Entries from March 2004 ↓

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Posted By Prostoalex on Slashdot [PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network ] about PeopleAggregator

prostoalex writes “When Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zaibatsu and Tribe.net just don’t cut it, meet PeopleAggregator, an open-source, PHP-written, FOAF-based social network. There’s the site and there’s the source in case you decide to launch your own. I found out about PeopleAggregator reading this interview with Mark Canter on Read/Write Web today.” I wish such sites would provide profile-conversion tools to encourage jumping ship from one to another.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Nicholas Petreley is uspet about the developers who are violating the spirit of GPL license and creating their own versions of licensing. According to him the spirit of opensource is “share and share alike” and as Free Software Foundation puts it, it is free as in “free speech” and not free as in “free beer”. The article further describes how developers have invented some license compromises.

Here’s the crux of the matter: It’s illegal to create and sell a proprietary application based on GPL code. Given the reality that people are always going to create proprietary applications, developers invented some license compromises that make it possible to build proprietary applications on open-source foundations.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Dwight Silverman praises Firefox Browser and claims it to be Easy, Fun, Fast, Safe & Free. You can make out his love for FireFox by this comment :

I’ve been using Firefox for several months, beginning with earlier releases under the name Firebird. Here’s how good it is: If it weren’t for incompatibilities with some Web pages designed only for Internet Explorer, I’d probably use this as my only Web browser.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Via Slashdot : David Lazarus writes a special report on Sfgate.com : How one offshore worker sent tremor through medical system ? . The reports traces how a transcription work was sub sub sub sub contracted and landed up in Pakistan without the knowledge of the client. They were able to discover only when they recieved a threatening e-mail from Pakistan when the sub sub sub contractor didn’t pay the dues of the end contractor. Even though it hits the idea of outsourcing and offshoring to other countried - its a genuine concern.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Bob Davis from the Associated Press writes in WSJ sited on mlive.com how we can learn the lessons of outsourcing from 4 historical tales that help illuminate today’s debate.

(1) Even high-skilled, good-paying jobs are vulnerable.

(2) Trade liberalization often works with technology to undermine powerful interests.

(3) Domestic workers are always vulnerable to competition from foreigners willing to work for less.

(4) Politics can slow down the transforming effects of new technology.

Popularity: 7% [?]

CIOL carries an article why India urged to embrace 4G ? According to the experts advise India must move forward in setting up a 4G forum that can provide insights into the country’s needs and capabilities in the area of 4G telecom networks.

Expressing the importance of having a 4G forum for the country, Jorge M Pereira, European Commission, Information Society Directorate General said that India should move forward in having a 4G forum that can provide insights into the country’s needs and capabilities in the area of fourth generation telecom networks.

“This forum when formed, can address issues like R&D in 4G technologies, educating the industry about 4G, expanding wireless with an increase in demand, seamless mobility and utilizing technologies of higher frequency spectrum,” Pereira added.

India as a country has got a big talent pool in terms of educational institutions and research organizations and this can help the country in early adoption of technologies like 4G. “India is very good in terms of talent, so the country can provide the talent manpower needed in the areas of computing infrastructure, signal processing, backbone networks, multiple access technologies, channel coding and VLSI,” informed, Prof Shankar Lall Maskara from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Creation of such forum will boost the chances of India moving towards cutting edge technologies like 3G and 4G. “Establishment of 4G forum is essential for the country now. In fact I am going to meet up with the government of India representatives and very soon we will have this forum functioning as a body,” said, Ramjee Prasad, Director, Center for TeleInFrastruktur (CTIF), Aalborg University, Denmark.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Google has launched two more services currently in preview state at labs.google.com The two services are (1) Personalized Web Search : personalized search results based on user’s interests & (2) Web Alerts : get alerts about new web pages on a topic of interest.

More at Sfgate.com & Forbes.com

Popularity: 8% [?]

via IndianExpresPharma major Lupin Ltd would set up the first of about the 100-odd rural convergence centres (RCCs) -planned by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) across India to foster public private partnerships to accelerate rural development.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Saritha Rai writes in New York Times how Tiny Loans Make a Big Difference in Lives of Poor. The article traces Mr. Khosla when he was Shamsabad and was listening to the women in rural areas who received tiny loans from a microfinance program run by SHARE Microfin and how it helped them start homegrown businesses, transformed their poverty-stricken lives and made better education possible for their children.

