Babar Ali

Every year, well technically twice every year, we in the Muslim world go through a major problem of deciding on what date Eid should be on. Never in my lifetime has Eid been celebrated by all Muslims on the same date. It’s a little absurd, and this video captures the absurdity like none other.

Enjoy!…

This is quite possibly the funniest, yet most accurate, way to explain what happened with the subprime economic crisis that we face today. Essentially a discussion format between two Brits, their accent making it all the funnier. Enjoy!

Jerry Yang’s and Bill Gates’ legacies are at stak

Is this Bill Gates’ last big throw?

Microsoft’s proposal to buy internet veteran Yahoo for a whopping $44.6bn (£22.4bn) certainly grabs the attention.

But does it make business sense?

In a way this won’t be the Microsoft founder’s problem. This summer Mr Gates will leave the company to work full-time on fighting global poverty and diseases like Aids, Malaria and TB.

But the Microsoft managers who have to make it work will be asked whether this is a case of one failing giant trying to prop up another.

The Google factor

Yahoo has been on the ropes for a long time.

Once the top dog of the internet, the company has been haemorrhaging users and money. With advertising income not anywhere near where it should be, Yahoo’s share price is stuck in the doldrums.

If Yahoo agrees to the deal with Microsoft, it will be a shotgun marriage, but it will be Google holding the shotgun.

Last June Yahoo’s board chucked out chief executive Terry Semel and brought back co-founder Jerry Yang to recapture the firm’s dominance - to little avail.

One word explains all of Yahoo’s troubles: Google. While Yahoo invested in content to lure its audience, the search engine rival simply focused on delivering what users really wanted: good search results.

Fighting over the mobile web

Microsoft has watched Yahoo’s struggle closely, and seen the writing on the wall.

As Google has grown into a billion dollar business, it has increasingly strayed into Microsoft’s territory, competing not just for advertising revenue but rivalling core Microsoft products like email and word processing.

That alone would not be enough to persuade Microsoft to make this unsolicited offer.

Microsoft was late to the internet and has always been playing catch up. Darren Waters, technology editor, BBC News website Microsoft & Yahoo: perfect partners?

Don’t forget, despite its many challenges Microsoft is still in rude health. It has one of the world’s largest research and development budgets, and key software products like Windows and Office are still licences to print money.

But Microsoft also knows that its stronghold, the PC business, is getting less and less important.

The future of today’s IT industry is the rapidly growing mobile internet space, and Google has made no secret that it is prepared to spend a lot of money to conquer this market.

Ultimately, Google and Microsoft pursue the same market, although they approach it from two different directions.

Google wants to enable its customers to organise and find the whole of human knowledge, and is providing the tools to do so.

Microsoft is a provider of tools that just happen to help users to process and use information.

Now both firms are meeting in the middle and fight for market space.

Shotgun marriage

If Yahoo agrees to the deal with Microsoft, it will be a shotgun marriage, but it will be Google holding the shotgun.

If Yahoo’s management says “yes, I do”, it will be an admission that its attempts to turn around the company have failed.

Yahoo shareholders, in turn, will not be able to believe their luck. Microsoft was probably the only company with pockets deep enough to bail them out.

For Microsoft, however, this is the deal that could break it.

Making the offer is an admission that Microsoft’s management has been scared by the success of Google.

The bid is also an acknowledgement that its numerous attempts to become a dominant internet content provider have failed.

But to make it pay, Microsoft will have to demonstrate that the combined company can offer a superior business model.

The big bet

Microsoft is promising that together with Yahoo it can offer “a competitive choice” that offers “more value… to advertisers, publishers and consumers”.

That holds true only if the combined Microsoft and Yahoo can do what they did not achieve as separate companies, namely develop search algorithms that rival those of Google.

Anything short of that would result in one of the biggest destructions of shareholder value since the disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner at the height of the dotcom boom.

If Microsoft succeeds, it will be able to extend its hold on the PC world to all aspects of our lives.

Bill Gates and his top managers are betting an awfully large part of the company in the hope of making it a success.

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I’m happy to announce a new addition to my family, a little boy by the name of Imraan Ali Gill. He is my elder sister’s first child, and my very first nephew. Here’s a picture of the little guy…

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I just downloaded Scribe for Firefox, a Blogging add-on for, well, Firefox.

just testing if this thing works.

to find out more, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730

-B

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The following is a story/review from the NY Times that I think is exceptionally note-worthy. This small company is about to revolutionize communications all over again, and we are able to bear witness and follow along as it happens. I will be keeping close tabs on Cubic in the future, so stay tuned. Hopefully we will be able to see some competitors emerge as well.

