In the furthest reaches of India’s rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn’t deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.
India will launch auctions on Jan. 14 to allot radio bandwidth for third-generation, or 3G, telecommunications services.
The government will hold a separate bandwidth auction for broadband wireless access, a document on the Department of Telecommunications Web site said Saturday.
Indian companies, long dependent on hand-me-down technology from developed nations, are becoming cutting-edge innovators as they target one of the world’s last untapped markets: the poor.
Indian technology-outsourcing companies no longer just want to serve their clients’ computing departments–they want to be them.
For years, India’s big tech firms positioned themselves as a cheap alternative to U.S. and European competitors for tasks such as software maintenance and database upgrades. They were content to take whatever work companies like Citigroup Inc. and BT Group PLC parceled out to offshore specialists.
Are things picking up at Nokia?
Maybe… or at least, they seem to be getting worse at a decelerating rate.
RBC Capital’s Mark Sue this morning repeated his Outperform rating on the stock and lifted his price target to $16, from $12, asserting that the company’s operating margins in mobile device many have bottomed. “It’s been the most volatile global handset quarter since we can remember, yet the shock to the system seems to be dissipating,” he writes.
It’s a rough morning for the Indian IT outsourcing sector, which has been hit hard by a highly negative report from Wachovia analyst Edward Caso.
Caso says the group is likely to take another leg down, forecasting that April conference call season will see most of the companies issue guidance below Street expectations. He writes that “demand remains lackluster and decision-making slow.”
India’s tech boom has inspired other developing nations to promote themselves as outsourcing destinations. The latest to try to cash in: Egypt.
Egypt seems like an unlikely place for Western companies to send tech work and open call centers, but Tarek El-Sadany, a government official in charge of helping to grow the country’s information-technology industry, says that the country is well positioned to do these tasks–literally.
Some members of Twitter, the microblogging service, received a surprise over the weekend when they were informed that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had joined the site. “Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter,” the message read. But @OHHDL was an impostor, it was revealed, and banned from the site.
According to IDG News Service, six tech companies with offices in Bangalore, India, have received emailed bomb threats. Among the threatened companies are Indian IT outsourcing firms Infosys and Wipro.
Having spent eight days in India in August, I found the recent tragic events in Mumbai of particular interest, as I have both business colleagues as well as friends in three of the largest cities in India. While the world watched the events play out to their terrible conclusion, I was reminded of one of the most seminal events in television history, that of watching Jim McKay’s harrowing updates during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich.
The Indian IT outsourcing companies are going to see a hit to earnings from the sagging global economy, Pacific Crest’s Kanchana Vydianathan asserted this morning. While still generally bullish on the sector, she cut estimates this morning for Satyam (SAY), Wipro (WIT), Patni (PTI), Infosys (INFY), Tata Consultancy and Cognizant (CTSH).
2008 hasn’t been the best year for CAPTCHA-based anti-spam systems; Google’s Gmail CAPTCHA was broken in February, followed by that of Hotmail in April. Researchers have fought back by incorporating images into CAPTCHAs, but this is only effective against bot-driven CAPTCHA crackers.
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