News..

Google dominates Indian Android app space

It’s no surprise that Google’s Android platform has turned out to be the most budding platform. It’s also the case in the slightly more price sensitive Indian market. Apple’s iOS-based iPhones and iPads are still pretty expensive for mainstream consumption in the Indian market, but it’s not the case with Android. Nielsen, a research company has released a blogspot that states that Google also happens to dominate the mobile app terrain in India. The report states that Indian smartphone users tend to spend roughly 40 percent of their time using data apps. Out of all the apps on the market space, the majority of 25 percent are made by Google.

Leading Android apps

The most used app from Google’s portfolio surprisingly is the Android Market followed by Gmail and Gtalk and then, the rest. The most popular app on the other hand isn’t a Google one, though. Facebook, the popular social networking service launched their app on Android and iOS devices quite sometime back and on Android, it’s the most popular app around today. Nimbuzz also figures in this list and it’s the second most popular social networking app around, used primarily for chat. In terms of other categories of apps, GPS, video, e-mail and search apps dominate the terrain.

Amount of time spent

In terms of time spent, Google’s apps dominate in the Search, GPS, e-mail and streaming video sections. Other third party app developer apps are preferred as far as chat and social networking apps are concerned. For example, 99 percent of social networking apps used aren’t Google-based. It doesn’t appear as if Google+’s mobile app has taken off in India. The same goes with chat, where only 7 percent of the time is spent on Google-based chat applications. The Nielsen report also details age groups and the use of the popular Google apps, which you can find on the Nielsen report blog post. The report doesn’t really cover other apps across other platforms, so it’s hard to conclude, if these are the most popular apps in the Indian market today. However, considering how well Android is doing these days, it might be assumed that it’s the case.

NEWS

Social-network update: Facebook up; Twitter slow?

Turns out it's pretty much business as usual today in social-network-land, despite earlier claims hackers would take down Facebook and despite a boycott of Twitter by users accusing the company of censorship.

Twitter did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment on the impact of the boycott, but the pace of tweets seems to have slowed, from this user's perspective anyway. It being Saturday, however, the news feeds we follow tend to slow down naturally, so it's hard to tell for sure. We'll update this post if we get any feedback today from Twitter.

The Twitter boycott is in response to an announcement made by Twitter on Thursday about a change in its police for withholding tweets when they violate a country's local laws. Until now, when a tweet had to be taken down, Twitter would have to remove the content entirely from the site. Under the new plan, it can be taken down on a country-by-country basis. Under the new policy, Twitter will also report taken-down tweets to Chilling Effects, a Web site that maintains a database of cease-and-desist notices sent to Internet users and providers.

Twitter tried to assure users in a blog yesterday that the new plan is intended to promote freedom of expression, transparency, and accountability. But users took it a different way--accusing the company of local-level censorship.

Reporters Without Borders Director Olivier Basille called the policy a violation of international speech standards and the boycott movement took off. Users took to Twitter hashtags like #TwitterBlackout and#TwitterCensored to air concerns about Twitter, the self-proclaimed champion of free expression, cooperating with local governments. They also tweeted fears that this could be setting the stage for Twitter to enter countries like China, where the service is now blocked and where Internet companies have to work with authorities to filter information deemed illegal.

An image displayed on the Reporters Without Borders Web site.

However, Alex Macgillivray, Twitter's general counsel, told The Wall Street Journal late Friday night that this is no "policy change" and that Twitter "philosophy is still the same" about protecting free speech on the Web. He added that this has "nothing to do with China" and further clarified that the company doesn't filter content before it is posted. Rather, it responds to requests after users have posted them.

And it should be noted that not all free-speech activists are upset about Twitter's policy. Take the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jillian York, who wrote: "This is censorship. There's no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law. Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content."

Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, adds, "In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can."

Still, the Twitter blackout has no doubt gained traction around the Web. A Google search this afternoon of "Twitter blackout" brought up more than 95 million results.

Meanwhile, the Twitter boycott (or perhaps distractions from the movement against the SOPA-like ACTA) may have interfered with earlier reported plans of Anonymous-related hackers to target Facebook today with a distributed denial-of-service attack.

Facebook did not immediately respond to CNET's inquiry about whether it was targeted today, but there have been no reports of the site going down. Facebook earlier clarified that it's always prepared for the threat of an Anonymous attack.

"Due to our size, we face the same threats as seen everywhere else on the Web, but we have developed partnerships, backend systems, and protocols to confront the full range of security challenges we face," a Facebook representative said Monday. We'll update if we get any feedback today from Facebook.

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Cannot censor the Web: Google to India

DAVOS - Ahead of a court hearing, technology giant Google facing controversy in India allegedly for hosting obscene and objectionable content on Thursday made it clear that it is not possible for the company to monitor everything on its website.
Google and Facebook are among 21 companies whose executives have been summoned to appear in person in a lower court in Delhi on March 13 for allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable content.
"I'm hoping there will be a balanced debate around it and eventually the right thing would happen," Google's chief business officer Nikesh Arora said.
The companies have challenged the summons in the high court. The next hearing is due on February 2.
"We cannot censor the Web. We cannot censor the ability of people to express around the world," Arora told a news channel on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos.
"You are asking not just censor the Web in India, you are asking to censor the entire world wide web. The Web has no borders.
"I think the idea of censoring everything and pre-clearing everything is going to fundamentally, sort of, taint the growth of the Indian economy in India and vis-a-vis the world," he added.
During the last hearing in court, Google and Facebook had argued that there was no way for them to screen content before it was posted online.
Google had also said the Indian subsidiary could not be held responsible for an act by its parent company.
The legal trouble for companies including Orkut, Yahoo and YouTube is based on a petition filed by Vinay Rai, a Delhi resident who has pointed the court to obscene depictions that he found online of Hindu deities, the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) and Jesus Christ.

