Facebook Announces The Winners Of The Internet.Org Innovation Challenge In India

The Internet.org Innovation Challenge in India bolsters our vision of a joined world by perceiving individuals why should working make the internet more relevant to women, understudies, farmers and migrant laborers in India. We will probably empower the advancement of applications, sites and online administrations that give genuine quality to the individuals from these critical groups.

In India, just 18 percent of the population has access to the internet. To get one billion individuals India online, the internet should be open, moderate and, in particular, we have to individuals comprehend the conceivable outcomes accessible to them online. Each of the entries we got has a section in making an associated India and we are eager to declare the 12 winners crosswise over four categories: Farmers, Migrants, Students and Women.

We are displaying four $250,000 USD Innovation Challenge Award prizes: one to the main application, site, administration or thought that best addresses the issues of each of the assigned populace categories, and two $25,000 USD Impact Award prizes have been allowed in every class. The winners are:

Farmers

Innovation Challenge Award Winner: eKutir, gives farmers devices and resources to bolster them all through the whole farming lifecycle, from harvest determination to the support and deals process. The administration empowers farmers and groups by changing over a divided framework into a worked together and associated disseminated model.

Impact Award Winner: Farmily, empowers farmers to reach new purchasers and arrange better costs for rural produce. Disintermediation of the center man in the farmer and purchaser interface.

Impact Award Winner: Farmalytics, expects to make Precision Providing so as to farm simple and moderate cutting edge sensor innovation with strong Analytics to offer farmers some assistance with making data driven decisions like each different business of the 21st century.

Women

Innovation Challenge Award Winner: mySangham, gives vocational training and skill building designed for women empowerment in 100 beginning recognized towns and groups. The administration means to fortify the financial and social security of the country by empowering India's masses with vocational skills in a quick paced, savvy, adaptable path through an online stage.

Impact Award Winner: Embrace Angel, outfits the power of mobile, internet, sensor, and huge data advances to take into account the requirement for neo-natal consideration in non-urban (level 2/3 markets), where an application permits healthcare and therapeutic experts to broaden their backing from a focal arrangement of pooled resources to far off areas.

Impact Award Winner: Rang de Habba, an eStorefront for ethnic products, with an emphasis on supporting neighborhood women artisans. The objective is to likewise expand the worth maintenance to the artisans who are generally abused by more business brands and stages, famous in the business sector.

Student

Innovation Challenge Award Winner: BodhaGuru, makes self-learning products, immersive mobile based learning applications, recordings and a book distributed stage to make learning for youngsters from KG to eighth grade fascinating, relevant and reasonable. Concentrates on creating inventive intuition in kids through storytelling.

Impact Award Winner: Fundamentor, utilizes gamification to fabricate and ingrain life skills for youthful kids in third through ninth grade. The administration concentrates on scientific, verbal, reasoning and basic deduction skills.

Impact Award Winner: LetsIntern, gives understudies from level 2-3 urban communities with internship opportunities by uniting them with small to media estimated businesses by means of an online portal.

Migrants

Advancement Challenge Award Winner: Helper4U, an online database of jobs that matches semi-skilled migrants in particular categories with potential employers. Concentrated on handling a large need to make straightforwardness, and help migrants specialists discover jobs by removing the mediator who take a large divide of their salary as commission.

Impact Award Winner: Mygram, empowers migrants by offering them some assistance with securing a computerized personality. The SMS-based email administration is focused for clients who are new to the internet. At whatever point some individual sends you an email, you will get a SMS with a connection to that mail. Their email location is <your-telephone number>@mygram.in

Impact Award Winner: mHS City Labs, gives an online store of resources and specialized instruments for migrants who are included in minimal effort development and may need direction on fundamental building workmanship. Objective is to enhance their skill set through how-to instructional exercises.

The challenge was judged by:

Arun Bansal, SVP and Head of Radio, Ericsson
Chris Daniels, VP, Internet.org/Facebook
Ameet Suri, Partnerships Manager, Internet.org/Facebook
Raj Talluri, SVP of Product Management, Qualco

European court declares Bitcoin exchange tax-free

The European Court of Justice decided on Thursday that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can be exchanged tax-free, reports Bloomberg. 

