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Microsoft Creates ‘Dubai Font’ Typeface for the City

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Microsoft Creates 'Dubai Font' Typeface for the City

The Dubai government on Sunday announced the launch of ‘Dubai Font’, the first typeface developed by Microsoft for a city, which will be available in 23 languages.

The font was developed simultaneously in Latin and Arabic script and is available to 100 million Office 365 users around the world.

Dubai Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed al-Maktoum has urged all government institutions to adopt the font in official correspondence.

The Executive Council of Dubai, which manages the affairs of the city-state and is headed by Prince Hamdan, said the font reflects the United Arab Emirates’ vision “to become a regional and global leader in innovation”.

“It is the first font to be developed by a city and to carry its name”, Executive Council secretary general Abdulla al-Shaiban told a news conference.

Home to the world’s tallest tower and the largest shopping mall in the Middle East, image-conscious Dubai has pushed in recent years to broaden its appeal by investing in its technology and culture.

The emirate also aims to emerge as the world’s happiest city, and last year appointed a happiness minister.

In 2016, some 14.9 million tourists visited Dubai, the most liberal of the UAE’s seven emirates and its least dependent on oil revenues.

Dubai will host the six-month Expo 2020 under the themes of sustainability and mobility.

 
[“source-ndtv”]

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Online Marketing

Snapdeal Board Expected to Meet Today to Discuss Sale

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Snapdeal Board Expected to Meet Today to Discuss Sale

The board of Snapdeal is expected to meet on Tuesday to discuss the potential sale of India’s third largest e-commerce firm to larger rival Flipkart.

Also, on the agenda will be getting Nexus Venture Partners (NVP), an early investor in Snapdeal, to agree to the sale deal.

The approval of Nexus Venture Partners will be crucial for the proposed transaction to proceed, according to sources close to the development.

The seven-member board of Jasper Infotech, which operates Snapdeal, includes representation from investors SoftBank, Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners (NVP), as well as co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.

The valuation of Snapdeal is believed to be one of the hurdles to the deal, as Kalaari and NVP were not in agreement with the valuation given by SoftBank, which is the largest shareholder in Snapdeal.

SoftBank has now succeeded in getting Kalaari (another early-stage investor in Snapdeal) to agree but is yet to get NVP on board for the deal.

The sources said once NVP agrees, the deal with Flipkart could be announced in a matter of weeks.

The deal with Flipkart, if it happens, would mark the biggest acquisition in the Indian e-commerce space and change the landscape of the sector that is witnessing an intense competition among players.

Snapdeal was valued at $6.5 billion in its last funding round in February 2016. The valuation, however, has shrunk since then and the potential deal could be struck at a discounted rate, say industry watchers.

According to reports, the deal may see Snapdeal’s mobile wallet service, FreeCharge being sold separately and players like Paytm, Flipkart and MobiKwik are said to be in the fray.

Indian e-commerce companies have seen funding dry up over the last few months as investors focus extensively on profitability and cutting down expenses.

With intense competition from deep-pocketed global rivals like Amazon, homegrown companies like Flipkart and Snapdeal could face even more heat in the coming days.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has recently said the company will keep investing in the Indian market to strengthen technology and infrastructure. The US-based firm has committed investments worth $5 billion in the Indian market.

 

 
[“source-ndtv”]

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Gadgets News

SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive for iPhone, iPad Launched Starting Rs. 2,750

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive for iPhone, iPad Launched Starting Rs. 2,750

 

After launching its iXpand Flash Drive earlier this year, Western Digital on Monday launched its SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive, presented as a memory solution for iPhone and iPad. The SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive has already been made available in India in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB storage capacities, with starting prices ranging between Rs. 2,750 to Rs. 7,050. The new flash drive is available online exclusively through Flipkart.

The SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive offers transfer speeds of up to 70Mbps, as per Western Digital’s claims. It features a different design than the drive launched earlier this year and allows users to connect it directly to the iPhone or iPad without having to remove the case, Western Digital said in its release. It comes with a Lightning connector and a USB 3.0 connector that allows for quick and easy transfer of files between iPhone/ iPad and Mac or PC.

“Smartphone and tablet users are creating more content than ever before and we know that customers are looking for physical mobile storage solutions that are easy to use, portable and reliable,” Khalid Wani, managing director sales at Western Digital Corporation India, was quoted as saying in the release. “The new SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive offers iPhone and iPad users an option to capture everything they love without worrying about running out of space,” he said.

The SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive comes with a companion app, called the iXpand Drive app for iPhone and iPad, which automatically backs up users’ camera rolls as well as content from social networking sites including tagged photos from Facebook and Instagram. The companion app also allows users to watch videos directly from the drive as well.

The iXpand Drive app even allows users to cast content from the SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive directly to their television via Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV. The app is already available for download from the App Store, and launches when the SanDisk iXpand Mini Flash Drive is plugged into an iPhone or iPad. The new flash drive from Western Digital features encryption software that password-protects files and allows users to share content while keeping sensitive files protected across devices.

 

 
[“source-ndtv”]

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Online Marketing

What Is Online Marketing? The Definitive Guide To Internet Visibility

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

What Is Online Marketing?

Today, with nearly half the world’s population wired to the internet, the ever-increasing connectivity has created global shifts in strategic thinking and positioning, disrupting industry after industry, sector after sector. Seemingly, with each passing day, some new technological tool emerges that revolutionizes our lives, further deepening and embedding our dependence on the world wide web.

And why not? Human beings have always enthralled themselves into one pursuit after another, all with a means to an end of improving our lives. Clearly, the conveniences afforded by the internet are quite literally earth-shattering to say the least. Three decades ago, few could have ever imagined the present state of our on-demand-everything society, with the ability to instantly communicate and conduct business in real-time, at a pace that often seems dizzying at the best of times.

However, with all of these so-called modern conveniences to life, where technology’s ever-pervading presence has improved even the most basic tasks for us such as hailing a ride or ordering food or conducting any sort of commerce instantly and efficiently, many are left in the dark. While all of us have become self-professed experts at consuming content and utilizing a variety of tools freely available to search and seek out information, we’re effectively drowning in a sea of digital overload.

