Highlights:

• Sandes is a homegrown App by the Indian Government.
• Basic features are similar to WhatsApp.
• It is available on the Apple Store as Sandes
• Sandes is free and there are no ads in the app
• It is named as GIMS(Government instant messaging system) in android
• It is not available on the Play Store but you can download it from the official government website www.gims.gov.in/dash/dlink

Sandes, an instant messaging app of the Government of India and an Indian alternative to WhatsApp, is now accessible to all. This app has been launched by the National Informatics Center (NIC), promotes PM Narendra Modi's Digital India and Atmanirbhaar Bharat (Self-reliant India) initiatives.

The Sandes app can be used by both government officials and personal users. It requires a mobile number or government email ID for sign-up. Once signed up, users can send and receive messages as well as create new groups. The app also supports media file transactions. There is also a section called "Gimoji", which displays symbols used in official communication.

After Koo, which is seen as an alternative to Twitter, the government has its eyes on WhatsApp as it brings Sandes, an instant messaging platform.

If u want to know more about koo, click on the link given below 

Is Koo App The Next Twitter?

Now, let's find out whether this messaging app is better than the already installed platform called WhatsApp.

If one looks at the app, its interface is very similar to WhatsApp and this app includes the same features. The main difference between Sandes and WhatsApp is that there is an option to sign up using an email ID and not just a phone number. Previously, it was available only to government officials. WhatsApp only allows you to create an account using your number.

Also, it has verified accounts on its platform, which are not available on WhatsApp. Sandes allows users to share videos or photos up to 500MB while WhatsApp offers the option to send videos with regular files of up to 16MB and 100MB. There is an option which enables you to create a backup of your chats over email as well , which is not the case in whatsapp as it only allows you to create a backup on either Google Drive or iCloud for respective android and ios users .

Meanwhile, the Sandes app does not allow mobile numbers or email IDs to be changed after creating an account. So, if you have a new mobile number or your email ID is lost, you will have to create a new account and all your chats will be lost. Whereas WhatsApp helps to change the phone number without deleting their existing profile.

Currently, Sandes does not have the fingerprint lock feature and screen lock feature, which WhatsApp provides. However, Sandes offers to check the weather details of the city in the app.

Like WhatsApp and other popular instant messaging apps, the Sandes (which can be read as "messages" in Hindi) app developers claim that the app is encrypted end-to-end. The application can be used to send and receive messages or to share media files with contacts. There is also a feature of contact sharing and group chat. Apart from this, users can also broadcast messages. Sources in the government have also confirmed to NDTV that the government is also working on an app named Samvad (which means dialogue). An official of MITY told NDTV that "These apps are being fully developed by the Indian government. It will be an instant messaging app like WhatsApp. "

What data does Sandes collect from users and say about security?

According to the Sandes App's privacy policy, all messages in an individual or group chat are "end-to-end encrypted to ensure secure communication". The policy clearly states that the system "does not sell or share any personally identifiable information to any third party, except as covered by law enforcement/courts, etc.

Sandes App can be run on which devices ?

For now, the Sandes app is only available for Android and iOS users. It is not compatible with tablets, but you can use the web version of the app. Currently, it is also not available on the Play Store. The Sandes app can be downloaded through the GIMS portal. It will run on Android 5.0 and above. The app for iOS users is available on the App Store and supports iOS 12.0 and above.

Download the Sandes App from here

Step 1: All you need to do is go to www.gims.gov.in/dash/dlink  and click on the download button.

Step 2: Open the application and create your account using your mobile number or email ID. The application sends you a six-digit OTP for verification. (Email ID is limited to official ID only - if you sign-up with a Gmail, Hotmail, or other email accounts, you will see a notice, according to which, you cannot use emails from these domains. Even government accounts like @mygov.in are not accepted. The only official @gov.in email can be used in the app. If you do not have an email ID for this domain, you can use your mobile number)

Step 3: Enter your name, gender and upload your profile. The latter is optional and you can choose to skip if you do not want to upload your image. 

Step 4: You will also be asked to allow location to the application, you can also skip this. The next window will ask if you want to sync contacts, and then you are all set. You can start messaging anyone.

Last Note

Overall Sandes is an Amazing app. The app's privacy policy is secure for every user as they are quite common and are collected by most messaging apps.

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During a joint press conference on 25th February 2021,  with Minister of Electronics and IT, Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad and Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Mr. Prakash Javadekar,  announced guidelines for OTT platforms. They stated that the ministry is not bringing censorship to OTT, but letting the OTT platforms offer age-based classifications themselves.

