Asus ZenFone 5 Variant With the 1.2GHz SoC, 8GB Storage Launched at Rs. 7,999

Asus has launched a new variant of its  popular ZenFone 5, called the ZenFone 5 (A501CG-2B509WWE), priced at just Rs. 7,999. The new ZenFone 5 variant is now available to buy on Flipkart.
One of the most notable differences in the new ZenFone 5 variant is it packs a dual-core Intel Atom Z2520 processor with Intel Hyper Threading Technology clocked at 1.2GHz. Meanwhile, the original ZenFone 5 (A501CG) is powered by a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2560 processor.
It's worth noting that this is the company's fourth ZenFone 5 model launched in India, the other three are the ZenFone 5 (A501CG), ZenFone 5 (A500CG), and ZenFone 5 (A502CG) - all including slightly different specifications mainly between the chipsets and the screen resolutions.
The Asus ZenFone 5 (A501CG-2B509WWE) comes with 2GB of RAM, which is again a highlight of the device at this price point. There is 8GB of built-in storage on the device. Other specifications of the new variant are identical to the 8GB model of the ZenFone 5 (A501CG).
It features a 5-inch HD (720x1280 pixel) IPS display; an 8-megapixel rear camera; a 2-megapixel front facing camera; inbuilt storage expansion via a microSD card (up to 64GB), and 2110mAh battery to back them all. Much like other ZenFone series handsets, the ZenFone 5 (A501CG-2B509WWE) runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean with the company's proprietary Asus ZenUI.
Earlier this month, Asus announced a price cut of its ZenFone 5 16GB model in India to Rs. 9,999, down from the Rs. 12,999.
The price cut was seen as an attempt of the Taiwanese company to compete against the likes of Xiaomi's Redmi Note 4G and Micromax's Yu Yureka - both priced below Rs. 10,000.

An Epic Yaarana: MR.Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan Pay Tribute to Ilaiyaraaja

Moments like these are hard to come by in real life, plentiful though they be on reel.On January 20, Superstars Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan and Kamal Haasan attended a double celebration in Mumbai  at which the music of Shamitabh was launched and its composer Ilaiyaraaja was felicitated for his 1,000th film score . Also present were actress Sridevi, who has co-starred often with all three actors, Mr Bachchan's Shamitabh co-stars and his family.
 

Nasa's Curiosity Rover All Set to Drill Into Crystal-Rich Rock on Mars

Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover is all set to drill into a crystal-rich rock on the Red planet to find out salt mineral left behind when lake water evaporated, says an Indian-American scientist associated with this project.
The rock target called "Mojave" at Gale Crater displayed copious slender features - slightly smaller than grains of rice - that appear to be mineral crystals.
"The crystal shapes are apparent in the earlier images of Mojave but we do not know what they represent," said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
"We are hoping that mineral identifications we get from the rover's laboratory will shed more light than we got from just the images and bulk chemistry," he added.
To begin with, Curiosity is beginning a "mini-drill" test to assess the rock's suitability for deeper drilling which collects a sample for on board laboratory analysis.
This is the fourth new version of the on board software since the rover's August 2012 landing.
The "Mojave" drilling begins Curiosity's third round of investigating the basal layer of Mount Sharp exposed at an area called "Pahrump Hills".
Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) can identify specific minerals in rock powder from a drilled sample.
Analysis of the drill hole and drill tailings may also reveal whether the crystals are only at the surface, like a salty crust, or are also deeper in the rock.
There could be a fairly involved story here.
"Are the salt crystals left from a drying lake? Or are they more pervasive through the rock, formed by fluids moving through the rock? In either case, a later fluid may have removed or replaced the original minerals with something else," Vasavada asked.

Xiaomi Mi Note Pro With 5.7-Inch QHD Display, Snapdragon 810 SoC Launched in India

Xiaomi, apart from launching the Mi Note phablet, also revealed the Mi Note Pro. The company stress on that the Mi Note Pro is even better than the Mi Note - and looking at the specifications, it would certainly appear to be.
The Xiaomi Mi Note Pro has been priced at CNY 3299 (approximately Rs. 32,900) and will enter mass production by the end of March.
The highlight of the Mi Note Pro is that it packs an octa-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor (quad-core ARM Cortex A57 and quad-core Cortex A53) alongside 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and Adreno 430 GPU. Running Android 4.4.4 KitKat-based MIUI 6, the Mi Note Pro supports a single SIM.

