Just 1 vote could bring govt down

This could be a replay of the last trust motion in 1999 when the Vajpayee government was brought down by one vote.
The gloves were off as UPA and the Opposition squared off for the July 22 trust vote with the numbers still too close to call and both sides resorting
to snatch-and-dash tactics to poach rival MPs, escalating a ding-dong battle marked by desperate deal-making and breathtaking brinkmanship.
With each and every vote now absolutely crucial, late night reports suggest that CPM has renewed pressure on Somnath Chatterjee to quit as Speaker after publicly saying it was up to him to decide.

The numbers game
UPA can count on 268 MPs. A couple of Independents might join. The combined opposition tally is 270. This figure might be eroded by defections. There are just four undecided votes. These can split between UPA and opposition. It is still anybody’s match
Political slugfest
UPA gets a jolt with RLD chief Ajit Singh and JD(S) leader Deve Gowda joining hands with Mayawati. In a counter move, it secures Soren’s support and claims two JD(U) MPs are set to defect. Amar Singh parades BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh
Emerging alliances
Third Front may have got a new leader in Mayawati. Though cooperation limited at present, poll pacts cannot be ruled out. Even if UPA loses, Cong-SP pact will endure. NDA hopes that some UNPA parties like INLD and AGP will join it. Left-BSP dialogue to continue It’s down to four fence-sitters

Source: Times of India, New Delhi

UPA has slight edge - Advani not against N-deal, wants renegotiation

Exuding confidence that the UPA will win Tuesday's trust vote, PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti said senior BJP leader L K Advani got the hint in this regard when he said that the Opposition was not to destabilise the government but to defeat it.

''We are very hopeful, Advani has got the hint that the government is going to survive. This is evident when he said that NDA is not to destablise the Government but to defeat it,'' Mehbooba, PDP's lone Lok Sabha MP said.

Source - NDTV.com

Industry Reviews|Great Lakes placement sees fewer IT,BFSI firms

Recruiters From Manufacturing & Consulting Cos Increase; Average Salary Up Marginally

THE GREAT Lakes Institute of Management (GLIM) saw a decline in the number of IT and financial services firms visiting the campus this year, giving way to more consultancies and manufacturers. Average salaries went up marginally.
However, the placement season for the fourth batch of Great Lakes saw a 40% jump in the number of recruiters, with 27 companies making a debut at the campus this year. Average salary went up to Rs 9.7 lakh from Rs 9.3 lakh a year ago. The highest salary was Rs 12.1 lakh a year.
“The notable trend this year is that the IT and BFSI component has come down while the recruitments from FMCG and manufacturing has risen,” said Mr S Sriram, director, Great Lakes. For example, 60% of the students were placed in the IT sector last year, but this year it is down to 48%. At the same time, 7% of the students were recruited in the consulting stream last year; this year it is 11%.
A total of 165 students, with an average work experience of three years, sat for placements this year. While students with twofour years of work experience got an average pay of Rs 9.52 lakh per annum, the students with more than four years of work experience were paid Rs 12.1 lakh per annum.
The recruiters included KPMG, Technopak & Accenture in consulting, HSBC, Citibank & Kotak in BFSI, Caterpillar, Cummins & Tata Motors in manufacturing, Cognizant, Infosys & Satyam in IT. Though IT scored over the other segments in terms of the number of visitors, it wasn’t high in the number of offers accepted.


Source: Economic Times, Chennai

Industry News| Goldman Sachs invests Rs 100 cr in TVS Logistics

GLOBAL investment banking major Goldman Sachs has invested nearly Rs 100 crore for a double-digit ‘significant minority stake’ in TVS Logistics. This is first ever private equity investment in the $5-billion turnover, family-owned TVS group.
TVS entered the logistics business in 1997 and formed TVSL as a susbidiary in 2004 with a paid-up capital of Rs 12 crore. The PE money will boost its net worth.
The company is upbeat on growing at 35-40% a year and achieving a turnover of Rs 1,000 crore by 2010 from Rs 338 crore in 2007-08 and increasing employee strength to 5,000 from 3,000 at present.
Of the Rs 338 crore, domestic business accounted for Rs 240 crore (with TVS group accounting for 20% and the rest by non-group companies), and global business claimed a share of Rs 100 crore (with 60% from the group and rest from nongroup companies).

The company will leverage the contact and reach of Goldman Sachs to further accelerate growth, he said, noting that the group had pioneered and identified logistics as sunrise industry 10 years ago.

TVSL recently picked up 50% stake in Greenarches (based in Mumbai) and renamed it as TVS Infrastructure. This venture will create logistics parks and has proposed to invest nearly Rs 500 crore by itself and through SPVs for building warehousing and other infrastruture.

The company already owns 20 acre in Pune and 10 acre in Chennai and has plans of building a land bank of around 200 acre in automotive centres like Hosur, Gurgaon, Halol, Lucknow, Singur, Uttranchal and Indore. TVSL also holds 75% stake in the newly formed TVS Dynamic Global Freight Services which will focus on the auto and non-auto segments and is expected to clock a turnover of Rs 250 crore in three years.

Source- Economic Times, Chennai

Industry Reviews | Google's Android work far from finished

As a wise man once noted, the waiting is the hardest part.

It's been nearly six months since Google sent ripples through the mobile phone industry with the announcement of its plans to develop Android, a Linux-based operating system. But after an initial splash, Google has been pretty quiet. So much so, in fact, that several representatives of companies within Google's Open Handset Alliance professed frustration at the ambiguity of some important details at the CTIA 2008 conference this week in Las Vegas.

