ITLegal

US shows sensitivities to Indian stand on IP and food security
Indicating a change in its position on key issues like intellectual property rights and food security - the two areas of concerns for India - the US appears to be sensitive and supportive of the Indian view point in this regard.

A top US trade officials yesterday told American corporate leaders that the Obama Administration is supportive of the Indian stand on affordable medicine and food security; which of late has emerged as the most contentious issues between the two countries.

"We are very clear. We want to give assurances on issues around food security. We remain committed to food security," US Trade Representative (USTR) Mike Froman said in response to a question during the annual leadership summit of the US-India Business Council.

Froman in fact pointed out that President Barack Obama had launched a major commitment on food security in 2009.

"We are committed to food security," he said, hoping that India and US would arrive at a solution to resolve this issue in a multilateral way.

Soon after coming to power, the Modi Government had blocked the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) arguing that its concerns on food security have not been addressed.

Following the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Obama at the White House last month, the two sides decided to launch a dialogue on intellectual property rights.

Observing that the dialogue would look at all issues of affordable access and quality medicine, Froman said his sense is that there are ways to achieve those objectives while respecting the intellectual property rights necessary to ensure that there are no impediments to innovation in the future.

"That is the kind of dialogue that we are going to have," he said.

"We are totally supportive of the notion that it is important to have access to affordable medicines. We care about that here. Eighty per cent of our prescriptions are filled by generics," he said.

"So when our partners talk about access to affordable medicine, we are on the same page. The question is how best we achieve that," he said.

Froman said India is a very much an innovative and creative economy - everything, from innovations in medicine, various patents and inventions to Bollywood, the creativity that comes from the great entertainment.

"So one thing that the leaders agreed to do is to launch a broad dialogue on intellectual property rights from Hollywood to Bollywood, because there are a number of areas, common between the two countries that they need to protect their products," he said.
http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/us-shows-sensitivities-to-indian-stand-on-ip-and-food-security-114101000322_1.html

Future Group, Amazon India announce strategic e-commerce alliance
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' recent visit to India is finally yielding some results for the American e-commerce giant.

Kishore Biyani-led Future Group, one of India's largest brick and mortar retailers, on Monday announced it has entered into a strategic alliance with Amazon India to sell its private labels.

While it will start with the fashion category, the partnershipwill eventually be extended to all other categories. Moreover, Amazon India will also assist Future Group in accelerating new product development in categories that are currently not served by traditional retailers.

Bezos had met Biyani during his recent visit to India.

Future group will use the Amazon platform to sell its private labels like Lee Cooper, Converse, Indigo Nation, Scullers or Jealous21, among others. The company has a portfolio of over 40 brands.

“The bottom line in each of our retail success stories is ‘know your customer’. … Partnership with Amazon, which obsesses to be earth’s most customer centric company, will enable us to leverage their strengths, investments, and innovations in technology to reach out to wider set of consumers across India,” Future Group CEO Kishore Biyanisaid in a statement.

Amazon India vice president and country manager Amit Agarwal said the tie-up is a “win-win for all”.

Last week Biyani had criticised Flipkart and other e-commerce companies for the deep discounts offered during Diwali sale, which he said will adversely affect other retail channels.

Amazon did not follow the flash sale/discount policy of Flipkart and Snapdeal and went easy when it came to offering discounts during its Diwali sale.

Commenting on the reason for the tie up when the company has its own omni-channel strategy, Biyani said, "The endeavour with external e-commerce platforms is to have exclusive tie-ups with them to push our brands."

Experts say that the association of Future Group with Amazon is crucial in two ways. It marks the entry of one country’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer into pure e-commerce. Also, it is the second after Tata group’s Croma, which entered into strategic alliance with Snapdeal, to sell its products online. Reliance Retail is also set to launch its e-commerce platform but has not partnered any e-commerce player yet.

The move will also be a crucial step for Amazon to grow into the much sought after fashion category. It currently lags behind Flipkart -- which recently acquired fashion e-tailer Myntra.com -- and Snapdeal in the assortment of products, number of sellers and brands etc. Fashion is the focus category for most e-commerce companies because of its high margins and growing demand.

The next category for partnership could be the F&B category. Amazon recently entered into the non-perishable food category -- it has already started accepting bookings for Coco-Cola Zero, the beverage's low-calorie variant -- offering ready to eat food and other products online and Future group has similar plans to expand into the food brands.

Future group is all set to launch Sunkist - a beverage range, and three new foods brands, Karmiq, So Fresh and Veg Affair.

“Each of these will have its own range. Veg Affair will be ready-to-eat frozen vegetables, including peas and carrots. Karmiq is for canola oil and other such products as well as dry fruits," Biyani recently told Business Standard.

