In a bid to strengthen its presence in the digital content market, Trivone Digital Services has acquired content service company Godot Media for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will allow Trivone to provide a full service offering in the digital content services market in India and overseas.

This is not the first time Trivone has acquired a content portal. Promoted by L Subramanyan, the company has also acquired tech portals like TechTree.com, ChannelTimes.com,Chakpak.co, Wheelsunplugged.com, Khelnama.com and CXOToday.com.

"Working with our existing services customers, we have long felt the need to complement our content offerings, along with associated services such as design technology and social media. We believe that combining the strengths of Trivone and Godot will provide the market with capabilities covering the entire gamut of digital content services," said Trivone promoter L Subramanyan.

Bangalore based Godot Media has a global client footprint across 20 countries, the Bangalore-based Godot provides digital content solutions, including development and distribution to help businesses build a strong online presence and engage their customers. Founded by Vishal Dutta, it is a self funded company and its clientele includes ING, Sotheyby's and Slide.ly among others.

Speaking about the funding, Dutta said, “As we were looking to expand our footprint inorganically, we are excited to be a part of Trivone, which is an aggressive services organisation“.

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Chip maker Intel Corporation is now seriously considering expanding beyond Microsoft, it's as yet, single largest customer, when it comes to making chips for operating system. And the best and most reliable option currently is Google's Android.

Microsoft and its Windows Operating System (OS) have so far been Intel's largest customer and consumer of computer chips. For well over a decade it has been optimizing its top line of Core PC processors—including recently launched Haswell processors, primarily and for Windows OS ecosystem, shared Kirk Skaugen, General Manager, Intel,

"For the last decade, they have been essentially 100% Microsoft but now with the emerging markets demand for Android is seen." What he clearly implied was that it was now time to considering thinking and expanding beyond, being an almost exclusive chip-maker for Microsoft.

What can Intel offer to the world of Android?
Intel's upcoming chip variant, code–named Broadwell, and even its future 'Core' variants (i3, i5, i7) could very well be optimized for Android. These are certainly high-end and powerful processors that power mid-to-high end PCs of today.

Interestingly, Intel already makes chips and has started offering processing power to Android via its low-power Atom tablet and smartphone processors, but hasn't openly confirmed support of the core processors for Android. Core processors have much more advanced instruction sets and graphics capabilities than Atom processors, and the present challenge being tackled is optimizing them for Android.

However, Intel plans to offer processors that will radically expand the consumer's usage–experience of Android, continued Skaugen,

"Android apps are written for phone, in portrait mode, and a significant percentage doesn’t exist in landscape mode for larger screens. Intel is going to scale Android to 64-bit and allow it to scale from Atom processors to the high-end of the Core processor family and get it into larger scale screens and allow multi-windowing."

Bulky Desktops, that are very much non–portable devices, have their market shrinking rapidly. Smartphones and Tablets are now the most preferred devices to execute almost all computing tasks. Hence, it is no surprise that companies like HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and others have started looking elsewhere to ensure revenue keeps flowing. Intel too could be hedging its bets against the dominant mobile platform and extrapolate it to larger entertainment devices. What do you think?

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After month of speculations, Apple has finally confirmed that its has acquired motion tracking company PrimeSense for $350M. The Israel based company is maker of motion-tracking chip technology that was used in Microsoft Corp.'s Kinect game console. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans“, said the report from AllThingsD.

PrimeSense sells its own 3D sensors for use in markets as diverse as TV, mobile, computers, retail, robotics, industry and healthcare. The company’s website says that its technology already powers over 24 million devices around the world, enabling natural interaction between people and devices and between devices and their surroundings. Its Capri sensor is a small-size device designed specifically for integration with mobile phones, TVs, tablets and PCs.

The deal comes at a time when firms are increasingly experimenting with gesture control. With this deal, Apple can catch up with rivals such as Microsoft and Intel. PrimeSense's technology could be used in any number of Apple's actual and hypothetical products in development, including the long-rumored Apple television set or an Apple-made smartwatch.

