cukoo review

 "There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time," wrote Jane Austen about the most colourful of our feelings and in Cuckoo, we see love budding between characters for whom the very concept of colours is alien. For, both Tamizh and Suthanthirakodi (aka Kodi), the romantic interests in the film, are visually challenged. The film is based on a real-life couple whom the director interviewed for a magazine article. The director actually inserts himself into the film as a character, a narrator to the audience and an enabler to the lead pair.

What is refreshing about the film is that it treats the disability of the lead characters in a matter-of-fact way and seldom resorts to manipulation. Tamizh, Kodi and their circle of disabled friends are as human as the rest of us and we never see them wallow in self pity. The romantic track between Tamizh and Kodi actually includes elements that we have seen in our movies earlier — the initial hate gradually turning into love, peer pressure, familial disapproval and even a whiff of the 'paakamaley kadhal' sub genre (in the final segment) — but what makes the film feel unique is the setting and the array of interesting supporting characters that the director has created. There is the wisecracking Ilango, Tamizh's friend who is also visually challenged, Murugesan, an admirer of Tamizh's singing (he is a singer in a music and dance troupe with oddball characters), the much-married owner of the troupe Kuberan Chandrababu, the MGR, Vijay and Ajith look-alikes, Kodi's friend Sangeetha, her reader Vinod (who she initially wants to marry), a cop who is humane enough to take pity on Tamizh but is human enough to take a part of his cash, a political underling who isn't above asking for money to get a job placement but will lash out at any disrespect to women and so on.

A significant portion of the film takes place in something as recognizable as railway platforms (PK Varma's backlit frames makes these places seem so beautiful) but we get to see the lives of people whom we normally, like the character of an elderly office-goer in the film, turn a, umm, blind eye to in real life. We also get a feel of the world of the visually challenged. We see how they learn and read, how close knit they are, and even how they 'see' the world differently; Tamizh is sensitive to sounds while Kodi seems to identify things more with smell — he identifies her approach with the sound of her footsteps while she gives him a perfume so that she can make him out at once.

The film turns somewhat melodramatic with the track involving Kodi's brother, Sekar. He is a security guard with a pregnant wife and tries to exploit his sister's disability. He wants to get a government job for her as a teacher, only because that will mean more money. And, to do so, he is willing to get her married off to Jilaki, his friend and an auto driver, who doesn't seem to be a nice person at all.

The film would have benefitted if it had gone through another round or two of editing at the scripting stage. Murugan, a one-time journalist, wants to present the story as true as possible and in his quest, he doesn't exercise his rights to take creative liberties in telling this story as a director as much as he should have done. This turns the film into a somewhat indulgent effort and given that many of the story's arcs are familiar, we, at times, feel restless when the film takes its own sweet time to move on to the next scene. And, in the climatic portions, Dinesh, who is superbly natural as Tamizh, is made to go melodramatic (starting with Tamizh getting picked up by cops), and this change of tone makes the final half an hour of the movie feel cinematic.

Western Digital, has introduced its My Cloud National Attached storaged(NAS)

Storage solutions company, Western Digital, has introduced its My Cloud NAS (Network attached storage) drive in India. The solution allows users to organize, centralize and store digital content from all of their computers and mobile devices and access the files from any connected device. 

My Cloud is available in 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB capacities, providing large storage capacity with no additional monthly payment. Users can also attach a compatible USB 3.0 hard drive directly to the USB expansion port on the My Cloud drive to expand the drive's storage capacity. 

Users can connect the My Cloud personal drive to the internet, and get anywhere, any-device access without paying monthly fees or storing content on a third party server. 

The My Cloud drive allows users to connect their computers and mobile devices with WD's free desktop and mobile apps. It offers direct file uploads from mobile devices, allowing files and videos to be moved to My Cloud, freeing up space on tablets and smartphones. 

The drive can be used to stream movies and music to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as a media player, smart TVs and gaming consoles. 

Users can also use My Cloud to back up their computers and digital files through WD SmartWare Pro software on PCs and Apple Time Machine backup software on Macs. 

My Cloud is currently available at leading resellers and WD's channel partners across India. It is available at a price of Rs 10,999 for 2TB, Rs 12,999 for 3TB and Rs 14,999 for 4TB.

The 4th dimension to reach consumers

When Kaushik Krishnan first heard of the Celebrity Cricket League (CCL) concept, which is fielding the country’s top actors, he rushed to get tickets.

The fourth edition of the cricket league is currently under way and it’s got drama and glitz on the ground.

But what the 24-year-old movie enthusiast did not expect was 4D images of his celluloid favourites on his 5-inch smartphone when he trained it on the posters at the stadium. It is an emerging technologycalled Augmented Reality, which is slowly evolving as a vehicle of brand promotion.

