On Monday two major companies USA`s Microsoft and India's Reliance Communications signed a 500-million-dollar deal to launch India's first high-definition Internet TV service.

The Internet protocol Television (IPTV) will start early next year in 30 cities including the financial hub of Mumbai and the capital New Delhi, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Reliance Communications Chairman Anil Ambani told reporters Monday, an eight-year exclusive alliance for IPTV services, which the former plans to launch in India by March 2008.

RCom will pay up to $500 million to Microsoft in licence fees for the US company’s Media room IPTV software platform. The service will offer both high and standard-definition TV, personal media sharing, VOD and PVR capabilities.

The service will be delivered through RCom’s fibre optic network, which covers 13,000 towns and five lakh villages in India.

However, officials from neither company would comment on the pricing strategy for the initiative. The platform will enable Reliance’s IPTV service to deliver video-on-demand, digital video recording, instant channel changing and personal media sharing. Subscribers will be able to watch popular standard definition as well as high definition content.

The companies have been working on the IPTV platform since 2003 and will roll out the service by the end of this financial year. RCom has tested IPTV at over 20,000 households in Mumbai and Delhi.

On the positive note Ballmer stated “IPTV is in its early stage in India, but would catch up in 12-24 months. Most of it will happen in two countries, India and the US, and in India we are expecting tens of millions of customers,”.

Reliance is also planning to go ahead with its DTH service in collaboration with Bluemagic DTH platform which was scheduled to launch by the end of 2007, but has slipped to first quarter of 2008. The service will Measat-3 satellite to beam MPEG4-compressed programming into the sub-Continent. RCom holds 20% of Bluemagic at the moment, with the rest held by subsidiaries, but is moving towards making the DTH service a 100% subsidiary. However, Reliance is coming to the DTH party late, with TataSky, DishTV and Sun Direct already operating pay-DTH services.

Source: (ZDnet INDIA, AFP, Rapid TV News, Business Standard)

Surpassing American software czar Bill Gates, Mexican business tycoon Carlos Slim Helu and famous investment guru Warren Buffett, courtesy the bull run in the stock market, billionaire Mukesh Ambani on Monday became the richest person in the world.

Record-breaking performance by India's stock markets has put the industrialist Mukesh Ambani at the top of a list of the world's richest people. With India's most valued firm Reliance Industries, Reliance Petroleum and Reliance Industrial Infrastructure Ltd, the net worth of Mukesh Ambani rose to $63.2 billion (Rs 2,49,108 crore), making Ambani's wealth total of about Rs 2,49,000 crore includes about Rs 2,10,000 crore from RIL (50.98% stake), Rs 37,500 crore from RPL (37.5%) and Rs 2,100 crore from RIIL (46.23%).

Reliance Industries, which was founded by Mr Ambani's father, Dhirubhai, spans oil, textiles and biochemicals and has annual revenues of $27bn, close to its fellow Indian conglomerate Tata Industries. Mukesh Ambani and his estranged younger brother, Anil, split the group's assets on their father's death in 2002.

The performance of companies owned by both brothers have been equally remarkable in the recent run by the Indian stock market. The Sensex has risen about 39 per cent since it became the third emerging market after China and Russia to surpass $1 trillion in May, helped by economic growth of around 9 per cent a year and a strengthening currency.

Shares in Reliance Industries, which has the heaviest index weighting on the Sensex, have risen by nearly 80 per cent this year. Indeed, Reliance Industries, operator of the world's third-largest refinery, has accounted for about a quarter of the Sensex's gain since it first crossed 10,000 points in February 2006.

In comparison, the net worth of both Gates and Slim is estimated to be slightly lower at around $62.29 billion each, with Slim leading among the two by a narrow margin and Warren Buffett, earlier the third richest in the world, also dropped one position with a net worth of about $56 billion.

The five richest people in the world with their net worth.

1. Mukesh Ambani ($63.2 billion)

2. Carlos Slim Helu ($62.2993 billion)

3. William (Bill) Gates ($62.29 billion)

4. Warren Buffett ($55.9 billion)

5. Lakshmi Mittal ($50.9 billion)


Source: (Times, Independent)

Patni Computer Systems on Wednesday said that it has bagged a multi-year $200 million deal with Britain's The Carphone Warehouse, Europe's largest mobile phone retailer, a five year deal will cover a wide range of consultancy, software and maintenance services.

Patni will become The Carphone Warehouse's technology partner for developing next-generation systems for the latter's global telecom and retail operations. The Carphone Warehouse is a large mobile phone retailer with over 2,100 stores in 11 countries. The consulting portion of the agreement will involve redesigning some of CPW’s business processes to help them reduce costs.

