Nokia launches City Lens Point application

NEW DELHI: Finnish handset maker Nokia launched a new app City Lens Point which allows users to search places as well as get directions and reviews to popular restaurants and shops.

The application has been launched for its Lumia series of phones and other smartphones.

"Using the augmented reality app, when the user holds their device up, the City Lens overlays information about restaurants, shops, hotels and other popular destinations nearby," Nokia India Director Sales V Ramnath told reporters here.

It also allows one to make reservations or navigate to the location via turn by turn walking map, he added.

"This application from Nokia's Location service bouquet allows users to sense the world around and discover places by simply holding up their smartphone instead of having to perform web searches. It's simple and it's spontaneous," Ramnath said.

The free application is available for Lumia 800, 710 and 900, while it is also available for Nokia's other smartphones like Nokia 700, 701 and N8.

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India’s heaviest satellite GSAT-10 launched

GSAT-10, the country's newest and heaviest satellite, was launched in the wee hours of Saturday from the Kourou launchpad in French Guiana in South America. It will directly boost telecommunications and direct-to-home broadcasting among others.

The satellite, 9th in ISRO's present fleet, will be operational in November and add 30 transponders to the domestic INSAT system, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said soon after the launch.

The ISRO launched the 3.4-tonne spacecraft on the European Ariane 5 rocket as the agency cannot currently launch satellites of such mass on its own vehicles. The satellite and the launch fee cost the agency Rs. 750 crore.

The ISRO called its 101st mission "a grand success," adding that the satellite was in good health.

ISRO's Chairman and Secretary, Department of Space, Dr. K. Radhakrishnan, and senior scientists have been at the Master Control Facility, Hassan (some 80 km from Bangalore) since Friday evening. It is also the first time that the Chairman was not present at the launch site.

Other Indian scientists present at Kourou included Director, Satellite communications, Prahlad Rao and Project Director T.K.Anuradha.

What the satellite brings

It carries 30 communication transponders - 12 in Ku-band, 12 in C-band and six in extended C-band. The ISRO is currently leasing 95 foreign transpondes to meet domestic demand. The INSAT/GSAT system has 168 transponders.

The Ku band is vital for seven DTH TV operators and thousands of VSAT operators who provide phone and Internet broadband connections. Public and private telephone and television providers also use the C band.

GSAT-10 also has the second GAGAN payload which augments or finetunes the US GPS signals into far more accurate readings. GAGAN, a venture of the Department of Sapce and Airports authority of India, is primarily meant to benefit airlines and their aircraft flying into and out of India. GSAT-8, launched in May 2008, carried the first GAGAN payload.

The flight at 2.58 a.m. IST was preceded by a countdown lasting for 11.5 hours. By 3.19 a.m. it was visible to scientists waiting to capture its signals at Hassan.

"MCF took over command and control of the satellite immediately after the injection. Preliminary health checks on various subsystems such as power, thermal, command, sensors, control etc., have been performed and all parameters have been found to be satisfactory. The satellite has been oriented towards Earth and the Sun using the onboard propulsion systems," the agency said.

In the coming days, MCF scientists will perform routine manoeuvres to "raise" the elliptical orbit into a circular orbit with 24-hour rotation around the Earth and fixed at 83 degrees East slot over the Indian region at 36,000 km above ground. They will do this by firing the apogee motors on board the satellite in three steps.

Later the antenna, solar panels and other instruments will be deployed and switched on.

Built for 15 years, GSAT 10 will be co-located with InSAT-4A and GSAT-12.

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How to enable private browsing in Safari?

When you browse the web, Safari stores information about the websites you visit. If you’ve turned on password saving in AutoFill preferences, Safari also stores any user names and passwords you enter for auto filling when you visiting the web page next time.

If some body check your computer after you browse a couple of web pages, then can get all your browse history including auto fill feature if they visit the same web page that you visit before. They can view your browsing behavior or the list of stored passwords, obviously not good for your privacy. To prevent others from gaining access to this information, you can enable Private Browsing before you start browsing.

