Facebook India head Kirthiga Reddy steps down, a day after Free Basics closed down in India

A day after closing down its controversy-ridden Free Basics programme in India, Facebook India Managing Director Kirthiga Reddy stepped down from her current role and will relocate to the US.

The social networking giant has started looking for a successor to Reddy, who would be moving to Facebook's headquarters in the US in the next 6-12 months.

Reddy said she along with William Easton, Managing Director of Emerging Markets (APAC) and Dan Neary, VP Asia Pacific, have started looking for her successor in India.
Facebook yesterday shut down Free Basics in India, days after telecom regulator Trai barred operators from charging discriminatory rates for Internet access based on content.

"When my family relocated to India, we knew that we would move back to the US some day. It's a bittersweet moment to share that the return timeframe is coming up in the next 6-12 months," Reddy said in a post on the social networking site today.

"It will be business as usual over the next 6-12 months.
I am working closely with William Easton and Dan Neary as we search for my successor in India. I have also begun to explore new opportunities at Facebook back at Menlo Park," she added.

Free Basics was offered in India in partnership with Reliance Communications and was earlier known as Internet.org.
Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has also slammed Free Basics saying such differential pricing modes are "plainly not acceptable" and Internet should not become a monopoly of few.

After months-long consultation process, triggered by the net neutrality debate, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) earlier this week barred operators from charging different rates for data access, dealing a blow to Free Basics and other such plans like Airtel Zero.

While Facebook had promoted Free Basics as a programme aimed at providing basic Internet access to people in partnership with telecom operators, critics slammed the service saying it violated the principle of net neutrality.

Reddy said over the last six years, starting as the first employee for Facebook in India, she has had the privilege to be part of its amazing growth journey, from the firm's operations in Hyderabad to being a business partner for its clients.

"Above all, it's all been about our mission: Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
We have only just begun," she added.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog