Current News, Technologies, and Developments.

Free Press Release Sites

2009-10-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

Given below is a list of Free Press Release Sites:

12pressrelease.com
1888pressrelease.com
addpr.com
adhesivesmag.com
afly.com
afreego.com
baygo.com/press
Bignews.biz
bizeurope.com
Businessportal24.com
Clickpress.com
dailyrecord.com
Digg.com
dime-co.com.com
download3k.com
downloadjunction.com
earthvision.net
ecommwire.com
Epicpr.com
Exactrelease.com
exchangenet.com
ezpress.info
Fastpitchnetworking.com
filecluster.com
free-press-release.com
freepressrelease.com.au
freepressrelease.eu
Free-press-release-center.info
Freepressreleases.co.uk
freepresssindex.com
freepresssrelease.co.cc
Ideamarketers.com
i-newswire.com
Information-online.com
itbinnovation.com
itbsoftware.com
itilcommunity.com
journal-courier.net
localnews.biz
macinstein.com
Mediasyndicate.com
michiganbusiness.us
Myfreepr.com
nationalprwire.com
news.eboomwebsolutions.com
Newsalbum.com
Newsblaster.com
newswiretoday.com
newzalert.com
Openpr.com
oylinki.com
pagerelease.com
pocketpctalk.com
Postafreepresssrelease.com
powerhomebiz.com
Pr.com
Pressbox.com
Pressexposure.com
PressFlow.co.uk
Pressmethod.com
Press-network.com
pressrelease.com.np
Pressreleasecirculation.com
Pressreleasepoint.com
pressreleases.kcstar.com
Prfocus.com
prfree.com
Prfriend.com
Pr-gb.com
pr-inside.com
Prlog.org
programmersheaven.com
prurgent.com
Pr-usa.net
prwindow.com
sanepr
Sbwire.com
Seenation.com
Seoprwire.com
sixsigmazone.com
techprspider.com
thehostingnews.com
topseos.com
transworldnews.com
Usprwire.com
webhostmagazine.com
Webnewswire.com
websitegear.com
winhpc.org
worldpressrelease.org
www.business.lincolndailynews.com
www2.ljworld.com
yourfreepressrelease.net

Bangalore Internation Airport - Making People to Travel Cross Country

2009-10-08T04:51:00.000-07:00

The BIA (Bangalore International Airport) is situated at about 35 km from city center. It is almost 45 - 50 km away from software hub, popularly known as Electronics City. Ofcourse, it is difficult to find enough space for a new airport within, say 10-15 km from city center. However, people are unable to find the logic behind the closure of the existing airport which is situated closer to city center (about 10 km away, and situated in the south of bangalore). Now, if someone residing in Electronics City wants to reach the new airport, it would take approximately 2 hours of travel (assuming normal weekday traffic) over a distance of about 50km. The reason given for closure of HAL airport (the old airport) for passenger traffic is that the new airport can handle all the traffic, and the existence of old airport services will be detrimental for the continued development of the new airport. So, the commuters should suffer with long travel times, usage charges (the charges levied on customers for use of new airport), higher taxi fares.

By the way, the infrastructure of the new airport is no bigger than the old airport at least as of now. The only difference being large open parking space.

There were several cases against the new airport, and in favour of reopening of old airport. However, since the state government signed with the developers in favour of closing the old airport, none of these cases could get a favourable judgement.

This is a typical case where the interests of the people are given step motherly attitude in favour of businesses.

Dengue..Chikun Guniya..Swine Flu..??

2009-07-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

The viral fevers are so rampant in India (particularly, in southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka), it appears that the governments (including the central government) lost pulse on controlling the epidemic(s). Other day, when I visited a doctor at Sagar Hospital, he said "there have been so many of these cases, we had reported to the municipal authorities, hoping that some action would be taken". Another doc at Workhardt hospitals says "These viral fevers have been doing rounds". A colleague of mine in Bangalore says that about 80% of his neibors including his wife, son, and father had been infected with these fevers (not to mention himself). The important characteristics of these fevers are: 1. Severe pain in joints, and muscles, 2. Body pains, 3. High fever, 4. Significant reduction in platelet count (some times could become fatal).

The state and central governments are completely ignoring the primary health, and common man is suffering from these virulent fevers frequently. The extent of damage could be guessed by looking at offices that are giving holidays to staff to take care of these epidemics. One such example is Google, Hyderabad that had given a couple of days holidays (to its 2000+ staff) on reports that some of its staff contracted H1N1 (Swine Flu).

Atleast as of now, there seems to be no remedy in sight for controlling these epidmics.

Government of India - where expenditure far outweighs income

2009-06-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

According to a recent report, the Government of India's fiscal deficit in April was at 541.58 billion rupees ($11 billion) The tax receipts were at 74.62 billion rupees while expenditure were at 662.17 billion rupees for the first month of 2009/10 fiscal year (India FY starts from April and ends in March). The government must be finding it hard to print the currency to meet the level of disbursements!

Fund Managers can become farmers: Jim Rogers

2009-06-05T22:55:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview, Jim Rogers, a global investor says cotton, silver and sugar can be hot picks. He further suggests that there are tens of thousands of fund managers and becoming a farmer would be a better idea. He opines that the financial community is not going to be a great place to be in for the next 30 years. He says that the world is likely to face food crisis sooner or later, and it would be a better idea to invest in food and commodities.

Full interview may be found at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Interviews/Fund-Managers-can-become-farmers-Jim-Rogers/articleshow/4610704.cms?curpg=1

H-1B and L-1 Visa Regulations

2009-06-03T03:39:00.000-07:00

Recently, the proposed US law has become a hot topic for Indian IT/ITES/BPO sectors. The proposed laws are aimed at protecting the American jobs, and it's reported in local news papers that the laws are not fair. Big Indian outsourcing technologies like TCS, Wipro, and Infosys are not happy with the development. In specific, a new rule would bar companies with more than 50 U.S. employees from getting any additional work visas if more than 50% of their US workforce is made up of H-1B or L-1 visa holders. It's surprising to know that some companies prefer to get their work done by H1B visa holders rather than native Americans. It also appears that the sole motive for this are:

Lower wages that are paid to H1B visa holders.
H1Bs' also work extra hours without any additional pay for the purpose of Green card (that entitles them permanent resident status) application processing.
The employer may terminate the contract at any time without any obligation on its part

Though there is a lot of commotion on the 50/50 rule, it appears quite reasonable to have atleast 50% of employees US residents (permanent). Indian companies would do better if they conform to laws, and get on to their business as early as possible. It is also surprising to a common man, how US had allowed a US company to run in US with a majority of H1B employees.

