To go for HD set-top box or not?

Watch out before you go for that high definition (HD) DTH set-top box. Even as DTH companies gear up for relaying content in high definition, the content backing it is very little.

Only two channels -- Discovery and National Geographic -- are available in HD. While Essel Group channels -- Zee TV and Zee Cinema -- are available only with Dish TV, ESPN has only two properties, the ongoing Fifa World Cup and Wimbledon, currently available for HD broadcast, and that too with select DTH operators.
Leading players such as Dish TV, Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV, Sun Direct are marketing HD set-top boxes.

“There is no demand for HD content from broadcasters,” says Nikhil Alva, MD of Miditech, the country’s third-largest production house that supplies content to many major TV channels.

“Also, the number of high-definition television sets in the country is miniscule. Transmitting HD is significantly more expensive for channels, so it is not a priority for them. Also our analog cable networks that supply content to the majority of C&S homes is already too clogged with channels to deliver HD content. For now, HD is a niche phenomenon and largely a marketing gimmick,” Alva adds.

Even DTH players admit that sale of HD set-top boxes will take some time. “The numbers on HD set-top boxes will be low,” says Salil Kapoor, COO, Dish TV.

Airtel Brings Free Facebook Access

Airtel has announced that it will offer free access to the mobile version of Facebook on its network. The company, which has a subscriber base of over 130 million will offer free access for a period of two months ending August 31.

The mobile version of the site enables users to post status updates, comment and write on walls, message others, and also be able to view or upload photos.

For existing mobile Internet customers on Airtel, there is no need to do anything - they can immediately start connecting with their friends by visiting the Facebook mobile site. Those who are accessing the mobile Internet for the first time need to SMS 'FACEBOOK' to 54321 to take advantage of this offer.

Airtel will also offer Facebook in six Indian languages - Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam, initiating with Hindi and English.

Looks like Airtel customers who are Facebook fans have a lot to rejoice!

Sandisk launches 64GB SD card

SanDisk Corporation has begun shipping the 64 GB SanDisk Ultra SDXC card. The company's highest capacity SD card ever offers up to 15MB/sec read speed2 and Class 4 speed rating.

The new card is ideal for capturing and storing massive 1080p High-Definition video files and then transferring them quickly to a computer.

SDXC cards are based on the new SD 3.0 specification, which makes it possible to manufacture cards with storage capacity up to 2 terabytes (TB)3. The SDXC card's exFAT file structure helps consumers record long-duration HD videos. The 64GB SanDisk Ultra SDXC card can store more than eight hours of such video.

“SDXC is the successor to the world’s most popular card format,” said Susan Park, director, retail product marketing, SanDisk. “The 64GB SanDisk Ultra SDXC card delivers the speed and capacity consumers need for extended HD video recording and improved rapid shooting of still images. The card is an ideal complement for recently-announced SDXC-compatible cameras and camcorders.”

The 64GB SanDisk Ultra SDXC card comes with a lifetime limited warranty.

PayPal suspends India services

US online payments company PayPal has temporarily suspended personal payments to and from India and transfers to local Indian banks.

PayPal, in a weekend blog post on the company website, said the operations were on hold "while we work with our business partners and other stakeholders to address questions they have about the service."

PayPal, which is owned by online auction giant eBay, did not provide any further details about the move.

It said customers "can still make commercial payments to India but merchants cannot withdraw funds in rupees to local Indian banks."

"We're trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we're really sorry for the inconvenience that this may cause our customers in India and around the world," PayPal said.

Twitter blocked in China?

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams today said he had been told that his microblogging service has been partially blocked in China but had no confirmation.

"That's what I've been told," he said, adding that he had "heard reports on that" but that the company did not have direct confirmation.

Williams said that China can use a firewall to block access to the service.

"There are ways for users to get around it, but I'm not an expert on that," he said, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

When asked about media reports that Twitter was developing ways to get around the firewall, Williams said he had been "misquoted."

