TechCrooks™

Micromax subsidiary Yu Televentures is gearing up to launch its next flagship smartphone this month. Ahead of the launch, company founder Rahul Sharma spoke to Gadgets 360 about the company's strategy for upcoming smartphones and the relationship with Cyanogen. He confirmed that the upcoming Yu flagship will run Android with some customisations from the company, and not Cyanogen , as seen on its predecessor. Sharma revealed that the company has so far sold 2 million devices since Yu established itself as an independent brand, with a new flagship smartphone expected to launch later this month. Talking about the upcoming smartphone, Sharma said that the company will be focusing on offering "pure Android experience" with a deep integration of Around Yu , a service aggregator platform that was introduced last year alongside the Yutopia flagship. He further hinted that the Around Yu will come with some new features. "When we got Cyanogen things were moving fine but ...

There's an interesting trend in web design these days: Making websites that look, well ... bad. Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites - some decades old, some built recently - and hundreds more like them, eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces that has long been the industry's best practice. Instead they're built on imperfect, hand-coded HTML and take their design cues from '90s graphics. The name of this school, if you could call it that, is "web brutalism" - and there's no question that much of the recent interest stems from the work of Pascal Deville. In 2014 Deville, now creative director at the Freundliche Grusse ad agency in Zurich, Switzerland, founded brutalistwebsites.com . He meant it as a place to showcase websites that he thought fit the "brutalist" aesthetic: Design marked by a "ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy...

Oracle Corp. and Google step before a jury a second time with potentially $9.3 billion on the line , and the prospect of profoundly changing how software is protected and licensed. The "World Series" of intellectual property, as the judge who presided over the earlier trial dubbed it, was left at a stalemate four years ago with Google's Android trophy untarnished. As the judge said then, there can be "only one winner" in the end. If that turns out to be Oracle , Google will have to pay fees for the operating system used in 80 percent of the world's mobile devices. The central question of the trial starting Monday in San Francisco federal court will be the same as in the last one: Did Google cheat by using part of Oracle's Java programming language to develop Android without a license? Oracle, saying monetary damages alone won't compensate for its loss, also seeks a court order "reasonably tailored" to the case that it says would put a...

Shopo, a marketplace for artisinal goods that has been compared to Etsy, was acquired by Snapdeal and relaunched in July 2015 . The company's year-long journey has seen it grow while keeping its focus on small businesses that would not be well served on the parent platform, says Sandeep Komaravelly, Senior Vice President Snapdeal - Shopo. What's interesting is that Komaravelly believes that much of the growth the platform has seen in this time has been driven by design, as it has not been strongly marketed as yet. To showcase the point, Komaravelly gave Gadgets 360 a behind-the-scenes peek showing exactly how the design has evolved since July, and why. We've talked a lot in the past about how Indian startups are turning to design to act as a differentiator in a crowded market. Improved data connections, and better displays on smartphones mean that companies are now turning to glossy magazines for inspiration and moving away from the tired designs that were so commonplac...

Twitter and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre have partnered to prove the infinite monkey theorem, which states that monkeys infinitely typing at random could eventually re-create the complete works of William Shakespeare. The project uses a machine to capture the random keystrokes of one group of monkeys: Twitter users. CompleteTweets tweeted, "I'm typing The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, word by word, one Tweet at a time. #Shakespeare400 https://t.co/uxENhdOyZR" In the Globe Theatre's lobby in London, a typewriter is hooked up via a mass of wires to a computer that combs Twitter looking for tweets that contain certain words. Starting with "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," the machine types out the entire play, word for word, as soon as a match is found in the Twitter-sphere. Launching the project Sunday, the machine has already gotten to Act 4 of the play, or around 1.22 percent of the complete works. It will ultimately work its way through 37 pla...

The selfie is about to get serious. Already ubiquitous at parties and for capturing Instagram- worthy landscapes, the act of raising a phone to your face and finding the perfect photo angle could take on a whole new role in people's finances. Some banks, tax agencies and tech companies are making the selfie an integral step for people checking their bank accounts, shopping online and filing tax returns. Forced to find creative ways to guard against the rising threat of identity theft, a growing number of companies are moving from a system that tests people on what they know, such as a password. Now they want to ask consumers to provide evidence of something that can't easily be changed or copied: their face. "In our opinion, the password is dying," said Tom Shaw, vice president of enterprise security at financial services firm USAA. The company now lets customers use a selfie instead of a password to log in to their mobile banking apps. Customers only need to ch...

