(In Pic: Yahoo India building in Bangalore)

Adrian Bridgwater

In October, Yahoo ran an Open Hack Day event in Bangalore, hosted by one of the company’s co-founders, David Filo. Two hundred local developers were invited to a 24-hour code-a-thon to combine their own ideas with mashed-up services from Yahoo’s own library of APIs. The winning entry brought together Yahoo’s mapping tool with a handwriting function to allow users to give travel directions to each other.

This kind of innovation-focused event is symptomatic of what some commentators are claiming is a fundamental shift in the focus of India’s tech industry. “Innovation was always there, but the right conditions, ecosystem and critical mass did not exist from 1947 until the early 1990s. Now, venture capitalists are more willing to venture forth in emerging markets and back entrepreneurs — and India’s universities have helped create critical mass in terms of skilled workers. So, as these factors start to coalesce, innovation and entrepreneurship are now much more evident in many different parts of India,” said Kamla Bhatt, acclaimed Indian podcaster and presenter of The Kamla Bhatt Show.

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(Pic: Sabeer Bhatia, Co-Founder of Hotmail)

By Nick Mokey

The fight for the future of office suites has often been described as a one-on-one match between Google and Microsoft, but with the introduction of new competitors, the situation might better be described as an all-out brawl. Indian-based software firm InstaColl introduced its own online office suite on Wednesday, dubbed Live Documents, which closely mimics the functionality of Microsoft Office in a free online form.

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Designation:

Global Research Head, Yahoo!

About:

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Raghavan was senior vice president and chief technology officer of Verity, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise search software that enables organizations to discover, analyze and process all of the digital information within their enterprises. Prior to Verity, he worked for 14 years in a variety of technical and managerial positions at IBM, including head of the Computer Science Principles (CSP) department at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.

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 Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers and viewers. Hope you all had a good feast!

 

 

 

 

Having a bit of a problem with Mozilla Firefox? Crashes now and then? Takes up too much memory? Flock is just for you!

Wiki:Flock is a web browser heavily based upon Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla technologies. Flock is also the name of the company developing the browser. Flock’s creators call it a “social browser”, due to its ability to interact with popular social networking web services. Such web services include Flickr, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Photobucket, and various popular blogging and news aggregation services.

Features

# Flock’s custom homepage, “My World”, tells you when your friends have new photos and videos and when you have new feeds. My World gives quick access to your recently visited favorite sites as well.

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(Pic: Let the good times roll by James Denmark)

By Shailendra Bhatnagar

(Bloomberg) — India’s computer-services exports will expand about 30 percent a year to $80 billion by 2011, federal communications and information-technology minister Andimuthu Raja said today.

No additional details were immediately available in the statement given to reporters in New Delhi.

India’s computer-services exports, including back-office services, for the year ended March 31 rose 33 percent to $31.4 billion, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies lobbying group. The exports will increase to $60 billion by 2010, Nasscom has forecast.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India’s largest computer- services provider, declined 9.30 rupees to 1,054.90 rupees at 1:20 p.m. local time on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s second largest, fell 1.7 percent to 1,851 rupees.

An Infosys employee in US involved in a dowry related bodily injury case. Please register your protest in the Comments column for legal prosecution of the Infosys employee.

Infosys is a top ranked Indian outsourcing and off-shoring company.

New Delhi: Twenty-three-year-old Samlin Jenita lies in Chennai’s Mehta hospital battling for life. Twenty-eight weeks pregnant, seriously bruised and nursing a severe brain injury, Jenita is a victim of dowry harassment.

She was flown to Chennai from the US on Sunday night in a special air ambulance after her family got a frantic call informing them of her accident and urging them to take her back.

Jenita was allegedly beaten up by her husband Christy Daniels – an Infosys employee in the US – who reportedly threw her out of a moving car.

She was rescued by Sardar Inamullah, a Pakistan-origin pathologist and was sent home.

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Andrew J Baltazar and Neha Mehta, Hindustan Times

New Delhi, November, 2007

Twelve years ago, Rajesh Mehta, an IIT Roorkee-trained electrical engineer, left India for the US, ready to ride on the dot-com bubble. After nine years in the land of opportunities, Mehta found himself riding yet another technology boom — this time back at home.

In 2004, Mehta came home to Noida to join Cadence Design Systems India, among the country’s top 20 IT employers, which develops electronic design automation software. What helped Mehta make the shift back to India was the presence of a buoyant IT ‘ecosystem’ — consisting of vendors, suppliers and consumers —which did not exist in India when he had left a decade earlier.

According to a survey conducted by The IndUS Entrepreneurs network of technology professionals based in India and the US, as many as 60,000 Indian IT professionals have moved back to India in the last few years.

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Associated Press 11.19.07, 4:35 PM ET

WASHINGTON -

The Information Technology Association of America, whose more than 300 members include Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. and Yahoo Inc., hired PLM Group LLC to lobby the federal government on immigration matters, according to a disclosure form.

The firm will lobby on issues related to the H-1B visa program, which allow companies to hire skilled foreign professionals for up to six years, according to the form posted online Nov. 13 by the Senate’s public records office.

Tech companies argue there aren’t enough visas to meet their needs for certain skilled positions and have long pushed to increase its cap from the current 65,000 per year – a number that has stayed relatively flat since 1990. Earlier this year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received 150,000 applications for the 2008 H-1B visas in a single day.

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(In Pic: NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik)

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE: India which handles three-fourths of the world’s outsourced information technology (IT) services business, contributes a minuscule portion — one billion dollars worth of a $300 billion opportunity — when it comes to software products involving intellectual property (IP).

Instead of resting on its laurels as the preferred IT services destination, technology players and academics in India must look to creating compelling products for the domestic and global market with an eye on cornering at least $15 billion worth business by 2015.

This was the challenge thrown out by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) to the Indian IT industry, at its annual Product Conclave that opened here on Monday.

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