Social media beating job portals in Job Search

Start-up companies building applications using social-media tools to pinpoint the right candidate for a job are prompting a wave of change in corporate hiring. With their ability to reach out to people who are not even scouting for a job, these technology-enabled startups look set to steal a lead over internet job portals that feature only candidates actively seeking new opportunities.

In less than a year of operations, some of these startups such as Round One, MyParichay, Antezen and HireRabbit have signed on dozens of corporate clients and are testing their applications in over a 100 companies across the globe. "Social media networks can reach people willing to join if offered the right job," says Advit Sahdev, chief executive officer of ODigMa, a social-media marketing venture.

In recent years, social media has played a supporting role in hiring, by helping managers run identity checks and do the requisite due diligence on prospective candidates. But these technology-enabled startups are taking this a step further and building their own referral networks using social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

HireRabbit, founded by Prafull Sharma and Pipalayan Nayak earlier this year, follows the softwareas-a-service model. It allows companies to build a social career page on a site like Facebook, automate job postings and receive applications through the network. "Anyone can create a Facebook page, but how do you reach out to the right set of candidates, get them to apply and manage those applications , this is what networks such as HireRabbit are able to provide ," says Anuj Agrawal, director of recruitment at Zyoin, a job portal that is now using HireRabbit's solution.

Social media is also helping these startups create specific applications on Facebook and Twitterfor individual companies. HireRabbit, which sources profiles from networks on Facebook by sifting through the popular tool of "like" and "share" on the social network, is now testing its applications across 100 companies in Asia, Europe and the US. "The users of Facebook and Twitter are highly engaged and spend a lot of time on these sites and are thus easier to reach out to," says Hire Rabbit's co-founder Sharma. "Around 30% of hiring within large IT companies takes place through social-media platforms, especially during mass recruitment drives," says Deepak Deshpande , a senior vice president for human resource at technology firm NetMagic. Others such as Zyoin's Agrawal say that while existing job portals can supply around half the candidates that a company requires, it is to find the other half that employers are turning to social media based networks.

Startups, such as MyParichay, have built an entire social network within Facebook that allows members to apply for jobs, companies to recruit, and employees to refer friends for internal job postings. "We have crawled various online resources to put together a large database of jobs available online. Facebook members after installing the 'MyParichay' app can apply for, or refer friends, for the various jobs available online," says Ranjan Sinha , co-founder of the Bangalore based start up. The platform currently has 4.5 million profiles and has notched up 12 corporate clients over the last six months.

Hiring agencies pay between Rs10,000 and Rs 25,000 a year for basic access to the employee database , while companies have to pay a higher rate of Rs 50,000-Rs 2 lakh to provide their employees with a platform to refer friends for internal job postings. Round One, another online platform that replicates the referral process, charges the employee. Once a candidate identifies a job he wants, he can send his profile to a potential referee within the company by making a payment of between Rs 500 and Rs 800.

"We facilitate a telephonic conversation between the two and if the referee is impressed with the profile, he forwards it to the company but if he declines, we return the money to the candidate," says Nishant Mathur , founder of Round One. In little over a year, the start-up has seen over 50,000 candidates sign-up , while there have been 6,000 to 7,000 referrals from employees of over 1,500 companies.

Another year old start-up , Antezen , founded by former Qualcomm employees Shashank Shekhar and Sunil Javaji, is building a network of co-workers . As individuals sign up, make professional connections and provide information, Antezen's built-in algorithm-based tool SupeRecruiter builds up the user database. People on the network can also privately let the system know that they are open for hiring. When a hiring manager posts a job, he can specify requirements and even ask for profiles that are similar to a team member's .

SupeRecruiter then matches the people in the network with the specifications. Netmagic's Deshpande is of the opinion that in the next three years social media will significantly eat into the market share of internet job portals. "If they improve on their security and privacy, social media will certainly account for 30-35 % of all hiring that takes place in the corporate world," he said.

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Google announces Let's Talk Mo service; helps create mobile site for free

Google India has come up with a new service called 'Let's Talk Mo', which aims to enable small and medium businesses to reach out to the 70 million mobile users in the country. With the Let's Talk Mo service, Google will help businesses create mobile sites for free.

“With Indian smartphone users spending over 157 mins daily on the mobile web (89 percent of them are searching for information), the user-experience is not optimized for the mobile screen as most Indian websites are still designed for the PC experience,” points out Google India in a blog post.

Google India is offering the businesses two options – create a mobile site for free, and test how user friendly your mobile website. For this purpose, Google has launched a dedicated website that gives users all the necessary tools and resources to create a mobile website.

Explaining the benefits of Let's Talk Mo service, Google says the GoMoMeter tool allows businesses to check how their site looks on a smartphone. The tool also helps them get personalised recommendations to make their website more user-friendly.

Businesses also get a Do It Yourself tool to create a mobile site. Moreover, businesses will also get information on current mobile trends, best practices, case studies and various other resources.

To know more about Google's new initiative, visit http://www.letstalkmo.com/in/d/

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IT firm Wipro join hands with Google to offer cloud computing solutions

Technology services firm Wipro has partnered with internet search engine provider Google to offer cloud computing solutions that leverage the vastcomputing infrastructure that the search major has built over the past several years.

Wipro will build technology services solutions such as developing applications using Google App Engine, cloud-based storage solutions that use Google's vast data centers and data analytics that require significant computing power using both Google's compute engine and its extensive server farms across the globe.

Anurag Srivastava, Wipro's chief technology officer at Wipro Global IT Business, said, that the capabilities and tools offered by Google's Cloud Platform will help Wipro offer customised solutions that meet client's business requirements.

Wipro is the second India-based company that Google has partnered with, the other being Orancescape Technologies, which unlike Wipro, is a technology partner.

"In the last decade, we've invested in building an infrastructure that can serve 4 billion hours of video every month, support 425 million Gmail users and store 100 petabytes of web index, and it's growing every day.

We've taken this technology and extended it via Google Cloud Platform so that you can benefit from the same infrastructure that powers Google's applications," Eric Morse, who heads sales and business development at Google's Cloud Platform, wrote in Google blog earlier last month, while introducing the Google Cloud Platform Partner programme.

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Analysts Reveal Exactly How Much Windows 8 Will Boost Flagging PC Sales

Analysts at IDC said Friday that the launch of Windows 8 in October will be directly responsible for boosting the flat U.S. PC market into a period of moderate growth next year. And they were surprisingly specific about how big a bump Microsoft’s new operation system will deliver.

David Daoud, research director of personal computing at IDC, said the firm is attributing 5 percentage points of U.S. PC market unit growth to Windows 8.

From Flat To Up

“In other words, for 2013, the market otherwise would have been flat,” Daoud told ReadWriteWeb. “But for Windows 8, we boost it by about 5%, so that gives it 5% growth. That’s essentially the premium given to Windows 8.”

On Thursday, IDC reported that PC growth was slowing in advance of Windows 8’s launch in late October. Just 367 million PCs will ship into the market this year, up less than 1% from 2011 and marking the second consecutive year of growth below 2%, IDC said.

Despite the advent of Windows 8, IDC also reduced its worldwide PC forecast for the next few years. IDC now estimates that that worldwide PC shipment growth will average 7.1% from 2013-2016, down from the 8.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) previously forecast for 2012-2016. IDC did not formally break out numbers for individual regions.

