Cloudtail India to Cease Operations from May 2022

Chaitali Chakravarty & Writankar Mukherjee reporting for the Economic Times:

One of Amazon India’s largest sellers Cloudtail India is going to stop operations from May 2022 with the company’s joint venture partners Amazon and N.R. Narayana Murthy-owned Catamaran Ventures will not renew the seven years old partnership when it comes up for renewal next year.

Cloudtail India is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Prione Business Services. Prione is a joint venture between Catamaran and Amazon. The two partners are going to exit from the business at a time when there is stricter surveillance on the operations of the foreign e-commerce marketplaces in the country.

The two partners have mutually decided to not continue their joint venture beyond the end of its current term ending on May 19, 2022.

I really hope Appario Retail survives.

August 9, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Games The Shop Brings Official Nintendo and PlayStation Merch to India

Mikhail Madnani, writing for The Mako Reactor:

This merchandise includes mugs, glasses, water bottles, and more. Pre-orders for all the items are also live on Games The Shop with shipping beginning next month as revealed on the product pages.

That official PlayStation glass looks good.

August 9, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Twitter to Kill Fleets on Aug 3

Ilya Brown, Twitter’s Head of Product, Brand & Video Ads, writing on the Twitter Blog:

[…] in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.

It’s so good to see Twitter rolling back something that clearly wasn’t working. Twitter has released some really interesting new features in the last year, and I hope they continue to do so.

You should read the whole article linked above where Ilya details their learnings.

July 15, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft Team Up to Improve Browser Extensions

Stephen Shankland, reporting for CNET:

The teams behind the Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers have banded together to improve extensions, the add-ons you can download to customize the software. That should mean your extensions will work better and come with a better security foundation to protect you from malware.

On Friday, the teams unveiled a discussion and development forum at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, dedicated to developing standards for extensions. The forum, the WebExtensions Community Group, gives engineers a place to build a unified and more secure core foundation for extensions.

At WWDC 2020, Apple introduced the WebExtension API for Safari on macOS Big Sur — an effort to enable cross-platform browser extensions. However, I’m yet to see a change in the Safari extensions ecosystem because of that. Here’s hoping this new WebExtensions Community Group brings about a change.

June 5, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Cloudflare Announces a New Initiative to Replace CAPTCHA Annoyances

Thibault Meunier, writing on the Cloudflare blog:

We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: a real human should be able to touch or look at their device to prove they are human, without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you are human without revealing which human you are! You may ask if this is even possible? And the answer is: Yes! We’re starting with trusted USB keys (like YubiKey) that have been around for a while, but increasingly phones and computers come equipped with this ability by default.

Let’s face it, CAPTCHAs are annoying. I may have clicked on thousands of little photos of traffic lights so far, and it’s been an annoyance every single time.

If you have a YubiKey, you can try out the flow on https://cloudflarechallenge.com — a test website setup by Cloudflare.

I’d love to see where this initiative goes.

May 13, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Vodafone India's BGP Hijack Takes Down Several Global Networks

Ax Sharma, writing for BleepingComputer:

A large BGP routing leak that occurred last night disrupted the connectivity for thousands of major networks and websites around the world.

Although the BGP routing leak occurred in Vodafone’s autonomous network (AS55410) based in India, it has impacted U.S. companies, including Google, according to sources.

You should also read Anurag Bhatia’s fantastic analysis here.

Time and again, these companies prove that initiatives like this one and this one need to be taken a lot more seriously for the Internet to become a better place.

April 19, 2021 ✚ Permalink

23 Million Students & Teachers in Maharashtra to Get Google's Digital Learning Platform

Manish Singh, writing for Techcrunch:

The company, which recently announced plans to invest $10 billion in India, said it had partnered with the government of the western state of Maharashtra that will see 23 million students and teachers access Google’s education offering at no charge.

I recently learned from my cousin sister living in the small village of Matheran that their tiny school was now conducting online classes via Google Meet and how she had to keep convincing her dad to add mobile data plans to their single smartphone in the house.

Google deserves all the shit it gets for their privacy-invasive practices, but no other technology company has come close to localization and grassroots efforts in India. Google’s products are universal.

August 7, 2020 ✚ Permalink

A Guide to Organizing Your Gmail Inbox

Over the official Spark Email blog, I’ve just published this detailed guide to decluttering and organizing your Gmail inbox.

In this article, I’ll tell you the tips and tricks to organize your Gmail inbox and also explain some hidden or lesser-known features that help you organize your emails in Gmail. And for those of you who have thousands of unread emails in your Gmail inbox, I’ll help you bring some sanity to your inbox.

Gmail is arguably the most common email provider today and thus, it is very common to see Gmail inboxes that are just left unattended. I’ve outlined some pretty simple steps that can help you clean up your Gmail inbox in minutes.

August 6, 2020 ✚ Permalink