Latest Technology

William Hulsey, HULSEY, P.C., Intellectual Property Lawyers (HULSEYIP)

2011-08-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

Topic

Global IP Issues

Presenter

William N. Hulsey III, Esq

Location

United States

Description

HULSEYIP takes great pride in serving emerging growth companies competing in global markets with products and services relating to renewable and sustainable energy technologies, life sciences, electronics, environmental innovations, software, and aerospace technologies. As broad as are HULSEYIP’s technology proficiencies, the firm is yet tightly focused in providing its clients with the highest quality in patent, trade secret, copyright, and trademark legal services. As a practicing patent attorney, Mr. Hulsey has developed and implemented complete intellectual property protection and licensing programs for numerous companies.

Clients receiving HULSEYIP services range in geographic diversity north-to-south from Norway to New Zealand and east-to-west from Siberia to Singapore. HULSEYIP represents clients before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, as well as other intellectual property offices of nations around the globe via a network of foreign associates with whom the practice daily collaborates. Through his legal work, as well as with teaching through the IC2 Institute, Mr. Hulsey has taught intellectual property rights formation, protection, and commercialization in over 34 countries and on all continents, except Antarctica.

Mr. Hulsey has committed his law practice and professional endeavors to promoting entrepreneurship and the protection and commercialization of his clients’ intellectual property rights. His range of legal representation covers initial IP portfolio development work through litigation in enforcing clients IP rights. Bill has represented clients in intellectual property matters before Federal District Courts in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, Texas, as well as in San Jose, California and Rochester, New York.

Mr. Hulsey serves on the Selection Committee for the Central Texas Regional Center for Innovation & Commercialization under The State of Texas Emerging Technology Fund Program. He also frequently serves as a Judge in the internationally recognized Idea to Product (I2P®) UT Competition at the University of Texas campus. Most recently, He served as a judge for The I2P® Portugal Competition 2010, which has organized by COTEC Portugal.

Bill also is the author of CREATING, MANAGING, AND LICENSING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ASSETS, a major work of over 30 hours of streaming video courses providing intellectual property education and training, through Stanford University.

Through his work with the IC2 Institute and personal travel, Mr. Hulsey has visited and worked in over 37 countries throughout the world. An avid singer, Bill is a tenor with the Texas Choral Consort, one of Texas’ leading audition-only choruses, and the St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Chancel Choir. He has sung an extensive variety of choral works from a broad array of composers over a ten-year period. Presently, he sings as a tenor in the Austin Civic Chorus, the Conspirare Symphony Chorus, and the Texas Choral Consort.

3D printing: The world's first printed plane

2011-08-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

The promise of 3D printing has finally taken off with the development of a drone that takes just a week to create

Under darkening skies on a grass airstrip in the UK's Wiltshire Downs, north of Stonehenge, I am watching half a dozen aeronautical engineers rushing to assemble an uncrewed aircraft before the weather takes a turn for the worse. They are hoping to show how 3D printing will revolutionise the economics of aircraft design – by flying the world's first fully "printed" plane.

Led by Andy Keane and Jim Scanlan of the University of Southampton, the team believes that 3D printing will soon allow uncrewed aircraft known as drones or UAVs to go from the drawing board to flight in a matter of days. No longer, they say, will one design of UAV be repeatedly manufactured on a production line. Instead, designers will be able to fine-tune a UAV for each specific application – whether it be crop spraying, surveillance or infrared photography – and then print a bespoke plane on demand.

3D printing has come on in leaps and bounds since its origins as an expensive prototyping tool over two decades ago. It uses laser-assisted machines to fabricate plastic or metal objects, building up the item layer by layer, each slice just 100 micrometres thick.

To do this, the 3D printer first slices up an object's computerised design into hundreds of easily printable layers. Each layer is then "printed" by training a laser beam on a bed of polyamide plastic, stainless steel or titanium powder – depending on the object being created – tracing out the entire 2D shape required for that layer. The laser's heat fuses the particles together at their boundaries. Once each layer is complete, more powder is scattered over it and the process repeated until a complete artefact is produced.

What the printer spits out is a powdery "cake" from which the desired object can be retrieved simply by pulling it out, like a child yanking a buried toy from a sandpit

To create a stronger object that can withstand higher loads and stresses, an electron beam can be used in place of a laser to melt the powder particles completely. And because 3D printing involves no cutting or grinding of metal, it offers vast design freedom.

This is a huge deal for aircraft designers. Some of the best ideas in aviation history have involved designs which proved too pricey and tough to make. The Supermarine Spitfire, for example, was among the most manoeuvrable fighter aircraft of the second world war because its wings were of an ultra-low-drag elliptical design. But it was a nightmare to produce, requiring complex machinery and production expertise.

"With 3D printing we can go back to pure forms and explore the mathematics of airflow without being forced to put in straight lines to keep costs down," says Keane.

So Keane's team set out to see how quickly they could design a 1.5-metre-wingspan, super-low-drag UAV, print it and get it airborne. A UK-based 3D-printing firm, 3T RPD of Greenham Common, Berkshire, joined the venture, agreeing to print the UAV out of hard nylon.

"We designed in printable hinges that would let the ailerons move," says 3T RPD spokesman Stuart Offer. "And we decided where to split the fuselage so the nose could be snap-jointed to the fuselage easily."

The budget for the Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft (Sulsa) was £5000, which imposed a number of design constraints. The aircraft would have no undercarriage to keep complexity and weight down, necessitating the use of a launch catapult – and a belly landing. It would be electric-motor-powered to eliminate the need for starting equipment and heavy fuel. And it would have a V-shaped tail rather than the usual upside-down-T, so that only two parts had to be printed instead of three.

Cost savings here meant that the plane could have Spitfire-style elliptical wings, as well as a strong geodesic airframe – another expensive second world war-era design, this time from the stout Vickers Wellington bomber, which was extraordinarily resistant to anti-aircraft fire.

Back at the airstrip, two wings, a nose cone and a fuselage with a built-in V-shaped tail have been ripped from nylon cakes, dusted down and delivered. Sulsa's airframe designers Jeroen van Schaik and Mario Ferraro, both grad students at the University of Southampton – which launches a UAV masters course in September – are assembling the aircraft after stuffing it with electronics, servos and batteries.

Nearby, Matthew Bennett of autopilot-maker SkyCircuits is discussing with the aircraft's ground-based pilot, Paul Heckles, how to hand manual control to the ARM-microchip-based autopilot once the plane is airborne.

Soon it's flight time. Sulsa twitches like a giant, grounded butterfly flexing its wings as ailerons and rudders are tested. Then the powerful launch catapult is cranked back. As soon as Sulsa clears the rail, Heckles punches the throttle – and the plane takes to the sky.

Computer Sciences a likely target for breakup

2011-08-13T05:02:00.000-07:00

(Reuters) - After a series of failed takeover attempts and accounting scandals, Computer Sciences Corp is attracting potential activist investors looking to take advantage of a weak share price to push for a breakup.

The $4.5 billion market cap company's shares have dropped 40 percent so far this year to below $30, valuing it at a steep discount to peers.

Its government services business faces an uncertain outlook amid prospective cuts in U.S. government spending, dragging down the value of its higher growth Information Technology services.

Adding to its problems, Computer Sciences is also caught up in an accounting investigation, shareholder lawsuits and a long dispute with the U.K. National Health Service regarding alleged delays in developing healthcare IT systems.

Activist investors are doing the math, evaluating a breakup and other ways to boost Computer Sciences' sagging share price, people familiar with the situation said. But Computer Sciences is aware of the pressure and has been reviewing it options as well, the people added.

Representatives for Computer Sciences declined comment.

Computer Sciences has been a target of multiple takeover attempts in the past and investors and potential buyers have long bet that separating the Falls Church, Virginia-based company's commercial IT services from its government services could boost value.

Its North American Public Sector, which provides outsourcing and consulting services to the Defense Department and other federal agencies, accounts for a little more than a third of its revenues.

The rest comes from data-center outsourcing and developing enterprise software applications. Computer Sciences' revenues totaled $16.2 billion in the 12 months ended July 1, 2011.

The company trades at about 6 times its earnings. Accenture Public Ltd Co, a close competitor in terms of size, scale and reach, trades at about 17 times earnings, said Morningstar analyst Swami Shanmugasundaram.

Shanmugasundaram said the commercial business has a higher growth profile and better margins than the government business, and splitting them up would "definitely" be good for shareholders.

"Because of its growth profile and execution issues ... I do expect CSC to trade at a discount (to peers), but this is too much of a discount," he said.

CSC PROBLEMS

People familiar with Computer Sciences management's thinking said the company believes the two units belong together and it wants to sort out several pending issues before determining its strategic direction.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is in the middle of a probe related to Computer Sciences' accounting errors, which primarily involve accounting irregularities in Europe's Nordic region.

The issues could "divert management's focus, result in substantial investigation expenses and have an adverse impact on the firm's reputation and financial condition," Computer Sciences has said in a statement.

The U.K. government, meanwhile, is reviewing whether a contract to install next-generation healthcare IT systems in the country should be continued after Computer Sciences allegedly missed deadlines. The company said this week it would likely meet the U.K. health agency in September to discuss the matter.

These challenges could prove a hurdle for any activists looking to buy into the company.

Activists would also have to wait it out if they launched a campaign either against the board, as all 10 Computer Sciences board members have been just reelected for a full year. The current board members have served long terms, with only four of the directors joining after 2007.

FAILED MATCHES

Over the last decade or so, private equity firms, big technology companies and prime defense contractors have looked at the company as a takeover target, but its presence in both the commercial and government sectors proved to be a hurdle.

In early 2006, Computer Sciences received an offer in the low $60s per share from a consortium of three private equity firms and a large technology company, the sources said.

But Chief Executive Van Honeycutt wanted at least $65 per share and rejected the bid, they said.

Lockheed Martin Corp was also interested at the time, but was not prepared to buy the entire company and its efforts did not gain traction, these people said.

In 1998, Computer Associates -- now known as CA Technologies -- unsuccessfully made a hostile $9.8 billion takeover bid for Computer Sciences.

It is unclear if any of these or other potential buyers would still be interested. Hewlett Packard Co bought Computer Sciences competitor EDS for $13.9 billion in 2008, while others such as Dell Inc and Oracle Corp have different priorities for takeovers, sources said.

The sheer size of a deal would also be a challenge for private equity firms in the near term, sources said.

But if government and commercial businesses were separated in a tax-free spinoff, the two units would attract more buyers, the sources said.

"If the company is really going to earn what Wall Street thinks it's going to earn, it is extremely attractive from a value perspective," a source said.

"That said, the company needs to reposition strategically and the question is: Can they get there on their own?"

How Kickstarter is reinventing the iPhone economy

2011-08-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

The crowd-funding site, which invites users to invest in various projects with small sum “pledges” that only have to be paid if a project reaches its funding goal, is a breath of fresh air for a jaded iDevice accessory shopper like myself. And Kickstarter projects associated with Apple hardware seem to have a knack for doing well, both on the site and after achieving funding. Dan Provost, co-designer of the Glif and the Cosmonaut (both listed below), shared with me his opinion of why Kickstarter has prompted so many interesting Apple-related projects:

To a smaller degree, the influx of Apple accessories on Kickstarter has mirrored the deluge of apps into the App Store back in 2008. Apple has created an amazing tool in the iPhone, and people are excited to build things for it. Apple enabled individuals to publish software on the iPhone in 2008 with the opening of the App Store, and it seems Kickstarter has created that same enthusiasm for hardware.

Considering how many Apple accessories currently populate Kickstarter (a lot), and the frequency with which they appear (very often), I’d agree. Here’s a look at some of the best iPhone, iPod and iPad-related projects Kickstarter has brought us so far.

1. TikTok + LunaTik

Apple’s iPod line has been overshadowed by the iPhone and iPad for quite some time now, but that didn’t stop the bite-sized music player it unveiled last fall from sparking the imaginations of many an accessory maker. Designer Scott Wilson was one of those who saw great potential in the 2010 iPod nano, and he came up with something that fits seamlessly with Apple’s own minimalist sensibilities.

Wilson created the TikTok and LunaTik, two watchband accessories for the iPod nano, based on the idea that users would be willing to pay more for a quality product, instead of just spending only a little bit of money on the nano straps rushed out the door by the usual suspects. The TikTok and LunaTike proved he was right, raising nearly $1 million on Kickstarter, before eventually finding a place on Apple Store retail shelves. The TikTok retails for $39.95, and the LunaTik is $79.95

2. Glif

iPhone photography is not a new phenomenon, but it seems to be taking off as the quality of the device’s camera improves. But for all their enthusiasm, mobile photo buffs still run into the limitations inherent in using a smartphone camera. Stability and shooting in low-light situations definitely number among those weaknesses. The Glif, designed by Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt, aimed to fix some of the problems with iPhone photography in a simple way.

The Glif is a single piece of hard rubber with a metal threaded tripod mount that snugly grips your iPhone 4. It works wonderfully, as I discovered, letting you use your iPhone with any standard tripod, and other useful photo accessories like the Joby GorillaPod. The Glif might have been possible without Kickstarter, Glif designer Provost says, but the site “does so much more than just money raising.” According to Provost, it also “creates and fosters an enthusiastic community around your product, which is invaluable.” The Glif retails for $20.00.

3. GoPano micro

Another project related to iPhone photography (they aren’t exactly a rarity), the GoPano micro also achieved Kickstarter success. It’s a case/attachment combo that allows the iPhone 4 to record 360-degree videos, which you can then upload and share to the GoPano website.

This relatively small and inexpensive add-on for the iPhone is a classic Kickstart project: a product that appeals to such a relatively small niche of customers that it probably wouldn’t otherwise get made. But for realtors, nature lovers and others who might benefit from the tech, it’s an amazing device at a great price, and judging by the GoPano micro’s nearly $170,000 in funding, many agree. The GoPano micro will retail for around $80 when it becomes available.

4. PadPivot

Holding the iPad for longer periods of time can be a bit of a challenge. Designer Bernie Graham recognized that, and created the PadPivot, which features a ball-and-socket design, combined with a contoured base to make it easier to perch your iPad on your thigh at an easy angle for viewing. In my review, I couldn’t really find anything bad to say about the finished product.

Graham says that while he likely could’ve made the PadPivot a reality without Kickstarter, the site streamlines things and really allows entrepreneurs to focus on the process. And having watched along as the PadPivot made its way through funding, to production, to being retail-ready, you really see the advantage of Kickstarter from a small manufacturer’s perspective, as well as the challenges that ramping up to full-scale production present. The PadPivot will retail for around $25 when it becomes available.

5. The Cosmonaut

Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt had so much fun creating the Glif on Kickstarter that they went back for seconds. The Cosmonaut, another project to break $100,000 in funding, is an iPad stylus designed based on how users actually draw on their iPads. The project was unusual in that it started out with a risky “pay what you wish” option, where every backer who pledged at least $1 would receive a pre-order of the finished product.

Luckily, the gambit seems to have worked out in Provost and Gerhardt’s favor, as you can tell by the success of the initial funding. It also reflects well on the Kickstarter community that it rewards smart design, even when given leeway to take advantage. The Cosmonaut will retail for $25 when it becomes available.

6. The Oona

Looking for a flexible iPhone mount that can stick to a variety of surfaces? The Oona can do that, and more. It works as an in-car windshield mount, a desk stand, a tripod attachment and even an under-the-cupboard clip for browsing recipes. Like the other projects listed here, it’s also stylish, showing off considerable design talent from the team of Brad Leong, Danny Fukuba and Sam Gordon.

The Oona managed to exceed its funding goal by more than $120,000, and is now accepting pre-orders with a four- to eight-week lead time. The Oona retails for $25.00 now in pre-orders, and $29.95 once it becomes widely available.

7. MySaver

The last project on this list, Thomas Lehman’s MySaver, has yet to be fully funded. But the problem it addresses is so widespread that I have faith it’ll exceed its goal. The MySaver addresses the tendency of iPhone, iPod and iPad cables to wear out near the points where they connect to the USB or dock connector ends. This has eventually happened to nearly all of my iPhone USB cables.

The MySaver comes in two flavors: a DIY version for upgrading your own cables at home, and a Pro version that comes pre-assembled with a high-quality OEM dock connector to USB cable of its own. The project is a smart idea, solves a common failing, and something we haven’t yet seen from the usual crowd of established accessory makers. The MySaver can be pre-ordered with a $8 Kickstarter pledge for the DIY version, or a $19 pledge for the Pro version.

That’s just a sampling of some of the best and brightest Kickstarter has to offer. Got any other suggestions we missed? Share them in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Hacker group Anonymous denies Sony attack

2011-05-09T06:04:00.000-07:00

The secretive "hacker collective" had earlier been singled-out by Sony as the possible guilty party.

But a posting on Anonymous' blog said: "Let's be clear, we are legion, but it wasn't us. You are incompetent Sony."

The electronics giant has offered compensation to users who suffer fraud as a result of the theft.

Earlier this week, Sony sent a letter to the US Congress accusing Anonymous of being involved in the attack.

"Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack," said the letter, signed by Sony America boss Kazuo Hirai.

He said that Sony had found a file planted on its network labelled "Anonymous" and bearing the group's slogan, "We are legion".

But Anonymous said that it had been framed by online thieves to throw law enforcement off track.

“Start Quote

Whoever broke into Sony's servers... clearly wanted Anonymous to be blamed for the most significant digital theft in history”

End Quote Anonymous' statement

The group, which made headlines in December 2010 after it used software freely available over the internet to temporarily bring down the sites of MasterCard and Visa, said that its members were not credit card thieves.

"Whoever broke into Sony's servers to steal the credit card info and left a document blaming Anonymous clearly wanted Anonymous to be blamed for the most significant digital theft in history," the statement read.

Revenge attack

According to Sony, the group targeted the company and facilitated the hacking in retaliation for the electronics giant's recent legal action against George Hotz.

The US-based hacker was accused of breaking copyright laws by devising a way to change the operating system on Sony PlayStations.

The case was eventually settled after Mr Hotz agreed not to repeat such behaviour in future.

Sony claimed that the massive data theft also coincided with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its website by Anonymous.

Kazuo Hirai, Sony America boss, said the company found a file on its network labelled "Anonymous"

Denial-of-service attacks take servers down by overwhelming them with traffic.

But Anonymous denies all responsibility for allowing access to online gamers' data, including millions of credit card numbers.

"No one who is actually associated with our movement would do something that would prompt a massive law enforcement response," said the group's statement.

"On the other hand, a group of standard online thieves would have every reason to frame Anonymous in order to put law enforcement off the track."

RIM launches new BlackBerry Bold smartphone

2011-05-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

By Alastair Sharp

ORLANDO, Florida | Mon May 2, 2011 4:28pm EDT

(Reuters) - Research In Motion showed off a new version of its BlackBerry Bold phone with upgraded software on Monday, aiming to regain its stride after last week's profit warning and other recent stumbles.

RIM also said it will manage corporate and government communications sent using Apple's iPhone and iPad, as well as devices running Google's Android software, through its secure BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It's an implicit acknowledgment by RIM that its grip on the sector has weakened.

The company aims to capitalize on the BlackBerry's enhanced security features and its established role controlling employee access to corporate data while out of the office.

For years, businesses and government agencies have given the BlackBerry to millions of workers in need of mobile access to workplace applications. But many now prefer using their own Apple and Android-powered devices.

"Device diversity is a reality," Co-chief Executive Jim Balsillie told analysts at an annual conference in Florida.

RIM said the new touchscreen phone it announced on Monday is its thinnest and its most powerful yet.

When the device becomes available worldwide in the summer it will support the world's two most widely used network technologies, GSM and CDMA.

Analysts said the company would need more than one new product to generate investor excitement and investors shrugged off the announcement, sending RIM shares down 1.3 percent to $48.05 on Monday. It dropped 14 percent on Friday after the profit warning.

"It's not so much any individual product that's going to change investors' perception of the stock. It's going to take an upgrade of the entire product portfolio with the operating system upgrades," Evercore Partners analyst Alkesh Shah.

SOFTWARE BATTLE

RIM stunned investors last week with a fresh profit warning, just weeks after it issued a dismal outlook and struggled through poor reviews for its PlayBook tablet.

Sales of its aging phones have lagged, especially in the vital U.S. market and in Latin America, while Apple and Google have powered ahead.

While defending its realm in the professional market, RIM is pushing hard to deepen its inroads in consumer markets. But it has struggled to catch the eye of the most discerning shoppers, though it has made strides in grabbing market share in emerging markets, mostly with cheaper handsets.

RIM's other co-chief, founder Mike Lazaridis, said the company never considered ditching its own software to adopt Android, as Motorola Mobility, HTC Corp and others have done. Some analysts say that would lessen the strain on RIM.

"This battle is going to be fought on software, and we decided not to basically succumb to the lowest common denominator with Android," Lazaridis said on Monday afternoon.

He declined to say whether RIM would bid for thousands of Nortel patents Google is frontrunner to acquire.

TOUCHSCREEN BOLD

The new Bold, the model most geared toward the business market, has a 2.8-inch screen and retains the company's trademark physical qwerty keyboard with a 1.2 GHz processor. It will ship with a near-field communication (NFC) chip, allowing the phone to be used as a mobile wallet, executives said at the annual BlackBerry World conference in Orlando.

Balsillie said some customers are prepared to buy tens of thousands of NFC-enabled BlackBerrys.

The Canadian company also launched a video chat application and Facebook app for the PlayBook and said it would buy device management company Ubitexx.

RIM also launched BlackBerry Balance, a program to allow corporate and personal data to coexist without compromising confidential communication.

(Additional reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Peter Galloway)

South Korea police probe Google over location data collection

2011-05-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

By Hyunjoo Jin

SEOUL | Tue May 3, 2011 6:32am EDT

(Reuters) - Google Inc's Seoul office was raided on Tuesday on suspicion its mobile advertising unit AdMob had illegally collected location data without consent, South Korean police said, the latest setback to the Internet search firm's Korean operations.

The probe into suspected collection of data on where a user is located without consent highlights growing concerns about possible misuse of private information as the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets increases.

Such information is viewed as crucial for the burgeoning mobile advertising sector as it helps personalize online ads according to individual preferences or locations.

Last month, Apple Inc defended its use of iPhone location data, but denied that it was tracking the movements of customers, while consumer electronics giant Sony is grappling with a massive data breach.

"Every technology has a flip side. Location-based services benefit customers by helping them find nearby restaurants, gas stations and other places with their smartphones," said Kim Kwang-jo, a computer science professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

"But it could potentially violate consumer privacy. There are loopholes in location-based services, and companies should get consent from customers to collect location data."

"We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission," a South Korean police official said.

A Google spokesman confirmed that the police had visited its Seoul office and told Reuters the company was cooperating with their investigation.

Google and Apple have been targeted by U.S. lawmakers over their protection and use of consumer data from cell phone applications such as where users are located.

Google executives have talked about the ability to target advertising to users based on location.

Google bought AdMob, a leading global mobile ad firm, last year for $750 million.

Seoul police also raided the offices of local portal Daum Communications over similar suspicions, Daum said on Tuesday.

Daum said location data collected by its mobile ad services was not illegal as it was anonymous and could not be used to track individuals.

PROBES

Google has already been the subject of a series of probes in the United States, Britain, France, Singapore, Switzerland and South Korea over data collected by its controversial fleet of "Street View" cars.

Seoul police concluded in January that Google collected location information and other data from 600,000 wireless Internet users in South Korea with three Street View cars.

Google tightened its privacy policy in the wake of revelations that Google's Street View cars, which take panoramic pictures of city streets, inadvertently collected data from unsecured wireless networks in more than 30 countries.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also considering a broad investigation into Google and reportedly alerting high-tech firms to gather data ahead of a probe of Google's dominance of the Internet search industry.

South Korea's top Internet portals filed a complaint with anti-trust regulators last month claiming Google was unfairly stifling competition in the mobile Internet search market of one of the world's most wired countries.

In South Korea, Google is one of smallest players in the fixed-line Internet search market, but it enjoys a near 20 percent share in the mobile Internet market, backed by its Android platform.

Google, which controls roughly two-thirds of the global search market, is a stellar performer in the booming smartphone and tablet market, as device makers such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics increasingly adopt its free Android operating platform to counter heavyweight Apple.

Global technology firms, including Microsoft, are trying to rein Google's growth.

The global smartphone market is forecast to grow 58 percent this year and Android will account for 39 percent of the market, according to research firm Gartner. In the tablet market, Apple's share will gradually decline to 47 percent by 2015 from 69 percent this year, with Google's share forecast to rise to 39 percent from 20 percent now, Gartner said.

(Additional reporting by Miyoung Kim and Jonathan Hopfner in SEOUL and Kenneth Li in NEW YORK; Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Internet Travel Ups and Downs

2011-04-10T06:54:00.002-07:00

More Chinese netizens are using the Internet to book airline and hotel reservations, and the global financial crisis appeared to not have much affect on the situation in China's online travel sector. 2009 began with China's leading travel website Ctrip.com winning an infringement lawsuit against a Beijing-based travel search engine Qunar.com. But then Ctrip.com found itself on the other side of the public relations window when it made a public announcement in which it apologized to a consumer surnamed Liang for selling him fake travel insurance policies. The passenger subsequently announced plans to sue Ctrip and its affiliates. Then Hong Kong's Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts pleased business travelers with the announcement that the global financial crisis has pushed it to now offer all guests free Internet services. Tencent's online payment tool Tenpay announced a cooperation with Ctrip.com to allow users to log onto Ctrip.com through their Tencent QQ instant messaging accounts to enjoy the one-stop service for ticket queries, airline searches, hotel searches and booking reservations. Chinese budget hotel chain 7 Days Inn announced the trial operation of a social networking site "Happy 7 Days" at its official website, and 33 Chinese media formally set up the China Travel Internet Media Alliance to integrate tourism resources and create sustainable development within the industry. China's leading business travel and meeting planning search engine 51MICE.com announced new features, and Et-china, a Guangzhou-based online travel company, announced that it acquired the Beijing-based Yoee.com, a leading online seller of air tickets in China, for an undisclosed amount. Around the same time last year, TripAdvisor.com announced it was buying Kuxun.cn, a Chinese flight and hotel search engine, but Travelzoo announced it was dumping all of its Asia travel-related businesses. Local governments also got involved in the burgeoning opportunities in online travel as Fujian's First Travel E-Commerce Center, the name of Fujian CTS Group's e-commerce center, was formally opened to netizens at the end of 2009.

IMEI Mobile Phone Blocks in India (Shanzai)

2011-04-10T06:54:00.001-07:00

Some of the most commented news we ran in 2009 dealt with shanzhai mobile phones lacking IMEI numbers. Countries like India banned the import of China-made mobile phones that lacked IMEI numbers, causing consumers to fret over the usability of their wireless devices. At the end of 2009, specific regions within India created their own rules for the phones, causing further consternation for consumers and manufacturers.

Mobile Value-Added Services Businesses In China Suffer Setbacks

2011-04-10T06:52:00.002-07:00

The last month of 2009 was an example of the problems that mobile companies faced in China during the entire year. In an effort to fight mobile pornography, Chinese telecom operator China Mobile announced that it suspended all of its WAP service partners' ability to charge for services as of November 30, 2009. This applies to all of its WAP wireless value-added service partners in China, regardless of a partner's propensity to disseminate pornography. Investors in Chinese companies like Linktone, KongZhong, and Hurray should be worried. Then a couple days later, Linktone announced its unaudited financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2009, and stated it had recorded poor wireless value-added services and other revenues of USD13.8 million, compared with USD18.3 million in the second quarter of 2009 and USD16.6 million in the third quarter of 2008. Then KongZhong Corporation became the first U.S.-listed mobile firm from China to admit that the expected downturn caused by the WAP suspension of telecommunications billing would adversely affect its bottom line. Then Hurray finally announced its quarterly earnings, and it too showed a dismal wireless outlook. Hurray's total revenues for the third quarter ended September 30, 2009, were USD6.9 million, representing a decrease of 2.9 million quarter-over-quarter and a decrease of 6.6 million year-over-year! Then, to prove that even the big boys have tough times, Zhang Chunjiang was removed from his positions at China Mobile due to alleged serious financial irregularities.

