Free News Alert on Mobile by All India Radio in 16 Different Language

Free India Tips let you introduce with an official amazing news alert service provided by All India Radio.
News Services Division, All India Radio, Provides Free AIR Alert SMS

Service in 16 languages, namely English, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Dogri, Nepali,

Assamese, Gujarati, Malayalam,Tamil, Odia

Under this service important headlines of 2/3 major bulletins are sent daily

free of cost through SMS in languages opted by the subscribers.

On pilot basis, this service has also been extended in 6 more languages,

namely Urdu, Odia, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi and Arunachali.

As of now the news SMS are originating from the NSD Headquarters, New

Delhi. It contains a mix of National, Regional, International, Business and Sports

items. SMS Service on regional news is in pipeline and would be started soon.

How to register for AIR Free News SMS Service

First Method: You can register for this service by simply sending SMS to

7738299899 in the following format from the mobile phone on which SMS service

is required:

AIRlanguage code

Second Method: For online registration a form is available at

http://www.newsonair.nic.in/smsservice

LANGUAGE CODES:

ENGLISH – EN

HINDI – HI

MARATHI – MH

DOGRI – DO

SANSKRIT – SK

NEPALI – NP

ASSAMESE – AS

GUJARATI -GJ

MALAYALAM – ML

TAMIL – TM

Newly Added Languages

URDU - UR

ODIYA - OD

BENGALI – BN

KASHMIRI - KS

ARUNACHALI - AL

PUNJABI - PN

To deregister from the SMS service Type AIR<Space>Newsstop to 7738299899.

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Samsung’s Head Of Mobile Design Resigns After Galaxy S5′s Poor Reception

Samsung Electronic’s head of mobile design, Chang Dong-hoon, has resigned following criticism about the Galaxy S5 smartphone’s lack of pulchritude.
Though the Galaxy S5′s design did not actually deviate too far from earlier models, its looks and textured plastic back were roundly lambasted by reviewers.
“I think I audibly let out a sound that was something along the lines of ‘aaaahuughhhh’ upon seeing the shimmering dimpled gold back of the Galaxy S5,” wrote Derek Kessler at Android Central, summing up many reviewers’ reaction to the device’s appearance.
Other Samsung smartphones have also been described as ugly. For example, some users felt that the Galaxy Note 3′s leather-textured plastic back was tacky. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S4′s glossy back looked and felt cheap to some, especially considering that it is one of Samsung’s pricier flagship models.
Despite their perceived lack of beauty, Samsung still managed to sell 86 million smartphones in 4Q2013, widening its lead over Apple. During that quarter, it also attained a 29.6% share of the global smartphone market, compared to Apple’s 17.6%.
But Samsung has been struggling to make a profit with its phones, thanks in part to heavy spending on marketing. In April, it also reduced the price of the Galaxy S5 in South Korea, the first time it has ever done so for a flagship phone.
Samsung said Chang will be replaced by Lee Min-hyouk, Samsung’s vice president for mobile design. Chang, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, offered to leave the company last week, but will continue to oversee Samsung’s overall design strategy.

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Google Nest Parody Protest Site Holds A Funhouse Mirror Up To The Search Giant

Google acquired Nest Labs last year, bringing the Nest intelligent thermostat to the search giant, and rumor has it they’re now working on a range of hardware projects. A new site popped up today called “Google Nest” claiming to be a collection of new products that focus on the user and the home, but it’s actually an activist project designed to skewer some of Google’s policies and practices.
The products listed include Google Trust, Google Hug, Google Bee and Google Bye, and each lampoons some aspect of the intersection of personal privacy and Google’s data gathering tendencies. Trust is free insurance against misuse of personal data, whereby high payouts are delivered to users for stuff like NSA accessing of records.
Google Hug is a hug-finding location-based social interaction tool. It’s designed to compensate for the fact that people don’t interact in person anymore. Google Bee is a so-called “personal drone,” which “watches over your house and family when you are away.” Finally, Google Bye takes things dark by building a post-mortem profile of a user by collecting their information and then publishing it in its entirety when someone expires.
Of course, as mentioned, none of these are real, but are instead parts of a project built by German activist organization Peng Collective. The group’s stated mission is to “provoke gently” using humor, jam culture and generally poke with subversive installations and art campaigns. Google Nest definitely fits in with that modus operandi, but I definitely feel like it could be a bit more cutting if it were more sharply tuned, but it does nail the branding and imagery. Also I’ll take one of those data insurance policies right now, please

