BlackBerry hangs up on phones; now what?

BlackBerry confirmed Wednesday it will no longer manufacture its own devices, instead outsourcing it to partners.

DBless Innovative Tech—There wasn’t an inkling of surprise inBlackBerry’s announcement Wednesday that the bygone  smartphone powerhouse would stop manufacturing its own hardware, part of a strategic pivot to security-focused software.

The surprise will be if it can pull it off a transformation that leads it anywhere near its former influence.

BlackBerry has been launching phones under its own brand that use its secure software on other handset makers' hardware, evidenced most recently by this summer’s launch of the security-minded DTEK50 Android phone, which is based on a TCL/Alcatel reference design.

“We haven’t been our own manufacturer of devices for some time now,” BlackBerry’s Vice President of Design and Device Marketing Scott Wenger told me on the phone.

But demand for recent and upcoming BlackBerry-powered devices may be contained to a tiny subset of the large, fiercely competitive smartphone market — a far cry from BlackBerry of its heyday.

The official pronouncement Wednesday out of Waterloo, Ontario, served as a punctuation mark to a long ago era, one still recalled with nostalgic fondness by a cadre of professionals who back in the day considered BlackBerrys an essential tool to conducting business.

Wenger made it clear that BlackBerry still plans to sell BlackBerry-branded phones, though he revealed no specifics on the product roadmap. BlackBerry previously killed its Classic line of phones.

There’ve been leaks that a high end Android-based DTEK60 touchscreen phone could turn up soon, and BlackBerry has stated that a Qwerty-keyboard Android phone was in the offing.

Expectations aren’t exactly high that these devices will be anything more than niche-oriented handsets, however, whose appeal lies mainly with corporate types who treasure BlackBerry’s roots in security.

BlackBerry did announce that the first licensing agreement under its new strategic path comes in a newly formed joint venture in Indonesia called BB Merah Putih. It is led by PT Tiphone, which is an affiliate of Telkomsel, the largest carrier in that country. Indonesia is now BlackBerry’s strongest market, telling in its own right.

BlackBerry is also still readying an update to its BB10 mobile operating system, but we’re talking about an operating system that barely registers. It’s no wonder BlackBerry has also embraced Android on recent models.

Indeed, by Gartner’s measures, phones based on the BlackBerry operating system recorded a puny global 0.1% market share in the second quarter of 2016, below even the 0.6% Microsoft has with Windows phones. Android and iOS devices claim an 86.2% and 12.9% share, respectively.

In a blog post, BlackBerry chief operating officer Ralph Pini indicated that “the future of the smartphone industry is about ‘the smart’ in the phone, and less about the form factor.”

Wall Street seems pleased with BlackBerry’s direction—the stock (BBRY) is up more than 5% in afternoon trading. But the smart and still unanswerable question right now is, how much will BlackBerry participate in that future?

Amazon will give you $1M if your AI can chitchat for 20 min

DBless Innovative Tech – Amazon is offering $1 million to the university team that builds an artificial intelligence that can keep up its side of the conversation with a human being for 20 minutes.

On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a $1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people “coherently and engagingly” for a third of an hour.

Such a system would be unprecedented “and at least five times more advanced than state-of-the-art conversational AI,” said Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa.

To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a $100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon’s Alexa team.

Amazon hopes the prize will lead to scientific breakthroughs in conversational AI, especially helping computers learn, understand, communicate and engage in "commonsense reasoning," the company said.

The push comes as Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa is coming to multiple platforms beyond its original home on Amazon’s Echo speaker, and as artificial intelligence is anticipated to become the cutting edge of tech companies' interfaces with their customers.

If no team meets the admittedly high bar, the team with the best performing “socialbot” will win $500,000.

The Alexa Prize announcement comes the same day several of the world’s largest tech companies announced the formation of a consortium aimed at fostering the promise of artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google and Facebook have formed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.

Google enterprise biz rebrands as Google Cloud

DBless Innovative Tech — Google has rebranded its business software business as Google Cloud.

The Alphabet unit made the announcement at a press conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

Google is playing catch up to competitors Amazon.com and Microsoft in cloud computing, the rapidly growing business in which the tech giants host other companies' digital businesses on their servers.