I was completely blown as I listened to the stories of these tenacious women,” Mr. Khosla said. “I started crying.” In his view, the microfinance initiatives he visited in India and Bangladesh last month ran more efficiently than most Silicon Valley organizations. “They have sophisticated credit algorithms,” he said. “Does the woman own a buffalo? Some chickens? Does she have a toilet in her home? What kind of roofing material does her home have? Does she bring a shawl to the village meeting?”

Popularity: 7% [?]

Via LinuxWorld : Internet whizz Marc Andreessen at the 3rd annual “Open Source in Government” conference came up with his personal top twelve reasons for why open source will boom over the next 5-10 years.

(1) “The Internet is powered by open source.”

(2) “The Internet is the carrier for open source.”

(3) “The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed.”

(4) “It’s simply going to be more secure than proprietary software.”

(5) “Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments.”

(6) “Incentives around open source include the respect of one’s peers.”

(7) “Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants.”

(8) “Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel.”

(9) “Embedded devices are making greater use of open source.”

(10) “There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren’t software companies.”

(11) “Companies are increasingly supporting Linux.”

(12) “It’s free.”

Popularity: 7% [?]

If you think that only US citizens are witnessing the trend of outsourcing then you are wrong. Even the Indian professionals are slowly seeing the rise of outsourcing trend from very low-tech to high-tech job. Job security is the most unsecure word today. Even though jobs are not directly going overseas, people are seeing it move to ‘another company’.IT operations at Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. are being turned over to IBM India in a deal which could be worth up to $750 million dollars over 10 years and this is said to be the largest deals in the history of IT outsourcing in the India market as told by Dean Douglas, vice president for telecommunications at IBM Global Services to internetnews.com.

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Via Keralanext.com : From next month Simputer or a simple computer will be commercially produced and will go on sale. Simputer has been branded as Amida Simputer and jointely produced by Bharat Electronics and PicoPeta Simputers Ltd. It’s three variants will be priced at between Rs.9,950 and Rs.19,900.

Even the Indian PResident Mr. Kalam is excited about Simputer and telephoned from New Delhi to compliment the manufacturers.

Lauding the four IISc scientists for conceiving, designing and developing the product indigenously, Kalam said he was proud of the institute for turning such gifted people into entrepreneurs, who set up PicoPeta Simputers Ltd.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Via Express India : ‘India’ is emerging as a great global brand name and recieving an unprecedented attention.

India is receiving unprecedented attention of industry, media and governments globally. This will help Indian companies in the long-term to have an edge over other countries that are considered to be India’s competitors in outsourcing business,” says Mr Karnik.

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Anshu Kumar in Fiancial Express writes why it is important for Indian Outsourcing Indsutry and Indian Software industry in general needs a strategic approach and expand its boundaries beyond India. The need is due to changing state of Doallar vs INR, geographical limitations, political situations and other kinds of concerns and threats:

National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) president Kiran Karnik says Indian software companies will have to look at other countries in order to build defences against geo-political risks, regional economic conditions, change in currency rates and possibly and an anticipated shortage of skill pool in some of the specific technology areas.

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Via Information Week : According to a survey of both software vendors and major business customers by IDC, up front license purchasing will soon be replaced by subscription-licensing plans, in which vendors and customers adopt a pay-as-you-go arrangement that extends over several years. Amy Mizoras Konary, program manager for software pricing and licensing at IDC points out the problem in the current licensing method:

The problem with traditional licensing, she added, is that customers are often unable to track the amount of software they actually use, much less predict what they need. “Most customers are guessing on how much they’re using, so they tend to overbuy,” Konary said.

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Via News Today: According to the study conducted by IBM Business Consulting Services in association with CII, with the support of Department of Information Technology and the Department of Telecommunications the rural india cannot progress with traditional approach. The need of the nation is to get ‘connected’ using the latest in the information technology

India should target a minimum of 10 million subscribers by 2010 and 35 million subscribers by 2020 in urban India across homes, enterprises and public kiosks, which is the vision according to the CII-DIT-DOT final report of the study on Broadband Economy: Vision 2010.

India’s governance will slow its rise as a tech competitor

Popularity: 8% [?]