Google Kills Android Menu Button, Replaces It with Action Bar

Android's Menu button is dead. Long live the action bar?

Following down the path blazed by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first Ice Cream Sandwich phone, Google has declared the Menu button dead, leaving just three – the Back, Home, and Recent Apps button – to remain at the bottom of the phone.

Instead, Google recommends that app developers begin using the "action bar," a small dedicated space that identifies the application and what actions users can take. (One example of an action bar might be at the top of the Google G+ application for phones, where the application is identified and users have a choice of actions: searching, writing a post, or opening their notifications. For another, see the image below.)

"Not only should your apps stop relying on the hardware Menu button, but you should stop thinking about your activities using a 'menu button' at all," Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "Your activities should provide buttons for important user actions directly in the action bar (or elsewhere on screen). Those that can't fit in the action bar end up in the action overflow."

What does this mean for users? A fairly significant change in how users habitually interact with their Android phone. By now, most users have taught themselves that additional options are accessed by the Menu button, which can appear as a circled "Menu" button or three stacked horizontal lines. Now, Google is saying, those options will all be found somewhere on the screen, and most likely in the "action bar" at the top of the screen. Typical action bar items include refresh, delete, share, Star, and more.

The Galaxy Nexus and most Android tablets also forego dedicated hardware buttons for software buttons, which also seems to be the direction Google is taking with its future user interface design.

So what happens if those actions can't fit on the action bar itself? Users will see the "overflow button" at the far right, which looks like a colon but with three dots, not two. Main also encouraged those apps writers who currently place the overflow button at the bottom of the screen to avoid doing so, to avoid user confusion.

News: Tweeps might boycott over new censorship rules

Twitter users across the world have threatened to go on a one-day boycott after the micro blogging website announced that it could remove tweets in certain countries which have “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”. After years of promoting itself as a champion of 
free expression on the internet, Twitter saiaid that it would block certain messages if governments or organisations complain about individual tweets.
The site insisted that it would not use the gagging system in a blanket fashion, but would apply it on a case-by-case basis.


But the reassurance was not enough to prevent outrage from twitter users and freedom of speech campaigners, The Guardian reports.


Jeff Jarvis, a media commentator, said the move set Twitter onto the “slippery slope of censorship”.


“I understand why Twitter is doing this, they want to be able to enter more countries and deal with the local laws. But, as Google learned in China, when you become the agent of the censor, there are problems there,” he said.


Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and dissident, said: “if Twitter starts censoring, I''ll stop tweeting”.


Other critical tweets showed the blue bird with a red cross or black strip over its beak.


“Twitter punctured the silence with its beak, and now it has provoked the tyrants to take revenge,” one tweet read.


Twitter’s announcement came a day after the first anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, in which the micro blogging site played a major role in drawing particular criticism from Middle Eastern users.

News:Steve Jobs told Google: Stop poaching our workers

Apple's Steve Jobs directly asked former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to stop trying to recruit an Apple engineer, a transgression that threatened one junior Google employee's job, according to a court filing.

The 2007 email from Jobs to Schmidt was disclosed on Friday in the course of civil litigation against Apple Inc, Google Inc and five other technology companies. The proposed class action, brought by five software engineers, accuses the companies of conspiring to keep employee compensation low by eliminating competition for skilled labor.

In 2010, Google, Apple, Adobe Systems Inc, Intel Corp, Intuit Inc and Walt Disney Co's Pixar unit agreed to a settlement of a US Justice Department probe that bars them from agreeing to refrain from poaching each other's employees.

According to an unredacted court filing made public in the civil litigation on Friday, the now-deceased Jobs emailed Schmidt in March 2007 about an attempt by a Google employee to recruit an Apple engineer. Schmidt was also an Apple board member at the time.

"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Jobs wrote.

Schmidt forwarded Job's email onto other, undisclosed recipients.

"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.

Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."

He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs."

Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said on Friday the company, "has always actively and aggressively recruited top talent."

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The tech defendants have asked a US judge in San Jose, California to quickly dismiss the civil lawsuit, arguing that the companies engaged in bilateral anti-poaching deals to protect collaboration. The companies did not participate in an "overarching conspiracy," they argued in filings.

But at a court hearing this week, US District Judge Lucy Koh said the civil lawsuit will proceed, although it may be split up into multiple potential class actions.

Among the revelations stemming from the civil litigation is a 2007 note from Palm's chief executive to Apple's Steve Jobs, saying that an anti-poaching agreement would be "likely illegal.

The latest court filing also refers to a 2007 note from Intel chief executive Paul Otellini discussing that company's agreement with Google.

"Let me clarify. We have nothing signed," Otellini wrote. "We have a handshake 'no recruit' between eric and myself. I would not like this broadly known."

Intel representative Sumner Lemon said on Friday the company, "disagrees with the allegations contained in the private litigation related to recruiting practices and plans to conduct a vigorous defense."

The case in US District Court, Northern District of California is In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-2509.