India pushes smart city collaboration among BRICs countries

A senior Indian official is pushing for greater smart city collaboration among the group of countries knows as BRICS.

As reported in the Indian Express, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje recently spoke as the BRICS Smart Cities Conference in Jaipur, India. The acronym BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Raje’s presentation emphasized the potential opportunities emerging for fellow BRICS nations to cooperate in developing smart cities and related infrastructure. As well, she encouraged further information sharing between these nations to enhance and accelerate the smart city learning process.

“Member countries of BRICS can learn many things from each other,” said Raje. “The collaborations within BRICS shall strengthen ties and improve our appreciation of each other’s cultures and peoples.”

She drew attention to innovative urban environmental management practices currently being developed in such cities as Beijing, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Saint Petersburg.

Innovative projects in these cities can be explored for potential application in India, with scholars and urban planners developing deeper exchanges of knowledge with fellow nations. She said that such knowledge exchanges will improve smart cities by enhancing safety and resilience.

“Growth of population in urban settlements is posing many challenges. It has placed additional loads on the infrastructure in every city,” said Raje. “Our thinking is that cities of tomorrow require technology-driven inputs to make life of our citizens easier and safer.”

BRICS may have more pressing citizen needs than others

In her presentation, the minister discussed the support of the Indian government for smart city transformations of Jaipur, Ajmer, Kota and Udaipur.

She added that a critical element in the process of developing smart cities is the tandem development of smart citizens. This echoes a growing sentiment among smart city pundits that governments are forgetting about citizens in the rush to implement whizzy new smart city technology.

“To make our citizens smart and skilled, our government has taken skill development as a top most priority,” she said.

“We have engaged with numerous partners in skilling up our youth in a wide range of trades,” continued Raje. “ITIs have been taken up by industrial houses to impart skills and all our industry partners are collaborators in creating job and imparting world class training to our youth.

The threats and challenges for Netflix in Asia

You might call it a Hollywood makeover of the tech industry; Netflix, a company that used to send you DVDs by mail and was almost sold to Blockbuster for a paltry $50 million, is now a juggernaut staring down big TV networks as it makes their programming and business models seem almost archaic for today’s world.

The streaming service effected a culture of entertainment being “anywhere, on anything and anytime you like” as the benchmark expectation for an entire generation, forcing other networks out of their comfort zones and making them up their games.

But to Asian internet users, Netflix seemed like another among many of the wonderful first-world luxuries that kept making waves on the news but never seemed within reach. Even today, being a native South Asian, it’s difficult getting used to the idea that one can get aNetflix subscription where high-speed internet access is still not available to everyone. The service was, until recently, available in only a select few regions with varying limitations on its library.

The past two years have witnessed a renaissance of worldwide expansion in tech companies. The services that had been exclusive to the U.S. and Europe swept through Asiawith unprecedented efficiency. You can now summon an Uber cab in New Delhi or ask Google Now to help you navigate the wild valleys of Swat in Pakistan. This is because these companies aren’t unaware of the fact that Asia is currently the driver of the world’s economy, while other continents’ financial conditions are ever-increasingly strained. The continent’s snowballing growth is showing no signs of stopping, thanks to domestic supply and demand.

Against well-adapted local players

When Netflix set foot in developing and emerging markets such as India, it was greeted by stiff competition, long-established and deeply rooted among local audiences from the get-go. Players such as HotStar, a streaming service run by STAR India, and Eros, a company that both produces and distributes a large selection of Bollywood movies and Indian TV shows online, had seized the opportune power vacuum early while Netflix had been fixated on U.S. and European markets.

These upstart players found success by catering to local tastes while keeping the price-of-entry in line with the region’s socioeconomic expectations. HotStar understood the mania that drew a large viewership for live cricket in India, while Eros Entertainment brought its offerings to the masses with free basic plans.

Netflix, meanwhile, currently offers its most basic subscription for 500 INR (or around US$7), more than twice the cost for a monthly subscription to HotStar. Considering the fact that Netflix is still severely lacking when it comes to licensed local content available for streaming, the asking price falls somewhere between luxury and redundancy. Given the massive amounts of popularized content being churned out by Bollywood and Indian television every year, the Netflix library immediately loses its premium label and luster for the average user in India.