Vijay Karunakaran, who two years ago founded ingage, the Chennai-based company that delivered the tech goods to CCL, says there a clutch of brands riding his technology to get to the customer: “When the CCL people approached us, they had the youth in their minds. They wanted to promote their brands on a platform considered ‘cool’.”

How it works

The idea is to fit image-processing technology into the operating system of a smartphone, and build a software (the app) that can throw up images when an pre-identified object is picked by the camera of the phone. “Basically, the image caught on the smartphone’s camera is enhanced to the fourth dimension through software,” says Karunakaran.

He had worked with Intel for 14 years, doing development work on the tech giant’s Atom processor. His company now provides the platform for a clutch of brands including Mitsubishi Pajero, GRTHotels and Resorts, PayPal, and som big brands are set to get on board. The Rajnikanth-starrer Kochadaiiyaan is being promoted by Karbonn Mobiles on ingage’s platform. His revenue flow is two way: In cases where the platform is licensed to the brand, the company gets an upfront payment and revenue share for every unit sold, and from brands for which campaigns are run for a fixed period, there are content development and promotional charges.

The charge for renting ingage’s platform to advertise a product is at ₹1-3 lakh a month.

The technology itself has its roots in the US, where small-time application developers write such software for a variety of brands, from realty developers wanting to inform buyers of their properties toretailers advertising new merchandise.

Cloud computing demerites

Cloud also having some disadvantages:

1. Cloud is not security and privacy 
2. Dependency and vendor lock-in
3. Limited control and flexibility
4. It is should be need internet access

Cloud computing merites

The cloud computing having many advantages,but this 10 is very important 

1. Cost Efficiency
2. Convenience and continuous availability
3. Backup and Recovery
4. Cloud is environmentally friendly
5. Resiliency and Redundancy
6. Scalability and Performance
7. Quick deployment and ease of integration
8. Increased Storage Capacity
9. Device Diversity and Location Independence
10. Smaller learning curve

Categories of Cloud Computing

There are mainly four models of cloud computing:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Network as a Service (Naas)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This is the most basic cloud-service model, which provides the user with virtual infrastructure, for example servers and data storage space. Virtualization plays a major role in this mode, by allowing IaaS-cloud providers to supply resources on-demand extracting them from their large pools installed in data centers.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): In this model, cloud providers deliver to the user development environment services where the user can develop and run in-house built applications. The services might include an operating system, a programming language execution environment, databases and web servers.

Software as a Service (SaaS): In this model, the cloud provides the user with access to already developer applications that are running in the cloud. The access is achieved by cloud clients and the cloud users do not manage the infrastructure where the application resides, eliminating with this the way the need to install and run the application on the cloud user’s own computers.

Network as a Service (Naas): The least common model, where the user is provided with network connectivity services, such as VPN and bandwidth on demand.

But we are study only three services(first three).

Facebook announced this morning that it has just purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion

The world will sleep with a different kind of realization tonight — well at least the one that uses WhatsApp to say good night will. In what might be the most expensive, and perhaps overvalued buyout in recent tech acquisitions, Facebook has forked out a whooping $19 billion for WhatsApp.

WhatsApp, which has over 450 million users, is a popular messaging service that allows users to send texts, images and videos anywhere around the world for a one time payment of just 99 cents.

So what really changes?

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum will join the Facebook board of directors, and the team will move and operate from FB's Mountain View, California. WhatsApp will continue to be an individual messaging feature, alongside Facebook messenger. So breaking it down a little, prima facie WhatsApp is the winner here, with the billions in stock and cash and integrating with the biggest social media firm the word has seen yet but Facebook could just have a much bigger plan in place.

User Experience

Mark Zuckerberg in his joyous status update shared, "WhatsApp will complement our existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for our community". Facebook claims that because the two services are useful for different purposes — one for your Facebook contacts and the other for phone contacts and smaller groups — they will not be mixing the two services.

In his blog post, Jan Koum said that WhatsApp has not entered into a compromised deal, and the user experience will not be affected in anyway. He writes, “Almost five years ago we started WhatsApp with a simple mission, building a cool product used globally by everybody. Nothing else mattered to us. […] here is what will change for you, our users , Nothing.”

The user experience will be unchanged, however Zuckerberg added, “over the next few years we are going to help WhatsApp to grow".

The Number game

$134 billion, that is Facebook's net value. Compared to that, $19 billion seems peanuts, but for the 5 ex-Yahoo! employees built up the chatting service, this is big. It has been the biggest exit for a venture-backed company, and strangely this is half of Yahoo! is worth. No wonder this should mean a lot for Jan Koum and Brian Acton, founders of WhatsApp.

