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Internet

ASSOCHAM-Deloitte Study Says Nearly 950 Million Indians Still Don’t Have Internet Connection

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

ASSOCHAM-Deloitte Study Says Nearly 950 Million Indians Still Don't Have Internet Connection

Though mobile data plans in India are among the cheapest in the world and average retail price of smartphones is steadily declining, nearly 950 million Indians do not have an Internet connection, according to a joint study done by ASSOCHAM-Deloitte.

“Internet penetration is increasing in India, the access to affordable broadband, smart devices and monthly data packages is required to spread digital literacy to make their ends meet,” said the study.

The study titled ‘Strategic national measures to combat cybercrime’ said: “Existing government infrastructure assets should be further leveraged for provision of digital services at remote locations.

“Digital literacy needs to be increased by providing institutional training in schools, colleges and universities; accelerating partnerships with global technology leaders and using the workforce trained under Skill India to impart training.”

The ASSOCHAM-Deloitte study said an integrated approach between Digital India and Skill India needs to be constructed to design programmes and impart training.

Saying that the government should increase awareness regarding the value add of technology to increase technology adoption, the study added that the benefits of technology — increase in the standard of living of the weaker sections of society and enhancing financial inclusion should be communicated to citizens.
“Private sector players should be incentivised to develop infrastructure, provide services and promote digital literacy as part of the Digital India programme.

“Start-ups should be involved to create and customise apps to local needs to increase adoption of digital technology,” added the joint study.

It said the top barriers to adoption of technologies in the economically weaker sections of society as well as in micro small and medium enterprises (MSME) include cost and affordability.

“Most telecom operators so far have not invested significantly in development of high speed access networks in rural areas. Similarly, MSMEs also have low awareness of government and stakeholder schemes that could lead to numerous benefits,” the study said.

It said a key hindrance to adoption of technology is the low rate of digital literacy in India.

“Several initiatives undertaken by the government and other organisations are expected to improve the digital literacy rate in the coming years which will in turn result in an increase in adoption of technology and digital services.”

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

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Education

Isle of Wight Council ‘still failing’ in education

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Department for Education issues order keeping the council’s children’s services department in the hands of Hampshire County Council director

Isle of Wight Council is still failing to promote high standards in the island’s schools, according to a government order that leaves its children’s services department under the leadership of an outside official.

The direction from the Department for Education, dated November 28 and published today, comes only months after the chairman of Ofsted resigned after branding the island a poor white “ghetto”that suffers from “inbreeding”.

David Hoare quit in August, following an uproar over the comments he used when linking educational under-performance to the social problems he claimed the island suffered from.

It is the second time since 2013 that the DfE has issued a direction to the local authority because of concerns about standards of education, as well as children’s social care.

The latest direction says the council is “failing to perform some or all of its education functions”.

“Whilst there have been improvements, including an ‘effective’ judgement by Ofsted of the school improvement function (June 2014), key stage 2 and key stage 4 attainment in the council’s maintained schools remains below national averages,” it adds.

According to the latest Ofsted data, 33 per cent of the island’s schools are rated “requires improvement” or “inadequate”, compared with 11 per cent across England.

And following this summer’s GCSE exams, the provisional Progress 8 score for the area was “below average”, while 48 per cent of children at the end of primary school reached the expected standard, compared with a national average of 52 per cent.

External control

The direction orders the council to continue an arrangement dating from June 2013, which sees Hampshire County Council’s director of children’s services perform the same role at Isle of Wight Council, with responsibility for appointing all senior staff in children’s services and education services.

The order, which will remain in force until June 2018, also tells the council to regularly assess how it is performing its education functions, take “appropriate action” to make necessary improvements and cooperate with schools seeking to become academies, or being encouraged to convert by the government.

These actions will be monitored at regular termly meetings between the council and DfE officials.

Jonathan Bacon, Isle of Wight Council’s leader and executive member for children’s services, said: “The directive from government regarding children’s services on the Isle of Wight has always been for a period of five years, to 2018, in order to improve the service to ‘good’ in Ofsted terms.

“We have seen strong improvement through our partnership with Hampshire County Council, much faster than in comparable authorities. The next window of opportunity for a published inspection to show that we are ‘good’ is not until 2018; we expect this to be the findings.

“However, the Isle of Wight Council has been working hard with its community and partners, including Ofsted, to raise standards and attainment across all of the Island’s schools; education on the Isle of Wight is improving. There is now only one primary school on the island that is in a category [rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted] and no secondary schools; reducing the percentage of schools judged to be ‘inadequate’ in 2013 from 25 per cent down to just 2 per cent. Results and outcomes are getting better.”

[Source:- tes]

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Internet

Rocket Internet Trims Losses; Still Working on Listings for Its Startups

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Rocket Internet Trims Losses; Still Working on Listings for Its Startups

German e-commerce investor Rocket Internet reported progress on Thursday in cutting losses at its main startups with three set to generate profits by the end of 2017, while its shares were lifted by a plan to buy back convertible bonds.

Rocket Internet shares, which have been hit by concerns about mounting losses and cuts to the valuation of some of the company’s leading startups, were up 10.4 percent by 0920 GMT, but were still down a quarter on the year.

Finance chief Peter Kimpel said Rocket was still working towards a goal of a public listing for one of its 10 main startups in food delivery, fashion and home furnishings in the coming months, but said timing would depend on market conditions.

Rocket was forced to pull the listing of its HelloFresh recipe ingredients business last year, but markets have become more receptive recently to technology flotations, with rivals such as Takeaway.com and Blue Apron preparing to go public.

Along with HelloFresh, Rocket’s other most likely candidates for a listing are seen as food site Delivery Hero and emerging market ecommerce firm Global Fashion Group (GFG), which reported last week it had managed to stem its losses.

Rocket did not publish any figures on Thursday for Delivery Hero, the second-biggest in its portfolio, but Kimpel said it would give more information in due course. He also declined to comment on a recent funding round for the business.

“They are doing what they are supposed to be doing. Bringing companies to profit,” said Berenberg analyst Sarah Simon, who has a “buy” rating on the stock.

Kimpel said a decision to spend up to an additional EUR 85 million on convertible buybacks by Sept. 30, 2017 was taken because Rocket now felt it had “excess capital”.

Rocket, which listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange in 2014, saw its shares tumble in July 2015 when it said it would sell 550 million euros worth of convertible bonds. In February, it said it would buy back up to EUR 150 million of them.

Rocket reiterated a target set a year ago to turn three of its 10 main start-ups profitable by the end of 2017, pointing to smaller losses at home furnishings site Westwing and at GFG.

Aggregate first half revenue rose 32 percent to EUR 1.043 billion ($1.17 billion), compared to the 34 percent gain achieved in the first quarter as the rapid pace of expansion at HelloFresh, Rocket’s biggest investment, slowed.

Neil Campling, tech analyst at Northern Trust Capital Markets, said that was a major concern: “It would appear that the focus on improving profitability (or rather, less losses) is dragging on growth.”

Earlier this month, Rocket reported a first-half consolidated loss of EUR 617 million, mainly due to impairments on its GFG stake. On Thursday, it also said that figure included writedowns on its stake in Latin American ecommerce site Linio.

Rocket said it had decided against participating in a funding round for Linio involving Swedish investor Kinnevik , which cut the valuation of the business to EUR 150 million from a previous 370 million.

[Source:- gadgets. ndtv]

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Internet

US Intelligence Still Sorting Out NSA Hack

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

US Intelligence Still Sorting Out NSA Hack

The US is still probing the extent of a recent cyber leak of what purports to be hacking tools used by the National Security Agency, the nation’s top intelligence official said Wednesday.

“We are still sorting this out,” James Clapper, director of national intelligence, said at an event at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.

“It’s still under investigation,” Clapper said. “We don’t know exactly the full extent – or the understanding – of exactly what happened.”

The tool kit consists of malicious software intended to tamper with firewalls, the electronic defenses protecting computer networks. The leak has set the information security world atwitter – and sent major companies rushing to update their defenses.

The rogue programs appear to date back to 2013 and have whimsical names like EXTRABACON or POLARSNEEZE. Three of them – JETPLOW, FEEDTROUGH and BANANAGLEE – have previously appeared in an NSA compendium of top secret cyber surveillance tools.

