Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Launced in India

Samsung has officially announced its Galaxy S4 mini smartphone, a compact version of Samsung's flagship smartphone.

Samsung Galaxy S4 mini is powered by a 1.7GHz dual-core processor along with 1.5GB of RAM. It packs in 8GB of internal storage of which 5GB is user accessible. The internal storage can be further expanded by up to 64GB with the help of a microSD card.

The smartphone comes with 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display. For camera, there is an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and 1.9-megapixel HD front-facing camera. The camera of Samsung Galaxy S4 mini also supports additional features like Sound&Shot. Apart from this, the images clicked through the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini are automatically gathered and saved according to the user's timeline, geo-tagging information, or a specific event to create a photo album.

Samsung Galaxy S4 mini runs on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) and has a 1,900mAh battery. It also supports Group Play feature, S Translator and S Health, all found in Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4. Samsung Galaxy S4 mini had leaked extensively over the past couple of months and there were speculations being made that this smartphone will be unveiled at the June 20 event being held in London along with other Galaxy and Ativ devices.

Samsung will be offering the Galaxy S4 mini smartphone in two colours options - White Frost and Black Mist. As per the company, the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini will support either 4G LTE, or 3G HSPA+ or 3G Dual-SIM. The connectivity option will vary across different regions.

Samsung had officially launched Galaxy S4 smartphone at a gala event on March 14, 2013. It has been recently introduced in India for Rs. 41, 500. The company recently announced that it has managed to ship over 10 million units of the smartphone.

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr in $1.1B Deal

Yahoo is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet icon that had fallen behind the times.

The deal announced on Monday represents Mayer’s boldest move yet since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo’s latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo’s most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, California, company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.

Yahoo is paying all cash for Tumblr, dipping into some of its remaining stash from a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.

Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Tumblr emerged has a trendy online hangout by providing a service that makes it easy to share blog posts, photos, video and other content in an enthralling mosaic. The service says it has amassed more than 50 billion posts from 108 million blogs. Tumblr users rely on a dashboard to pinpoint the kinds of blogs that they want to track and also have tools to pass along the posts that interest them.

Yahoo’s acquisition will deliver a jackpot to Mr. Karp, who dropped out of high school to concentrate on computer programming. He ended up being home schooled while taking classes in Japanese and working on gambling software. Later, he became a product executive at a parenting website called UrbanBaby. After CNet bought the site in 2006, Mr. Karp set up his own a development service called “Davidville” before deciding to create an outlet for personal expression an endeavour that hatched Tumblr.

Google Plus Takes On Facebook With New 41 Features

Google is digging deeper into its technology toolkit to turn its social networking service into a more formidable threat to Facebook, sprucing up its photo features at a time when sharing snapshots online and on mobile gadgets is growing more popular.

Many of the 41 new features being added to Google Plus beginning Wednesday will draw upon the computing power, machine learning, algorithms, semantics analysis and other innovations that established Google's search engine as the most influential force on the Internet.
"All of these features collectively put more of 'the Google' into Google Plus," said Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice-president of engineering, in an interview. "This will give people a powerful reason to come to Google Plus."
But the most compelling new attraction may be a new photo-management tool that promises to test how much control people want to cede to computers. It will also further blur the lines between a real moment in time and augmented reality.

Google promises the feature will pick out the best shots from a wide assortment of photos. The automatic photo selection is done by calling upon Google's knowledge of the elements that make up a visually pleasing picture, coupled with facial recognition technology and a vast database that helps tie together the relationships of people appearing in a photo. Google says its computers will recognize the best photos featuring family members or close friends of a person who uploads a bunch of pictures to Plus.
"You have amazing images of the most precious image of your life," Gundotra told a software developers conference Wednesday as he discussed the additions to Google Plus. "But if we are honest with each other photos are very labor intensive."

If the photos don't look quite right, Google is promising to enhance them, taking over a job that typically requires people to buy and master special photo editing software such as Adobe System Inc.'s Photoshop, Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa. Computer-controlled editing tools will automatically remove red eyes, soften skin tones, sharpen colors and adjust contrast. Google offers something similar through an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Picasa.

In an effort to get more photos onto the Plus network, Google is offering to back up all pictures taken on a mobile device, as soon as they're snapped. To accommodate the increased volume, Google Plus will now provide each account holder with up to 15 gigabytes of storage for full-resolution photos.
Gundotra believes Plus' management tools will be compelling because they are designed to save people the time and trouble of choosing and editing photos. Google Plus users will be able to compare all original photos with the versions altered by computers. The auto-enhancement tool can also be turned off.

