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With the country set to witness Lok Sabha polls in 2014, the impact of social media on influencing voters choices has become a hot topic.

Politicians, too, have left no stone unturned, with many of them making their presence felt through Twitter and Facebook to influence voters.

A recent study, jointly conducted by IRIS Knowledge Foundation and Internet and Mobile Association of India, says of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, social media is likely to influence about 160 in the next general elections.

The study did a check on the total number of Facebook users in each of the 543 constituencies, and termed the ones where the numbers of users account for over 10% of the voting population as high impact constituencies. The study further revealed that more than 35% of the constituencies won by the Congress and the opposition party, the BJP, in the 2009 general election fell in high-impact constituencies.

A few days ago, Facebook introduced a feature for its Indian users called Register to Vote. Through this platform, people can share status updates and individual stories on voter registration.

Long way to go While the study has successfully established social media as a decisive political tool, experts feel that this is just the beginning and there is still time till the actual impact of social media is felt in general elections in the country.

Whatever the data says, I am actually doubtful on how much impact the social media will have on the results of general elections, says Yashwant Deshmukh, founder, C-voter.

India is still considered traditional when it comes to the use of social media. Not everyone in India has access to the internet, and since they constitute the majority of voters in the country, a crucial part of the population is left out.

According to the provisional census data, of Indias 1.21 billion population, 833 million people live in rural India and 377 million in urban India.

Unlike their urban counterparts, people in small towns are believe in the power of voting. Though, youth in small towns do have access to Facebook, they are occasional users and hence, the medium will have minimal impact on them as far as swinging party fortunes is concerned, says Garima Tiwari, a political researcher.

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SNS is influential, but not a political game changer yet

PETALUMA, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 23, 2013) - MarketLive, the leading provider of eCommerce technology for high-growth merchants, today raised the bar for social commerce with a new suite of capabilities delivered through its Social Experience Manager, powered by its new partner Social Annex. MarketLive Social Experience Manager offers four unique platforms: Social Login, Social Commerce Apps, Social Contests and Brand Loyalty, each including Social Analytics.

MarketLive's social commerce solution differs from competing vendors by offering a full suite of social login, apps, contests and loyalty programs, using social graph data and social engagement to drive conversion, revenue and ROI, rather than settling for just more social mentions. The Social Experience Manager helps merchants engage, incentivize, and learn from shoppers so that social activity actually converts leads to sales. MarketLive's customers can pull social graph data into their MarketLive system to inform tailored outbound communications, to apply best practices regarding social campaigns and contests, and to manage social logins and other social engagement.

MarketLive has partnered with Social Annex to deliver the Social Experience Manager.

"We are very excited about the launch of the Social Experience Manager and we truly see it as a game changer," said Ken Burke, founder and chairman of MarketLive. "Statistics show that social login users spend more time on a site and convert at an average of 15-20% higher than other visitors. With our expanded Social Experience Manager, MarketLive is providing merchants with the holy grail -- social commerce capabilities that go beyond just expanding the audience and winning likes, to actually driving key performance improvements like revenue growth, retention rates, return visits and average order size."

Powered by Social AnnexMarketLive's Social Experience Manager is powered by Social Annex, a leader in social apps and social login. MarketLive sought out Social Annex because of the company's best-of-breed commerce solutions and unique focus on and experience with retail and commerce customers, as well as its strong partnership and customer-success focused culture. Social Experience Manager is another example of MarketLive's unique approach to its partner ecosystem. Rather than establish a huge community of distant partnerships in the social space, MarketLive chose Social Annex for its best-in-breed commerce solutions and then worked closely with Social Annex on a mutual product roadmap to deliver features and capabilities that are pertinent to and optimized for customers, driving conversion and increasing revenue. For example, the MarketLive platform will provide fully integrated social login functionality based on MarketLive and Social Annex best practices.

Specifically, Social Annex powers the following functions in the MarketLive platform:

"We are extremely excited to partner with MarketLive, a leader in eCommerce Platform Technology, to provide the Social Experience Manager to all MarketLive customers," said Al Lalani, Co-founder and Head of Client Success at Social Annex. "The Social Experience Manager will not only give MarketLive's customers a competitive edge, it will bring their site experience to a new level. Social Commerce Apps and contests drive revenue and create more engaging shopping experiences, while Social Login and Loyalty programs tie it all together by increasing the lifetime value of the customer. The adaptability and power of the Social Experience Manager will be a big value add for online retailers."

About MarketLiveSince 1995, MarketLive, Inc., has been the leading provider of eCommerce technology and services that help fast-growing companies successfully sell goods and services online. Designed to meet the unique requirements of catalogers, retailers, direct marketers, and manufacturers, the extensible MarketLive eCommerce Suite and MarketLive's best practices-based Intelligent Selling methodology enable merchants to enhance their customers' experience online while dramatically improving acquisition, conversion, and retention rates.

The MarketLive platform is the most retail-targeted, fully featured, customizable eCommerce solution on the market today. MarketLive powers many successful retail eCommerce sites, including Armani Exchange, Party City, Perricone MD, Sport Chalet, Sundance, Helzberg, John Deere, Title Nine, Intermix and others.

For more information, visit MarketLive at http://www.marketlive.com.

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MarketLive Announces 'Social Experience Manager' Powered by Social Annex

Redshirt is a game which offers a science fiction take on social networking. Starting as the lowliest person aboard a space station you must use Spacebook -- the game's social network -- to work your way up the social and career ladder. But to what end? Wired.co.uk took this and other questions to the game's developer, Mitu Khandaker.

