Outsourcing giant Infosys believes it is the new model for global businesses

First came orientation at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame -- name tags for all, a buffet of pasta, sushi and apple pie, the quick rundown on company goals and ethics. Then the recruits prepared to climb aboard three jet airliners for the 30-hour journey to Bangalore, headquarters of their new employer, Infosys Technologies.
``I'm nervous about the flight and I don't know what to expect there -- the weather, the culture, working,'' said Nicole Dun, a 22-year-old San Franciscan embarking on a six-month intensive company training program before being redeployed in the United States. ``Business is global now.''
The summer hiring of 126 young Americans was a validation of sorts for the outsourcing giant, a company that for some in the United States has been synonymous with offshoring and lost jobs.More>>

Andreessen wants to social network

Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen helped bring the Internet to the masses during the 1990s. Now the Netscape Communications co-founder is trying to help Web surfers build online communities outside the walls of social networking leaders MySpace.com and Facebook.com.

Andreessen's vehicle this time around is Ning Inc., a Palo Alto-based startup that he began in 2005 with former banker Gina Bianchini.

After months of fine-tuning, Ning is finally ready to make its big push with a free toolkit designed to make it easy to launch a social network with a few mouse clicks. Ning's package includes all the social networking staples - videos, photos, music, forums, personal profiles and blogs.

Although both MySpace and Facebook have become smash hits by offering the same features, Andreessen is convinced people dislike the big social networks' one-size-fits-all approach. With Ning's products, even technology neophytes can customize social networks around narrowly shared interests, such as a sports team, church group, hobby or TV show.

"This is the next logical step (for social networks)," said Andreessen, 35, who is Ning's chief technology officer and primary financier. Bianchini, who first met Andreessen while working at another startup, is chief executive.

Ning hopes to make money through a combination of advertising and fees for premium services like extra storage space or bandwidth.

Since he got rich in 1999 when AOL bought Netscape for $10 billion, Andreessen has been scouring for the next big thing with little success so far. He has invested in variety of startups and still serves as chairman of Opsware Inc., a software support provider that has been growing rapidly in recent years but still has accumulated nearly $500 million in losses since its 1999 inception.

Dell to Sell Linux PCs

After collecting some 1,800 new product and service ideas from IT users and customers using an online "suggestion box," Dell Inc. has announced that it's taking the user suggestions seriously and will soon debut and sell a new line of certified, user-ready Linux-loaded desktop and laptop computers.
The Dell IdeaStorm Web site, where customers and other IT enthusiasts can offer recommendations about future Dell products and configurations that they'd want to buy, was started on Feb. 16 by CEO Michael Dell, who is looking for ways to re-energize the company's sales and financial performance after several disappointing quarters.
One post that got a lot of interest was the idea that Dell bring back a reasonably priced laptop computer that runs Linux.More>>

Happy 52nd birthday, Steve Jobs

Happy birthday to you – Steve, this is your day.
On this day for you we’re gonna love you in every way.
This is your day, your day, happy birthday to you, to you, to you.

Happy birthday to you, you’re still young.
Age is just a number, don’t you stop having fun.
This is your day, your day, happy birthday to you.
This day only comes once every year,
Because you’re so wonderful with each and everything you do, hey!

Happy birthday to you, this is your day.
On this day for you were gonna love you in every way.
This is your day, your day, happy birthday to you, to you.
This day is only for you, because you’re so special in every way,
Happy birthday to you and thanks for the Apple iPhone!

Steve Jobs, Business Personality

• Born: 24 February 1955
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Best Known As: The co-founder of Apple Computers

Steve Jobs was a college dropout when he teamed up with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs’ garage. That was the beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and made Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He was forced out of the company in 1985 and started the NeXT Corporation, but returned to his old company in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Jobs soon became Apple’s chief executive officer and sparked a resurgence in the company with products like the colorful iMac computer and the iPod music player. Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock; the deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock.

Some sources list Los Altos, California as Jobs’s place of birth. However, in a 1995 oral history interview with The Smithsonian, Jobs said, “I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955.” Jobs was given up for adoption after birth and raised by his adoptive parents in Silicon Valley… His biological sister is novelist Mona Simpson, author of Anywhere But Here.