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Everything Facebook Launched At f8 And Why

This year’s f8 didn’t see comedian Andy Sandberg bumbling around on stage parodying Mark Zuckerberg. And that was smart, because Facebook is no joke to the millions of developers that earn their livelihoods on the social network. Instead, f8 focused on washing away the perception of Facebook’s platform as hostile and unpredictable for developers and giving them new ways to grow their apps and make money.
That might not be exciting to the general public. Zuck’s keynote lacked the flare and emotion of the last f8 in 2011 like Timeline launched. Rather than muddy the developer conference with consumer launches, the message was clear. Facebook has grown, and it’s ready to earn developers’ trust.
Zuckerberg said Facebook wants to be a “cross-platform platform” that rides across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, the web, and more. That’s a convenient framing of the fact that Facebook doesn’t own a mobile operating system.

Still, given its status as a social layer, the f8 announcements did a good job of not reaching too far or promising too much. Many squarely align Facebook’s objectives with those of developers. If it can help developers grow and build better apps, it will endear them to its platform and get their apps big enough so they can contribute significant amounts of content back to the News Feed and buy Facebook ads. So below when we say Facebook did something to help developers grow, know it’s not totally altruistic.
You can check out our full coverage, but here’s a summary of all the f8 launches and what they mean for Facebook.

Facebook Ads And E-Commerce

Audience NetworkA mobile ad network that lets advertisers use Facebook’s personal data to target both standard banners and custom native ad units on third-party publisher apps. Facebook earns a cut of what advertisers pay, and pays the rest to the developers so they have a way to monetize their ads.
Why? To earn lots of money. Rather than cluttering its own site and apps with more ads, Facebook can monetize its deep database of volunteered personal and activity data with ads shown elsewhere.

Autofill With FacebookFacebook rolled out its previously tested Autofill product to the 450,000 merchants that have built e-commerce sites using Ecwid’s platform. Autofill lets customers auto populate their credit cards, billing and shipping info in third-party e-commerce checkout processes using the data they have on file with Facebook to make purchases quicker.
Why? Facebook doesn’t take a cut, but instead will use the purchase data slurped up by Autofill to prove its own ads deliver a return on investment for e-commerce apps.

Facebook Platform

Anonymous LoginA way to “Try Before You Buy.” Anonymous login lets Facebook users sign up and demo third-party apps without having to create another username and password or give up their personal data until they’re sure they like the app. It’s not totally anonymous, though, as Facebook can still track the user’s app activity. Beyond anonymous trial modes, it could let developers build ‘anonymous-first’ apps like a Secret clone that doesn’t employ a user’s name but still maintain a profile that can save their previous activity like posts, high scores, or progress.
Why? To make users more comfortable logging in with Facebook instead of using their email address when they want to try a new app. If users later give their name and sharing permissions, Facebook can monetize the content then share back to the feed, and either way it endears developers. Facebook could also use the system to power its own ‘anonymous first’ apps.

Removing The Ability To Pull Friends’ DataFacebook announced plans to stop letting developers pull data from users’ friends, such as their photos, birthdays, status updates, and checkins.
Why? Because the idea that anyone could give someone else’s data to a developer without their permission was always kind of shady. This should boost a perception of privacy on the Facebook platform, but also deny developers the ability to build apps like photo album browsers, search engines, calendars, and location maps that could compete with Facebook’s own products.
Granular Mobile Privacy PermissionsPreviously, apps asked users to provide all their personal data and sharing permissions in two big screens. Soon, developers will have to provide a checklist of each data type and permission they’re requesting, such as friend list, Likes, email address, and the ability to post to the News Feed.
Why? To give users more privacy, transparency, and control when giving data to third-party apps, making them more trusting of logging in with Facebook and the company in general.