Wired.co.uk: What's Redshirt about?Mitu Khandaker: It's a comedy sci-fi social networking sim, which is quite a weird way to describe a game but it really is just about being the most insignificant person on this future space station. You're trying to climb up the career ladder using the onboard social network, Spacebook. It's up to you as the player to try and navigate the social relationships on board the station. They're different each time you play because it's all AI-driven and the non-player characters (NPCs) are generated each time you play a new game.

The title Redshirt is a Star Trek reference -- you're trying to stop being the most insignificant person. You're trying to stop being the redshirt by the time something terrible happens.

Does something terrible always happen? Originally I'd intended it to be a very sandboxy experience where you were trying to navigate social relationships and do whatever you want, but it seemed like it needed a story structure behind it. So there is a big intergalactic story which unfolds as you're busy liking statuses. Eventually it will end up affecting you -- there's no way out of it so there's a time frame by which you have to stop being a redshirt.

Where did your interest in social networks come from? I was in my second year of university when everyone got on Facebook. At that time in your life you've got this interpersonal drama anyway and the ways social media can exacerbate that -- it's always been really interesting to me. At some point it coincided with my love of thinking about modelling social behaviour and relationships in games. Those things coalesced into wanting to simulate a social network in this game environment. Even before I started working on Redshirt I'd had that idea and when I originally spoke to Cliff Harris of Positech Games (who's publishing Redshirt) I'd pitched it as a social networking sim without all the sci-fi skin over it.

In talking to him -- he's hugely into sci-fi -- it seemed like adding the sci-fi skin would only enhance the idea because then it becomes a reflection of what our possible future in space would be like. If we do become this space-faring species we're still going to be the same -- we're still going to be self-obsessed and post pictures of cats.

What led you to Facebook and did you consider other social networks? Right now Twitter seems like a bigger deal to people for a lot of reasons and when I started working on the game it was more of an even split. But when you think of social networking people tend to think of Facebook first because it's in the public consciousness the most. Ultimately the mechanics of the game to do with trying to share statuses and liking other people's things are all very similar [across social networks]. It's about putting yourself out there to gain approval of others. You can abstract Spacebook down to any social network really.

What was the research process like for the game? Most was extrapolating from my own experience but I did definitely do research. Articles like "What are the most popular Facebook statuses?" and what people post about the most. Also just speaking to people. There's very much an awareness of the different tropes you see on social media. The person who wants to share every mundane detail of what they have eaten, the people who post really vague things just to attention seek -- there are definitely archetypes of behaviour on social media which anyone who uses social media is aware of. It was about identifying those things and making sure they're covered in the game.

Was there anything interesting that came out of the testing phase? One of the challenges of trying to model characters with different behaviours is that you get the character to behave a certain way but a lot of the interpretation of the game and the way the characters behave comes from the players.

The ways NPCs can express their behaviour in the game are by liking statuses, sending you messages, updating their own status or responding to friend requests. There is a very limited range of things through which to assert an NPC's personality. Even though I might want a particular NPC to be a really selfish character who doesn't care about the others and is a bit mean, if for whatever reason the player doesn't interpret a certain status that way [...] the player's own experience will dictate how they interpret an NPC's behaviour. I suppose that applies to life. People behave a certain way but how someone else perceives them is down to their own personality as well.

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Star Trek, Spacebook and social networking with Redshirt's Mitu Khandaker

Current vaccines only target most common strains by making the immune system produce antibodies to prevent infection Thanks to a study carried out during the 2009 swine flu outbreak, the annual flu season could be reduced and future pandemics prevented Scientists at Imperial College London used outbreak as a unique natural experiment to investigate why some people got sick while others did not

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 19:40 EST, 22 September 2013 | UPDATED: 05:10 EST, 23 September 2013

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A Universal flu vaccine to protect against new strains of the bird and swine flu may be a step closer thanks to British research.

For decades the key to creating a vaccine to protect against all forms of flu has eluded scientists.

Current vaccines only target the most common strains by making the immune system produce antibodies to prevent infection.

A Universal flu vaccine to protect against new strains of the bird and swine flu may be a step closer thanks to British research

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Breakthrough in the fight against flu: Scientists move a step closer to a universal vaccine to protect against new ...

In Gorakhpur, small successes in understanding and conquering the killer disease of children are undercut by a wily virus and administrative bottlenecks

On August 18, five-year-old Vishal spent the evening playing with friends in Vanjhai village in Gorakhpur district's Bhathat block. He came home irritable, with a slight fever. His mother and grandmother gave him a little milk and sent him to bed. They were not worried, because Vishal, like most children in the village, was "protected". What's ailing the Bihar's children?

Three years ago, Vishal had been given two shots, separated by four months, of "jhatki teeka", or the Japanese Encephalitis (JE) vaccine. The first shot, given in August 2010, was part of the child's immunization schedule; the second, in December of that year, in a massive campaign across Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar, to ensure the vaccine reached all "left out" children. 1,600 children dead in UP, Bihar; no answers yet

Vishal's mother, who had seen children dying in their village during the monsoon deaths long attributed to the dreaded JE virus was assured that her son was protected.

So, when Vishal woke up the next morning with a jhatki convulsions with a yellowish frothing at the mouth, fists clenched and eyes shut tight, seemingly unable to hear his mother's cries the family went to the local fakir, hoping he would rid the boy of the spirits they believed had attacked him.

A day later, when Vishal was struck by another convulsion, his uncle took him on his motorcycle 15 km away to Gorakhpur town, ignoring the women's protests that he already had "jaadui" protection and needed no more medicines. The boy was admitted to the Nehru Hospital in BRD Medical College, where he died the next day.

... contd.

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A dissolving faith, an enduring mystery