Microsoft claims Hotmail back up

and running
glitch caused lost emails for thousands
By Alison Lis
Super Administrator
Posted: Jan, 04, 2011 10:37 am UTC
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Microsoft has said that it's Hotmail service is back on track after thousands of it's customers lost
access to their accounts for several days.
The loss was due by a server management glitch which caused emails to be lost from inboxes or
redirected to deleted mail folders.
“Beginning on December 30th we had an issue with Windows Live Hotmail that impacted 17,355
accounts,” said Windows Live executive Chris Jones on the company blog.
He went on to say, “Customers impacted temporarily lost the contents of their mailbox through the
course of mailbox load balancing between servers. We identified the root cause and restored mail to
the impacted accounts.”
Hotmail is a free service that boasts over 360 million users worldwide.

Story Source: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/363991/microsoft-claims-hotmail-restored-after-email-

glitch

Latest investment values Facebook

at $50 billion
Goldman Sachs inject cash into social networking phenomena
By Alison Lis
Super Administrator
Posted: Jan, 04, 2011 10:11 am UTC
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An infusion of $500 million from elite investment house Goldman Sachs has taken the value of
Facebook to $50 billion.
This is twice the value of Internet giant Yahoo.
The welcome injection of cash allows Facebook breathing room to focus on long-term ambition
rather than short-term profit and means it can delay going public for at least another year.
Facebook is approaching its seventh anniversary after founder Mark Zuckerberg set up the social
networking site in his dorm room while studying at Harvard University.
Story
Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110103/ap_on_hi_te/us_facebook_investors;_ylt=AgQeRTKA
6LbuxfuZfmkMkG

Hackers demonstrate mobile

'eavesdropping'
Pair built 'toolkit'
By Alison Lis
Super Administrator
Posted: Jan, 02, 2011 09:18 am UTC
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Any mobile phone call or text using GSM networks can be 'eavesdropped' on, say security
reasearchers.
Using just four cheap phones and open source software, duo Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut
demonstrated their hacking technique at the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) Congress in Berlin.
The pair spent a year developing their 'eavesdropping toolkit' after earlier research uncovered holes
in widely used mobile technology.
"Now there's a path from your telephone number to me finding you and listening to your calls," Mr
Nohl said. "The whole way."
Story Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12094227

'Most sophisicated Trojan yet' hits

China
Watch out for 'Geinimi'
By Alison Lis
Super Administrator
Posted: Dec, 30, 2010 09:42 am UTC
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Lookout Mobile Security has issued a warning to be on the lookout for what it terms "the most
sophisticated wireless malware it has seen."
Dubbed 'Geinimi', the android Trojan has so far only cropped up in China on various app stores but
has the capability of of sending a significant amount of personal date to remote servers.
"Geinimi is effectively being 'grafted' onto repackaged versions of legitimate applications, primarily
games, and distributed in third-party Chinese Android app markets," Lookout said in a blog post on
Wednesday. "The affected applications request extensive permissions over and above the set that is
requested by their legitimate original versions."
The security firm said it has updated both the paid and free versions of its software to protect against
Geinimi.

Story Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20026804-83.html?tag=mncol

Second Net dedicated Spacecraft

Launched
Ka-Sat lift off successful
By Alison Lis
Super Administrator
Posted: Dec, 28, 2010 08:53 am UTC
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Ka-Sat, the second European net-dedicated satelite launched successfully yesterday.

Designed specifically to deliver broadband Internet connections to Europe, the six-tonne Eutelsat-
operated spacecraft took off at 0351 (local time) from Kazakhstan.
Following the Hylas-1 platform into orbit, Ka-Sat will concentrate on so-called 'not-spots'.
The flight lasted nine hours and twelve minutes.
Story Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12065466

Kindle sales to hit 8million +

Amazon report e-reader is flying off the shelves
By Alison Lis
Super Administrator
Posted: Dec, 23, 2010 08:44 am UTC
Add comment

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek's sources, Amazon sold only 2.4 million Kindles, it's popular
e-reader, in 2009.
This year, sales are set to hit over 8 million.
According to Amazon, Kindle 3 is the fastest selling Kindle ever, quashing concerns that the release
of the iPad would affect sales.
Kindle retails at $139.