Google for Work, Google's Cloud Platform and all of Google's cloud-based services will be combined under Google Cloud.

Forrester Research estimates that Amazon will generate $10.8 billion in cloud revenues this year,  Microsoft will generate $10.1 billion and Google will generate $3.9 billion.

"The cloud partner that customers choose really matters. It amounts to picking which technology curve to bet on, and it’s a long-term bet, there's more to be had than cost savings and increased security," Google cloud chief Diane Greene wrote in a blog post. "Over the next five years, businesses of every kind will be transformed by smart data, analytics, machine learning and digital communications."

Google's pitch: cloud technologies it is developing with "machine intelligence capabilities."

Google also rebranded Google Apps for Work. Now known as GSsuite, these apps include Gmail, Docs, Drive and more for businesses.

Coming soon to a TV near you: ads for Facebook Live

DBless Innovative Tech — Facebook wants you and its other 1.7 billion to stream more live video.

So coming soon to a television screen near you: A major advertising campaign for Facebook Live. It's another bid persuade regular people to embrace what public figures and publishers already have.

The ad campaign, created by Facebook's in-house ad studio called The Factory, will feature videos posted by users of the giant social network, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook Live launched earlier this year. It's a key priority for CEO Mark Zuckerberg who says Facebook is now a "video first" company.

It's unclear when the ad campaign will begin or how much it will cost, the Journal said. Facebook declined to comment.

Does Facebook speak your language?

DBless Innovative Tech — Facebook has been translated into three new languages — and it has its users to thank.

Be it "what's on your mind?" or the "like" or "share" buttons, a dedicated community of Facebook users want to make sure all the words and phrases on the social networking service are accurately translated into their native tongues.

In all, Facebook is now available in 101 languages with the addition on Friday of Maltese (the official language of Malta that has more than 400,000 native speakers), Pulaar (a dialect of Fula spoken by more than 7 million across West and Central Africa), and Corsican (spoken by some 200,000 people and listed on UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.)

Human-powered translation is critical to Facebook's growth. More than 1 billion of the 1.7 billion people who use Facebook speak a language other than English. That number will undoubtedly increase as more people connect to the Internet.

"As the number of languages grow, the number of people on Facebook also grow," Iris Orriss, Facebook's director of internationalization, told USA TODAY.

The goal: to eventually translate Facebook into all the languages requested by Facebook users. More than 40 more languages are currently in the process of being translated.

"A  lot of passionate people feel strongly about having Facebook in their language," Orriss says.

Among them: Vannina Bernard-Leoni who two years ago leaped into action after learning that Facebook was being translated into Breton, spoken in the Brittany region of France.

"Corsican people thought, 'If Facebook can be translated into Breton, why not  in Corsican?'" says Bernard-Leoni, director of innovation and development at Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli.

She gathered six students to begin translating English into Corsican. Soon hundreds joined in and ultimately a couple thousand, all tapping into the broader movement to save the Corsican language.

"The Corsican language is really important for the people here, and unfortunately, it is an endangered language." Bernard-Leoni said. "The translation proves that Corsican language is not only a vestige of the past...it could be a part of the future for our people."

In 2007, Facebook was only available in English, a significant barrier to Facebook's stated mission of connecting every person on the planet. A hackathon at Facebook produced a community translation tool that let Facebook users translate the service into their native tongues. The tool released in 2008 asks native speakers to submit translations of phrases and then solicits their votes on which is the most accurate.

"It's almost like a democratic process to find the best version of Facebook in that language," Orriss says.

Another important effort for Facebook: to bridge language and culture so that people can translate status updates into their own tongue, without any of the colloquial language getting lost in machine translation. Most recently, Facebook has turned to neural  networks in a quest to improve automated translation of status updates.

Samsung looking into reports of overheating Note 7 replacements

Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 problem has burned it in the stock market and among some smartphone users, but a strong pivot into crisis management could minimize the damage.

SAN FRANCISCO — Samsung has another problem with overheating batteries catching fire in its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone: Some of the replacement units may be doing the same.

Consumers in the U.S., South Korea and China who picked up the replacement device this month have said it is too hot, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

“We would like to reassure everyone that new Note 7 phones are operating properly and pose no safety concerns. In normal conditions, all smartphones may experience temperature fluctuations,” Samsung said in a statement to USA TODAY on Thursday.

