Raman's hacking expertise is much in demand -- and not from criminal elements. Indian firms and multinationals like ABN Amro Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Bank of Maharashtra, Bombay Dyeing, HSBC, ICICI Bank, Indiabulls, Centurion BOP, Citibank, India Infoline, Ispat Industries and Kotak Group proactively seek his services. Raman's hacking expertise is much in demand -- and not from criminal elements.
By far the most awaited game of the year, Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) takes gamers on the streets of Liberty City, a dystopic version of New York City in 2008. What propels this violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire is the fun factor weaved into every scene. GTA IV has vehicles that look even more fantastic.
The broad idea is to help freshers and high-potential employees develop soft skills not generally taught at universities, and simultaneously increase retention rates in an industry that has attrition rates between 30 and 50 per cent. The industry, according to Nasscom estimates, accounts for almost $11 billion and employs slightly over 700,000 professionals (in terms of direct employment).
In what will be the first such comprehensive exercise in the IT industry, all the 91,000-odd employees of India's second-largest IT services provider, Infosys Technologies, will now have to pass certification programmes to get promoted. The certification programme, conducted every March, is now being extended across the board and will test the employees' domain expertise, and grade them accordingly to be eligible for promotion.
Sluggish volume growth and mark-to-market losses have affected the performance of a majority of mid-cap information technology companies in the January-March 2008 quarter. Analysts expect that growth will continue to be sluggish in the next two quarters.
B K Modi-controlled Spice Mobile is all set to launch its GSM phone for Rs 800 this month. Branded as the 'People's Phone', the handset, a very basic model, doesn't have a display screen. Spice officials believe the company will sell around one million units in India and 10 million globally over the next 12 months.
India's largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will not announce a cut in variable pay of its employees this year , despite the company reporting a negative net profit on sequential basis.Last quarter, the company had announced a reduction in its staff variable pay as it did not achieve the internal targets.
Entertainment, Dhruva will be working with the company to produce games that could be marketed both in local and international markets. The company will also introduce the use of motion-sensing technology, made popular by Nintendo Wii, to PS2 game developers this year.
Shah Rukh Khan's Kolkata Knight Riders have signed on Zapak Digital Entertainment, a Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) venture, to develop online games for them. As part of the exclusive one-year tie-up, Zapak will create a cricket gaming zone on the official website of the Knight Riders and is said to make an investment of Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million) in the deal. The exact value of the deal is not known. The portal has already gone live with two games.
Thanks to the development of power-efficient and smaller components, small form factor desktop PCs from Acer, Dell and HP have become quiet popular among home and professional users. SFF PCs are mostly sold with kits that include a motherboard, case, power supply, and central processing unit (CPU) cooler. This makes them cheaper when compared to professional PCs. Most of the SFF systems in the market are based around Intel processors, particularly the mobile CPUs.
Projectors seem to have come of age and there is no dearth of quality images, if you have the money .
WNS Global Services, India's second largest business processes outsourcing company, has signed on Sri Lankan fast bowler Lasith Malinga as its brand ambassador. It has thus become the first Indian IT services firm to have a brand ambassador. Accenture, a multinational company, is another one that has ace golf player Tiger Woods as its mascot.
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.
With hundreds of theatre screens coming up across India in 2009, Texas Instruments (TI) - a leading semiconductor technology company - is eyeing the Indian cinema market with its digital light processing (DLP) technology. TI has patented the DLP technology. In DLP projectors, the image is created by small mirrors laid out in a matrix on a semiconductor chip known as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD).
IBM has deployed over 1,200 Indian employees to countries like Austria, Finland, Denmark, Costa Rica, under the Blue Opportunities programme.
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.
More and more Indian service providers are taking the help of the Internet to reach out to foreign clients in the US and Europe. There are 4,000 Indian service providers on Elance.com - a business-to-business work-on-demand portal that caters to small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) across the globe. It acts as a site on which people who have work post their projects and service providers bid for them. India is one of the largest growing service providers in terms of payments.
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."
The fourth quarter of financial year ending March 31, 2008, may hold a mixed bag of results for Indian information technology (IT) companies. On the one hand, IT firms - which hedged themselves taking the view that the Indian rupee would continue rising against the US dollar - will have to bear a negative impact on the portfolio that has been hedged so far. On the other, their top line as well as operating margins (EBIDTA) will get a boost since the rupee has depreciated.
The emerging markets strategic business unit of the country's largest IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services aims to touch the revenues of $2 billion by 2011-2012. The SBU targets regions such as Eastern Europe, West Asia, South Africa and Latin America. The company is also planning to have strategic development centres that will cater to these regions, beginning with Egypt & Russia. Emerging Markets offer great opportunity for TCS as IT sector there is growing at 8%.
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