Via Forbes : Federal Trade Commission has aressted Zachary Hill , a ’scam artist’ who who crafted fake e-mail messages to trick hundreds of Internet users into providing credit card numbers and other sensitive information. According to the report Phishing has emerged as a favorite tool of identity thieves.Victims of identity theft should visit http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft

Links:

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Another interesting story on Slashdot - Builder.com Writers Outsourced to India.

An anonymous reader writes “Builder.com, which is part of CNet.com, is now outsourcing some of their writing to India. The funny thing is, the editor claims it’s not as much about money as because he’s ‘getting a better interface with producers of the content.’ He claims CNet isn’t giving up control, but if they’re the publisher, and he’s the editor, and they can’t hire and manage their own writers, why shouldn’t the Indians just put up their own website to replace CNet, and we can all read what they write direct? I mean, we’re all going to be buying software direct from Indian companies soon, so why not?” Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. OSDN also runs sites like devchannel.org which are more-or-less direct competitors of builder.com.

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The dotcom age is not gone. Yahoo! India is number two in logins after US and Yahoo! India expects a growth of 40% per annum, according to the article by Rahul Gupta in CIOL. In another article in Business World [29 March issue] the other risers in the dotcom’s are …

Rediff.com

AutoMartIndia.com

Bazee.com

Naukri.com

Traveljini.com

Makemytrip.com

Indiabulls.com

Popularity: 7% [?]

BBC UK has an interesting story about how some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service by combining ‘e-mail’ with the traditional ’snail mail’

Popularity: 7% [?]

The 802.16 standard, otherwise known as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax), has been getting much hype over the past year as being the next biggest technology since Wi-Fi. Some analysts believe that WiMax poses a threat to the large mobile phone companies, most of which have already invested billions in other technologies to deliver voice and data over the airwaves (WiMax can cover a distance of 50 kilometers, ten times more than a 3G base station); e.g. EV-DO, a next-generation wireless network that delivers broadband service based on a technology called CDMA. The other side of the story can be found at Alarmist WiMax Predictions [WiFiNetNews | Fleishman’s Blog]

For WiMax to pose a threat to any other wireless technology, it will need a major operator to commit to building an extensive network. That hasn’t happened. Also, WiMax wouldn’t pose a significant threat to 3G or Wi-Fi until the mobile version of the standard is complete. Once it’s complete, vendors have to make equipment and that gear must be certified, then an operator must build a network. That process will take many years.

WiMax could leave Wi-Fi in the dust | The Age

The promise of WiMax revealed at conference | Computerworld

Reliance part of global wireless initiative | CIOL

Locate the Hot Spots in India (The lisiting provides more than 100 hotspots but only for bangalore)

Popularity: 7% [?]

VSNL, India’s first and the largest ISP has acquired DishnetDSL for Rs.270 crorers. Dishnet DSL was the first DSL service provider in India and has presence in many locations throughout india providing Dial-Up and Boradband services.

On the other hand Telecom Regulator Authority of India (TRAI) today removed a major hurdle for internet service providers (ISPs) by permitting them to use any medium, including copper wire, optic fibre and radio to establish the last-mile connectivity

Popularity: 6% [?]

Yet another step towards a wirefree generation, the launch of NFC Forum [a.k.a Magic Touch RFID Technology] will enable the standardization of NFC in various electronics devices to communicate with each other just by holding them near each other. The NFC forum is established by Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and Sony Corporation.

Via WirelessDevNet:

About Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification (RFID) and interconnection technologies. NFC operates in the 13.56 MHz frequency range, over a distance of typically a few centimetres. NFC technology is standardized in ISO 18092, ECMA 340, and ETSI TS 102 190. NFC is also compatible to the broadly established contactless smart card infrastructure based on ISO 14443 A, i.e. Philips MIFARE(R) technology, as well as Sony’s FeliCa* card.

Near-Field Communications Opens Vision Of E-Commerce

NFC , Application & Product information on Philips

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New Top Level Domain Names

The other applications are: “.asia,” “.cat,” “.jobs,” “.mail,” “.post,” “.tel” and “.travel.” The “.tel” name was sought by two groups.

In 2000, seven new top-level domains were added, including “.biz,” “.info,” “.name” and “.pro,” which were unsponsored, and “.aero,” “.coop” and “.museum,” which were sponsored.