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By: David Pogue

It’s amazing the way the Internet keeps toppling traditional businesses. Telegrams have gone away. Music CD sales are tanking. Newspapers are hurting.

One especially lucrative business, however, has somehow escaped the Internet’s notice so far: international cellphone calls.

That’s about to change. Early next month, a small company called Cubic Telecom will release what it’s calling the first global mobile phone.

But first, some background. Cellphones from T-Mobile and AT&T rely on the same type of network (called GSM) that most of the rest of the world uses. In theory, then, you can take these phones to other countries and make calls as usual. (Most Verizon and Sprint phones work only in the United States.)

Unfortunately, international roaming runs from $1 to $5 a minute. A 20-minute call home from the Bahamas on a T-Mobile phone will set you back $60. The same call home from Russia on an AT&T cellphone will cost a cool $100.

Sure, you could always rent a phone or use a phone card when you travel — but then nobody knows how to reach you.

It costs a lot to dial overseas from here, too. Verizon charges $1.50 a minute for calls to most countries. AT&T’s rates can be truly Dr. Seussian — like $2.52 to Greece, $2.80 to Iraq and $3.65 to Australia. That’s per minute. Make one 20-minute call to New Zealand, and you owe $75 to AT&T.

Now, most carriers offer special international plans: you pay more a month, you get slightly lower roaming rates. But even they can’t touch the appeal of Cubic’s cellphone. It makes calls to or from any of 214 countries — for 50 to 90 percent off what the big carriers would charge.

On this phone, a 20-minute call from the Bahamas costs $5.80 (that’s 90 percent off T-Mobile’s rate). The Cubic price from Russia is 49 cents a minute (90 percent lower than AT&T).

And there’s no monthly fee and no commitment for any of this. It works like a prepaid phone, where you put some money in your account and use it up as you talk.

At this point, the appropriate world traveler’s response ought to be involuntary drooling, but there’s more to the story. Most of it is more good news, but also more complexity.

For example, consider this: at the MaxRoam.com site from Cubic, you can request local phone numbers in up to 50 cities at no charge. Now you can have a Paris number, a London number and a Mexico City number that your friends overseas can use to call your cellphone.

No longer must you hand out a series of international phone numbers for each trip you make, or expect your colleagues in the United States to pay $50 a pop to reach you.

Cubic points out that this feature alone is a life-changer for people who have moved, for example, to the United States from overseas. Their family back home can keep in touch for the price of a local call.

I signed up for numbers in Paris, London and Barcelona, and then asked friends in those cities to call me. They dialed local numbers, and my phone rang in New York — very slick. Voice quality was typical of Internet calls: perfectly understandable, but slightly muffled, with a quarter-second to one-second voice delay.

Even that’s not the end of this phone’s possibilities. For a flat $42 a month, you can turn on its unlimited Wi-Fi calling option. It lets you receive unlimited unmetered calls to any numbers in the world from Internet hot spots, or make them for a penny a minute. Either way, you have little fear of racking up your bill.

This works on hot spots that require a password, but not ones that require a Web-page login. And in contrast to the new HotSpot@Home phones from T-Mobile, which seamlessly hand off calls between Wi-Fi and the cellular network as you move, the Cubic phone drops the call when you leave the hot spot.

Still, if you make a lot of international calls, this option could save even more money. The voice quality is excellent, although these Wi-Fi calls are sometimes marred by random beeps, clicks or dropped connections.

In some ways, the Cubic phone isn’t just different; it’s actually eccentric. As a phone without a country, it requires a country code and area code for every call, even next door.

The bigger weirdness: when you dial a number and press send, your phone rings a few seconds later. When you answer, you hear a voice saying, “Connecting your call,” and then you hear the other person answer.

That’s the Cubic’s big trick at work: It carries your call over the Internet. Therefore, placing a call just sets off Cubic’s own system to call you back, avoiding the big carriers’ expensive cellular networks.

This, too, takes getting used to, and it also adds about 25 seconds of waiting to every call. It helps if you keep chanting: “90 percent savings, 90 percent savings.”

That’s one reason you won’t want to use the Cubic as your main cellphone. Here’s another: everyday domestic calling rates haven’t been determined yet, but will probably be a steep 15 cents a minute. Because there’s no monthly fee, though, there’s no reason you can’t just keep the Cubic in a drawer until you travel (or place international calls). When you travel abroad, you can either forward your regular cellphone number to the Cubic, or change your voice mail greeting, instructing people to use your Cubic’s number while you’re away.

The Cubic phone itself isn’t much to look at. It’s a slab-style camera phone made by Pirelli — yes, the tire company — with clunky menus, a very slow start-up and a tendency to freeze.

