Fancy owning cars painted with particles that will cool your vehicle drawing solar power and still not leave a trace of carbon in the air? Or buildings that remain cool while consuming far less energy than they do now? 

These and several other sustainable energy solutions for a wide variety of everyday needs could become a reality with India and the US deciding to bring together scientists in both the countries with support from corporate groups. 

The Ministry of Science and Technology is all set to launch ‘BIJLEE’ or the Berkeley-India Joint Leadership on Energy and the Environment, under which the US government will spare its top scientists and engineers to develop sustainable energy solutions for India, said an Indian government official, who declined to be identified. 

Institutions supporting the initiative include the University of California, Berkeley, the Indian Institute of Science and various Indian Institutes of Technology. The Indian government’s research body, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), played a key role in envisaging the project. 

All this was also confirmed by Purnendu Chatterjee, chairman of investment company The Chatterjee Group, which is a major corporate supporter of the initiative. US-based Chatterjee is an alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley, and his group is most known in India for its investment in Haldia Petrochemicals. 

He is not alone in the BIJLEE initiative. Indian groups such as ITC, Tata Power, Reliance Energy, Infosys and some California-based utilities are also supporting this project, which needs strong participation from industry to help design technologies that are commercially viable. 

BIJLEE will attempt to find sophisticated ways to lower energy consumption across a range of industrial processes and could potentially benefit everything under the sun from building houses and cars to consumer electronics, lighting systems and water purifiers.

The Orissa Information Technology (IT) Department will review the progress of the ongoing and the upcoming IT projects of the state in a meeting scheduled for January 6. 

“At the meeting, we will review the status of construction work of the existing IT players and also that of projects announced by MindTree and Genpact who have announced their development centres in the state”, Pradipta K Mohapatra, the state IT secretary said. 

Mohapatra indicated that the IT players had deferred their construction work as they were awaiting the new building norms of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), adding, “Now that the BDA has come out with its new building norms, the IT players would be keen to kick off their construction work.” 

The new building norms of BDA which focuses on vertical growth and allows multi-level parking are expected to benefit the companies in the IT and ITeS (IT enabled services) sectors. 

The fresh building norms of BDA have done away with the building restrictions, except in some strategic zones and the new norms have linked the height of buildings to the plot size and width of the road, which the plot abuts. According to the new BDA norms, the maximum height of a building shall not exceed one and a half times the width of the road, which the plot abuts. 

Apart from the new building regulations of BDA, the new SEZ (special economic zone) policy being formulated by the Orissa government is also set to benefit the IT companies. 

“The Orissa government is in the process of finalising a new SEZ policy which will incorporate the best practices of other investor friendly states in the country like Gujarat, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The policy will also include IT SEZs and in the IT SEZs, 50 percent of the area will be earmarked for manufacturing and the remaining 50 percent for non-manufacturing purposes”, said Mohapatra. 

Asked on the status of the proposed Investment Technology Investment Region (ITIR) in Orissa, he said, “IL&FS Infrastructure Development Corporation is expected to submit its report to the Orissa Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation on the proposed ITIR in the state by the second week of next month.”
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Mumbai-based IT firm Rolta has acquired Piocon Technologies, a Chicago-based firm that has customers in the oil and gas sector. The acquisition gives Rolta access to solutions, which address critical operational needs of refineries. 

Rolta shares were up 1.4 percent on Monday at Rs 111 on the BSE. 

ET had reported that Rolta was close to finalising the deal in its Monday edition. Currently, all of Piocon’s customers are based in the US and Rolta plans to expand this to the Middle East and India, CMD KK Singh said. Piocon’s website lists oil major Chevron as one of its customers. Chevron has a stake in Reliance Petroleum. 

Rolta also intends to cross-sell these services to its existing customers for engineering design, which are mostly in oil and gas, petrochemical and energy sectors. “This (Piocon’s) solution is eminently suited to be extended beyond refinery operations to up-stream and down-stream operations in oil and gas, and to other industry segments like petrochemicals, mining, power, and especially highly regulated sectors like pharmaceuticals and nuclear power,” said Rolta

Rolta’s acquisition of US-based Piocon Technologies couldn’t have come at a better time than this. The acquisition would strengthen Rolta’s engineering design business at a time when new capital expenditure is hard to come from refineries given slowing demand for petroleum products and global credit crunch. At the same time, at over $10 million, the deal is too tiny to significantly pull down Rolta’s financial performance for the next few quarters until it fully integrates Piocon’s operations with itself. 