The documents have been leaked by a group calling itself the “Shadow Brokers,” although many have floated the possibility of Russian involvement.

CIA Director John Brennan, who appeared with Clapper at the event, called cyber threats the most serious issue facing the nation.

“This administration, the intelligence community is focused like a laser on this and I would say the next administration really needs to take this up early on as probably the most important issue they have to grapple with,” Brennan said.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

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Tech Update

Microsoft, Sony, and other companies still use illegal warranty-void-if-removed stickers

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep
Xbox-Feature2

One of the ways manufacturers coerce users not to modify or even open hardware they’ve purchased is through warranty-void-if-removed stickers. These stickers are common on electronics equipment — Microsoft uses them on the Xbox One, Sony has them on the PS4, and you’ve probably owned a phone that had at least one somewhere.

These stickers are almost certainly illegal, as Motherboard points out in relation to the new Xbox One S. The problem with the stickers is that they run afoul of the FCC’s rules on tying repair services to specific products. This issue is also probably why Apple agreed to change its practices regarding iPhones, when devices that had been repaired by third-party shops would then suddenly fail when upgraded to Apple’s latest operating system.

“The stickers could be deceptive by implying consumers can’t use parts the warrantor doesn’t pre-approve, which violates the anti-tying provisions of MMWA,” FTC spokesperson Frank Dorman told Vice.

This practice isn’t remotely unique to Microsoft. The PS4 does the same thing.  Image by iFixit

Companies don’t like to talk about these policies, most likely because they don’t want to admit they’ve been doing something illegal for decades. Laws like the 1975 Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act were passed to prevent companies from tying customers to expensive repair contracts, or requiring customers to use only approved hardware installed by “authorized” resellers. The common example for this is with cars, where it’s illegal for a manufacturer to try and force you to only install their own parts.

There are, of course, limits to these laws. If you destroy your transmission or engine while servicing them, the manufacturer is under no obligation to repair the vehicle. What manufacturers aren’t allowed to do is refuse to honor a warranty on your engine just because you installed a different set of speakers or an aftermarket radio. The obligation is on the manufacturer to demonstrate that your third-party repairs or modifications caused the failure, not the other way around.

Modern electronics are tightly integrated, but the concept is the same. Microsoft isn’t allowed to prevent you from opening your own hardware, and neither is any other manufacturer. So why do they?

The answer is simple: Because they know you won’t do anything about it. It’s a nifty example of how companies get away with doing illegal things — the cost of taking them to court and forcing them to comply with the law is higher than the value of the product. A car is expensive enough to repair that companies can’t get away with telling you to pony up thousands of dollars for their own parts and repair shops. On the other hand, a smartphone can cost $500 to $700, but that doesn’t begin to cover the cost of a lawyer to litigate the issue, and Apple, Microsoft, and other companies know it.

In Microsoft’s case, its warranty states that it ceases to apply if the Xbox One is “opened, modified, or tampered with.” It’s flatly illegal. But until someone brings a case against the company and litigates it out, electronics companies will continue to put these stickers on their products, and consumers will continue to believe the manufacturers are legally allowed to do.

The situation is also playing out in new ways thanks to the advent of DRM. Tractor manufacturer John Deere and the Library of Congress have both resisted any attempt to require manufacturers to share data on firmware or other DRM’d blocks of information, because it could conceivably allow for piracy or alter the function of the vehicle. John Deere has gone so far as to claim that by purchasing a tractor, farmers gain “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.” It’s the concept of software licensing, except applied to hardware, and the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t seem to concern anyone much.

[Source:- extremetech]

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News Update

Why is Apple still being asked to unlock iPhone by the US government

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Apple has been asked to unlock more iPhones, this time involved in cases from Boston and Brooklyn. These demands have been made shortly after, FBI dropped the case against them after they managed to unlock an iPhone 5c without Apple’s help.

While Apple has helped the authorities access data on iPhones before, CEO Tim Cook took a stand against the FBI’s request for a universal key that would let them into any iPhone.

