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Friday, June 29, 2007

HCL Info, Wipro for dealerships with iPhone

MUMBAI: Friday 6 pm U.S time. As the world gets ready for this deadline to grab one of the most sought after handsets - the iPhone - two Indian companies are also getting ready to register gains from this revolutionary offering of Apple Inc., the makers of Macintosh computer (popularly called Mac) and the iPod.

Noida-based HCL Infosystems and Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies are close to becoming the exclusive Indian distributors of the iPhone. Analysts are expecting 1-3 million handsets to hit the shelves on Friday.

A luxury product costing $499 for 4 gigabytes memory and $599 for 8 gigabytes memory, iPhone will have a large touch screen minus the conventional keypad. It will also double up as an iPod, video player and will come equipped with a digital camera.

Despite some of its flaws, the iPhone has bagged rare reviews and is being branded as a 'breakthrough handheld computer' as it automatically syncs all contacts from a PC, a MAC or internet service.

The good response is seen helping Apple Inc's head, Steve Jobs, to meet his goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. Such sales will automatically catapult iPhone to third major revenue garner for Apple along with Mac and the iPod.

Back home, HCL Info and Wipro may have to wait only few weeks before counting their profits. Generally, companies get 2-3% commission on the sale of handsets.

"The hype behind the iPhones launch globally has already hit the Indian shores. There are quite a few people waiting to grab the latest gizmo," said technology analyst of leading domestic broking firm.

Both HCL Info and Wipro could not be reached for comments. On the distribution side, HCL Info already has an edge due to its multi-year contract with Nokia. In the domestic market, Nokia has 71% marketshare (as on February 2007) followed by Motorola at 14%, Sony Ericsson at 8%, Samsung at 3% and rest 4%.

In U.S, AT&T has bagged the multi-year license to distribute iPhone. As per media reports, AT&T will be selling iPhone with a two-year service plan with prices varying from $60-220 a month. The phone will also be available directly from Apple retail stores.

- Via TOI

Solar Power Project - Google

That’s prety cool, here in Bangalore or other Indian IT campuses if people start doing stuff like this they might save huge power… but the sad thing about here is, they’ll first waste 2-3 years thinking and then finally start doing something… Anyways, read on what Google’s been up to with power saving…

“In the last 24 hours, Google produced 9,900 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the sun.

In October 2006, Google announced a commitment to solar energy production and launched the largest solar panel installation to date on a corporate campus in the United States. Google has installed over 90% of the 9,212 solar panels that comprise the 1,600 kilowatt project. Panels cover the rooftops of eight buildings and two newly constructed solar carports at the Googleplex (check out this SketchUp fly-over video).

GooglePlex (Google HQ, MountainView CA) with solar panels in rooftops

This installation is projected to produce enough electricity for approximately 1,000 California homes or 30% of Google’s peak electricity demand in our solar powered buildings at our Mountain View, CA headquarters.

Google built this page to monitor and share the day to day production of clean, renewable energy from our very own rooftops.”



- Via ShekLOG, Google

Adobe AIR Applications


Rob Christensen from Adobe Labs has written a great article on Six must-see Adobe AIR Applications (AIR; formerly code-named Apollo).

The goal of Adobe AIR is to make it very easy to build desktop applications with the skills and technologies web developers are already familiar with such as HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, ActionScript and Flex. Just as Flash and HTML are designed to run the same on different operating systems, the objective of Adobe AIR is to extend that same concept to desktop applications.

Once the AIR runtime is installed, the same file can be installed on a Mac or Windows (Linux coming soon). Applications built using Adobe AIR have read and write access to the local file system just like a native application. Other features include local SQLite database, drag’n'drop between applications, clipboard support, a simple and painless install, native file pickers, code signing, support for embedding PDF’s and more. Since a web browser is built-in (WebKit), you can also use your favorite AJAX libraries to build applications entirely in HTML and JavaScript. Or, if you want more creative control, you can use Flash and Flex. There are several tools for building AIR applications including Dreamweaver CS3, Aptana (open source), and Flex Builder 3 (public beta). Since the command line tool for building applications is included in the AIR SDK, you can technically use whatever your code editing tool you’re comfortable with.

