Ever since online fashion retailer Myntra went ‘app only’ in May, there have been talks whether other e-commerce players, including its parent company  Flipkart , would follow suit. However, major players in the market — Snapdeal ,  Amazon , Paytm and Flipkart — are currently wary of going ‘app only’. While for consumers on-the-go, shopping through hand-held devices is a major benefit, the screen size of mobile phones and the app storage space acts as a negative. Also, going ‘app only’ ignores a particular segment of consumers who shop online, because of which companies are taking a cautious approach of not shutting their desktop version. “We have not decided whether we should go app only or not. But we are thinking seriously about how to win on mobiles. M-commerce will be a huge focus area for us,” Mukesh Bansal, head of commerce at Flipkart, told FE. Talking about Myntra, he said: “Initially the revenue dropped by 15% after we went app only, but recovered at a later stage.” ...

IBM will soon buy 200,000 Macs for its employees While iPad demands and sales keep on dropping, the same can't be said for Apple's much-adored Mac. Amid the last quarter alone, Apple sold 4.7 million Macs. This point to 9% increase from the same quarter a year-back. Also, now comes the word that Apple's Mac may get a little help from IBM to buy 200,000 Macs every year for its employees. This news of IBM's new Mac activity comes by the means of  video . The video shows the IBM CIO Jeff Smith telling about the conversation he had with the Apple CIO Niall O’Connor. The various transcripts of the video shows Jeff Smith asking Nial about their largest customer and in response Apple’s CIO indirectly refers to him by saying “Well, that customer has got about 25,000 MacBooks a year.” In the response Jem Smith proposes the idea of selling around 200,000 MacBooks to IBM per year for all employees. Apple’s CIO seems excited and responds in a positive way by setting a meeting with ...

  NEW DELHI:  You may soon expect call centre services even from healthcare providers. Many metros as well as tier II and III cities like Gurgaon, Bangalore, Nagpur, Nasik and Pune are now attracting business process outsourcing (BPO) firms focused on healthcare. These firms promise to offer a variety of innovations such as reminder calls to patients for consultations, help in fixing up appointments, and even complicated tasks like dealing with insurance firms for claim processing. For instance, if a patient with an insurance policy gets treated at a certain hospital which has a tie up with such a BPO, then the patient's insurance claim payments and paperwork will be managed by the BPO which will coordinate with all three parties. "The healthcare space has been an aspirational space for a very long time for many service providers. However, they have looked at it with a very narrow lens of pure offshoring. What Antworks is doing is looking at being an end to end se ..

It used to be that a text message is a way to communicate with people, but now it appears that it can carry malicious files that can hack somebody's phone. A mobile security team has uncovered a major flaw in Android phones, putting 95% of users and millions and millions of gadgets at risk of hack attacks. The bug, called "Stagefright" from Android's media library, is dubbed as the popular mobile operating system's (OS) worst security flaw discovered ever,  Fortune  reported. The bug, which affects Android phones running on version 2.2 and onwards, was announced last July 21 by Zimperium, a mobile security company, during the annual  BlackHat conference . The malicious program that would attack Android is embedded in a short video, which will be sent to a person through a text message, according to a report from  NPR . As soon as the receiver gets the infected text, Stagefright features prepare the video for viewing. But apparently, as the program processes the vi...

Nividia has rolled out the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop for Shield Tablet users. However, at the same time, the company has recalled certain Shield Tablet devices in order to prevent a possible battery fire hazard. According to  CNET , Nvidia is recalling all the Tablet Shield devices featuring Y01 type batteries that were purchased between July 2014 and July 2015. The reason is that the battery of the device, which is known to overheat quickly, can cause a fire hazard. In the U.S., Nvidia has recalled 83,000 sold tablets and in Canada, it has recalled 5,000 sold units. Nvidia has decided on the recall when it received four complaints that batteries were overheating. The company has alerted its customers not to use recalled tablets. Users have also been advised to back up their data and fill out an  online form  to get a replacement unit. To find out whether a Shield Tablet is susceptible to fire hazard, users are must navigate to Settings > About Tablet > Statu...

