Sony overtakes Apple to emerge second largest smartphone brand in India

Sony has overtaken ace rival Apple to emerge the second largest smartphone brand in India in value sales, thanks largely to its strategy to focus on the Rs 10,000-20,000 smartphone space, backed by Rs 300-crore marketing spend.

According to latest data from market tracker IDC, the Japanese electronics major garnered 9.1% value share in the Indian smartphone market in the October-December quarter of 2013 against Apple's 7% share. Samsung dominated the market with 43% value share.

IDC India senior market analyst Manasi Yadav said Sony's strong positioning in the mid-tier smartphone space of Rs 10,000-20,000 price band has delivered results for the company. "Some of the top selling models for Sony are Xperia M Dual and Xperia C priced in this bracket, which is one of the fastest growing segments in the Indian smartphone market," Yadav said.

The CEO of a leading mobility device retail chain said Apple lost out since it withdrew its largest selling model, iPhone4, from India as a global decision thereby vacating the sweet spot ofRs 20,000 pricing. "While this loss of sales prompted Apple to relaunch iPhone 4 once again in India in January, sales have not picked up since it is not at all spending on marketing or offering any buyback offer and even the initial euphoria around iPhone 5s has sobered down," the person said.

Analysts, however, said Sony's share in the smartphone market may have slid in the January-March quarter, with Nokia venturing into Android phones with its aggressively priced X series, Apple relaunching iPhone 4 and Micromax rolling out a new range of Canvas phones. IDC will release its figures for the January-March quarter in May or June.

India is one of the rare markets outside Japan where Sony has achieved major success in the smartphones. Kenichiro Hibi, managing director at Sony India, said the company's smartphone business has attained similar revenues as its flagship television business in the fiscal ended March 31. The two businesses contributed around 70% to the company's turnover of about Rs 10,000 crore during the year.

"However, smartphone business will overtake television business in sales this fiscal year," Hibi told ET. "For us, both television and smartphone will be the main pillars to continue the pace of growth in India," he said.

Hibi said the company is poised to further grow its share this fiscal with flagship Xperia Z2 ready for launch this quarter. "The smartphone business doubled in last one year which led to 20% growth in overall sales in 2013-14. We expect to grow at a similar pace this fiscal as well to touch Rs 12,000 crore sales," he said.

Indian brands such as Micromax,Karbonn andLava have notched up significant share in the smartphone volume sales. While Samsung had 38% market share by unit sales in the October-December quarter, Micromax is second with 13% share. Sony's volume share was 5.5% while Apple's was 2%. 

Officials praise Samsung's Galaxy S5 antitheft features

A move by Samsung to include free anti-theft features on its Galaxy S5smartphones sold by Verizon Wireless and US Cellular won praise on Friday by two US members of an international coalition aimed at combating robberies involving smartphones. 

The new features allow Galaxy S5 users to track devices and require the owner's account information to reset the phone. The features, Find My Mobile, and Reactivation Lock, will come installed in the phones but must be activated by users. 

"The decision ... to provide Samsung's Find My Mobile and Reactivation Lock features on Galaxy S5 smartphones and to allow those features to be activated for free is a step forward in our effort to ensure the industry makes effective theft deterrents available on every smartphone sold in America," New York's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and San Francisco's district attorney, George Gascon, said in a statement. 

Schneiderman and Gascon, along with London Mayor Boris Johnson, are co-chairs of the coalition Secure Our Smartphone Initiative. 

They said, however, that they remain "concerned that consumers will need to opt in to the system, thereby limiting the ubiquity and effectiveness of the solution." 

Both Schneiderman and Gascon have criticized the cellphone industry for what they say is a perceived unwillingness to solve an escalating theft problem. 

Schneiderman has publicly supported bills currently in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate that would require a kill switch to be installed in every smartphone manufactured in the United States. The switch would prevent the phone from being re-activated in the black market. 

In 2012, 1.6 million Americans were victimized for their smartphones, according to Schneiderman's office.

Microsoft's Cortana: Is it better than Apple's Siri?

When Microsoft was developing Cortana, a virtual assistant for its mobile operating system that was unveiled Wednesday, the company thought, naturally, about how it could improve on Siri, Apple's sometimes bumbling assistant for the iPhone. 