Actor Sanjay Dutt to Go Back to Jail As the Parole Extension is Rejected

 Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt is likely to return to prison today after the Yerwada Prison authorities in Pune rejected the plea for extending his furlough.

Mr Dutt had sought an extension of 14 days after exhausting the two weeks granted to him by jail officials. The decision came after the Mumbai police sent its report to  Yerwada prison.

"We are told that the city police report was positive. Hence we have no idea as to why it was rejected," Mr Dutt's lawyer Hitesh Jain told.

However, Mr Jain pointed out that as per a new circular issued by the prison department if an inmate doesn't report back to jail on the 29th day after the "initial 14 days and a 14 day extension taken as granted", only then it would be a violation.

But the actor won't be taking any chances, Mr Jain assured," I have advised him to surrender today itself."

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis reiterated in Delhi that Mr Dutt would not be given any special treatment. "Our government will neither favor anyone nor will it do any kind of discrimination," he said.

Mr Dutt is serving his sentence after being convicted in the 1993 Bombay Blasts Case for illegal possession of weapons. 

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Lenovo A6000 Launches at CES; To Take on Micromax's Yu Yureka and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G

On Thursday lenovo, as expected, launched its affordable A6000 smartphone at the CES 2015. The Chinese brand also confirmed that the Lenovo A6000 will be launched in India via exclusive online partner, Flipkart.
The Lenovo A6000 is priced at $169, which translates to roughly Rs. 10,500, but Flipkart confirmed the phone will be priced "below Rs. 10,000 in India." With Lenovo looking to compete with recent launches like Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G and Micromax's Yu Yureka, the phone could be priced as low as Rs. 8,999. Unfortunately, Lenovo as of now has not revealed any time frame for the launch of its A6000 smartphone.

Infosys Announced 100% Bonus for Employees

Infosys has announced 100 per cent variable bonus payout for employees for the December quarter, the management said on Friday.

"We have made 100% variable payout for Q3 and have seen a further decline in attrition as a result of  the multiple initiatives taken over  last few quarters," said  by U. B. Pravin Rao, Infosys chief operating officer.

Annualized attrition for  December quarter inched up to 20.4 per cent from 20.1 per cent in the September quarter. However, Infosys chief financial officer Rajiv Bansal said attrition is down 3 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

"Our initiatives are paying off and we are in the right direction," Mr Bansal added.

Over the last few quarters, Infosys has taken several steps to control a record-high attrition, which led to nearly one in five employees quitting India's second largest IT outsourcer last fiscal.

Infosys is now training more employees in areas such as design thinking and artificial intelligence.

"We have covered over 9,000 employees across the company with design thinking training; more than 400 of these are at senior levels," Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys said.

The company has also partnered with Stanford Global School of Business for an executive education program.

"This initiative will include 200 executives, each of whom will participate in a part-time, year-long program over three years," Dr Sikka said.

Infosys said it had added a total number of 13,154 employees during the December quarter. As of December 31, 2014, Infosys had 169,638 employees on its payroll.

PlayStation Still Has Problems, Said by Sony

Boston/New York: Sony Corp's PlayStation Network suffered connection problems for a fourth straight day since hackers attacked the video game network, and the company said that on Sunday service was gradually being restored.

The hacker activist group known as Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for disrupting both the PlayStation Network and Microsoft Corp's Xbox Live on the Christmas Day.The Service was restored to Xbox Live on Friday.

"We are currently experiencing widespread network issues that are being addressed," Sony said in a statement on PlayStation's maintenance website.

Hours earlier, Catherine Jensen, vice president of consumer experience at Sony Computer Entertainment America, said on the PlayStation blog that the network was "back online."

Some gamers said that on Twitter  they were able to access the PlayStation Network on Sunday, but others took to the microblogging site to complain about the continuing outage. It was not clear how many of the 56 million video gamers who use PlayStation still suffered problems.

On Sony's Twitter customer support account, AskPlayStation, a representative wrote, "Network services are gradually coming back online."

Sony has been the victim of some of the most high-profile security breaches in history.

