R@ke$h------TECHMASTRO: Google's three-day shopping festival fuels more bu...

R@ke$h------TECHMASTRO: Google's three-day shopping festival fuels more bu...: Google's three-day shopping festival fuels more business for e-tailers. If Indian consumers' response to sales and discounts...

Google's three-day shopping festival fuels more business for e-tailers.

If Indian consumers' response to sales and discounts by e-commerce websites is anything to go by, all the venture capital money that has flooded the sector over the last year or so is perhaps justified. Despite the numerous discounts through the festive months of October and November, buyers responded enthusiastically to Google's recently concluded Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF).

“All the earlier sales were limited to one single website and were narrow in that sense. The GOSF was across websites, so there was much more range to choose from,” said Hyderabad-based Samantha Menacherry, who made several purchases during the GOSF. “There were deals across all the e-commerce websites I generally shop from, so I have in fact bought everything that I anticipated I would need in the next few weeks.”

While most e-commerce websites that participated in the event witnessed a four to five times jump in traffic, portals that offer related services such as coupons, cashbacks, price comparison and mobile wallets were also major beneficiaries of the GOSF that concluded at midnight on Friday.

Mobile Wallet firm MobiKwik clocked a revenue of Rs 5 crore during the three days in 105,000 transactions it facilitated. Almost half of these transactions were for shopping, followed by food and entertainment, travel and fashion, and cosmetics. The top three e-commerce merchants on MobiKwik wallet transactions were eBay, Shopclues, and Snapdeal. “Traffic grew by five times during the three days. Mobile shopping has really taken off at this GOSF,” MobiKwik co-founder Upasana Taku told Business Standard.

With sales running across hundreds of e-commerce portals, buyers took to comparison portals for making purchases. Price comparison portal iSpyPrice.com saw an 80 per cent rise in traffic during each of the three days of the GOSF as against usual days.

Comparison shopping platform MySmartPrice called this year's GOSF “bigger and better” than last year, as the company saw a 35 per cent increase in its gross merchandise value (GMV) and received over 800,000 visitors per day. “Consistent growth in traffic is one thing to notice this year, as we saw the growth sustain throughout three days, despite early fear that the excitement may wear out in a day,” the company said.

The absence of Indian e-commerce poster boy Flipkart, which gave the GOSF a miss this year because the dates of the event clashed with its Big App Sale (where the company is offering discounts to buyers who make purchases through its mobile application), helped several competitors and smaller players. According to various data analytics firms, Amazon, Snapdeal, ebay, andShopClues were among the most visited websites in the general e-tail segment.

Several niche segments such as automobiles, jewellery, travel and real estate remained the highlights of the sale as buyers flocked to these websites.

During Thursday and Friday, online travel aggregator Goibibo saw a 40 per cent jump in total transactions with the hotels segment receiving the highest traffic. “There has been an increase in traffic by over 100 per cent as compared to last year,” the company said in a statement.

Having learnt a lesson from earlier online sales that were widely criticised for technical glitches and stocks running out too soon, e-tailers appeared more prepared during the GOSF with no major technical snags being flagged at any of the portals. Also, most offers and stocks lasted long enough for consumers to make purchases.

“This time the GOSF was better known and very well marketed. We think compared to last year, this year customers know what to expect from the GOSF,” said Arun Sirdeshmuk, co-founder and chief executive officer of premium fashion retail portal Fashionara.com. “Our sales during this year’s GOSF are 500 per cent more compared to last year’s GOSF.”

Nokia X, X+ and XL: What’s different?

 

 

 

 

 

Nokia had recently surprised us all by announcing not just one but three smartphones – the X, X+ and XL – running on its own forked version of the Android OS. The Finnish handset vendor is now planning to launch the first of the phones in this series in India tomorrow. These three models in the company’s X series bring slightly different set of specifications, with the X and X+ being more or less similar in almost all departments, and the XL being the biggest of them all. Here we take a look at how these phones vary from one another in terms of specifications.