Follow these screen shots to turn on private browsing.

• While browsing a webpage using Safari, choose Action menu > Private Browsing. (The Action menu is near the upper-right corner of the Safari window, and looks like a gear.) A Private button appears in the address field to indicate that Private Browsing is on.

• When you see a confirmation message, click OK. You can see the screen shot on right side marked as PRIVATE confirming that you turned on private browsing.

Private Browsing is always turned off when you open Safari, even if it was on when you last quit Safari. Plug-ins that support Private Browsing also stop storing cookies and other tracking information.

You can turn off Private Browsing incase you do not want to be private. Follow these steps:

• While browsing a webpage using Safari, choose Action menu >; Private Browsing (so the checkmark disappears), or click the Private button in the address field. (The Action menu is near the upper-right corner of the Safari window, and looks like a gear.)
• Close any Safari windows you used to view private information. If you don’t close the windows, other users can view those pages using the Back and Forward buttons.
• If you downloaded any items from websites, Private Browsing only removes the names of the items you downloaded from the Downloads window. To get rid of the items themselves, delete them from your computer.

Suppose If you forget to turn on Private Browsing and you want to make the same private browsing privacy after a while, you can do that by this way. After you finish browsing, choose Action menu > Reset Safari. (The Action menu is near the upper-right corner of the Safari window, and looks like a gear). This will clear all history with one single click.

Do you want to know more details about private browsing in Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, iPad / iPhone Safari? Please go through the entire article forProtect your data while browsing on a public computer.

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Common anxiety drug ups risk of dementia by 50%

London: A medicine widely used by people over-65s to combat anxiety and insomnia increases the risk of dementia by 50 percent within 15 years, researchers have found.

Benzodiazepines are widely used in many countries, and it is prescribed to 30 percent of pensioners in France, the Mirror reported.

The research team at the University of Bordeaux in France have warned “indiscriminate widespread use” of benzodiazepines should stop.

The research studied 1,063 people with an average age of 78, over 20 years.

They had never taken the drug before and were all free from dementia.

The chance of dementia developing in those who took the drugs was 4.8 per 100 “person years”, compared with 3.2 for those who had not taken benzodiazepines.

The research study concluded: “Uncontrolled chronic use of benzodiazepines in elderly people should be cautioned against.”

The findings are published in the British Medical Journal. 

ANI

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Rainbow Moon getting Vita port

Rainbow Moon was a quirky throwback to the classic Japanese-style strategy RPG, complete with quick tactical battles and an extremely lengthy story mode. In other words, it's exactly the kind of game you'd want on a portable system, and publisher EastAsiaSoft has announced it's making that happen.

IGN reports that the Vita version will hit sometime in 2013. The studio is aiming to include cross-saving between the PS3 and Vita versions.

Now for the bad news: it won't feature the cross-buy promotion that Sony is implementing with many of its first-party products. That means if you already bought the PS3 version, you won't get the Vita version for free. EAS' Nils Ngai noted that the studio can't afford to bundle the games for one price, since it wasn't built on a framework for both platforms and needs to invest an estimated nine months to port the game. "We are definitively looking into discounted options for customers that wish to purchase both release versions at the same time," Ngai noted. "We won't be charging double the price if you want to buy both releases at the same time."

Meanwhile, Rainbow Moon developer SideQuest Studios is at work on another game for 2013-2014. EastAsiaSoft still plans to work closely with SideQuest, though it may look into other platforms as we enter the next generation. Aside from the mystery project currently in its conceptual phase, Ngai noted that a sequel to Rainbow Moon or porting its Soldner X games to the Vita are possible future projects.

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Facebook Seeks Next-Generation Big Data Tools

Social network giant Facebook and venture capital blue chip Accel Partners think emerging platforms like Hadoop deserve new business intelligence, data visualization, and analytics tools.

