Personal computers are not dying

Desktops may be on their deathbed but definitely not any other personal computing device.

The original definition of PC referred to desktops, the complete set of CPU, monitor, keyboard, speakers, modem and voltage stabilizer. Now desktops have shrunk to laptops and netbooks (notebooks). PCs are seen different from smartphones and tablet; though mobile devices are highly personal and effective computing devices.  
 
The talk of imminent death of PCs is evidently prompted by the ever-growing popularity of mobile phones. Many people have two phones, or a phone and a tablet. But it’s no argument that personal computers, to mean laptops and netbooks, are dying.
 
In spite of all the advantages, mobile devices have their flip side. One, small user interface, because of the screen size. A 14- or 16-inch monitor of a laptop is definitely not the same as a 4-inch mobile screen. Higher dimensions of 5, 7 and 10 inch screens are a shade better. Besides, wider screens are easy on the eye.
 
Two, mobile devices generally work well for quick work on the go; a multitasking device that lets you talk, text, check mails and Facebook, send a one-line reply, do a web search, etc. But if you want to watch a 3-hour movie or live streaming of a sports event, or read or type a long document, the wider screen and broad keyboard of a laptop is more comfortable.
 
Three, screen navigation is easier when it comes to keyboard and mouse. Be it opening multiple tabs or copy-pasting text or working on photos or playing games, the superior user experience of a laptop is undeniable.
 
PC shipments in India grew by 4.9 per cent to 2.99 million units in July-September period of the current year over the previous quarter, according to global market intelligence and advisory services provider IDC. Even the netbook with 10-inch screen and much lower processing capacity compared to the laptop, was supposed to have flopped but that’s not the case. Many people possess both netbook and laptop, and use each for different purposes.
 
But it is a fact that PC shipments have slowed over the past few years. One, most people have a laptop. So the boom-time, first-acquisition numbers have tapered. Two, with tablets and other options, use of laptops have reduced, making them last longer. So, the replacement-buy is delayed.
 
Personal computers will be around for some time. Multiple devices is the norm -- each being used for a specific purpose. Nevertheless, a time may come when the nascent convertibles, a cross between mobile phones and laptops with detachable keyboards, would replace laptops. But that is quite some time away. At least now, it’s too premature to say PCs are dying.

(Crossposted from Kaleidoscope)

Connecting Kinect and Android

Nothing like an app developers' congregation to see young brains at their creative best, pushing frontiers to make out-of-box ideas work. Droidcon 2012 at MLR Convention Centre on Nov 2 and 3 was no exception.

Droidcon is an international meetup on everything related to the Android operating system; and the first such gathering was in Berlin in 2009. India hosted its first Droidcon last year in Bangalore. The 2nd edition, organised by HasGeek, brought together a galaxy of app developers, visual and interaction designers, software startups, enterprise software companies, robotics and arduino wizards, kernel and ROM hackers, OEMs and platform providers, besides of course the technology enthusiasts.

Aravind Krishnaswamy, co-founder of Levitum and Program Chair, Droidcon, said the objective of the conference was to provide a platform for people to meet each other, brainstorm ideas and share knowledge. "We, in fact, encourage participants to skip sessions, so that they can meet other participants and exchange ideas. It is all about learning new things while having fun."

Allen Thomas, a young software professional working with the Innovation Lab at UST, TechnoPark, Thiruvananthapuram, was one of the participants. He spoke on how Microsoft Kinect and an Android device could be used to help two people interact with each other (pictured below). His premise was that the gesture-recognition features of Kinect could be made use of to develop applications that give more value to interactions among different users.

 

To demonstrate this, he devised a captivating game of swatting a fly. The movement of the fly is controlled by one of the players using an Android device. The other player, who is tracked by Kinect, will have to swat the fly using his hand. With more Android devices, more flies could be added to the game. Thomas said the big challenge was to ensure that there wasn't data transfer loss between the two systems.

There are many user-end applications for Kinect, one of them being the virtual dressing room. You would no longer have to undress many times to try on new clothes. By standing in front of a Kinect sensor and by waving your hand, you can virtually try out new outfits. Kinect has also proved to be a great education tool in classrooms. Teachers could engage their students better this way than with the chalk-and-board approach. Some of the other daily-life applications of Kinect-based systems are for physiotherapy and and market research in department stores.


