Watch FIFA Cup Games With Ultimate Visual Experience

With the 2014 FIFA World Cup around the corner, all football fans are excited about the game broadcast in full HD quality. For those who can’t fly to Brazil in person to watch the game, ViewSonic Corp., a leading global provider of visual solution products, recommends 2 projectors with outstanding image quality and full features: PJD7820HD and Pro8520HD, to make the football matches come alive. The two projectors all come with BrilliantColor technology featuring multi-color processing to produce stunning, vibrant colors. ViewSonic projectors will bring you the ultimate visual experience to watch FIFA on a big screen.

“ According to a market research survey, in the last World Cup most of football fans would rather watch the game at home as it is more comfortable and convenient in the living room. Besides, many people go to authentic pubs or sports bars to watch live matches with other people and enjoy the convivial atmospheres.” said Max Hsu, PM Director for ViewSonic Asia Pacific. “ As a small screen is not good enough for those football fans, ViewSonic introduces PJD7820HDand Pro8520HD projectors that bring exceptional details and outstanding color saturation for incredible pixel-by-pixel performance and superior image quality on a big screen.  The HighLumens and a contrast ratio of our projectors will enable you watch every move in details like you were there at the stadium.”

PJD7820HD Full HD 1080p High Lumens 3D Projector

The ViewSonic PJD7820HD is the best in class price-performance Full HD 1080p DLP projector with 3,000 ANSI lumens and 15,000:1 contrast ratio (w/DynamicECO). With the latest HDMI, the PJD7820HD can now display 3D images from 3D Blu-ray players. The new advanced lamp technology from ViewSonic extends the lamp life up to 8,000 hours. Its filter-less design eliminates filter cleaning or filter replacement and provides virtually zero maintenance. The ViewSonic PJD7820HD projector with BrilliantColor technology features multi-color processing to produce stunning, vibrant colors. Built on DLP technology, ViewSonic’s PJD7820HD projector virtually eliminates image degradation known as color decay – a yellow/faded tint that LCD projectors may develop after extended use. 

The Pro8520HD Professional High Lumens Full HD 1080p Projector

The ViewSonic Pro8520HD is a 5000 ANSI lumens high brightness, Full HD, and 15000:1 contrast ratio (w/DynamicECO) projector ideal for use in any large venue, even with high ambient light. Built with BrilliantColor technology, this projector produces vibrant colors, while its 1.5x optical zoom offers more than twice the mounting flexibility over a standard 1.2x optical zoom. Equipped with dual HDMI inputs, it's perfect for connecting to any HDMI-enabled devices.

The ViewSonic Pro8520HD offers seamless integration and full support for Crestron control systems and Crestron RoomView Express control software. IT admin can monitor, schedule, and manage multiple projectors remotely. The presentations can be projected by using a quick and simple plug-and-play USB connection without running a bulky VGA cable. With a PC-less slideshows feature, you can enjoy pictures or images directly from a USB flash drive without a PC. The 20-watt integrated speakers, adding dual HDMI inputs, RGB inputs x 2, S-video and RS-232 interfaces, make the Pro8520HD easily integrated with all kinds of audio-video equipment and ideal for lecture halls and boardrooms.

Persistent Expands Into 3000 Sqm Facility in Goa

Persistent Systems, a leading software product and development services today announced the opening of a new office building adjacent to the existing one in Verna, Goa. The new building is fully constructed and measures 3000 square meters. This doubles the existing area and the combined facility will accommodate 700 developers. Keeping with the tradition of naming buildings after prominent Indian figures, Persistent announced that the two buildings will be named Bhaskar and Charak.  Bhaskar is a well-known mathematician from the Seventh Century and Charak is known for his contributions to Ayurveda. The facility boasts of environmentally-responsible and resource-efficient design and architecture.

At the inauguration, Anand Deshpande, Chairman and Managing Director, Persistent Systems said, “We have been in Goa since 2005 and have over 400 employees working on next generation technology areas viz. social, mobile, analytics, and cloud.  We are very pleased with the work ethics and the capabilities of the Goa team and with the new building we will be in a position to expand rapidly in Goa.” 

NICE Survey Says Millennials Still Like Human Touch

use of social media and mobile apps for customer service has doubled since 2011, but according to NICE Systems’ Global Customer Experience Survey, 88 percent of customers still elect to pick up the phone and call.