This is Apple's second major purchase of an Israeli company this year, the first being a $500 million acquisition of Anobit, which makes high-performance flash memory controllers.

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Twitter is following Yahoo’s footsteps and taking measures to protect user data. Last week we reported that Yahoo will encrypt all information that moves between Yahoo data centers and offer users an option to encrypt all data flow to and from Yahoo by the end of the first quarter of 2014. Now, Twitter has also given its security measures a tweak in order to save user data following reports of spying on digital content by the National Security Agency.

The micro-blogging site has has implemented "perfect forward secrecy" on its web and mobile platforms for the same. “As part of our continuing effort to keep our users' information as secure as possible, we're happy to announce that we recently enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com, api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com”, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews wrote in a Twitter blog post. This encryption method will ensure that hackers or snooping organizations won't have an easy access to any personal information on Twitter.

An internal team of security engineers have spent several months implementing “perfect forward secrecy”, (PFC) which adds an extra layer of security to widely used HTTPS encryption deployed by online banking, retailers and, increasingly, consumer web services. Twitter said that the new encryption technology "caused negligible increase in CPU usage" and should have noticeable impact on performance, at least for Twitter users in the U.S. With PFS, the data encryption is based on two short-lived keys that cannot be later recovered even with the knowledge of the server key, so the data remains secure.

The PFC is already being used by Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Tumblr and LinkedIn is understood to be introducing it in 2014. This step was taken by the companies owing to Edward Snowden leaked information about the NSA spying on tech companies earlier this year. While Twitter did not mention the NSA specifically, the company underscored the need of users to maintain strongly secured connections and protect against possible surveillance by a third party that could tap into a network or listen in on a session.

The 230 million user micro blogging site sees sees about 500 million tweets being sent out per day.

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Qubecell, a prominent Indian company offering online billing aggregation services has been acquired by San Francisco based mobile payments company Boku. With this acquisition, US Based Boku has become India's largest carrier billing provider.

India's carrier billing industry is still very much in its infancy. Though there have been multiple attempts in the past to offer such services, the adoption is till to pick–up. However, Boku appears to be strengthening its position to consolidate the market and offer a holistic service across multiple mobile and internet based endeavors.

Why Qubecell?
Boku's interest in Qubecell is primarily because of vast network, the company has already managed to setup across this equally vast country. Boku claimed that after its acquisition of Qubecell, its carrier billing technology can now tactically reach more than 75% of the country's mobile subscribers. Considering the active mobile connections in existence in India, this number comes to roughly 550 Million users.

Apart from the sheer number of customers that Boku will now be able to cater, Qubecell's offerings will now be part of Boku's bouquet too. Qubecell offers essential Mobile Payment Services through Carrier Billing. This allows the telecom companies to instantly activate the value added services like ‘Caller Tunes’, ‘Call–back Tunes’ and many others. The revenue recovery of such services happens at the time of billing. Additionally, if the subscriber is a pre-paid customer, the balance is instantly deducted and corresponding service is instantly activated. Though there were some issues pertaining to wrongful activations, TRAI has nearly eliminated the same with some revisions in the activation process.

Qubecell also caters to mobile app developers and mobile publishers, providing a host of add–on services such as chronological and time-bound event billing on daily, weekly or monthly subscriptions and that too at various price points. The company also offers an Analytics Platform that provides real-time customer information to merchants. The platform has multiple filters and information that can be segregated based on device, browser, network, location, historical behavior and more.

Boku now owns all of the technologies and is ready to instantly cater to the ready market. But, what is more interesting is the applicability of such a platform can have far–reaching impact on the Indian Customers since it has been found that online and mobile based transactions pertaining to credit-card information is still viewed with caution. Carrier Billing could easily eliminate this worry and greatly boost purchase activity. What do you think?

Image Source | iamwire

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