New App Helps the Blind 'See' via Sighted Volunteers

Here comes an app that connects the blind who use smartphones via a voice over feature or Google TalkBack service to sighted volunteers who can help them with everyday tasks.

With help from volunteers, the app called "Be My Eyes" uses smartphone cameras to help visually challenged people with tasks such as looking for expiration dates on food items, finding the right doorbell on an apartment complex or reading messageson the road, media reports said.

The app allows people to "level up" the more they interact with the app and vetting them for future interactions - although there's also a way to report malicious or unhelpful users as well, just in case. If you get a call as a volunteer but you are unable to pick up the phone, you can ignore it and it will go to another random user in the app's database.

Currently, there are over 103,000 registered volunteers for 8,500 blind iPhone users.

Madhya Pradesh Announces Free Land, Buildings for Chipmakers

Electronic chip makers will get free land and buildings for setting up plants worth about Rs. 3,000 crores in Madhya Pradesh, a senior state government official said in Bengaluru.

"Happy to announce that Madhya Pradesh government has approved Analog Semiconductor Fab Policy. Minimum investment under this policy has to be about Rs. 3,000 crores. State government will provide free land and reimburse cost of shell (plant building) as well," MP Science and Technology Secretary Hari Ranjan Rao told PTI.

Madhya Pradesh is the first state to come up with an electronic chip plant specific policy.The secretary was in Bengaluru to attend the IESA Vision Summit.The analog semiconductors are used in all kind of electronic products to connect various components inside them, such as connecting touchscreens with circuits, monitoring mobile phone battery power etc.

Rao said that government has identified 4-5 different locations with 200 acres of contiguous land for establishing semiconductor clusters in the state.The land will be given for 50 years and will be extended further based on business case.

Groupon Founder Launches 'Detour' App Offering Unconventional Audio Tours

Two years after his ouster as Groupon's CEO, Andrew Mason is embarking on a new entrepreneurial journey selling unconventional audio tours of major cities on a new iPhone app called Detour. The initial selection of seven different San Francisco expeditions released Tuesday meander from the city's beatnik bars to the weathered docks of the bay while regaling listeners with colorful tales about local lore. Each excursion costs $5.

If Detour follows the course being charted by Mason, the audio tours will span the world within the next five years and the app will become a standard accessory for vacationers or city dwellers just looking for a fun way to learn more about where they live.

"Most of the audio tours that exist today are about what's popular inside museums," Mason says. "So what we are trying to do is turn the world into a museum."

Mason, 34, became rich by trying to create the world's biggest bargain bin. In 2008, he transformed an online service devoted to social causes into Groupon, which offered steep discounts on everything from restaurant meals to hot-air balloon flights if enough people bought them.By late 2011, Groupon had become an Internet sensation valued at $13 billion in an initial public offering of stock that turned Mason into a billionaire.

Twitter Expands Advertising Network to Outside Websites, Apps

Twitter unveiled plans Tuesday to sell ads that run outside its own platform in what could be the start of a broader advertising network. The one-to-many messaging service announced it would begin syndicating its "promoted tweets" to allow advertisers to reach people who are not on Twitter itself.

The first partners for the service will be Yahoo Japan and the news app Flipboard. Because tweets are already embedded in those services, the new arrangement will allow advertisers to deliver promoted messages directly to users of those services.

"These new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," Twitter's Ameet Ranadive said in a blog post. "Syndicated ads will be seen by users within Twitter content sections on third-party properties, as well as within third-party content areas."

The move allows an advertiser to run a simultaneous campaign on and off Twitter, Ranadive noted.

"Thousands of Web and mobile applications already syndicate Tweets to provide compelling content experiences, through products such as Fabric and Twitter for Websites," he added.

"Combine that with the flexibility and control of a promoted tweet, and we think marketers will have an almost infinite capacity to create large-scale, rich and well-targeted advertising campaigns across a variety of platforms. In a small number of private tests with Flipboard, both Flipboard and our advertising partners saw promising results." Twitter, which unveils quarterly results this week, has been under pressure to show both revenue and user growth following its highly anticipated 2013 initial public offering.

SAP Eyes Growth After Unveiling Major Software Overhaul

SAP has launched the most high-stakes overhaul of its core software line in more than two decades, aiming to convince multinational corporate customers that its software can now run their most critical applications to predict business conditions.Europe's biggest software company said on Tuesday its widely used suite of corporate planning applications and newer cloud-based Internet software are set to work together using a single, modern user interface.

Analysts estimate this means hundred or even thousand-fold improvements in SAP data-crunching times. The unified database platform, called S4 HANA, promises to cut the time it takes to compile business accounts and forecasts to minutes, instead of hours or days, by analysing vast amounts of data in local memory rather than slower magnetic disk drives.