More E-Books On The Horizon

2011-04-10T06:52:00.001-07:00

With conferences, trade shows, and advertisements devoted to e-books and e-book readers in China, this sector is expected to grow on domestically-built devices and services. In April 2009, international book publisher Penguin laid the groundwork for e-books in China with a deal, and then Hon Hai announced a new distribution deal. China's Datang unveiled its first TD-SCDMA e-book reader, and China Mobile also worked on delivering reading material to mobile phone users. A Chinese online gaming firm created a subsidiary called Shanda Literature, which announced plans to enter the Taiwanese market.

The Curse of World of Warcraft

2011-04-10T06:45:00.002-07:00

Online gaming has grown in China, and nothing better illustrates the follies of the sector better than the World of Warcraft curse. The game, created by U.S.-based Blizzard Entertainment, appears to be a curse that adversely affects any Chinese company it touches. The9 originally had the Chinese license to operate the game, but first denied rumors that it would lose the license in 2008. Then in March 2009, more rumors spread that The9 would soon lose the WoW franchise in China. One month later, in April 2009, the rumors were proven true: Blizzard dumped The9 and chose Netease.com instead. Then The9 sued Blizzard in Shanghai and The9 cut 300 of its staff. But then the curse moved to NetEase.com, which angered Chinese online gamers with postponements to a re-launch of the game. Then The9, who now lacked its one-trick pony game, announced a huge profit drop. NetEase.com finally resumed the WoW game in September 2009, and investors in The9 launched a lawsuit in the United States because of lack of disclosure over WoW's fate. The curse again shifted back to NetEase.com in November when the Chinese government announced that NetEase.com had no legal right to operate the WoW game — this caused NetEase.com to announce a poor financial quarter.

ZPRIME MAY ZAP IBM REVENUE AS IBM TRIES TO CUT NEON TO ZIP

2011-04-10T06:45:00.001-07:00

IBM says its mainframe customers can save money by moving portions of their work from general purpose processors to specialty engines. Until recently, this helped some customers shave their software bills. But now there's a software company that claims it can do what IBM says is possible in a very big way. The company is called Neon Enterprise Software, based in Sugar Land, Texas, and its shape-shifting product is called zPrime.

Neon isn't making specific cost reduction claims, at least not publicly. But industry gossip suggests that it might be be possible for users to cut their software costs by a quarter to a half. We know of one respected mainframe expert who thinks zPrime could cut some customers' bills by more than 75 percent (although we remain skeptical). Whether the savings is one quarter or three, Neon's software could have a huge impact on IBM's mainframe software and hardware revenue. In addition, zPrime could radically reduce the cost of providing services. If IBM doesn't pass along potential hardware and software savings to its services customers others, such as HP or Dell, could clean IBM's clock wherever there is a competitive opportunity.

IBM has already come up with a scare letter to warn prospective users of zPrime that it won't take kindly to anyone who doesn't stick to the rules governing the use of IBM's Ziip and Zaap engines. Neon reportedly said it studied the rules (with the help of some smart lawyers) and that it's playing fair and square no matter what IBM says.

If recent history is any guide, IBM might try to crush Neon in the courts if it can't beat the company in the marketplace. But unlike Big Blue's other mainframe rivals, such as PSI, T3 and Fundamental Software, Neon is not a pissant. Quite the opposite. Neon's main backer is John Moores. Mr. Moores is a big player in technology and in professional sports. He is the boss of the San Diego Padres and has property overlooking the Pebble Beach golf course. He was the M in BMC, which he founded. But the most big leage fact about Moores is that he chairs the Carter Center, a job he took as President Jimmy Carter eases toward retirement.

Basically, John Moores seems like the kind of person who knows how to pick winners avoid losers. He is, at the moment, IBM's most daunting competitor. The only mitigating factor might be that Moores is above all else practical. If IBM buys Neon in order to kill it, as it did with PSI, the price could be pretty big but Moores is unlikely to say no. Moores just doesn't seem like the kind of person to hang onto the company out of pride and against all he has learned in business over the years.

Interested users must understand that there are limits to what zPrime can do. Neon's product doesn't work on all mainframes. It only works with current and recent z/OS on current or recent hardware. But it will work on mainframes that have tiny (and thus relatively inexpensive) general purpose engines along with Ziip and Zaap engines that always run at full speed. And for mainframe shops trying to trim their costs, the really crusty old legacy work they run on new engines can always be farmed out to services companies that run older and therefore cheaper mainframes that provide the kind of hardware a lot of that legacy stuff was written to work with in the first place.

We haven't heard the last from IBM on this matter of course. But it's safe to say that even now every mainframe shop that has taken a look a zPrime seems to be impressed. If these shops worry about IBM's revenge, that, took, is a tribute to John Moores' killer software, where the thing that could be killed is IBM's bottom line.

PRESUMED HEIR TO IBM'S CEO HAULED OFF BY FEDS FOR INSIDER TRADING

2011-04-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

Neon, the company behind zPrime, the software that helps users move legacy workloads to specialty engines and thereby reduce their metered software charges, has sued IBM in Federal Court. The case was filed in Austin, near Neon's home town, which is one of the cities served by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The suit stems from allegations that IBM has falsely disparaged zPrime and misrepresented in a material and harmful way the software and maliciously disputed the legality of using it on IBM mainframes while knowing otherwise.

The key Federal law invoked by Neon is the Lanham Act. The Lanham act is part of U.S. trademark law, not antitrust law. It has been invoked in this matter because Lanham can bring a successful plaintiff substantial relief quickly and perhaps simply (compared to an antitrust suit, anyway). The law appears to fit the circumstances as described by Neon, although it is a safe bet that IBM will say Lanham has no applicability to this matter. Neon's Lanham hook has been sunk into the way IBM has disparaged zPrime and Neon in its effort to dissuade mainframe users from buying the product.

The Lanham act is named after a Texas Congressman, Fritz Lanham, who served (and got his law passed) during the Truman administration. The Lanham Act has been updated and amended during the more than six decades since its initial passage.

In recent years, IBM has been accused of antitrust violations by rivals such as Platform Solutions, which it bought and slaughtered, and T3, which is has not bought and not yet slaughtered. In its suit, Neon says IBM is probably violating antitrust law in the mainframe business, but Neon is not making any antitrust claims at this time. Neon views an antitrust suit against IBM as a morass. Instead, Neon is using its assertions about IBM's allegedly monopolistic practices to paint a dark picture of Big Blue's business practices. But that does not mean Neon's suit is confined to a Lanham claim. On the contrary: Neon has also invoked California's law against unfair competition and some related Texas law.

Neon is represented by the Houston firm Reynolds, Frizzell, Black, Doyle, Allen & Oldham.

Like Neon, IBM has already been talking up its side of the story in the business press, along the way conceding that zPrime really could save users a bunch of money. IBM told Bloomberg news that Neon's zPrime "is akin to a homeowner tampering with his electrical meter to save money." Neon would be unlikely to approve of the term tampering, but its complaint seems to say that IBM's practices are a bit like those of a utility company . . . if the utility company happens to be Gazprom.

PRESUMED HEIR TO IBM'S CEO HAULED OFF BY FEDS FOR INSIDER TRADING

IBM won't have Bob Moffat on deck to replace Sam Palmisano now that Moffat's been indicted for insider trading. The IBM executive has resigned, effective October 31, saying (with the help of his lawyers) that he had retired from the computer business and was going to make his defense a full-time occupation. The surrounding case that got most of the headlines is the one that killed off hedge fund Galleon and put its founder and boss, Raj Rajaratnam at the center of an insider trading scam.

It may yet turn out that Moffat will be able to avoid a criminal conviction if the prosecutors picked him up primarily to flip him and get him to rat out other defendants. If that is the case Moffat could end up naming parties who have not yet been indicted, even folks who also are connected with IBM.

IBM quickly filled the gap in its executive ranks by naming Rod Adkins senior veep for technology, meaning the boss of the hardware business. Adkins is amply qualified for what is one of the toughest jobs at IBM.

Adkins official IBM biography says:

Rod Adkins leads all of IBM's global server and storage systems hardware and software development. He also leads the microelectronics business which includes semiconductor process technology development and semiconductor manufacturing operations for microprocessors and application specific integrated circuits used by IBM and its OEM clients.

Mr. Adkins has held a number of product development, business operations and general management positions since joining IBM in 1981. He has experience in Printers, Personal Computers, Servers, Storage and Software. Mr. Adkins has served as General Manager for Desktop Systems in Personal Systems Group; for UNIX systems in Server Group; and for Pervasive Computing in Software Group.

As a member of IBM's Performance and Technology Teams and the Board of Governors for the IBM Academy of Technology, Mr. Adkins helps drive IBM's corporate and technical direction. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Executive Leadership Council (ELC), and National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). He is also a member of the board for the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), the Smithsonian Institution and Pitney Bowes, Inc.

Moffat was a powerhouse, as the following biography, no longer on the IBM website, indicates.

Robert W. Moffat, Jr. is senior vice president and group executive, IBM Systems and Technology Group. Named to this position in July 2008, Mr. Moffat is responsible for all IBM hardware offerings as well as the microelectronics division, which translates IBM research and development into semiconductor solutions for IBM systems and OEM clients. In addition, the company's integrated supply chain operations, which include global manufacturing, procurement and customer fulfillment, report to him.

Mr. Moffat was senior vice president, Integrated Operations. In this cross-functional role created in July 2005, he led an initiative to transform and integrate the company's supply chain and service delivery operations globally, leveraging new business process designs and advanced technology to achieve greater levels of efficiency while improving IBM's market responsiveness.

Prior to that, Mr. Moffat was senior vice president and group executive of IBM's Personal and Printing Systems Group, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, development, manufacturing and marketing of Personal Computers, Printing Systems and Retail Store Solutions. Before that, he was vice president, finance and planning for the Enterprise Systems Group.

Mr. Moffat has held a number of executive positions at IBM, including general manager of manufacturing, fulfillment and procurement initiatives for the PC business. He led the team that pioneered the Advanced Fulfillment Initiative, and channel collaboration initiatives, which were awarded the 1999 Franz Edelman Award, the highest recognition for achievement in operational research and management sciences, and supply chain management.con

IBM ANSWERS AND COUNTERSUES NEON, WHICH GOES RIGHT BACK AT 'EM [UPDATED FEBRUARY 18]

2011-04-10T06:43:00.002-07:00

Name-calling about name-calling, that's the story in the Federal District Court for West Texas. Neon Enterprises and IBM are really going at each other, litigating away, all over a lousy few billion dollars. The few billion is what Neon could cost IBM if its zPrime software catches on, says a source at Neon, declining attribution.

zPrime lets mainframe shops move work around inside a mainframe so that it lives in the low rent district instead of on Park Avenue. With zPrime, IBM's zIIP and zAAP specialty processors can do a lot of work that customers without Neon's product (or Neon's know-how) otherwise would run on general-purpose engines. Customers can save a lot of money this way, apparently much more than IBM expected when it came up with the idea of zIIP and zAAP engines. Mainframe specialty processors are ordinary mainframe engines dressed in microcode mufti and unmetered; once a customer buys the engine, there is no extra cost for using it. By contrast, all the work done by general-purpose mainframe engines is measured and the amount clocked by IBM determines the price a customer pays for running the jobs.

Neon irritates IBM in two ways: One is obvious, as the zPrime package helps users cut costs, thereby reducing IBM's take. The other is that zPrime reduces IBM's account control. Together, the two annoyances brought Big Blue to a boil.

IBM had tried to put a lid on Neon by telling customers that zPrime broke some contractual rules. It asserted that anyone who used the package was cheating IBM and that in the end these users would end up with punishing bills. But Neon told prospects it was not doing anything wrong let alone illegal and said it would indemnify customers against IBM's threatened sanctions. Neon also took IBM to court on December 14, alleging Big Blue's disparaging remarks were so nasty that they violated the Lanham Act, which, among other things, gives owners of trademarks and brands remedies for obloquy. (This was a very creative bit of lawyering, say some observers.)

Neon updated its complaint on February 17, adding antitrust claims.

On January 17, six weeks after Neon's oriignal lawsuit was filed, IBM fired back. It answered Neon's complaint and launched a countersuit. IBM says zPrime gets IBM customers to illegally cheat Big Blue out of big bucks. And IBM didn't just speak up, it shouted, bringing in the awesome Evan Chesler, presiding partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, who will serve as counsel to the Houston firm Yetter, Warden & Coleman.

Neon's lead attorney, Chris Reynolds of Reynolds, Frizzell in Houston, didn't retreat. In fact, the following Monday, February 1, Reynolds was back in court with an answer to IBM's counterclaim and a document that contrasts Neon's legal position with that of IBM on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.

Reynolds and a couple of his partners have gone against Cravath in the past, successfully. But law comes down to cases. There is no way to look at past events and forecast the outcome of a courtroom fight between teams led by two razor sharp litigators.

If there's any history to be examine, it is story of a product called Fast400, which let customers do with an IBM AS/400 something akin to what they can do on a mainframe with zPrime.

(In its February 1 response, Neon's legal team refers to a number of documents from the Fast400 case, and we have made them available here. The documents include Jim Stracka's Response to IBM's Supplemental Motion to Dismiss; Jim Stracka's Response to IBM's Motion for Leave to File Second Amended Answer, Defenses and Consideration Filed January 31, 2005; Response of Jim Stracka and Leif Svalgaard to IBM's Motion to Strike the Expert Report of David Nimmer; and James Stracka's Original Answer to International Business Machines Corporation's Second Amended Counterclaims. Another exhibit, Neon's comparison of IBM's counterclaims and its answer, is linked above but we repeat that link here.)

After a bit of legal adventurism that included getting the FBI to arrest Jim Stracka, the entrepreneur behind Fast400, on an extortion charge, IBM ultimately settled the matter. Basically, IBM paid to get rid of Fast400 and for the people behind the product to vow omerta. Once Fast400 was withdrawn from marketing, the extortion charge vanished like a fart on a breezy day. Mr. Stracka appears to be wealthy; today, his most visible activity is an indulgent venture in the world of golf. What happened to the users who had bought Fast400? They were all allowed to run the program forever on the machine where they installed it. They saved many times the $1,000 they paid for Fast400. And they lived happily ever after. con

NEON SUES IBM ALLEGING ILLEGAL DISPARAGEMENT OF ZPRIME

2011-04-10T06:43:00.001-07:00

Neon is represented by the Houston firm Reynolds, Frizzell, Black, Doyle, Allen & Oldham.

WHAT DOES IBM WANT CUSTOMERS TO DO? MAYBE SOMETHING LIKE THIS

2011-04-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

Neon is trying to sell zPrime to mainframe customers as a way to reduce software bills. IBM is trying to prevent this. Customers are caught in the middle. If, as Neon contends, using zPrime is just a smart and perfectly legal way to cut software bills (even if that makes IBM unhappy), a VPDP who doesn't evaluate the product could be in trouble. Corporate management might want to know why that IT manager is wasting scarce corporate funds. On the other hand, if IBM prevails and gets to shut down Neon it could go after customers who got cute with zPrime, and that, too, could lead to awkward conversations between corporate computing managers and their company's bean-counters. Making matters even more difficult, IBM is not entirely sure it will win in court, so it's trying to change the rules under which it sells mainframe hardware and software to run on it. Mainframe shops trying to turn on a specialty engine are starting to see new documents that circumscribe their use of the equipment. At shops that already have zIIP or zAAP engines up and running, it may be too late, but IBM seems to have no problem pressing customers to sign new deals or amend their old arrangements . . . without offering any quid pro quo.

We asked IBM to provide contextual material that might make what they are asking customers to do easier to understand, if such material is available.

In the meantime, here is a letter IBM sent a user who ordered a specialty engine, according to a source who may have redacted the material to protect the recipient:

Thank you for your interest in IBM Specialty Engines. As you are aware, like any IBM Licensed Internal Code, this offering is subject to the IBM License Agreement for Machine Code (a copy of which may be found at http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/machine_warranties/machine_code.html).

As we have reason to be concerned you intend to utilize Specialty Engines to process unauthorized workload (workload beyond that for which the Specialty Engine was created and marketed by IBM), which would constitute a breach of the license, we will fulfill the specialty engines per your order only if you provide reasonable assurances you will comply with our agreements. Please confirm that you will operate these engines in compliance with your existing agreements with IBM, and specifically including that you will not run any workload on these specialty engines other than those workloads expressly designated by IBM as eligible and authorized to run on these processors.

For your convenience, the product announcement letters summarizing eligible workload may be found at: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/zaap/index.html and http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/ziip/index.html.

Please acknowledge your assurance of compliance by executing and returning a copy of this letter to my attention. Thank you again for your interest.

IBM is also in some cases changing definitions in its product licenses, according to a party familiar with the situation:

Authorized Workload — the specific, limited workload (including without limitation programs, code, or machine readable instructions) that IBM has specifically authorized in writing (including in Announcement Letters) for execution on a particular type of Specialty Engine Capacity. For each type of Specialty Engine, the capacity to process all workloads other than Authorized Workloads is Unauthorized Built-in-Capacity.

Specialty Engine Capacity (including System z Application Assist Processors ("zAAP") and System z Integrated Information Processor ("zIIP")) — is a processor on or in conjunction with which IBM has restricted use to execute only Authorized Workloads and on or in conjunction with which IBM authorizes you to use IBM LIC to execute only Authorized Workloads. IBM designates Specialty Engines by feature code; (3) Unauthorized Built-in-Capacity — is Built in Capacity that is not authorized by IBM for access or use.

Last but not least, here is an intimidating paragraph from a menace letter sent to a mainframe customer. We hope this prose appeared in a document that included a balancing statement, such as an offer by IBM to compensate the customer for the unprovoked assault if it turns out that the shop's using zPrime to help reduce software costs was perfectly legal, as Neon claims.

If it is determined that at any time [Acme] was executing on Specialty Engine Capacity any workload other than Authorized Workload, the Actual Inventory Value will be recalculated using the charges for the MLC Programs installed on such Specialty Engine Capacity which are applicable to General Purpose Engine Capacity and [Acme] will be responsible for full payment of any additional amounts.

WikiLeaks' founder Assange fights extradition to Sweden

2011-02-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asked a British judge on Monday to block his extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations, arguing he would not get a fair trial and could end up facing execution in the United States.

The 39-year-old Australian computer expert, who has infuriated the U.S. government by releasing thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables on his website, is wanted in Sweden where two WikiLeaks volunteers allege sexual misconduct. Assange denies the allegations.

Assange's lawyer Geoffrey Robertson told a court in London that Assange would not be able to get a fair trial in Sweden because rape trials are usually held in private.

"You cannot have a fair trial when the press and the public are excluded from the court ... There is a real risk of flagrant violation of his rights," he said at the start of Assange's two-day extradition hearing.

In Stockholm, Swedish officials confirmed that rape trials in the country do normally take place behind closed doors.

Assange, wearing a dark suit and tie, was cheered by a small group of supporters as he was driven into the maximum security Belmarsh Magistrates' Court earlier.

About a dozen TV satellite trucks were parked outside and reporters from around the world queued to cover the hearing, reflecting the intense media interest in the WikiLeaks founder.

RISK OF EXTRADITION TO U.S.

In a 74-page court submission, Assange's lawyers argue there is a risk that, if he was extradited to Sweden, the United States would seek his "extradition and/or illegal rendition to the USA, where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantanamo Bay."

If he was sent to the United States, there was a risk he could be "made subject to the death penalty" charged with espionage for publishing the diplomatic cables.

Prosecution lawyer Clare Montgomery said there was no proof that Assange did run the risk of being extradited to the United States and, if it did happen, Britain would have to give its consent first.

Montgomery dismissed defense arguments that Swedish prosecutors were abusing the fast-track European arrest warrant process because they only want to question Assange and have not yet decided whether to prosecute him.

"The procedure in Sweden requires interrogation before the formal process of indictment can take place," she said.

Grounds for refusing a request are mainly limited to whether extradition would violate a suspect's human rights or whether the arrest warrant was drawn up correctly.

Assange has been living at a supporter's mansion under a form of house arrest since a court granted him bail in December.

Video Barbie in FBI Cross Hairs

2010-12-05T01:20:00.000-08:00

A Barbie doll tricked out with a video camera concealed in her necklace could be used by predators to create child pornography, warns the FBI in a recent cybercrime alert.

In the alert, mistakenly released to the press, the FBI expressed concern that the toy’s camera, which can capture 30 minutes of video and rivals a Canon 7D in quality (see above), could be used to lure children and surreptitiously film child pornography. Barbie and other dolls have been used in the past by sexual predators to attract victims.

According to ABC News, which obtained a copy of the memo, the FBI appears to have opened an investigation into the doll.

Mattel, the maker of Barbie Video Girl, noted in a statement that the FBI didn’t say it knew of any cases where the Barbie camera had been used for such nefarious purposes.

But a sheriff’s spokesman told ABC News that the FBI alert will be helpful for drawing attention to investigators collecting evidence at a crime scene.

“When we’re doing a search warrant looking for media that a child pornographer may have used, we’re gonna have to put Barbie on the list just like any other cameras [and] computers,” said Sgt. John Urquhart from the King County Sheriff’s Department in Washington state.

WikiLeaks Attacks Reveal Surprising, Avoidable Vulnerabilities

2010-12-05T01:18:00.000-08:00

Some online service providers are in the cross hairs this week for allegedly abandoning WikiLeaks after it published secret U.S. diplomatic cables and drew retaliatory technical, political and legal attacks. But the secret-spilling site’s woes may be attributable in part to its own technical and administrative missteps as well as outside attempts at censorship.

Struggling with denial-of-service attacks on its servers earlier this week, WikiLeaks moved to Amazon’s EC2 cloud-based data-storage service only to be summarily booted off on Wednesday, ostensibly for violations of Amazon’s terms of service. Then on Thursday its domain-name service provider, EveryDNS, stopped resolving WikiLeaks.org, amid a new DoS attack apparently aimed at the DNS provider.

While WikiLeaks was clearly targeted, its weak countermeasures drew criticism from network engineers. They questioned its use of a free DNS service such as EveryDNS, as well as other avoidable errors that seem to clash with WikiLeaks’ reputation as a tech-savvy and cautious enterprise hardened to withstand any concerted technical attack on its systems.

“If they wanted to help users get past their DNS problems, they could tweet for assistance, tweet their IP addy and ask to be re-tweeted, ask owners of authorities to set up wikileaks.$FOO.com to ‘crowd source’ their name, etc.,” observed one poster to the mailing list for the North American Network Operating Group. “So at the very least, they are guilty of not being imaginative.”

“IMHO it is a gambit to ask for money,” wrote another.

WikiLeaks’ downtime was short-lived, with the site announcing Friday on Twitter that it was operational on WikiLeaks.de, WikiLeaks.fi, WikiLeaks.nl and WikiLeaks.ch — the country codes respectively for Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The scattering followed a Thursday outage of WikiLeaks.org and the “Cablegate” subsite, that occurred when EveryDNS cut off the secret-spilling site.

Unlike the incident this week in which Amazon unceremoniously booted WikiLeaks from its servers, the latest outage appears to have had less to do with censorship than with WikiLeaks’ inattention to the more-mundane side of running an organization.

Oracle Asia Pacific experiences growth in Q3 FY2009Organizations across key industries in Asia Pacific continue to adopt or expand implementations of

2010-11-16T22:00:00.000-08:00

Organizations across key industries in Asia Pacific continue to adopt or expand implementations of Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management and Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Applications for their strategic company-wide business systems.

Allied Bank, Barclays Bank Pakistan, Berger Paints Pakistan, EFU Life Assurance Ltd and Wateen Telecom from Pakistan are among those organizations who have selected Oracle to streamline their business processes.

“Now more than ever, customers are looking to information technology to meet a wide range of business challenges, such as reducing risks, innovating business processes, delivering superior customer service, and building a foundation for growth,” said Steve Au-Yeung, Senior Vice President, Oracle Asia Pacific. "Organizations continue to choose Oracle’s standards-based software solutions to replace legacy, proprietary systems, so as to optimize performance and lower costs. Our strategy to offer choice and value is winning customers across the region."

Allied Bank has chosen to implement Oracle Database with RAC and OEM Packs to help their core banking transformation. "After careful internal analysis and reviewing all our options we opted for the award winning Oracle Database with its Real Application Clusters & Grid Control solution to help us with our technology led core banking transformation project," said Mr Mujahid Ali, CIO Allied Bank Ltd. "Oracle Technology products are specially recognized for providing scalability, high availability and ease of management for mission-critical applications like Temenos T24. This technology platform will enable us to be highly competitive and maintain customer satisfaction though high quality and 24x7 banking services."

Berger Paints Pakistan has also selected key modules from the Oracle E-Business Suite to improve and standardize its business operations to gain a consolidated picture of its Finance, Sales, inventory and customer order information. It expects to benefit from capabilities such as improved production planning, greater operational efficiency, and improved manufacturing productivity. “Oracle E-Business Suite will empower us with critical and real time knowledge about our assets, financials and all the core aspects of the manufacturing process”, said Sarfaraz Arif, Senior Manager MIS, Berger Paints. “Critically, the Oracle applications we have implemented will provide us a 360-degree view of Berger Paints’ financial and operational information to company decision makers that will enhance its operational infrastructure to increase the efficiency of the organization and support further expansion”.

Wateen Telecom has also implemented a wide range of Oracle Database and Database Options including RAC, Data Mining and Advanced Security. "Wateen Telecom is operating in a highly aggressive environment. In order to gain a competitive edge, we need to be able to transform available data into consolidated, meaningful, timely and actionable information. From a technology perspective, performance, scalability and manageability are primary requirements for us," said Amir Khan, Chief Information Office, Wateen Telecom.

Selection of Q3FY09 Customer Wins

Communications, Media, Utilities: Aircel (India); Axis (Indonesia); China Unicom Co., Ltd.(China); PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (Indonesia); Saigon Telecom Services Company (Vietnam); Samsung Networks Inc. (Korea); Shenhua Beijing Guohua Electric Power Co., Ltd Corporation (China); SK TELECOM CO., LTD (Korea); SPI ELECTRICITY PTY LTD (Australia); Total Access Communications (Thailand); True Corporation Public Company Limited (Thailand); Wateen Telecom (Pakistan); Wharf T & T Limited (Hong Kong); Zhejiang Provincial Energy Group Company Ltd. (China).

Manufacturing, Retail : Best Buy China (China); China Agri-Industries Holdings Limited (China); China International Shipping Container (Group) Shanghai (China); Cong Ty Co Phan Sonadezi Chau Duc (Vietnam); Dah Chong Hong Holdings (Hong Kong); Fonterra Australia (Australia); Foster’s Group Ltd (Foster’s)(Australia); FPT Corporation (Vietnam); GTL (Singapore) Pte Ltd (Singapore); Hunan Hualing Steel Co., Ltd. (China); India Yamaha Motor Pvt Limited (India); Masan Industrial Joint Venture Co. (Vietnam); Panasonic Plasma Display Shanghai Co., Ltd (China); Primax Electronics Ltd (Taiwan); PT. Jasa Marga (Persero) Tbk. (Indonesia); PT. Total Indonesie (Indonesia); Qingdao Sen Kylin Tyre Ltd (China); Samsung Electronics Co.,Ltd (Digital semiconductor division) (Korea); Shanghai JA Solar PV Technology Co Ltd (China); Shenzhen Coship Electronics Co., Ltd. (China); Wei Lih Food Industry Company Limited (Taiwan); Vietnam Cement Industry Corporation (Vietnam).

