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Gadgets News

Nokia 9 Renders Surface on the Internet, Tipped to Ditch 3.5mm Headphone Jack

by Loknath Das October 12, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Nokia 9 Renders Surface on the Internet, Tipped to Ditch 3.5mm Headphone Jack

HIGHLIGHTS

Nokia 9 may ditch 3.5mm audio jack
HMD Global’s next flagship is said to be Nokia 9
Nokia 9 likely to sport glass finish at the back panel

Nokia 9, HMD Global’s much-anticipated flagship smartphone, has been leaked yet again. This time, the handset’s press renders based on leaks and rumours so far have surfaced on the Internet giving a good idea about the design of the handset. The new renders corroborate previous leaks, showing the Nokia 9 may indeed sport curved display and a dual rear camera setup.

The Nokia 9 mockups also suggest that the handset may sport glass finish at the back, much like the new iPhone 8 series. The new renders also indicate that the Nokia 9 may be the next premium smartphone to ditch the 3.5mm audio jack. We have already seen Google’s latest Pixel phones missing the feature. There’s a fingerprint scanner at the back panel, based on new renders. The renders also show the antenna bands on the side panels instead of the back of the device. The right panel is seen housing both power and volume controls on the alleged Nokia 9. The new renders have been posted by OnLeaks, which has a decent record when it comes to smartphone leaks before actual launch, and Compareraja. Considering the new renders are based on leaks, we can expect to see changes in the product when it launches.

Previous leaks have suggested that the Nokia 9 may come in 6GB and 8GB RAM options. Other rumoured specifications include IP68 certification and 128GB inbuilt storage. The leaks have also hinted that the Nokia 9 may be the company’s first to sport an iris scanner.

Not too long ago, Nokia 9 was reportedly spotted on the company’s website and seemingly showed the handset in promotional image. Nokia 9 is expected to be priced starting at EUR 750 (roughly Rs. 55,100) – a price that will see it compete with flagships from other companies such as Samsung and Apple. Other rumoured specifications include a dual camera setup at the back with two 13-megapixel Zeiss sensors with dual-LED flash support. It is said to sport a 5.5-inch QHD (1440×2560 pixels) display and be powered by Snapdragon 835 SoC.

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Nokia 9

KEY SPECS
NEWS

Display

5.30-inch

Processor

quad-core

Front Camera

12-megapixel

Resolution

1440×2560 pixels

RAM

4GB

OS

Android 7.1

Storage

64GB

Rear Camera

22-megapixel

Battery Capacity

3800mAh

Also See

Nokia 105 (2017) (Black)

Rs.1,006
Nokia 105 (2017) (Black) –

Rs.1,074
Nokia 105 (2017) (Black)

Rs.1,198

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

October 12, 2017 0 comment

Internet

We’re all connected now, so why is the internet so white and western?

by Loknath Das October 5, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Abidjan mobile phones

We recently passed a milestone in the history of human connectivity – people online now make up the majority of the world’s population. This has largely gone unnoticed, but it is an important moment and not just for statistical reasons.

North American and European internet users now make up only about a quarter of the world’s users. Furthermore, while countries like the US and the UK have almost reached internet saturation, Africa, Asia and Latin America are home to billions more people who will come online in the next few years.

The networking of humanity is no longer confined to a few economically prosperous parts of the world. For the first time in history, we are creating a truly global and accessible communication network. However, while access to the internet is quickly being democratised, research by us for the Geonet project at the Oxford Internet Institute shows that web content remains heavily skewed towards rich, western countries.

All of sub-Saharan Africa combined, despite having 10% of the world’s internet users, registers only 0.7% of the world’s domain names (a good proxy for how much web content is produced) and 0.5% of the world’s commits (or revisions) to GitHub (a proxy for how much computer code people write and share in a place). France alone produces 5.7 times more GitHub commits and 3.4 times more domain registrations than all the sub-Saharan countries.

The skewed geography and gender of Wikipedia edits is perhaps even more concerning. Research shows that the vast majority of content on Wikipedia written about most African countries is written by (primarily male) editors in Europe or North America. Wikipedia is one of the most used websites in the world and an important data source for countless platforms and services.

Huynh Thi Thai Muoi talks to her mother in Vietnam from her apartment in South Korea. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

So 20% of the world or less shapes our understanding of 80% of the world. This causes an amplification of geographical and gendered biases, including on search engines like Google. If you are using Google to search for local information in Belgium, Canada or Australia, you will be directed to primarily locally produced content. But if you’re in Sierra Leone, Pakistan or Indonesia, almost all content is produced by outsiders.

For a Nigerian woman going online, there are hardly any Wikipedia biographies of the women she reads about in a national newspaper. You might speak Mandarin, Bengali or Arabic, all of which are in the top 10 most spoken languages. But there are only 52,000 articles in the Bengali Wikipedia (a language spoken by 237 million people), while the Dutch Wikipedia has nearly 2 million articles for a country whose language is spoken by 28 million people.

