Google Planning A Big Push In India This Fall

Google is planning a big advertising campaign for its Android One initiative in India this fall, according to several recent reports.

The Information’s Amir Efrati claims that Google is telling potential partners in the country that it is planning to spend “at least several hundred millions dollars” to boost awareness for phones made as part of the Android One initiative.

The Economic Times of India’s report cites a much lower number: approximately $17 million. The Economic Times also states that the push will begin in October and that Google SVP Sundar Pichai will visit the country as part of the launch effort.

While the figures don’t line up — which could simply be due to sources talking about different time frames, i.e. Google could spend $17 million right away with more to come based on how well the campaign does — the news itself makes a lot of sense.

The Indian market is huge and smartphones haven’t penetrated there like they have in the United States or even other emerging markets like China. According to IDC data, smartphone penetration in the world’s second most populated country is at about 10% despite 186% year-over-year growth for the category in the first quarter of 2014.


With Android One, Google is looking to make it easier to launch affordable devices in emerging markets. It’s working with suppliers to ensure cheap but powerful parts used by OEMs will be compatible with the latest versions of Android, providing access to the Google Play Store, and handling updates to the Android operating system while still allowing device makers to install their own apps on devices.

At Google I/O, Google’s Pichai announced that the company is working with Micromax and other device manufacturers in India to bring multiple devices in the ~$100 range to the country by the end of the year. That’s a price range that’s proven to do well in India, with Motorola’s low-margin lineup selling a million units within five months of entering the market.

By getting in while the Indian smartphone market is still in its infancy, Google has a chance to capture a significant portion of it as people are still deciding their preferences in operating system. The Android One initiative is important Google because it gets people into its Play Store ecosystem instead of smaller third-party app stores generally offered on the millions of cheap phones and tablets sold in emerging markets running the open source version of Android.

While it’s not bringing in a lot of money just yet — India has yet to crack the top 5 countries in terms of revenue for Google Pay — App Annie’s latest Market Indexsuggests that Google is at least doing a good job of getting users into its app ecosystem, with India outpacing South Korea and Russia in terms of download numbers. That puts the country right behind the United States and Brazil, the 1st and 2nd largest countries by app downloads, respectively.

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The MBGN Tourism 2012 is marrying her man Jude Okoye today in Anambra state, SEE PICS

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MIT Students Create An Ice Cream Printer

You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.

The system is a proof-of-concept right now but they were able to print some clever shapes out of the sweet, sweet cream. Writes Bunker:
We were inspired to design this printer because we wanted to make something fun with this up and coming technology in a way that we could grab the attention of kids. We felt that it was just as important to come up with a new technology as it was to interest the younger generation in pursuing science and technology so we can continue pushing the limits of what is possible.





The team worked on the project their spring semester at MIT and got it working to print a star. They have no plans to commercialize it yet but it seems like a clever and very useful hack.

“We ate a lot of ice cream during the making the machine especially during the couple all-nighters when ice cream became our midnight snack and breakfast, it was a great project and we had a lot of fun working on it,” she said.


The team built the printer as part of Professor John Hart’s class in additive manufacturing. They used a Solidoodle printer to control the plate and the stream and froze the ice-cream as it came out with liquid nitrogen. As you can imagine, it melted quite often, resulting in a pool of sweet, edible sadness. As a man who can eat three gallons of ice cream in a sitting, I could imagine this thing just 3D printing all over my head.

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'Those who want to take power through the back door will die' - Gov Akpabio

The Governor of Akwa Ibom state Godswill Akpabio has pronounced death on any politician who tries to gain political power through the backdoor come 2015, adding that the PDP in the state will continue ruling the state.

The Governor made this declaration yesterday July 16th at the ground breaking ceremony for the construction of the new PDP Secretariat in Uyo, the state capital.

He also stated that all those who betrayed him in politics would not enter into the government house "Just as God threw Lucifer unto the Earth, those who have betrayed the governor of Akwa Ibom State will not enter the Government House. And because of impatience, Absalom (son to King David) wanted to take over by killing King David.

And when David heard, he asked the people to leave him. This did not end up well with Absalom. He died before his father. Those who want to take power through the backdoor will die and the PDP will continue,” he said.

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Yahoo Gets To Keep More Of Its Stake In Alibaba

As part of today’s earnings release, Yahoo revealed that Alibaba is allowing it to keep a greater portion of its stake when it issues its initial public offering. Yahoo will be required to sell 140 million shares in the Chinese e-commerce company, compared to the 208 million the two companies agreed to last October.

That previous deal was already a huge win for Yahoo, as it brought the number of shares it had to sell down by approximately 20 percent from 261.5 million. As Re/code’s Kara Swisher pointed out back in May, the October agreement left the door open for an amended amount, should Alibaba feel generous:


Still, if it does not offer up Yahoo shares for sale, Alibaba will probably have to gin up more from its own kitty. So — since the initial IPO filing gave no indication — we’ll see how generous it wants to be. If it were to allow Yahoo to keep more shares at all, sources said it will still be a very small amount.

