15% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

August 31, 2015 Ajay GhoshScience & Technology 0

For many Americans, going online is an important way to connect with friends and family, shop, get news and search for information. Yet today, 15% of U.S. adults do not use the internet, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data.

The size of this group has changed little over the past three years, despite recent government and social service programs to encourage internet adoption. But that 15% figure is substantially lower than in 2000, when Pew Research first began to study the social impact of technology. That year, nearly half (48%) of American adults did not use the internet.

A 2013 Pew Research survey found some key reasons that some people do not use the internet. A third of non-internet users (34%) did not go online because they had no interest in doing so or did not think the internet was relevant to their lives. Another 32% of non-internet users said the internet was too difficult to use, including 8% of this group who said they were “too old to learn.” Cost was also a barrier for some adults who were offline – 19% cited the expense of internet service or owning a computer.

The latest Pew Research analysis also shows that internet non-adoption is correlated to a number of demographic variables, including age, educational attainment, household income, race and ethnicity, and community type.

Seniors are the group most likely to say they never go online. About four-in-ten adults ages 65 and older (39%) do not use the internet, compared with only 3% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Household income and education are also indicators of a person’s likelihood to be offline. A third of adults with less than a high school education do not use the internet, but that share falls as the level of educational attainment increases. Adults from households earning less than $30,000 a year are roughly eight times more likely than the most affluent adults to not use the internet.

Rural Americans are about twice as likely as those who live in urban or suburban settings to never use the internet. Racial and ethnic differences are also evident. One-in-five blacks and 18% of Hispanics do not use the internet, compared with 14% of whites and only 5% of English-speaking Asian-Americans – the racial or ethnic group least likely to be offline.

Despite some groups having persistently lower rates of internet adoption, the vast majority of Americans are online. Over time, the offline population has been shrinking, and for some groups that change has been especially dramatic. For example, 86% of adults 65 and older did not go online in 2000; today that figure has been cut in half. And among those without a high school diploma, the share not using the internet dropped from 81% to 33% in the same time period.

CampusKnot By Indian Americans Receives $100,000 in Funding

August 31, 2015 Ajay GhoshFinance/Economy, Science & Technology 0

CampusKnot, a startup founded by three Indian American students and a German student at Mississippi State University has received $100,000 in funding, setting a record for private investment in a student-run startup at the university, a media report said. CampusKnot, founded by Rahul Gopal, Hiten Patel, Perceus Mody and Katja Walter, is an online educational hub designed to increase collaboration among faculty and students, the Clarion-Ledger newspaper reported.

“We’re excited, but we’re scared at the same time,” said Gopal, a senior aerospace engineering major at MSU. “It’s funny, I guess, how I feel about it, but I’m looking forward to continuing to grow the company.”

CampusKnot, which is free to users, seeks to serve as a single Web site for students at MSU and other colleges and universities to easily reach teachers and classmates. The platform also offers space for faculty to post course syllabi and related academic material. “The faculty will be the celebrities of this site,” Gopal said. “They can post access to knowledge for their ‘fans.’”

CampusKnot debuted in 2013. Since then, the creators have spent two years refining their project at MSU’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the College of Business. They won second place in the center’s 2013 startup competition and, in December, earned a $2,500 startup grant. CampusKnot has moved into its first office within the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park’s business incubator in Starkville, Miss.

Amazon to Invest in India to Make It Biggest Non-U.S. Market

August 31, 2015 Ajay GhoshBusiness, Finance/Economy, Science & Technology 0

Amazon is planning to invest billions of dollars to catapult India as the world’s largest market outside of the United States, according to news reports. The e-commerce retail company said it could invest as much as $5 billion in the country.

Amazon, which entered India in 2013, committed to investing $2 billion in its Indian operation last year with an eye on capitalizing on the country’s expanding middle class. A large portion of the middle class, according to reports, is going online at a rapid rate. Most of the funds are expected to go toward expanding the company’s network of warehouses and data centers, as well as strengthening its marketplace platform.

It hopes to compete with India-based e-commerce retail rivals like Bangalore-based Flipkart, which was founded by former Amazon employees Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. CEO Jeff Bezos said Amazon’s presence in India has already exceeded expectations when it invested the $2 billion.