2-Year Core API Stability GuaranteeFacebook themed f8 around a “Stable Mobile Platform” and changed its mantra from “Move Fast And Break Things” to “Move Fast With Stable Infra”. It promises not to scrap any core API without giving at least two years of notice.
Why? So developers will be more willing to build on Facebook’s API, as they can be confident Facebook won’t pull the rug out from under them like it used to.
Graph API 2.0Including issuing app-scoped user IDs for added security, a test app framework, a Social Context API to surface a user’s friends’ activity in apps, a Tagged Places API for leverage where someone has been, and improved tagging and invites in stories that apps publish.
Why? To make it easier to build more powerful apps on its platform.
FbStartA program that gives fledgling developers $30,000 in free dev services from Facebook and 11 third-party companies such as UserTesting.com which provides A/B testing and bug spotting, and Adobe Creative Cloud for cloud storage of creative projects.
Why? So Facebook can jumpstart apps in the hopes they grow big enough to offset the $30,000 with ad buys and contributed content.

Mobile Like ButtonA Like button that can be embedded in mobile apps so users can easily share content back to their friends via the News Feed.

Why? To get more content shared to the feed where Facebook can monetize it with ads, while also helping developers grow their apps.
Send to MobileA tool that lets developers of web apps help their users remind themselves with a push notification to download the companion mobile app.
Why? To help developers grow.
Message DialogThe option developers can embed in mobile apps that lets their users privately Facebook Message friends with in-app content or a link to the app itself.
Why? To boost Messenger engagement and help apps grow.
AppLinksAn open-source initiative to give developers a cross-platform way to deep link to and between specific content buried inside their apps. The deep links launch the corresponding app and open the specific screen instead of opening a browser window to a top-level download page for an app.
Why? To proliferate deep linking so they can buy Facebook’s mobile re-engagement ads which could link you to a discounted New York City hotel in HotelTonight when you’re in town instead of the homescreen of HotelTonight.

Visualization APIs For MediaNew APIs allow TV shows and other media to visualize the buzz on Facebook. These include listing de-personalized Trending topics, “Trending Insights” to show demographic info on who’s discussing trends, Topic Feed to show public posts mentioning the topics, and Hashtag Counter to tally mentions of hashtags.
Why? Facebook wants more media outlets showing its public and current events discussion data to the masses so more people turn to Facebook to discuss real-time news and content instead of Twitter.

Parse

Pricing changesInstead of a tiered system, Parse now offers a very liberal free tier and then charges developers by usage after that. The free tier gives developers 30 API requests per second, 20GB of file storage, 20GB of database storage, 2TB of file transfer, and 1 million push notifications, and they can pay for more.
Why? To make Parse more appealing to try for free so developers get addicted to the mobile-backend-as-a-service and end up paying.
Analytics and Offline StorageParse updated its analytics product to give developers deeper insights into their audience and user retention. Offline storage helps developers store app data locally on devices so they run even when there is no connection.
Why? To make Parse more robust so more developers build on it and pay for it.

Internet.org And Open Source

Internet.org Innovation LabFacebook and Ericsson debuted the first public, physical incarnation of the Internet.org project to connect the remaining 5 billion people to the Internet. Developers could test their apps on a simulated low-bandwidth network complete with slow and spotty connections common in the developing world.
Why? To show Internet.org is more than just talk, and help developers root out bugs that could break their apps if run on the affordable Internet that Facebook hopes to spread through drones, satellites, lasers, and industry partnerships.
DisplayNodeFacebook will soon open source a tool called Display Node that powers its app Paper, allowing developers to render animations more smoothly.
Why? To improve recruiting by showing off Facebook’s mobile engineering prowess, help developers improve and grow their apps, and get community assistance for iterating on DisplayNode.

If none of these launches strikes you as monumental, you won’t have to wait as long for more big developer updates from Facebook. Instead of waiting years until Facebook thinks it’s time, Zuckerberg said f8 will now occur annually.
Hopefully by then it will have learned to have its after-party less than three hours after the conference concludes. By the time Diplo took the stage under a projection mapped lighting rig, the DJ was mostly spinning for Facebook employees and volunteers.

