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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Southern railways announced new Sabarimala Special trains between Ernakulam and Chennai central for avoiding extra rush of passengers during the season. Following are the details Train No. 06345 /...

This is the content summary only. Pls Visit IRCTC Online Passenger Reservation Information: http://www-irctc.blogspot.com for full links, other content, and more!

Xbox One, the latest series of gaming console developed by Microsoft has created a new record in the Xbox history: Over 1 million units were sold within 24 hours of its launch on November 22, 2013.

Xbox is an iconic gaming console series, which was first introduced in the year 2001 by Microsoft. The inventor of this console was Atari Jaguar, which ceased production in 1996 after selling 24 million units. In the year 2005, Microsoft introduced Xbox 360 which has sold more than 77 million units as of April, 2013. The successor to Xbox 360 is Xbox One, which has broken all previous Xbox records by selling more a million units in the first 24 hours.

Fans from all over the world lined up at Microsoft Store since midnight in order to become the first one to grab a unit; a scene rarely seen with Microsoft product launches and more or less associated with Apple launches. But when it comes to Xbox series, then it has some serious fan following.

Xbox One was simultaneously launched in 13 countries, including UK, and this marked the biggest ever launch of this gaming console series. In several countries, twice as many Xbox One units were sold compared to Xbox 360 which was launched 8 years ago. Clearly the fan following of Microsoft's gaming series has increased by leaps and bounds in all these years.

Out of 16 gaming titles which came with Xbox One launch, 10 of them managed to break into UK's top 40 Gaming chart. As per the official Microsoft's blog,

• Over 60 million zombies have been killed in the game "Dead Rising 3"
• Over 3.6 million miles have been covered in the game "Forza motorsport 5"
• Over 8.5 million enemies have been defeated in the game "Ryse: Son of Rome"
• And more

Here are the top rated games for Xbox One series, updated as per the current ratings of players.

Xbox One costs $500 for one unit, and includes not only games but also Kinect integration, Voice commands, Video conferencing, Blu-Ray and other media functions.

But Few Fans Were Disappointed

As soon as the console was launched globally, complains started arriving that the units are not working properly. Maximum issues came from the defect in Blu-Ray drives, as users complained that their drives are not working. Some of the fans reported that there is a strange grinding sound coming in from these drives, which is making the overall experience bad.

In some cases, there was a complete hardware failure as the machine stopped functioning.

These issues had become so widespread that Microsoft had to intervene as they made an official statement, "The issue is affecting a very small number of Xbox One customers. We're working directly with those affected to get a replacement console to them as soon as possible through our advance exchange program. Rest assured, we are taking care of our customers."

But overall, Xbox One is a bumper hit, all over the world.

Retailers have declared that their stocks were finished within hours, and SOS has been sent to Microsoft's headquarters to deliver more units, as there is 'unprecedented' demand for this latest gaming console.

If you are a game lover, then what are your views on this latest offering from Microsoft? Will you rate it higher than Playstation 4 which was also launched last week, and which also managed to sell one million units in 24 hours?

Please do share your views!

Last year when Google first announced it's Shopping festival called GOSF or the "Great Online Shopping Festival", there was nothing great about it. Infact, I came to a conclusion in the end that it was merely a farce, something that is rare when it comes to Google doing it!

Last year's GOSF event happened on 12/12/12.

If you are not aware of GOSF; It is a single day event, in which various Indian ecommerce sites participate and offer some very attractive discounts on single or multiple products. Very similar to what "Black Friday" deals are in the US.

When Google originally announced it last year, there was a huge buzz created and many consumers thought that Google was trying to create a day in India, just like what Black Friday is in US. Unfortunately, the deals were no-deals at all. Infact, out of over 100 sites that participated, not a single one had deals where one could say "WoW".

Now, coming to this year – Google has not made any official announcements as yet. If you visit GOSF.in, you will be greeted with simple text message stating "GOSF is coming soon".

Interestingly though, many Indian ecommerce sites have already started setting up their GOSF pages. Flipkart has it, Jabong has it, Myntra has it, Freecultr has it and smaller sites like Voylla are also showing it!

Though we are not sure, unlike last year, it seems that GOSF will run for 2 or 3 days between 11th and 13th December of this year.

While only a few sites are showing GOSF pages right now, I am sure nearly all Indian online stores will participate.

Out of curiosity, we checked if Amazon India will participate, and yes, sure enough they may also have something. They already have a placeholder page at amazon.in/gosf. Though it does not show anything right now, I am sure something will start showing up there soon enough.

