This Week I Learned - Week #170

This Week I Learned -

* You can use Always Encrypted to help ensure that your sensitive data remains private and confidential while it's stored and queried in Azure SQL Database

* Azure Automation schedules now support time zones and adjust for daylight saving based on the schedule’s time zone.

* Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows on the inside. They allow you to run applications insulated from the rest of the system, within portable containers that include everything an application needs to be fully functional. As they did with Linux, containers will change the nature of the software supply chain for Windows users.

* Bing API v5 service differentiates between a DOS attack and QPS (queries per second) violation. If the service suspects a denial of service attack, the request will succeed (HTTP status code is 200 OK); however, the body of the response will be empty. If you exceed your QPM (queries per month), the request fails with HTTP status code 403, and if you exceed your QPS, the request fails with HTTP status code 429. The response will also include the Retry-After header, which contains the number of seconds that you should wait before sending another request - MSDN

* It's been almost two years (August 2014) since Google announced that HTTPS was a ranking signal. As of late June, SEOMoz's tracking data shows that 32.5% (almost one-third) of page-1 Google results now use the "https:" protocol.

* Any major change from HTTP to HTTPS for sitewide URLs is risky, especially for large sites.

* There are more than 3 billion internet users who access it using 8.1 billion connected devices, including more than 24,000 distinct mobile device types.

* There are 12,106 W3C specified APIs and no browser implements them all

* Over the last year (June 2015-May 2016) 2.07% were running IE8, a browser that Microsoft no longer patches; the same goes for more than three-quarters of the 1.59% on IE9 and for virtually all of the 10.95% who ran IE10 

* Webcompat.com is a place to report bugs from any website across the web

* Tesla the inventor:
- He was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin
- Tesla felt that thought could be photographed ultimately. He believed we would develop ways to see thought and that people would communicate with their thoughts. He had so many phobias that he couldn't have had close relationships with women. He didn't like most of the jewelry that they wore or the perfume, and he couldn't bear to touch hair. In fact, he didn't like to shake hands.
- Tesla underwent a debilitating trauma a few years after recovering from cholera. This time, the nature of the illness and its causes were a complete mystery. Tesla's physical senses, which had always been remarkably acute, seemed to go inexplicably into overdrive, paralyzing him with an overabundance of sensation. Tesla shunned physical contact with other people, with a special aversion to touching hair. To avoid shaking hands with people he met, Tesla lied that he had injured his hands in a laboratory accident.
- Tesla claimed to never sleep more than two hours
- In middle age, Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain; they spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere
- Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress
- Tesla had serious differences with Edison & Marconi & a lot of animosity
- In 1917..Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal
- Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions

* Mexico which has one of the highest prevalence rates for obesity in the world,  introduced a 8% "sin tax" on energy dense food (275 kcal/100 g).

* India is the largest importer of defense related equipment in the world. Of its annual spend of over $50 Billion on arms, over 50% of that is spent on imports.

* The son of a government bureaucrat, Subramanian Swamy was raised in New Delhi but left in 1962 to pursue a doctorate in economics at Harvard, the beginning of a nearly 50-year affiliation with the university, as an associate professor and summer lecturer. Over the years, Mr. Swamy has served five terms in Parliament for two different parties that have since become part of Mr. Modi’s governing party. He settled into a routine of spending winters in India and summers teaching at Harvard. Mr. Swamy’s wife, Roxna, is a member of the Parsi community, which emigrated centuries ago from Iran. One of his sons-in-law is Muslim. He has nearly three million Twitter followers - NY Times

* The journalist, Suhasini Haider is Subramanian Swamy's daughter

* Steve Wozniak stayed at Hewlett-Packard before he finally jumped to Apple. Bill Gates stayed at Harvard until he wrote the first code for what became Microsoft Basic. Larry Page and Sergey Brin stayed in graduate school until Google started to become viable as a business. They even tried to sell their business to Yahoo for one million but Yahoo said no.

* America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately it’s all the same. We’re all the same in that we’re enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.