In South-East Asia alone, the video-on-demand streaming market is projected to generate up to $42 million in subscription revenue in 2016. — Media Partners Asia

No longer the first to market

In other parts of Asia, there are more than 35 different streaming services catering to local markets with similar strategies. iFlix, available in Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines offers licensed content from U.S. studios to a subscriber base surpassing 1 million viewers. In Indonesia, the situation becomes bleaker for Netflix, as some ISPs are outright blocking its services, while iFlix has forged partnerships with local satellite services such as Ooredoo. Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, with more than 100 million internet users, a number that is projected to grow to 133 million in the next 3 years.

The great walls of China

Other challenges the streaming giant faces range from political to regulatory. The proverbial elephant on the list of countries in which Netflix has yet to launch is China, where it may take years for the service to get greenlit, if at all.

China represents the second largest theatrical market in the world, and is quickly becoming the benchmark for international success for movie studios. When big budget risks such as Terminator Genisys and Pacific Rim failed to spark at the box office in western markets, they found resounding success among Chinese audiences, where moviegoers are not only accustomed to Hollywood’s over-the-top flare and spectacle, but outright expect it. It’s needless to say that catering to the Chinese market is becoming increasingly important for studios producing global content these days.

There are caveats, though.

In China, Netflix cannot operate without specific permission from the government, and even then it has to walk a razor-thin line over the nature of content it can and cannot distribute in the country. The Chinese government monitors, moderates and censors all content its citizens can access online.

Netflix’s “House of Cards” found an unlikely audience on Chinese streaming site Sohu, to the extent that it became the most popular show at the time before censorship authorities caught wind of it and took it down. Chinese censorship laws prevent not only violence and sexually explicit content, but also dictate that any content based on anti-authoritarian, anti-military, religious or political themes be blocked altogether.

“Recently, China’s online entertainment censorship regulations have actually become stricter and must officially meet the same standards met by more conservative television stations,” says Aynne Kokas, an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. “In practice, online content is much more difficult to regulate because of the vast numbers of distribution options available. But I don’t foresee a more formal liberalization of online censorship happening in the near term.”

When I asked her whether Netflix had the capacity to adapt to such restrictions, she added: “I do envision Netflix altering, or at a minimum, expanding, its content to cater to China. We can already see that happening with Netflix original programming like Marco Polo and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Sword of Destiny. The film was partly funded and distributed by Netflix in the U.S., but was also produced and distributed by the China Film Group in China. Netflix is already working with Chinese partners on content and distribution.“

What does not help Netflix’s case is the fact that most successful streaming services operating within China’s walled-off internet are funded by the government itself, adding to the list of hurdles that Netflix must vault over before it can even begin operating within the region. Other limitations include regulations like the mandatory government requirement for all broadcasters to host no more than 30 percent of foreign content, something thatNetflix already struggles with when it comes to content licensing (as noted in previous examples).

What would success look like?

In order to break into the largest markets in Asia alone,Netflix not only has to convince the governments to allow its operations, but also dance around regulations, censorship, finding appropriate content partners for licensing and original content.

To put things into perspective, it took a juggernaut like Apple Inc. six years just to forge a partnership with China mobile before they were able to launch their products in the region. Similarly, Uber spent an exorbitant amount of time, money and effort to set up its operations in China.

The fact that these companies still took on these challenges and investment risks to break in to these markets, however, stands as a testament to the lucrative nature and the shifting benchmark for successful globalization that Asia represents to the world. And here we have a company that has single-handedly declawed traditional TV and cinema’s monopoly on entertainment, and has transcended into millennial culture like no other brand before it. If there’s anyone that can make lightning strike twice, it’s probably Netflix.