Financial Services: Shinhan Financial Group (Korea); Allied Bank of Pakistan Limited (Pakistan); MSIG Holdings (Asia) Pte Ltd (Singapore); PT. Artajasa Pembayaran Elektronis (Indonesia); PT Bank Ekspor Indonesia (Indonesia); PT. Bank DBS Indonesia (Indonesia); Banco de Oro Universal Bank (Philippines); EFU Life Assurance Ltd (Pakistan)

Government, Education, Healthcare & Life Sciences: Amway (china) Company Limited (China); Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (Thailand); Beijing Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. (China); The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong); Singapore Post Limited (Singapore); COFCO 606 (part of China Agri- Industries Holdings Limited ( COFCO) (China); Deputi Bidang Survey, Gleneagles Clinical Research Center (Singapore); Pengukuran dan Pemetaan - Badan Pertanahan Nasional (Indonesia); Bureau of Meteorology (Australia); PT. Dexa Medica (Indonesia); Singapore Tourism Board (Singapore).

Professional Services: Central Realty Services Co., Ltd. (Thailand); Hudson Global Resources (Aust) Pty Limited (Australia); Korea Educational Broadcasting System (Korea); MFEC Pcl. (Thailand); Nutune Singapore Pte Ltd (Singapore); PT. Bursa Efek Indonesia (Indonesia).

Awards and Recognition:

Telecom Asia Readers’ Choice Awards: Best SDP Provider of the Year. Recognizes strength of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) solutions from combined Oracle and BEA communications products
2008 SCMLogistics Excellence Awards - Best Transportation Management Software Award. Oracle won this award for the 3rd time, and this recognition signals the continued growth and performance of Oracle Transportation Management in Asia Pacific. (Forrester press announcement, Gartner press announcement)

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PTA says it has completed Q1 targets

2010-11-16T21:54:00.000-08:00

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has completed targets and goals set for the first quarter (January to March) of 2009. An Authority meeting was held at PTA Headquarters to review the progress on the targets and goals set for the year 2009.

The meeting was chaired by Chairman PTA Dr. Mohammed Yaseen, Member Finance Mr. S. Nasrul Karim Ghaznavi, Member technical Dr. Khawar Siddique Khokhar and attended by senior officers of the Authority. On this occasion, progress of various division and directorates of PTA including Finance, Commercial Affairs, Technical Services, Enforcement, Law, Strategy & Development, Economic Affairs and Human Resources was reviewed.

The progress was reviewed at length on survey of telecom services including mobile operators, reduction in illegal telecom traffic and blocking of IMEI of mobile handsets. It was decided in the meeting that PTA will continue to implement technical solutions to address these issues. It was also decided that consultancies will be carried out on various technical subjects for the benefit of the telecom industry.

It was informed in the meeting that new Numbering Plan for AJ&K and Northern Areas has successfully been implemented with parallel operations for the convenience of telecom users in these areas. It was also informed that PTA has prepared a Disaster Communication Plan to use telecom services effectively in a natural calamity and disaster-hit areas. During the meeting polices to improve human resources in PTA were also discussed.

Chairman PTA showed satisfaction on the progress made by different divisions and directorates of PTA.\
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PTCL establishes free PCOs for IDPs

2010-11-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) in an effort to connect the displaced families from Swat with their loved ones and missing family members has established PCOs at five different relief camps. These PCO’s will provide free communication services to the IDP’s. Besides the company has also established medical teams and has donated medicines. PTCL doctors and paramedical staff will visit all the major relief camps on a rotation basis.

PTCL President and CEO Walid Irshaid, has stated that the PTCL will do its utmost to provide relief to the IDPs especially PTCL employees affected by this crisis. PTCL stands by the government of Pakistan to ensure that we fulfill our responsibility to help these war affected people, he said.

Around 300 PTCL staff families have been displaced on account of the confrontation going on in Swat. The management has decided to provide financial assistance to each of these families. The company has also arranged accommodation facilities for fourteen of these families and this number is growing on a daily basis as more and more staff families contact for accommodation.

PTCL has always played a proactive role during all difficult times to provide help to the people in the camps. It had generously donated during the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, during the Baluchistan earthquake and for Benazir Income Support Fund created for assisting poor families.

PTCL with its growing concern and empathy is certainly pulling all the strings to make things easier for the IDP’s, and its efforts are being highly acknowledged and applauded by people from all walks of life.
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PRESUMED HEIR TO IBM'S CEO HAULED OFF BY FEDS FOR INSIDER TRADING

2010-10-24T06:52:00.003-07:00

Neon is represented by the Houston firm Reynolds, Frizzell, Black, Doyle, Allen & Oldham.

PRESUMED HEIR TO IBM'S CEO HAULED OFF BY FEDS FOR INSIDER TRADING

Adkins official IBM biography says:

Moffat was a powerhouse, as the following biography, no longer on the IBM website, indicates.

NEON SUES IBM ALLEGING ILLEGAL DISPARAGEMENT OF ZPRIME

2010-10-24T06:52:00.001-07:00

Neon is represented by the Houston firm Reynolds, Frizzell, Black, Doyle, Allen & Oldham.

WHAT DOES IBM WANT CUSTOMERS TO DO? MAYBE SOMETHING LIKE THIS

2010-10-24T06:51:00.003-07:00

We asked IBM to provide contextual material that might make what they are asking customers to do easier to understand, if such material is available.

In the menatime, here is a letter IBM sent a user who ordered a specialty engine, according to a source who may have redacted the material to protect the recipient:

Thank you for your interest in IBM Specialty Engines. As you are aware, like any IBM Licensed Internal Code, this offering is subject to the IBM License Agreement for Machine Code (a copy of which may be found at http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/machine_warranties/machine_code.html).

As we have reason to be concerned you intend to utilize Specialty Engines to process unauthorized workload (workload beyond that for which the Specialty Engine was created and marketed by IBM), which would constitute a breach of the license, we will fulfill the specialty engines per your order only if you provide reasonable assurances you will comply with our agreements. Please confirm that you will operate these engines in compliance with your existing agreements with IBM, and specifically including that you will not run any workload on these specialty engines other than those workloads expressly designated by IBM as eligible and authorized to run on these processors.

For your convenience, the product announcement letters summarizing eligible workload may be found at: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/zaap/index.html and http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/ziip/index.html.

Please acknowledge your assurance of compliance by executing and returning a copy of this letter to my attention. Thank you again for your interest.

IBM is also in some cases changing definitions in its product licenses, according to a party familiar with the situation:

Authorized Workload — the specific, limited workload (including without limitation programs, code, or machine readable instructions) that IBM has specifically authorized in writing (including in Announcement Letters) for execution on a particular type of Specialty Engine Capacity. For each type of Specialty Engine, the capacity to process all workloads other than Authorized Workloads is Unauthorized Built-in-Capacity.

Specialty Engine Capacity (including System z Application Assist Processors ("zAAP") and System z Integrated Information Processor ("zIIP")) — is a processor on or in conjunction with which IBM has restricted use to execute only Authorized Workloads and on or in conjunction with which IBM authorizes you to use IBM LIC to execute only Authorized Workloads. IBM designates Specialty Engines by feature code; (3) Unauthorized Built-in-Capacity — is Built in Capacity that is not authorized by IBM for access or use.

If it is determined that at any time [Acme] was executing on Specialty Engine Capacity any workload other than Authorized Workload, the Actual Inventory Value will be recalculated using the charges for the MLC Programs installed on such Specialty Engine Capacity which are applicable to General Purpose Engine Capacity and [Acme] will be responsible for full payment of any additional amounts.

IBM ANSWERS AND COUNTERSUES NEON, WHICH GOES RIGHT BACK AT 'EM [UPDATED FEBRUARY 18]

2010-10-24T06:51:00.001-07:00

Neon updated its complaint on February 17, adding antitrust claims.

If there's any history to be examine, it is story of a product called Fast400, which let customers do with an IBM AS/400 something akin to what they can do on a mainframe with zPrime.

San Diego County Sheriff’s Department demonstrates use of LRAD 500X

2010-10-24T06:48:00.000-07:00

LRAD CORPORATION ANNOUNCES $17.6 MILLION LRAD® SYSTEMS AND MAINTENANCE ORDER FROM A FOREIGN GOVERNMENT Order Includes $5.5 Million Maintenance Agreem

2010-10-24T06:36:00.001-07:00

Order Includes $5.5 Million Maintenance Agreement

(SAN DIEGO, CA, September 29, 2010) – LRAD Corporation (Nasdaq: LRAD) the global leader in acoustic hailing devices (AHDs), announced today it has received a LRAD® systems and maintenance order from a foreign government for one of its military services totaling approximately $17.6 million. The LRAD systems order totals over $12.1 million and is scheduled to ship in the first half of the Company’s fiscal year 2011 (October 1, 2010 – March 31, 2011).

As part of the order, LRAD Corporation also received a multi-year maintenance agreement worth approximately $5.5 million. Under the terms of the agreement, the Company will establish and outsource several maintenance locations in the country where the order originated. The foreign government is not being disclosed at this time per the terms of the order.

LRAD Corporation’s proprietary LRAD directed sound systems enable military forces to communicate clearly and determine the intent of potential threats at safe distances, providing time and distance to employ a measured response to a threat’s actions. Through the use of focused multi-lingual voice commands and deterrent tones, LRAD creates large standoff and safety zones, supports peaceful conflict resolution, and potentially saves lives on both sides of the device.

“LRAD systems are becoming an essential part of the layered defense strategies being deployed by international military forces,” commented Tom Brown, president and CEO of LRAD Corporation. “LRAD provides military and security organizations the unique capability of communicating, hailing, warning and determining intent at distances up to three kilometers. The fact that this order is the largest international order to date in the Company’s history demonstrates the expanding markets for, and the growing acceptance of, LRAD throughout the world.”

About LRAD Corporation
LRAD Corporation’s Long Range Acoustic Device® (LRAD®) directional sound systems are being used around the world in diverse applications including, fixed and mobile military deployments, maritime security, critical infrastructure and perimeter security, commercial security, border and port security, law enforcement and emergency responder communications, and wildlife preservation and control. For more information about LRAD Corporation and its long-range directional sound systems, please visit the company’s web site at http://www.lradx.com/.

Forward-looking Statements: Except for historical information contained herein, the matters discussed are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. We base these statements on particular assumptions that we have made in light of our industry experience, the stage of product and market development as well as our perception of historical trends, current market conditions, current economic data, expected future developments and other factors that we believe are appropriate under the circumstances. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those suggested in the forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, the performance of our management team, market acceptance of our directed sound technologies and products, entry of competitors, the possibility our intellectual property protections will not prevent others from marketing products similar to or competitive with our products, potential technical or manufacturing difficulties that could delay product deliveries or increase warranty costs, and other risks identified and discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements are based on information and management's expectations as of the date hereof. Future results may differ materially from our current expectations. For more information regarding other potential risks and uncertainties, see the "Risk Factors" section of the Company’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2009. LRAD Corporation disclaims any intent or obligation to update those forward-looking statements, except as otherwise specifically stated.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:

Investor Relations:
Robert Putnam
(858) 676-0519 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (858) 676-0519 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
robert@lradx.com

LRAD CORPORATION TO REPORT RECORD REVENUES OF $17 MILLION+ FOR FISCAL YEAR 2010

2010-10-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

Company Produces Third Consecutive Fiscal Year of Record Revenues and
First Profitable Fiscal Year

(SAN DIEGO, CA, October 6, 2010) – LRAD Corporation (Nasdaq: LRAD) the global leader in acoustic hailing devices (AHDs), announced today that it expects to report record revenues of over $17 million for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2010.

“We enter fiscal year 2011 with a record backlog and significant business momentum,” stated Tom Brown, president and CEO of LRAD Corporation. “We’re pleased with our fiscal year 2010 performance as we anticipate reporting our fourth consecutive year of record LRAD® revenues and our first profitable fiscal year.”

“During the last two months, we’ve landed approximately $30 million in new LRAD systems and services orders demonstrating the growing markets for LRAD AHDs,” Brown added. “To date, we’ve sold LRAD systems into over 30 countries around the world and we recently received orders from four more international naval forces. With these and other expected orders, this fiscal year we anticipate continued strong financial performance and substantial revenue growth.”

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:

Investor Relations:
Robert Putnam
(858) 676-0519 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (858) 676-0519 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
robert@lradx.com

America's new wonder: a record-breaking bridge

2010-10-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

America's greatest technological achievement, the Hoover Dam, now has a soaring companion piece, a massive looming bridge held up by the longest arch in the Western Hemisphere.

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The Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which opened this month and connects the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada, spans the vast chasm 890 feet above the Colorado River that is controlled by the dam.

The striking 1,900-foot-long structure, which reroutes traffic off of the two-lane road atop the dam, will improve traffic in the region and help protect the dam from terrorist threats, officials said.

It is the seventh highest bridge in the world, behind four in China, one in Papua New Guinea and one in the US state of Colorado.

"The Hoover Dam is the greatest civil engineering achievement in America's history," said bypass bridge project manager Dave Zanatell with the Federal Highway Administration.

"Our goal was not to outdo or outshine it. Our goal was to, in a respectful way, do something that would be great for our generation and that would stand besides Hoover Dam in a respectful and quality way that would become a part of Hoover's legacy."

The 240 million dollar bridge was built in five years by 1,200 laborers and 300 engineers.

Enlarge

Native American children from the Red Hand Dance Troupe, perform on the newly opened Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge which spans the Colorado River, beside the Hoover Dam. The bridge, which opened this month and connects the US states of Arizona and Nevada, spans the vast chasm 890 feet above the Colorado River that is controlled by the dam

It could not have arrived at a better moment for a nation and region whose psyche has been pummeled by a prolonged, devastating recession.

Just as the Hoover Dam was built in the heart of the Great Depression and was seen as an example of the nation's can-do spirit, some hope this project can provide some uplift.

The dam and bridge are "two engineering wonders constructed at times when our country was looking at itself and wondering what the future held," said Colleen Dwyer of the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the dam.

"We're looking at what can be done even at these worst of times to make these wonderful structures come to be, to create something new and different which enables America to keep moving ahead. That's the parallel."

The bridge's dimensions are staggering: at 1,050 feet, its support arch is the longest arch in the Western Hemisphere, holding up a roadway that leans on 300-foot-long concrete pillars, some of the tallest in the world.

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It contains 16 million pounds of steel, 30,000 cubic yards of concrete and two million feet of cable.

The idea of the bridge originated in the 1960s because the top of the Hoover Dam has been a narrow two-lane road that is the fastest route from Arizona to Las Vegas and then the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

Access to the dam from each direction is a treacherously winding route, but massive semi-trucks and passenger vehicles shared and navigated it for decades.

During the day, when thousands of tourists flock to the dam from Las Vegas, about 30 miles away, the interaction between traffic and pedestrians has been resulted in three times as many accidents as on a normal road, Zanatell said.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government feared a terrorist with a truck bomb could attack the dam, potentially flooding the region and disrupting water and power supplies to several states.

Semi-trucks were banned from bridge, forced to take route to Las Vegas that is more than 40 miles longer.

In addition to driving on it, tourists will be able to park in a designated lot on the Nevada side and climb stairs to walk the bridge, which has a sidewalk on the side facing the dam.

The retaining wall is 54 inches high, so pedestrians can snap photos from a spectacular vantage point.

"It makes me feel good as an American," said Jerry Couden, a residential general contractor from Milford, Connecticut., who, like millions of Vegas tourists each year, made the 30 miles drive southeast.

"Look what we did then (building the dam) and now look at what this is. It's a tremendous feat. It is cool to see."

People & Population of Bangladesh : The Racial Mix

2010-07-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

The country's population is almost evenly distributed throughout its 64 districts except for the three Hill Tracts districts which are rather sparsely inhabited. Regionally, the eastern districts have a slightly higher density than the western ones. On average, a district has a population of about 1.8 million, a thana 230,000, a union 25,000 and a village 2,000. There are 490 thanas, 4,451 unions and 59,990 villages. The number of households is about 20 million. On average, a household consists of 5.6 persons. The tribal people, who lead a simple life, are generally self-reliant, producing their own food and drinks and weaving their own clothes.
There are 4 metropolitan cities and 119 municipalities in the country. The level of urbanization is low at 20%. This leaves 80% of the country's total population of about 120 million to live in the rural areas which primarily depend on a poorly developed agriculture for livelihood. The capital city of Dhaka has an estimated population of 8.58 million. The annual growth rate of the population has come down to 1.75% with the acceptance of family planning practices rising to 48.7%. The crude birth rate per 1000 is 25.6 and the death rate is 8.1. Life expectancy at birth is 59.5 years. The rate of child mortality per 1000 has come down to 76.8 and that of maternal mortality to 4.5. About 96.3% families in the country have now access to safe drinking water. The sex ratio is 106 males for every 100 females. The density of population per square kilometre is 800.

Some 44.3% of the people are literate with about 5 million having passed secondary school level and another 1.27 million being graduates. The primary school enrollment rate has risen to 86% and the rate for secondary school enrollment to 33%. To intensify promotion of compulsory primary education, the food-for education programme has been extended to over 16,000 schools. More and more primary schools will be brought under this programme.

Bangladesh : Science & Technology

2010-07-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

The need for faster technological development is increasingly felt in Bangladesh. Development plans of Bangladesh have emphasized science and technological research to develop technologies through adoption of imported technology as well as development of indigenous technologies. As the country is heavily dependent on imported technologies, proper planning is required for its effective transfer through acquisition, assimilation and adoption.

A National Science and Technology Policy has been formulated and adopted by the Government. It has laid down the directions for S and T activities and research, institutional and manpower development. dissemination and documentation facilities. The National Council for Science and Technology (NCST) determines S and T policies, reviews the activities of different institutions and provides direction towards S and T research and activities.

Flexible Touch Screen Made with Printed Graphene

2010-06-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

Graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, has spectacular strength, flexibility, transparency, and electrical conductivity. Spurred on by its potential for application in new devices like touch screens and solar cells, researchers have been toying with ways to make large sheets of pure graphene, for example by shaving off atom-thin flakes and chemically dissolving chunks of graphite oxide. Yet in the thirty-some years since graphene's discovery, laboratory experiments have mainly yielded mere flecks of the stuff, and mass manufacture has seemed a long way away.

See through: Researchers have created a flexible graphene sheet with silver electrodes printed on it (top) that can be used as a touch screen when connected to control software on a computer (bottom).
Credit: Byung Hee Hong, SKKU.

"The future of the field certainly isn't flaking off pencil shavings," says Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT. "The large-area production of monolayer graphene was a serious technological hurdle to advancing graphene technology."

Now, besting all previous records for synthesis of graphene in the laboratory, researchers at Samsung and Sungkyunkwan University, in Korea, have produced a continuous layer of pure graphene the size of a large television, spooling it out through rollers on top of a flexible, see-through, 63-centimeter-wide polyester sheet.

"It is engineering at its finest," says James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University who has been working on ways to make graphene by dissolving chunks of graphite. "[People have made] it in a lab in little tiny sheets, but never on a machine like this."

The team has already created a flexible touch screen by using the polymer-supported graphene to make the screen's transparent electrodes. The material currently used to make transparent electronics, indium tin oxide, is expensive and brittle. Producing graphene on polyester sheets that bend is the first step to making transparent electronics that are stronger, cheaper, and more flexible. "You could theoretically roll up your iPhone and stick it behind your ear like a pencil," says Tour.

Biodesign Institute chief named scientist of the year

2010-05-27T04:13:00.000-07:00

George Poste, director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, was named 2004 Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine.

His 38-year career has encompassed roles in academia, industry and government, with expertise in disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, pharmaceutical development and biosecurity.

The award honors Poste for his career accomplishments as a world-renowned researcher, scholar and policymaker. It also recognizes his leadership in establishing the Biodesign Institute as a confluence of leading-edge technologies, said Tim Studt, editor in chief for R&D Magazine.

Poste was recruited by ASU in May 2003 to head the institute.

R&D Magazine is distributed to more than 80,000 scientists and engineers in industrial, academic and government research and development. Recent recipients of the annual award include J. Craig Venter, whose company led the decoding of the human genome; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; Eric Lander, founder of the Center for Genome Research at MIT; Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis.

"Our nation is asleep at the switch when it comes to being able to handle a public health crisis caused by infectious disease, whether from nature or bioterrorism," said Poste.

"We need faster diagnostics and better information linkages to spot the early signs of an epidemic. We need new classes of drugs, especially as antibiotic resistance is increasingly problematic. We need better ways to assess emerging diseases so we can develop vaccines before a sizable population is infected," said Poste.

"It will take radical changes within government and academia to meet these challenges, including better linkages with industry. The Biodesign Institute at ASU is an incredible vehicle for positively impacting the future," he said.

For more: www.biodesign.org.

Healthcare chief named

Tom Sadvary will replace Max Poll as president and chief executive of Scottsdale Healthcare.

Poll had announced his intent to retire in October 2005. Sadvary's appointment was approved during a board meeting last week.

During the next few months, Sadvary will work closely with Poll on the transition, while also reviewing operations of similar hospital systems.

Sadvary, who currently serves as executive vice president and chief operating officer at Scottsdale Healthcare, joined the organization in 1986 as administrator for the Scottsdale Healthcare Shea hospital.

For more: www.shc.org.

Children's center unveiled

Banner Thunderbird Medical Center unveiled a children's center at the Glendale hospital this week.

The 14-bed center, licensed through the Arizona Department of Health Services, includes a pediatric zone in the emergency department and a pre-op surgical room dedicated to pediatric patients.

As a pediatric licensed facility with pediatric surgeons on staff, Banner Thunderbird now may admit patients under the age of 18 and perform elective surgeries; previously the facility only operated in the event of an emergency.

Banner Thunderbird plunges into tower expansions

2010-05-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

Banner Thunderbird Medical Center has begun a $289 million expansion.

The biggest portion of the project is a 200-bed patient tower on the south side of the hospital, with construction to begin in July. The tower will include a new emergency department that can accommodate 84 patients at a time, a new critical care area, and telemetry floors.

Once the seven-story tower is completed in March 2009, other service lines will grow and backfill vacated floors through August 2010. It will be the tallest building in the northwest Valley.

Construction of the south tower will force the emergency department to close its southern patient entrance and move it to the east. The new department is expected to open in late 2008.

A north tower also will begin construction next month, to be completed in June 2008.

For more: www.bannerhealth.com.

Phoenix is hotbed for nurses

Phoenix is the country's best market for nurses, as evidenced by the percentage of nursing job postings on Monster.com and the year-over-year growth in those postings.

According to Monster's "Nursing Job Seeker Activity: 2007 Outlook," nursing job postings on the Web site surged nearly 55 percent in late 2006 from the same period in 2005. In addition, 54 percent of recruiters said they felt their hiring needs would increase in 2007, and one-third consider many of their job openings difficult to fill.

Only 30 percent of nursing job seekers indicated that they were willing to relocate, down from 32 percent a year ago. Candidates may be becoming more selective as they are better able to find attractive opportunities within their current job markets.

Phoenix was followed by Chicago on the Monster list. Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and New York followed, with the Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M., area ranking seventh and California's greater San Francisco Bay Area ranking eighth. Denver and Baltimore, Md., rounded out the top 10.

For more: www.monster.com.

AzTE CEO to be named soon

Word on the street is that Peter Slate's replacement as chief executive of Arizona Technology Enterprises should be announced within the next couple of weeks.

The technology-transfer arm of Arizona State University is building marketing alliances with Columbia University, which is where ASU President Michael Crow worked before coming to the Valley.

Prior to becoming the founding chief executive of AzTE, Slate served as general partner for two Arizona venture capital funds: Arris Ventures and Paradise '94.

For more: www.azte.com.

Seniors get a hand

Brentwood, Tenn.-based Inspiris is extending nurse practitioner-led care and care management services for members of Senior Care Action Network in the Phoenix market.

Inspiris focuses on improving quality of life for the frail elderly, chronically ill and disabled in an effort to reduce the cost to Medicare Advantage and Medicaid health plans.

Inspiris has been serving SCAN members in the Phoenix market since October, providing its CarePlus nursing home-based services to enrollees in custodial care. Now Inspiris is expanding its services to SCAN members who live in about 15 assisted living centers, through its new CarePlus At Home model.

Under this program, nurse practitioners will visit the assisted living centers each week, seeing members as needed and providing case management over the phone.

Inspiris also will provide post-acute care management for members receiving short-term care during skilled nursing home stays.

AzTE and Japan Technology Group form partnership

2010-05-27T04:06:00.000-07:00

Arizona State University’s technology-transfer arm is partnering with Japan Technology Group to collaborate on commercializing technologies from ASU and eight Japanese universities.

Arizona Technology Enterprises will market Japanese intellectual property in the U.S., while JTG will do the same for ASU in Japan.

The goal is to accelerate the transition of university innovations into the marketplace.

Augustine Cheng, managing director of AzTE, said the exposure of intellectual property from ASU researchers to Japanese industry increases the chances these discoveries will be developed further and potentially commercialized.

“This collaboration allows ASU and these Japanese universities to expand their international reach in the technology space,” Cheng said.

This is Philadelphia-based JTG’s first formal collaboration with a U.S. university, said JTG President Taro Yaguchi. He said the two groups also will seek joint research opportunities.

Robert Green, president and CEO of the Arizona BioIndustry Association, said it is more critical than ever for universities to exploit the technologies they develop.

“Commercializing technology can be very lucrative and provide desperately needed funds,” said Green.

“It also helps retain our top talent,” he added. “Increased exposure of technology dramatically improves the chance for commercialization, so AzTE’s unique program with JTG is a dramatic step

forward.”

Get Connected

Arizona Technology Enterprises: www.azte.com

Japan Technology Group: www.japantechnologygroup.com

Arizona Technology Enterprises partners with Japan Technology Group

2010-05-27T04:03:00.000-07:00

Arizona State University’s technology transfer arm is partnering with Japan Technology Group to collaborate on commercializing technologies from ASU and eight Japanese universities.

Arizona Technology Enterprises will market Japanese intellectual property in the U.S., while JTG will do the same for ASU in Japan. The goal is to accelerate the transition of university innovations into the marketplace.

“This collaboration allows ASU and these Japanese universities to expand their international reach in the technology space,” he said.

While ASU has partnerships with many international and U.S. universities, this is JTG’s first formal collaboration with a U.S. university, said JTG President Taro Yaguchi.

JTG, based in Philadelphia with offices in Tokyo, represents technologies from Nagoya University, Waseda University, Tokyo University of Science, Hokkaido University, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Kyushu University, Kumamoto University and Iwate University.

“AzTE has a proven technology licensing record, as well as an extensive network of domestic and international companies and universities on their roster,” Yaguchi said. “It is extremely beneficial to foster friendly ties with an established entity such as AzTE.”

He said the two groups also will seek joint research opportunities.

A SHOPPING REVOLUTION

2010-05-26T07:55:00.001-07:00

A SHOPPING REVOLUTION
IC Tags Speed Up Checkouts (March 27, 2007)

One of the checkouts where IC tags are used (Jiji)

Some convenience stores, supermarkets, and other retailers are attaching integrated circuit tags to their merchandise. IC tags, which allow vast amounts of information to be read in the blink of an eye, have a variety of retail applications, including instantaneous checkouts and sophisticated inventory management. The use of this technology not only enhances convenience for the consumer but also boosts efficiency for retailers.

Check Out by the Basket
Imagine yourself at a convenience store. You pick out a sandwich, a cup of instant noodles, and a canned drink, put them in the shopping basket, and take the basket to the checkout counter. You hear a beep, and the total for your purchase instantly appears on the cash register display. In February 2007 major convenience store chain Family Mart tested a system that does just this at two of its stores in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo.

The test, which was conducted under the guidance of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, involved placing 2-cm-square stickers fitted with IC tags on the approximately 800 items carried by the stores. The stickers were attached at the company's production facilities, allowing all the items to be tracked en route to delivery at the stores. Then, when customers make a purchase, a sensor at the checkout counter scans the data on the products' IC tags and calculates the bill, eliminating the need to scan individual item barcodes and cutting customers' waiting time in half.