In a world riven by stereotypes and discrimination, the internet should be challenging the biases of our physical world, not deepening them. In fact, the internet could well serve as a digital space that reflects and produces the richness of our world’s multiple forms of knowledge, through a combination of text, voice and visuals. As Google projected a few years ago, the world has nearly 130 million books in at least 480 languages. Yet in a world of nearly 7,000 languages and dialects, that means only about 7% of our languages are in published material. We need to do much more to capture the oral knowledge of our past and present.

So how do we make the internet look more like the world we live in? Those of us who make up most of the world need to bring our information and knowledge online, and all of us – wherever we are from – need to help make it happen.

A number of individuals, groups and campaigns have been working to make the internet more diverse and plural. Wikimujeres (and similar initiatives in different languages) work on increasing the number of women’s biographies from Latin America on the Spanish Wikipedia. Wiki Loves Africa expands the number of high-quality images from African countries, and Afrocrowd works to create and improve information on black culture and history on Wikipedia. Organisations such as the Association of Progressive Communications focus on women’s rights and knowledge in internet and telecommunications policies.

Whose Knowledge? is a global, multilingual campaign that works with these groups and beyond, to centre the histories and knowledge of the majority of the world that is underrepresented on the internet. For instance, in 2016 when we began, we worked with scholars from the Kumeyaay Native American community of southern California, on the Wikipedia article about the California gold rush, to reflect its deeply negative impact on Native American communities. In April, with our partners in Equality Labs, we held a Wikipedia editing session to include information about the 350 million people of India’s Dalit community, and wrote about inspirations like Grace Banu – the first transgender Dalit person to be admitted to an engineering college in Tamil Nadu. At the same time, we are working with communities such as the Dalit and the Kumeyaay to archive their oral knowledge and histories.

Google and other key mediators of information should have a responsibility to ensure that communities around the world are not flooded with foreign content, and that the internet begins to resemble the network for billions that it is meant to be. But we – as users – also have a responsibility to question the perspectives presented to us by the Googles and the Wikipedias of the world, and perhaps also to change them: to edit, to create, and to build the internet we want to see.

• Mark Graham is professor of internet geography at the Oxford Internet Institute in the University of Oxford and a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. His research focuses on digital labour, digital geographies and inequalities in our digital world

• Anasuya Sengupta is the co-founder and coordinator of Whose Knowledge? – a global, multilingual campaign to reimagine the internet to be for and from us all. She is supported by a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation for this work

Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to information.Thomasine F-R.

Source:-theguardian

October 5, 2017 0 comment

Education

Want Change In Education? Look Beyond The Usual Suspects (Like Finland)

by Loknath Das October 4, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Global innovation in education

Suharu Ogawa for NPR

In a tiny hamlet in Tanzania, children who have never been to school, and can’t recognize a single letter in any language, are about to start learning basic math and reading. They’ll do this with the help of a cutting-edge, artificially intelligent “tutor” who can hear what they are saying in Swahili and respond meaningfully.

In the slums of Bogota, Colombia, children play with special board games, dominoes and dice games that can teach them math and reading in a matter of months. Youth volunteers in the community help bring the games to younger children.

On the outskirts of Tokyo, a kindergarten is built more like a giant playground. There is a circular park on the roof. You can reach classrooms by climbing a tree. A slide that goes from top to bottom of the building and the furniture is made of lightweight wooden boxes that the children can reconfigure themselves.

These three ideas have something in common. Each is part of a distinct global effort underway right now to identify important innovations in education and to help them spread.

The first project, RoboTutor from Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the just-announced finalists in the Global Learning Xprize, a $15 million innovation competition sponsored by Tesla founder and visionary Elon Musk. Mission: Create a software application that will enable children to learn basic math and reading independently.

The second, Literacy Education and Math Lab or LEMA, was highlighted in a recent report from the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education titled “Can We Leapfrog? The Potential of Education Innovations to Rapidly Accelerate Progress.” Brookings has cataloged 3,000 innovations from 166 countries so far.

The third, known as Fuji Kindergarten, was picked by a Finnish nonprofit called HundrED dedicated, again, to spreading the top educational innovations from the world, around the world. Today they announced their first global group of 100 ideas from 42 countries.

Something big is happening here. Governments, nonprofits, donors and educators are gearing up to try to solve two intractable, and seemingly disparate, problems — at the same time.

The first one is that not enough children are learning the basics. The second is that the basics are no longer enough. And to solve these two problems, they are working hard to spotlight and spread innovations that go far beyond Silicon Valley.

100 years behind

The first problem, and likely the most familiar, is inequality. More than a quarter of a billion kids worldwide don’t attend school, and that number hasn’t budged for a decade. The Global Learning Xprize challenge is addressed specifically at these children, who may never see the inside of a schoolhouse or meet a trained teacher.

For those who are in school, meanwhile, there is a massive gap in basic skills between the richest and the poorest. You can express this as points on a standardized test: in the United States, for example, that gap is almost 40 percentage points in math at the highest level.

Or, you can express it in years: Adults living in the poorest countries in the world are about as educated as the average for adults in rich countries 100 years ago. And, at the rate they’re going, it would take another century to catch up.

