Great offer on Nexus 7 Tablet

Great offer on Nexus 7 Tablet

For a limited period, get the Nexus 7 Tablet with Wi-Fi & 16GB storage for 11,999

Read More

Save Big on GRE Prep books

Read More

Samsung launches Galaxy Note 3 at Rs 49,900 in India

Just two weeks after the global announcement of Galaxy Gear and Galaxy Note 3, Samsung launched the two devices in India. While the Galaxy Note 3 has been priced at Rs 49,900 , the Galaxy Gear, which is a smartwatch, will be sold at a price of Rs 22,990. Note 3 and Gear will be available to consumers on September 25, though they can preorder it after paying Rs 2,000 at a web store managed by Samsung.

Note 3 is a successor to Galaxy Note 2, which was launched last year and was received very well in the market. The new Note has a 5.7-inch screen with a SuperAMOLED panel. It has the FullHD resolution with 1920 x 1080 pixels. It is the first smartphone to pack in 3GB RAM. It comes with 32GB internal storage as well as supports microSD card. While the body is made of plastic, in a first for a Samsung smartphone, the back cover uses a leather-like material to give it a more premium finish. The device sports a primary camera that can shoot 13MP images while the front camera comes with a tag of 2MP.

Note 3 weighs 168 grams. The Indian version of the device is powered by Exynos Octa 5420 processor. The processor has two set of cores. One set of four cores based on A15 architecture runs at 1.9GHz. The other set of low-performance cores based on A7 architecture runs at 1.3GHz. For now the processor can utilize only one set of cores at a time. But Samsung is likely to release a software patch by the end of this year that will make device use all 8 cores in various combinations for the best balance between performance and battery life.

Note 3 processor features the next-generation Mali chip called T628, which is one of the fastest mobile graphics chips at the moment.

But the highlight of the device is its multi-functional stylus. When used in combination with special software features, the stylus in Note 3 not only allows a user to scribble their thoughts into the notepad app but also offers additional options for better multitasking and switching between apps.

Samsung said it is expecting the Note 3 to contribute significantly to its bottom line during this festival season. Note 3 will be available with special EMI schemes from day one. However, for now Samsung has not planned any exchange offer for the device.

"Galaxy Note 3 represents the next evolution of Note experience. It meets the needs of consumers for a larger screen, makes everyday life easier with the S Pen... It is slimmer, lighter, and more powerful," said Vineet Taneja, country head for Samsung Mobile & It.

With Galaxy Gear, meanwhile, the Korean company is hoping to get in front of others in the area of wearable computing devices, which are expected to be part of the next big technology wave. Gear is a smartwatch with 1.63 inches SuperAMOLED screen. It has a single core 800MHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB internal storage. One of the big features of the watch is a 1.9MP camera that will allow a user to shoot images with a flick of his wrist.

The smartwatch will allow users to receive or make calls. It will also show them notifications from social media apps. It has a gyroscope, accelerometer and pedometer, which makes it suitable for tasks like monitoring of physical activity of a user in real time. Samsung said that a number of native apps will be available for Gear.

The device currently works with Note 3 and Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition), which will be launched in India in the coming weeks. Samsung said that support for additional devices, including Galaxy S4, will be added at a later date.

Gear is a new type of device. To make sure that consumers understand it and utilize it properly, Samsung is planning to demo the watch at its retail stores extensively. The company has also decided to feature and highlight Gear in all Note 3 advertisements and promotions to showcase its utility when paired a smartphone.

Read More

BBM for Android may launch on Sept 20

For those of you who eagerly waiting for BBM   messaging service on yourAndroid phones, here's good news. As per a recent tweet by Samsung Mobile's

Nigeria unit, the BBM for Android app would be available from Friday, September 20, onwards.

However, according to the tweet, the app will initially be exclusive to Samsung phones for the first three months. Also, it is not clear from if the agreement is exclusive to Nigeria or is a global agreement.

After the initial three months, the app is likely to be available on all Android phones. Recently, alleged photos of the BBM app were leaked online and there were reports that it would be available to a select few accounts.

Reports were also doing the rounds that BlackBerry has been handing out invitations for an event scheduled for September 20. It is being expected that the

BBM would be made available for the iOS and Android operating systems. There are also speculations that BlackBerry may unveil its new Z30 smartphone at the event.