A virtual makeup selector using IC technology at a Shiseido outlet (Jiji)

Personalized Product Information
Odakyu Electric Railway Co. has partnered with Hitachi Ltd. to survey consumers' preferences and create a system capable of offering people information on products based on their own individual tastes. They provided survey respondents with IC-chip cards containing data indicating their degree of interest in various aspects of product appeal, such as healthiness, environmental-friendliness, price, and freshness. Participants were asked to scan the card on special in-store devices that recommended products based on customers' preferences. Tested recently at selected Odakyu Group supermarkets, the system received high marks from shoppers.

The use of IC tags has been expanding among a variety of retailers. The department store chain Mitsukoshi has introduced IC tags in its sales of cosmetics, while bookstores have utilized the tags to measure the frequency with which certain titles are browsed by customers. Electronics stores, meanwhile, are using the tags to provide swift and accurate product inventory data. If the current obstacle of high IC chip costs can be overcome, the use of IC tags is sure to expand further and could even lead to the emergence of unmanned shops.

HOT NEW HAIR DRYER

2010-05-26T07:54:00.001-07:00

HOT NEW HAIR DRYER
Matsushita Hits It Big with Latest Nanocare Model (December 8, 2006)

An image of "nanoe ions" flowing from the dryer (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.)

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.'s latest model in the Nanocare series of hair dryers has been making waves since its release in July 2006. At nearly ¥20,000 ($167 at ¥120 to the dollar), the Nanocare dryer costs considerably more than its rivals, most of which have negative-ion capabilities and are priced around ¥3,000 ($25). But thanks to its "nanoe ion" generator, which reduces frizz and makes hair strong and lustrous, it has become a hot seller. The product appears to have won the hearts not just of the women consumers it originally targeted but of men as well, especially those concerned about hair loss.

Removes Oily Buildup
The Nanocare EH5441, of which 110,000 units were sold in the first three months after its release, is equipped with a device that uses electricity to break down airborne moisture into micro droplets, which are delivered together with a stream of hot air. The minute droplets have a radius of 18 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter) and contain minus ions. When they are sprayed on the head, oil that has built up on the scalp is loosened, making it easier to wash away. A subsequent shampoo leaves users feeling refreshed and reportedly makes hair lustrous and supple.

Matsushita originally used the "nanoe ion" label on an air purifier that it marketed in 2003. The technology not only eliminated indoor odors but had anti-bacterial properties as well, and the air purifier was a big seller. The company began looking into other applications and eventually found that the ions are also good for the skin and hair. This led to its use in hair dryers.

The Nanocare EH5441 (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.)

Big Hit Among Men Too
Over the past few years, the domestic market for hair dryers has hovered between 4.3 and 4.6 million units annually, with no expectations of further growth. At the same time, a price war has unfolded among manufacturers, pushing prices at major appliance chains down to low levels.

Matsushita seems to have hit upon a device that may beat this trend by winning not only women but also men, who have traditionally shown little interest in these products. Ordinary hair dryers can cause hair to become too dry and frayed at the ends, but the "nanoe ion" dryer helps the ends to retain moisture, and women appreciate that this keeps their hair smooth and silky. But it is not only women who are attracted by this product. The company says a number of men have sent messages describing how they no longer have problems with an oily scalp and other benefits of the new "nanoe ion" dryer.

MUSIC THAT COMES WHEN YOU CALL

2010-05-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

MUSIC THAT COMES WHEN YOU CALL
Robot Takes Music Where You Want to Hear It (December 15, 2006)

There is now a robot that will come over to you and play music with just the push of a button on a remote control. ZMP Inc., a startup company that develops and sells humanoid robots, released the "miuro" in December 2006. It is the first such product capable of autonomous movement to go on sale anywhere in the world.

Mobile-Phone Controlled
The small robot "miuro," which contains a music player, is essentially a moving stereo. It measures 35 cm across and 22 cm high, it weighs 5 kg, and it moves on two wheels. Priced at an affordable ¥108,800 ($907 at ¥120 to the dollar), with the purchase of an add-on package for ¥19,800 ($165) users with a computer and wireless LAN can enjoy having the robot autonomously navigate their house using onboard cameras and sensors, finding its own way to the living room and other preprogrammed locations. For example, it could be used in place of an alarm clock, moving into your bedroom and waking you up with the song of your choice in the morning.

The miuro uses a lithium battery that allows up to four hours of use on a single two-hour charge. It is operated by means of an infrared remote control, but it is also possible to give it instructions using a mobile phone. Using the remote control, the user can select and play music taken from an mp3 player, a computer, or Internet radio. On top of that, when users are away, they can keep tabs on what is happening at home by instructing the miuro go to a preprogrammed location, take a photo, and email it to them.

An Integral Part of Life
Industrial robots account for most of Japan's robot market at present. When Sony Corp. released the dog-like robot AIBO in 1999 for home use, sales were not as good as expected, and the company later halted production. Robots that feature human-like intelligence and those that can walk on two legs are still in the development stages, and those that are available remain too expensive for ordinary consumers to purchase.

The miuro, however, is priced affordably enough for most households. A company spokesperson explains: "Robots had previously attracted attention just for being able to move. What we're trying to do is make this kind of robot a part of everyday life, showing people a new kind of lifestyle."

FLOWERS ON DEMAND

2010-05-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

FLOWERS ON DEMAND
Newly Discovered Hormone Controls When Plants Bloom (July 31, 2007)

The Hd3a-GFP protein at the tip of the stem (where flowers are formed), observed under a microscope. (©NARA Institute of Science and Technology)

A group of researchers led by Professor Shimamoto Ko of Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) has identified the hormone that makes rice plants flower, while a group from the Max Planck Institute in Germany has identified the equivalent hormone in the arabidopsis plant. The teams confirmed that the two proteins, called Hd3a and FT, respectively, are produced in the plants' leaves and then transported to the tip of the stem. The theory that flower buds are formed by florigen (flowering hormone) produced in the leaves through stimulation from sunlight was first put forward in 1937. It has taken 70 years for scientists to track down the hormone.

What Is Florigen?
Flowering hormone is a chemical signal that causes flower buds to form. When a plant reaches a certain point in its growth, it begins preparing to make flowers. This stage is called anthogenesis. Florigen is the hormone that sends the order to begin these preparations to the top of the stem and activates the genes responsible for making flowers.

Hd3a protein, which is the flowering hormone of the rice plant, is produced in the fibrovascular bundle of the leaves and then transported to the meristem at the tip of the stem, where it causes flowers to form. (©NARA Institute of Science and Technology)

Plants time their flowering according to the length of the day. It is their leaves that sense how long a day is, while the flowers are actually made by the meristem at the tip of the stem. Some scientists postulated, therefore, that flowering hormone was produced in the leaves and then transported to the tip of the stem through the stem's sieve tubes.

It was previously thought that florigen was responsible for causing flowers to open, but researchers have learned that this is done by a separate hormone and that florigen is responsible for triggering the formation of buds. Countless plant hormones have been identified over the past few decades, but until recently florigen had proved elusive.

A World First
In 2005 a group at Kyoto University revealed the mechanism by which the FT gene in arabidopsis (commonly known as thale cress or mouse-ear cress) forms flower buds. The team discovered that the gene works in the fibrovascular bundle of the plant's leaves, making FT protein. FT protein joins with another protein, FD, in the bud to produce a complex, and once the functioning of this complex is adjusted, it turns on the plant's bud-formation switch. It was still not known, however, that FT protein is transported from the leaves to the buds. This is what the Japanese and German groups have now confirmed.

Professor Shimamoto and his NAIST team used rice plants for their research. By combining the rice plant’s Hd3a gene with a fluorescent material called GFP, they were able to observe the route by which the flowering hormone is transported. Introducing the gene to the rice plants caused them to flower early.

It is thought that these results could be used to control when plants flower. The main scientific significance of the work, though, is that the researchers have identified a hormone that had eluded plant biologists around the world for over 70 years.

WORLD'S SMALLEST HUMANOID ROBOT

2010-05-26T07:37:00.001-07:00

WORLD'S SMALLEST HUMANOID ROBOT
i-SOBOT Can Dance and Mimic Animals (August 31, 2007)

A new humanoid robot, certified as the world's smallest, will be released this autumn by Japanese toy manufacturer Tomy Company. On October 25, 2007, the Omnibot 17µ i-SOBOT is scheduled to hit the market—as well as the 2008 edition of Guinness World Records, which will list the product as "the smallest humanoid robot in production." Robotics fans look forward to i-SOBOT as a fun toy to add to their collections, but also as a leap forward in miniaturization of the advanced parts that go into these high-tech tools.

Surprising Size and Price
i-SOBOT stands just 16.5 centimeters tall, and weighs only around 350 grams. While the robot fits in the palm of your hand, it remains a fully outfitted bipedal machine, with 17 moving joints. Used throughout the body are tiny, custom servomotors developed by Tomy. The robot's onboard gyro-sensor allows it to maintain its balance automatically as it goes smoothly through its programmed motions. i-SOBOT comes with an infrared remote-control unit, but users can also use voice commands to control it.

Tomy's i-SOBOT architecture, the control system developed to operate this new robot, makes use of 19 integrated circuit chips that work in tandem to enable the toy's complex actions.

i-SOBOT will be sold for ¥29,800 before tax ($248 at ¥120 to the dollar) in fully assembled form, complete with rechargeable batteries and its remote control, which features twin joysticks, programmable buttons, and an LCD screen. According to the manufacturer, this price is quite affordable for a robot of this complexity. In addition to its release in Japan, the robot will make its way to markets in the United States and elsewhere in Asia. In 2008 Tomy intends to extend sales to Europe as well. To reach its global sales target of 300,000 units, the company is localizing i-SOBOT's software in English and Chinese in addition to Japanese.

Four Modes for Action
An attractive feature of this versatile robot is its four separate modes for controlling the action. In Remote Control Mode, the user manages the robot's movements directly with the command buttons and joysticks on the wireless remote. In Programming Mode, the user has the option to easily choose commands from a list of available actions—182 in all— or to use the controller to create original actions, or use a combination of the two to program complex sequences that can be up to 240 steps long, with 80 steps stored in each of the robot's three memory slots. Special Action Mode, meanwhile, includes 18 more complex preprogrammed actions, such as "hula dance" and "air drumming." And Voice Control Mode lets the user give the robot one of 10 commands, to which the i-SOBOT can respond with a range of actions.

This robot is entertaining to the ear as well as the eye. As it goes through its actions it plays sounds from its library of nearly 100 sound effects and songs. The speaker can be turned off, too, when silent action is preferable. The toy is humanoid in form, but the designers have included playful actions in its repertoire that have it imitate the adorable movements of animals.

Tomy has taken steps to make i-SOBOT eco-friendly. The toy manufacturer is shipping the robot with three rechargeable AAA batteries from Sanyo Electric Co., whose Eneloop nickel metal hydride batteries let users keep the robot running for months without sending dead batteries to landfills. Tomy is also collaborating in Sanyo's Energy Evolution Project by making i-SOBOT part of the programs carried out at Japanese elementary schools. The companies hope to boost children's awareness of environmental issues by powering the fun robot with rechargeable cells.

SURFING IN THE RAIN Internet Umbrella Lets Users Browse in Any Weather

2010-05-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

The umbrella projects images on to its underside. ©Pileus LLC / Keio University

Gray, rainy days may be about to get more colorful thanks to a new umbrella invented by Japanese researchers. The Internet Umbrella, conceived by a team at Keio University, acts as a photo browser by displaying images from the Internet as the user walks along. The handle of the umbrella contains a projector that displays images on the underside of the umbrella.

Student Inventors
The Internet umbrella, named Pileus (meaning the head of a mushroom) was created by two young graduate students. Second-year doctoral student Matsumoto Takashi, 27, and first-year master’s student Hashimoto Sho, 22, of Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance were motivated by a desire to make walking on rainy days more enjoyable. Both belong to a research lab led by Professor Okude Naohito that is renowned for its interaction design research based on the concept of ubiquitous computing.

Prompted to start this project by the everyday act of using an umbrella, Matsumoto and Hashimoto combined numerous technologies to make the Internet umbrella a reality. The handle of their creation contains a camera, a motion sensor, GPS, and a digital compass. The device is controlled by rotating the grip.

The Internet Umbrella, Pileus ©Pileus LLC / Keio University

Pileus has been presented or displayed in several countries, including the United States, France, and Austria, and won the Innovation Prize at Laval Virtual 2007, Europe’s biggest virtual reality convention.

Future Vision
The Internet Umbrella has two main functions. One is browsing the online photo-sharing site Flickr. Not only can the umbrella display photos from the site; using the camera in the handle it can also take pictures and upload them to the Internet via a wireless connection. Pileus users can thus view each other’s photo streams. The umbrella can also display movies from the video-sharing site YouTube.

The other key function of the device is to help users find their way around by displaying 3D maps using Google Earth. The umbrella “knows” the user’s location (thanks to GPS) and direction (thanks to the digital compass), so it can show a bird’s-eye map of the surrounding area, enabling the user to navigate streets with ease. Both functions are easily controlled by rotating the grip of the umbrella. The team is currently working on enabling photos taken with the umbrella to be displayed on the map, along with their location.

©Pileus LLC / Keio University

Predicting continued growth in the quantities of tagged photos and consumer-generated media on the Internet, the developers imagine a time when Pileus users will be able to view social information generated by other users anywhere in real time. On their website they stated, “This product aims to enhance people’s everyday lives by synchronizing information on the Internet and in real places.”

US underplays Pakistan connection to terror

2010-05-05T09:28:00.001-07:00

Washington, May 5 (IANS) As another terror case with Pakistani links emerged, US sought to underplay the connection projecting terrorism as a common threat to 'a number of countries around the world, including Pakistan and India and others.'

'We obviously are aware that, you know, we have a threat that we face on an ongoing basis of individuals in this country and elsewhere who wish to do us ill,' State Department Philip J. Crowley told reporters Tuesday

'The same is true of a number of countries around the world, including Pakistan and India and others,' he said when asked to comment on a growing number of cases, including the 26/ 11 Mumbai attacks, where US citizens of Pakistani origin were involved.

'This is a global struggle. We are cooperating, you know, with these countries. Obviously, we have to continue to find ways to detect, you know, these plots before they reach a place like Times Square,' Crowley added.

In March, Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In several other cases too either people with Pakistani backgrounds were involved or had trained in Pakistan.

Asked if Pakistan had changed since 1992 when then President Bill Clinton was about to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, Crowley said: 'I'd be very careful about making a broad-brush statement. You know, we value our relationship with Pakistan.'

'We value the fact that there are many Pakistanis who have come to this country, have links to Pakistan and have become citizens of this country. We're very proud of them. They enrich us as a society.'

'And I think that we all share the same goal here, which is to determine, you know, what's behind this movement, how people that, you know, may come here to study, come here to live, all of a sudden, you know, take a turn in a dangerous direction,' Crowley said.

'We're all trying to understand, you know, what this phenomenon is and see what we can do, you know, to prevent it from occurring in the future.'

'We sense the concern, and we're determined to reduce this threat to the United States and to other countries as best we can,' he said.

At the White House too, spokesman Robert Gibbs referred to the Headley case as a high profile recent terror case, but denied there was any perception of the White House that there has been an increase in attempted attacks during President Barack Obama's tenure.

'No, I just was listing high-profile cases, and I just added one to that list. I don't know, in terms of looking at statistics, whether that's the case or not,' he said about his reference to the Headley case.

Black market in Facebook accounts!

2010-05-05T09:27:00.001-07:00

That being online is not really safe has been brought to the forefront again, this time on Facebook.

A sale of 1.5 million stolen Facebook accounts on the black market by a hacker has created panic amongst users.

Researchers at VeriSign iDefense Labs, an internet security firm, said that they had found stolen login details for the world''s most popular social networking site on sale for as little as $25 for 1,000 on a Russian website Carder.su.

According to the firm, the hacker called ''kirllos'' was offering login information for bundles of 1,000 accounts with 10 or fewer friends on sale for just $25 (Â£16) and with more than 10, for $45 (Â£30).

Facebook however, has rubbished the claims, saying that ''kirllos'' was known for making wild claims.

According to the Sun, company spokesman Barry Schnitt said Facebook had tried to buy details from kirllos during its own investigation but that "the hacker was unable to produce anything for our buyer".

Hackers use software that logs computer keystrokes or 'phishing' techniques that trick users into giving out their passwords, personal information like birth dates, addresses and phone numbers.

The accounts can then be hijacked to send spam and malicious programs or to commit identity frauds.

Users concerned about their account privacy can report the matter through the Help Centre.

Nokia, Microsoft launch new mobile software

2010-05-05T09:26:00.003-07:00

Nokia and Microsoft unveiled on Wednesday the first result of their new software collaboration aimed at breaking the dominance of Research in Motion's BlackBerry in wireless services for corporations.

Nokia and Microsoft, at one time fierce rivals in the mobile telecommunications business, announced the alliance in August 2009. They expect to offer Nokia phones running Microsoft's Office programs later this year.

On Wednesday the companies unveiled Communicator Mobile software, which enables people to see their colleagues' availability, and click to communicate with them using instant messenger, e-mail, text or phone call.

The names and status of colleagues are embedded directly in the devices' contacts application. Owners of Nokia E52 and E72 models can download it as of today from Nokia's Ovi Store.

SMS Was Predicted 100 Years Ago

2010-05-05T09:26:00.001-07:00

Texting may be a boon in today's world, but the concept was visualised more than a century ago.

And, it was a pioneering American physicist who had predicted about the portable messaging service, like the SMS, via a hand-held device in the 'Popular Mechanics' magazine in 1909, its Technology Editor Seth Porges has claimed.

Nikola Tesla, the physicist and a mechanical engineer, whose name lives on at the electric car maker Tesla Motors saw wireless energy as the only way to make electricity thrive, according to Porges.

Tesla wrote in the magazine that one day it'd be possible to transmit "wireless messages" all over the world and imagined that such a hand-held device would be simple to use and one day everyone in the world would communicate to friends using it, Porges said.

This would usher in a new era of technology, Telsa wrote in the publication.

"Nikola Tesla was able to predict technology which is still in its nascent forms a hundred years later. He talked a lot about his other great passion, which was wireless power.

"It has taken a little longer to get off the ground, but work on fascinating wireless conductive transmission is going on right now in research centres at MIT and Intel and other places," 'The Daily Telegraph' quoted Porges as saying.

Porges disclosed Tesla's prediction at a presentation, '108 years of futurism' to industry figures in New York.

The magazine, which has nine international editions that is read by millions, has been trying to imagine how the world will look in future years since it was first published in January 1902.

Mobile Internet Set To Grow In India

2010-05-05T09:24:00.002-07:00

There seems to be a burgeoning market for mobile Internet in India as is clear by the number of companies jumping on the cell technology bandwagon! Last month, for instance, July Systems was trying to create technology that would stream IPL matches on mobile screens using the existing 2G bandwidth.

This firm is big in the mobile media segment and has ambitious plans for mobile streaming of sports. With the number of GPRS handsets growing, the wide availability of mobiles and 3G services getting launched, mobile streaming is set to become big in India. The company’s proprietary technology is called MIX (Mobile Internet Experience), and is the first nextgeneration mobile publishing platform that offers features like cross-platform publishing and distribution, reports The Economic Times. Thanks to this software, users could download IPL matches clip-by-clip.

Anupam Srivasatava of Intel Capital explains, “Mobile internet usage in India will become very big with 20 per cent of 500 million users possessing GPRS handsets. With such handset prices falling and the advent of 3G, it will gain a new growth curve in next two years.”

I Don't Think FPGAs Will Ever Rule The Market'

2010-05-05T09:24:00.001-07:00

Xilinx is the world leader in programmable platforms, with $1.7 billion revenue in 2009 and more than 50 per cent market share in the programmable logic device segment of the semiconductor industry. Vin Ratford, senior vice president, worldwide marketing and business development, Xilinx, speaks to Jesus Milton Rousseau S of Electronics Bazaar about the latest trends and opportunities for the company in the Indian market.

EB: Do you think application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and application specific standard part (ASSP) will lose market share to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)?

No, I don't think FPGAs will ever rule the market completely, but they are becoming more popular. ASICs and ASSPs have become expensive and FPGAs are being used as an alternative platform for product development. However, FPGAs are most likely to serve applications in sectors where volumes are not enough to invest $50â€“100 million in a dedicated ASIC or ASSP such as automotive infotainment, UPS and communications. In aerospace and defence, FPGAs are already being used universally.

In general, FPGAs will be used where volumes are up to millions of units and ASSPs will be adopted in sectors where volumes are in tens of millions of units. However, the number of applications having high volumes will decrease with time. For example, very high end handsets, netbooks and PCs.

EB: What is the significance of the Indian market for Xilinx operations?

Revenue wise the Indian market is still a small contributor for Xilinx, but it is a significant growing market. It supports lots of our other businesses as many of our tier 1 customers have design teams located here. Equally important is the intellectual capital.

EB: What is Xilinx India's R&D contribution?

Our Indian R&D centre has doubled its human resource to 240 engineers in the last 18 months. It has the capacity to accommodate 450 engineers and our aim is to have 350 engineers at this centre by 2010 end. The Indian R&D team does across the board IC design, both physical and verification. While a large team is working on intellectual property (IP), another team is developing embedded software and chip design software around simulation. The Indian centre integrates all our R&D functions across the globe.

EB: What is Xilinx's contribution to the Indian ecosystem?

Our success is tied to the success of the Indian ecosystem. Our platforms are now much more pre-packaged, supported and defined than before. As a stakeholder in the ecosystem, we are developing these base and domain specific platforms to meet customers' market needs. Other areas of our contribution are investment in technology, training programmes, certifications, implementing and designing on the Xilinx platform and investment in IP development.

EB: Do you help your partners financially?

We help some of our partners in evaluating customers' needs and market study. This is being done through investment in IP. Certain companies in India have been selected to work within targeted end markets and help them to add capabilities to our platforms. But they are not looking for investments. They want access to customers, technology and technical staff; knowledge sharing; and in few cases, some risk sharing. Our direct and indirect spending would depend on the growth of the Indian market. Our goal is to help the ecosystem become self sufficient as the market develops rather than serve as an ecosystem bank.

EB: What are your plans to generate more revenue from India?

In India, there are three types of customers--local original equipment manufacturers, multinational companies like Cisco, Juniper, and design houses, who serve global customers. Our direct revenue in India is less but the company's impact is significant. So, we are targeting all the three categories of customers. We are the only FPGA company to serve US engineers working in India; we have a dedicated technical support team for them.

EB: What are the areas of applications or verticals you're targeting in India?

We are targeting the next generation telecom, optical network, wireless base stations, broadcast and security (secure networking) applications. In aerospace and defence verticals, our target is the next generation telecom and supercomputers based on FPGAs. In industrial sector, we aim to have a market share in video application and Ethernet in factories.

EB: What is the USPs of the 28 nm platform?

Historically, we have focussed on performance and capacity. Firstly, the 28 nm platform is optimised for more performance with much lower power to leverage performance in devices. Secondly there is the issue of unified architecture. When customers port IP from in Virtex to Spartan, it needs modifications. But the 28nm has a single architecture and it's based on Virtex so it's compatible with previous generations and it can scale from highest capable to lowest power devices. Thirdly, technically speaking it is around interfaces and standards that make it easier for engineers to build their application on the silicon platform. We will also see some new embedded products that will be more attractive to build on embedded systems.

EB: Please tell us about your future FPGA families?

Our future FPGAs are 22 nm, which are in developmental stage. The production of 22 nm will begin within next three to four years. Mixed signal blocks on FPGAs are also expected in the near future. Companies are looking for new packaging technologies and materials, but new lithography is posing technical and economical challenges to us.

'Solar Will Always Occupy A Good Place In My Life'

2010-05-05T09:23:00.001-07:00

The first thing people notice about him is, almost invariably, his flawless personality. Born in a journalistic and writers' background, he had always been anxious to prove he is more than just a son of two popular writers-his parents-and this is reflected in the challenging roles he took on since he was very young. He is known and recognised in the industry as a senior technology leader with an experience of over 25 years in the solar energy space. He has built and integrated professionals into result oriented multidisciplinary teams and has been instrumental in scaling up and validation of thin film technologies from research into production. Meet the man who brought sunshine in many a lives and saw very closely how solar energy completely changed people's lives. Changing the direction of his life a couple of times, Rajiv Arya is presently the CEO of Moser Baer Photovoltaic Ltd, a fully owned subsidiary of Moser Baer India Ltd. Arya's story is one of determination, focus and perseverance .

I was born in England where my father spent his 14 years. My parents were both writers-my father was a journalist and my mother a short story writer. I have two sisters, and when my younger sister was born, my father left England to settle in India. I was then seven-and-a-half-year-old. My father joined Economic Times as the bureau chief of Kolkata and served it for 20 years.

Caught between social movements

As a student I excelled in studies. I went to Andrews School in Kolkata. In 1970-71, Kolkata was tensed due to the Naxalite movement and all colleges remained closed for most of the year. I lost an academic year in Kolkata. So I had to move to Ranchi to do undergraduation. But life had other plans for me. In Ranchi, too, I ended up losing a year as the JP movement had started there. So, I lost two academic years as I was caught between the Naxalite movement and the JP movement. It is a common parlance that if you're 20 and you're still not a communist it means you don't have a heart. And at 40, if you're still a communist you don't have a head. Kolkata, as we all are aware, is a politically sensitive city. I was influenced by the Naxalite movement but not to the extent of getting involved in it. I was never politically active. In fact, I was more active in sports and made my school and college proud of my sportsman skills. Losing two academic years and being away from college during the turmoil was like an extended holiday for me. I represented my school and college in many sports. I played hockey at the district level, cricket, football and badminton. Also, my tall and skinny stature helped me being a good wicketkeeper and a goalkeeper.

Education, an important part of my life I come from a family where education is given a lot of importance. That was the major drive for everything I did in life. So like many youngsters, I was not carried away by the Naxalite and JP movements. I would not call myself a naughty child, rather I was mischievous. However, I took part in all competitions, particularly scientific model competitions, and won many prizes in school. It is only when I was in college that I realised the importance of education and became very serious towards studies. I was overwhelmed by the thought that I have to do something that would make me successful. After my undergraduation, I went back to Kolkata and did my Masters in pure science-solid state physics-from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and M Tech in material science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. In 1983, I proceeded to the US to obtain my PhD in engineering from Brown University, Rhode Island. My favourite subject in college was physics and I still like it.

The turning point

In college, I was determined to be a hardcore political physicist. But when I was doing my Masters, I realised that I am not fit for it. It happened so when I was writing an article where I had to explain what a political physicist do, that's when I realised that I did not fit into the definition and decided that I will not remain in pure science and wanted to take up technology. That was a turning point in my life where I realised my limitations, both in terms of liking and my ability to think independently. I always did what I wanted to do. Sometimes when I think back, I realise that the biggest support my sisters and I got from our parents was their faith in our ability and the freedom to do what we wanted to, so long as we had an objective. They never had any problem when I changed the direction of my studies. They never pushed me to be a doctor or an engineer, neither did they push me to be a journalist. They always gave me the freedom to figure out what I would like to do in life. This positive support from my parents has deeply influenced my life.

Writing is my passion

I started writing very young. My first story was published when I was 13 and was paid for it. My second story was published when I was in the ninth grade, however, my third story was rejected. After two of my stories got published, I was confident that I had become a writer and sent the third story to Sarika, a magazine for adult readers. Naturally, they would reject a child's article. When I came back from school I saw the manuscript on the living room table which was corrected by my mother. As egoistic as I was, I stopped writing completely because I couldn't digest the fact that my Hindi was corrected by my mother. I was being stupid. But that was the end of my journey of becoming a writer or a journalist. My father learned several languages; both my sisters were taught various languages but I pronounced that if I wanted to learn any language I would learn on my own. My ego didn't permit me to do the same things as other did. In fact, I felt a lot of competition from my parents, so I chose to do things differently.

