Leo Mirani

Last year, some 20 million Indians spent a total of $2 billion shopping online, according to a report from Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. That represented just over 3% of all money spent in organized retail in the country, and a piffling 0.3% of the total market including unorganized retail, which includes neighborhood vegetable vendors, hawkers, and informal markets.

This item has been corrected.

“What Google really wants is for everybody to be signed in to their Google accounts all the time,” a Google insider told me in passing last month.

Line, a Japanese messaging app, announced today that it’s hit 400 million registered users. That’s an impressive number, especially since it stood at 300 million only four months ago. But it also means very little in isolation. By way of comparison, another popular messaging app in Asia, KakaoTalk, which also revealed updated figures today (paywall), has 140 million users. How do these numbers match up to the world’s most popular—and, since it was bought by Facebook, now best-known—messaging app, WhatsApp?

The battle between Verizon and T-Mobile for US subscribers is getting pretty ugly. Verizon has for several months been running television ads mocking its rivals’ paltry network coverage. The ad claims that Verizon’s LTE  network, the fastest of its data networks, covers more of America than anybody else’s. T-Mobile hit back in March, with an aggressive ad saying “Fold up your old map, Verizon.” And it announced that it had ”taken legal action demanding that Verizon cease and desist the carrier’s network map advertising.”

Over the weekend, Google reported that Turkey had intercepted traffic to its public domain name system (DNS) service—part of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly draconian crackdown against the social media networks that are being used to distribute damaging information about him.

Mark Zuckerberg announced last night that Facebook has brought on “key members” of the staff of Ascenta, a small company based in southwestern England, to develop high-altitude solar-powered drones that could help supply internet access to remote areas. The value of the deal—which didn’t involve acquiring the firm, but made at least some of its team Facebook employees—was under $20 million. That’s a substantially lower price tag than the $60 million being bandied about earlier this month when TechCrunch reported that Facebook was in talks to buy Titan Aerospace, a maker of similar drones.

Fifty-two days after taking over Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella appeared at his first press event today—the official launch of Microsoft Office for the iPad. But more important than a product launch, which was as advertised, is what he said in his introduction.

The largest mobile network operator in Afghanistan is not a multinational company. Or it wasn’t until this month, when Roshan Telecom took its network to Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania. That makes telecoms Afghanistan’s most high-profile export after opium.

Xiaomi, the much-hyped Chinese smartphone maker, certainly knows how to do things in style. Last night, it confirmed that it is entering the Indian market, the world’s largest after its home in China, and the head of Google India, Rajan Anandan, and the vice president of Xiaomi, Hugo Barra, exchanged friendly tweets:

Few tech bigwigs get excited about disrupting nitty-gritty municipal markets like street lighting. Even fewer have ever set foot on an actual farm, much less thought of technology designed for one. But the boring world of basic needs and utilities hides huge opportunity for tech’s favourite revenue source: data.

London’s Metropolitan Police Service operates three EC145 helicopters in its air support unit (ASU). On Jan. 3, 2012, the unit joined Twitter.

In the new domain-name land rush, the temptation of alternatives that range from .guru, to .sexy may not be enough to get many to switch from the old reliable .com. But some companies have a plan to lure businesses to make the switch.

I spent the past week tethering my computer to the mobile internet connection on my phone. It was awful. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The Supreme Court of India ruled today that Nokia must deposit 35 billion rupees ($571 million) in an escrow account before it can transfer its factory in India to Microsoft as a part of its 5.4-billion-euro deal to sell its mobile phones business to the tech giant. The court also wants Nokia to “waive some of its rights to legal defense as a condition for transferring Indian assets to Microsoft,” reports Reuters.

Thad Starner has been wearing computers on his face for 21 years. Today he works with Google on Glass, the web giant’s wearable computing project which, because of its high-profile backer and the accompanying publicity blitz, also happens to be the go-to example of all that is good and evil about wearable devices. With that status comes plenty of angst (such this campaign to “stop the cyborgs“) as well lots of hand-wringing about what it means for privacy and surveillance.

In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges wrote “On Exactitude in Science,” a very short story about an empire so obsessed with cartography that it eventually built a map as vast as the territory “which coincided point for point with it.” That vision is now coming close to being reality.

Everybody seems to have it in for London. Writing in the New York Times last week, Ben Judah decried Britain’s capital as a ghost town of empty mansions owned by Russian oligarchs. Yesterday, Cory Doctorow of the blog Boing Boing has a separate but related complaint: Shoreditch, the part of London favoured by tech startups, is being overrun by new developments! And student housing! And incubators! Meanwhile, Ben Southworth, the founder of a Shoreditch-based “content, promotion and events company“, is busy opposing a planned development on the site of the long-disused, boarded-up Bishopsgate Goodsyard. “We don’t want the area to lose its soul and heart,” he tells the Evening Standard.

Would you pay $2.50 a year for access to Facebook? What about WhatsApp? Those services don’t think so, which is why Facebook is free and WhatsApp costs nothing to download (though there is a subscription charge of $0.99 a year after that). Yet a mobile operator in India, where the average monthly revenue from mobile phone subscribers is a mere 105 rupees ($1.72), is betting that charging for access to social media may get subscribers to spend more.

NTT Docomo, Japan’s biggest mobile operator, hoped it would win a bigger market share when it finally started offering its subscribers the iPhone last September. And it did. But the iPhone is also battering the company’s bottom line. Docomo said this morning that its full year forecast may be hurt by a price war with rivals Softbank and KDDI, and heavy discounting of the iPhone.

Brian Acton, one of the two founders of WhatsApp, the messaging service that Facebook recently bought for $19 billion, carries this phone:

“Avoid clicking on ads on your mobile device.” That’s the ”best practice” suggested by Blue Coat, an online security company, in its latest report on mobile malware (registration required), or malicious software. The report found that thing most often leading mobile users down the path to malware has ceased to be pornography and is now advertising.

For nearly half a decade, Yahoo has been giving away its most valuable asset to its rivals. Now it has decided that that must stop.

This post has been updated with comment from Microsoft.