Its development teams studied other assistants too - actual human assistants, those keepers of executive calendars and interceptors of phone calls. After interviews with several of them, Microsoft resolved that virtual assistants need to do a better job of anticipating their bosses' needs. 

"Siri is this anthropomorphized character, but Siri doesn't know you personally," Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft's operating system group, said in an interview. 

Belfiore showed the results of the company's work Wednesday at an event for software developers in San Francisco held by Microsoft. Cortana is the most high-profile feature ofWindows Phone 8.1, a soon-to-be-released update to Microsoft's mobile phone operating system. 

It's another way in which Microsoft is seeking to narrow the technological gap between its competitors and Windows Phone, which is a distant third among smartphone operating systems, accounting for 3 percent of worldwide shipments in the fourth quarter, according technology research firm IDC. 

Late last week in a conference room at the company's headquarters, Belfiore demonstrated how Cortana offers all the Siri-like basics, with a number of its same shortcomings. Mobile phone users can use her to set calendar appointments with natural voice commands ("Schedule a phone call with Jim at 2 p.m. tomorrow.") 

Ask Cortana basic trivia - "How old is Barack Obama?" - and she responds with the correct answer in a congenial, synthesized female voice. But ask her when Barack Obama was elected president - a question with two correct answers - and she is stumped, displaying a list of web search results on the topic so you can do the legwork yourself. 

Belfiore showed how Cortana tries to go beyond Siri to figure out what mobile phone users want before they ask for it. If you keep searching for NCAA basketball scores, local traffic conditions and news on the Washington state mudslide, she will start to proactively display fresh data about those topics prominently. 

With permission, Cortana can examine a user's email to look for airline reservations, warning if a flight is delayed. If traffic to the airport is horrendous on the day of departure, Cortana will notify users that they should leave early. When you land in Mexico, Cortana, without prompting, will display the local currency exchange rate, provide an airport map and offer a link to an English-Spanish translation app. 

Cortana is named after a virtual character in "Halo," Microsoft's science-fiction video game series, that uses her encyclopedic knowledge about the universe to help the game's protagonist, Master Chief. Actress Jen Taylor, who does the voice for the character, also provided recordings for the phone assistant's voice. 

Only when Microsoft's new software is in use by the masses will it become clear whether it has a real edge on Siri. Apple's virtual assistant was ridiculed, especially during its early days, for performance problems that rendered it unavailable when people wanted to use it. Those early impressions have been hard for Siri to shake, even as Apple has improved its technology. 

Microsoft appears to be making Cortana more open to independent app developers than Apple has with Siri. People will be able to use voice commands to watch a television show on Hulu and to compose and send tweets. 

Microsoft has also given Cortana a sense of humor. Last week, Marcus Ash, a program manager for Windows Phone, asked her to sing a song and she belted out a verse from "Danny Boy." 

"Who's your daddy?" got this response: "Technically speaking, that'd be Bill Gates. No big deal." 

Word around Microsoft is that Gates, too, had a sense of humor when he heard that line during a recent product review. 

"I heard he laughed," Ash said.

US employers add jobs at solid pace in March

US employers added jobs at a solid pace in March and hired more in January and February than previously thought. Friday's government report sent a reassuring signal that the economy withstood a harsh winter that had slowed growth. 

The economy gained 192,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department said Friday, slightly below February's revised total of 197,000. Employers added a combined 37,000 more jobs in January and February than previously estimated. 

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 6.7 per cent. But a half-million Americans started looking for work last month, and most of them found jobs. The increase in job-seekers is a sign that they were more optimistic about their prospects. 

"We're back to where we were before the weather got bad," said John Canally, economist atLPL Financial. "It's a nice, even report that suggests the labor market is expanding." 

March's job gain nearly matched last year's average monthly total, suggesting that the job market has mostly recovered from the previous months' severe winter weather. 

Stocks fell modestly in late-morning trading, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.75 per cent from 2.8 per cent late Thursday. 

The March report included one milestone: More than six years after the Great Recession began, private employers have finally regained all the jobs lost to the recession. Businesses and nonprofits shed 8.8 million jobs in the downturn; they've since hired 8.9 million. Still, the population has grown over that time, leaving the unemployment rate elevated. 

And many of the new jobs pay less than the ones they replaced. Last month, most of the hiring was in lower-paying industries: Temporary help agencies added 28,500 positions. Hotels and restaurants added 33,100, and retailers added 21,300. 