Next year, however, worldwide PC sales in units should jump from 0.9% this year to 6.5%, with growth accelerating to 7.0% and 7.5% in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Much of that demand will come from emerging markets, whose residents are still buying their first PCs, as well as purchasing Windows 8 replacements for those they already own.

Part of IDC’s adjusted forecast can be explained by its definition of a PC: IDC still defines a PC as a box with an associated keyboard, whether it be a notebook or desktop computer. As more consumers choose tablets, which typically lack those discrete keyboards, the number of “PCs” sold decreases. Daoud also said that IDC factored in macroeconomic conditions; although U.S. GDP growth is expected to be about 2.0% next year, Europe is struggling and the Asia-Pacific region is “cooling off,” he said.

Windows 8 Driving PC Differentiation

One way that PC makers plan to cope is by using Windows 8 to drive new kinds of PCs. The Windows 8 PC designs Daoud has seen show that PC makers plan to differentiate their products. “So we do think there is the opportunity for growth,” he said.

Still, Daoud wasn’t prepared to cast Windows 8 as an unmitigated success, citing increased uncertainty “Windows 8 will have positive repercussions, without any doubt,” Daoud said. “That’s why we’re witnessing consumers waiting for that operating system to hit the market.

“But there’s a lot of unanswered questions: the price point, the design, how consumers will receive the product,” Daoud added. “So it’s also a wild card… We’re certainly moving to a crossroads in the industry: we’re moving to a new OS, new user interface, user behavior, new usage model, new software delivered through the app store, which is a new delivery mechanism. So we’re seeing a totally new type of environment, meaning that consumers will need to be educated about this.”

PC Makers Getting Hammered

Given the anticipation and uncertainty surrounding Windows 8, the slowdown in PC shipments before the launch of the new operating system should have come as no surprise. But PC makers were apparently caught unprepared.

In a conference call with analysts this week, Hewlett Packard chief executive Meg Whitman acknowledged that the number of PCs sold through the channel “softened” or slowed during the second half of July, driving the amount of stock in retailers’ hands “higher than our acceptable ranges,” Whitman said. All told, the company’s commercial revenue slipped 9% and consumer revenue declined 12% year-over-year, HP said.

Dell’s results were even worse: consumer revenue slipped 22%, and a combination of weak consumer environment and macroeconomic concerns prompted Dell to cut its revenue forecast by 2% to 5%.

“In the quarter, we saw the channel drawing down inventory in anticipation of the Windows 8 launch,” Brian Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer, reported. Dell’s strategy of maximising profits at all levels of the business failed to pay off, as the only growth the company saw was in the low-value segments, Gladden reported; high-end customers, who undoubtedly knew Windows 8 was coming, held off purchasing PCs.

Arrow image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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‘Application development market to grow 22.6% in 2012’

The Indian application development maintenance (ADM) software market is expected to be worth more than $227 million in 2012, an increase of 22.6 per cent over 2011, according to research firm Gartner. Growth will be driven by new software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development and open source software. As more users switch from laptops to tablets and smartphones, the shift will hasten change in applications development as well.

"Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for applications development (AD) spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing," said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner. "These emerging trends are directing AD demand towards newer architectures, programming languages, business model and user skills."

According to a Gartner report, 'Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016', cloud is changing the way applications are designed, tested and deployed, resulting in a significant shift in AD priorities. Cost is a major driver, but also agility, flexibility and speed to deploy new applications. Almost 90 per cent of large, mainstream enterprises and government agencies will use some aspect of cloud computing by 2015.

"The trend is compelling enough to force traditional AD vendors to 'cloud-enable' their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud," said Raina. "AD for cloud demands rapid deployment, a high focus on user experience and access to highly elastic resources for software testing, while requiring comparatively less underlying infrastructure for developing applications."

Gartner predicts that mobile AD projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects 4:1 by 2015. Emerging mobile applications, systems and devices are transforming the AD space rapidly, and are one of the top three CIO priorities at the enterprise level. Gartner research found that CIOs expect more than 20% of their employees to use tablets instead of laptops by 2013, hastening the process of change as AD tools and applications evolve to address the requirements of these new devices.

Also driving the AD shift, Gartner expects open source software to continue to broaden its presence and create pressure on market leaders during the next three to five years, especially as open source becomes a key element of the software quality landscape beyond the developer level. It predicts that at least 70 per cent of new enterprise Java applications will be deployed on an open source Java application server by the end of 2017.

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Google concerned about dwindling number of women at higher positions

At Google, data is king. Now the company is using data to figure out if it can anoint a few queens.

The company hopes its famous algorithms can solve one of the most vexing problems facing Silicon Valley: how to recruit and retain more women. Google has generally been considered a place where women have thrived, but it wants to figure out how to compete even more vigorously for the relatively few women working in technology.

Executives had been concerned that too many women dropped out in the interviewing process or were not promoted at the same rate as men, so they created algorithms to pinpoint exactly when the company loses women and to figure out how to keep them. Simple steps like making sure prospective hires meet other women during their interviews and extending maternity leaves seem to be producing results - at least among the rank and file.

At the same time, though, senior women at the company are losing ground. Since Larry Page became chief executive and reorganized Google last year, women have been pushed out of his inner circle and passed over for promotions. They include Marissa Mayer, who left last month to run Yahoo after being sidelined at Google.

"There was a point at Google when the cadre of women leadership was pretty strong," said a former Google executive who would only speak anonymously to preserve business relationships. "That has changed."

The valley's longtime image as unwelcoming for women became a new topic of conversation recently whenEllen Pao, a junior partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer. And it persists even though more women than ever are leading or in top positions at technology companies - including Yahoo, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and Facebook.

Mayer, 37, was the first woman to be an engineer at Google and ran its most profitable business, search, for years. But in 2010, she was given a new assignment that many at Google considered a demotion, and then Page removed her from his committee of close advisers.

That committee shrank from about 15 people, four of whom were women, under Eric E. Schmidt, Google's previous chief executive, to 11 with just one woman, under Page.

Also removed from the L Team, for Larry Page, were Rachel Whetstone, who oversees communications, and Shona Brown, who oversaw business operations and now leads Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm, a lower-profile job. Only one woman remains - Susan Wojcicki, who oversees advertising. Several men were also removed in the shuffle.

Of the seven people Page appointed to lead product areas when he reorganized the company last year, just one, Wojcicki, was a woman.

People familiar with Page's management style and the company's reorganization said gender played no role in his decisions.

"Larry focused on certain products, and the people who happened to lead those products and became his direct reports were men," said Laszlo Bock, who oversees people operations at Google.

Many senior women remain at Google, including the director of marketing, Lorraine Twohill, and the leader of the Washington office, Susan Molinari. Google has three women on its 10-member board - Diane B. Greene, Ann Mather and Shirley M. Tilghman, all outside directors. Also, one man, Jonathan Rosenberg, former director of product management, resigned around the time of the reorganization.

"Being here so long, it has been a very supportive place for women," said Wojcicki, who is the sister-in-law of Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder. "The founders understood it was something that was good to build into the culture early on."

Some women in less prominent positions at the company agree.

"On the ground, I think that the sentiment is still that it's a very welcoming place for women," said a woman who works for Google who spoke on condition of anonymity because employees are not supposed to talk to reporters without permission. "Things haven't really changed at the lower levels of the company."

