Sandeep Monangi

BANGALORE: A 21-year-old free-software enthusiast in Mumbai is taking on Hewlett-Packard, the multinational computer giant. Ishan Ketan Masdekar has sent a legal notice to HP for "compelling" him to buy a product that he says doesn't meet his requirements. The product in this case is Microsoft Windows 8 operating system, which came bundled with the HP Notebook he bought in June this year.

Masdekar's notice asks for a refund of his cost on the OS but, more importantly, he wants a change in HP's software terms policy, which the notice says is anti-competitive and violates India's Competition Act 2002.
The programmer at Digital Freedom Foundation is perhaps the first in India to send a notice to an original equipment manufacturer for bundling software with hardware, but he is part of a global trend. Free-software enthusiasts across the world run campaigns like 'No More Racketware' and fight what they call "Windows Tax".

In 2011, an Italian consumer watchdog took Microsoft to court over software bundling after it won a pilot case against HP in 2007 and, in 2012, a French buyer won a case against Lenovo. Microsoft has been fighting bundling accusations since the browser wars of the 1990s between Internet Explorer and Netscape. Masdekar himself has sent the notice not so much for the refund, but to make buyers aware that they have a choice.

"I don't care much for the refund," he said, "which would come to around Rs 3,000. I want people to know that they don't have to take whatever software is given to them."

Responding to ET's request for comment, HP said it "has an extensive product portfolio which provides consumers with variety, including units bundled with a built-in OS and those without".

Proprietary software makers and OEMs have their defence against the free-software activists. They say 'naked' PCs - machines that don't come with pre-installed OS - encourage piracy. Without the pre-installed OS, a user might be easily persuaded to buy a cheaper copy. Also a large portion of Indian consumers may not be looking for a choice, says Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"Many buy PCs for their convenience and not to begin a learning curve (which an alternative OS would require)," he says. Therefore, a large number may prefer machines with pre-installed OS.

Windows' licence agreement leaves the resolution of conflicts such as Masdekar's to the laptop manufacturer's policy, in this case HP's. When Masdekar contacted HP's Customer Relations, a manager wrote back saying that "the HP OS Image (HP Recovery) is a bundled software meant for HP systems only" and a refund for the Windows 8 OS alone would not be possible.

Therefore the user, Masdekar, is now left with two options - use a software he does not want or return a hardware that he does. This does not mean that consumers have a choice of picking every model with or without OS, says Pravin A, founder of Pirate Movement of India. "Entry level, low-powered PCs usually come without an OS pre-installed."

The move is especially relevant in emerging countries like India, where limited data plans and feature phones are common.

"Targeting by mobile network type helps advertisers choose creative that will run smoothly on any given device and connection speed.

"That is why we are launching a new feature that enables advertisers to reach people based on the network connection -- 2G, 3G or 4G -- they most often use when accessing Facebook," the social media giant said in a blogpost.

The US-based firm, which has over 1.32 billion users globally, already offers advertisers to reach people based on the type of device they use (smartphones, feature phones and tablets) as well as device model and operating system.

In June this year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had said 30 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) globally are using Facebook to connect to customers and expand their presence and reach.

India, which is Facebook's second largest market in terms of user-base, has nine lakh SMBs leveraging its platform.

"People want fast, efficient experiences on their phones. Our hope is that mobile network targeting can improve the experience people have with Facebook ads by helping advertisers deliver the right experience while respecting people's device bandwidth and data costs," Facebook Product Marketing Manager Brendan Sullivan said.

Advertisers like Vodafone in India are already testing these new targeting capabilities with good early results.

"We are excited about the new mobile targeting option on Facebook which allows us sharper targeting to a relevant audience," Vodafone India Senior Vice President (Brand Communication, Insights and Online) Ronita Mitra said.

ET Bureau Jun 30, 2014, 04.00AM IST

This should be the beginning of an important piece of deconstruction — of the notion of secularism as practised by the Congress. Only by affirming secularism in the sense in which it finds a place in the Constitution can the Congress hope to regain lost ground and help the larger polity keep majoritarianism at bay.

Secularism in the classical sense means separation of religion from the state. In India, it has come to mean equal treatment of all religions by the state rather than denial of any room in the public sphere for religion.