“On average, customers use about six different channels to contact companies for various customer service questions, issues, or complaints – ranging from social media to email to trying to solve the problem by themselves on the company website,” said Yochai Rozenblat, President of the NICE Enterprise Group. “The usage of multiple channels continues to grow, especially in the areas of social media, online and direct chat platforms, and apps. Yet, the majority of customers still prefer to speak with a live service representative over the phone to get their issue resolved quickly.”

NICE surveyed 1,206 consumers between the ages of 18 and 65 to assess their satisfaction with customer service channels, to understand how and why customers move from one channel to the next, and to discover their behavior and frequency of use on particular channels and how they influence brand loyalty. 

Phone is king – 88 percent choose to speak with a live rep over the phone. Connecting with a customer service representative over the phone is in fact the most used channel, with website self-service following closely behind (83 percent). In addition, no matter what channel they are using, customers like having the option of turning to a live phone representative as their next choice.

Social media, live chat, and smartphone app use has doubled since 2011. Seventy-three percent of customers have used multiple contact methods over the past six months to reach a customer service provider. While more customers are turning to emerging channels, they still prefer “live” interactions. Sixty-four percent of the people using a smartphone app want it to facilitate connection to a live rep. Despite the increase in channel use, social media has a 29 percent success rate in resolving customer service issues as compared to 69 percent over the phone, and only 1 percent of respondents found social media to be the most satisfying channel, signifying that these modes of customer service still need improvement.

For customer service interactions, millennials give lower preference to social media channels. While millennials are more likely to use social media channels as compared to older age groups, respondents actually prefer to speak to a live rep via phone or use website self-service when it comes to customer service issues. 

“As overall channel usage increases, it reinforces the need for a seamless and effortless customer experience across all channels,” said Rozenblat. “It’s possible that a year or two from now we’ll see consumers using many more channels, as new methods are developed. Now is the time to get closer to your customers, understand their preferences, personalize interactions, and take charge of the multi-channel customer service journey.”

The survey unveiled additional findings about channel usage and customer service preferences:

Make it personal and effortless – customers want companies to remember their past three to five interactions. Customers expect companies to deliver service continuation, no matter what channel was used. An effortless customer service experience has a high reward as well – 96 percent of consumers who expended little effort while resolving an issue with their service provider reported high loyalty.

Cisco Reaches 200 Million TV Viewers in India

Cisco has announced that it now reaches more than 40 million digital homes across India with its industry-leading VideoGuard conditional access (CA) and digital rights management (DRM) solutions. Using the industry estimated average of five people per household, Cisco is now enabling a rich and advanced TV experience for more than 200 million viewers in India, an important milestone that  reinforces the company’s leadership at a time when the pay-TV industry is on the cusp of a major transformation.

This milestone reinforces Cisco’s market leadership in the estimated 72 million digital pay-TV homes in India (Source: MPA Media Route26, Issue 123 - September 2013). Cisco state-of-the-art VideoGuard® CA and DRM technology ensures critical protection of premium content with a zero piracy track record. A strong team of engineers working at the Research and Development Center in Bangalore is dedicated to the technology needs of leading satellite and cable service providers in India and worldwide. The company’s commitment to security, research and innovation puts it in prime position to address the changing needs of operators both now and into the future.

Highlights:

• Cisco VideoGuard conditional access and digital rights management solutions make Cisco the leading CA provider in India with a market share of 43% (source: Media Partner Asia Media Route26, Issue 1 – December 2013 and Cisco’s internal subscriber data).

• Cisco is a trusted pay-TV technology partner for more than 150 pay-TV operators as well as media and entertainment companies worldwide, including leading direct-to-home and cable operator customers in India, such as Airtel Digital TV, Asianet, DEN, GTPL, Hathway and Tata Sky.

• Cisco is committed to delivering world-leading, affordable and innovative solutions and services to help its satellite and cable customers differentiate their services in their respective markets in India.

Sue Taylor, Vice President Sales, Asia Pacific, Cisco Service Provider Video Software Solutions says, “In the changing landscape of pay-TV services in India, this milestone highlights our continued growth with several leading MSOs in the country. We pride ourselves in empowering our service provider customers to establish themselves as the innovators in their business. The achievement of this milestone is a great motivation for us to continue to develop market-leading solutions for our customers globally.”

Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC: “Achieving the milestone of 40 million homes in India reinforces our commitment to the government’s mandate to digitalize the cable industry and also speaks of our ability to provide best in class solutions and technology. We work closely with our customers to enable them to provide an unparalleled experience to their subscribers as well as help monetize their investments.”