Future Group operates some of India’s most popular retail chains including Central, Big Bazaar, Foodhall, Planet Sports, Brand Factory, Home Town and eZone. The group operates around 17 million square feet of retail space in around 98 cities and towns and 40 rural locations across India. The group’s retail formats attract over 300 million customers annually and connect them to around 30,000 small, medium and large enterprises. Amazon started its e-commerce operations in 2013.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/reuters/future-retail-amazon-in-enter-into-strategic-partnership-114101300146_1.html

Future Group, Amazon India announce strategic e-commerce alliance Future Retail Ltd says enters into a strategic partnership with Amazon.in. According to deal, Future group's portfolio of over 40 brands will be retailed exclusively through Amazon.in platform.

. Data protection authorities find privacy lapses in majority of mobile apps
Many mobile apps request too many permissions and don't explain how they collect users' personal information, a study of 1,211 popular apps by the Global Privacy Enforcement Network has found.
The majority of the apps reviewed did not adequately explain to users how they were collecting and using information, according to the study, carried out by 26 privacy enforcement authorities in 19 countries. It also found that a third of the tested mobile applications requested excessive permissions that were outside the scope of their functionality.
The issue of overly broad permissions has been brought up by privacy advocates and security experts before. It is often the result of the advertising-based revenue model used by many applications and which involves the bundling of ad frameworks in their code.
To provide targeted and interactive ads, ad libraries typically require access to a larger set of user data and device functionality than the host apps would normally need. Since these frameworks become part of the apps that use them, the access they require is reflected in the permissions requested by those apps.
The problem is further exacerbated by platform-dependent behavior. For example, iOS allows users to revoke an application's access to certain data after installation, but Android has no such mechanism, forcing users to choose between granting apps any permissions they request or not using them at all.
According to the GPEN study results published on the website of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, reviewers found that almost one in three tested apps provided no privacy information other than permission requests. An additional 24 percent provided some information, but didn't explain how the information is collected, used and disclosed.
In 31 percent of cases the privacy information provided by developers somewhat explained the app's collection practices, but left open questions about certain permissions, the reviewers concluded.
Sixty percent of apps had too little privacy information available prior to their download, and forty percent of them did not have privacy communications tailored for the small screens of phones and tablets.
"Many apps provided a link to a webpage with a tough-to-read privacy policy that wasn't designed to be read on a handheld device," the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said. "In other cases, the apps linked to social media pages. Sometimes users would have to log in to view the policy or the links were simply broken. A number of apps raised questions about who the developer or data controller was."
The U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which also participated in the study, published a document with guidance for mobile application developers on how to present privacy information to users and obtain their consent.
In the case of free ad-funded applications "the ad network is a data controller, but as the developer you will likely have a duty to inform your users of what personal data will be collected, how it will be used, by whom, and what control your users can exercise," ICO said in the document.
"Consider just-in-time notifications, where the necessary information is provided to the user just before data processing occurs," the ICO said. "Notifications like this could be particularly useful when collecting more intrusive data such as GPS location, or for prompting users about features of an app that they are using for the first time. You could avoid excessive notification by remembering the user's choice for a certain time period before reminding them again."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2682555/internet-privacy/data-protection-authorities-find-privacy-lapses-in-majority-of-mobile-apps.html

'Getting data protection right is vital to our credibility' – Vouchercloud


oja Buck, the chief architect and technical department head at Vouchercloud
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VOUCHERCLOUD is an online discount service that was launched in 2010.
In just four years the digital Bristol business has grown significantly.
The company now has 150 staff across three countries that help well over two million people access discount codes for high street shops and restaurants, per month.
With more than six million app downloads, protecting a mass of user data is no mean feat.
Roja Buck, the chief architect and technical department head at Vouchercloud, explained how the company prevents hackers accessing their users' data.
"We follow strong internal security policies which include everything from symmetric encryption through to regular pe*******on testing."
"With our new product Giftcloud, we have to store digital gift cards for our users, so substantial investment was made into building proprietary technology to protect our customers data from attack."
According to Roja, storing user data is incredibly important to Vouchercloud's market success.
Without it the company couldn't create targeted and compelling content for its particular customer base, so it takes data protection seriously.
Roja said: "We need to maintain data about that user and that user therefore, explicitly trusts us with information which they consider private.
"We take that trust as a fundamental pillar of our business, as without it we can't possibly hope to deliver a market-beating product."
Part of keeping that trust with their customer base meant keeping their customers' data "utterly segregated" from Vodafone, which became a shareholder in 2011.
Vouchercloud must comply with the data regulations of each country it operates in, so that means investing time into researching relevant data laws.
"Our policies have to meet international requirements," said Roja. "The most important data is anything directly related to our users, personal identifiable information or 'PII' as it is known. Extra protection has to be taken around transmitting and storing such details."
Roja, like the experts, thinks the best form of data protection is tactical prevention.
"The most important thing is to safeguard our systems from attack so that data does not get into the wrong hands in the first place. It is a complex issue and is a field that changes and becomes ever more important as we adopt technology deeper into our lives."
Roja has been a part of Vouchercloud for over two years and watched as the business went from 25 to 150 staff.
For small businesses and start-ups hoping to go global he advised: "Read the legislation in all countries you do business, as data laws can be significantly different across the world.
"Make security a unique selling point of your product and follow best practices in storing personal identifiable information.
"Lastly, security is only as strong as the weakest point, make sure your data is physically secure as well as digitally secure by using a reputable hosting provider, such as Amazon web services."

