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Forrester the leading IT research firm has come with a new report on mid sized companies that offer lower billing rates compared to IT gaints like Infosys, TCS it really doesn’t translate to lower costs to the customer according to economictimes.com  Lower billing rates doesn’t always translate to lower costs.  It doesn’t mean that the II two tier companies are not capable of delivery and avoidance of them is a necessary. Of the 300 or so tier-II firms, 10-15% provide value addition through specialisation around a line of service or technology, specialisation around an industry and business process, or a unique client experience.

 Written by Anand.G
The writer is founder of a cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast 

Vivek Paul, the erstwhile Vice chairman of Wipro Technologies hasn’t lost his touch for Technology. After leading wipro from a unknown organization of revenues 150$ million dollars in 1999 to 1.4 Billion dollar company by 2005 is planning to connect IT professionals across the country through a medium of networks. Based on similar grounds like linkedin.com ITfundas.com is geared to collaborate, network and convergence the power of social networking on a massive scale reports economictimes.com
Vivek Paul was a former GE Medical Systems CEO who led GE to staggering heights and was also instrumentation for the growth of wipro to a top leading company. Several online magazines like Time had reported about Vivek Paul as one of the powerful 30 CEO’s of those days. It is stated that Vivek Paul has started Kinetic Glue Online Communities, Vivek Paul’s latest venture, will make investments in other firms that have a presence in the Internet space Itfundas.com

Written by Anand.G
The writer is founder of a cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast 

According to economictimes.com Karnataka the leader in the Indian IT industry has once again proved that it leads the pack of IT states when it comes to IT share. Industry experts and pundits who were predicting the decline of the IT share in the country and the state in particular to its counterparts like Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh has clocked an astounding export of 74,929 crores this fiscal. “We have not fallen behind… and we are expecting exports of Rs 100,000 crore by the end of this fiscal,” said, state IT & BT minister Katta Subramanya Naidu. However, the hardware exports from Karnataka dipped by 6.8% on a Y-o-Y basis to touch revenue of Rs 2,889 crore for FY09. The performance of the tier-II cities namely Mysore, Mangalore and Hubli on a combined basis has been 45% with revenue touching Rs 2,423 crore. So Karnataka has emerged as the leader in IT exports once again.

Written by Anand.G
The writer is founder of a cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast 

Tech Giants come together in a legal feud with Google.The fight against a legal settlement that would give Google Inc. the digital rights to millions of copyrighted books is starting to resemble a heavyweight brawl in the library, according to BBC news.
Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are joining a coalition that hopes to rally opposition to Google’s digital book ambitions and ultimately persuade a federal judge to block or revise the Internet search leader’s plans.

The group, to be called the Open Book Alliance, is spearheaded by the Internet Archive, a longtime critic of Google’s crusade to make digital copies of as many printed books as possible.Both Microsoft and Yahoo have confirmed their intention to join the alliance. Amazon declined to comment because the group hasn’t been formally announced yet. The Open Book Alliance also will include an assortment of nonprofit groups.
Google plans to offer free access to some books through its search engine and sell others as part of a registry that will share revenue with authors and publishers if the class-action settlement is approved.Opponents of the deal believe it will give Google too much pricing power, and have raised concerns about the company’s ability to stockpile more personal data about the users of its search engines by tracking what they’re reading.Microsoft and Yahoo could be hurt if Google’s expanded index of digital books propels even more traffic to its search engine. If that
were to happen, Google might process even more search requests than it already does, allowing the company to show more of the text ads alongside search results that generate most of its revenue.Hoping to siphon advertising away from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo last month announced a planned partnership in search. The proposal, which still must be approved by the Justice Department, calls for Microsoft to run the search engine on Yahoo’s web site in return for 12 percent of the revenue generated by accompanying ad sales.
“The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition,” Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said.Stricker also took a stab at Microsoft, which abandoned its efforts to make digital book copies to focus on more profitable online opportunities.

The writer is a software engineer but occassionaly writes to silicondunia

Indian Government has finally snapped out of slumber and woken to green technology. Indian Govt is all set to launch a venture fund to encourage green technology research , ths specifics of which will be worked on by NMSKCC- National Mission on Strategic Knowledge for Climate Change . As reported by siliconindia.com , NMSKCC is in the process of preparing a document for promoting green technologies and would identiy key academic institutions that excel in climate change related research.

Citing the need for technology innovations to reduce energy used by industry and other user sectors, the Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh said that the 11th Five Year Plan has articulated strategies in many of these areas for the country.