On the other hand, it's discourating to resort to protectionism in Companies that had received US Government aid. The respective companies should be able to choose their employees without Government intervention. It might lead to lower efficiencies, and reduce productivity.

In any case, Obama government appears to be very careful in implementing the laws, and hope that the H1B laws would not be detrimental to countries like India, and China.

Credit Card Bill - Protecting the Rights of Consumes

2009-04-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

The credit card bill that is going become law in United States is a step taken by Obama government in right direction. Credit card companies are abusive of consumers' rights and privileges when it comes to interest rates, penalties for late payments, foreign exchange conversions (when purchases are made in foreign currency), levying additional charges towards card insurance, etc. India can take a hint and implement similar legislation.

U.S. credit card debt has jumped 25 percent in the past 10 years, reaching $963 billion in January, according to figures from the White House. The average outstanding credit card debt for households that have a card was $10,679 at the end of 2008, according to CreditCard.com, an online market.

General Elections India "Schedule 2009"

2009-04-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Election commission on Monday announced dates for the 15th Lok Sabha elections, which will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13. The schedule is as given below:

Andhra Pradesh: April 16 and 23.
Arunachal Pradesh: April 16
Assam: April 16 and 23.
Bihar: April 16, 23, 30 and May 7.
Chhattisgarh: May 13.
Goa: April 23.
Gujarat: April 30.
Haryana: May 7.
Himachal Pradesh: May 13.
Jammu & Kashmir: April 16, 23, 30, May 7, and May13
Jharkhand: April 16 and 23.
Karnataka: April 23 and 30
Kerala: April 16.
Madhya Pradesh April 23 and 30.
Maharashtra: April 16, 23, and 30
Manipur: April 16 and 23
Meghalaya: April 16.
Mizoram: April 16.
Nagaland: April 16.
Orissa: April 16 and 23.
Punjab: May 7 and 13.
Rajasthan: May 7.
Sikkim: April 30.
Tamil Nadu: May 13.
Tripura: April 23.
Uttar Pradesh: April 16, 23, 30, May 7, and May13
Uttaranchal:
Uttarkhand May 13.
West Bengal: April 30, May 7 and 13.
Andaman & Nicobar Islands: April 16.
Chandigarh: May 13.
Dadra & Nagar Haveli: April 30.
Daman & Diu: April 30..
Delhi: May 7.
Lakshadweep: April 16.
Pondicherry: May 13.

Polling schedule with states segregated by poll dates are given below:

Andhra Pradesh: April 16 and 23.
Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Chhattisgarh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep will have a single-phase poll on April 16.
Assam: April 16 and 23.
Bihar: April 16, 23, 30 and May 7.
Karnataka: April 23 and 30.

In Mizoram, it will be on April 16.
The polls are scheduled as follows:
Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh will have polls on all five dates.

Maharashtra: April 16, 23, and 30.
West Bengal: April 30, May 7 and 13.

Madhya Pradesh : April 23 and 30.
Manipur: April 16 and 23.
Orissa: April 16 and 23.
Punjab: May 7 and 13.
Jharkhand: April 16 and 23.

Goa and Tripura will have one-day poll on April 23.
Gujarat, Sikkim, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu will have one-day poll on April 30.
Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan will have a one-day poll on May 7.
Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Chandigarh and Puducherry will have polling on May 13.

Infosys - Where Trainee Employees Almost Outnumber the Regulars!

2009-04-13T04:37:00.000-07:00

A leading Indian software outsourcing and development firm Infosys Technologies Ltd. (popularly known as Infosys) appears to have it Trainees (Newly recruited employees not yet ready to take up regular work) outnumber the regular employees. According to recent news article from Economic Times of India, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/TCSInfosysWipro/Infosys-fires-2100-for-poor-performance/articleshow/4387963.cms, Infosys has as many as 45,000 trainees out of a total of 1,03,078 work force (which includes trainees).
It is amazing to know how aggressively the Indian outsourcing companies recruited freshes (almost having no skilset, except for college degrees) in anticipation of business growth. Indian top notch companies are now in a fix as to how to reduce their work force without adversely impacting their public relations and Companies' market cap. The most favored solution to issue pink slips is to cite performance reasons. Recently, Infosys has terminated the employment of about 2,100 people citing performance reasons.
It is obvious that the government and the Industry have difficulty adjusting to the changed realities in wake of economic down turn. In India, poverty rate is very high, and any retrenchment in jobs is likely to evoke adverse public reaction. In some cases, it also likely that the government may takeover the company(ies). Recent example of such takeover is Satyam Computers Ltd. The government has taken over the company and sold it highest bidder in an auction.
It is obvious that the government intervene, and provide more jobs so that the impact of retrenchments in IT related companies is minimized.

2009 - A Year of Economic Hardships

2009-03-06T02:42:00.000-08:00

The severe recession in the USA and other countries have crippling effect on world countries, including India. It was reported that the un-employment rate is the highest since 1983. The recession was compared with that of 1929.
The world stock markets are under severe pressure, and stock markets are declining month after month.
The root cause for recession can be traced to

Unrealistic "real estate" prices during boom years, and the cascading effect that followed.
The home prices have appreciated almost 100% during the past few years
The stock markets have appreciated several times without solid fundamentals

The speculation systematically infused in to the public by the media, and vested interests. US along with other other governments fueled the speculation (forgot to govern?). As a result, stock markets have sky rocketed, and the home prices followed. Unfortunately, the "boom" kept the end users away.

The banks and insurance companies are taking the direct hit of the recession. Motor industry, and other products and services industries are getting severely impacted.

Is it recession? Technically, yes. But, it is a correction being done for the wrong policies of the governments, particularly the United States. Unfortunately, most other governments including India followed the same policies as that of the US and are getting severely effected.

How much time it might take? It is reported that the current situation may last for a few years. The recovery time may be different for different countries. Faster the governments acknowledge the realities, and take corrective measures, lesser will be the time for recovery. If the governments tend to ignore the severity (down play it), it is likely to take several years before the normalcy is restored.