But others say the dearth of women at the top of Google reflects what is, overall, a male-driven engineering culture. Page values product people like himself over business people, they say, and at Google, like many tech companies, product engineers tend to be men.

"Part of the issue is who Larry wants around him, and those are the guys he's most comfortable with because he knows their whole engineering and computer science background," said a former longtime senior Google employee.

Another former Google executive said, "I don't think there's a gender bias per se, but I think the c-suite at Google is going to belong to product owners, not business people. People witness it as a demotion of women. I don't view it as that. I view it as a demotion of business."

Even so, filling Page's inner circle with men could have consequences for Google.

"Having women leaders is not just a question of equity or somehow ticking the box," said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who studies gender diversity and business at Columbia University and is president of the Center for Talent Innovation. "Particularly at technology companies, it really does contribute to innovation and a company's ability to exploit new markets."

Google is hardly alone in its struggle to attract, retain and promote technical women. The number of women working in professional computing jobs dropped 8 percent to 25 percent between 2000 and 2011 while the number of men climbed 16 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More than half of women in technology leave their employers midcareer, but half stay in technical jobs in the public sector or at startups, indicating that there is something about big companies that pushes them out, said Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Google's founders hired Wojcicki, Mayer and Jen Fitzpatrick, now an engineering vice president, early; they believed they would have more luck luring technical women once several already worked there, Wojcicki said. She was pregnant when she started, so the founders promised her subsidized child care.

That continues to be a benefit at Google, as are other family-friendly perks like a $500 stipend for takeout meals after a baby is born, paid leave of up to five months for new mothers and seven weeks for new fathers, and conveniences like dry cleaners on Google's campus so people can complete errands during the workday.

Meanwhile, there is the very Google-y approach of gathering data on precisely when the company loses women, then digging deeper to figure out what is happening and to try to fix it.

The results, Bock said, have been noticeable. One-third of Google's 34,300 employees are women. He would not say what percentage of technical employees are women, but he said it was better than the national average of about 25 percent.

Google's data-filled spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished. Google now asks interviewers to report candidates' answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.

Once hired, technical women were not being promoted at the same rate as men. At Google, employees nominate themselves for promotions, but the data revealed that women were less likely to do so. So senior women at Google now host workshops to encourage women to nominate themselves, and they are promoted proportionally to men, Bock said.

Another time Google was losing women was after they had babies. The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent.

"We get incredible women into the company, and we work hard at getting incredible women," said Alan Eustace, senior vice president of knowledge at Google. "I wish we could say we're amazingly successful and closing in on 50 percent women, but it's not true."

Courtesy: Tech News.

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Microsoft launches new logo after 25 years

Microsoft will use a new logo for the first time in over two and a half decades. The software titan has created a new logo which has been heavily inspired by the emblem of Windows operating system. This change in the logo also shows the company's focus on the tile-centric Metro interface, which it uses in the Windows Phone platform, XBOX 360 and the upcomingWindows 8 and Office suite.

On the Microsoft Blog on TechNet, Jeff Hansen, the general manager of brand strategy at the company, said that this step will ensure that a consistent user experience can be delivered across all platforms, from PCs and phones to tablets and television.

Rather than the previous emblem, which only had the name of the company, this new logo has 'Microsoft' written in Segoe font on the right and square with four tiles, reminiscent of the Metro UI, on the left.

The new Microsoft logo is already on the company website and in retail stores in Boston, Seattle and Bellevue. It will be seen heavily in advertisements as well as intra-organisation communications.

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Source says that Iran is speeding up work on nuclear program

Washington: International nuclear inspectors will soon report that Iran has installed hundreds of new centrifuges in recent months and may also be speeding up production of nuclear fuel while negotiations with the United States and its allies have ground to a near halt, according to diplomats and experts briefed on the findings.

Almost all of the new equipment is being installed in a deep underground site on a military base near Qum that is considered virtually invulnerable to military attack. It would suggest that a boast by senior Iranian leaders late last month - that the country had added upward of 1,000 new machines to its installation despite Western sabotage - may be true.

The report will also indicate, according to the officials familiar with its contents, that Iran is increasingly focused on enriching uranium to a level of 20 percent - a purity that it says it needs for a specialty nuclear reactor that it insists is used only for medical purposes, but that outside experts say gets it most of the way to the level needed to produce a workable nuclear bomb. The report does not attempt to address the question of whether Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon; American intelligence officials believe it has not, and Iran insists it wants to use nuclear power for peaceful ends.

It is unlikely that Iran has begun to use the new centrifuges to produce fuel, and even with a significant increase in fuel production it would still take months, at the least, to produce a crude weapon. By most American government estimates, Iran would need at least two years to develop a workable warhead that could fit atop a missile.

Nonetheless, the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency's experts, first reported by Reuters, is likely to renew the debate over Iran's intentions at a time when Israeli officials are stepping up their warnings that the window to conduct a pre-emptive military strike is closing.

A faction led by Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, will almost certainly argue that Iran has moved closer to what Mr. Barak calls a "zone of immunity," a point at which so much equipment is installed in the underground facility, called Fordow, that it will soon be too late for Israel to stop Iran from producing a weapon, should it choose to do so.

The report could also become an issue in the presidential race. The presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, used a trip to Israel last month to declare that President Obama had wasted time with fruitless negotiations with Iran, and that Iran had taken advantage of the time to advance its nuclear program.

"This will stir more discussion of how much time is left for diplomacy," Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, and now a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said Thursday. "Even if the new centrifuges are not operating yet, a thousand new ones would represent a 20 percent increase - and an increased production level will be a red line for many people."

It may also make it harder to win a diplomatic deal. Under an offer that the United States and its Western allies, along with Russia, presented to Iran privately in late spring, Tehran would be allowed to retain some enrichment capability if it turned over its entire stockpile of 20 percent-enriched uranium and answered the questions posed by international inspectors about evidence that it has worked on a weapon. Though Iranian officials have privately expressed some interest in the plan, the deal has gone nowhere, and no new negotiating sessions are scheduled, American officials say.

"For now, the talks are dead in the water," one senior official said on Thursday.

Mr. Obama and his staff have been trying to avoid a crisis over Iran that would unfold in the last months of the presidential election. But the report, expected to be the last by the I.A.E.A. before Election Day, will lay out a stark reality: Despite increasingly painful sanctions, and a covert program called Olympic Games that aimed to slow the Iranian program with cyberattacks, Iran has made substantial progress in producing enriched uranium in recent years - from about one bomb's worth when Mr. Obama took office in 2009 to the equivalent of about five bombs' worth today.

But the fuel would require considerable additional enrichment before it was usable in a weapon, and even then, Mr. Obama and others have insisted, the United States would almost certainly have considerable notice, and time to act, before Iran developed a usable nuclear weapon. On this point, the Israelis disagree. The critical question likely to be prompted by the I.A.E.A. report, which could be published as soon as Wednesday, comes down to this: How much closer is Iran to gaining a nuclear weapons "capability" - that is, the ability to produce a bomb on relatively short notice?

The Israelis have declared that Iran cannot be permitted to reach that capability, a position Mr. Romney seemed to endorse during his visit to Israel. Mr. Obama has said only that he would prevent Iran from obtaining a weapon, and has left unclear whether it would be worth the risks to stop Iran from walking up to the edge of building a weapon.

