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Its now possible to tour Beijings Forbidden City, without actually setting foot there.A social networking app allows would-be visitors to take virtual tours of parts of the city.

More than 400,000 Imperial artifacts have been digitized.

But as CGTNs Roee Ruttenberg reports, the job is far from complete.

For some 500 years, the corridors of Chinas Imperial Palace were off-limits to non-royals. The Forbidden City, as it became known, opened-up just in the last century. Now, a museum it attracts more visitors each year than any other in the world.

A new social networking app now allows those visitors to share their stories online. And museum administrators are working in other ways to deepen the experience.

Su Yi oversees an ambitious effort to digitize nearly two million artifacts. Her teams just a quarter of the way there.

The technology is changing every day. It can help us become more efficient, said Su, who is the director of the Palace Museum Institute for Digitization. But it also poses a challenge. New equipment makes our older methods outdated.

In April, the museum announced it had found another 55,000 artifacts.One by one, thousands of items are being photographed by highly-skilled professionals. A smaller number are being captured using 3D technology, and then placed inside virtual replicas of Palace rooms.

Everything has to be very precise, to reflect the true nature of the building, Senior Digitization Engineer Ouyang Hong said. And it can be very challenging to convert the large scale numbers into an accurate 3D representation.

Now, patrons of the Forbidden City, or Palace Museum as its also known, can virtually visit areas still closed-off to the public. Curators hope the digital data will also help researchers get a fuller picture of what life was like during Imperial times.Theres nothing quite like being here in person to experience the majesty, the history, and the culture. The digitalization process isnt meant to replace that, but rather supplement the old with something very new.

China has a long history, Su said. But the world doesnt fully understand Chinese culture or the Chinese people very deeply. We want to use the internet to help change that.

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Social network app provides digital tours of Beijing's Imperial Palace - CGTN America (blog)

NEW DELHI -- The Union Government is contemplating to regulate the functioning of social networking sites to ensure safety of the users' data.

The Central Government on Friday told the Supreme Court that it is contemplating to enact regulatory regime for social networking sites or services like WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype and others.

The Centre made these submissions before the five-judge Constitution Bench that is hearing WhatsApp privacy policy case.

The Centre told that personal data of users is a part of their right to life and it can't be shared freely by telecom providers or any social network sites.

Any attack on data is an attack on 'Right to Life', the Centre told the apex court.

During the hearing before a five-judge Constitution Bench, the bench asked the government whether it would regulate data.

Counsel for WhatsApp and Facebook, senior lawyers Kapil Sibal, Sidharth Luthra and Arvind Datar, said that they were willing to give an undertaking before the bench that WhatsApp has not and will not share data with anyone.

A nine-judge Supreme Court Constitution bench is also hearing various issues relating to right to privacy and data protection arising out of question whether whether Aadhaar violates right to privacy or not.

This bench is to rule whether right to privacy is a fundamental right or not, and other contours relating to data protection.

A nine-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar is examining the nature of privacy as a right in context of two judgments -the first in 1954, the other in 1962 - which held that privacy was not a fundamental right.

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Centre Plans To Regulate Functioning Of Social Networking Sites To Ensure Safety - Huffington Post India

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the global sharing economy, worth $15 billion today, will hit $335 billion by 2025. IMeYou, which makes local information collaborative, is hoping to grab a piece of that pie.

New to Bengaluru, Anuj Singh wants to buy some Hindi fiction books. But he doesnt know where to go and wishes he knew someone who shared his interest. Its tougher because Anuj lives in a locality of Kannada speakers. A friend suggests IMeYou, an app that will connect him to people who have the books hes looking for.

I borrowed the books, made friends and returned the books after a month, says Anuj Singh, who works as a restaurant manager in Bengaluru.

Such are the wonders of the sharing economy.

Every year, it is expected that more than six million students head to 56 cities in search of jobs. At their new destination, they must depend on local agents for information on rentals, food and local government rules. What if this was sorted for you on an app where a digital friend can answer queries dynamically? This is exactly what 30-year-old Vartika Manasvi has been trying to do for a couple of years.

Vartika, who completed her MBA course from JIIT, Noida, in 2010, built communities during her initial days at work, but chose to give up her corporate job when she realised that there was a business opportunity staring her in the face.

Most people would call their friends to know about a place or to know how to get something done, says Vartika, who quit her job in December 2015 and started IMeYou as a side project.