(Crossposted from Kaleidoscope)

Merely chasing the corrupt won't do any good

( Crossposted from Kaleidoscope )

Salman Khurshid, the latest entrant to the Arvind Kejriwal stage, has raised the tone of the slanging match to a new high. Anti-corruption activists say that more players would be dragged into media conferences, presumably for people to take the final call on redefining political morality in India. Politicians -- willy-nilly declared corrupt, and therefore guilty -- have their backs to the wall, fighting back to retrieve their remaining reputation.

As new acts unfold on the political theatre, we are left with more questions than answers. What is the stake for us, the common people? Are we mere spectators? In what way do we benefit? Will Kejriwal's campaign translate into votes? Or, are we staring at a mirage, where the political slate has been wiped clean of all dirt?

It's quite a long time since the public campaign began with Anna Hazare's exhortations, rallies and fasts. Down the road, the movement lost sight of the end, bickered over the means and now stands divided. Hazare has virtually given up, declaring that the existing political system itself is beyond redemption. Kejriwal has, on the contrary, entered the system in a bid to clean it. How much he will succeed, remains to be seen.

Nothing has changed

We are supposedly better informed about the evil called corruption and the corrosive effect it has on the nation. But, has anything changed on the ground in the past one year? No. Examples are aplenty.

The conductor of BMTC (Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation) bus is reluctant to return the Rs 2 change. After many reminders he relents, but only when it's time for you to get down from the bus. He gives the change but takes the ticket back. When you ask for the ticket, he gestures you to get down and pretends he is busy and moves into the crowd of passengers to give them tickets. Ticket is recycled, and the fare you gave has gone into the conductor's pocket. Or else, why should he take the ticket back?

Another tactic employed by the conductor is a "win-win" one: if the fare is Rs 8, and you give a Rs 10 note, he gives you back a Rs 5 coin, and moves on without giving you the ticket. The conductor has gained Rs 5, and you have gained Rs 3.

Has common man's life become easier? Do files move  faster now? Have public servants become more courteous and helpful? Do we have better transportation facilities in villages, towns and cities? Do we have more electricity for our daily needs? Do we have better and easier access to clean drinking water? Have our elected representatives become more accountable? The list goes on; and you need to have an unrealistic degree of optimism to answer yes.

Need for positiveness

If Kejriwal and IAC members can usher in a new tomorrow, nothing like it. The whole nation will forever be grateful. But there is not even a flicker of hope at the end of the tunnel. Instead, we get an impression that there are now two battles being fought -- one, the common man's struggle with daily tribulations; and two, the war of charges and countercharges. The collateral damages are further erosion of faith in the system and deeper cynicism.

The negativeness is all too pervasive and it's only getting worse. More people are asking: why should we vote? Showcasing the corrupt and pronouncing them guilty in public will do little good; it primarily serves as retribution. If any good has to come out of this campaign, there has to be a huge infusion of positiveness. Instead of stalling everything, the campaign has to look at means to get the system moving in the right direction.

There has to be a parallel, and more powerful, movement at the grassroots to identify the good people in the system and encourage them. It may be a good idea for Kejriwal and IAC to publish a list of clean and efficient public servants, especially at village and ward levels. It is more important to bring them onto the stage and let the world know the enormous amount good they have done to the society.

Or else, Kejriwal risks being branded -- if not already -- as another politician who has his own axe to grind.

Netbanking now includes wealth management too

The milling crowds at some bank counters might give us a feeling that netbanking hasn't really caught on in India. But that isn't true. Multiple surveys have indicated that the number of people making use of the internet for financial transactions has been increasing. For example, McKinsey India's Personal Financial Services Survey of 2011 says branch banking has come down by 15 percent points.

But then why do we see such huge crowds in some banks? That's because though the number of people doing netbanking is on the rise, their percentage is small. The McKinsey report puts the figure at 7% of the total number of bank customers. But this 7% itself is a jump — from a mere 1% five years back. The survey also shows that India leads the growth in Asia in mobile and internet usage for banking.

