Biometric data to be used as a part of GMAT exam

For the first time in its history, the French National Commission for Data Protection and the Liberties (CNIL) has granted approval to a private testing company -- the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) -- to collect biometric data as part of its efforts to ensure the highest level of security for the GMAT exam. No other private examination has obtained this permission.

GMAC is the international organization of business schools that owns and administers the GMAT exam, used by almost 2,000 business schools worldwide as part of the admission process. In consideration of the guarantees taken by GMAT to protect privacy, the CNIL authorized GMAC's use of the new PalmSecure biometric device to authenticate the identity of individuals taking the GMAT. In the near future, data collected from this device will be used to match candidate information across a central database that includes biometric data from individuals sitting for the exam at other test centres around the world.

The GMAT exam is currently the only examination that utilizes the new PalmSecure palm vein identification technology. PalmSecure features a near-infrared light that captures a palm vein pattern, generating a unique encrypted biometric template that is matched against the pre-registered candidate's palm vein pattern, thus ensuring the test taker is that candidate. It offers a highly reliable form of authentication because it utilizes no trace technology, no image is ever stored, and the data cannot be read by other devices. The CNIL noted in its approval, "It is not likely to be captured without the knowledge of the person concerned and therefore presents very little risk for the civil liberties and fundamental rights of the individuals."

"We want to express our appreciation to the CNIL for reinforcing, in its decision, our commitment to leadership in protecting personal data and complying with international data privacy laws," said David A. Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC. "We want to ensure the highest level of security to protect the interests of schools and of honest test takers."

Wilson noted that leading business schools around the world have relied upon the GMAT as a proven predictor of a candidate's academic success for five decades. "The CNIL's action in granting approval for the collection of biometric data only to the GMAT exam reflects the importance of the high priority we place on vigilant security."

In 2005, GMAC notified the CNIL of other security measures under the Data Protection Act to protect the GMAT exam against fraud, including audio-visual recording in the test room and photos of candidates. However, France and some other countries did not accept the collection of fingerprints, which was also a part of GMAT exam security measures. GMAC then began a search for alternatives to fingerprinting that would comply with international data privacy laws. The CNIL received a letter of support for the value of the palm vein technology in guaranteeing the security of the test from the HEC School of Management in Paris.

GMAC will now implement PalmSecure and file requests for its use with other European countries. Portugal has already authorized it. GMAC expects to use the PalmSecure technology in all test centers by the close of 2009.

About Graduate Management Admission Council

The Graduate Management Admission Council (www.gmac.com) is a nonprofit education organization of leading graduate business schools worldwide dedicated to creating access to and disseminating information about graduate management education. GMAC is based in McLean, Virginia, with a European office in London. The Council owns the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), used by approximately 4,600 graduate management programs at some 1,900 business schools around the world to assess applicants. The GMAT -- the only standardized test designed expressly for graduate business and management programs worldwide -- is now available at more than 450 test centers in 110 countries.

For more information about the GMAT, please visit www.mba.com.

Read more...

How heavy is the Internet

Using publicly available information, for the first time in the world,the weight of the internet has been calcuated precisely and scientifically. Obviously this information is only really useful to someone attempting to work out the cost of posting the Internet somewhere, perhaps to North Korea. Still, the casual reader -- hi there! -- may still enjoy learning just how damn heavy the thing is.

Around 570,937,778 computers are believed to be connected to the Internet, according to the Internet Systems Consortium. That's an awful lot of heavy hardware jacked into the idiot pipes. In fact, at an average of around 40kg per machine, including your monitor, it all adds up to a staggering mound of electronics. Obviously some of these machines are laptops. Many desktop machines will have printers or scanners plugged into them though, offsetting the difference.

Servers are the place where all your 'Internet' is stored. Picture them as electronic lending libraries, only your book is never on loan, or smeared in sick. Instead, servers serve up the pages you ask for when you type those addresses into your browser window. As you can see, there's a fair number of them. Netcraft estimates there are 175,480,931 servers worldwide.

This is one of the few definitive figures available on the weight of cabling that makes up the Internet. It's the approximate weight of the 15,000km TAT-14 cable that links the US to France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and the UK. The cable weighs 5.8kg per metre.

Quite a lot of iPhones have been sold, 42 million in total, and all of them connect to the Internet. Collectively they weigh an absolutely mindblowing 6 million kilograms.