Coffee with ET: Premji & Murthy

How often have you seen the chairmen of Wipro and Infosys together? If at all, you can count that on the fingers of one hand. That, too, at very important events or on committees which cannot do without Mr Narayana Murthy and Mr Azim Premji.

How often have you seen the two sit down, either in private or public, for a cup of coffee and chat up. Not once until now. Not until ET got them to do that on a liesurely Sunday morning. The rest, as they say, is history.

We do not want to use adjectives, it was great, or any other devices that English language permits to describe how it went or what they discussed. We bring that extensively for you. If you are impatient to read what they said about the emerging global market place, competition, with others and, certainly, between them, opportunities for the country in many sectors, the admiration and respect they have for each other, you can go straight to the interview .More>>

Top 10 Largest Databases in the World

We all collected things as children. Rocks, baseball cards, Barbies, perhaps even bugs -- we all tried to gather up as much stuff as possible to compile the biggest most interesting collection possible. Some of you may have even been able to amass a collection of items numbering into the hundreds (or thousands).More>>

JavaBeat WebLog

Articles on Java 6.0

I have collected list of articles on Java 6.0.
Resources and Articles for Java 6.0 (Mustang)

Closures in Java 7.0

Java 7.0 Articles
Introduction to Java Module System in Java 7.0

I am just trying in google to know what is in next version of Java. So many blogs writing about the new feature closures in Java 7.0, a functional programming cocept.

An excerpt from sun blogs:

Modern programming languages provide a mixture of primitives for composing programs. C#, Javascript, Ruby, Scala, and Smalltalk (to name just a few) have direct language support for function types and inline function-valued expression, called closures. A proposal for closures is working its way through the C++ standards committees as well. Function types provide a natural way to express some kinds of abstraction that are currently quite awkward to express in Java. For programming in the small, closures allow one to abstract an algorithm over a piece of code; that is, they allow one to more easily extract the common parts of two almost-identical pieces of code. For programming in the large, closures support APIs that express an algorithm abstracted over some computational aspect of the algorithm. We propose to add function types and closures to Java. We anticipate that the additional expressiveness of the language will simplify the use of existing APIs and enable new kinds of APIs that are currently too awkward to express using the best current idiom: interfaces and anonymous classes.

Java 7.0 Articles
Introduction to Java Module System in Java 7.0

Web 3.0 is about creating Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.>>

Minglebox - Web 2.0 company in Bangalore

Minglebox Communications Private Ltd. is a start up in the internet and mobile space, founded by ex IIT/IIM alumni. The founders are marketing and technology professionals with varied experience in consumer goods, internet, telecom, financial services and IT industries across India and the US. The company aims to build internet and mobile consumer products for the next generation of Indian users. This is located in Bangalore.

Minglebox is in the process of setting up a world class technology team to build a set of highly scaleable web 2.0 based applications/platforms. They are looking to getting a couple or more high caliber techies from the Java world with an interest in building web2.0 technology.>>

Linus Torvalds - Godfather of Open Source

Linus Torvalds was just 21 when he changed the world. Working out of his family's apartment in Helsinki in 1991, he wrote the kernel of a new computer operating system called Linux that he posted for free on the Internet — and invited anyone interested to help improve it.

Today, 15 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones around the world, and Torvalds has achieved fame as the godfather of the open-source movement, in which software code is shared and developed in a collaborative effort rather than being kept locked up by a single owner.

Some of Torvalds' supporters portray him as a sort of anti-Bill Gates, but the significance of Linux is much bigger than merely a slap at Microsoft. Collaborating on core technologies could lead to a huge reduction in some business costs, freeing up money for more innovative investments elsewhere. Torvalds continues to keep a close eye on Linux's development and has made some money from stock options given to him as a courtesy by two companies that sell commercial applications for it.