The Indian government has proposed a new regulatory model to govern over-the-top(OTT) video streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hotstar. The regulatory model called Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 has been provisioned under Section 87 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. According to the new regulation these video streaming apps will now have to classify their content into five different age-based categories namely

•  Adult category
•  U/A 16+(content that can be viewed by a person below sixteen years)
•  U/A 13+(content that can be viewed by a person below thirteen years)
•  U/A 7+ (content that can be viewed by a person below seven years)
•  Universal(suitable for everyone)

Apart from the classification of content, platforms will be required to execute parental locks for content classified as U/A 13+ or higher. 

OTT platforms will now have a three-tier censorship model and for now, the government has announced a timeline for the implementation of this draft model.
The first tier of this model involves self-regulation, which the OTTs and social media need to implement.

The second tier involves one or more self-regulatory bodies of publishers. This panel will censor the content, but cannot take any action.

The 3rd tier will have a regulatory officer of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting who can issue a direction to block access to any movie, series being streamed via OTTs, and also content being shared on social media.

Many  film personalities and politicians welcomed new guidelines for OTT platforms by tweeting

FINAL NOTE

According to me this new regulation model will lead to consolidation or termination of small OTTs, which have always been relying upon salacious content. So, this will augur well for global giant OTT’s and TV broadcast based OTTs.

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Ever seen this logo? You must have if you are an active social media user. This is a homegrown social media platform which is known as Koo. A few months back, when the government banned hundreds of Chinese apps, the ones “Made in India” started getting popularity for promoting the Indian government’s AatamNirbhar Bharat vision and Koo is one of those apps. 

What is Koo?

Koo is a Twitter-like microblogging platform for Indian language speakers. It lets users, communicate in their mother tongue via text, audios, and videos. This app is meant for people to express thoughts, opinions, and strike a discussion on trending topics. Koo has gained immense popularity within a short period. 

Key Highlights:

• It supports different Indian regional languages.
• You can express your views and opinions on various topics and follow other users on the platform.
• This app came into existence from the AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge
• It can be used on both Android and iOS devices. 
• Koo gained popularity after the Indian government locked horns with Twitter over the suspension of a few accounts.

The brain behind this app?

Koo is created by Aprameya Radhakrishna (who co-founded Taxi For Sure) and Mayank Bidawatka (who has co-founded RedBus, The Media Ant anf Goodbox) back in March 2020. The best thing about the app is that it is available in various Indian languages such as Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya, and Assamese. This gives users a better way to express themselves in the language of their choice.

Koo App is the Voice of India in Indian Languages- reads the website bio.

 

The government had a Digital India AatmaNirbhar Bharat Innovate Challenge which had many participants and Koo was the winner of this challenge, since then Koo is considered as an AatmaNirbhar App. 

Koo is getting wordwide recognition after getting promoted by prominent Indian political figures. Earlier it had 1.5 million active users. However last month, the number of users on the App reached 3 million. This is because many Union ministers like Ravi Shankar Prasad, Piyush Goyal, and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Shiv Raj Singh Chauhan left Twitter to support Koo.

Why Koo is in News?

Koo became popular when the government of India openly expressed its displeasure with Twitter on late agreement with its emergency orders to remove the hashtag "farmer genocide" and all similar content from its platform.

While the app was launched in early 2020, its participation and the subsequent winning of the government's Aatmnirbhar App Innovation Challenge brought it under the spotlight. Google PlayStore has announced Koo as the winner of the Best Apps of 2020 in the Everyday Essentials category from India.

Since the users of the app have been increasing a French ethical hacker Robert Baptiste, who goes by the name Elliot Alderson on Twitter tweeted saying that he spent 30 minutes on the recently launched app, Koo and was able to access sensitive data such as email IDs, addresses, passwords, etc. He posted screenshots of his finding on Twitter. He also said Koo has some form of Chinese involvement as well. Responding to the claims, Koo's co-founder Aprameya RadhaKrishna said users have voluntarily put their data on display. User data has not been breached in any form and tweeted that the news about data leak is being spoken unnecessarily. However, Baptiste responded to Radhakrishna's claims and called it 'Lies'. Koo has been also accused of cloning Twitter's look and feel. Koo has a yellow bird as the mascot, which is very similar to Twitter's blue one.

Packing Up

So, this was all about this made-in-India app and its rise to prominence. I must say Koo can woo the world.  You should check out this Aatamnirbhar Bharat App. 
Do you think Koo can give Twitter a tough fight? Will you prefer Koo over Twitter? Will the vocal for local sentiment contribute to Koo mania? Please do write your views in the comment section below.

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Technologies are rapidly growing  and reaching new heights

 

Highlights:

• More than 50 features for Google Classroom, Google Meet, and Google Drive
• Includes offline mode and improved mobile grading
• More than 170 million students and teachers across Google will benefit from this

During this COVID-19 pandemic, the search for remote teaching and learning applications has grown rapidly. After this, Google has advanced, to aid millions of Indian students who were left hanging due to the closure of schools. 

