Free Wi-Fi in 400 Railway stations across India. ........by google

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Googleplex today

I’m very proud to announce that it’s the train stations of India that are going to help get millions of people online. In the past year, 100 million people in India started using the Internet for the first time. This means there are now more Internet users in India than in every country in the world aside from China. But what's really astounding is the fact that there are still nearly one billion people in India who aren’t online.

We’d like to help get these next billion Indians online—so they can access the entire web, and all of its information and opportunity. And not just with any old connection—with fast broadband so they can experience the best of the web. That’s why, today, on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to our U.S. headquarters, and in line with his Digital India initiative, we announced a new project to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India.

Working with Indian Railways, which operates one of the world's largest railway networks, and RailTel, which provides Internet services as RailWire via its extensive fiber network along many of these railway lines, our Access & Energy team plans to bring the first stations online in the coming months. The network will expand quickly to cover 100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016, with the remaining stations following in quick succession.

Even with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day. This will rank it as the largest public Wi-Fi project in India, and among the largest in the world, by number of potential users. It will also be fast—many times faster than what most people in India have access to today, allowing travelers to stream a high definition video while they’re waiting, research their destination, or download some videos, a book or a new game for the journey ahead. Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future.

This map shows the first 100 stations that will have high-speed Wi-Fi by the end of 2016

We think this is an important part of making the Internet both accessible and useful for the more than 300 million Indians already online, and the nearly one billion more who are not.

But it’s not the only piece. To help more Indians get access to affordable, high-quality smartphones, which is the primary way most people there access the Internet, we launched Android One last year. To help address the challenges of limited bandwidth, we recently launched a feature that makes mobile webpages load faster and with less data, and we’ve made YouTube available offline with offline Maps coming soon. 

To help make web content more useful for Indians, many of whom don’t speak English, we launched the Indian Language Internet Alliance last year to foster more local language content, and have built greater local language support into our products—including Hindi Voice Search, an improved Hindi keyboard and support for seven Indian languages with the latest versions of Android. And finally, to help all Indians reap the benefits of connectivity, we’ve been ramping up efforts to help women, who make up just a third of Internet users in India today, get the most from the web.

Just like I did years ago, thousands of young Indians walk through Chennai Central every day, eager to learn, to explore and to seek opportunity. It’s my hope that this Wi-Fi project will make all these things a little easier. 

8 facts about American workers

BY SARA KEHAULANI GOO2 COMMENTS

Although the U.S. economy is recovering and appears to be on stable ground compared with other parts of the world, there’s still a lot of debate over how to best secure the future for American workers. Some Democrats have pushed for raising the federal minimum wage, and the Obama administration has proposed new overtime rules that would make millions of Americans eligible for extra pay. Meanwhile, some Republican presidential candidates have maintained that labor unions are too powerful and impede business.

Just in time for Labor Day, here are eight facts about the state of American workers.

1Over the past three decades, the share of American workers who are union members has fallen by about half.  Union membership peaked in 1954 at nearly 35% of all U.S. wage and salary workers, but it’s fallen to just over 11% in 2014.

The biggest decline in union representation from 2000 to 2014 was in installation, maintenance and repair occupations, a broad grouping that includes everything from auto mechanics to avionics technicians and watch repairers. Americans have mixed views about this trend, with about as many people saying it’s mostly a bad thing as there are saying it’s mostly a good .

2There is broad support for the right of workers to unionize across a range of occupations. Among six industry categories we asked about, about eight in-ten Americans (82%) say manufacturing and factory workers should have that right. Big majorities backed the rights of transit workers, police officers and public school teachers to do the same. About six-in-ten (62%) said fast-food workers should be able to unionize, while 35% opposed the .

3Millennials are now the largest generation in the labor force. More than one-in-three American workers today are Millennials (adults ages 18 to 34 in 2015), and this year they surpassed Generation X (ages 35 to 50 in 2015) to become the largest share of the American workforce. Gen Xers’ place as the dominant generation within the labor force was very short-lived – just three years. (On a chart, they are easily overlooked, sandwiched between Baby Boomers and Millennials.)

4American women earn 83 cents on the dollar compared with men, but the youngest working women are narrowing that gap substantially. Among the American workforce, there are manygaps in earnings among groups, such as byrace and ethnicity. In 2014, among workers ages 25 to 34, women’s hourly earnings were 91% those of men, according to an analysis of median hourly wages that includes full- and part-time workers. Among even younger working adults, ages 16 to 24, the gender wage gap lessens further, with women making 93% of what men earn.

Yet there is no guarantee that today’s young women will sustain their near parity with men in earnings in the years to come. Trends show that young women fall further behind their same-aged male counterparts as they age and deal with the responsibilities of parenthood and family.

5On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment, young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education to a greater extent than in the past. With the cost of college soaring and student debt rising in recent years, there’s been much debate about the value of a college education. Our economic analysis finds that college graduates ages 25 to 32 working full time in 2013 earned more annually—about $17,500 more—than employed young adults holding only a high school diploma. The pay gap was significantly smaller in previous generations. College-educated adults also are more likely to be employed full time than their less-educated counterparts and significantly less likely to be unemployed (3.8% vs. 12.2%).

6A much smaller share of U.S. teens work today compared with in the 1970s. In the ’70s and ’80s, most teens could expect to be working at least part of their summer vacation.

But the share of teens working summer jobs has dwindled since the early 1990s; last summer, fewer than a third of teens had a job. Teen employment has fallen with every economic recession. After bottoming out in 2010 and 2011 at 29.6%, the teen summer employment rate has barely budged – it was 31.3% last summer.

7The idea of raising the federal minimum wage has broad popular support, but less among Republicans. Overall, 73% of people we surveyed in early 2014 favored increasing the minimum to $10.10 an hour, but efforts by Democrats in Congress to move ahead with such a bill have stalled. Nine-in-ten Democrats surveyed backed a minimum wage increase, but support among Republicans was more divided, with 53% supporting an increase and 43% opposed. Twenty-nine states, plus the District of Columbia and nearly two dozen cities and counties, have set their own higher minimums, citing the high cost of living. The restaurant/food service industry is the single biggest employer of workers who make more than the minimums set in their states but less than proposed $10.10 federal minimum.

8New overtime rules could makemore than 5 million white-collar workers newly eligible for extra pay. A new proposal by the Labor Department would increase the salary threshold used to help determine eligibility for overtime. Most of the newly eligible under the proposal would be retail and food service managers, office administrators, low-level financial workers and other modestly paid managers and office professionals, according to our estimates.

OLA PROMO CODE WORTH RS. 100 | FREE OLA RIDE WORTH RS.100 | FREE TAXI

Hey,

I have been using the Ola app to book cabs quickly and travel safely around the city.
I want you to try this app and enjoy the Ola experience!

Sign up with this referral code VVV25B to ride for free up to Rs 100!

Have a great ride! Download here: m.ola.bz/1qlr8s

Cheers!