Eventually, the FBI did manage to unlock the iPhone 5c without Apple’s help and dropped the case against the phone maker. However, the method FBI acquired to unlock iPhones is valid only specific models of iPhone and the iPhone 5s — evidence for the Brooklyn case — can’t be unlocked using the same method.

According to a report in the New York Times, the technological solution found in the San Bernardino case would not work to get into the phone of the Brooklyn drug dealer, which has a different operating system.

“In this case, we still need Apple’s help in accessing the data, which they have done with little effort in at least 70 other cases when presented with court orders for comparable phones running iOS 7 or earlier operating systems,” said a Justice Department spokesperson.

So, prosecutors are asking for Apple’s co-operation to unlock the iPhone. But with the bitterness lingering from the court case, Apple sees this request as a recurring pattern. Especially, when the court case reached a point where Apple employees contemplated quitting before they build a back-door into their own security features.

Addressing the Spring Event, Cook started the evening by calling for a discussion on the topic of our privacies and how much control the authorities should have over it.

A lawyer for Apple told NYT that, that prosecutors were pushing the case not because of the value of the information in the phone, but rather to set a precedent that could be used to get into other locked iPhones.

[Source:- Hindustantimes]

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Education

Affordable education still out of reach for Indians | Opinion

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The NSO survey shows that only 10.6% of the Indian population aged above 15 years has successfully completed a graduate degree.

The NSO survey shows that only 10.6% of the Indian population aged above 15 years has successfully completed a graduate degree.(Gurminder Singh/HT File Photo )

Before last Sunday’s attack in Jawaharlal Nehru University, the students’ union was protesting a fee hike in the university for months. An analysis of National Statistical Organisation (NSO) data shows that affordable education is a larger problem that needs to be seriously discussed.

The NSO recently released a report based on an all-India survey conducted in 2017-18. The survey shows that only 10.6% of the Indian population aged above 15 years has successfully completed a graduate degree. This proportion is only 5.7% in rural India and is 8.3% among women. The proportion of graduates in the same age group was 8.2% as per the 2011 Census.

Since micro data for the 2017-18 survey on education is not yet available, it is not possible to go into the socio-economic background of those who received higher education. Another NSO survey, the 2017-18 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS),can be used for this, though.

The PLFS data confirms the intuitive belief that social and economic disadvantages perpetuate educational inequalities. The proportion of the population (15 years and above) with a graduate or a higher degree is much lower for the socially backward sections than others. Muslims fare worse than even the Scheduled Caste (SC) Hindus. To be sure, the social gap has been reducing over the years, but it still remains significant. There is also a gender gap when it comes to access to education. (See table 1)

 

A similar pattern can be seen by economic status as well. Disaggregation by deciles of monthly per capita consumer expenditure shows a strong correlation between economic status (spending) and educational attainment. Data clearly shows the social gap in educational attainment as well as the gap by economic status across and within socio-religious groups.

 

The NSO report on education also tells us about the average cost of education in the country.

The average annual expense on a graduate course was Rs 10,501 in a government institution, and almost double in an unaided private institution (Rs 19,972). The expenditure for a graduate degree in technical courses in a government college was Rs 36,180 as compared to Rs 72,712 in private unaided institutions.

This must be seen along with the income data available from PLFS (2017-18): 45% of the regular workers, 60% of the self-employed and almost all casual workers earned less than Rs 10,000 a month.

Overall, about 67% of Indian workers earned less than Rs 1,20,000 in a year.

India remains a country with an overwhelming number of poor people who cannot afford expensive education.

The NSS report on education spending also reveals that in the age group of 3 to 35 years, 15% of men and 14% of women never enrolled in an educational institution because of financial constraints; 5% of women never enrolled as there was ‘no tradition in community’.

Among those who were enrolled at some point in time but were not attending at the time of the survey, 24% of men and 18% of women cited financial constraints as the reason for dropping out; 13% of women cited marriage as the reason for dropping out.

What is the importance of a graduate degree in India? If we look at the distribution of graduates in the workforce, 62% were in regular jobs in 2017-18. The wage for a worker with a graduate (or higher) degree in salaried jobs was 1.6 times the overall average wage of a regular worker.

Here, it must be noted that the unemployment rate is much higher among the educated.

Quality education leads to better job prospects and higher wages for all, but also provides a path for social mobility. Students’ demand for better and just prospects for all is completely justified.

[“source=hindustantimes”]

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Education

The education system still has much to learn

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The education system still has much to learn

There is a driven, compulsive quality to Japanese education, which emerges clearly in a report by Shukan Toyo Keizai magazine titled “Schools are breaking down.”

Technological progress has a side-effect: an economy that demands higher and higher education as the price of admission into it. Children struggle to learn, and teachers to teach, more and more. Two resulting symptoms are overworked teachers and bullied, or bullying, children.

Karōshi (death from overwork) is a familiar phenomenon in the private sector but not one commonly associated with the teaching profession. And yet 60 percent of public junior high school teachers are “borderline karōshi,” Toyo Keizai says, meaning they work at least 60 hours a week, though contracted to work only 38 hours, 45 minutes. The overtime hours, largely unpaid, are spent preparing lessons, grading assignments and tests, supervising extra-curricular activities, counseling, dealing with concerned and/or obnoxious parents, attending meetings, handling administrative chores and so on.

One teacher, in November 2011, actually did work himself to death. He was 26 and in his second year of teaching junior high school in Osaka. He was dedicated. He thought his students deserved everything he had to give, and he gave everything. He collapsed one day in his apartment. He’d suffered a stroke. It took three years for his death to be officially recognized as karōshi.

Bullying is an old story, hardly confined to Japan, seemingly impervious to decades’ worth of measures to reduce it. In fact it’s rising. In extreme forms it amounts to nothing less than torture, physical and psychological. The ubiquitous smartphone makes the latter easy. You can say anything you like about anyone you don’t like. Smearing a classmate all over the net is an easy way to vent stress you can’t cope with otherwise — partly caused, maybe, by classmates smearing you all over the net.

In 2015, there were roughly 220,000 officially recognized bullying episodes in elementary, junior high and senior high schools nationwide — the most ever, nearly double the figure for 2006. Part of the increase is due to stricter reporting requirements. Schools were too apt to turn a blind eye. They had reputations to protect. A notorious instance, the immediate cause of the heightened requirements, was the suicide in 2011 of a boy in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture. It took the school two years to admit the boy had been bullied. Over 300 children a year in Japan kill themselves — 320 in 2016. The overall suicide rate is declining, but not the under-18 suicide rate, unchanged over the past decade. School can make childhood a living hell, unknown and unknowable to adults.

Toyo Keizai fears schools are going “black.” The reference is to burakku kigyō (black companies) that overwork and underpay employees to the point of neo-slavery. In the private sector, one-third of the workforce is officially part time — which is to say, paid like part-timers, though often worked like full-timers. Public elementary junior and senior high schools seem to be moving in that direction. As of 2013, one-sixth of their teaching staffs nationwide were part time. It saves money. A 41-year-old part-time teacher in her seventh year earns ¥2.46 million a year — roughly a third of a veteran full-time teacher’s salary, and little enough, ironically, to make her eligible for limited welfare assistance. Adding insult to injury, she never knows from one year to the next whether her contract will be renewed.

What, one wonders, of the quality of education in such a cauldron as the public education system seems to be, if Toyo Keizai’s picture is anything to go by? Much is made of international rankings, specifically those of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and Japan doesn’t fare too badly: second among OECD advanced nations in “science literacy” in 2015, up from fourth in 2012; fifth in “mathematical literacy,” up from seventh. The weak link in the chain is literacy literacy — more literally, reading comprehension — in which Japan ranked eighth, down from fourth.

Maybe science and mathematics are enough. Who needs words when you have numbers? This or that individual, or this or that employer, might not, but civilization as a whole might. The education ministry seems to think it does. Its introduction of moral education as a formal subject, effective next April, suggests as much.

An episode that occurred in Okinawa last month will bolster the view that a moral vacuum exists, which moral education must fill. Four teenagers allegedly vandalized a memorial in a cave in which civilians were forced to commit mass suicide in the closing days of World War II.

Teens do crazy things; it’s part of growing up, and maybe too much shouldn’t be made of it. But this particular stunt suggests a blindness and deafness to tragedy that Okinawa International University professor emeritus Masaie Ishihara, for one, sees as an education problem.