What financial transactions can be done online? Quite lot, in fact. You can check your balance online, which means you can bid goodbye to your passbook. You can open fixed deposits and recurring deposits, which means you are saved from a whole lot of paperwork at the bank. If you need to pay someone, you needn't write out a cheque, and post it; you can transfer cash online to any branch; you just need to get your 'Third Party Transfer' option enabled. All banks have multiple layers of security to make sure there is no misuse. You can also make your credit card payments online.

The scope of netbanking has now broadened to including even services that aren't strictly banking. Many banks, especially in the private sector, are now getting into wealth management, for example. One of the reasons is that many customers like to handle their investments themselves rather than rely on third party agents. And this is possible, thanks to the power of internet technology, which allows users to make informed decisions. Artha Money and Intuit are very popular websites that help users to view all their accounts in one place, set budgets, configure alerts and track their investments. ICICI Direct links your banking, trading and demat accounts. HDFC Securities is another popular one.

ING Vysya Bank has gone one step ahead, and got the wealth management functions also within the netbanking website. Thus, with a single login into the netbanking account, you get access to a whole range of services that goes beyond mere banking. Sonalee Panda, business head, wealth management & marketing, ING Vysya Bank, says, "75% of our clients rate control and access to their investments as the most important need. This is in line with the growing 'Do-It-Yourself' trend we are witnessing in travel and shopping."

You can either check your bank balance or go to the wealth management section and check out the investment products. The customers can view not only their mutual funds but also investments across life insurance, demat account, portfolio management schemes and other assets.

Thanks to technology, managing finances all by ourselves sitting in the comforts of our homes is only getting easier by the day.

(This article appeared in The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Are you safe from Flame virus?

There will be few among us whose computers weren’t infected by a virus. We wouldn’t know if any data was ever stolen by a stranger sitting, say in Estonia. But, what we do recollect is how our laptops wouldn’t start; and we had to get the operating system reinstalled; and in the process, lose photos and videos we hadn’t backed up.

 The buzz in cyberspace now is about the biggest, the most powerful, and the most complex  computer virus ever discovered — variously called Flame, Flamer or Skywiper. It has sent alarm bells ringing, and has reminded us, for the umpteenth time, how even the best-protected network can be broken into. 

The virus hit headlines in March/April this year, when the Iranian oil ministry was affected. And a few weeks back, researchers found Flame similar to Stuxnet virus that had disabled the centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear plant. What has stunned experts is the complexity of Flame, the size of which was 20MB, while Stuxnet was only about half a megabyte.

Calling it the dawn of a new era in cyberwarfare, Kaspersky Labs said the virus was “destined to leave an indelible mark on the cyber weapons’ landscape”. Symantec research shows Flamer has been operating for at least two years with the ability to steal documents, take screenshots of users’ desktops, spread via USB drives, disable security vendor products, and under certain conditions spread to other systems. One mode of operation is Bluetooth.

According to Shantanu Ghosh, VP and MD, India Product operations, Symantec, the Bluetooth functionality of Flame is embedded in a module, which when triggered in accordance with the configuration set by the attacker, can result in two actions: one, scan Bluetooth devices in the range, and once detected, steal details like the ID; and two, the infected computer itself will appear when any Bluetooth device scans the local area.

It is networks in mainly West Asia that have been affected, but Ghosh says infections have been reported from Hungary and Hong Kong. Are we in India under threat?

Kaspersky says that it recorded instance of attacks in India. Says Alex Gostev, chief security expert, Global Research and Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab, “Only a few detections by Kaspersky Lab anti-virus were registered on the computers with Indian IP address. But that can be any user even a tourist from another country who was in India at that moment. The countries worst hit by Flame are Iran, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Lebanon.”

Says Ghosh, “This threat is highly targeted and not likely to impact most users. In addition to particular organizations being targeted, many of the compromised computers appear to be personal computers being used from home Internet connections.”

However Naresh Raval, a web developer, sounds a word of caution. “You never know. Security agencies have all said Flame is so complex that they haven’t fully understood how it works. Internet is a vast global network, and it doesn’t take much for malware to spread, and wreak havoc.”

(This article appeared in the Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Living with multiple identities

Recently I got a Facebook request from Roby S, my schoolmate. I was surprised, because he is already my friend. Why was adding me again? The profile photo was similar. The ‘About’ column too matched. Was it someone else who had stolen Roby’s identity and playing mischief?