Koum moved to the US from Ukraine at the age of 16 and lived off food-stamps, Venture Capitalist Jim Goetz, claims in his blog . With the current deal in place, Koum's worth would be pegged at $6.8 billion and Acton at atleast $3 billion, based on Facebook's closing share price on Wednesday.

In an event of the merger falling through, Facebook has still agreed to pay an unusual sum of $2 billion to WhatsApp, which includes a $1 billion fee in cash and shares of Facebook's Class A common stock of $1 billion, based on the average closing price of the ten trading days preceding such termination date.

A chance to get back

More often than not, businessmen love to compete. Koum has seen a bumpy ride until he founded WhatsApp. Acton refused by Twitter and Facebook in the 2009, has now shown the world that he is worth more.

Facebook on its part has already tried to buy out the likes of Twitter and SnapChat in the past, only to be turned down smugly. However, it has made a bigger point with WhatsApp — especially because the latter enjoys a much bigger user base as compared to Twitter's 200 million users.

Apart from additional profits, FB has more reasons to celebrate; it has a better per-employee-profit ratio, thanks to WhatsApps lean team of just 50. Also, it poses a real competition to Apple's iMessage,Tencent's WeChat, SnapChat, LINE, Kik Messenger, and Kakao-Talk, alongside its home-brewed Facebook Messenger. Moreover, Facebook will now be a formidable player in the mobile communication market, something many companies admit they were a tad to late to move into.

For both these CEOs the merger is bigger than just the monetary gain, it’s also a personal victory of sorts.

The Data snooping act

Alongside a million downloads, 450 Million users use WhatsApp everyday. Add this to Facebook's official figure of 900 million users, and the social networking giant gains an upper hand in user data analysis, but that also means it sits on a gold mine of user behaviour related information worth much more than $19 billion.

However, in August 2013 Facebook released the numbers of data requests made by government bodies across the world in the first six months of 2013 alone, with a total of 12,000 requests, the US sent the largest number of requests, the EU responsible for 8,590 demands while India stuck to a low of 3,254.

In a statement, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch assured that they believe in transparency and have stringent processes in place to find legal deficiencies in such requests. “Transparency and trust are core values at Facebook. We strive to embody them in all aspects of our services, including our approach to responding to government data requests. We want to make sure that the people who use our service understand the nature and extent of the requests we receive and the strict policies and processes we have in place to handle them", he said.

"Governments make requests to Facebook and many other companies seeking account information in official investigations. The vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings. In many of these cases, these government requests seek basic subscriber information, such as name and length of service. Other requests may also seek IP address logs or actual account content. We have strict guidelines in place to deal with all government data requests," said Facebook’s press release in 2013.

Setting foot in Europe and Emerging Markets

Emerging economies have seen users picking the mobile platform over the web, thus underlining the popularity of apps. Facebook is the most popular social network, it boasts of over 1.23 billion users with 945 million accessing the service via the mobile platform. All this makes acquiring the biggest mobile messaging app  a really important deal.

After tasting success in the European markets, big names such as Digg , Viber and Reddit have seen Facebook steal their audiences in the recent past, which will only increase with its control on WhatsApp.

That said, Facebook has seen a ban in China in 2009, with Renren and Sina Weibo taking over the entire billion Chinese user base. Zuckerberg in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2011 said, “the way that we look at it now is there’s so many other places in the world where we can connect more people more easily without having to face those hard questions that I think a simple rule in business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.” Despite the shrug-off Facebook has ever since been playing the surround-and-conquer game that includes buy outs, adding Chinese programmers to their pay rolls and registering trademarks in China & now the the merger with WhatsApp that widens the crack a little further.

Operations at WhatsApp

Koum promised that there will be no advertisements,“You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you’re using. And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product.”

Although the two messaging services will operate independently and WhatsApp will have autonomy in operations, becoming a part of Facebook will allow WhatsApp to inherit a few things. With the team remaining in the Mountain View office, it gets access to Facebook's analytics arm. With more resources at hand, and more importantly access to advanced processing for data, their joint information processing power could probably be much bigger than that of Google.

, Zuckerberg’s new dream

In the statement made on Facebook’s 10 anniversary, Zuckerberg had announced plans to make cheaper and easier internet services available to every part of the world. Zuckerberg said, “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want. WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day.”

With the social angle added to Facebook’s capitalist operation, Zuckerberg joins the likes of Google that claims its mission is to integrate all the information in the world, and make it free for users. However, with Google, Skype, Twitter and other internet biggies being embroiled in controversies surrounding user data, no information and service is really safe. Rightly said, there are no free lunches in this world.