Pic: bigadda.com

Global networking sites like Orkut are benefiting from India’s huge number of young people, but many local ventures want to claim the clicks

– Nandini Lakshman, BusinessWeek

For the past year, global networking sites have been growing in popularity among young Indians. According to JuxtConsult, a New Delhi-based online research and advisory company, 44% of Indian online traffic uses the Internet just for social networking. Google’s (GOOG) Orkut is the most popular social networking site in India, with a 64% market share. Facebook is also winning many Indian fans, especially students.

But in the last six months, a plethora of local sites has emerged to compete with the Americans. Today, there are more than a dozen India-based and focused social networking sites with colorful Hindi names that are synonyms for community (bigadda.com) and friends (yaari.com). “I guess it’s a cool thing to do,” says Praveen Gandhi, managing partner of Seed Fund India, an early stage Mumbai venture capital fund. He claims in the last year he’s had fund requests from over 50 entrepreneurs wanting to set up social networking sites locally.

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(Pic: Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Anshuman Mishra all worked at Oracle before leaving to establish maxHeap, a start-up).

By Anand Giridharadas, IHT

BANGALORE, India: Sumit Jain wanted out of Khatauli, a down-on-its-luck hamlet in northern India. When his father made him work at the family store, he sat at the counter poring over books, lifting his eyes only to make the occasional sale.

Thanks to his own ambition, and to the Indian outsourcing boom, he escaped. He gained admission to the best engineering school in India, then landed a job that he could hardly have dreamed of as a child: writing software for Oracle, the U.S. technology giant.

“I fell in love,” he said, recalling his first visit to Oracle’s campus in Bangalore.

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Dailytimes:

ISLAMABAD: After getting attracted with the rich potential of outsourcing services of Pakistan’s Information Technology (IT) industry, several Irish companies have shown interest to enter agreements with local IT companies.

“At least six major Pakistani companies Softech Systems, MSoft, Efrotech, Esolpk, Invaterra and Alp Business Service Management have made major contacts with the Irish IT companies and are in process of signing up projects,” the spokesman of Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) said in a statement here on Monday.

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BANGALORE, India (AFP) — Indian IT firms used to selling their services to banks and manufacturers are now looking to the world of sport for new business, after a breakthrough deal with football’s governing body FIFA.

Software group Satyam Computer, the country’s fourth-biggest software firm, has blazed the trail, signing a seven-year agreement to be FIFA’s official IT services provider and its first major sponsor from cricket-mad India.

Satyam estimates that the sports industry is a one-trillion-dollar business which spends 40 billion dollars annually on IT services — and is growing at an annual rate of eight percent.

Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, says Satyam’s deal with FIFA demonstrates the vast potential of the sports market for India’s IT firms.

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(Archived pic)

IT major Infosys Technologies Ltd on Thursday said that it would invest Rs 800 crore (Rs 8 billion) more during the current fiscal. “Total investment during the current year would be Rs 1,600 crore (Rs 16 billion) and during the last two quarters Rs 800 crore had already been pumped in,” Infosys member of the board, T V Mohandas Pai said on Thursday.

Pai said that the company was building the country’s largest educational complex at Mysore with an investment of Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 15 billion) and it was likely to be completed by March. The company is expanding its centres it operates and Pune will become larger than Bangalore centre.

“By June, Pune workforce capacity would be about 24,000 whereas Bangalore strength is 23,000 people,” Pai said. During the current fiscal, Infosys aims to add 30,000 headcount.

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(Pic: Wipro’s Azeem Premji)

Julia Talevski

Indian-based IT services provider, Wipro Infotech, will establish a global IT services centre in Sydney. Local country head, Manoj Nagpaul, said it had been present in the Australian for about five years and recorded significant growth.

“Australia has become a strategic geographic area for us from a growth perspective,” he said. “Now that the volume is increasing and we have more people working with more clients, we decided to set up a centre.

“Having our own centre gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of the infrastructure we can have, the competencies we can put in place and the services we can provide to clients.”

Nagpaul said the centre would provide consulting, software development and testing services to local and global clients. It will initially be manned by 50 staff. He hoped to grow this figure to 200 over the next couple of years.

“We have a very broad range of services to offer and as our customers come up with a need for a certain service, it is going to be shipped from there,” Nagpaul said. “We expect to deliver a very high level of service from the centre, which will benefit our customers. Overall we hope to raise the quality of IT services being provided by the general market.

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Check out another article on HCL’s famous business philosophy covered at TechBanyan.

NEW DELHI: India’s fourth largest software exporter HCL Technologies has been ranked as the World’s top vendor in the infrastructure space, a recent survey said.

HCL Technologies topped the list of 276 vendors, while beating global and domestic giants like IBM, Accenture, HP, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Satyam.

HCL Tech is followed by US-based Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) on second and third positions, according to an annual survey by Brown-Wilson survey for “The Black Book of Outsourcing.”

A total of five Indian companies made to the top-20 list, including Satyam (13), Wipro (14), Infosys (18) and Tata Consultancy Services (20).

HCL Technologies also excelled in the sub-categories like on-site comprehensive, remote comprehensive and desk top support services and storage and servers.

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John Boudreau
HONG KONG – Four years ago, Chuck Cheng left Palo Alto to launch a computer chip design company in this city known more for financial acumen than tech prowess.

He was lured by the Hong Kong government’s generous incentives, such as subsidized rent in a new science and technology park, and strong intellectual-property laws. Then there were dream logistics: His company is a day trip from mainland China’s Pearl River Delta, the world’s factory for everything from iPods to personal computers.

But for all its advantages Hong Kong, like much of the rest of the world, is Silicon Valley 1.0. The city lacks the Bay Area’s secret sauce – which includes an abundance of high-end engineers, quick access to world-class universities, vast networks of tech and market visionaries, and high-rolling venture capitalists.

“When you talk with the local venture capitalists in Hong Kong and China, all they care about is making a lot of money in a short period. But how can you innovate, how can you take risks?” said Cheng, who in the end launched his 10-employee start-up, AppoTech, with $1 million of his own money.

Nonetheless, Hong Kong and many other corners of Asia are betting billions of dollars to become incubators of innovation.

China has 56 official – and countless unofficial – technology parks, and President Hu Jintao regularly calls for “independent innovation.”

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IANS
WASHINGTON: Indian firms are not just taking up outsourcing any more, but have in fact invested a whopping $6 billion in the United States and created 40,000 jobs with quite a few of them going to the Americans.

If a Janaki posing as Janet at call centres in India has been servicing customers in the US, many a Jane and John employed by India Inc. in the US is now helping travellers worldwide book a flight or send flowers and gifts to loved ones in America.

A group of 34 Indian companies represented in the India Business Forum (IBF), launched in June 2006, structured at the initiative of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), has made investments in such diverse sectors as technology, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and gems and jewellery.

The Indian companies with 40,000 employees have invested about $6 billion in the US this year alone through acquisitions and mergers. While there are more Indian nationals in the service sector, the number of local employees goes as high as 95 percent in the manufacturing sector.

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DURBAN, South Africa (AFP) — Software group Satyam has become FIFA’s first major sponsor from India after being appointed as their official IT services provider for the next seven years.

Under an agreement signed here on Saturday, Satyam will join global giants such as McDonalds and the US brewer Anheuser-Busch as one of six World Cup sponsors.

The Indian company will provide Information Technology (IT) support for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups to be held in South Africa and Brazil respectively.

“This is a momentous day for Satyam, as we pledge to work much more closely with FIFA than we have in the past in the run up to 2010 and 2014,” the company’s founder and owner B. Ramalinga Raju said after the signing ceremony.

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