BlackBerry: the iPhone for people who like to 'do business'. The 'business people' have spent a huge amount on BlackBerrys. RIM has sold over 50 million of the critters since the gadget was first introduced. The weight soon adds up!

These viruses don't actually weigh anything, but they're a huge part of the Internet you know and love. There are over 287,524 viruses available on the Internet for free installation on your Windows PC.

Web sites are also an important part of the Internet experience, but they don't really weigh very much either. Most of them are electrical impulses, magnetic stripes on hard disks, or electrons floating about the place, giddy with excitement. The Internet Archive stores over 85 billion pages, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Internet is very heavy indeed. To give you some idea of just how heavy the internet is, imagine an absolutely enormous tower of computers and servers and cables reaching up into the sky like the evil fingers of some apocalyptic demon. Now imagine sparks, thunder, electrical storms. And, on top of it all, an otter screaming pointlessly. That is the closest you are likely to come to visualising the Internet.

Read more...

MBAs Consider startups

Business Schools have quietly become the back door to starting your own business. Once considered merely the hallway to a high-salaried career with an investment banking or consulting firm, business schools are now drawing attention from those tinkering in their garages and hoping to find the next big thing. Through virtual and traditional business incubators, business schools are helping students launch startups with everything from fund-raising and networking to finding office space and interns.

During the economic crisis, many people took shelter in graduate programs, while many others who had been pursuing careers at companies large and small sought opportunities to become their own boss so they won't have to worry about the next round of layoffs. These ingredients have come together in a recipe that has graduate business programs cooking up entrepreneurial ideas like never before—from RecipeKey, a reverse search engine that has visitors to its Web site typing in ingredients to get recipes, to WallStreetOasis.com, an online community for finance professionals.

Read more...

MBAs face a tough job market

The MBA Class of 2009 was hit harder than expected by the recession. At some top schools, 1 in 5 are jobless 3 months after graduation

According to the latest data reported to BusinessWeek, 16.5% of job-seeking students from the top 30 MBA programs did not get even one offer by the time schools collected their final fall employment data three months after graduation. Last year that was true of just 5% of students. And despite the meteoric rise of salaries over the past several years, starting pay was down this year for the top 30, dipping from roughly $98,000 in 2008 to $96,500. For many programs, it marked the first time since the tech bubble burst that salaries didn't increase. Signing bonuses, too, fell both in value and quantity.

Even students at top schools have been affected by the slump. With MBA mainstays like the consulting and financial services sectors still hurting from the crisis, industries that were once elite schools' bread and butter have hit lean times. The average number of students without job offers three months after graduation at the top 10 programs was 15%, just three percentage points better than the rest of the top 30.

One factor that made this recession different was that it hit MBA students where it hurt the most, with thousands of high-paying finance jobs going up in smoke. The companies usually responsible for doling out generous bonuses dramatically scaled back both their hiring and incentive packages. The percentage of employed graduates who got signing bonuses fell to 71% from 81% the year before, and their median value dropped by $5,000. In 2007 signing bonuses went to about 76% of students who accepted jobs across the top 30. That number fell to 65% in 2009.

Read more...

How A Project Manager Stayed on Track : London Heathrow Airport

Unforeseen problems can derail even the most carefully planned projects. Just ask this project manager. Then ask them how he managed to snatch success from the jaws of project politics, unforeseen setbacks, and way too little time.

Terminal 1, London’s Heathrow Airport

The goal: Refurbish Terminal 1 at London’s Heathrow Airport. David Buisson led the high-profile, $93.8 million project, which started in January 2006 and wrapped up in April 2009, to redevelop the arrival area and construct new check-in desks, retail facilities, baggage equipment, and business-class lounges.

The problem: The terminal had to continue to function at all times and not inconvenience the 20 million passengers who use it annually. Buisson’s construction team had a very limited window of time each night, normally between 11 p.m. and 3:30 a.m. The crew worked in an area of the terminal used by a number of airlines, including BMI, the second-largest airline at Heathrow. The team had about 21 weeks to renovate BMI’s part of the terminal. When they set to work on BMI’s tiled flooring, the construction crew ran into a big, unexpected problem: a completely degraded concrete floor and metal infrastructure underneath. There was no money or time budgeted to fix it. Buisson initially estimated it would take 20 extra weeks of work to fix it, on top of the 21 weeks the project required.