As a part of its engineering design operations, Rolta caters to petroleum refining and power sector. Of this, the refining segment contributes over 18 percent to annual revenue of over $260 million (Rs 1,250 crore in last 12 months). Since Rolta provides refinery design support under this segment, the business largely depends upon new capex plans of refineries in India and abroad. With slowing economic scenario, this part of Rolta’s business is likely to take a hit, as refinery capex would drop. 

The deal is of strategic nature for Rolta. Acquisition of Piocon would provide support to this division once Rolta starts fully leveraging the newly acquired operations. This is because Piocon offers services related to data integration across various IT platforms of a refinery, a business service, which is of support and maintenance in nature. Such services become all the more essential to refineries in the times of slowdown as they help reduce cost of ownership in medium-to-long term. Typically, a medium sized refinery (with refining capacity of about six million tones per annum) would have to invest anywhere between $5-10 million for such a solution based on size and complexity of the refinery. The Rolta management claims that annual savings as a result of implementation of such a solution may go up to $20 million

Compucom Software said on Monday it has bagged an order worth Rs 7.67 crore from Rajasthan government for the supply of various software packages to 2, 500 government run schools in the state. The order has been awarded by Secondary Education Department of Rajasthan, Compucom Software said in filing to the Bombay Sock Exchange.
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ADAG Group firm Reliance Communications on Monday said that its subsidiary Flag Europe Asia's damaged sub-marine cable in the Mediterranean Sea has been repaired fully. 

"Flag Europe Asia's (FEA) cable, which was under repair due to multiple cuts reported on December 19 has been restored, ensuring full connectivity (Internet and voice)," a statement from the telecom major said. 

After the damage to the cable, Reliance Globalcom's, which operates the FLAG, cable network, IP traffic through the Mediterranean has been automatically diverted via the Pacific region. 

Reliance Globalcom’s HAWK cable system is under construction in the Mediterranean region and would provide resilience and diversity on this route once completed, the statement added. 

Cuts were reported on multiple sub-marine cables Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We 3, Go and FEA cables in the Mediterranean region last week. 
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The year 2008 witnessed great growth for social media, sharing and networking properties and applications. More than 60% of the Indian Internet users are using one of the social media platforms. We are witnessing a co-existence of global, local and niche based social networking platforms. Besides broad based networks, categories such as professional, education, entertainment and games will emerge as strong growth drivers for the social media. The second aspect that emerged in 2008 was the fact that young users in the age group of 18 to 24 from tier II and tier III cities began to aggressively enrol into social networking platforms. This is a healthy trend, given that social networking satisfies key needs of this young population besides enabling them to express across borders. 

The growth in this segment is also fuelled by the increasing Internet penetration in tier I and tier II cities across India. The third key trend is an emergence of integration between social networking and casual gaming. 

Across social media platforms, multi player games such as chess, word games such as Scrabble and various fantasy games have created an important context for forming new relationships and at the same time increasing engagement level between friends. Users’ profiles are tightly integrated as they play games among friends, thereby creating a strong viral force. We anticipate more and more users to consume casual games in a social networking context, rather than on a games only website. 

The fourth and very healthy trend is the fact that marketers are beginning to use social media to intimately communicate their message, engage with their target audience and, at the same time, leverage the power of viral on networking platforms. 

Social media has provided a new interactive platform to brands to get connected with consumers, and also get a complete mapping of the impact of the campaign with the features of number of views and participation. Brands have started identifying online platform, which is catering to the right target audience and are together creating a platform, which is interactive and has engagement factor with the audience. It’s a paradigm shift from the conventional banner ads in the online media to a more interactive approach. 

Also average time spent by a consumer over a conventional medium is very low compared to the average time spent by the consumer on new age online media. Clearly, social media has brought a shift from
 

Sun Microsystems India and Indian Institute of Technology- Delhi are launching an e-governance centre on the IIT campus here to focus on development of non-proprietary software. The Sun-IIT Delhi Centre of Excellence is an outcome of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the institute and the IT company in September 2006. The centre has been set up with an objective of carrying out research in related areas of e-governance and educating the stakeholders, including senior government officials, defence officials and other people who are a part of the e-governance system. This centre is an apt platform to further the cause of open source and open standards, both of which are extremely relevant for the government and Sun's expertise and propagation of these two areas are well known, said M.P. Gupta, a professor at IIT-Delhi

Edexcel International, the UK-based awarding body, which offers joint academic and vocational qualifications to schools and colleges world wide, is expanding in India by opening four offices in Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai. The cost of the expansion is Rs 10 crore. Edexcel had recently entered the Indian academic space by representing eight schools and is already present in vocational streams. It has partnered with Aptech and IGNOU for offering diploma programmes. 