This summer, two top administration officials, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and the president's national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, made separate visits to Israel to convince Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Mr. Obama meant it when he said he would stop Iran from obtaining a weapon.

But Israeli officials have made it clear that they have found the reassurances less than convincing, and suggested they might act even if the limits of Israel's military power may mean the Iranian program would be delayed by only two years or so. Many in Israel's military and intelligence establishments have argued that this is not the time for an attack, and the recently retired chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force, Gabi Ashkenazi, added his voice on Wednesday to the former officials urging Mr. Netanyahu to look for other options, from further sanctions to additional covert action.

The Israeli case that the West may not be able to detect Iran's progress could be fueled by another element of the forthcoming report, detailing efforts by Iran to clean up a long-suspected nuclear site called Parchin on the outskirts of Tehran.

It is at that site that the agency, based on interviews with at least one scientist and intelligence reports provided by Western powers, suspects Iran may have conducted weapons-related testing. But satellite imagery suggests that Iran has spent months cleaning up the site, even carting away topsoil. Diplomats believe that by the time I.A.E.A. inspectors are permitted to visit - if such a visit is allowed - whatever evidence was there could have been eradicated.


© 2012, The New York Times News Service

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Internet analysts question India's efforts to stem panic

Mumbai: The Indian government's efforts to stem a weeklong panic among some ethnic minorities has again put it at odds with Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Officials in New Delhi, who have had disagreements with the companies over restrictions on free speech, say the sites are not responding quickly enough to their requests to delete and trace the origins of doctored photos and incendiary posts aimed at people from northeastern India. After receiving threats online and on their phones, tens of thousands of students and migrants from the northeast have left cities like Bangalore, Pune and Chennai in the last week.

The government has blocked 245 Web pages since Friday, but still many sites are said to contain fabricated images of violence against Muslims in the northeast and in neighboring Myanmar meant to incite Muslims in cities like Bangalore and Mumbai to attack people from the northeast. India also restricted cellphone users to five text messages a day each for 15 days in an effort to limit the spread of rumors.

Officials from Google and industry associations said they were cooperating fully with the authorities. Some industry executives and analysts added that some requests had not been heeded because they were overly broad or violated internal policies and the rights of users.

The government, used to exerting significant control over media like newspapers, films and television, has in recent months been frustrated in its effort to extend similar and greater regulations to Web sites, most of which are based in the United States. Late last year, an Indian minister tried to get social media sites to prescreen content created by their users before it was posted. The companies refused and the attempt failed under withering public criticism.

While just 100 million of India's 1.2 billion people use the Internet regularly, the numbers are growing fast among people younger than 25, who make up about half the country's population. For instance, there were an estimated 46 million active Indian users on Facebook at the end of 2011, up 132 percent from a year earlier.

Sunil Abraham, an analyst who has closely followed India's battles with Internet companies, said last week's effort to tackle hate speech was justified but poorly managed. He said the first directive from the government was impractically broad, asking all Internet "intermediaries" - a category that includes small cybercafes, Internet service providers and companies like Google and Facebook - to disable all content that was "inflammatory, hateful and inciting violence."

"The Internet intermediaries are responding slowly because now they have to trawl through their networks and identify hate speech," said Mr. Abraham, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy group based in Bangalore. "The government acted appropriately, but without sufficient sophistication."

In the days since the first advisory went out on Aug. 17, government officials have asked companies to delete dozens of specific Web pages. Most of them have been blocked, but officials have not publicly identified them or specified the sites on which they were hosted. Ministers have blamed groups in Pakistan, a neighbor with which India has tense relations, for creating and uploading many of the hateful pages and doctored images.

A minister in the Indian government, Milind Deora, acknowledged that officials had received assistance from social media sites but said officials were hoping that the companies would move faster.

"There is a sense of importance and urgency, and that's why the government has taken these out-of-the-way decisions with regards to even curtailing communications," Mr. Deora, a junior minister of communications and information technology, said in a telephone interview. "And we are hoping for cooperation from the platforms and companies to help us as quickly as possible."

Indian officials have long been concerned about the power of modern communications to exacerbate strife and tension among the nation's many ethnic and religious groups. While communal violence has broadly declined in the last decade, in part because of faster economic growth, many grievances simmer under the surface. Most recently, fighting between the Bodo tribe and Muslims in the northeastern state of Assam has displaced about half a million people and, through text messages and online posts, affected thousands more across India.

Officials at social media companies, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending political leaders, said that they were moving as fast as they could but that policy makers must realize that the company officials have to follow their own internal procedures before deleting content and revealing information like the Internet protocol addresses of users.

"Content intended to incite violence, such as hate speech, is prohibited on Google products where we host content, including YouTube, Google Plus and Blogger," Google said in a statement. "We act quickly to remove such material flagged by our users. We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities wherever possible."

Facebook said in a statement that it also restricts hate speech and "direct calls for violence" and added that it was "working through" requests to remove content. Twitter declined to comment on the Indian government's request.

Telecommunications company executives criticised the government's response to the crisis as being excessive and clumsy. There was no need to limit text messages to just five a day across the country when problems were concentrated in a handful of big cities, said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India.

"It could have been handled much more tactically," he said.

Others said the government could have been more effective had it quickly countered hateful and threatening speech by sending out its own messages, which it was slow to do when migrants from the northeast began leaving Bangalore on Aug. 15.

"It has to also reach out on social networking and Internet platforms and dismantle these rumors," Mr. Abraham said, "and demonstrate that they are false."

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Limited space on your PC? Use ‘cloud storage‘ to your advantage

Filled up the space on your mobile phone or tablet? As long as you have working internet on both ends, you can access your home computer's hard drive from anywhere.

Use Your PC as a Personal Cloud

To do this, you need to set up remote access to your computer — simpler than it sounds. A small server application needs to be installed on your home computer. LogMeIn (www.logmein.com) provides free server software for Windows and MAC OS X.

Once the server is running, you simply need to log in to your account (free registration required) using a web browser on any computer or phone/tablet. You can then remotely control your home system to run programs or transfer files to and from it.

Another alternative to remotely access your files is to purchase a network-connected hard drive like the Buffalo CloudStation (Rs16,000 onwards).

The CloudStation comes in various storage capacities and connects to your internet router/modem using Ethernet. Once you set it up (an easy wizard is provided), you can view, stream or download files from it using a web browser.

Access Data Using Your Phone

If you prefer a dedicated way of accessing your content on your mobile/tablet device instead of using a web browser, there are various free apps available for the popular smartphone platforms.

Like the browser method, these apps require that a server software be installed on your home PC for accessing files remotely. Tonido, a free app for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry works great over Wi-Fi as well as 3G. Head to www.tonido.com to download the desktop server software for Windows, MAC OS X or Linux.

Once you link the app to your computer at home, you could be anywhere in the world and can stream musicdirectly to your phone, access and download files from your computer and upload photos/videos taken from the phone back home. The app has a custom server address that makes setting it up super-easy.

Another app, Polkast converts your computer into your personal cloud for free. The Polkast server software (www.polkast.com) lets you choose which folders to share. Plus, there is no limit on file transfers to and from the PC, which makes it great for transferring large files.

Stream Music From Your PC

Although apps like Tonido offer audio and video streaming to your remote mobile device, lack of on-the-fly transcoding (file conversion) can lead to long wait times depending on your connection. If audio streaming is your main priority, use the free Subsonic app (iOS, Android).