Read More

Top cybersecurity expert hacks Nasdaq in 10 mins

A top cybersecurity expert has revealed that the stock exchange Nasdaq.com's security is so poor that it took him a mere 10 minutes to hack their systems.

Ilia Kolochenko, head of Swiss information security company High-Tech Bridge, said that despite his repeated warnings, the exchange has done nothing to fix the problem.

According to New York Daily News, Kolochenko has claimed that a good hackers can get full access to Nasdaq.com in a couple of days with the ability to do almost whatever he wants, such as push an announcement that Facebook shares have dropped 90 percent, which could cause havoc on the stock exchange.

The report said that recently the Nasdaq's trading was halted because of an incident that the exchange called a 'technical glitch' but some computer experts said resembled the work of political hackers.

Kolochenko said that he inputted some code into the website's script to see if it would be detected before displaying on the site, but it was not, which means that anyone could inject arbitrary HTML code into the site to display malicious information, seek credit card numbers, etc.

Meanwhile, spokesman for Nasdaq said that the exchange responded to Kolochenko's discovery on September 4 adding that they take all security matters seriously and work with leading security experts to evaluate all credible threats across their digital assets.

The report added Kolochenko saying that an attacker would just send a unique web address in a private message to Nasdaq technical support or administrators, and with a single click could steal very sensitive information from the browser.

Read More

How Mettl is changing online examinations

Disruption-free computer networking has popularized online education, commonly abbreviated as MOOC, or massive open online courses. They are web-based classes that students can complete at their own pace. Perhaps more challenging than teaching and learning online, is aptitude assessment and skill testing. 

Four years ago, when online learning itself was a niche area, Ketan Kapoor and Tonmoy Shingal saw an opportunity in the run-of-the-mill assessment tools that were available then. "We realized that assessment as a practice could do with a lot of innovation. There was a need for a disruptive transformation as the demand for skill-based professionals increased exponentially. Moreover, none of the existing online assessment tools could provide skill-based assessment at a large scale," says Kapoor. 

Thus was born Mettl, which is now being used to test technical, functional, behavioural, sales, accounting, leadership and other skills through broad-based, multi-dimensional, analytical methods. 

The Mettl software has a number of unique features. One of them is the ability to perform high-stake assessment with automatic invigilation empowered by advanced proctoring, which Kapoor says is an aspect that is unmatched globally. 

The virtual and remote proctoring involves a set of auto-invigilation algorithms employed while a student is taking a test at a remote location. 

Mettl's online proctoring technology eliminates the need for manual invigilation. It prevents candidates from navigating away from test window and blocks the copy-paste option. The test administrator can detect if a candidate tries to move away from the screen or refer a book by capturing live images on a web camera. 

Another unique feature is that of measuring skills online. The platform assesses the skills of the candidates by evaluating their performance in simulated situations. Some of Mettl's simulators include coding simulator (evaluation of programming skills closer to the actual work environment), voice-based simulator (tests the skills required in the BPO industry in the voice-based process) and case-study simulator (judging acumen of the candidate in solving business case study). 

Mettl can even go to the extent of finding out if the candidate entered the answer by approaching the question in a logical or arbitrary manner. 

The evaluation summarizes and gives a detailed report of the candidate. It also does an analysis of candidates on multiple dimensions (raw score, time taken to solve an answer, accuracy level, etc.)

Mettl has caught on now with about 150-200 clients of which 10 are global organizations. Some of the prominent ones include Cognizant, Capgemini, Accenture, Wipro, HCL, Inmobi and Makemytrip.com. Tavinder Pal Singh Arora, VP, NIIT says that such a platform helps make training assessments quickly across multiple test centres concurrently. 

Sreenivasa Rao, VP and India Talent Head, Capgemini, says, "We hire around 1,500 people every month and screen around 20,000 candidates to hire this number. 

We use Mettl for 60% of our online assessments, and we have found the platform adaptable and customizable" The company, which was initially self-funded by the founders, is now funded by 9 investors led by Kalaari Capital who have put in around $4 million.

Read More

Google buys file transfer app Bump

Google has acquired Bump, the maker of a smartphone app that allows users to share files by bumping devices together.

The two companies did not release financial terms of the deal.

In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Bump CEO David Lieb said the company's apps, which also include a photo sharing service, Flock, will keep working for now.

