Monday, 3 November 2014

india rocks in whatsapp number if users

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MUMBAI: Mobile messenger service WhatsApp's user base in India has grown to 70 million active users, which is over a tenth of its global users, its business head Neeraj Arora has said.

"We have 70 million active users here who use the application at least once a month," Arora, a vice-president with WhatsApp, said at the fifth annual INK Conference.

He said the total user base for the company, which was bought by Facebook in a blockbuster $19 billion deal earlier this year, is 600 million.
With over a tenth of the users from the country, India is one of the biggest markets for WhatsApp, he said, adding connecting billions of people in markets like India and Brazil is the aim of the company.

Arora, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and ISB Hyderabad, said WhatsApp will continue to hold a distinct identity even after the takeover by Facebook and will not get merged with the social networking giant.

He said WhatsApp, which has only 80 employees, will benefit through learnings from the social networking giant.



Arora, who first heard of WhatsApp as a business development executive for internet search giant Google and later joined as its business head, said it took two years to stitch the $19 billion deal announced this April.

Interestingly, Arora said he would have paid a fraction of the sum to buy WhatsApp three years back.

It would have been in "low tens of million" dollars, he said stressing that the company has grown a lot since then.

REVENUE OF MICROSOFT CLOUD INCREASES

It’s taken Microsoft quite a while to get traction in the cloud, and even longer for it to get its cloud data story right. For the longest time, things weren’t looking good. I say that as someone who has worked with – and at various times championed – Microsoft technology for most of my career. As much as I’ve wanted Microsoft to do well in the cloud data arena, I thought it was doomed to an eternity of near misses.

Fast forward

But things have been steadily improving since the summer, especially in the last few weeks. The glass that was half empty in the spring is now nearly full, with a complete HDInsight Big Data service based on Hadoop 2.0; an able machine learning service called Azure Machine Learning; a document store NoSQL database called DocumentDB; a publish-subscribe service for capturing streaming data calledEvent Hubs; a service for processing and analyzing that data called Azure Stream Analytics; a data transformation workflow service called Data Factory; and an eponymous Search service based on ElasticSearch at its core.
Beyond all of these “house brand” products, partnerships announced in the past two weeks mean that customers can or will soon be able to spin up Hadoop clusters based on Cloudera’s Distribution of Hadoop (CDH) and Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), running on either Linux or Windows; IBM’s Cloudant NoSQL database, based on BigCouch and Apache CouchDB, is also available; and so is IBM’s relational database standby, DB2. Oracle and DataStax provide access to Oracle 12c andCassandra on Azure, and other partners allow customers to run MySQLPostgreSQLand MongoDB.

Competitive landscape

Azure competes well with Google Compute Engine’s Cloud DataFlow service and parts of its BigQuery service. In numerous other areas, Mountain View has some work to do to catch up with Redmond. But what about the cloud juggernaut, Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS)Elastic MapReduce (EMR)DynamoDB,KinesisData Pipeline and CloudSearch each now have opposite numbers in the Azure camp. Amazon does not yet have a service to compete with Azure Machine Learning. On the other hand, its gangbuster-growth service Redshift has no answer from Redmond (although a competitive offering from BitYota is now available on the Azure platform as well as on AWS).
Some of the pieces that have filled out the Azure data story are in preview while others are in general availability. Many of them appeared in just the last 4 months. The drinking water on the east side of Seattle is normally very good, but it seems like something extra got in the reservoir this summer.

what does PC world says about new Microsoft band lets see

microsoft band beauty
’ve never worn an ankle bracelet like the one Lindsay Lohan had to wear while under house arrest. But after two days testing the Microsoft Band, I think I may have an idea of how constricting and confining those electronic monitors might be.
The Microsoft Band is uncomfortable to wear, and its heart-rate tracking, a marquee feature, doesn’t hold up to real-world testing. It’s a shame my first impressions are so negative, because with built-in GPS, a UV sensor, skin temperature and perspiration sensors, and a broad set of smartwatch-style notifications, the Microsoft Band promises a lot of cool features for $200.
Where the best wrist wearables are pliable and unobtrusive, the Microsoft Band is bulky and rigid, and never lets you forget you have it on. Sure, it’s physically large relative to competing fitness bands like the Jawbone UP24, Runtastic Orbit, and Samsung Gear Fit. But the bigger problem is its broad, inflexible display face. Factoring in the bezel around the display, it measures more than two inches long. It’s also straight as a board. A more comfortable chassis would follow the gentle curves of human anatomy.
The upshot is the Microsoft Band never melts away into the background like a proper wearable. During testing, I always felt that something was on my wrist, especially when I banged the band on table tops, or got it caught on shirtsleeves. It’s omnipresent in the worst way possible.