It is going to irreversibly change the economies of world countries. The currencies are going to depreciate at a faster rate, and savings are going to become less significant.

It is arguably the biggest challenge that "democracy" has faced to date.

RBI Stimulus 2008-2009 - a Staggering Rs. 400,000 Crores

2009-01-27T21:44:00.000-08:00

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has provided a stimulus exceeding Rs.400,000 crores (Rs. 400 billion) up till now towards boosting Indian Economy. The money is pumped in to the banking systems by way of reducing CRR, and other means. The interest rates have been cut several times during the past 3-4 months. The industry is looking forward for more stimulus. Fiscal difficit is shooting up to 6% of GDP.

Stock market below 10,000 levels - The Sensex has reduced by 50% from its peak of 21000. However, it is yet to reach realistic levels (considered to be at 7000). It might take another few months before it reaches those levels. The primary impediment for stock market correction are the general elections scheduled for later this year. We can see more stimulus packages being annouced till elections, and the fiscal dificit shoot up further.

Satyam Computers, and the Media

2009-01-10T17:25:00.000-08:00

Satyam Computers Chairman, Ramalinga Raju has admitted to accounting fraud, following Satyams bid to acquire family-owned Maytas Properties. Satyam is #4 IT company in India only after TCS, Infosys, and Wipro with over 50,000 employees and 2+ billion dollars revenues per year.

According to Raju, the tampering of records started a while ago to keep the company under his control, fearing a below average earning will prompt hostile takeover. Accounts have been inflated to the tune of Rs.6000 crore (One and half billion dollars approximately). But it appears that there are no significant bad loans. It is just that the surplus funds that the Company had been claiming are simply not there. The company still has solid client base, employee base, and infrastructure.

It appears that the scam has been projected out of proportions. Only the guilty could be punished, and all support could have been extended to the company from the government. The government could also have put a few directors on board Satyam. It's unfortunate that the government has decided to scrap the board, and put its own directors on board.

The media, particularly TV and news papers have recently been playing spoil sport over a wide range of issues. Recently, there was an assault case on a girl student (in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India), in which acid was thrown on the face of the girl student by another person, who claimed to have been refused his love. There was a huge coverage of the incident in the media. The police killed all the three persons (gents, aged about 20 years) involved in the acid throwing incident in an encounter (said to be an encounter, but people widely believe it was a false encounter). People also believe that the political bosses gave this prescription to police to counter media.

Who owns media? and who has to be punished for the misdeeds of media?

CertExams.com SCJP - Sun Certified Java Programmer Practice Tests

2008-11-20T23:59:00.000-08:00

CertExams.com, a leading certification practice exams website recently released SCJP (short for Sun Certified Java Programmer) certification practice exams. SCJP is a certification considered to be the most reputed programming certification today offered by Sun Microsystems (R).
The practice exams offered by CertExams.com consists of 250+ questions with explanations. The test simulator resembles that of actual exam simulator and the candidates improve the chances of passing the actual certification, the first time.
The objective covered by Sun Java certification include the following:

Section 1: Declarations, Initialization and Scoping
Section 2: Flow Control
Section 3: API Contents
Section 4: Concurrency
Section 5: OO Concepts
Section 6: Collections / Generics
Section 7: Fundamentals

Download SCJP practice tests may be downloaded from Cert Exams website.

Other practice tests offered by Cert Exams.com include the following:

The online exams consist of free demo questions, and 200+ questions in full version.

Economic Times of India - Feeding Speculation!

2008-11-09T03:06:00.000-08:00

As per a recent report by Economic Times of India (Times of India group) the inflation in India may approach zero in the second half of this fiscal (2008). The report appears to be wrongly interpreted by Economic Times, likely to be a deliberate misinterpretation. What actually the CEO of Edelweiss Mr. Rashesh Shah said was that the inflation might touch zero at certain times of 2009 fiscal. Being a responsible news paper in India, Economic Times need to maintain the integrity of its news better! The statement by Mr. Shah itself is highly speculative given that the inflation is in double digits, and there seems to be no significant deceleration in sight. The food prices are sky rocketing in India, and the common man is finding it very difficult to make the ends meet. Added to this, there is huge power shortage in India. The electric supply for villages ranges from 5 to 7 hours per day (24 hour day), and for that of cities range from 18 - 21 hours per day. In otherwords, there is 4 to 6 hours blackout from electric utility supply in cities like Bangalore, and 16 to 18 hours black out in rural areas. Therefore, the demand for electric generators (that run on diesel or gas) is going to be huge, which in turn increases product prices and inflation.

Title: Inflation to be near zero in H2 of this fiscal: Edelweiss

Link:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Inflation_to_be_near_zero_in_H2_of_this_fiscal_Edelweiss/articleshow/3691876.cms

RBI Desperate Measures to Safe Guard Liquidity and Stocks

2008-11-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

Govt. of India, specifically, Reserve Bank of India is cutting Repo rate, SLR, and CRR (Cash Reserve Ratio) over the past couple of weeks like never before. RBI, in an unprecedented move cut the repo rate, the cash reserve ratio (CRR) and the statutory liquidity ratio (SLR) all at one go to ease liquidity in the markets and propup the stock markets. All this at an inflation rate running in double digits. CRR has been reduced by over 250 basis points over the past couple of weeks releasing over Rupees one lakh crores (One hundred thousand crores) in to the banking system. Repo rate has been cut by about 200 basis points. Further, RBI has also opened a special window of Rs 20,000 crore for mutual funds redemptions
The price of food items such as vegetables, rice, and others are sky rocketing with 10+ inflation. It is not clear whether the Indian government is interested in safeguarding the interests of business houses or 1+ billion people of India.

Stock Market Melt Down

2008-10-06T02:51:00.000-07:00

The Indian Sensex fell below 12,000 mark, thus nullifying gains obtained when it reached an all time high of 21,000 in January 2008. The fall is bound to happen, and the government is entirely responsible for the stock market debacle. It failed to control the inflation, failed to control the real estate market, failed to control money market. The finance minister was categorical when the stocks reached all time highs that the market deserves it, adding fuel to fire!
According to experts, it might take anytime between 5 to 10 years before the stock market stabilizes, and returns to its glory.
See our previous threads on this topic:
http://anandsoft.blogspot.com/2006/02/india-bse-sensex-crosses-10000-mark.html
http://anandsoft.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_archive.html
http://anandsoft.blogspot.com/2008/03/stock-market-meltdown-and-us-economic.html
http://anandsoft.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html

Google - A limitation?