In a blog post from late March, Bump said that its namesake app was downloaded 125 million times. The Bump app was launched more than four years ago.

"The Bump team has demonstrated a strong ability to quickly build and develop products that users love, and we think they'll be a great fit at Google," Mountain View, California-based Google said in an emailed statement. Bump is also based in Mountain View.

Read More

Smartphones not ‘hurting‘ gaming consoles: Study

Games on tablets and  smartphones are better, faster and more varied than ever, but the excitement surrounding the upcoming PlayStation 4 -- expected to attract big crowds at this week's Tokyo Game Show -- proves consoles are here to stay, say observers.

They point to Tuesday's global roll-out of Grand Theft Auto V, the latest in a multi-billion dollar mega-franchise that dwarfs some Hollywood films, as evidence of the sector's vitality.

Although the market has come off its peak, a hard core of gamers will continue to demand their favourite titles on high-performance machines, they say.

Combined retail sales of game consoles -- static or portable -- and the software for them topped 700 billion yen ($7 billion) in Japan in 2007, the year after the release of Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3.

But in 2012, the domestic market had shrunk to an estimated 485 billion yen, according to Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association.

The shortfall is a sharp contrast to the fast-expanding market for social games -- those that involve some form of remote communication with others and are usually played in Japan on smartphones and other mobile devices -- which now accounts for more than 400 billion yen a year.

Hisakazu Hirabayashi, a long-time games industry analyst who heads Tokyo-based consultancy firm InteractKK, said the casual observer might conclude consoles were on their way out.

"It is a market that is not growing but it is stable," Hirabayashi told AFP, adding software sales bottomed out in 2009 at 300 billion yen a year and have stayed around there since.

He says consoles can be thought of as a specific entertainment in their own right for a certain sector of society that will never be "won-over" to a different format at the expense of the thing they love.

"They've got their own styles and solid fan-bases... It's a certain 'cultural mode'" that attracts people, he said.

Hirabayashi says games machines have taken root in people's lives and established traditions that can be seen alongside worlds such as sumo and kabuki.

Millions of people are willing to buy a new instalment in a mega-hit series such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest "in the same way that kabuki fans will go to the theatre to see their favourite performers in a new version of an old play".

Games evolved on a series of technological innovations but "game content has become a traditional, conservative industry," he said.

Sony is addressing its core audience with the upcoming PlayStation 4, he said. There will be "no leap (in sales) but no flop either," he said.

Big titles still generate excitement. Grand Theft Auto V, the latest addition to the multi-billion dollar franchise was making its worldwide debut Tuesday.

Midnight launch parties featuring DJs and free burritos were among events in Australia, where 320 stores were carrying the title.

If its predecessor is anything to go by, the rumoured $270 million price tag for development will be a sound investment for the company that owns the title -- Grand Theft Auto IV raked in $500 million in the week after its release in 2008.

In Tokyo, the weekend launch of Monster Hunter 4, saw a crush of 500 people queueing up for its 7am launch on the Nintendo 3DS platform.

Until Saturday the Monster Hunter series by Capcom, first released in 2004 for Sony's PlayStation 2, had sold 23 million copies worldwide. The firm said Tuesday it had already shipped two million copies of the new game since the weekend.

Takuma Kawakami, 18, who was first in line at the event, said: "There are beautiful graphics and movements that only game consoles can realise."

"DS has got its own fans and PSP has its own fans," he said, referring to the portable PlayStation device that competes with Nintendo's offering.

Analyst Hirabayashi said smartphone games were easy to play and matched people's need to kill time when commuting by train or waiting for food in restaurants.

The bulk of them are free to download, but charge players for extra functions or to unlock new sections.

The pricing model has proved attractive to developers because it gets users hooked on a game and then demands their cash. Users also like it because they enjoy the freedom of being able to play a game and decide whether they like it before parting with money.

"If home console games are like kabuki, smartphone games are like casinos where a small number of high rollers support the business. They are two different markets," Hirabayashi said.

"No one thinks kabuki is dying off because casinos are becoming popular."

The Tokyo Game Show opens on Thursday with more than 300 developers and hardware companies from around the world flocking to display their latest offerings.

Test play of games on PlayStation 4 will also be available, while visitors can expect to get more detailed specifications of the new machine, which will hit the North American market in November and Japan in February.