In late November, Sony Pictures' computer system was taken down by hackers protesting the film, "The Interview," which depicted the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. US President Barack Obama has blamed the North Korean government for the attack.

Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for attacks on the PlayStation Network in early December and August of this year. The August attack coincided with a bomb scare in which Lizard Squad tweeted to American Airlines that it heard explosives were on board a plane carrying an executive with Sony Online Entertainment.

In 2011, hackers stole data belonging to 77 million PlayStation 

Xiaomi Tests Selling Phones in Stores to Boost India Sales

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc says it could sell more models in Indian stores while pursuing its primarily online-only strategy if it succeeds in selling enough Redmi Note 4G handsets through shops of the carrier Bharti Airtel Ltd.
Xiaomi entered India with online retailer Flipkart.com in July, selling phones through flash sales whereby availability is limited to short time frames. The online strategy cuts down on marketing and distribution costs, allowing Xiaomi to sell feature-rich phones at low prices.

But last week, Bharti Airtel said it would sell Redmi Note 4G handsets in the six cities through 133 stores of India's biggest fourth-generation (4G) mobile network provider. In-store handset prices in India are comparable to online models because neither are sold with network chips or subsidised through pricing plans.

"If this works out fine, we'll expand the partnership to other cities and other devices," Manu Jain, head of Xiaomi in India, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday, adding that it was too early to form any concrete plans yet.

Making models available in stores - as Xiaomi does in China - could help the fast-growing startup reach more users in the world's third-largest smartphone market as Bharti promotes the handsets to attract subscribers to its 4G service.

Tail of Missing AirAsia Plane Is Found, Indonesian Official Said

JAKARTA, INDONESIA:  The head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency said Wednesday that the tail of AirAsia Flight 8501 had been spotted in the Java Sea, a development that could be significant because the plane's so-called black boxes were contained there.

"The tail section has been found and confirmed," the official, Bambang Soelistyo, said at a news conference.

Flight 8501, an Airbus A320-200, crashed into the Java Sea on Dec. 28 with 162 people aboard, less than an hour after taking off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya bound for Singapore. Bad weather has slowed the process of identifying wreckage and recovering bodies.

The cause of the crash remains unclear, and officials hope that recovering the plane's voice and flight data recorders, or black boxes, will shed light on what happened.

Five Apps to Watch Out in the New Year 2015

Uber, Facebook, Instagram - sure, they've been all the rage, but as 2014 winds down we're all ready for something fresh. From ride-hailing to photo sharing, here are a few up-and coming apps and startups to watch in 2015. Which will be the breakout hit of the new year?

Tell a story
Instagram, which is owned by the Facebook Inc., now has 300 million users - more than the Twitter. Scrolling through its snapshot feeds gives users a quick glimpse into the lives of friends and strangers.  Its simplicity is part of its appeal. But what if you want to tell a longer story?

Enter Storehouse, a mobile app that promises to let you share "your stories, as they happen." Instead of sharing one-off photos, Storehouse lets users combine photos, videos and words to share anything from a detailed recipe, to travel memories or a first-person documentary on the Yakuza. Storehouse was founded by Mark Kawano, who previously worked at Apple as a User Experience Evangelist, helping developers design iOS and Mac apps.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G Now Available through Airtel

Airtel will now be selling the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G smartphone with its own postpaid plans including 4G data starting  this Thursday. Until now, the smartphone was available exclusively via e-commerce website Flipkart. An Airtel representative had earlier told NDTV Gadgets that the units being sold via the telecom operator will not be locked to the Airtel network, just like the ones available through Flipkart.

The Airtel-Xiaomi collaboration will let users buy Redmi Note 4G handset at Rs. 9,999 from 133 Airtel stores across six cities - Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, and Kolkata. Users will be able to book the handset from Airtel's dedicated Mi page and select their preferred Airtel store in the aforementioned cities where they wish to pick up the device. While the booking process has already started, the sales will commence from Friday. Users can book online via Credit Card, Debit Card or Cash payment method, the company said.

Airtel added that it will keep a 'Mi Day' each week where users can walk-in and buy a Redmi Note 4G without any pre-booking from the selected Airtel stores.