Story Source: http://mashable.com/2010/12/21/amazon-to-sell-more-than-8-million-kindles-in-2010-

report/

Solution soon to help connect doctors, patients thru wireless devices

‘TELEMEDICINE' PROJECT.

If we succeed, it could be an ideal model to take telemedicine across India, especially to rural areas where doctors
cannot reach. –
 Mr Kaveh Safavi of Cisco

T.E. Raja Simhan

Chennai, Jan.3

Cisco Systems and Apollo Hospitals are jointly working on a telemedicine project to help doctors connect with
patients through a laptop or any other mobile device from anywhere in the world — in contrast with the current
concept of ‘telemedicine' that calls for a ‘room' with the necessary infrastructure.

“This is an experiment to create a completely different kind of telemedicine model,” said Mr Kaveh Safavi, Vice-
President and Global Lead, Healthcare Practice Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco, a global networking
company.

Mr Safavi feels availability of quality bandwidth will be crucial for the project. “If we succeed, it could be an ideal
model to take telemedicine across India, especially to rural areas where doctors cannot reach,” he told Business Line.
With around 10,000 telemedicine locations, the Chennai-based Apollo is an interesting global example on
telemedicine implementation, said Mr Safavi, who works with leaders in the healthcare and life sciences industries to
design and deliver healthcare to customers.

Location-neutral consultation

At present, patients wait for consultation in Apollo's affiliate remote office sites. While doctors attend to their normal
routine in the clinics, they also visit the telemedicine room where patients are in video conference.

But doctors having to stay put in the clinic limits the number of cases they can handle through telemedicine, feels Mr
Safavi. Apollo now wants a solution that will enable doctors to participate from home from their desktops, or any other
mobile environment, and connect to a location that is not confined to just office location.

Another key issue in telemedicine is, how does the doctor examine a patient in a remote location? How does he
connect a cardiogram or any other medical device, check the blood pressure and document medical records? These
issues need to be addressed.

The issue is not about transitioning from having a physical infrastructure, such as a hospital, and expanding it but to
cut it out and go to telemedicine directly and get the same kind of quality that one can get in an urban-set up, he said

A vote for technology

Knowlarity Comm says its solution helps politicians to connect with large numbers of people at one go..

Governments and enterprises collecting information would be able to disseminate it in one go by relaying a pre-
recorded message.
 Pallav Pandey

Ambarish Gupta

L.N. Revathy

While technology enterprises tend to focus on industry verticals such as banking, insurance or telecom, generally, IIT
duo Ambarish Gupta and Pallav Pandey looked to develop solutions for a completely different space.

Want to guess? It is Indian politics!

It sounds offbeat, yet interesting, as Ambarish recounts the technological innovation story of Knowlarity
Communications.

After working for a couple of years in the US, the duo returned to their homeland to start their dream venture —
Knowlarity Communications. “We decided to leverage on the telecom revolution happening in India to reach out to
large sections of the people. We believed that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) practices would help
Indian politicians connect better with rural voters and thereby increase their chances of emerging victorious.

We developed a hosted telephony engine – Knowlus — and a voice-based solution – SuperCaller — that runs on
Knowlus. The idea is very simple. Governments and enterprises collecting information would be able to disseminate it
at one go by relaying a pre-recorded message. Imagine a politician/a chief minister calling you to seek your vote
during election time. Will not the rural voter be thrilled to receive a personalised call on his mobile phone from his/her
leader, hear the leader's voice address the voter by their respective names along with a request for votes?” asks
Ambarish.

The Co- founder and CEO of Knowlarity Communications said some political bigwigs used the SuperCaller effectively
to reach out to 50 lakh voters in 10 days during the recent elections in Orissa and Bihar. “Compare the efficacy of this
solution with other go-to-voter strategies. It can cost a couple of lakhs to hire a chartered helicopter and all that one
can do is address two-three constituencies a day. Forget reaching 5 lakh voters daily!”

Tech for emergency

Mobile may go longer way than loudspeaker.