Smart City projects rumbling to life around the world

A new report from boutique research firm Navigant Research shows the global smart city technology market is expected to more than double in the coming years, from $10.4 billion in 2015 to $27.4 billion by 2023.1

The firm tracks a complex matrix of issues, solutions, technologies, operations, and infrastructural requirements related to smart cities, and new projects have been added to the database – showing continued investment in smart grids, networked LED street lights, urban mobility, climate action plans, open data platforms, water management, and government service applications for smart cities.

“The expansion of smart city projects is happening not only in terms of the quantity of projects being developed but also in relation to the level and variety of integration being pursued,” says Ryan Citron, research analyst with Navigant Research. “This expansion is expected to increase as governments continue to recognize the tremendous associated benefits of smart cities, including improved economic opportunity, sustainability, and quality of life.”

Citron says they see continued investment in technologies like advanced parking systems represent a growing market for smart cities. As well, an increase in innovations from suppliers in terms of the product and solution offerings – as well as the partnerships they are forming with cities and other stakeholders – is expected to further propel the industry’s growth.

This most recent report covers five key industry sectors as they relate to smart cities: smart energy, smart water, smart transportation, smart buildings, and smart government, looking at across sectors at projects that address multiple aspects of city operations.

They identified 235 projects around the world. Roughly 85% of the projects are focused on issues related to energy, transportation, or government. That’s up from 170 projects in the third quarter of 2013 when the firm first began looking at the smart city space.

                                                                                 Courtesy: Eneltec LED

Navigant see developing world with strongest demand

Smart city development is a huge growth area in the developing world as well as the big economies. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Digital India” plan has them building 100 smart cities across the country. They’ve allocated $1.2 billion for Smart Cities in their 2014-15 national budget.

As you can imagine, the scale of this development plan acknowledges the public resources would largely be insufficient. And so the government is working on new financing routes to boost the program. The government has also been inviting foreign partnerships, signing deals to build the first eight of the 100 cities — three with German partners, three with American partners, and one each with Spain and Singapore.

“Cities in the past were built on riverbanks (and now) they are now built along highways,” Modi said. “But in the future, they will be built based on the availability of optical fiber networks and next-generation infrastructure.”

As the benefits of smart cities become clearer, the number of projects and partnerships supporting the cause is rapidly increasing. In the last few years, city leaders, central government ministries, and technology and service suppliers have announced a range of new smart city initiatives, incentives, and product and service offerings, while more cities are moving from one specific technology interest to a broader range of solutions that have multiple applications.

Viewpoint: India's nuclear lobbying and an increasingly isolated Pakistan

India's American-backed bid to join the prestigious Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) has once again isolated Pakistan in South Asia.

Pakistan is increasingly finding itself friendless in the region as Iran, Afghanistan and India all find fault with Pakistan's inability to end terrorism on its soil and in particular to bring the Afghan Taliban to the table for peace talks, as Islamabad promised to do nearly two years ago.

The 48-nation NSG, which sets global rules for international trade in nuclear energy technology, has become the latest diplomatic battleground between India and Pakistan. It is due to hold a crucial meeting this month. The Pakistani military is angry that after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent trip to Washington, the US has been furiously lobbying all member countries to give India a seat at the NSG table.

Pakistan then asked for the same, but its proliferation record is not as good as India's and it clearly would not succeed. Instead, it has asked China to veto the Indian bid which it is likely to do. However, smaller countries are angry with the US, who they accuse of browbeating them, and complain that neither India nor Pakistan can become members until they sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) which is an essential requirement.

President Obama backs Indian entry to nuclear technology

Pariah to friend: Narendra Modi and the US come full circle

President Obama is going against his own policy of nuclear restraint and disarmament by offering to make India - but not Pakistan - a member of the NSG, when the US has also tied up plans to sell India six nuclear power plants.

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionIndia's economy is growing fast and it has plans to build many nuclear plants

At the same time the US has shown in several dramatic steps that it is deeply unsatisfied with Pakistan's efforts to stop the Afghan Taliban operating out of Pakistan. Last month it used a drone in Balochistan province to kill Mullah Akthar Mansour, the Taliban leader, which led to Pakistan accusing the US of violating its sovereignty.