The order takes after a dispute in Sweden that emerged last June between the nation's tax power and Bitcoin forum operator Daniel Hedqvist about whether cryptocurrencies ought to be conceded tax-free status in the nation. 

The court ruled: 

"Transactions to exchange conventional currencies for units of the bitcoin virtual money (and the other way around) constitute the supply of administrations since they comprise of the exchange of distinctive method for installment." 

It additionally noticed that barring such transactions from the tax exceptions given to customary exchanges "would deny it of some portion of its belongings," since the exclusion's point is to counter "the troubles joined with deciding the taxable sum and the measure of VAT deductible." 

In July, the court's Advocate General said in an opinion document that Bitcoin operations ought to be absolved from Value Added Tax (VAT). 

The decision spells a major win for Bitcoin adopters, as it implies that individuals in Europe can purchase Bitcoin with fiat coin without paying taxes on their buy. It puts forth an in number defense for utilizing cryptocurrencies for international transactions. 

It presents an in number defense for utilizing cryptocurrencies for international transactions.

Akismet XSS Vulnerability : Wordpress Security Update

A scientist from Sucuri told us of a XSS vulnerability in the Akismet WordPress plugin. This bug influences all versions of the Akismet WordPress plugin since 2.5.0, however we have no confirmation that it has been misused in nature. 

A vulnerability in Akismet found a week ago and due to fact that Akismet is a standout amongst the most broadly utilized plugins for WordPress, we needed to draw it out into the open. 

Akismet is a comment spam channel for WordPress and when all is said in done, it makes an awesome showing. The Akismet team reported on their web journal a week ago that a cross website scripting (XSS) vulnerability had been found in all versions of Akismet since 2.5.0. 

The vulnerability permits an hacker to post a remark on a WordPress site which will execute javascript in the WordPress administrator console. This is a normal XSS vulnerability example and one of the assaults it empowers would permit an aggressor to take a WordPress head's treats and increase regulatory access to a WordPress site. 

There is no proof that the vulnerability has been abused in nature. The Akismet and WordPress teams instantly took the accompanying activities: 

• They released updates for every single influenced version of Akismet. 
• The WordPress.org team issued an automatic upgrade of the Akismet plugin on influenced sites. In the event that you saw that your WordPress site was automatically moved up to the freshest version of Akismet, that is the reason. 
• The Akismet team adjusted their API so that if a hacker did attempt to endeavor a helpless version of Akismet, their API would shut the assault by sifting through the remark the hacker attempted to post. This means when the vulnerability was found and the Akismet team rolled out this improvement, even defenseless versions of Akismet were no more exploitable. 

Kudos to the Akismet team for reacting to this so quickly and completely. In case you're running Akismet, we prescribe you sign into your WordPress site and ensure that Akismet has been redesigned to the most up to date version. 

To update, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and take after the instructions. In the event that you have to download the plugin compress document straightforwardly, links to all versions are accessible in the WordPress plugins directory.

Report: Social and Mobile Marketing Are on the Rise

Salesforce releases its 2015 State of Marketing report, and the outcomes are exceptionally fascinating for online marketers, enrollment specialists, and marking experts. As Salesforce put it: "Marketers are moving consideration from customary metrics like change rates to metrics that better reflect customer satisfaction." More entrancing discoveries are beneath. 

Salesforce studied a large number of marketers around the globe and found that the top metric for computerized marketing success was "rate of return" at 32% — however took after not far behind by "customer satisfaction" at 30%. "Customer retention" was generally as critical as "customer procurement," with both evaluated at 23%. 

Marketers aren't simply captivating online; they're tuning in, as well

A portion of the ways that organizations are looking for customer-arranged success emerge to me. 44% are utilizing online networking engagement, which Salesforce isolates from online networking listening at 37%. Only a couple spaces down, 38% of marketers utilization blogging as a system, 37% utilization videos, 31% utilization substance marketing, and 15% utilization podcasts, for goodness' sake. This demonstrates that there are various convincing, imaginative, and outright fun methods for coming to your audience on the web. I likewise think that it intriguing that online networking listening evaluated an "exceptionally powerful or viable" rate of 68%, the most elevated on the rundown, tied with email marketing. It is safe to say that you are utilizing online networking listening programming as a part of your marketing or enrolling endeavors? 

