Hardly 14 hours have passed since Mumbai have come under siege of terror. Taj Mahal and Trident Hotels, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), Colaba and other locations in south Mumbai are virtually terror-stricken in the attack that claimed 78 lives and injuring hundred of people.
As the hubs of activities in the city are still under the gun-wielding terrorists, the impact of these heinous crimes against humanity is evidently being reflected in the city's business affairs and the IT sector is no exception.
As a reflection of the terror siege, many IT companies have closed their shutters for the day and some have reportedly asked their employees to work from home.
Netcore Slutions Pvt Ltd, an IT product and service company based in Mumbai, decided to down the shutter for the day considering the situation in the city.
"Whatever has happened is unfortunate. And we have decided not to work today considering the security of the employees," said Abhijit Saxena, CEO, Netcore.
However, he hoped that things would normalize soon and people would be back to work. "After all, terror attack is not something exclusive to India and hence I don't think it would have any major impact on the industry or the economic scenario of the country as such," said Saxena.
TCS House near CST, the main office of Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai has also downed the shutters today considering the extremely panicking situation. However, the TCS offices in north Mumbai are working.
"TCS employees that work out of our offices in South Mumbai can operate out of any of the offices in North Mumbai until further advise," Pradipta Bagchi, senior general manager, Corporate Communications, TCS said a in a statement.
"A team of TCS experts continue to monitor the situation continuously and the company has very well established business continuity plans in place should the need arise to implement them," he added.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra Government has declared a general holiday for today. The terror strike has also resulted in the cancellation of many IT events in the city. Sun Microsystems, which had planned to announce its new initiative targeted at emerging markets sales region in India, has been called off the event for the time being.
Another such event of Sony Ericsson slated for today, which was set at ITC Grand Central in Parel, Mumbai's central suburb has also been cancelled.
It appears that the IT businesses are under the 'wait and watch' mood till the tense situation in the financial capital improves and the business is back to normalcy.
Source: CMN
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Mumbai attacks will not slow investment, says Kamal Nath
Trade Minister Kamal Nath said on Thursday the attacks on high profile targets in the country's commercial capital would not slow investment into an ecomomy already under strain.
At least 101 people were killed by gunmen in the attacks on some of Mumbai's top hotels, a popular cafe, a busy railway station and other locations. Hostages were taken in two of the hotels.
"This does not have an economic component. It's an unfortunate event. These type of things have happened in New York and other major cities," Nath told Reuters by telephone.
"(There will be) no slowdown in investment flows."
The global downturn has already rattled Indian financial markets and a credit squeeze has prompted the government and central bank to take a series of measures to lift sagging growth.
The Reserve Bank expects the economy to expand by 7.5-8 percent in the 2008-09 fiscal year, slowing from 9 percent posted in the last three years.
India's capital market regulator said the country's two major stock exchanges would remain closed on Thursday.
Source: Reuters
At least 101 people were killed by gunmen in the attacks on some of Mumbai's top hotels, a popular cafe, a busy railway station and other locations. Hostages were taken in two of the hotels.
"This does not have an economic component. It's an unfortunate event. These type of things have happened in New York and other major cities," Nath told Reuters by telephone.
"(There will be) no slowdown in investment flows."
The global downturn has already rattled Indian financial markets and a credit squeeze has prompted the government and central bank to take a series of measures to lift sagging growth.
The Reserve Bank expects the economy to expand by 7.5-8 percent in the 2008-09 fiscal year, slowing from 9 percent posted in the last three years.
India's capital market regulator said the country's two major stock exchanges would remain closed on Thursday.
Source: Reuters
Is Wipro facing impact of global woes?
Wipro in India sees the impact of the financial crisis in the form of lower demand output.
This is the view of Wipro CFO Suresh Senapaty during a television interview at the Reuters India Investment summit in Bangalore.
To check out the video interview...click on the video below:
http://in.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=94456&videoChannel=104
This is the view of Wipro CFO Suresh Senapaty during a television interview at the Reuters India Investment summit in Bangalore.
To check out the video interview...click on the video below:
http://in.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=94456&videoChannel=104
IBM India continues to hire despite recession
IBM's India BPO continues to hire and has not yet seen any impact of a slowdown.
That is the view of Sandip Patel, managing partner of IBM's global business services in India and South Asia, during a television interview at the Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore.
To check out the video interview...click on the link below:
http://in.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=94457&videoChannel=104
Has salary for AIG CEO been cut?
Under pressure from Attorney General Andrew M Cuomo of New York, the American International Group that it would pay its chief executive, Edward M Liddy, only $1 a year and that it was freezing the salaries and eliminating bonuses for its seven other top executives.
In addition, the troubled insurance company said its next 50 highest-ranked executives would not receive salary increases through 2009.
AIG’s cutbacks on executive pay came after Cuomo questioned last week whether the company actually planned to give out raises and bonuses to top executives, especially in light of the federal government’s $150 billion bailout of the company.
The company said it was taking steps to ensure that no government money would be used for bonuses and cash awards to its 60 top executives.
Source: NYT News Service
In addition, the troubled insurance company said its next 50 highest-ranked executives would not receive salary increases through 2009.
