Category Archives: Technical
Is India slipping on the outsourcing graph?
Published media reports quoting a recent study claims that India could well be on the way to losing its top position in the outsourcing industry to emerging giants like China and the Philippines.
A study conducted by Global Services-Tholons has ranked the top 50 emerging global outsourcing cities which indicates that China with six takes top honours over India and Philippines with four cities each.
However, Philippines edges past India due to the fact that the list boasts of two new cities in the top-50 list including Quezon and Mandaluyong, while in the case of India only Jaipur figures as the new choice.
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It may be recalled that India had topped the 2007 rankings with six new cities in the Top-50 list, though the study now says that outsourcing clients are getting increasingly sophisticated while making their choice of locations.
Instead of making their outsourcing decision on the overall strength of countries, they are closely looking at the strengths of individual cities, even those considered tier-II and tier-III, to ship their work, a report published in the Deccan Herald has said.
According to the report, India also lost out its top spot in the top-10 elite list of emerging global cities where three cities from CHina feature while India and Philippines could manage only one city each. Last year, India had five cities in this elite list with Chennai emerging as the world’s top emerging destination, the position going to Cebu (Philippines) this year.
The newspaper report quotes un-named analysts to state that India’s position is likely to get weaker as other countries begin aggressively promoting their destinations. The latest top-10 list has cities from Vietnam, Poland. Egypt, Brazil and Argentina, the report says.
It adds that Indian cities are drawing negative publicity due to poor governance issues like the infrastructure woes of Bangalore and the lack of trained manpower in some of the smaller destinations. However, India continues to hold the pole position with respect to the list of established outsourcing centres, claiming six of the top-eight current destinations.
159,000 jobs lost in U.S. in a month: official report
New York: As many as 159,000 jobs were cut in the U.S. in September, the worst ever retrenchment in a month for five years, the government has reported, heightening fears that the economic downturn was worsening and could persist well into next year.
The job loss has continued for nine consecutive months totalling 760,000 in the period, according to the Labor Department’s report released Friday. In the last couple of weeks many people also had to leave work as several Wall Street institutions collapsed.
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“We’ve lost jobs in nearly every area of the economy, and this is going to get worse before it gets better because the credit markets have deteriorated basically on a daily basis for the last few weeks,” Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm in Connecticut, was quoted as saying by the New York Times.
Though the financial bailout plan cleared by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush Friday may restore order in the financial system, it will take time for its effect to be felt.
In a chain reaction, housing prices continue to fall, eroding household wealth just as millions are trapped in unmanageable debt. The shrinking job market has taken many paychecks out of the economy, forcing people to rethink thrift, resulting in reduced sales from car showrooms to hair salons.
Till only a few weeks ago, many economists held hopes of the economy recovering late this year or early next year. But now with the job market contracting faster, and fear dogging the financial system, 2008 is seen as a lost cause. The more pessimistic analysts don’t mind using the word ‘recession’.
“This is an economy in recession, and every dimension of the (labour) report confirms that,” said Ethan S. Harris, an economist at Barclays Capital. “This has been preceded by a slow-motion recession. Now we’re going into the full-speed recession that will last somewhere between three and five quarters.”
Web Standards Software and Learning
Text appearance
This recipe is really more of a collection of recipes to help give you some ideas of how you can make text in your pages look with the aid of a style sheet.
I want to make all the code on my pages appear in a special font
I want to create boxed “pull-quotes” on my pages, maybe with a special background color and a border around the box
I want to make my headings really stand out
Defining special fonts
With style sheets it’s easy to define a set of fonts that a browser will look for when drawing a particular element on a web page. The example I’m going to use here relates to the actual pages you are viewing now. I’m going to show you how I make all my examples of code appear in a particular font.
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In the HTML
This part is really easy because the selector you use, CODE, is what’s called a Basic HTML Selector. Most WYSIWYG editors will probably have a menu item that allows you to mark text up as code, but just in case you’re doing it by hand, it should look like this.
<code>sample code</code>
So the first thing you do, maybe as you’re writing the document in the first place, or maybe with a document that was written before if you’ve just discovered the wonders of structural markup as opposed to presentational markup.