I always felt, if my father could find his own bread why couldn't I? My parents encouraged this attitude. I did everything on my own. My father let me move around on my own even in unknown places since I was a small boy. He used to say, â€œIf you get lost, you have the house phone number and address. You should be able to find your way home.â€ I grew up in a family where there was a lot of pressure to do well in school and college. The rest was left to us. I think that is what made us so independent. My sister and I found our own ways and are doing well in life.

Solar just happened One of my professors, Dr Dilip Paul, who was also my guide in PhD, persuaded me to do my M Tech thesis on solar energy. In 1978, he sent me from the US to Delhi to attend a solar energy conference at Vigyan Bhawan. I was extremely enlightened and took up solar as my career. I did my thesis on solar energy. I feel extremely satisfied that I have chosen this line. I have seen people's life taking a turn around with the help of solar. In late 1990s, there was a UN project in India on water pumping. I came to India to see how the solar powered water pumps were working. I landed in Hyderabad and took a car to visit a village in the interior. There was no electricity in the village, and no pacca road. I had to leave the car and walk for 45 minutes to reach the village. You can imagine how backward the village was. In such a village, when I saw the solar panels I was overwhelmed.

From a long distance I could see the solar panels in the fields. Then I saw three water pumps powered by the solar panels. When I was introduced to the farmer working in the field, he came and touched my feet out of gratitude. He took me to his home and fed me. He said that before the three solar powered water pumps came in the village, he used to cultivate only one crop annually. But with three pumps, he was cultivating three crops a year and also been able to send his three children to school. Even today, when I remember such incidents I get goosebumps!

I am happy that I never gave up on solar. Solar requires dedication and good technology. I think if my professor would have given me a different direction I would have taken it but since he showed me the solar direction I am grateful to him. So I can say that solar just happened. During my college days I did change lines but after solar happened I was very determined that this is what I want to do.

Road to success

If I am on the road to success, I owe it to a large extent to my family support. In 1979, I went to the US, and for the next 28 years I stayed there-first I did my PhD, then I worked for a small startup company. After leaving that I joined Solerex as a senior project scientist and left 19 years later as executive director (thin film technology). I was also the director of the Oregon Renewable Energy Centre in Portland, Oregon, where I led an organisation with a statewide charter for applied research and education in renewable energy systems. Next, I started a solar company along with five others. Initially, the company was called Gen3Solar in Hayward, California. Later, it was named OptiSolar Inc., where I worked as the chief technology officer. I also launched Arya International, Inc., a solar technology and business consulting firm, in 2003. I joined Moser Baer in September 2007 and was instrumental in envisaging the company's plan to attain 1 GW capacity across three verticals-silicon, thin film and concentrators. Presently, I am working as the chief executive officer. My work includes product design, process scale up, process transfer, piloting and start up of a thin film solar module plant.

With 25 years' experience in thin film solar cells and modules, I have maintained a professional interest in many aspects of renewable energy components and systems. My R&D activities have centered on material and device aspects of three types of thin film solar cells and modules-amorphous silicon, copper indium diselenide and cadmium telluride.

Other roles in life I got married in 1979, the year I left for the US. My wife, who has a Masters in social work, has been a psychiatric social worker. Our only son Rajat studied computer science and is working in the US. Rajat is also as independent as I was when I was his age. I think I have well managed my roles as a father and as a husband. My son is like a friend but I think he is closer to my wife. Whenever he comes to India, we spend quality time together. We go to watch a play or a game, leaving his wife and his mother home. We like to spend time with each other despite a wide generation gap that exists between us. I am fortunate and feel blessed that I have this kind of relationship with my son and daughter-in-law.

However, I must admit that I may have neglected some of my responsibilities towards my wife. As I was very dedicated to my work, my wife had to give more time to my son and do most of the interactions with his school and college. She keeps my family going by filling in for me. What overwhelms me the most is how she compromised her career for mine.But we are both professionals and know each other for long. So there are no hangups.

Later life

I did stop publishing my stories after ninth standard but that does not mean that I have stopped writing. Besides studies, if I have done anything serious, it was writing poetry. I still write and recite poetry. I recite essentially in three languages, mostly in Hindi, but I have friends in south India who speak English, and for them I recite in English. There is a lot of pressure from publishers to publish my work but I don't let any of my poetries go out. One day I may go back to writing and publish in those journals where my parents published their stories. But that is for later. I would never be as good a writer as they were. But I am absolutely sure, if I wanted I could have become a writer. Once I was a big movie buffer but now I don't watch movies. I would rather go and watch a play. I am very fond of watching plays.

Solar is close to my heart

The future of solar in India is very bright and the national solar mission will change the entire future of solar energy. India was not counted as a solar hub like Germany, Japan and the US. But in the coming years, India will be one of the leading solar countries for multiple reasons-shortage of electricity, 300 days of sunshine, and now we have a strong government policy.

Moser Baer will play a major role in achieving the target of the solar mission. In two-and-a-half years, Moser Baer will be the largest solar company in India. I want to capture the biggest share of the solar pie; we have the ability to do it.Solar energy is very close to my heart and will always have a good place in my life. Even after I retire from work, I would continue working with it. Besides, I will teach languages-let me tell you, in the US I taught Hindi to little children. I will also pursue writing full time and I will give a serious try to see what level I can achieve.

Your Pick CDMA Mobile

2010-05-05T09:22:00.001-07:00

OMH will serve to fuel the growth and popularity of CDMA just like GSM. As mobile phones are more like a style icon, consumer likes to change it every now and then. OMH will provide a great deal of flexibility to switch handsets and opt for high-end multimedia phones and smartphones for CDMA.

"So far we have binary runtime environment for wireless (BREW)-based OMH handsets. There are plans to launch Android-based handsets this year," shares Jain.

Just by sliding in the OMH SIM card, all the network settings get activated automatically unlike the lengthy process of calling the operator, getting the parameters, entering them manually and then finally using the data service.

OMH SIM cards and OMH handsets can be easily recognised by the trademark OMH logo, like a gem. "The OMH SIM card and the service will not carry any additional cost with it," shares Shelat.

Ajay Mathur, senior vice president, Tata Teleservices enunciates, "Within a very short span of the commercial launch of OMH, we have seen 15-20 per cent growth from open market initiatives. This platform will give a tremendous boost to high-end phones, use of Internet for rich data downloads in India."

It started off well, and holds great potential. The consumer, operator and
OEMs foresee a great market for OMH.

Three-fold benefit CDMA Mobile

2010-05-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

OMH offers great benefits to all the main players in the CDMA ecosystem--the consumer, the OEMs for the handsets and the operators.

"OMH has increased the choice of devices for the consumers with ease of access using OMH SIM cards. You can have great multimedia experience and leverage the Internet services on high-speed data networks of CDMA operators," says Vrajesh Shelat, head of wireless data business, Reliance Communications. It gives you the flexibility to chose the handset and has increased the touch points through retail distribution.

As OMH offers operator-independent handsets and services across the globe, there is an increase in device volume. "Earlier, there were lack of multimedia handsets and mid-range (2.5k to 9k) handsets in the CDMA space.

Larger device volumes across the geographies will play a vital role in lowering the handset prices," shares Deval Parikh, chief officer of handsets, VAS and procurement, Virgin Mobile India.

Jain, talking about his experience says, "OMH is one of the most exciting things for handset manufacturers. It has reduced the inventory risk, as one handset can be sold by many operators/distribution channels. With OMH, we can have retail presence rather than operator distributing the handsets."

OMH eliminates the operator specific testing. "For every operator, the OEM had to perform a device test on their network. As the handset becomes independent of the operator, it eliminates the testing related to the operator and increases time to market," says Jain.

One of the major benefits of OMH for the operators is that it lowers handset inventory cost. It creates open distribution channels and simplifies the supply chain management. "Operators need not have to worry about the inventory of the CDMA handsets," shares Parikh.

OMH also reduces the testing cost of the device at operators' end and the customer support.

Technological Change

2010-05-05T09:19:00.003-07:00

In the OMH ecosystem, the complete configuration settings to support operator and subscriber identification is shifted from the handset to Removable User Interface Modules (R-UIMs) card, commonly known as OHM SIM card. "Earlier only the voice and SMS were provisioned on the SIM card. By moving the network settings for data onto the SIM card, the handset is made operator neutral," explains Sibal.

Qualcomm provides the technology and the chip-sets for OMH. "Qualcomm's
chip-set QCS1010 onwards support OMH," shares Anil Kaushik, executive vice president, Fly Mobile. â€œHandsets using Qualcomm's OMH chip-sets are basically the OMH compliant handsets as they are capable of reading the network settings on the OMH SIM card," he adds.

"If you have a non OMH SIM card-based handset, you can change from one
CDMA operator to the other," explains Vikas Jain, business director,
Micromax. "But you will be able to access only the voice and SMS service
of the operator. All the data applications will need manual configurations
and can be tedious at times," he explains. Also, the handsets were locked
by the operators which made it difficult to switch the operator and have
the same handset.

The OMH handset is backward compatible and can work with a non OMH SIM
card. Similarly, an OMH SIM can work with a non-OMH handset. You can slide
in any operator's SIM in any handset and all the configuration settings
for voice and data will be done automatically.

What is OMH?

2010-05-05T09:19:00.001-07:00

OMH is a part of the Global Handset Requirements for CDMA (GHRC) initiative. GHRC brings a diverse group of operators and vendors for handset, application and chip-set to facilitate the delivery of feature-rich and affordable 3G devices across the globe. There are about 40+ companies (operators, OEMs, chip-set providers) working jointly to develop standards and specifications based on carrier requirements and device functionality.

The first worldwide trial of OMH was completed in India in August 2008 (source: www.cdg.org); also the first commercial OMH handset was launched by Samsung, Mpower 699 in India in August 2009. "India, being the second largest market for mobile phones in the world, with over 110 million subscribers was a natural choice to begin the programme," annotates Sibal.

"Today we have about six OMH handsets in the market. We plan to launch 25+
OMH handsets this year, ranging from entry-level phones to high-end multi-media phones," Sibal adds.

Joshi, from MTS says, "OMH market is expected to see double digit growth as it offers convergence of voice and data with ease of operation."

Open Market Handset For CDMA Mobile Services

2010-05-05T09:18:00.001-07:00

The OMH initiative promises to enhance the CDMA ecosystem; it gives you flexibility in device selection as well as changing operators in CDMA which was not easy earlier.

Open Market Handset (OMH) offers you greater choice and pliancy to stay tuned into the CDMA ecosystem. OMH is an initiative led by CDMA development group (CDG) to enhance the CDMA customer base, offer them flexibility to change the handset and the operator conveniently, and to use voice and data services. Reliance Communications, Sismeta Shyam (MTS), Tata Teleservices and Virgin Mobile India are the operators supporting this initiative in India. Samsung and Micromax have already launched their OMH handsets.

"When CDMA phones were first launched in India, people were sceptical about it being SIM-Card-less and tied to the operator after getting used to the GSM model," shares Sandeep Sibal, country manager and vice president of technology, Qualcomm India & South Asia. "Open market handsets are operator-neutral not only for voice but also for data. It has created greater selection of devices for consumers," he adds.

"CDMA as a technology is well-positioned to have a great future," expresses Atul Joshi, chief sales officer, MTS. "There is a business case to put more smartphones and higher-end CDMA phones in India for the CDMA customers," states Joshi.

Haryana Raj Bhawan Complex To Go Solar

2010-05-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, May 05, 2010: The Haryana government is all set to go green! It has earmarked Rs 2 crore to set up solar power plants at the Haryana Raj Bhawan and collectorate offices in 10 of the state's districts. Madhusudan Prasad, financial commissioner and principal secretary of renewable energy said yesterday that a 45 kilowatt (KW) solar power plant will be installed at Haryana Raj Bhawan in Chandigarh.

"Plants of 4.5 KW capacity each at 10 district collectorates' offices in Ambala, Jind, Kurukshetra, Rewari, Fatehabad, Hisar, Faridabad, Sonepat, Narnaul and Panchkula will also be installed this year.The total cost of the project will be Rs 2 crore," Prasad explained.

The solar plant at Raj Bhawan alone would set back the exchequer by Rs 1 crore. He added that the solar power plants were being set up under the aegis of the union ministry of new and renewable energy to utilise renewable energy options, reports SiliconIndia.

Further, Prasad added, "This would not only demonstrate the renewable energy options and substitute conventional energy, but also contribute in carbon reduction of 120 tonnes annually, which is the need of the hour."

Moon Landing Hoax Apollo : Disney used Fake Miniature Astronauts, Lunar Rovers & Modules (2 of 10)

2010-04-30T12:05:00.001-07:00

Moon Landing Hoax Apollo : Disney used Fake Miniature Astronauts, Lunar Rovers & Modules (1 of 10)

2010-04-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

Moon Landing Hoax Apollo 15 : Astronaut and Houston Admit the Lunar Rover Was Fixed Overnight

2010-04-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

Self-Powered Flexible Electronics

2010-04-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

Touch-screen computing is all the rage, appearing in countless smart phones, laptops, and tablet computers.

On a bender: This machine is testing the electrical properties of a graphene sheet. Korean researchers have incorporated these stretchy electrodes with thin-film nano-generators to make an energy-harvesting screen.
Credit: Advanced Materials

Now researchers at Samsung and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea have come up with a way to capture power when a touch screen flexes under a user's touch. The researchers have integrated flexible, transparent electrodes with an energy-scavenging material to make a film that could provide supplementary power for portable electronics. The film can be printed over large areas using roll-to-roll processes, but are at least five years from the market.

The screens take advantage of the piezoelectric effect--the tendency of some materials to generate an electrical potential when they're mechanically stressed. Materials scientists are developing devices that use nanoscale piezoelectronics to scavenge mechanical energy, such as the vibrations caused by footsteps. But the field is young, and some major challenges remain. The power output of a single piezoelectric nanowire is quite small (around a picowatt), so harvesting significant power requires integrating many wires into a large array; materials scientists are still experimenting with how to engineer these screens to make larger devices.

Samsung's experimental device sandwiches piezoelectric nanorods between highly conductive graphene electrodes on top of flexible plastic sheets. The group's aim is to replace the rigid and power-consuming electrodes and sensors used on the front of today's touch-screen displays with a flexible touch-sensor system that powers itself. Ultimately, this setup might generate enough power to help run the display and other parts of the device functions. Rolling up such a screen, for instance, could help recharge its batteries.

"The flexibility and rollability of the nano-generators gives us unique application areas such as wireless power sources for future foldable, stretchable, and wearable electronics systems," says Sang-Woo Kim, professor of materials science and engineering at Sungkyunkwan University. Kim led the research with Jae-Young Choi, a researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

The same group previously put nano-generators on indium tin oxide electrodes. This transparent, conductive material is used to make the electrodes on today's displays, but it is inflexible.

To make the new nano-generators, the researchers start by growing graphene--a single-atom-thick carbon material that's highly conductive, transparent, and stretchy--on top of a silicon substrate, using chemical vapor deposition. Next, through an etching process developed by the group last year, the graphene is released from the silicon; and the graphene is removed by rolling a sheet of plastic over the surface. The graphene-plastic substrate is then submerged in a chemical bath containing a zinc reactant and heated, causing a dense lawn of zinc-oxide nanorods to grow on its surface. Finally, the device is topped off with another sheet of graphene on plastic.

In a paper published this month in the journal Advanced Materials, the Samsung researchers describe several small prototype devices made this way. Pressing the screen induces a local change in electrical potential across the nanowires that can be used to sense the location of, for example, a finger, as in a conventional touch screen. The material can generate about 20 nanowatts per square centimeter. Kim says the group has subsequently made more powerful devices about 200 centimeters squared. These produce about a microwatt per square centimeter. Kim says this is enough for a self-powered touch sensor and "indicates we can realize self-powered flexible portable devices without any help of additional power sources such as batteries in the near future."

Solar Cost Cutter

2010-04-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

A highly reflective thin film made of microlayers of silver and copper, protected by a polymer and backed with adhesive, could cut the cost of solar thermal power plants by hundreds of millions of dollars. In most such plants, glass mirrors concentrate heat from the sun to create steam that spins conventional turbines. The thin film--which replaces those mirrors--reflects more light, increasing power output.

Courtesy of 3M

New Life for Old Tires The process involves freezing old rubber and shattering it into small particles--resulting in new, low-cost materials.

2010-04-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

Of the nearly 300 million tires discarded in the United States each year, more than half end up either as landfill or are burned for fuel in cement kilns and in other industries.

Lehigh Technologies of Tucker, GA, has developed a process for rejuvenating discarded rubber that could open up new recycling opportunities. If the company's technology catches on, it could carve out a billion-dollar market for high-performance recycled rubber.

Used rubber is hard to recycle because it is vulcanized--hardened and rendered chemically inert--by the addition of sulfur and other compounds to the material's long molecular chains. Small chunks of used tires can be partially melted and used as filler in asphalt, but devulcanizing rubber involves expensive chemical and thermal processes.

Lehigh Technologies instead shatters rubber into a fine powder using a process that involves freezing old rubber and smashing it to pieces. This starts with tires that have been torn into half-inch chunks using conventional shredding equipment. Lehigh mixes these rubber pieces with liquid nitrogen, cryogenically cooling the rubber to -100°C. The rubber is then fed into a high speed "turbomill" that shatters it into particles no more than 180 microns in size.

Creating such fine powder transforms the rubber from a highly inert filler material to one that can bond with other materials. "We deliver a huge increase in surface area relative to size, and that allows for a much more intimate mixing with other materials," says Lehigh Technologies CEO Alan Barton.

In 2006, Lehigh Technologies opened its first commercial facility, which has a capacity to produce 100 million pounds of rubber powder and to process four million tires per year. Sales of the company's products increased by 40 percent last year, but the facility is still operating at less than half capacity. Barton says that his firm has sold recycled rubber to a number of leading tire manufacturers. He estimates that 30 million tires now on the road in the United States are made in part with his company's recycled rubber, although only about 3 to 7 percent of all the rubber in these tires is their recycled material.

This is largely because Lehigh's rubber is still technically vulcanized. Carbon atoms in the rubber are still bound to sulfur atoms, and these bonds prevent them from forming covalent bonds with surrounding materials.

The company recently opened an in-house research center that is looking to change the chemical properties of powders it produces, to make their surfaces more reactive. The company has also developed ways to make recycled rubber bind to surrounding materials via noncovalent, intermolecular bonds.

Nearly a third of Lehigh's annual output also goes to specialty applications, from paints and coatings to injection mold plastics. Lehigh's PolyDyne and MicroDyne powders can be used to replace as much as 40 percent of the polymers that normally go into plastic.

PolyDyne, the larger and less expensive of Lehigh's two rubber powders, sells for just under 50 cents a pound; finer grained MicroDyne requires colder temperatures and higher milling speeds, making it significantly more expensive. PolyDyne is half the cost of nonrecycled synthetic rubber, a third of the price of natural rubber, and nearly half the cost of polypropylene, a polymer commonly used in plastic moldings.

This is an area that Lehigh's investors are particularly interested in.

"Pick whatever plastic product you want to make and it will have specific technical performance requirements," says Ben Kortlang a partner at venture capitol firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which recently invested in Lehigh Technologies. "Using a blend of PolyDyne and traditional materials, there will typically be a cost savings and, in many cases, a performance improvement. And many of these markets could be very, very large."

Big Energy Storage in Thin Films New ultracapacitor material could be fabricated directly on chips and solar cells.

2010-04-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

Energy storage devices called ultracapacitors can be recharged many more times than batteries, but the total amount of energy they can store is limited. This means that the devices are useful for providing intense bursts of power to supplement batteries but less so for applications that require steady power over a long period, such as running a laptop or an engine.

Micro ultracapacitor: This thin-film carbon ultracapacitor electrode, shown in a microscope image, is about 50 micrometers on each side. The zigzagging, porous regions are the active part of the device.
Credit: Min Heon

Now researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia have demonstrated that it's possible to use techniques borrowed from the chip-making industry to make thin-film carbon ultracapacitors that store three times as much energy by volume as conventional ultracapacitor materials. While that is not as much as batteries, the thin-film ultracapacitors could operate without ever being replaced.

These charge-storage films could be fabricated directly onto RFID chips and the chips used in digital watches, where they would take up less space than a conventional battery. They could also be fabricated on the backside of solar cells in both portable devices and rooftop installations, to store power generated during the day for use after sundown. The materials have been licensed by Pennsylvania startup Y-Carbon.

An ultracapacitor is "an electrical energy source that has virtually unlimited lifetime," says Yury Gogotsi, professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who led the development of the thin-film ultracapacitors. "It will live longer than any electronic device and never needs to be replaced." While batteries store and release energy in the form of chemical reactions, which cause them to degrade over time, ultracapacitors work by transferring surface charges. This means they can charge and discharge rapidly, and because the electrode materials aren't involved in any chemical reactions, they can be cycled hundreds of thousands of times. Researchers have begun developing thin-film ultracapacitor materials but have had difficulty getting high enough total energy storage using practical fabrication methods, says Gogotsi.

Gogotsi's group uses a high-vacuum method called chemical vapor deposition to create thin films of metal carbides such as titanium carbide on the surface of a silicon wafer. The films are then chlorinated to remove the titanium, leaving behind a porous film of carbon. In each place where a titanium atom was, a small pore is left behind. "The film is like a molecular sponge, where the size of each pore is equal to the size of a single ion," says Gogotsi. This matching means that when used as the charge-storage material in an ultracapacitor, the carbon films can accumulate a large amount of total surface charge. The Drexel researchers complete the device by adding metal electrodes to either surface to carry current into and out of the device and adding a liquid electrolyte to carry the charges. They found that the performance of the device is best when the carbon material is about 50 micrometers thick, about the same as the width of a human hair.

The Drexel researchers first developed this ultracapacitor material a few years ago; today in the journal Science they report the first demonstration of thin films made from it. Conventional ultracapacitors are made from powdered activated carbon. These powders can't be used to make large, thin films because they won't stick to the surface. Other groups have developed printable thin-film ultracapacitors based on carbon nanotubes; Gogotsi says his devices can store more charge.

Gogotsi says there is, in theory, no limit to the size of the films that could be made using these methods, which are used by the solar industry and display industries to make panels as large as nine square meters. Because the carbon films are thin and can be made at temperatures as low as 200 ºC, it might be possible to integrate them with flexible electronics.

Wind Turbines Shed Their Gears

2010-04-28T12:13:00.001-07:00

Wind turbine manufacturers are turning away from the industry-standard gearboxes and generators in a bid to boost the reliability and reduce the cost of wind power.

Power ring: This three-megawatt wind turbine uses permanent magnets and a design that makes it significantly lighter than a conventional geared turbine.
Credit: Siemens

Siemens has begun selling a three-megawatt turbine using a so-called direct-drive system that replaces the conventional high-speed generator with a low-speed generator that eliminates the need for a gearbox. And last month, General Electric announced an investment of 340 million euros in manufacturing facilities to build its own four-megawatt direct-drive turbines for offshore wind farms.

Most observers say the industry's shift to direct-drive is a response to highly publicized gearbox failures. But Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology officer of Siemens's wind power unit, says that gearbox problems are overblown. He says Siemens is adopting direct-drive as a means of generating more energy at lower cost. "Turbines can be made more competitive through direct-drive," says Stiesdal.

Siemens's plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system's generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine's blades and must therefore be much bigger--over four meters in diameter for Siemens's three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine's entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons--12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines.

Much of the weight reduction comes from the use of permanent magnets in the generators' rotor--a trick that GE is also using. Conventional turbine generators use electromagnets--copper coils fed with electricity from the generator itself. Henk Polinder, an expert in permanent-magnet generators at Holland's Delft University of Technology, says that a 15-millimeter-thick segment of permanent magnets can generate the same magnetic field as a 10- to 15-centimeter section of copper coils.

Stiesdal says Siemens reduced weight further by inverting its generator's design. Rather than a steel rotor covered with permanent magnets spinning inside a stationary doughnut-shaped stator (the design GE is using in its four-megawatt direct-drive turbine) Siemens's rotor is a steel cylinder with permanent magnets on the inside, and this rotor spins around a column-like stator.

A Caltech group has created materials that could improve the efficiency of solar cells.

2010-04-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

In an advance that could lead to solar cells that more fully utilize sunlight, researchers at Caltech have designed materials that can bend visible light at unusual but precise angles, no matter its polarization. The scientists hope the materials are a step toward perfectly transparent solar-cell coatings that would direct all the sun's rays into the active area to improve solar power output.

Solar material: Caltech researcher Stanley Burgos uses a focused ion beam microscope to examine a new metamaterial. The material’s microscopic structure, visible on the computer screen, can be tuned to interact with light in unusual ways.
Credit: Stanley Burgos

Many groups are working on novel antireflective solar cell coatings in the hopes of getting more light into solar cells. The Caltech group, which includes Harry Atwater, professor of applied physics and materials science, and researcher Stanley Burgos, is addressing the problem by precisely tailoring the structure of materials at the nano and micro scales, creating "metamaterials" that exhibit optical properties that are not found in naturally occurring materials. In the most recent work, Atwater and his coworkers demonstrated a material that precisely controls the path of visible light regardless of the polarization of the light--a first for metamaterials.

The Caltech metamaterial is a metal film several hundred nanometers thick. The films are patterned with circular cavities, each of which surrounds a wirelike column made of the same material. The space between the wire and the cavity wall is filled with a second metal. Depending on the dimensions of the patterns, the material bends, or refracts, light of different colors to a different degree. Atwater says the goal of his project is to make films with a refractive index exactly equal to that of air. Such a material would not bend light at all but would transmit it perfectly, with no reflection. When light moves from one medium to another, it scatters--this is why a straw in a glass of water appears to be broken. There's a mismatch between the refractive index of water and air. A solar cell coated with a material whose refractive index is identical to that of air would reflect no light at all.

The films that Atwater's group is making are metallic conductors, and could also serve as the top electrode on a solar cell. Atwater says that while some metamaterial designs have been complex to make and involve multilayered structures, these single-layer films can be made using lithography and etching techniques commonplace in the chip-making industry.

The ability of the material to work with both polarizations of light is exciting, says Nicholas Fang, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But, he says, one of the major remaining challenges in engineering metamaterials is loss. As these metal structures interact with light, they lose energy to heat. This heat loss is so great in Atwater's current materials that just 40 percent of incident light passes through them.

For solar applications, Atwater says his goal is a metamaterial film that passes 90 percent of the light. To that end, his group and others in the field are developing ways to amplify light as it passes through metamaterials. Optical amplifiers are used in lasers and in telecommunications; incorporating them with thin films like Atwater's will enable metamaterials to find their way into practical applications in devices like solar cells.

Capital Programme Advisor - Midlands

2010-03-14T03:38:00.000-07:00

We are interested in hearing from individuals who have been involved in any of the major capital build programmes within the education sector (ie Building Schools for the Future, Academies, Primary Capital Programme or FE Capital Programme) with an ICT remit. This experience may have been gained from working within an educational or governmental organisation, local authority, or as a supplier to a capital build programme.

In this high-profile role in the Midlands, you will have a broad remit providing strategic and operational support to ensure the successful delivery of the technology aspects of capital programmes, including BSF, academies and the primary capital programme. Specifically, you will provide technical, curriculum and procurement advice and guidance during the planning, development, implementation and early operational phases of capital projects within your region, drawing on the wealth of expertise available across Becta.

If you wish to use your ICT knowledge to ensure technology is effectively harnessed for learners in capital build programmes across the Midlands, please get in touch.

In addition to the salary offered, benefits include 31.5 days holiday and final-salary pension.