So, I sent Roby a message seeking a clarification. He replied saying he had an FB account opened with his official ID. Later he discontinued it, and opened one with his personal ID. Now, he decided to revive his FB account opened with his official ID after he came to know that some friends whom he had added there, had sent him messages to which he hadn’t replied.

There was another case of Vini. Her earlier email ID was on Hotmail, and she had opened an FB account with it. Later, she dumped her Hotmail ID and moved to Gmail, and she opened another FB account with the Gmail ID. Now there are FB accounts of hers, confusing her friends no end.

Should Roby and Vini have opened another FB account? No. Even if your email ID has got hacked, you needn’t dump the FB account opened with it. Just add another valid email ID to your existing FB account and delink the hacked email ID from it.

You can link multiple email IDs to one Facebook account and use any of them to log in. You can even use your phone number as login ID if you have added it.

To add another email ID to your FB, click on the downward arrow beside ‘Home’ on top right corner, click on ‘account settings’, click on ‘Edit’ against Email, and click on ‘add another email address’. It will get activated, after you click on the verification link sent to the email ID you added. Just as you add, you can remove email IDs as well.

LinkedIn works the same way. There’s no need to another account, just because you have changed your default email ID.

Of course, there are cases where people do have two FB accounts. But that’s when they want to have two sets of identities -- like one account that can be accessed by acquaintances. colleagues etc; and another more personal one that can be accessed only by family members and very close friends.

Similar is the case with email accounts. Suppose you have three email IDs, used for different purposes, they can be accessed at one place. All major email clients like Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail allow forwarding emails to another ID. They also allow you to open different email ID that’s linked to the original one, and you can toggle between them.

Gmail also lets you reply from a non-Gmail ID from within Gmail. Meaning, you can send a mail from your Yahoo! ID, say abc@yahoo.com, via Gmail. The recipient of your email will see it as sent from your Yahoo ID, but via Gmail. These can be done by going to ‘Mail Settings’.

Cyberspace lets your different identities easily co-exist.

(This article appeared in my Wireless World column in The Times of India, Bangalore, today.)

Mobile phone radiation alert

We have praised the ubiquitous mobile phone enough for its innumerable benefits. But how much have we thought about the danger it poses to our health by way of radiation? Are we safe while talking on the cellphone?

The common fear has been that talking on the cell for a long time may cause brain tumour: and neurological and ENT disorders. A study by the National Institutes of Health, a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, concluded that the side of the brain closer to the mobile phone recorded higher activity. But if it led to any harm or not couldn’t be established. There have been many other studies as well, but none of them makes a direct correlation between cellphone usage and a particular health disorder.

A measure of the radio frequency absorbed by our body while we talk on the phone is called the Specific Absorption Rate. The standards drawn up by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, a non-governmental organization recognised by the WHO, is widely followed to determine the safe level of radiation exposure.

The SAR level is capped at 1.6 watts per kg in the US and Canada, and 2 w/kg in Europe. India had capped it at 2 w/kg, but last year, following suggestions of an inter-ministerial group, it was brought down to 1.6 w/kg. The SAR for each call a person makes or receives could vary depending upon many parameters; the distance from the cell tower and strength of the signal being two of them. All mobile phones, and cellphone towers, are supposed to conform to the SAR limit. Also, handsets should have the SAR displayed. But that’s not always the case.

Now, there’s an app for measuring phone radiation -- tawkon. Ironically, it hit the headlines when Steve Jobs rejected it, saying it would confuse iPhone users. The one for Android is available for free download on Google Play.

The app calculates the phone's radiation level and thereby the SAR, and alerts the user, with a beep or vibration, when the call could be above the limit. Tawkon will also email you a report that highlights your weekly talk time, a breakdown of high exposure vs. low exposure minutes, plus a chart to compare personal phone / headset / speaker usage.

How reliable it is? Tawkon says its technology has been calibrated in an FCC (Federal Communication Commission) -certified RF (Radio Frequency) lab with state-of-the-art equipment.

The app will serve as a warning. The wiser counsel though is to keep the phone away from our body; use text and email when you can; if you have to talk, keep the conversation short. If you need to talk for long, use the headphone or the speaker.