The start-up's latest rollout is ‘technology for emergency'. Citing some recent newspaper reports on abduction and
gang rape, the Knowlarity Founder says, “if you have read the reports carefully, you will realise that an alert
mechanism to call the police and other important people simultaneously could have helped avert such tragic
incidents. We now have a technology — Emergency Coordination and Control System (ERCC) — wherein the victim
or any witness can call up as many as 3,000 people simultaneously within 60 seconds in case of any emergency with
just a long-press of a pre-defined button on their mobile phone.”

ERCC finds application in industries, hotels, housing societies, educational institutes, hospitals, theatres, offices,
shopping complexes, malls, etc. The user can choose from a selected set of pre-recorded emergency messages or
record a customised message based on the emergency at hand in the local language, upload a phonebook and then
broadcast it to multiple recipients at the press of a button. The ERCC system takes over and the pre-recorded or
recently recorded message gets delivered to the intended recipients at lightning speed as a voice call on their mobile
phones, explains Ambarish.

He further points out that the system automatically reconnects with people who have not answered the call and after
the campaign is completed, generates a log with details of every call. “It is an entirely Web-hosted application,
requires no maintenance cost and is available 24 x 7,” adds Ambarish.

lnr@thehindu.co.in

Tech can't wait

Companies are finding out that they can no longer postpone technology updates, says Dell..

Most customers, especially the larger enterprises, will continue to look for vendors who offer a heterogeneous
approach and do not tie them into proprietary technology costs.
 Mr Vikas Bhonsle

Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee

IT research firm IDC's PC market review for September quarter notes that large enterprises have responded to
improving global cues by ramping up IT infrastructure spends, resulting in improved traction, particularly for desktop
PCs. Incidentally, the IDC India quarterly PC tracker for Q3 calendar year 2010 ranks Dell in the numero uno spot for
overall PC sales (notebooks and desktops taken together) with an increased market share of 16.7 per cent.

Vikas Bhonsle, General Manager, India Large Enterprise operations - Dell India, believes that the industry is at an
inflection point where virtualisation, mobility, cloud computing, storage requirements, digital home, personalisation,
ubiquitous data access and security concerns are fundamentally changing the way people use technology.

eWorld caught up with him to discuss the industry performance for 2010 and expectations from 2011. Excerpts:

How do you see the industry performance in 2010? Has it turned out to be a better-than-expected year?

Dell has achieved the number one position in the India PC market. We have gained considerable market share in
both categories — desktop and notebooks.

Overall, we have seen a return to growth, and though companies continue to be careful with their technology spends,
businesses are finding out that they can no longer postpone technology updates. It is this trend that we see carrying
on in the year ahead.

Given concerns around business continuity, data protection and return on investment (ROI), customers are definitely
looking to make investments.

But what is imperative is how we help our customers leverage key technology trends such as cloud, SaaS,
virtualisation and storage for an optimal ROI.

What fuelled the growth in 2010…Was it the enterprises buying or consumers category. With regard to enterprises,
which verticals chose to aggressively spend on computers this year?

We continue to see strong growth across many of the large enterprise segments, including manufacturing, telecom
and BFSI. In medium enterprises, segments such as animation and Value-Added Services (for telecom) are among
the key drivers. We also see strong growth across segments such as media and online companies.

Demand continues to come in from SMB and consumer segments. We are seeing an explosion of unstructured data
such as audio and digital images, combined with email, as the primary means of communication. That is challenging
SMBs to manage, control, back up and archive their data.

New technology trends continue to drive the market. As virtualisation has become mainstream, it is being deployed
in server, storage, networking as well as client environments.
By far, the most visible adoption of virtualisation technology is happening in servers, from the largest UNIX servers
down to the smallest volume system. For mid-sized businesses, it is being used as a tool for consolidation, a means
to reduce space and power requirements and recently, as a way to bring business continuity to a larger part of an
organisation's IT infrastructure.

Where do you see enterprise budgets for 2011 (higher than 2010 or lower). Which sectors will lead the pack in PC
buying in 2011?

