Computer Gupshup

Learning begins at home. But, while Indian IT companies were busy providing software solutions for the rest of the world, they could not see beyond the traditional route when it came to hiring wannabe techies.

For all these years, IT majors - like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro Technologies, Cognizant Technology Solutions and HCL Technologies - have been using the pencil-and-paper test for campus recruitments.

Now, they have started looking beyond tradition to promote an automated platform for pre-employment screening tests online. "These tests provide a variety of efficiencies, helps in saving time and money in comparison to the traditional pencil-and-paper route and companies are finding it more apt ," said an industry source. "The assessment capabilities can be used to even size up the existing workforce for the purposes of team-building," he added.

While TCS administers the tests on their own, HCL is working in partnership with a Gurgaon-based company, Aspiring Minds. When contacted, HCL however declined to comment.

Source: Business-standard By Kalpana Pathak Going online: IT majors take tech route to hiring

Twenty-eight residents of Hinjewadi, including top names like Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and Wipro, that once ruthlessly poached talent from each other, have now agreed to work collectively to reduce attrition.

At their first meeting hosted at the Infosys campus in Hinjewadi last month, CXO-level representatives from all 28 companies keenly explored a no-poaching agreement, but concluded it was unviable. However, they managed to seal a pact under which they will hire from rivals only after candidates have fully served out notice periods. Earlier, it was common practice for the hiring companies to pay salary in lieu of the notice period. This worked well for the hirer, but caused problems for the previous employer who would not have enough time to find replacements. "We met last month and worked out a broad agenda," confirmed Mritunjay Singh, the Pune head for Infosys and president of the Hinjewadi Industries Association (HIA). Infosys is Hinjewadi's largest employer with 42,000 on its rolls.

 The companies have also agreed that new employees cannot join without a relieving letter from the previous employer. Earlier, it was common for IT pros to desert jobs without any notice.

All of this will be spelt out in a `code of ethics' that will be honoured by the HR departments of all these companies and by their employees.

Source: Economic Times By Omkar Sapre Pune IT Cos Ink Peace Pact To End Talent War, Firms Agreed To Work Collectively To Reduce Attrition

The government plans to develop portals for at least 10 states by October 2010, and the rest will follow. These state portals' services will range from getting a birth or death registration certificate, to applications for pensions, to getting a domicile or residence certificate all online. The forms will be available electronically.

"We expect many states to go live within six months. It will reduce red-tapism and make delivery of services hasslefree," said a joint secretary-level official at the ministry of IT & communications.

"Citizen service centre kiosks in rural areas will help the technologicallychallenged submit these forms online," the official added. The government plans to roll out almost 10,000 more CSC kiosks by December this year, taking the total to 90,000.

Source: Economic Times By Harsimran Julka All govt services to be at your mouse-tip soon

More business process out- sourcing (BPO) companies are setting up back-office units in the regions where their clients are located to help them save costs through process im- provements than by shifting work to low-wage countries.
These units are run by the BPOs, but employ local peo- ple.

India's outsourcing industry has been under fire from in- creasingly protectionist West- ern countries that are still bat- tling huge job losses after the worst economic downturn in decades.

This has forced the back-of- fice sector to innovate and of- fer clients smarter ways to save on costs.

Their Western clients, too, prefer onsite back-office units to be able to continue saving on costs while avoiding any backlash for shipping jobs out.

Indian BPOs are not new to process improvements. They have for long been building tools and investing in quality management standards such as six sigma to improve effi- ciencies and deliver work to clients from centres in India, but with cost arbitrage as the main draw.

Source: Live Mint By K.Raghu Improving Efficiency: Indian BPOs Work At Client Sites To Reduce Costs Without Job Cuts

FALSE ALARM: The `notice' also carried a threat that users who did not update their details within seven days would lose their account permanently

India's 71 million internet and close to 10 million broadband users are increasingly becoming the victims of vicious phishing attacks that can result in identity theft, danger to life and even crippling financial fraud.

On Wednesday, users of Google's email services received a legal notice from the gmail team asking them to update their account details for security reasons.

"Gmail Team is working on total security on all accounts in order to make Gmail better as ever and as a result of this security upgrade we require all Gmail members to verify their account with Google. To prevent your account from disability you will have to update your account by clicking the reply button and filling the space below," the mail read.

The legal notice from Gmail wanted users to refurbish their account name, password, occupation, birth date and country of residence. It also carried a threat that users who did not update their details within 7 days of receiving the warning would lose their account permanently.