so end of windows of 7 and windows 8 comes

Windows XP on sale
The date to stop selling the software was set some time ago and should help Microsoft move people on to more recent versions of its operating system.
Separately, statistics suggest people are finally moving away from some very old versions of Windows.
The next version of Windows, called Windows 10, is due to be released in late 2015.
Old code
From 31 October, consumers could no longer buy copies of the Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate versions of Windows 7. Now, Windows 8 is also no longer available. The change affects both copies bought in shops or loaded on PCs and laptops.
The current version of Windows, 8.1, will be the default version offered on PCs.
The change will take time to feed through into the market, as many PC makers have large stocks of older versions of Windows and will continue to sell PCs running the software.
Those keen to get a computer running Windows 7 will be able to "downgrade" from 8.1 to Windows 7 Professional but relatively few PC firms offer this option.
Gordon Kelly, writing in Forbes, said the policy revealed "Microsoft's determination to distance itself from the original form of Windows 8" despite it being released just over two years ago.
The original version of Windows 8 did not prove popular because it did away with some familiar elements of the desktop version of the operating system.
By contrast, he said, Windows 7 has been available since late 2009 and is still very popular among users. About 53% of Windows users are on the various editions of Version 7 of Windows, he said. The more recently released Windows 8 has only grabbed a 6% market share and has already been surpassed by 8.1, said Mr Kelly.
The change will also clear the path for the arrival of Windows 10, he added.
Separately, market analysis reveals that the numbers of people using the venerable Windows XP operating system has suddenly seen a sharp decline. Data from Netmarketshare suggests that in October this year its share dropped from almost 24% to just over 17%. It is not yet clear what was behind the fall.

winding of mobile handset business in Chennai

Microsoft to discontinue Nokia Asha and S40 feature phones
s Nokia suspends production at its Chennai facility in India, the company says it has reached an agreement with workers over a severance package.
The company appears to be one step closer to extricating itself from a sticky tax situation in India that prevented it from transferring its Chennai handset-manufacturing facility to Microsoft as part of the sale of its devices business earlier this year.

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Microsoft to discontinue Nokia Asha and S40 feature phones
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The Finnish company last month announced it would wind down production at the Sriperumbudur site after Microsoft terminated manufacturing services from November 1.
Since then, Nokia has been negotiating the details of a severance package that it first offered to the 6,600 employees of the site in Chennai in April. While the majority accepted the package, around 1,000 workers remained and stood to be affected by Saturday's suspension, which has seen Nokia negotiating with unions and India's Labour Commissioner.
According to a Nokia spokesman, the company has now reached an agreement with affected workers.

"We can confirm that constructive discussions with Union representatives and the Labour Commissioner have resulted in agreement on a financial package for Chennai factory personnel," the spokesman said in a statement.
According to the Economic Times, the package offered is between 750,000 rupees ($12,215) and 950,000 rupees ($15,470) depending on an employee's experience, and includes monthly salaries for November and December.
The publication notes Nokia's significance as an employer in the region. After opening in 2006, it directly employed 8,000 people while another 25,000 indirectly benefitted from the plant.
Nokia's Chennai plant was once among its largest facilities in the world but ahead of the sale to Microsoft it ran afoul of authorities in two separate tax claims, both of which were refuted by Nokia.
While Nokia was gradually shifting its focus away from basic mobile phones that were produced at the facility, Microsoft put a swift end to the bulk of its feature phone business this July, when the company announced it was putting an end to the production of Asha and S40 phones. It also announced plans to reduce its headcount by 18,000 worldwide, including 12,500 employees gained through the Nokia acquisition.
As for fate of the facility itself, Nokia last month said it was unable to transfer the facility to a successor due to the continuing asset freeze imposed by the tax department.

no licence to Microsoft

Samsung has issued a court filing regarding its collaboration with Microsoft on Windows Phone and states that it refuses to fulfill its end of the deal as it now sees the software giant as a direct competitor. The business collaboration agreement between the two companies sees Samsung pay Microsoft north of $1 billion in patent royalties and $6.9 million interest due to payment delays. Microsoft took action in early August in an attempt to collect the cash.

nokia reentering into andriod business

Although Nokia sold its handset division to Microsoft, it doesn't mean the Finnish company is done creating its own handsets, with rumours suggesting that it's planning to release a new Android smartphone.
Nokia Corporation's CEO Rajeev Suri recently dropped hints that the company might be planning to re-enter the smartphone market, and now we're hearing that the first handset could be one running Android.
The new report states that the phone will be a flagship device, and will be build by the same team that made the Nokia N9 - the handset which ran on the MeeGo operating system.

Android over Windows

When Microsoft bought Nokia it got the Nokia brand's 10-year licence. This means that Nokia can produce its own smartphones and sell them as rebranded devices, so while they might not be called Nokia smartphones, underneath they will be.