The truth? Today, rising above the noise and achieving any semblance of visibility has become a monumental undertaking. While we might prevail at searching, we fail at being found. How are we supposed to get notice while swimming in a sea of misinformation and disinformation? We’ve become immersed in this guru gauntlet where one expert after another is attempting to teach us how we can get the proverbial word out about our businesses and achieve visibility to drive more leads and sales, but we all still seem to be lost.

It’s clear that online marketing is no simple task. And the reason why we’ve landed in this world of “expert” internet marketers who are constantly cheerleading their offers to help us reach visibility and penetrate the masses is because of the layer of obscurity that’s been afforded to us in part thanks to one key player: Google. Google’s shrouded algorithms that cloud over 200+ ranking factors in a simple and easy-to-use interface has confounded businesses for well over a decade now.

Understanding Online Marketing

Google’s core algorithms and its propensity to shroud its data in layers of obscurity is not something new. However, it is critical to any understanding of marketing on the internet simply because this visibility is at the heart of everything else that you do. Forget about social media and other forms of marketing for the time being. Search engine optimization (SEO) offers up the proverbial key to near-limitless amounts of traffic on the web.

The better you learn and understand SEO and the more strides you take to learn this seemingly confusing and complex discipline, the more likely you’ll be to appear organically in search results. And let’s face it, organic search is important to marketing online. Considering that most people don’t have massive advertising budgets and don’t know the first thing about lead magnets, squeeze pages and sales funnels, appearing visible is critical towards long-term success.

When traffic is coming to your website or blog, nearly unfettered, it gives you the opportunity to test out a variety of marketing initiatives. However, without that traffic, you’re forced to spend money on costly ads before really determining the effectiveness of your offers and uncovering your cost-per acquisition (CPA), two things which are at the core of scaling out any business online.

I liken this to a paradoxical Catch-22 scenario, because it seems like without one you can’t have the other. It takes money to drive traffic, but it takes traffic to make money. So don’t make the mistake that millions of other online marketers make around the world. Before you attempt to scale or send any semblance of traffic to your offers, be sure to split-test things to oblivion and determine your conversion rates before diving in headfirst.

Gaining Google’s Trust

The biggest problem that most people have when trying to learn anything to do with driving more traffic to their website or boosting their visibility across a variety of online mediums, is that they try to do the least amount of work for the greatest return. They cut corners and they take shortcuts. Because of that, they fail. Today, if you’re serious about marketing anything on the web, you have to gain Google’s trust.

Gaining Google’s trust doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. Think about building up your relationship with anyone. The longer you know that person, the more likely that trust will solidify. So, the reasoning is, that if Google just met you, it’s going to have a hard time trusting you. If you want Google to trust you, you have to get other people that Google already trusts, to vouch for you. This is also known as link-building.

But I’m not talking about any kind of link building. I’m talking about organic link building by getting out there and creating insatiable “anchor content” on your website, then linking to that content with equally-great content that’s created on authority sites like Medium, Quora, LinkedIn and other publishing platforms. It’s not easy by any measure. Google is far more wary of newcomers these days than it once used to be.

However, if you’re going to understand online marketing, you have to understand the importance of building Google’s trust. There are three core components involved here. These three core components are like the pillars of trust that comprise all of Google’s 200+ ranking factor rules. Each of those rules can be categorized and cataloged into one of these three pillars of trust. If you want to rank on the first page or in the first spot, you need to focus on all three, and not just one or two out of three.

Trust Component #1: Indexed Age

The first component of Google’s trust has to do with age. Age is more than a number. But it’s not just the age when you first registered your website. The indexed age has to do with two factors: i) the date that Google originally found your website, and; ii) what happened between the time that Google found your website and the present moment in time.

Just think about any relationship for a moment. How long you’ve known a person is incredibly important. It’s not the be-all-end-all, but it is fundamental to trust. If you’ve known someone for years and years and other people that you know who you already trust can vouch for that person, then you’re far more likely to trust them, right? But if you’ve just met someone, and haven’t really vetted them so to speak, how can you possibly trust them?

Trust Component #2: Authority

What’s the authority of your website or webpage, or any other page on the internet for that matter where you’re attempting to gain visibility? Authority is an important component of trust, and it relies heavily on quality links coming from websites that Google already trusts. Authority largely relates to the off-page optimization discipline of SEO that occurs away from the webpage as opposed to the on-page optimization that occurs directly on the webpage.

For example, what are the quality and quantity of the links that have been created over time? Are they natural and organic links stemming from relevant and high quality content, or are they spammy links, unnatural links or coming from bad link neighborhoods? Are all the links coming from the same few websites over time or is there a healthy amount of global IP diversification in the links?

Trust Component #3: Content

Content is king. It always has been and it always will be. Creating insightful, engaging and unique content should be at the heart of any online marketing strategy. Too often, people simply don’t obey this rule. The problem? This takes an extraordinary amount of work. However, anyone that tells you that content isn’t important, is not being fully transparent with you. You cannot excel in marketing anything on the internet without having quality content.

Quality content is more likely to get shared. By staying away from creating “thin” content and focusing more on content that cites sources, is lengthy and it reaches unique insights, you’ll be able to gain Google’s trust over time. Remember, this happens as a component of time. Google knows you can’t just go out there and create massive amounts of content in a few days. If you try to spin content or duplicate it in any fashion, you’ll suffer a Google penalty and your visibility will be stifled.

An Overarching View Of Marketing On The Web

Okay, if you’re still with me, fantastic. You’re one of the few that doesn’t mind wading through a little bit of hopeless murkiness to reemerge on the shores of hope. But before we jump too far ahead, it’s important to understand what online marketing is and what it isn’t. That definition provides a core understanding of what it takes to peddle anything on the web, whether it’s a product, service or information.

When we talk about marketing on the internet, we’re talking about driving traffic or boosting visibility via a number of means. Any type of advertising done on the internet to promote any product, person, service, business or place for that matter, can be deemed as online marketing. However, to succeed in this arena, whether it’s SEO, social media, email marketing or beyond, you need to ensure you adhere to the three pillars of trust first and foremost.