We believe there is significant headroom for growth across all business units — large enterprises, public
(government, education), small & medium business and consumer. Even as companies focus on growing their
business, they will strive for cost-efficiency and scalability to compete on a global scale. With increased connectivity,
3G rollout, proliferation of different kinds of connected devices and growth of social networking, we will see more and
more people coming online for professional and personal purposes and these will drive growth and penetration in the
market.

We will continue to focus across all key verticals while simultaneously looking to further increase our product as well
as service coverage across India.

Most customers, especially the larger enterprises, will continue to look for vendors who offer a heterogeneous
approach and do not tie them into proprietary technology costs.

We have always worked closely with industry partners to create open solutions. For example, in our virtual integrated
system (VIS), Dell can work with all major server vendors.

Similarly, on storage or networking needs, we can offer solutions that work with our customer's legacy installed base.

The key focus for companies is to plan their IT investments to facilitate future growth and to ensure strategic growth
is not impacted by any cost-reduction initiatives.

Which are the new product offerings lined up for 2011 that, you think, will get the market all excited?

While we continue to introduce new products under our desktops and notebooks category, we believe mobility is
going to drive the future trends.

Given the rapid growth in India's mobile market, we feel there is a tremendous opportunity to grow in the
smartphones category.

We launched the Dell Streak towards the end of 2010. Streak is a compact and powerful companion for people who
want to expand the ability to access their digital lives ‘on the go'.

Its built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and available 3G connectivity facilitate easy access for downloading and listening to
music, updating social networking status in real-time, and staying connected to friends and family through e-mail,
text, IM, and voice calls. We will continue to add to our offerings.

moumita@thehindu.co.in

Innovation should benefit end users

SAP expert on bridging the gap between a good idea and its effective packaging.
 D.Murali

Ferose V.R.

D. Murali

Motivating employees to innovate, and creating a culture that encourages innovation, can often result in organisations
spending considerable time and energy to examine several frivolous ideas, cautions Ferose V. R., Managing Director,
SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd, Bangalore (http://bit.ly/F4TFeroseVR).

It is, therefore, important to create a mechanism whereby idea generators are able to put a value to their idea before
passing it through the process; for, doing this would bring a sense of discipline and earnestness to the whole process,
he adds, during a recent interaction with Business Line at a media off-site organised by the company in Kumarakom.

“Also, unless the time between an idea and its close is shortened, employees would feel less motivated to innovate,
however encouraging the environment may be,” Ferose observes. Our conversation continues over the email.

Excerpts from the interview.

What is innovation in the context of IT?

In my view, innovation should benefit end users, without which it just becomes a fancy word. That said, with specific
reference to IT (information technology), innovation in a product company can be both disruptive and incremental.

It is disruptive when it happens around the core technology, like HANA (High-performance ANalytic Appliance) in
SAP, for example, an innovation which has resulted in bringing the power of in-memory processing to deliver
unprecedented benefits to analytics and a new category of applications.

Innovation can also be incremental — for example, product improvements that can happen both internally or through
a network of partners (co-innovation). Co-innovation at SAP happens through our large ecosystem of partners who
co-create products to help our users benefit from a wide range of products, delivered quickly.

In IT services companies, innovation in my view is more towards process improvements that will help the company
bring down its operational cost, and thereby grow the profit margin.

How do you go about creating a culture of innovation in an IT organisation?

Innovation is a long process and therefore it cannot have a specific time frame to happen. Yet, there are three
aspects to innovation. The first is creating a culture of innovation, the others being idea generation, and conversion.
Let me elaborate.

Since innovation is about ideas, it is very important to create a culture where there is a free flow of ideas. At SAP
Labs we have done this by creating an environment that fosters innovation. Each of our business groups, for
example, has periodic innovation events to harness innovative ideas; besides this, we have public platforms such as
the SAP Demo-Jam and TechEd sessions to showcase innovations. We even have achievers from diverse
professions to come and share their experience so that our employees get a different perspective of things.

