Specialised online stores hottest e-commerce start-ups: Survey

They are a constant feature of internet surfing - online retailers offering cash on delivery facility, option of creating your own T-shirts and other services. In fact, such specialised online stores , fashion brand retailers and group buying stores are among the hottest e-commerce start-ups, a survey says.

The study was conducted jointly by leading infotech magazine Dataquest, online research company JuxtConsult and business solution provider firm SapientNitro.

The 20 companies selected for the survey included 20north.com, 99labels.com, Bindaasbargain.com, Buytheprice.com, Caratlane.com, Dealsandyou.com, Fashionandyou.com, Flipkart.com, Indiangiftsportal.com, Infibeam.com, Inkfruit.com and Magazinemall.in.

The selection depended on three broad parameters -- business model, user experience and traction.

The report did not rank the companies.

According to the report, the business model of these companies is far more robust than the companies set up in the first phase of e-commerce ten years ago. Many of these sites have adapted models better suited to Indian needs.

Facebook becoming more secure

In order to stay safe and protect users from getting hacked, the popular social networking site Facebook is rolling out a new set of security features.

Facebook, with over 500-million members, has added the ability for users to login and surf the site using a more secure encrypted connection, known as HTTPS.

The encryption is the same used on shopping and banking websites to secure connections, and was previously used on Facebook when passwords are checked.

"Starting today we'll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools," the company said in a blog post.

Facebook noted that the site may function more slowly using HTTPS, and some features, including many third-party applications, don't currently support HTTPS.

In addition to the added encryption, Facebook said it will now also offer "social authentification," a unique form of the traditional "captcha" coding that will ask a user to identify Facebook friends from their photos.

New Google service solves sudoku

If you're stuck on your sudoku puzzle, there's hope. New photo recognition software for Android mobiles, Goggles, can help solve the puzzle.

Just hold the numerical puzzle up to the camera on your mobile. Goggles will then recognize the numbers already in the puzzle and calculate the missing values.

Goggles, now in version 1.3, is also capable of reading ads in US magazines and newspapers and pulling up the appropriate websites. Recognition of bar codes has also gotten better, reported Google in its blog.

Goggles photographs items and loads them up to Google's servers, where they are analyzed before results are sent to the user's mobile.

Google says the app can also recognize products and famous sites. It also translates texts between English, German and Spanish.

The free software is available for all smart-phones that use the Android operating system. The Sudoku assistance is also available in the Google Mobile app for the iPhone.

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iPod, iPhone, iPad fuelling Apple's logic defying growth

Size is the enemy of growth. It is one of the unwritten laws of business, a matter of simple percentages. After all, when a company has $1 billion in yearly sales, an extra $1 billion doubles its size. Add $1 billion in new business to a $10 billion-a-year company, and it amounts to just 10 percent growth. The size-growth tradeoff seems inevitable, an inescapable force like gravity.

Try telling that to Apple, the corporate giant that two weeks ago reported a 71 percent jump in quarterly sales. Apple generates revenue at the rate of $100 billion a year. Its chief executive, Steve Jobs , who went on medical leave this month, is ailing, but the company is certainly not.

Hit products like the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are fueling Apple’s logic-defying growth. The latest entry – the iPad, introduced in April – is on track to deliver $15 billion to $20 billion in revenue in its first full year of sales, estimates A.M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. At that size, if the iPad were a stand-alone company, it would rank within the top third of the Fortune 500.

The software and services that work on Apple’s hit products are accelerating its extraordinary expansion. Apple provides the underlying technology and marketplace: iTunes software and the iTunes Store for managing, downloading and buying music and media; iPhone and iPad software for creating applications; and the App Store for sampling and buying them.

The more people buy iPhones and iPads, the more software developers and media companies want to write applications for them, as various as games and digital magazines. And consumers are more likely to buy iPhones and iPads when more entertainment and information applications are available on them. The combination of hardware, software and services is what corporate executives, economists and analysts call a platform. Successful technology platforms sustain and reinforce growth. And this self-reinforcing cycle is known as a network effect. It helps the platform owner and raises a barrier to competitors.

Visit Mexican museums, archaeological sites via Google

About 180 Mexican archaeological sites and 116 museums are being made available for virtual visits via the Google Earth platform from any part of the world, Mexican authorities and executives of Google Latin America said.

During the platform's presentation at Chapultepec Castle in the Mexican capital, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH's director Alfonso de Maria y Campos, and Google Latin America' marketing manager, Miguel Angel Alva, said Thursday that this is "a unique effort in the Latin American region and its first such project at an international level."

At the event, which included the awarding of prizes for entries in the "Put Mexico on the Map" contest, De Maria y Campos said that the sites form part of Google's interactive digital atlas, and will help boost the promotion of Mexico's culture and tourism around the world.

The INAH director said that "cultural tourism brings in twice the cash that sun, sea and sand tourism does, which tells us that this tourist segment travels more, has a better image of the country and above all leaves more money in non-traditional places."

For his part, Alva said that the project was born of an alliance between INAH and Google Mexico aimed at creating international awareness of the country's cultural riches.