Tech This Week: Cook in, Flash out

INDIA: Celebrity dinners and star-struck IPL matches aside, Apple’s CEO India visit caused a lot of speculation and discussion back home and around the world.

When he shared plans with media about leveraging the developer contingent, R&D muscle and huge market here; more headlines followed around start-up accelerators (Bangalore), development offices (For Maps in Hyderabad) etc. Now would Apple Pay be the last lever that mobile payments in India needed - at least Cook is bullish about that. But the pre-owned iPhone idea did cause more debate between the dumping-critic-alley and environmentally-inclined-side while Cook was here.

His visit may be a short-one but his plans for India seem to stretch across 1000 years.

Talking of short-and-long time windows, in another highlight, that marked a move away from well-entrenched Flash days, Google pursued systematic deprecation of Flash by planning to disable it in the fourth quarter of this year. This means that embedded Flash content would not be on and plugins won’t be on the radar too.

While exceptions for enterprise side and some white-lists might still be around, Google’s firm direction here also indicates browsers’ shying away from plug-ins in imminent future.

Google floated the industry buzz with the I/O developer conference too with peeks into driverless cars, more syncing between app and Chrome, along with enterprise-oriented updates around Firebase, machine learning, API partner ecosystems, and cloud.

As to what’s coming out, UPS and SAP could be bringing 3D Printing service soon and when it turns to what’s going out, watch out for what happens to 'copy', 'paste' and 'backspace' concepts with Google Chrome going by the hush-hush war that appears to be brewing with new developer tools and Microsoft’s productivity apps.

The Sheets and Slides chatter will go on for some time. But this week’s backspace key comes to a rest for now.