Types Of Online Marketing

There are ten essential types of marketing that can be done online. Some of these can be broken down into organic marketing and others can be categorized as paid marketing. Organic, of course, is the allure of marketing professionals from around the planet. It’s free and its unencumbered traffic that simply keeps coming. Paid marketing, on the other hand, is still a very attractive proposition as long as the marketing pays for itself by having the right type of offer that converts.

#1 — Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO should be a core tactic in any marketing strategy. While it might seem difficult to understand at first, as long as you find the right course, book or audiobook, and devote your time to learning, you’ll be in good shape. Considering that there are over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s current algorithms, learning, digesting and successfully implementing good SEO tactics is essential to the success of your website or blog.

  • Pay attention to the often-overlooked on-page optimization elements such as your page speed, which can be determined by using tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google’s own Page Speed Insights.
  • Leverage Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Projects (AMP) specification to ensure that you appear relevantly on mobile searches using this new lightning-fast loading spec.
  • Utilized Google’s Webmaster Tools for suggestions on fine-tuning your site’s structured data, rich cards, and other HTML improvements such as discovering duplicate title and meta tags, and so on.
  • Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure that your content and your overall SEO strategies are in harmony with what the search giant is looking for.
  • Always build high quality, relevant content that’s unique, insightful and engaging, paving the way for a higher likelihood of visitors sharing that content organically and naturally.

#2 — Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Organic SEO’s flip-side offers up a paid method for marketing on search engines like Google. SEM provides an avenue for displaying ads through networks such as Google’s Adwords and other paid search platforms that exist across the web throughout social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and even video sites like YouTube, which, invariably, is the world’s second largest search engine.

By utilizing SEM, it provides you with a great avenue for getting the word out quickly and effectively. If you have the budget, then marketing on search engines for competitive keywords might be the right fit for you. But be prepared to pony up. Keywords can range anywhere from a few cents to upwards of $50 and more. The quality score for any term is reflective of what you can expect to pay for bidding on that keyword. The lower the competition, the lower the quality score and the lower the price.

However, SEM doesn’t just cover paying for clicks, but also paying for impressions. That means, for example, that every 1000 times your ad is displayed, you pay a pre-arranged amount, regardless of whether anyone clicked on it or not. While this is a less popular form of advertising, it still exists today on some platforms.

#3 — Social Media Marketing

One of the hottest forms of marketing anything online right now is through social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, amongst others. Social media provides a near-direct avenue for reaching the masses, but it most certainly isn’t a simple or easy thing to achieve saturation, especially when we’re talking about millions of followers.

In a number of recent articles, where I’ve interviewed some of social media’s rising stars such as Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor, Sean Perelstein, who built StingHD into a global brand and Nathan Chan from Foundr Magazine, amongst several others, it’s quite clear that multi-million-dollar businesses can be built on the backs of wildly-popular social media channels and platforms.

However, getting that saturation is a frustrating process. Obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight. Based on my conversations with numerous rising stars in social media, there are a few things that should be done when it comes to gaining attention through a variety of social media channels.

  • Find your voice: decide what your message is going to be and stick to it. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Make a decision and stay committed to it. Whether it’s a topic, idea, niche, business or something else, do your best not to waver.
  • Be real and be yourself: people can see through those that try to put up a front on social media channels. Don’t try to be something that you’re not. Be real and be yourself. It will resonate with people.
  • Deliver value no matter what: Regardless of who you are and what you’re trying to promote, always deliver value, first and foremost. Go out of your way to help others by carefully curating information that will assist them in their journey. The more you focus on delivering value, the quicker you’ll reach that proverbial tipping point when it comes to exploding your fans or followers.
  • Constantly engage with others: many of the social media superstars I’ve spoken to have said that, in the beginning, they followed the popular profiles and constantly commented, shared and engaged with others. Not just on their own profiles, but by directly commenting on photos and engaging in conversations on other feeds.

If you’re serious about finding your voice and discovering the secrets to success in business, one of the best people to follow is Gary Vanyerchuck, CEO of Vayner Media, and early-stage invest in Twitter, Uber and Facebook, has arbitraged his way into the most popular social media platforms and built up massive followings and often spills out the secrets to success in a highly motivating and inspiring way.

 

#4 — Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

PPC advertising is a method of advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. As mentioned earlier, with PPC ads, you pay each time that ad is clicked on. PPC ads also exist on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well. However, if you’re going to engage in PPC advertising, it’s important that you determine conversion rates by using tracking pixels.

By using the Facebook tracking pixel or the Adwords pixel, you can help to define your audience and work to entice them to come back to your site. Let’s say the didn’t finish their purchase or they simply showed up and left after adding something to their shopping cart, or they filled out a lead form and disappeared, you can re-target those individuals.

Re-targeting is one of the most effective ways to market your business online, because you’re marketing to “warm” traffic, or people who’ve already visited your site. If you’ve ever gone to a website and then seen those ads following you around the internet, then you’re well aware of what re-targeting is.

When running PPC ads, it’s important that you keep careful track of the specific ads and keywords that you’re targeting. You can do this by using the Google Analytics UTM builder to create campaign URLs that you can use to track the campaign source, the medium and any keywords or terms that you might be targeting. This way, you can determine the effectiveness of any campaign that you run and figure out the precise conversion rate.

#5 — Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the art of marketing products, services or information for others. It doesn’t require that you ever house or warehouse a single thing. But it does require that you have an audience to market those things to online. Without that audience, whether it’s through search engines like Google or social media channels like Facebook, you’ll find a difficult time with affiliate marketing.

However, if you are seasoned online marketer, and you’ve built a substantial following, then marketing as an affiliate might be the right fit. Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor has built a seven-figure business with affiliate marketing, while David Sharpe from Legendary Marketer has built up an eight-figure business by creating an army of affiliates that market products in collaboration with his team.

There are numerous repositories to source affiliate products and services from. However, some of the biggest are sites like Clickbank, Commission Junction, LinkShare and JVZoo. You’ll need to go through an application process, for the most part, to get approved to sell certain products, services or digital information products. Once approved, be prepared to hustle.