You can get the desktop software for Windows, Mac or Linux at www.subsonic.org. It takes some time to get started since you need to first create an account and set up the folders to be shared. You also need to provide a custom name for a 'webserver' that the app on your phone/tablet connects to.

Once done, you could be anywhere in the world — as long as you have a working internet connection, the app will display all the music files from your computer. You can also create playlists and it works with most audio formats. It also supports video streaming, which, needless to say, works best over a Wi-Fi connection.

Supercharge Your Dropbox

Dropbox can be more than just online file storage. With some nifty add-ons, you can use your Dropbox storage for multiple things. For instance, if you have your stored on Dropbox, you can access them (and stream them) using DropTunes.

Visit www.droptun.es and sign in with your Dropbox account — you'll get access to all your files from within a web browser and you can play them without transferring them. You could also get the DropTunesiOS app to stream the files to your iPhone or iPad — which solves the problem of limited space on the iDevice too.

With Dropbox, you can also automate easy or boring tasks like file conversions or transfers. The Dropbox Automator from Wappwolf lets you do all this and more. Head to http://wappwolf.com/dropboxautomator — you will need to grant permission to your Dropbox account (either one or all folders inside your Dropbox storage).

Then you need to create an 'action' — for instance, convert to PDF. Once you place a file inside that folder (from your computer or mobile device), the Automator will instantly convert it into a PDF and store it in the same folder. There are numerous actions available for many common tasks.

Get All the Storage You Need by Creating Your Own Cloud

With faster internet connections, digital storage need not be confined to your local device. That's the idea behind cloud storage -keeping your data and multimedia files in one place and accessing them from wherever you go.

Imagine a scenario where you have limited storage on your workplace computer. You could simply access all your files from your home computer, without the need to install any software on the office computer (where software installation may be disallowed or frowned upon).

Your mobile device, which has limited local storage, could use your home PCs huge hard drive as a repository. Or you could use conventional cloud storage solutions like Dropbox to stream music and photos. Whatever you need done, there's a 'cloud' way to do it.

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Apple is the most valuable company, ever

                                    Apple is the world's most valuable company, ever.

On Monday, its surging stock propelled the company's value to $623 billion, beating the record for market capitalization set by Microsoft Corp. in the heady days of the Internet boom.

Apple's stock has hit new highs recently because of optimism around what is believed to be the impending launch of the iPhone 5, and possibly a smaller, cheaper iPad.

Apple Inc. has been the world's most valuable company since the end of last year. It's now worth 53 percent more than No. 2 Exxon Mobil Corp.

Apple's stock hit $664.74 in midday trading before retreating slightly to $663. That was $14.98, or 2.3 percent, higher than Friday's close.

Microsoft's 1999 peak was $620.58 billion, according to Standard & Poor's.

The comparison to Microsoft does not take inflation into account. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the software giant was worth about $850 billion on Dec. 30, 1999. Microsoft is now worth $257 billion.

Analysts believe Apple's stock has room to grow. The average price target of 38 analysts polled by FactSet is $745.80.

Apart from the iPhone and "mini iPad," analysts are speculating that Apple plans to make a TV set to complete its suite of consumer electronics products. Apple usually doesn't comment on its future product plans until a few weeks or days before a launch.

China's largest oil company, PetroChina, was briefly worth $1 trillion after it listed on the Shanghai stock exchange in 2007, but only based on its price on that exchange. Its shares also trade in Hong Kong and on the New York Stock Exchange. Based on trading there, its market capitalization never went as high as $500 billion.

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Infosys, Wipro focusing on employees‘ecopreneurship

Six months ago, Infosys freed up two executives from their daily grind, gave them their own labs, financial grants and a licence to chase ideas in alternate energy. Vishwas Vidyaranya is now trying to produce electricity from bacteria and Deepan is looking at seawater as a source for power, in Mysore and Chennai respectively.

Executive co-chairman S Gopalakrishnan handpicked the two after an in-house competition on alternative energy sources, organised by Infy's 'sustainability' team. If the two find a new source of energy for their employer, it could first power Infy's Mysore and Bangalore campuses, and later its centres around the country, says Rohan Parikh, head of the company's Green Team.

If they don't, Infy would still have got what it wanted from the competition — get the boardroom agenda of 'sustainability' to reverberate across its rank and file. Companies like Infosys, Wipro, Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and Mahindra & Mahindra are discovering that it is not just enough for CEOs to talk about sustainability; executives have to live it out, and over time drive it, too.

That's why many companies are going all out to get employee buy-in into their sustainability programmes: from recognising and rewarding efforts among staff and funding events they organise, to turning them into sustainability evangelists within and outside the company.
"Sustainability is at the heart of our business," says Nitin Paranjpe, CEO and MD at HUL. "The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) takes a value-chain approach to sustainability, right from sourcing to consumer use and disposal of our products. Employees have a key role in enabling this." To survive, every company will eventually need to become sustainable, says Amita Joseph , director of Business and Community Foundation (BCF).

"It is important to get buy-in from all your stakeholders including employees," she says. Conversely, not being sustainable presents a business risk, says Beroz Guzdar, senior vice president, Group Sustainability at Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M).

"The idea is to make our employees sensitive to both the environment and the communities around them, while also drive home the point that not doing so amounts to a business risk," says Guzdar. "For instance, we have to tell our plants to conserve water because without it, there can be no work."

Taking it a step further, Guzdar's team also asks its plants to try and improve the water tables of the catchment communities, in the long-term interest of the company. Back in the office, M&M's sustainability team acts as an advisory body for the company's 11 verticals to map strategies, actions and processes that take into consideration climate change, natural resource constraints and local people.

Suggestions for sustainable practices come from everywhere — including the shadow boards at M&M, who have been asked to ideate around the theme of sustainability. But it is programmes like the Employee Social Option (Esops) and initiatives undertaken by the individual verticals that clinch employee buy-in. Employees doing well in sustainability receive a congratulatory letter from CEO Anand Mahindra, himself a huge advocate of it.

Companies are also discovering that a commitment to sustainability can help attract and retain talent. "This helps to increase the motivation levels among our employees, given that they find their jobs more fulfilling, being driven by a larger purpose," says Paranjpe. Adds PS Narayan, head of sustainability at Wipro, "A younger workforce is much more clued in to sustainability and may actively choose to join only organisations that have a strong sustainability commitment." "We welcome ideas from anywhere, whether it's from employees or even our supply chain," says Infy's Parikh.

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Coal loss Rs 1.86L cr, Delhi airport 24K cr, power 29K cr: CAG

New Delhi/India: The Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) reports on allocation of coal blocks without bidding and the Delhi airport concession given to GMR and power projects was tabled in Parliament on Friday.

The report says that 44 billion tonnes of coal was given away at throw-away prices, while 194 coal blacks were allocated on mere recommendations.

Importantly, as against the draft report, the final CAG report was silent on the role played by Prime Minister’s Office in allocation of coal.

The major beneficiaries included Tata Group entities, Jindal Steel & Power, Anil Agarwal Group firms, Essar Group's power ventures, Adani Group, Arcelor Mittal and Lanco.

"Delay in introduction of the process of competitive bidding has rendered the existing process beneficial to the private companies. Audit has estimated financial gains to the tune of Rs 1.86 lakh crore likely to accrue to private coal block allottees," CAG said in a report on allocation of coal blocks.

