Bhubaneswar: Planning to have ‘abadha’ (temple prasad) of the well-known temple in the city? Or want to serve a mouth-watering vegetarian dish on a special occasion? Or wish to gift your parents living in the city temple food while staying at a faraway place? You don’t have to rush to the nearest temple, tiffin carrier or bag in hand, wait in a long and often serpentine queue before getting your stuff anymore. All you have to do to avail the heavenly stuff now is to click a few buttons on your computer, laptop or smart phone from the comfort of your home or office. And Bingo, your Prasad reaches you in next to no time – and at a highly affordable price too.
This coming together of tradition and cutting edge technology has been made possible by a few young entrepreneurs with fire in their belly and a desire to explore new horizons by launching start-ups in hitherto unexplored areas.
One such online prasad provider service, templethali.com, is creating ripples among the netizens in the Twin City Started by six engineering students of the College of Engineering and Technology (CET), Bhubaneswar and operating out of a two-storey house in a residential area in the Macheswar in Bhubaneswar. The templethali.com is providing ‘abadha’ (cooked bhoga) from the famous Ananta Basudeba temple in Old Town and Shani Temple near Vani Vihar to begin with. The customer just has to make the booking online and the ‘abadha’ reaches his doorsteps. The cash-on-delivery facility on offer saves the customer the usual hassles in making payment. .
Abhishek Lenka, one of the founders of the templethali.com, told odishatv.in, “Someone can also make payments online through net banking, debit or credit cards.”
The templethali.com, launched as recently as July, 2016, is planning to open franchises across Odisha as well as outside the State after people showed interest and began making queries to the company.
“People from Western and southern parts of the State as well as faraway cities such as Bangalore and Mumbai are showing interest to open franchises. So one can imagine what kind of response we are getting from people,” a visibly pleased Lenka said.
Customers too are happy with the online Prasad service. For some, it is a highly convenient option to get vegetarian food in the city with just a click of mouse. For others, especially those located in faraway places, it is a convenient way to order temple food for their parents or near or dear ones, who cannot travel from one part of the city to the other.
Hariprasad Swain, an engineering student, said, “I have ordered ‘abadha’ 10-12 times online through templethali.com. The service is fantastic. Above all, templethali.com delivers single orders also, which is the USP of the online prasad service provider.”
Sudhansu Sekhar Seth, who ordered ‘abadha’ online from Bangalore for his aged parents in Bhubaneswar, said, “For the first time, I availed the service through templethali.com. The idea of this service is really great.” He is, however, sceptical about the quality of the food following the kind of feedback he got from his parents.
There will always be Doubting Thomases like Seth, who will wonder whether the ‘prasad’ on offer online is the actual stuff offered to the deities first. But most customers believe in the honesty and integrity of the service providers.
Ritu Poddar, a Mumbai resident, who availed the service of jagannathpurionline.com, said, “It’s a matter of trust. We have faith on the service provider that it would not betray us in the name of god. In any case, the freshness and the aroma of the prasad leave little room for any doubt.”
Echoing Poddar, Ganesh Sahu from Chennai, said, “We believe no one will cheat customers in the name of god. The online ‘prasad’ service provider might fool someone once, but he will be caught out sooner or later. Therefore, I don’t think they would risk their reputation as well as their business by resorting to such fraud.”
For those wanting to avail ‘abadha’ from the Sri Jagannath temple in Puri online, there are Puri based start-ups like jagannathpurionline.com and mahaprasadam.net. These portals are a Lord Jagannath-sent opportunity for those living outside Puri, who do not have either the time or the money to come down to the pilgrim town to get the dry ‘prasad’ of the deities. These start-ups are offering deals through which one can get the dry ‘prasad’ sitting in the comfort of his/her home or office and that too at an eminently reasonable price.
Says Amresh Sahu, proprietor of the jagannathpurionline.com, “Around 98% of our customers are from outside Odisha. Social media and word-to-mouth have been acting as catalysts for my business to grow. As long as the internet is there, I do not see any decline in the business.”
Online dry Prasad from the Sri Mandir has even transcended national boundaries and gone global, claims Ramkrushna Dikshit, owner of the mahaprasadam.net and a servitor of the Puri temple.
“Most of the times, I get orders from abroad to provide dry ‘prasad’ of the deities. As Bhubaneswar and Cuttack are within 100 km radius of Puri, I hardly get orders from these places,” Dikshit told odishatv.in.
If the response to the first few start-ups is anything to go by, the online Prasad market is soon going to be an overcrowded place.
Announcing the launch of the new facility, the EPFO said after linking of UAN with Aadhaar, members will be able to avail better and speedy EPFO services online.
Few things to know about EPFO's new facility to link Aadhaar-UAN online:
1) The facility is available at its website - epfindia.gov.in.
2) A user can access the facility by selecting the "eKYC Portal" link under the Online Services section on the EPFO website.
3) On the next page, the user can proceed by clicking on the 'Link UAN Aadhaar' link.
