Google was penalised by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for "non cooperation" in the pending investigation.
According to an official statement today, Google has been fined Rs 1 crore for failing to comply with the directions of the Director General (DG) seeking information and documents.
A Google spokesperson said the company was "disappointed by this development."
The DG, the investigation arm of the regulator, is probing a complaint filed by matrimony.com Pvt Ltd and Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) against Google, alleging that it was abusing market power in the online search and advertising markets.
"CCI also directed Google to cooperate with the investigations by furnishing such other information/documents which may be required by the DG during the course of further investigations," the statement issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs said.
The commission is under the administrative control of the ministry.
"While we are confident that our products are compliant with competition law in India, we continue to cooperate fully with the Competition Commission of India's extensive and ongoing investigation.
""We're disappointed by this development. While we are confident that our products are compliant with competition law in India, we continue to cooperate fully with the Competition Commission of India's extensive and ongoing investigation. We've not yet received this procedural order, but will review it fully once we have," the Google spokesperson said in a statement.
The case against Google has been before the CCI for over two years.
Last year, CCI Chairman Ashok Chawla said the complaint was that the Google search engine favours platforms it wants to support.
"That is when you click on Google under a certain category, you will get the platforms where there is a tendency to put them in a certain order which may not be the fair and non-discriminatory manner.
"So, what is the software and what is the algorithmic search?
The rise was blamed on an increase in users, but the company also said more governments were starting to "exercise their authority to make requests".
In releasing the data the search giant renewed its calls for government surveillance reform.
Last year, 53,356 requests for data were made globally, Google said.
The majority of requests come from the US - but the figures do not include bulk surveillance carried out by the country's National Security Agency (NSA).
Google has been publishing the twice-yearly Transparency Report since 2009.
Transparency push
Not all requests Google receives are successful. In the period of July to December 2013, 69% of the UK government's 1,397 requests resulted in user information being passed over.
In the US, 83% of 10,574 requests were granted.
"We consistently push back against overly broad requests for your personal information," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's legal director.
"But it's also important for laws to explicitly protect you from government overreach.
"That's why we're working alongside eight other companies to push for surveillance reform, including more transparency."
Following revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden into US spying - technology companies have been pressing for more openness in the activities of governments.
Google has joined some of the sector's big hitters - including Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter - in pushing for the right to publish data into national security requests as well demands made for law enforcement purposes.
Journalists targeted
In a separate publication on Friday, two Google engineers revealed the extent of state-sponsored hacking attempts on journalists and news organisations.
The engineers suggested that 21 of the top 25 news organisations in the world had been targeted - and that while general users face such attacks, journalists were "massively over-represented" in the study's data.
Shane Huntley and Morgan Marquis-Boire presented their findings at the Black Hat security conference in Singapore.
Mr Huntley told Reuters: "If you're a journalist or a journalistic organisation we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from."
He added that Chinese hackers had accessed a US news organisation - which was not named - by sending out a fake questionnaire to staff.
Google has been slapped with a lawsuit by the actress who has faced death threats for her role in the controversial anti-Muslim film 'Innocence of Muslims'. The actress, Cindy Lee Garcia, has filed an appeal alleging contempt of court's order against the internet company, and that the video with her performance is still available on YouTube. This is despite a court order saying that no copies of the video with her performance should be available on the video-sharing platform. She had sued Google last year to get the film removed from YouTube, but court denied her appeal. In an appeal filed on Tuesday, Garcia's lawyer said that copies of the movie's trailer with her performance were still on YouTube until the time of filing. They could also be accessed in Egypt by altering the settings from global to country-specific. The filing said that the video being available from any computer in the world is in violation of the earlier court order. It also said that Google continues to profit illegally via traffic from the channels that have uploaded the video. Garcia's legal counsel said the maximum penalty of $150,000 for each video is the "only fair measure of the contempt." He called for Google to submit bonds for the same amount for all 852 channels that have the video uploaded on YouTube, amounting to a total of $127.8 million. The actress has also complained that Google has only disabled videos with her performance rather than taking them down altogether. She has also raised an issue against the "snide message" that the company has put up on such web pages. "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by an actress over her 5-second appearance in the video. A US court has ordered Google to remove the video. We strongly disagree with this copyright ruling and will fight it," reads the message. In a ruling earlier this month, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, San Francisco had said Google must take down all copies of the video and not allow any future uploads. However, it later amended the order and said the video may be published on YouTube, provided Garcia's part was cut. Videos featuring Garcia need to be edited or removed from YouTube. According to Garcia, she never acted in 'Innocence of Muslims' and the portions featuring her were taken from another movie she acted in. In the controversial film, she appears to be asking, "Is your Mohammed a child molester?" She has received several death threats for her performance. While Garcia says she has copyrights for the part she appears to be playing in the video, Google claims that the Copyright Act distinguishes between a performance and a copyrightable performance. The company has also said in the past that such copyright claims would encourage those who have appeared in amateur videos to get them removed from YouTube.
The social networking company's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR, a maker of virtual reality goggles, took Wall Street and technology observers by surprise, not least because of the hefty price for a company with no real revenue and untested technology. But Facebook's desire to bet on "the platforms of tomorrow," as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg described the deal on Tuesday, also marks a broadening of ambition for a company that has until now focused mainly on bolstering its existing service or defending its turf from immediate threats.