Forget about the business intelligence suites from IBM, Oracle, and SAP Business Objects, the analytics from SAS, and even the hot data visualization tools like Tableau Software. New platforms like Hadoop and NoSQL databases demand new tools that are purpose built for these environments.

This is a core theme that Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, and Ping Li, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners, discussed on stage on Thursday at the DataWeek 2012 Conference in San Francisco. Their talk was about the challenges and opportunities facing startups and young companies in the big data arena, and Parikh and Li shared their message with InformationWeek by phone just hours before they took to the stage.

There's little doubt that Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and other emerging big data platforms are quickly evolving, says Li, "but we're hoping to see more new applications on top of these platforms." Parikh and Li are encouraging more innovation because there's not enough speed and breadth of development to truly feed a rich big data community, they say.

New analytics, business intelligence, and data visualization tools are needed, Li says, because "stats platforms like SAS and R for predictive analytics were not built for the big data world. Tableau Software has been wildly successful, but it was built before big data tools were even around."

Citing a "huge gap" in connecting big data business users to the new underlying platforms, Li says there's also ample room for new business applications, like CRM, and new vertical industry applications for data-intensive fields, such as oil and gas.

Li manages Accel Partners' Big Data Fund, which clearly stands to benefit if there's a crop of new startups to invest in that ultimately succeed. But why is Facebook taking a stand?

"We've had a long history of innovating on infrastructure very openly and contributing back into various open source projects," Parikh explained. "There's a lot more work to be done on these platforms, but we're not going to hire every smart engineer on the planet. We want to be able to collaborate with the people that we can't hire in the open through various communities."

In its earliest days, Facebook helped push the envelope with open source projects like Memcached and MySQL. The social network giant has since made significant contributions to Hadoop, including foundational work on Hive and many contributions to HBase, HDFS, and MapReduce. The company has been forced to innovate because it runs the largest Hadoop deployment in the world, with more than 100 petabytes of information.

"We built Hive as a way for business users to get what they needed out of our [Hadoop] big data infrastructure," said Parikh. "Writing MapReduce jobs is fine for engineers, but if you're an analyst or a product manager and you want to extract reports or do analysis, you need an easier interface for that data. Hive gave our users a SQL-like interface to Hadoop."

The "we need new tools" thesis seems to write off products that have made huge strides in connecting to new platforms. Parikh grants that there is a bias in the big data community toward "shiny new things," and doesn't believe there's "one magical piece of technology that's going to wipe out everything done in the past."

Li, too, grants that the relational database and the applications built for it will survive, "but we're seeing enough new green field applications that will require a new set of tooling." Most relational databases and BI platforms have sprouted connections to Hadoop, with one of the latest wrinkles is HCatalog-based access to Hadoop data without data movement. But over time, Li foresees new tools built natively for the new platforms.

"It's kind of like the mobile world where people started by putting Web applications on the mobile phone, but now they're developing natively just for the mobile phone in a way that takes advantage of the fact that it's a mobile device that has location information and all sorts of other good stuff," Li says.

On Li's short list of platforms of the future are Hadoop, HBase, and "a couple of different flavors of NoSQL databases." It's early for real-time platforms, but these will also emerge, he says, mentioning Twitter's Storm open source project and Google's Dremel technology. On the application side, Li sees BI, data visualization, and analytics as ripe for innovation.

"The concept of machine learning is going to change the way that people think about analytics," Li says. "We'll no longer do sampling because we can now run analytics across an entire data set repeatedly."

The in-database processing already being done by the likes of Alpine, Fuzzy Logix, IBM SPSS, and SAS on massively parallel processing grids and platforms like EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and Teradata is "just a first step," according to Li. "The next step is running it natively on some of the newer platforms," he says.