* Aedes albopictus, known as the Asian tiger mosquito, is found on Long Island and is capable of transmitting Zika in a laboratory setting. As bats eat flying insects, including mosquitoes, a Long Island town is using bat houses in several parks to attract more bats to the area. Bats can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes per hour. New York State is home to nine bat species — none of them vampire bats. New York State is home to nine bat species — none of them vampire bats. Less than one-half of 1 percent of all bats in North America carry rabies, according to the Humane Society of the United States - NY Times

* Sir John Chilcot’s 12 volume report covering 2.6 million words (the complete works of Shakespeare contain 8,85,000 words) found that not all peaceful options had been exhausted in the lead up to the war and the invasion was by no means a final resort. His inquiry took 7 years, a year longer than the 6 year Iraq war.

* Like Machine Learning - "A passion is a theory. Now you have to test your theory. The world is your laboratory. Construct the experiment that will test your theory. Then test and test and test and tweak and test more" - James Altucher

This Week I Learned - Week #165

This Week I Learned -

* Azure App Service app cloning can be used to clone apps from one region or one app service environment to another. 

* Active geo-replication in Azure SQL Database provides database-level disaster recovery, cross-region redundancy, readable online secondary databases, and automatic asynchronous replication.

* On June 2, 2016, users from multiple locations faced issues searching for a product on Amazon’s desktop as well as mobile websites. The problem lasted for more than 3 hours.

* Based on interest-based ads policy pages of Facebook and Amazon is that they are both associated with the Digital Advertising Alliance & follow the same modus operandi

* The average age of an InMobian is 28 years

* It takes quite some time to draw a cartoon & color it

* In October 1887, John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon, developed the first practical pneumatic or inflatable tyre for his son's tricycle

* Henry Nicholas III cofounded fabless semiconductor firm Broadcom in 1991 from a spare bedroom in a Redondo Beach, Calif. condominium with business partner Henry Samueli, his professor at UCLA to become one of the most financially successful student-teacher partnership of all time. In February 2016 Broadcom finalled a $37 billion cash and stock deal to be acquired by chip firm Avago and, the largest acquisition in technology to date.

* In 1984, less than half of people on The Forbes 400 were self-made; today, 69% of the 400 created their own fortunes. To merit a score of 10, a member of the Forbes 400 (billionaires) would have to have been born into poverty, or lower middle class, and had to overcome obstacles such as being left an orphan, forced to work low-paying jobs, or faced abuse or discrimination.  Oprah Winfrey, who grew up dirt poor, raised alternately by her single mom and her grandmother, and was sexually abused by several male relatives, and George Soros, who survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest, fled Hungary under Communist rule and worked his way through the London School of Economics as a railway porter and a waiter, are prime examples of what a 10 represents.
1: Inherited fortune but not working to increase it: Laurene Powell Jobs
2: Inherited fortune and has a role managing it: Forrest Mars Jr.
3: Inherited fortune and helping to increase it marginally: Penny Pritzker
4: Inherited fortune and increasing it in a meaningful way: Henry Ross Perot Jr.
5: Inherited small or medium-size business and made it into a ten-digit fortune: Donald Trump
6: Hired or hands-off investor who didn’t create the business: Meg Whitman
7: Self-made who got a head start from wealthy parents and moneyed background: Rupert Murdoch
8: Self-made who came from a middle- or upper-middle-class background: Mark Zuckerberg
9: Self-made who came from a largely working-class background; rose from little to nothing: Eddie Lampert
10: Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles: Oprah Winfrey

* Teens react differntly to information when they believe it has been endorsed by many or few of their peers, even if these peers are strangers, according to UCLA researchers.This behavior influences posts they may "like" on Facebook

* India Post is one of the prime carriers that Amazon India uses as a delivery channel in over 19,000 pin-codes through 155,000 post-offices which includes a majority of outlets in rural areas across all 35 states and union territories in India.

* Tiger Global Management, the largest investor in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, reduced its stake in the rival company Amazon by about two-third in the January-March 2016 quarter. Alibaba has investments in PayTM, Snapdeal, NDTV’s gadget e-commerce venture, Gadgets 360.