The South Korean electronics giant, which recalled 2.5 million Note 7 devices in 10 countries on Sept. 2, says it is addressing the replacement issue with individuals via customer service.

“Samsung is currently contacting the customer (in China) and will conduct a thorough examination of the device in question once we receive it," a company spokeswoman said.

Samsung says more than 60% of the devices purchased in the U.S. and South Korea have been exchanged; of those, 90% of consumers opted for a new Note 7 rather than a refund or another Samsung model.

The company confirmed a report in Reuters that about 1 million people have replacement Note 7s.

While the fluid nature of the recall has taken a toll on Samsung's reputation, it is not unique in an industry burned by battery problems. Dell and Hewlett Packard are among several companies forced to recall products because of overheating.

"It looks bad for them, but we have to put this in perspective," says Jack Gold, an independent tech analyst. "Lithium-ion batteries (in the Note 7 and other smartphone brands) have always been an issue. When you try to fast-charge a phone, it is going to get very hot."

U.S. set to hand over Internet address book

A contract between the U.S. and a non-profit in charge of all internet domain names expires September 30th, and has lawmakers saying America is "giving away the internet" USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — The United States doesn’t own the Internet, but it’s held the oversight contract for the organization that runs its address book for many years. That’s set to change Friday.

The U.S. contract with the non-profit organization in charge of all Internet domain names expires then, and the non-profit running the database will become autonomous and be accountable to international stakeholders in the Internet community. These include a governmental advisory committee, a technical committee, industry committee, internet users and telecommunications experts.

The move has been opposed by some officials and lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz who say America is “giving away the Internet.”

On Thursday the attorneys general of Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas and Nevada filed a lawsuit asking a Federal district court to block the transition, alleging that it amounts to giving up U.S. government property, among other complaints.

At issue is oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Created in 1998, the non-profit is based in Los Angeles. One of its main jobs, done by ICANN's Internet Assigned Numbers Authority department, is tocoordinate the Domain Name System that matches address such as usatoday.com with their actual computer addresses, in this case 66.61.174.185.

To do that and other work, ICANN  has a budget of more than $126 million a year.

Started with a clipboard

It began as a simple list of what names were assigned to what numbers, known as Internet Protocol addresses and was originally kept on a clipboard by Jon Postel, a famed computer scientist at the University of Southern California.

The 18-year-old contract for ICANN has been held by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration but is not scheduled to be renewed on Sept. 30 when it comes to an end.

At that point ICANN will become an autonomous non-profit.

Very little will change with the handover. The staff and protocols will remain the same. The only thing that changes is that the Department of Commerce will no longer be approving every change to the domain name root file, the master list of Internet addresses that allows the Internet to function.

ICANN was always meant to become independent. However, under President George W. Bush, the Department of Commerce backed away from that, saying in 2005 that it would “maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file.”

Snowden legacy

Efforts to make it truly neutral and global came back into the fore in 2013, after National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the depth of U.S. Internet surveillance. That pushed ICANN to begin working on a new transition proposal.

Some in the United States argue that the Internet has always belonged to the United States and that the handover is illegal and dangerous.

Cruz, a Republican from Texas and a former candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, has been very vocal in his belief that the move will harm the freedom of the Internet.

“The likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Chinese President Xi Jinping should not dictate what can be read, written, distributed, bought and sold on the Internet,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post when the plan was first discussed.

A last-ditch effort by Cruz to stop it from taking effect failed this week when it was not included in a stop-gap spending bill to keep the government open.

U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), ranking member of the Senate subcommittee on communications, technology, innovation, called the suits by the four attorneys general lawsuit baseless.

“Congress has repeatedly rejected attempts to delay the transition. Technology and foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum agree that any delay of this transition would only empower our enemies and undermine America’s commitment to keeping the internet open and free," he said in a statement.

Others dispute that such censorship would even be possible. The new entity that is scheduled to take over control on Oct. 1 is run through consensus and includes multiple stakeholders from many countries, said Milton Mueller, a professor in the school of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a longtime participant in ICANN’s volunteer advisory groups.