The telecom giant has also made it mandatory for prepaid Airtel customers and non-Airtel customers to first opt for Airtel's postpaid myPlan before buying the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G. Airtel postpaid users with at least 500MB of 3G data activation can buy the smartphone without opting for any other data plans.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G users in the above mentioned six cities will be upgraded from 3G to 4G networks, as and when 4G services are rolled out. The upgrade to 4G will happen at the same tariff as their 3G data packs.

Airtel postpaid users in Bengaluru, where Airtel already has a 4G network, can get up to 10GB free 4G data by logging on to company's Airtel Live website via their Redmi Note 4G smartphones.

Google's Gmail Gets Blocked in China

Beijing: Google Inc's Gmail was blocked in China after months of disruptions to the world's biggest email service, with an anti-censorship advocate suggesting the Great Firewall was to blame.

Large numbers of Gmail web addresses was cut off in China on Friday, said GreatFire.org, a China-based freedom of speech advocacy group. Users said that the service was still down on Monday.

"I think the government is just trying to the further eliminate Google's presence in China and even weaken its market overseas," said a member of GreatFire.org, who uses a pseudonym.

"Imagine if Gmail users might not get through to Chinese clients. Many people going outside China might be forced to switch away from Gmail."

Google's own Transparency Report, which shows real-time traffic to Google services, displayed a sharp drop-off in traffic to Gmail from China on Friday.

"We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end," a Singapore-based spokesman for Google said in an email.

Almost all of Google's services have been heavily disrupted in China since June this year, but until last week Gmail users could still access emails downloaded via protocols like IMAP, SMTP and POP3. These had let people communicate using Gmail on apps like the Apple iPhone's Mail and Microsoft Outlook.

China maintains tight control over the internet, nipping in the bud any signs of dissent or challenges to the ruling Communist Party's leadership.

The country is host to the world's most sophisticated internet censorship mechanism, known as the Great Firewall of China. Critics say China has stepped up its disruption of foreign online services like Google over the past year to create an internet cut off from the rest of the world.

The Google disruption began in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the government's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

Gmail's setback could make email communication difficult for companies operating in China which use Google's Gmail for their corporate email system, said GreatFire.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she did not know anything about Gmail being blocked, adding that the government was committed to providing a good business environment for foreign investors.

"China has consistently had a welcoming and supportive attitude towards foreign investors doing legitimate business here," she said. "We will, as always, provide an open, transparent and good environment for foreign companies in China."

One popular way for companies and people to get around China's internet censorship is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which allows unhindered access to blocked sites and services.

"It's becoming harder and harder to connect and do work in China when services like Gmail are being blocked," said Zach Smith, a Beijing-based digital products manager at City Weekend magazine. "Using a VPN seems to be the only answer to doing anything these days online in China."

Bankers Will Ask PM Modi for Recruitment Revamp

In the two-day bankers' retreat, the government clearly asked the bankers to be free in expressing their views and ideas. I learns that one of the reforms the bankers are asking for is in the human resources.

According to sources, the bankers will likely to ask PM Narendra Modi to allow them to do campus recruitment like it is done in private sector banks.

There are many issues in the recruitment which need to change. Compensation structure is not good enough to attract good talent and it needs to be revised, sources cited the bankers as saying.

Besides, the bankers said there is a need to reduce charges on transactions done through credit/debit cards, the sources said, adding that the bankers also pitched for tax incentives for merchants on transactions done through the mobile phones.

Currently, the recruitment in public sector banks is done through Institute of Banking Personnel Selection or IBPS twice in a year. Sources said that among other recommendations, the bankers are going to seek more autonomy in talent recruitment and management. There is a need to have a hire-and-fire policy if the government wants productivity and profitability in the public sector banks to increase.

Bankers say this is the right time to bring this reform and it is important for effective operations in the public sector banks. They would also seek more autonomy in talent management, the sources added.

Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha had on Friday told the bankers that they should provide bold and creative suggestions which could lead the economy to 7 - 8 per cent sustainable and non-inflationary growth in GDP.

On Day 2 of the bankers' retreat, the bankers are first going to give presentations to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan and then a compressed version will be presented to PM Narendra Modi.

The bankers' group will give presentations on three different issues to PM Modi later on Saturday. Mr Modi will announce in the evening the final blue print of the reforms in the banking sector.