Febin John James's Blog, page 18

It allows you to browse everything on the internet without any restriction.

It allows you to browse everything on the internet without any restriction. But, they do discriminate between voice packets and browsing packets allowing you to make free voice calls where as browsing is charged. Let’s see, if they step their boundaries.

How India saved its internet from greedy corporations

( Gursimranjeet Khamba, Co-Founder AIB) All Indian Backchod is an Indian comedy group who helped raise awareness of Facebook’s attack on Net Neutrality.

In early 2015, the Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) was hijacked by the telecom companies that it was supposed to be regulating. It released a consultation paper on Net Neutrality for public feedback.

The question was whether services like Whatsapp and Viber should be brought under an expensive licensing regime.

TRAI put a tiny, hardly noticeable link to the paper on their official government website. They also put in place a tight deadline for public discussion. They hoped the public wouldn’t notice this proposal to fundamentally change in how the internet worked.

Whatsapp had made messaging free of cost. Before Whatsapp, we had to buy costly messaging packs to send short messages. Every international message used to cost around Rs 5 (US $0.08) — a huge source of revenue for telecoms.

Next, several of these messaging apps started offering free calls. This cut into telecom operator revenues even more. Since these messaging apps made a lot of money through advertising, these telcoms hope to take a cut of it themselves.

Indian activists set up a website, savetheinternet.in, where people could answer all the questions that TRAI’s consultation paper was asking. People could then send these answers to TRAI with just a few clicks.

This was a smart move. But still, most people where unaware of the importance of Net Neutrality — the basic rule that all internet traffic should be treated equally, regardless of where it comes from, and that the internet access should be treated like any other utility.

Net Neutrality is a complicated concept, and the typical Indian had no understanding of it, or its importance. So we needed to an effective way to communicate all this.

Thankfully, the comedy group All Indian Backchod stepped in to help communicate this. Here’s their first video:

https://medium.com/media/479abe8bef4028ff6f48077097863850/href

Indians sent a million emails was sent to TRAI. (TRAI retaliated by “accidentally” leaking those million email addresses to public.)

Facebook and the telecom operators responded by changing their campaign to try and fool the Indian public into thinking that these corporations were actually in favor of Net Neutrality.

These corporations tried to define Net Neutrality as everyone being able to access some things on the internet. In fact, Net Neutrality is about everyone being able to access everything on the internet.

Facebook launched Internet.org with a major telecom operator, Reliance. They claimed they were providing free internet. In reality, they were providing a very limited slice of the internet with only the websites of companies who were registered with Internet.org. And Facebook had full control of which websites could register.

Of course, none of this was clearly mentioned in their innocuous-seeming promotional videos.

Facebook tried to trick the Indian public into thinking they were making these websites available as out of charity. In reality, they were very clearly violating the principle of Net Neutrality.

Next, TRAI made it more difficult to protest Facebook’s actions by moving the discussion to mygov.in. Now a citizen had to go through a long account registration process in order to make a public comment, and they only had a few days to do so.

All Indian Backchod again moved in to cast light on these corrupt actions with a second video:

https://medium.com/media/61655c442b38219b603a87b17bd2e67c/href

As a result, Facebook’s Internet.org effort was bashed all over the internet for violating Net Neutrality. Facebook rebranded it “Free Basics” and began an expensive marketing campaign to publicize it in every corner of the country.

Look at the normal people just going about their lives, using Facebook for free. They were designed to make people think, “How can Free Basics be a bad thing?” This even made lay-people question the activists.

What is your problem if they are giving us free internet?

Free basics was just another name for Internet.org. Though they changed their branding outside, the source code said otherwise.

Designers responded with parody ads drawing attention to the folly of Free Basics.

And All India Backchod came back with a third video:

https://medium.com/media/fe7092b601fc259b134c929f86abc019/href

The corporations quietly convinced TRAI to set up yet another short deadline for public discussion. In that time, a lot of emails were sent to TRAI through savetheinternet.in.

There were protests in the street. The Indian media hosted discussion panels where they brought experts from different fields to talk about Net Neutrality.

Here’s a photo of News 9's discussion panel. The Grammy Award winner Ricky Kej stepped in to speak up for the importance of Net Neutrality.

I was also part of the same panel.

Finally, all of these efforts paid off. The public outcry forced TRAI to side with citizens, and against the corporations. They ruled in favor of preserving Net Neutrality.

We had won.

In the big scheme of things, I had hardly contributed anything. The real heroes are the people behind savetheinternet.in like Kiran Jonnalagadda, and Tanmay Bhat’s team from All India Backchod, among many other activists.

Some of the corporations and their investors weren’t very happy about this. Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted this:

After getting utterly trashed in the Indian and American media, he was forced to publicly apologize for this.

India’s story had a happy ending. But America’s may not.

America’s president is currently working to destroy Net Neutrality. The telecom companies have lobbied congress and taken over the Federal Communications Commission. All that stands between these corporations and their bigger profits is us — the public.

I hope India’s Net Neutrality heroes inspire you.

Don’t remain silent. Raise your voice. Educate yourself on the importance of Net Neutrality. Explain its importance to your friends, family, and followers about its importance.

Together we can make sure that America continues to enjoy the same open internet that India does. Let’s do this!

