Accenture to hire 8,000 in India by next year

Global technology and consultancy firm, Accenture has said that it is going to add around 8,000 people in India by the end of next year taking its total employee base in the country to 50,000.

“We are 42,000 right now and we imagine we will be about 50,000 by the end of 2010,” said Accenture Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, William D Green on the sidelines of the India Economic Summit. Indicating a recovery from the global downturn, Green said the company will continue to focus in India, specially in the areas of analytics, reports PTI.

Accenture’s focus in India is going to be the analytics space, which will help its clients in converting information into insights for better yields. Green added, “We believe that analytics is going to be an important trend that our customers are going to demand from us. We think India is going to be a great place for us. We have some core centres of excellence in the analytics space in the country.”

Accenture, which has annual revenue of $21.58 billion for fiscal 2009, will strengthen its focus on clients in pharmaceutical, telecommunications and energy in the country.

Nokia intros 3G enable NOKIA 6316s

To enhance its CDMA collection, Nokia rolled out a 3G enabled handset for the Chinese market dubbed Nokia 6316s.

The Nokia 6316s packages diverse functionalities including web browsing, music, imaging and GPS. The multimedia device sports a 2.2-inch QVGA display, a 2 megapixel camera and Bluetooth 2.1.

“Nokia is boosting its leadership in the CDMA market by updating an already strong line-up with products that appeal to a wide range of customer needs,” stated David Tang, Vice President of Nokia China.

“Of these devices, the Nokia 6316s is bringing exciting 3G services to life for users in China. Building on previous collaboration over the Nokia 8208, this is yet another success story resulting from our close relationship with China Telecom,” he added.

The compact slider offers a wide variety of features in support of China Telecom services and preloaded applications including QQ, Email and try-and-buy applications, mobile navigation and mobile stock. Connectivity is more enhanced with the device’s 3G capability. The Nokia 6316s is presented in black, gold and red colors.

The Nokia 6316s is expected to be offered during the first quarter of 2010 for an unknown price.

TCS,Microsoft in virtualisation deal

IT outsourcing firm Tata Consultancy Services has entered into an alliance with Microsoft India to launch a virtualisation Center of Exc ellence (CoE) in Chennai.The Microsoft-TCS virtualisation CoE is a joint initiative by the companies to accelerate the adoption of virtualisation technology in India, TCS said in a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange today.”Virtualisation is one of the most disruptive technologies in the world today. Through our partnership…we will address this crucial market need and help customers lend the benefits of virtualisation technology,” Microsoft India Managing Director Rajan Anandan said. Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources. This helps companies in cutting costs and optimising resources. “We are always looking to enhance the services we provide to our customers. The Microsoft-TCS virtualisation CoE is an initiative aimed at enabling our customers rapidly realise the advantages of this technology,” TCS Infrastructure Services, Vice President & Global Head PR Krishnan said.

Indian IT companies skip campus recruitment

With Nasscom, the software industry’s apex body advising its members not to go to campuses for recruitment, the placements at engineering colleges has dried up. However, although 2008-09 was a difficult year for training and placement officers (TPO) at engineering colleges, 2009-10 could be the most critical year for campus placements,reports Economic Times.

JN Pitambare, Dean of Sinhagad Institute says, “Normally, 75-80 percent of the placements used to take place by mid-August. However, this year I will be happy if I am able to place even 10-15 percent of our students by December.”

SV Dravid, TPO, DY Patil College of Engineering at Akurdi, near Pune said, “Last year, we had placed 150 students by this time. This year, not a single student has been placed. I hope the situation improves by December.” Normally the big software companies finish recruitment by mid-August, placing around 75 percent of the college students.The core sector companies used to come from August, but this year they are non-committal.

Companies have been telling TPOs that their placement requirements are yet to be firmed up since things are not planned yet or they do not know how many projects they will get. “Most of the core companies are in a dilemma. They have promised to come for placements by December,” said TPO Federation President Professor Shital Rawandale. Not only are there fewer jobs on offer for 2009-10 but the companies are adopting various techniques to defer the joining dates of candidates recruited last year or even to reject them.

Top colleges like the College of Engineering Pune (COEP) are also facing problems. “Of the 576 students placed last year, only 150 have joined till now. For the rest of them, joining has been deferred from July to December,” said Assistant TPO, COEP, SA Meshram.

Some of the selected candidates are being asked to take more tests. With the recession, singing of bonds has also returned. “Some small and medium-sized software companies now want the candidates whom they had already selected to enter into two-year bonds,” said a TPO.

Nokia set to launch push mail service in December

Leading mobile manufacturer, Nokia Inc. may introduce its push email service, Nokia Messaging, in India by December. Trials for the messaging service are already under way since April and the world’s largest mobile phone vendor has been making efforts to get regulatory approval from the Department of Telecommunications.

Nokia is said to have signed a partnership deal with Telecom Italia to roll out the service.

Nokia India Director Marketing, Vineet Taneja said, “We plan to launch the service by the year-end. We are in advance stages of discussion with different operators, whereby consumers will get the service through an operator plan.”

Currently, Canada based smartphone maker Research in Motion’s (RIM) is an unchallenged player in the push mail service supported by BlackBerry. Nokia’s move may create major movement in telecom market circles as the idea to introduce similar service has been considered as a clear challenge to RIM’s dominance in the filed.

