Twitter‘s new homepage to look like Facebook: Report

 Twitter is reportedly working on a major redesign of its webpage that is said to make the social network site look like Facebook. 

The all new profile page of Twitter has the avatar photo and biography placed well to the left side of the page, giving a lot of space to the header photo. 

However, Twitter's magazine-style web layout will only affect the desktop version of Twitter, making the tweets larger, 

According to Tech Crunch, following changes, tweets no longer flow vertically in a single column like they do now; instead they spread out with a tile-style layout similar to what one might expect from a Pinterest or Facebook's new Paper app. 

Meanwhile Twitter's another new feature offers pop-up notifications with fields for easy replies for direct messages sent through the platform, and similar notices for RTs and favorites, which if merged with other features, will help the social network site don a richer, more complex presentation that offers up additional information.

Snapchat Hacked By Fruit Smoothie Enthusiast

If one of your friends randomly sends you a photo of a smoothie on Snapchat, don't go to the URL on the picture. It's a hack that has affected several accounts, as a Twitter search shows. Wired writer Joe Brown was one of the users who suffered a Snapchat fruiting. A Snapchat spokesperson told him that the startup did not see any evidence of 'brute-force tactics,' and that someone had likely gotten ahold of his email and password and accessed his account on the first try. We've emailed Snapchat for more information.

The spam looks like this (once again, don't go to the URL).

Yahoo Appoints Gurmit Singh as MD For Its India Operations

Yahoo Inc has hired Gurmit Singh to man the MD Chair for its India Operations. Singh’s immediate role will be to study the company’s position in India and come up with ideas for the rejuvenation of the ailing giant.

Gurmit Singh was working at Media Conglomerate Network18 as Chief Executive Officer of Forbes India. At Yahoo, he will report to India and South East Asia VP and Head Yvonne Chang, confirmed the company via an official statement.

Why has Gurmit been selected? Yahoo is expanding very rapidly. Under the leadership of Marissa Mayer, the company is engrossed in serious inorganic expansion activity, gobbling–up companies of all sizes; from fledgling startups to established organizations in the hope of restoring the company’s glory from the hey days of Internet. Marissa has made it clear that Yahoo will now focus on the fast emerging world of Mobile and make the site optimized for easier & faster consumption on these portable internet enabled devices.

Given Gurmit’s track record, his expertise with myriad fields might be just what the company needs. Singh has held leadership roles across Consumer Products, Music & Entertainment And Media Sectors. He has worked with illustrious companies and brands such as Sony Music, Hindustan Times, India Today Group, Rajshri Media and Marico Industries. Gurmit’s wide scope is of particular interest to the company, clarified Chang,

“Gurmit comes to Yahoo with a strong track record of delivering growth. His understanding of users and advertisers will be a great asset for Yahoo as we bring a number of product innovations to India,”

For the past couple of days, quite a few companies have been adding fresh blood (external recruitment) to their Upper Management. Is it pre–Appraisal strategy or the candidates simply needed to move–on?

Phishing Attacks Affect 20% Of Indians: Microsoft Survey

Microsoft has released the results of the third annual Microsoft Computing Safer Index (MCSI) that reveals impact of poor online safety precautions being taken.

The company surveyed over 10,000 consumers in 20 countries including India. Out of these 10,000 consumers, 20 percent of Indians had claimed that they had been victims of online phishing attacks and in a worrying statistic, 12 percent Indians said that they had suffered an identity theft at an average cost of Rs 7,500. 

Surprisingly, only 34% of respondents around the world said they limit what strangers see on social networks and the amount of personal information online, while 38% said they adjust their social network privacy settings, the survey revealed. It also noted that only 35% of users use a PIN (personal identification number) or password to lock their mobile devices.

According to the MCSI survey, the annual worldwide impact of phishing and various other forms of identity thefts could be as high as $5 billion. The cost of repairing online reputation is far higher at around $6 billion or an estimated average of $632 per loss. “Internet users can prevent intrusions and thefts by using a unique four-digit PIN for mobile devices and strong passwords for online accounts,” Microsoft India National Technology Officer Prakash Kumar said. He advised that users should perform sensitive transactions over secured networks, which includes paying bills, banking or shopping. 