Not Like Last Year

I am really hoping that GOSF this is year not a dud as it was last year. Ecommerce sites need to really offer some great deals on those 1 or 2 days of festival, so that people will wait for it every year. If the same story is repeated this year as well, I am not sure if anyone will even blink an eye, if it happens again in the future.

What do you think?

Government owned banks like SBI are always looked upon a like boring place to be in. A behemoth in banking but a novice in innovation. So was it thought. But not after you read this.

Way back in July 2009, the Reserve Bank of India had permitted cash withdrawal at Point-of-Sale but the service had not taken off owing to various reasons including lack of clarity on processing fee structures.

Now, in line with RBI's proposition to allow cash withdrawals through prepaid cards issued by banks from point of sale terminals, India's biggest lender has come up with the Cash@POS facility across the country from last week, that lets merchant shops act as ATM counters.

Next time when you are in need of some quick petty cash, just walk into any of the shop that accepts credit card payments. If you are a customer of SBI or its associate banks, you can use the machine to withdraw cash up to Rs 1,000 from your savings account using your debit or credit card.

This helps customers to withdraw about Rs 100 to Rs 1,000 per debit card per day at any of these point of sale (PoS). This includes customers of State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Mysore.

There is no such thing as a free lunch – For now, a convenience fee of one per cent of the transaction amount will be levied on the cardholder which can be anything in the range of Rs 7.50 to Rs 10.

Does the Merchant benefit? Merchants will be paid an incentive of Rs 5 for every successful transaction along with the cash paid to customers.

SBI speak – "Though the facility will be made applicable to all debit cards issued in India, to start with, we are rolling out the facility with SBI group debit cards. SBI, which already has over one lakh POS terminals, will deploy an additional 40,000 more exclusive terminals before the end of this fiscal year," said P.V. Rajamani, AGM, merchant acquiring business, of the bank. "In Tamil Nadu alone, there will be 15,000 POS terminals during the same time."

Why start with SBI? As on June-end SBI, had over 20 crore customers and had issued 14 crore debit cards and accounted for 29 per cent of India's total 1,23,705 ATMs.

Necessity is the mother of invention – RBI had instructed banks since years to concentrate on installing ATMs in rural areas. Withdrawal of cash from such POS releases the pressure on banks to speed up the ATM installation process, which is costly and cumbersome too.

Once this is successful, and we have no reason to say it won't be, will private banks follow? Or will they come up with some more unique way of dispensing cash? Lets see…

Adobe seems to be now wholly embracing subscription based business model, and it firmly wants to implement the same across every verticals.

In a latest development, it has been revealed that its much acclaimed as well as criticized Photography Bundle is now open to all for a monthly subscription charge of Rs 499/mo ($9.99/m globally) This is a limited time offer, and will expire on December 2, 2013.

You can sign up for this program right here.

What Will You Get For Rs 499/mo?

In this special Photography Program, you can get access to Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, subscription to Behance Pro-site and 20 GB of Cloud space along with access to training resources and all the latest updates and patches.

Lightroom 5 is an easy tool, developed for photographers who want to digitally edit their photographs without being overwhelmed by the features of Photoshop. It has all the necessary tools which are required by a professional photographer. This is also available as standalone product.

Behance is like a social networking site for creative people, where you can upload your latest designs and photographs and have a conversation around them. It can also be used as a portfolio by photographers and graphic designers.

Subscription Based Model Is The Future?

Adobe previously sold software in the traditional way: users bought licenses of its products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects etc and kept on using them until the license expired. Back in May, 2012, it changed its business model, and introduced the Creative Cloud, which enabled users to subscribe to all these software for a monthly charge of $50 per month (Rs. 2700 in India). This included access to all their software plus various online services like Cloud storage and online training manuals.

When this new subscription based model was introduced, there was hue and cry from every sector, as the existing users didn't want to pay extra for the new subscription and wanted the old license method to be retained. There was even a Change.org petition filed against this step, with around 44,000 people supporting the cause.

But Adobe proved its detractors and nay-sayers wrong. Subscription based model was a big hit, as its total customer base crossed 1 million, raising its stock prices and promising further growth. There were several inherent advantages in choosing this subscription based model, and Adobe was right in its calculations.

To further promote the subscription based model, and to lure photographers into their network, Adobe introduced the Photography Program in September, 2013, wherein they offered Photoshop, Lightroom, Behance, 20 GB Cloud Space and Online training manuals for those, who had previously purchased Photoshop CS3 or higher version.