“I suspect,” Ishihara told the Mainichi Shimbun, “that history, and what happened during the Battle of Okinawa, are not being passed down to younger generations in education.”

It’s hard to “pass down” the past to a present in such rapid flux. Toyo Keizai mentions yet another burden on educators. Traditionally, school was one of three “pillars” in a child’s education. The other two were family and community. Career-oriented parents and weakened community ties leave school shouldering a near-monopoly that would strain it even under ideal circumstances, which present ones are not. Schools have their hands full keeping kids technologically primed. Kindergartens are teaching computer programming. The past? Who needs it? Who has time for it?

“Who needs it?” is a good question. There’s the all-to-oft-quoted line about those who forget the past being doomed to repeat it. If George Santayana, whose line it is, meant war, his thinking is open to question. Historical memory, and the resentments it breeds, have caused at least as many wars as historical forgetfulness. North Korea seethes not because it has forgotten the Japanese occupation but because it remembers it.

What to teach, how and to whom are permanent questions, increasingly urgent as postmodern civilization careens into an unknown future. If Toyo Keizai is right about schools “breaking down,” it’s a bad time for it to be happening.

Source:-japantimes

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Blogging

Riding the ‘new media’ wave + Is blogging still for ‘unserious’ people?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

When it comes to new media, you need to be flexible and go with the flow. A lot of it (new media) is learning what can catch and hold the attention of your audience and trying new things regularly to keep catching the interest of your ever growing audience.

Most of it is having the willingness to change the way you communicate with your audience so that you don’t lose your relevance. It is always a willingness to change the way you have always done things (at least for branding online) and be willing to walk into your future.

 

A ship is safe in harbour but that is not what ships are for – William G.T. Shedd

 

Don’t stay in your comfort. Be willing to try new things consistently to ensure that you grow and keep growing.

Having a social media platform that works is not having too much time on your hands that you cannot use for anything else. It is the future! It is the vehicle for influence and decision making.

It is having a digital business card.

 

When you have a social media platform that just lies there that and doesn’t share anything, impact the world around you or touch anyone’s life in anyway, it might as well be dead.

Let me tell you a story:

Damilola Elebe, was simply an OAP with Beat FM (with a salary at the end of the month that could satisfy some young people her age) but she was blessed with dreams of becoming a film writer, a book writer, anything writing until she got on social media and then met up with other young people who were already writing scripts for Multi Choice Nigeria. All of this happened in about two years and season 3 of her YouTube sitcom, Skinny Girl in Transit (It can be found on the internet if you use the the hashtag #SGIT to follow the conversation) will be released in a couple of weeks on Ndani TV.

She has so many opportunities and has had so many dreams realized because social media. Today she is still an OAP, a writer, a film maker and she is making important contributions to her community, much more than she was making as a fantastic OAP.

Dami Elebe is simply a friend on Twitter. We follow each other. You might say, that’s just social media but she has opened the door to so many opportunities for me, you have to call her a friend indeed.

Dami is just one person who has used social media for good. There are so many of them.

There’s Subomi Plumptre who creates solutions for brands and people. There’s Esther Ijewere who trains widows in skills acquisition programs, pays for school fees, feeds multiple families etc. There’s many groups where you can get doctors, lawyers, activists, teachers, trainers, everyone is using social media for good.

 

What the companies call Corporate Social Responsibility is being carried out by individuals and companies are partnering with them to achieve social good, faster than it used to be done in the days of Frank Olize. Frank Olize and Abike Dabiri were trail blazers in their era. But if they were just a hundred of them, there are thousands and ten thousands of new media professionals.

Omojuwa and a bunch of other entertainers raise millions in 3 days or more for individuals who need urgent medical care. While doing this they won the hearts of Nigerians and sold more albums or simply moved their ministry to the permanent site because of a lot of good will. They did a lot of good and benefitted a lot of Nigerians that might otherwise have been powerless.

They gave a voice to the powerless. If that is not the description of the power of media, I don’t know what is.

 

Social media has opened the door to communication louder than any tool ever has and you can seat in your couch wishing it away or you can jump on the train and leverage on the opportunities therein and there are many.