"A part of this financial gain could have accrued to the national exchequer by operationalising the decision taken years earlier to introduce competitive bidding for allocation of coal blocks," CAG said.

The auditing body said it is "of strong opinion that there is a need for strict regulatory and monitoring mechanism to ensure that benefit of cheaper coal is passed on consumers".

Delhi airport

The CAG report on public-private partnership for the Indira Gandhi International Airport had reportedly said that Delhi International Airport (DIAL), which runs the utility, has a potential to earn Rs 1,63,557 crore over a 60-year period from the land given to it on a lease rent of Rs 100 per annum, hurting the interest of the government.

The report pointed out that 239 acres of land for construction of the terminal was given away to GMR Group owned Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) on lease as against the market rate of Rs 24000 crore rupees.

Also, even after getting land at such low rates, DIAL was charging User Development Fee from passengers using the airport. The CAG said that the company has made over Rs 3400 crore by way of UDF and that the clause allowing DIAL to charge UDF was not in the initial agreement but was later introduced by the civil aviation ministry.

CAG said contrary to provision of the airport concession agreement, DIAL was allowed to use the amount collected as Development Fees to meet the project costs. "In face, only 19 per cent of the project cost came from equity, approximately 42 per cent came from debt. The remaining project costs were met from security deposits and Development Fees".

"Whenever DIAL raised an issue regarding revenue to accrue to it or expenditure to be debited to government in contravention to the provisions of Operation Management Development Agreement (OMDA), the Ministry and AAI interpreted the provisions always in favour of the operators and against the interest of the government," it said.

Power

 

The CAG also raised questions on some power projects in the country. On the Sasan Power Project of Reliance Power, the auditor said that differential tariff has led to a gain of Rs 29000 crore for the company.

CAG said bidding process was vitiated by allowing Reliance Power to use excess coal from three blocks allocated to Sasan project.

CAG in its report tabled in Parliament said subsequent to award of the 4,000 MW Sasan ultra mega power project to RPL, the government granted permission to the company to utilise the surplus coal from three mines attached to the projects for the group's Chitrangi project in Madhya Pradesh.

CAG said the permission to use of excess coal from Moher, Moher Amlohri and Chhatrasal blocks allocated to RPL's Sasan power project after its award "not only vitiated the bidding process but also resulted in undue benefit to RPL".

CAG said it was not clear how Power Ministry in October 2006 came to the conclusion that two initially allocated blocks for the Sasan project (Moher and Moher Amlohri) would be inadequate to fire the 4,000 MW plant.

"The basis on which Ministry of Coal was prevailed upon in October 2006 itself to allot an additional block (Chhatrasal) of coal to Sasan ultra mega power project by de-allocating it from the public sector NTPC is not clear," it said.

The audit estimated the financial benefit that will accrue to RPL on the basis of comparison of tariff of Sasan project (Rs 1.196 per unit) with that of Chitrangi project (Rs 2.450 for Madhya Pradesh and Rs 3.702 for Uttar Pradesh).

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Android top selling OS in smartphone market: Gartner

Google's operating system, Android has extended its lead in the smartphone market, as Apple's sales were stalled ahead of the launch of its new iPhone 5, according to new research.

Industry analysts at Gartner claimed that Android was installed on 64.1 per cent of smarphones sold worldwide in the second quarter, compared to 43.4 per cent a year ago, as opposed to 18.8 per cent of Apple's smartphone operating system market share.

Android's sales benefited from the decline of Nokia's largely abandoned smartphone operating system, Symbian and BlackBerry'sResearch In Motion (RIM), whose market share was more than halved, from 11.7 percent to 5.2 per cent, the Telegraph reports.

According to the research, Apple's smartphone operating system market share in the second quarter was 18.8 per cent, up slightly from 18.2 per cent a year ago. Gartner said iOS users appeared to be holding off purchasing a new device before the expected introduction of the iPhone 5 in September.

The study also showed that Microsoft's slow response to the smartphone boom continued, with shares of Windows Mobile growing from 1.6 per cent to only 2.7 per cent.

On the manufacturing side, Apple and Samsung maintained their rivalry ahead of other players such as HTC and Huawei, the paper said.

"Samsung and Apple continued to dominate the smartphone market, together taking about half the market share, and widening the gap to other manufacturers," the paper quoted analyst Anshul Gupta, as saying.

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Wikileaks revelation raises privacy concerns in US

A new release of stolen corporate e-mails by Wikileaks has set off a flurry of concern and speculation around the world about a counter-terrorist software programme called TrapWire, which analyses images from surveillance cameras and other data to try to identify terrorists planning attacks.

"US government is secretly spying on 'everyone' using civilian security cameras, say Wikileaks," read a headline on Monday at the British newspaper website Mail Online. The article included a photograph from the movie "The Bourne Identity." PC Magazine describedTrapWire as "a secret, comprehensive US surveillance effort."

Though TrapWire, the Virginia company that sells the software, would not comment on Monday, the reports appear to be wildly exaggerated. TrapWire was tried out on 15 surveillance cameras in Washington and Seattle by the Homeland Security Department, but officials said it ended the trial last year because it did not seem promising.

A claim in the leaked emails that 500 cameras in the New York subway were linked to TrapWire is false, said Paul J Browne, the New York Police Department's chief spokesman. "We don't use TrapWire."

TrapWire is discussed in dozens of emails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private security firm in Austin, Texas, that were posted online last week by Wikileaks. The emails were part of a large cache captured late last year and early this year by hackers associated with the loose-knit international collective called Anonymous, which gave the emails to Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks website has been shut down by unidentified hackers in recent days, leading to speculation that it might be retaliation for the email leaks.

TrapWire was originally developed in 2004 by the Abraxas, which was founded by several former CIA employees. It later spun off TrapWire, but the CIA connection, along with the company's vague but impressive descriptions of the programme's capabilities, appears to have fuelled the furore on the Web that it was a sort of automated Big Brother.

TrapWire's marketing materials say it uses video cameras and observations by security guards to develop a 10-point description of people near a potential terrorist target and an eight-point description of vehicles. It also records "potential surveillance activity, such as photographing, measuring and signalling," combining in a TrapWire database "this human-entered data with information collected by sensors."

If the same person or car is picked up in multiple locations engaging in suspicious behavior, the software is supposed to make the connection. But a privacy statement on the TrapWire website says the software does not capture "personal information."

Jay Stanley, who studies threats to privacy at the American Civil Liberties Union, said many companies had tried to use technology "to find terrorist plots in an ocean of information about everyday activities."

"But it's extremely difficult, and probably impossible, to distinguish the one-in-a-billion terrorist from innocent people doing ordinary things like taking pictures," Stanley said, adding that the current fears demonstrate why the government should publicly address concerns about surveillance before adopting new technologies.

"We live in a democracy," he said, "and that's what security agencies are here to protect."

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Endemic protests could lead to flirting with chaos: Pranab

NEW DELHI: President Pranab Mukherjee today made a veiled attack at "endemic" protests against corruption warning that the country would be "flirting with chaos" if its democratic institutions come under an assault.

Mincing no words in underlining the dangers in undermining institutions like Parliament, he said legislation cannot be wrenched away from legislature or justice from judiciary.

He described Parliament as "the soul of the people, the 'Atman' of India".

The President's comments against the backdrop of anti-corruption protests of Anna Hazare and Ramdev came in his maiden address to the nation on the eve of 66th Independence Day.

