Nokia 'confirms' Lumia phone with 41MP camera

NEW DELHI: Nokia changed the for smartphone cameras last year when it launched the 808 PureView with 41MP snapper. It was rumoured to have included this camera in its flagship Lumia 920 last year, but that was not to be. However, speculation is now rife that the Finnish manufacturer will launch a Lumia phone 41MP camera at its July 11 event in New York. And the company has nearly confirmed it too.

On the Nokia Conversations website, the company has put up a teaser that says there will be "41 million reasons" to attend the July 11 event. "41 million" is a clear hint towards the 41MP camera, as it is the same number of pixels in the sensor of the upcoming Lumia phone. In the invite Nokia sent for the July 11 event, it said it will reinvent zoom, suggesting the launch of the phone currently being called Lumia EOS in tech circles.

In a blog post on Nokia Conversations, it picked five of its favourite internet memes. One of the memes carried the tagline: "Oh, so you've got a smartphone with a zoom lens... I bet that fits in your pocket perfectly." This is a jibe at Samsung's recently unveiled Galaxy S4 Zoom phone, which comes with a 16MP camera and 10X optical zoom.

The Nokia Lumia smartphone with 41MP camera has surfaced on the internet via leaked photos many times in the past few months. The images suggest a body similar to Lumia 920's made of polycarbonate and a huge camera sensor hump on the back. This camera is said to run on Windows Phone 8 operating system, have speaker grilles at the bottom, support wirelessging via a strap-on supported covers and come in red, white, yellow and black colours.

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Samsung Galaxy Note III leaked image surfaces online

NEW DELHI: Samsung has been releasing smartphones at a rapid pace in the past couple of months. Now, a new image of the company's Galaxy Note III phablet has emerged on the internet, just a day ahead of Samsung's June 20 event in London. The handset is an update to the Galaxy Note II smartphone and is slated to be launched at IFA 2013 in August.

The image has been leaked by a Twitter user @PunkPanda, who tweeted that the phone has a 6-inch screen. He also wrote that the display accounts for 84% of the front's footprint, meaning very thin bezels onsides of the screen. The image shows a Galaxy Note III with big screen and curved edge.

Recently, a prototype of Samsung Galaxy Note III also made its way to the internet. It is rumoured that this phone will have a 5.99-inch SuperAMOLED screen with 1920x1080p resolution, 13MP camera with optical image stabilization and support S Pen stylus. Antutu records show the score of a Galaxy Note III with 1.6GHz quad-core processor and running on the unannounced Android 4.3 mobile operating system.

Samsung is scheduled to host an event for its Android-powered Galaxy range of devices as well as Ativ series of gadgets, which run on Windows OS. The company has launched a total of 12 devices globally since April this year, including the flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone and tablets running on Intel chips.

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Google to open Android Nation retail stores in India

NEW DELHI: In a significant move that will help increase Android penetration in India, its promoter Google is now vying for a piece of the retail market with brick-and-mortar stores called Android Nation. 

The US company will partner BK Modi's Spice Global to set up the stores in various Indian cities, starting with New Delhi later this year. 

Like other such stores in Indonesia, each Android Nation store will promote and sell Android smartphones and tablets across multiple brandsSamsung, HTC, Sony, LG and Asus, to name a few. 

The store will also serve as an Android experience centrecustomers can find out more about the latest Android apps, get help experts, download software updates or check out the latest accessories for their devices. 

Importantly, India is only the second country after Indonesia to get Android Nation stores — a move that indicates how much importance Google gives to the market. The first Android Nation store opened in Jakarta, mid 2012. Google now operates two such stores in Jakarta in partnership with Indonesian electronics retailer Erafone. 

The first Indian store will open in New Delhi's Citywalk, a person with direct knowledge of the situation informed ET. Google has been scouting for a 1,200-1,500 sq ft location for this store.

BK Modi, chairman of Spice, told ET that his company's partnership with Google is not just restricted to India — Spice Global will also push Android devices in the Middle East, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Africa. 

He said Google was also supporting Spice Global in bringing China's third largest smartphone brand CoolPad, to India — Spice CoolPad co-branded products will also be sold through Android Nation. 