Finally, the software giant also issued tips and guidance on the Internet Safety Day, like using a unique four-digit PIN for mobile devices and strong passwords for online accounts; performing sensitive transactions over secured networks like paying bills, banking or shopping, rather than sharing personal account information over “borrowed” or public wifi connections among others.

India ranked fourth among countries targeted by phishing attacks as per an EMC Report last year.

HCL Attempts To Hire Candidates With #CoolestInterviewEver Campaign On Twitter

Trying to bring a revolutionary change in hiring, IT Service provider HCL Technologies has initiated a very cool recruitment campaign.

With an intention of tapping into the vast talent pool that frequents Social Media Portals, HCL has come up with #CoolestInterviewEver, an attempt to hire qualified candidates. The campaign which started yesterday, will witness HCL conducting a series of interviews exclusively over twitter and offering the winning candidate an opportunity to work on a yearlong strategic project with the company’s top management.

What is the campaign and how to apply: The #COOLESTINTERVIEWEVER will run for three consecutive weeks, allowing participants from all over the world to connect and interact with HCL HR executives through twitter.

Participants need to follow the company on Twitter and answer 6 questions to register themselves. The process of evaluation and selection will be carried out by HCL HR executives completely on Twitter, including the one-on-one interviews with the top five applicants. In the third and final week, HCL will select a single winning candidate to serve for 12 months as one of the following roles of his or her choice, clarified a statement from the company:

Ideapreneurship Evangelist: The selected candidate will get a chance to travel to different HCL offices and share his/her ideas and thoughts with other HCL employees.
Big Data Guru: The candidate will get to work directly with HCL’s Analysis and Data Research teams.
Hacker–In–Chief: The candidate will get an opportunity to work closely with HCL’s web design and project delivery teams.
Womenspiration: The chosen candidate will be aligned to HCL’s employee branding team and will interact with HCL employees to explore new avenues within the organization where women will emerge as future leaders and help craft a strategy to ensure women empowerment within HCL

HCL has always proclaimed to follow Employees First, Customers Second management philosophy in order to “unleash the innovative thinking of empowered employees”. Though this approach may seem radical, it is now very common for companies and recruitment agencies to go talent–hunting on the Social Media Platforms. Multiple instances have proven that this trend is not only here to stay, but is growing. HCL has merely taken a dedicated approach. Will others follow suit?

Massive Layoffs Reported At IBM’s Bangalore Headquarters

News has emerged that IBM’s so called rebalancing of its staffing worldwide has affected a significant amount of employees here in the country. Massive layoffs are being reported at Bangalore headquarters in what employees are calling a ‘slaughter’.

Last month, IBM reported that it had seen seven straight quarters where their sales were declining and the senior management of the company had decided put a $1 billion rebalancing in place when it came to human resources. This inevitably meant that there would be job cuts at the company which has offices around the globe. It seems now that the plan has been initiated first here in India. Reports says that around 40% of the employees in the Bangalore office have been given the pink slip.

It seems the affected employees were told to hand over their laptops and exit the premises immediately. Many are calling the action being meted out to employees as inhuman. The report also says that many employees were seen crying as they left the building. The current understanding is that severance packages are being provided to cover 3 months of an employees basic salary, which boils down to 6 weeks of pay. The rebalancing is not over yet and is supposed to last till Friday.

According to an analyst, IBM will be cutting 13,000 jobs worldwide. India is a massive operation for IBM and it seems that it will be the worst affected among the lot. IBM India employs 100,000 people across India.

Developing .. Will be updated when more news comes in.

LG G2 Mini official as LG Facebooks photo of big things with mini things

The LG G2 Mini seems locked on for a MWC 2014 unveiling after LG posted a photo of the back of the handset to its Facebook page.
Well, we assume that's what it is, since it's a smaller handset pictured next to a bigger handset and that bigger handset is the LG G2.
It's also joined by a big shoe and a smaller shoe, a big starfish and a smaller starfish and a big cupcake next to a smaller cupcake.

