Category Archives: News

IT cos find Pune rentals high-priced

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The Times of India is reporting that the increasing rentals in Pune could be a significant deterrent in growth of IT in Pune.

Sunil Patil, president (Pune region), UBICS, a software company of the UB group, believes that the rentals may spoil the show. “Rentals in Pune for software companies have gone up 300% in three years. We are being offered space at Rs 65 per sq ft, which at $1.50 is the rate in Manhattan,” he said.

This comes on top of the disappearing cost advantage, especially in product companies. Salaries have been going up, and what used to be a 1 :: 6 or at least 1 :: 4 cost advantage is fast evaporating, especially at the higher levels. For people with 7-8 years of experience or more, I’ve heard numbers like 1 :: 1.5, and in some cases, I’ve heard that execs in India actually need to be paid more than the equivalent US salary. Factor in the increasing cost of real estate, travel, and other overheads associated with having India operations, and the economics of the situation start looking troubling.

When riya.com (now like.com) shut down their Bangalore operations, CEO Munjal Shah wrote a detailed post on why they couldn’t afford India. It is very instructive reading. Larger companies have an internal headcount ratio – if you have budget to fund a 100 person team in the US, how many people can you fund in India. This number used to be 300 earlier, and there’s at least one company that has updated its numbers to 100. Think about that. They end up with the same cost irrespective of whether the team is in the US or India – and this factors in the fact that junior programmers in India are much cheaper than those in the US.

If you are not careful, your job is going to Shanghai. Or Philippines.

Note: I am talking about product companies that are trying to do full-fledged product development out of India. In services (i.e. outsourcing) the ratios are better. But even there the situation is grim. Read Sramana Mitra’s “The Death of Outsourcing“, for example.

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UoP accepts online proposals to fund research

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The University of Pune has now created a website where college and university level researchers may submit research proposals online to get them funded by UoP, which has earmarked Rs. 8 crore for this purpose.

Since 2006, the UoP introduced the scheme to encourage college and varsity-level research projects by teachers and students. The university provides Rs 50,000 to Rs 3.5 lakh for each project, depending upon the proposal.

Source: Now submit your research papers online (The Times of India).

Azingo to raise Rs 200 cr for acquisitions in India

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LiMo FoundationImage by mtlin via Flickr

Azingo, a mobile platform development company, which provides a full Linux-based mobile stack, as well as services, (and which has a development center in Pune), is planning to raise Rs 200 cr in a Series-B funding from US-based private equity firm Garnett Helfrich Capital and a few other VCs.

Azingo, one of the core members of UK-headquartered LIMO Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to creating an open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices, helps the foundation’s 55 members, including nine tier-I operators like Verizon, Orange, SK Telecom and Soft Bank Mobile, to develop, integrate and tests its Mobile Linux software platform.

“Our Mobile Linux operating system is currently in the beta stage and we are in the process of commercialising the technology. The funds will be utilised to build applications for service and delivery to large operators and vendors, besides scaling up our workforce in India through the inorganic growth route,” Azingo’s chief executive officer Mahesh Veerina told Business Standard.

Veerina said they had identified a couple of companies in India and abroad that could bring in engineering talent, mobile application development, intellectual property IP or customer relations. It expected to wrap up the buyout deal in the next six to nine months. Azingo currently has 300 engineers working out of its Hyderabad and Pune centres. It will add close to 700 engineers in the country in the next one year.

Source Azingo to raise Rs 200 cr

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MultiEyeVision – Mobile GPRS based remote monitoring

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MultiEyeVision Observer is a product for remote monitoring and remote observation. The Observer is a pre-configured mobile phone, which in addition to functioning as a normal mobile phone, can also be used at any time as a remote observation camera. High quality image stream captured by the Observer is viewable in real-time from anywhere over the internet.

The Observer can be used for a wide range of business and consumer applications. For example, keep the Observer at home, and keep an eye on your kids while you are at work. Or place the Observer in your office / workshop, and supervise your staff when you are travelling.

The biggest advantages of the MultiEyeVision Observer are its simplicity of use and mobility. There is no cabling / wiring or installation. It can be moved at any time to the place you want to monitor. And all you do is press a button on the mobile to start monitoring.

[edit] Links

Contact Info

  • Phone: +91 20 6500 2263 – During work hours Mon-Fri 10.00 am to 6.00 pm.
  • Email: info@multieyevision.com

[edit] Articles

Chitale Dairy Consolidates Two Datacenters into One with VMware Infrastructure

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(news sent in by PuneTech reader Chirag Dalal)

Yahoo! Finance reports that Pune’s Chitale Dairy has used VMWare’s virtualization infrastructure to consolidate their two data centers into one and save costs:

Chitale Dairy, which produces about 400,000 liters of milk per day as well as cream, butter and yogurt, faced operational challenges with 10 physical servers spread across two datacenters in a town 500 kilometers from the nearest city. In its remote location, the company found it expensive and challenging to source and retain qualified IT support staff while also grappling with server sprawl.

By consolidating its two physical operations into one virtual datacenter using VMware Infrastructure, Chitale Dairy reduced server hardware acquisition costs by 50 percent, software acquisition costs by 75 percent, and power consumption in half. VMware also reduced server deployment times from three weeks to three hours and the time to restore a corrupted server from six or seven hours to 10 minutes.

See full article.