However, the way the Congress has practised secularism, it has come to mean playing identity politics with Muslim sentiments. When the Sachar committee report came up with the finding that Muslims were exceptionally deprived in most states of the country, the UPA government declared that the minorities would have the first claim on the nation's resources.

In practice, the minorities continued to be deprived, Muslim youths got picked up, particularly in Congressruled Maharashtra, and implicated in terror cases on the flimsiest of evidence, only to be released years later. This has served to antagonise both Hindus and Muslims and also to give secularism itself a bad name, as a disingenuous term for minority identity politics.

To reclaim secularism and redeem itself, the Congress needs to appreciate the good sense in what Antony says. It has not, at least in Maharashtra, where chief minister Prithviraj Chavan seeks to buy votes with quotas. Community-based mobilisation in itself does not constitute communalism.

But such mobilisation in hostility to another community is communalism. Tolerance of minority communalism is fodder for majority communalism and secular parties must appreciate this reality as well.

The study, conducted by researchers affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California at San Francisco, appeared in the June 17 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers wanted to see if the number of positive, or negative, words in messages they read affected whether users then posted positive or negative content in their status updates. Indeed, after the exposure the manipulated users began to use negative or positive words in their updates depending on what they were exposed to. Results of the study spread when the online magazine Slate and The Atlantic website wrote about it on Saturday.

"Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness," the study authors wrote. "These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks."

While other studies have used metadata to study trends, this appears to be unique because it manipulates the data to see if there is a reaction.

The study was legal according to Facebook's rules -- but was it ethical? "#Facebook MANIPULATED USER FEEDS FOR MASSIVE PSYCH EXPERIMENT... Yeah, time to close FB acct!" read one Twitter posting. Other tweets used words like "super disturbing," "creepy" and "evil," as well as angry expletives, to describe the experiment.

Susan Fiske, a Princeton University professor who edited the report for publication, told The Atlantic that she was concerned about the research and contacted the authors. They in turn said that their institutional review boards approved the research "on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time".

Fiske admitted to being "a little creeped out" by the study. Facebook told The Atlantic that they "carefully consider" their research, and have "a strong internal review process". Facebook, the world's biggest social network, says it has more than one billion active users.

Till now, finding that individual was like searching for a needle in a haystack. But a clutch of companies is bringing prospective lenders and borrowers together. You can register online and meet people who are willing to lend or borrow from you. "We are an e-Bay for loans," says Rajat Gandhi, CEO of Gugaon-based Faircent, which began operations last year and has already disbursed loans to 123 borrowers.

Though individuals have been lending to each other since time immemorial, this segment of credit has been largely unorganized. Without any proper paperwork, people only lent to business associates, friends or relatives. But companies like Faircent and the Hyderabad-based i-Lend have turned this traditional funding mechanism into an organised market.

In the process, they have reduced the spread between the lending and deposit rates of banks. It's a win-win arrangement, which lets investors earn higher returns on their capital at low risk, and borrowers get access to funds at lower rates. For example, a bank charges roughly 20-24% for an unsecured loan but offers barely 9-10% on fixed deposits. The difference (also known as the spread) is pocketed by the bank. "Our innovative model not only removes the complexity of modern banking, but also cuts the spread and passes on the savings to depositors and borrowers," says Gandhi.

How can you get a loan through these P2P portals? For one, you must have an impeccable repayment record. VVSSB Shankar, founder and director of i-Lend, says only credible borrowers are introduced to the investors. Investors prefer borrowers who are educated, have a steady job and have a good credit history. A high credit score will automatically help you get a loan faster and at compratively lower rates.

How safe is it to lend to a complete stranger whom you have never met and won't even see? The peer-to-peer companies insist that it is very safe. Shankar says the annual default rate is a mere 3-4%. "We have never had a full default till now," he adds. Gandhi says they screen borrowers diligently. "We follow the same process as any bank before a borrower is allowed to list on the Faircent site," he says.

To reduce the risk further, the P2P portals advise lenders to diversify their lending across 4-5 different borrowers, though oneto-one deals are also allowed. Shankar cites the example of a lender who spread his investment of Rs 1 lakh across five loans of Rs 20,000 each.