To begin with the looks and display, all the three phones bring the Nokia’s polycarbonate plastic finish and come in a plenty of color options. In term of display, while both the Nokia X and the X+ come with an exactly same 4-inch WVGA (800×480 pixels) display, the XL dons a bigger 5-inch display but with the same resolution.
On the hardware front, all the three phones are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon dual-core processor clocked at 1GHz, however vary in terms of RAM. In fact, RAM size is the sole differentiator between the X and the X+. While the Nokia X brings 512MB of RAM on-board, the X+ comes with slightly better RAM at 768MB. The XL too gets 768MB of RAM. The 4GB of internal storage space with up to 32GB of microSD support remains the same in all the three phones.
Talking of the camera, the X and X+ come with 3-megapixel rear camera and lack a front-facing camera, while the XL sports better 5-megapixel rear and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. These devices all have dual-SIM capabilities and come with similar connectivity options.
The XL, being the biggest amongst the three phones, comes with a bigger battery at 2,000mAh and promises to offer up to 13 hours of talktime on 3G, while both the X and the X+ come with a 1,500mAh battery, which the company claims give up to 10.5 hours of talktime on 3G.

 

R@ke$h------TECHMASTRO: Hijacking of browser settings tops the list of us...

R@ke$h------TECHMASTRO: Hijacking of browser settings tops the list of us...: Hijacking of browser settings tops the list of user complaints made to search engine Google as cyber criminals change them using ma...

Hijacking of browser settings tops the list of user complaints made to search engine Google as cyber criminals change them using malicious software.

Modification of the settings is done without users' knowledge to generally force hits on a particular website, increasing its advertising revenue.

"So, you're trying to download a free screensaver or game or something else you really want. But later you find out that game came bundled w ..

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/29826318.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Hijacking of browser settings tops the list of user complaints made to search engine Google as cyber criminals change them using malicious software.

Modification of the settings is done without users' knowledge to generally force hits on a particular website, increasing its advertising revenue.

"So, you're trying to download a free screensaver or game or something else you really want. But later you find out that game came bundled with a malicious programme that's trying to ..

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/29826318.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Google Chrome bug allegedly allows attackers to eavesdrop and record your voice.

 

An alarming bug has been discovered in Google Chrome that could allow attackers to surreptitiously record your voice and everything around you. Israeli web developer and entrepreneur Tal Ater discovered the problem last September while working on a JavaScript speech recognition project. After seeing no concrete action from Google to fix the problem, he has now posted proof to his personal website.

According to Ater's description, the flaw is possible because of the way different parts of Chrome were designed. While there is a clear indication to users on the tab bar when a website has activated your PC's mic or camera, there is no way to display such a notification on popup windows. Thus a website which has been granted permission to use your microphone (such as Google's own homepage, when voice search is enabled) can quietly spawn popups in the background which will inherit the permission but not display any indication that they are recording you.
Websites could thus be compromised, and a user might never know that a pop-under page has opened behind their open browser window. A user would have no way to know such a window is open, and it could be disguised as just another ad.
Compounding the problem, Chrome remembers permissions granted to pages that use the HTTPS protocol, trusting them to be secure. Thus, users aren't even asked to confirm whether they would like to allow a page to activate the mic.
Ater says he contacted Google on September 13 2013 and was informed less than a week later that the root causes problem had been identified. Five days after that, a patch had been developed. Ater says he was nominated for a reward under a Google scheme that pays up to $30,000 (approximately Rs. 18,72,300) to ethical developers who discover and report such bugs.
However the patch was never released to the public or applied to future releases of Chrome. Ater claims that Google does not believe that there is anything wrong with the way Chrome behaves. In a statement to UK news site The Register, Google said, "The feature is in compliance with the current W3C specification, and we continue to work on improvements."
We attempted to recreate the problem and confirmed that Chrome tabs with voice input enabled do display a pulsing red dot in the tab bar, but do not cut off the microphone when the user switches to another tab or program. We were prompted for permission the first time we used a voice input feature on any website, but not on subsequent uses. Furthermore, there is no indication outside of Chrome that anything is being recorded. This means that background windows are indeed capable of recording a user's voice and surroundings without his or her knowledge.