But there’s a second problem. Just learning reading and math the way it was done 100 years ago is not going to prepare anyone for the future. Up to 70 percent of the tasks in most jobs are on track to be automated, leaving only the most creative, empathetic, technically fluent, collaborative work for humans.

Students need to find motivation and meaning, and take a playful attitude that makes it safe to try and fail.

It’s as though half the world’s children were 100 years behind on learning to walk, but everyone now needs to dance.

From walking to dancing

That’s why Rebecca Winthrop of Brookings asked the question “Can We Leapfrog?” In other words, she says, “How quickly can we transform both what and how children learn?”

Leapfrogging as a concept is often associated with technology. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia and elsewhere adopted mobile communications without ever having extensive landline or telegraph networks. Kenya is a world leader in mobile payments because the system came in before people had formal bank accounts or credit cards. Social goals like sustainability can leap forward, too. This summer the nation of India, where car ownership is far behind the U.S., announced a goal to sell only electric vehicles by 2030. China is leading the world in both production and installation of solar power.

But schooling is fundamentally a human enterprise.

Change can’t just be a matter of mass-producing some technological marvel and pushing it to market. And there are many in the development world, says Winthrop, who argue that poor countries should master the basics before trying to address 21st century skills. Can you really take people who can’t walk and show them the moonwalk?

Her work argues that it has to be both/and.

“From the learning sciences literature we know that kids can learn small things,” like addition and subtraction, “on the way to big things” — like creativity and collaboration, she says. “We’re not doing poor kids any favors by the drill-and-kill method.” Projects like LEMA, the board game project that started in Latin America and is now in 16 countries, bring a playful attitude to learning, which is part of cultivating what Winthrop calls a 21st century “breadth of skills.”

Leapfrogging isn’t about supplanting traditional schools, Winthrop explains, but it does address the need to change how they do business. Even in rich countries with high literacy rates, like the United States for example, there’s a great deal of dissatisfaction expressed about education. And here’s where leapfrogging really gets interesting: Some of the places with the fewest resources can become sources for huge inspiration.

Identifying great ideas is one thing, but getting them to spread is another. It requires overcoming a silo effect, says Saku Tuominen, the Finnish innovation expert who is the creative director of HundrED.

“If you think of a teacher in Helsinki, New York, New Delhi, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, they haven’t got the faintest idea what is happening in another city on the classroom level,” he says. In fact, they often don’t even know much about what the teacher down the hall is doing.

One theme he’s identified among the innovations highlighted so far has to do with exactly that problem: thinking about new ways for teachers to collaborate and co-teach. Other professions are increasingly evolving in a collaborative direction, he notes; why not teaching?

His nonprofit offers free support in PR and consulting to educators with ideas worth sharing, and it helps identify schools that want to adopt the ideas. “We’re moving to a global world and it’s time to make education global as well.”

[“Source-npr”]

October 4, 2017 0 comment

Education

The education system still has much to learn

by Loknath Das September 30, 2017

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

September 30, 2017 0 comment

Blogging

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

by Loknath Das September 25, 2017

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”]

September 25, 2017 0 comment

Blogging

Dover’s Nicole Warner is enjoying the Swiss life — and blogging about it

by Loknath Das September 23, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Image result for Dover’s Nicole Warner is enjoying the Swiss life -- and blogging about it

The first thing Nicole Warner noticed about Switzerland was that it wasn’t anything like her home state.

“Coming from Delaware, the mountains here are pretty incredible,” the First State expat said. “I remember when I was in high school we were on a hill in Pennsylvania and I called it a mountain. I got laughed at. Seeing the mountains here in Switzerland is just amazing to me.”

Warner, a 2000 graduate of Dover High, has been spending a lot of time among those mountains: for the past two years she and husband Paul have been living in Zug, Switzerland, surrounded by snow-covered Alpine peaks. She writes about their life in her blog, “Warner Wanderweg,” creating a colorful travelogue for her family and anyone curious about living overseas.

So far, the couple and their Hungarian Vizsla, Darcy, have journeyed to the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and Liechtenstein.

“We are less than an hour away from there so one afternoon we spontaneously decided to go,” she said of the tiny principality. “We drove there after lunch, saw the castle, and were home by dinnertime.”

Days in Delaware

Warner, 34, is a native Delawarean, born to Donald and Sharon Petersen at the Dover Air Force Base hospital. Soon after coming into the world, her father was transferred to Berlin, where he served three years before coming right back to Dover.

“That was too long ago for me to remember, but I wonder if German sounds more familiar to me because of it,” she said.

Warner has pleasant memories of growing up in Kent County.

“When I was able to drive, a bunch of friends and I would go out to Rehoboth and spend the entire day on the beach and on the boardwalk,” Warner recalled.

Over evenings were spent at the old Kent Drive-in with friends J.B. Hogan, Luke Siler and Mellora Taylor.

“We’d pack up some snacks and the radio and some blankets and just go watch movies,” Warner said.

After graduating in 2004 from the University of Delaware with a fine arts degree, she lived in Philadelphia, where she met her husband, Paul. He works in the pharmaceutical field but also had studied for a time in Germany.

They were married in 2013.

