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Wednesday 12 July 2017

HTC and CRY makes quality education accessible to girl child with initiative 'Aarzoo: ek wish har Aarzoo poori karne ki'

Aarzoo, an initiative by HTC Corporation, in association with leading NGO  'CRY - Child Rights and You', is supporting young girls in achieving their objectives. Aarzoo is a movement and a promise to fulfill dreams of countless young girls from the lower income group families by facilitating guidance and resources to supplement their dedication and enthusiasm. As part of its corporate social initiative and, to mark 20 years of global operations, HTC Corporation, a leading innovator in Mobile and Virtual Reality technology, has unveiled this initiative ‘Aarzoo: ek wish har Aarzoo poori karne ki’’ in India.

Not just wanting to limit the contribution only from the company, Mr. Faisal Siddiqui, President South Asia, HTC, visited the CRY center in South Delhi and spent time with the children talking, exchanging gifts and clicking photos and selfies. Speaking on the association, Mr. Faisal Siddiqui said, “I firmly believe that education is the birthright of every child. After interacting with the children here, I am amazed to see their skills, enthusiasm and the confidence. Their small, yet powerful performances clearly reflect that, by moulding these young minds in a positive manner, you can help them build a bright future for themselves.  I am immensely pleased that we associated ourselves with CRY which has been dedicatedly working towards providing a better childhood to children."

The campaign brings together HTC and CRY in an effort to create education and basic training opportunities for the girl child from the under-privileged sections of society and also aims at making them aware of their rights and the means to protect them. As part of the campaign, HTC hopes to achieve an on-ground-impact on girl child education for 1500 girls through CRY, and, for this, has contributed part of consumer sales proceeds over the past few months to the NGO.HTC and CRY also unveiled a calendar wherein the models were 12 bright girls from the CRY center to mark the association.


Details on the initiative with impact stories are available on http://aarzoo-ekwish.com

Tuesday 11 July 2017

5 incredibly innovative uses for Augmented Reality

If seeing is believing, ‘trying on’ seals the deal. Augmented reality or AR goes beyond VR in some key respects, enabling users to integrate real and virtual scenes — in effect, allowing us to try on products before we buy.
Here are some of the most innovative, cutting edge uses for AR technology apart from gaming that we are sure to amaze you.

Home Decor
One truly exciting application for AR and related technologies is to showcase large purchases like furniture that consumers often have trouble visualizing in their home. Asian augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR) startup iStaging lets shoppers arrange furniture and appliances in their own living space. By integrating users’ own photos of their home with product images, the app gives buyers a concrete visualization of potential purchases.

interactive iStaging AR app


Enriching travel and tourism
Augmented reality can give travelers amazing new experiences. Travelers can also use AR to find information about historic events and significant buildings with Wikitude World Browser and Lonely Planet. There are even apps that bring AR out onto the hiking trails, giving users inspiring route guides and AR-enhanced topographic maps.

Wikitude World Browser is widely regarded as the king of all augmented reality browsers, and in a way, serves as a third eye of sorts. While using your smartphone’s camera in a given area, the virtual browser — along with more than 3,500 associated content providers — offers you just about any geographically-relevant information you may find valuable in your travels. Useful information is often presented in the form of Wikipedia articles detailing the hallmarks of a specific landmark, or directions to the nearest ATM location or five-star restaurant.

Education and training
Bridging the gap between the virtual and physical worlds, Augment changes the way we see, imagine, and learn about the world around us.
Augment an augmented reality (AR) app and platform enables students and teachers to visualize 3D models in the real environment, in real time, and at scale. Google Sky Map will give you the ability to identify everything in the night sky. Once installed, just point your phone upward when it’s reasonably dark and clear outside, and Google will point out all the different stars, constellations, and planets that are visible to your phone’s camera.


Shop without the hassle of changing
DressingRoom by Gap, help customers virtually “try on" clothing through a smartphone, Augmented Reality experience. This is how it works – shoppers choose a Gap style that they might be interested in purchasing. Next, they select one of five body types featured in the app so they can “try on" the piece of clothing from anywhere on a Google Tango-enabled device, and if they love it, they can buy it online.


Healthcare
Augmented reality in healthcare has wide reaching implications that will transform the medical sector; from providing real-time data and assistance during complicated surgical procedures, to supporting aftercare and administration, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of Augmented Reality’s potential benefits to our health and well-being.
Smartphone AR apps today can help retrain the brains of patients suffering from chronic vertigo, help blind people ‘see’ the world around them by rendering 3D surroundings into an audio soundscape or help medical students crush their anatomy classes.
With so many different fields of innovation at their fingertips, it is no surprise that tech-savvy and design enthusiasts want their next smartphone to come equipped with the sophisticated hardware and incredible processing power that can unlock these immersive and exciting augmented reality experiences.