It's a strategy more often associated with Facebook's arch-rival Google Inc, which has established a track record of making early bets on the next big thing. Google acquired the Android software that now powers three out of four smartphones in 2005 when PCs were dominant, and Google currently has projects under way involving self-driving cars and robots. "It's really the first acquisition of theirs which is really thinking about the future, versus the next wave of products or defensive," venture capitalist Jeff Clavier said of Facebook's deal for Oculus. "I don't know whether Oculus is as exciting as driverless cars or things like that in terms of impact. But at least it's a future technology that will definitively be mass market at some point," said Clavier, the founder and managing partner of Palo Alto-Calif-based SoftTech VC. Investors seemed unsure about Zuckerberg's crystal ball. Shares of Facebook were down more than 6 percent at $60.70 in late trading on Wednesday. The deal, which comes less than two months after Facebook announced plans to acquire Whatsapp for $19 billion in cash and stock, raised fears about the beginnings of an unchecked spending spree. "I'd be surprised if a lot of people want to spend serious time with goggles that shut the world out entirely," said industry analyst Roger Kay, who wrote a post on the Forbes website on Wednesday that began "Okay, I'll come right out and say it: Mark Zuckerberg is nuts." CRYSTAL BALL-GAZING Detractors warn that Zuckerberg is spending shareholders' cash on a 2-year-old company that's first prototype was infamous for inducing motion sickness, though Oculus says it has largely ironed out the kinks. Though it has distributed some 75,000 development kits to interested developers, it has yet to ship an actual, consumer-ready product. Facebook will spend $400 million in cash on the deal, with the rest in stock. With Facebook's stock up 25 % over the past six months, some said it was not surprising that the company was choosing to use its stock to place some bets on the future. As a percentage of Facebook's nearly $160 billion market value, the Oculus acquisition is not a "bet the company" deal, said Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter. The most surprising thing about the Oculus acquisition was that the buyer was Facebook, and not a hardware company like Apple Inc, said Schachter. "It's Facebook emphasizing a much broader ambition than people perhaps had realized," he said. Despite some of the market's skepticism, Schachter said he believed Oculus could be a good fit for Facebook's communications services. "People always underestimate the value of these things when they show they are going to be the winning platform," said Joe Lonsdale, a founding partner of venture capital firm Formation 8, which invested in Oculus. Until now, Facebook's biggest deals have focused on fortifying or defending its social networking service. Photo-sharing service Instagram and mobile messaging app WhatsApp both competed with key aspects of Facebook, threatening to siphon users away from Facebook's advertising-supported website. It recently stepped up its investments in artificial intelligence. And Facebook was reported earlier this month to be looking at buying drone company Titan Aerospace for $60 million, as part of an effort to deliver online access to people in under-developed parts of the world. Google meanwhile, has an entire "Google X" division focused on "moonshot" projects ranging from wearable computers to airborne wind turbines. Working on far-reaching technology projects is a good way to motivate engineers and to retain employees, said SoftTech VC's Clavier. And in the fast-moving technology industry, focusing only on today's business can be dangerous. "As a Larry Page or a Mark Zuckerberg, you have to be paranoid and think about who and what is going to displace you and make you obsolete," Clavier said, referring to Google's chief executive officer. "You have to build that next thing or you have to buy that next thing before it happens. Because by the time it happens, it's too late."
Google ATAP
Parts of a functional prototype of a Project Ara phone -- still a work in progress -- including the endoskeleton frame, the screen, electrical components and custom 3D-printed module enclosuress a Good Game at D11
Except that it didn’t really end there. It turned out that Google was holding onto one organization within Motorola: the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. Headed by Regina Dugan, the former director of the U.S. Defense Department’s fabled Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ATAP aims to bring the same approach to mobile-gadget innovation that DARPA used to kickstart the Internet, satellite navigation, stealth fighters and other technologies that started small and eventually mattered a lot.On January 29, Google announced that it had agreed to sell Motorola, its phone-manufacturing business, to Chinese electronics giant Lenovo. Thus concluded the company’s brief, unprofitable foray into smartphone hardware, which began when it revealed plans to acquire Motorola Mobility in August, 2011.
In retrospect, it’s completely logical that Google would choose to retain ATAP. The technologies and projects it specializes in are the wildly audacious ideas Google likes to call moonshots. The company already has another group devoted to such efforts — Google X, which is working on Google Glass, self-driving cars, broadband balloons and more — but it’s hard to imagine it handing off any moonshots in progress to Lenovo or anyone else.
Among the ATAP initiatives that have been announced, one in particular is quintessentially Google-y. It’s Project Ara, which aims to reinvent the smartphone by breaking it down into modules that can be assembled and customized in a limitless number of configurations. The company first disclosed that the project existed on October 29 of last year, when it released some intriguing photos but little in the way of concrete details. Today, it’s lifting the veil further as it prepares for an Ara developer conference it’s holding at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum on April 15-16. A year or so from now, it hopes to have a product on the market.
Google ATAP
The back side of a modular Ara phone
Right now, if you buy a smartphone, the odds are that you’ll get something that one of a handful of large companies designed to appeal to tens of millions of people. And as gobsmackingly capable as modern phones are, that dynamic leads to a certain sameness.