#6 — Email Marketing

For those that are not in the know, email marketing is a substantial money generator. In fact, email marketing can far outstrip standard website sales because, at least for unknown brands or websites that are not household names, clinching a sale on the first interaction often doesn’t happen.

That’s why seasoned online marketers build squeeze pages with lead magnets, webinars and sales funnels to drip-deliver value and build a close personal relationship with their email subscribers, effectively moving them up a value chain to sell them high-ticket products and services.

If you have a website or a blog, be sure that you create a lead magnet or give something else of value away for free such as a trial software to a SaaS system or anything else for that matter that people could get value out of. Exchange your free offer for the email address and drop them into your sales funnel.

Use an email marketing system like InfusionSoft, ConvertKit or MailChimp, amongst others, to drip-feed value to those subscribers while also working to move them up your value chain. Russell Bruson does a great job of explaining sales funnels and marketing virtually anything on the internet is his best-selling book, Dot Com Secrets.

#7 — Influencer Marketing

Using influencers to market your products or services is a great way to quickly saturate yourself into the marketplace, no matter what you’re peddling. However, finding the right influencer at the right price is the hard part. You don’t necessarily have to go to the top-tier influencers; you can also opt for micro-influencers (those that have 10,000 to 100,000 followers or fans).

Some influencers charge a hefty sum for a simple post on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. You can expect to pay upwards of a million dollars and more for some of the top-tier influencers. If you’re looking for mid-level influencers, you’ll likely get away with paying roughly a couple hundred-thousand dollars and up.

The really important part of influencer marketing is to find influencers that are in your niche. Be sure that they represent your target demographic audience before deciding to part ways with your hard-earned cash. It can get incredibly costly, but it can also bring you instant attention and business.

#8 — Blogging

Blogging is one of the best forms of marketing online. It’s free and it gives you a platform to build a massive audience as long as you don’t give up. While starting a blog is relatively easy, actually following through and growing the blog is nothing short of downright frustrating and seemingly impossible.

However, some of the world’s top-earning blogs gross millions of dollars per month on autopilot. It’s a great source of passive income and if you know what you’re doing, you could earn a substantial living from it. You don’t need millions of visitors per month to rake in the cash, but you do need to connect with your audience and have clarity in your voice.

#9 — Video Marketing

Video marketing is a great avenue for exposure on the internet, and utilizing a platform like YouTube to deliver value in the form of tutorials and other useful information such as courses or entertainment is a great way to grow your brand and build a presence.

While there are several platforms for doing this, clearly YouTube is the most popular for doing this. However, video marketing is also a great form of both content marketing and SEO on its own. It can help to provide visibility for several different ventures, and if the video is valuable enough in its message and content, it will be shared and liked by droves, pushing up the authority of that video through the roof.

#10 — Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of my favorite go-to strategies when it comes to marketing on the web. It’s my favorite because it’s one of the most powerful, free and organic methods that are available for online marketers no matter where they’re from. However, marketing content is difficult. So be prepared to put in the sweat equity.

My favorite style in this is article marketing. You create anchor content on your website or blog, then you build authority-content links to that content, effectively driving up the visibility. I’ve used this single strategy to rank hundreds of keywords in the #1 spot on Google, and I would highly recommend that if you’re going to learn any marketing strategy, that you get really good at this one.

The type of content you can market is wide open. Aside from articles, you can use infographics, tutorials, ebooks and many other forms of content marketing. As long as it’s done the right way, and it isn’t intentionally setup to trick or fool search engines, but rather to add value to human beings, you’ll see immense results from this.

R.L. Adams is a software engineer, serial entrepreneur, and author. He runs a wildly-popular blog called Wanderlust Worker and contributes to Entrepreneur, Engadget and the Huffington Post.

[“Source-forbes”]

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News Update

Update: Crews unable to locate driver who reportedly jumped from a bridge following crash

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

car-crash-accident-collision-generic.JPG

Update, 10:45 a.m.: The driver of the Nissan Sentra, who reportedly jumped from a bridge into the Yakima River following an overnight crash on State Route 22, has not been located, said the Washington State Patrol.

The driver was a 31-year-old man from Zillah, said Detective Sgt. Mike Russell, a spokesman for the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office.

Search and rescue crews from the sheriff’s office assisted the state patrol with the search.

TOPPENISH, Wash. – Search and rescue crews are searching for a man who jumped off the Yakima River bridge over State Route 22 after a collision Friday morning, the Washington State Patrol reports.

The crash happened a few minutes after midnight when a 1993 Nissan Sentra heading west on SR 22 crossed the centerline and collided with an eastbound tractor trailer, according to a news release from the patrol.

Troopers said the Sentra’s driver got out of the now totaled car and jumped from the bridge into the Yakima River. The search and rescue team from the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office was still searching for that driver Friday morning.

The driver of the tractor trailer, identified as Exequiel Ramirez, 46, of Las Vegas, was not injured in the crash, according to the patrol.

SR 22 was closed in both directions over the bridge for several hours after the crash but it reopened around 3:30 a.m., according to the state Department of Transportation.

This story will be updated

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Internet

Reason TV Interviews Ajit Pai on the Future of the Internet

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Ajit Pai, originally appointed to the Federal Communications Commission by President Obama and elevated to the chairmanship by President Trump, wants to throw out the recently-enacted regulatory structure that calls for Internet service providers to be treated like a public utility, i.e., net neutrality. He recently talked with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie about his plans for the future.

The decision to change policy is, of course, controversial and will be the subject of fierce ongoing debate. My colleague Ryan Radia, however, spoke for CEI and many in the free market movement this week in his statement on Pai’s announcement:

CEI welcomes Federal Communication Commission Chairman Pai’s plan to end harmful public utility regulation of Internet providers. Undoing the Obama-era net neutrality rules that threaten free speech online is critical to protecting a free and open Internet. The FCC’s 2015 Internet regulations must be eliminated in order to promote competition and innovation in the broadband market, which will ultimately serve American consumers with more choices and better products at lower prices.