Much is still up in the air, just a few months before the first phones are expected to arrive. Google has yet to make crucial decisions about the code base that will accompany Android; such as, which applications are required to make it an Android phone? How will that base be maintained into the future? And how much freedom will Android developers and partners really have to tweak the software?

Google is aiming high with Android. "Android has two goals: First, to be an excellent mobile platform on its merits, and second, to be open and open source," wrote Dan Morill, a Google engineer, on the Android Internals discussion board last week. But in this new world of advanced mobile computing, those goals can conflict.

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Industry Reviews | Yahoo Counters Google’s Mobile Onslaught With Voice

Yahoo, with the second generation of its oneSearch product, has thrown down the gauntlet in the mobile search wars. Whereas Google employed a clean and easy-to-use interface to win over the desktop space, Yahoo is trying to make gains in the mobile space by taking a different approach: voice.

The more time I spend with my mobile, the more I realize what a godawful pain it is — even with a QWERTY keyboard — to type. Anything that would make the process less time-consuming (and free up my hands) is welcome, and is precisely the reason I use voice services such as Jott and Goog-411. So using voice (powered by Vlingo) for oneSearch is a compelling proposition.

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Latest Industry News | India short of 6 lakh doctors

Even as India faces an acute shortage of manpower in the healthcare sector, the country holds the top position when it comes to its physicians migrating to developed countries like Britain and the US. According to a Planning Commission report, while India is short of six lakh doctors, 10 lakh nurses and two lakh dental surgeons, Indian doctors who have migrated to developed countries form nearly 5% of their medical workforce. Almost 60,000 Indian physicians are estimated to be working in countries like US, UK, Canada and Australia alone. India, on the other hand, has a dismal patient-doctor ratio. According to the report, for every 10,000 Indians, there is one doctor. In contrast, Australia has 249 doctors for every 10,000 people, Canada has 209, UK has 166 and US has 548. India also faces an acute shortage of dental surgeons. At present, the number of dental surgeons registered in India stands at just over 73,000 against a requirement of 3 lakh. Similarly, the health ministry estimates that there needs to be one nurse for every 500 people. According to this, India required 21 lakh nurses in 2007. But only 11 lakh nurses were available. This has made the Planning Commission suggest that the medical education sector should be opened up completely for private sector participation and companies should be allowed to establish medical and dental colleges just as they have been allowed to open nursing colleges. "The group is of the view that the only way to accomplish this (bridging the gap in doctors) is for the medical education sector to be opened up completely for private sector participation. Other entry barriers such as the requirement of land and built-up space need also to be lowered to realistic levels in order to facilitate the opening of new colleges. Government's role should be limited to opening a few high quality institutions dedicated to research," the report said.

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Industry Reviews | AT&T would offer Google Android Mobile Phones

US based telecom giant AT&T has said that they would indeed offer Google Android powered mobile devices.

The company had earlier decided to stay away as they were afraid that Google would require them to provide all of their applications.

The search engine giant has now assured them that the operators would be allowed to customize Android phones to include any applications.

A company representative spoke on this new development: “That’s attractive to us. We were concerned that maybe the focus was just on Google apps”.

Latest Industry News | Google trims DoubleClick workers; 300 fired or put in "transitional" jobs

Google is cutting jobs at DoubleClick, the online advertising company it bought last month for $3.24 billion.

About 300 of DoubleClick's 1,200 U.S. employees were fired or placed in "transitional" roles, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google said Wednesday in an e-mailed statement. DoubleClick has about 150 employees at a data center in Thornton.

The purchase, Google's largest in its nine-year history, bolsters the company's technology for selling and measuring the effectiveness of display ads, which include pictures and video.
As part of the reshuffling, Google split DoubleClick's online marketing business, called Performics, into two units. One division sells services that help ads show up in search queries, while the other links advertisers and publishers, Google said.

Latest Industry News | Adobe joins Linux Foundation

Adobe Systems is to join the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to fostering growth of the open source operating system.
The Foundation was created last year as a result of a merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. Members include HP, IBM, Google and Nokia.
"Adobe's decision to join the Linux Foundation is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation.
"Adobe's membership will contribute to our goal of even more application development on Linux with a specific emphasis on web 2.0 applications."
The announcement was designed to coincide with the release of an alpha version of Adobe's Air for rich web applications on Linux.
Air for Linux allows developers to build rich internet applications for the Linux platform that work with popular web technologies, including HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex, without the need for extra platform code.
The alpha quality release of Air currently works only with Sun Java, although Adobe is promising compatibility with GNU Java in the final version.
The final product is expected to arrive later this year and will feature multiple language support, according to Adobe.

Latest Industry News | MPs attack Google's web vetting record

Google's vice-president, Kent Walker, came under fire from MPs today after admitting that his company does not employ a single person to proactively vet online content and for failing to censor a YouTube video of a gang rape.

One member of the Commons culture, media and sport committee called Walker "objectionable" after he attempted to defend the mistake by YouTube, the popular video sharing website owned by Google, over the gang rape.

Walker admitted that footage of a gang rape, reported to be of a woman in south London being set upon by a group of teenagers, received 600 page views before it was taken down from YouTube last month.

He said that the incident was "clearly a mistake on our part", adding that it was one of a "tiny, tiny number of mistakes" when the company's record on censoring inappropriate content was good.

"Once flagged, more than 50% is removed within half an hour; a large majority is removed within an hour," Walker added, giving evidence to the select committee's inquiry into harmful content on the internet and in video games.

He also drew criticism from MPs on the committee after revealing that Google did not employ anyone to proactively monitor footage on YouTube.

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