TWIL - Week #19

This Week I Learned:

• RuPay is the Indian domestic card payment network being set up by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) at the behest of banks in India. This project had been conceived by Indian Banks Association and has the approval of Reserve Bank of India. On Jun 21, 2013, NPCI launched RuPay PaySecure to enable e-commerce or online transactions using RuPay debit cards. 
• Rare are companies like Infosys and MindTree, which had seven founders apiece. With 12 founders—all aged 23-24 years, all engineers from IIT Bombay, all friends—housing.co.in has outdone them all. Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny share the same surname Bansal but they are not related. #trivia
• Nearly 80% of smartphones shipped run Google's Android software. (Source: WSJ)
• A study shows that on social media, hype can work and feed on itself as well. Very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding. "Cumulative advantage" is the idea that something that starts slightly more popular will build upon that popularity until it is far ahead of its competitors — and conversely, something that does not catch on will usually fade away whether or not it is good. “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by Robert Galbraith, received good reviews but tiny sales when it was released in April. When it was revealed that Galbraith was a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling, the book suddenly had the cumulative advantage conferred by the Harry Potter series and jumped to the top of best-seller lists. The biggest obstacle to success is just being noticed. 
• GitHub (launched in 2008) has three and a half million users working on close to seven million projects, and it grows by ten thousand users on a typical weekday. The GitHub Web site is built around an independent piece of version-control software called Git (released eight years ago), which was created by the developer Linus Torvalds. (via excellent article in NewYorker that your grandmother may follow)