Ubisoft Consulted Kaspersky Lab to Authenticate Watch Dogs Script

A team of Kaspersky Lab experts were consulted by the developers of the upcoming action-adventure game, Watch Dogs, set for release on May 27 worldwide by Ubisoft, a leading producer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment products. The goal of this cooperation was to avoid over-sensationalization or misinterpretation of the cyber-domain, and to make the theoretical cyber-scenarios in the game, both during in-game play and in character/plot developments, as authentic as possible.

Watch Dogs tells the story of Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker whose criminal past led to a violent family tragedy. Now on the hunt for those who hurt his family, players will be able to monitor and hack their enemies by manipulating everything connected to the city’s Central Operating System (ctOS). Watch Dogs lets the player use Chicago as their ultimate weapon and exact their own style of revenge.

The Watch Dogs development team approached Kaspersky Lab’s security experts at the beginning of 2013, shortly after the latter issued a lengthy research paper on the cyber-espionage campaign dubbed Red October. This was a sophisticated toolkit for cyber-espionage activities able to steal data from computer systems, collect information from smartphones, record audio if the system had a microphone, and hack webcam streams, and upload everything to a server. By that time, with most of the Watch Dogs script already complete, the developers were just polishing it to make it look more realistic. This is where the team of Kaspersky Lab experts joined in. It provided technical consultations and recommendations on what they considered was accurate, and what could be tweaked, edited or changed to make the gameplay and plot development more technically authentic.

Commenting on consulting Ubisoft regarding Watch Dogs, Vitaly Kamluk, Principal Security Researcher with Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis Team, said: “When we first heard about the game we were really intrigued. Ubisoft was pretty accurate in terms of predicting upcoming threats and how cities might look like in five or 10 years. Many of the in-game hacks have become reality already. The game conveys well what might happen if control over systems winds up in the wrong hands. You can seize this control yourself and see how it causes difficulties for people all around you. You can take it to extremes to bring chaos to the city. Your actions could even hurt or kill people.”

For example, most of the hacks in the game are about automated control systems being compromised. This is a relatively new trend that started several years ago with the appearance of the Stuxnet worm, which attacked industrial control systems at an Iranian nuclear facility. That was an example of how a computer program can break things in the real world – Stuxnet actually broke physical equipment. And you can have the same thing in Watch Dogs.

Vitaly Kamluk added: “Although some of the hacks are very similar to those occurring in the real world, it is still just a simulation – thankfully! It's crucial to understand that Watchdogs doesn't teach you hacking. What it can do is show you just how powerful a hacking tool can be. We hope that this game will allow people to think about the security of future city operating systems, which needs to be taken really seriously. After all, if such systems are hacked, the consequences could be catastrophic.”

“Working with Kaspersky Lab helped us to solidify the technical authenticity in the game,” said Thomas Geffroyd, brand content director, Ubisoft. “There were some liberties we had to take in order to keep the game fun so Vitaly and his team gave us advice within the parameters of including this content in a video game.”

FDI in Retail E-comm to Achieve $70 Billion Growth

A roundtable discussion on the topic of allowing FDI in the retail e-commerce, specifically in the B2C segment, was held on 28^th May at Hotel Le Meridien, New Delhi. The roundtable saw the presence of representatives from the various e-commerce companies like Snapdeal.com, Yebhi.com, Infibeam.com, apart from Kiran Karnik, Chairman, CII National Committee on Broadband & Telecom, R. Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM,  Arvind Gupta, Head-IT Cell, BJP and Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India.

The forum highlighted some key issues related to the Indian e-commerce industry, particularly the current policy that disallows FDI in inventory-based B2C e-commerce, thereby creating a regressive environment for the industry to grow. The Indian e-commerce industry is slated to grow to a $70 billion industry by the year 2020 and in order to achieve the target, it is essential to remove the anomalies being faced by the sector currently.

R. Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM, commented “ The focus of the current Government is on manufacturing and overall economic development. We feel that the Government also needs to focus on a policy framework for allowing FDI in B2C e-commerce as presently the market players do face certain restrictions when it comes to raising funds. 100% FDI is allowed in the B2B segment, however Indian financiers are reluctant to invest when it comes to the B2C segment. Hence, investment through the FDI route is the need of the hour”.

