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

Tips & Tricks of Email Marketing @ IAMAI Conference

Just when we all though email marketing was a thing of the past, Internet & Mobile Association of India organised an Email Marketing Summit to re-establish the fact that Email Marketing is one of the best sources of communication and engagement with your customer.

The 3rd Email Marketing conference discussed various aspects of email marketing like use of Big Data, automation of marketing, segmentation, cross and multi-channel marketing, the art of storytelling, new techniques of making marketing more effective and design needs for effective emailing. Here is a sneak-peek to the conference.

Open Education with MOOC Courses Raise Their Game

Open education includes resources, apparatuses and hones that utilize a system of open offering to enhance educational access and viability around the world.

Open Education consolidates the conventions of learning offering and creation to 21st century innovation to make an incomprehensible pool of openly shared educational resources, while tackling today's community soul to create educational methodologies that are more receptive to learner's necessities.

The thought of free and open partaking in education is not new. Actually, offering is most likely the most essential normal for education: education is imparting learning, experiences and information with others, whereupon new information, abilities, thoughts and comprehension can be constructed. Open Education looks to scale up educational open doors by exploiting the force of the web, permitting fast and basically free spread, and empowering individuals far and wide to get to learning, interface and team up. Open is key; open permits access, as well as the freedom to alter and utilization materials, information and networks so education can be customized to individual clients or woven together in new routes for different groups of onlookers, extensive and little.

Why is Open Education vital?

Individuals need to learn. By giving free and open access to education and learning, we help make a world where individuals can satisfy this yearning. Understudies can get extra information, perspectives and materials to help them succeed. Laborers can learn things that will help them at work. Faculty can draw on resources from all around the globe. Researchers can impart information and grow new connections. Educators can discover better approaches to help understudies learn. Individuals can join with others they wouldn't generally meet to impart thoughts and information. Materials can be deciphered, combined, broken separated and openly shared once more, increasing get to and welcoming crisp methodologies. Anybody can get to educational materials, insightful articles, and strong learning communities at whatever time they need to. Education is accessible, accessible, modifiable and free.

Check out @blinktower's awesome video explaining Why Open Education Matters https://t.co/zUCLtZ9oXM #openeducationwk ht @OA_Button
— Creative Commons (@creativecommons) March 12, 2015

Open educational resources are most valuable when instructors disseminate them in open configurations, so educators and understudies can utilize those resources paying little respect to the specific specialized stages their schools have embraced. Undertakings like the OER Commons go about as archives for top notch open educational resources.
 

MOOCs and Open Education

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are also kind of Open Education programs, available for everyone, anywhere, anytime. Individuals call these courses "massive" in light of the fact that their enlistment is open to a bigger number of understudies than customary educational establishments may allow implying that hundreds (even thousands) of understudies may take part in a specific MOOC. Today, numerous schools and colleges have joined associations focused on giving astounding education through MOOCs.

MOOCs are online courses where lectures are ordinarily "canned," quizzes and testing are computerized, and student investment is willful. They accomplish extensive scale by decreasing instructor contact with individual students; students frequently believe in self-paced learning and group discussions. 

List of few Open Courseware: MIT Open Courseware, P2PU Courseware, University of the People, Academic Earth, CK12, OER Commons, Connexions, National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), Saylor: Free Education, Education Portal (or study.com), Open Education Week and many more.  

However, besides these experiments, the major development in 2014 has been the Big 3 MOOC providers, Coursera, Udacity, and edX, introducing their own credentials for paid courses. Udacity announced its Nanodegree program (and a new round of funding), billed as “Industry credentials for today’s jobs in tech”. Coursera announced Specializations in January and currently has developed 27 specializations, with more in the works. Specializations are already a strong revenue driver for Coursera. edX also has its version, called Xseries, of which 11 have been announced. Parallely, The Government of India led by Narenda Modi (PMO,India) launched a India specific MOOC platform called Swayam.

Get your WhatsApp voice calling activated for Free

The voice calling feature that WhatsApp had been teasing and testing for quite a while is at last going standard. The WhatsApp voice calling feature is empowered in the most recent form of the WhatsApp Messenger that is currently available for download for Android devices on Google Play (version 2.11.561).

Anyway WhatsApp isn't enacting voice calling feature immediately. Burning users will in any case require an invite, as a WhatsApp call from whatever other WhatsApp user who has the feature activated on his/her application.

The steps to be followed:

1. Go to Google Play and download/upgrade the free WhatsApp Messenger application.

2. Ask whatever other WhatsApp user you know with the voice calling feature activated to call you through WhatsApp.

Taking after the call you ought to discover the WhatsApp voice calling feature activated on your telephone. You will now see another "Calls" tab to one side of the Chats and Contacts tab on the WhatsApp home screen.

While there have been informal APKs skimming around guaranteeing the feature, yet it is prudent that users introduce the application from Google Play or the authorized WhatsApp website.

SQL injection vulnerability in WooCommerce : Wordfence

Yesterday Matt Barry, researchers at Wordfence discovered a SQL injection vulnerability in WooCommerce version 2.3.5 and more established amid a code review of the plugin storehouse. WooCommerce is introduced on more than 1 million active WordPress websites.

Wordfence has quickly reached Woo about the issue and they've been unimaginably responsive, discharging a fix early today with their arrival of WooCommerce version 2.3.6.

We emphatically recommend you instantly upgrade on the off chance that you have not as of now.

The particular issue is a SQL injection weakness in the administrator board. Inside the Tax Settings page of WooCommerce, the key of the "tax_rate_country" POST parameter is passed unescaped into a SQL insert articulation. For instance, a payload of tax_rate_country[(SELECT SLEEP(10))] would result in the MySQL server to rest for 10 seconds.

Since this helplessness requires either a Shop Manager or Admin client account, it would need to be consolidated with a XSS attack so as to be misused.

What to do: Upgrade promptly to version 2.3.6 of WooCommerce which contains the fix.

Thanks to the WooThemes team for instantly tending to the issue and pushing the fix inside a couple of HOURS of accepting the report.

If you don't mind make sure to tweet, FB or email as expected to help spread the saying to your kindred WordPress site admins.

Suicide rates in Britain have risen by 4%

Official suicide statistics discharged on February nineteenth contain disturbing news: suicide rates climbed by 4% somewhere around 2012 and 2013, and the ascent was because of one group: men more than 30. Rates were extensively level among ladies, and among young men—regularly thought to be especially at danger suicide rates fell.

Why are moderately aged men so defenseless? The subsidence hit working-age men particularly hard in Western nations, where social and employment status are nearly connected. A late study in the Lancet, a diary, discovered solid ties in the middle of unemployment and suicide. Roger Webb and Navneet Kapur of the University of Manchester say unemployment is one and only contributing element, be that as it may. Different parts of the subsidence, for example, falling income, "zero-hour" contracting and obligation, might likewise be imperative. 

Source: Economist