Mini-G

Is there a hidden meaning to these seemingly random items? Will the LG G2 Mini come with a shoe-cleaning peripheral? A starfish fishing app? Or a free cake?
It seems unlikely. Less unlikely is that the handset will feature the G2's funny back-mounted volume slider, a Xenon flash and a camera.
We've heard all kinds of rumours about the G2 Mini's screen size, with the decidedly not-that-mini 4.7-inch option proving most enduring.

The LG G2's display is a 5.2-inch affair and looking at the difference in size between the two handsets pictured, we'd say there's a good chance that 4.7-inch screen rumour will prove true.
Not too long to wait until we know for sure - the caption under the photo on Facebook says, "Experience the MINI. Mobile World Congress 2014-02-24."

Buying Guide: 10 best laptops for students

Becoming a full-time student is expensive - all those student loans, tuition fees, and flights to Thailand to discover who you are don't come cheap.
Regardless of the money you'll save in haircuts, times are tough, indeed. But choosing a decent portable PC to lug from lecture - to pub - to lecture halls and, hopefully, last the duration of your course is something we can help you with. So we've scoured our peerless laptop reviews to find 10 of the best laptops for students.
As we know scholars aren't renowned for being flush with cash, we mainly picked the cheap laptops. we've also added a few that have a little more graphic power should your course tutor offer extra credit for live action documentaries with your history papers or your lecturer demand exploding real-time 3D pie charts with every marketing assignment.

Acer C720 Chromebook - £199

Chromebooks are great for chucking in a backpack for lectures. They are fast, maintenance-free, light and, if you leave the backpack on the bus, cheap to replace. The Acer C720 uses a 1.40GHZ Celeron processor and, like all Chromebooks, boots up quickly and will get you on the web or writing notes in seconds. That's their main sell, though, and they aren't going to be for every student.
There are so many caveats with Chromebooks that it's worth reading our Chromebook guide before buying one. The main one being that you're limited to Google products and Chrome Store web apps that run in the browser.
On-board storage is also small, in this case - 16GB, but you're meant to store everything in the cloud. Additionally, printing is also a bit of an issue - you'll need to use a printer that supports the Google Cloud Print protocol, which could see you having to buy a new printer as well. In theory, you can edit images, but we'd suggest giving video editing a miss.
If you can afford it, you might want consider using the Acer 720 as a really lightweight research and note-taking device. You'll be able to save everything to the cloud for easy access on your main machine back at your dorm.

• Read our full Acer C720 Chromebook review

HP Chromebook 11 - £229

The HP Chromebook 11 is surprisingly well built for the price. Its ARM processor is powerful enough to do the things you'd expect of a Chromebook: web surfing and writing essays, checking email and amusing yourself on YouTube during a tiresome lecture. However, like the Acer 720 above, you'll need to decide whether a Chromebook and its Chrome OS will work for your studies.
The 16GB SSD is fast, but not enough to store all your offline work, but as long as you can connect via Wi-Fi you'll have access to 100GB of cloud storage on Google Drive for free for two years.
We found the keyboard was up to the task and responsive while the 11-inch 1,366 x 768 IPS screen is decent quality considering the price. The HP Chromebook 11's one key failing is battery life. We managed five hours, which is less than the full day of work we expect from a Chromebook.
Beyond its limitations by design, this is a stylish, affordable and fast little laptop that will be great for the basics, but, depending on your course, may not be enough for your needs.