If you would like an initial confidential discussion about these roles, please telephone Jonathan McIntyre on 020 7588 5407. Applications by covering letter and CV, no later than Monday, 22nd March, (quoting reference FERD45) by e-mail. Next

Premier International Law Firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP

2010-03-14T03:36:00.001-07:00

Our London office has quickly established a reputation as a full service city and European practice. We provide a complete multidisciplinary legal service to multinational and national corporates, financial institutions, investment banks and private clients, and have extensive experience of advising on numerous international and UK transactions, assignments and cases.

Our office is staffed by more than 70 lawyers, including 23 partners most of whom are acknowledged as leaders in their fields by leading directories and market commentators (Legal 500, Chambers, Legal Experts and Global Counsel). Unique amongst UK offices of US law firms, all of our London based lawyers are UK qualified except three US qualified corporate and securities partners.

Our lawyers bring a wealth of practical experience and impressive legal and business backgrounds to all matters on which they advise. In addition to specific issues and multidisciplinary advice, our clients also benefit from an interactive approach with a host of client support services to add value to their business.

London, England Full Service Corporate and Business Law Office

2010-03-14T03:35:00.001-07:00

Anghel Stabb brings together a team of experienced Romanian and international lawyers, which is able to offer a combination of in depth local experience and knowledge in all relevant areas of Romanian law, together with an excellent appreciation of the commercial requirements expected by our international clientele. The lawyers on the team are highly dedicated and enthusiastic and very flexible in terms of availability and are noted for their speed of response and creativity in conceiving new solutions. All Romanian members of the team are fully fluent in English, French and Romanian.

The presence of resident international lawyers on the team enables the Firm to ensure effective management and organisation of the provision of legal services combined with international methods of working. Project coordination (including quality control, overall supervision, reporting and budget management) and day to day co-ordination of the team in Bucharest is conducted by David Stabb and Ana Anghel.

In addition, the success of any major transaction will depend to a great extent on the team work of the professionals and others involved from all disciplines. We have particular experience of transaction management, but we are also accustomed to working as part of a team of consultants to achieve the common aim of devising and implementing a project, on time and within budget, in a manner, which is responsive to both to local and international needs.

Based on long term experience in the Romanian market place starting from 1998, the Firm is able to offer expertise in a wide range of legal and business matters covering all our clients' needs. Our practice ranges from providing advice in connection with inward investment in Romania and subsequent sales of investments, whether by way of stock exchange listings, trade sales, privatization, Greenfield developments, joint ventures and major projects (whether involving public or private sector finance or a combination of both) to providing ongoing advice to our clients on all corporate, banking, property/real estate, securities, competition, employment and commercial matters as they develop their businesses.

We aim to understand our clients' businesses and the sectors and markets in which they operate and to work with them in evolving practical solutions to the legal aspects of running their businesses. We listen carefully to our clients and, building on our market understanding, give advice in the context of their business strategies; we are always concerned with commercial realism not merely legal competence. We also appreciate the need to provide our clients with a prompt, professional, efficient and ethical service at an international standard, whilst on a cost effective basis.

Our experience includes numerous joint ventures, acquisitions, management and employee buy-outs, privatizations and project finance transactions acting for both local and international clients in Romania and elsewhere in the region (Bulgaria, Hungary and Moldova). In recent years we have also developed our litigation capacity acting on high profile shareholder litigation, insurance litigation and cross-border disputes.

Members of the team are well ranked by the independently compiled annual reviews of the European Legal 500, Chambers Directory and Global Counsel 3000 for their expertise in M&A, privatization, energy, utilities, insurance, employment and litigation.

In addition to providing advice on Romanian legal matters, the firm also acts with a network of contacts and advisers throughout the region, especially in Bulgaria, Moldova, Hungary and Ukraine.

Romanian Law Firm in London, United Kingdom

2010-03-14T03:33:00.000-07:00

Gradeanu & Partners Law Firm Romania Bucharest

Gradeanu & Partners is a full-service romanin law firm with clients in Romania, Italy, UK, Israel. For more than 8 years, we have provided our clients with a full range of experienced and innovative legal services. We have successfully grown in response to the emerging needs of both long-term and new clients. We understand that clients are looking for value beyond just legal expertise and we take time to learn about our clients' firms and their business objectives. It's our promise to give you advice instead of just options, and the truth about where you stand and what we think. Our constant goal is to cut through confusion and help you succeed.

We provide the full breadth of legal resources to represent all of our clients' interests.

We are a Romanian business law firm and we make it our first priority to know your market, your competitors, your industry in other words to know and understand the context in which you do business.

Fiat’s new thinking: a lesson for the business software industry?

2010-03-14T03:29:00.000-07:00

In Lean Thinking, authors Womack and Jones list a few distortions in specifying and creating customer value. Here’s distortion #2: engineers specify value. If engineers define value, designs are created with more complexity, the authors say. Also, newer versions of products/services have refinements that are of little interest to anyone but the experts themselves.

In 2004, Fiat lost substantial amounts of money, saw its new car fail, had a staff strike, etc. That’s downhill in most aspects of business. And, as if to make things worse, a new CEO entered — the company’s fifth in only 3 years.

The fifth CEO Sergio Marchionne, however, discovered something. In Harvard Business Review (December 2008), Marchionne says “Fiat’s culture was traditionally dominated by engineers. That has given us some great advantage in developing cars and engines — we have long been at the leading edge in diesel, for instance. But it has also made us rather inward-looking, and part of a leader’s job is to get the organization focused on markets and the competition. In our case, the engineering focus had taken our eyes off our brands, which had been in a long, slow decline.”

Having discovered the problem, Marchionne appears to have fixed it too. Fiat has reduced time-to-market from 48 months to just 18 months. And its bottom line is in the black.

In the business software world too, technology focus creates problems. Here, problems are experienced by enterprises that invest millions of dollars every year in applications. To reduce technology complexity, the software industry did a good job of bringing human factors perspectives and principles into application design. However, poor levels of business process orientation continue to result in two bigger problems enterprises face:

- Technology silos
- Poor business-IT alignment.

Starting in the 1950s, the first era of business software was technology-centric. The second era has been user-centric. More recently, a few software firms have already stepped up to the third era of business software: the business process centric era. These firms have defined value in terms of the business objectives of customer organizations. Here, the fundamental objective is business process excellence. For the software firm, this means keeping the primary focus on customer’s business process performance — regardless of whether the current activity is analysis, architecture, or design.

Software firms should explore stepping into this new era. They may end up scripting a new success story like Fiat did.

What CIOs Want – Candid Advice to Indian Product Companies, 57th Session of the EMERGE Friday’s 2.0 with Mr. Ajay Dhir

2010-03-14T03:28:00.001-07:00

I am glad to be blogging LIVE the 57th session of the EMERGE Friday’s 2.0 with Mr. Ajay Dhir, CIO, Jindal Steel Limited, the winner of the best CIO 2010. We have a room full of people with clear objectives and I foresee a high value session ahead.

Its an exciting opportunity and sure its a pleasure to be listening to Mr. Dhir.

Mr. Dhir starts with saying that the definition of a CIO has evolved overtime. The CIO in an organisation is the head of information systems and the custodian of the IT and information assets in a organisation. The role has evolved into planning , strategy. Its moer involved. Every CIO cannot have all these qualities and it all comes with time. Interestingly Mr. Dhir spreads out the role of today’s CIO for everyone in the room.

When I went into the entrepreneurial mode about 10 years back, things were different then. It needs lots of things to sustain the business.

So interestingly we start with The Divide: CIO’s and Technology Vendors. From the CIOs side:

the vendors talk only technology
they are small
haven’t heard about you
how different are you from others?

and from the vendors side:

How do we approach the CIO/
Rigidity to change/ inflexibility/ Lack of technology awareness
If the CIO doesn’t listen or understand, I’ll go to the business guys
Extended evaluation/ buying cycles
Comparison with the biggies
Very high/ unrealistic expectation

This is highly interesting, Mr. Dhir, is talking from his experience giving the entire scope and its fantastic to learn from experience.

CIO Priorities for 2010, Pressures from Business to;

Cut costs
Improve efficiency
add value to business
lean head count
Agile infrastructure

These points came into prominence in the last 2-3 years and these remain as priorities. Well, and here we are with some interesting projections, which Mr. Dhir shares with the room for 2010-2011.

While sharing On the IT spend, IT Budgets, Mr. Dhir, shares that the recession has not really gone. It will take time from the Q2 of this year and forward.

And from the technology perspective we have the most invested technologies now:

Information security
ERP
Document management systems
Business intelligence/ Analytics
Virtualization
Data center consolidation
Unified communications
Mobile workforce
Web 2.0
Cloud

These are the technologies which are going to be invested in the next 2-3 years says Mr. Dhir. Interesting talk about how a CSO and the IT work together in organizations of today. One of the things Mr. Dhir says, I’d like to add over here, is Green Technology. Another couple of years down the line, organizations will start planning for this.

Hot technologies:

Cloud
Web 2.0
Mobile Workforce
Unified communications

Most explored tech

Web 2.0
cloud
Unified Communications

Things have changed today, you have a lot of flexibility says Mr. Dhir, while sharing his experiences.

Critical Issues:

Vendor or Partner
What CIOs want?
The CIO vendor alignment
meaningful and win win relationship
Best and worst practices

This ecosystem is a very collaborative ecosystem of the consumers and the partners who are there. Most of the CIOs consider providers as partners, of their ecosystem and this is how the partner ecosystem evolves. When you position yourself, you have to start thinking, positioning and behaving yourself as a partner.

Well, and now we have an interesting CIO survey with us, with questions, which found out the pain points from the CIOs perspective. The first touch point we are talking about is a telephone call and the various questions for the CIOs regarding the same. We now evolve to E-mails and how CIOs respond.

What is the issue and how do you resolve them? This is the real part now!!

Issue – unsolicited phone calls/ emails/ posts/ invites

No mass mailers
Avoid calls on direct numbers/ cellphones
Send personalized mails
Seek permission to speak/ meet
Observe etiquette in Emails/ Calls
People who are the first touch point, should be imparted ’soft’ skills

These can make or mar the impression and the relationship indeed! What are the three most important ways a vendor should differentiate themselves when contacting you? What is the single best piece of advice you would give vendors about approaching you to create a potential win-win scenario.

We have the results of the questionnaire being shared by Mr. Dhir now and well, sure there are CIOs in the room who speak in the same voice.

Issue – lack of awareness on the company

Adequate research on the prospect organization
Dont expect the CIOs to do business based on what you want to sell or have, but position your products/ solutions/ services on a clearly articulated and understood strategy

You need to know the first contact point in the organization, you must be prepared for the same.

Issue – value propositions, what buyers want and what sellers propose

CIOs – a framework enabling them to quantify their potential ROI vendors – A pitch or positioning statement

Recommendations –

Inside – out perspective
Listen to your buyer
Think how your products will help the CIO and his organization to achieve specific business goals
Create an outside – In perspective by careful research and listening
Understand the CIOs business/ strategies / IT goals and then align the solution offering with a quantifiable and measurable ROI

Issue – referential cases, or lack of

Recommendations –

Ethical endorsements of CIOs
Create marquee installations
Brand visibility and Recall
Online matchmaking
Mentoring
Relationships – Build, Manage Ethically, Nurture, Sustain

Create your positioning, branding and a strong memory recall. Your first touch-point matters!

Issue – Ethics, conduct and Integrity

Recommendations –

Understand carefully the culture of the organization and the Ethics, Conduct and Integrity Policy
Never breach the code of conduct

In the anxiety to sell, in the pressure, at times you mis-sell. You must never though, miss the code of conduct.

Issue – Bypassing the CIO Hierarchy

Recommendations –

In your quest for a sales deal never bypass the CIO
Respect the hierarchy
Respect the sensitivity of the relationship
Learn to lose a deal as gracefully as you would love to win it! Who knows – you may get a call from the same CIO after some time, good impressions always last long

Well, now comes the real question from Mr. Dhir, what do you want to be?!

We now have the session to an end and I am sure everyone in the room has gotten absolute amazing value from the same.

Nurturing the IT DNA in India’s growth sectors – NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave in Chennai – 30th April 2010

2010-03-14T03:27:00.000-07:00

The NASSCOM EMERGE forum acts as a catalyst for growth of emerging and start-up companies. The NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave are a series of Conferences held across cities in India, starting off with Chennai and Delhi every year. It aims to be a collaborative initiative by the EMERGE Community to leverage on the knowledge base and look at strategies which have the potential and wherewithal to tap into the Emerging Market.

In Chennai, the focus is on the addressable domestic market for the IT BPO sector. This sector is showing phenomenal double-digit growth constantly, and is expected to touch 100 BN US$ or thereabouts in the next decade. Needless to say, this four-fold growth will be driven by the emerging companies and start-ups, who need to make adequate preparations now, in order to leverage this opportunity.

This theme will allow us to discuss the transformational impact IT will have on several domestic industries, for instance the small-and-medium scale Automobile sector. Without adoption of IT, this sector would lose its competitiveness to other Asian countries. So how do we grow the penetration of IT within that sector? I think it is time for us (as the IT industry) to examine these issues and develop plans for engaging our future customers in more meaningful ways at events like the EMERGEOUT Conclave. The focus on small-and-medium scale Manufacturing sector lends itself naturally to Chennai. The e-Governance opportunity, being the other. The potential for IT to play a role here, is again significant and mostly untapped.

Here’s a sneak preview of the fourth EMERGEOUT conference and what you are likely to experience on 30th April in Chennai:

How big is the domestic market really?
Automotive software: Is there an Opportunity for IT and Where
The Emerging UID inspired ecosystem and What it means for you?
OnDemand Software: An Essential Ingredient for the Domestic Market
The Rural Banking Opportunity – hear from the experts.
User Centric Design : Designing Products for New Markets
Building IT For Scale
Next Generation IT Services
Innovation Jam: New Ideas for New Markets

Targeting this Market requires a new approach, defined by extremely low operating costs, an OPEX based costing structure and built-in scalability models which are profitable. The EMERGEOUT Conference aims to relook into these existing models and enable a thinking process that will help SMEs and larger corporates to seriously consider this Opportune Market. Like in the past, it will be hands-on, with workshops, interactive sessions and the popular (Un) Conference format. Needless to add, some of the top names will be addressing here and this entire experience gives it a unique touch, which you can ill-afford to miss.

After all, there aren’t too many conferences which can keep up with the changing trends, understand the emerging strategies and yet stay ahead. Please do stay connected as we build further on this platform. Will you be there?

What are the key challenges faced by the players in India?

2010-03-14T03:24:00.003-07:00

The challenges faced by UC players are not unlike those faced by overall technology solutions providers. Technology deployments are not about sending out a request for proposal and selecting the least cost supplier. They are about intelligently using existing resources, and adding new ones, to deliver a powerful ROI. In a sense, and especially with UC deployments, the sum of the whole benefit is far higher than the sum of the parts (piecemeal benefits). While UC adoption is on an upswing, there is not enough awareness yet regarding the potential impact it can have on a business bottomline. Two key challenges here revolve around reluctance to try new technologies because first the enterprises have legacy infrastructure and are afraid to take the next step to invest in new age technology. SMBs believe that UC is ‘not for them’. Both the above are mindsets that must change if Corporate India must move the needle both in its use of technology to drive business growth, and also to come on par with the rest of the world

Lastly, many believe that India is a price sensitive market, more so than the western world. But I believe India is a value-driven market, and nothing is too expensive for the India customer mindset if the returns are tangible and rapid. And UC delivers exactly that. Tangible cost savings, better productivity, good ROI – and all within a short time span. Today, with the worst of the economic slump hopefully over, having exposed even the smallest inefficiency in the system, businesses in India are poised just right to make this leap into a communications enabled business process.

Can you share same details about your alliance with Microsoft? How are you supporting customers adopt this new technology?

2010-03-14T03:24:00.001-07:00

At Aspect, we had recognized the significance of unified communications as a platform for transforming customer-company interactions. Microsoft saw the implications of UC in the contact centre to deliver a competitive advantage for organizations looking to streamline their customer-facing business processes and partnered with Aspect, the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact centre.
.
As a deliverable from this alliance, we introduced Seamless Customer Service with the new Ask an Expert ™feature that utilizes the instant messaging and presence technology available in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This solution enables contact centers to seamlessly escalate customer interactions to different channels – phone, IM, e-mail or conferencing – while addressing reliability, scalability and reporting needs.

With this feature, agents can identify available experts in the enterprise based on specific skill sets to address customer inquiries, therefore streamlining business processes and improving first-call resolution.

Also, to demonstrate the value of unified communications across a global organization, we have completed the deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 across our global offices and 1,700 employees, including the sites in India. We are already seeing aggressive ROI numbers, including reduced conference calling costs of $75,000 per month and additional cost savings resulting from the use of session initiation protocol (SIP) Trunking.

With regard to support for customers on this new technological advancements, we have built a professional services and systems integration practice - unified communications services. This service will help customers with planning through implementation and support of Microsoft unified communications products, including Office Communications Server in their contact centers and throughout their enterprises for software-powered voice, instant messaging, presence and conferencing.

Aspect’s currently offers five new UC applications that include:

2010-03-14T03:23:00.002-07:00

Seamless Customer Service™delivers the tools needed for comprehensive call response, including coordinated self-service/live service and integrated assistance to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience.
Blended Interaction™ provides inbound, outbound, self service and workforce optimization capabilities. By eliminating complex integration and providing common management, reporting and administration, Blended Interaction gives contact centers greater visibility, control and staffing efficiency in your multichannel contact center.
Streamlined Collections™automates early stage collections and enables expert agent engagement for a more effective delinquent account targeting strategy so contact centers can get more promises to pay faster and improve collections results.
Productive Workforce™delivers the tools and processes to help you optimize resource utilization and adopt a continuous improvement culture. By motivating agents throughout their workforce lifecycle, contact centers can service more customers with fewer agents, reduce customer interaction costs, and improve customer service, sales and collections results.
Optimized Collections™ utilizes performance, workforce and campaign management to enhance contact and calling strategies by applying the right resources at the right times to increase right party contacts, lower staffing costs, improve collector effectiveness and collections results.a

Can you share some details on Aspect applications?

2010-03-14T03:23:00.001-07:00

n 2009, Aspect introduced an innovative set of unified communications solutions to the market, delivering both software and services to help companies streamline communications and optimize business processes. As a worldwide leader in the IT domain, Aspect drew decades of insights gained working with the world’s leading companies on mission-critical customer contact to introduce some of its new global applications, six in all, for India. Our innovation is not just in understanding customer needs and choosing the right solutions that will deliver maximum benefit in an Indian scenario, but also delivering them to customer in a manner that is tailored to suit their current technology and usage environments. [See list A].

How important is the right customer strategy for enterprises especially today when the customers are highly empowered?

2010-03-14T03:22:00.004-07:00

Yes, consumers today have more power than ever before. A dramatic increase in publicly available information and communication channels has gradually shifted the power from businesses to customers and has inverted the dynamic between the two. This wave of the power shift was triggered with the onset of Web 2.0 – the transformation of the Internet from an information source to a collaborative public forum. This shift is fundamentally changing the way consumers choose with which companies they do business. The unprecedented ability for consumers to reach out to other consumers, combined with the staying power of their self-published messages, gives them a forum in which they can share thoughts and ideas about the companies they love, and those they love to hate. Clearly, it is here to stay and companies must either embrace it or endure the consequences.

As the front-line touch point for customer-company interactions, the contact center can enable a company to become known for exceeding consumers’ expectations, while generating customer and brand loyalty, and increasing financial performance. Businesses that accept this new age of consumer empowerment must revisit existing customer strategies to ensure business processes are aligned to deliver optimum results. This includes assessing segmentation strategies, service delivery, interaction channels and technology while continually refining those based on customer and market feedback. Companies that choose to reconnect with the consumer by listening to and responding to their powerful voice will be poised for success in this new age

What is the focus for Aspect in India? Can you please explain the nature of work?

2010-03-14T03:22:00.003-07:00

We set up our business in India in 2001. In the last few years we have gradually scaled to more than 250 employees today. Today, in India, we have successful presence across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore in addition to the R&D center. With more than 400 customers and 500+ installations of our unified platform in India, we have a proven track record of unifying siloed communications technologies and enhancing customer-company communications. Moreover we also enjoy a strong presence across verticals. Globally, we help two-thirds of the FORTUNE Global 100 companies and small and medium enterprises power their business processes with Aspect unified communications solutions. Also, we recently announced a global strategic alliance with Microsoft that clearly represents our joint commitment to UC and to connecting the enterprise and the contact center

On the technology front, we have introduced five new software products to bring UC to the contact center. The solutions include Blended Interaction™, Seamless Customer Service™, Productive Workforce™, Streamlined Collections™, and Optimized Collections™. These applications provide a wide array of services necessary for efficient operations of call centers and BPOs. The applications enable organizations to turn the potential of unified communications into real business results, through enhanced knowledge worker and agent productivity and by helping optimize business processes throughout the enterprise and contact centre for improved agility and responsiveness.

In fact, our customers include leading companies across the world: American Airlines, American Express, British Airways, British Gas, China Eastern Airlines, CitiGroup, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Daimler Chrysler, Discover Financial Services, FedEx, General Electric, Hilton Reservations Worldwide, JC Penney, Lands' End, Lloyds TSB, MCI, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Verizon, U.S. Airways, VW Credit, Wachovia Corporation and Wipro.

Can you share an overview of Unified Communications market in India?

2010-03-14T03:22:00.001-07:00

Unified communications (UC) allows companies to build a structure for streamlining communications and connecting people through the adoption of presence and availability awareness tools. These tools meld each individual’s capability for communication with the availability to communicate and the specific knowledge that person holds.

Technologies such as UC become relevant especially during times like economic slowdown when companies are driving cost control. Unified communications technologies fall squarely in this category, with several companies beginning to adopt wide-scale UC strategies. According to Datamonitor, the UC market is set for continued growth over the next five years at an overall compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4 percent. A key trend is the adoption of UC among enterprises with large end-user interaction, such as FMCG companies and telcos etc, since UC enables better customer connect, and enables the enterprise to deliver higher customer satisfaction and therefore drive loyalty.

Two key variables are implicit in building a creative UC strategy for such companies. One is the end customer, along with an understanding of the tools that the customer uses to connect to the company. The second is the contact center, where agents can use the UC infrastructure to boost and extend the effectiveness of the customer experience. This offers the opportunity for people with relevant expertise, outside the contact center, to become part of the knowledge pool that can be tapped by the agent during the customer interaction. Here, performance optimization technologies, long a staple in the contact center, present a unique opportunity to extend the UC best practices enterprise-wide.

Mr. Rajeev Soni, General Manager, South Asia & Middle East, Aspect

2010-03-14T03:21:00.000-07:00

Rajeev Soni, General Manager South Asia and Middle East at Aspect Software is a renowned expert in productivity enhancement techniques. Under his stewardship, the company not only scaled newer heights in clocking higher sales but has enabled all our clients to quickly realize higher return on investments from this technology.

With competition hotting up in the marketplace, winning or losing is determined by better service, and contact center technology of Aspect clearly helps companies to obtain that edge over others. With more than 12 years of solid experience behind him, Rajeev is a leading votary of contact center technology and passionate about the positive spin-offs the clients can get from this new technology.

An avid golfer and a cricketer, Rajeev, during his spare time, devotes time to pursue these hobbies. He also loves travelling with his family whenever time permits.

South Asian Entrepreneurs and Mentors Form a Tie That Binds

2010-03-14T03:20:00.002-07:00

By DAVID KESMODEL - Los Angeles Times, July 03, 2000

When Sandeep Walia and his partners presented their sweeping plan for an Internet start-up to investor Navneet Chugh last year, Chugh was underwhelmed, to put it kindly.

"Navneet said, 'Shut up, guys. You can't do all that,' " said the 26-year-old Walia, an electronics engineer whose idea for a worldwide e-tailer of ethnic handicrafts occurred to him at a party.

A swift wake-up call was not all that the fledgling company, BuyBuzz Inc., received from Chugh, a member of a closely knit group of established businesspeople from India and neighboring countries called the IndUS Entrepreneurs, or TiE. Seeing potential in the team, the Cerritos attorney and CPA helped streamline its concept to match its strengths. He also injected seed capital in the business, provided free legal and accounting services, and enticed Walia to locate in Cerritos--instead of Silicon Valley--with free space in his law offices. What's more, he has handed off BuyBuzz's business plan to other investors.

After revamping his original idea, India-born Walia instead developed a software application that will enable e-tailers and auction sites to syndicate their offerings. BuyBuzz is now poised to launch its product in August.

Chugh's blend of critical advice and robust support is emblematic of the mentoring acts of TiE, a group whose influence on the high-tech sector has extended from Mountain View to Mumbai, India, leaving its largest imprint on Silicon Valley.

The buzz surrounding TiE's 440-member Southern California chapter, of which Chugh is a founding member, has grown rapidly since launching in 1997--organizers had to turn away 100 people from its annual conference in October. Yet investments haven't followed at the same torrid pace, keeping the chapter in the shadows of its Northern California cousins, who spawned the likes of Exodus Communications Inc., Hotmail Corp. and Junglee Corp.

But there are signs the tide is turning. The number of new companies that TiE Southern California members have cultivated has risen in the last year. Today, about two dozen start-ups here are led or backed by TiE members.

"What we need in Southern California is one or two success stories," said Chugh, who stresses that the chapter is still in its gestation period. "Once that happens, it will be a great morale booster."

Safi Qureshey, the president of TiE Southern California and its most noteworthy ambassador, is the principal figure behind the recent surge in investments. A Pakistani, Qureshey achieved prominence in the 1980s as co-founder and chief executive of Irvine-based personal computer maker AST Research Inc.

Qureshey has invested about $7 million in a dozen Southern California start-ups. He recently launched a $50-million business incubator, IrvineVentures, which works closely with UC Irvine and other local research institutions to hatch new companies.

He also helps entrepreneurs in another way by bringing prominent speakers to TiE Southern California's monthly meetings through his many connections in the high-tech community. More than 200,000 people from the Indian subcontinent are estimated to live in Southern California.

About 200 people typically attend the events, held at the Sheraton Cerritos. Over dinner and cocktails, they listen to experts such as Mohan Sawhney, a top e-commerce authority who teaches at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Yet speeches are only part of the draw. Before and after, members engage in a flurry of networking. Budding entrepreneurs can rub elbows with angel investors and get advice from seasoned executives. Members of the group liken the personal exchanges to the Indian tradition of passing wisdom from a guru, or teacher, to the chela, or student.

"One of the key things we've learned in entrepreneurship is that there's nothing that encourages individuals more than getting to meet someone who has [become successful], and say, 'If he did it, I can do it,' " Qureshey said.

Added Chugh: "What makes me come back year after year is pure business learning--the stuff they don't teach you at Harvard Business School."

The organization was founded at a 1992 luncheon in Silicon Valley by South Asian high-tech executives who had bumped up against various barriers during their rise to the top. With TiE, their goal is to help smooth the process for the new waves of ambitious immigrants. While the majority of TiE's members are from the Indus region (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka), there are non-Asian members. Chapters exist in 10 U.S. cities and five in India.

It's no secret that South Asians were a significant force in the U.S. technology sector long before the Internet boom and the emergence of TiE. For example, in the 1970s,Indian engineers became fixtures in the offices of IBM and Xerox. But they usually hit a ceiling blocking ascent into management.

Successful entrepreneurs such as Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1982, helped blaze a new trail. And the Internet boom, which offered a more level playing field for South Asians to strike out on their own, became a fast ticket to wealth.

"The dramatic shift we've seen is not so much a shift in cultural attitude but because the environment exists where a phenomenal idea can get funded," said Ahmed Ghouri, a 33-year-old anesthesiologist who co-founded San Diego-based CarPrices.com, a so-called reverse auction Web site chaired by Qureshey.

Another of Qureshey's South Asian-founded start-ups, Irvine-based ConnectCom Microsystems, expects to close a round of venture capital funding of $15 million by September. ConnectCom is a semiconductor design firm that is developing high-speed silicon germanium optical transceivers for transmitting Internet data.