However, when contacted, a Google spokesperson said: "Some spammers send fraudulent mass-messages designed to collect personal information, called `spoofing' or `password phishing'. We always advise our users to be wary of any message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information. Google or Gmail does not send unsolicited mass messages asking for passwords or personal information; even if the message asking for it claims to be from us, please don't believe it."

This information is publicly available in the Gmail support center at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/ answer.py?hl=en&answer=8253

Source: Times Of India By Shalini Singh Don't believe this notice from Gmail

Social networking may be gaining traction across India, but the growing army of users riveted on microblogging websites such as Facebook and Twitter would do well to focus beyond privacy settings.

A humorous status message or an impromptu Tweet could get a person arrested, fired, or even divorced by recent changes in the country's IT laws, a development that seems to have gone unnoticed by most users bitten by the social networking bug.

Amendments to India's IT Act, notified last October, make status messages and Tweets admissible as electronic evidence and the onus of the posts on these accounts now rests solely on users, say cyber lawyers.

"Messages on a social networking can be used as electronic evidence under the IT Act," says lawyer Pavan Duggal, adding that posting a tweet or a status message online amounts to publishing in the public domain.

India has a teeming social networking population of about 35 million. Orkut dominates the spectrum with 15.5 million users, followed by Facebook at 10.3 million users, LinkedIn at 2.2 million users and Twitter at 1.4 million users, according to online audience measurement site Vizisense.

Source: Economic Times Inappropriate messages on social sites could get you arrested, fired, or even divorced

Competition from countries that have a greater cultural affinity with the US is fast upstaging India in outsourced voice services, compelling call centres to diversify into non-voice areas and give up their efforts to change the accents of Indians. Some centres have started moving up to higher-end voice based services that requires technical knowledge and problem-solving capabilities (a space where India still has an advantage), while some others are moving to service domestic call requirements.

In voice, many customers prefer the Philippines, a country that has been a US naval base and is hence culturally far closer to the US than India has been. India has already lost tens of thousands of jobs to this Pacific Ocean nation.

In 2007, India had over 3 lakh call agents, the Philippines had barely half that number
Today, India and the Philippines both have 3.5 lakh workers each in voice BPO South Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Australia and Ireland emerging as other major voice destinations Indian call centres moving into non-voice areas or higher-end voice-based services

Telemarketing clearly on decline

India had over 3 lakh call agents in 2007 when the Philippines had just half of that. Today, India and the Philippines have an equal strength of 3.5 lakh people in voice BPO.

Source: Times Of India India's voice BPO segment falling silent

So in villages that don't receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular "radio" service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

"I call it the poor man's iTunes," says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India's largest cellular companies. "A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available."

The cricket fan without a television or radio can dial up and listen to the latest match live on his phone. Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest cell company by subscribers, has a special service that calls hundreds of thousands of farmers every day with recorded messages of weather reports and advice about crops.

Tata Teleservices has a service which lets farmers use their cellphones to control the pumps that water their crops.

Source: Live Mint Cellphone entertainment takes off in rural India

Following an expose by TOI on November 5 that SMS tariffs are 50 to 100 times higher than what it costs service providers, a top Trai official said, ``We are going to issue a consultation paper to review telecom tariffs within 20 days to a month.''

Consumers can expect substantial relief in SMS tariffs latest by March. The official said the move would have come sooner had the regulator not had its hands full with a consultation process on 2G spectrum.

The now inevitable tumbling of SMS rates has important implications for data usage. At present, SMS forms less than 5% of total revenue for mobile operators.

The widespread proliferation of texting is expected to spin off into far higher levels of internet usage. Experts confirm that a crash in SMS tariffs could be the first step to generating demand-side pressure for wireless broadband access.

The cost of an SMS is a fraction of a paisa. This is because an average SMS consists of 1KB data, which takes a fraction of a second for transportation and termination. This revelation by TOI knocked the bottom out of claims that India has among the lowest telecom tariffs in the world.

Trai has so far refused to regulate rates under the belief that competitive markets were at work and tariffs reflect costs. However, in the SMS arena, competition has clearly failed to move prices closer to costs. The practice of pricing SMSs high has been prevalent for several years while Trai has chosen to look the other way. This, despite the facts stating otherwise in Trai's own cost data from its IUC regulation of August 2006.

Besides monitoring and interception, the amended Act also deals with the appointment of Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, which deals with computer security and situations arising from cyber attacks.

“A rapid increase in the use of computer and internet has given rise to new forms of crimes like sending offensive emails and multimedia messages, child pornography, cyberterrorism, publishing sexually explicit materials in electronic form, video voyeurism, e-commerce frauds like cheating by personation etc. So, penal provisions were required to be included in the Information Technology Act, 2000,” the government said in a statement today.