In your style sheet
As you know, you cannot define a font that you want your code examples to be drawn in and just expect then that this font will always be used. With a style sheet though you can define a series of acceptable fonts, in order of preference, that the browser will work its way down until it finds a font that is also on the client.
For my CODE example then, the style sheet looks like this
CODE {font-family: Courier, “Courier New”, Monotype.com, monospace}
The selector is “CODE”, the property is “font-family” and the value is “Courier, “Courier New”, Monotype.com, monospace”. Note that the inverted commas around “Courier New” are important because of the space between the two words in the name.
I’ve chosen this value because
Courier is the font I really want my code to appear in
Courier New is the version of Courier more commonly found on the Windows platform
Monotype.com is a “web font” similar font to Courier which is commonly installed with the major browsers
Monospace is the “font family” to which courier belongs. This tells the browser “if you can’t find any of the previous, at least use a font from this family.” It’s strongly recommended that you get into the habit of putting a font family at the end of your list of fonts.
Gandhism
Gandhism (or Gandhianism) is a collection of inspirations, principles, beliefs and philosophy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (known as Mahatma Gandhi), who was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian Independence Movement.
It is a body of ideas and principles that describes the inspiration, vision and the life work of Gandhi. The term also encompasses what Gandhi’s ideas, words and actions mean to people around the world, and how they used them for guidance in building their own future. Gandhism also permeates into the realm of the individual human being, non-political and non-social. A Gandhian can mean either an individual who follows, or a specific philosophy which is attributed to, Gandhism.
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“Without truth, nothing”
Mohandas Gandhi’s early life was a series of personal struggles to decipher the truth about life’s important issues and discover the true way of living. He admitted in his autobiography to beating his young wife, and indulging in carnal pleasures out of lust, jealousy and possessiveness, not genuine love. He had eaten meat, smoked a cigarette, and almost visited a prostitute. It was only after much personal turmoil and repeated failures that Gandhi developed his philosophy.
Gandhi disliked having a cult following, and was averse to being addressed as Mahatma, claiming that he was not a perfect human being.
In 1942, while he had already condemned Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, Gandhi took on an offensive in civil resistance, called the Quit India Movement, which was even more dangerous and definitive owing to its direct call for Indian independence. Gandhi did not see the British as defenders of freedom giving their continuance of imperialist domination in India. He did not feel a need to take sides with world powers.
Gandhism is brutal adherence to truth. If it means condemning the practice of untouchability in Hindu society, it means condemning the victimization of Muslim women and coerced conversions to Islam and Christianity in the same breath. Gandhism has no respect for power. No institution or individual is infallible, save God.
Gandhi believed that all humans are susceptible to sinful actions and behavior, and the worst of dictators were essentially the same despite the difference in their lives, beliefs and actions. Despite this, he held firmly that humans had no right to punish each other. He believed punishment to be the responsibility of God
Credit crisis to hit BPOs
The catastrophic events overtaking global financial majors will dent the revenues of Indian outsourcing majors, both in terms of the expected business and contracts they have already undertaken.
Number one software services vendor, Tata Consultancy Services, is likely to be worse off than its peers because of its significant exposure to Merrill Lynch which, analysts said, ranks among its top five financial services clients.
Merrill is also a significant client for Satyam Computer Services. Analysts estimate nearly 2,500 employees at TCS and Satyam work for Merrill.
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The bankrupt Lehman Brothers has relationships with a number of top vendors, but is not a major outsourcing company compared to some of its peers. “Lehman has been the worst outsourcing company among the investment banks. Compared to it, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have been outsourcing a lot more aggressively.
In 2003, its total outsourcing to vendors in India was only around $100 million,” said an analyst, adding that Wipro and TCS were among its vendors here.
“Lehman Brothers does not account for a significant portion of our revenue and we are in dialogue with them during this difficult period of uncertainty. Wipro is monitoring the US economic situation closely, but we have nothing more specific to communicate,” a statement from the company said.
