Times of India is reporting that, while IIT chieftans are encouraging the young students to take up research work rather than going for a lucrative job, Arun Kumar Baranwal, father of IIT-JEE topper Shitikanth, is yet not convinced with the efforts being made by the institutes.

The report also went on to add that talking to TOI over phone from Patna, Baranwal said, “Shitikanth might not continue at Indian Institute at Technology for long because he is determined to go for research in Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology”. He also said he wanted to join MIT for full-fledged research work, the institutes here in India were keener on giving classroom knowledge.

Something doesn’t sound right here. Besides the fact that why his father needs to speak out loud about being convinced, what was the point of taking this exam in the first place if the kid wanted to join MIT to begin with.

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Just few days back I had covered the winner of National Geographic spelling bee, who happened to be an Indian American. Now we have another Indian descent winner of the equally prestigious Scripps.

Sameer Mishra won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington on Friday by correctly spelling the word guerdon, which appropriately means reward.

Mishra, 13, from West Lafayette, Ind., won $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond and thousands of dollars worth of reference books.

Sameer also had the crowd in splits during the course of the tournament.

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But guess what. Members from India get first preference when it comes to testing out new changes. Same was the case when Orkut changed its theme to a new CSS layout long time back or when it introduced applications like Facebook.

Its always the users from India who get to try out these changes first. Orkut knows which side its bread is buttered on.

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I use a Garmin 360 and I think it is the most useful piece of electronic gadget I have ever spent my dough on. (The only other device I use more often is of course, my HP laptop but that’s company gifted).

Nuvi 5000 is the latest in the series of Garmin navigational GPS products to hit the market. 360 to 5000, sure sounds like a hell lot of difference but trust me, its only numerical. There is only so much you can go as far as core technology goes. Here by introducing newer models, they are only making spec changes and not introducing a totally new concept.

Comparing with the nuvi 360 that I have, the only way nuvi 5000 or another GPS would out strip it in technology would be if it has a more robust satellite receiver.

Points of Interests (POIs), live traffic receiver, maps, all these can still be updated later on whenever a new update is available in the market.

Some cons with my nuvi 360 – sometimes it takes inordinately long to load the route map initially when you boot it up. Worst case scenario, I often have to reboot it and hold it up my arm facing the sky so that it loads faster. Also, while driving down the streets of Manhattan it would sometimes lose the signal cuz of the high concentration of tall buildings around.

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Arun Sarin, the Indian born and educated CEO of the world’s largest telephone company Vodafone has resigned from his spot. The surprising move came after five years and a profitable turn around for the company. Mr Sarin almost doubled the number of phone connections the carrier has by penetrating markets like India and Africa.

Arun Sarin is leaving Vodafone after showing good profits and leaving the company in a much better shape than when he joined it.

Sarin graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur with a B.Tech degree in Metallurgical Engineering in 1975. In 1978 he gained a MS in Engineering and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Businessweek came out with a list of Top 100 technology companies that showed the strongest growth and how, in its words, they are faring in a treacherous economic climate.

Of the top of my head I knew any such list would feature Apple, Google, IBM etc. But over all the list definitely managed to be a lot different.

America dominated overall in the list with 33 companies, 1/3 share of the whole. Besides the popular American companies there were some from Europe, a lot from Asia especially Taiwan. In fact way too many from Taiwan clearly showing how advanced and progressive the country is when it comes to trade in high tech.

A pleasant surprise was India which had 6 companies in the list. Only Taiwan had more than India. Which means Indian companies managed to beat other strong contenders like South Korea, Japan, China etc. Thats a big deal by any measure. Its a sample of things to come in future when Indian companies would dominate their counterparts in the world just like American and Taiwanese companies do now. In fact many of the developed countries had just one company in the list.

The Indian companies shown in the list were:

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Take a look at this site.

Cinematube.net

This is how the online version of a business take down looks like.

Most of us enjoy watching movies. It would be even more fun to watch movies and not have to pay for it. Internet has made that possible. Easy availability of music online has already sounded the death knell for music publishing industry. Record sales have fallen down like there’s no tomorrow and totally stripped this business model of any respect.

Now the same could have happened in the movie business too but the Hollywood moguls have learned their lessons well. They smartened up and took the fight right into the enemy camp. The pirates have no where to run and hide.

Cinematube is one example of that. This site was not even well known. Even then Hollywood went after it (and its ilk) with hammer and tongs to act as a deterrent for other such similar piracy businesses online.

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Its that heady time of the year when the fruition of all the hard work that you put in takes place.

Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 examination results are being announced today. Students based in Orissa who’ve appeared for the exams can access their results through Reliance mobile phones.

They can check their exam results on their Reliance mobile phones either via voice portal by dialing 51234 815 @ Rs 2.40 per minute or via the Reliance mobile educational portal by dialing 53030 815 @ Rs 2.40 per minute or by clicking on:

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Lately I have noticed an exponential rise in the spam comments I get on my website. Usually it was averaging about 10 to 20 a day. But now if I check after a day or so, I see about 150 spam messages caught by the Akismet plugin.

Fortunately, none of it has managed to slip through the Akismet but I am not sure if some genuine comment also got barred by Akismet. Earlier, I did notice that Ajay’s comment was always getting caught as spammed and I have always marked it as Not-Spam in the hope that the software would recognize it from now on and allow it through its filters.

But if you have, lets say 15-20 spam messages, then its easier to verify all of them before deleting it with one click. Same is not possible if you have 100s of comments caught in the spam queue.

I am not sure why there has been a sudden surge in spam comments and I have not seen much written about it in different blogs.

Have you noticed this spike as well on your blog?

I was watching the final round of National Geographic Bee on PBS when Akshay Rajagopal answered the winning question without batting an eye lid. He even had a bit of a smile playing on his face as if he was privy to some inside joke.

An 11 year old from Lincoln, Akshay Rajagopal, went on to win the National Geographic Bee with a flawless score. He did the same last year as well.

The winner is only the second one in this competition’s history with a perfect performance. His win has made him richer by $25,000 and a trip to the next Bee competition.

Some of the questions that were asked in the competition.

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