“Patni will become a key technology partner providing services across consulting, systems integration, application development and maintenance. In addition, Patni will also be a key partner to The Carphone Warehouse for developing next-generation systems for its global telecom and retail operations,” the company said.

Patni's telecom business contributes 14.1 percent to its revenues. The company also recently acquired Europe-based telecommunications consulting services company Logan-Orviss International.

The agreement ranks alongside deals of similar size it got as ABN AMRO’s preferred vendor in a $2.2 billion contract and its engagements with General Electric.

Source: (ZDnetIndia, EconomicTimes)

There was a surprising turn to the sensex bull run after crossing 19K mark, marketing today crashed more than 1700 points, minutes after the opening bell. The sudden down fall of the market led SEBI to hit the panic button, closing the market for almost 30 minutes, before it resumed it trading for day.

The 30-share index, Sensex, tumbled to 17,307.90, a fall never seen before,and the impact wasn't limited to the Sensex only but also Nifty showed the symptoms and tumbles as much as 500 points after the opening bell.

Minutes after the market was closed for trading our honorable FM appeared on national television and urged investor and analyst, `not to panic` as this step was taken by the SEBI and it is aimed at arresting the surge in foreign inflows through PNs, which are offshore derivative instruments that allow foreign investors to invest indirectly in a the stock markets which has seen the BSE Sensex zoom more than 5,000 points in two months.

He also stated that there was nothing to be alert of and this was a normal procedure to curb the inflows of FII in Indian market.

With markets open at 10:55 am today, it has shown a signs of recovery as speculated by our honorable FM, all we have to see is can market recover till the day's end as quoted by FM.

Four trading sessions — that's what it took the sensex to rally from 18k to 19k, making it the fastest 1,000-point run in the history of the 21-year-old index. If you think that's a milestone, consider this: Over the last month, the sensex has gained 3,500 points. And during this period, four of its five all-time highs were achieved.

"Milestones are a stone's throw away," muttered a derivatives strategist at a domestic brokerage even as the sensex closed at 19059.

The question is, what's feeding the frenzy? The answers at 19K remain what they were at 18K. Unabated buying interest by foreign fund managers because returns from India remain among the best in the world; and expectations that in the future, the Indian economy and corporates will continue to do well.

In any case, these are variables that don't change over four trading sessions. Which is why, foreign institutional investors have pumped $7 billion into Indian stocks in less than a month.

The rush for Indian paper started on September 19 after Ben Bernanke, chief of the US Federal Reserve, cut key interest rates in an attempt to save the world's largest economy from dipping into a recession. Call it the Ben(ji) effect if you will!

He cut interest rates due to the sub-prime mortgage mess. Sub-prime loans are extended to people with low income and hold the potential for default. The gamble American lending institutions took was that with a certain degree of controls, they wouldn't default. But high interest rates in the US started pushing up the numbers of people who couldn't repay the loans.

As it turned out, American banks had a huge exposure to this segment of borrowers and many started tottering under the weight of defaults. The problem had reached proportions that threatened to derail the American economy. Bernanke reckoned that if he cut interest rates, it would be easier for people to service their loans and the financial services sector could ride out the storm.

But investors in the stockmarket saw it differently. It would be some time before the American financial system recovered from the mess it had gotten itself into. In any case, with lower interest rates, returns on their investments would go down. It made sense, therefore, to look at safer markets that offered better returns. Like India.

"India is being looked at much differently today than a few months back," said a dealer at a foreign brokerage. To that extent, India has been re-rated. Going by FII inflows over the last couple of weeks, it is tempting to believe the India re-rating story is playing itself out well.

In the days ahead, institutional players believe FIIs will become specific in their stock selection, but deal sizes will increase substantially. "FII buying is expected to be more stock- specific, driven by strong growth stories rather than broadbased buying," said Naresh Kothari of Edelweiss Securities.

Source: (Times)

Shares of 3i Infotech are likely to see an upside Monday on the company acquiring US-based J&B Software Inc and its subsidiaries for $25.25 million.

J&B Software Inc. is engaged in the business of providing software products and services relating to remittance processing in the United States with blue chip customers.

It has robust and highly scalable software products for payment processing. J&B Software Inc. is engaged in the business of providing software products and services relating to remittance processing in the United States with blue chip customers.