Higher-paying positions didn't fare as well. Manufacturers shed 1,000 jobs, the first such drop since July. And professional and technical services, which includes accountants, engineers and information technology workers, added just 10,400. 

The proportion of Americans in the labor force _ those either working or seeking work _ has rebounded this year after steady declines since the recession officially ended in June 2009. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, noted that the labor force increased by 1.5 million in the January-March quarter after shrinking by 500,000 last year. 

Encouragingly, the per centage of Americans age 16 or older who were working reached 58.9 per cent in March _ its highest point since 2009.

Americans worked an average of 34.5 hours last month, up from 34.3 in February, which was held back by the severe weather. The increase, though small, means many Americans received larger weekly paychecks. 

Yet average hourly pay slipped a penny to $24.30 after a big 10-cent gain in February. That was a disappointment for many economists, who thought February's sharp increase might mark the start of a trend. Average hourly wages have risen 2.1 per cent in the past year. Inflation has risen 1.1 per cent in that time. In a healthy economy, hourly wages typically grow about 3.5 per cent a year. 

Freezing temperatures and heavy snowstorms this winter closed factories, slowed home sales and kept consumers away from shopping malls. Hiring averaged 178,000 in the first three months of this year, down from 198,000 a month in the final three months of 2013. 

Still, many economists expect hiring to average about 200,000 jobs a month for the rest of the year. Hiring at that pace should lower the unemployment rate and support steady growth. 

Other recent economic data suggest that the economy is picking up from the winter freeze. 

Auto sales jumped 6 per cent last month to 1.5 million, the most since November. That was a sign that Americans remain willing to spend on big purchases. 

And surveys by the Institute for Supply Management, a group of purchasing managers, showed that both manufacturing and service companies expanded at a faster pace in March. Factories cranked out more goods and received slightly more orders, a good sign for future production. Service companies also received more orders. 

Home sales and construction, however, have been weak in recent months. Sales of existing homes have fallen in six out of the past seven months. Cold weather has likely caused some of the decline. But higher mortgage rates, rising prices and a limited supply of available homes have also held back sales. 

Many economists think growth slowed to a 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent annual rate in the January-March quarter, down from a 2.6 per cent pace in last year's fourth quarter. But most also forecast that steady hiring and less drag from government spending cuts should lift growth to nearly a 3 per cent annual pace for the rest of the year.

90% students get campus placement in IIT-Roorkee; highest offer stands at Rs 73 lakh

Ninety per cent undergraduate students at IIT-Roorkee received campus placement offers this year from globally renowned companies, with the highest international placement offer standing at Rs 73 lakh. 

As many as 1,047 out of 1,631 students registered at the institute got job offers from global giants like Google and Microsoft through campus interviews which took place for the first time in the history of the institution, a release from IIT-Roorkee said here today. 

The highest salary package among international offers stood at Rs 73 lakh while the one in domestic category stood at Rs 32 lakh, it said. 

171 companies have already visited the campus (till date) for the Campus Recruitment Programme this year, it said. 

Prof In-charge (Training and Placement), IIT-Roorkee, N P Padhy said, "10 startups have also visited the campus this year and offered 56 jobs to the students. Some of these include companies like Unbxd, MySmartPrice Web Technology Private Limited and Printvenue.com."

5 ways to deal with a bad hire

It is costly, time consuming, and a manager's worst nightmare. Hiring a bad employee can cost a company dearly. But assessing the reasons on time and taking remedial steps to rectify performance could help salvage the situation for managers.

1. Set a deadline

Defining someone as a bad hire almost a year after recruiting him does not really cut it, feels T Muralidharan, founder and chairman of recruiting and HR services firm TMI. "Typically a period of 90-120 days is enough to recognise one and will also help put remedial steps into action before the next year," he says.

2. Assess the reasons

The reasons why a manager would not approve of an employee can be multiple and varied. "The most crucial aspect of dealing with a bad hire is the manager's assessment of the problem. It is only after assessing the reasons can a manager decide on whether the employee should stay the course or should be terminated," says Tarun Katyal, chief human resources officer at MTS India.

3. Gather solid evidence

The veracity of reasons can only be highlighted once managers back up their reservations and concerns by facts and figures. Documenting evidence against employees can also put their own doubts to rest. Allegations of grave nature like sexual harassment require solid evidence and proof before initiating action, says Muralidharan.