Other attractions are set to include a romance simulation game area, as well as tournaments on a Tekken beat-em-up and a third-person shooter called World of Tanks.

Read More

‘iPhone 5S cant be unlocked with user‘s mutilated fingers‘

Apple introduced its hi-tech biometric security inclusive iPhone 5S and the experts were quick to react on the Touch IDfeature with some claiming that such a feature could lead to more brutal crimes where criminals could mutilate fingers just to get the fingerprints.

However, security experts have dismissed all the claims and said that in order to unlock the iPhone5S using the fingerprint scanner, owner of the finger needs to be alive and attached to the finger being used. 

Chief technology officer at Validity Sensors, a California based provider of fingerprint sensor solutions, Sebastien Taveau said that the sensor in the phone is built in a way that the fingerprint image has to be taken from a live finger and a severed finger will not work with the feature, stuff.co.nz reports. 

The report said that the iPhone's Touch ID feature uses radio frequency scanning to detect the sub-epidermal layers of the skin and hence, it is indispensable for a user to be alive and attached.

Read More

How Twitter became a money-spinning juggernaut

Around midnight on Christmas Eve of 2009, a handful of employees at Twitter received an unconventional holiday greeting from Dick Costolo, then the chief operating officer.

"It was an email that said, 'We have to move really, really fast. There's no time to rest because we have a massive opportunity in front of us," recalled Anamitra Banerji, who headed the team that built Twitter's first advertising product. "It was kind of crazy because we were all on break, but that attitude was exactly what we needed at Twitter."

The company is now on the verge of fulfilling the opportunity Costolo foresaw as it prepares for the most highly anticipated initial public offering since Facebook's debut last May. The offering is expected to value Twitter at up to $15 billion and make its early investors, including Costolo, very wealthy indeed.

Yet Twitter's quick transformation from an undisciplined, money-losing startup into a digital media powerhouse took every bit of whip-cracking that Costolo could muster, along with a rapid series of product and personnel decisions that proved effective even as they disappointed some of the service's early enthusiasts.

Costolo was a comparative late-comer at Twitter, joining the company three years after it's 2006 launch, but the company increasingly bears his imprint as it hurtles towards the IPO: deliberate in decision-making but aggressive in execution, savvy in its public relations and yet laser-focused on financial results.

Costolo has not flinched in pruning and reshaping his management team, while Twitter, the company, has been ruthless in cutting off the smaller companies that were once a part of its orbit. A one-time comic actor who cut his teeth in business at Andersen Consulting before starting several companies, Costolo may never be as closely associated with Twitter as Mark Zuckerberg is with Facebook, yet he is arguably just as important.

"The founders consider Dick a co-founder, that's how deep the connection is," said Bijan Sabet, an investor at Spark Capital and a Twitter board member from 2008 to 2011. "He's not this hired gun to run the company. He understands building out the business but also the product, strategy, vision."

Twitter declined to make Costolo available for comment, citing the pre-IPO quiet period.

Birth of the Promoted Tweet
When Twitter's then-CEO Evan Williams brought on Costolo, an old friend and colleague from Google Inc, as COO in September of 2009, the three-year old company was already under pressure.

The microblogging service was gaining hip, young users at an unprecedented pace, and its trio of co-founders - Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey - had been splashed across magazine covers as the embodiment of San Francisco cool. Yet the whispers in Silicon Valley were growing louder: Twitter didn't have the technical chops to make the service reliable at huge scale, and it didn't have any way to make money.

"Having been on the core original team of engineers, we didn't have the skills among us to build a world class service," said Alex Payne, an early Twitter engineer, noting that many of the team members came from smaller start-ups and non-profit organizations rather than established Web giants like Google.

Williams viewed fixing the site's notorious technical problems as the top priority but was ambivalent about the business strategy. For months, people familiar with the situation say, Williams weighed options ranging from display advertising to licensing Twitter's data to becoming an e-commerce hub to offering paid "commercial" accounts to businesses.

Costolo - who had sold Feedburner, an advertising-based blog publishing service he founded, to Google for $100 million - had no such doubts. By his second month on the job, he had helped persuade Williams to green-light engineering positions to build Twitter's first ad unit, which would become the "promoted tweet" - the cornerstone of Twitter's business today.

