"Tez" Google’s new payment app for India that uses Audio QR to transfer money

After several weeks of speculation and leaked details, today Google officially unveiled its first big foray into mobile payments in Asia. Google has introduced a new payment app in India called Tez (the Hindi word for “fast”). Tez features a technology called audio QR that allows users to transfer money using sounds to pair two devices.

“Send money home to your family, split a dinner bill with friends, or pay the neighbourhood chaiwala. Make all payments big or small, directly from your bank account with Tez, Google’s new digital payment app for India,” Google notes in its information portal about the new app.

Tez is Google’s play to replace cash transactions and become a more central part of how people pay for things, using their mobile to do so. But it’s also a chance for the company to push out some new technologies — like audio QR (AQR), which lets users transfer money by letting their phones speak to each other with sounds — to see how it can make that process more frictionless, and therefore more attractive to use than cash itself.

There are 300 million smartphone users in India, and phones with NFC are still relatively rare and expensive, with many users instead favoring entry-level and mid-tier devices. Tez is a step beyond Android Pay, because it allows users to link payment apps from Indian banks — it works with all of the country’s 55 banks on India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). UPI is a system that allows numerous bank accounts to be linked into one mobile app, and enables secure peer-to-peer payment. According to Bloomberg, digital transactions have surged after the Indian Government banned high-value cash notes late last year.

Tez has already gone live on Google’s Play Store, and Apple’s App Store on iOS as well. Google’s Tez is based on UPI platform, which stands for United Payments Interface and has been made by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). UPI allows for easy transfer for payments within bank accounts. With UPI, a user can just rely on the mobile number of the VPA (Virtual Payment Address) to make a payment straight to the bank account, rather than requiring the full bank account number, IFSC code, etc as is needed in most cases.

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Time to go Anonymous.

Facebook reportedly working on a mobile app that would allow to chat with people anonymously.

Facebook defied its strict Real-Name policy as the users had little complaints and some shifted to Ello.Now, it looks like Facebook's responding to complaints with a mobile app "that allows users to interact inside of it without having to use their real names." That's according to two people speaking with The New York Times, anyway; the sources also said the app is set to launch "in the coming weeks."

Nvidia 970 & 980 on-the-go GPUs

Nvidia announced their GTX  970 and 980 GPUs  for desktop at Game24,last month.Today they announced their Maxwell structure based mobile GPU components i.e. GeForce 970M and 980M for smoother gaming.

Similar to its desktop-bound brethren, expect the new line of GPUs to improve certain aspects of the rendering process - like multi-frame sampling anti-aliasing and dynamic super resolution - by nearly two-fold while keeping the bottom panels cool to the touch.

Google to enable faster search on slow mobile network in India

Google has been increasing its focus on the Indian market, bringing out products designed to cater to the price and quality-conscious people in the country.

Aimed at strengthening its foothold in the Indian mobile Internet space, tech giant GOOGLE Inc. will enable a faster search capability for mobile phones with slower network connections.

Using a new streamlined version of its search results page, the US-based company will automatically check if a user has a slow wireless connection and deliver a fast loading version of search.

“Increasingly, people in India are accessing the Internet through mobile devices such as their smartphones. However, not all of these devices come with fast, cheap connections,” Google distinguished software engineer Bharat Mediratta said in a blogpost.
Fewer bytes means users get answers faster and cheaper, he added.

“Google’s high-quality results will remain the same, but elements such as images and maps will only show up when they are an essential part of the result,” he said.

This is just another step Google is taking to organize the world’s information and make it accessible to everyone, including those who do not have fast mobile connections, Mediratta added.

Google has been increasing its focus on the Indian market, bringing out products designed to cater to the price and quality-conscious people in the country.
Last month, it launched its Android One  initiative in the country first, saying it was originally conceived with India in mind.

Under the Android One initiative, Google had initially partnered with three handset makers— Micromax, Karbonn and Spice—to bring out handsets priced Rs.6,399, aimed at making affordable smartphones available to a larger number of people.

It has now extended the programme to more manufacturers and is also expanding it to other countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

The US-based firm is also working to adding more options for searches in more local languages in India. Currently, Google has search options in nine languages in India (for PCs).

Google, which offers voice-based search in 47 languages globally, also expects to roll out services in Indian regional languages in the future, though no specific timelines have been set for the same.