What happened: Buisson immediately brought all of the stakeholders to the project site, where they could better understand the size of the problem, the constraints the team faced, and the cost and equipment required to finish. Getting everyone together eliminated weeks of going back and forth via phone and e-mail to describe the problems, decide who would fix them, and obtain separate work approvals — the kind of piecemeal steps that can bring a project to a standstill. The team finished the project only one day later than originally scheduled.

Read more...

Economy and market for MBAs

Business schools have been widely accused of fashioning the wrecking balls and training many of the demolition crews that have wreaked such havoc in the economy over the past two years. And the crisis, whether it was forged in business schools or not, is undoubtedly making it harder for students to afford their fees, or to get jobs when they graduate: in America only half the class of 2009 had been offered a job three months before graduating. Yet business schools are thriving. More than two-thirds of full-time MBA programmes received more applications this year than last, their best performance for five years, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, a business-school association.

Deciding whether to go to business school or not is difficult. The long-term benefits sound substantial: an improved chance of getting a corner office and a six-figure salary. But the short-term costs are also weighty: two years at a leading American business school can cost $100,000 even before you take living expenses and forgone income into account. Many of the world’s most famous business people, from Bill Gates down, did not bother with an MBA, whereas some of the most illustrious products of business schools have covered themselves with ignominy of late. Consultancies, which were forced to recruit more people without MBAs in the late 1990s because of competition from high-tech companies, found that they performed no worse and sometimes better.

Still, on balance, the benefits probably outweigh the costs, particularly in straitened times. People with MBAs are more likely to get jobs than people without them, and earn higher salaries. Employers pay MBAs on average twice as much as people with only undergraduate degrees and 30-35% more than people with lower-level management degrees, such as Master of Finance. Some 98% of corporate employers report that they are satisfied with the MBAs they hire, a sign that they will continue to fish from the same pond.

Read more...

MBA and Ethics

In the spring of 2009, when Bernie Madoff’s massive scam still felt raw and shocking, a few members of Harvard B-School’s graduating class decided to take a stand. They would sign a kind of Hippocratic oath for MBAs, promising, among other things, to “act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.” By graduation in June, slightly under half of their 886 classmates had joined them. To put the glass-half-empty spin on it, that means most of the students at Harvard B-school didn’t even grasp the basics in their ethics classes.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not that MBAs can’t learn ethics. Maybe it’s just that B-schools are very bad at teaching it.

MBA ethics classes tend to focus on training students to recognize what’s right and wrong. Most of the ethics analysts say the standard approach fails to address the real problem. In most real-life business situations, you already know what’s right. The hard part is figuring out how to act on that knowledge without jeopardizing your career. Often, it’s just easier to justify bending the rules.

A lot of MBA Students think about the easiest way to deal with an ethical situation was to avoid it. But it is not possible all the time. Using this approach, you have a little more ammunition to deal with an ethically questionable situation at work.

Read more...

GMAT: The MBA Job Seeker's Best Friend

The primary purpose of the Graduate Management Admissions Test may be winning the favor of B-school admissions committees, but that's not all those four hours of geometry and critical reasoning questions are good for. For many students, the scores they get on the GMAT will reach an audience that might be even more important—job recruiters.

For a select group of companies, mostly top consulting, finance, and banking firms, employers routinely look to MBA graduates' GMAT scores as a reliable standard measurement of academic prowess—a fact that may be well-known to MBA students in the thick of the job search, but is relatively unknown among applicants when they're taking the test. Particularly when jobs are tight, and every element of each résumé takes on added weight, test scores can be the difference between an interview and the dustbin.

Of course, the chief use of GMAT scores are, and almost certainly will always be, admissions. But what happens when your score is good enough to get you into the MBA program of your dreams, but not the job of your dreams? For some ambitious students, and some career-focused programs, the answer is simple: You take it again.

For students with strong applications but lackluster scores, some career services directors will advise admitted students to retake the exam. New admits who go that route typically take the test after they have put down a deposit but before they start classes.A few recent admits with mediocre GMATs and C-suite ambitions that it might be worth retaking the test if they think they can score higher.

Small piece of a big puzzle

At the University of Notre Dame's, university staff a letter to its 2011 class informing it of the test's importance in prestigious firms' recruiting processes and offered a four-day course for students wishing to retake the test. Five did, at their own expense, and increased their scores by an average of 19 points. There are large number of consulting companies, some investment banks, and a couple of corporations all looking at both GMAT and undergrad and MBA GPAs.

For any firm, particularly those with the most clout, a 19-point difference hardly guarantees a spot, however. At Bain & Co., senior director of global recruiting Mark Howorth says that most serious applicants get good scores, meaning that it's typically not a key differentiating factor. "Plenty of people here don't get interviewed who have an exceptionally high GMAT," he says. "It's easy to look at a score like a GPA or a GMAT, but in fact, what we teach our people is not to focus on those. Those scores don't capture the type of problem solving we do in our job." As proof, Howorth cited internal Bain research that shows there's "almost zero" correlation between GMAT scores and employee performance within the company.

Still, a person's quantitative GMAT score does seem to be linked to salary, while verbal GMAT scores appear to be linked to managerial status, says Andrew Hussey, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Memphis. This is true, he says, regardless of what school, if any, a student attends. Additionally, there's a wealth of information released by the Graduate Management Admission Council showing that scores have a high correlation with success in an MBA program, which in turn can be a determining factor of success in the job search. And there's a strong, if unsurprising, parallel between schools where graduates earn the highest starting pay and schools where students have the highest GMAT scores.

Not every company cares about GMAT scores, of course, and not every school considers them as being useful for anything but admission. At the University of Connecticut's School of Business it was such a non-issue that the executive director said neither he nor his staff had even encountered requests for scores. In many cases, companies seem to simply rely on the schools' admissions departments to do that kind of screening for them. Students' average GMAT score is a primary factor in deciding where companies choose to recruit, says Kip Harrell, president of the MBA Career Services Council and associate vice-president of career and professional development at Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Getting the interview

But for companies that do request students' scores, often those that require lots of heavy quantitative lifting, the GMAT can be an equalizer in a world where traditional metrics are fairly nebulous. Many MBA programs have grading systems that vary widely or are solely pass-fail, making it difficult for recruiters to compare applicants from different schools, and others don't provide grades at all. Even at schools where grades are released, grade inflation may render As and Bs poor markers for actual skill. While the GMAT is typically not the most important factor for recruiters, it can have a particularly large impact in the early going, when they're determining who should and shouldn't be called in for interviews. "

At Emory University's Goizueta Business School ,Tsung, executive director of MBA career services, says she recognizes the GMAT is a standard way for corporate recruiters to sort through applications. "Because the economy is so bad, and there's so many people applying for positions, companies are looking for different ways to reduce the number of résumés that they go through," Tsung says. Of the reasons to throw out an application—GPA, undergraduate institution, years of work experience—the GMAT is an "easy one," she says.

But Tsung, along with most other career services directors, maintains that even in a recession, the more traditional and personal elements of the job search, such as interviews and references, will always be more important than the hard numbers. As for recruiters cutting off applications with low scores, "it's much easier to do that when you don't have anything to go on besides paper," she says. "What that means is that they all need to get out there and talk to people."

Source:Businessweek

Read more...

A new strategy in teaching MBA

A year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a new intake of students begin their first week at business school. Will they be taught to do things differently?

As a new academic year begins, it is not just the students who have that first-day-at-school feeling. Business schools themselves have spent the past 12 months wondering whether they need to re-invent themselves in response to a global financial crisis to which many believe they lent a helping hand. For them, too, there is the trepidation of a new beginning.

Few business schools would disagree that the credit crunch has become their defining moment. The arguments—that failed firms such as Lehman Brothers were chock full of the alumni of prestigious schools, who were complacent and greedy, too focussed on the short term and unwilling to question financial instruments of which they had little understanding—are well rehearsed. But regardless of whether such criticisms are valid, it is certainly true that the crisis has fundamentally changed attitudes towards both business schools and the art of management itself.

As a result, schools have agonized over how to save their flagging reputations. MBA program directors have spent their summer holidays pondering what constitutes a proportionate response: totally overhaul their curricula and they may appear hasty and ill-considered; change nothing and they would be seen to be in a state of denial.

Most have settled for modest adjustments. Columbia Business School in New York, for example, set up a faculty committee that delved into every aspect of the MBA program. But it is introducing just two new modules—on the future of finance and the collapse of the auto industry. At Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona, too, there is to be no ripping up and starting afresh. Instead, students on the Global MBA course are to be brought together at the end of the program for a final module on global citizenship.

The lazy pace of change is proving a frustration for some. Angel Cabrera, president of Thunderbird, worries that schools are missing an opportunity to transform themselves from followers to leaders. “As late as last year, business schools were still debating whether it was irresponsible to use the resources of a corporation to do anything that wasn’t directly related to maximizing shareholder value,” he laments. “But the biggest corporations in the world all had social strategies in place—the business world had already resolved this, but we were still debating it.”

However, the speed of transformation is being hampered by a fundamental tension within business schools. They may like the idea of being leaders, but academia, by its nature, takes a long time to implement changes. When professors want to introduce new modules, in response to fast-moving events, they have to go through a lengthy approval process: other faculty have to be won over, academic competency has to be proved, and it has to be demonstrated that the course design meets the quality threshold of the program, the school and accrediting bodies.

A business school that found itself responding to events without anticipating those events would be a pretty poor business school.

Back the basics

Furthermore, schools must be wary of change just for the sake of it. Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business, believes that the basic tools of business haven’t changed just because of the crisis. But even if the fundamentals of marketing, economics or finance remain valid, teaching them in the context of corporate failures will become a leitmotif. “It is one of the great historical events,” he explains. “It has changed the tone of everything.”

Randall Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve and an economics lecturer at Chicago University’s Booth school, agrees that his MBA students will notice a change of emphasis, if not a radical new curriculum. “If I just taught my money class as I did four years ago I wouldn’t have the same emphasis on the housing market or the inter-connections between the banking and non-banking financial systems. I touched on it, but one would be foolhardy not to put a new emphasis on it.”

Monetary policy is another example. Five years ago, the theoretical possibility of a zero lower bound on interest rates may have been mentioned in passing, but most students saw it as such a low-probability event for most developed countries that they didn’t pay it much attention. Now it is a real issue that affects business decisions.

One area in which the crisis seems to be having a more fundamental effect on curricula is a renewed interest in economic history. Both Stern and Chicago expect brisk interest in new courses examining the lessons from America’s Great Depression in the 1930s. At Cass, Professor Ilot’s MBA students will study the formation of 18th and 19th century companies, such as Cadbury’s or old Quaker firms, which, he says, “started with a view that the long-term sustainability of the enterprise depended on responsible behaviour in all aspects of the organisation.”

And it is not just the academic curriculum that is changing. MBA programmes have for many years been a strange hybrid of academic degree and vocational course. Equally as important as teaching theory is imparting the “soft skills” needed to brave a difficult job market after the programme. One area in which this is becoming more noticeable is a greater emphasis on personal development. At Cass, the new intake is, for the first time, being psychometrically tested during the first week of the programme. The idea is that students will go through their MBAs more aware of their strengths and having addressed their weaknesses, making them more employable when they leave. With a sceptical world awaiting them, they may need all the help they can get.

Read more...

Choosing an Online MBA college

Online MBA programs have existed for more than a decade, but the major publications that rank business schools . BusinessWeek and U.S. News and World Report  have yet to weigh in on the worth of online degrees.  Much of the data currently used to rank full-time MBA programs doesn't translate well to online programs, and often schools don't report the necessary statistics  like the percentage of students who drop out of the program before completing it.In addition, students tend to pursue online MBAs for a wider variety of reasons than full-time students.

To many students, traditional guideposts like reputation matter less than, say, convenience and cost. But in evaluating programs, there are a few questions that any candidate should ask. Here are three to start with, as well as places to look for more information:

Is the School Accredited?

  If it is, find out what entity issues the accreditation. The AACSB, the oldest accreditation board for business schools, is the most attractive to corporate recruiters because it has the strictest requirements. For online MBAs, that includes high-caliber curricula taught by the business school’s regular faculty, frequent interaction between students and teachers, and a rigorous admissions process.

For example, most AACSB schools require the GMAT. Of the 68 AACSB schools with online MBA offerings, a handful will waive the test, but only if you already have an advanced degree or eight years of managerial experience. MBA-Options.com offers a near-complete list of AACSB-certified online MBA programs. And GetEducated.com’s article “Do I Need an AACSB-Accredited Online MBA?” can help clarify whether you need to make this a priority. The next best option, after the AACSB, is a regional board that the federal government recognizes, like the Higher Learning Commission or the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which are used by many big Midwestern universities. 

But beware: Not all accrediting boards are legit. “There is no federal requirement that a school be accredited by an agency approved by the U.S. or a state government,” says Vicky Phillips, CEO of GetEducated.com. “It’s a very easy scam to perpetrate a fake college.” If you don’t recognize a school’s accrediting agency, look it up at the Department of Education’s accreditation database. You can also search the Diploma Mill Police at GetEducated.com, which tracks more than 300 fake online colleges.
    