Parikh says that real-time processing and graph analysis are the hottest areas of exploration at Facebook, but the needs aren't yet well served by existing technologies. "The way Hadoop is evolving is great because it's open, but over the next couple of years you're going to see significant changes in the Hadoop stack as we know it today," he says.

Work is needed on HDFS to make it more robust, more scalable, and more efficient, he says. What's more, real-time demands and the need for incremental processing will drive development, because people don't have time to rerun MapReduce jobs they way they have to today.

Graph processing is another area where Facebook is innovating. "Everything in Facebook is modeled as a social graph, and it's a completely different way to model data than is used in the relational world," Parikh explains. "We're trying to develop more powerful ways to query the graph. MapReduce requires a lot of iteration and it's non-intuitive, so we're building a whole set of tools that will allow us to query the graph in real time."

But even Facebook, with more than 50,000 employees, seems overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done. Thus the appeal to entrepreneurial software developers to build better mousetraps for big data.

In-memory analytics offers subsecond response times and hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Now falling costs put it in reach of more enterprises. Also in the Analytics Speed Demon special issue of InformationWeek: Louisiana State University hopes to align business and IT more closely through a master's program focused on analytics. (Free registration required.)

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BlackBerry's tech appeal: Dev-friendly RIM bets on tools and openness

Summary: Keeping developers on side while making a major OS shift isn't easy - and it's even harder when you're losing ground in the market. So what is RIM doing to persuade new and long-time developers to keep the BlackBerry faith?
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Managing an operating system transition isn't easy. The journey from System 7 to OS X nearly bankrupted Apple, and Microsoft's journey from DOS to Windows was hardly smooth.

Now Research In Motion is getting ready to make the break with its own OS past, with a shift to its QNX-based BlackBerry 10 next year. So how does it plan to keep developers on side?

The BlackBerry Jam event marked a renaming and a rebooting of the BlackBerry Devcon get-together. Image: RIM

The answer, going by what I heard at BlackBerry Jam Americas this week, is to put its faith in openness, open source and giving coders a lot of ways into the platform.

For one thing, the new RIM developer programme is very different from the old. The requirement for people to sign a notarised agreement before downloading the development tools is long gone. Now these are freely available, as are device simulators for the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform, and RIM is providing airport-style information boards that indicate when key APIs are due to arrive — and whether they are delayed.

It's a much more open RIM — one that's adding transparency to what had been a notoriously secret developer programme.

Courting developers

At the San Jose event, Bob Taniguchi explained that RIM understands it needs to try to keep long-term BlackBerry app makers on the platform, as well as work to bring in new programmers.

"Current BlackBerry developers are the hardest to bring on board," said Taniguchi, who set up Microsoft's original MVP programme and now heads up RIM's rapidly growing developer evangelism team. "It's not Java [any more]."

And given BlackBerry 10's move to C and C++, Taniguchi said he was surprised to find "the expectation that we'd carry on doing the same thing from long-term developers."

RIM has set out to court existing and new developers to its BB10 OS. Image: RIM

The BlackBerry Jam event itself marked a shift — a renaming and a rebooting of the BlackBerry Devcon get-together. This year's edition put on hackathons, code-porting labs and an unconference, as well as traditional presentations, and while a little smaller than previous events, the convention halls were bustling.

The event fired the starting gun for the final sprint to the launch of RIM's new platform, with finalised APIs ready for developers to start coding, and an app store that's due to open at the beginning of October.

While RIM wasn't beyond using stunts to get its message across at BlackBerry Jam — itsgruesome REO Speedwagon spoof sung by developer-facing execs being a case in point — it's the tools and options available that Taniguchi is keen to stress.

"We've given them multiple entry points, and more than just one SDK. Developers have different flavours: HTML5 developers are building mobile applications alongside C and C++ games developers. There a much broader appeal for this platform," he said.

Enterprise apps

Consumer developers aren't RIM's only constituency. BlackBerry devices remain an enterprise stalwart, and businesses are going to need to move existing applications to a new platform.

