Application programming interface | CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon

27/05/2016

Why It Could Be a While Before Apple Can Open Stores in India – India Real Time – WSJ

India’s finance ministry has rejected a government-panel recommendation to exempt Apple Inc. from local sourcing requirements, two government officials said, in a decision that could effectively block the technology company’s plan to open its own retail stores in the country.

“We are sticking to the old policy,“ said one of the officials. “We want local sourcing for job creation. You can’t have a situation where people view India only as a market. Let them start doing some manufacturing here.”

An Apple spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

India is a crucial market for Apple as it holds huge sales potential. Like China, which for years fueled the Cupertino, Calif., company’s growth, India is a large, developing economy in which more people can afford its high-end gadgets every year.

India wants to use the company’s interest in its market to attract investment and create the manufacturing facilities and jobs the country needs to sustain long-term growth.

Source: Why It Could Be a While Before Apple Can Open Stores in India – India Real Time – WSJ

Posted in Economics, India alert, Manufacturing | 1 Comment »

Tags: Apple Inc., Application programming interface, California, Cinema of India, Cupertino, Emraan Hashmi, Google, Hyderabad, India, Maps (application), Siri

18/03/2016

How Modi’s Social Media Skills Earned Him a Spot on Time’s Internet Influencers List – India Real Time – WSJ

Since Narendra Modi took office nearly two years ago, his social media might has helped cultivate his international profile as an Indian prime minister who receives rockstar welcomes at concert venues and sports arenas overseas, shares smiling selfies with other heads of state and boasts among the biggest banks of Twitter followers of world political leaders.

This week, he burnished that image by winning a spot for a second consecutive year on Time magazine’s list of the 30 most influential people on the Internet.

The roundup of online luminaries describes Mr. Modi as an “Internet star,” noting that the prime minister, unlike other world leaders, uses social media to break news and conduct diplomacy. With 18.7 million followers, Mr. Modi ranks second only to President Barack Obama among political leaders.

The magazine’s picks of Internet A-listers also includes U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump, who has nearly 7 million Twitter followers, artist Kanye West and the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling.

Mr. Modi used Twitter to announce Mr. Obama’s visit to India last year as the guest of honor at India’s Republic Day parade, and signaled a breakthrough in tense relations with neighboring Pakistan by tweeting that India’s foreign secretary would travel to that country. He tweets in several languages, shouting out to other world leaders on their birthdays and congratulating them on election victories.

The digital-savvy leader and his Bharatiya Janata Party’s social media team runs a full-time, data-driven operation. It coins hashtags and uses what one member called “online volunteers”–a digital army to retweet and comment on posts relating to the prime minister and his policies–to keep him trending.

They also use specialized software to study social media behavior and track the ebbs and flows of online sentiment to Mr. Modi’s speeches and actions, funneling their analysis to help craft his message–and to tweak it when traffic turns unfavorable.

Mr. Modi appears to have become a regular on Time’s rankings. Last year, he was on its “100 Most Influential People” list where Mr. Obama called him India’s “reformer-in-chief.”

Source: How Modi’s Social Media Skills Earned Him a Spot on Time’s Internet Influencers List – India Real Time – WSJ

Posted in Economics, India alert, Politics | 1 Comment »

Tags: Addition, Android operating system, Application programming interface, Bernie Sanders, Bleacher Report, Buffer, Business, Button, Social media, Twitter

23/01/2014

Hardware startups: Hacking Shenzhen | The Economist

OH NO, NOT another accelerator, you may think. But this one is different. On the tables are not just the obligatory laptops and smartphones but circuit boards, cables, screwdrivers and a few items which look only vaguely familiar. One resembles a very old mobile phone with an oddly shaped knob attached to it. Another, a set of small blocks with switches and buttons, calls to mind a disassembled mixer in a recording studio. Yet another might be the microphone of a computer headset, but is mounted on a pair of glasses.

Even more surprisingly, the home of Haxlr8r (pronounced “Hackcelerator”) is not some co-working space in London or San Francisco but the 10th floor of an office building in Shenzhen. The city in the Pearl River Delta, close to Hong Kong, is the world capital of electronics: most of the planet’s digital devices are assembled in factories in and around the city.

Haxlr8r is living proof that, as Karl Popper once said, history repeats itself, but never in the same way. Just as with software services, new technology makes it ever easier to build new types of devices, most of them connected to the internet. The difference is that making hardware remains, well, hard—which is why Haxlr8r is in Shenzhen. That way its teams may avoid the fate of a first generation of hardware startups, mostly based in America. They put their ideas up on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the leading crowdfunding services, but then endured months of delay or never got as far as manufacturing their devices.

The technologies that allowed software services to be developed more cheaply and quickly were cloud computing, social networks and any number of digital services called application programming interfaces (APIs). For hardware the list includes all of the above plus 3D printers, sensors and microcontrollers which bridge the analogue and the digital worlds. The platform for most connected devices is smartphones. All these elements can be combined in countless ways, creating a Cambrian explosion not just in software but in physical electronic devices too.

via Hardware startups: Hacking Shenzhen | The Economist.

Posted in Economics, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Application programming interface, Hong Kong, Karl Popper, Kickstarter, London, Pearl River Delta, San Francisco, Shenzhen, smartphones

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