What Do Recruiters Think?

Online degrees are not universally admired by hiring managers at top companies , but if you’re not aiming for the C-suite, that may not matter to you. If you’ve got your sights set on a mid-level career at a specific company, call the HR department or an executive search firm that works with the company. Ask whether they hire candidates with online MBAs — and, if so, which schools they think most highly of. We asked executive recruiters at firms such as Stanton Chase International and education experts at GetEducated.com,

The Princeton Review, and U.S. News and World Report to tell us which online MBAs are standouts. The five names that came up again and again — Indiana University, Thunderbird School of Global Management, University of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania State University, and Arizona State University — all happen to be AACSB-accredited schools that require the GMAT and report completion rates of 80 to 95 percent.

What’s the Value?

One of the biggest perceived advantages of an online degree is affordability — and yet not all of them are bargains. The typical online MBA costs about $20,000; those that are AACSB-accredited average $32,000. Many of the best online programs, however, cost more than their residential counterparts because of the technology and the extra work required of professors.

Duke’s Global MBA, a hybrid program, runs about $135,500 because it includes travel to foreign countries.The important consideration is what you’re getting for the price.

Are cheaper degrees worth less? Not necessarily. At the most expensive programs, part of what you’re paying for is the school’s reputation. And in this increasingly democratic, global — and expensive — world, students (or should we say consumers?) are starting to value different criteria. This year, Forbes’ list of best undergraduate programs threw out reputation as a metric and replaced it with criteria like debt load and alumni salaries, upending the traditional school-ranking system. As tuition prices skyrocket, the value of a degree — undergrad or graduate, online or residential — is under serious reconsideration.

Unless you plan to leap from B-school directly to a Fortune 500 company or management-consulting firm, where you went to school may not matter as much as what you learned while you were there.

Read more...

UN: Record 1 billion go hungry

NAIROBI, Kenya – Parents in some of Africa's poorest countries are cutting back on school, clothes and basic medical care just to give their children a meal once a day, experts say. Still, it is not enough.

A record 1 billion people worldwide are hungry and a new report says the number will increase if governments do not spend more on agriculture. According to the U.N. food agency, which issued the report, 30 countries now require emergency aid, including 20 in Africa.

The trend continues despite a goal set by world leaders nine years ago to cut the number of hungry people in half by 2015.

"It's actually a world emergency that calls for action from both developing and developed countries," said Otive Igbuzor, the head of international campaigns for ActionAid International.

"We know a child dies every six seconds of malnutrition," he said.

Spiraling food prices have added to hardships, especially in the world's most desperate countries where the poor could barely afford a single daily meal to begin with. The inflated prices — which caused riots across the globe last year — have stabilized but remain comparatively high, especially in the developing world, Jacques Diouf, director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, told AP Television News.

In Somalia, ravaged by violence and anarchy for almost two decades, the monthly expenditure for food and other basic needs for a family of six has risen 85 percent in the past two years, said Grainne Moloney of the Somalia Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit.

On average, such a family spent $171 in September this year, compared with $92 for the same amount of food and other needs in March 2007, said Moloney, a nutrition expert for the Horn of Africa nation.

"Families are cutting out the school, cutting out the clothes. A lot of them are going for cheaper cereals," said Moloney, adding that despite those desperate measures, one in five children in Somalia is acutely malnourished.

Igbuzor said the trend can be seen in impoverished countries across Africa.

In Kenya, herders have seen scores of their animals die and crops have withered because of drought. Today, 3.8 million people in Kenya need food aid, up from 2.5 million earlier in the year.

After worldwide gains in the fight against hunger in the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of undernourished people started climbing in 1995, reaching 1.02 billion this year amid escalating food prices and the global financial meltdown, the FAO said in its Wednesday report.

The long-term trend is due largely to reduced aid and private investments earmarked for agriculture since the mid 1980s, the Rome-based agency said in its State of Food Insecurity report for 2009.

In 1980, 17 percent of aid contributed by donor countries went to agriculture. That share was down to 3.8 percent in 2006 and only slightly improved in the last three years, Diouf said.

"In the fight against hunger the focus should be on increasing food production," Diouf said. "It's common sense ... that agriculture would be given the priority, but the opposite has happened."