* Every year, Indian Railways loses about Rs.1,500 crore in providing 53 concessions as a part of social service obligation, including those for senior citizens, differently-abled and patients. Of the total loss of Rs.1,500 crore on passenger fare concessions, the largest chunk of about Rs.1,000 crore is accounted for by subsidies for senior citizens. The Parliamentary Affairs Ministry pays the full ticket fares for Members of Parliament travelling on railway concession passes - The Hindu

* The automobile industry is the largest constituent of the manufacturing sector in the country's economy which contributes to more than 47% of the manufacturing GDP of the country...it is the fifth largest sector receiving Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the country.

* "There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income." — Manmohan Singh

* Happydent White chewing gum is an Ayurvedic Proprietary Medicine! It lists Neem satva, Pudina satva, Pudina spiceta, Meetha (baking) soda as ingredients and is manufactured by Perfetti Van Melle, a global confectionary conglomerate headquartered in Lainate, Italy and Breda (the Netherlands). Perfetti Van Melle India crossed 1,200 crores in 2010 and 1,600 crores in 2012.

* Hong Kong Phoenix Television political commentator Wu Jun thinks Trump “could in fact be the best president for China,”

* The New York City Marathon sure has come a long way; from 127 entrants in its inaugural year (1970) to being the largest marathon in the world in 2015 with over 49,000 finishers!

* When drinking alcohol, intoxication occurs when it passes from the stomach and intestines to the blood, in a process called absorption. While all types of ingested alcohol are eventually absorbed, the rate of absorption is determined by factors such as biological sex, body weight, type of alcohol, full or empty stomach, speed of consumption, and the use of medications or other drugs in your system. For most people, the body can process approximately 1 to 1.5 ounces (oz.) of pure alcohol an hour, which is the amount contained in a single standard drink (i.e., twelve oz. beer, five oz. of wine, or one and a half oz. of hard liquor). While the choice of alcoholic beverage can vary between people, the rate at which the alcohol is absorbed into the body does not change  - Go Ask Alice!

Bing Search API v5 sample refers to jQuery library on Google CDN

It was gratifying to see a complete JavaScript sample for Bing Search API version 5

Though there is nothing wrong with the sample making a reference to the jQuery library on Google CDN, it felt a little strange as Microsoft should have favored its own CDN

Back in 2012, Hotmail's sign-up page used to use Google's ReCAPTCHA service

This Week I Learned - Week #143

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft claims that Service Fabric is the foundational technology on which it runs Azure core infrastructure. It powers some of the Microsoft cloud services such as Skype, InTune, Azure Event Hubs, and Cortana.

* A new version of Firefox is shipped every six weeks. Mozilla calls this pattern "release trains".

* WPOStats compiles case studies and experiments demonstrating the impact of web performance optimization (WPO) on user experience and business metrics.

* Google Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at Google are the software engineers responsible for ensuring that all of Google’s services are super reliable and super fast, all of the time.

* Google Translate is translating one million words every second.

* India is the third-largest market for mapping services

* The Asus Chromebit taps into the demand for a simple cheap computer of the type that the failed Aakash project was supposed to service. Its central processing unit is the size of a chocolate bar, it costs about Rs 8,000 and it can be hooked to almost any external monitor and keyboard. It works off cloud storage. If Chromebit is hooked on to an old personal computer, it is a cheap and instant upgrade.

* Both Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL feature Continuum for phones, enhanced by the optional Microsoft Display Dock accessory. This Windows 10 feature allows people to use their phone like a PC by connecting it to a monitor and transforming it for larger-screen entertainment, or adding a keyboard and mouse to work like a PC with Windows 10 apps like Microsoft Office, while simultaneously taking calls or performing other tasks

* PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel defines start-ups as creators of vertical innovation and not horizontal innovation. Vertical innovation refers to new technology that has not been created before. A start-up aims to create a monopoly in a niche market, and then expand to new markets. Meanwhile, horizontal innovation (also called globalisation) is about bringing existing technology to places that don’t have it. Once a start-up finds a repeatable and scalable business model, it ceases to be a start-up. Examples of once-start-ups include YouTube, Facebook, and Alibaba. Start-ups make products that cater to a niche in ways that haven’t been done before. This makes start-ups unpredictable, because a new product may not resonate among its apparent users and may require constant adjustments before it gets there.