Open and closed beta testing now offered in the Google Play Developer Console Google is expanding how app developers can test their apps among Android users. Google launched app  alpha and beta testing through the Google Play Developer Console  out of its Google I/O conference in 2013. Developers could ship alpha and beta tests to employees and select users through Google+ Communities and Google Groups. At the time, Google also announced staged rollouts for testing, allowing users to test different versions of an app and provide feedback directly to the programmers. This week Google announced that it is extending the functionality of its  beta testing capabilities for Android  in the Google Play Developer Console. The ability to perform closed beta tests with Google+ and Groups will remain and Google is adding two new features: Open beta testing : Any user that has the link will be able to join a beta test group with one click. This allows developers to roll out beta...

Downtown was flooded with cheerleaders Saturday evening as roughly 45,000 Taylor Swift fans flocked to BC Place to catch the Vancouver leg of her 1989 Tour. The cheerleader is the perfect symbol for the 25-year-old country turned pop star who is as well known for her enthusiasm as she is for her commanding stage presence. She's not the kind of popstar who wallows, preferring instead to turn heartbreak and hardship into infectious pop anthems with just enough repetition to stick in the brain of even the most casual listener. Rather than the hint of danger pop stars like Justin Bieber have tried to cultivate, the heart of Swift's carefully constructed public persona is the contradiction between refinement and that enthusiastic kid who shows a bit of an overbite when she smiles. Even down to the videos that came before the show Saturday night, the heart of Swift's image seems to be the beautiful popular girl who is a nerd at heart. This double persona allows her to construct a...

Microsoft's  new cross-platform mobile strategy  continues after the official release of Windows 10 with a new Android launcher called Arrow. Last week on  Tap That App , we took a tour of Cortana for Android, which was leaked a few weeks ago when Microsoft began beta testing its AI assistant for the world's largest mobile operating system.  Well, another week, another (leaked) Microsoft beta for Android: Here's everything the Arrow Android launcher features so far, and everything it doesn't. The Basics "Basic" is the keyword for Arrow launcher, as Microsoft has obviously tried to find ways of simplifying the sometimes overly-complicated Android ecosystem into just three screens. The three home pages each have a specific category and function assigned to them, which definitely makes for fast navigation, though many will immediately feel that this takes away a good amount of the rich functionality of Android Lollipop. Apps First is the Apps page, which is the s...

The U.S. company is no longer the third-largest phone maker. Huawei is now the third-largest mobile phone maker in the world, beating out Microsoft    MSFT   -0.38%    for the number of items shipped in the second quarter of 2015, according to Strategy Analytics. Engadget  reported  Friday that Huawei shipped over 30 million phones during the year’s second quarter, which is roughly a 50% increase from the same period in 2014. Microsoft, meanwhile, sold 27.8 million phones worldwide in the quarter. According to the publication, Huawei now has a 7% global market share, which trails Apple’s    AAPL   -0.67%    10%, and Samsung’s 20%. “Huawei is rising fast in all regions of the world, particularly China where its 4G models, such as the Mate7, are proving wildly popular,” Ken Hyers, director at Strategy Analytics, told Engadget. Neil Mawston, the executive director at Strategy Analytics, added that “Microsoft’s 6 percent global mob...

AP Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella In its annual corporate report to the SEC, Microsoft laid out its unexpected plans for how it expects Windows 10 to drive the company's growth. "Our ambition for Windows 10 is to broaden our economic opportunity through three key levers: an original equipment manufacturer ('OEM') ecosystem that creates exciting new hardware designs for Windows 10; our own commitment to the health and profitability of our first-party premium device portfolio; and monetization opportunities such as services, subscriptions, gaming, and search," reads the report. The first two points are somewhat contradictory, and show Microsoft hedging its bets a little. The big question for Microsoft around the Windows 10 release cycle is whether or not the operating system is still relevant amid a shrinking PC market. If it's looking for "exciting new hardware designs" from OEMs (industry-speak for hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell), Microsoft is ...

Mozilla, the company behind the web browser Firefox, is accusing Microsoft of discouraging users from changing default applications in Windows 10. Microsoft's latest operating system, released this week, changed the way to set preferred applications for Internet browsing, calendar and other apps. Now a user has to work through more options and pages to make basic changes. The move drove Mozilla CEO Chris Beard to pen an  open letter  to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, urging the company to respect user choice. "It now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows," he said in the letter. "It's confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost." Microsoft released a statement of its own, asserting that they give users ample chances to set their preferences. "During the upgrade, consumers have the choice t...