Spice Global currently operates around 900 Spice Hotspots that sells various mobile phone brands and accessories. After the opening of the first Android Nation store, they plan to convert about 50 of the Hotspots into Android Nation stores to enable rapid expansion of the franchise. 

"We will focus on 3G phones and phase out 2G gradually," he said. Modi's son Dilip Modi will spearhead Android Nation in India. 

"Google feels that many potential customers need to get hands-on experience with its products before they are willing to purchase," technology blog 9to5Google said while breaking the story on Google's possible foray into retailing. 

"Google competitors Apple and Microsoft both have retail outletscustomers can try before they buy, so it won't be an entirely new area," it added.

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Telcos offer average salary hike of 7%

MUMBAI: Wages across India's telecom sector have risen by an average 7% this year, with smaller companies loosening their purse strings a little more than their larger peers in a sluggish market. 

The pay increase at market leader Bharti Airtel, which has seen its share slip lately, has been 4-5%, said two people familiar with budgeting at the company. The Sunil Mittal-controlled company has reported 13 consecutive quarters of profit decline, and has significantly lagged Vodafone India and Idea Cellular in capturing new market. 

Bharti declined to comment but a company executive, who did not wish to be named, said, "What can you expect with an overarching environmentthis, and the general performance of the company." 

The pay increase at No. 2 operator Vodafone India and Telenor's Indian arm, Uninor, has been about 8%, people with knowledge of the matter said. Vodafone India's HR Director Ashok Ramachandran said the company urges its staff not to quit if salary is the only motivator. "My aim at every stage is to see if a person was promoted, was the organisation there to help him succeed." 

Uninor said, "We are a growth company. This means that while we against the industry, we also place increased emphasis on business growth and performance and our remunerations are structured to reflect this." 

Topping the increment list, according to people in the know, is Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Communications with 9-10% hike. The company declined comment on the matter. 

A close second is Sistema Shyam's MTS brand with 9% increase. The gap in pay increase between market leaders and their smaller peers has not surprised analysts, though. 

"That is traditionally the case. Smaller companies have to incentivise employees to show commitment to the future; especially at this time when consolidation is happening," said Hemant Joshi, partner at Deloitte. 

India's telecom sector has been reeling since the Supreme Court of India last year cancelled 122 telecom licences in a case of graft involving sale of spectrum in 2007-08. 

Ever since, industry experts have maintained that new entrants are unlikely in the sector, and the incumbents will dominate the space as more than four operators are not viable. 

"We try to keep our employees happy, because telecom requires specialised skillset. But there have been many layoffs and cut backs in operations, so this year there is talent available in the market," a human resources executive at one of the top three Indian telecom operators said. 

While Vodafone has already issued pay hike letters, othersBharti Airtel, Reliance and Idea are in the process of doing so.

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Uploading your brain to PCs may soon become reality

NEW YORK: Humans may be able to upload their brains to computers by as early as 2045, some futurists believe.

This notion formed the basis for the Global Future 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference held in New York, last week.

The conference, which is the brainchild of Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, featured Ray Kurzweil - an inventor, futurist and now director of engineering at Google - who predicted that by 2045, technology will have surpassed human brainpower to create a kind of superintelligence an event known as the singularity.

Other scientists have said that robots will overtake humans by 2100, 'LiveScience' reported.

According to Moore's law, computing power doubles approximately every two years. Several technologies are undergoing similar exponential advances, genetic sequencing to 3D printing, Kurzweil told conference attendees.

By 2045, "based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold," Kurzweil said.

Substantial achievements have already been made in the field of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs (also called brain-machine interfaces).

Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz, electrical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are working to develop state-of-the-art motor BCIs.

These devices consist of pill-size electrode arrays that record neural signals the brain's motor areas, which are then decoded by a computer and used to control a computer cursor or prosthetic limb (such as a robotic arm).

Theodore Berger, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is taking BCIs to a new level by developing a memory prosthesis. Berger aims to replace part of the brain's hippocampus, the region that converts short-term memories into long-term ones, with a BCI.

The device records the electrical activity that encodes a simple short-term memory (such as pushing a button) and converts it to a digital signal. That signal is passed into a computerit is mathematically transformed and then fed back into the brain,it gets sealed in as a long-term memory.

