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iXA TaB 2012 - Kobian launches Rs. 3,999 tablet in India

Kobian, a computer peripherals maker, has launched an Android-powered budget tablet called iXA Tab today. It has been priced at Rs. 3,999 and will go on pre-orders starting May 23.

The iXA Tab sports a 7-inch resistive touchscreen and runs on Android 2.3. It also features a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB of internal storage expandable upto 32 GB via microSD card slot.

The exact availability of the tablet will be announced on May 23. It joins the bandwagon of economical tablets in the market from companies such as Micromax, Datawind, HCL and Mercury.

Key specifications
7-inch resistive display with 800x480 pixel resolution
0.3MP front-facing camera
Wi-Fi connectivity
Weighs 341 grams

Good Technology To Offer Encryption For Windows Phone FROM- http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120510-724057.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120510-724057.html

Bharti Airtel wins best quality mobile network provider award |FROM |http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel, the world's fifth largest telecoms company by subscribers, was awarded the best quality mobile network provider at the National Telecom Awards held in the national capital recently.

Bharti Airtel that has operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa said that the Communication, Multimedia and Infrastructure Association of India (CMAI) had recognized it as a winner in the categories of Star News Viewers Choice Best Mobile Network and Best Quality Mobile Network Service Provider at the 6th edition of National Telecom Awards 2012.

Under the aegis of the Department of Telecom (DoT), the National Telecom Awards had been constituted to identify and recognize outstanding contributions in the field of communication, information and communication technology, multimedia and infrastructure.

Bharti Airtel director for network services group Jagbir Singh said, "At Airtel, it is our constant endeavor to create ubiquitous network to offer enriched experience to our customers. While it is great to be acknowledged for ones efforts, we also take this as a responsibility to sustain the performance and efforts towards taking a consumer experience to a newer level by enriching their lives."

CMAI granted the Star News viewers' choice best mobile network award to Airtel on the basis of public votes gathered in a survey conducted by ZipDial and Star News. On the other hand, an eminent jury panel at CMAI chose Airtel as the winner in the best quality mobile network service provider category.

ViewPhone 3 2012 -Viewsonic launches ViewPhone 3 with 3G for Rs 9,990 | www.firstpost.com

FROM - http://www.firstpost.com/tech/viewsonic-launches-viewphone-3-with-3g-for-rs-9990-305987.html
Viewsonic Corporation has just launched the ViewPhone 3 at only 9,990, which could prove to be a good option for users who want to buy a 3-G smartphone under 10K. ViewPhone 3 is an Android phone with a dual SIM card.
Tech2.in reports that the phone has a 3.5-inch multi-touch display screen (with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels), and a custom TouchPal virtual keyboard, with Wi-Fi hotspot capability.
In addition it has an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, with 32 GB expandable memory.

Viewsonic's ViewPhone 3. Image from Tech2.in

Interestingly the phone also boasts of 3D technology, which has an interactive interface along with animated graphics. The phone also features 5 megapixel rear autofocus camera.
According to Tech2.in, ViewPhone 3 is available exclusively at all Reliance Digital Outlets across the nation at an MRP of INR9,990.
This phone joins a long-list of cheap droids, with dual SIM capability. But the question will it be good enough against serious competitors like Samsung Y?

Bing revamped in battle for search engine supremacy | http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

BELLEVUE: When Facebook goes public in the coming weeks, there will be a lot of winners. Among them is one of the stalwarts of the tech industry, Microsoft, which has a small stake in the company.

But Microsoft has an even bigger bet on Facebook through an alliance between its Bing search engine and the social network. And that partnership is about to get even deeper.

On Thursday, Microsoft introduced a set of changes to Bing that it says will improve searches by tapping into the expertise of friends on Facebook and other social networks. The company hopes to mine people's online social connections to provide more personal search results for everything from hotel searches in Hawaii to movie recommendations.

For example, if you are logged into your Facebook page through Bing, and you search for "best hotels in Maui," you will get results with pictures of friends who have shared some affinity for Maui before on Facebook, whether by listing it as their hometown in their Facebook profile, liking the island on Facebook or posting photos from a previous Maui vacation.

"This is a fundamentally different way to look at search," Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services division, said in a recent interview in a high-rise building here, a few miles from its main campus, where its Internet operations are based.

The new version of Bing is the biggest overhaul to the search engine since Microsoft introduced it three years ago. It is the result of a continual conversation at the company about how to make Bing a more effective competitor to that other search engine - Google - and try to stem its considerable losses. In its last fiscal year, Microsoft reported operating losses from its online services division of $2.6 billion.