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Topix.net provides news on various topics and provides an RSS feed for the same. There is a similar site called Newstrove.com but topix.net feeds are more accurate, relevant and exhaustive. The advantage of Newstrove is that , it also offer Java Script which can be included in any web page, in case the web server doesn’t support XML parsing. The twop indian news sites who have started XML syndications are IndianExpress.com and Rediff.com, I don’t know why Timesofindia.com which claims to be the number one Indian news site on the internet doesn’t have one. The same is true for Googlenews.com which doesn’t offer any RSS feeds. But there are many tools avialable on the net who parse the html to get RSS XML feeds out of them. This method is called “scarping” and it violates copyright, but still there are many tools available and I remember that there was something for Timesofindia.com too.

The convinience which these feeds offer are:

(1) You don’t have to visit numerous news/content sites everyday, you can simply subscribe to the RSS feeds.

(2) These RSS feeds generally includes main home page (headlines) and also categorical and topical headlines. Thus I may subscribe only to Cricket feed from Rediff and business news feed from financial express.

(3) These feeds can be viewed in a web based aggregators likes bloglines or blogstreet and destop applicatications like Feedreader.[all are free]

(4) Thus I save lots of browsing time and visit exactly the page whose title has generated interest.

(5) You can also use these topical feeds in your web pages, e.g. a cricket blogger or a web master may show latest headlines in his web page / blog side bar which adds more intelligence to his web page.

(6) Many others things can be done with this syndication method depending upon the creativity, the most interesting I find are blagg and Rollup.org which allows you to subsribe to various syndicated feeds and re-mix them. That is, the headlines are generally shown from one site , then another and then the next one in these aggregators all the individual feeds are randomly mixed and displayed.

To know which sites from India offer syndication you can visit Syndic8.com.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Reliance Industries Ltd. Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani expects that India’s entertainment industry could ride the broadband wave to grow to $200 billion in the next 20 years. The broadband initiative from Reliance is named as Broadband Baharat. Mr. Ambani was addressing Ficci Frames 2004, a global convention of the business of entertainment. The great advantage according to him is that:

This is because India has the largest digital infrastructure in the world, is not burdened by legacy systems and can leapfrog to the latest technologies cost-effectively, he added.

The Indian Animation Industry which estimated to be a billion-dollar industry in India will grow at 30 per cent annually in the near future as expected by Walt Disney President Andy Bird during FICCI-FRAMES 2004.

According to another REPORT by by Ernst and Young and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry:

12th Convergence India 2004 international exhibition and conference will focus on the tools, technologies and policy perspectives of the emerging convergence scenario in India, showcasing innovative products and services. The 12th Convergence India 2004 event will be held during 18-20 March at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. The event will incorporate carriers and telcos, broadcast and cable; multimedia and internet; networks and computing; IT hardware and software; smart card technologies; satellite and space technologies and telecommunication equipments.

While speaking at Convergence India 2004, TRAI Chairman, Pradip Baijal said that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) will issue guidelines for the Internet and broadband sector in the next fortnight.

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Have you seen the latest IBM Linux advertisement on TV?. It is fantistically conceptulazied , Linux is shown as a kid who befriends everybody wherever he goes. Thus, Linux is growing / The future is open. View the Flash Version

ibm.com/open (philosophy) & ibm.com/linux (products)

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Via FinancialExpress:
New Delhi is exploring technology alliances with Paris on a range of areas including smart cards, e-governance, tele-medicine, telecommunications and open-source software.

In a joint statement after a meeting of the fourth Indo-French joint working group (JWG), communications and IT minister Arun Shourie has solicited the support of France “for reversing the rising tide of protectionism in the western world, which could inhibit innovation, impose additional costs on cross-border exchanges and reduce competitiveness of IT products and services.” More…

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According to the article, written by David Shaffer, president of the Public Policy Institute, an Albany-based think tank,said that the “one-sided” blame game of blaming India and outsourcing should stop.

“A lot of our legislators are looking at the scary news stories about call centers in India. They think they see a way to shift the blame. So, one bill after another is being introduced in the legislature to “crack down” on companies that employ people in other countries,” claims Shaffer, while adding that only two of the legislators — Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver have not joined this bandwagon. “Nothing in this or any of the other proposals would create one single job in New York State. But more important, anybody with even a marginal understanding of New York’s economy should know that we gain far more from international trade than we lose,” Shaffer’s article further goes on to add.

Fact is, we need to imitate India, not whine about it.”

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Bandwidth to India Surges

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