“It’s not like Russia and China suddenly have more power than anyone else. All the governments in the room have to agree to give advice to ICANN, but it’s non-binding. ICANN can not take the advice, particularly if all the other stakeholder groups strongly object to it,” said Mueller.

“Their argument has been that ‘We are the bulwark of freedom in the world and if we let go of this, the Internet will go to hell.’ How much of them really believe that and how many are just exploiting this to make the Obama administration look bad isn’t clear to me,” said Mueller.

While the Department of Commerce had been very hands off in its oversight of the contract, at least it provided a sort of safety valve, said Mark Grabowski, a professor of Internet law at Adelphi University, in Garden City, N.Y.

“You knew if anything really went wrong you’d have the U.S. government to step in,” he said.

He expects any chances to be very gradual. “We really won’t know for three to five years whether this was something to worry about or not, whether the proponents can truthfully say, ‘We told you so,’ or the people who were critical had a point,” Grabowski said.

Top tech investor Marc Andreessen has quit Twitter (again)

Silicon Valley investor and prolific tweeter Marc Andreessen has abruptly abandoned Twitter, deleting all his tweets after writing: "Taking a Twitter break!"

Andreessen, cofounder of buzzy venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, is well-known for his constant Twitter presence, sending stream-of-consciousness tweetstorms and retweeting messages about tech, economics, and politics, at all hours of the day.

With nearly 600,000 followers, he is one of the tech industry's most prominent tweeters. "It's like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world," he enthused in a profile of himself for the New Yorker in May 2015.

But the Netscape cofounder has now apparently changed his tune. To hazard a guess, the departure doesn't seem to be permanent: He hasn't outright deleted his account, and his now-solitary tweet frames it as a "break."

Andreessen, who sits on Facebook's board, has taken a break from Twitter before. In February 2016, after he became embroiled in a row over Facebook's Free Basics internet program and colonialism, he stopped tweeting for weeks. 

In June, the Twitter tech community was rocked by another high-profile departure: Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator.Altman was more explicit about his reasons for leaving, arguing that "the platform rewards negativity and snark. There are occasional attacks on me and a lot on my friends. Outrage does too well on Twitter." (He has since resumed tweeting intermittently.)

Andreessen's Twitter hiatus comes amid rumours that multiple interested parties are looking to buy the social network - among them Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. The reports have pushed Twitter's stock to its highest in nearly a year, and it is currently hovering at around $22.60 per share.

Made in India wearable technology platforms are beating Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi

All of a sudden there is a sudden boom in the Indian wearable technology platforms. Beating Xiaomi's Mi Band, Vishal Gondal's GOQii is the market leader in India in this segment. 

SenseGiz, a Bengaluru-based startup that makes a safety monitoring wristband called SAFR, has sold around 35,000 devices so far. Priced at Rs 3,000, SAFR connects to a smartphone app and can detect if a user has got into an accident and alert emergency contacts, as per a news report by The Economic Times. 

Its primary markets have been Japan and the US. "Now, awareness is growing even in India," Abhishek Latte, cofounder and CEO of SenseGiz told the ET. 

"People should not throw the devices after a few months. To prevent that, there should be enough services that keep the consumer interested. Hardware is just one part," Gondal, whose GOQii counts former Googlesearch head Amit Singhal and WhatsApp's business head Neeraj Aroraamong investors, told the financial daily. 

Another wearable start up by an IIT Kharagpur alumnus, Blink operates a smartwatch and uses an inhouse operating system. The device will be priced at around $200 and will be launched by the end of September. 

Some of the wearable ventures that have won funding include Actofit, a fitness wearable that has received funds from Next Orbit Ventures; Azoi, another fitness wearable funded by Vedanta Capital, MadRat Games, which has built a wearable gaming suit and has been funded by Ratan Tata and others, and Leaf Wearable, a bluetoothconnected jewellery for safety of women and funded on crowdfunding platform Ketto.

The head of Yahoo's popular finance app says he knew the redesign was going to 'piss some people off'

The product team at Yahoo Finance had a hard time sleeping for the whole week leading up to the big redesign in July.