<em>The writer is a software engineer but occassionaly writes to silicondunia</em>

Travelguru that was recently buzzing with activity has been acquired by online giant travelocity. According to the latest news travelguru was acquired by the US based online company. Travelocity has a online booking of more thant 10$ billion dollars. Travelguru has more than 4000 hotel bookings in its capacity in the sub-continent. Travelguru has a large customer database. The deal size is still not disclosed but it needs to be seen what would be impact of a such major acquisition in the market. Some of the other competitors of travelguru are makemytrip.com,yatra.com, cleartrip.com… Well whatever the acquisition could give a better valuation for the dominant internet space and it may add some value proposition in the Internet segment.

Written by Anand.G
The writer is founder of a cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast 

Well all said and done IT services was the golden goose and mantra for several IT companies in the last 7 years. But it seems many companies have taken a liking to prune IT services in a big way. According to Economictimes.com HP is on its way pruning the IT services where it is seeing margins in the range of 8-9%. HP the company that was considered the leaders in printers and desktop computers seems to have realised that they have to move for higher end to cut cost and improve the margins. By acquiring the recent giant of IT services EDS for 25$ Billion Dollars HP was moved into second place in overall revenues after IBM.
HP seems to have started to challenge gear manufacturer Cisco Systems. Analysts seems to believe that HP may focus its guns towards buying software, storage and communications equipment companies rather than IT services. so the future of IT services market seems to being heading for a sea change.

Written by Anand.G
The writer is founder of a cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast 

Sprint and Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile), the #1 mobile phone provider in the U.S.1, has launched Samsung Reclaim™ as the first phone in the U.S. constructed from eco-friendly bio-plastic materials.Sprint dove into the green cell phone market with its ostentatioslu green “Reclaim” phone which has a slide-down QWERTY keypad, 3G data network support, a 2-megapixel camera with 3X digital zoom, video recording functionality, stereo Bluetooth support, a GPS receiver with Sprint Navigation software, a Web browser, an e-mail client, a microSD slot and a standard headphone jack.This would be available in Aug , according to CNet.com .
About 40 percent of the phone’s shell is made from bio-plastics and about 80 percent of the entire phone can be recycled.It’s also painted green or blue, just in case the phone’s “deal” wasn’t already clear to everybody . When customers purchase Samsung Reclaim from Sprint, $2 of the proceeds will benefit The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program, which supports land conservation across the United States and protects some of the world’s most beautiful and important natural habitats.
An eco-friendly overachiever, Sprint is making it easier than ever for customers to “go green” with new eco-friendly products, services and programs and expanding its commitment as a leader in sustainability.”Sprint is widely recognized as a leader among telecommunications companies in environmentally-responsible initiatives, and today we are proud to announce an even stronger commitment to sustainability with new eco-friendly products and programs,” said Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO.Hesse claims that the Reclaim is one of a number of green initiatives being pushed by Sprint. For example, Sprint hopes to recycle 90 percent of wireless devices by 2017.

The writer is a software engineer but occassionaly writes to silicondunia

Gmail the mail service started by the Internet Gaint Googlein year 2004  is all set to take on the yester days darlings of the Internet Hotmail and give a stiff competition to yahoomail. According to comscore It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL. It seems gmail seems to becoming the preferred email service across the world.  Google seems to be heading to topple the king of mail services Yahoomail in the long run. But it all depends as how strong the brands could emerge out from the shackes of the ever changing internet.

Written by Anand.G
The writer is founder of a cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast 

With the recent decline in the growth of y-o-y of 24% as of 2008 and Nasscom prediction of the growth of the Indian IT market at submissive level of 4-7% for year 2009-10 , a lot of introspection have led  major IT companies to  start corroborating on new technologies as reported in Economics.com IT companies like Cognizant are creating new sub-verticals healthcare, retail, logistics, media and entertainment and  are integrating in their consulting practices. These initatives may have helped companies increase their revenue. IT Bellweather Wipro which had pioneered near shoring and offshoring in the yester decades of 80′s and 90′s has also created newer strengths like cloud computing, green IT, collaboration software, social computing, information management, mobility and open source creating a new wave for better optimization of clients. So whatever newer technologies are emerging, are aiding the older and yester day companies for a bright future and sustenence of Indian IT industry.

Written by Anand.G

The writer is founder of cricket website Crickick.com, a IT-ITES Professional, an startup enthusiast