2008-09-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

Stock market is plummeting in India and worldwide...like never before. It appears that the bank call rates in India have increased to about 16%, and the stock market is down by about 500 points. By the way, what is meant by bank call rate? I tried to search using Google. Didn't get any useful result for the first few screens. I tried using quotes like " what is bank call rate"...nope..not even one result with exact phrase. The term call rate is so frequently used, but unable find a meaning using Google SE. The melt down in stocks and real estate market is long overdue...and respective governments deserve any blame for the same.

Oracle OCA DBA 10g Certification Tests

2008-08-31T04:10:00.000-07:00

SimulationExams.com has recently released Oracle OCA 10g DBA (Oracle Certified Associate) practice tests. Oracle OCA DBA Certification is intended for candidates who have at least one year of experience in Oracle DBA configuration and administration. The practice tests offered by SimulationExams include 250+ questions that provide a simulated test environment for candidates and facilitate taking final exam with confidence.

Oracle dba 10g is most widely taken certification at present, though 9i, and 11g are also offered by Oracle. Candidates are expected to renew certifications by taking renewal exam or by taking revised exam as and when it is offered. There are three levels in any Oracle certification.

* ORACLE CERTIFIED ASSOCIATE (OCA)
* ORACLE CERTIFIED PREOFESSIONAL (OCP)
* ORACLE CERTIFIED MASTER (OCM)

OCA is the foundation certification for taking OCP (Oracle Certified Professional) exams. Download Oracle Certification Exam or read more about OCA Certification exams at http://www.simulationexams.com/OracleCertificationExams.htm

3G Mobile Services in India

2008-08-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

India is all set to launch 3G mobile telephone services by october 2008 first in four indian metros. According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India chairman Nripendra Misra, a total of 32.5 MHz is available for allocation within the next 6-9 months. Trai has also recommended auctioning 200 MHz for broadband wireless access services like Wimax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access) and has proposed a national frequency management board to oversee spectrum availability and its efficient use. He hopes that the allocated spectrum would be enough for the next two years and said Trai would recommend freeing up more spectrum for those who lose out in this auction.

How is 3G different from 2G?
While 2G stands for second-generation wireless telephone technology, 1G networks used are analog, 2G networks are digital and 3G (third-generation) technology is used to enhance mobile phone standards.
3G helps to simultaneously transfer both voice and non-voice data (such as downloading information, exchanging e-mail, and instant messaging. The highlight of 3G is video telephony.

How will 3G services help you?
3G services will enable video broadcast and data-intensive services such as stock transactions, e-learning and telemedicine through wireless communications
All telecom operators are waiting to launch 3G in India to cash in on revenues by providing high-end services to customers, which are voice data and video enabled

What is Trai’s recommendation on 3G pricing?
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has recommended auctioning radio frequencies for 3G telecom services at a reserve price of Rs 1,000+ crore to companies seeking to offer nationwide high-speed Internet and streaming video.
The base price for spectrum in cities like Mumbai and Delhi and Category A telecom circles is Rs 120 crore (Rs 1200 million); in cities like Chennai and Kolkata and Category B circles Rs 80 crore (Rs 800 million); and in all other cities Rs 15 crore (Rs 150 million).

What are the frequency bands and quota for CDMA?
Trai has recommended three sets of frequency bands - 450 mhz, 800 mhz and 2.1 ghz. For CDMA players like Reliance [Get Quote] and Tata Teleservices 1.25 MHz each is offered. CDMA operators are free to bid both in the 2.1 GHz and the 450 MHz bands, but they will be allocated spectrum only in one. The pricing of these two bands is linked to the auction in the 2.1 GHz band. CDMA operators will pay the same as the second-highest GSM bidder. And if there is more than one claimant in the 450 MHz band, the reserve price will be half of that arrived at in the 2.1 GHz band. Another rider is that if the highest bid is a quarter more than the lowest, the lowest bidder has to raise its bid to 75 per cent of the winning bid.
But CDMA operators are likely to face problems. Operating 3G services on 450 MHz is a problem because we they do not have dual-band phones that work both in 450 MHz and in 800 MHz (the band in which CDMA operates in India).

What are the issues regarding 3G for providers and users?
3G has successfully been introduced in Europe. But several issues continue to hamper its growth.
What are the issues regarding 3G pricing?
Pricing has been a cause of concern. Spectrum auctions ran into billions of euros in Europe. In Europe, spectrum licensing fees were collected years before the 3G service was developed and it required huge investments to build 3G networks, hitting mobile operators’ margins.
However, in Japan and South Korea, spectrum licensing fees were not applicable as the focus of these countries were national IT infrastructure development.

Which companies have applied for 3G license?
GSM players like BSNL, MTNL, Bharti, and Vodafone and some international companies have shown in providing 3G services in India.
GSM players operate on 900 MHz and 1,800 MHz, while CDMA players operate on 800 MHz.
The Cellular Operators Association of India and the Association of Unified Service Providers of India are studying TRAI’s recommendations and have not given their comments.

What about the security in a 3G network?
3G networks offer a greater degree of security than 2G predecessors. By allowing the UE to authenticate the network it is attaching to, the user can be sure the network is the intended one and not an impersonator. 3G networks use the KASUMI block crypto instead of the older A5/1 stream cipher. However, a number of serious weaknesses in the KASUMI cipher have been identified.
In addition to the 3G network infrastructure security, end to end security is offered when application frameworks such as IMS are accessed, although this is not strictly a 3G property.

Where was 3G spectrum first introduced?
Japan was the first country to introduce 3G on a large commercial scale. In 2005, about 40 per cent of subscribers used only 3G networks. It is expected that during 2006 the subscribers would move from 2G to 3G and upgrade to the next 3.5 G level.
The success of 3G in Japan also shows that video telephony was the killer application for 3G networks. Downloading music was the biggest draw in 3G services.

In how many countries does 3G exist?
There are about 60 3G networks across 25 countries . In Asia, Europe and the USA, telecom firms use WCDMA technology. The WCDMA standard provides seamless global evolution from today’s GSM with support of the worlds’ largest mobile operators.
WCDMA technology is built on open standards, wide ranging mobile multimedia possibility, and vast potential economies of scale with the support of around 100 terminal designs to operate 3G mobile networks. 3G services were introduced in Europe in 2003.