When floated for public feedback this May, the draft amendments (particularly Section 69A) had stirred up a hornets’ nest. Critics argued that the amendments gave the government blanket power to block news portals and other sites for ‘offensive’ content and could be abused.

The government, under Section 69A of the amended IT Act, can “block public access of any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in a computer resource” in the interest of sovereignty or integrity of India; defence of India; security of the state; friendly relations with foreign states; public order; and to prevent incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to the above.

Source: Business-standard Amended IT Act comes into effect

In its second term, the UPA government has concretised Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi's proposal to build Rajiv Gandhi Bharat Nirman Seva Kendra at every panchayat -- the lowest level elected local body in a three-tier system.

This will mean that villagers do not have to travel long distances to government offices for for petty jobs and will be able to skip the red-tape.

The Rs 28,000-crore (Rs 280 billion) scheme is the third biggest rural development scheme after National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (Rs 39,100 crore) and National Rural Livelihood Mission (Rs 10,000 crore). The kendra (centre) will be set up in a two-room building to be constructed in each of the 265,000 panchayats.

The state governments will provide the land,while the Centre will fund the infrastructure.

Once the kendras start functioning, the villagers would be able to check their National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme bank accounts, pay premium for health insurance scheme for below poverty line families and can get many other services through these centres.

Source: Hindustan TimesWeb widens to include grassroots

Last month, Deepak Kumar (name changed on request), a visually-impaired businessman, logged on to check out for some information on the newly-created Rajya Sabha website.

Given the government's assurance this February that at least 50 important government websites would be made disabled-friendly and accessible, he should have faced no problems. However, there were accessibility problems galore.

For instance, there were inappropriate alternate texts, no means to control the moving content, missing form labels, and code (XHTML) that did not match the world wide web consortium (W3C) specifications -- all in violation of guidelines provided by the Indian government itself.

Moreover, links leading to external websites existed but users were not informed about the same in advance, thus creating more problems for disabled people. The very title for the homepage of the website "Rajya Sabha -- Parliament of India" failed to describe that it is the homepage.

The world over, as new websites are created, countries like the US, the UK, Canada and Australia have enacted legislation to make it mandatory for creators of web pages to follow the minimum standards for accessibility adopted by

Source: Business-standardIndian websites flout guidelines for the disabled

A web-based tool like Google Earth, Bhuvan promises to give better 3-D satellite imagery of India than is currently being offered by the US-based software giant plus a host of India-specific features like weather information and even administrative boundaries of all states and districts.

The application can be downloaded from http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/

The tool would offer pictures of the globe, just like Google Earth, and navigable in the same way but currently has the best resolutions over the Indian sub-continent. It allows users to fly from space to street level, grab, spin and zoom down to any place.

It also provides tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing and visualizing thematic information. The resolutions currently on offer are good enough to view a vehicle moving on a road quite clearly.

Bhuvan currently only offers images taken between one and three years ago even over India. It combines satellite imagery from various sensors onboard IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) satellites and transposes them on a 3-D globe. As it keeps updating its database with more recent and higher resolution images, Bhuvan eventually promises to offer real-time data and images.

Source: The Indian Express Launching Bhuvan: ISRO's answer to Google Earth, zoom into states, districts

• Cyber police is watching Government can monitor, intercept or even block any online content including e-mail that it thinks is offensive or could threaten national security. Could lead to misuse.

• Personal data up for grabs Government agencies can now demand users' personal data from internet service providers. Could lead to privacy issues and litigation.

• Beware of e-mail/MMS/SMS jokes Exchange of messages/data that are "offensive, annoying or cause inconvenience" over any computing device will be treated as an offence. Open to interpretation.

• Intermediaries are better off Service providers will not be held responsible for offensive content put up by websites, but will have to respond to state orders to block/ remove content within two hours. Could lead to technology issues.

Pretty soon, millions of Indian users will find that it's no longer easy to put up just about anything on the internet without bothering about it. A photograph, a joke or an innocent, honest comment on a contentious issue could prove to be troublesome depending on how a government agency interprets it.

Drafted under the broad umbrella of cyber security, the rules give teeth to a new law passed by the government late last year.

It changes the system of penalties for cyber offences and makes it easy for government agencies to seek any information, including users' personal data. This sudden extremism over Net activities stems from the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year, where internet and mobile technology was allegedly used to plan and execute the operation. India's action here is not isolated and follows a pattern among countries like US and China, who are targeting terror aided by the internet.

