Xpertfeed

A Farewell for Orkut S ervice Summary:  One of the first social networks around, Orkut was most loved by Indians & Brazilians by statistics. Now, Google is pulling the plug on it. A kind of nut? An obscure race of extra terrestrials in one of the forgettable, recent Star Wars movies. An Eastern European small car!  Depending on where you are in the world, these may well be your guesses to the meaning of the word that suddenly proliferated news channels a few days ago, especially in India. Orkut, as you may know, is none of the above but the name of one of the world's first online social networks of significance. The reason it made headlines is because of its decision to shut shop. Or rather, a decision made by its parent, which happens to be one of the world's biggest internet companies. Google has decided to do a 'Kevorkian' on its child which admittedly has been on life support for many years now.  The company plans to pull the plug on it on Septembe...

India's Chargebee takes the sting out of billing hassles for a competiting service Summary:  Chargebee is yet another company whose origins can be traced to indignant comments on a Hacker news post about a subscription rate hike — in this case, at billing infrastructure leader Chargify — which inspired the founders to jump-start a competing service. Name:  Chargebee Cloud Segment:  SaaS Type of App:  Billing and Subscription Management Founders/Management:  KP Saravan, S Rajaraman S and T Thiyagarajan T, S Krishnamoorthy Co-founded by former employees of Zoho, one of India’s first stars in the CRM and cloud space, Chargebee’s business model seems to have arrived at the right time in a world where almost everything seems to require a subscription, from online television to digital newspapers and magazines. Yet for companies who dole out these subscriptions, managing things like billing can be a distracting affair, especially if you ca...

Intel pushes industry to cut the cables Summary:  WiFi is wonderful, but somehow we are still stuck with lots of cables. Now Intel and others are working to eliminate the rest and deliver true wireless computing. Intel didn’t invent WiFi — 802.11b was approved four years before Centrino came along. But the wireless platform did much to bring about a world in which we can walk into a coffee shop or hotel and expect free wireless broadband. What it did not do, however, is get rid of all the cables. Now the industry is setting its sights on the remaining ones. Two technologies, in particular, are poised to make this happen. The first, WiGig, can be used not only to stream video to TVs and monitors, but also to connect computing devices to wireless access points, docking stations and other peripherals. The second, wireless charging, could finally eliminate the need to carry a power cable everywhere. Like WiFi, these aren’t new technologies. Dell has been offering a La...

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google: in a month review Summary:  It's been a busy month in the mobile world and this recap pulls all the best coverage into a convenient place. If you missed something big, you'll find it here. From Recently announced Fire phone from Amazon to some new Windows 8 hybrid tablets. I've opined about the myth of the optimal tablet size and shared how to deal with that. All in all it's been a busy month and those interested in the mobile space should find lots of interesting things in the recap. The Big Guys — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, and Amazon Apple is fun again  — Things have seemed a bit stiff and unsure at Apple events since the passing of Steve Jobs. The WWDC keynote indicates that Apple is back, and fun things are about to happen. Microsoft Office for Android: Pushing Windows even further behind in mobile  — Microsoft came under some heat from Windows customers when it released Office for iPad before ...

Nokia paid millions to protect Symbian from code thieves Summary:  A Finnish television station has discovered that one time mobile phone giant Nokia paid millions in Euros to keep essential software for its Symbian operating system from being used to create malware and rootkills. Nokia  reportedly paid millions of euros  (Finnish) to blackmailers in 2007-2008 to keep a key part of the source code for its Symbian feature phone platform from being used to create malware, according to Finnish broadcaster station MTV. According to the report, which has been confirmed by Finnish police, the code blackmailers had stolen the Symbian's encryption key. With these few kilobytes of code, the code thieves could have created signed applications that would have appeared to have been, not merely legitimate Symbian applications, but Nokia programs and operating system "upgrades." In short, this would have given the cybercriminials the power to create...