“He’d always wanted to live in Europe and that was one thing he told me before we got married,” she said. “We thought it was a good time to do it.”

Blog provides more insight

Naturally, Warner has noticed a lot of differences between the United States and Europe.

“We don’t have suburban sprawl over here,” she said. “As soon as you go out of a town, you’re in the countryside. There’s a lot of easy access to public transportation and to shopping; my grocery store is just a five-minute walk from my house.”

Warner was impressed with the Swiss penchant for cleanliness, even when it comes to their highways and roads.

“They really care about keeping their communities clean,” she said. “You don’t see trash on the ground, and if you do, you’re offended.”

Europe also is incredibly dog-friendly, meaning they can take Darcy almost everywhere, including stores and restaurants.

She enjoys the open markets found in German and French towns that are only a short distance drive from Zug. Over the holidays they visited 24 separate Christmas markets including the world-famous Nuremberg market.

And, of course, they’ve traveled to Munich.

“We went there for a soccer game and said, ‘Hey, they’re having Oktoberfest, so let’s go,’” she recalled. “It’s only a three-hour drive, and we can do it in a weekend.”

Warner began her colorful blog soon after arriving overseas.

“I wanted to share photos and stories with my family and to give people a little insight into our lives and to share our experiences,” she said. She and Paul both contribute, as does Darcy, who makes entries — with a little help — to give a dogs-eye view of European life.

“The blog is awesome,” Sharon Petersen said. “Her grandfather, he can’t travel anymore, and her writing and photography allow him to experience it through her eyes.

“It’s made it so much easier for us since we can’t have her close by.”

Warner has learned Europeans are very interested in American affairs of state.

“Everyone here pays very close attention to politics in America. Even my neighbors, who don’t speak English, want to learn. They really care about what’s happening in America.”

While Paul works at his office, Warner, who is seven months pregnant, works at home.

“I’m spending my days learning German, oil painting and figuring out the Swiss art scene,” she said. “I also do a lot of hiking with the dog and carrying around this watermelon that in two months will be a baby boy.”

She’s also working on some chapter illustrations for a book old friend J.B. Hogan is writing, Warner said.

Paul’s contract is open-ended, so the Warners don’t have a set plan for when they’ll return to the United States.

“There’s really no deadline,” she said.

“I think they’re having a really great experience,” Donald Petersen said. “They have the availability of travel and not taking too much time out of their day to do it. I think it’s really great that they’re taking advantage of being able to visit other areas.”

Living in Europe has, thus far, been a life-changing experience, Warner said.

“I think living in a different place you get to see other people’s cultures and how different things are from back home,” she said. “You get to reflect on your culture. There are many things I enjoy about European culture, and being here gives you a chance to step back and see some really positive things about each.”

[“Source-milfordbeacon”]

September 23, 2017 0 comment

Internet

Avril Lavigne is the internet’s most dangerous star – but that’s nothing new

by Loknath Das September 21, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Avril Lavigne in 2002, about a year before her supposed replacement by a lookalike. Photograph: Jim Cooper/AP

Not every article is written while wearing full hi-vis, Perspex goggles, hard hat and abseiling harness, with a police-quality Taser sleeping like a lazy boomslang next to the keyboard.

But this is one such story. That is because I have been tasked with reporting on Avril Lavigne, and “Avril Lavigne” has just been named the most dangerous celebrity search term on the internet.

Malware expert McAfee produces an annual poll, ranking the risk that searching for certain names will lead you to a malware-rich environment, leading to potentially mailicious websites and cybercriminals. This year, for Avril, the risk was 14.5%. It rose to 22.5% when users searched for “Avril Lavigne MP3s” (the fools don’t even know the MP3 format is low quality and now defunct).

In a crowded field, the Canadian tween-punk beat the likes of Bruno Mars, Carly Rae Jepsen, Zayn Malik and Sean Combs, who made up the rest of the top five.

Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, married to Lavigne in 2013. Photograph: Handout

This is not an in-with-a-bullet No 1 for Lavigne, who despite having done little of commercial interest in the past decade, sat at No 2 on last year’s list. Somewhere, for reasons known only to the vagaries of nostalgia and the dank breeding pods of web culture, Lavigne has become a kind of meme unto herself.

The internet already knows that Nickelback is the sound a comedy writer makes in their head when searching for a reference that means “bad music for numbskulls”. When Avril married lead singer Chad Kroeger in 2013, she was not only creating a twisted Canadian pop royal family, she was also marrying into a meme factory. She may have since divorced him, but when you marry memes, you marry for life.

Just as importantly, there is the ongoing attempt to expose her as a having died and being nothing more than a lookalike called Melissa. The theory, which began on a Brazilian fan site and seems to have spread to every corner of the internet, says that a young Avril, uncomfortable with her fame, began using a body double in certain situations. Then, at some point, the real Avril died. So her record label just kept going with the clone. After all, “Melissa” was written on her hand in a photo shoot – and who doesn’t write their own secret name on their hand in publicity shots? All of which was given credence by her near-fatal encounter with Lyme disease in 2015.