Even Motorola’s much-ballyhooed program that lets consumers order custom Moto X phones assembled at a Texas plant involves superficial factors such as case colors and materials, not unique features. By allowing for features to be implemented as user-installable modules, Project Ara’s creators hope to make smartphones a whole lot more interesting.
“The question was basically, could we do for hardware what Android and other platforms have done for software?” says Paul Eremenko, the DARPA alumnus who leads the effort. “Which means lower the barrier to entry to such a degree that you could have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of developers as opposed to just five or six big [manufacturers] that could participate in the hardware space.”
It’s a big, improbable dream; even based on what little information Google has disclosed to date, pundits have been busy pointing out the pitfalls. But if Ara works as advertised and large numbers of phone buyers buy into the proposition, they could get something that contrasts sharply with the traditional breed of off-the-shelf phones released on a yearly schedule.
For instance, when Samsung announced the Galaxy S5 this week, its headline improvements included a better camera, a fingerprint scanner and a heart-rate monitor. In a world of modular phones, you might be able to pick any or all of those features and add them to the phone you already have. You’d even be able to pick among multiple cameras, or choose quirky features not meant for the masses. (Eremenko’s playful example: an on-phone incense burner.)
Ara also speaks to an overarching issue near to Google’s heart: the need to help get another five billion people on the Internet, by bringing it to individuals in developing nations in affordable forms tailored to their needs. The first expression of the modular concept Ara’s creators are focusing on is a smartphone with a target price of $50 that’s so basic it comes with only Wi-Fi, not a cellular connection. Unlike the bargain-basement “feature phones” such a handset would replace, this wouldn’t be a technological anachronism. As its owner’s needs evolved and budget permitted, new modules would make it better and better and better.
Wikipedia
Cameras for use with Handspring’s Springboard slot
The notion that a pocket-sized device might provide modular expansion for capabilities designed by third parties is hardly new. Fifteen years ago, theHandspring Visor — a PDA created by the inventors of the PalmPilot — made a splash with a feature called Springboard. A slot on the device’s backside accommodated modules that expanded the phone’s capabilities, even turning it into a proto-smartphone with an add-on called the VisorPhone.
The Springboard slot generated lots of excitement for a time, but it made for a portly PDA in an era when rivals were emphasizing slim design And “most modules were single purpose — there was a camera, memory, a modem, GPS, the phone,” remembers Handspring product manager Greg Shirai. “Some people liked to carry a bandolier of modules and swap them in and out. It was geeky and fun. But at some point, a lot of people didn’t.”
When Handspring turned its efforts to the Treo smartphone, says Shirai, “we decided we had our hands full just trying to build a great phone.” And the Springboard slot was relegated to the dustbin of gadget history.
Modu
The Modu T phone and some of its special-purpose jackets
The modularity concept resurfaced in 2008 with phones from Modu, an Israeli startup that made a credit card-sized micro-handset you could slip into different cases for different purposes — one sported a five-megapixel camera, another a BlackBerry-esque keyboard. But the idea didn’t catch on, and Modu folded. (It ended up selling its patents to — wait for it — Google, suggesting that someone at the company was intrigued by modular phones at least as early as 2011.)
Meanwhile, the most influential smartphone of all time, Apple’s iPhone, was leading the entire industry in a distinctly non-modular direction: Even the battery was sealed into the case, and there was no memory-card slot for storage expansion. So last September, when Dave Hakkens, an industrial-design student from the Netherlands, proposed a snap-together smartphone system he calledPhonebloks, the very notion felt as contrarian as it did futuristic.
Phonebloks
Dave Hakkens’ Phonebloks concept
Hakkens was motivated mostly by the ecological implications of a culture that has tech enthusiasts using a smartphone for only a year or two before dumping it and moving onto something newer and shinier. After all, “If you have a bike and you get a flat tire,” he reasoned, “you don’t throw it away and buy a new bike.” His noble, seemingly far-fetched goal was to spark enough interest in Phonebloks that the industry would embrace the concept and make it happen.
For starters, he made an engaging video and set out to find 500 supporters on “crowd-speaking” site Thunderclap. Instead, nearly a million signed up, and the video went on to rack up 19 million YouTube views.
But even if Phonebloks was an instant phenomenon, it remained a vision of a phone from a possibly distant future, as far as Hakkens knew. “Maybe it’ll take us ten or twenty years, but it’s not impossible,” he remembers thinking.
Motorola, startled by the sudden surge of enthusiasm for something so similar to the effort it had been secretly toiling on for months, moved its announcement of Project Ara up by a month. It also partnered with Hakkens, whose Phonebloks site now serves as a community where enthusiasts can brainstorm Ara-related ideas. (Hakkens stresses that he’s an equal-opportunity supporter of modularity: He’s also pleased about the Eco-Mobius, a concept phone with user-replaceable components that Chinese manufacturer ZTE showed off at last month’s CES conference.)
Exuberant though the support for Phonebloks was, Hakkens’ campaign also proved that an awful lot of people just didn’t buy the idea of a modular phone. Fast Company’s John Brownlee, for instance, called it “a pipe dream,” while Colin Lecher of Popular Scienceventured that it would “fall apart faster than a Lego castle in the path of a toddler.” A whole Reddit thread was devoted to knowledgeable people helpfully explaining why build-it-yourself smartphones were a technological non-starter.