Martine Rothblatt - a lawyer, author and entrepreneur, and CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics Corp introduced the concept of "mindclones" - digital versions of humans that can live forever - in the conference.

She described how the mind clones are created a "mindfile," a sort of online repository of our personalities, which she argued humans already have (in the form of Facebook, for example). This mindfile would be run on 'mindware', a kind of software for consciousness.

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Former Vodafone exec to head Airtel‘s consumer biz

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel, the country's largest mobile operator, has roped in the Vodafone UK's former consumer director Srinivasan Gopalan, to play a similar role in India, an indictor that the company is tweaking its organization structure yet again, as its new leadership team grapples with twin challenges of falling profits and slowing growth in its primary market. 

The Sunil Mittal promoted telco had made three major organisational changes earlier this year, including the appointment of Gopal Vittal as the chief executive of its Indian operations March 1. 

Gopalan, who quit Vodafone UK last month, will join Airtel as director, consumer business, a newly created post, and report directly to chief executive Vittal, executives with direct knowledge of the development said. It is learnt that Gopalan's primary responsibilities will involve handling the brand, marketing and customer service. Gopalan had joined Vodafone UK in 2010 and is credited with turning around the operator's performance in the challenging prepay market. 

His responsibilities there included the refurbishment of its retail portfolio, towards a more modular style that focuses on operating systems, executives linked to his appointment said. Prior to joining Vodafone, he had worked with T-Mobile UKhe was chief marketing officer. 

Gopalan also spent the earlier part of his career in Indiahe worked for Unilever and Accenture, before moving to the UK in 1999 to work for Capital One. In February, Bharti had announced that it was splitting its business into eight divisions, and doing away with its earlier structure of three regional hubs. The eight divisions now report to the newly created position of director, market operations headed by Ajai Puri. 

The Sunil-Mittal promoted telco also elevated its former operations director for West and Distribution Raghunath Mandava, as director, customer experience. Now, the trio of Puri, Mandava and Gopalan will report to Vittal, executives aware of the development added. 

The new Indian management will have a formidable challenge as last month Bharti reported that its India and South Asia profits declined 26.3% to Rs 993 crore for the quarter-ended March 2013, when compared to the year ago period, even though it added nearly 19 million new customers, increased tariffs and witnessed significant growth in data usage. 

Its sales in India were up 8.4% to 14,551 crore in March 2013 when compared to the same period last year. Overall, Bharti's quarterly profit declined 50%, its thirteenth consecutive fall, primarily due to increased losses in its African operations, which it acquired Kuwait's Zain in a $9 billion debt-funded deal in 2010. 

At the same time, Bharti's Indian operations also showed signs that the worst may be over, as the minutes of usage had gone up by 12.3 billion in the March quarter, the highest volume growth in over four years. The company had arrested the fall in average revenue per user (ARPU), a key metric of profitability. 

Bharti's ARPU has risen 4% sequentially to Rs 193 in the March quarter, and 2% on a year-on-year basis. During his tenure at Vodafone UK, Gopalan's division at Vodafone accounted for revenues of £3 billion, had a £100 million marketing budget and effective management of a base of about 15million customers. He was also the program director for network modernisation, including 4G.

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India sets up nationwide phone, email tapping programme

NEW DELHI: India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance program that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said.

The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American shores has set off a global furor.

"If India doesn't want to lookan authoritarian regime, it needs to be transparent about who will be authorized to collect data, what data will be collected, how it will be used, and how the right to privacy will be protected," said Cynthia Wong, an Internet researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The Central Monitoring System (CMS) was announced in 2011 but there has been no public debate and the government has said little about how it will work or how it will ensure that the system is not abused.

The government started to quietly roll the system out state by state in April this year, according to government officials. Eventually it will be able to target any of India's 900 million landline and mobile phone subscribers and 120 million Internet users.

Interior ministry spokesman KS Dhatwalia said he did not have details of CMS and therefore could not comment on the privacy concerns. A spokeswoman for the telecommunications ministry, which will oversee CMS, did not respond to queries.

Indian officials said making details of the project public would limit its effectiveness as a clandestine intelligence-gathering tool.

"Security of the country is very important.countries have these surveillance programs," said a senior telecommunications ministry official, defending the need for a large-scale eavesdropping systemCMS.