3i Infotech expects the acquisition to be EPS accretive. “The acquisition of J&B Software Inc. is a strategic move for 3i Infotech as it would enable penetration into the blue chip BFSI customer base in the US,” the company said in a notice to BSE.

The 3i Infotech share closed 4.13 per cent lower at Rs 142.70 on Friday.

The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) has collaborated with One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation to bring the latter's much-hyped $100 laptop to India to promote e-learning among poor children.

Under this initiative, Reliance Communications (RCom) will provide Internet connectivity, network backbone, logistics, and support to the OLPC initiative.

The initiative aims at covering over 25,000 towns, and 6,00,000 villages in the country by 2008. The larger OLPC project has already provided laptops to 5 million school children across the world, and aims to cover 150 million by 2008.

Based on the Linux OS, the OLPC (XO) laptop has replaceable keyboards, which can be changed for use with 35 global languages.

While announcing the collaboration, Tina Anil Ambani, said, "Children are the future of the nation, and shaping the future of millions of school children through new age learning systems is of prime importance in today's digital era."

OLPC has launched its first pilot in the country at a school in a tribal village at Khairat, near Karjat in Maharashtra, where school children have been provided with laptops, and training for teachers to incorporate new ways of imparting education.

Carla Gomez Monroy, learning consultant of OLPC, and a part of the pilot, said, "Children lack opportunity, and not capability. Children at Khairat school, who have never even seen a laptop before, are showing easiness and receptiveness while learning on laptops. It has also resulted in reduction in the number of children absentees."

Sumit Chowdhury, chief information officer of RCom, said, "School children will be able to access their educational modules in local languages, collaborate with each other, connect to the Internet, and play games as well."

The laptops are connected via network to the school server. All laptops are on the network, so school children can interact with each other, and share the learning experience. However, once out of the school network, these laptops are rendered absolutely useless. They would work only till such a time the battery lasts.

"Keeping in mind that the laptops will be handled by school children, they have been built drop-proof, 45-degrees shock-proof, water proof, and have a longer battery life as compared to regular laptops," added Chowdhury.

RCom and OLPC are in talks with government agencies, NGOs, content developers, translators, teachers, and project managers to create successful ecosystems to further the OLPC program in India.

Around 20,000 youths from the eight northeastern states are to be recruited for India's booming IT enabled services and business process outsourcing (ITES-BPO) industry.

According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), the initiative for the recruitment drive is being done with help from the union ministry of development of northeastern region (DoNER).

Nasscom, the apex body of Indian IT and service companies, has created an assessment and certification programme called Nasscom Assessment of Competence (NAC) for a common and transparent recruitment process.

"About 100 NAC tests would be conducted across the northeast followed by job fairs early next year for the successful candidates for recruitment to the ITES-BPO industry," said Brajamohan Sinha, director of the Tripura manpower and employment department.

The tests, meant for graduates and others, are to be held in phases later this month and in November and December.

According to a Nasscom statement, of the 20,000 proposed recruits, the highest number of 8,000 would be from Assam followed by 3,500 from Tripura, 2,000 in Nagaland, 1,500 each from Mizoram, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, and 1,000 each from Manipur and Sikkim.

"The ITES-BPO industry is growing at an overwhelming pace and giving a major fillip to the Indian economy. India has established its leadership position globally in the off shoring market and now the availability of skilled manpower is one of the key barriers to the fast growth of the industry," Nasscom said.

BANGALORE: The rupee appreciation looks to be hitting jobs in the technology sector. The industry's spends devoted to hiring have hit a speed breaker. According to industry observers and media analysts, the last few months have seen as much as a 50% decline in recruitment advertisements.

Several tier-1 tech firms that advertised 12 times across the country in a quarter has brought the frequency down to five. Domestic and MNC tech firms like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, HCL, Patni, IBM, HP and Dell are all said to have embarked on a "conscious cost-cutting binge". The only exception is seen to be Accenture, which continues to spend heavily on print recruitment ads as the company has an ambitious mandate to increase its India strength.

Analysts say the decline in advertising is a consequence of increased utilisation of the bench (those sitting idly waiting for projects), and a greater dependence on employee referrals (on an average 30% of the entire IT hiring is done through this channel) and external hiring agencies.

Joydeep Raha, vice president (initiative) in advertising company Lowe, said, "IT firms today are extremely conscious about the utilisation levels of their bench staff to optimise productivity and increase profitability (which has been badly hit by the rupee appreciation). This has significantly brought down the size of the IT recruitment ad market."