It’s a bird, it’s a plane….it’s India's first pizza-delivering drone!   Summary: Mumbai's Francesco's Pizzeria stunned the world by delivering a pizza via a drone. However, the city's cops aren't too pleased about the stunt. Pizza delivery using a drone   Mumbai's Francesco Pizza recently delivered one of their Pizza's using a drone In perhaps the most audacious and value-for-money stunt that the city of Mumbai has yet seen, a once unknown hole-in-the-wall Pizzeria at Kemp's Corner in tony South Mumbai used a drone to delivery a Pizza to a location nearby (Worli), giving further credence to the notion that India can be both way ahead of its time and way behind it. While this is apparently not the first pizza in the world delivered by a drone—a Dominos franchise snagged that badge of honor by doing so in the UK last year—it certainly was the most attention grabbing. The idea was born when Francesco Pizza's owner, Mikhel...

Apple unveils iOS 8 for iPhone, iPad at WWDC 2014  Summary: Project "Okemo" finally has a name. Meet iOS 8.Apple on Monday unveiled its latest mobile operating system for the iPhone and iPad at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, kicking off a week's worth of developer events for the app-building community. The new iPhone and iPad software was unveiled almost exactly one year to the day after the release of iOS 7, its immediate predecessor, following a major redesign of its user interface. Apple chief executive Tim Cook described the new software as a story of two fronts, adding that it includes new developer hooks to help app makers build new apps like never before. Senior executive Craig Federighi said on stage that iOS 8 builds on the successes of its predecessor, and lands with a bevy of brand new features. Included with the new software: Enterprise features:  iOS 8 will land with a number of enterprise-focused and manageabili...

Enterprise to act as vanguard for proximity computing Summary: After chasing consumer-led computing for the past few years, enterprises are due to be the opening front in the next change to computing — an experience that depends on where you are, and which device you are using. At the start of this week everything was in a nice, settled place: most peripherals still needed a wire for best performance, saving to the cloud was the state of the art for passing documents between devices, desktop computers never took phone calls on a regular basis, and 2-in-1 convertibles were still a solution looking for a problem. But pairing the announcements out of Apple's WWDC conference, with those emanating from Computex in Taiwan this week, presents a computing future that suddenly cares a lot more about where devices are, and how close those devices are. The biggest switch though, is that once again, enterprises and business users wil...

Self-learning Humanoid Amelia poses existential threat to BPOs Summary:  IPsoft's self-learning computer software algorithm Amelia could be ruinous for the Business Process Outsourcing industry but the company says that it wants to partner with them instead The world of self-learning Bots has finally arrived with IPsoft's Amelia Somewhere up there, both science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick are chuckling upon reading that Robotic engineers, or 'Bots' are finally beginning to threaten the human order. Those who may not be quite so tickled are companies in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) arena who may face extinction if the world of Bots takes over the world of process—stuff like back office accounting and finance to tech support voice calls—which has been their meat and potatoes so far. India has been the heavyweight champ in this area with the Philippines also asserting its dominance. In the same year that audie...

Microsoft makes Azure ExpressRoute,a hybrid-cloud networking technology available Summary:  Microsoft has made its Azure ExpressRoute private-networking service available to enterprise users who want a more secure way to connect their datacenters to Microsoft's cloud. Microsoft is making generally available to enterprise users as of May 12 its  Azure ExpressRoute networking technology . Microsoft is playing up ExpressRoute as a key piece of its hybrid cloud strategy. Officials announced the general availability of ExpressRoute during the kick-off keynote at TechEd 2014 in Houston on May 12. ExpressRoute, codenamed "Golden Gate,"  offers users private and dedicated network connections that don't use the Internet. Microsoft is delivering ExpressRoute via partnerships with telecommunications providers like AT&T, Verizon, BT, Level 3, Equinix, Telecity and  also storage-as-a-service provider Zadara. By circumventing the Internet and making connecti...