Earlier this week, Ryan also had the following to say about the ongoing net neutrality debate:

Over the past decade, the FCC has sought to transform itself into the Internet’s regulator in spite of a clear directive to the contrary from Congress. The rigid rules that now govern Internet providers forbid an array of business models that could benefit consumers, from prioritizing time-sensitive Internet traffic to cutting deals with Web startups to exempt them from data caps.

Unfortunately, rolling back these regulations will not end the fight over net neutrality. A never-ending game of regulatory ping pong where the winner changes every four or eight years serves no one. Resolving this battle will require Congress to rewrite the nation’s telecom laws, phasing out the FCC’s many functions that can be better sorted out by markets or courts. Otherwise, broadband providers will soon look and act like the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly: stagnant, entrenched, and anything but innovative.

If you are going to be in Washington, D.C. on May 16th, please join us for a lunch-time discussion event on Capitol Hill: “Internet Freedom, Regulation, and Congress: A Discussion with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai” in the Russell Senate Office Building.

[“Source-cei”]

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Gadgets News

High-tech gadgets take to air, sea at Camp Pendleton

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Image result for High-tech gadgets take to air, sea at Camp Pendleton

Brandon Reimschiissel, flight operations engineer for the “V-Bat” a vertical take off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle, prepped the aircraft for a demonstration at Camp Pendleton on Wednesday April 26. (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)

An exercise taking place this month at Camp Pendleton is designed to help answer a simple question: how to mount an aggressive beach invasion while risking fewer U.S. Marine lives in a time when technology almost ensures that the enemy will see everything that’s coming at them.

On display in the air, sea and land were more than 100 high-tech tools the U.S. Marine Corps. is considering for future warfare use. Those tools included flying drones of all shapes and sizes, unmanned ground vehicles that can start a beach assault with a machine gun controlled from half a kilometer away, and submersible robots that scour the shallow waters near shore searching for mines and other obstacles.

The Advanced Naval Technology Exercise — which has been under way for two weeks and concludes Thursday — has turned Pendleton’s Red Beach just west of Las Pulgas Road into “Combat Town” with thousands of invited guests coming through.

“This is a relatively new construct where we use the Navy’s organic labs and warfare centers to bring together emerging technologies and innovation to solve a very specific fleet force fighting problem,” said Carly Jackson, director of prototyping SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific and the main organizer of the event.

“It’s focused on first wave and mostly focusing on unmanned systems with a big emphasis on intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance,” she said.

“What we’re doing here is marrying up technologists from industry, academia and government labs with the guys who actually develop the operation concepts for the Marine Corps,” added Marine Lt. Col. Jim Foley.

The event was reminiscent of a huge trade show with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military contracts potentially at stake.

Each afternoon some of the tools were put into practice during a faux amphibious landing in which the waters were scanned by air and sea by drones and robots that looked for mines and gauged the currents and wave heights. The unmanned ground vehicles were then brought in to set up on the beach and perhaps begin the fight. Information was being relayed from above by flying drones of all sizes and shapes.

“Some of the vehicles that in the past were piloted by actual people are being remotely operated so the first things that hit the beach won’t be manned, they will be robots that can breach or go through obstacles,” Foley said.

A few examples of the 100-plus gadgets on exhibit:

  • The Pegasus Hybrid — a quad-copter small flying drone that becomes a ground vehicle once it’s landed. “You can do missions with it you can’t do with just a ground vehicle or an air vehicle,” said Robotics Research LLC Vice President Carl Murphy. “You could land it on a building and then drive it around to look at things without causing a bunch of sound and ruckus.”
  • The Multi-Utility Tactical Transport family of vehicles — (MUTT) which are various sized supply carrying vehicles that can be put on the beach in advance of troops. They can also be turned into a weapon by mounting a M2 .50-caliber machine. “It would take five guys to take the .50-cal downrange. One guy can do it here and he can remotely control it. So now you look like a big force and the enemy won’t know.” said Dan Rodgers of General Dynmacis Land Systems.
  • The RAZOR Biorobotic Mine-Hunting UUV — “This thing swims sort of like a sea turtle with four flapping fins that can do low-speed maneuvers” which is ideal for doing widespread mapping of a minefield, said David Beal, engineer with the naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport.

“We believe amphibious operations will be a vital part of our tool box in the future,” Lt. Col. Foley said. “What has changed is our potential adversaries abilities. they can have access to overhead and satellite imagery so we assume we’re always going to be looked at.”

He said even groups like ISIS can use 3-D printers to make drones and explosive devices and are using those today. “So even at the lower levels we are seeing threats we never saw before. We need to use technology to aid our manned units to maintain our edge.” Foley said. “We don’t ever want to be in a fair fight.”

Tracy Conroy, experimentation director for SPAWAR Systems Center PACIFIC, said events like this used to be commonplace but since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where amphibious landings played little role, the Marine Corps had gotten away from such things.

“The purpose of this exercise is to see what has happened in the past 14 years, what new technology is there, to help improve and enable the Marines to get ashore quickly, safely, quietly and get them back to the ships,” he said.

He said in the future drones and man will work together as one unit, one team.

“It’s given you eyes on the water, eyes under the water, eyes on the beach and eyes in the sky,” Conroy said. “We take less of a risk of losing a Marine or a Seal with that (teamwork).”

[“Source-sandiegouniontribune.”]

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Education

In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The idea that highly educated people are less religious, on average, than those with less education has been a part of the public discourse for decades, but some scholars of religion have called this notion into question. 1 And a new analysis of Pew Research Center surveys shows that the relationship between religion and education in the United States is not so simple.

On one hand, among U.S. adults overall, higher levels of education are linked with lower levels of religious commitment by some measures, such as belief in God, how often people pray and how important they say religion is to them. On the other hand, Americans with college degrees report attending religious services as often as Americans with less education.

Moreover, the majority of American adults (71%) identify as Christians. And among Christians, those with higher levels of education appear to be just as religious as those with less schooling, on average. In fact, highly educated Christians are more likely than less-educated Christians to say they are weekly churchgoers. 2

Looking at the U.S. public as a whole, however, the answer to the question of whether more education is correlated with less religion appears to be yes. Among all U.S. adults, college graduates are considerably less likely than those who have less education to say religion is “very important” in their lives: Fewer than half of college graduates (46%) say this, compared with nearly six-in-ten of those with no more than a high school education (58%).