"Everything we announce at [BlackBerry Jam] is something the enterprise can take advantage of" — Gregg Ostrowski, RIM

One BlackBerry exec with a close-up view of this is RIM's senior director of enterprise developer partnerships Gregg Ostrowski, who helps businesses build applications behind the firewall. These are apps that need to be long lived, and they need to be delivered quickly. Ostrowski sees standards as key to achieving this in BlackBerry 10.

"The route in is HTML5 and RIM's WebWorks for connecting to enterprise data. We handle services, connections. There's no third-party middleware," he noted.

As BlackBerry 10 has dropped Java, Ostrowski can now help enterprises to move to HTML5, where, as an added bonus, "the app looks so much nicer", he said.

He also pointed to the BYOD trend, where consumer technology has begun driving business, as a way for the new platform to get traction. "Everything we announce at [BlackBerry Jam] is something the enterprise can take advantage of," he said.

Dev response

RIM is clearly courting app writers on both the consumer and enterprise sides. But how do developers feel about the changes?

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BlackBerry Dev Alpha: First Take

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Nobex Radio has been a popular app on the current generation of BlackBerry devices, and developer Gadi Mazor now needs to move to the new platform. Mazor said the most important thing RIM could give him with BlackBerry 10 is the one thing most developers need: "The right tools to develop, as well as to see our code in action".

Having worked with RIM for many years, Mazor said he sees a lot of big changes in the way the company works with its ecosystem.

"They're definitely improving things; the arrival boards are huge, and we know what APIs are coming, when," he noted.

This has helped with Mazor's development of Nobex Radio forBlackBerry 10, he said.

"We know that there'll be a build in November with a new set of APIs. So in mid-September, we were able to know that we'd be able to have a build that took advantage of these features."

Mazor is also finding that RIM is giving developers a lot more resources — calling out events and developer evangelists in particular. "They're a big team that knows the local guys," he said.

Open source

The changes RIM is making with BlackBerry go a lot further than a new operating system and new devices. At the heart of BlackBerry 10 is Cascades, a UI framework that's built on top of the open-source QT. That's meant that the historically proprietary BlackBerry has had to adopt open source in a big way.

"I'm genuinely excited about BB10," said Till Adam, managing director for QT consultancy KDAB in Germany. "It's a very sweet platform, and QNX is nice and fun to work with. It's open: open standards, open libraries — all familiar territory to someone from a free software background."

"I'm genuinely excited about BB10. It's a very sweet platform, and QNX is nice and fun to work with" — Till Adam, KDAB

While he's been training Java developers to work with QT and RIM's Cascades, Adam is also hopeful that BlackBerry 10 will attract developers who've worked with QT in the past, on platforms like Nokia's Meego.

Perhaps the most significant thing RIM has done is provide developers with hardware. The Dev Alpha and the new Dev Alpha B are touch phones with much the same form factor as the first BlackBerry 10 devices. As they run an early build of the new OS, they're able to give developers a test platform with many of the APIs they'll be using — and that also has the same touch characteristics as production hardware. Instead of using simulators, code can be pushed to real devices.

At BlackBerry Jam, I heard again and again that the 5,000 or so Dev Alphas RIM has distributed really made a difference. Taniguchi certainly feels that about the developers who've got their hands on one.

"We're getting code out of them — nearly 100 percent are working on apps, and most are planning to deliver at least two applications," he said.

Mazor agrees, and points out another important feature of the Dev Alphas. "We can put Nobex in the Dev Alpha App World, updating it for new APIs," he said. "That lets us share it with our peers. 5,000 people can see the app, and try it out. We get peer review."

With the new BlackBerry 10 platform taking so long to arrive, you might expect developers to be impatient — but they're not. While the outside world waits for new phones, developers are quietly writing code and building new apps. There's a trust that's grown up between RIM and its developers over the last year, and that could well be the biggest change of all.