Gardena-based EntComm Inc., meanwhile, is believed to be the first organic TiE enterprise--all three founders met at a group function. Launched in September by Sundaresh Ramayya, Brij Mathur and Gopalakrishnan Satish, the business-to-business exchange integrates the supply chains of companies with their trading partners'. Clients include ConAgra and Universal Studios.

TiE also helps start-ups find technically skilled workers, a perpetual headache for technology firms, says 1StopMD Inc.'s founder, Venkat Yepuri. His Arcadia company, which enables physicians to buy medical and office products from a single source on the Web, has hired key technical consultants thanks to TiE connections.

The labor factor is one reason TiE's Raghu Mendu is raising $125 million for a venture capital firm, Ventureast Capital, that will be based in both Los Angeles and Chennai, formerly known as Madras. The firm wants to help U.S. companies leverage the pool of highly skilled labor in India and help India-based companies take advantage of technology being developed in the U.S.

TiE's local chapter is expanding its reach in other ways: It recently started holding angel forums in which start-ups can pitch their ideas to potential seed investors, and it is launching a chapter affiliate in San Diego.

Still, the process of brewing more South Asian-run technology companies in Southern California--and guiding them toward initial public stock offerings--will take more time to gather momentum, said Ravin Agrawal, a partner at EastWest Venture Group, a Los Angeles venture capital firm.

To help stoke the fire for more start-ups, Agrawal recently began holding gatherings of about 40 people every six weeks at the Westwood Brewing Co. The group, informally called the South Asian Venture Alliance, meets for networking purposes and to discuss ideas for new ventures. It works independently of TiE.

But whether young South Asian entrepreneurs turn to established networking groups to jump-start their ventures, the interaction with older, successful business owners is what matters most.

"These people give you the sense that anything is possible," said Vikas Bhushan, 33, founder of Santa Monica-based Medschool.com. "If you achieve one-tenth of where they set their sights, then you could be very successful and proud."

Without the guidance of TiE mentors, who have helped steer his company through several metamorphoses, BuyBuzz's Walia said he doesn't know where his company would be.

"A large portion of this is not making the bread but deciding what kind of bread you're going to make," he said.

India to be the fastest growing IT market in 2001: IDC

2010-03-14T03:20:00.001-07:00

SINGAPORE--India will be the fastest growing market in Asia in terms of IT spending followed by Singapore and China while IT markets in South East Asia and South Korea will witness a slow down in 2001.

This was stated by Sandra Ng, vice-president, communications and peripheral research of IDC Asia while making predictions for year 2001. Ng was addressing a media and analyst symposium organized by Sun Microsystems in Singapore.

Ng in her presentation said that the U.S. slowdown will be one of the major reason for slowdown in Asian countries but the IT spending in India will grow faster as it would be making huge investments in setting up necessary infrastructure.

She also predicted that the Internet stocks will not stage a come back in the current year but the Internet crash is not going to have any adverse impact on investment in e-business.

Talking about the e-commerce trends, IDC official said that hype around mobile commerce and Internet connectivity will reach the hysteria levels and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications will be a key driver for technology investments. Ng was making these predictions with respect to the Asian market place.

As far as the technology trends are concerned, IP Telephony will gain a foothold and Peer-to-peer (P2P) network technology for file sharing on Internet will become a red hot buzzword, she said adding that the P2P, however, will get a cool reception in corporations and technology companies will stick to its good old client-server architecture.

Later talking to the Indian media on the sidelines of the symposium, Ng said that IDC has observed around 25 percent cut in Investments of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in last six months in India. The service providers in India seems to have overspent on setting up infrastructure and now adopted a wait and watch policy to see the impact of US economy slowdown. "But, they can not afford to wait for long if the number of Internet users in India continues to grow at a present speed. However, a stretched slowdown will lead to the consolidation in industry through mergers and acquisitions," she said.

Substantiating the slowdown in ISP investments, Ms Ng said that ISP investments in India were growing at about 25 to 50 percent from second half of 1999 and continued the same in 2000 but in last six months, the growth has come down to just 15-20 percent.

(The travel for this story was sponsored by Sun Microsystems)

Cisco to hike India investment to $200 m

2010-03-14T03:19:00.002-07:00

The US-based $26 billion networking major, Cisco Systems, said that it would increase its investment commitment in India from $150 million to $200 million.

January 18, 2001

The US-based $26 billion networking major, Cisco Systems, said that it would increase its investment commitment in India from $150 million to $200 million.

It also said it would invest in Indian information technology start up companies through the venture capital mode.

Investments by the company would go towards enhancing Cisco's research and development activities in India. “We are increasing our financial commitment to India in research and development sector to $200 million, an increase of $50 million over the amount announced in August last year,” John T Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco Systems said.

He said the funds, to be invested over the next two years, would be pumped in for R&D activities especially in the areas of next generation networking technologies and solutions.

The company’s investment would go into the Cisco Global Development Centre in Bangalore, which currently employs over 400 engineers. In addition, the investment would promote five development centres which Cisco had set up with Indian IT companies.

Referring to the VC funding of Indian companies he said, “We will be looking at venture capital funding of Indian start-ups, particularly those which operate in the Internet software segment.” He said that the company's team in India would facilitate identification and selection of potential start-ups for investments in the near future.

Chambers said that Cisco would need to, over the next three years, increase overall engineering strength in the country by 300 per cent to meet growth projections.

According to Chambers, the Indian operations which currently contribute less than one per cent to the company's global business is expected to account for up to 10 per cent in five to seven years.

Cisco Systems India currently employs about 500 professionals at the Bangalore development centre and in its sales offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Calcutta.

Acknowledging India's strength in the software market, Chambers said: "We are expanding our presence in India to take advantage of the research and development talent and to demonstrate our commitment to the government and the country. Our global development centre is the critical component in our success."

Chambers had earlier announced an investment of $10 million for expanding the Internet education programme in the country, including setting up of 34 regional networking academies in all the states of India.

The global networking giant also announced the establishment of a centre of IT and networking excellence in the country. Of the total $10 million earmarked for India, $8.6 million would be invested for the networking academy project. The balance $1.4 million would be invested in establishing the centre for excellence.

A laboratory would also be set up with the support of the IT ministry to promote advanced networking education in the country.

Planet Web: High-Tech Passage to India

2010-03-14T03:19:00.001-07:00

You could argue that the developed world owes India something like the MIT Media Lab. The West has been siphoning off Indian brainpower for a decade and has profited handsomely in the process. So, too, have many smart young Indians. Witness the vibrantly successful Indian communities in Silicon Valley or in Boston's high-tech corridor or at MIT itself.

But despite the software-development miracle that is Bangalore, India, and the success of India's myriad ex-patriots, the nation's IT corporate base remains relatively shallow and its consumer market tiny. Its chances of breaking out have not been helped by India's political instability or by a governmental approach to IT that too often has been heavy on regulation and light on the kind of investment and incentives that would unlock the sector's potential.

The news that MIT is looking at India as the site for its next Media Lab, a 16-year-old tech incubator funded largely by corporations which then have unlimited access to the lab's research, suggests this is changing. Indeed, it is one of a number of positive signs during recent months that India's high-tech future might be a little less dependent than its past.

Private-sector money has been flooding into India of late, most obviously from blue-chip U.S. and European companies, including Nortel, Deutsche Bank and Cisco , investing in software development, either through outsourcing or building their own facilities. India's IT diaspora also is feeding money and ideas back to the old country, and the supply of venture capital funding for Indian IT companies is showing strong year-on-year growth. India's coalition government also has become more proactive.

In part, this stems from an awareness of the opportunity on its doorstep and a determination not to let it slip. But it also might reflect a fear that its window might soon begin to close as low-cost rivals – led by China, which is investing heavily in educating a new IT-savvy generation – hone in on the software development market India still owns.

Whatever the reasons, change is on the way. The government's recent budget bent over backward not to discourage the IT sector, proposing a new tax on services but granting IT companies a retroactive exemption and putting forward a raft of proposals to encourage foreign investment. The nascent deal for the new Indian Media Lab also follows a strong lobbying effort from the government that helped beat out competition from China, among others. Although specifics, such as where it will be based and precisely how it will operate, are still being worked out, what has been released is impressive.

As much as $1 billion will be invested in the project over 10 years, 20 percent of that from the government and the rest from corporate sponsors, making it better funded than the existing labs in the U.S. and Ireland. It also is likely to be spread over multiple sites and to focus on areas of domestic concern such as technology uses in health care and education.

Indian IT luminaries in the U.S. see little but upside in the Media Lab's imminent arrival. Vinod Khosla , who co-founded Sun Microsystems and is now a partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers , says, "India desperately needs this kind of project to leverage its knowledge base."

With a few exceptions such as Infosys, he adds, "There are very few role models for the development of great ideas in India. When you know something is possible, the chance of doing it is orders-of-magnitude greater." The Media Lab, he says, "could help seed the ground. It could be very powerful."

Phaneesh Murthy, an Infosys board member and head of the company's sales and marketing worldwide, is similarly encouraged, arguing that the arrival of the Media Lab and other R&D ventures "would mean people didn't have to go out of the country for opportunity. That would be a terrific thing for India."

"It is good all around," agrees Rakesh Mathur , co-founder and chief executive of PurpleYogi. "India will get to attract research funds, and it will get MIT's expertise, bottled and presented to it." He adds that the Media Lab "could help India transition from the professional services model – writing software, for instance – to the intellectual capital model" – developing and manufacturing new products.

However, he also says that India needs to generate IT graduates in larger numbers, adding that the five Indian Institute of Technology schools that have produced the cream of India's IT establishment, and a steady flow of students to MIT, should not be ignored in the enthusiasm for the newcomer. When MIT opened its Media Lab in Ireland last year, some cash-starved academics were stunned at how much government money was suddenly available to the prestigious new arrival. India's IIT's also could benefit from an injection in funding and resources, Mathur said. He added that MIT could learn plenty about "how to operate in an Indian environment" and help generate a larger and more qualified talent pool for the future.

The devil, as always, is in the details, which are still being hammered out between MIT and the Indian government. MIT says it hopes to have a plan for the first year's activity, starting with academic exchanges, in place by this spring. One thing that can be said at this stage is that in sifting through the candidates for its next Media Lab, MIT could not have lighted on a more deserving host.

AOL to Open Netscape Office In India's Tech Center

2010-03-14T03:18:00.004-07:00

By Alec Klein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 6, 2001; Page E05

First America, now India.

AOL Time Warner Inc., expanding its global reach, plans to invest up to $100 million in the Indian high-tech center of Bangalore over the next five years to build on its overseas software business, the company has confirmed.

The Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry approved the New York-based media conglomerate's proposal, which calls for investments by iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, a joint venture between network-computing giant Sun Microsystems Inc. and Netscape, AOL's portal, Web-browser and software unit. Under the plan, AOL will open a Netscape office in Bangalore and hire dozens of engineers to develop e-commerce services and software targeted at corporate markets. AOL said executives were not available for comment.

AOL's investment in India comes as it is stepping up efforts to expand internationally, penetrating markets throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. Already the No. 1 Internet access provider in the United States, with about 30 million subscribers, AOL is gaining ground in such far-flung locales as Britain and Brazil. Last year AOL added 2 million subscribers outside the United States, giving the company more than 6 million members in foreign markets, including users of its discount CompuServe service.

India represents a largely untapped market for AOL as it joins other big U.S. companies that are increasingly looking to outsource computing work to developing nations offering strong talent pools and cheap labor. In the past five years or so, about two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies have begun to outsource computer-related work to India, according to the Indian Embassy in Washington.

AOL's investment in Bangalore follows its first foray into India last June, when the company announced a deal to distribute a co-branded version of AOL Instant Messenger to customers of Satyam Infoway Ltd., India's leading private Internet access provider, with more than 160,000 customers. AIM, the market leader in instant messaging, with more than 80 million registered customers, allows Internet users to send text-based notes to one other that appear on their computer screens as pop-up boxes almost as fast as the messages are sent. AOL does not yet operate a local Internet access service in India.

Internet use remains in its fetal stages in India, the most populous nation on the globe after China, with more than 1 billion people. The percentage of consumers who use the Internet remains in the single-digit range, according to Indian officials, but urban centers are getting wired fast.

"There is a huge market," said Navtej Sarna, a spokesman for the Indian Embassy. "We're increasingly getting wired up in terms of usage of e-mail and Internet services."

In India, only about two out of every 1,000 people have a telephone, which remains an obvious hurdle to expanding regular dial-up access to the Internet, but there is a substantial middle-class core of potential adherents, and cybercafes are popping up in urban locales with greater frequency.

"It might not seem like an attractive market," said Navi Radjou, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "But the urban middle class is roughly 100 [million] to 200 million people."

Network Solutions plans Indian arm

2010-03-14T03:18:00.003-07:00

Network Solutions, the world leader in Internet domain name registration, is setting up a fully-owned subsidiary in India by year-end.

Angshuman Bonerjee, March 07, 2001

Network Solutions, the world leader in Internet domain name registration, is setting up a fully-owned subsidiary in India by year-end.

The company will launch registration services in nine Indian regional languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi (gurmukhi), Tamil and Telgu.

The company will soon approach the government for initiating the process of setting up the subsidiary. "We are establishing a direct presence in India by setting up a fully-owned subsidiary or by buying out an Indian company," Arthur Chang, managing director, Asia Pacific, Network Solutions, said. The company is currently operating in India through its channel partners.

The Indian subsidiary will bring in various Internet services offered by the company world wide. "We will bring all the services like, hosting server farms, offering domain name registration and domain name database on the Internet etc," he said.

The Indian arm of the Network Solution will also take up software development for the company's global operations. "Apart from developing software, the Indian arm will also be localising some of our existing offerings," he said.

He said besides bridging the digital divide, the expansion of multi-lingual services would induce small and medium businessmen to conduct transactions online in their own language.

Until recently, every domain name registration was done using exclusively Ascii characters, Chang said adding that India ranked third in the domain name registration in the Asia-Pacific market.

"The invitation price for the service initially would be $25," he said.

Sun doubles Indian investment to $ 50 million

2010-03-14T03:18:00.001-07:00

Sun Microsystems is doubling its investments from $25 million to $50 million in India in the next one year to build more infrastructure resources, set up new offices in Chennai and Hyderabad and for supporting educational programmes.

Angshuman Bonerjee, March 12, 2001

The US-based $17.6 billion company is also putting India on its R&D map, giving their Indian facility the responsibility of developing a complete stack of high-end servers for its global market.

Sun is also launching a range of new servers including the Cobalt Qube 3 servers and other low-end servers in India. The company has also launched Sun Open Net Environment (ONE), a new generation of software for open, smart web services through a complete product portfolio that helps companies to web-enable operations.

Masood Jabbar, executive vice-president, global sales operations, Sun Microsystems Inc, said: "India is a key market for Sun Microsystems and we will be doubling our investments in the country. We are in fact looking at giving our developers in India a complete project of developing a whole stack of servers."

Speaking at the Sun Microsystems 8th Media and Analysts Symposium in Singapore, Jabbar added that despite the slowdown in the US economy, Sun will not reduce spending on key areas like R&D and education.

Giving a perspective on future trends in the networked world, Jabbar said that India will soon become one of the major development centres in the world. This may lead to the country losing its advantage of having cheap manpower as IT professionals who are scarce globally will attract a premium.

"Knowledge is India’s oil. As the web economy matures, wages across the world will equalise and Indian will lose its cost advantage. The talent and skills of IT professionals in India will fetch a premium," he said.

Jabbar said that India will be a key player in the emerging global new economy, with companies increasingly outsourcing non-competency areas to service providers. India being a market of service providers will be a big player in the new economy as companies would look at outsourcing non-core areas like ERP implementation, said Jabbar.

Highlighting the agenda for Sun Microsystems Inc’s global operations for 2001, Jabbar said that the company will drive new leadership products like low-end servers and drive new areas of revenues growth like software for the telecom sector.

Towards achieving this, Sun has identified ‘Three Bets’ which includes providing a massive scale from low-end to high-end products, provide an integrated stack of both software and hardware products and focus on products that provide real-time solutions like the mobile Internet.

The two-day annual symposium organised by Sun Microsystems focussed on the new economy — a snapshot on the realities that will impact business.

The symposium, attended by journalists from most of the South Asian countries including India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, saw presentations from some of the top executives of Sun Microsystems.

This included John Loiacono, senior vice-president & chief marketing officer, Sun Microsystems Inc, Lionel Lim, vice-president & managing director, Asia South Sun Microsystems, and Marc Hamilton, director of technology, worldwide education and research, Sun Microsystems Inc.

Nasscom signs MoU with US infotech body

2010-03-14T03:17:00.001-07:00

The initiative has a greater significance as it can help the Indian software companies to fight the US economy slowdown with newer opportunities in US market.

"Against the backdrop of slowdown of US economy, the Nasscom-ITAA pact assumes greater significance, as it would try to bring new opportunities of business to IT industries of both countries," said Dewang Mehta, president, Nasscom.

Mehta was speaking on the occasion of signing the memorandum with Harris N Miller, President, ITAA here today.

According to Mehta, Nasscom and ITAA have been working very closely together for the last five years and have now decided to formalise this agreement.

Mehta said that the pact will facilitate a lot of new initiatives such as road shows in US by Indian companies to explore new markets and opportunities, sharing of research information,, web linkages between the industry players of the two countries and joint efforts for policy initiatives such as lowering down of non tariff trade barriers.

Miller said" "The emphasis of this MoU will be on software, IT services, Internet, e-commerce, m-commerce, ASP, communication software, e-security, e-government and IT enabled services."

Highlighting IT trade between India and USA, Mehta said" "USA continues to be India's largest software export market and it will continue to have its dominant position. In 1999-2000, out of total Indian software exports of $4 billion, almost $2.35 billion was exported to USA. In 2000-01, out of projected software exportsof $6.24 billion, almost $3.7 billion of software is expected to be exported to USA".

Mehta also emphasised: "We would now work very closely in creating marketing alliances between US and Indian IT companies with a special focus on SME member companies".

Intel group company sets up $3.5m development centre

2010-03-14T03:16:00.002-07:00

Trillium, which was completely acquired by Intel in 1999 is the networking software division of Intel and is focused on developing software, protocols and source codes for the communications infrastructure and computer segment.

Angshuman Bonerjee, March 22, 2001

Intel group company Trillium Digital Systems Inc has set up a development center in Bangalore at an investment of $3.5 million.

This development center is part of the company's strategy to enhance its presence in the Asia region and will complement its existing network of regional offices in Asia including Seoul, Korea, Tokyo, Japan and Shanghai.

Addressing the media, the company's president and COO Rich Cahalan said that as the convergence of infrastructure and services takes off, IP and ATM backbones would become predominant.

Trillium therefore would focus extensively on providing source codes, software, chips, boards, platforms and other professional services to the OEMs, Cahalan said.

Plans to provide integrated sub-solutions for products are also in the pipeline. India operations have been set on-stream with a team of 45 people which is expected to scale up to over 80 by the year end.

More investments in the center are also being planned for 2001-2002. Trillium posted total revenues of $32 million last fiscal.

Ericsson to set up software platform in India

2010-03-14T03:16:00.001-07:00

Swedish telecom equipment provider Ericsson is setting up telecom software platform called Developers Zone in India to enable local software developers to develop applications for the global telecom network market.

Angshuman Bonerjee, March 23, 2001

The company is also aggressively targeting the Indian telecom service providers to provide its state of the art GPRS systems for the cellular sector and CDMA based equipment for the basic operators.

Rohit Chandra, vice president, marketing & technical solutions Ericsson Communications Limited said “ We will be making substantial investment in the Indian market to drive our already expanding business here. Through the Developer Zone we would partner with local talent and develop value added application for wireless services.”

He added that Ericsson would roll out at least three GPRS based mobile networks by 2001 in India and three CDMA based basic services networks for the wireless in local loop services.

Chandra said that Ericsson is also bringing to India CDMA handsets and will put further emphasis on GPRS handsets as the lack of a GPRS handset in the Indian market is resulting in cellular service providers delaying their plans to move from GSM based network to GPRS.

GPRS or general packet radio switching technology is higher than the wireless application protocol (WAP) industry standard used by operators to offer Internet access to mobile customers. GPRS offers faster and an always-on Internet connection.

Indian mobile firms have still to commercially launch GPRS, seen as a stepping stone to third generation or 3G networks.

A New Kind of Software Company for India

2010-03-14T03:15:00.001-07:00

BANGALORE, India — At a time when the term start-up evokes images of crashing stock prices and collapsing business plans — here as much as in the United States — Ashok Soota might not seem to be a man to watch.

But Mr. Soota's 19-month-old venture, Mind Tree Consulting, has been celebrated by technology analysts and journalists, even though it is privately held and has all of $15 million in sales.

Part of the buzz stems from its pedigree: Mr. Soota, 58, had been the vice chairman of Wipro, one of India's largest software concerns. He helped lead India's drive in the early 90's into the back-office end of the computer business, writing software code for big American companies.

But most of the excitement stems from Mind Tree's ambition: Mr. Soota wants his new company to leap several links up the technology food chain. Rather than supply programmers for the humdrum work of writing routine software code, he wants to design and build sophisticated computer networks for customers.

"In the early days, there was no need for Indian software companies to differentiate themselves," said Mr. Soota, an intense man given to philosophical musing. "Now, companies are starting to set themselves apart."

In Bangalore, a southern Indian city that has been called the Silicon Plateau, Mind Tree is viewed as something of a leading indicator. Its success or failure could say a lot about India's ability to graduate into the more advanced, lucrative realms of the technology industry.

Other Indian companies — Infosys Technologies, Satyam Computer and Wipro itself — are trying to make the same jump. But nobody has set out to do it from scratch, nor with quite the audacity of Mr. Soota.

"By inserting themselves at a higher level in the value chain, they are creating a mind-set in the company," said N. R. Narayana Murthy, the chairman of Infosys, arguably India's flagship software company.

"The question is whether they'll have credibility," he added. "Where do they get the experience to do higher-level work for clients?"

Despite India's reputation for superlative code writing, which has won it a blue-chip roster of customers like General Electric and Nortel Networks, some analysts question how successfully the country can compete in the more-rarefied digital fields of strategic consulting or systems integration.

Infosys is eager to offer high-end services, too. But Mr. Murthy is not about to discharge his army of software writers, who work at a sprawling, verdant campus outside Bangalore. His strategy is to continue writing code while gradually building expertise and to appeal for more complex assignments. "It is a longer-term process," he said, "but it has a higher likelihood of success."

India's technology industry will have $6.2 billion in exports this fiscal year, and total sales of about $8 billion. That is extraordinary growth, given that the services industry did not exist a decade ago. But it still accounts for just 2 percent of India's total economic output.

India also faces rising competition in the low end of the business from other Asian countries like China, Vietnam and the Philippines. With salaries in software companies here rising at more than 15 percent a year, India must expand into new areas that promise a higher return.

"What gives us an edge is that our education system has a bias toward mathematics and engineering," said Vivek Paul, the current vice chairman of Wipro. "But China will be a real threat in a few years."

Enter Mr. Soota, who had already steered Wipro through a transition from making PC's and minicomputers in the 1980's to providing software services. Determined to have a "third inning" in his career, Mr. Soota left Wipro in 1999 and began hunting for seed capital to start his own business.

Unknown to him, another Wipro refugee, Subroto Bagchi, had also been promoting the idea of a high-end software consultancy. A partner at a venture capital firm in the United States, Walden International, put the two men together in March 1999 and suggested they merge their plans.

With $9.5 million from Walden and an Indian venture firm, Sivan Securities, Mind Tree Consulting hung out its shingle six months later. From the start, it behaved differently from a typical Indian company.

First, the founders pledged to donate 3 percent of Mind Tree's after-tax profits to primary education. The company's initial donation went to a center in Bangalore for children with cerebral palsy.

The company logo, a stylized tree, was designed by the children, and their artwork adorns the walls throughout the headquarters, which are two glass boxes in a clamorous residential neighborhood.

Mr. Soota said he chose not to build a suburban campus, like that of Infosys, because he did not want his employees to spend three hours a day commuting on Bangalore's horrendous roads. Likewise, he noted, Mind Tree's philanthropy was part of a broader business strategy.

"It will attract a certain kind of employee, which in turn will attract a certain kind of customer," he said.

So far, Mind Tree has won assignments from Lucent Technologies, Avis and BP Amoco. Though the company is cagey about the project's details, it is designing a Web-based reservations system for Avis, a unit of Cendant. It is also advising Harvard University on ways to promote sports events on the Internet.

In addition to e-commerce projects, Mind Tree advises equipment makers like Cisco Systems, Alcatel and Fujitsu on network management issues. To be close to its mostly American clientele, it has built a development center in Somerville, N.J., and a branch office in Santa Clara, Calif.

"We're not building a small company," said Mr. Bagchi, 44, who plans to move to New Jersey to run those operations. "We've built large successful companies for other people. We're comfortable with growth."

So far, Mind Tree has hired 437 employees. It plans to add 1,000 more in the next year. The company has a five-year revenue target of $231 million. Yet Mr. Soota said he would not pursue a stock offering for three years. He also wants to have 100 clients before going public.

In part, he is only being realistic. The appetite for information technology start-ups is as sour here as in Silicon Valley. But, his philosophical side showing, Mr. Soota sees a lesson in starting his company in such an unforgiving climate.

"It's a good reminder for India's I.T. industry not to take what we have for granted, or become too greedy," he said.

Virtual India At Your Service

2010-03-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

BANGALORE, India - Drive 25 kilometers outside this city's center - past the old automobile parts factories and cement plants - and you will come to an area called Whitefield. Go on past the brand-new, 200-seat, technical support call center Dell Computer opened this summer, and past General Electric's 1-year-old, $40 million R&D facility.

Eventually, you will arrive at International Tech Park Ltd., referred to in Bangalore simply as ITPL. You can't miss it: three gleaming, 13-story towers in the middle of a 68-acre complex that provides a total of nearly 1.2 million square feet of office and retail space.

It's like a space station plunked down in the middle of an underdeveloped country. Designed to be self-sufficient, ITPL has its own water treatment facility, a 9-megawatt power plant and satellite telecommunications links - not to mention a food court, bank branches, underground parking and a gym.

The technology park - a joint venture of Tata Group, one of the largest and oldest corporate conglomerates in India; a consortium of Singapore companies; and the government of Karnataka - had trouble attracting tenants to occupy it in its first phase, completed in 1997. Now it enjoys almost full occupancy, housing more than 100 companies, and what once threatened to become an expensive disaster now stands as a symbol of sorts of the future of India's IT industry.

ITPL is a place where entrepreneurs are expanding beyond the traditional "code factories" that made India a software powerhouse, to provide knowledge-based services to which businesses all over the world can turn for help in building or managing critical parts of their Internet infrastructures. As a result, they are transforming India into a global e-services leader.

"In India, you're seeing companies move from being mere arms of multinationals based overseas to being global companies in their own right," said Dorothy Leonard, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied entrepreneurial groups in the U.S. and India. "We've seen a real cultural mindset change."

Take Bangalore Labs, on the 7th floor of Innovator, the west-facing building of the ITPL complex. Founded in November 1999, the company bills itself as India's first managed service provider and offers a range of services that include network application monitoring, managed Internet security and technology consulting. With 100 employees, Bangalore Labs has a network operations center staffed 24 hours per day in three shifts.

Co-founder Joy Nandi, executive vice president in charge of business development, is well-aware of the reputation of the Indian IT industry. "India is looked upon as providing cheap labor," he said. "We're still considered a third-world country."

But Nandi is among the entrepreneurs trying to change that perception. Bangalore Labs is out to compete in the world market on skill sets, not cost. It's true, he conceded, that there are cost advantages to being based in India. Nandi estimated he saves 55 percent to 60 percent by operating in India rather than the U.S. But that doesn't mean Nandi prices his services lower; it means his margins are better than those of his overseas competitors.