But his success isn't just measured in dollars. There's an asteroid named after him, as well as an annual software-geek festival. Torvalds' parents were student radicals in the 1960s and his father, a communist, even spent a year studying in Moscow. But it's their son who has turned out to be the real revolutionary.More>>

Seagate puts a padlock on drive data

The Seagate technology called DriveTrust encrypts all data written to the disk, making it accessible only to users who have the correct password when the computer is hard booted.

The 128-bit encryption technology has been welcomed by notebook users, in the light of a number of recent high profile thefts of notebooks containing sensitive data in the US Government.More>>

Why vivek paul quit Wipro?

On May 5, Wipro vice chairman Vivek Paul walked into the second floor Bangalore offices of Wipro executive vice president (human resources), Pratik Kumar. The meeting was unscheduled.

Paul told Kumar about a certain sense of 'restlessness' that had seized him lately. He disclosed how he 'was evaluating to do something else'. Kumar thought Paul was at a stage 'where he wanted to make a decision'.

After the conversation, Kumar lost no time in speaking to Wipro chairman Azim Premji on what had transpired between him and Paul. Premji seemed to be aware of what was going on in Paul's mind. He simply expressed his quiet disappointment to Kumar.More>>

Wipro Roars

When Premji took over his father's business it was anything but global. It had about 350 employees, mostly in and around Bombay, and just $3 million in revenues. The company was publicly traded, and not long after Premji assumed control he faced shareholders for the first time at the annual meeting. Premji, who was self-conscious about his age, had grown a mustache in an effort to add some gravitas. But restless investors weren't impressed. One stood up to complain about the stock's lousy performance and demanded that Premji sell the company. ``'There's no way a twit like you can run it,''' Premji recalls him saying. ``More than anything else, that made me determined to prove him wrong,'' says Premji.More>>

Leading Infosys 2.0

Leadership in transition is a particularly painful time for companies. But not for Infosys and Nandan Manohar Nilekani. This year's Dataquest IT Man Of The Year continues to take Infosys and the Indian outsourcing story to new heights.More>>

Oracle unveils new apps, Linux support program

Oracle Corp. has unveiled a new version of its Oracle E-Business Suite of business applications and a support program for the Red Hat Linux operating system.

The E-Business Suite 12 software adds features to help worldwide operations more easily consolidate data, said John Wookey, senior vice president of application development at Oracle. The new version was introduced during the company's OpenWorld user conference here this week.

Oracle E-Business Suite 12 offers easier deployment than Version 11i and includes tools to help users more easily execute profitability analysis by channel or product line, Wookey said. The updated E-Business Suite also adds a Web service repository and links to Oracle's Fusion middleware, the company said.

The new release will begin shipping within a year, Oracle said.More>>

Web Browser Faceoff

The last few weeks have been packed with browser action and the two market leaders, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have launched major new versions. So to round out our recent browser coverage, we present the Web Browser Faceoff - looking at how all the main browsers compare with each other in terms of features and innovation. We are basically looking for what is unique, interesting - and missing - in each browser.

Right now Microsoft still holds onto its huge market lead, but Firefox is gaining more ground every month. Probably more importantly, there are other major innovators in the browser space - such as the social browser Flock (a Read/WriteWeb sponsor) and the perennial innovator Opera. The Mac browser Safari of course has many passionate supporters, while new kid Maxthon is one to watch.

Regardless of who will prevail in the 'browser 2.0 wars', the users will win. While fighting each other, the browser makers innovate and simplify. They increase our productivity by integrating into the browser web concepts such as search, RSS, OPML, microformats and more. The core browsers are getting slimmer and faster, while extensions that cover a wide range of services are being developed by external parties.More>>

Sun CEO: Java open source in 30-60 days

Sun Microsystem will announce the open-sourcing of the core Java platform in 30 to 60 days, said Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday morning.

Java will be offered via an open source format under an OSI-approved (Open Source Initiative) license similar to the one used for open-sourcing of the Solaris OS, he said during a keynote presentation.

Sun officials have talked about Java being offered via open source in stages later this year and into 2007.

Google zooms past IBM

INTERNET advertising giant Google has surpassed IBM to become the world's third most valuable technology company, trailing only behind software giant Microsoft and network leader Cisco.More>>