ET Bureau Jun 9, 2014, 05.29AM IST

This theory would have it that AAP is yet a party in the making. That may be the case, but it is also important to remember that AAP did a laudable job of acting on the promise of a new era of transparency in politics, and our polity has much to benefit from the party self-correcting and re-establishing itself.

The way AAP went about garnering funds pretty much broke the mould of Indian politics, where unaccounted funding and spending by parties remains one of the main causes of corruption in public life. That the party spread itself too thin, overestimated its own appeal nationally, might be true. Taking on the might of established players would take some doing.

Despite that, the party must stick to its transparent methods of funding, even raise the pitch on this count so that the BJP and Congress are forced to take some action on that front.

In tandem, the absence of democratic functioning within the party must be made good and, that done, gains like the four seats in Punjab it got can be built on. For, it is still possible that the party can gain in areas where the established players are perceived as not having been able to deliver. But, as of now, the party seems about to implode.

The hasty decision to quit the Delhi government was a disaster, and much of the goodwill and positive buzz about the party seems to have evaporated. The task now is to pull itself up by the bootstraps, focus on areas where it can put up a fight, and gear up for a long haul.

The Finnish mobile phone maker's India manufacturing unit was at one time a marquee investment and a symbol of India's importance for Nokia. But the company quickly fell into troubled times. It has shed thousands of jobs at the Chennai factory but in a rare example of corporate social responsibility, it is trying to help its former employees cope with their reversal in fortunes.
Among those benefitting is K Thyagarajan, 27, a former Nokia India worker who like most others suddenly lost his job and was clueless about what he would do next. He had opted for the voluntary retirement scheme and the exit had left him at a crossroads. "We were like a family, nearly 7,000 employees at the factory. I was extremely sad when they announced the VRS," said Thyagarajan. And just as he was trying to recover from the job loss, he received a letter from Nokia India requesting him to attend some interactive sessions. Thyagarajan initially ignored the letter, but then decided to give in to the persuasion.

Thyagarajan became a part of Nokia's Bridge programme, which conducts awareness and training sessions for employees to help them secure a new job or start a new venture. It is aimed at those who have worked with the company for at least five years. Apart from structured financial assistance, the programme offers beauty treatment courses, MS Office/Tally accounting courses, training for commissioning of solar units, desktop publishing modules and garment-making. In all, there are about 30 modules being conducted in around 40 locations in TN.

According to company statistics, over 60% of the outgoing employees have attended the awareness sessions and almost all have opted for the training sessions that have commenced in a few centres.

Ajit Isaac, the chairman and managing director of Ikya Human Capital Solutions, said that initiatives such as these help employees gain new skills and provide them the confidence to seek opportunities outside. Industry experts are of the view that helping employees to get another job in a difficult situation is new in the Indian context whereas globally many organisations do so. "These programmes would be based on the opportunities available in the market. This is a welcome move. Any corporate which does this, they have the long-term interests of their employees in mind," said K Purushothaman, a regional director of software industry grouping Nasscom.

Nokia's factory was excluded from a Microsoft's recent acquisition of Nokia's devices and services units. The Chennai plant was left out of the deal because it is entangled in a legal dispute with tax authorities in New Delhi and Chennai, and the assets of this division has been frozen as a result of the dispute.

The factory, located at Sriperumbudur, about 40 km from Chennai, is now operating as a contract manufacturer for Microsoft. Although the timeframe of this arrangement with Microsoft is unclear, Nokia India began cutting its workforce by announcing an early retirement scheme. A month after concluding the VRS programme, Nokia India came up with the Bridge programme. It has tied up with TVS Training and Services and Ace Skill Development to design and implement the programme.

A Nokia India spokeswoman says the company has invested "tens of millions of euros" to run the Bridge program globally in which around 18,000 employees have participated. She claims the program has been successful where it "has resulted in the creation of 1,000 new companies across 19 cities/sites worldwide" and "more than 90% of those companies are still active".

The company declined to provide specific information on investments in the programme in India.

P Chitra, 27, who worked at Nokia India's factory for eight years, has now registered a partnership firm with other four ex-employees to export fancy jewellery. The group of five was already pursuing this as a hobby before deciding to take it up as a full-time business opportunity. The initial investment for the business came from the Bridge compensation and the VRS amounts of these five former Nokia employees.