Project Ara aims to prove the naysayers wrong, and to do so more quickly than you might think possible. The earliest explorations of the concept started in the fall of 2012, and work got underway in earnest on April 1, 2013. Eremenko says that ATAP is finishing up work on a functioning prototype, which will be ready within weeks, with a version ready for commercial release in the first quarter of 2015.
DARPA
Project Ara head Paul Eremenko, in a photo taken during his days at the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA
Google has made so much headway on Ara in so little time because of the lean, speedy approach to invention that Dugan, Eremenko and other DARPA defectors brought with them when they joined Motorola. ATAP is applying it to a variety of projects: Besides Project Ara, efforts underway include Project Tango, an experimental smartphone that can map the world around it. Plus, presumably, other efforts that remain undisclosed.
The DARPA/ATAP way involves small in-house teams — just three people in the case of Ara — being given about two years to tackle an ambitious challenge. That schedule is meant to be a little scary: “Generally, time is not your friend,” says Eremenko. “Innovation under time pressure is generally higher-quality innovation.”
Much of the heavy lifting is done by “external performers” — individuals, companies or universities that contribute to the project on a contractual basis as necessary, either briefly or for the long haul. In the case of Project Ara, one key external performer is NK Labs, a small outfit sandwiched in between a towing company and a fencing center in an industrial section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. NK’s founders, Seth Newburg and Ara Knaian, are overseeing the electrical, mechanical and software engineering required to make modular phones a reality, heading up a team of around fifteen people.
“They’re absolute superstars in their field,” Eremenko says. “Creative, out-of-the-box, do-anything kind of guys. I could never, ever get them to work [for Google] full time, move across the country, et cetera, et cetera. There was no way in the traditional model to capture that mindshare.”
(In case you’re wondering: Yes, Project Ara’s moniker is a nod to Ara Knaian, both to acknowledge his contributions and because he happened to have a name that sounded cool. Google hasn’t decided what all this stuff will be called when it becomes a commercial offering.)
Google ATAP
An experimental 3D-printed antenna
Another vital contributor to the effort is 3D Systems, the major maker of 3D-printing equipment. It’s developing a new high-speed continuous 3D printer capable of cranking out enclosures for Ara modules in volume, allowing for phones to be both mass-produced and custom-designed in a way that’s new for any consumer product. Eventually, even electrical elements such as the antennas might be printed rather than manufactured by conventional means.
“If this is successful, it could become one of those watershed moments for 3D printing,” says 3D Systems CEO Avi Reichental. “All of us passionately share the vision of what this could become, and the passion to do our best to make it happen.”
Though ATAP now falls into the part of Google responsible for Android and Chrome, headed by Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai, it hasn’t exactly been subsumed into the Google machine. After the Motorola sale was announced, the Ara team decamped to a tiny sublet office at an office park with a 1980s vibe, seven miles from Google’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. The downside: Staffers don’t get any of that fabulous free food that other Google employees feast on. But they do get to sidestep big-company burdens such as dealing with the mothership’s security apparatus and legal department.
What the Ara team and its outside collaborators have created is a platform that supports three sizes of phone: mini (rather basic), medium (mainstream) and jumbo (an oversized, phablet-style variant). The size of each is determined by its endoskeleton, or endo for short — the one component of an Ara phone that will be Google-branded, as opposed to being devised by a third-party company.
The endo is an aluminum frame that contains a bit of networking circuitry so the modules can talk to each other, a tiny back-up battery and not much else. Everything from the screen to the processor to the battery is provided in the form of a module — the medium-sized endo has space for ten of them — which you slide into place to form a phone. In the first prototype, the modules use retractable pins to connect to the endo’s network; later this year, Google plans to replace that approach with more space-efficient capacitive connections.
Doug Aamoth / TIME
A prototype Project Ara module, without its enclosure
Like the expansion slots on a desktop PC’s motherboard, each compartment on the endo is designed to handle any module of the correct size, regardless of its function. Though basic technical issues are sometimes a factor — an antenna can’t just go anywhere on a phone’s body, for instance — the general idea is to design the phone so that you can swap modules in and out at will. If you never take photos with your phone but worry about running out of power, for instance, you might choose to do without a camera module, freeing up room for a second battery.
Furthermore, the Ara platform is designed to permit hot-swapping of modules, without requiring you to power down the phone — which means that you could slide out the camera and replace it with a battery whenever you needed a little extra juice.
Many modules would offer features that every conventional smartphone offers as standard equipment, such as cameras, speakers and various sensors. But Eremenko says that breaking them out into modules will allow a consumer to make a phone more personal, choosing speakers optimized for NPR-type content, for instance, or ones meant for rap. Rather than everything being dependent on a component maker’s skill at landing contracts with big handset manufacturers, phone buyers would call the shots. “If it turns out that consumers really care about megapixels in cameras, then your bajillion-megapixel camera is going to sell,” he says. “And if it turns out that consumers don’t, then it won’t.”
Google ATAP
Ara Knaian, lead mechanical engineer on Project Ara, with the phone in its current functional prototype form
Other modules could offer more specialized capabilities. Based in part on lessons learned last summer from MAKEwithMOTO — a tour that involved visiting universities and Maker Faires in a Velcro-covered van outfitted with existing Motorola phones modded to encourage hacking — Eremenko thinks that two particularly hot categories will be health and personal transportation. Texas A&M students, for example, rigged up a camera attachment and depth sensor that gives a phone the ability to conduct eye exams. Another team designed an add-on for skateboarders that captured data about terrain, then relayed it to other skaters. In the future, either idea could be an Ara module.