• Read our full HP Chromebook 11 review

Lenovo G500s - £300

The number of plain-looking Lenovo portables available at this price range is a little overwhelming, but they do make good student laptops. This G500s is an updated G505 and sports an Intel Pentium 2020M running at 2.4GHz. Coupled with the 8GB of RAM, this means the Lenovo G500s handles Windows 8 smoothly and will be fast enough for general day to day studies.
It is, however, lacking a good keyboard. Keys have very little feedback and making sure that every keystroke registers isn't likely to be appealing at deadline time.
As with many laptops at this price, the integrated Intel HD graphics can handle video playback smoothly, but its not for serious gaming. Viewing angles are limited on the 15.6-inch TFT screen, which maxes out at 1,366 x 768 and supplies an overall decent but unexciting display.
In terms of connectivity, it hits all the requirements with two USB 3.0 ports, built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi and a DVD writer and, a large 1TB hard drive.
The Lenovo G500s isn't the most portable at 2.5kg or the best suited to lots of typing with its subpar keyboard, but it is a solid and good value laptop with most of the features you'll need.

• Read our full Lenovo G500s review

Asus Transformer Book T100 - £329

A lightweight portable that can be both laptop and tablet while still running Windows 8.1 is an impressive feat, even more so when it allows for stats like 11 hours of battery life and a weight of 2.4lbs (with keyboard attached).
The 10.1-inch Asus Transformer Book T100 achieves this through its 1.33GHz Atom Z3740 processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 64GB of eMMC flash storage. As you might expect, the processor won't cope with image and video editing very well, but there's a enough power available to do basic tasks, such as surfing the web and streaming YouTube videos. There's also a MicroSD for expanding storage as well as 1TB of free Sky Drive space for a year.
The keyboard, when attached, is smaller than normal, which makes it more suitable for light word processing, which does put it at odds with the free copy of Microsoft Office 2013 Home & Student Edition it comes with.
The IPS screen has a max resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels, which isn't surprising at this price, but it's not as crisp as a full-HD display.
The cramped keyboard of the Asus Transformer Book T100may be a dealbreaker for uni work, but it's worth trying it out for yourself at this price.

• Read our full Asus Transformer Book T100 review

HP Pavilion 15 - £370

This is a reliable, budget laptop that runs Windows 8. It uses a bargain processor, the AMD A4-500 running at 1.5GHz, and it's for everyday computing, which is good as that covers most things a student might need for their course. If you decide to use it for anything that requires serious processing power, like video editing, you'll be in for a long wait.
The rest of the specs are solid: 4GB of RAM, 750GB hard drive and a DVD+RW drive. In fact, the overall feel of the laptop is snappy and responsive, and pushing the Pavilion 15 as hard as it can go still garnered almost five and half hours of battery life, which is incredible.
The 15.6-inch TN display isn't much to shout about though; it runs at 1,366x768 native resolution, which means you won't be able to watch true HD video, except through the HDMI port connected to an external monitor. The keyboard is also comfortable enough, but the keys aren't very responsive.
This is a straightforward laptop but on a tight budget this little machine, with its pleasing metallic red finish, is certainly worth considering.

• Read our full HP Pavilion 15 review

Asus V550CA - £370

The Asus V550CA is classed as a mid-range laptop with touchscreen, and as such is more than capable for day to day studies. Windows 8 is pre-installed, and the model we reviewed had an Intel Core i7-3537U running at 2.50GHz, which doesn't exactly make it slow, but is a generation behind the current Haswell chips.
It also packs 6GB of RAM, which is fine for most uses but performance may become noticeably slower during taxing tasks, such as photo or video editing. This is unfortunate as it you'd have plenty of space for big files - the Asus V550CA comes with a 1TB hard drive.
The 1,366 x 785 resolution from the 15.6-inch TFT screen is poor at this price. It basically lets the integrated Intel HD Graphics off the hook. If you we hoping to pay a bit more to be able to play more than casual games then you'd be disappointed. There's also no optical drive.
The Asus V550CA offers a slim, light, brushed aluminium design, which is let down by a low resolution screen, but it would be a reliable study laptop.