In a speech that covered India's emergence as a stable democracy and its economic growth post-Independence, the new President also warned that if progress fell behind rising aspirations of the youth "rage will manifest".

Earlier last month in his acceptance speech after his election to the post, Mukherjee had said that trickledown theories do not address the legitimate aspirations of the poor.

In today's address, he said if Indian economy has achieved critical mass, then it must become a launching pad for the next leap. "We need a second freedom struggle; this time to ensure that India is free for ever from hunger, disease and poverty."

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Mumbai police were warned of violence

Mumbai: A report had allegedly warned Mumbai police of possible “law-and-order problems” ahead of recent violence in the city that claimed two lives and left over 100 injured, including 45 policemen.

In the violence near Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in south Mumbai, about 100 public and private vehicles were damaged or destroyed, and the country's commercial capital was held to ransom for several tense hours.

A report in a news channel said that just before the commencement of protest, a mob of around 1,000 people, armed with sticks, rods, knives and swords, was noticed heading to the CST from Kurla station.

However, the Mumbai police say this mob infiltrated the protest to execute a conspiracy of violence.

Meanwhile, a report in The Indian Express claimed that Additional Commissioner of Police (Special Branch) Nawal Bajaj had sent a confidential report to Mumbai Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik and Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Rajnish Seth in which he warned that “law and order problems are expected”. The letter also urged “heavy police bandobast”.

The report said that the recent developments in Assam and Myanmar had angered the Muslim community. It predicted a “charged atmosphere” at the ground, adding Muslims were told about the protest during Friday prayers and would be present in large numbers.

However, despite these warnings, the Mumbai Police top brass were unprepared for violence.

The police were not expecting more than 3,000-4,000 people. Instead, 10,000 showed up. The organizers had told police in their application seeking permission to hold the rally that they were expecting a turnout of around 1,500. Some media reports yesterday pegged the actual figure at over 10,000, police said.

The newspaper quoted Patnaik as saying, “It is not true that we were caught unawares. The fact that there could have been trouble prompted the joint commissioner of police (law and order) to camp at the protest site. However, it is true that we did not expect anyone to torch media vans. The trouble began when a group from outside the venue attacked the media van. It all happened within five minutes.”

On Sunday, a report said that the violence in Mumbai appeared to be a "pre-planned" act.

What prompted police to suspect that the violence was per-meditated was that the word about the event was spread through Facebook, sources said, adding that the investigators might rope in the Cyber Crime cell to find out who posted the online messages and sent the SMS's.

Police suspect the violence to be a "per-planned" act as participants at the Azad Maidan rally came "prepared" to wreak havoc.

The rally turned violent with the mob pelting stones, torching vehicles and damaging buses, forcing police to open fire in which Mohammed Umar (22) and Altaf Shaikh (18) were killed.

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Firefighters tackle huge blaze 11 kilometres east of London Olympics Park

London: Firefighters were tackling a massive blaze at an east London recycling center Sunday, saying it was the biggest the city had seen in several years.

Olympic organizers said the fire - which is about 7 miles (11 kilometers) east of the Olympic Park - would have no effect on the games' closing ceremony planned for the evening. By late Sunday, wind was blowing the smoke away from the park.

The London Fire Brigade said in a statement that the whole of the 50 meter by 100 meter (165 feet by 330 feet), single story building was on fire and that, at one point, a plume of smoke could be seen across the capital.

"We've not seen a fire of this size in London for several years," London Fire Commissioner Ron Dobson said. "It's certainly a dramatic end to the Olympics for the London Fire Brigade."

The statement said more than 200 firefighters drawn from across the city were fighting the fire in Dagenham, an industrial, riverside area at the very edge of the capital.

"I would like to reassure people that we are still able to attend incidents across the capital and the fire cover we're providing at the Olympic venues has not been affected," Dobson said.

The cause of the fire wasn't yet known. No injuries have been reported.

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Up to 50 dead as strong earthquakes rock Iran

DUBAI: Between 40 to 50 people were killed and 400 hurt when two strong earthquakes struck northwest Iran on Saturday, Iranian official said.

The US Geological Survey measured the first quake at 6.4 magnitude and said it struck 60 km (37 miles) northeast of the city of Tabriz at a depth of 9.9. km (6.2 miles) at 12.34 GMT.

It said a second earthquake measuring 6.3 struck 49 km (30 miles) northeast of Tabriz 11 minutes later at a similar depth. Three more lesser aftershocks have followed since then.

The second quake struck near the town of Varzgan, Fars news agency said. "The quake was so intense that people poured into the streets through fear," it said.

Fifty people in the town had been taken to hospital, Fars said.

Other reports said the earthquake had broken telephone communications, making rescue efforts more problematic.

Iran is straddled by several major fault lines and has suffered several devastating earthquakes in recent times, the last which struck the city of Bam in 2003, killing more than 25,000 people.

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Key facts about virus that can steal banking credentials

A new computer virus, dubbed Gauss, has been discovered in the Middle East. Researchers say can it steal banking credentials and hijack login information for social networking sites, email and instant messaging accounts.

Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab said Gauss is the work of the same "factory" or "factories" that built the Stuxnet worm, which attacked Iran's nuclear program. Here are some key facts about Gauss, according to Kaspersky Lab.

what is its purpose?

Gauss is a surveillance tool. It steals credentials for hacking online banking systems, social networking sites and email accounts; it also gathers information about infected PCs, including Web browsing history, system passwords and the contents of disk drives.

Can it do anything else?

There is a mysterious module, known as Godel, that copies malicious code onto USB drives when they are plugged into infected PCs. Godel's purpose is unknown because some of its code is compressed and scrambled using a sophisticated encryption method. It only activates when it infects a predetermined target. Researchers have not identified the target or figured out its mission. Kaspersky Lab senior researcher Roel Schouwenberg said he believes it may be a "warhead" designed to damage industrial control systems.

How many victims are there?

Kaspersky Lab has uncovered more than 2,500 computers infected with Gauss since late May. It estimates the total number of victims is in the tens of thousands. The largest number of infections were found were inLebanon, followed by Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Is Gauss still a threat?

Yes. Infected USB drives could still launch attacks. Servers that controlled infected machines were shut down in July, so it is unlikely that any more information will be stolen from the surveillance part of the operation.

Why is it called Gauss?

The virus is built using modules with internal names that appear to be inspired by famous mathematicians and philosophers, including Kurt Godel, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Kaspersky named the entire operation after the Gauss component as it implements the data-stealing capabilities.

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426 Indians undergoing sentences in British jails

London: There are 426 Indian citizens - 421 male and five female - undergoing sentences in British jails after being convicted for a variety of offenses, latest figures show as demands grew to deport foreign prisoners to their home countries to serve their sentences.

Official sources said on Thursday that according to prison figures as of June 30, there were 2,093 prisoners with citizenship of countries in Asia, which included 426 from India. The number of prisoners with Pakistani citizenship was 472, Bangladesh 239 and Sri Lanka 141.

It was also said on Thursday that the British government is spending 3 million pounds every year in foreign countries to improve prison conditions there so that foreign prisoners could be deported home to complete the remaining period of their sentences.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson would not say if part of the money would be spent to improve prison conditions in India, but said three projects were currently underway to achieve better prison conditions in Jamaica and Nigeria. Prisoners holding foreign citizenship in British jails currently number 10,861.