Rob Wrote: “Since the alpha release of Adobe® Integrated Runtime (AIR; formerly code-named Apollo) on March 19, dozens of next-generation rich Internet applications (RIAs) built on top of the Adobe® AIR™ runtime have been designed, developed, and distributed across the Internet. Internally, the development teams have been inspired by the imagination, creativity, and resourcefulness reflected in the Adobe AIR applications released so far.” …. more»

Rob listed 6 AIR applications, which are:

One more recently launched AIR Application I just saw is Pownce by Digg’s Kevin Rose.


- Via ShekLOG.

Meet the Next Billionaires

Calling all geeks! Do you have a hot idea for a start-up? If so, this boot camp where Silicon Valley meets 'American Idol' is for you. That is, if you make the cut.




May 21, 2007 issue - Sitting at the long trestle tables in Y Combinator's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters last January, the Weeblies felt wobbly. Back home at Penn State, the three undergraduates were alpha geeks, go-getters who'd capitalized on the university's requirement that students have a Web portfolio by creating software that makes it really easy for students to build a personal site. The trio—David Rusenko, Dan Veltri and Chris Fanini, all 22 years old—decided to start a company, calling it Weebly because it sounded good and the domain name was open. Then last November they heard about a company called Y Combinator that gives seed money to fledgling start-ups and imports a bunch to Silicon Valley for three months of intensive entrepreneuring. They sent off their application the day before the deadline, and made the cut.

Now they were here, just down the road from Google and Yahoo, one of 12 companies that would be part of Y Combinator's winter program of total immersion in the Silicon Valley start-up life. For a techie, it was as if you were making home movies one day, and the next day found yourself on the Paramount lot with a contract and empty film cans to fill. No matter where the start-ups came from—Sweden, Chicago, Oxford or even the South Pole (yes, one person arrived straight from graduate research there)—their lives would never be the same. Also attending the dinner that night were veterans of the previous three Y Combinator programs—some of them millionaires before 25. You don't see too much of that in State College, Pa.

That's the charm of Y Combinator. It's "American Idol" meets Wired magazine. The inspiration came from Paul Graham, a high-energy 42-year-old who himself had a monumental start-up experience, selling his company Via-web, an e-commerce application, to Yahoo at the height of the boom, enriching himself and his buddies. In the spring of 2005 he made a speech at Harvard that was a broadband update of Horace Greeley ("Start up, young man!"), then realized that he could help make it happen for others. He gathered his former partners—Trevor Blackwell, now making robots, and Robert Morris, who achieved brief notoriety in the 1980s as the author of a virus that almost shut down the Internet—and recruited another friend, an investment banker named Jessica Livingston. They drew up the plans for an operation: from hundreds of applications, the YC partners would cull the 30 most promising, conducting "Idol"-style auditions to choose a dozen or so companies for the program. Each start-up is given $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder (a start-up with two founders would get $15,000). This money covers lodging, food and equipment during the program. In exchange, Y Combinator (named after a mathematical function) gets a piece of the start-up, usually 5 or 6 percent.

Some critics scoff that Y Combinator's investment is peanuts for that amount of equity. But the opportunity is unparalleled—total immersion into Silicon Valley start-up culture, advice from Graham and a fast track to the top angel investors and venture-capital funds. When Graham calls the winners, the founders have only five minutes to accept. "If people turn us down," he says, "as far as we're concerned they've failed an IQ test."

Every Tuesday during the program, Y Combinator hosts a dinner of chili or stew for the start-ups. At this first one, Graham and Livingston distribute gray T shirts emblazoned with one of Graham's pithiest admonitions, MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. A second, black shirt is bestowed only to start-ups that achieve a "liquidity event"—a purchase by a larger company or an IPO. It reads, I MADE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT.

Y Combinator's model dovetails perfectly with the new start-up ethic in Silicon Valley. It's dramatically cheaper to start a company now than it was in the dot-com boom, and possible to build a substantial operation before requiring venture capital or achieving that liquidity event. (To pay salaries and costs during that time, one can get "angel funding"—less money than a VC firm pays, but in exchange for less equity.) Software tools, which used to cost hundreds of thousands, are now largely free. A wide variety of tasks can be outsourced cheaply. Computers, servers, bandwidth and storage cost a fraction of what they did a decade ago. And there's no need for a marketing budget when you've got Internet word of mouth.

As a result, when it comes to funding, "$500,000 is the new $5 million," says tech investor Mike Maples. It's several weeks into the program, and Maples is in a Palo Alto, Calif., coffeehouse for a meeting with the Weeblies. He sees a lot of people barely out of their teens. The old wisdom for investors in start-ups said you needed an experienced hand as a CEO. The Valley's new wisdom: don't fund anyone over 30. The average age of Y Combinator founders is 25.

When the Weeblies show up for the meeting, they pull up Maples's Web site and, using their software, clone it almost instantly. Then they show him how he can use Weebly to tweak it easily and even redesign it. Maples's eyes open wide. Later he will explain that at that moment, he was determined to help fund the Weebly team.

Connections with top investors are common for Y Combinator start-ups. In May 2006, Condé Nast bought Reddit, a user-generated news site from YC's initial summer 2005 group. The amount wasn't announced, but Graham says the founders could live off it for the rest of their days—and they're only 23. "Before the Reddit sale there were questions about the Y Combinator model," says Mike Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, the unofficial racing form for Silicon Valley start-up news. Around the same time, another YC company also sold to a bigger one, but it wasn't publicly announced. Between the two sales, seven black T shirts were distributed. Others among YC's 38 companies so far have gotten hefty angel rounds and multimillion venture-capital deals.

By the middle of the winter session, tension is building for the start-ups, which are preparing for the upcoming Demo Day, when the room will be filled with investors. It is not uncommon for Y Combinator start-ups to hit the restart button and drastically change its approach as D-Day nears. One group originally planned to make online-based publishing software. After Graham's suggestions, it shifted the focus to collaborative word processing and changed the name of the company to WriteWith. Another start-up called Socialmoth set out to have people share personal secrets confidentially; the new idea was a place where people in corporations could anonymously post gripes and suggestions, allegedly leading to improved practices. (New name: overhear.us.)

No company feels more under the gun than Zenter, formed by Wayne Crosby, 29, a former Amazon.com project manager living in Phoenix, and Robbie Walker, 23, a programmer in Texas. Last summer the two chums cast around for an idea for a start-up and decided to develop a totally Web-based PowerPoint-style application—it would be the Gmail of presentations.

Graham loves it when his little chicks take on the big birds. "These guys have written 40,000 lines of code in three months!" he crows. "You never see that in a big company!" The Zenters did it by living a spartan existence, sharing a threadbare apartment a five-minute walk from Y Combinator. This was especially tough for Crosby, who had left his pregnant wife behind in Arizona (the couple kept in touch by video Web chats). Their diet consisted of Lean Cuisine, with the exception of some frozen steaks that Crosby's father sent them. The Styrofoam box in which the steaks were shipped became their coffee table.

Looming over Zenter's efforts was the knowledge that Google was working on its own online-presentation app. The word, though, was that the Zenters' program was better, and one day Google invited them over. The search giant made an offer that Crosby and Walker considered too low, but didn't shut the door to further negotiations.

The Weeblies were also working with maniacal intensity. A Penn State alum who was a Y Combinator veteran set them up with an apartment in a North Beach high-rise that is so much a favorite of YC companies that its informal name is the "Yscraper." Paying $2,700 a month in rent for a two-bedroom unit with a spectacular bay view, the Weeblies pushed three desks together to make the dining area into office space.

On Demo Day, each start-up gives a 10-minute demo to a room packed with the top investors in the Valley. The Zenters lead off, using their own software to build the presentation for their demo online in real time; as they give it the Weeblies follow, and nail the crowd with the simplicity of their Web-site creation service. One of the biggest hits was a sleeper—Octopart, an e-commerce site created by two physics grad-school dropouts; it slickly aggregates the inventories of electronic-parts sellers (normally they are buried in phone-book-size catalogs) and makes them easy to buy. Some of the demos aren't as sharp, but none fall flat. "Angels and VCs who don't go to this are missing some of the best innovations," says Ron Conway, the Valley's most celebrated angel investor.

After Demo Day, there's only three weeks left, and the focus shifts from building products to getting funding to keep them going after the YC program ends in April. The Weeblies had buyout interest from a company in Maryland, Freewebs. Rusenko and Veltri took a red-eye to meet the Freewebs executives and, they say, received an offer in the low millions, two thirds of it in stock. They said no. Instead, they'd pursue the angel-funding offer sheet that was at their lawyers' office: Wilson Sonsini, the top firm in the Valley.

Pretty heady stuff for kids who were sitting out in the rain at football games only four months before. "It's almost as if I can't explain it to the people back home," says Chris Fanini. His partner Dave Rusenko agrees: "First you feel real green, then little by little the lifestyle becomes normal." Dan Veltri nods. "Yeah—then it's normal to turn down an offer in the millions."

The last Y Combinator dinner in the session, on March 27, was almost nostalgia-free—though things were over, they really weren't. Most of the companies planned to stay in the Valley. Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston now reports that all the companies in the group are still going strong—most have funding lined up and the others have good prospects for money to keep them going until they build an audience. One has even tentatively agreed to a multimillion-dollar buyout from a major tech company. (Since no deal is a deal until the final papers are lawyered and inked, secrecy is paramount.) "We're going to have to print more black shirts," Livingston says.

And the Weeblies? They completed their angel round—$650,000, with the money coming from a consortium that includes Conway, Maples and Paul Buchheit, the former Googler who wrote Gmail. What did they do to celebrate? "We had a beer or two and then we went back to work," says Rusenko. This month they're returning to State College—to graduate with their class as Silicon Valley heroes.

By Steven Levy
Newsweek

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

iPhone. A guided tour


Apple now featuring iPhone Guided Tour on it’s web site, which is also available as download. Also iPhone section on Apple is updated.

Everything coming wonderful around iPhone & it’s launch, just downloaded the iPhone Guided Tour… It was awesome demo of iPhone in the tour video. One thing why Apple products rocks is the simplicity they put in their design & UI. It is so simple to understand & navigate through that any kid can use it, and they are using it!…

YouTube is also coming to iPhone…




Damn, India will receive it somewhere around Feb/March next year… that means still 6-7 months of wait….

LINK >> Click here

- extracts from Sheklog!

Monday, June 18, 2007

India Brand - India expects record foreign inflows into equity markets

Foreign inflows into the Indian equity markets are projected to reach a record high of over US$ 15 billion in 2007. And, of the US$ 30 billion realty equity investments expected into Asia this year, India alone is likely to receive one-fifth.

Ernst Young's latest report on the rise of telecom in Asia projects that India's telecom sector will see investments up to US$ 25 billion over the next five years.

And Bangalore will now not only be home to Cambridge Silicon Radio's largest R&D centre outside the UK, but also where Lenovo, in a global first, is moving its entire global advertising portfolio to Ogilvy Mather.

- India Brand Equity Foundation

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Historic discussion live from D 2007



- We kind of never thought we'd see the day where Mac and PC voluntarily shared the stage on neutral ground, but that day is today. Very soon Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- both pioneering execs that need absolutely no introduction -- will sit up in front of the audience here at D and discuss god knows what. Don't miss this, people, who knows if this will happen again in any of our lifetimes. You'll know when we get started. Who's got odds that they don't walk out and say "Hi, I'm a PC." "Hi, I'm a Mac."?

We're in! They're playing the Beatles, just like they did when Jobs came out the first time.

- engadget

Friday, June 15, 2007

Photoshop is Magic! - go chk it .. dont be offended



- Whenever you see a hot girl in a magazine, just remember - you can't Photoshop a personality.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Friday, June 1, 2007

Early IBM Hard Disk Drive


Its a hard disk in 1956. The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956.

In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

Harley Davidson's







Creative Harley Davidson's Advertising Campaign
This is lovely, liked the ad much.
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