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‘Run Kerala Run’ creates history
Thiruvananthapuram: ‘Run Kerala Run’, the curtain raiser to the 35th National Games, ‘ran’ into history when every third Keralite took part in the race held all across the state Tuesday morning.
All eyes were rooted to the front of the state secretariat with cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar as the chief guest.
Right from Chief Minister Oommen Chandy to Governor P. Sathasivam found it difficult to rub shoulders with the cricket legend as thousands were in waiting to have a glimpse of the icon and to run alongside him.
At 10.30 a.m. (local time), Sathasivam read out a pledge in English and soon after raised the flag signalling the start of the run.
Chandy and his cabinet colleagues turned up in track suits while Tendulkar stood out in a red T-shirt with sunglasses.
Due to security reasons and huge crowd, the emminent personalities, including Chandy and Tendulkar, found it impossible to run and instead walked 200 metres and had to hop into a car to reach the Central Stadium nearby.
Addressing the public meeting, state Sports Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan said this was a world record — more than a crore people took part in the run that took place in more than 10,000 locations all across the state.
Chandy said with this, Kerala has written itself into the record books and this showed that nothing is impossible for the southern state to achieve.
“If Kerala stands united as we did in this event, there is nothing that Kerala cannot achieve. We should stand united in all our efforts,” said Chandy.
However, the biggest cheer was reserved for Tendulkar who is also the goodwill ambassador for the upcoming 35th National Games that begin here Jan 31.
“I am not at all surprised with this response from Kerala. Kerala has always given me lots of love and respect. This run is a pre-cursor to the National Games. I will be back shortly,” said Tendulkar.
He also obliged by taking a selfie with others and soon he was whisked away by the security guards, signalling the end of the event.
At Kochi, thousands of people took part in the main venue where cinestar Mohanlal read out the pledge.
Likewise, in all other 12 districts a similar run was conducted. Kozhikode witnessed a massive turnout, so did Malappuram and all other districts.
This event was mainly done to promote the National Games to be held from Jan 31 to Feb 14 at 30 venues across seven districts of the state.
The Kerala government gave an hour’s break to its employees to take part in the run and so did all the schools so that students could participate.
The event, however, left a section of the media disgruntled after it was learnt that the event management company was a sister concern of Malayala Manorama, the leading regional daily in the state.
On a few occasions, the press meetings conducted by the National Games committee were boycotted by a section of the media but Tuesday morning, all the TV channels did a live telecast of the main event from the state secretariat.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
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Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
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Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
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The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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