"We are aiming to earn a profit of Rs 1 lakh per person per month," said a confident Chitra.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW (CALIFORNIA): Just down the road from Google's main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult - and far more expensive - for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.

As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the NSA had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.

After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal is to thwart Washington - as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.

Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world's oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customers' data.

A year after Snowden's revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. AT&T, Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the US government in "gray areas" where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.

But governments are fighting back, harder than ever. Cellphone giant Vodafone reported Friday that a "small number" of governments around the world had demanded the ability to tap directly into its communication networks, a level of surveillance that elicited outrage from privacy advocates.

Vodafone refused to name the nations Friday for fear of putting its business and employees at risk there. But in an accounting of the number of legal demands for information that it receives, it noted that some countries did not issue warrants to obtain phone, email or web-searching traffic because "the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link."

The company also said it had to acquiesce to some governments' requests for data to comply with national laws. Otherwise, it said, it faced losing its license to operate in certain countries.

Eric Grosse, Google's security chief, suggested in an interview that the NSA's own behavior invited the new arms race.

"I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things," he said, referring to Washington's efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. "But signals intercept is totally off the table," he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.

"No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard," he added.

Are there no ways to investigate a case like this without putting the CEO in jail? Is the cost to any aggrieved consumer, whose complaint leads to the arrest, greater than the reputational damage to India as an investment destination? Based as it is on a state-level law, the arrest presents itself as a challenge to the new prime minister, one reflecting the complexity of improving things in our multi-level polity.

Amway's business model is direct selling using multilevel marketing, in which an operative who recruits new operatives gets a commission from the sale proceeds of his recruits and of their recruits down the chain of recruitment. It is easy to confuse this with a pyramid/Ponzi scheme.

The crucial, distinction between legitimate multilevel marketing and a pyramid scheme is that mere recruitment will generate income for those up the chain in a pyramid scheme while only genuine sales by the recruits will generate incomes for those up the hierarchy in legitimate business.

In its initial phase, Amway India did use to count the kit supplied to a new recruit as a sale qualifying for a commission, creating an overlap with a pyramid scheme. But that is no longer the case and only real sales generate incomes. It should be possible for the police to establish this without actually arresting anyone. Narendra Modi is a champion of states' rights. But when state-level laws and practices damage India's collective interests, the Centre has the duty to countervail these offending laws and practices.

How this is done is a matter of political management, not of strong-arm tactics or federal trespass. That management is crucial, and state laws must align with a model, central law on multilevel marketing.

ET Bureau May 30, 2014, 03.31AM IST

If the people choose to place their faith in someone, that is reason enough for him/her to qualify as a people's representative. Any such representative is eligible to hold higher office. Democratic accountability will ensure that a wrong choice is penalised, subsequently. Many leaders have built their political career dropping out of college. This does not make them any the less public-spirited or capable of upholding the larger public interest while taking policy decisions.

The job of a minister is not to have expertise in the area under his/her charge but to have a clear idea as to the public interest in that area and draw on expertise to attain that. The lack of educational qualification is, of course, altogether different from any misrepresentation of educational qualifications attained.

Such misconduct would have its own legal consequences. The purpose of barring subsequent employment for regulators is to guard against any favour being shown to a potential future employer. Such a provision is neither sufficient nor necessary to prevent regulatory capture. Continuous scrutiny of regulatory policy and action by the media and watchdog bodies is the best guarantee of propriety.

Misra's past membership of the regulatory body should not come in the way of the services of this upright, efficient officer being utilised further.

Wednesday's announcement came nearly three weeks after deal negotiations were leaked to the media.

It's by far the most expensive acquisition in Apple's 38-year old history, a price that the company is paying to counter a threat posed to its iTunes store.

The price consists of $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in Apple stock that will vest over an unspecified time period. The deal is expected to close before October.

With $1.1 billion in revenue last year, Beats is already making money and will boost Apple's earnings once the new fiscal year begins in October, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview.