Recently, Google has added over 50 new features to its Google Classroom, Google Meet, and other platforms. The new features have been introduced to enable a more effective learning and teaching experience for students and educators. Apart from this, it has also rebranded its existing G Suite for Education as Google Workspace for Education. 

 

Features added to Google Classroom 

When students attend school in-person, educators can easily notice where a student is lacking behind. A new set of Classroom features is aiming to do something similar for virtual learning, as well. With the new student engagement tracking feature, educators will be able to observe regular stats about how students are interacting with Classroom, like which students submitted assignments on a given day or commented on a post.

Other than this, Google Classroom is also introducing the new Offline mode for the android app. This includes reviewing their assignments, opening Drive attachments, and writing assignments in Google Docs — all without an internet connection.

Moreover, for educators, the Classroom Android app has also updated the mobile grading system which would allow them to grade student's submissions and share feedback with the help of an easy switch.

The classroom will also gain support for rich text formatting — like bold, italics, underline, and adding bullets across the web, iOS, and Android.

Google Classroom will render real reports in 15 different languages ​​including Hindi, English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish to help educators learn pluralism. Apart from this, the Student Information System (SIS) roster will be available in the classroom, which will give the students the capability to log in, review reports and removals, etc.

Features added to Google Meet

The new features in Google Meet include the ability to support multiple hosts to allow more than one teacher for each virtual class. Not just that, teachers will have the option to “End meeting for all”, so they have complete control and can prevent students from staying on a call after the teacher has left. 

Another much-awaited feature that was missing in Meet was the option to ‘Mute all’ and now, teachers would be able to mute all students to avoid interruptions. They would also get the option to decide whether the students would be able to unmute themselves or not.

This past year, the education community has inspired us with their creativity and resilience. This ability to learn, and teach, from anywhere is more important now than ever, and won't end when the pandemic does - Bani Dhawan, Head of Education - South Asia.

Features added to G Suite for Education

The major change in G Suite for Education is that it has now been rebranded to Google Workspace for Education. This workspace would continue to include the same products as before, including Meet, Docs, Sheets, Classroom, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc. However, the free version of G Suite for Education would be renamed to Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, and the users of this version would not see any changes except for the new name and new features. The company plans several updates for its Google Workspace for Education product line in the weeks to come, including saved drafts in Google Forms (in Fundamentals) Google Meet meeting transcripts (in the Teaching and Learning Upgrade), and more.

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Cloud gaming has been winning a lot of popularity recently, with various brands launching their service. Google Stadia continues to be one of the most famous cloud gaming services with the sheer number of features it offers. Google also established an in-house studio for developing games mainly for Stadia, known as Stadia Game Development Studios. 

Google stadia received a big push in the beginning. It is a new representation of a video-game platform that works without a console and that stores game-playing sessions in the cloud. It allows players to jump across devices including phones, PCs, and laptops. All you need is an internet connection, and you will be able to play games on any screen. During the unveiling of the technology, Google showed off the seamless ability to switch between screens and continue your game because everything you needed was happening in the cloud. 

Google has announced that the company is shutting down its in-house game development studios for the Stadia platform. With this, the company will now be concentrating on provided content from third-party developers. Stadia will now host games from existing developers instead of developing games of its own.

Despite this, Google is still planning to operate Stadia and its $10 monthly service, Stadia Pro. The company also plans to offer its Stadia technology to publishers, deepening business partnerships and opening the door for the streaming platform to become the gaming solution for video game companies. "We believe this is the best path to build Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry," wrote Google's head of Stadia operations Phil Harrison.

What is the future of Stadia?

According to Phil Harrison, Vice President and General Manager "You can continue playing all your games on Stadia and Stadia Pro, and we’ll continue to bring new titles from third parties to the platform. We’re bound to the future of cloud gaming and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward". He further adds, "We see an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia’s advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools. We believe this is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry".

Conclusion

I don’t know if Stadia’s future is dark or bright after this announcement. But I’m sure of one thing: this isn’t the time and way of making such huge announcements. It’s all about empathizing with users. I’m just confused about Stadia and their goal for the next year. I hope for some clear information to be provided to users about Stadia’s future.

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What is Dogecoin?

Dogecoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency featuring the doge dog, a popular internet meme, founded by IBM engineer, Billy Markus and Adobe software engineer, Jackson Palmer. It is currently the most frequently-traded digital currency used essentially for online purchases and tips. Dogecoin first emerged in December 2013, as a sarcastic tweet by Jackson Palmer, during the rise of the doge meme’s popularity. After being encouraged by friends to make the Dogecoin joke a reality, Jackson teamed up with programmer Billy Markus, who wanted to create a form of currency more convenient and commercial than Bitcoin.