It's not because they weren't confident, says Michael La Guardia, the head of product for both Yahoo Finance and Sports, but because of the drastic changes he was about to bring to one of Yahoo's most popular products ever.

"We knew what we were doing was the right thing," La Guardia told Business Insider. "But anytime you change anything, particularly a product that's much loved and much used, you're going to find people flustered by it."

Since the July roll out of a completely revamped design, Yahoo Finance has received huge backlash from its users, estimated to be 75 million uniques a month, according to comScore. Its user forum is rampant with profanity-filled posts criticizing the changes, and even some prominent investors who used Yahoo Finance say they're ready to ditch the product.

But La Guardia says the change was necessary to improve the overall product. And despite all the vocal critics, he says the reception has been both positive and negative. The actual performance and engagement metrics have improved, too, La Guardia argues.  

"We refer to it as 'You moved my cheese phenomenon,'" La Guardia says. "I absolutely think we have a better product now."

La Guardia's team spent nearly 18 months conducting various user group studies to learn what the users liked the most and what parts of the product needed improvements. Even last week, he had dozens of users test new features, he says.

Some of the changes, like the continuous stream of articles, were made because it's become a trend led by Facebook and Twitter, La Guardia says. The native ads that now show up in the news stream is intended to maximize value for Yahoo's premium partners. The wider chart and video section? Those are supposed to present a consistent and fresh look across all of Yahoo's products, including Yahoo Sports, he says.

And despite all the complaints around Yahoo Finance's lagging speed after the redesign, La Guardia says that's just a matter of a "perception."

"The interesting thing about performance is that a lot of it comes down to perception," La Guardia said. "The actual speed, the actual numbers on this are faster than our previous numbers."

Although LaGuardia declined to give any meaningful numbers around the performance, he pointed out traffic has continued to go "up and to the right" since the redesign.

Just last week, its daily active users were up 5% from its 52-week average, and earlier this month, it even had the highest traffic day of the last 6 months - an impressive feat given the market has been relatively quite over the past couple months and finance sites typically don't see as many traffic spikes during the summer.

Still, La Guardia's the first to admit that it was a high-pressure situation because Yahoo Finance hadn't changed in nearly 7 years and it had such a huge and loyal following.

"It took a bit of an intestinal fortitude to go and take such an iconic product and say 'We're going to try to do it better,'" he said. "Product management for large consumer products is not for the faint of heart."

"Deserve to have users leave"

On the day of the new release, La Guardia sent out a personal email to 7 million Yahoo Finance users. It was intended to receive feedback from some of its most loyal users, but also part of La Guardia's effort to directly engage with people, he says.

"I can't make people's complaints go away, other than a day-in-day-out commitment to making the best product experience that we can possibly make," he says. "In trying to do that, we knew we were going to piss some people off."

That doesn't mean all the negative comments have gone unnoticed. La Guardia says he pays more attention to the criticisms so that he can learn from them. So far, he's addressed nearly 100 user complaints on the product, and in August, he even wrote a blog post detailing the types of new changes he's brought.

"My boss, Simon Khalaf, likes to say, 'The opposite of hate is not love, it's apathy.'  And what we're seeing is not apathy here - we're seeing that people really care about this product," La Guardia says.

The redesign touched upon all aspects of the site, including the backend of the product. That means it's now able to bring more innovation and new features that were previously impossible on the old site. He declined to share what exactly is in the pipeline, but said it will unlock "all kinds of innovations in finance."

People who don't like the new Yahoo Finance can still access the old version by going through international sites, like Yahoo Canada's finance page, as the update was made only in the US. La Guardia says he has no control over people's choices, but he'll continue to work hard to make them happy.

"I'm not trying to say good riddance. People should only be using Yahoo Finance if I'm actually delivering value to them. If I'm not, I deserve to have them leave. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up. I'm gonna keep trying to earn back their trust," he says.

Why Hackers Care About Your Medical File, Not Your Yahoo Email

The unconscious belief allowing us to eat-out twice a week even though we have never met, let alone seen, the chef that is responsible for making our food.

In the wake of the Yahoo Hack, where 500 million user accounts were stolen, we are forced to think about all of the places we are unconsciously believing will take care of our precious data.