(This article appeared in Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Handhold kids online

Children are savvy with gadgets and technology. The way they play around with hand-held devices, wearing a geek-like air around themselves, giving one an impression that they have already set eyes on Silicon Valley, is oftentimes awe-inspiring.

While we gloat over the new-age kids’ technological sagacity, as it were, we overlook how safe they are in the world they have got access to. For, mobile phones and laptops are effectively a key to a storehouse of information, that are both serious and trivial, useful and useless, appropriate and inappropriate.

When children venture out into the physical world, there’s someone, mostly parents, to handhold them. Rarely they go too far, alone. But that’sn’t the case when they go out into the online world.   

We are in the Mother’s Day week; and here’s what the mother of a 14-year-old boy has to say: “I don’t understand what my son does with my mobile or on the desktop. He says he is downloading something, he is playing games. If I ask him too much, he will dismissively brush me aside, saying, mama you don’t know these things. I think I need to learn a lot, and give him at least an impression that I too know something!”

This is something every parent will relate to, to some extent at least. The digital divide, by way of awareness levels, is far too wide and worrisome. Results of a recent McAfee national survey on children's online behaviour are startling. 62% of the polled kids shared personal information; 58% shared their home addresses; 39% did not tell their parents about their online activities; and 12% were victims of cyber attack.

Anindita Mishra, McAfee's Cybermum, counsels parental guidance when children use internet. "That’s because the internet has evolved into a platform for self-expression and social interaction, with children indiscriminately indulging in information exchange leading to an increasing rate of cyber exploits."

Some of the ground rules offered by experts are: One, make a comparison with the offline world and educate children as to how online world could be even more dangerous. Two, handhold them; and don’t let them surf alone, because there are high chances they will stray and stumble on something that is inappropriate and distracting. Three, keep the computer in an open place where everyone can see what’s on the screen; and regulate the usage.

Parents should keep an eye on not only which websites kids visit, but also on their chat sessions. Says Mishra, “Get to know your child’s online friends as you do their school and neighbourhood friends. Learn to surf the web and chat online yourself so you understand what it is that your child is doing.”

The challenge before mothers and fathers is not as much as keeping a watch on their kids’ online activity but learning what exactly their kids are up to online.

(This article appeared in Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Build your family tree on web

Online networking platforms, like Facebook and Google Plus, have expanded not only our friends’ circle; but also our family circle. There have been instances when the friend request was actually from a long-lost distant cousin, with whom you had indulged in many a childhood prank during your summer-holiday visits to his house!

Knowing 50 family members is not the same as knowing 50 friends, because, unlike the latter, we also need to know how they are related to us. And that’s no easy task: one, because of the large number of relatives we have got to know through networking sites, and two, it’s simply impossible to remember how someone is related, especially if it goes something like: “she is my father’s brother’s son’s wife’s mother’s sister’s daughter”!

The web, as always, has the solution. Make a family tree, of not just 50 members but even 200 or more. It was in late 1990s that attempts were first made to draw on the power of internet to help people trace their family lineage. Ancestry.com, which owns many related sites, is said to be the world’s largest genealogy company in the world. It’s a paid site.

However, there are now many free online family tree websites that are very user-friendly. Geni.com, Myheritage.com, Tribalpages.com and Familyecho.com are a few. Some of them become paid if you have to add beyond a specific number of members.

Most of these have similar features. Begin by opening an account either with a dedicated login and password or by using your Facebook account. Enter names of your parents, siblings, spouse, and keep adding to make the tree bigger and bigger.

There are many attractive features that make these sites interesting to work on. You can add photos and personal details like date of birth, wedding date, email ID etc. You can create a family newsletter so that everyone is updated about all the family events. You can indicate if the person is alive or deceased.

You can invite family members to open their own account and you can merge their trees with your tree. When trees are merged, there could be “conflicts”, meaning, the same person could be referred to by different names or have different spellings. In such cases, the software will identify and suggest you to resolve the conflict by picking one name that you like.

You can search people in your family tree; and the best part is, the software figures out how you two are related, and shows the names and relationship of everyone who is in the chain. For example, your relationship with E will be shown as: “You →  A your father →  B his mother →  C her sister →  D her daughter → E her daughter.”