Ara handles one common concern about modular phones — what’s to keep them from falling apart in your pocket or when they slip out of your hand? — in two different ways. The modules on the front of the endo are secured with latches. Those on the back use electropermanent magnets. In both cases, you use an app to lock everything in place. Eremenko says that the phone will be as resistant to water and other environmental threats as conventional models, although some tests — including one that simulates the phone being jostled around in a crowded purse — will need to wait until ATAP has a functioning prototype.
As neat as all this sounds, modularity has some obvious downsides. When Apple designs an iPhone, it can cram in parts in the tightest possible manner, as if each new model were a one-of-a-kind jigsaw puzzle. Breaking out hardware features into modules loses that advantage.
“A big challenge on this project was that a cell phone is one of the most integrated things that’s made today, and we’re trying to separate it into modular pieces,” says Knaian. “And so the challenge was how to fit everything in an efficient way, so that people could have the ability at home to add and remove modules and have a lot of flexibility about what modules they put in, but not to have too much added weight or too much added cost by doing that.”
Keeping the size reasonable was crucial. “When people say ‘modular phone,’” explains Eremenko, “the first thing that jumps to mind is, like, Legos — a big, blocky thing. And so we had to overcome that with the industrial design. That was the first mental hurdle to overcome.”
Ara’s masterminds have managed to design a platform that doesn’t suffer from the elephantiasis many have declared an unavoidable side effect of modularity. The modules are 4mm thick — tiles, really, rather than blocks. (The proportions of the smallest ones remind me of an Andes thin mint, though the modules are thinner than the mints.)
Inserted into an endoskeleton, the modules form a phone that’s 9.7mm thick in its current prototype form. Later this year, as the design progresses, the designers may allow that to slip to 10mm or so to make room for beefier batteries. That would be noticeably chunkier than the 7.6mm iPhone 5s or 8.1mm Galaxy S5, but only a skosh more so than the 9.3mm HTC One.
At least in the design model I got to see in person, the Ara phone is surprisingly elegant-looking. When you slide the modules into the endo, the result is less like Lego, and more like a Mondrian painting rendered in 3D.
Google ATAP
A work-in-progress functional prototype of an Ara phone, flanked by 3D-printed module enclosures
Google is also keen to let consumers specify an Ara phone’s aesthetics as well as its capabilities, which is where 3D Systems’ next-generation 3D printer comes in. It will be able to print 600-dpi color images on module enclosures made out of multiple types of materials, which will be user-swappable. The printer will even be able to treat the enclosure as a surface for one-of-a-kind sculptures: Among Ara’s prototypes is an enclosure bedecked with dozens of microscopic soccer balls.
“We want not just to create something that’s custom, and not even just something that’s unique, but actually something that’s expressive so that people can use this as a canvas to tell a story,” says Eremenko. “So that you can set your phone down at dinner on the table next to you, and it becomes a topic of conversation for the first fifteen minutes of dinner.”
Between a hardware ecosystem that Google hopes will eventually offer thousands of modules and the infinite opportunity for exterior modifications, configuring an Ara phone will involve a lot of decisions. Gadget geeks would revel in the opportunity, but a lot of folks might react the same way that new-car buyers do when confronted with the responsibility of choosing between multiple options for everything from engines to wheels to floormats.
And Google is adamant that it’s not targeting geeks. It wants people who have never even used the Internet to be comfy with the prospect of buying and using an Ara phone — “the alpaca farmer in Peru who might not even have a feature phone today,” as Eremenko describes a typical customer. So the company is developing Android apps that will expedite the configuration process by pinpointing a different set of features and designs for each shopper.
When phones are ready for sale, the company plans to get them to consumers in three ways. There will be what Ara’s creators are calling a “grayphone” — that $50 bare-bones version, designed to be sold at convenience stores and running an app that will let buyers begin the process of customizing the phone with additional modules and aesthetic modifications. People will also be able to use the customization app on a friend’s Ara phone to order a handset of their own; Google’s research indicates that choosing a model will be easier if you’ve got a pal helping out.
The fullest expression of the Ara sales experience will happen at mobile kiosks, which Google is designing to fit into industry-standard shipping containers for easy transportation to wherever on Earth they’re needed. (A towering wooden frame matching the dimensions of such a container dominates Project Ara’s office space.) The company is still figuring out where they’ll show up first, though it’s likely that phones will be available in one geographic region before any global rollout.
Eremenko describes a scenario in which visitors to a kiosk might choose a phone with the help of a special tablet capable of measuring galvanic skin response, sub-voluntary muscle movements, pupil dilation, heart rate and other factors that suggest “whether you’re happy to be configuring your Ara phone, or whether you’re stressed, frustrated, impatient, et cetera.” It would then use that assessment of your mood to steer its recommendations.
Another part of the phone-picking process could involve suggestions based on an automated examination of your Facebook or Google+ activity. If your updates show that you’re a frequent traveler, for example, you might be advised to go for a big battery and a wireless carrier with service in the destinations you frequent. Someone whose photos get lots of positive feedback from friends could be pointed towards a serious camera module; if those photos tend to be taken at dusk, it might be a camera with good low-light performance.