Another new photo feature promises to stitch together a sequence of photos taken of the same group of people or a panoramic scene. This stitching system can be used to create a single photo that pulls the best shots of everyone featured in a series of pictures. It will also produce an animated clip featuring the motions of people captured in a succession of photos taken against the same background.

By appealing to people's photo fondness, Google is hoping to make Plus a more useful and fun place to hang out than Facebook. But Google Plus still hasn't proven it can become as much of a magnet as Facebook, largely because people had already established their online social circles at Facebook.
Google Plus has built up a broad swath of accountholders since its introduction nearly two years ago, mainly because so many people already had set up Google logins while using the company's Gmail or other services. Gundotra announced Wednesday that Google Plus now has 190 million users who interact on the service each month, up from 135 million in late December. About 390 million people log in to Google Plus each month, but that includes a large number who have tied their Gmail accounts to the social networking service. Facebook says it has about 1.1 billion active users.

As such, Google has a long way to go. Facebook has claimed the title of being the world's largest photo-sharing site for years, and with last year's purchase of Instagram only propelled it further ahead. Instagram has 100 million monthly active users, up from 22 million when Facebook agreed to buy it last spring. Rather than offer powerful editing tools or high-quality pictures, Facebook became the most popular way to share the photos online simply because it is the most popular place to hang out online. Today, users upload more than 350 million photos to Facebook each day.

Over the years, it enhanced the quality of the photos displayed, too, and has recently redesigned its site to make photos more pronounced. Instagram, meanwhile, offers an easy-to-use mobile app and playful filters users can apply to snapshots of friends, quirky buildings or plates of food.
Google Plus is getting a new look just two months after Facebook spruced up its news feed - the centerpiece of its service - to feature photos more prominently and generally make posts look more like articles in a magazine or newspaper. Unlike Facebook, Google says there are no current plans to show ads on the revamped Plus.

In another change aimed at attracting more traffic, Google Plus will start to display automatic hash tags to identify the main topic being discussed in a post or featured in a photo. Google is using its understanding of semantics and photo-scanning technology to figure out what is going on. Individuals will still have an option of editing or forbidding a hash tag from appearing if they don't agree with Google's automatic selection. Clicking on the hashtag will take Google Plus users to other posts and pictures bearing the same marker. Similar content being shared by family and friend is supposed to show up first, thanks to the same ranking system that Google's search engine uses to pick out the most relevant results. Facebook doesn't currently use hash tags, though there have been reports that it is working on incorporating them to its site, just as Twitter and Instagram already do.

Nexus 4 Launched in India

LG and Google announced that Nexus 4, the official Android phone, would be available in India in the coming days at an MRP of Rs 25,999. Yesterday, the device became available for pre-order on Flipkart, an e-commerce site, starting at a price of Rs 25,990. Sources said that the pre-order was part of an exclusive deal that Flipkart had struck with LG.










"LG Electronics is pleased to partner Google on the release of the Nexus 4 in India," shared Soon Kwon, managing director, LG Electronics India. "We added the best of our talent to our strength, and the result is a feature-packed smartphone that packs superb hardware under a slim hood."
For now, LG had announced details about only the model with 16GB internal storage and not about the 8GB one, which could be cheaper by at least a few thousands rupees.
Nexus 4 has a 4.7-inch screen with 720P resolution. The phone is powered by a quad-core processor and has 2GB RAM. It has a 8MP primary camera and a 1.3MP front camera. The phone doesn't support microSD card and has a battery that cannot be replaced by users.
The real appeal of the Nexus 4 lies in the software it runs. Like all Nexus devices, it is powered by an unmodified version of Android and is guaranteed to get quick updates whenever Google comes out with the new version of the OS.








This is in stark contrast to other devices that get updates several months after Google had introduced the new version of Android. In an interview to Wired, Sundar Pichai, Android division head at Google, acknowledged that the company was working to fix the update process.
Google usually sells Nexus devices online through its Play Store. But sources said that Nexus 4 would be sold only by LG and its retail partners.
The phone was launched in the global markets last year. At that time an LG executive claimed that it would be available in India in October. But the plans to launch it didn't materialize.
So far Google has made six Nexus phones and tablets. Nexus 4 is the third from the series to hit India. The other two are Nexus S and Nexus 7.  

10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows Server 2012

Here are 10 reasons to give serious consideration to upgrading to Server 2012 sooner rather than later.