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Microsoft Patches Latest Internet Explorer Security Flaw — Even For XP Users

Microsoft is issuing an update to Internet Explorer today that patches a very serious security issue in its browser. This issue came to light over the weekend and what made it especially problematic was that it involved every version from IE 6 forward.
Windows XP users, however, can’t update their browser beyond version 8 and Microsoft isn’t patching XP anymore at this point in its life cycle. For this bug, however, Microsoft has made an exception and it is patching IE on Windows XP as well.
“The security of our products is something we take incredibly seriously. When we saw the first reports about this vulnerability we decided to fix it, fix it fast, and fix it for all our customers. The update that does this goes live today at 10 a.m. PST,” said Adrienne Hall, General Manager, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing in a statement today.
The update will take place automatically and users will not need to take any action themselves to get this patch.
The security issue allows hackers to execute code on an affected machine remotely if users visited a malicious site. IE 10 and 11 users were relatively safe thanks to the enhanced Protected Mode these browsers offer. Older versions of IE, which are still widely used, don’t offer this feature.

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Oculus VR Created A Research Group To Advance Virtual Reality

Oculus VR was recently all over the news because it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. But Oculus VR is still operating independently and trying to figure out the future of virtual reality. Co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe took the stage at Disrupt NY today to talk about a new research initiative to turn virtual reality into the next major tech platform.
“We just started a research group. There are starting to recruit very talented engineers,” Iribe said. “And they will engage with universities and work with students.”
The company will also sponsor hackathons and get engineers excited about the Oculus Rift. In other words, Oculus VR plans to crowdsource virtual reality use cases.

Looking at where VR is going to go in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a lot about face-to-face communication and social.

The company already knows one thing for sure — virtual reality has a huge potential. TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino’s first questions were of course about the acquisition. And, according to Iribe, it makes sense because Facebook and Oculus VR share the same vision and ambition.
“We started off with a big focus in gaming,” he said. “But looking at where VR is going to go in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a lot about face-to-face communication and social.”

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Oculus VR’s Brendan Iribe on the Decision to Sell

Over the past decades, multiple major tech platforms were created and became mainstream. At first, there was the personal computer. Then, the Internet built on top of that. Smartphones put all that in your pocket. Iribe believes that virtual reality is the next platform.
“Mobile is probably one of the last 2D screen-based platform,” Iribe said. “We are replacing vision and actually making synthetic vision. This is going to be what we call the final platform. You can convince and trick your brain to be in this place.”
For example, the research & development team of Oculus VR has developed and interesting demo. When you put the Oculus Rift headset, you are transported into an empty room with a cube at the center. This cube is attached to another headset, meaning that when someone else puts another headset, the cube will move with this other person’s head. You instantly know that it’s another human being, even though it looks like a cube. This is why virtual reality is powerful. “You will believe that these virtual avatars are real,” Iribe said.
Iribe also had comments on Google Glass. According to him, Google is not really competing with them. “You just get notifications in the corner of your eye,” he said. Moreover, Google Glass is facing a social issue — wearing Google Glass in public is still awkward. Or, in Iribe’s own words, “Google Glass has a little bit of that Segway feel to it.”

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Nearest bright 'hypervelocity star' found: Speeding at 1 million mph, it probes black hole and dark matter

 

 

An astrophysicist-artist's conception of a hypervelocity star speeding away from the visible part of a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way and into the invisible halo of mysterious "dark matter" that surrounds the galaxy's visible portions. University of Utah researcher Zheng Zheng and colleagues in the U.S. and China discovered the closest bright hypervelocity star yet found.

Credit: Ben Bromley, University of Utah

[Click to enlarge image]

A University of Utah-led team discovered a "hypervelocity star" that is the closest, second-brightest and among the largest of 20 found so far. Speeding at more than 1 million mph, the star may provide clues about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the halo of mysterious "dark matter" surrounding the galaxy, astronomers say.