Eremenko emphasizes that all of this would be optional and done only with the customer’s full knowledge and consent, and that buyers would be able to review and overrule any recommendations. If you’re still creeped out by the prospect of Google poking around in your social networks to that degree — let alone trying determine if you’re sweaty or fidgety — it’s understandable. But don’t fret too much just yet: At launch, it’s likely that not all of the more out-there elements will be ready. And Google isn’t saying when it might start marketing Ara phones in the U.S.
Google ATAP
A front view of an assembled Ara prototype
For all the progress Project Ara has already made, some basic issues remain on the to-do list. For instance, the team hasn’t yet managed to grind the cost for the grayphone down to a $50 price point. Nor is it clear how regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which test and certify new phones to confirm they don’t interfere with other devices, will deal with a smartphone that contains components that consumers can rearrange to their liking. (Eremenko says that the FCC has been encouraging so far: “They see this as good for American industry…this says that, hey, your competitive advantage can be innovation, as opposed to making the same fricking phone a few dollars cheaper.”)
Still, the overriding issue with Ara, like any truly new idea, is whether real people will care. Eremenko thinks that when Google can show a working Ara phone, it’ll be its own best advocate. Will the argument that the whole concept is hopelessly naïve fade away? “I think it has to, if you show it and everybody agrees that it’s beautiful, and delightful to the consumer, and it actually works. I’m certain that some level of skepticism will remain: If I drop it, will the modules scatter all over the train platform? And those kinds of things. But the proof is in the demo.”
It’s a core tenet of ATAP’s philosophy that projects have a two-year window. So assuming that Ara is viable a year from now, Eremenko and the rest of the team will be winding down their involvement and handing off responsibility to others within Google. At that point, it’ll be a business, not a project. Maybe a huge one someday, if enough people buy Ara phones running Google search, Gmail, Google Maps and other advertising-supported Google services.
For the record, Eremenko says that he’s had the luxury of focusing on making sure Ara is great, not profitable: ”This is potentially the only thing out there that could turn into a five-billion-unit kind of device. The fact that that will accrue benefits to Google downstream is so obvious that I don’t have to make a business case.” Even if everything goes swimmingly from here on out, addressing a market with billions of potential customers will take a long time — but it may not be all that long until Ara’s prospects are clear enough that the modular-phone doubters are either having the last laugh or eating crow.
TIME Tech editor Doug Aamoth contributed to this report.
Google is not unduly worried about Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp as it does not compete with them in the small and medium business segment, a top company official said. Google's vice-president and global head of SMBs, Allan Thygesen said the search engine giant was working on innovating solutions in messaging, among others, to help the businesses effectively engage with customers.
"I think that WhatsApp is a terrific example of new messaging services. And they have done a fantastic job creating utility that was great for the businesses and consumers," he said. However, "in terms of acquiring new customers, it is not really as obvious how Whatsapp is useful. So, I am not worried about WhatsApp as a competitor to destabilising our presence or competitor for Adwords." Social media company Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp, a mobile sharing platform provider, for $19 billion (nearly Rs 1.2 lakh crore) in cash and stock, earlier this month. Google's Thygesen, who was in Hyderabad on Wednesday, said the internet search giant is spending a lot of resources to bring about innovation in messaging, including Google Hangout where businesses could do video conferencing with multiple entities from their phone, desktop or laptop. "We are making it available to companies at low cost as a competitive solution," Thygesen said. Google India, which currently has a customer base of 3 lakh SMBs, is targeting at least half a million over the next year or so. Against 47 million SMBs in the country, the search engine giant sees the potential of getting online advertising from at least eight million. Only 7% of the Indian ad market is currently digital and the balance is distributed among print and electronic segments, against 30% online in developed economies such as the US and Britain. Google India head of SMBs, K Suryanarayana said the Indian e-tailing market is projected to touch $16 billion (Rs 99,000 crore) by 2017 from $2.5 billion (Rs 15,500 crore) now, signifying a sizeable opportunity for his company.
For the first time, Facebook is letting users of its online social network identify themselves as a gender other than male and female. The basic user profile for members in the United States now includes a customizable category among the gender types that users must select, the world’s No 1 Internet social network announced on Wednesday, the day the feature became available for US members using the site’s English-language version.
Those who select that option can select up to 10 gender identifications, including “transgender,” “intersex” and “fluid.” The company said it worked with a leading group of gay and transgender advocacy organizations to come up with the selection of identity options. In all, the website is offering about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender as well as three preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them
Until now, Facebook’s 1.23 billion members could only select male or female for their genders, which Facebook requires users to state in their profiles. Users of rival Google Inc’s Google+ social network already had an “other” option for gender.
Facebook said users also can control the audience who can view a custom choice, noting the challenges that some people may face in publicly sharing their gender identity. Users can also choose the personal pronoun to which they are referred publicly. A message on Facebook might now invite a user’s friend to write a birthday message on “their” wall, instead of “his” or “her” wall.
“We want you to feel comfortable being your true, authentic self,” Facebook said.
With inputs from Reuters
Google today celebrates 135th birth anniversary of Sarojini Naidu with a doodle dedicated to her. The doodle on the search giant's home page has a portrait of Sarojini Naidu in the place of the second 'O' in the company's logo. There's also a pen in place of the letter 'L' in logo, which seemingly depicts Naidu's writing capabilities.