Google has notably been pushing AR/VR technologies with its latest Android OS. The most prominent introduction however, has been the ASUS ZenFone AR launch that took place at CES, 2017 earlier this year.

That’s not all, ASUS recently took to its Facebook and Twitter pages to post a hinting that the super smartphone is all set to launch in India. According to industry sources, the company is planning to launch a smartphone in mid - July.

Sunday 9 July 2017

Honor 8 Pro To Be Available with Exclusive Deals on Amazon Prime Day, Rs 2000 cashback on HDFC Cards

Honor today announced special offers on its latest launch Honor 8 Pro on upcoming Amazon Prime Day which will be held on 10th July,2017.

All Amazon Prime members who shop on Prime Day will get assured offers worth INR 1100 from
MakeMyTrip, BookMyShow and Swiggy.com. When members use their Amazon Pay balance they can enjoy fast and easy checkouts, quicker refunds coupled with a secured shopping experience on
Amazon.in. They can avail a 15% cashback of upto INR 2000 cash back on the purchase of Honor 8 Pro using an HDFC credit or debit card. Members who had been topping up their balance since June 29 will also be awarded with an extra 20% cashback upto INR 200.

Honor 8 Pro


The Honor 8 Pro which was launched on Thursday, 11 th May 2017, featuring a 14.47cm 2K display in a thin 6.97mm metal body with 12+12-megapixel dual-lens camera, with RGB and Monochrome lens along with an 8-megapixel front camera backed by 4000 mAh battery has received rave reviews for its cutting-edge technology and performance by experts and consumers.

Running on the latest premium flagship Kirin 960 octa-core processor, supported by 6+128GB and all new EMUI 5.1 software, the device which also supports 4K video recording, will be bundled with a 9V/2A fast charger, standard USB-C cable in a box that can be used as a VR headset.

Honor has also partnered with Gameloft, GoPro, and Jaunt VR to enrich digital lifestyles through enhanced smartphone experiences. Honor 8 Pro will come with 12 months service warranty along with Honor’s best-in- class after sale facilities.

Amazon Prime Day starts on the 10th of July at 6 PM and goes on till midnight of the 11th of July.

ASUS Zenfone Live Review: Only suitable for frequent live broadcasters on social media

ASUS has been doing well with its Zenfone Series in market especially after the launch of Zenfone 2 Series with multiple models to cater (confuse as well) different needs of different type of customers. With Zenfone 3 the company has definitely upped its ante with doing away with the bulky plastic body and larger size phones to slim and beautiful metallic phones, though charged a bit higher the series still made a break through change in product design language and sturdiness. Apart from these phones ASUS has time to time also tried to cash on different features or requirements which are already popular or are required by the smartphone users. ASUS Zenfone Selfie, Zenfone Deluxe, Zenfone Max series phones are good examples for such criteria. These devices had performed good in market as well. A couple of months ago ASUS had launched another such 'required' phone named ASUS Zenfone Live , as the name suggests this phone is specially launched keeping in mind the increasing trend of broadcasting live videos on social media among the users. So is this the phone we really need or it is just another marketing gimmick? Let's find out.

ASUS Zenfone Live


Build and Design:

The first thing you notice when you pick the phone is that the phone is very light in weight at just 120 grams, second the phone is comfortable to hold and gives a good grip along the curved edges, though the color treatment makes it feel like a metallic body phone but it is actually plastic.On the front side there is 2.5D glass on top of the display which is generic across almost all models from ASUS, there are three capacitive navigation buttons on bottom which are back, home and multi tasking from left to right. On the top however you will notice a front camera along with LED flash apart from ALS and proximity sensor.

On the back the camera is on top left corner supported by an LED flash light. The ASUS branding goes in the center of the phone. On the right edge of the phone you will find volume rockers and power button. The feedback from all the buttons is tactile and we didn't faced any issue in our 2 weeks usage. On the left edge of the device you will see a SIM tray, on the top there is a headphone jack and bottom houses the speakers and micro USB port.

Specs and Features:

On the specifications part we are bit disappointed as at this price point you will get far superior hardware specification devices from other brands. The phone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad core processor clocked at 1.4 GHz and Adreno 305 GPU. The device comes with 2 GB RAM and has 16 GB internal storage on board which can be further expanded via micro SD card if you don't use the hybrid second SIM slot.

On camera side, the front camera has a 5 MP resolution accompanied by an LED flash for clear selfies in low light , rear camera is of 13 MP resolution with LED Flash. The display is  5 inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 1280x720 pixel.