What speed we can expect?
It is often suggested by industry sources that 3G can be expected to provide 384 kbit/s at or below pedestrian speeds, but only 128 kbit/s in a moving car.

Yahoo Search Creteria Revealed

2008-07-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

Prior to Yahoo!, Priyank worked at Ensim Corporation managing and evangelizing the company’s flagship hosted service automation platform, Unify. Earlier, Priyank worked as a Systems Consultant with Deloitte Consulting working alongside top-tier U.S. organizations to address their information systems needs.

Priyank earned a bachelor of technology in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where he also led student extra-curriculars and governance. He also holds a master of science in computer science from Stanford University.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you talk a little bit about the role that links play in Yahoo’s ranking algorithms?

Priyank Garg: Sure. There’s a lot of mythology in the industry sometimes around how links work. Links are a way for us to understand how Web sites and other people on the Web are recognizing other content that they have come across. The anchor text from that indicates context for the content that it’s linking to, and we have used this information in our algorithms for many, many years to better address search queries as they come into the search engine.

So links are important, but anchor text is just as important. What we look for are links that would be naturally useful to users in context, and that add to their experience browsing on the Web. And links of that nature, which are organic, will survive when the user comes across them and interests him. Those are the kinds of links that we are trying to recognize, identify, and attribute to the target content.

Eric Enge: Right. So part of what you are pointing at there is that relevance matters a lot. So getting a link from the bottom of a WordPress template that you create and distribute is completely irrelevant.

Priyank Garg: Exactly, that’s the kind of thing that we are trying to do all the time. The irrelevant links at the bottom of a page, which will not be as valuable for a user, don’t add to the quality of the user experience, so we don’t account for those in our ranking. All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won’t support the ranking. That’s what we are constantly looking at in algorithms. I can tell you one thing, that over the last few years as we have been building out our search engine and incorporating lots of data, the absolute percentage contribution of links and anchor text to the natural ranking of algorithms or to the importance in our ranking algorithms has gone down somewhat.

New sources of data and new features that Yahoo! has built and developed have made our ranking algorithm better. Consequently, as a percentage contribution to our ranking algorithm, links have been going down over time. I believe that is somewhat attributable to people abusing links on the Web. As that happens, the net quality of links goes down, and the net contribution directly goes down too. However, we’re still working hard to make sure all the high-quality links are effective in providing us information we need to search on queries.

Eric Enge: So from a mind-set point of view it sounds like you are much more focused on the high-quality links, because they are less noisy as a ranking signal?

Priyank Garg: Exactly, that’s right. If we take all the links together including the noise, the percentage contribution to our ranking system goes down, because we are discounting the noise more effectively over time.

Eric Enge: Right. I understand, but the links are still a very significant factor even now.

Priyank Garg: Yes. They continue to be a very significant factor.

I‘m saying that people and site owners should think about the site in all aspects of the user experience, and not obsess about links as the only thing that drives traffic to them. Links are critical factors, good organic links are earned through great content and great value that will add to the users’ visibility on search engines. But they can do a lot of things in parallel that will also make the search engine visibility better and beyond the search.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. So do you picture the role of links that will continue to decrease as new rankings do?

Priyank Garg: We are not focused on doing that. This is a developmental process and you might have anything happen, right? It somewhat depends on how the Web evolves. For example, if tomorrow there is a whole turnaround and all spammy links are shutdown, we might suddenly have a link signal noise quality go up so much that they might increase in importance. I don’t want to make predictions about what will happen in the future. All I can say is that we have seen that as we enhance our algorithms with a lot of other features, which we have been building, they have been contributing a lot of information to supplement the links. As a percentage contribution to the ranking function, links are relatively less than they were in the past.

Eric Enge: So it sounds like the process in which you are evaluating the noisiness of the signal is used to attenuate its impact on the results.

Priyank Garg: That’s right.

Eric Enge: That’s a very interesting concept. If link prices were going up at the same rate that gas prices are going up and people just stopped doing it, then the signal quality would improve and its importance would improve.

Priyank Garg: Yes. Our algorithms are evolving constantly; we are making changes to our systems multiple times a week. Some of the changes are minor. Most of them are so minor that we don’t even need to talk about it, but we are constantly evolving our system to keep up with the data on the Web that is also evolving. In search engines, the data is the key part of the output.

The data and the algorithm constantly evolve. The Web evolves, new tools come into play, new ways of interacting with users comes into play. It is a constant evolution all the time, and we adapt our algorithms to what we are seeing on the Web to make sure that our end goal of user relevance is optimized.

Eric Enge: Sure. Ultimately, that’s what it is all about. So, what kind of non-link based signals do you use?

Priyank Garg: Well, we have lots of data sources that we are recognizing all the time. We build understandings of how a site lays out its contents; what’s the distribution of the quality of the content; what’s the spamminess of the content on the site; what is the spamminess of an individual page; what is the spamminess of a site in aggregate; what’s the emphasis on words on the page; what’s the context of anchor text of the page? There are so many factors in there, hundreds and hundreds of elements.

Eric Enge: Right. As for off page factors, one example of something is the level of adoption on social media sites, like del.icio.us for example.

Priyank Garg: All of those factors are a part of it. To give you a general answer, the elements of the locations that provide the most signals are the ones where users are taking active steps to recognize the value of content, whether it be through links they have created on their clean Web pages, or through social media sites like del.icio.us.

So every location where the incentive is aligned for user value is the place where it matters most. If there’s a good Web site with reviews for a product and it’s generated by users, which have no incentive except to help other users, then those links would be valued more.

That would come out through the algorithm because of the quality of that site itself. If that site is used by users and they value it, that will represent itself on the rest of the Web, and the quality of the site will propagate down to the sources that it links as well.

Eric Enge: An incredibly important thing to consider is the type of relationships you are trying to develop in your market. It becomes really important to focus on the truly authoritative type of sites in your space, and I can make the argument without even bringing search engines into it, but it sounds like it is a very smart way for a SEO to think about promoting his/her site.

Priyank Garg: That’s right.