"You can see terrorists getting caught, you see crimes being stopped. You need surveillance. This is to protect you and your country," said the official, who is directly involved in setting up the project. He did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

No independent oversight

The new system will allow the government to listen to and tape phone conversations, read e-mails and text messages, monitor posts on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and track searches on Google of ed targets, according to interviews with two other officials involved in setting up the new surveillance program, human rights activists and cyber experts.

In 2012, India sent in 4,750 requests to Google for user data, the highest in the world after the United States.

Security agencies will no longer need to seek a court order for surveillance or depend, as they do now, on internet or telephone service providers to give them the data, the government officials said.

Government intercept data servers are being built on the premises of private telecommunications firms. These will allow the government to tap into communications at will without telling the service providers, according to the officials and public documents.

The top bureaucrat in the federal interior ministry and his state-level deputies will have the power to approve requests for surveillance of specific phone numbers, e-mails or social media accounts, the government officials said.

While it is not unusual for governments to have equipment at telecommunication companies and service providers, they are usually required to submit warrants or be subject to other forms of independent oversight.

"Bypassing courts is really very dangerous and can be easily misused," said Pawan Sinha, who teaches human rights at Delhi University. In most countries in Europe and in the United States, security agencies were obliged to seek court approval or had to function with legal oversight, he said.

The senior telecommunications ministry official dismissed suggestions that India's system could be open to abuse.

"The home secretary has to have some substantial intelligence input to approve any kind of call tapping or call monitoring. He is not going to randomly decide to tape anybody's phone calls," he said.

"If atthe government reads your e-mails, or taps your phone, that will be done for a good reason. It is not invading your privacy, it is protecting you and your country," he said.

The government has arrested people in the past for critical social media posts although there have been no prosecutions.

In 2010, India's Outlook news magazine accused intelligence officials of tapping telephone calls of several politicians, including a government minister. The accusations were never proven, but led to a political uproar.

No privacy law

"The many abuses of phone tapping make clear that that is not a good way to organize the system of checks and balances," said Anja Kovacs, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Internet and Society.

"When similar rules are used for even more extensive monitoring and surveillance, as seems to be the case with CMS, the dangers of abuse and their implications for individuals are even bigger."

Nine government agencies will be authorized to make intercept requests, including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India's elite policy agency, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the domestic spy agency, and the income tax department.

India does not have a formal privacy law and the new surveillance system will operate under the Indian Telegraph Act - a law formulated by the British in 1885 - which gives the government freedom to monitor private conversations.

"We are obligated by law to give access to our networks to every legal enforcement agency," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India.

Telecommunications companies Bharti Airtel, Vodafone's India unit, Idea Cellular, Tata Communications and state-run MTNL did not respond to requests for comment.

India has a long history of violence by separatist groups and other militants within its borders. More than one third of India's 670 districts are affected by such violence, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.

The government has escalated efforts to monitor the activities of militant groups since a Pakistan-based militant squad rampaged through Mumbai in 2008, killing 166 people. Monitoring of telephones and the Internet are part of the surveillance.

India's junior minister for information technology, Milind Deora, said the new data collection system would actually improve citizens' privacy because telecommunications companies would no longer be directly involved in the surveillance - only government officials would.

"The mobile company will have no knowledge about whose phone conversation is being intercepted", Deora told a Google Hangout, an online forum, earlier this month.

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MTS launches MBlaze in 37 Tamil Nadu towns

CHENNAI: Sistema Shyam TeleServices, which offers telecom services under the brand name MTS, today announced the launch of high speed mobile broadband service MBlaze in 37 towns across Tamil Nadu. 

With this roll out, MTS has expanded its high-speed data footprint to over 140 towns across Tamil Nadu, Suresh S Kumar, chief operating officer, Tamil Nadu Circle, MTS India, told reporters here. 

"MTS is focused on expanding its high speed data network across the country. As a part of the same endeavour, I am proud to announce the launch of MBlaze services in 37 new towns in Tamil Nadu."

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India set to frame new telecom gear testing norms

KOLKATA: India will shortly frame new testing standards for telecom gear to shield networks potential cyberattacks. The country's top security brass has decided that CCRA or "Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement (CCRA)" clearance will no longer be enough to certify global telecom gear used in India. 