A report put together by The Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India forecast a 67 percent increase in average annual online spending in 2015. Consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers projected India’s e-commerce industry was likely to balloon in value from some $17 billion in 2014 to $100 billion by 2019.

Abhay Parasnis Named Adobe CTO

August 31, 2015 Ajay GhoshScience & Technology 0

Abhay Parasnis, a Pune-born Indian American technology veteran was named by Adobe as its chief technology officer and senior vice-president of platform technology and services late last month. Abhay Parasnis was appointed to the position July 20, the company said in a statement. Parasnis will drive Adobe’s technology strategy, architecture and innovation roadmap for its cloud services, focusing on integration of its three cloud services and will provide a consistent customer experience via the cloud and enable its cloud-based go-to-market strategies.

As the majority of Adobe’s business has moved to a cloud and services-based model, including its flagship offerings Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and most recently Adobe Document Cloud, the opportunity to drive a more integrated and scalable architecture has become a key initiative for the company.

“Abhay brings a powerful combination of technical credentials and operational experience to this new cto role,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s president and CEO. “Our cloud platforms are the foundation for our next phase of innovation and growth as a company, and Abhay is the ideal candidate to lead this initiative.”

Parasnis wrote on Adobe blog that he has interests in Adobe from both personal and professional perspectives. “As a hobbyist photographer, I’ve had a personal connection to Adobe for some time. I’m passionate about landscape photography and can’t live without Photoshop CC. Most recently, I’ve become a hardcore Lightroom CC user,” he said.”

“On the professional side, I have great respect for Adobe’s successful transition to cloud-based services. Having led similar efforts at Oracle and Microsoft, I know first-hand how challenging that shift is for business, technology and the company culture. I’m energized by the opportunity to continue the journey and help take Adobe into its next phase of growth,” he said.

Parasnis brings nearly 20 years of experience in the software industry. Most recently, he was president and chief operating officer of venture-funded enterprise mobility leader Kony. He previously held a variety of enterprise technology, platform and cloud roles at companies including Microsoft, i2, Oracle and IBM.

“Adobe has set the standard on how to successfully shift to a cloud-based business while delivering great innovation for customers,” Parasnis said in a statement. “Adobe’s cloud initiatives are dramatically re-shaping how content is created measured and consumed, which is unique in the software world and a great technical challenge. I’m excited to dive in and make great things happen,” he said. Parasnis has a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunications from the College of Engineering Pune, and holds more than 20 patents spanning enterprise and consumer Internet technologies.

UC Irvine Computer Scientist Wins $250K Award for Young Scientists

August 4, 2015 Ajay GhoshBusiness, Science & Technology 0

IRVINE, Calif. — Syed Ali Jafar, a University of California-Irvine computer scientist who has changed the world’s understanding of the capacity of wireless networks, last month won the 2015 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists in physical sciences and engineering.

One of three winners chosen from among 300 candidates from highly ranked American universities and research institutions, Jafar will receive a $250,000 unrestricted cash prize and a medal in September at New York’s Museum of Natural History.

A professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Jafar explores the fundamental performance limits of wireless communication networks. Determining network capacity — the maximum data rates that can be reliably supported — is the holy grail of network information theory, according to Jafar and others.

And with the rapid growth of wireless communication networks, the quest has taken on unprecedented urgency. Jafar’s research group has gained worldwide recognition for its numerous seminal contributions to this topic, including its groundbreaking work on interference alignment in wireless networks.

This research found that data rates are not limited by the number of devices sharing the radio frequency spectrum, a discovery that changed the thinking about how wireless networks should be designed.

“This is a truly remarkable result that has a tremendous impact on both information theory and the design of wireless networks,” one of the judges, Paul Horn, senior vice provost for research at New York University, stated in a UCI press release.

Jafar became interested in science in high school. “Einstein’s E=mc2 captured my imagination,” he said. The equation made him wonder about how something so profound could be so simple and beautiful – and it became his lifelong dream to pursue beauty through science.

As a graduate student studying information theory at the California Institute of Technology, Jafar found similar elegance in the formula describing the capacity of an information channel. He realized that much about the capacity of communication networks was still unknown and made it his life’s work to solve the mystery.

Jafar earned a B.Tech. degree at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, an M.S. at Caltech and a Ph.D. at Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. He’s a fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, and he recently received the UCI Academic Senate’s Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research.

Jafar was also recognized as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and included by ScienceWatch among the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014.