You need to brand yourself and keep branding. You must learn about branding and keep learning. Since strategies change daily, you must be learning on the go!

I can reel off the facts but money speaks louder for many people. So let me use Linda’s example.

Linda Ikeji’s mansion in Banana Island made everyone seat up. She is a blogger. The world has sat up long before then. See (CNN, FT, WSJ, BBC et. al.)

 

Sundar Pichai, the owner of Google came to Nigeria and he didn’t visit the government houses but he visited the online community. Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook visited Nigeria and the same thing happened.

 

This just lets us know a little too late that the age has changed again. The potential in technology is huge and instead of fighting it, we need to embrace it and learn, learn, learn, it is the future.

 

I was honoured to be part of blogville almost ten years ago when no one knew it existed and Mark Zuckerberg and Sindar Pichai were still on their way to becoming billionaires.

 

In case you are wondering who Sisi Yemmie is, she is the face on the Youtube video in Lagos, at the airports, at the places of important in Nigeria. How did she get there?

By simply vlogging regularly. She is a food vlogger and blogger who share her life and food experiences with her over 80K people on Youtube. She was a blogger first. She makes unimaginable income from blogging/vlogging.

She is not an unserious person.

 

I bet many people thought Mark Zuckerberg was an unserious person until Facebook became larger than the largest continent in membership. Once the money started rolling in, everyone became taking him seriously.

Nigeria might not be taking Sisi Yemmie seriously but Youtube is. Learn more about growing your personal brand from Sisi Yemmie.

Woli Arole was a guest on one of her blogs about growing your brand. Woli is really funny. He is not unserious. His instagram handle says that he is an MC, actor and an international stand up comedian. He started building his brand two years ago.

Just to prove it, He has 449.5K followers on instagram, he travels to many countries in the abroad to do shows. The money follows him. That’s the power of branding. The potential in technology is immense, we must study and learn what we need to take advantage of it.

I hope you enjoy this video because you can learn a lot about new media and how you can do it different from the way it has always been done.

NEW WORDS

Blogville: A place on the internet where people, young intellectual college undergraduates or college graduates used to journal their hopes and dreams and share and interact with like minded people from everywhere in the world

 

I put the names of some of the people I mention in links. So if you click on them, you can find them on Wikipedia. If I didn’t put the link, just type in the names on Google, put a comma and type wikipedia and you can read summaries of their personalities and achievements on Wikipedia.

 

Disclaimer: If I didn’t mention you and you are doing great things on social media, don’t hate, participate. Email me at [email protected] and let’s share what good and innovation is happening on social media.

 

[“Source-businessdayonline”]

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Uncategorized

HBO Hack: Probe Still Ongoing, Company Says

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

HBO Hack: Probe Still Ongoing, Company Says

HBO, the Time Warner cable network that broadcasts Game of Thrones, confirmed on Tuesday that it was investigating a hack that it disclosed to employees 10 days ago.

“The forensic review is ongoing,” HBO said in an emailed statement, noting that it was working with cyber security experts and law enforcement.

The hack came at a sensitive time for HBO, whose parent Time Warner is awaiting regulatory approval to sell itself to AT&T in an $85.4 billion deal announced in October.

The Guardian and other publications reported on Tuesday that hackers had posted some stolen HBO files online, demanding a bitcoin ransom to prevent additional releases.

Reuters was not able to view the leaked files or verify their authenticity.

Technology news site Mashable posted written demands that it said hackers claimed to have sent to HBO Chief Executive Officer Richard Plepler. The hackers said they had stolen a wide variety of confidential material including scripts to its programs, contracts, human resources documents and budget details.

A source familiar with the situation said the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing the matter. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment.

It was the second time documents have been released on the Internet that were purportedly stolen from HBO since the hack surfaced early last week. Entertainment Weekly reported last week that hackers stole 1.5 terabytes of data and leaked online a script or treatment for an upcoming episode of the network’s popular series Game of Thrones, along with yet-to-be-broadcast episodes of the series Ballers and Room 104.

HBO has provided few details about the hack. It said in its statement that it does not believe its “e-mail as a whole” was compromised, and added that it believed further leaks might emerge from the incident.

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

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