But here’s the other dizzying news: Cubic’s cheap global dialing has nothing to do with the phone. The real magic is in the SIM card, the memory card that determines your account information.

So get this: For $40, you can buy this card without the phone. Cubic says that you can slip it into any GSM phone — even your regular T-Mobile or AT&T phone, as long as it’s an “unlocked” phone (one that works with other companies’ SIM cards). Then your own cellphone behaves exactly like the Cubic phone described up to this point, minus the Wi-Fi calling, of course.

This is a lot to absorb, and it’s going to be tough for Cubic to explain all of it to the masses in a short tag line. (So far, it’s going with “All Global Calls Are Local Calls.” Not bad.) Maybe it would have done better to introduce one feature at a time.

You should know going in, too, that the company responsible for tearing down this bastion of outrageous roaming rates is a little group of 13 people in Ireland, with vast experience in calling cards but none in cellphone sales. Its plans are ambitious, disruptive — and incomplete. Several pieces of its system have yet to be slipped into place, including tech support, customer service, documentation, Internet data plans and domestic calling rates. But what the heck—here’s a $140 phone, or a $40 SIM card, that can save you thousands of dollars a year. Depending on how many international calls you make, it could pay for itself in a week or a month.

If nothing else, this ingenious melding of the cellphone and the Internet should strike fear into the hearts of the giant corporations that are currently bleeding travelers dry. This is how the last great overpriced pre-Internet racket will end: not with a bang, but with a SIM card.

Source: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html?8dpc=&_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1190866739-j4UoLagwJS0mnoHHp+20pg

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MYSORE, India — Thousands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.

Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.

India is outsourcing outsourcing.

One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks — and jobs — to India. But rising wages and a stronger currency here, demands for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India’s success as a back office — including China, Morocco and Mexico — are challenging that model.

Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”

To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.

In May, Tata Consultancy Service, Infosys’s Indian rival, announced a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico; Tata already has 5,000 workers in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Cognizant Technology Solutions, with most of its operations in India, has now opened back offices in Phoenix and Shanghai.

Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.

And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.

In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)

For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.

The company seeks to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call.

It is a peculiar ambition for a company that symbolizes the flow of tasks from the West to India.

Most of Infosys’s 75,000 employees are Indians, in India. They account for most of the company’s $3.1 billion in sales in the year that ended March 31, from work for clients like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.

“India continues to be the No. 1 location for outsourcing,” S. Gopalakrishnan, the company’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.

And yet the company opened a Philippines office in August and, a month earlier, bought back offices in Thailand and Poland from Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch company. In each outsourcing hub, local employees work with little help from Indian managers.

Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.

“We have pioneered this movement of work,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. “These new countries don’t have experience and maturity in doing that, and that’s what we’re taking to these countries.”

Some analysts compare the strategy to Japanese penetration of auto manufacturing in the United States in the 1970s. Just as the Japanese learned to make cars in America without Japanese workers, Indian vendors are learning to outsource without Indians, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of TPI, a Texas-based outsourcing consultancy.

Though work that bypasses India remains a small part of the Infosys business, it is growing. The company can be highly secretive, but executives agreed to describe some of the new projects on the condition that clients not be identified.

In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for instance, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would have the right language skills and grasp of cultural nuances.

But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico.

Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.

In Europe, too, companies now hire Infosys to manage back offices in their own backyards. When an American manufacturer, for instance, needed a system to handle bills from multiple vendors supplying its factories in different European countries, it turned to the Indian company. The manufacturer’s different locations scan the invoices and send them to an office of Infosys, where each bill is passed to the right language team. The teams verify the orders and send the payment to the suppliers while logged in to the client’s computer system.

More than a dozen languages are spoken at the Infosys office, which is in Brno, Czech Republic.

The American program here in Mysore is meant to keep open that pipeline of diversity.

Most trainees here have no software knowledge. By teaching novices, Infosys saves money and hopes to attract workers who will turn down better-known companies for the chance to learn a new skill.

“It’s the equivalent of a bachelor’s in computer science in six months,” said Melissa Adams, a 22-year-old trainee. Ms. Adams graduated last spring from the University of Washington with a business degree, and rejected Google for Infosys.

And yet, even as outsourcing takes on new directions, old perceptions linger.

For instance, when Jeff Rand, a 23-year-old American trainee, told his grandmother he was moving to India to work as a software engineer for six months, “she said, ‘Maybe I’ll get to talk to you when I have a problem with my credit card.’ ”

Said Mr. Rand with a rueful chuckle, “It took me about two or three weeks to explain to my grandma that I was not going to be working in a call center.”

From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/business/worldbusiness/25outsource.html?em&ex=1190952000&en=1f7d89ef7b1299ea&ei=5087%0A