But perhaps Avril’s bad rep is merely about timing? She was peaking in popularity (with a very young Bebo-savvy crowd) at the exact point the internet itself was moving from a place of sinister coves and Pirate Bays into the glossy corporate content-engine we know and love today.

After all, as long ago as 2008, her video for Girlfriend became one of the first on YouTube to bust through the 100m views mark. This traffic, though, was itself allegedly driven mainly from a dodgy source – one fansite that encouraged users to follow a link which would keep the video open in their browsers, then refresh it every 15 seconds to spike the view-counter. The malware motherlode normally comes through similar shady sub-scripts – the saga continues.

Since you’re here …

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to information.Thomasine F-R.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure.

[“Source-theguardian”]

September 21, 2017 0 comment

Online Marketing

Why digital marketing is the next big career opportunity

by Loknath Das September 21, 2017

written by Loknath Das

India’s digital growth story is both interesting and surprising. The country has embraced digitization so rapidly that it has created a large opportunity for online marketing.

On August 15th, 1995, VSNL introduced public internet access in India. In 2000, only 0.5 percent of the Indian population had access to internet facilities. After 16 years, the figure climbed to 28 percent with 373 millioninternet users.

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) report, by 2021, 829 million Indians (59 percent of the population) are expected to take an incredible leap towards internet accessibility. With the transformation from lower-generation network connectivity (2G) to higher-generation network connectivity (3G, 3.5G, and 4G or LTE), there is scope for the broad adoption of video, high bandwidth data, and advanced multimedia applications contributing to increased mobile and Wi-Fi traffic.

Say hello to digital marketing

India’s internet revolution is a perfect launch pad for online brands. While digital marketing looks promising, brands get overwhelmed with responsibilities like SEO, content ideation, social media strategy, email marketing, website design, and more.

According to IMRB International study, India currently spends 12 percent on digital marketing. The Times Internet comprehensive online study of CMO’s and CDO’s states that digital spending shoots up to 50-55 percent for some brands and industries. The spending is as high as 75-80 percent for new age online retail firms.

Additionally, 90 percent of Indian brands spend 15 percent of their annual marketing budget on social media.

Online businesses’ challenges are digital marketers’ strengths

With companies busy running business operations, they cannot invest quality time on understanding top, middle and bottom funnel objectives for an engaging audience. It becomes difficult for them to devote resources to study the ever-changing online marketing landscape.

Digital marketers come to their rescue by lowering the business costs to a great extent as compared to traditional marketing tactics.

They solidify the survival and business growth by targeting the right people at the right time.
These professionals identify and prioritize the key performance indicators (KPI) by auditing your audience’s behaviour on digital channels.
By analysing the performance of online marketing campaigns, they help companies make informed data-driven decisions for optimal customer experience.

Digital India

With India going digital, here are some statistics to brighten a digital marketers’ career in coming years:

With a mighty 241 million monthly users in July 2017, India claimed the first spot among the leading countries ranked according to the Facebook users leaving behind USA and Brazil.
In 2021, Indian internet traffic will be 291 times the entire Indian internet in 2005.
From 2016 to 2021, internet traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32 percent.
2.0 billion networked devices will be available in 2021. In 2015 and 2016, the number was 1.4 billion and 1.3 billion respectively.

By 2021, IP traffic will reach 5 gigabytes per capita.

The massive growth of digital marketing in India is self-explanatory from the unprecedented jump of users from 0.5 to 59 percent. There is 9142.5 percent increase in the number of internet users from 2000 to 2017.

Although Indians are second to Chinese in the number of internet users worldwide, India does not feature in the top 50 countries with the highest internet penetration rates. Despite the gigantic stats, we are still scratching the surface. Undoubtedly, digital is the future.

Boom for Indian languages: endless options for digital marketers

According to a Google and KPMG report (April 2017), titled ‘Indian Languages- Defining India’s internet’, 9 out of every 10 new internet users in India are likely to be regional language users over the next five years. Indian language internet users will surpass the English internet.

As compared to 175 million English internet users, currently there are 234 million Indian language internet users. According to the report, in the next four years, Indian language internet users will reach 536 million at 18 percent CAGR while English users will grow at 3 percent CAGR to reach 199 million. Increase in digital literacy, penetration of internet enabled devices, high-speed data availability has resulted in the growth in user base.

From October 2015 to October 2016, the urban internet users grew by 9 percent, whereas the rural users growth skyrocketed to 26 percent, as per a joint report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI) and IMRB. The report revealed that while the urban Indian internet penetration is 59 percent, it is only17 percent for rural India.

However, according to Boston Consulting Group study, by 2020, half of India’s internet users will be rural. So, there is still an ample scope for exploring India’s digital market.

In rural-urban analysis, the statistics show the inclination of rural internet users towards entertainment and social networking. They were least interested in online ticketing and shopping experience.

Google report tells that mobile applications enabled with Indian languages increases the possibility of adoption of online services among regional language internet users. It gives open access for online companies to expand their network in unexplored areas. That’s icing on a cake for digital marketers.

Government’s Initiative: Double boost for digital marketing landscape

For solving affordability and mobile data quality issues in rural areas, the center and state collaborated to give a green signal to National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN). This project aims to provide 100 Mbps broadband connectivity to all the gram panchayats.