While the damage of the Yahoo Hack was limited to a few spam emails on accounts that are probably inactive by now (sorry Yahoo, but you aren’t all that hot anymore), situations like this are more common than we think and have calamitous effects.

For instance, a Russian group known as the Fancy Bears Hack Team broke into the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) records and released positive drug-doping results of Simone Biles and the Williams Sisters. Not only does this tarnish the reputation of these athletes, but also looks bad on the validity of WADA.

And here’s your wake-up call: 47% of Americans have had their medical record hacked in the past 12 months. Excuse me? That’s absurd! Basically, either your record or my record is sitting on the hard drive of a very malicious person.

Our unfortunate hospital visits rely on the faith that our doctor knows what they’re doing, and our blind faith in the system that gave them their stamp of approval. And these are two very important things to think about, but we don’t even think twice about the fact that we just hand out our information all willy-nilly and don’t think about how securely it is handled.

By no means am I suggesting that you avoid giving out your information at a hospital, but there needs to be some solution to this.

The black market is paying big bucks for your medical information, which is worth 60x more than your credit card number, so you can imagine there are a lot of evil-minded people focusing all their efforts on cracking into doctors’ and hospitals’ records.

With your general information, social security number, insurance file, credit card number, and entire medical history on file, they hold a lot of power. Best case scenario: they open a line of credit up under your name. Worst case scenario: they wipe-out or change the medical history of thousands of patients, causing a huge blockage in operations resulting in poor treatment and even loss of lives.

Next time you are in a hospital or getting your flu shot take a look at the nurse’s computer terminal. Are the USB ports on her computer in plain sight and quick reach? This isn’t something you would see if you walked up to a teller at a bank.

Yes, there are a lot of problems that exist in healthcare data security, but it’s not like nothing is being done. You need to realize that twenty years ago, there were no standards for data security in hospitals, and often times they were still using paper records. The adoption of EHR (electronic health records) and CPOE (computerized physician order entry) systems has allowed the medical workforce to become more mobile and efficient, but also increased security issues.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) was enacted in 1996 and has made monumental progress in cyber protection, but it takes time for changes to be made nationwide, and they often find themselves reacting to situations as opposed to predicting and preparing.

Honestly, it’s a common happening across all industries, especially in business. How often do you find yourself reacting when you should’ve already been prepared? Probably more often than you’d like. Really the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to continue looking at the horizon and adapting.

Despite making around 2,000 movies a year, India’s film industry just doesn’t rake in enough money

Indian cinema may be churning out blockbusters that set the box office on fire but it will need many more movies such as Salman Khan-starrerSultan or Akshay Kumar’s Airlift for the industry to make a global mark.

India produces the most number of movies in the world at between 1,500 to 2,000 every year in over 20 languages, according to a new report by Deloitte. This is far above the 700 or so films made in the US and Canada annually.

Wrestling drama Sultan has been India’s biggest blockbuster till date in 2016, raking in Rs300 crore ($45 million), according to koimoi.com, a website that tracks box office earnings. The second in line is Airlift, based on the evacuation of Indians from Kuwait during the 1990 Iraq invasion; it made Rs129 crore. Of the top-10 grossers of 2016, six earned well under Rs90 crore, koimoi.com said.

So, the sorely-needed big hits remain few and far between.

From $2.1 billion currently, India’s gross box office realisations—a measure of revenue—are set to rise to $3.7 billion by 2020, according to the Deloitte report. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 11%. Yet, the industry pales in comparison to that in the US and Canada, for instance, which together rake in around $11 billion in gross box office realisations currently.

“Despite the large number of films and theatre admissions, the industry continues to remain small with respect to other global industries in terms of revenue,” the report said.

Revenues are muted in India due to several factors, such as the relatively lower number of multiplex screens and the slower rise in ticket prices. The massive piracy problem also contributes to the situation, costing the film industry around Rs19,000 crore every year, according to the report.

India lags most other countries when it comes to screen penetration, too, with only around six screens per million people, compared to 23 in China and 126 in the US. While ticket prices at multiplexes are getting steeper, they’re still much lower than the global average.

A complicated tax structure, bureaucratic hurdles, and a whimsicalCentral Board of Film Certification only worsen matters.

It’s time for a whole new script for Indian cinema.