* Jeff Atwood writes that at Discourse.org they have a default avatar renderer which produces nice looking PNG avatars for users based on the first letter of their username, plus a color scheme selected via the hash of their username. 

* 2015 is closing with a string of weather anomalies all over the world. Scientists say the most obvious suspect in the turmoil is the climate pattern called El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean for the last few months has been dumping immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. Because atmospheric waves can travel thousands of miles, the added heat and accompanying moisture have been playing havoc with the weather in many parts of the world. Although El Niños occur every three to seven years, most of them are of moderate intensity. The current El Niño is only the third powerful El Niño to have occurred in the era of satellites and other sophisticated weather observations. It is a small data set from which to try to draw broad conclusions.

* It is  is flawed logic to base investment decisions on past performance. For instance, the Sensex which was at 3,000 levels in 1999, is 26,000 now. In the interim, it fell from 21,000 to 8,900 in 2009. Performance of asset classes will change every year.

* Between 1989 and 2001, 3,245 hectares of water bodies were lost in Hyderabad. Bengaluru had 262 lakes in 1960, but today only 10 of them hold water

* Gramener has 6 founders who all worked in IBM on the same project

* Fourth generation technology standards allow to take advantage of more bandwidth and better output. So what has been done traditionally through wired applications can be now done on wireless devices at an equal speed. So consumers with 4G devices can access high-speed data, high-definition voice and do real-time video conferencing. The network also offers superior latency for gaming. Since the high-speed data service runs on multiple frequencies, it would need a phone that can seamlessly function on multiple frequencies that are compatible with 4G network.

* Online video in India
- Rajshri Entertainment, one of the oldest players in India’s film industry, produces 200 minutes of web-only video a day which it offers free to consumers on YouTube and similar services, paid for by advertising.
- 21st Century Fox, which owns many of India’s most popular television channels through its Star India unit, began offering free online access to delayed sports broadcasts and hundreds of movies and TV shows through a website and mobile app called Hotstar. Right now, however, Hotstar is entirely free. Although about 100 advertisers help pay the bills, most of the company’s Indian revenue comes from its Star television channels
- Some Indian YouTube channels now have millions of followers, and the company says the total number of hours watched has been growing 80 percent annually. YouTube recently began allowing Indians to download and store clips for later viewing. YouTube shares the revenue from advertising around the clips, giving content creators like The Viral Fever and All India Bakchod a way to earn a bit of money, although ad rates are low — from about $1 to $4 per 1,000 viewers reached, or roughly one-tenth the rate in the United States.

* “I did things like reading the encyclopedia for fun and I was lucky in that my parents would buy me any book I wanted.” - Bill Gates (reads about 50 books in a year)

Azure Powershell 1.0.1 MSI is hosted on Amazon's S3 file storage service

The Azure Powershell 1.0.1 MSI installable package is hosted on Github which serves this installable file from Azure's competitor Amazon's S3 file storage service

Back in 2012, Hotmail's sign-up page used to rely on Google's ReCAPTCHA service.

Name changes in the Azure world

If you are developing for the Microsoft Azure platform, you not only need to learn about new developments but also keep track of name changes so that you can follow old documentation. Anyone authoring a book on Azure has a tough job on his hands. Here's a look at the current Azure related nouns now and what they were in the past -

Old name	New name
Windows Azure	Microsoft Azure
Team Foundation Service, Visual Studio Online	Visual Studio Team Services
SQL Azure	Microsoft Azure SQL Database
Azure Web Sites	Azure Web Apps
Project Oxford	Microsoft Cognitive Services

work in progress...

This Week I Learned - Week #135

This Week I Learned -

* Azure interacts primarily through RESTful APIs. Even behind the scenes the Azure PowerShell libraries call the Azure REST APIs. Many times from PowerShell you would just use the Azure PowerShell cmdlets, however there may be times that either there is no cmdlet available as the REST API is very new or perhaps you wish to interact without requiring the Azure PowerShell modules to be installed.