The significance of social marketing

Comprehensively, the estimation of online networking marketing is turning out to be all the more clear. 66% of marketers now accept social marketing is center to their business, and the same parcel now have a committed group dealing with their online networking endeavors. Maybe most altogether, the quantity of marketers who sort social as an essential revenue source has multiplied since a year ago. 

What channels are brand utilizing? The main five are Facebook (80%), Twitter (70%), LinkedIn (62%), Google Plus and YouTube (both at 56%). However, the Salesforce report found a scope of new or corner channels, including Line (11%), MySpace (17%), Flickr (20%), and Snapchat (13%). With respect to the best social marketing, one and only site beat out just "videos" at 81% — a site called Tagged, "the informal community for meeting new individuals" (86%). 

This demonstrates not just that your association should be on the "huge five," however that you ought to search for different locales that better mirrors your image or identifies with your audience. Alongside content posts and site articles, consider photographs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and particular substance for destinations like Vine, Line, and SlideShare. 

Mobile at last makes a major sprinkle

Salesforce's feature is "The Year of Mobile Has Arrived — For Real This Time," and the numbers back that up. In 2014, just 23% of marketers were utilizing some type of mobile marketing (like applications, SMS, or location-based capacities). In 2015, that number has multiplied to 46%. 58% of organizations (and 73% of US organizations) have a devoted group for mobile marketing — which implies that more than 50% of all brands have particular partners for both social and mobile, an insane idea five years prior. In the event that your marketing division is too little, it might be time to acquire an organization accomplice to oversee no less than one of these vital activities. 

I additionally think that it fascinating that 35% of marketers consider simply "mark mindfulness" a metric for success. That implies that even non-profits or B2B brands without a retail store can in any case influence mobile to extend your customer base and build revenue. 

Looking ahead to 2016

The expense of inaction in social and mobile marketing hopes to move higher. Three of the main five zones of expanded spending for American organizations are in social networking; another is in location-based mobile following. At the point when asked which advances are "most basic to making a binding customer excursion," 52% of marketers named mobile applications. Furthermore, since responsive design can prompt a 130% increment in snaps for emails read on a mobile gadget, 68% of marketers say responsive design is "completely basic" or "critical" to their email marketing battles. Another 46% dependably or regularly incorporate responsive design into their site landing pages. In this manner, even "old" marketing systems like email and websites are being influenced by social networking and mobile devices. 

As indicated by the report, the third-biggest challenge for all marketers around the globe is "staying cutting-edge with current marketing technology and trends. 

Safety first - Microsoft Site Hacked

Nobody is resistant to hacks. It doesn't make a difference on the off chance that you are a small business with 10 employees or an immense business with 10,000 employees. This was proved when the Microsoft site, digitalconstitution.com, was found to contain various spammy pages and links in its website. The site, as per ZDNet, was running an older variant of WordPress which made it helpless to the attack. This ought to likewise serve as a calming suggestion to every one of us. 

At the point when was the last time you took a gander at the plugins you were utilizing on your site? What about your themes? Do you truly require every one of them? Are there any simply staying there, not upgraded and incapacitated? A significant number of the adventures and hacks that happen today to WordPress sites are an immediate consequence of outdated themes and plugins. In the event that you are unrealistic to ever utilize that truly perfect slider plugin that you never got around to playing with then why do regardless you have it? What about those 10 distinct themes you transferred when you were supposing about upgrading the site? Truly, would you say you are constantly going to utilize them? In the event that the response to any of those inquiries is no, then dispose of them. 

What about the plugins you do utilization? Is there any reason that you are as yet utilizing an old outdated and unmaintained plugin that hasn't been upheld in years? Is the usefulness so vital that you are willing to hazard your site's security on it? Is it worth the time, the vitality, lost business, and lost rest that will inescapably come when your site is misused and diverts everybody to a seaward drug store? With 38,461 plugins in the WordPress.org vault at the season of this passage there are presumably no less than a few that will give the same reason yet that are upgraded and evaluated to work with the flow rendition of WordPress. 