The US then publicly accused Pakistan of not doing enough to stop the Taliban and the Haqqani militant group - and in a clear signal of support to the beleaguered Afghan government, President Obama has allowed remaining US forces in Afghanistan to fight alongside Afghan forces.

Finally, during Mr Modi's trip the US publicly condemned those extremist groups operating out of Pakistani Punjab and Kashmir whose activities Islamabad has not stopped. In what was seen as a clear snub and a signal of defiance to the US and India, the military allowed Hafiz Saeed, the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba who is wanted for the Mumbai bombings in 2008, to lead prayers last Friday in Islamabad.

The military's fear is that it believes the US is withdrawing from South Asia and will leave behind its rival India as the regional policeman - something it cannot tolerate. The military has already accused Iran and Afghanistan of hosting Indian spies which are working to undermine Pakistan and in particular sabotage the One Road One Belt route and transportation network that China has promised to build from the Gulf port of Gwadar to China.

Pakistan's relations with Afghanistan are as bad they have been for years, and not much better with Iran. After waiting for more than a year Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has now washed his hands of trying to persuade Pakistan to get the Taliban to hold talks with Kabul. His frustration has clearly been supported now by the Americans.

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionThe India Pakistan border in Kashmir remains heavily armed, years after independence from Britain

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionThe Pakistani military is accused of giving continuing support to the Afghan Taliban leadership

Meanwhile, with sanctions against Iran having ended, civilian politicians and the public were looking forward to the quick building of an Iranian oil and gas pipeline that would give Pakistan desperately needed energy and electricity. However after Islamabad accused Iran of hosting Indians trying to sabotage Pakistan's economy, Iran is now nursing its pride.

China remains Pakistan's closest ally but China, too, is becoming frustrated. It plans to build a $45bn transportation and energy link up to its grand Silk Route project through Central Asia, but it wants the military to use its political influence to first end the Taliban-led war in Afghanistan and the insurgency in Balochistan province.

The chronic state of Pakistan's foreign policy has affected domestic politics. Part of the problem is that there is little input from the civilian government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif or the foreign ministry or parliament into making policy - that has become the domain of the military.

Mr Sharif has wanted to improve ties with India, Iran and the US but he has been unable to do so. Meanwhile, opposition politicians have accused Mr Sharif of surrendering all foreign policy decisions to the military.

The military in turn are deeply frustrated - and here they have considerable public support - that Mr Sharif has not appointed a foreign minister or improved governance. He has not even given up the portfolio for foreign affairs even as he recovers from open heart surgery in London.

The region is changing rapidly and Pakistan needs urgently to address its security and improve relations with its neighbours.

Ahmed Rashid

• Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author based in Lahore
• His latest book is Pakistan on the Brink - The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan
• Earlier works include Descent into Chaos and Taliban, first published in 2000, which became a bestseller

Can India’s smart city effort tackle its pollution problems?

Having kicked off plans to build 100 smart cities across the country, the Indian government will need to make sure any smart improvements address a critical issue in its urban environment: overwhelming pollution.

A recent World Health Organization (WHO) report about pollution levels places 34 cities in India in the top 100 most polluted cities in the world list, with 22 of the Indian cities in the top 50. And out of the 100 cities chosen for smart city transformation, 17 of them have the dubious honor of making WHO’s list.

 A large majority of the most polluted cities in India are located in the Northern and Western states.  No cities from the Southern states are included in the report.  WHO based their rankings on the biggest concentration of fine particulate matter with a size of 2.5 micrometers or less that was found in each city.  This type of matter is linked to a rise in deaths from stroke and heart disease, along with cancer and respiratory illness.

To compare this list to other large cities, London and New York have a particulate matter concentration of 15 and 9. Delhi has a concentration of 122.

According to WHO, “measurement of fine particulate matter of 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter is considered to be the best indicator of the level of health risks from air pollution.”

Indian smart city efforts overlooking pollution for now?

Though upgrading city amenities, improving infrastructure and transportation and introducing more technology will be part of the smart city initiative for India, government officials will now have to figure out ways to improve air quality in these cities, too.  The increase in air pollution has become a real problem.