* Interesting facts from S Anand's talk on Data Visualization
- Visualization is communicating ideas in a easy to understand way
- Doordarshi Party keeps contesting in elections across India but hasn't won a single seat so far
- Bilaspur and Shimoga have weather patterns opposite to what's in their sorrounding regions
- Russian scamsters linked to a shopping site in UK (sucking up their bandwidth) to sell their products so that potential buyers could view product information from the UK site
- When people cook up numbers they cook up round numbers
- Excel and Powerpoint can also help with visualizing data. You can do gecoding in Excel
- Airtel runs on DB2

* While you read from a Kindle, Kindle reads you. Amazon keeps very detailed records of your reading habits

* It is estimated that at least 6.5 million Chinese had no official status because they were born outside the family planning rules which restricted couples to one child.

* Vir Sanghvi's formula for tipping in India: for okay service, 12 per cent is great. For good service, 15 per cent. For exceptional service, 18 per cent to 20 per cent. At the Oberoi group, where a service charge is now the norm, many old staff members left when it became clear that they would now have to share their tips. At ITC, where servers get tips, the best waiters and captains can make so much money that not only do they always earn more than their bosses, the restaurant managers, but many have even refused to be promoted to a managerial grade because then they would lose their tips.

* If a person is lying they will add excessive details to make themselves sound more credible to their chosen victim.

* As Anton Chekhov's family fell into poverty, he had to pay for his own education, which he managed by private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers, among other jobs. He sent every ruble he could spare to his family, along with humorous letters to cheer them up. In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. His literary output is prolific

* Any journalism that uses multi panelled comics format as a medium of storytelling can be called comics journalism

* Prabodhankar Thackeray, father of Bal Thackeray, changed the spelling of the family name to mimic his favourite satirist from British India, William Makepiece Thackeray

* Konkan Railway has 2 timetables - the regular one and for monsoons (trains run slower). The route covered by it has 92 tunnels, 59 stations. The longest tunnel is 4 miles long and takes 10 minutes to cover. The Pernem tunnel took 7 years to complete. The 800 kilometers track opened on January 26th, 1998

* Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for the Second World War. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities. It was produced as part of a series of three "Home Publicity" posters (the others read "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory" and "Freedom Is in Peril. Defend It With All Your Might"). Detailed planning for the posters had started in April 1939. Printing began on 23 August 1939.Design historian Susannah Walker regards the campaign as "a resounding failure" and reflective of a misjudgement by upper-class civil servants of the mood of the people. As the popularity of the poster in various media has grown, innumerable parodies, imitations and co-optations have also appeared, making it a notable meme. Examples have included "Now Panic and Freak Out" (with an upside-down crown), "Get Excited and Make Things" (with a crown incorporating spanners), "Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake" (with a cupcake icon), "Don't Panic and Fake a British Accent", "Keep Calm and Hate Apple" (with the Windows logo), "Keep Calm and Hate Microsoft" (with the Apple logo), "Keep Calm and Switch to Linux" (with Tux) and "Keep Spending and Carry On Shopping".

This Week I Learned - Week #134

This Week I Learned -

* You can use Windows Server 2012 Standard for the SQL server nodes-unlike in previous Windows releases, you can enable the failover cluster feature in the Standard edition of Windows Server 2012 as well as Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. SQL Server 2012 does require the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2012 to use the AlwaysOn feature

* SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups are supported between Microsoft Azure Regions

* There is a web application with code on Github that can detect a user's location and find the latency of various Azure data centers with respect to the user. For Amazon Web Services timings, there is CloudPing.info

* The whitepaper "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" [PDF] by James Hamilton summarizes the best practices accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live

* The game The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land which currently occupies #1 spot (over 1,000,000 downloads and 31M minutes played on opening weekend alone) on Apple’s Top Free App chart uses Azure DocumentDB. The Next Games development team selected Azure DocumentDB, the fully managed NoSQL JSON database as they needed to ingest massive volumes of game profile and state metadata while serving low latency queries (under 10 ms)

* Microsoft also launched Cloud Accelerator Program in India along with its partners to help businesses create cloud adoption blueprints to identify applications which can move to the cloud.