How about we additionally not disregard the core WordPress software. WordPress doesn't discharge new forms just to discharge something. They contain security fixes, bug patches, and, yes, even some new usefulness or changes. In the event that you are running an outdated form of WordPress, then you likely have gaps in your website's security. 

Without a doubt, its enticing to jab fun when the huge fellows get egg all over. In any case, gain from their errors. Keep up your website. Redesign your software, themes, and plugins. The contrast between the enormous gentlemen and you is this: They have a group that will settle their site for them on the off chance that they get hacked. You have you, and in case you're fortunate, a much smaller group. A touch of redesigning and upkeep now will keep you from being the following measurement. 

A bit of redesigning and upkeep now will keep you from being the following measurement.

Source: Wordfence

In Conversation with 132 Connect

In a time when it is really difficult to get a good job, finding a satisfying career path seems next to impossible. The problem is greater for recruiters as they end up hiring the wrong talent. 132Connect aspires to bridge this gap. In conversation with Kartik Sharma & Pavan, about their Ericsson Innovation Award winning startup, 132Connect.

- What is 132 Connect?

For engineering students: 132Connect is a platform to connect with career opportunities in the market place in a more efficient way. This is done by exposure of student to customized industry information and domain knowledge, helping them being industry ready.

For recruiters: 132Connect is a platform to effectively engage and identify employable talent who are currently non accessible.

- How did you come up with the idea and what is the problem statement that you are trying to solve? 

Both of us have engineering background and experience of working in well structured companies. However after feeling that learning has stagnated in those structures and currently visible jobs do not align with professional interests, we went on to attend series of entrepreneurship focused workshops. The idea of a platform arrived after interviewing students and seeking opinions from experts regarding the current status of higher education ecosystem. We are trying to address inefficiencies in this ecosystem that leads to low employ-ability of students and low visibility of employable students to recruiters.

- What makes 132 Connect different from other ventures in the same domain? 

Most of current ventures expose students to industry in a generic manner, while 132Connect focuses on matching mutual expectations of industry and a student first, and then exposing the student to industry information in a gradual and personalized manner. This will help a student identify career interests and develop industry relevant skills at the same time.

- How was your experience at Ericsson innovation Awards 2015 and what are your future plans? 

We got constructive feedback at Ericsson Innovation Awards and judging panel appreciated the business concept intermixed with recruiters and domain experts and a personalized approach for candidates who would use the platform. Additional to this, we had opportunity to interact with key personnel from HR department of Ericsson AB.

Getting business concept validated from top of the line professionals is always a motivation booster.

Currently, we aspire to finish the development of the platform and then run a pilot to further refine our business concept. Cash prize from the Ericsson Innovation Awards will help us bear the costs of this stage.

- What is your revenue generation model? 

Subscription plans for recruiters. Though it seems an obvious revenue generation model, a framework will be worked out after insights from the pilot project.

- Anything else you would like to say about your startup?
As Indian higher education ecosystem is experimenting with personalized learning methods. It will be our pleasure to connect with motivated individuals and groups who want to explore the usage of technology to customize learning experience for students.

- About Ericsson Innovation Awards 
Ericsson Innovation Award is an open competition for students all over the world. Take the chance to develop your idea into an innovation that has reached the market. Team Blendlee wins the EUR 25,000 first prize for their platform for self-development based on the concept of blended learning at the event. Taking home a top prize of EUR 25,000, the winners beat off strong competition from runners-up Pik-Do (USA), third-placed 132 CONNECT (India) and Bridge (Ukraine), who came in fourth place.

Reference Pages:
Ericsson press: Link 
Yahoo News: Link 
132Connect FB : Link

GitHub is back following 5 days of DDoS attacks

The code management platform GitHub has risen victorious in the wake of continuing just about a week of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The company figured out how to get workarounds set up to settle the site and come back to typical operations in the wake of encountering accidents since March 26.

San Francisco-based GitHub saw gigantic measures of activity originating from Chinese search engine, Baidu, which brought on the site to seem occupied to different guests.

While GitHub hasn't stuck the assault on any particular association, the pages focused on were ones that connection to duplicates of websites banned in China.

The company has said that it is the greatest assault in its history.

Everything operating normally.
— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) March 31, 2015