For the second phase, Bharat Net- updated and upgraded version of NOFN- envisions connectivity to all 2,50,500 gram panchayats by using an optimal mix of aerial fibers, underground fiber, radio and satellite media. For the third phase, from 2018 to 2023, the focus will be on the future-proof network, state-of-the-art, with a ring topology.

In 2016, United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) passed a nonbinding resolution to make internet access a fundamental human right. In India, Kerala becomes the first state for adopting the internet as a basic human right. For promoting the digitization moment, the government is working on the proposal of installing optical fiber network for providing internet access to every citizen of Kerala.

Mobile Internet Users: Boon for digital marketers

Indians love surfing internet from mobile: 79 percent of them accessed the internet through mobile in February 2017. Of the G20 nations, they are number one regarding mobile internet usage, leaving behind the UK (34.8 percent) and US (37.2 percent) with a gap more than double.

According to Ashish Kalsi, strategist, search quality of Google India, the Indian internet users tally would go up to 500 million by 2017, out of which 400 million will access the net through a mobile device.

With the entry of Chinese brands, a new line of smartphones have ushered in with big screens, improved user interface, and local language support at an affordable cost.

750 million rural people don’t have proper access to internet facilities. With affordable data plans and mobile devices, the growth of internet usage will increase in rural heartlands. Like urban Indians, they’ll start integrating digital payments, online booking, e-commerce in their daily lives.

Conclusion

From the nostalgic dial up connection sound in the 90’s to the hi-speed Wi-Fi era, internet has become an indispensable part of our lives. With increase in digital marketing spendings, government’s initiative to propagate the agenda of Digital India and mobile device penetration to the remote areas, the possibilities are endless for digital marketers to help companies build a long-lasting online presence.

Gone are the days, when only the customers became loyal to brands. Noisy online marketplace has pushed brands to become loyal to their clients. With rising number of internet users, businesses will require digital marketers for targeted awareness and focused engagement. Today, marketing has shifted from “one-to-many” to “one-to-one.”

Therefore, the career opportunities in digital marketing look bright and promising.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

Get your tickets now for India’s largest tech-startup conference! Last chance to get TechSparks tickets at 45% off. Prices go up at 11:00 PM today. Click here to book your tickets now!

[“Source-yourstory”]

September 21, 2017 0 comment

Gadgets News

iPhone X, iPhone 8 Price in India Almost 40 Percent More Than the US Price

by Loknath Das September 19, 2017

written by Loknath Das

iPhone X, iPhone 8 Price in India Almost 40 Percent More Than the US Price

HIGHLIGHTS

The new iPhone models were launched on Tuesday
iPhone X comes with edge-to-edge display
iPhone X pricing in India starts from Rs. 89,000

iPhone X price in India has created a new benchmark for expensive phones in India, topping the Rs. 1 lakh mark with the 256GB variant. Before this, the highest price tag for a phone was iPhone 7s Plus 256GB’s Rs. 92,000 at the time of the handset’s launch, but the iPhone X India price tag tops that by Rs. 10,000. There is, of course, the 64GB variant that costs Rs. 89,000 but even that is not pocket friendly. The high iPhone X price in India seems even more expensive when you consider the US pricing of the handset, which once again raises the question whether buying it from the US is a better option.

Here’s a comparison between the iPhone X prices in India and the US – as well as those of iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus – to help you get a better idea of how much more expensive in the country compared to Apple’s home market. But before we start the price comparison, we want to clarify that manufacturers have to pay when they import smartphones to a particular country – without fail, you will find that the direct conversion of pricing will show that Indian pricing of the iPhone is higher than in US. We are comparing the prices just to give an idea to the users about the difference, leaving aside fluctuation of exchange rates and purchasing power parity. Also to be noted is that US pricing does not include taxes, roughly 10 percent and varying from state to state. Indian pricing does.

iPhone X price in India vs the US

Starting with the flagship iPhone X, the 64GB variant of the smartphone has been priced by the Cupertino-based company in US at $999. In India, the handset will be made available at a steep price of Rs. 89,000 which roughly translates to $1,388, around 39 percent more than in the US. If we talk about the 256GB storage variant of the iPhone X, the price in India sets you back by Rs. 1,02,000, while the US pricing stands at $1,149, around 39 percent higher than the US again.

iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus price in India vs the US

Moving to the iPhone 8, the 64GB variant of smartphone has been priced in the US at $699. In India, the handset will be made available at a price of Rs. 64,000, which roughly translates to $998, around 43 percent more than in the US. If we talk about the 256GB storage variant of the iPhone 8, the US pricing stands at $849 while in India the smartphone will set you back by Rs. 77,000, which is roughly $1,200 and around 41 percent higher than its US price.

Finally coming to the iPhone 8 Plus, the 64GB variant of smartphone has been priced in the US at $799. In India, the handset will be made available at a price of Rs. 73,000, which roughly translates to $1,139, around 43 percent more than in the US. If we talk about the 256GB storage variant of the iPhone 8, the US pricing stands at $949 while in India the smartphone will set you back by Rs. 86,000, which is roughly $1,341 and around 41 percent higher than its US price.