http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Getting-data-protection-right-vital-credibility/story-22786137-detail/story.html

Software firms facing threat of losing high-value projects as clients setting up inhouse centres in India

BANGALORE: For Indian software companies which are recovering from the global economic slowdown, the next big worry could be customers eating the best portion of their lunch. Increasingly, multinational clients are saying they are okay to outsource bread-and-butter work but not the jam and cream.

What this means is that the country's biggest software firms are facing the threat of losing high-value projects to customers who are setting up inhouse centres in India to ensure they keep tab on critical work involving the latest technologies.

For example, later this year, Lowe's —the second-biggest US home improvement chain with $53 billion (Rs 3.2 lakh crore) in annual revenue —will shift high-end analytics and ecommerce projects from companies including Cognizant, WiproBSE 0.56 % and InfosysBSE -0.87 % to a new centre in Bangalore.

Lowe's move, which spends over $1 billion annually on IT, reflects a growing trend of customers shifting their most important work to their own centres, leaving chores such as maintenance to Indian service providers.

"This (the new Lowe's centre) is not going to be a back office," Robert F Hull Jr, the CFO of Lowe's, said in an interview. For Lowe's, the new technology capabilities in Bangalore will mean a competitive edge against rivals such as Home Depot. As more US consumers shift to the web for home improvement solutions, technology has become the new battlefront.

Lowe's, which now gets around 2% of its revenues from online sales, has been closing in on market leader Home Depot. The new centre could potentially hire up to 1,000 engineers, and will focus on data analytics and next generation online commerce projects.

Lowe's also plans to engage with retail software startups in India, and could potentially even invest in some of them. Scores of captives were set up in the 1990s as global corporations looked to take advantage of the lower costs of operating in India without relinquishing control of their information technology systems.

Over 800 Captive Centres in India

There are more than 800 captive centres in the country and more are being added each year. In 2012, captives employed about 5 lakh people and delivered as much as $15 billion (Rs 90,000 crore) worth of work, according to Nasscom data.
While the over-$100-billion Indian software services industry employs around 3 million staff and is forecast to grow at 13-15%, captives are growing at nearly twice that rate.

While this trend may not be very good news for IT services companies, it will open up new opportunities for employees in the software sector to work on cutting-edge technologies directly with global corporations.

Over the past year, Hull met around 38 companies having captives in India and got some of the myths busted. "We even visited some of the universities and were fully convinced that there's going to be no scarcity of talent in the long term," he said. "We are going to manage and develop key capabilities in-house
The third-party providers can do maintenance and support work far more effectively; they have tens of thousands of people in place." Lowe's has hired Narayan Ram as managing director for India, reporting directly to Hull. Ram, an IT industry veteran who ran Sony's technology centre, said Target, Tesco and Walmart have already set the bar high for Lowe's India.

"We do expect a war for the right talent," Ram said. Lalit Ahuja, a former Indian Navy commander who helped companies such as Target and several others build their captive centres in India said these centre are also beginning to manage service providers such as TCSBSE -0.02 % and Infosys on behalf of their parent organizations.
"In some ways, the captives have broken the 'value' barrier that Indian IT has been aspiring to address for a long time now," said Ahuja whose company ANSR Source is helping Lowe's and several others establish technology centres in India. "There are incredible opportunities for Indian IT to understand the games captives play to operate at the high end of value chain."

Senior executives at some of India's biggest software firms are watching in envy and even praying that these captives remain mere experiments and hopefully fall short of what one called "lofty adventures". "Don't get me wrong — we have seen these waves of captives being feverishly talked about.
But a lot of them eventually get acquired by a large service provider," said a senior executive at one of the top India-based software firms. He was referring to how the technology captives of banks such as UBS and retailers including Supervalu ended up being acquired by Cognizant and TCS, respectively.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/software-firms-facing-threat-of-losing-high-value-projects-as-clients-setting-up-inhouse-centres-in-india/articleshow/37600503.cms