The WHO report stated, “Many factors contribute to this increase, including reliance on fossil fuels such as coal- fired power plants, dependence on private transport motor vehicles, inefficient use of energy in buildings, and the use of biomass for cooking and heating.”

The WHO’s air quality study includes 1,600 cities across 91 countries, with the ranking determined by pollution levels from the year 2012. The Organization says indoor and outdoor pollution are among the greatest health risks in the world.

Like Follow Follow Meet the 20-year-old girl who may be India’s youngest pilot

This June, three women will make history by becoming the country's first female fighter pilots. In Mumbai, 20-year-old Ayesha Aziz has also broken a glass ceiling in the profession by becoming one of the youngest pilots in India.

Driven by her childhood dream of becoming a pilot, Aziz began training at the Bombay Flying Club in 2011, when she was 16, and got her student pilot license in the same year. She took her flying lessons over the weekends, attending school during the rest of the week. “I love adventure, travel and meeting new people,” Aziz says. “I wanted to do something unconventional, and working as a pilot seemed especially unconventional.”

Since getting her student license, Aziz is working towards clocking in the 200 flying hours that are required to get a commercial pilot license, which will enable her to work with an airline. She currently flies single engine Cessna 152 and 172 aircraft, and has completed 120 hours of flying.

IMAGE: AYESHA AZIZ

While no one in her family in a pilot, Aziz attributes her success to her parents, especially her father, “who keeps motivating and pushing me”. Aziz says that she was fascinated by seeing aircrafts land and take-off as a kid. “Flying works against gravity, you give up everything that gets you down,” she says.

Her role models include astronauts such as Sunita Williams, and she was further encouraged to pursue her childhood dream when she was selected to visit the NASA headquarters in 2012 to learn what it takes to be an astronaut.

“It is challenging to be a pilot. You always have to be ahead of the aircraft and quick to takedecisions. You need presence of mind and you need to multi-task,” Aziz adds. “When you’re inside a cockpit all your worries have to be left behind, and your mind should be focused on whatyou're doing at that moment.”

Data suggests Uber is trailing far behind rival Ola in India

New data has suggested that Ola, the $5 billion valued taxi on-demand service, may be more than twice as large as Uber in India.

The information comes courtesy of Truecaller, which today released a snapshot of data from the 130 million registered users of its smart calling app. Truecaller operates a community-based directory that helps label spam callers, but more broadly assign IDs to otherwise random phone numbers that might call you. Truecaller used its database of call tagging to look at the volume of calls coming from numbers that it knows to be Uber and Ola drivers to get a glimpse at the communication volume between drivers and its users, and thus a snapshot into the potential marketshare of the two rivals.

Truecaller found that between January and March this year, 4.1 percent of all calls that it identified as being made for the purpose of getting a taxi where made to Ola or Ola drivers. By contrast, Uber’s share comes in at 1.6 percent. Ola users were found to have racked up 59.5 million outgoing calls and 42.5 million incoming calls over that same period. Uber users call volumes were 24.5 million outgoing and 13.6 million incoming.

 

 

Reliable information addressing the marketshare for taxi on-demand companies is hard to come by, and figures released by both Uber and Ola differ wildly, as Mint recently pointed out. That makes this information from Truecaller all the more interesting but, of course, there are caveats — it applies to Truecaller users only (we don’t know how many active users the service has in India), while multiple calls between a driver and passenger are common but can’t be broken out from the Truecaller data. Nonetheless, the information does seem to validate what other such studies have shown. WhichApp, a service that lets friends share their favorite apps with each other, similarly found that Ola usage was double that of Uber, but that sample size was likely far smaller than Truecaller’s given that Which App counts just 90,000 users.

What is perhaps most interesting about this data is the room for expansion that both Ola and Uber have, according to Truecaller’s findings.

The app firm, which is based in Sweden but has a strong focus on emerging markets, found that 94 percent of all calls for taxis or private cars were made independent of Uber, Ola or other booking apps like Meru or Ola-owned TaxiForSure. There may be some error here, but, even adding an unlikely 10 percent error rate, it appears that most users who are savvy enough to download a smart dialer app like Truecaller don’t use taxi on-demand services.