Known as The Nightingale of India, Naidu was the first Indian woman to become the president of the Indian National Congress. Naidu joined Indian national movement after the partition of Bengal in 1905. In 1925, Naidu presided over the annual session of Indian National Congress at Cawnpore. She played an active role during Civil Disobedience Movement and Quit India movement.
Born as Sarojini Chattopadhyay on February 13, 1879 in Hyderabad, Naidu was eldest among eight siblings. A daughter of a poetess, Naidu had great interest in poetry right from childhood days. Her first collection of poems titled 'Golden threshold' was published in 1905.
A meritorious student, Naidu topped the matriculation examination at Madras University. She received her higher education from King's College London and later at Girton College, Cambridge.
At the age of 19, she married Dr Govindarajulu Naidu.
British government awarded Naidu Kaiser-i-Hind medal for her work during the plague epidemic in India.
Naidu died of a heart attack on March 2, 1949 at Lucknow.
The Nokia "Normandy," the long-rumored Nokia Android phone, looks squared away for an official reveal at MWC 2014..Normandy will also be released this month, the Wall Street Journal reports.
While it's good news for 'droid lovers, apparently Normandy will be specially tailored so that some Google features won't be promoted as heavily as they might be on a traditional Android phone - you know, one not made by a company now owned by Microsoft.
That means no Google Play Store, and the Normandy will instead feature a selection of apps created by Nokia and Microsoft, like Here maps and Mix Radio, plus a Nokia app store full of Android apps, the Journal's sources said..Let's be practical
Nokia has long been focused on Windows Phone, but its work on an Android handset has been rumored for months. The Normandy's debut at MWC has even been touched on before.
However, ever since Microsoft picked up the Finnish phone maker for $7.4 billion (about £4.4 billion, AU$7.9 billion) in 2013, the Nokia Android phone's fate has presumably been up in the air.
Considering it was never officially announced to begin with, it seemed Microsoft could put its foot down at any time and cancel it altogether.
But the WSJ report says Nokia's engineers were working on the Android phone long before Microsoft began conducting due diligence leading up to the purchase, and the Windows company will reportedly let Normandy continue all the way to retail.
The apparent reason for that? Pragmatism. If the phone is debuting in a matter of weeks, then the legwork was likely completed months ago, and Microsoft would likely rather make some money off of it - even if it does run Android - then scrap it entirely and throw away all of Nokia's hard work.
The much awaited Moto G, Motorola's economy Android smartphone, has finally been launched in India. The phone has won accolades the world over for its low price and great performance combo, and for bringing the focus back to usability instead of high-end specifications, a trend Motorola started with the Moto X, its flagship smartphone. We try to find out if Moto G really lives up to the hype surrounding it, in our review.
What's in the box Unlike the international version of the Moto G, the Indian version imported by Flipkart includes a charger and a headset. It doesn't include a USB cable so you'll need to buy one to transfer data to the phone. Other than these, you'll find the user manual and a warranty-related document. The Moto G comes with a standard black coloured back panel, but additional back panels in other colours can be ordered separately.
Build and design One of the most striking things about the Moto G is its minimalist no-frills design. The phone's look is essentially based on Moto X which is not available in India at this moment.
Moto G feels good to hold despite it being heavy at 143 gram and a bit thick at 11.6mm due to its curved back and rounded corners that take care of ergonomics. The phone is made from plastic materials but feels durable. Although it comes with a removable back panel, the construction is excellent. The back panel fits snugly, with no creaks and wobbles.
At first glance, the only thing you notice is the Moto G's shiny black front panel devoid of any distractions. There's no branding and no hardware buttons. The 1.3MP front camera and a notification LED placed next to the earpiece are the only other components visible.
Turn on the phone, and the 4.5-inch 720p IPS edge-to-edge display comes to life bursting with pixels. The phone's front bezel is designed in a manner so as to put all the focus on the display, making it the centre of attention. On the sides, the bezel is pretty narrow, but it takes up considerable amount of space below the display, which is a good thing as the navigation controls are easily accessible. There's a minor gap between the edge of the front panel, which is slightly raised, and the display that tends to attract dust particles. The edge may also be susceptible to wear and tear once you start using the phone. The display comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection guarding the screen against scratches. Moto G is the only phone in this price range to feature Gorilla Glass 3. The right edge of the Moto G features the narrow Power/ Screen lock keys which are made of metal and offer decent tactile feedback. However, we wish the volume rocker key would have been a little longer as we ended up hitting the power key during the initial period of use.
The 3.5mm headset jack sits at the top while the micro-USB port is placed at the bottom edge of the phone. There are no ports or buttons on the left edge.
The back of the phone, which is essentially the removable back cover, is curved and sports a rubberized soft matte finish, that makes holding the phone a pleasant experience. It features the phone's 5MP rear camera lens, an LED flash and Motorola logo (in an indent). We also found the back prone to smudges, but it is thankfully easy to clean.
Moto G also comes with a nano-coating that makes is water resistant up to a certain level. It will be able to handle minor splashes, but most likely won't survive a dip in the pool.
Overall, the Moto G is a compact and durable no-frills smartphone that is built to last.
Software The dual-sim version of Moto G available in India comes with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. Motorola has promised that the phone will get the Android 4.4 KitKat software update in the coming days. At the time of filing of this review, our Moto G unit had not received an update and was still running Jelly Bean.