 

Hijacking of browser settings tops the list of user complaints made to search engine Google as cyber criminals change them using malicious software.

Modification of the settings is done without users' knowledge to generally force hits on a particular website, increasing its advertising revenue.

"So, you're trying to download a free screensaver or game or something else you really want. But later you find out that game came bundled w ..

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/29826318.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

How to avoid strangers' emails from landing in your Gmail inbox!

Google recently announced a Google+ integration with its emailing service that allows people to send emails to any Google+ user without knowing their email id.
The feature would not expose a user's email address until they reply to that email, but it sure would lead to an undesirable spam-like clutter in the Gmail inbox.
However, since the feature, which is to be rolled out in a couple of days, isn't as tough to undo, as it appears, users can simply `opt-out` of it without much of a hassle.
According to Cnet, users can turn off the `by default email via Google+ feature` by clicking on the Settings menu and under the General tab clicking on the said feature and choosing a setting they are most comfortable with.
Users can choose from options like 'Circles', 'Extended Circles' or 'No One' and save the changes to switch back the good old emailing sending feature.

 

iPhone 5: Apple Doing Something Different

Apple is doing something different with the iPhone 5. It’s creating the iPhone 5C to replace the iPhone 5 and turning the iPhone 5S into its flagship smartphone product. How is it any different from what Apple’s done before? Normal procedure for Apple was to just lower the price of the previous year’s model to take the silver spot on the iPhone podium.

This time, the iPhone 5 gets a plastic back piece to replace the metal one, some designer colors to catch the eye, iOS 7 and some first party software and some hardware tweaks. Then it is designated a new product, the iPhone 5C and simply replaces the iPhone 5 at a cheaper price.

The fly in that ointment is that iOS 7 isn’t quite as polished as it needs to be, with screen elements moved around and parts of the Control Center truncated, giving it a feeling of being unfinished. There is no real customization options as to what app buttons are shown.

Fortunately, all versions of the iPhone 5 are “Jailbreakable,” allowing these minor problems and many others to be fixed. Jailbreaking is the term used to define the process of gaining administrative access to a mobile device, in this case Apple mobile products, to remove usage restrictions that are locked by the factory. It is the exact same process, figuratively, of “rooting” an Android phone.

Owners of the iPhone 5 are chomping at the bit to Jailbreak their devices because waiting for Apple’s incremental updates to iOS 7 is driving them crazy. IOS 7.1 is still in the developers’ hands, but supposedly it will bring back user defined buttons, as opposed to pressing text for an action, which is a bit confusing when you don’t know what button does what until it’s actually pressed. But the decision to go that route is certainly Apple doing something different for the iPhone 5.

The thing about Apple that generates such a level of love/hate with its users is cutting them out of the design process loop. Apple decides how things should look and function and then simply deploys. Now it looks as if they’re trying to get a feel for what their users want.

That’s probably a very good idea. With the humongous Chinese market about to crack wide open for Apple, it would be a bit embarrassing for them to discover their iPhone 5S have been hacked to use the Android operating system simply because users are displeased with the way iOS 7 functions. As it stands, they probably aren’t too pleased about users Jailbreaking their devices now.

On a lighter note, the latest thing to wow iPhone 5 users, especially international travelers, is the dual SIM case that allows SIM cards to be switched out on the fly. The company, Digirit, calls it the SIM+ Case and it replaces the iPhone 5’s original back piece with one that fits into the SIM card slot and provides slots for two SIM cards. It comes with software that allows the two cards to be switched without even having to power down the phone. The company is in its first round of crowdfunding and plans an early 2014 release.

One would suppose that something else Apple is doing that’s different is inspiring third-party developers to participate in the evolution of the iPhone 5.