The telecom department (DoT) will work with the Department of Electronics & IT and National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) to establish testing standards and procedures for telecom gear, which will be necessary in addition to CCRA certification, says a confidential note circulated by the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), a copy of which was reviewed by ET. 

The NSCS is the apex agency looking into India's political, economic and energy and strategic security concerns while the NTRO is the country's technical intelligence-gathering agency under the PMO. 

India is a signatory to CCRA, which was created over a decade ago by the governments of UK, US, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, to define a common process to evaluate security-sensitive IT & telecom products. The objective was to motivate global telecom vendors to find common processes to reduce equipment certification costs worldwide. 

But India's decision to evolve country-specific telecom gear testing standards is aimed to complement an earlier DoT directive to mobile phone companies, who have been mandated to use equipment deemed "safe" by an authorized testing lab in India November 1, 2013. India is also readying a cyber security framework, a cybersecurity policy and a National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) that will monitor metadata on cyber traffic flows. 

The telecom department has established a pilot lab and creation of a full-fledged certification centre and development systems is in progress, a top DoT official told ET. 

At present, telcos give an undertaking to DoT that equipment they install is "safe to connect" in line with globally accepted standardsed with the CCRA. 

India's network safety drill was progressively made more stringent two years ago after security concerns, especially regarding Chinese vendors rocked the telecom turf, ing network expansion plans of several mobile phone companies. India is the world's largest market for network gear makers and sales of telecom equipment is slated to hit the $40-billion mark by 2020, according to sector regulator, Trai.

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How Silicon Valley makes money online snooping

WASHINGTON: When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley company. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook's more than 1 billion users outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Kelly's move to the spy agency underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

The only difference is that the NSA does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The disclosure of the spy agency's program called Prism, which is said to collect the emails and other web activity of foreigners using major internet companiesGoogle, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret NSA court orders for specific data.

Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the NSA and the rise of data mining - both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool - have created a more complex reality.

Silicon Valley has what the spy agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyze it.The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley's largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley's fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, US intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley startups, award classified contracts and recruit technology expertsKelly.

"We arein these Big Data business models," said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco. "There are a lot of connections now, because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests."

Although Silicon Valley has sold equipment to the NSA and other intelligence agencies for a generation, the interests of the two began to converge in new ways in the past few years as advances in computer storage technology drastically reduced the costs of storing enormous amounts of data - at the same time that the value of the data for use in consumer marketing began to rise. "These worlds overlap," said Philipp S. Kruger, chief executive of Explorist, an Internet startup in New York.

The sums the NSA spends in Silicon Valley are classified, as is the agency's total budget, which independent analysts say is $8 billion to $10 billion a year.

Despite the companies' assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the NSA and to make their customers' information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure the NSA to make access easier.

Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

Project Chess was small, limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The project began about five years ago, before most of the company was sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October 2011.

A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA.

One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Snowden says Skype joined Prism on February 6, 2011. Microsoft executives are no longer willing to affirm statements, made by Skype several years ago, that Skype calls could not be wiretapped. Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment.

In its recruiting in Silicon Valley, the NSA sends some of its most senior officials to lure the best of the best. No less than Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency's director and the chief of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, showed up at one of the world's largest hacker conferences in Las Vegas last summer, looking stiff in an uncharacteristic T-shirt and jeans, to give the keynote speech. His main purpose at Defcon, the conference, was to recruit hackers for his spy agency.

NSA badges are often seen on the lapels of officials at other technology and information security conferences. "They're very open about their interest in recruiting the hacker community," said Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

But perhaps no one embodies the tightening relationship between the NSA and the valley more than Kenneth A Minihan.

A career Air Force intelligence officer, Minihan was the director of the NSA during the Clinton administration until his retirement in the late 1990s, and then he ran the agency's outside professional networking organization. Today he is managing director of Paladin Capital Group, a venture capital firm based in Washington that in part specializes in funding startups that offer high-tech solutions for the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In effect, Minihan is an advanced scout for the NSA as it tries to capitalize on the latest technology to analyze and exploit the vast amounts of data flowing around the world and inside the United States.