Why Is Email Marketing An Important Part Of Inbound Marketing, When It Is An Outbound Strategy?

Email marketing is frequently seen as the classic outbound digital marketing strategy, but it also plays an important part in inbound marketing. While outbound emails focus on a specific sales ask and are often targeted at ‘cold’ new business leads, inbound email marketing seeks to increase the value of existing or lapsed customers through a process of targeted relationship building.

Here are some of the core reasons why emails should be included in any inbound marketing toolkit:

1) Target specific buyers

The old-fashioned way of conducting email marketing was to purchase a list, create an email and blast it out to the whole lot. This was called a ‘shot gun’ or ‘fire and forget’ method for good reason. It was generic, impersonal and highly inaccurate. The only way to gain results through such a strategy was to rely on sheer weight of numbers to bring in results through statistical chance.

Inbound marketing uses far more precise methods. Using a CRM it is possible to segment your contact database based on their relationship with you, growth potential, geographical location, job position or industry; or any other valuable metric. You can then go about crafting a specific message that meets their requirements. The more an email pre-empts the questions your prospects may have about your services, and help them understand your relevance to them, the higher your click through and conversion rate.

2) Easy to personalise

Once you have established your segments or buyer personas, you are free to completely personalise each email. In doing so, use should be made of every piece of personal data you can get your hands on, as emails featuring the prospects first name are far more likely to be opened and those that do not. This is your chance to make your prospect feel you care about them, you understand their needs and can provide them a valuable service. With emails you are not limited to simply personalising a little bit of text. Each segment can have a completely different campaign approach, with graphics, written content and video tailored to their needs. This is what makes email marketing such a cost-effective and powerful inbound marketing tool.

Timing can be personalised as well. For each segment, there will be an optimum time to send the email to boost click through rates. This may be based on the prospect’s time zone, viewing habits or working pattern. Insight can be gained into this through analytics. For instance, you may find that the prospects in ‘Segment A’ respond best to your emails when sent on a Wednesday afternoon. A marketing automation package will help you time your campaigns, so that each segment receives their email at the best time for them.

3) Create shareable content

Email-based content has a high share value. At the click of a button a prospect can share your email with friends, colleagues, clients and family. Email content can also be easily shared through social media. Emails are a very effective way to disseminate infographics and video content. The content itself is usually hosted on a part of your website, with a link embedded in each email. As the prospect clicks through to the content they are taken onto your website, and can then share the relevant URL with their network through social channels. You can also use emails to boost your social media following on YouTube or Facebook, by creating content that can easily be shared on these platforms. For more on creating content read: How To Bring Your Creativity To Life: 4 Easy Ways To Help Create Content

4) Low cost, effective results

Email marketing has very few of the costs associated with traditional direct mail; no printing or postage costs, no pay per click expenses. Sending emails is cheap, effective and comparatively quick, especially once you have established a portfolio of adaptable templates. It is also the most effective way of reaching out to an international market, as it eliminates all the time lags and expenses of contacting overseas customers by other means.

5) Fast Results

Unlike other forms of advertising, which can be slow to yield results, results from email marketing can be astonishingly quick. So long as the campaign is timed correctly, it is not uncommon to see enquiries or sales coming through within minutes of the email being sent. You can monitor your campaign statistics in real-time and watch your customers respond. There really aren’t too many better feelings than this!

6) Effects can easily be measured

Email marketing is a dream come true for analysts. It allows you to measure very precise metrics that give powerful insight into customer behaviour and the value of your data. Find out exact figures for delivery rates, open rates, which recipients have clicked through and when, how many people have subscribed or unsubscribed. With analysis playing such an important role in inbound marketing, the more in-depth and accurately results can be measured, the more valuable they’ll be in planning subsequent campaigns. In this, email marketing ticks all the boxes. You will know exactly how effective each email has been, and how much it has cost you to generate every lead. From this you can measure ROI from campaign to campaign, using this as benchmark to evaluate your messages.

Email marketing has such potential as an inbound marketing tool that you really cannot afford to ignore it. It is a tried and tested method of spreading brand awareness and sharing content, in a way that keeps your business at the forefront of your prospect’s attention, and makes it more likely that they’ll convert into leads.