For connectivity the device offers 4G LTE, GPS, FM Radio, Wifi, Bluetooth 4.0, microUSB 2.0.

On the software front the device runs on Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 with familiar ZenUI skin on top. One of the constant feedback ASUS keeps receiving is number of pre-installed apps which can not be un installed by user that amounts to a lot of bloatware in your phone. This can be a turnoff for people who like to see their phone clean of any non-used apps. The ZenUI however provides lots of customization options such as wallpapers, themes, icons, locking apps etc. 

There is a dedicated app named BeautyLive pre-installed on the phone which is basically a live beautify app. This app can help you post live videos on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. The app also helps in reducing background noise so that the sound experience is better than what we see in regular live videos.

The camera of the phones are rather mediocre in performance, the rear camera shoots good images in bright settings however in low light it struggles to capture the details required from the shots. The camera app comes with familiar modes such as Auto, HDR, panorama, night mode, high resolution mode etc. The front camera is somewhat satisfactory and the beautification features (can be controlled on a scale of 1-10) enhances the overall image by fine tuning the skin tone and facial features.

Verdict:

ASUS Zenfone Live seems to have a single objective to help users broadcast themselves live on social media when it comes to 'smart phone' features. The hardware from processor to battery doesn't really stand in line with the price (INR 9.999/-) for two reasons first the hardware is not the latest and second competition is offering way too much for this price point. Having said that the phone can be a good buy for those who post a lot of live videos on Instagram or Facebook like Fashion bloggers or bloggers who do a lot of self-videos on YouTube.



Tuesday 4 July 2017

Videocon Telecom forays into Indian Security and Surveillance market; launches CCTV brand WallCam

Videocon Telecom announces its entry into fast growing Rs 6600 Cr Security and Surveillance market with its new brand of ‘Videocon WallCam’. The brand will bring in wide range of security and surveillance products with its prime focus on Video Surveillance products to cater Enterprise, Government, institutional and retail (residential and small commercial set-ups) segments.

Videocon WallCAM products


In addition to basic Video Surveillance products such as AHD (Analogue high definition), IP (Internet Protocol )& wireless cameras, DVRs & NVRs, Video-Door Phones, intrusion alarms etc; the brand will also offer customized security solutions to institutional, corporate and government sector including PTZ (Pan, Tilt & Zoom) and vandal proof cameras, mobile vehicle cameras, access control systems, scanners and detectors, number plate reader solution, central monitoring system, boom barriers, X-Ray baggage inspection system, cloud storage with secure remote access etc.

The company has finalized its range of products to be offered in the institutional and retail market segments, and is now scouting for system integrators and Distributors for its Go to market. The company is also seeing a lot of synergy from its existing business lines including its Broadband business for IP based solution, cloud storage and access; and DTH business for installation of CCTV. 

Videocon is already engaged in select Government and Enterprise Security & surveillance projects and has bagged many prestigious accounts in the domain, and with the launch of its own brand, VideoconWallCam is eyeing 15% of the organized player market share by the end of FY 2019 and aims to be among the top 3 players in the category by 2021. 

Riding on its diversification into new business verticals like security and surveillance, smartphone accessories, smart homes & city solutions and Mobile VAS, Videocon Telecomis targetingtopline revenue of INR 300 Cr during the FY 2017-18.The company’s existing business lines including Broadband & FTTH business in Punjab, Haryana & Himachal Pradesh; Wholesale ILD Carrier business; Smart Solutions and Tower business are projected to contribute a topline revenue of INR 1358 Cr during theFY taking the total consolidated revenue to INR 1658 Cr in the current financial year.

Announcing the company’s foray into the new verticalMr.Arvind Bali, CEO, Videocon Telecom said, ‘The currentVideo surveillancemarket of approxRs 3650 Cr is 55% of the overall Rs 6600 Cr security & surveillance market and is projected to growat a CAGR of 26% and reach Rs9150Cr by 2021, which is 2.5 times the current market size. The growth will be driven by households,including small commercial establishment(Shops& offices) segments and the key success factor for market expansion will be affordability, ease of use (plug n play), and quality.This is where Videocon as a brand has its expertise in.We are all set to enter this market in a big way and capitalize on brand acceptability, manufacturing capabilities, R&D, distribution strength and reach.”

Talking about the ‘WallCam’ brand, Mr Bali further added, “Why ‘WallCam’, there is a very interesting background behind this. The term CCTV is a technical lingo and stands for Closed circuit television, while what we are selling is surveillance cameras. There is no product name to identify the category with, and this is where our marketing team came up with this interesting thought of a brand name which could represent the product category, something similar to Handycam for mini-camcorders, and Walkman for mini music players. Our objective is to make our brand ‘Wallcam’ a synonymous to CCTV cameras.”