How India saved its internet from greedy corporations was originally published in freeCodeCamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bringing hidden stars to light

We are here to improve the Infrastructure of Indian Football. We are starting by creating a database of players and clubs across the country. If you work with a club, you can get started by creating an account here. If you are a fan of Indian Football, just register an account. We will have more things soon.

Lot of Indian football players lack encouragement, infrastructure and visibility. Though a few metropolitan cities have coaching institutes, most cities across the country lack such facilities.

We want to take football training to every corner of the country. Our vision is to help India be in the top 10 on Fifa ranks. We are now beginning by connecting with football clubs across the country to see how we can help them.

Please feel free to reach us at jamesfebin@gmail.com .

Bringing hidden stars to light was originally published in InFootball Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building a start-up from scratch Pt 2: Designing the solution

This is a continuation of Building a start-up from scratch Pt 1 : Identifying the problem. In part two of the series I will talk on how I went about designing the solution. Make sure you follow Hackernoon and me (Febin John James), so that you won’t miss later part of the series.

Recap: I decided to write about my start-up while I build it. Last week, I identified the problem of the high cost involved in product development. I decided to make a tool that can help non tech entrepreneurs launch their product with a few clicks. To begin with I am focusing on services business.

I designed the solution by working backwards. I first made the prototype of the deliverable that I should give a user. Say, Joy wanted to start a laundry business called Joywash. Here’s what my tool should deliver.

So yes, I am generating an app that can help his users signup and make orders. Also a web portal where he can handle the orders.

Now , here is how my solution would look like.

All the services business have the same template. They have signup, login, make orders and track orders. You can use this tool to customize the app to your needs like changing the logo, add/remove user input fields etc.

I kept it minimal because the idea is to launch it fast . Later, improve the solution based on customer feedbacks.

For now there is only one template. But, later there will be a store where developers can sell their templates. I will discuss more about this in the later series. By next week the product should be ready, so stay tuned.

See you next week 

Net Neutrality , Why should I care?

You can access anything through the internet which is open. If you build something , you can show that to anyone around the world.

Few people want to change this.

Now why would they want to do that?

Because they are greedy and lazy. Net Neutrality enforces fair competition. Before Facebook there was Orkut. Facebook build a better social network and replaced Orkut.

Now , lets imagine if there was no net neutrality. Consider, you have build a social network which is better than Facebook. You will have to pay the Internet Service Providers like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, CenturyLink, etc to make your services accessible to your consumers. If you don’t pay, no one can access your site. You won’t grow.

Even before you start, you are killed.

Established companies can remain lazy. They don’t have to innovate. They only have to pay your service provider. They will remain as a monopoly. This means death for start-ups.

I am consumer, why should I care?

As a consumer, you may get the basic package for free. It might include Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter etc. Now, if you want to access medium, you will be charged an extra amount say $5, Dropbox another $5 and so on .

To install this , they will have to track you. So it’s a death for privacy. It’s dead and you are already on watch.

Most people are not even aware of the consequences. When the POTUS itself is working against it, Net Neutrality will be a history.

Facebook tried to violate net neutrality in our country (India). We didn’t allow them. We fought against them.

Now, it’s up to you. You can choose to remain silent or raise your voice. The least you can do is to spread this message.

Net Neutrality , Why should I care? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Amazon Connect : How can my business benefit from AWS Pt 3

In part three of the series. I will cover about the recently launched Amazon Connect. Here is part one and part two. Make sure you follow Hackernoon and me (Febin John James) so that you won’t miss the later part of the series.

Imagine you want to start a contact center. You got to buy lot of hardwares , pay engineers to setup the network, pay the installation charges of IVR, etc . The process would consume time and money.

With Amazon Connect you can setup your contact center in minutes. It goes beyond high quality voice service. The Interactive Voice Responder (IVR) uses data and business intelligence to predict the questions your customer would ask.

The speech recognition engineering included is the same technology used by Amazon Alexa. It has got skill based routing which means it is smart enough to route a call to the right agent. If a customer has a question on sales. He would be connected to the sales agent.

You get real-time reports on the kind of problems your customer have. This will enable you to increase the utilisation of your agents. Hence decreasing the waiting time.

Since it’s an open platform , developers can use it to export data and use API’s to connect with existing services.

If you are interested in making apps on cloud , do checkout my book Cloud Is a Piece of Cake on Amazon.

You can also join my mailing list Cloud Computing Stories. I will use this to notify you if I write new stories or books on Cloud Computing.

Amazon Connect : How can my business benefit from AWS Pt 3 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After reading the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products I was expecting someone to write…

After reading the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products I was expecting someone to write a counter article on How these tech products are designed to make us procrastinate. This was a brilliant post. Super Like!

Do this and employers will come after you

Contribute to open source repositories on Github. Employers actively browse through Github profiles. It’s the best way to measure one’s skills. See proof.

Start with an open source repository you use a lot. Think of ways you can improve it. Then contribute :)

Do this and employers will come after you was originally published in Don’t Panic, Just Hire on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sure thing :)

Sure thing :)

molfar.io I am sorry if there was a confusion.

molfar.io I am sorry if there was a confusion. It wouldn’t be a single line of code. There will be lot more lines of code, but they will be automatically generated without requiring much efforts from the customer.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in having a faking landing page. But, I want to help people build a working product at the same cost. Now, that would be an innovation? Isn’t it ;) .

I will cover the solution in the later part of the series :) .