Eric Enge: Very interesting. Now, as you have already alluded to, there are, unfortunately, a lot of people out there generating spam type tactics, ranging from old-fashioned things like hidden text to purchasing links and these kinds of things.

Priyank Garg: Yes.

Eric Enge: So, what are the kinds of things that Yahoo typically does to fight spam?

Priyank Garg: We use algorithmic and editorial means to fight spam. What we have found is algorithms are very effective at fighting spam at the large scale, and our human editors are very effective at recognizing new techniques and providing us that early signal, which we can use to scale-up the detection processes. This two step approach helps us to be recognized as one of the best in the industry.

We show the least spam among the search engines, because both of our techniques are in action. Our spam detection techniques run on every page, every time we crawl it. Those detection algorithms are fed directly into our ranking function, where the spam detection is actually pretty high in importance.

Eric Enge: Yes, I guess the editorial function, which isn’t quite scalable, probably gets directed by the algorithmic detection of things that just smell bad, and by where people are reporting problems.

Priyank Garg: Yes it is. Yahoo! specialists who are doing all the editorial efforts are people who are great experts in this and they sometimes are ahead of our algorithms in detecting these things. Some times, the algorithms point out suspicious things, which they look at. There is a knowledge that builds up over time about what looks suspicious, which only humans can detect in the beginning.

Then, we use that to go to the next level of quality in our spam detection. Both of those mechanisms of algorithmic detection – followed by editorial follow-up or editorial detection followed by algorithmic follow-up - are in action all the time. Ultimately, the way to scale up the response is to build algorithmic ways to detect things on every page and every crawl. So everything that our editors do is constantly being mirrored by our spam team as quickly as possible in the algorithms.

Eric Enge: Yes, I understand. Do you have a situation where editors have the ability to take manual action if they see something extreme?

Priyank Garg: Our editors are authorized to take action for various kinds of situations like DMCA or legal deletes, such as for markets like France, where there is a restriction of certain types of content, such as Nazi memorabilia, which other markets don’t have. Consequently, there are various tools that are available to them. They are not focused on saying, I need to find a million pages of spam and remove them in this month.

We can use it to have our algorithms learn, we can use it to address it directly, we can use it to reach out to the webmaster and warn them that it might not be meeting our guidelines, so we do what is right for the users as best we can.

Eric Enge: Right. And sometimes, you are going to spot something which looks like a mistake. That’s the kind of the scenario where you might reach out to someone and ask if they know that they have hidden text that is kind of objectionable.

Priyank Garg: Yes, exactly. The point is that we don’t want to hurt people who may be doing things innocuously or starting to cross the line without being aware. And our clear intent is not to explicitly remove spam from our index. Our goal is to affect the ranking and reflect the relevance appropriately.

There is a query out there for which each page is relevant, and so the completion of our goal requires our algorithm to keep all the content we can, even the spammy ones. Of course, that’s something that becomes egregious on resources, and then sometimes, we have to make other choices. However, if there is a page that is generally okay but has some spamming techniques, someone might search for that URL, and as a search engine we want to make sure we have the most comprehensive experience we can.

But if someone goes out there and creates a hundred million spam DNS hosts, that’s just a waste of resources and we may not choose to take that approach. In principle, our desire is to keep as much of the Web available to users on our search engine, to rank it appropriately.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you saw a page that has some good content, but there are some spammy practices on it, it affects ranking as opposed to indexing? When it crosses a certain line of resource consumption, we may change the approach. But that is the intent, yes?

Eric Enge: Of course, another way you can end up with pages that are not high quality is if you have large sites, which perhaps have enormous reams of really good content, but because of their size, you may end up with pages that are thin in unique content.

You might also have a database of some addresses, so when you look at it it’s relatively thin in content, but then again, someone might actually be searching for the address of a particular business that’s on that page.

Priyank Garg: Yes. Again, as we work we’ve tried to make sure that our algorithms are constantly trying to optimize experience for the largest number of queries that we get from users. The net information content that’s available to users and ranks for queries is what we are looking at. If the page has unique content, whether it is from a large site or small site, it may mean that it’s less useful for most of the queries.

Eric Enge: Right. Yes, indeed. So, what about just paid links in general? What’s your policy on that?

Priyank Garg: There’s no black and white policy that makes sense in our mind for paid links. The principle remains value to the users. If a paid link is not valuable to the users, we will not want to give it value. Our algorithms are being organized for detecting value to users. We feel most of the time that paid links are less valuable to users than organic links.

But that’s not black and white, it is always a continuum. Yahoo! continues to focus on the element of recognizing links that are valuable to users, building mechanisms in our algorithms that attenuate the signal and capture as much value from that link in context, rather than worrying about it being paid or unpaid. As I said before, paid links are found to be generally less useful to users. That’s how we try to capture that aspect of it.

Eric Enge: Right. So now I would like to talk a little bit about some of the common meta tags that have emerged in the past couple of years: NoIndex, NoFollow meta tags, and NoFollow attributes, and robots.txt. In particular, the context I’d like to talk about is limiting the flow of what I will call link juice, or stopping a page from being crawled, or stopping it from being an indexed.

Let’s take them one at a time and talk about how you handle NoIndex?

Priyank Garg: NoIndex on the page essentially means that none of the content on that page will be searched or will be indexed in our search engines. If there is a page with a meta NoIndex on it, that page will not be recalled for any of the terms in its HTML.

Eric Enge: Right. Now let us say lots of people link to this page, which is NoIndexed and those are good relevant links, and then the NoIndexed page turns around and links to some other pages with good relevant content; is that NoIndexed page passing link value to those other pages?

Priyank Garg: We do index a page and we will show its URL in search results if it is very heavily linked to the Web, even if it has a NoIndex tag on it.

That is something that is a behavior that we follow. That’s been essentially applicable to situations where the page itself is high value, and it has many links that are very relevant to a particular query as indicated by anchor text.

Eric Enge: Right. I guess there is sort of a threshold in which the links indicate a high enough demand for that page’s content that it’s hard to not have it in the index.

Priyank Garg: Exactly. So in that particular case, we will have the URLs show up in the search results, but there will be no abstract. And the URL would show up only because of the anchor text; it will not show up because of any terms on that page.

Eric Enge: Right.

Priyank Garg: We do currently show pages which have a NoIndex if anchor text recommends that. We also discover links from a NoIndex page and pass the link weights and anchors to destination documents.