Source: www.outlookindia.com IT: CYBER LAWS, What Was The Password?

In response to this need for a proper law for electronic commerce, and the larger canvas of Fundamental Rights from the encroachment of cyberspace, in 2006 an Amendment Bill was introduced in the Parliament to provide for its integration into the legislative changes being implemented in other laws such as the Negotiable Instruments Act, the Indian Evidence Act, in recognition of the role of electronic media in the 21st century. Renamed as the IT Amendment Bill 2008, several changes were made to the initial recommendations and the draft passed by the two Houses of Parliament without any discussion thereon. Even in terms of media recognition, there was very little coverage of a law as controversial as this though there was a lot of spirited blogging, which could have far reaching implications on privacy rights of citizens.

To an extent, the Act is an updation of the IT Act 2000, differentiating application of digital and electronic signatures in relation to authentication and creation of documents. Definitions have also been introduced to include new technology in communication devices and systems of creation and transmission through various systems. The Act has sought to validate the concept of penalties, compensation and adjudication in dealing with what is popularly known as cyber crimes and in doing so Section 66 and 67 of the existing Act have been enacted.

Source: business-standard IT Act 2008 gets tougher with cyber crime

With the US in recession, India's call centres have opened a new outsourcing frontier: India.

The shift is a sign of how India's flagship export industry is shifting from providing services to the developed world to catering to its own, quickly growing market. The Indian economy grew 6.7% for the fiscal ended March 31.

"We cannot deliver and make money in the same way we make money for an international market," says Ananda Mukerji, chief executive of Firstsource Solutions Ltd, a Mumbai-based outsourcer.

In April 2007, his company opened a call centre in Hubli, a city of 800,000 people 370km northwest of Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital. Hubli is best known for its cotton and peanut farms.

But it is also a place where wages and rents are half of those in major cities such as Mumbai. A call centre worker who gets roughly $500 a month in Mumbai would earn $250 to $300 a month in Hubli.

source: Live Mint India's call centres take calls from home

The intensity of the syndrome could become severe when a team member working on a project is benched or sent out, a leading psychiatrist said.

"It's a mental situation where IT professionals who of late have seen their colleagues, who are often friends, too, being laid off," B.N. Gangadhar, professor of psychiatry at the premier National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) here, said.

"First, it is the anxiety that the axe may fall upon them the next time and, secondly, a sense of remorse, with a tinge of guilt that they have survived, whereas their colleagues sitting next to them have lost jobs," Gangadhar said.

Two million people were employed in the Indian IT and BPO industry in 2007-08, according to the IT industry body Nasscom. The BPO sector employed more than 7 lakh persons.

"These are bad times. Recently two of my colleagues, who are also close friends, were fired. I am feeling terrible after the episode," said Sundar Gopal working with a reputed Indian IT company.

UNITES-Professionals (Union of Information Technology-Enabled Services Professionals), says there is no clear estimate of the job loss in these sectors in the wake of the global economic meltdown.

Source: The Tribune Pink slip fear drives techies to docs

A few continents away, the New York-headquartered Lehman Brothers had just posted record revenues and profits, and was handling assets of over $275 billion. At that time, Vegi was sitting on multiple job offers. One was from American outsourcing giant EDS and the other from Wipro, India's second largest IT company. Both offered to pay him substantially more than what he was earning at TCS. But EDS was willing to pay a little more than Wipro.

Multiple job offers and generous pay hikes were nothing unusual in the IT industry. Talent was hard to come by. Companies had to pay plenty in cash, bonuses, perks and stock options to retain existing employees, and attract new hires by the thousands. New contracts from US clients were flowing in easily and IT companies had a simple formula for success: they could grow as much as they could hire. They often behaved like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They hired indiscriminately.

Vegi chose to accept Wipro's offer ahead of EDS. "I thought my job would be more secure with an Indian company," he recalls. Soon after, on September 14, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. In three months, the bank would be just a footnote in financial history. When Vegi heard the news, he was in Vizag for his housewarming ceremony. "Good I moved out of that account," he thought. But he had no inkling of the catastrophe awaiting him the next day.

On September 15, Vegi was summoned to his supervisor's cabin. He had been a part of Wipro's `free pool' (the bench, IT industry lingo for people without any work to do) for a few months. "The supervisor asked me to resign as there were no projects," recalls Vegi. If Vegi were to be assigned a project during his notice period, the supervisor promised to reinstate him. The supervisor then pushed his laptop across the table and asked Vegi to type out his resignation letter. Flustered, Vegi asked for time.

Source: business.outlookindia.com IT Layoffs: The Fall of the Software Professional