1: Freedom of interface choice

A Server Core installation provides security and performance advantages, but in the past, you had to make a commitment: If you installed Server Core, you were stuck in the “dark place” with only the command line as your interface. Windows Server 2012 changes all that. Now we have choices.
The truth that Microsoft realized is that the command line is great for some tasks and the graphical interface is preferable for others. Server 2012 makes the GUI a “feature” — one that can be turned on and off at will. You do it through the Remove Roles Or Features option in Server Manager.

2: Server Manager

Speaking of Server Manager (Figure A), even many of those who dislike the new tile-based interface overall have admitted that the design’s implementation in the new Server Manager is excellent.

Figure A

Server Manager

One of the nicest things about the new Server Manager is the multi-server capabilities, which makes it easy to deploy roles and features remotely to physical and virtual servers. It’s easy to create a server group — a collection of servers that can be managed together. The remote administration improvements let you provision servers without having to make an RDP connection.

3: SMB 3.0

The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol has been significantly improved in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The new version of SMB supports new file server features, such as SMB transparent failover , SMB Scale Out, SMB Multichannel, SMB Direct, SMB encryption, VSS for SMB file sharing, SMB directory leasing, and SMB PowerShell. That’s a lot of bang for the buck. It works beautifully with Hyper-V, so that VHD files and virtual machine configuration files can be hosted on SMB 3.0 shares. A SQL system database can be stored on an SMB share, as well, with improvements to performance. 

4: Dynamic Access Control (DAC)

Even though some say Microsoft has shifted the focus away from security in recent years, it would be more accurate to say it has shifted the focus from separate security products to a more “baked in” approach of integrating security into every part of the operating system.
Dynamic Access Control is one such example, helping IT pros create more centralized security models for access to network resources by tagging sensitive data both manually and automatically, based on factors such as the file content or the creator. Then claims based access controls can be applied. 

5: Storage Spaces

Storage is a hot — and complex — topic in the IT world these days. Despite the idea that we’re all going to be storing everything in the public cloud one day, that day is a long way off (and for many organizations concerned about security and reliability, it may never happen). There are myriad solutions for storing data on your network in a way that provides better utilization of storage resources, centralized management, and better scalability, along with security and reliability. Storage area networks (SANs) and network attached storage (NAS) do that, but they can be expensive and difficult to set up.
Storage Spaces is a new feature in Server 2012 that lets you use inexpensive hard drives to create a storage pool, which can then be divided into spaces that are used like physical disks. They can include hot standby drives and use redundancy methods such as 2- or 3-way mirroring or parity. You can add new disks any time, and a space can be larger than the physical capacity of the pool. When you add new drives, the space automatically uses the extra capacity. 

6: Hyper-V Replica

Virtualization is the name of the game in the server world these days, and Hyper-V is Microsoft’s answer to VMware. Although the latter had a big head start, Microsoft’s virtualization platform has been working hard at catching up, and many IT pros now believe it has surpassed its rival in many key areas. With each iteration, the Windows hypervisor gets a little better, and Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 brings a number of new features to the table. One of the most interesting is Hyper-V Replica.
This is a replication mechanism that will be a disaster recovery godsend to SMBs that may not be able to deploy complex and costly replication solutions. It logs changes to the disks in a VM and uses compression to save on bandwidth, replicating from a primary server to a replica server. You can store multiple snapshots of a VM on the replica server and then select the one you want to use. It works with both standalone hosts and clusters in any combination (standalone to standalone, cluster to cluster, standalone to cluster or cluster to standalone).

7: Improvements to VDI

Windows Terminal Services has come a long way, baby, since I first met it in Windows NT TS Edition. Renamed Remote Desktop Services, it has expanded to encompass much more than the ability to RDP into the desktop of a remote machine. Microsoft offered a centralized Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution in Windows Server 2008 R2, but it was still a little rough around the edges. Significant improvements have been made in Server 2012.
You no longer need a dedicated GPU graphics card in the server to use RemoteFX, which vastly improves the quality of graphics over RDP. Instead, you can use a virtualized GPU on standard server hardware. USB over RDP is much better, and the Fair Share feature can manage how CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth are allocated among users to thwart bandwidth hogs. 