"We've taken the tune that we want a bigger role, to provide greater value to our customers," said Nandi, 31. "For a company like ours, there's no better location than India at this point in time."

The kind of remote services offered by Bangalore Labs and others will be central to e-businesses everywhere in the next decade and beyond. As the Internet and telecommunications networks become increasingly advanced, it appears India is well on its way to becoming one of the world's leading suppliers of knowledge-based services.

"If you look around the world, no other country except India has the depth of manpower, the low cost base, the high quality of standards," said T.V. Mahandas Pai, chief financial officer of Infosys Technologies, the largest software development company in India. "Some of the most highly educated people in the world, especially in technology, are in this country."

The trend is rooted in India's rise as a provider of low-cost software development in the mid-1990s. Bangalore, a city of about 6 million in the southern Indian state of Karnartaka, got on the high-tech map by offering low-cost, high-quality software development.

Hundreds of international companies, including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems - even American Express - have since flocked to Bangalore, the "Silicon Plateau" of India. Here they set up remote development centers or contracted work to local firms, attracted by the generous supply of highly trained, English-speaking computer science graduates and the fact that they could pay those workers a fraction of the salary programmers in the U.S. command. Starting programmers' salaries range from $550 to $650 per month.

The industry has provided the country's largest and fastest-growing export: India expects to ship more than $9 billion worth of software in 2001, a trend that many compare to the migration of electronics manufacturing to Asia in the 1980s - or, indeed, the overseas migration of many other industries.

"India has a 10-year plan to become a software powerhouse, and they are way ahead of that," said Intel CEO Craig Barrett at a recent technology business conference. Earlier this month, Barrett visited India, where Intel recently opened a new e-business software laboratory on Infosys' Bangalore campus.

Having established itself as an indispensable center of software development, India is now beginning to emerge as an equal partner on the world technology stage. Rather than just providing pools of inexpensive labor, Indian IT companies are offering higher-value services to their foreign customers. Part of this is due to the worldwide cooldown in IT spending, which has pinched the companies' bottom lines and prompted them to look for higher-margin revenue streams.

But more than that, observers say, a new Indian entrepreneurial spirit is developing, aided in part by experienced and wealthy Indian technology executives in the U.S. That spirit is leading local companies toward competing head-on with other global companies, trying new business models, taking risks and, sometimes, failing.

Bangalore: Technopolis

Bangalore is where it all started, and today it is one of the world's top cities for technology development. About 80,000 people work in Bangalore's high-tech industry, many of them graduates of one of Bangalore's more than 100 research universities or technical colleges. In all of India, there are 580 engineering schools and 245 universities.

The locals call Bangalore "The Garden City" of India because of its many trees and gardens and year-round mild temperatures. There's a cosmopolitan feel to Bangalore, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups from all over India. Dozens of pubs and restaurants have sprouted in the last few years, most catering to the new class of relatively well-to-do IT professionals with pints of beer for 40 rupees (about 90 cents). And in a development that has cheered many of the area's weary globetrotting technology executives, Lufthansa next month plans to initiate Bangalore's first direct international flights, flying straight to Frankfurt, Germany, instead of doglegging through Bombay.

Still, this is India. The streets of Bangalore are choked with traffic, and getting around can be difficult. Besides automobiles, there's a constant stream of diesel trucks, buses, three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, mopeds, bicycles, carts and pedestrians vying for the right of way. An estimated 200,000 stray dogs roam through Bangalore and can be seen lolling around on median strips. Cows forage through the drainage ditches, eating garbage. There's even the occasional monkey: At certain hotels, guests are reminded to shut their windows to keep out fruit-seeking simians.

By most American standards, the infrastructure of Bangalore is in shambles. The city's power grid occasionally cuts out; lights will flicker off for a moment or two, and no one takes much notice. The telephone system, run by the government-controlled monopoly provider, is comparatively underdeveloped and unreliable. In India as a whole, there are 28 phone lines per 1,000 people.

But if you walk into just about any IT company's office, you might as well be in San Jose.

Stroll over, for example, to the offices of Cisco Systems India in the Prestige Waterford building at 9 Brunton Road, one of two main buildings Cisco occupies in Bangalore. It's a little eerie, in fact, how closely it resembles the home office in the U.S., with its five floors of cubicles, two large testing lab areas and covered outdoor patios where staffers can eat lunch. One difference is that all the conference rooms are named after Indian ragas, the different melody patterns of Hindu music.

Cisco, which has said it plans to invest $200 million in India over the next three years, employs about 700 people at its Global Development Center in Bangalore. Characteristic of the first wave of foreign technology development to land in India, Cisco's GDC is basically an annex of the U.S. headquarters. The big difference is that the Indian workers show up twelve-and-a-half hours before their colleagues on the West Coast. The close collaboration is made possible by Cisco India's aggregate bandwidth of 12 megabits per second back to San Jose, over which engineers exchange data and voice, and participate in weekly videoconferences - which, to accommodate the time zone differences, are either early in the morning or early in the evening.

"There is really no demarcation of what work is done here and what's done in San Jose," said S. "Dev" Devarajan, who heads the center. "It's really an extension of the facilities back in San Jose. We do much of what they do, except we don't have the physical number of people here."

Across town at IBM's Bangalore headquarters, more than 3,000 developers write code for IBM customers, as well as for Big Blue's own software product lines. There you will find Vijay K. Sukthankar, who might be India's biggest Linux nerd. "If you open my drawer, you will find lots of penguins," he said, laughing. Sukthankar is the general manager of IBM's Linux Technical Center here, a group of 10 programmers that works with about 200 IBM Linux developers in Beaverton, Ore.

The group in India makes recommendations on new features that might be added to Linux, then manages the code development. Currently, Sukthankar's crew is working on remote access services, scalability features and IP version 6 support for Linux.

The India Linux team collaborates primarily with those IBM engineers in the U.S., but Sukthankar also interacts with open source developers in Australia, Germany and Japan. He's also active in Bangalore's local Linux user group, which has 600 active members and meets every month to share industry news and programming tips.

"Linux is popular in India because it's free and you can do a lot with it. You can learn from it," Sukthankar said. "If you buy Microsoft Windows, you don't get the source code; you don't understand what's happening inside it. Students in grad schools really want to understand what's happening underneath in the operating system."

Like many Bangalore IT veterans who work for multinational companies, Sukthankar has lived and worked all over the world, his career taking him wherever his talents and interests led. He first joined IBM in mid-1994, spent about two years in Boca Raton, Fla., and landed briefly in Japan and in Europe, before coming back to India. "The amount of cultural experience you get working here is phenomenal," he said.

That international cross-pollination of ideas, facilitated by the Internet's long tendrils, has altered the corporate culture among Indian IT firms in recent years. It has also nourished the seeds of entrepreneurship among the technology elite. Such a cultural transfer was inevitable, the by-product of the working relationships between Indian software developers, IT executives and the customers or colleagues they deal with on a regular basis, who are often located outside of India.

In some cases, the cultural export to India has been deliberate. When Sun decided to open a development facility in Bangalore in 1999, it wanted an insider to start the operation in order to instill its own values. The company picked seven-year operations manager Avinash Agrawal, a native of India, to oversee the center, which now has 320 staffers.

"The culture of Sun is more informal than traditional Indian businesses," Agrawal said. "Some of the new students I meet with have a habit of saying 'sir' after everything. I tell them, 'Look, call me by my first name.' It's very egalitarian here. My door is always open; if someone has an issue they can always bring it up with me. It's not an us-against-them mentality, in terms of the management and the workers, which is typically what it's like in traditional Indian companies."

Hands Across the Water

The migration of 100,000 indians to the U.S. every year, many of whom work in the high-tech industry, represents an estimated economic loss to India of $2 billion, according to the United Nations Development Programme. It's classic brain drain: The most talented people leave a country to pursue greater career opportunities somewhere else. But the exodus from India has also provided valuable networks of business contacts for the home country and, what's more, some Indians in the IT industry are even deciding to come back to their homeland after accruing experience in the U.S. or elsewhere .

"These guys who went abroad were the ones who brought the multinationals into India to do offshore software development in the first place," said B. Mahesh, joint director in Bangalore of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), a government agency that promotes the country's software industry. "And they are coming back to start companies. They have contributed a lot to this industry."

Kailash Joshi is one of those guys. Joshi, who now lives in San Jose, worked for IBM for 24 years, having come to the U.S. in 1954 from a small town in northern India. After his career in technology, Joshi, now 59, wanted to give something back to his native country, following the traditional stages of life in Hindu philosophy, which holds that in the third stage of your life you return your debt to society. So in 1994, he founded The IndUS Entrepreneurs, an organization that lets entrepreneurs of Indian origin share experiences and learn the tricks of the trade. Today, TiE counts 6,000 members in seven countries, and holds an annual convention in Silicon Valley.

"The people who made it big in Silicon Valley came from modest, middle-class backgrounds. They were very competitive in academia, so they're bright and good thinkers," Joshi said. "That maps extremely well with the conditions in India. Frankly, the only thing they've lacked that we have in the U.S. is infrastructure - bandwidth and telephones."

TiE has served to inspire and guide an unknown number of entrepreneurs, in the U.S. and India, to start their own businesses. One of the key ideas it has spread is the Silicon Valley notion that it's OK to flop - indeed, a failure gives someone the experience to try something else. "Failure in many Asian countries is seen as personal failure and hard to separate from a failure of a business," Harvard's Leonard said. "There's evidence that in India, now, there's a shift happening, separating personal failure from professional failure."

And beyond just helpful words of advice, Indians who have succeeded in the U.S. have stimulated the entrepreneurial culture by pumping money into ventures on the subcontinent.

E4e - "entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs" - is a technology holding company established in October 2000 that has assembled a $125 million fund with plans to incubate about a dozen companies focused on Internet-delivered services in three years. The company's investors include K.B. Chandrasekhar, who founded Exodus Communications and Jamcracker, and Som Das, a former general partner of venture capital firm Walden International.

The venture has a dual base of operations, with its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., and an office in Bangalore. In that sense, E4e is hoping to create companies in its own image. "We're looking for Indian entrepreneurs interested in the U.S. market, or U.S. entrepreneurs looking to use India as a back end," said Sridhar Mitta, E4e India's managing director, who has cross-continental ties as former head of Wipro's Santa Clara subsidiary.

In its Bangalore offices, E4e has 11,500 square feet of mostly empty space. It's sitting there, unoccupied, waiting for a startup to come in and begin working immediately. So far, E4e has backed four startups: Aztec Software and Technology Services, iCelerate, iSeva and Vinciti Networks. "We believe this is the decade of the entrepreneur in India," Mitta said. But, he added, so far there aren't any success stories or benchmarks among the nascent Indian entrepreneurial community.

The world of high-tech Indian entrepreneurs can sometimes be a small, small world. Bangalore native B.V. Jagadeesh came to the U.S. almost 20 years ago. He's a former colleague of Chandrasekhar - Jagadeesh was Exodus' original chief technology officer - and is now president and CEO of networking company NetScaler.

In the last five years, he's invested in four Indian startups and three Indian-focused venture capital firms. Jagadeesh's companies include iNabling Technologies, a Bangalore venture that has created an e-mail appliance for the Indian market that costs about $150.

"My goal was to help take India to the next level and be able to say, 'We have more capabilities besides being a human skills supplier to the rest of the world,'" he said. "India should be able to produce products for the global economy."

A Palace That Software Built

Meanwhile, the companies supplying skills to the rest of the world have become the largest IT companies in the country - and a huge source of national pride, if not envy, among regular Indians. "People used to come to India to see the Taj Mahal. Now they come to see Infosys," said the cab driver on the way to the company's campus.

It's supposed to be sort of a joke, but here is the American tourist on his way to see one of the wonders of modern India, a sprawling palace built by software: Infosys' 1.1-million-square-foot campus on the outskirts of Bangalore. The compound, which accommodates 4,400 of the company's 10,000 employees, has a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, a gym, a putting green and three huge food courts - including a Domino's Pizza. The coffee bar serves 13,000 cups of coffee each day.

Infosys, a 20-year-old software development company whose 277 customers include American Express, Cisco, Nortel Networks and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, is one of the most respected companies in India. Last year, 350,000 people applied to work at Infosys; the company hired 4,400.

Part of Infosys' success and, more broadly, that of India as an IT destination must be attributed to regulatory changes the Indian government adopted in the 1980s that made conditions more favorable to software development companies.

Under the government's STPI program, software exporters will not pay any taxes until 2010 - at which time the issue will be reconsidered - and pay no duties on capital imports. "When there was a boom in hardware, India missed out," said Mahesh, STPI's joint director in Bangalore. "The government didn't want to lose that opportunity again with software."

Furthermore, India boasts of its Western-style intellectual property rights laws, democratic government and judicial system - factors that Indian IT executives bring up in pointed comparisons to China or Russia, which have designs on becoming low-cost providers of software development to rival India.

Another barrier India is removing is the government monopoly on international telecommunications services. The state-run telecom provider, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd., is set to be privatized by the end of 2001, and will face competition in 2003.

Even with government control over the Internet access market, the cost of bandwidth has fallen in the past decade: In 1991, a 64-kilobit-per-second leased line connection outside the country cost $100,000 per year. Now the same link costs $17,000 per year.

Nevertheless, the most favorable tax policies can't shield the Indian IT sector from the global slowdown in technology spending. Infosys, which saw its revenue almost quadruple in the last two years to $413.9 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, is now expecting more modest growth of 30 percent in the coming year.

"There had been a set of huge drivers in the market - the Internet, telecom spending, Y2K [year 2000], the e-business trend," said Nandan Nilekani, Infosys' president and chief operating officer. "All these drivers have now slowed down or vanished in some sense. So it's really back to basics right now."

To continue their long-term growth, the large IT companies have realized they need to offer higher-value services in order to compete with worldwide consulting firms Accenture, Ernst & Young, KMPG and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as technology services firms like Electronic Data Systems and IBM Global Services. Infosys executives have said they are looking to acquire a strategy consulting company with a presence in the U.S. The other major Indian-based companies are following suit. At the same time, the U.S. consultants have been looking at ways to take better advantage of the cost efficiencies of the "offshore development model."

"We are trying to emulate what the Big Five are doing, and they're emulating us," said R. Ramanan, vice president of Tata Consultancy Services, the giant IT services arm of privately held Tata Group.

Bipolar Startups

It seems clear that indian technology services companies are destined to become ever more integrated into the economic fabric of the U.S. and other countries. The first digital footbridges connecting the world will soon be superseded by ultra-fast - and ultra-cheap - transoceanic superhighways.

Real-time interaction between customer support reps in India and the U.S. and U.K. is a reality today. One of the hot startups in this segment, generally referred to as "IT-enabled services," is Bangalore-based CustomerAsset, which launched in April 2000. In the year-and-a-half since its launch, the company has swelled to 640 employees. It has landed 10 overseas customers and 13 that are based in India, though CustomerAsset wouldn't disclose customer names.

The same preconditions that make India ideal for outsourced software development also apply to call centers. There are 200 million Indians who speak English. There's a large population of highly educated people - India will produce an estimated 2.5 million college graduates this year. And not only can college graduates be hired to answer telephone calls from halfway across the world for about $220 per month, but they view this as a fantastic career.

K. Ganesh, CustomerAsset's 39-year-old CEO, said the main difference between his company and the traditional software companies is that a significant portion of the cost of operations - about 80 percent - is in the telecom infrastructure - basically, everything needed to route toll-free numbers from the U.S. to India. For IT services companies, on the other hand, 80 percent of the expense is people's salaries.

Another key difference is that CustomerAsset takes over a core part of its clients' business processes - which can make some prospective customers very nervous.

"Instead of the companies in the U.S. taking the call, we're taking the call. This is very different from saying, 'I want a certain portion of my Web site development to happen somewhere else.' The amount of risk involved in the minds of our customers is much, much larger," Ganesh said.

But except for what people wear, the facility looks and sounds exactly the same as a call center in the U.S. Ganesh recalled that CustomerAsset's first visitors from the U.S. refused to believe that the customer representatives had never been to the U.S. "They know about the Knicks game and what the weather was like in Houston. We can actually train people to understand the culture and be comfortable conversing with a housewife in the U.S.," he said.

For more complex development projects, however, Jerry Rao, chairman of boutique IT consulting shop MphasiS BFL, believes successful global IT companies need workers on both continents. In fact, Rao himself is practically always on a plane, commuting among the office near his home in Santa Monica, Calif., and the company's two other main centers in New York City and Bangalore. Talk about jet lag.

The specialty of MphasiS - with a customer list that includes J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citicorp, FedEx and Singapore Airlines - is to help clients with integration and middleware solutions without getting rid of their legacy systems. Earlier this year, MphasiS merged with Indian software company BFL, becoming MphasiS BFL, a 1,400-person company. About 1,000 of its employees are in India, in development centers in Bangalore, Pune and Bombay; 250 are in the U.S.; and 150 are scattered elsewhere in the world.

MphasiS operates using a hybrid concept of a virtual team - it's neither on-site nor offshore. To Rao, it is the perfect blend of the U.S. consulting model and the Indian outsourced model. "Usually you either have 20 consultants sitting in the client's premises doing coding, testing and bug fixing, or, in the offshore model, the client gives you a set of specs, gives you 90 days to turn it around, and takes it back to test and launch it," he said.

The virtual development model keeps the hardware in San Francisco or wherever it happens to be, and 10,000 miles away over the telecom link a programmer in Bangalore works on the code as if he is sitting next door. "Today the telecom links are stable and affordable, so you can do this, and do this very well," Rao said.

Another essential facet of the virtual team model is that it is the only way Rao believes MphasiS can successfully sell higher-value, more complex solutions.

"You have to have credible staff on the ground where your customer is," he said. "When specs are dynamic, when you're talking about integrating a lot of off-the-shelf products, you can't make it work without a presence at the client."Aside from figuring out what time zone he's in, Rao said his major challenge as a cross-cultural business executive is to draw from the strengths of the U.S. and India, rather than become ensnared by the shortcomings of each. In India, he said, people tend to be far more process-driven, far more control-driven. In the U.S., people tend to be more entrepreneurial and quicker in their decision making."You don't want to succumb to the weaknesses of each culture," he said. "The U.S. can be too much shoot-from-the-hip sometimes. But at the same time, you don't want to get screwed by the Indian bureaucratic mindset.

"What you want," Rao said, "is the best of both worlds."

Homeward Bound

Bharath Dorairaja doesn't especially like New Jersey.

In October 2000, Bharath moved from Bangalore, India, to Parsipanny, N.J., where he established the U.S. business development office of VisionCompass, an enterprise software subsidiary of Bangalore's Satyam Computer Services.

But Bharath wants to go back to India someday, and soon. "I'm just more comfortable in India," he said. Aside from occasionally saying, "Hello" to his New Jersey neighbors from the driveway, he never socializes with them. Bharath is also repulsed by American television. "I stopped subscribing to cable. I had trouble finding anything that wasn't trash."

Bharath's feelings are indicative of what appears to be a small but growing trend. "There's anecdotal evidence that there is a 'reverse brain drain' happening," said Dorothy Leonard, a Harvard Business School professor who has researched Indian entrepreneurs. "People are seeing they can come back to India and make good money."

To be sure, the growth of the diaspora of software programmers and other tech workers from India hasn't slowed. "It's a trickle of people coming back to India, compared with the flood of people still leaving India for America," said Avinash Agrawal, managing director of Sun Microsystems' engineering center in Bangalore. Through July, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had granted 138,000 of the 195,000 H-1B temporary work visas available for 2001, about half to Indian citizens. Roughly 250,000 Indians are in the U.S. on H-1B visas.

Some Indians, though, are going home. Agrawal, 43, is a case in point. A native of the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan, he came to the U.S. in 1978 and earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1994 he went to work for Sun, and when the company decided to open a development center in India two years ago, he readily agreed to head the project and relocate to Bangalore. "I saw it as a unique opportunity to come here and start something from scratch," he said.

The decision to go back isn't always voluntary, though. Layoffs at U.S. IT companies have left many Indians unemployed. Without jobs, H-1B visa holders are not supposed to stay, but the INS says tracking those who stay illegally is not a priority.

What's fueling the reverse-migration trend is the disappearance of the perceived penalties of working in India. First is the issue of money. Salaries are, of course, higher in the U.S. - typical starting pay for a programmer in India is 30,000 rupees per year, or about $650. But the cost of living in America is much higher. In Bangalore, a midlevel IT worker is able to hire cooks and nannies. "Indian programmers in India are overpaid by comparison [to those in the U.S.]," said Jerry Rao, chairman of consulting firm MphasiS BFL, which has dual headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., and Bangalore.

Another strike against staying in India was the "networking penalty:" In Silicon Valley, it was assumed there was more opportunity for career advancement. But the Indian IT industry has grown dramatically in the last two years, and a gusher of startups has created a more vibrant local tech community.

Finally, many Indians are coming to believe that there's as much chance to work on cutting-edge technologies in their country as in the U.S. "Now, there's no way you could say the work we do here is any less advanced than anywhere else in the world," Agrawal said. And if you're an Indian guy who's tired of living in Jersey, that's one more reason to pack up and head home.

The FCC National Broadband Plan: Long Haul Expected

2010-03-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

Paul Karpowicz has nothing against broadband. But he has no plans to take part in a government effort to bring it to more homes.

Karpowicz is president of Meredith Broadcasting, which owns 12 local TV stations from Portland, Ore., to New Haven, Conn. Meredith also holds unused TV airwaves covering some of those markets and Karpowicz intends to use them to stream programming to handheld devices.

As part of its National Broadband Plan, due to be unveiled Mar. 16, the federal government wants broadcasters like Meredith to relinquish and let the government sell excess airwaves, which could then be used by wireless carriers to deliver mobile-Web access. Karpowicz says he has no intention of giving up Meredith's airwaves. "I truly don't visualize a scenario where proceeds [from a sale] would exceed lost business opportunities," says Karpowicz, who also sits on the executive committee of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Opposition from the NAB is just one of the hurdles the government must clear as it presses ahead with a plan to bring broadband access to almost 100 million U.S. residents.

For starters, the plan is just that. Federal Communications Commission officials, under Chairman Julius Genachowski, will present the proposal to Congress, which will weigh in as the FCC embarks on a years-long process of implementing the various proposals. "The really difficult policy options are going to be made in follow-through actions," says Paul Glenchur, senior analyst at Potomac Research Group, a Washington-based consultant.

Plan Resistance

Along the way, the FCC may face resistance from lawmakers unwilling to approve additional funding and from parts of the communications industry, such as satellite providers, largely left out of the plan. "If it were easy, [this reform] would have been done a long time ago," Blair Levin, the Federal Communications Commission official who's spearheading the National Broadband Plan, says in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Besides asking broadcasters to give up some airwaves, the plan will also propose a nationwide wireless broadband network for use by public safety agencies and urge an overhaul of a federal program that supplies funding for telecommunications carriers which provide phone service in rural areas, FCC officials have said in recent weeks. The plan is also expected to push for the broader adoption of electronic health records and so-called smart grid technologies designed to help consumers and utilities better monitor energy use.

Parts of the plan that have been made public have enjoyed widespread support in the telecommunications industry, including from the main U.S. wireless industry group. FCC officials "were given the difficult task of providing a road map to ensure all Americans—regardless of location, income, or education level—are able to access the Internet, and we were pleased to be able to assist with their efforts as it appears they are on target," CTIA, the wireless trade group, said in a Feb. 24 statement. Derek Khlopin, head of regulation and policy, North America, for Nokia Siemens Networks, a telecommunications equipment maker, says the plan "could positively impact investment."

Web-Connected TV: A Distant Dream for App Makers

2010-03-11T08:36:00.000-08:00

Last year, Mark Phillip unveiled Are You Watching This?!, a tool for mobile phones that alerts sports fans to can't-miss, in-progress games, such as baseball no-hitters. Thousands of users have bought the 99¢application and downloaded it to their Apple (AAPL) iPhones and other handsets. Phillip also wants to create a version of Are You Watching This?! for Web-connected TVs, which he calls the "Holy Grail" for this type of content, but that's been a struggle. "It's a tough platform to build on," says Phillip, a resident of Austin, Tex.

By the end of 2010, Americans will own more than two million Web-connected TVs, which let users access online services such as and Pandora with the same remote control they use to switch channels. Yet while developers have managed to create a wide range of apps for mobile phones, they're daunted by the prospect of building software tools for TVs. There's no easy way to create an app that can run on the wide range of sets, says Forrester Research (FORR) analyst James McQuivey. "Nobody wants to get in the business of developing separate widgets for Samsung (005930:KS), LG (066570:KS), Vizio, and Sony (SNE)," he says.

In addition to all those TVs, there's a growing range of set-top boxes, each with its own software. There's Roku and its Channel Store, which bundles movie-streaming services from Netflix (NFLX) and others with handy tools, like a Facebook photo viewer. Vudu, recently acquired by Wal-Mart (WMT), plans an Apps platform for watching video podcasts such as Diggnation. This summer, the Boxee Box by D-Link (2332:TT) will bid to become the first hardware of its kind to let developers charge for programs through the TV.

To companies such as Internet music provider Pandora, each new outlet for TV applications presents a further opportunity to reach a fresh audience. The Oakland (Calif.)-based company makes its free program available on almost every TV set and box on the market and says its TV business currently adds up to about 500,000 users. "The foundation is there for those numbers to start growing exponentially," says Tim Westergren, Pandora's founder and chief strategy officer.

A trickle of apps for Connected TV

For smaller companies looking to get a foothold, the competing makers of TVs and set-top boxes add an unwelcome layer of complexity. "We're having great difficulty in determining how much effort to put into specific technologies," says Trevor Doerksen, CEO of MoboVivo. His company, which packages TV shows and other video content into apps, gave up on TV apps two years ago when the technology was in its infancy. Instead he opted to build apps for Apple's iPhone, which opened to developers in 2008. Now MoboVivo is again eyeing TV apps, but hasn't decided which gadget to get behind. "Nobody knows how successful it's going to be in two years," Doerksen says.

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William Hulsey, HULSEY, P.C., Intellectual Property Lawyers (HULSEYIP)

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Arizona Technology Enterprises partners with Japan Technology Group

A SHOPPING REVOLUTION

HOT NEW HAIR DRYER

MUSIC THAT COMES WHEN YOU CALL

FLOWERS ON DEMAND

WORLD'S SMALLEST HUMANOID ROBOT

SURFING IN THE RAIN Internet Umbrella Lets Users Browse in Any Weather

US underplays Pakistan connection to terror

Black market in Facebook accounts!

Nokia, Microsoft launch new mobile software

SMS Was Predicted 100 Years Ago

Mobile Internet Set To Grow In India

I Don't Think FPGAs Will Ever Rule The Market'

'Solar Will Always Occupy A Good Place In My Life'

Your Pick CDMA Mobile

Three-fold benefit CDMA Mobile

Technological Change

What is OMH?

Open Market Handset For CDMA Mobile Services

Haryana Raj Bhawan Complex To Go Solar

Moon Landing Hoax Apollo : Disney used Fake Miniature Astronauts, Lunar Rovers & Modules (2 of 10)

Moon Landing Hoax Apollo : Disney used Fake Miniature Astronauts, Lunar Rovers & Modules (1 of 10)

Moon Landing Hoax Apollo 15 : Astronaut and Houston Admit the Lunar Rover Was Fixed Overnight

Self-Powered Flexible Electronics

Solar Cost ­Cutter

New Life for Old Tires The process involves freezing old rubber and shattering it into small particles--resulting in new, low-cost materials.

Big Energy Storage in Thin Films New ultracapacitor material could be fabricated directly on chips and solar cells.

Wind Turbines Shed Their Gears

A Caltech group has created materials that could improve the efficiency of solar cells.

Capital Programme Advisor - Midlands

Solar Cost Cutter