A little background about the meme

In 2013, a doge meme became famous. It consists of a picture showing a Shiba Inu(dog breed in Japan) face along with multicolored, silly phrases in Comic Sans font and misspelled English! The cryptocurrency was initially started as a joke but now it has gained an enormous amount of followers worldwide. You can know more about this meme here.

Growth Of Dogecoin!

In 2021, Dogecoin reached over 900% as a result of attention from Reddit users and a series of tweets and memes from Elon Musk! Dogecoin became trending after getting involved in a stock market “war” between retail investors and hedge funds.

According to CoinMarketCap Data, Dogecoin is currently trading at ₹5.21, which reveals an almost 17 percent increase in its value.

Difference between Dogecoin and Bitcoin

Under the hood, Bitcoin and Dogecoin look almost the same. Their code varies in only some parameters. But their economic functions are almost opposite.

The key difference between Dogecoin and Bitcoin is that there is no limit on the total supply of coins in Dogecoin whereas Bitcoin has a fixed supply of about 21 million coins, of which not all have been mined yet.Bitcoin is a kind of “digital gold” used as a secure hedge against political and economic uncertainty. Dogecoin, on the other hand, is a meme, people add to their digital wallet because they think it’s funny. 

Should You Buy a Dogecoin?

When I started investing in Crypto it was close to  ₹0.30. The graph of Dogecoin has always been straight and there were' t any jumps in the graph!

Until these Reddit Groups and Elon Musk started tweeting about it. People thought that its something interesting and started investing in it. They are pumping the price of Crypto! We never know when there is going to be a huge dip. It's risky and if you still want to take risks then yeah, you can invest but always remember don't be greedy and emotional while investing!

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 A report from Bloomberg indicates that Amazon is developing an Alexa-powered Echo device that will act as a digital command center for smart homes, and can be mounted on a wall.

The device could feature either a 10-inch or 13-inch touchscreen which will be  capable of controlling smart home devices, like locks or lights, play music and videos, video chatting through a built-in camera, and will also show upcoming calendar events. This device will also feature Alexa voice-activated assistant integration.  As this device is meant to be installed on walls, so it would be much slimmer than current Echo gadgets.

Amazon has delivered various Echo devices over the years, but nothing entirely as ambitious as a wall-mounted Echo. The device would free up shelf space and offer a little more flexibility for where to put it (assuming there’s a plug nearby). It’s unclear if the device can be mounted in any orientation or if it features a kickstand to place on a nightstand or media console.

Amazon plans to debut the new device by the end of this year or next and could price it between $200 and $250, although Bloomberg notes that those plans could change or be canceled completely. If successfully launched, the device would put Amazon in competition with the makers of professional smart home control panels, a category that includes Apple.

Granted, that doesn't sound very different from what the Echo Show 10 and 8 can already do, but it's interesting to hear Amazon is exploring even more form factors for its extremely popular and versatile smart home products.  What are your thoughts on this smart device? Do you think it’s a useful design or a gimmick? Let us know your feedback in the comments.

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Whether you are feeling sad, upbeat, dreamy, or perhaps just a little bored, Spotify will soon recommend songs to match your exact mood. Freaky eh? 

Spotify has patented a new technology that would allow the streaming service to humanize the user interface by their personality. According to reports, in the music business worldwide, the company filed for the patent all the way back in 2018, and it was approved on January 12, 2021.

The patent states that Spotify will need access to use your audio recognition, which will then identify traits such as an emotional state, a gender, an age, or an accent of the user and then recommend music based on what it analyses. Further, this technology will avail Spotify to make observations about a user’s environment and emotions. Spotify could then play music according to your mood or even according to your social environment. For instance, if you are alone, or you are at a party.

 

Spotify said that it is common for a media streaming application to include features that provide personalized media recommendations to a user. If implemented, then this feature will presumably boost the streaming statistics. I know, it sounds like a load of jargon, but essentially this means that Spotify will pull live audio data from your smartphone, from which it will determine your current emotional state based on intonation and units of speech and also your location type based on background cues, such as bird noises or traffic.

For me, this feature is terrible. Just think, if you are feeling down and depressed, do you need a (selfish) company to start playing songs adjusted to your depressed state? That borders on abuse, no matter what kind of music they choose. Does Spotify have a mental healthcare license? Who makes the judgments of how to adjust the song to one's mental state? Will they be held answerable when bad things happen? Of course not. And even if you are happy, do you need a company sensing your mood to start playing happy music? 

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