“There are certain unwarranted fears amongst the retail industry that e-commerce will destroy jobs in India. However, it is just the opposite as e-commerce opens up new markets and creates new opportunities for SMEs and individuals across regions where none existed before. Also, since retail e-commerce involves a substantial logistic support part, it results in the creation of new jobs for the skilled” added Kiran Karnik, Chairman, CII National Committee on Broadband & Telecom.

A recommendation document containing inputs and feedback of the industry players will be submitted to the policy-making bodies of the government for them to review the current policy on FDI in e-commerce and also addresses issues related to Internet penetration, payment systems, logistics, improving supply chain efficiency and alternate mode of payments.

Arvind Gupta, Head, IT Cell, Bharatiya Janata Party further commented “Our government’s key focus is on the overall economic development and we are willing to extend our support to the industry in all possible ways. We are planning to roll out GST soon as it will cut down on multiple taxation on the manufacturing industry and benefit industry players. Revisiting the policy on FDI in retail e-commerce is also a part of our agenda and we are willing to consider the recommendations provided by the industry representatives on the same”.

The roundtable discussion was organized by the CyberMedia Group, moderated by Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia.

BlackBerry Battles Google for the Internet of Things

By Rob Enderle

The war for smartphones is not over, but it is rapidly moving on to the Internet of Things, where most of the appliances, vehicles and devices around us are both connected to the Web and to each other. But there is an inherent problem in this market -- while there are interconnect standards, there has been no platform that has emerged as dominant, and the standards that do exist haven’t yet fully addressed the emerging need to manage or secure these devices. 

BlackBerry actually has the missing parts pretty well in hand and is planning to take its QNX platform, already dominant in automobiles, to the Internet of Things as an alternative to Google’s similar effort. I think we’d rather this go to BlackBerry. Let me explain.

Standards

When you are talking about connecting everything you don’t just need standards on how these devices talk to each other, but some kind of a standard platform so software developed for one type of device can easily and cheaply be used on another. If this isn’t done, the cost of each solution and its inability to work across vendors will prevent any eventual success.

We saw this first with PCs and then with smartphones, until we got a single platform to be dominant enough interesting applications were almost non-existent and there was really not revenue stream for developers. But Microsoft DOS and then Windows created a lucrative platform for PCs, and eventually Apple and Google did the same thing on smartphones. 

But with the Internet of Things, we are talking about a massive increase in the number of connected devices, and no one wants to manage them one at a time. Standards bring with them risk -- folks who want access to these devices (because they want to know more about you or do you harm) now have an easier path through those standards.  So while we don’t have our cars and appliances being hacked (well, not much), now once standardized this won’t remain the case, much like we found with PCs and smartphones.

So we need standards, but we need the solution to be secure or we’ll be screwed.

BlackBerry vs. Google

Google’s solution will undoubtedly be cheaper because it can sell the information it gathers about those who use its products to others subsidizing their costs like they do with Android. However, I think it is ill-advised to have anyone sharing this much information about any of us. In addition, the firm’s platform, Android, has been the least secure of the major platforms, suggesting that that Google’s winning this battle wouldn’t be in our best interest.

BlackBerry, thanks to its QNX platform, is actually farther along and it doesn’t sell information to advertisers. BlackBerry has security in its DNA because its primary market has always been corporations that require a much higher base level of security than consumers do.

BlackBerry Ion

Blackberry launched Project Ion this month to address this specific need, and with healthcare as a short-term target. This is one of the areas that has proven to be low hanging fruit for this Internet of Things movement because so many of the related devices must communicate back to some central service so remedial action for a health problem can be both timely and effective. This, of course, brings with it a higher security requirement because laws typically require a high level of confidentiality in this segment.

Also critical to this effort is the ability to analyze this information in real time on a large geographic scale so broad problems with the devices, tracked medication and the illnesses themselves can be rapidly identified and fixed. That is all designed into this program.

Also designed in is a heavy partnership component, which will undoubtedly be BlackBerry’s ability to capture a critical mass of partners that will be critical to this effort.

Fingers Crossed for BlackBerry

Running against Google won’t be easy, given the company’s size and financial resources. Fortunately, Google has never learned to focus on any one thing, which is what gives BlackBerry this opportunity to steal the Internet of Things market. Given how Google makes money, off of our information, I think it is in all our best interests if BlackBerry wins this fight. 

Regardless, Project Ion showcases that we are marching forward to a time when our devices all talk to the cloud and each other. Let’s hope they say nice things about us.