Wipro has around 400 employees working on software services and infrastructure management projects for Lehman. HCL Technologies is also a vendor to Lehman but Premkumar S, who heads HCL financial services business, said its exposure was less than a single integer in percentage terms.
Among the top five IT firms in India, HCL Technologies could possibly be the least hit by the crisis overtaking the global financial giants because of its lower exposure to financial services clients compared to its peers. Traditionally, the company has been strong in engineering services. Apart from Bear Stearns, which was bailed out by JP Morgan, Citigroup is its other major financial services client of note. Analysts were unsure of who the other Indian IT and BPO vendors of Lehman were.
They said Satyam and Infosys may also be among its vendors but none of them are were likely to have above $50 million in annual revenues from the bankrupt firm.
The next Internet
Historically, the Internet has been all about connectivity between computers and among people. The World Wide Web opened enormous opportunities and motivations for the injection of content into the Internet, and search engines, such as Google’s, provided a way for people to find the right content for their interests. Of course, the Internet continues to develop: new devices will find their way onto the net and new ways to access it will evolve.
In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well–either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. “Where are my glasses?” you will ask. “You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room,” your mobile or laptop will say.
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The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in Star Wars I with the chariot race in Ben Hur. Conventional videoconferencing will be augmented by remotely controlled robots with an ability to move around, focus cameras and microphones, and perhaps even directly interact with the local environment under user control.
The Internet will also become more closely integrated with other parts of our daily lives, and it will change them accordingly. Power distribution grids, for example, will become a part of the Internet’s information universe. We will be able to track and manage electrical power demand and our automobiles will participate in the generation as well as the consumption of electricity. By sharing information through the Internet about energy-consuming and energy-producing devices and systems, we will be able to make them more efficient.
A box of washing machine soap will become part of a service as Internet-enabled washing machines are managed by Web-based services that can configure and activate your washing machine. Scientific measurements and experimental results will be blogged and automatically entered into common data archives to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reproduction of experimental results. One might even imagine that scientific instruments could generate their own data blogs.
These are but a few examples of the way in which the Internet will continue to surround and serve us in the future. The flexibility we have seen in the Internet is a consequence of one simple observation: the Internet is essentially a software artifact. As we have learned in the past several decades, software is an endless frontier. There is no limit to what can be programmed. If we can imagine it, there’s a good chance it can be programmed. The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric
Google phone to cost above Rs 20,000
Excited about the new Google phone? Wondering when the phone will hit Indian shores? Soon. HTC is planning to roll out Google Android-powered phone in India by December end.
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According to a business daily, Taiwan-based cellphone major is currently in talks with a leading service provider in India. The company which has an exclusive partnership to sell phones in India with service provider Airtel said that it is open to selling the phone through independent retail channels. The business model is still under consideration.
Indian consumers, however, will be required to shell out more for G1 than it’s US pricing of around $180. While HTC is yet to firm up the prices for G1 in India, it is expected that the phone will be priced higher than Rs 20,000.
The phone which has widely being termed as Google’s rival to Apple iPhone was launched by TMobile in US earlier this week. Apple’s 3G iPhone sells for $199 8GB in US as compared to Rs 31,000 for 8GB in India.
The G1 phone boasts of touchscreen, a computer-like keyboard and has Google’s new open operating system, Android. It also hosts an array of multimedia features similar to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry.
The phone has a trackball for navigation, high-speed Internet browsing, WiFi, email, instant messaging and SMS texting. The phone functions on 3G network and is specially designed to offer high-speed Internet surfing.
It also has a Global Positioning System (GPS), a 3 megapixel camera with photo-sharing capability and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a feature lacking on the iPhone. Like iPhone, in G1 users cannot shoot video.
There’s also a feature by which Gmail users will get instant notification whenever they receive a new message in their inbox. Available in three colors — black, white and brown — it includes familiar Google services, such as Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube. Like the iPhone and other smartphones, the device is meant to broaden the appeal of Web surfing on the go.
Research firm Strategy Analytics has predicted that the G1 could sell 400,000 units by the end of 2008, accounting for 4 per cent of the smartphone market