• Read our full Asus V550CA review

HP Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook 15 - £410

It may be a Sleekbook by name, and by design it's a glossy number, but its ultrabook appearance belies its weight of 2.1kg.
This is little heavy for lugging around all day, but it does offer some excellent value for money. For instance, we found the 15.6-inch TFT touchscreen vibrant while the 10-point touchscreen offered good responsiveness.
Windows 8 also runs well on the AMD A4-4355M 1.9GHz processor, bolstered by 8GB of RAM and capacious 1TB of storage. Overall, this specification will cope easily with studies (unless you're writing a dissertation on Bitcoins), but it's not equipped for serious video editing or playing 3D games. It also has no optical drive, which is becoming a more common omission.
Its attempts at good value continue with an excellent keyboard and a decent trackpad, which will make bashing out assignments far less of a chore. There's also good connectivity, including two USB 3.0 ports and HDMI for connecting to an external monitor back in your room.
Crucially, there's enough power efficiency in the design to offer five to seven hours of battery life. This is more of a desktop replacement than a light, portable laptop, but it's a fast, responsive and good-looking laptop at an affordable price.

• Read our full HP Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook 15 review

Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Touch - £450

When Lenovo updated its IdeaPad U410, it added 'Touch' to the end of its name, which although a responsive and good feature isn't the standout one. No, it turns out to be the graphics. The Nvidia GeForce GL710M is capable of some impressive gaming results.
This gaming focus most likely lead to the compromise on the 14-inch screen too, which is a TFT with a max resolution 1,366 x 768. Generally, the display was quite reflective and a tad on the dull side, but it does squeeze the most from the graphics, for instance, we saw a very respectable 52 frames per second in Bioshock Infinite at High settings.
The rest of the core specs are generally good, the Intel Core i5-3337U will handle all the essay work, spreadsheets and pie charts you can throw at it, but it isn't for high-load tasks. The keyboard offers good feedback when typing, but is on the small side. The Core i5 also tends to hit battery life, which, as we expected, ran out after just over two and half hours.
Thanks to the 8GB of RAM, a generous 1TB hard drive with a 24GB SSD for fast booting the IdeaPad U410 Touch offers a responsive and fast Windows 8 experience.

• Read our full IdeaPad U410 Touch review

Lenovo IdeaPad Z500 Touch - £450

Another Lenovo, but this time we have a 15.6-inch touchscreen laptop that's been carefully specified for gaming… oh, and will be good for your studies, too.
The models start with a Core i5-3230M, but for an extra £100 you can add a Core i7-3632QM running at 2.2GHz, which together with the 8GB of RAM yields a nippy Windows 8 experience. This isn't the latest Haswell generation of chips from Intel, but it's essentially your power issues dealt with for any typical college work you might do.
As we've noted previously a resolution of 1,366 x 768 on a 15.6-inch screen won't offer full HD or a sparkling screen, but it is clever move in gaming terms. It enables the Nvidia GeForce GT 740M discrete graphics to run games like Bioshock Infinite at 35 frames per second at medium settings. The laptop also comes with a 1TB hard drive as well as an optical drive.
Better graphical performance does have its downsides. The Z500 managed three hours of 720p video playback, which isn't a great result. It's also heavy at 2.7kg. If, however, you want laptop that will be great for your studies and your gaming habit, you'll just have to accept its failings.

• Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad Z500 Touch review

Lenovo Yoga 11S - £570

The Lenovo Yoga 11S is a handy 11.6-inch hybrid laptop. It's quite a chilled out model from a company that's known more for its corporate machines.
The hardware specs are still business-like, which isn't a bad thing as you get a Core i7 processor, 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. We'd have preferred a more recent Haswell processor, but unless you like to relax with some serious gaming, it will be fast enough for your college work.
It's quite a versatile portable, too: bend the screen back on its solid hinge and it becomes a Windows 8 tablet for a quick surf during a study break; Flip the screen back to make a stand and it's great for watching TV or movies in bed.
The 11.6-inch touchscreen isn't going to support full HD at a maximum 1,366 x 768 resolution, but at least you'll get through two 90-minute episodes of Sherlock before you need to find the charger. If you prefer writing in bed, however, there's the full QWERTY keyboard, which is small but comfortable enough.
Overall, the Lenovo Yoga 11S is a light and perfectly sized laptop for lugging between lectures, it's only real omission is the lack of USB 3.0 ports, which is a puzzling oversight.