A strong motivator to innovate, according to me, is in having an attractive reward mechanism. Not the typical cash
award, which is common, but offering an incentive so alluring that it is hard to ignore. The top innovators at SAP, for
example, get to attend training programmes and courses in the best globally-renowned institutes for technology, such
as the Stanford design school and the Hasso Plattner Institute. This has resulted in a few of our best brains, normally
reticent, to come out and participate in innovation forums and events.

Are there hurdles to innovation that require surmounting?

The easier part is providing an environment for innovation to happen; however, the next two stages — i.e. capturing
the ideas and making them commercial — are where many companies fail.

No innovation, however great, is good unless it is taken to the end user; therefore, capturing ideas and converting
them is the key and often becomes the stumbling block for innovations. Also, many a time, organisations, in their
enthusiasm to encourage innovations, overlook the importance of the evaluators. While a conducive environment
encourages creativity, it is vital to have a mechanism whereby the ideas are evaluated quickly and effectively.

Earlier on, we realised that many ideas were getting stuck as evaluators neither had the capability nor motivation as
such. We made sure that people who examine the ideas have the breadth and depth to do so and are also suitability
rewarded. This has accelerated the entire process to the extent that presently ideas that employees come up with are
critically examined and brainstormed within 24 hours.

Yet another hurdle to innovation is in bridging the gap between idea and its marketability. An idea that is not
marketable, however great, is of little value to an organisation. Most often, there is a big gap between the
technologists who create the idea and the business people who commercialise them. It is, therefore, important to
bring them together to figure out the market potential of an idea. At SAP we have a global incubator team that works
in tandem with innovators to take their ideas to the stage of production. One also sees that good ideas fail to take off
when organisations provide multiple funnels to collect ideas; because, this often results in ideas floating around
randomly. It is, therefore, important to provide a single funnel for ideas to pass through.

Can you describe a few examples of customer successes enabled through innovation?

CRM via email, a product created at SAP Labs, is an example to illustrate the power of innovation. A few employees
brainstormed to come out with this powerful tool which, simply put, provides the full functionality of a CRM on
universal communication mediums such as handheld devices. This product has received great reviews in some of the
key international SAP Technology forums.

Interestingly, quite recently, following a session addressed by a renowned sports personality who also touched upon
the problem of corruption in sports administration in his talk, an employee came up with an idea to create an
application that would provide a transparent way to manage administration in sports clubs. Since this was considered
among the top ideas with a huge commercial potential, it is currently work-in-progress.

Your views on the ecosystem outside of organisations to support and foster IT innovation.

Since innovation has no boundaries, it can happen outside organisations too. Hence, creating an ecosystem of
partners is vital to fostering innovation. There is a huge army of SAP trained professionals working for our partners,
and they are highly competent to innovate. Besides this, we have the Global Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) Network, a
globally distributed set of teams and lab facilities aimed at driving and facilitating innovative projects between SAP
and its partners.

COIL and its internal and external partners have been successfully driving a vast number of innovative projects.

Being part of SAP's Global Ecosystem and Partners Group, the Global COIL Network leverages the innovative
strength of the many sources in the SAP Ecosystem to form a vast social network and multiple communities of
innovation. A big advantage of driving innovation through partners is that customers get the benefits of innovation
much faster.
Arteria Technologies, a Bangalore-based SAP COIL partner, for example, has created products that enable access to
workflows through mobile devices. For partners such as Arteria, COIL provides a platform to jointly engage in a well-
defined process from idea concept stage to bringing to market the final product and showcasing the joint
achievements in a variety of channels and events. The COIL Network is a strong evidence of our commitment to
ecosystem growth and ability to drive global as well as regional solutions.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Viewer's choice
Personalise online video watching with Shufflr.

Shufflr faces competition from the likes of Boxee, Hulu and Clicker

Watch what you want.

Mahananda Bohidar

Not too long ago, ‘online videos' were almost synonymous with YouTube. With the amount of content online
increasing by the second, new players have entered the space and are trying to add a twist to the experience of
watching videos online.

One such service now is Shufflr, a Web site that lets you personalise the videos you watch and suggests videos
based on your earlier choices.