The members of Paladin's strategic advisory board include Richard C. Schaeffer Jr., a former NSA executive. While Paladin is a private firm, the U.S. intelligence community has its own in-house venture capital company, In-Q-tel, financed by the CIA to invest in high-tech startups.

Many software technology firms involved in data analytics are open about their connections to intelligence agencies. Gary King, a co-founder and chief scientist at Crimson Hexagon, a startup in Boston, said in an interview that he had given talks at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., about his company's social media analytics tools.

The future holds the prospect of ever greater cooperation between Silicon Valley and the NSA, because data storage is expected to increase at an annual compound rate of 53 per cent through 2016, according to the International Data Corp.

"We reached a tipping point,the value of having user data rose beyond the cost of storing it," noted Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy group in San Francisco. "Now we have an incentive to keep it forever."

Social media sites in the meantime are growing as voluntary data mining operations on a scale that rivals or exceeds anything the government could attempt on its own. "You willingly hand over data to Facebook that you would never give voluntarily to the government," said Bruce Schneier, a technologist and author.

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What is forcing Indian mobile app developers to change biz models

HYDERABAD: Soaring sales of mobile phones and their rising prominence as personal entertainment devices are forcing game developers in India to change tacks and shift the focus of their business models away the personal computer. 

Gamers switching to mobiles are buying fewer games for their PC, hitting developers hard. Also, the fact that most games on offer through applications for mobiles are free for the initial stages— known as the "freemium model"— is adding to the hassles of these game developers. 

As a result, many developers are now converting their existing development technology formats to suit mobile gaming platforms. 

"Currently, we have a portfolio of 70% paid games and 30% freemium," said Reliance Entertainment Digital's chief executive Manish Agarwal. 

"But every game now would be 'freemium' and we will take this ratio to 100% in the coming years." In all, Reliance Entertainment—part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group—has some 600-odd games in its portfolio now. 

But the segment is likely to expand rapidly. A KPMG-FICCI study forecasts the Indian gaming market—currently at aroundRs 1,500 crore—to nearly triple toRs 4,200 crore by 2017. The mobile gaming segment will more than triple to Rs 1,800 crore, Rs 560 crore now, in the same period. Many game developers are now forging alliances with app stores of mobile handset manufacturers and operating system developers, including Google Play, Samsung Apps and Nokia's Ovi. 

Gartner's principal research analyst Shalini Verma said even developers of AAA games—those that are high-budget and generally developed by a large studio—are exploring the freemium model. 

Also, unfavourable conditions have forced many game developers to shrink operations. For instance, while French firm Gameloft closed its Indian operations in January, 7Seas Entertainment shut its US subsidiary this April. 

Disney UTV's chief operations officer Sameer Ganapathy said the "freemium model" gives users more freedom. "The model is viable and lets users make a decision on whether they wouldto pay for the game or not. India, which is a price sensitive market, is apt for this business model." 

Game developers said they are likely to earn more the "freemium model" in future than the existing model of selling games through CDs and DVDs. 

"There are few challenges in the Indian market. While less than 1% of our users are ready to pay for use, it is about 7-8% in the developed world," said Reliance Entertainment's Agarwal, who pointed out that average spending on games per month in the US is at $8 (about Rs 470). 

Rajiv Vaishnav, vice-president at software industry grouping Nasscom, said while "monetisation on mobile apps is a challenge for gaming companies, good quality games are finding eyeballs." 

India currently has over 900 million mobile devices, comprising some 350-400 million devices connected to the internet and about 150 million smart phones. 

According to the recent Flurry fiveyear report, games top the list of most-used apps and customers spent nearly 32% of their time on them on Android and iOS phones. 

Disney UTV's Ganapathy said this has created "virtuous circle" in which the size of the opportunity attracts developers and the huge number of games attracts even more users to the platform. 

Currently, hostsGoogle Play get 50-60% of the revenues the advertisements while the balance goes to the game developers. Though there are challengestracking the flow of advertisements in the games, the developers hope to save at least 10-15% of marketing costs by adopting the "freemium model". 

L Maruti Shankar, nanaging director of 7Seas Entertainment, said his company was in the process of converting a few online games into mobile games. "We will be focusing more on mobile games now onwards." He, however, added that though "freemium games" offered cost savings on marketing, "converting online games to mobile games involves additional costs of 20-30%."

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