8: DirectAccess without the hassle factor

DirectAccess was designed to be Microsoft’s “VPN replacement,” a way to create a secure connection from client to corporate network without the performance drain and with a more transparent user experience than a traditional VPN. Not only do users not have to deal with making the VPN work, but administrators get more control over the machines, with the ability to manage them even before users log in. You apply group policy using the same tools you use to manage computers physically located on the corporate network.
So why hasn’t everyone been using DirectAccess with Server 2008 R2 instead of VPNs? One big obstacle was the dependency on IPv6. Plus, it couldn’t be virtualized. Those obstacles are gone now. In Windows Server 2012, DirectAccess works with IPv4 without having to fool with conversion technologies, and the server running DirectAccess at the network edge can now be a Hyper-V virtual machine. The Server 2012 version of DA is also easier to configure, thanks to the new wizard.

9: ReFS

Despite the many advantages NTFS offers over early FAT file systems, it’s been around since 1993, and Windows aficionados have been longing for a new file system for quite some time. Way back in 2004, we were eagerly looking forward to WinFS, but Vista disappointed us by not including it. Likewise, there was speculation early on that a new file system would be introduced with Windows 7, but it didn’t happen.
Windows Server 2012 brings us our long-awaited new file system, ReFS or the Resilient File System. It supports many of the same features as NTFS, although it leaves behind some others, perhaps most notably file compression, EFS, and disk quotas. In return, ReFS gives us data verification and auto correction, and it’s designed to work with Storage Spaces to create shrinkable/expandable logical storage pools. The new file system is all about maximum scalability, supporting up to 16 exabytes in practice. (This is the theoretical maximum in the NTFS specifications, but in the real world, it’s limited to 16 terabytes.) ReFS supports a theoretical limit of 256 zetabytes (more than 270 billion terabytes). That allows for a lot of scaling.

10: Simplified licensing

Anyone who has worked with server licenses might say the very term “simplified licensing” is an oxymoron. But Microsoft really has listened to customers who are confused and frustrated by the complexity involved in finding the right edition and figuring out what it’s really going to cost. Windows Server 2012 is offered in only four editions: Datacenter, Standard, Essentials, and Foundation. The first two are licensed per-processor plus CAL, and the latter two (for small businesses) are licensed per-server with limits on the number of user accounts (15 for Foundation and 25 for Essentials).

Kerala-based Telmoco Launches 7-inch Android Tablet Phone

Telmoco Development Labs Pvt. Ltd., Kerala's first incubated consumer electronics start-up based in Technopark here, has forayed into the retail segment with Attitude Next 6339 a seven-inch Android tablet phone.

The company's new offering was unveiled by Minister for Industries and Information Technology P.K. Kunhalikutty and handed over to Francis Mukkannikal, director of MFJ Communications and Marketing Pvt. Ltd, which will be bringing the product onto retail shelves.
The product will be available in over 400 retail stores in Kerala and over 100 online stores from May 26 onwards at a price of Rs.7,999.

Kunhalikutty said the government was happy to see a consumer electronics company from Technopark developing state-of-the-art products at par with global brands.
It was last year in April that Telmoco launched their first product Attitude Daksha which was touted as a competitor for the central government promoted Aakash tablet computers.

"Daksha's success in the market was overwhelming and we sold over 2,500 tablets. We are constantly researching to bring in latest technological advancements and our Next 6339 is equipped with the latest features along with fully loaded informative and entertaining apps," said C.R. Nijesh, director, Telmoco Development Labs Pvt. Ltd.

Blackberry Announces BlackBerry Messenger For iPhone & Android

BlackBerry announced on Monday at its 2013 BlackBerry Live keynote address that it will finally be releasing it Blackberry Messenger (BBM) for iPhone and Android over the summer. Up until now, the popular BBM service has been exclusively available only on BlackBerry-branded phones. The existing app allows users to bypass calling, text-message and data charges by communicating using text, photos, videos, and voice on WiFi, similar to other popular apps such as iMessage and WhatsApp. By offering this app as a cross-platform service, users of almost all types of smartphones will be able to seamlessly communicate with each other.

“We’re committed to making the BBM experience on other platforms as fully featured as we can,” said BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins. “We’ll start with messaging and groups, but we’ll add voice and screen share later on. … BB10 is such a strong platform that we are confident it can become an independent messaging solution.”

With that said, the app will only allow for messaging functions for iPhone and Android. Heins has obviously alluded to potential updates, but since the app is targeted at the current iOS 6 and Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), it’s possible that the company is going to wait for phone OS upgrades.

Some say that Blackberry is behind the curve when it comes to this release. Other WiFi-oriented messaging apps exist, and services like Viber already allow for VoIP calls. However, it’s possible that the name “Blackberry” alone will reel in users.