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Pune engineer honored as RHCE of the year

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From Red Hat News:

The achievements of Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCEs) from around the world will be honored for the third-consecutive year at the upcoming Red Hat Summit, June 18 – 20 in Boston, Mass. RHCE of the Year awards will be granted to five individuals – one each from the United States, Canada, Asia-Pacific, India and Europe.

The RHCE of the Year award gives Red Hat an opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of five extremely resourceful and capable individuals whose winning submissions highlight the value of the Red Hat certifications for the enterprise, the career and the community. The awards also recognize the contributions of our certified community as a whole. More than 500 RHCEs entered this year’s contest by answering the question: “why should you be considered RHCE of the Year?” in 1,000 words or less.

[…]

Anil Waychal, India’s winner, led his company’s efforts in migrating more than 350 systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The end result was a large cost savings and a significant boost for Suma Soft’s overall security.

Suma Soft is a Pune-based company that provides development and support services in web technologies and security.

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Reconnex named a leader in DLP by Forrester

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(Newsitem forwarded to punetech by Anand Kekre of Reconnex)

Reconnex, has been named a “top leader” in the data leak prevention space by Forrester in its DLP Q2 2008 report.

DLP software allows a company to monitor all data movements in the company and ensure that “sensitive” data (i.e. intellectual property, financial information, etc.) does not go out of the company. Reconnex and Websense have been named as the two top leaders in this space by Forrester.

Forrester employed approximately 74 criteria in the categories of current offering, strategy, and market presence to evaluate participating vendors on a scale from 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

  • Reconnex received a perfect score of 5.0 in the sub-categories of data-in-motion (i.e., the network piece of DLP), unified management, and administration
  • Reconnex tied for the top scores in the sub-categories of data-at-rest (i.e., discovery) and forensics

“Reconnex offers best-in-class product functionality through its automated classification and analysis engine, which allows customers to sift through the actual data that the engine monitors to learn what is important to protect,” according to the Forrester Wave: Data Leak Prevention, Q2 2008 Report. “This solution stands out because it is the only one that automatically discovers and classifies sensitive data without prior knowledge of what needs to be protected.”

For more information about this award, see Reconnex’ press release.

For more information about Reconnex technology, see the punetech wiki profile of Reconnex.

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PubMatic Launches Default Optimization Service to Recapture $1 Billion in Lost Advertising Revenue

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A large number of websites rely on advertising as their primary source of income. Typically the ads are served by third party ad networks (for example Google’s adsense). When an ad network is unable to find an appropriate ad for a specific page being served to a specific reader, they put in default or public service ads (PSAs). This is not good because the website makes no money from PSAs.

Ad optimization service Pubmatic, says that more than half the ads that get shown at an average website are PSAs:

Over the past several months we’ve studied just how severely default ads are affect our publishers and the numbers are jaw dropping. We found that ad networks defaulted 56% of the time on average and as much as 87% of the time. We also found that that the traditional static daisy chain of ad networks may be effective at reducing blank ads but is highly ineffective at maximizing a publisher’s revenue. Between 20% and 30% of publishers’ ad inventory is going to waste.

(Source.)

This is of course terrible, if true.

Now Pubmatic has just launched the default optimization service that automates the process of contacting other ad networks whenever the ad being served by the primary network is a PSA

PubMatic’s default optimization service automates the reselling process, allowing publishers to instantly redirect unsold ad inventory back to PubMatic, which fills that inventory with the highest paying ad impression every time. PubMatic’s new service is an automated solution for the billion-dollar loss that plagues the industry.

For more details, see the press release.
Related articles:
Pubmatic and Komli to power all eBay.in ads
PubMatic releases AdPrice Index: Sensex for Online Ads
See also:  The PuneTech wiki profile of Pubmatic , and Mukul Kumar, head of engineering at Pubmatic (based in Pune).

Commercial work pilots begin on Eka, Tata’s supercomputer

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The Financial Express reports that Eka, the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world, built in Pune by the Tata’s Computation Research Lab (CRL), has begun running pilot projects for various commercial entities. Excerpts:

According to sources close to the development, the main application areas are in aerospace and aerodynamics, automotive design and engineering, academics, animation, weather forecasting and so on

and

Although the company would use some of these application in house, be it for Tata Motors or Tata Elxsi, much of the revenues would flow in from outside the Tata Group, mostly from abroad. 

These would include aircraft design companies like Boeing, Lockheed and Airbus.

See also:
Building the world’s 4th largest supercomputer

121 Tech unveils easyTXT signage solutions | Televisionpoint.com News

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From  Televisionpoint.com:

121 Technologies has unveiled its Bluetooth/SMS enabled easyTXT smart signage solutions. easyTXT is a digitally enhanced media format for deployment at OOH locations such as retail spaces, airports, malls/multiplexes, exhibitions, events. The technology allows potential customers’ mobile phones to be registered in an intuitive manner to receive offers and notifications.

[…]

The technology is location specific. For instance, a pizza outlet in a food court in a mall can send out specific SMS’s about its meal deals. For this, the outlet has to install a light box with the easyTXT hardware unit mounted inside it. The unit has bright flashing LEDs that ensure maximum eyeballs see the signage.

Once near the signage, users need to turn on the Bluetooth feature on their mobile handsets, accept the incoming connection and enter the pairing code written on the signage to start receiving the offers/notifications from that brand. The pairing code ensures that only those people interested in receiving the offers get them.

Related articles:
InfoBeanz: Free web-based platform for “digital signage”