Moto G runs an almost stock version of Android complete with on-screen navigation controls. The interface is close to Google's Nexus 4 except that Motorola also includes some of its own apps. Thankfully, these apps are not bloatware and add to functionality. One of the Motorola app called Assist changes how the phone alerts you during meetings or sleep. If you've used an iPhone, you must have used or come across the Do Not Disturb; Assist is similar and allows you to silence or auto reply to missed calls while you're in a meeting or sleeping. You can choose exceptions for Favourite callers or when someone calls twice.
Another Motorola app bundled with the phone is Moto Care. The app is not only a searchable user guide featuring Tutorials, FAQs, How-tos and actionable tips, it also offers a shortcut key to get in touch with Motorola's customer care. Motorola Migrate allows you to transfer content and settings from your old Android phone or iPhone.
The dual-sim Moto G also comes with settings for managing the behavior of two sim cards, allowing you to choose the default connection for data, calls and messaging.
That's about it. You get a pretty neat slate to customize as per your own preference and use the apps that you wish to.
The Android 4.4 KitKat update is expected to bring some minor cosmetic improvements including white notification icons and a transparent notification bar, a new Phone dialer app, some camera improvements in addition to other changes under the hood.
Camera Moto G is an economy smartphone and despite the phone delivering more than what other smartphones in the price segment offer, the limitations are apparent when it comes to the camera.
The phone comes with a 5MP rear camera and a 1.3MP front facing camera. The rear camera can capture 720p video and also comes with an LED flash for taking pictures in low-light conditions.
Motorola ships its own camera app with the phone which is pretty bare bones when it comes to offering granular settings but designed keeping in mind the casual camera user. You'll only see two controls - one for switching to the video camera and the other to switch between the front and rear lenses till you swipe from the edge to the right side of the screen to reveal an arc shaped dial that features controls for HDR mode, LED flash, focus & exposure, slow motion, Panorama mode, geo-tagging, widescreen mode and shutter sound. Similar to the Windows Phone camera app, you click pictures by tapping anywhere on the screen. The soft viewfinder can be moved up and down to zoom in and out or shift focus.
We were pretty impressed by the images captured by the Moto G outdoors, during daylight. The images had good amount of detail, reproduced colour accurately and good contrast, especially in HDR mode. Pictures captured in low-light conditions and indoors were not that great but noise levels were comparatively lower than other phones in the same price range.
The rear camera can capture 720p video and we found the quality to be satisfactory.
The front camera comes in handy for taking selfies and for video chats, and does a decent job.
Performance Moto G is known for offering the level of performance which is only delivered by phones costing Rs 10,000 more than it. At the heart of the phone is the 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor coupled with Adreno 305 graphics and 1GB RAM. We did not notice any lag whatsoever while navigating through the phone's menu, launching apps and switching between them.
We were able to play games like Temple Run 2, Banana Kong, and Asphalt 8 without encountering frame drops or freezes. Despite the limited RAM, the phone is a great gaming device.
In synthetic benchmarks, it beats competitors like the Micromax Canvas Turbo Mini by a margin. The phone scored 17,404 in Antutu, 8574 in Quadrant and 57.9 in Nenamark 2 benchmark tests. Some of these scores are better than the Nexus 4.
Out of the 16GB storage, 12.92GB is available to the user. Unfortunately, you can't expand the storage as the phone doesn't come with a memory card slot. Google is offering 50GB free cloud storage in Google Drive with the phone but we don't see cloud storage going mainstream till data connectivity gets better and data tariffs go cheaper.
Moto G offers Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS connectivity options. Interestingly, it comes with a trusted Bluetooth feature allowing you to disable lock screen when the phone is paired with a device specified as 'trusted.' This means you don't need to unlock the screen to change tracks when listening to music via Bluetooth headphones.
Moto G offers excellent call quality and signal reception and we did not encounter issues while making calls even in areas where cell signal is relatively weaker. The phone was able to lock to GPS without any hiccups.
Moto G offers FM radio but unfortunately, you can't listen to it through the phone's speaker even when you've plugged in the headphones to use as an antenna. It also doesn't offer a recording feature. We were able to play most popular video and audio file formats.
The external speaker on the phone offers loud sound output though it lacks bass. Of course the sound gets muffled when the phone lies on its back, which is an issue.
The phone is backed by a 2070 mAh battery and will last you a complete day even if you put the screen brightness at the highest level and use 3G data all the time. You'll be able to make about 2-3 hours of phone calls, play some casual games and browse the web in this time period. The phone can play video continuously for 7 to 8 hours.
Overall, the Moto G offers impressive performance and using it as our daily driver turned out to be a pleasant experience.
Verdict There has been a vacuum in the Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 price segment when it comes to quality Android smartphones. Indian brands do somewhat fill the gap but the after-sales experience has left many customers high and dry. Also, the build quality and finish of these devices leaves a lot to be desired.
The Moto G addresses this very segment delivering great performance at an affordable price. We would not shy away for calling it a value for money proposition as the phone is well built and comes with the promise of latest software. We hope Motorola (even after completion of its acquisition by Lenovo) continues to offer software updates and ensures good level of on-ground after sales support.
There's no other Android phone we can recommend in the price segment. If you're fine with Windows Phone and want a better camera, the Nokia Lumia 720 is a good option.