Such sites are useful in these times, when families are nuclear and scattered; and the newer generations have lesser and lesser knowledge about family lineage and relationships.

(This article appeared in Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Cloud gets a new Drive

The much-talked about Google Drive is here. If you have a Gmail account, you can request your Drive to be activated by going to drive.google.com. It’s roughly the same as Dropbox, as a storage platform. But Drive has, obviously, many Google features embedded in it.

Drive is one place where you can create, share, collaborate and store documents, worksheets, presentations, tables, etc. That’s pretty much like Google Doc. It has all the features of Microsoft Office as well. So, whether it’s an official team project, or planning out a vacation with friends, Drive comes handy.

All files like videos, photos, music, Google Docs and PDFs can be uploaded to Drive and stored. You can instal Drive on desktops and mobile devices, and all can be synced. This means, the contents of the Drive are accessible anywhere, at any time. If you change a file on one device, it gets changed on all devices.

There are some clear advantages, like you don’t need to send attachments: a video can be put on Drive shared with others. Another is that Search works for scanned documents as well. For example, if you scan a hotel menu and put it up in the Drive, you can retrieve it later by searching for one of the items in the menu. Google is also working on enabling image recognition for search, so that you can, for example, retrieve a photos of Taj Mahal, even though the photo isn’t named so.

Sharing options can be controlled by the owner of the account. For increased security, there’s an option for 2-step verification. Once enabled, the account holder will have to not only key in the password but also a code that’s sent to his or her mobile phone. There’s some talk about privacy and IP issues, but the debate goes on.

Up to 5GB storage is free, which Google says is “enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on”.

Interestingly there’s an India link to Drive -- the management tools, security features and billing systems were conceptualized and built by Google's engineering team in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Is Google Drive the first of its kind? Well the concept is nothing new. It has existed for many years. Microsoft has a good a platform called Skydrive that’s quite similar to the Google product. Dropbox is a hugely popular one. For Apple fans, there is iCloud. In fact, Google Drive has entered a segment that is crowded. The advantage is its seamless integration of all Google products.

But then, storage is never a problem in India. With our poor broadband connectivity and very few public wi-fi hotspots, success of all cloud-based platforms depends solely on easy accessibility.

(This article appeared in Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Measure your cyber-fame

There are no introverts online. A few comments, a few likes, a few followers -- you gain a strange sense of accomplishment and self-confidence. Yet, some remain cocooned in cyberspace, using it as an eternal refuge from real-life claustrophobia. For others, it’s a launch pad for many a real-life venture.

Most cyber-beings are bitten by the self-promotion bug at one point or another. It manifests in various ways (filling up an elaborate profile, putting up photos of oneself and family) and for various reasons (letting oneself known to others, making friends or for business promotion). Cyber-fame is key to leveraging the full potential of one’s online existence, be it on blogs or networking sites.

You need to work your way to it, though arguably it’s easier than in real-life.
One, make sure you blog on topical issues; two, regularly post updates; three, network by visiting blogs, liking updates, and leaving comments; four, link your blog to networking sites so that each time you have fresh post, your friends see it on their timeline; and five, revive contacts by messaging.

No of hits, friends and comments fair indicators of your online popularity. Blogger, Wordpress, YouTube etc have an in-built device to let you know the number of visitors. Or else, you can let sites like Blog Counter or Sitemeter do that by signing up and placing an HTML code on your blog.

The credibility of the number of comments depends on the nature of comments, because not all could be relevant, and there could be spams.

Now, you have sites that combine your presence, activity and contacts on various platforms and calculate your influence. One of the popular sites is Klout. Another one is Peer Index. Both work on similar lines, though Klout assesses your influence on a broader scale. Sign in with your Twitter or Facebook login and password; and add to it all your networking sites.

Klout Score measures your influence on a scale of 1 to 100, and takes into consideration Comments, Wall Posts, Likes, Mentions, Reshares etc. It measures your Reach (number of people you influence within your network and across extended networks), Amplification (how likely your audience will respond to your actions) and Impact (the influence of your audience).

Klout also will tell your style from among 16 possibilities -- a Conversationalist, Networker, Observer, Pundit etc. The score can be tweeted and shared on networks to publicize your fame and influence.