Strengthening the ties between Bing and Facebook is also another sign of how Microsoft and Facebook are working together to provide a counterbalance to their common adversary, Google. While Google is by far the dominant player in the Internet search business, it also competes with Microsoft in productivity applications and with Facebook through its Google Plus social network.

And like Microsoft, Google earlier this year began to integrate data from its social network into its search results through an initiative it calls "search, plus your world."

Google declined to comment for this article.

The alliance between Facebook and Microsoft, so far, has barely caused a dent in Google. The two companies first announced a plan to work together on what they called "social search" in late 2010 and a bit later began to pepper Bing search results with a limited amount of data it began to pull from Facebook.

If a person searched for the movie "The Avengers," for example, Bing would annotate the results to indicate whether the searcher's Facebook friends had "liked" any of the Web pages found in that search previously on the social network.

Microsoft executives said that approach, on its own, did not have much success, partly because it cluttered the display of search results.

"It was a good experiment, but it wasn't working in the way we expected," said Derrick Connell, a corporate vice president of Bing program management.

The new Bing has a much cleaner design that tucks all of the social search results away into a sidebar on the Bing search results pages, where they are now clearly distinct from the traditional Bing search results on the left side of the screen.

But the revamping also goes much further in the kind of information it picks up from Facebook.

For the search for "best hotels in Maui," for example, the results will also allow searchers to post questions about favorite hotels to the friends with Maui expertise that Bing has identified, without leaving the Bing search results page.

Microsoft executives say they will show only data from Facebook friends' pages that could be seen by going directly to the pages.

"Bing is taking a thoughtful approach to giving people the option to call on their friends as part of the search experience," said Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships at Facebook.

Bing will also suggest other people it deems to be "influential" on a particular search topic by scouring more public social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora.

"I think Bing has very elegantly incorporated a lot of information into the search results page, which is a formidable challenge," said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, who had seen the new Bing design. "What really remains to be seen is how users will accept this."

Microsoft's effort to make Bing stand out from Google in the search business is led by Lu, a wiry, intense former Yahoo executive, who regularly asks his lieutenants to ponder an existential question for Microsoft's search efforts.

"This is one of our key challenges - answering the question, 'Why Bing?'" Lu said recently, as he roamed in front of a whiteboard sketching out his vision for the evolution of search.

Wall Street investors have asked that question too, ever since Microsoft years ago began plowing money into building a credible competitor to Google. Despite the financial losses, the company shows no sign of backing away from its investment.

"On the business side, it's really sort of questionable," said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.

Microsoft has gained a bigger portion of the US search market, rising to 15.3 per cent of searches in March, up from 13.9 per cent in the same month a year earlier, according to comScore.

But most of those gains appeared to come at the expense of Yahoo, not Google. Microsoft and Yahoo have a multiyear agreement in which Bing provides search results on Yahoo.

In March, Google accounted for 66.4 per cent of US searches, according to comScore.

What makes Google's grip on the search market even more vexing is that there appears to be little difference between the quality of its search results and Bing's. Microsoft regularly conducts blind tests of users in which it shows them Bing and Google search results side-by-side, without identifying which search engine the results are coming from. In recent tests, Microsoft said most of those users said they favored Bing's results.

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a website devoted to Internet search, agrees that Bing and Google are "pretty even" in the quality of their search results.

In theory, it's extremely easy for people to switch to a new search engine. Yet, as Microsoft executives concede, Google has become a habit for people that is difficult to break. For most people, the idea of switching to Bing has seemed unnecessary, Sullivan said.

"It's like saying, Here's another person who could be a great best friend for you," he said. "Why don't you become best friends with them?"

Why more mobile access worries Facebook ahead of its IPO

The latest data shows that more and more users are beginning to access Facebook via mobile phones as opposed to computers, and Facebook is not happy.

The average time spent accessing Facebook via smartphone in the United States was 441 minutes in March, compared with 391 minutes via computer, according to comScore.

comScore’s new Mobile Metrix 2.0 report showed U.S. smartphone users spent 441 minutes per month, or 7 hours and 21 minutes, on Facebook in March. That compares with 391 minutes, or 6 hours and 31 minutes, for people who tapped into Facebook via a computer.

The statement by Facebook is effectively a profit warning: Reuters

In filing documents for its initial public offering, Facebook highlighted the fact and noted that it does not generate meaningful revenue from mobile users.