AIG’s cutbacks on executive pay came after Cuomo questioned last week whether the company actually planned to give out raises and bonuses to top executives, especially in light of the federal government’s $150 billion bailout of the company.
The company said it was taking steps to ensure that no government money would be used for bonuses and cash awards to its 60 top executives.
Source: NYT News Service
Financial giant UBS officials refuse salary
As a number of American banks resist calls to rein in executive pay, the unthinkable is happening — at least in Switzerland, where three former officials of UBS, the troubled Swiss financial giant, said that they would forgo more than $27 million in compensation.
Marcel Ospel, the former chairman of the board at the Swiss bank, and Stephan Haeringer and Marco Suter, two former directors, said they would give up pay promised them after the bank reported nearly $50 billion in losses and received even more than that in financial support from the Swiss government.
“With the involvement of the Swiss government, I realized that decisive action was required on my part,” Ospel said in a statement. “I hope that my action will help to resolve a situation that was inconceivable to me until a short time ago,” he said.
Ospel will contribute more than twothirds of the total; the balance will be paid by Haeringer and Suter.
In response, UBS issued a very brief statement: “We welcome the decision.” As indeed UBS might. The former UBS executives had been the focus of intense public criticism after the bank reported stunning losses on devastating subprimerelated investments.
This month, the bank announced that its chairman, Peter Kurer; its chief executive, Marcel Rohner; and members of its executive board would also have a bonus-free 2008.
Source: NYT News Service
Marcel Ospel, the former chairman of the board at the Swiss bank, and Stephan Haeringer and Marco Suter, two former directors, said they would give up pay promised them after the bank reported nearly $50 billion in losses and received even more than that in financial support from the Swiss government.
“With the involvement of the Swiss government, I realized that decisive action was required on my part,” Ospel said in a statement. “I hope that my action will help to resolve a situation that was inconceivable to me until a short time ago,” he said.
Ospel will contribute more than twothirds of the total; the balance will be paid by Haeringer and Suter.
In response, UBS issued a very brief statement: “We welcome the decision.” As indeed UBS might. The former UBS executives had been the focus of intense public criticism after the bank reported stunning losses on devastating subprimerelated investments.
This month, the bank announced that its chairman, Peter Kurer; its chief executive, Marcel Rohner; and members of its executive board would also have a bonus-free 2008.
Source: NYT News Service
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Guruji to take on Google, Yahoo in the search engines space
Guruji.com, Indian’s Internet search engine, focused on providing better search results to the Indian consumers is eyeing to emerge among the ‘Top 3’ search engines by 2011. The search engine major is presently growing at 20-30 percent per month and is eyeing one million searches in the future.
According to Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), the search engine market in India is presently worth $50 million in 2007 and is expected to grow to $100-$200 in the next 5-6 years time. However, China is far ahead of India and has already touched the $100 million mark.
Anurag Dod, founder and CEO of Guruji says, “we want to emerge as a dominant player in the search engine space and for this we are leveraging on proprietary algorithms and content for the Indian consumers.”
Guruji.com was founded by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, two Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi graduates in 2006 by the backing of venture capitalists Sequoia Capital. “It is the first time that India is seeing a "desi" search engine,” he said.
As per the latest Commscope report, the English search engine market is dominated by basically by six players namely – Google, Yahoo, ASK, MSN, and Guruji among others. In fact, Aaidu.com, a search engine in Chinese and Daum and Naver are the dominant search players (Korea) and are more prominant than Yahoo, Google in these countries. So is Yandex in Russia. “We are now focusing on the Indian consumers and so have extensive searches on cricket, music, images, city focussed seaches like movie tickets,” says Dod.
Even though, we are catering to the English speaking market, still 80 percent of the traffic comes from India while the rest 20 percent is spread across US, Middle East, UK etc.Dod says Yahoo was initially a portal site and in December 2003, that bought Inktom followed by three more companies Overture, which has bought Alta vista followed by Fast. So Yahoo’s search engine is a combination of these three companies. MSN is mainly a portal site player and less of search engine, ASK acquired Teoma, while Google that has a 80 percent market share in the search engine space is the only pure search engine player.
We initially started with web search, city search in 2006 and moved to local laungages –Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam in 2007. Later on we added cricket and music that has a large customer base in India. So will be offering live match scores updates and historic cricket database that is good for data mining, says Dod.
. “We are looking at raising funds but are presently adequately funded and will sail through this global recession.” Guruji secured an investment of $7 million from Sequoia Capital that is the same venture capitalist firm that initially funded Google as well.
The company claims that they remain unaffected by this global recession. “Our organization the attrition level is 0 percent for the past two years and will grow from the present employee strenght of 63 to 100 over the next 1.5 years. Besides we have also opened an office in Mumbai.”
The salaries we offer is very competitive to any product design company like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Cisco and much above service companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys, Dod claims.
Earlier search engine companies like khoj.com focused on subscription based unlike Guruji that is focused on news, features, e-commerce, education, music, cricket, technology that are free.
Over the next few years, the company shall focus on entertainment, which is a big category besides music, images tickets by enhancing the capabilities. The company has invested majorly in the web crawlers software that was locally developed,” Dod adds.
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