Yahoo owns 523.6 million shares of Alibaba that should hold a value in the tens of billions of dollars after the company’s IPO. Many have speculated about what Yahoo will do with the capital it would have to work with once it sold those shares, including major acquisitions. By keeping more shares, Yahoo gets less money in the short-term but potentially greater returns from post-IPO growth in Alibaba’s stock. It also gets to maintain a tighter relationship with Alibaba, one it has been cultivating since Yahoo exec Jacqueline Reses joined Alibaba’s board in late 2012.

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Apple Teams Up With IBM For Huge, Expansive Enterprise Push

Apple has announced a strategic partnership with IBM that will see the enterprise giant transfer over 150 of their enterprise and IT apps and tools to Apple platforms natively, and will also have IBM selling Apple iPhones and iPads to its business clients all over the world. In an interview with CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty both told the network that Apple and IBM are like “puzzle pieces” that fit perfectly together.

“We knew that we needed to have a partner that deeply understood each of the verticals,” Cook told CNBC. “That had scale, that had a lot of dirt under their fingernails so to speak from really understanding each of these verticals and we found a kindred spirit in IBM.”

Apple touts the access the partnership gives them to IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities, and talks about how the apps that it produces with IBM will be developed “from the ground up for iPhone and iPad.” These apps will supplement new cloud services aimed at iOS specifically, including security and analytics solutions, and device management tools for large-scale MDM deployments.

The so-called IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions will see apps created that are designed to give specific industries solutions tailored to their unique problems – Cook and Rometty described in speaking to CNBC apps tailored to pilots, for example. To do this,Apple cites the expertise resident in over 100,000 IBM industry and domain consultants as a valuable resource in making apps tailored to different needs. This isn’t about owning the general office; it’s about turning Apple’s software and devices into the core functional software in every vertical possible.

Apple has made headway on its own in the enterprise, thanks in large part to the iPad, the iPhone and the trend of bring-your-own-devices that we’ve seen arise over the last few years in workforces around the world. And while it has made efforts to highlight the advantages of its platform for business users, this is a very different thing and involves a huge, targeted effort to sell through to enterprise users of all stripes. BlackBerry, in other words, has every reason in the world to be terrified.

Industries Apple and IBM look to be tackling first include retail, healthcare, banking, travel, transportation, telecommunications and insurance (among others) per the official press release, with a planned rollout starting this fall and continuing in earnest through 2015. The solution is designed to be end-to-end, covering everything from cloud storage to security and MDM, as well as private app stores and deployments. In many ways, this sounds like what Google is trying to do with Play for Enterprise, but backed by the expertise of a partner that already has extensive expertise identifying and addressing the needs of enterprise customers.


AppleCare for Enterprise is also part of the arrangement, and will provide IT customers with 24-hour, all-day support via phone and online, while IBM’s workforce will offer on-site support as well. iPhones and iPads will be sold by IBM to enterprise buyers, too, and those arrangements will include available leasing options. Apple currently offers business and volume sales, but it sounds like under IBM these will be more exhaustive and cover a wider range.

Apple incorporated a lot of new features for enterprise and education with changes introduced back in February, and promises additional improvements in iOS 8 via new means of informing users about device configuration, management or restrictions, and new security features and tools.

As industry analyst TIm Bajarin points out, this is a blow to both Google and Microsoft in terms of the enterprise aspirations of both of their mobile platforms – Apple already managed to disrupt enterprise IT with its devices, and working together with IBM essentially guarantees continued growth in this key market, regardless of any other potential outcomes.

Google also announced a key new partnership this year regarding its enterprise mobility efforts – at its I/O developer conference last month it detailed how it would be bringing Knox to all of Android thanks to the help of Samsung, to be recast as ‘Android for Work,’ offering a way to partition personal and work data on Android smartphones and tablets in much the same way they’re kept separate on BlackBerry 10 devices using ‘BlackBerry Balance.’ Google Play will be able to offer business-specific approved apps, which can be sold in bulk for enterprise-wide fleet purchasing, Google revealed.

At first glance, Apple’s partnership looks to be a more far-reaching overture to enterprise than that Google is making with Android L, but we’ll have to wait and watch how both arrangements shake out when they start to hit the market proper this coming fall.

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Boko Haram claims responsibility for Lagos blast

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has claimed responsibility for two explosions on June 25 at a fuel depot in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub.

“A bomb went off in Lagos. I ordered (the bomber) who went and detonated it,” Shekau said, according to the French news agency, which is usually the first to get hold of Shekau’s videos before they are distributed online.

The two blasts minutes apart last month in the country’s main port, Apapa, were almost certainly caused by bombs, three senior security sources and the manager of a major container company told a news agency. One was most likely the work of a female suicide bomber, they said.

Authorities said the blasts on Creek road were an accident caused by a gas canister, but the security sources told the agency that was a coverup meant to avoid panic in the southwestern city of 21 million people. At least two people were killed.

sources;punch

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