"We're not actively developing any way to get around it," he said, although he stressed that "we're for the free exchange of information."

Asked if his company had noticed any cyber attacks, such as those launched against search engine giant Google from China, he said that no such moves had been detected.

How to beat a spammer

Spam messages are an incredible nuisance for most web users. But, now scientists claim to have developed an effectively "perfect" method for blocking the most common kind of spam, using spammers’ own trickery.

An international team, led by International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and California University, has come up with a system that deciphers the templates a “botnet” is using to create spam. These templates are then used to teach filters what to look for, the ‘New Scientist’ reported. According to the scientists, the system works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters.

As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies message content and how it should be varied.

The team reasoned that analysing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And, since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot.

To test their idea, the team installed a previously captured software bot onto a machine. After analysing 1,000 emails generated by this compromised machine, less than 10 minutes’ work for most bots, the scientists were able to reverse-engineer the template.

Knowledge of that template then enabled filters to block further spam from that bot with 100% accuracy. The new system did not produce a single false positive when tested against more than a million genuine messages and the biggest advantage is this false positive rate, team member Andreas Pitsillidis said.

“This is an interesting approach which really differs by using the bots themselves as the oracles for producing the filters,” added Michael O’Reirdan , chairman of the messaging anti-abuse working group, a coalition of technology companies.

India Inc buys 143 US cos in 2 yrs

The greater engagement of US with India seems to have benefited the former during the economic downturn as thousands of Americans managed to save their jobs when Indian corporates went on a major acquisition drive in the US.

During the last two years, Indian companies acquired 143 US firms across various sectors. While 94 deals were concluded in 2007-08, in the following year when the economy was on the downturn, Indians bought as many as 50 US entities that were on the verge of closure, saving thousands of jobs.

A study, jointly conducted by Indian industry association FICCI and Ernst & Young, said Tata Chemicals, Wipro, Reliance Communications and Firstsource Solutions were some of the top Indian entities that were involved in bailing out US companies in the red.

The report released on Thursday said IT&ITeS, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals were the prime sectors in which most of the deals were formalised. Indian companies from the IT sector have over the years been aggressively expanding in the US market.

The deals were predominantly debt financed with cash being a popular mode of payment. "This trend probably extends from India Inc's traditional preference for cash transactions in the domestic merger and acquisition space," the report observed.

The Ernst & Young report says the boom in the Indian economy in the last three to four years made the domestic companies cash-rich which provided them with access to more capital than in the past.

Interestingly, one of the key factors, as the report cites, behind more acquisitions has been the liberal policies introduced by the government and RBI for overseas investments.

According to RBI data, in 2007-08 the total outbound investments of Indian companies amounted to $18 billion. In the first half of 2008-09, at least 2,000 proposals valued at $9 billion were cleared for overseas investments in joint ventures and wholly owned subsidiaries.

Ex-employees sue HP on unpaid incentives

Three former Hewlett-Packard Co salespeople sued the printer maker alleging they were denied tens of thousands of dollars in commissions because of a malfunction in the company’s order-management system.

As many as 50,000 current and former salespeople haven’t received commissions and bonuses because of problems with the software system that tracks sales, called Omega, according to a lawsuit filed with federal court in San Francisco.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest maker of personal computers and printers, said on August 5 that about 2,000 members of its global sales team of 23,000 were affected by the Omega glitch. The company was working to fix the problem, spokeswoman Gina
Giamanco said then.

The complaint was filed by Shaun Simmons, a former sales representative who says he’s owed at least $30,000 in commissions, and two other former salespeople. All three reside in Colorado. They seek to represent all Hewlett-Packard salespeople who didn’t get paid and recoup their bonuses and commissions.

Barry Dunn, a Colorado attorney representing the former HP workers, and Christina Schneider, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, didn’t immediately return voice-mail messages seeking comment after regular business hours.

The case is Jeffrey Johnson v Hewlett-Packard, 09-03596, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).