The authenticity and credibility of such online indices are debatable, but recently, a matchmaking site Tawkify announced that it would consider members’ Klout score when pairing them with each other for dates.

(This article appeared in Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

There’s nothing private online

From the password you type to access email, to the texts and photos you put up on social networking sites -- they are all visible to someone other than you. Theoretically, that is. Practically, of course, there are institutionalized safeguards to prevent data from being accessed.

But, how much privacy can Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft etc ensure? After all, our data are on their server, right? And, for free, in most of cases!

We define privacy differently online. Offline, private means, only I have access to it. But online, we trust the owner of the server where our data is, and we co-opt him into our personal space. This handing over of data to a trusted guardian will become the norm as we move more and more to the cloud.

While we fret about privacy, we have no qualms about proclaiming either to the entire world via Twitter or to our “Friends” via Facebook and similar sites, our location, our travel plans, what articles we read, our political views, our religious faith etc. (By the way, in the days of yore, “Friends” were people whom we knew very closely and whom we trusted. No longer!)

The most we can secure our privacy is to not let our browser know which sites we visited, by using “Incognito window” in Chrome or “Private Browsing” in Internet Explorer and Firefox. But it isn’t as private as one may think -- it only prevents history of websites visited from being saved on the browser, and prevents cookies being placed on the computer. Even with private browsing, service provider can track websites and malicious software can get implanted.

Privacy issue has grown alongside the shift that has taken place in the way we communicate. We have moved from “person(s) to person(s)” communication to putting up data in a central place that is accessible to many people. Now, you don’t send information, instead others access your information. Earlier, email was the way you shared photos. Now, you put them up on a site (cloud), where others view it. The problem here is, not all of us are careful what information should be made accessible to whom; with the result, all info becomes visible to all people!

And people whom you may not even know may get to see the info. For example, if on Facebook I Like a photo put up by SMJ, that photo will reflect on the feed of my friends all of whom may not know who SMJ is. Why should strangers get to see SMJ’s photo, even though SMJ originally made the photo visible only to her friends?

Privacy issues are tricky. If you are too fussy about privacy, never put anything personal online!

(This appeared in the Wireless World column of The Times of India, Bangalore, today)

Virtual pinboard gets into news feed

Six months ago, very few of us had heard about a site called Pinterest. But Friday last, cyberspace was abuzz after "The 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report” reported that Pinterest was the third-most visited social networking site by people in the US, after Facebook and Twitter. The report also said that 60% of visitors to the site are females and 55% in the 25-44 age group.

Pinterest, development of which began in 2009, is a virtual pinboard (or a notice board, as the Brits would say) on which you can pin interesting items. It could be photos of animals like puppies or decorative items like wall hangings, or nature like mountains or culinary delights. To join you have to send a request or you can join by responding to an invite sent by someone on Pinterest. You can also connect Facebook and Twitter accounts.

There are three ways you can pin: “add a pin” by pasting the URL of site where you found the item or “upload a pin” from a folder in your computer. Also, you can have a ‘pin it bookmarklet’ on your browser, and each time you find an interesting website, you can pin that by clicking on the bookmarklet. Only a website with a photo on it can be pinned.

The site works like Twitter or Google Plus -- others can follow your pin; you can follow others’ pins; you can repin what you find on others’ sites; you can “like” pins of others; and you can comment on others’ pins.

But, who has time for another networking site and why is it catching on?

One, it’s a visual medium, which tends to be more popular. Two, like FB, it’s a place to publicize and discover new ideas. Three, it is a social marketing medium: if you are, say, an interior decorator, you can see the latest trends just as you can publicise your innovations. And, four, this is not a Flickr-like site where you upload your pics and share it among friends. Pinterest combines elements of Facebook and Twitter.

A random check shows that the site has some following in India; and the fact that some well-known websites already have a “Pin it” button on their pages, indicates that the site is gaining some traction here.

Will Pinterest pose a threat to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Yahoo!? It may not, since this looks like a niche site that is to do with style, decor and such visual aspects; unlike the other four that are more broad based with many facets to them.

Still, the established giants -- even while competing among themselves -- will have to take notice of cyberbeings’ new interest to pin items.

(This was published in the Wireless World column in The Times of India, Bangalore, today)