4) The EPFO member or subscriber will have to provide his/ her EPFO UAN to proceed. An OTP will be sent to his/her mobile linked with UAN.
After OTP verification, the member will have to provide their Aadhaar number. Another OTP will be sent to their mobile number or email ID linked with Aadhaar. After verification, if the UAN details are matched with Aadhaar details, then the UAN will be linked with Aadhaar, following which the subscribers can avail online EPFO services linked with Aadhaar.
The companies are awaiting a final approval from the Petroleum and Explosive Safety Organisation (PESO) before they start the online booking and delivery of diesel on the lines of delivery of LPG cylinders.
The entire process will require a new set of delivery tankers with nozzles and hosepipe fitted on them. There will be safety clearance for areas in which these tankers can move. Any congested, busy and residential areas will be strictly prohibited from home delivery as fueling requires open space. The companies have experience of supplying aviation turbine fuel on similar lines, however, it may vary slightly as conditions are different in cities and rural areas compared with airports.
Heavy traffic, narrow roads and small size retail pumps within city limits make it extremely difficult for large earth movers and loaders to come to the fueling pumps. Hence, online booking and onsite delivery would be helpful, said an official. However, the PSUs said they are mindful of their obligations and will take care of entire safety process before online booking for home delivery becomes operational.
Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had last month said that all petroleum products will soon be available on e-commerce platforms. In a tweet, he had mentioned, “Using the technological advancements in the IT & Telecom Sector we will soon be starting online home delivery of Diesel & Petrol.”
The joint admission board, policymaking body on IIT admissions, took the decision at a meeting in New Delhi on Sunday.
In a statement, IIT Madras director and JAB 2017 chairman Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi said:
It has been decided that the JEE (Advanced) will be conducted in online mode from 2018 onwards. Further information regarding the examination will be provided by the JAB in due course.
The HRD ministry had earlier introduced the option of taking the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains online.
Also Read: CBSE’s ‘Udaan’ helps 135 girl students crack IIT JEE 2017
The JEE (Mains) is the entrance examination for admission to engineering courses offered across the country and a qualifying exam for JEE (Advanced) which is required for admission to the prestigious IITs and NITs.
The board has taken the decision to go completely online to make logistics and evaluations easier, reported PTI citing a JAB member.
“The concept was being discussed for many years, but it was necessary to have adequate infrastructure to conduct the exam online,” the member added.
Also Read: IITs likely to scrap some courses to check fall in admissions
More than 13 lakh students took the JEE (Mains) this year, with less than 10% of them going online. Around 2.2 lakh students were eligible to write the JEE (Advanced).
As per a CBSE notification, the JEE Main online examination would be held over two days with two sittings each day.
As many as 6,000 students from Odisha will appear in the examinations, which will be held at 18 centres across the state.
While the state capital will have the maximum of nine centres for the examination, Balasore will have two. The other centres in the state are Angul, Berhampur, Cuttack, Jeypore, Rourkela and Sambalpur.
In a bid to make the test more transparent, CBSE has asked the students to come to the examination hall only with their admit cards as no other articles will be allowed inside the hall. No student will be allowed to enter the hall with mobile phone, wrist watch and other electronic gadgets.
For the first time CBSE will provide pens, pencils and other items to candidates in the entrance hall. The Board has also installed mobile jammers in all the examination halls.
The software provides intelligence data, including website traffic information, keywords projected AdWords spend, and other SEO-related data.
The SEMrush's research, which digs into the online user behaviour of 192 million viewers, has come up with this data.
The keyword "IPL" has more than 22,520,00 related keywords. While the IPL keyword volume in April 2017 was 823,000, in April 2018, it has risen to 1.8 million, said a statement.
"When it comes to big-ticket events like IPL, marketeers get only one chance to create a campaign that perfectly targets their audience in the context of that event. This means, they should rely on hard data more than intuition when developing creatives and crafting the right brand message.
"Data lets us analyse what worked in the past, as well as upcoming trends, and gives us a better shot at connecting with customers," said Rohan Ayyar, Regional Marketing Manger- India, SEMrush.
After discovering the flaw in WhatsApp, Rob Heaton -- who has made similar security-related findings in the past -- exploited the flaw by creating a Chrome extension with a minimal four lines of code, Digital Trends reported late on Tuesday.
"What that means is that when you go offline and then come back online to read a message, that action is being logged.
"Those online and offline actions from both participants in the conversation can then be correlated to identify when two people are messaging each other," the report added.
Heaton warned that this data can be easily collected on a mass level and then sold to third-party firms for advertising purposes.
"People with irregular sleeping patterns are, after all, excellent customers to sleeping pills manufacturers," The Next Web reported.
The code could even be tweaked to correlate more than two people messaging each other.
Heaton was able to identify when users were going to sleep by seeing their first and last "online" statuses for the day. According to reports, users actually can do nothing to prevent hackers from being able to spy on them, unless WhatsApp security researchers find a way out.
