It's a $38-billion company with a touchingly simple ambition. Cisco wants to become a household name. Having sold over 80 million devices to consumers the world over, it no longer wants to be perceived as a boring company that only manufactures networking gear such as routers and switches. The ambition may sound soft but for Cisco, it is serious business.
The fourth quarter (January-March) is usually a weak quarter for the Indian IT companies due to the lesser number of billing days. This time, however, the good news is that the rupee has depreciated by about 1.3 per cent during the quarter. Every increase/decrease of a percentage point in the rupee lowers/adds to the operating (EBIDTA) margins by 30-50 basis points (bps).
Not a single Indian insurance company offers a comprehensive anti-cybercrime policy for the corporate sector. In India there are few takers for cybercrime insurance primarily because of the high cost vis-a-vis their exposure. These policies are of a high value and, on request from a few brokers, are customised for banks. Cybercrime policies in the US cover e-theft, denial or impairment of e-service, e-communication, e-vandalism, e-threat and fraudulent e-signatures.
Projectors seem to have come of age and there is no dearth of quality images, if you have the money .
Highlighting piracy as the main problem concerning the Hindi film industry, founder of Yash Raj Films, Yash Chopra, said Bollywood is losing Rs 16,000 crore annually to piracy. During Ficci Frames 08, he appealed to the I&B Ministry to work out a plan of action against piracy. YRF has digitised its distribution in a bid to combat piracy. They are also getting aggressive on the new media. He lamented industry does not have the legal authority to book the wrongdoers in piracy.
The media and entertainment industry in 2007 grew by an estimated 17 per cent over the previous year to touch Rs 51,300 crore (Rs 513 billion), according to a recent Ficci-PwC 2008 report. However, this is 6 percentage points lower than the 23 per cent growth registered in 2006. All the major segments within the M&E industry, comprising TV, film and print, will see a year-on-year fall in their growth rates going by the report estimates for 2007.
In its efforts to thwart Microsoft, IBM had unveiled Lotus Symphony a few months back, challenging the former's dominance in the office desktop software market. The package includes a word processor, spreadsheets and a presentation suite. Edward Orange, director, Lotus Business Unit (Software Group), IBM Asia-Pacific, said, "Since it's free, Lotus Symphony is a formidable challenge to Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite in the market for Windows-based productivity software."
Indian operators offering BlackBerry services, top executives of Canadian telco Research in Motion (RIM), the company that owns the brand, security agencies and officials of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) are expected to meet on March 14 to answer the concerns of security agencies in a bid to prevent having BlackBerry services terminated after the March-end deadline.
According to a survey conducted jointly by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB, the consumer Internet market is growing at 30 per cent and this is lucrative enough for Microsoft and Google, with each trying to outdo the other. The 38.5 million Internet users, according to an IAMAI study, have become the prime target for numerous advertisers clouding the web. Recently, Microsoft launched the platform in India with four leading publishers.
The Central Board of Excise and Customs has been empowered to frame a scheme for preparation and filing of service tax returns through service tax return preparers, similar to the tax return preparer scheme for income tax introduced in 2006. The performance of the TRP scheme so far, however, indicates that it is in need of fine tuning - in terms of recruitment, training and remuneration - to become more effective and serve as a benchmark for the STRP scheme.
The Open Document Format (ODF) proponents are alleging that the Microsoft has "cajoled" Indian NGOs to write to the IT ministry and BIS, supporting OOXML as a standard.
Logitech Squeezebox, the new music gadget on the block, is a wireless box that uses wi-fi to play music. It can be integrated in home theatre system and speaker or ear phones too.
The company also maintains that its original equipment (OEM) partners such as Taiwan-based Asustek Computer, HTC, HCL, Gigabyte and Palm, will start rolling out cheaper internet-enabled notebooks and handsets at prices that will drive mass adoption in emerging markets.
Shorter durations and smaller-value transactions, analysts reason, allow businesses to spread operational risk and develop new relationships according to business demands.
From CCTV cameras to mobile jammers and perimeter protection equipment, the Indian electronic security market is worth over Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion).
Indian PC and console game developers and publishers are gradually waking up to the potential of developing games completely in India.
With a fast-expanding pool of billionaires and millionaires, India is now an important market for pleasure-craft peddlers.
Mobile banking will soon reach Indian villagers as state govts tie up with banks, telecom companies to provide this facility to them.
While the extent of Iran's isolation was unclear, many blogs alleged that the cable cuts and outages in West Asia were a ploy by an intelligence agency to disrupt Iranian commerce, targeting an emerging petroleum exchange that the country was shortly hoping to roll out.
Anti-virus and anti-spyware technologies, which are packaged as 'blacklist' solutions, are gradually giving way to what security experts claim is a far more effective IT security technology based on 'whitelist' solutions.
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