The institution has been operational in India for the last 12 years. It is in talks with Educomp Solutions, Everon Systems and Reliance Retail to bring in curriculum and teacher-student material for quality control. Currently, almost 25,000 students have registered themselves for various Edexcel programmes and the board is now eyeing a 15 percent market share by 2011. It is also planning to expand its India team from 15 to almost 40 people. 

Samiulla Baig, regional director, South Asia, Edexcel, said: “Besides entering the academic space by representing 8 schools, we are also getting into the soft skills space by offering 60 small modules on communication, interviewing skills and behaviour. We are in talks with industry bodies like CII and FICCI to spread awareness in our board. 

After entering the academic space, the $500 million (Rs 2,400-crore) Edexcel expects academics to contribute 20 percent to its India revenues. The firm expects the vocational streams to contribute the rest. It is also bullish on its ePen technology in which there is a centralised computerised centre for checking and marking the students’ answer sheets that suggests what the students can pursue as their careers. “Some Indian universities and boards are coming to us for this technology as it analyses both the teachers and students and is a transparent marking system, “ explains Baig.

Life-cycle content management services and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing) company Aptara is set to enter the healthcare content management space. Headquartered in US, the company is eyeing an acquisition in the healthcare content space in India. 

Dev Ganesan, chief executive officer, Aptara said that a major acquisition is on the cards for the company in the healthcare content services. “India is emerging to be a major market for us in terms of inflow of work. We would be looking at an acquisition in this space in India. We are also on look out in US for a similar acquisition,” he said. The company is yet to identify firms for acquisition. However, he declined to divulge any details on the deal size. 

At present, Aptara offers content life-cycle consultancy, data mining and analysis services, content development, staff augmentation. The provides a full range of data, document, and digital solutions, including imaging, to leading publishers, academic institutions, financial institutions, government agencies, and major corporations. “Healthcare content management is an emerging area, which offers strong business opportunities. We want to expertise in this area and broaden our service offerings,” Ganesan said. 

The company is strongly focusing on offering eLearning solutions for the US and UK market. UK and US are the major markets for the company's businesses. The company has identified India as the emerging destination for businesses and talent. Three months ago the company consolidated its Los Angeles and Boston office into one location in Boston, as the top clients of the company are located in the east coast.
 

Ascenders Technologies Private Limited has bagged the ISO 9001:2008 quality certification from Quest International Certification. The company headquartered in Chennai provides end-to-end solution and consultancy services for implementing ERP systems, managed services, HR-IT service and process consulting and business process management services

Shortly after taking the helm of Hewlett-Packard in early 2005, Mark Hurd realized that despite being one of the world’s leading technology suppliers, HP had an embarrassing and crippling technology problem. There was no easy way for executives to get a picture of what was happening in the entire company. 

Each unit of the computer giant based in Palo Alto, California, had its own systems for tracking information in crucial areas like inventory, component costs and marketing expenditures. No central system pulled all the data together into what Hurd liked to call ‘‘a single version of the truth.’’ Hurd developed his passion for that quest during a previous job running the Teradata division of NCR. Teradata pioneered a technology called data warehousing, which allows managers to get a coherent picture of a company’s inventory, production, marketing and sales. 

NCR spun off the unit in October 2007. With all of that information at their fingertips, employees can sift through and see once-hidden trends. Such technology helps companies like Wal-Mart Stores determine which shirt colors are preferred by people in Cincinnati, tells Best Buy what offers it should dangle in front of online shoppers in mid-March and suggests to Wynn Resorts which frequent gamblers should be coddled. To Hurd, who rode his success at Teradata into the chief executive’s spot at NCR, data warehousing is a vital tool for making a business much more efficient. He had a few options for fixing HP’s information problem: Buy Teradata’s products acquire Teradata outright or have HP build data warehousing technology.