This was a project on Slack initially and I joined an Asian blog as a community manager to make some money to survive, she says.

Vartika went about her idea with clinical precision. She on-boarded 300-plus people on the Slack group by doing Skype calls and telling them about her vision for IMeYou, where people share knowledge with each other and collaborate.

She envisaged IMeYou as a geo-social platform to context connect people at places that matter), as a social networking platform for the sharing economy.

The objective of this experiment was to make one friend in every city who can help with local information and test digital trust among strangers, she says.

Vartika was joined by two young engineers, Celento C George, 19, and Arshpreet Wadehra, 21, who came forward to help build this platform because they believed in the vision and the power of the community she was building.

The three of them formed a strong team and the Slack group supported them with UI suggestions.

By August 2016, less than a year after she had started work on IMeYou, the platform was built.

From that Slack group we graduated to the web application and recently launched our mobile app for IOS, she says.

IMeYou, which currently has 2,000 consistent customers, wants to democratise access to goods and services.

Its our vision to unlock the world of collaborative consumption where trust is the new currency, Vartika says.

The companys business model is to take on traditional market behaviour pertaining torenting, lending, sharing, bartering and gifting.

On this platform, users will be able to generate the most efficient use of resources by extracting maximum value from products and materials while in use, and extending longevity through reuse at the end of a life cycle. So if you and your classmate want to read the same book why not invest in buying the book equally, share the cost and then redistribute it to someone who would want it?

Currently we are not charging our users to engage with each other. It will evolve as we gather data on engagement levels, Vartika says.

IMeYou is focusing on a micro-universe of college hubs where students can connect with each other to collaborate on needs like sharing hostel rooms, exchanging books and notes, planning project groups, finding accommodations, and inter-college connectivity.

The company has an investment of less than Rs 10 lakh and is yet to generate any revenues.

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the global sharing economy to be worth $15 billion today, a figure that is projected to hit $335 billion by 2025.

There are plenty of social sharing and discovery apps, including GoYaNo, Fashin and Loqation, on the market, but majority are yet to make money while some are struggling to stay afloat.

IMeYou is yet to deliver value and being a consumer business must spend for consumers to discover their app on a national scale.

But Vartika believes that the sharing economy drives huge benefits not only from the economic point of view, but also from environmental and social points of view.

Naganand Doraswamy, founder of IdeaSpring Capital, says: All consumer businesses need to build on strong technology and must figure out a business model quickly otherwise history shows how money is lost to marketing instead of building a strong product.

Vartika is hopeful that connecting people will help take her product forward. For now, we suggest you check out IMeYou if you want to share guitar/lessons, meet someone for coffee or exchange notes on rental apartments.

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Read Also: Why Startups need to work with Corporate?

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With IMeYou, Vartika Manasvi aims to build top social networking platform for the sharing economy - YourStory.com

Since the Echos release in 2014, millions of people have given in to Amazons nonstop advertising and welcomed Alexa into their homes. Amazons original sell for the always-on, voice-activated device was that users could ask Echo for information, music, news, sports scores, and weather from across the room and get results or answers instantly. But in the last couple of months, it has evolved into something else: the hub for Amazons new social network.

In May, Amazon pushed a software update that added features called Drop in and Alexa calling and messaging, which let you connect to other peoples Echos. The communal device, used by all members of a given household, suddenly became a telephone and answering machine, much like an old-school landline shared by a family, except this one emits a pulsing yellow light when you have a message.

This is a unique aspect to being a consumer of the Internet of Things: The things stay connected to the company you bought them from, which means the company can push down an update from afar and change them into, well, other things. Overnight, the Echo went from being a voice-activated Google search to a device that could be networked to a bunch of other devices.

In order to use the new feature, Echo owners have to open the Amazon Alexa app on their phones and import their contacts, after which they are stored in the Amazon cloud. Amazon then offers up a list of who among their contacts is an Echo owner, and automatically makes all of them part of their network, rather than letting them choose who they actually want to connect with (as most other companies do). Amazon assumed this was the best way to organize its network, apparently not realizing most of us have tons of strangers and randos in our phonebooks.

My own list included a couple of ex-boyfriends, a person I stayed with once on Airbnb, current co-workers, former colleagues, and a U.S. senators press secretary, who would probably be surprised to learn I knew she had an Echo because Ive never actually called or talked to her. There was not a single person on the list whose Echo I would want to call. Instead, it was an uninvited look into the consumption habits of the sundry individuals whose numbers have made their way into my phone over the last 15 years.