4. Engage and provide feedback

At MTS, a new hire performed spectacularly well in the first two months, only to flounder later. Post frank discussions, the manager realised the sudden downward spiral stemmed from the employee's mother's illness. Engaging with employees and providing constant feedback will help rein in rude shocks

5. Facilitate counselling

According to a survey, 41% of the companies surveyed stated that a bad hire in the last year has cost them at least $ 25,000. Factors like inability to deliver results or slow learning can be addressed through counselling 

India leads the race in reporting bugs on Facebook in 2013

 India, which accounts for over 93 million Facebook users, reported the largest number of bugs under the social networking giant's bug bounty programme last year. 

The California-headquartered firm said it received a total of 14,763 submissions in 2013, of which 687 bugs were found to be valid and eligible to receive rewards. 

A bug is an error or defect in a software or hardware that causes a programme to malfunction. It often occurs due to conflicts in software when applications try to run in tandem. 

The social networking platform, which has over 1.2 billion users globally, paid $1.5 million last year to security researchers who report bugs on its website. 

"India contributed the largest number of valid bugs at 136, with an average reward of $1,353. The US reported 92 issues and averaged $2,272 in rewards," Facebook said in a post. 

Brazil and the UK were third and fourth by volume, with 53 bugs and 40 bugs and average rewards of $3,792 and $2,950, respectively, it added. 

Researchers in Russia earned the highest amount per report in 2013, receiving an average of $3,961 for 38 bugs, Facebook said. 

It said: "We've paid over $2 million since we got started in 2011, and in 2013 we paid out $1.5 million to 330 researchers across the globe." 

The average reward in 2013 was $2,204, and most bugs were discovered in non-core properties, such as websites operated by companies the firm had acquired, it added. 

"2014 is looking good so far. The volume of high-severity issues is down, and we're hearing from researchers that it's tougher to find good bugs," Facebook said. 

The social networking site said it will encourage best research in the most valuable areas and will continue to increase its reward amounts for high priority issues.

New MacBook Air to Deliver 'Lightning Quick' Performance in 2014

New MacBook Air to Deliver “Lightning Quick” Performance in 2014 is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

Apple is reportedly planning a new MacBook Air 2014 model that will likely use a new type of technology to deliver better performance and battery life to users.

Apple typically updates the MacBook Air in June, and new MacBook Air release date rumors point to an arrival near the Apple WWDC 2014 event on June 2nd.

Multiple reports suggest Apple will bring a new higher-resolution display to the new MacBook Air, and it is very likely that this new notebook will carry a MacBook Air Retina or MacBook Air with Retina Display name when it hits store shelves.

The new MacBook Air could deliver “lightning quick” performance compared to the 2013 model.

In the latest report analyst Matt Margolis identifies a new type of RAM that Apple is very likely to implement in all new MacBook models this year. The DDR4 RAM can potentially deliver increased performance and contribute to better battery life on the new MacBook Air notebooks. Apple already works with Micron, which is the company that Margolis identifies as the partner Apple will rely on for new DDR4 RAM.

According to claims from Micron, the new DDR4 RAM will offer double the bandwidth without using more power. In simplest terms this means the new MacBook Air should offer faster performance as the RAM, processor and PCIe SSD are all able to communicate faster. This will translate into apps launching faster and allow users to gain performance with the same amount of RAM, which is good considering there will not likely be an option to upgrade the RAM on a new MacBook Air.

Margolis describes the speed increase as, “You can take my word for it that Apple users are going to love how “lightning quick” the 2014 devices will be compared to the 2013 devices.”

In addition to improved performance a new MacBook Air with DDR4 RAM may also deliver better battery life. Apple already boosted the MacBook Air battery life dramatically in 2013 pushing the 13-inch MacBook Air to 12 hours of real world use. There is no specific battery life claims available for the new DDR4 RAM at this time.

According to the latest new MacBook Air rumors we could see the device arrive as early as WWDC 2014 with sales starting the same day, or week as the announcement. A DigiTimes report points to a new MacBook Air Retina update this year, citing display supply chain sources. This lines up with claims that the MacBook Air Retina release is coming soon, from a source who accurately predicted the MacBook Pro Retina. A MacBook Air with Retina Display will likely arrive with a price hike, similar to the premium charged for a MacBook Pro with Retina Display.