The idea of presenting something like this to the public might seem obvious when there are new videos flooding
cyberspace every minute, but Vinod Gopinath, CEO, Althea Systems, the company that created Shufflr, has a
different story about the inception of the Web site. “We started off with the idea of bringing online videos to the TV
screen. But when we flagged off the process we came across a lot of videos on the Web that we did not even know
existed and possibly could not sort through manually. This was the potential opportunity that we recognised.”

Even as early as five years ago, one could think of watching videos or multimedia only on the desktop PC or maybe
on one's laptop. But this is in the process of undergoing an enormous change with the advent of smartphones and
tablets.

“We realised that people will soon want to start watching videos outside their PC screen space and on their television
sets, tablets or mobile phones. Hence, personalised video feeds across these platforms would be very convenient to
have. I can pause a video that I was watching on my mobile phone and resume watching it on my laptop when I get
to office,” says Gopinath.

Shufflr, providing users the option to watch videos of their choice, is not the only one of its kind on the Web. Shufflr
faces competition from the likes of Boxee, Hulu and especially Clicker – Web sites on which you can watch series of
popular sitcoms, movies and videos online.
On being asked whether YouTube is a competitor, Gopinath says, “YouTube does have a chunk of videos that
people prefer to watch but it only has about 40 per cent of all the videos that are available online.”

“Plus, a lot of people who own content and want to publish it online are not comfortable with putting it up on YouTube
because of issues like revenue. For example, New York Times has its own video player and apart from that they also
put up videos on YouTube. For them, the videos they might choose to put on YouTube are a teaser that'll draw the
crowds to their proprietary player on their own Web site,” he adds.

How does Shufflr work? “We don't post any videos as such,” says Gopinath. “We have servers in the Amazon cloud
which go out and crawl the Web for us and collect as many videos as they can. We, then, use intelligence to filter
those videos and offer them to our users based on the user's profile and social graph.”

Right now Shufflr has the download option only after which you can have access to the videos and personalise the
experience. The company plans to launch its own independently workable Web site soon. But the option of
downloading the service will still be available for users because the overall experience is better when it runs from the
PC. Says Gopinath, “The user experience, graphics that we use is hard to replicate on a purely online platform.”

Shufflr, launched in July this year, makes most of its profits from deals with the content owners whose videos are
linked to on the Web site for users to watch. As of now, most of the hits on Shufflr are from the US, followed by Spain
and India. While only the PC version of the software is available right now, Althea already has an Android app
running in the labs alongside a TV prototype for which it has targeted a worldwide audience and all this is “likely to
remain a free service” for users.

mahananda@thehindu.co.in

Shutting shop
CH. VIJAYA BHASKAR

Closing down, lock 'n stock

Email from email contacts service, Etacts, in October 2010: Since you signed up for Etacts on Mar 7 we've made a
bunch of improvements that we'd like to tell you about. Take a look below to learn more, and, as always, send us
your thoughts and feedback!

-The Etacts Team

Email from Etacts in December 2010: After almost a year of providing our free service to help you manage your
relationships, we're sorry to announce that we will be shutting down the Etacts service. Effective January 31, 2011,
the service will cease to operate and your user data will be deleted....

Thank you for your support throughout our existence.

Evan and Howie

The Founders of Etacts

Unlike Etacts, some sites suggest alternatives and also how to go about transferring the data to rival services.

G.ho.st, which closed down some time in March, offered help to users: We advise you to migrate all important folders,
files and emails to another secure place before March 15. You might like to consider Google Docs or Microsoft
SkyDrive for files and services such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail for email.

But again, some offer no help in their announcements. The email from Notifu says: Effectively immediately, we are
shutting down notifu.com.

There were mild tremors when Yahoo!'s Delicious announced it was shutting down service.

What many may not notice is that Delicious is just one of the services closing down in recent times.

Other companies or services that have shut down in the last two years include relatively unheard of Joggle and
Stikkit and popular ones such as I Want Sandy and Pownce. There are also the services that were a rage, such as
Google's Wave and Yahoo's Geocities.

These are just a few companies that have shut shop in the last two years. There are more that have gone unreported.
Is there a mini dotcom bust we are not noticing?

R. Dinakaran