Topics: RIM, Apps, Mobile OS, Mobility, Software Development

By Sathish Kumar.

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Tim Cook's 'Mapology': No explanation of premature Maps launch

What's missing from Cook's letter is any explanation as to why Apple would publish a beta product that it knew would frustrate customers.

On Friday morning, Tim Cook represented Apple in taking responsibility for the inauspicious beginning of Apple's new iOS 6 Maps. He said that "we," Apple, are "extremely sorry" for not "delivering the best experience possible" to customers. He offered alternatives, including Google Maps, so that customers wouldn't suffer as much while Apple is "working non-stop" to offer a Maps app that lives up to "an incredibly high standard."

He expresses an appropriate level of contrition and hope, going from expressing extreme sorriness for inflicting Maps on users of 100 million-plus iOS 6 devices to promising to bring Maps up to the company's incredibly high standards. 

Cook went for some empathy in sharing that Maps is a major initiative that had to be created from the ground up. He also implied that iPhone users could help facilitate bringing Maps to incredibly high standards, writing that Maps will get better as customers use it and provide feedback to Apple. 

He also noted, without glee, that despite the problems, Maps users have searched for nearly 500,000,000 locations so far. That could be interpreted as "it's really not that bad," but if you want, use the alternatives. 

Of course, Maps isn't a complete disaster, it's a beta product. For most searches you will not be led astray, if you don't mind the absence of public transit data and street view and slow flyovers on 3G and poor location and landmark searches.

(See CNET's Transit directions field test: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps, Turn-by-turn field test: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps and Local search field test: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps).

What's missing from Cook's letter is any explanation as to why Apple would knowingly publish a beta product that frustrates customers and causes Apple to send out a note to customers like the one below. The Apple CEO could have added something like, "We would have preferred to spend more time making Maps incredibly great but we couldn't reach an agreement with Google to provide voice navigation for the Apple iOS app as it does on Android. We felt it was an important enough feature to end our agreement with Google and accelerate the deployment of our iOS 6 Maps app." (See ATD: Apple-Google Maps Talks Crashed Over Voice-Guided Directions)

Of course, corporations don't like disclosing backroom negotiations with the public, and Apple has a culture of secrecy and isn't know for its transparency. Instead, Cook asks for forgiveness, gives a shout-out to alternative maps and basically promises customers that he won't rest until Maps is worthy of the Apple brand. It's smart way to quell the unrest and buy some credibility and time to get Maps right. In the meantime, it would be great to have an iOS 6 Google Maps app. 

The Tim Cook full letter:

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.

There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations. The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.

While we're improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.

Tim Cook 
Apple's CEO

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Centre is confident of mopping up Rs.30,000 crore through disinvestment

The Kelkar Committee headed by former Finance Secretary Vijay Kelkar (in picture) has suggested a slew of measures to cut the subsidy bill. File photo.

Appreciation of rupee will help reduce subsidy bill and contain inflation, says Mayaram

Contrary to the underlined pessimism expressed by the Kelkar Committee with regard to the likely disinvestment proceeds during 2012-13, the government, on Friday, appeared confident in mopping up about Rs.25,000-30,000 crore through sell-off of the Centre’s equity in public sector undertakings (PSUs) and thereby remain as close as possible to the fiscal deficit target of 5.1 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) set for the financial year.

At a press briefing here to present the government’s stance on the recommendations of the ‘Report of the committee on roadmap for fiscal consolidation’ headed by 13th Finance Commission Chairman Vijay L. Kelkar, Economic Affairs Secretary Arvind Mayaram said: “There is now a decision for disinvestment in several PSUs. Some more are under consideration. And, therefore, we believe that we could net about Rs.25,000-30,000 crore from that itself…Then there is spectrum auction, which is on stream. We have a target of Rs.40,000 crore…”

Dr. Mayaram’s statement needs to be seen in the light of the Kelkar Committee report pegging the receipts from disinvestment this fiscal at Rs.10,000 crore, way below the budgeted target of Rs.30,000 crore.