Nokia will provide push mail service at its more than 20 Nokia smartphones including E Series handsets, 5800 XpressMusic, N97 and N86, running on Symbaib S60 platform. The company is also working to provide email service on the mid-end handsets using the S40 operating system.

India to launch major project to study climate change

At least 220 Indian scientists and 127 research organizations are joining hands for a massive study to monitor climate change in different parts of the country. Climate change in India has led to a rise in sea levels while storm surges in coastal areas have also become a major concern for environmental authorities.

According to the Ministry of Environment and Forests officials, the report of their study will be released in November next year.

“We’ve seen that the shoreline across the country is getting affected due to the sea-level rise. Erosion is going to take place and it will cause a major damage and human displacement in the coastal parts of the Bay of Bengal,” said Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services Director S.S.C. Shenoi.

“In Cuddalore (Tamil Nadu) also a large portion of land is likely to go under water in next 50-100 years,” he said.

Despite only about six percent of the global tropical cyclones affecting the coastal areas along the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, intensity of cyclonic storms has gone up, said S.K. Dube, Professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi (IIT-Delhi).

“Storm surge has also become a major cause for concern in several coastal areas along the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. We have noticed that the intensity of cyclonic storms has increased though only 5-6 percent of global tropical cyclones affect these two areas. It’s also because of climate change,” Dube said.

The climate study will enable the scientists to gauge the changing aspects of the environment properly.

“This will be the first comprehensive scientific climate assessment study carried out in different regions of the country. India has to build its own capacity to study what is happening to our ecology,” Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh told a recent South Asian seminar on climate change organized by the Delhi-based green body Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in the capital.

The minister said, “So far, our knowledge of climate change in the country is mostly impressionistic and not robust. With the climate study being carried out in various places – including glacial retreat in the Himalayan region and the sea-level rise in coastal states of India – we’ll be able to gauge the changing aspects of our environment properly.”

Some state governments have also been asked to prepare their own climate action plans focusing on environmental changes.

Talking about research collaboration, Ramesh said India could always enter into technology development and transfer activities with foreign nations especially on the subject of the climate change survey.

Ramesh said India was also on its way to launching its own satellite to monitor atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Scientists will replicate human brain in 10 years

Within 10 years, scientists will be able to create a model that replicates the functions of the human brain says a neuroscientist.

“”I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial. It is an extremely expensive project and not all is yet secured,”says Henry Markram, professor at the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. “The brain is of course extremely complex because it has trillions of synapses, billions of neurons, millions of proteins, and thousands of genes. But they are still finite in number,” says Markram. “Today’s technology is already highly sophisticated and it allows us to reverse engineer the brain rapidly.”An example of the capability already in place is that today’s robots can do screenings and mappings tens of thousands of times faster than humans. Another hurdle on the path to a model human brain is that 100 years of neuroscience discovery has led to millions of fragments of data and knowledge that have never been brought together and exploited fully. “The biggest challenge is to understand how electrical-magnetic-chemical patterns in the brain convert into our perception of reality. We think we see with our eyes, but in fact most of what we ‘see’ is generated as a projection by your brain. So what are we actually looking at when we look at something ‘outside’ us?” For Markram, the most exciting part of his research is putting together the hundreds of thousands of small pieces of data that his lab has collected over the past 15 years, and seeing what a microcircuit of the brain looks like. “When we first switched it on it already started to display some interesting emergent properties. But this is just the beginning because we know now that it is possible to build it. As we progress we are learning about design secrets of our brains which were unimaginable before. In fact the brain uses some simple rules to solve highly complex problems and extracting each of these rules one by one is very exciting.” “For example, we have been surprised at finding simple design principles that allow billions of neurons to connect to each other. I think we will understand how the brain is designed and works before we have finished building it,” Markram says. The opportunities for this neuroscience research challenge are immense, explains Markram, according to an AlphaGalileo Foundation release. “A brain model will sit on a massive supercomputer and serve as a kind of educational and diagnostic service to society. As the industrial revolution in science progresses we will generate more data than anyone can track or any computer can store, so models that can absorb it are simply unavoidable.”

Ford India Uses EcoBoost

Ford India, is looking to introduce its EcoBoost engine technology in its new cars that the company claims will raise fuel mileage

by 20%. EcoBoost, which uses gasoline turbocharged direct-injection technology, has already been launched by the US-based parent, in its compact cars and large trucks sold in the American market.

Ford claims the new engine also lowers carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 15% compared to the conventional petrol and diesel engines and will help the company meet future emission norms. Michael Boneham president and MD Ford India said, “Initially, we will go for the regular technology to develop 1.2-litre petrol and 1.5-litre diesel engine to benefit from government’s policy of lower excise on such engine sizes and introduce the much expensive EcoBoost engines in the long-term.”

Ford India has set up a new engine plant at Chennai and is also doubling its plant capacity to two lakh cars as part of its $500 million fresh investment in the country announced earlier. This is part of the plan to develop Chennai as a strategic production hub to produce cars and engines for Ford’s global operations at competitive costs. The company is looking to save 15-20% on engine costs by going for high localisation after developing a local vendor base at Chennai.

The plant currently makes 1.6 Duratec petrol engines and 1.4 Duratorq diesel engines currently strapped in its Ikon and Fiesta sedan besides the Fusion hatchback.