When asked about the privacy context collapse involved in revealing your Echo ownership to anyone with your phone number, an Amazon spokesperson emphasized that calling and messaging via Alexa is an optional feature.

To import contacts and send voice messages youll need to first set up calling/messaging if you prefer not to use the feature, simply dont set it up, the spokesperson wrote via email.

Amazon is not the only company to decide that its users should be able to identify other users based solely on knowing their phone numbers. Signal, an encrypted messaging app, also discloses its users this way. (Its why I had the press secretarys number in my phoneI wanted to find out which senators offices were using the secure app.) It makes it easier to connect with other people using the same app, but theres a privacy trade-off: You only need someones phone number to figure out that theyve bought or downloaded that product.

And that could potentially be used against users. A repressive government, for instance, could find out if activists were using Signal to encrypt their communications. A hacker could find out if a target was using an Echo, in the hopes of using it to invade the persons network.

But Echo users had more immediate concerns when the feature came out. Amazon, new to the social networking game, didnt realize that some users in its network might not like other users. Those who first turned on Alexa calling, like Elise Oras, discovered that they couldnt block people from calling their Echo. And once they discovered that, they discovered they couldnt easily leave the social network. There is no delete button. To exit AmazonEchoverse, you have to call Amazon Customer Service and get a real live human being to turn off the feature.

Its still the case two months after its release that you have to make an actual phone call to exit the Echo social ecosystem, but Amazon came to its senses with blocking. Last month, it gave users the ability to block contacts from calling their Echo; those contacts will still see the person listed but wont be able to make a call to them or leave them a message.

Amazons missteps here may not prove to be a big deal to Echo owners. After all, if theyve bought a device for their home with an always-on microphone, theyre likely the type of people who arent too worried about their privacy. But its good to remember, as you ponder whether to buy an internet-connected thermostat, or lamp, or refrigerator: The transformation from a lowly appliance to a node in a vast privacy-demolishing network is just a software update away.

This post was produced by the Special Projects Desk of Gizmodo Media Group.

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Surprise Echo Owners, You're Now Part of Amazon's Random Social Network - Gizmodo

The micro-blogging site admitted there is "still much work to be done".

Twitter users are experiencing "significantly less abuse" on the social media platform than six months ago, the company has claimed.

As part of a results update on the social network's work to improve safety for users, Twitter said it is taking action on ten times the number of abusive accounts every day compared to the same time last year.

However the micro-blogging site admitted there is "still much work to be done".

Since the start of the year, Twitter has announced several updates to its platform designed to cut down on abusive content, including reducing notifications and increasing filters on "low quality tweets" that appear in user timelines.

The social platform has been repeatedly criticised by industry figures and government over its record of handling abusive material that appears on the site, and has pledged to work with independent experts to cut down on extremism online.

Twitter's Ed Ho said in the last four months, the site had removed double the number of abusive accounts created by users who had previously had other accounts suspended for violations of site rules.

"Beyond the technology, our teams are continuing to review content daily and improve how we enforce our policies," Mr Ho said.

He also revealed that communicating with violators on why their accounts had been temporarily suspended has led to a reduction in future abuse incidents.

Mr Ho added: "Communication about problematic Tweets, especially to the people who send them, is key.

"Accounts that demonstrate abusive behaviour are now limited for a time, and told why. Accounts that we put into this period of limited functionality generate 25% fewer abuse reports, and approximately 65% of these accounts are in this state just once."

He said Twitter would continue to seek the advice of industry experts and academics as part of ongoing review of its services, having convened its first "Trust and Safety Council" earlier this year, seeking feedback on its performance.

Dan Raisbeck, co-founder of The Cybersmile Foundation said continued dialogue between Twitter and other organisations would improve safety on the site and the wider internet.

He added: "We are pleased to see Twitter continuing to meet the challenges of user safety and will continue our work with the Twitter Safety Team in addressing these important issues.

"We are confident that through working with industries, governments and Internet users around the world we can all help to make the internet safer for everyone."

Twitter's head of trust and safety, Del Harvey, said: "There's no easy fix - as the world's conversation evolves so too does the challenge we face.

"We'll continue to adapt and do our part to ensure Twitter continues to be the safest place to see every side of what's happening."

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Twitter clamps down on abuse on social networking site since start of 2017 - Lancashire Evening Post