Chinese Web Vandals Attacking Western Targets
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Many of you would have noticed the heavy chatter in the media about China and its atrocities in Tibet. With the oncoming games, people are the world are protesting about the excesses China has been committing.
Apparently, CNN too couldn’t resist jumping on the bandwagon when one of their hosts trashed China on its harsh policies.
This ruffled quite a few feathers. Besides the Chinese government coming out against CNN, a bunch of hackers planned to get back on CNN by launching a full scale cyber attack against the online presence of news giant.
Respect The Van Gods
Saw the new Honda Odyssey ad today and got hooked right away. While channel surfing the thing that grabbed my attention and made me stop from moving on was the heavy sounding guitar riffs. Don’t hear much of these lately. Then I noticed the accompanying animie-like video and that was not bad either. (I am not an animie fan BTW, but this one sure looked good).
So what I found was, apparently this commercial is a new one in a series of Respect The Van campaign, where what looks like a a Viking god and other similar Viking characters like unicorn riding princess, a merlin etc come to life.
A new Honda Odyssey van blooms into picture alongside magic mushrooms and crystals to the rocking sounds of 1977 rock track Barracuda.
Boeing To Test Wings Using Indian Super Computer
One of the world’s largest defense contractor and air craft manufacturer, Boeing, is joining hands with a unit of India’s Tata group to test and validate a super computer to run dynamic simulations for the wings of its air crafts.
According to a press release,
Tata’s Computational Research Lab will model high-lift aerodynamic simulations in three dimensions on the Eka System, the fastest super computer in Asia, to help design and develop airplane wings.
The joint statement and the accompanying press release was quite highfalutin sounding but basically what it boils down to is that Tata’s would make use of its Eka super computer to design and test the wings. I am quite skeptical about the design part here but its a start.
Also, the press release had Boeing estimating India will need 911 planes worth $86 billion by 2027. (I don’t doubt the high estimates but, just exactly how do they arrive at a figure like “911″?! ).
Besides earning some lucrative operating margin, this assignment would definitely give bragging rights to Tata’s as well. It would go a long way in projecting a positive image of the company’s ability to under take and execute state of the art, cutting edge projects and not just run of the mill outsourced service and maintenance projects.
More details from here.
As an aside, Boeing is also angling for India’s requirement to provide for hundred plus multi role combat aircraft for the Air Force. No decision has been finalized yet but its quite apparent that Boeing, along with other companies in the fray, is involved in heavy lobbying on this front as well.
You Know India Has Arrived…
When a local pub at a nearby village downtown advertises to patrons using the following poster.
The original saying had India and China being used as a bugaboo by American parents who often reminded their kids to finish dinner cuz there were starving kids in India.
Another one more recently had American parents asking their kids to complete the science and maths homework because of high rate of outsourcing and how kids when they grew up were “hungry” for jobs.
What the pub management decided to do with the famous bugaboo is totally different and creative.
Apple Vs Apple
Actually make that Apple Vs the Big Apple, with Big Apple being the colloquial name for New York city.
The city of New York has launched a campaign to promote green and as part of that, they adopted an apple as the logo. The GreeNYC logo shows a creatively designed apple with a short twig and two leaves on top.
Personally, to me it looks totally different than the famous tech company’s logo but then how many variations of the fruit apple can you have. Its kind of inevitable that Apple corp cried foul and claimed copyright infringement.
However traditionally, Apple has been on the receiving end mostly when it comes to such infringement allegations. Many of you would remember that Beatles was published on Apple Corp records, a totally different company that the Cupertino based tech one. The court feud went on for ages. Similarly Apple got embroiled in an iPhone related controversy when they got sued by Cisco Systems.
At my workplace, which is incidentally in NY as well, they are trying to go Green, started off by offering everybody company logo emblazoned coffee mugs with the hope of weaning them off from using the paper cups.
If you are interested in reading more about New York city’s green initiative, go here.
SearchMe Beta Invites
The new 3-D search engine on the block SearchMe is giving out Beta invites. You might wanna quickly grab one while they are still out there.
SearchMe is a totally different way to search for information on the internet. Right now their indexed database is relatively small, about a billion documents but going by their capabilities in the introductory video, they sure seem to be on their way to revolutionize the whole Search game plan.
Watch their video or go to their site directly and sign up for a beta invite.
How Kulveer And Harjeet Stuck Gold
By building a great startup and managing to sell it for a cool €3.2 million. Along with their partners, Kulveer and Harjet started an online service Auctomatic that describes its mission as empowering online sellers through various features. The tools proffered by Auctomatic asssit a user in maximizing their potential in online selling sites like eBay, Amazon, Overstock etc.
Google’s Outrageous Executive Compensation Plan
Guess how much do the founders Sergey and Larry, and CEO of Google Eric Schmidt pay themselves?
Finally the search engine giant has filed its 2008 proxy statement which shows what insane amounts these guys pay themselves as Salary at Google:
How Does An Indian Company Innovate?
…By opening tech centers in US and hiring US talent.
Traditionally, Indian companies have focused more on either importing cheap labor from India using the skilled worker visa (a lot of them even come on Business visa and do billing but thats another story) as the statistics have shown or by totally off-shoring the job to low cost development centers back home.
In a changing trend, TCS, the largest technology services company from India plans to open a development center in a former paper plant in Cincinnati, Ohio. To staff the site, the company additionally announced it has plans to recruit about 1000 people. Talent would be primarily scouted from the mid-west. This would make it one of the largest U.S based development centers by an Indian company.
Perhaps more such examples of local hirings would help deflect some of the criticism the Indian companies have been gathering lately about ridding America of high paying tech jobs, which consequentially also resulted in less number CS major seats getting filled up in colleges.
In related news, Bill Gates recently proffered his views to a senate committee hearing about skilled worker visa reforms. Affirming his traditional position of supporting an increase in the number of such visas, Bill Gates thinks there is dire shortage of skilled manpower in America and if the country is to maintain its numero uno position, needs to act fast on this.
Read more about reverse outsourcing from an Economics Times article from here.
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My comment about Indian companies innovating is in humor. Hoping nobody takes offense.
Adding Twitter To Your Wordpress Driven Website
Twitter is a micro blogging app which allows you to broadcast tiny SMS-ish messages to your friends and contacts. I had a first hand experience of this technology when Google integrated Twitter with Google Maps during the current election primaries. I was totally awed by it’s power and concept.