"Using WhatsApp, you can set the app to show your 'last seen' statuses to either everyone, only contacts, or no one, but no such feature exists for your online status," the report said.
In an interview on Saturday, Children's Commissioner for England Anne Longfield slammed the ways social media giants use to draw children into spending more time.
She said parents should be proactive in stopping their children from bingeing on the internet in the summer holidays.
"It's something that every parent will talk about especially during school holidays; that children are in danger of seeing social media like sweeties, and their online time like junk food," the BBC quoted Longfield as saying in the interview.
"None of us as parents would want our children to eat junk food all the time.
"For those same reasons we shouldn't want our children to do the same with their online time."
Last year, industry watchdog Ofcom said the internet overtook television as the most popular media pastime for children in the UK.
Children aged five to 15 are spending 15 hours a week on the internet, reports the BBC.
A study earlier this year of screen time and mental well-being among teenagers suggested that moderate use of devices may be beneficial.
The research, which appeared in the journal Psychological Science, was based self-reported data from 120,000 15-year-olds in England.
Dubbed as 'SIREN', the fake botnet campaign was discovered by ZeroFOX, a Baltimore-based security firm specialising in social-media threat detection.
"To our knowledge, the botnet is one of the largest malicious campaigns ever recorded on a social network," ZeroFOX wrote in a blog post.
ZeroFOX's computer vision and natural language processing algorithms identified over 8,500,000 tweets from close to 90,000 accounts related to the 'SIREN' campaign.
"'SIREN' has been incredibly successful, netting over 30,000,000 clicks from its victims. This data can be gleaned because the botnet uses trackable, Google shortened URLs," ZeroFOX added.
ZeroFOX last week reported the findings to both the Twitter and Google security teams, who promptly removed the offending accounts and links, comprehensively remediating the 'SIREN' botnet.
All of the nearly 90,000 accounts had a suggestive photo of a woman as a profile picture and a female name as the display name.
The accounts either engaged directly with a target by quoting one of their tweets or attracting targets to the payload visible on their profile bio or pinned tweet.
The tweets themselves generally contained canned, sexually-explicit text, often in broken English, compelling the target to click, such as "you want to meet with me?" or "Push, don't be shy" [sic].
Once a link is clicked, the user is issued a series of redirects.
The final redirect websites encouraged the user to sign up for subscription pornography, webcam or fake dating websites.
"These types of websites, although legal, are known to be scams. Many of the websites' policies claim that the site owners operate most of the profiles," the blog post said.
A large percentage of the bots were female names with nude or semi-nude pictures.
In terms of the 'SIREN' actors themselves, a large chunk of the Twitter accounts' self-declared user languages were Russian.
"The poor English, Cyrillic text and sheer magnitude of the infrastructure is indicative that 'SIREN' is a group or actor that is technically proficient and probably located in the Eastern Block of Europe," ZeroFOX said.
The botnet is named after the mythical Greek Sirens, who seduced wayward sailors with their singing and lured them to their doom.
"Many requests have been received from the candidates of Kashmir Valley regarding difficulty they are facing while filling in the online application form for NEET (UG)-2020. In view of the above, it is hereby notified that, in addition to the existing online application facility, the candidates in the Kashmir Valley can also submit the application form offline..." a statement by the NTA read.
Students can download the form available on the website ntaneet.nic.in and fill it in the hard copy, deposit it at the Nodal centre mentioned below and obtain a receipt therefrom or they can use a hard copy of the form available at the Nodal Centre, fill it, depositing it at the centre and obtain a receipt therefrom.
The online registration for the NEET 2020 had started from December 01. According to the notification released by the NTA, aspiring candidates can apply for NEET 2020, with the last date to apply being December 31, 2019.
(IANS)
As of November 2019, 433 million active Internet users in India are of the age of 12+ years old and 71 million are in the age bracket of 5-11 years who access the Internet on the devices of family members, according to the report titled "Digital in India" which is set to be released this week.
Based on data from the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2019, the research also found that nearly 70 per cent of the active Internet population in India is daily users.
"While nine out of 10 Internet users in urban India access the Internet at least once a week, in rural India, there is an addition of 30 million new users who access the internet daily compared to March 2019," said IAMAI.
In India, close to a third of users access the Internet for more than one hour during Sundays/holidays versus a normal working day.
The time spent on the Internet continues to be higher in urban India compared to rural India.
According to the report, with better connectivity, quality of service, and affordability of mobile Internet, there could be an increase in rural consumers spending more time on the internet in future.
Interestingly, the report found that 26 million new female Internet users were added by November 2019 which is a 21 per cent increase compared to that of nine per cent increase in male users.
While the proportion of male Internet users in rural India is more than double than female internet users, however, usage of Internet among females in rural India is growing at a fast clip with 31 per cent increase in Internet population in November 2019 compared to March 2019.
The research showed that mobile continues to remain the device of choice for accessing Internet in both urban and rural regions.
(IANS)