Highly educated Americans also are less inclined than others to say they believe in God with absolute certainty and to pray on a daily basis. And, when asked about their religious identity, college graduates are more likely than others to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics (11% of college grads vs. 4% of U.S. adults with a high school education or less).

At the same time, Americans with college degrees are no less likely than others to report attending religious services on a weekly basis. Roughly a third of U.S. adults with college degrees (36%) say they attend a house of worship at least weekly, about the same as the share of those with some college (34%) and those with a high school diploma or less education (37%) who say they attend services once a week or more.

And while college graduates are more likely than others to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics and less likely to identify with Christianity (64% describe themselves as Christians, compared with 71% of those with some college education and 75% of those with a high school degree or less), they are not, on the whole, much less likely than others to identify with any religion. Indeed, fully three-quarters of college graduates are affiliated with some religion (including 11% who say they are adherents of non-Christian faiths like Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism), as are 76% of those with some college experience and 78% of those whose education topped out with high school.

In addition, among those who do identify as Christians, college graduates tend to be about as religiously observant as those with less education – and in some cases more so. For instance, more than half of college-educated Christians say they attend religious services on a weekly basis (52%), compared with 45% of Christians with some college experience and 46% of Christians with a high school degree or less.

Overall, 70% of Christians with college degrees have a high level of religious commitment on a scale incorporating four common measures of religious observance (worship attendance, frequency of prayer, belief in God and the self-described importance of religion in one’s life), as do 73% of those with some college and 71% of those with no college experience. 3

There could be many possible reasons for these patterns, though such explanations are outside the scope of this report. This analysis does not attempt to explain why, for example, Americans with more education are less likely to express belief in God. Nor does it try to explain why college-educated Christians appear to go to church more often than less-educated Christians. The focus here is simply on describing the patterns found in recent Pew Research Center polling, particularly the very large U.S. Religious Landscape Study, which involved interviews with more than 35,000 Americans reached on randomly dialed cellphones and landlines.

For ease of presentation, this analysis generally uses three categories of educational attainment, dividing U.S. adults into those who have a college degree, those who have some college (including those with an associate’s degree and those with some community college experience), and those who have only a high school diploma or less (including those with no high school diploma and those who never reached high school).

The broad patterns are largely the same if the number of educational categories is expanded, for example, by separating Americans who hold postgraduate degrees from those with just bachelor’s degrees, or by separating those who have not completed high school from those who have a high school diploma but no college experience. In fact, those at the lowest end of the educational spectrum (i.e., people who did not finish high school) stand out for especially high levels of religious observance by some measures, such as the self-described importance of religion in their lives, further supporting the idea that more education is connected with lower levels of religiosity among the U.S. public overall. (For more detail, see the detailed tables at the end of this report.)

Furthermore, the links between education and religion reported here generally persist in more sophisticated modeling even when other factors that might influence religious belief and practice – such as gender, race, age and religious tradition – are taken into account.

Religion and education within Christian traditions: Highly educated are generally at least as observant as those with less education

The tendency for Christian college graduates to exhibit rates of religious observance that are at least on par with their less highly educated counterparts is evident across a variety of Christian traditions. Among evangelical Protestants, for instance, 87% of college graduates are highly religious, according to the four-item index of religious commitment, as are 83% of those with some college and 82% of evangelicals with a high school diploma or less schooling.

Catholics are, on the whole, less religiously observant than evangelicals. But here again, college-educated Catholics exhibit a similar overall level of religiosity (62% highly religious) as Catholics with less education (61% among those with some college, 60% among Catholics with only a high school education).

Among Mormons, those who are more highly educated are not simply as religious as those with less education – Mormons with college experience are more religiously observant, on average, than Mormons with less education. Fully 92% of college-educated Mormons are highly religious, as are 91% of Mormons with some college. Among Mormons whose education topped out with high school, however, just 78% score high on the index of religious observance.

The propensity for highly educated Christians to exhibit relatively high levels of religious observance is most pronounced with respect to religious attendance. Indeed, across all five of the nation’s largest Christian traditions, college graduates are significantly more likely than their counterparts with less education to say they attend religious services regularly. Among mainline Protestants, for instance, 36% of college graduates say they attend religious services on a weekly basis, compared with 31% of mainline Protestants who have not completed college. And among those in the historically black Protestant tradition, 59% of college graduates say they attend church weekly, compared with 53% of those with some college and 52% of those with only a high school education.4

On other measures of religious observance, college-educated Christians tend to look quite similar to those who haven’t completed college. There are, however, a few exceptions. Among mainline Protestants and Catholics, for instance, those with higher levels of education are slightly less likely to say religion is very important in their lives. And college-educated mainline Protestants are less likely than mainline Protestants who have less formal education to say they believe in God with absolute certainty.

Religion and education among religious ‘nones’ and Jews: Most highly educated are least religious

While college-educated Christians are about as observant – and sometimes more observant –than Christians with less education, the data show that among the religiously unaffiliated (i.e., those who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”), those who have college degrees are considerably less religious than “nones” without a college education.

For example, just over a third of religious “nones” who have a high school diploma or less schooling say they believe in God with absolute certainty (36%), compared with just 15% of religiously unaffiliated adults who have completed college. One-quarter of “nones” whose education topped out with high school say they pray every day, which is double the share of college-educated “nones” who say they pray daily (12%). And while 20% of religiously unaffiliated adults with no college experience say religion is very important in their lives, only 6% of college-educated “nones” say the same.

As with the religiously unaffiliated, highly educated Jews tend to be less religious than Jews with fewer years of schooling. For instance, Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey of U.S. Jews found that while more than half of Jews who have not completed college say they believe in God with absolute certainty (54%), only about three-in-ten Jewish college graduates say the same (28%). 5 And while about four-in-ten Jews who have not completed college say religion is very important in their lives (39%), only a quarter of Jewish college graduates say religion is very important to them (25%). 6

These differences are driven partly by Orthodox Jews, who tend to be much more religiously observant and less educated (in terms of number of years of secular schooling) than non-Orthodox Jews. However, even when the analysis is restricted to the non-Orthodox, Jews with college degrees are less likely to say religion is very important to them or that they believe in God with absolute certainty compared with Jews with lower levels of educational attainment.