"Dick's conversations with Ev were key," said Banerji, now an investor at Foundation Capital. "He had a fundamental belief that this was the future of Twitter monetization and said, 'You have to do it.'"

Over four months in early 2010, Costolo, working closely with Banerji and Ashish Goel, a Stanford engineering professor who specialized in the science of auction algorithms, to refine the promoted tweet. It resembled an ordinary Twitter message in every way, except that advertisers could pay for it to appear at the top of users' Tweet streams and search results.

Costolo threw his heft within the company behind the advertising strategy. In early 2010, as the ads team drew up a related product called "promoted trends," Costolo privately told them to make sure he was in the room when they pitched the product to Williams, so it would get pushed through.

A central mechanism governing the promoted tweet was "resonance," a concept coined by Goel. Because Twitter users can re-circulate or reply to tweets, including paid advertisements, the company had the real-time ability to gauge which ads were most popular, and those ads could then be made more prominent. And because the ads appeared in the same format as other tweets, they were perfectly suited to mobile devices, which could not handily display traditional banner ads.

Paid ads that are inserted into a stream of status updates have since become something of an industry standard for mobile advertising. Its adopters include Facebook, which has enjoyed a 60 percent rise in its stock price in recent months due to its newfound success in mobile.

"The closest thing before this was the contextual advertising that Google was selling, but the problem was that it was clearly an ad," said Charlene Li, the founder of Altimeter Group, an online research and consulting firm. "Promoted tweets look just like every other tweet. The form factor, the way it is displayed in stream - that was a breakthrough."

When Costolo unveiled the promoted tweet in April 2010, Twitter announced it as a trial for only five brands, including Starbucks Corp and Virgin America, and users almost never saw the ads.

But by the summer of 2010, Costolo felt confident enough in his concept that he began seeking a deputy to ramp up the company's sales effort. For months, he courted Adam Bain, a rising star at News Corp, and at the same time began assiduously courting marketers, from corner suites on Madison Avenue to industry conferences on the French Riviera.

Under Bain, the Twitter ad team set it sites on the most lucrative advertising market of all: television. Twitter attached itself to TV programmers and major brand marketers by positioning itself as an online peanut gallery where TV viewers could discuss what they were watching.

"Hashtags," which help people find the conversations they're looking for on Twitter, soon grew ubiquitous on TV, appearing in Super Bowl commercials, at Nascar races and on the Oscars red carpet.

"It wasn't easy for Twitter to explain to people why they should buy content on Twitter until they sold it as a companion to TV," Ian Schafer, the chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital advertising agency. "Now you're even seeing the networks selling Twitter's inventory for them. That's magic."

Twitter has steadily refined its targeting capabilities and can now send promoted tweets to people based on geographic location and interests. This month, the company paid more than $300 million to acquire MoPub, which will enable it to target mobile users based on websites they have visited on their desktop computers.

As the promoted Tweet became a reliable revenue engine -generating a substantial chunk of the estimated $580 million in ad sales the company is expected to earn this year - Twitter began to evolve the service beyond its 140-character text messaging roots. Tweets today can embed pictures, videos, page previews and are expected to eventually have more interactive features, including those for online transactions and deals.

Focused and ruthless
While Costolo has been widely credited with bringing management stability to a company that had struggled to find the right leadership formula among its three founders, he hasn't hesitated in making changes in the executive suite.

"Jack always said he 'edited' his team, and Dick looked at it the same way," said a former employee. "He wanted to choose the top people around him, but he was ruthless with replacing his top people."

Bain and Ali Rowghani, Twitter's influential chief operating officer, have emerged as Costolo's key deputies. A string of recent high-profile hires includes former TicketMaster CEO Nathan Hubbard as head of commerce; Geoff Reiss, former Professional Bowlers Association CEO, as head of sports partnerships; and Morgan Stanley executive Cynthia Gaylor as head of corporate development.

Meanwhile, once-powerful executives including product guru Satya Patel, engineering vice president Mike Abbott and head of growth Othman Laraki have left the company, with each departure stoking chatter about Twitter's unusual rate of employee turnover.

Rank-and-file employees described a chief executive who will pause from his workday to laugh with them at YouTube clips but who will also nudge them to put in long hours.

At a conference last fall, Costolo told the audience he had sought out a new office for Twitter in central San Francisco partly because it would allow employees who lived in the city to go home for dinner with their families and still come back to work at night.

