters. Ease-of-use, good documentation, and intuitive APIs make developers happy.

Work across platforms. We’ll support you whether you’re building for iOS, Web, or Android.

Integrate where possible. Firebase has one SDK, one console, and one place to go for documentation and support. You can mix-and-match any of our features and, where it makes sense, data flows between them to help you do more, faster.

Introducing Firebase Analytics

Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, and features some new capabilities for apps:

Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric and gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.

Firebase Analytics is also integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.

Source : Firebase Blog