Eric Enge: So can we talk a little bit about NoFollow meta tags and NoFollow attributes?

Priyank Garg: Yes, so NoFollow meta tags mean that we will not use the links on a page as a attribution, but you may use them for discovery. The same thing applies for the NoFollow attribute on a link.

Eric Enge: Right. So the anchor text and the vote represented by the link for a given page are ignored if it’s NoFollowed or it’s on a page that has the NoFollow meta tag, but you will still look through the page and use it for discovery and potentially indexing if there are other reasons to index it.

Priyank Garg: Yes. Exactly.

Eric Enge: Yes, that makes sense. And then lastly, robots.txt? Say somebody uses robots.txt who don’t crawl a page, is it still possible for that page to get into the index?

Priyank Garg: Yes. If robots.txt files says don’t crawl, we will not crawl, we will not even try to retrieve that page at all from our crawling. But if the anchor text to that URL, as discovered on the Web, indicates a strong preference for it to show up for certain queries, it might show up.

One example in the past was the library of congress had a robots.txt denying crawling, but we still had that page show up because it was what users wanted for that query. So it will only show up when lots of anchor text on the Web suggest that this page on this particular query is relevant to that query.

Eric Enge: Right, okay so that makes perfect sense. So if you can’t crawl the page because it said don’t crawl it, then it’s hard to show a search snippet, for example, right?

Priyank Garg: Yes, we won’t have a search snippet for that page. We won’t even be showing the title of the page; the title we show will be generated by other information sources.

Eric Enge: Right. So all that makes sense and what it ranks for is really driven by the source of the links?

Priyank Garg: Exactly.

Eric Enge: That same phenomena could be ascribed to other technologies which just aren’t in practice crawled, like Flash files for example.

Priyank Garg: Adobe Flash files are somewhat different, because that’s not always what happens there. We do have an ability to crawl the HTML of the page, and they might give us an HTML title with the description of that page. There might be a version of content that might be available for crawlers for Flash. So there is another thing playing into it, but if there is nothing on the page except a link to a Flash files, then the other off-page factors will be what drive the visibility of that URL in the search results.

Eric Enge: Right, and then perhaps a PDF file?

Priyank Garg: We are actually able to convert PDF files to HTML.

Eric Enge: So you can actually look at the text inside the PDF file, and process that, and use that for context and everything else?

Priyank Garg: That’s right. We can also do that with Word files, Excel files, and many other formats.

Eric Enge: That’s, of course, something that has evolved pretty significantly over the past few years, because not so long ago nobody was looking inside PDFs.

Priyank Garg: Yes we continued to evolve our quality of tools to look into PDF files, and there are efforts that have been going on over the last few years, so that has been an evolving area as well.

Eric Enge: Is there any reason for a publisher to fear that issuing content in the form of a PDF file wouldn’t rank as well or get exposed to as many terms as the same content rendered in HTML?

Priyank Garg: That’s a tough one to say, and the reason is that my sense is users link less to PDF content or non-HTML content, just because it’s somewhat slower to view.

Consequently, what effects are playing into the visibility of this could be multi-variant. I wouldn’t make a blanket statement about HTML being equivalent to PDF because user attribution and other factors do play out to be different on the Web for different formats of context. So that is something that the publishers will need to think about.

Eric Enge: Right, I understand. So just to step back a second to the NoIndex, NoFollow and robots type stuff. The notion has been discussed in many circles on the Web of what people call link juice sculpting. Using tools like the NoFollow attribute a little more explicitly to show what you think is important versus which ones you don’t think are important. And so a classic example is, you have a Web site and you have your contact us, about us page, and legal disclaimer page linked to from every page of the site. What your thoughts on that kind of sculpting?

Priyank Garg: It’s interesting that this discussion is described in that context. A NoFollow tag creates an alternative state of attribution, but if you think about it, it’s not very different from not linking to those pages. When you link to a page, you are saying something about it. When you don’t link, that’s also an implicit comment, either you didn’t know about the page, or you didn’t think it was useful.

So if you think about link juice sculpting, this targeting of link attribution existed even before the NoFollow tag, where you could link and you could not link to something. Now you have an intermediate stage such that:

you can link without NoFollow
you can link with NoFollow
you can not link.

So, it’s not something that is entirely out of the blue, it’s just an intermediate stage that’s created; and it’s not anything terribly new. You should always make sure you link to content that’s useful to users and if you link to the right content, that will work best.

One of the things Yahoo! has done is look for template structures inside sites so that we can recognize the boiler plate pages and understand what they are doing. And as you can expect, a boiler plate page like a contact us or an about us is not going to be getting a lot of anchor text from the Web and outside of your site. So there is natural targeting of links to your useful content.

We are also performing detection of templates within your site and the feeling is that that information can help us better recognize valuable links to users. We do that algorithmically, but one of the things we did last year around this time is we launched the robots-NoContent tag, which is a tool that webmasters can use to identify parts of their site that are actually not unique content for that page or that may not be relevant for the indexing of the page.

If you have ads on a page, or if you have navigation that’s common to the whole site, you could take more control over our efforts to recognize templates by marking those sections with the robots-NoContent tag. That will be a clear indicator to us that as the webmaster who knows this content, you are telling us this part of the page is not the unique main content of this page and don’t recall this page for those terms.

That kind of mechanism is something that we provide as a control for site owners to be more explicit about what parts of the page are boiler plate. But the NoFollow links are very different from not putting the link, and so I don’t see this to be very different in terms of the tools available to webmasters.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. So you have a NoContent that is interesting too, because I am sure when people use that it just removes potential ambiguities in the interpretation of the page and allows them to focus the attention on all the things that are most important.

Priyank Garg: Exactly right.

Eric Enge: Yes, so that’s a good tool. Have any of the other search engines moved toward supporting that?

Priyank Garg: We’ve actually brought this up in our conversations. You might recall earlier this month we all blogged about the support we have for robots exclusion protocols.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Priyank Garg: And we resolved a bunch of the small variations among us. So it has been brought up. I don’t believe any of the others are supporting it yet, but we will find out in time.

Eric Enge: What is it that Yahoo does when you discover duplicate content across two different sites and how does it deal with that in terms of the quality of the search experience?