Religion and education among Muslims

There is no clear pattern when it comes to the relationship between religion and education for U.S. Muslims. 7 According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey of Muslim Americans, Muslims with a college education and those with no more than a high school education attend mosque and pray at about equal rates: Roughly half of Muslims in both of these educational groups attend services at least once a week, while two-thirds pray some or all of the five salah (Islamic prayers) each day. Nearly all Muslim Americans in each educational category (95% each) say they believe in God. 8

Although U.S. Hindus, Buddhists and other, smaller religious groups are studied in Pew Research Center surveys, including the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, they are not analyzed in this report, for a variety of methodological reasons. Interviews for the Landscape Study were conducted in English and Spanish, effectively excluding members of these religious traditions who speak only Asian languages. Pew Research Center’s 2012 survey of Asian Americans did include interviews in seven Asian languages, but the survey excluded respondents who did not identify as Asian American. Since a considerable share of U.S. Buddhists are not Asian Americans, the Asian Americans study is not able to provide information on the full population of U.S. Buddhists. Hindus are not included in this analysis of religion and education because the vast majority of Hindus in the U.S. have college degrees, and neither the Asian Americans study nor the Religious Landscape Study included enough interviews with Hindus who do not have college degrees to compare U.S. Hindus with different levels of education.

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Blogging

‘Brown Girl Bloggers’ creator shares her journey, gives helpful tips

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Credit: CandiceVanWye.com

Courtesy of CandiceVanWye.com

Blogging has become an essential factor for not only creative minds but creative companies in order to further express what it is they’re selling and to engage their audience on a personal level. With content everywhere, one millennial noticed the lack of women of color who are in those spaces and thriving. Candice VanWye, a blogger turned creator, was blogging for a year when she realized there wasn’t much of a voice coming from girls who looked like her, with stories similar to hers. The 25-year-old quickly realized the necessity for that space to be filled. With practice and passion, VanWye created Brown Girl Bloggers in 2014.

Brown Girl Bloggers’ mission is to help women create amazing blogs in a safe and fun environment.

Blogging involves commitment and consistency. How did you get started with creating the Brown Girl blog?

I got started with Brown Girl Bloggers through social media. Brown Girl Bloggers was only a blogroll at first and I listed blogs under different categories like interior design or food and told people to check those blogs out. I would then go on Twitter and Instagram to look through hashtags like #bloggers, #blackgirls, #creatives, etc and every time I came across someone with melanin, I would add their blog to our blogroll and then contact them to let them know about BGB. It was a slow process, but eventually, bloggers started telling other people about BGB and using our hashtag. Now we’re connecting our members with brands, teaching our content creators how to master their craft, and making genuine connections that go beyond blogging.

Brown Girls Blog has close to 70K in Instagram followers, along with 11K followers on Twitter; with so many social media platforms today, how do you go about marketing BGB and making sure that the website’s content stands out from competitors?

I ask our readers what they want to see or go through our analytics to see what they are responding to the most. For instance, I noticed when we post quotes about positivity or anything about the Black girl experience, it invites a lot of comments — which I love. Whenever I want to encourage conversation on our platforms, I’ll do that. This helps our mission because bloggers usually connect with each other through the comments or tweets and it helps our brand because people tag their friends and if their friends didn’t know about Brown Girl Bloggers, but like what they see, they become followers too.

Being engaging helps in the social media climate. Most of us aren’t doing anything revolutionary. We are largely just reinventing the wheel and putting our personal spin on it, which is OK. To stand out, everything you do has to be done amazingly and you need to pull people in with your unique perspective and voice. The best way to showcase that is by being engaging.

This doesn’t apply to everyone, obviously, but I think it’s relevant to those of us coming up. I notice that really popular bloggers or celebrities can have a lot of followers, comments, and even generate sales without a lot of interaction with their audience, but that’s because they’ve already built a loyal following over the years.

I can’t expect people to support BGB, especially through purchasing things, if they don’t know who I am. I need to show my passion for minority women who create content and most importantly I need to show that I am truly like everyone who reads the blog.

If you’re trying to build a loyal following you can’t ignore the people who support you. You have to respond to comments, ask follow-up questions, retweet them, reply to emails, and support the things your followers are doing. That’s going to help your brand more than you know.

Why do you feel it’s important to create a space specifically for women of color?

It’s important because we aren’t always celebrated in other spaces. It’s gotten better, but it’s not where it needs to be. Honestly, I don’t believe other groups will ever support us like we support ourselves. No one can deny how helpful mainstream media is for content creators, but it will never replace the need for our own media and communities. In a community like BGB, you’re learning about blogging with your specific audience in mind, you’re getting real interactions from people who want you to win, and you’re getting the recognition you need to keep creating. I can’t tell you the amount of gratitude I’ve received just because I reposted a blog link or followed a fellow blogger’s Instagram. We want our work acknowledged like everyone else and in our own communities we are the focus and not just the token.

With you helping other women of color to create blogs and ultimately ways to express themselves, what are some common mistakes you see bloggers make when they are starting out?

I see a few big mistakes. New bloggers start out thinking it’ll be easy and that they will be an overnight success. I get a lot of emails from bloggers asking how to grow their audience fast and monetize. My answer is always that they should focus on creating a great brand first and then monetize after that. Most of the time I’ll click over to look at their blogs and it’s clear that they haven’t invested money in a design or learned how to write with their audience in mind, and they usually don’t have any type of consistency, but they want people’s time and money. That’s crazy to me.

I also notice that a lot of bloggers think the only way to be a successful blogger is to monetize through ads and sponsorships and become entrepreneurs. It’s so unrealistic to think that everyone can be an entrepreneur because it takes a special kind of person to do that properly.