In its report, the committee said: “It would be extremely difficult for the government to move ahead with its disinvestment programme, given the subdued equity market conditions. In our assessment, a conservative estimate for disinvestment receipts, if no policy interventions are made, would stand at around Rs.10,000 crore”.

Asserting that policy interventions were in the pipeline and the government was watchful and would take steps to curb wasteful spending as also plug leakages in the implementation of various social and welfare schemes, Dr. Mayaram said: “Wasteful expenditure, if any, will be strongly curbed and, therefore, I am confident that we will be able to come pretty close to our fiscal deficit target...We are cognizant of the fact that there could be a possibility [of wasteful expenditure]...we will be watchful”.

Even as the fiscal deficit during the April-August period this fiscal spiked to Rs.3.38 lakh crore or about 66 per cent of the budgeted target of 5.1 of GDP for the entire fiscal year, the DEA Secretary pointed to a development in the currency market which many may have not taken into account. Dr. Mayaram was referring to the steady appreciation of the rupee against the U.S. dollar.

“If rupee further strengthens, which we hope it will, with the steps the government is taking, we expect it could even touch 50 in the next three or four months…,” he said while pointing to appreciation of the Indian currency to an over five-month high of 52.49 against the greenback to end the day’s trading at 52.85 on the back of strong capital flows and hopes of more policy reforms.

“Now there is a much better foreign exchange management in terms of flows on account of decision that the government has taken in the last two to three weeks. We expect higher FDI flows to come into the country. So the pressure on the rupee is decreasing to that extent,” Dr. Mayaram said while maintaining that the appreciation of the rupee would help in reducing the subsidy bill and containing inflation.

The net positive impact of a hardening rupee would be a lower import bill for petroleum products, considering that 80 per cent of the requirements are met through imports.

“(As and when the rupee strengthens further] our subsidy burden will go down even further…We expect inflation to come down because of that…A one rupee change [vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar] gives you about eight basis points of drop in inflation,” the DEA Secretary said.

“We are expecting that we will be able to come very close to our fiscal target if we are prudent in our expenditure where all important critical expenditure commitment will be fully met,” he said.

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India begin Super Eight campaign today against Australia in the Group of Death

Michael Hussey couldn’t have put it more aptly when he said that his side’s clash against India would be deemed as a mini grand final considering the formidable line-ups and the pressure involved. Australia has looked one of the most convincing teams in the World Cup thus far, and their Indian counterparts aren’t far behind either. This Super Eight group involving India, Australia, South Africa and Pakistan has been termed as ‘Group of Death’ for obvious reasons, and to draw first blood would provide huge impetus as the tournament progresses.

India

Strengths

India’s ruthless performance against England would have done their confidence a world of good. To dismiss the defending champions to a paltry total of 80, despite fielding a second-strength bowling attack, is a huge morale booster. Moreover, the fact that the Indians haven’t lost more than five wickets since the last many T20 games speaks volumes of the strength the line-up possesses. But the probability of Virender Sehwag making way for a fifth bowler in the form of off-spinner Harbhajan Singh could prove to be a gamble. Nevertheless, it’s a move that could also pay rich dividends.

Virat Kohli’s stupendous form with the bat is another plus for India. Not only has he been India’s Most Valuable Player  since the last few seasons, he’s carried the Indian batting on his shoulders whenever need be. Also, he’s a livewire on the field and can certainly lift the side’s spirits up when the going gets a little sombre.

Weakness

The Indian bowlers have copped severe criticism since the last few years, yet, bowling continues to be an area of vulnerability. The likes of Irfan Pathan and Lakshmipathy Balaji haven’t come out all guns blazing yet. A the dip In Zaheer Khan’s form implies that the batsmen must add a few more than usual to the scoreboard to compensate for the bowling weaknesses.