"I expect a nice tailwind of growth out of this," Chief Executive Bill McDermott said of S4, speaking at SAP's annual capital markets meeting at the New York StockExchange. "We are really ready to come out and start accelerating," he said.

Established software makers such as SAP are battling to boost Internet software sales and fend off pure cloud-based rivals such as Salesforce.com and Workday. All major database vendors including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Teradata also offer "in-memory" versions and dozens more rivals supply predictive analytics software in the cloud.

Yet, SAP has staked out a big, early lead in the market for real-time business planning software by signing up around 2,000 of its corporate customers to HANA, according to some analysts.

Cisco to Help Andhra Pradesh With Smart City, Education Projects

Cisco Systems would help Andhra Pradesh in developing Visakhapatnam as a smart city and it is also keen on working with the state government in the areas of education and healthcare. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu held a video call with top executives of the American networking giant on Tuesday, an official release said.

"In a video call with Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Cisco Systems Padmasree Warrior and President (Globalisation and Smart +Connected Communities) Anil Menon, the chief minister was informed that Visakhapatnam will first be taken up for development as a smart city among other cities chosen from Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra," it said.

Sharing his experience of working on smart cities, Menon informed Naidu that the development model adopted by Cisco for Visakhapatnam will be replicated in other cities too, the release said. Cisco, which designs, manufactures and sells networking equipment, would focus on setting up a skill development centre and provide training through Global Talent Tracker (GTT).

"The company is also keen on working with Andhra Pradesh in digitising education and healthcare. Cisco is mulling setting up an incubation centre either at Tirupati or Visakhapatnam and living labs on lines of those in Barcelona," it said.

Microsoft Updates Yammer Apps With Support for Android Wear and Handoff

Microsoft on Monday updated its Yammer social network apps for Android and iOS devices with Android Wear and Handoff support respectively. The latest version of Yammer for Android (varies with devices) and Yammer for iOS(version 6.4.18) is available for download via respective the app stores.

First up, is Android Wear support on Yammer for Android that allows users to read and like team messages directly from their smartwatches, and even reply using Google voice commands. In the Yammer for iOS app, Microsoft has put in the Apple's Handoff compatibility that allows users to switch and sync app data and other information between iPhone, iPad and Mac with one swipe or a click.

Additionally, the Yammer apps for Android and iOS share some common improvements, such as redesigned interactive notifications, and new sharing options for links, photos and more in Yammer groups from Safari, Chrome and other apps. "The pace of innovation on our Yammer mobile apps will only accelerate. We want to craft intuitive, powerful mobile experiences that enable teams to collaborate openly, individuals to scale their impact and organizations to bring down silos so everyone can do more and achieve more," noted Carlos Bohorquez Marin on the Yammer blog.

To remind you, Microsoft had bought Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion in cash. Yammer is a social network that helps companies' internal communications and collaboration by allowing employees to form groups and interact with each other freely. Companies such as Ford Motor Co., Supervalu and Deloitte are customers.

Delhi Elections 2015: MapmyIndia Launches Polling Booth Locator

It has been just over a year since the Aam Aadmi Party formed the Delhi government in December 2013, and nearly as long since Arvind Kejriwal resigned as Chief Minister on February 14, 2014.

If you're going to vote in the Delhi Assembly elections which will take place on February 7, then you probably still remember where you're supposed to go, but if you've forgotten then there's a very easy way to look up the location of the polling booth you're supposed to go to. Mapping service MapmyIndia has launched a service called the Polling Booth Locator, which is a simple website where you can enter your details and see the location of the polling booth. The site is extremely easy to use, and worked fine on both desktop and mobile phones.

Remember though that you're not supposed to carry your phone with you in to the polling booth, so if you're going alone, then look up the address and route before leaving home. To use the app, you can look up your details with you voter ID. If you don't remember that, just your name and your father's name is enough to look up the details you need. Or, you can check the location of all polling booths in your locality, and then cross-check this list with your name, to see where you have to vote.

The search quickly throws up all your details - your voter ID, gender, age, address and your serial and part number on the rolls. There's only one button you can press at this point, which shows the directions to the polling booth.You'll see a detailed map that is supposed to give you the directions from your doorstep to the polling booth. This worked well, for the most part. We tried with a number of different people's details, and the map was accurate. When checking the site, one voter's address in Mayur Vihar showed correctly on the details page, but was in the wrong place on the map. We tried this with three other people though, and got correct results. The issue is probably with the way addresses in the CGHS apartments in Mayur Vihar are written, because we got the same issue with three other people in the same area.