While the iPhone 8 models pre-orders in India will begin on September 22, and will be launched in India on September 29, the pre-orders for iPhone X will start on October 27, and shipping will begin on November 3.

As you can see from the price difference, India is among the markets where the price difference is on the higher side in comparison to the US. Let us know in comment section if pricing will keep you from buying new iPhones or you like them enough to pay the price.

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Apple iPhone X

KEY SPECS
NEWS

Display

5.80-inch

Processor

hexa-core

Front Camera

7-megapixel

Resolution

1125×2436 pixels

OS

iOS 11

Storage

64GB

Rear Camera

12-megapixel

Also See

Apple iPhone 7 Plus (Red, 256GB) –

Rs.81,999
Apple iPhone 7 Plus (Rose Gold, 256GB)

Rs.90,000

Apple iPhone 8

KEY SPECS
NEWS

Display

4.70-inch

Processor

hexa-core

Front Camera

7-megapixel

Resolution

750×1334 pixels

OS

iOS 11

Storage

64GB

Rear Camera

12-megapixel

Also See

Apple iPhone 7 (Red, 256GB) –

Rs.60,990
Apple iPhone 7 (Gold, 256GB)

Rs.67,000
Apple iPhone 7 Plus (Black, 32GB)

Rs.59,590

Apple iPhone 8 Plus

KEY SPECS
NEWS

Display

5.50-inch

Processor

hexa-core

Front Camera

7-megapixel

Resolution

1080×1920 pixels

OS

iOS 11

Storage

64GB

Rear Camera

12-megapixel

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

September 19, 2017 0 comment

Blogging

A Trail For All Cities: The Journey Of Trell From An Instagram Handle To A Visual Blogging Platform With Over 30K Users

by Loknath Das September 18, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Image result for A Trail For All Cities: The Journey Of Trell From An Instagram Handle To A Visual Blogging Platform With Over 30K Users

“What you seek is seeking you.” For Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO Trell, a visual blogging app which started its journey from Instagram, that search started around three years back in Mumbai.

It was the time of Mumbai’s most famous festival Ganesh Chaturthi and Pulkit was looking for a good pandal to go to. He reminisces, “I had been in Mumbai for four years but I never got the chance to see good Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations apart from the famous ones. I didn’t know how it was celebrated in the local streets. Even on the Internet, almost everyone talked about those four-five famous pandals which everyone knows of.”

So Pulkit resorted to a local Mumbai friend who took him to those unheard of pandals which no one apart from a local would know of! For him, those culturally rich pandals on myriad themes like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Bollywood stars’ whereabouts, splendid Tamil architecture, Ramayana skits, were a revelation. When he asked his friend how she knew about these hidden gems, she revealed that information about such places is only available with localities and they would not share it anywhere online unless they are into blogging. More so, blogging is difficult and tedious for people who are not into writing and do not have time to write long-form content.

And that sparked the idea of filling this gap of sharing local interesting knowledge, even for people who are not into blogging. Pulkit explains, “So we wanted to solve this problem of how we can make it easier for people to blog and make it more fun. The idea was to make blogging‘fun’, ‘visual’ and ‘intuitive’ for everyone including the teenagers so that they could use it easily to start sharing these local titbits and inspire journeys for people like us.

Thus, Trell (TRail experiences and tELL your friends) was born in November 2016. The team noticed that on Instagram there were lots of handles like Mumbai foodie were picking up quite well. They had more than 200,000 followers and getting a lot of likes and comments. So they first decided to start on Instagram to test waters, to see how people are discovering new things through such handles.

visual blogging-trell-instagram

The visual blogging platform started off first as an Instagram handle (@trellingmumbai) in Mumbai and posted about exclusive and relatively unknown things in the city. Within four months, Trell started going viral with more than 40,000 followers. For Pulkit and his co-founders Prashant Sachan, Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Arun Lodhi and Nirav Sheth, that was a validation for the fact that there is a need for something like this. The team also started hosting meet-ups like photo walks or food ones and roping in some of the really good food, travel influencers. This helped them understand how these influencers are using Instagram to their advantage.

Interacting with more than 1000 bloggers and travelers personally led them to realise their needs, restrictions of existing platforms and gaps in the ecosystem. As a result, the team discovered that writing in English is not natural to all, so most were more inclined to using visual mediums. Thus, by combining these learnings from both the consumer’s and the creator’s end, they came up with a platform.

Trell is typically a visual blogging platform where people can create these visual stories, incorporate visual tags to make it easy to share their story. The location-based storytelling platform helps people create beautiful collections of their travel stories, favourite food places, and other explorations. It helps them in discovering new experiences around them through their peers, which they can save in a self-reminding bucket list. The startup launched the Trell app in July 2017 which is now is accessible on Android, iOS and Web.

trell-visual blogging-instagram

30K Users, 80K Visual Blogging Posts, 300K Instagram Followers

Trell’s initial focus was on Instagram, where it rapidly grew to more than 100,000 followers. Today that number stands close to 300,000. Post launching the latest version of the app two months back, the visual blogging platform now claims to have amassed more than 30,000 users who are using the platform actively and have created posts related to more than 25,000 locations. As of today, Pulkit claimed that there are roughly 80,000 visual blogging posts on the platform.

visual blogging-trell-instagram

Trell reveals that people are not using it a normal blogging platform, but are rather talking about different things such as beautiful bungalows in Indiranagar (Bengaluru) or something beautiful in their community parks. The team claims the community in total has followers spread across 15 cities and reaches out to people with 5 Mn+ weekly impressions on Instagram.