Let's face it. It's not easy to zero in on an activity tracker, with options ranging from Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 20,000. One of the most popular queries people often ask us is, is: "Which fitness band should I buy?" We're not big fans of the fitness bands available today but we've tried so many that we can help you pick one if you think it will be useful. How much should I spend? This is the easy part. Just ask yourself how active you are and you'll have your answer. If you are someone who's recently become health conscious, start with a basic activity and sleep tracker like the Xiaomi Mi Band . It costs you just Rs. 999 and it's a pretty good device for the price. However, if you're a fitness enthusiast who exercises regularly, you might need a fitness band with a heart rate monitor. You can skip the most expensive gadgets such as the Fitbit Blaze or Surge unless you're an endurance athlete. ( Also see : From 0 to 21, Running a Half Mara...

This week's top tech deals include a high-end laptop from Dell, a big-screen TV from LG, and a lot more going at a discount. 1. Dell Inspiron 7548 15-inch laptop If you're in the market for a 15-inch laptop that is both powerful and cost-effective, the Dell Inspiron 7548 is now down to Rs. 75,950 (effective after cashback) at Paytm. Use the promo code A10K to get Rs. 10,000 cashback in your Paytm Wallet. The laptop is powered by Intel's fifth generation Core i7 processor, supported by 16GB of RAM. It comes with a 1TB hard drive and runs Windows 8.1 out of the box. The specifications are perfect if you are looking to run games on your laptop. There's an AMD Radeon R7 M270 graphics card with 4GB of RAM as well and the display itself has touchscreen support. The Dell Inspiron 7548 15-inch laptop is a great choice if you are looking to invest in a decent Windows based laptop that can last the next few years. Price: Rs. 75,950 (MRP Rs. 92,999) Link: Paytm 2. Luminous Z...

Editor's note: spoilers below for second episode of Game of Thrones' sixth season. So, Jon Snow then is officially back. But a mixture of shock, confusion and scare surround his face as his eyes meet Ser Davos', struggling to grapple with the situation he's been put in: brought back from the dead. "I shouldn't be here," he remarks. With her faith seemingly restored, Melisandre kneels before Jon's crouched and cold figure to talk about the Prince that was promised - Azor Ahai reborn - but it's all a bit too soon. It only serves to push Jon away more, into the deep recesses of his mind. She asks him what he saw after being stabbed to death, and he gives her the same reply as Beric Dondarrion - nothing. Davos feels Jon getting uncomfortable, and ushers Melisandre out. The two emerge a moment later, Jon looking more like the Lord Commander he was what with the cloak on. Tormund tells him that the people think he's a God, having made the return ...

Judge Marcel Montalvao joined some of Brazil's top politicians as one of the country's most-hated public figures when he ordered a 72-hour shutdown of WhatsApp this week , abruptly cutting off the messaging service for some 100 million users. But none of the young women staring at their cell phones and tapping away on the now-restored WhatsApp in a patch of shade outside Montalvao's courthouse in the small city of Lagarto were among the haters. Even as the judge prepared to rule on cases involving their loved ones in a courthouse compound that is heavily guarded and sits behind a high, electrified fence, the women expressed understanding for a man known locally as fiercely dedicated to fighting crime. "It was a pain at first. We use zap-zap all the time," said Marcielle Santana, 26, using the universal slang term in Brazil for Facebook -owned WhatsApp. "But you have to respect him. He's going after drug gangs, pedophiles. That's more important ...

It's been an interesting week in tech news, with both scientific development and consumer tech ticking along nicely. There have been some major developments from India, but one of the most important bits of news that we came across was that the government might be working on a law that could would make it mandatory for Google Maps to get a license in India . According to a draft bill, the Ministry of Home Affairs is planning a law where you need a government license to acquire and to disseminate map data; and there are huge fines if this is not the case. There are also huge fines for "incorrect" depictions of India's borders. While the idea of a law around geospatial information makes sense, the specifics of the draft could be worrying. The next piece of news from India is also really big - the Mumbai police warned that data had been hacked from the rail ticket booking site IRCTC, which is the biggest e-commerce destination in the country. It later turned out that ...