Your blog can do so much more for you. It can help you land your dream job, meet your future life partner, or help you make friends. You might simply learn a lot about yourself and have a great time. Everything doesn’t have to be about money. Sometimes, you can blog for the love of it and watch everything else fall into place.

What are three things you personally learned while getting your brand off the ground?

I learned so much, but if I have to think of my top three I’d say …

  1. Community is more important than everything else. When you build a real community around your brand, you’re going to be successful. The thing about building community is that you’re building a group of people who want you to succeed and will do what they can to ensure that you do. That means putting your community first without the ego and helping them. If you’re helpful, you’ll build community and if you build a community, you’ll build a brand. It’s that simple.
  2. Always have a platform that doesn’t rely on social media. You need an email list and your own website so that you don’t always have to play by everyone else’s rules. If your business can be destroyed because Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook changed their rules, you’re being lazy and your success is dependent on those platforms. Build your own outside of them.
  3. You have to trust the process and stay committed. Building a brand is filled with highs and lows. Sometimes everything is going great! And other times, the thing you worked super hard on flops. That’s OK. Nothing lasts forever, so you have to trust the timing of your life and stay committed even when it doesn’t seem like things are going your way. This is why consistently creating is good for you. When you train yourself to be consistent you’ll keep going through the good and the bad.

Are there any women in communications or in the blogger world that you admire?

I admire a lot of entrepreneurs. Myleik Teele, Patricia Bright, and Claire Sulmers come to mind. These are all Black women who have amazing businesses with employees, which I admire. I also love that they are all building empires in their own ways. Seeing Black women do that is inspiring and beautiful, even.

Millennials love their news now. What are three “make or break you” tips every blogger needs to know while having a blog?

  1. You have to invest in your blog. The people you see that have successful blogs online, invested time and money into whatever you’re seeing. This doesn’t mean you have to put a lot of money in to start, but you should buy a domain, choose a nice theme, and put some effort into learning how to be a master at your craft. That might mean taking a photography class or learning the basics of HTML from Google, but you have to do something.
  2. Creating content is the smallest part of your job a blogger. Creating content for your blog is probably going to take up about 20 percent of your time, while everything else like marketing, social media, pitching, design work, etc. will take up the rest of your time.
  3. Although it happens, you probably won’t become an overnight success or a millionaire by starting a blog and that’s OK.

I’ve read that there’s a launch coming soon, what does that entail? Any other future plans in store for Candice VanWye and Brown Girl Bloggers?

Yes! Brown Girl Bloggers is launching a new membership area in May. Our membership area will have original and curated stock photography featuring black and brown people, private forums and a private Facebook group, lots of learning materials to help bloggers create better content, writing prompts, weekly office hours with me, and live Q&As with successful women. There are also other perks like discounts and giveaways. You can sign up to learn more here. I’m also very excited to host live events later this year and next year, in which, our members will hear about first.

On a personal note, I have my podcast called The Creative Millennial where I interview amazing creatives every single week and I’ll continue to do the most on Instagram and Snapchat (@candicevanwye).

What’s VanWye’s definition of the phrase, Black girl magic?

I see Black girl magic in everything from hanging with my high school friends and cracking jokes in the ‘hood to seeing Black women thrive in careers like law to seeing us carve out niches on the internet and get paid to do it. Anytime I see a Black girl prospering I feel like I’m prospering and that’s the magic of being a Black girl. We are magic by default but when I see another Black girl living a life that makes her happy, regardless of the type of life it is, I see a little bit more of our magic.

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Gadgets News

Brickerbot is mysterious antimalware that nukes badly secured Internet of Shit gadgets

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The Mirai Worm is a seemingly unstoppable piece of malware that targets the garbage-security Internet of Things gadgets that have proliferated through the world; these gadgets then used to deliver equally unstoppable floods of traffic that endanger whole countries.

Because Mirai (and its cousins) use your devices to target other people, you might never even know that your gadget is destroying the world.

For the past week, security researcher Pascal Geenens has been tracking what appears to be a vigilante response to this threat, a competing worm he’s dubbed “Brickerbot,” which infects these insecure IoT devices and renders them permanently inoperable. Brickerbot is mutating fast, with four versions appearing in a week, each more powerful than the last.

Brickerbot appears to be a botnet hosted on thousands of vulnerable gadgets that are spared euthanasia in order that they might serve as executioners.

There are other vigilante botnets competing with it: Hajime has infected at least 10,000 devices, and is a successor, of sorts, to the Wifatch botnet, which shut down vulnerable devices in 2015.

Pascal Geenens, the researcher who first documented what he calls the permanent denial-of-service botnet, has dubbed the fiercest new instance BrickerBot.3. It appeared out of nowhere on April 20, exactly one month after BrickerBot.1 first surfaced. Not only did BrickerBot.3 mount a much quicker number of attacks—with 1,295 attacks coming in just 15 hours—it used a modified attack script that added several commands designed to more completely shock and awe its targets. BrickerBot.1, by comparison, fired 1,895 volleys during the four days it was active, and the still-active BrickerBot.2 has spit out close to 12 attacks per day. “Just like BrickerBot.1, this attack was a short but intense burst,” Geenens told Ars. “Shorter than the four days BrickerBot.1 lasted, but even more intense. The attacks from BrickerBot.3 came in on a different honeypot than the one that recorded BrickerBot.1. There is, however, no correlation between the devices used in the previous attack versus the ones in this attack.”

Commands performed by BrickerBot.3 are identical to those carried out by BrickerBot.1 except for several new ones that put new processes into the background until all resources are exhausted.

Shortly after BrickerBot.3 began attacking, Geenens discovered BrickerBot.4. Together, the two newly discovered instances have attempted to attack devices in the research honeypot close to 1,400 times in less than 24 hours. Like BrickerBot.1, the newcomer botnets are made up of IoT devices running an outdated version of the Dropbear SSH server with public, geographically dispersed IP addresses. Those two characteristics lead Geenens to suspect the attacking devices are poorly secured IoT devices themselves that someone has compromised and used to permanently take out similarly unsecured devices. Geenens, of security firm Radware, has more details here.

[Source:-boingboing]

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