Trell gives travelers and foodies an avenue to share their explorations as beautiful visual blogs called “Trails”. All trails are Google searchablewhich ensures the discovery of these visual blogs & people as they expect from a traditional blogging platform.

The startup is currently bootstrapped but in advance talks with some prominent investors for closing an angel-funding round. As per Pulkit, the funding will enable Trell to focus on enhancing the app experience and fuel user-base growth going ahead.

Trell Makes To ‘Top 20’ For The Worldwide Mobile UX Awards

As far as monetisation is concerned, Trell started monetising from its Instagram handle. And the same avenues are being leveraged on the platform as well. For instance, though the Instagram handle, it was able to get some of the advertisers to advertise on the handle or basically do influencer marketing. The startup also held various competitions and meetups for various brands.

In addition, Trell is also focusing on the data about the users and how to personalise it. So on the platform, it has an action button called Tryout. If someone likes some post about a place, one can tap on Tryout. It bookmarks the post by adding it to a self-reminding bucket-list. So whenever he/she is around that place, it will remind him/her that the place is in his/her bucket list. This is something the startup can again leverage for advertising. Also, the startup will explore in-app native advertisements and revenue through promoted places and business claims.

trell-visual blogging-instagram

Along the way, Trell also got selected in StartupBootcamp’16 – (Europe’s Largest Accelerator) as “Top 10 promising startups worldwide”, Nasscomm’s 10K Program and FBStart’17 for the same. It is also the only Indian Startup which recently got featured in ‘Top 20′ for the Worldwide Mobile UX Awards which includes other heavyweights like Crunchbase, Wattpad, EventBrite etc recently got awarded for offering the best user-experience in Social and Communications category.

trell-visual blogging-instagram

The Other Visual Discoverers

Pulkit states that Trell is not trying to compete with Instagram or any other social network because Trell doesn’t see itself as a social network. “We see ourselves as an interest-based network wherein people are coming and blogging about stuff they have been already doing,” he says. He points out that there will be very less non-useful content on Trell and more of interest based content on Trell. This contention is based on the feedback from the users also; who Pulkit claims do not compare it with Instagram or any other platform. Specifically, because Instagram is about your highlights of the living moment, whereas Trell is about the things that you explore on the basis of your interest.

However visual discovery is a growing space and Instagram and Pinterest remain one of the big contenders in this space. Another Bengaluru-based startup galleri5 also focuses on the same themes, enables users to find amazing photos of things they love, such as amazing places to travel to, interesting activities to try out, tempting culinary dishes to experiment and any other thing that might inspire someone. Hence Trell is not the only Indian startup surfing the visual discovery space. Meanwhile, in the discovery space, there are many others like Little Black Book.

Trell’s focus meanwhile is on how it can grow the community further. In that respect, the 10 member team is now trying to grow the community in Bengaluru specifically locals and travellers by organising meet-ups and competitions. As of now, most of the content on the platform is currently related to Bengaluru, then Mumbai, and then pan India.

The team believes that with increasing penetration of AI and IoT in this space, will help people further to ease the problem of visual discovery.

“The visual discovery space will become very interesting. If you see, right now even a class four or five student has a cell phone in his hands. He/she might not be able to write but is able to click photographs. There is the incredible potential that has got unlocked because of visuals and mobile. And on the other hand, there are still things going the traditional way. For instance, blogging, which is still desktop based. We see an interesting evolution that visual discovery will bring and we definitely want to be a part of it.”

Editor’s Note

As per Pulkit, the visual blogging platform has its sights set on the huge potential of the O2O Indian market with the total size of $92.5 Bn. With major expenditure in O2O space (~80%) for brands being on marketing/advertising and data analytics, Trell aims to leverage this opportunity. However that being visual discovery and blogging is a vast space full of big contenders. Today, over 2 Bn photos are uploaded online every single day, with almost 90% of content being user-generated.

Instagram, Pinterest are some of the heavy-weight and heavily funded players in this space. By focusing on the mobile platform, Trell has its fundamentals in place for growth as the number of smartphone users increases. Smartphones which are projected to reach over 500 Mn customers in India by 2018 is going to see an app explosion soon. Last year, Indians downloaded 6.2 Bn apps through Google Play, up from 3.6 Bn in 2015, according to a recent report by App Annie. That marks the first time India seized the top spot for Android-app downloads, toppling longtime leader US. Trell’s timing is ripe but how far can even the visual blogging platform rise out of the shadow of its own more popular Instagram account to leverage this boom will be interesting to watch out.

[“Source-inc42”]

September 18, 2017 0 comment