Ajay Shroff, director in ad firm Pinxit Blue, said, "This scenario has resulted in an immediate business impact of 20 to 25% on ad agencies. Agencies that do not have a vertical spread could be the most hit, by up to 50% of their income. Also, the bring-the-buddy scheme (employee referrals) has become extremely popular, with some companies doubling or even trebling the referral bonuses."

Shroff said one employee was recently given a reward of Rs 1 lakh by his employer for referring his friend to work. "IT recruitment ads have become seasonal. Now, ad firms wait for increment/attrition months like June, July, August or January to put out the ads. This has started impacting our revenues adversely," said Soumya, director (accounts) at RK Swamy BBDO.

Quality of talent has always been a problem with recruitment ads, which drives up costs. "A single print ad can throw up 10,000 resumes at a time. But often, the employable ones in the lot could be barely 10. Imagine the time and energy we end up spending on screening these CVs" asked an HR manager of a large IT firm.

MUMBAI: It’s another feather in the cap of Indian academia. Vijay Govindarajan, the Earl C Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at Dartmouth Colleges Tuck School of Business, will soon join General Electric (GE) as professor in Residence and chief innovation consultant to help the company advance its innovation agenda.

Indian academicians are among the most sought after business brains in the West. Already people like Govindarajan, Ram Charan and CK Prahalad are advising several Fortune 500 companies. Incidentally, all three of them have made it to the Thinkers 50, an annual ranking of the Top 50 business and management thought leaders.

Says Govindarajan, "My area of expertise is how to create breakthrough businesses while managing the current business. And this is what I will do at GE as well." This was also a theme that Govindarajan addressed in the bestselling book 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators (co-authored with Chris Trimble).

Jeffrey Immelt has been pushing innovation at GE ever since he took over in 2001. The idea is to grow though organic innovation instead of just acquiring companies. GE has identified six areas to innovate in: environment, infrastructure, demographics, emerging markets, digital technologies and financial liquidity.

Each of these businesses present tremendous opportunities to create breakthrough businesses, says Govindarajan. "For instance, demographic changes are leading to a huge ageing population and huge healthcare needs in the coming 50 years."

"This means GE needs to identify these needs now and see how it can address them through its diagnostics business. Similarly, environmental problems like global warming and water scarcity also present significant opportunities."
This is the first time GE has created the position of chief innovation consultant. Govindarajan will perform three roles during his one year stint at the company (he will return to Tuck in 2009): teaching its top 600 executives and teams, consulting on a few innovation projects and consulting to GE executives who want to develop their ideas.

GE does a good job of integrating what they teach at their development centre in Crotonville with actually growth strategy, says Govindarajan.

BANGALORE: Continuing with its string-of-pearls acquisition strategy, Wipro has entered into an agreement to acquire a Singapore-based design services semiconductor firm in an all-cash deal. However, the value of the deal was not disclosed.

Wipro Technologies will acquire Oki Techno Centre Singapore (OTCS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oki Electric Industry, Japan, over a period of one year and this would be its second acquisition in the semiconductor space with the earlier one being NewLogic.

OTCS registered revenues of 8.8 million Singapore dollars for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007 and has a 40-member team. Vasudevan Aghoramoorthy, V-P, Wipro Technologies said, this acquisition will enable them to meet the demand for newer wireless technologies and also expand its breadth of offering in the semiconductor design space.
For the first time, Wipro Technologies has made an acquisition in the Far East region with all its previous buyouts in the US and Europe.

OTCS is focussed on wireless design and has capabilities in radio frequency (RF) technologies. It mainly works for the parent company with some third party clients and Wipro expects to provide solutions for the semiconductor companies.

Sudip Nandy, chief strategy officer, Wipro, said, “Wipro sees this transaction as strategic fitment in building niche competencies which will enhance our presence among technology companies in Japan.”

Wipro Technologies has also entered into an agreement with Oki Electric to set up a dedicated development centre in Bangalore. Mr Aghoramoorthy said, this centre will work with tandem with the Singapore centre.

"OKI has been enhancing its design and development skills. We have been looking for a global partner to improve our efficiency in semiconductor design through outsourcing," said Masahiko Morioka, president, silicon solutions company at Oki Electric Industry.

India's top car maker, Maruti Udyog Ltd, is eyeing the Israeli market as it mulls expansion plans amid robust growth.

Dan Gafni, CEO of Automotive Equipment and Vehicles (Machshirei Tnua), the importers of Suzuki vehicles, told daily Ha'aretz that they are involved in the plan and considering to import the cars.

Maruti Suzuki India Limited recently announced its plans to expand its Indian operations to export cars to Europe by 2009.