Iovine, 61, and Dre, 49, were the keys to the deal. They began working with Apple in the early days of its iTunes store and now will become key in Apple's music divisions, though Cook said their roles haven't been determined yet

"We have known these guys forever," Cook said of Iovine and Dre. "We've dated, we've gone steady and now we are getting married. This relationship started a decade ago, so we know there is an incredible cultural fit. These two guys have a very rare set of skills. It's like finding a particular grain of sand on the beach. It's that rare."

Cook indicated Beats' music streaming service was the main selling point in the deal, though the headphone line also is expected to continue growing, too.

Although he regards most technology companies as "culturally inept," Iovine believes Apple will empower Beats to realize its goals of improving the sound of digital music and creating playlists tailored for each subscriber.

"To complete our dream, we needed a company like (Apple)," Iovine said in an interview. "We couldn't finish this on our own."

The growing popularity of music streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify has been reducing sales of songs and albums, a business that iTunes has dominated for the past decade. U.S. sales of downloaded songs slipped 1 per cent last year to $2.8 billion while streaming music revenue surged 39 per cent to $1.4 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Although Apple broke into streaming with the launch of iTunes Radio last September, the service has not been as popular or as lucrative as the company expected, according to two people familiar with the matter. The people were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

ITunes Radio has 40 million listeners and will continue as a free service with ads while Beats Music will try to tap into the more than 800 million iTunes accounts to sell more subscriptions to its customized service.

Beats Music currently has more than 250,000 subscribers, Cook said. That's well below the more than 10 million paying customers that Spotify's streaming service boasts.

Apple is counting on the Beats acquisition to boost its cachet with teenagers and younger adults as it tries to remain a leader in digital music - an industry that looks much different than when Apple reshaped the scene with the 2001 debut of the iPod.

"Apple suddenly has regained its cool," said Sony Music CEO Doug Morris, who was one of the first recording executives to embrace iTunes at Iovine's urging more than a decade ago.

Beats was founded in 2008 by Dr. Dre, whose real name is Andre Young, and Iovine, a longtime recording industry executive who is stepping down as chairman of Universal Music Group's Interscope Geffen A&M Records to join Apple. It now dominates the luxury headphone market. Its equipment is also a big seller in Apple's stores.

Operating from its Culver City, California, headquarters, Beats commands 62 per cent of the $1 billion U.S. market for headphones priced above $100, according to NPD Group.

The purchase marks Apple CEO Tim Cook's biggest strategic break from the way the Cupertino, California, company was led under co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011. Jobs favored smaller acquisitions and didn't believe subscription music plans would be popular.

Before Beats, Apple's biggest acquisition had been its $400 million purchase of NeXt Computer, a company that Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple in the 1980s.

Cook said he never considered what Jobs would have thought about the Beats' acquisition during the negotiations. Jobs "told me to do what was right," Cook said. "And I am 100 per cent certain this is what is right. This is one of those things that we will look back upon and say it was meant to be."

Morris, who considers Iovine to be his best friend, believes Cook is making a smart move that will give Apple even more credibility in the music industry.

"It's a game changer because Jimmy is that kind of guy who can change a game," Morris said. "I am not saying he is Steve Jobs, but he is a guy with new ideas and he really knows how to build the bridge between music and technology."

But some analysts question whether Beats will be a good fit for Apple, which makes most of its money selling hardware such as iPhones and iPads.

Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett says Apple would have been better off developing its own headphones in-house and expanding into music subscriptions through iTunes.

"It's hard to understand why Apple would have to spend $3 billion on a nascent streaming service and a line of bass-heavy headphones," Gillett says.

Yukari Iwatani Kane, the author of "Haunted Empire," an inside look at Apple since co-founder Jobs' death, also sees a disconnect.

"Culturally, Beats is the complete opposite of Apple," Kane says. "It's known for being loud and bold and in your face. It doesn't fit with Apple's understated, discerning brand."

Having visited Apple on a regular basis since he first met Jobs more than a decade ago, Iovine said he has no qualms about joining Apple.

"This is not a big company to us," Iovine said. "We can roller skate in the halls here. Dre and I have been working together for 22 years. We are not about to go somewhere where we are going to fall."

Dre was more sedate Wednesday than he was in a celebratory video posted online declaring him as hip-hop's first billionaire after news of the Apple talks leaked earlier this month. "To be able to do something that could potentially change the world, I'm thrilled."