Amidst continuing efforts to reduce immigration, there are growing demands across the political spectrum to deport foreigners who break UK law and end up in prison here.

The spokesman added: "Foreign national prisoners should serve their sentences in their home country. We need to make sure these sentences are properly enforced, and work with other governments to share best practice, improve standards and ultimately save the British taxpayer money".

During the hearing of the case to extradite one of India's most wanted criminals, Tiger Hanif, to India, the Westminster Magistrates Court had sent a team to Gujarat to examine prison conditions there after Hanif's lawyers alleged that he would be tortured if sent there.

In May, the plea was overruled by a judge and his extradition was ordered. His extradition file is currently with Home secretary Theresa May, who needs to approve the extradition.

A Home Office spokesman said: "On Wednesday May 2, the case of Mohammad Patel, aka Tiger Hanif, was sent to the Secretary of State after the district judge found there were no statutory bars to his surrender under the Extradition Act 2003".

He added: "The Secretary of State will carefully consider the case and make a decision in due course".

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The term E-Commerce is now changing to the word Social Commerce

The fast increasing social media population hooked onto Facebook, Twitter, etc is set to give a big boost to the already burgeoning domestic e-commerce market that has touched the Rs 50,000 crore-mark last year, says an industry study.

According to latest Internet & Mobile Association of India numbers, with 150 online population, the country is the third largest in terms of internet users after China and the US. Out of this, 50 million are on Facebook and 13 million on Twitter, taking the size of social media universe to 63 million.

This also makes the country the second largest Facebook market after the US, while the sixth largest for Twitter, says ICICI Merchant Services and First Data general manager Amrish Rau, adding most of these social media members are also actively taking up e-commerce transactions.

"Going by the current growth rates, social e-commerce is the next step in evolution, combining the comfort and ease of use of social media and e-tailing," says Rau.

Social commerce continues to gain popularity around the globe, especially in the US, with the rising popularity of e-gifting, under which users send tangible gifts to their loved ones from retailers through Facebook and email, he adds.

Explaining the plus points of e-gifting, he says since social networking sites are accessible on mobile phones, it is easy for both individuals as well as organizations to expand their e-commerce strategy into the social commerce realm.

According to a recent report, 82 percent of online buyers consider others' opinions. A Forrester study shows that when online retailers suggest relevant products, they increase the average basket by 47 percent and the number of products sold by 27 percent.

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Hackers reveled top 10 common passwords of Yahoo

A security breach at the offices of internet search giant Yahoo, which led to over 450,000 login details being leaked online, highlights how careless internet users are while choosing their passwords.

Last month, a hacking collective posted account information belonging to thousands of Yahoo users on a public website in what they described as 'a wake-up call'. According to Enterprise Innovation, the incident showed that the company that holds user details in question has poor user security, which allows the hackers to grab this important data.

But most importantly, it tells how blind internet users are when it comes to password security.

According to the report, out of 442,837 passwords that were published, the top ten passwords were "123456," "password," "welcome," "ninja," "abc123," "123456789," "princess," "sunshine," "12345678," and "0". The word "'qwerty"' (the first six letters appearing on the top left letter row of a US keyboard when read left to right, came in at number 11.

Despite their obvious weakness, numeric-only passwords still appear popular and make up nearly 6 percent of the total, with nearly one-fourth of those being a list of numeric values on the keyboard in order from 1 - 0 such as 123456 or 1234. According to the report, one must follow a simple rule for strong passwords in a bid to avoid their accounts being hacked.

First, mix up letter and numbers. Second, use a minimum of eight characters. And third, do not use real words or sequential numbers such as password 1234 5678.

But if you must, mix them up, such as p1a2s3s4w5o6r7d8.

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Gurudwara in US has been attacked......

NEW YORK: The gunman who went on a killing spree inside a gurdwara in Wisconsin was a "white man with a 9/11 tattoo" on his arm, according to eyewitnesses.

Kanwardeep Singh Kaleka said those rescued from the Oak Creek, Milwaukee gurdwara described the attacker as a bald, white man, dressed in a white T-shirt and black pants and with a 9/11 tattoo on one arm -- which "implies to me that there's some level of hate crime there."

Kaleka, a nephew of the gurdwara's president, told CNN that the gunman started shooting in the parking lot and killed at least one person there. He "then entered into the temple and proceeded to open fire."

"It seems the few casualties that have been divulged to me have been the equivalent of priests, the holy leaders of our people," he said.

"My uncle is one of the administrators of the temple. It's mainly those individuals who have been targeted or shot. Maybe it's because the ladies were fortunate enough to dodge it out, but so far most of the people I've heard have been shot and killed were all turbaned males."

Kaleka said he was not at the temple at the time of the shooting, but helped police interview witnesses and other congregation members once they were rescued.

Meanwhile, FBI agents had cordoned off a street in Cudahy, a town about five miles from the gurdwara, where it was executing a search warrant related to the shooting.

A team of law enforcement officers, including from the Milwaukee County Sheriff's department and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, surrounded a duplex in Cudahy.

Authorities cordoned off the area and the neighborhood was being evacuated.

Police have searched the suspect's home, "a short distance" from the temple, a law enforcement source told CNN who added that a single 9mm semi- automatic pistol believed to have been used by the gunman was found at the scene, along with a weapon that belonged to a police officer who was injured.

Some members of the community told local news channels that Sikhs had been targeted in hate crimes following the September 11 attacks.

They said people often falsely identify them as Muslims because of their bearded and turbaned appearance.

According to the Association of Religion Data Archives, there are around 314,000 Sikhs in the United States.

In April, representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York and co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Indians and Indian-Americans had sent a letter to attorney general Eric Holder urging that the FBI collect data on hate crimes committed against Sikhs.

NEW DELHI/CHANDIGARH/INDIA: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today expressed shock over the shooting at a gurdwara in the US and hoped authorities there will ensure "conditions" that such violent acts are not repeated, as the attack sparked an outrage in the country, especially in Punjab.

The Prime Minister said what was more painful was the fact that this "senseless act of violence" should be targeted at a religious place. An anguished Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal asked the Prime Minister to take up with the Obama administration the issue of safety and security of Sikhs living in the US while the Sikh religious leadership said the attack by a lone white gunman was a security lapse on the part of US government.

Condemning the attack, external affairs minister S M Krishna said it does not fit into the proclaimed policies of the US. Six people were killed in the attack on the gurudwara during Sunday morning prayers in Wisconsin by at least one gunman who was also shot dead. The Sikh community in Jammu staged a protest and sought adequate security for their members and religious institutions in the US. Reaching out to the Sikh community, US Ambassador to India Nancy Powell offered her prayers at Gurudwara Bangla Sahib in Delhi and said the incident will be probed thoroughly.

"We hope that the authorities will reach out to the grieving families and ensure conditions that such violent acts are not repeated in the future," Prime Minister Singh said in a statement.

Later talking to reporters, Singh said he was "enormously" saddened by the incident and hoped the "American authorities will investigate who were behind this dastardly attack". In a letter to the Prime Minister, chief minister Badal said "there is a growing feeling in the minds of Punjabis in general and Sikhs in particular that the Union government must get more actively and vigorously involved in getting the US administration address the issue of safety in right earnest." The US Embassy in a statement in Delhi said any incident like the attack on a Gurudwara one is tragic, especially when it happens in a place of worship.

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