Phone notifications kill concentration: Study

August 4, 2015 Ajay GhoshScience & Technology 0

Mobile phone notifications can ruin your focus even if you do not actually pick up the phone to respond to them, a study says. “Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance,” lead study author Cary Stothart was quoted as saying.

“We found that notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task,” Stothart said. Study authors, Ainsley Mitchum, and Courtney Yehnert ran volunteers through an attention-monitoring test to reach their conclusions.

Participants were found to perform significantly worse on a task when their phones were buzzing or ringing. In fact, they were three times more likely to make mistakes. The level of distraction was comparable to actually answering a phone call or writing a text message.

“If you really want to keep your mind on a task, just ignoring your phone notifications is not enough. You need to disable them altogether,” the researchers said. An earlier study from Rice University found that phones can be detrimental to learning process. The research said while users initially believed the mobile devices would improve their ability to perform well with homework and tests and ultimately get better grades, the opposite was reported at the end of the study.

Companies in India create thousands of U.S. jobs

August 2, 2015 Ajay GhoshBusiness, Science & Technology 0

A remarkable story that has often escaped public attention in the overall context of the vibrant India-U.S. relationship is that Indian companies have been pouring investment dollars into businesses in the U.S. and creating tens of thousands of American jobs. A new report from the Confederation of Indian Industry and the accounting firm Grant Thornton reveals that not only is Indian investment in the U.S. large, it’s also extremely widespread and clearly growing.

The 100 Indian-based companies surveyed for the study have made an aggregate $15.3 billion investment in their U.S. operations. That, in turn, has created 91,000 jobs in the U.S., which by any measure is a substantial contribution to the American economy. Those jobs are scattered throughout the country. In fact, the survey found that Indian companies have a presence in all 50 states.

The U.S. isn’t just a favored destination for the time being; it is likely to remain attractive for Indian investors for years. When asked if they plan to invest in the U.S. in the next five years, 84.5 percent of the Indian companies surveyed said yes. Only 4 percent said no. Asked if they plan to hire more employees locally in the U.S. over the next five years, 90 percent of the companies answered in the affirmative.

The survey also challenges the greatest stereotype about the kinds of Indian companies in the U.S. They are not all information technology companies. Far from it. In the U.S., IT comprises 40 percent of Indian-company investment, according to the survey. The rest is highly diversified. Life sciences, pharmaceuticals and health care companies make up 14 percent of Indian investment here. Another 14 percent are manufacturers and mining companies. 16 percent offer financial, engineering, construction and entertainment services. The remainder is companies in the automotive, energy, hospitality and food businesses.

The average investment received from Indian companies per state is substantial: $433 million. The top five states with the highest volume of investment – $1 billion or more – are Texas ($3.85 billion), Pennsylvania ($3.56 billion), Minnesota ($1.8 billion), New York ($1.01 billion) and New Jersey ($1 billion).

In terms of employment generated by Indian companies, the top five states are New Jersey and California, each with about 9,000 jobs, Texas (6,000 jobs), Illinois (5,000 jobs) and New York (4,000 jobs).

All of these numbers have been rising steadily, a sign that the U.S. market is among the strongest investment destinations in the world. These substantial investments are also a testament to the trust and openness that India and the U.S. enjoy both at the people-to-people and government-to-government levels. According to Select USA, India is now the fourth-fastest growing source of foreign direct investment into the United States. The significant and growing contributions of Indian investments in the U.S. remain a vital component of the bilateral relationship.

American firms, of course, have long been major investors in India. Foreign direct investment by U.S. firms in India has been more than $1 billion a year. Efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make economic growth a hallmark of his administration have accelerated U.S. investment there.

India has been lowering barriers to investment and encouraging business expansion. For example, the Indian government has over the past year raised limits on foreign investment in sectors such as insurance, medical devices, railways and defense. This will no doubt provide myriad opportunities for U.S. companies to increase their presence in India and will strengthen Indian companies so that they can enlarge their footprint in the U.S.

The exchange is good for both nations and should be encouraged. The U.S. and India have much in common. They are the largest democracies in the world. They are also economic powerhouses that are helping each other grow in a dynamic global marketplace. We have a stake in each other’s economic future – and that future is very bright.

Arun K. Singh is India’s ambassador to the U.S.

Category: Science & Technology