Priyank Garg: Our goal is to surface good, unique content for users and provide the maximum amount of relevant information for every query the user makes. So, our efforts are constantly to detect duplicate content sources, recognize the parent source as much as possible, and attribute content as much as possible to the parent or the original author for duplicate content. Then we try and surface that for every query that we receive that it’s relevant for. Say site-A has content which is duplicated on site-B, and we recognize that A is the parent, then for a query related to that content will likely surface A higher. But if a query says I want content from side B on those terms, we will obviously try to surface that.

Eric Enge: But it’s not always that easy to know who the parent is.

Priyank Garg: That’s true, that’s something that it is not always easy to know the best page, but its part of our algorithmic efforts to detect that intent, and we continue to do that. So there are lots of signals that can often work, and in most cases works when the duplication is not egregious or intentional. It is entirely a function of how the Web is operating. Usually we do a reasonable job, but sometimes it’s not always possible.

Eric Enge: Right. And then of course is the extreme version where it’s a copyright violation and sometime that escalates itself to you in the form of DMCA requests.

Priyank Garg: That’s right, we have a well-documented process for DMCA complaints. Those complaints, when they come in, are investigated directly by our support and editorial teams and can be acted upon in a very targeted manner. So if you or any site owner has any content that you believe has been plagiarized or taken without your consent and you file a DMCA complaint with us, we will investigate that and take down the content that is found to be in violation of the copyright rules.

Eric Enge: Right, although I think it’s probably fair to say that if you file a DMCA request that you best be the owner of the content.

Priyank Garg: That’s of course true. You better know what you are pointing out.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. Are there situations in which extreme amounts of duplicate content can be flagged?

Priyank Garg: The essential policy on duplicate content is not to treat it as negative; it’s essentially to treat it as an optimization on our systems. But there is a point where that no longer holds true. A common example could be a spammer, who has hundreds of millions of posts up on the same content.

That’s a clear example where you can say that it’s not really duplicate content, it is just an egregious practice that can affect the entire site. So, there is a point at which it does become a violation of our editorial guidelines.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. To finish I would like to see if you have some general advice that you would like to offer to publishers and SEOs in terms of what Yahoo views as best practices.

Priyank Garg: Yes. The basic principle remains the same as you said; be aware of users and that’s what we will be continued to gear ourselves toward. But be search engine smart so that we can discover your content. The robots NoContent and other tools that we have provided are means that give you control and if you use them, they can work for you. We don’t expect everyone to have to use those controls, and we continue to build algorithms to do much of that work.

Yahoo Site Explorer continues to be a great avenue to learn about what we are doing. We have been doing some work learning from the last feature we launched, which was well-appreciated, the Dynamic URL Rewriting. That is a tool that we have seen in multiple examples as having really significantly increased the quality of the experience of site owners.

I talked about this feature again at SMX Advanced in June 2008, and while speaking on the panel, someone from Disneyworld was in the audience. Within five minutes, while I was still describing it, he went to Site Explorer and set it up, and he is already seeing the benefits of what he had implemented.

Eric Enge: Right. I really appreciate you are taking the time to speak with me today.

Priyank Garg: Thank you Eric!

Source: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-priyank-garg.shtml

Blackberry India - The controversy

2008-06-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

The government of India, concerned about the BlackBerry secure communication, directed RIM to install servers in India so that e-mail traffic can be monitored. Alternatively, the government requested RIM to part with the codes so that it can monitor the communications in real-time, if required. However, RIM is undecided about the solutions offered by the Indian government

The Indian government also made it clear to RIM that it would be impossible to operate in India in long run without conceding to its demand. The Indian government sees it as a security threat and wants all communications in and out of the country to be monitored as and when required.

RIM is confident of resolving the issue. "There should be some solution by June-end," Raja told reporters. In May, Raja had said RIM was expected to resolve India's security concerns within two months.

Food Prices and India

2008-05-04T21:12:00.000-07:00

According to a recent report, worldwide food reserves are at their lowest in 35 years, so prices are likely to moveup for the foreseeable future. "Past shocks have quickly dissipated, but that's not likely to be the case this time," says Ghurkan a Rome-based FAO analyst. "Supply and demand have become unbalanced, and... can't be fixed quickly."

The world's food import bill will rise in 2007 to $745 billion, up 21% from last year, the FAO estimated in its biannual Food Outlook. In developing countries, costs will go up by a quarter to nearly $233 billion. The FAO says the price increases are a result of record oil prices, farmers switching out of cereals to grow biofuel crops, extreme weather and growing demand from countries like India and China. "The situation could deteriorate further in the coming months," the FAO report cautioned, "leading to a reduction in imports and consumption in many low-income food-deficit countries."

The bio-fuels are siginificantly responsible for increased food costs. Several countries like India have switched to bio-fuel crops in place of Rice, and the trend is expected to grow.

AT&T Finds It Hard to Hire Local Talent

2008-03-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent.

"If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down," he said.

Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

"We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he said, referring to the Indian city where many international companies have "outsourced" technical and customer support workers.

"I know you don't like hearing that, but that's the way it is," he said.

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T's repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080327/tc_nm/att_workforce_dc

The Stock Market Meltdown and US Economic Worries

2008-03-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Indian stock markets (BSE/NSE) have declined over 6000 points from somewhere around 21000 to about 14000 over the past couple of months. The primary reason for the meltdown was attributed to the US mortgage security crises, and sub-prime crises. Though it may be true to certain extent, the primary reason for the decline is that the stocks are inflated to a large extent and a correction is overdue.

Similar correction may be expected from the India realty that had shot several times over the past few years.

Related article:

http://anandsoft.blogspot.com/search?q=bse

E-mail Spammer Pleads Guilty

2008-03-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

USA - A man, described as one of the world's top e-mail spammers pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, and failure to file a tax return.

Robert Alan Soloway, 29, was dubbed "the spam king" by prosecutors who said he used networks of compromised computers to send out millions upon millions of junk e-mails since 2003.

He was arrested last summer and charged in a 40-count indictment. He agreed to plead guilty to the three charges and the rest were dropped, including e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and numerous other counts of mail and wire fraud.

Prosecutors said Soloway made hundreds of thousands of dollars from his spamming business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp. When he's sentenced in June, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman will determine how much restitution he must pay.

The government already seized at least four of his bank accounts, and Soloway has agreed to take a polygraph test as to his remaining assets.

He could face up to 20 years in prison.