“As you can see, these new app-based services are still just a drop in the bigger ocean that is the Indian taxi industry. Even if the market keeps growing at anywhere near the pace it currently is, then there is abundant room for more than one service to operate,” Truecaller said in a statement.

While Ola got an earlier start on the market by launching its service before Uber arrived in August 2013, Ola’s lead may also be down to the sheer breadth of services that it offers. Last week, the SoftBank-backed company claimed that its ‘Micro’ vehicle service alone is bigger than Uber, covering 75 cities and over a million daily rides. The acquisition of TaxiForSure for $200 million last year will also have helped.

This is the first report of its kind for Truecaller and it is designed to help showcase the company’s monetization push. Truecaller has begun making money via something that it describes as ‘call intent’ — that’s to say that, thanks to its tagging data, it can tell what number or service a phone owner wants when they bring up a number and before they hit dial. That information — which the company stressed is anonymized to protect users — is then offered to companies which can place messages such as promotions or deals.

So, for example, if I am about to call a bank, or receive a call from a bank, there’s intent that companies offering financial products may be interested in pursuing. I might find myself receiving a bank or loan-based message before or after I phone my bank.

Facebook India makes it tough to remove offensive content

NEW DELHI: Facebook, the world's largest social network, has made it tougher for offensive content to be taken down and will do so only if it gets a legal or government notice, in keeping with a recent Supreme Court ruling.

"We have changed our process. So now, before we restrict content in India for illegality, we require that the government submit legal process to us and we scrutinise that with our legal teams," Facebook's global policy head Monika Bickert told ET by phone. "We would not restrict the content if somebody in the community, somebody outside the government, flagged that content."

India had 14,971 content restriction requests in the July-December period, second only to France, and down from 15,155 requests in the first half of 2015, according to aFacebook report released on Thursday. The take-down calls were made by legal and government agencies as well as NGOs and Facebook members. The numbers in the next report will reflect Facebook's decision to act only on legal or government requests.

India also made the second highest requests for user data at 5,561, after the US, which made 19,235 such demands. Facebook gives users the option to flag or report objectionable content including posts, photos, messages, comments, profiles, events and pages. Content is blocked or taken down if it violates Facebook's community standards. Bickert clarified that the new rules do not mean that people can no longer report offensive content.

Koh-i-noor: India says it still wants return of priceless diamond

The Indian government says it is still seeking to reclaim the Koh-i-noor diamond from Britain, despite telling India's Supreme Court otherwise.

The gem came into British hands in the 19th Century and is part of the Crown Jewels on show at the Tower of London.

Ownership of the priceless gem is an emotional issue for many Indians, who believe it was stolen by the British.

On Monday, India's solicitor-general had told the court that it was "neither stolen nor forcibly taken".

Ranjit Kumar, who was representing India's government in the hearing, had said the 105-carat diamond had been "gifted" to the East India company by the former rulers of Punjab in 1849.

But a statement by India's ministry of culture on Tuesday said the government "further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Koh-i-noor diamond in an amicable manner".

Mr Kumar's comments, which elicited surprise in India, did not represent the views of the government, the statement said. The official submission to the court has yet to be made, it added.

Explaining India's confusion: Geeta Pandey, BBC News, Delhi

India's culture ministry appears to have misread the popular mood - the solicitor general's comments sparked a full-scale political row, forcing the government to backpedal.

The main opposition Congress party said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government must make all efforts to bring the diamond back since "it's connected to our emotions".

Mr Modi's allies in Punjab state, the Shiromani Akali Dal, joined the criticism, describing the government stand as "wrong". One party MP said the Punjab government would even be willing to join the court case seeking its return.

Rattled by the criticism, the prime minister's office intervened, and the culture ministry issued a clarification.

The Koh-i-noor is undoubtedly an emotional issue in India where many believe that in 1849, the 10-year-old ruler of Punjab was forced to give it to the British and that it should be returned to India, its rightful owner.