“If users increasingly access mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users,” the company writes in its filing documents, “our financial performance and ability to grow revenue would be negatively affected.”

The changes made to the regulatory filings show that mobile is an increasingly urgent problem for Facebook to solve in order to continue its financial growth. The Telegraph said that the statement was effectively a ‘profit warning’.

Three days later, Facebook announced that it was planning to launch an app store for mobile users. As well as showcasing popular apps, such as the game Draw Something, on Apple’s and Google’s app stores, Facebook will sell apps based exclusively on its network and take a 30pc share of revenues.

Analysts say that the move to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing mobile app, for $1 billion was also an almost panicked move to increase mobile revenue. “It was a reactive, almost panicked reaction to usage statistics,” said Sam Hamadeh, founder of research firm PrivCo to The Telegraph.

Historically, Facebook hasn’t shown ads to mobile users, although in March 2012 it started including “sponsored stories” in users’ mobile new feeds.

March marks the first month comScore measured mobile usage — for Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and RIM’s Blackberry — on sites like Facebook.

Facebook commands the lion’s share of smartphone users’ time, comScore data showed. The next-most popular services were check-in services Foursquare, with 146 minutes; microblogging service Twitter, with 114 minutes; and blogging-service Tumblr, with 68 minutes.

Facebook likely racked up more minutes because people like to stay on to craft updates, read friends’ updates, and respond, said Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. By contrast, “it doesn’t take that long to tweet,” he said.

Facebook’s rich valuation — approaching $100 billion at the high end — is in part based on high levels of user engagement. Facebook cautioned in its filing documents that as growth in its numbers of users slows, its “business performance will become increasingly dependent on (its) ability to increase levels of user engagement in current and new markets.”

Facebook IPO is oversubscribed

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook record initial public offering is already oversubscribed, a source familiar with the share listing said, days after the world's largest social network embarked on a cross-country roadshow to drum up investor enthusiasm.

Despite concerns about slowing growth, a lofty valuation and signs the company is having trouble ramping up revenue from mobile advertising, institutional investors have so far indicated demand for more shares than Facebook has available, the source told Reuters.

Analysts say the company, which is seeking to raise about $10.6 billion by selling more than 337 million shares at $28 to $35 apiece, may raise that price range if demand turns out to be healthy enough.

One large institutional investor had put in a major order for shares on Wednesday and was calling around syndicate desks trying to acquire more, a second source familiar with the IPO's progress told Reuters, declining to be identified because the details are not public.

Facebook declined to comment.

The company that began as Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room project is expected to begin trading on May 18 after an IPO that dwarfs the coming-out parties of other tech powerhouses.

With 900 million users, it is challenging established web businesses such as Google and Yahoo for consumers' online time and advertising dollars.

But longer term, analysts say Facebook needs to develop a way to earn money from the increasing number of users who access the social network on mobile devices such as smartphones.

Facebook, which makes most of its money from advertising, began offering limited ads on the mobile version of its service only recently.

FACEBOOK IPO 2012 | Facebook's IPO said to have more demand than shares available | http://news.cnet.com

FROM - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57432318-93/facebooks-ipo-said-to-have-more-demand-than-shares-available/

Facebook's recent IPO filing and upcoming debut on the Nasdaq may be eliciting speculation of weak demand, but some sources say the social network is doing just fine in rounding up investors.

According to Reuters, which spoke to sources familiar with the share listing, Facebook's IPO is "already oversubscribed." The news source reported that institutional investors have currently "indicated demand for more shares than Facebook has available."

But it hasn't been so rosy up til now. Just yesterday, news broke that the social network amended its S-1 filing with the SEC to emphasize how the shift of its users to mobile devices is hurting what it can charge for ads, threatening its long-term revenue. And last month, first-quarter financial results showed that while the company's revenue rose, its profits fell.

Facebook announced its IPO pricing details a week ago, saying that it's seeking to raise as much as $13.6 billion in its IPO. That would value the company at roughly $88 billion. The company is aiming to price its shares between $28 and $35 and begin trading on May 17 or 18.An analyst for Sterne Agee, Arvind Bhatia, says he believes the stock could hit $46 within the next 12 months. And even if the company prices its shares at the midpoint of the $28 and $35 range, it could land $5.6 billion in cash in the offering. A higher price would help it raise even more cash, which Facebook says could be used to help it grow.

According to Reuters, one major institutional investor earlier today put in a big order for shares and was "calling around syndicate desks trying to acquire more."

Facebook declined to comment on the matter when contacted by CNET.

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