Despite his on-stage charisma, several employees describe a CEO who can seem aloof.

"He's always very cordial," said one former employee. "But try to get into a deeper conversation with him, and he's thinking about how much time he has to do that, because his schedule is tight and he has a lot to do. He's all business."

Costolo's single-minded focus on Twitter's business goals has not been welcomed by everyone. It alienated many early Twitter enthusiasts who were interested in the political, social and technical potential of a unique new service that could fairly claim to express the sentiment of the world in real time.

Twitter has slowly shut off third-party access to its data, preferring to keep the information for its own business purposes. It has cut off many developers that want to build new features that would interact with the Twitter platform.

Its status as the most aggressive of all the global Internet companies in defending free speech and protecting its users from government spying is also in question. After years of essentially ignoring foreign governments that wanted it to comply with local laws, it announced last year that it had developed the technical capability to block Tweets by country, and it has recently begun to use it in countries including Germany and Brazil.

Twitter is currently banned in China, where the country's own Twitter-like service, Sina Corp's Weibo, has 500 million registered users.

"The most obvious effect of the IPO will be that it will push Twitter to go more international," said Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I don't think there's much evidence that their position on free speech has softened in the U.S, but internationally, yes. I think they've absolutely run into the complexities of opening offices in other countries, potentially even made some promises that they couldn't keep."

Yet Costolo has clearly kept his biggest promise: turning Twitter into a major media business. And in that regard, the IPO may be just the beginning.

Read More

Anti-snooping app Wickr gets Android version

Startup Wickr has released snoop-thwarting messaging software tailored for Android-powered smartphone or tablets, following last year's release of the program for Apple devices.

"Wickr not only offers the most secure form of correspondence but also helps protect our users' contacts as we anonymize this information before it leaves the senders phone," said startup co-founder Robert Statica.

"Wickr does not collect any personally identi?able information on users nor can we read any messages or contents sent through Wickr, therefore, no criminal or rogue government can take them from us."

Wickr has not released details on numbers of users, but reported seeing "exponential growth" since releasing a free version for Apple mobile devices in June of last year.

The free version of Wickr that debuted was tailored for devices running on Google's Android mobile platform that dominates the smartphone market.

Wickr was fielded as a more secure option to messaging platforms at online venues such as Skype, Facebook, SnapChat.

"The release of Wickr Android for public beta comes at an important moment in history as this right to privacy is challenged by governments, corporations, star?sh organizations and lone criminals throughout the world," Statica said.

"Bound by the strong belief that private correspondence is a universal human right, San Francisco-based Wickr aims to bring free private communication to users across the globe."

Wickr co-founder Nico Sell envisions building a "geek utopia" where people hold the power when it comes to who sees what they share on the Internet or from their phones.

"Freedom: there's an app for that," Sell said in an earlier interview with AFP.

Wickr's business plan is to have hundreds of millions of people globally use free versions of the application while a small percentage opt to pay for premium features such as being able to control larger data files.

More information about the application was available online at mywickr.com.

Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are among Internet firms pushing for permission to disclose more details to users about demands for data made in the name of fighting terrorism or other threats.

Technology titans have been eager to bolster the trust of its users by making it clearer what has actually been demanded by and disclosed to US authorities.

A vast National Security Agency surveillance program was exposed in a series of bombshell media leaks in recent months by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.

Documents divulged by Snowden have shown the NSA conducts a massive electronic dragnet, including trawling through phone records and online traffic, that has sometimes flouted privacy laws.

Read More

Health apps pose privacy risks

Health apps can provide information and motivation to help you manage your wellbeing, and they're easy to use and often free. But they may not be protecting your privacy as a priority. 

Health apps collect all sorts of personal information, like your name, email address, age, height and weight. Others get even more detailed, depending on the focus of the app; fertility apps, for instance, allow you to enter details of your menstrual cycle, and exercise apps allow you to post the route of your daily jog. 

An analysis of 43 wellness apps by the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found many apps connect to advertising and data analysis sites without the user's knowledge. They often transmit unencrypted data over insecure network, possibly including your medical and pharmaceutical search terms, like those for sexually transmitted diseases or antipsychotic drugs. 

It's easy for others on a network to read what's being transmitted , said Craig Michael Lie Njie, a consultant who did the technical analysis for the report.

Read More