* SQL AlwaysOn is the technology of choice for disaster recovery of a SQL Server. Azure Site Recovery now provides native support for SQL AlwaysOn.

* Pat Meenan has tirelessly been maintaining the WebPageTest tool for nearly 10 years. Web performance guru Steve Souders, is responsible for many key WebPageTest features including the filmstrip. This tool now has a book on it - Using WebPageTest

* Wayback Machine API can retrieve Wayback Snapshots at a certain time. If the timestamp parameter not specified, the most recently available capture in Wayback is returned.  It may be possible to recover an entire website from the Wayback Machine

* A growing number of institutions are allowing their photo archives via Flickr & its API

* Only 1% of medical articles on Wikipedia have passed review, yet it is widely accessed, with 5 billion page views per year.

* Staycation is a fancy term for spending your time-off at home.  In the days of cheap air travel and a booming economy this never would have been considered.  Some people have spent their lives in one area and want to get away and explore new places.  But we are a country on the move.  According the U.S. Census Bureau, about 1 in 6 Americans move each year and the average American moves 11.7 times in their life.

* "moot" formerly and more acceptably meant "open for discussion, debatable". It is now more commonly used to mean "irrelevant to discussion or debate". "awful" was originally used as a term to mean full of awe, even better than awesome but it now means something exceptionally bad. Auto-antonyms are words which in and of themselves have two or more generally accepted meanings in the English language that directly or generally contradict each other. Such words are also known as antagonyms, contronyms, and words having self-contradictions. Many such contra-definitions arise from slang usage. Others develop as a result of their frequent use in sarcasm.

* 43 Mutual Fund houses in India manage over Rs 13 trillion worth of assets

* The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation that administers the city is divided into 150 wards and 18 circles. These 18 circles are clubbed into 5 zones very appropriately named North, South, Central, East and West Zones. The Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) takes care of most of the defense lands and the residential colonies in Secunderabad. It is divided into seven wards. Osmania University is independently handled by the administration of the college. Hyderabad Urban Agglomeration (HUA) is spread over four parliamentary constituencies – Hyderabad, Secunderabad, Malkajgiri and Chevella. In terms of the state assembly constituencies, the HUA is spread over 26 of them across three districts. - Hyderabad Urban Lab

* Routemaster Hyderabad is a website for crowdsourcing bus routes information in Hyderabad and for generating bus routes

* Cyberabad Police provides Crime Maps and Accident maps by police station and nature of offence

* Group A employees form less than 5 per cent of the total Indian Central government workforce; Group C and D are about 90 per cent.

This Week I Learned - Week #111

This Week I Learned -

* Unlike a virtualized application includes not only the application - which may be only 10s of MB - and the necessary binaries and libraries, but also an entire guest operating system, the Docker Engine container comprises just the application and its dependencies. It runs as an isolated process in userspace on the host operating system, sharing the kernel with other containers. Thus, it enjoys the resource isolation and allocation benefits of VMs but is much more portable and efficient.

* The reason Myntra wants its customers to transact only from apps is that consumer data is most valuable when tied to specific individuals, as it enables a closer tracking of user behaviour. It is also why Google, Facebook, and other tech companies want your mobile number. It is also why Google, Facebook, and other tech companies want your mobile number The Hindu

* 40% of railway tickets & 60% of flight tickets are booked through e-ticketing - Ravi Shankar Prasad, Telecom Minister, India in a TV interview

* Of the 750 million plus cellphone users in India, less than 30% use Internet on their phones

* If you like to work while standing you are have joined other proponents like Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Hemmingway & Charles Dickens

* California farmers produce more than a third of the America’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. To do that, they use nearly 80 percent of all the water consumed in the state - NY Times

* United States (9,833,000 km²) is 2.99 times as big as India (3,287,263 km²).

* What Homer Simpson thinks of India:
Flanders (offering his dog to Homer): I'll pay for all the shots
Homer: (Dog) Shots? What is she going to India?  (at 15:45)