When the camera gets wings
Goa-based writer Cecil Pinto and his son Desmond have taken up a new hobby. They have been clicking and sharing aerial views and photographs of prominent landmarks, which they put out via Facebook.
This has earned them quite a bit of attention and even wows. Most of the time, we don’t have a clue of how our part of the world looks like from the skies. To attain this, they’ve made use of camera mounted on a drone.
This hobby doesn’t come cheap. It cost them about Rs 1.2 lakh equipment. Search the Internet or various drone-mounted cameras, and the prices that show up can touch upto Rs 1.4 lakh, maybe beyond. Some come at a suspicious low price (Rs 5,999), but it’s not clear how effective these will be.
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, or an un-piloted aerial vehicle and sometimes a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) can come in different sizes. These are tiny ones that can be held in your hands. Camera-carrying drones are tiny ones that can fly maybe a hundred metres range.
For instance, the Parrot AR.Drone is a remote controlled flying quad-copter helicopter built by the French company Parrot. It can be controlled by mobile or tablet operating systems such as the supported iOS or Android within their respective apps or the unofficial software available for Windows Phone, Samsung BADA and Symbian devices. Nixie is a small camera-equipped drone that can be worn as a wrist band.
Up, up and into the sky these go and come back with all kinds of amazing angles and perspectives of mother earth. Even if this was your own city or village, you might have never imagined that it looked that way!
Drones are making news in India, and we will probably hear more about them. Someone in New Delhi wanted a gold medal to be delivered on the convocation ceremony via a drone. Delhi police have reportedly mobilised drone-power when communal riots broke out in Trilokpuri, specially to spot bags of bricks meant to be used in the violence. DRDO also reportedly has plans to use drones on the border. This also recently became part of the Indo-Pak war of words. But reaching the citizens’ hands — if it’s allowed to stay there — is quite another thing altogether.
———————–
Tool to take you online
WordPress is one tool which you simply can’t afford to ignore if you’re thinking of having just about any online presence.
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. CMS is a technical way of saying that it helps you to set up and run websites without needing to have much technical knowledge.
Its features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress was used by more than 23.3% of the top 10 million websites as of January 2015. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites. Understandably the figures are impressive! Best of all, it was released under the GPLv2 (or later) license from the Free Software Foundation. So you can freely use it, without having to worry about being labelled a ‘pirate’.
Nowadays, there are many ‘themes’ which offer you the chance of making a easy-but-attractive WordPress site. Some of these are free, others are paid. But even in the paid themes, you would end up paying something like $50-60…in one case, I got some good ones even at US$9.
Interestingly enough, some of these themes seem to have Indian coding skills behind them. Suraj Vibhute wrote in from Libertyville, IL and commented: “We are based in the US and have offices in New Delhi as well.”
Great going!
MyThemeShop LLC
https://mythemeshop.com/themes/
————–
How Indian shop has surged ahead
Flipkart’s head of product Punit Soni on Bloomberg: “Mobile is incredibly mainstream in India. People say there’s an app for everything in the US. In India, people use an app for everything. There’s no option but using an app. Large swaths of Indians are never going to see a laptop. Our focus and our energies is to make sure we make a good mobile experience, but we have a desktop site on.”
(The interviewer reminds that ecommerce in India is just 1% of the total of all transactions. And Flipkart says more than 60-70% of its retail transactions are paid for in cash. Still.)
Flipkart in figures, in its own claims: 45mn registered users. 10 million daily hits. 8 million shipments per month.
————
InstaPayBack
…is now on Android. It’s promising you cashback right from your Android device “on all your purchases”. Its features the chance to earn cashback on major online retailers, to activate “exclusive” coupons and deals, to review your account, and track orders.