And now, in the month of November, they have opened this offer for all, irrespective of whether you owned any previous version of Photoshop or not.

Will you choose this new subscription based offer from Adobe or the old license based purchase was better? Do you believe that subscription model will survive the market? Please share your views right here!

[Hat Tip: Suraj Jain]

Tech evolves in many different ways, and although we tend to focus our attentions on the mobile industry, Philips has demonstrated that there is still room for interesting niche products with its Hue bulb collection. The beautiful, colorful glimmer emitted by the bulbs is glorious in itself, but by integrating with mobile devices for control of colors, dimness and other such settings, geeks far and wide have been sucked in by their glow. Philips may have been fairly unrivalled in this market hitherto, but the Lumen Bluetooth 4.0 LED bulb looks set to change all that. The company took its...

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It may be one of the biggest gaming franchises on the planet, but that doesn't mean that Assassin's Creed developer Ubisoft is resting on its laurels. With the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launching so recently, Ubisoft today remind everyone that it is committed to mobile platforms too with the announcement of a new, standalone game for iOS and Android.

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Apple's iPhone 5s includes a wealth of exciting new hardware features, but whilst we've been more than impressed by the new 64-bit A7 processor, much has been made of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Allowing iPhone users to unlock their devices without going through the tiresome rigmarole of typing in a passcode, it has been a big hit in its short lifespan, and according to a recent patent filing by Apple, could be about to get even better.

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Sometimes it's easy to forget that Apple's iPad isn't the only tablet in town. The world may sit up and take notice whenever Apple's announced a new iPad as shown by the latest iPad Air and iPad mini releases, but the same can't be said about the competition. That's why that competition often tries to gain notoriety by prodding Apple and sometimes even the people that buy its products. Yes, we're looking at you Samsung.

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Well things are never dull when a post has the former Apple's board of directors member's name in the title, and this latest offering is no different. Now executive chairman over at 'the Plex,' Eric Schmidt is never shy about making his thoughts clear, and he's got Apple, iOS and the iPhone in his sights right now, as shown by a rather thinly veiled jibe courtesy of his Google+ account.

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This week, in the unlikely case that you weren't already aware, is Black Friday week, and the deals and special offers will be running from most of the major retail outlets. In technology terms, it's a great time to go shopping in preparation for the holiday season, particularly since many of these price-cuts don't occur at any other time of year. Apple is a prime of example of a company that seldom alters its price structure except for on Black Friday, and those holding out on an Apple purchase in hope of making some savings later on this week will be pleased to learn that the Cupertino...

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The folks of Square Enix are back with another App Store installment of Final Fantasy for fans of the series to enjoy. The long-running series, which has been around for well over a decade now, has already seen a number of releases on Apple's iOS - some notably more successful than others - and after Final Fantasy IV seemed to finally get things right, its sequel has just arrived for iOS and Android. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is now ready to download worldwide, and you can check out the 2-minute trailer after the break.

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Samsung does not hold back when it comes to releasing new smartphones of all varieties, and following on from a multitude of new and exciting handsets dropped this calendar year comes the Galaxy Grand 2, the direct successor to the original Galaxy Grand launched back in December of last year. Designed with movie lovers in mind, it packs an HD 5.25-inch panel of 16:9 aspect ratio - ideal for watching your favorite films and TV shows on the move. By means of a press release, the South Korean company divulged all of the juicy details pertaining its latest model, and we've got them all right here...

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OS X contains many useful and intuitive features that collectively make for a seamless experience, but not every little addition made by Apple over the past few revisions has been so well received. As a long-time Mac user, I've always found the Dashboard to be a bit of a waste of time, and although it could be better if developers of widgets hadn't abandoned the Dashboard en masse, it is, to most, a dud of a feature. Don't get me wrong here, some on OS X use their Dashboards on a daily basis, but for those apathetic about the far-left feature, there's a way to hide it and in turn, speed up...

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After weeks of sitting on a terribly guarded secret, HTC has finally introduced the world to a gold variant of its popular One handset. A number of companies have quite clearly taken note of the excitement surrounding the launch of the gold iPhone 5s eight weeks ago and have decided that if you can't beat them then you might as well join them. Or emulate them depending on your personal view of the situation. Apple watched as worldwide inventory of the gold iPhone 5s was immediately depleted upon launch, with HTC hoping that they can also generate the same levels of excitement about their gold...

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