"The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy -- especially its center and the dark matter halo," says Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and lead author of the study published recently in Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team of U.S. and Chinese astronomers.
"We can't see the dark matter halo, but its gravity acts on the star," Zheng says. "We gain insight from the star's trajectory and velocity, which are affected by gravity from different parts of our galaxy."
In the past decade, astronomers have found about 20 of these odd stars. Hypervelocity stars appear to be remaining pairs of binary stars that once orbited each other and got too close to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. Intense gravity from the black hole -- which has the mass of 4 million stars like our sun -- captures one star so it orbits the hole closely, and slingshots the other on a trajectory headed beyond the galaxy.
Zheng and his colleagues discovered the new hypervelocity star while conducting other research into stars with the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, or LAMOST, located at the Xinglong Observing Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, about 110 miles northeast of Beijing.
LAMOST boasts a 13.1-foot-wide aperture and houses 4,000 optical fibers, which capture "spectra" or light-wavelength readings from as many as 4,000 stars at once. A star's spectrum reveals information about its velocity, temperature, luminosity and size.
LAMOST's main purpose is to study the distribution of stars in the Milky Way, and thus the galaxy's structure. The new hypervelocity star -- named LAMOST-HVS1 -- stood out because its speed is almost three times the usual star's 500,000-mph pace through space: 1.4 million mph relative to our solar system. Its speed is about 1.1 million mph relative to the speed of the center of the Milky Way.
Despite being the closest hypervelocity star, it nonetheless is 249 quadrillion miles from Earth. (In U.S. usage, a quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000 miles or 10 to the 15th power, or 1 million billion).
"If you're looking at a herd of cows, and one starts going 60 mph, that's telling you something important," says Ben Bromley, a University of Utah physics and astronomy professor who was not involved with Zheng's study. "You may not know at first what that is. But for hypervelocity stars, one of their mysteries is where they come from -- and the massive black hole in our galaxy is implicated."
The Down-Low on a Fast and Loose Star
A cluster of known hypervelocity stars, including the new one, is located above the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, and their distribution in the sky suggests they originated near the galaxy's center, Zheng says.
The diameter of the visible part of our spiral-shaped galaxy is at least 100,000 light years, or 588 quadrillion miles. Zheng says that when the halo of dark matter is added, the estimated diameter is roughly 1 million light years, or 5,880 quadrillion miles.
Scientists know dark matter halos surround galaxies because the way their gravity affects the motion of a galaxy's visible stars and gas clouds. Researchers say only about 5 percent of the universe is made of visible matter, 27 percent is invisible and yet-unidentified dark matter and 68 percent is even more mysterious dark energy, responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe. By traveling through the dark matter halo, the new hypervelocity star's speed and trajectory can reveal something about the mysterious halo.
Our solar system is roughly 26,000 light years or 153 quadrillion miles from the center of the galaxy -- more than halfway out from the center of the visible disk.
By comparison, the new hypervelocity star is about 62,000 light years or 364 quadrillion miles from the galactic center, beyond as well as above the galaxy's visible disk. It is about 42,400 light years from Earth, or about 249 quadrillion miles away.
As far as that is -- the star has a magnitude of about 13, or 630 times fainter than stars that barely can be seen with the naked eye -- it nevertheless "is the nearest, second-brightest, and one of the three most massive hypervelocity stars discovered so far," Zheng says.
It is nine times more massive than our sun, which makes it very similar to another hypervelocity star known as HE 0437-5439, discovered in 2005, and both are smaller than HD 271791, which was discovered in 2008 and is 11 times more massive than the sun. As seen from Earth, only HD 271791 is brighter than LAMOST-HVS1, Zheng says.
The newly discovered hypervelocity star also outshines our own sun: It is four times hotter and about 3,400 times brighter (if viewed from the same distance). But compared with our 4.6-billion-year-old sun, the newly discovered LAMOST-HVS1 is a youngster born only 32 million years ago, based on its speed and position, Zheng says.
Is there any chance that the supermassive black hole might hurl a hypervelocity star in Earth's direction one day? Not really, Zheng says. First, astrophysicists estimate only one hypervelocity star is launched every 100,000 years. Second, possible trajectories of stars near the supermassive black hole don't forebode any danger, should any of them become a hypervelocity star in the future.
Collaborating Institutions and Funding
Zheng conducted the study with researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.; National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Ariz.; National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing and Nanjing; Spitzer Science Center, Pasadena, Calif.; University of California Observatories-Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz; Georgia State University, Atlanta; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Ill.; and University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.
The study was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Development and Reform Commission of China.

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