Ravichandran Ashwin has been India’s most productive bowler in the overs-limit format of the game, and the fact that Harbhajan Singh too is beginning to find his foothold augurs well for the team.

Australia

Strengths

The duo of David Warner and Shane Watson can dent the confidence of an opposition with their swashbuckling style of play early on in the innings, and there is little doubt that the Australians will be looking at the two to get the side off to a flyer. Watson’s heroics with both the bat and ball during the league stages will hold him in good stead, and he’ll be hoping to carry the momentum throughout the Super Eights where tougher opponents could present a roadblock. Also, Michael Hussey’s experience and the stability he adds to the side cannot be counted out.

Mitchell Starc has been impressive in the bowling department, and his economy rate and average provide ample evidence of that. Moreover, all eyes will be on him, since it’d be interesting to see how the Indians react to his open threat of “chin music”.

Weakness

Although formidable, the Australian middle-order hasn’t been tested much in Sri Lankan conditions. They’re also devoid of a player like Andrew Symonds who can instantly instil fear in the opposition. Moreover, their proficiency against spin is an unknown quantity. There’s little doubt that India will unleash its spin artillery against them, and the middle-order could eventually have a big role to play in the outcome of the match. Can they fight it out?

Previous encounters

The two teams have played six T20 Internationals thus far, winning three each. The last encounter between these two sides was seven months ago at Melbourne, as India romped home with eight wickets to spare. The margin of difference has been significant during five of the six games played. The other occasion was during the 2007 T20 World Cup, a match that India went on to win by just 15 runs.

India will have a psychological edge owing to the fact that they managed to oust Australia during the 2007 T20 World Cup as well as the one that was held last year. On both occasions, India went on to win the coveted titles, and they’ll be hoping to replicate the scenario this time around as well.

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Apple iPad dominates tablet-based web browsing with 98% share, report says

A study released on Thursday claims the iPad accounts for nearly of all web traffic originating from tablets, and 54.5 percent of all traffic from mobile devices, to sites running the touch-centric Onswipe platform.

In its first-ever study, Onswipe, a digital publishing tool developer that helps websites create "touch friendly" web experiences without building a standalone app, found that Apple's tablet represented 98.1 percent of 29.5 million unique impressions over 1200 sites from Sept. 13 to Sept. 20. 

Apple's massive share was followed by Samsung's Galaxy Tab and Motorola's Xoom, which managed 1.53 percent and 0.21 percent of tablet-based traffic, respectively. Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire came in fourth with 0.11 percent.

"The iPad is clearly a browsing device," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told AppleInsider, explaining that his company can track device and engagement data via the aptly-named Onswipe platform.

Digging deeper into the results, iPad users spent 56.9 percent more time per web surfing session than iPhone owners, possibly hinting that the tablet's larger screen is better suited for browsing. 

Also of note is the iPad's 54.5 percent share of total mobile web traffic, more than doubling the iPhone's share of 19.05 percent despite having comparatively fewer units in operation.

Interestingly, the Kindle Fire has seen a bump in web content engagement, as users spend 79 percent more time per page visit compared to iPad users. Amazon's small form factor device also generates 138 percent more page views per visit relative to Apple's tablet. The results offer a look at what could be the future of tablet computing as an onslaught of 7-inch products hit the market, possibly signaling a push toward smaller, more portable devices. 

As for operating system share, Apple's iOS owns 75.12 percent of total mobile content consumption across Onswipe's monitored network, followed by Android with 22.3 percent and all others with 2.5 percent. 

Baptiste made note of a brief follow-up study conducted on Wednesday which found iOS 6 accounted for 40.8 percent of all iOS traffic for visitors to Onswipe partner sites. Of the 250,000 unique iOS users studied, 56.76 percent of iPhone users upgraded to iOS 6, compared to 37.75 percent of iPad owners.

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