The decline may have been caused by low food prices that discouraged private investment in agriculture and competition for public funds from other aid fields, including emergency relief, said FAO economist David Dawe.

Governments and investors may also have chosen to put their money into other economic sectors because agriculture's share of the economy in some developing countries dropped as people moved to cities and found work in industry.

But agriculture still needs sustained investment to feed people in developing countries, Dawe said.

The world's most populous region, Asia and the Pacific, has the largest number of hungry people — 642 million — followed by Sub-Saharan Africa with 265 million.

Diouf said world leaders are starting to understand that investment in agriculture must be increased. He cited the goal set by the Group of Eight summit in L'Aquila, Italy, in July to raise $20 billion to help farmers in poor countries produce more — a shift from previous emphasis on delivering food aid.

However, more investments will be needed to fulfill pledges like the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve the number of those living in hunger and poverty by 2015, the report said.

The FAO says global food output will have to increase by 70 percent to feed a projected population of 9.1 billion in 2050.

To achieve that, poor countries will need $44 billion in annual agricultural aid, compared with the current $7.9 billion, to increase access to irrigation systems and modern machinery as well as build roads and train farmers.

Source: Associated Press - http://www.ap.org

Read more...

Is the Internet Falling Apart?

How secure and dependable is the Internet? The Great Twitter Outage of 2009, which shocked the microblogging community and amused many other observers, called into question the reliability of Web-based communications and transaction capabilities that are easy to take for granted.

According to Nielsen NetRatings, the Twitter user base grew at almost 1,400 percent from February 2008 to February 2009. Microblogging, online auctions and email may be a convenience for some users, but others view these features as critical to their connected lifestyles. Is the Internet falling apart, or can we depend on the Web to be there when we need it?

The Twitter outages in August surprised many Internet observers with their persistence -- repeated failures over several days -- as well as the size and speed of the shock waves sent around the world. Denied their ability to tweet, users turned to blogs, online forums and other channels to vent their frustration. Web and TV outlets were clogged with commentary and speculation by reporters and pundits, many of them Twitter users themselves.

The uproar only increased when word got out that the cause of the outage was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack with political motives. When the dust settled and tweets began flowing again, the big question remained: Will it happen again? To answer that question, it is helpful to look back at other Web service outages of similar scale and review their causes.

For full article:- Is the Internet Falling Apart?

Source:- Technews world, http://www.technewsworld.com

Read more...

9 to 5 Workday is changing

The 9 to 5 workday is under siege. 61 percent of executives believe the traditional workday will disappear within the next decade. This makes sense since few executives currently get to clock in and out during normal working hours, although they are usually compensated accordingly. And there are plenty of reasons why more workers down the ladder will witness the end of 9 to 5 soon too. New information technology tools enable everyone to work from wherever and collaborate across time zones. Plus, many companies will likely continue the trend of skirting labor laws whenever the recession ends by hiring “independent contractors” who work on a project basis, instead of investing in that pesky concept known as an employee.

There was a time when escaping the 9 to 5 grind seemed liberating. Freed from cumbersome office traditions, the worker of tomorrow could show up in jeans whenever they wanted, since they could finish their proposal on the beach or navel-gaze over the next big idea on the golf course.

As more workers see their 9 to 5 routine vanish, they’ll see just how absurd this fantasy is. Flexible hours are really just irregular shifts at odd hours. Flexibility means your boss can call you whenever they want–and you’re obligated to respond if you plan on putting food on the table.

Time off should be your time to relax, rejuvenate and enjoy the fruits of your labors–not time to catch up on emails. And work should be time to hunker down and get things done. Blurring the distinctions between working and living results in never really working or living life.

Read more...

WD's new 1TB portable hard drive

Western Digital’s new line of portable and desktop hard drives have higher capacities, smaller sizes, tougher hardware security and support for incremental backups.

WD’s 2.5-inch, USB-powered portable My Passport lineup has three new models: ‘Essential,’ ‘Essential SE’ and ‘Mac.’ The lineup now tops out at 1TB capacity. Its USB-to-SATA-to-drive connection has been exchanged for direct-to-USB, saving space without speed loss, the company says.

WD’s 3.5-inch My Book desktop lineup offers two new models: ‘Essential’ and ‘Mac.’

Here’s the rundown:

My Passport Essential:

• USB 2.0
• 320GB, 500GB, 640GB
• MSRP $99 to $149
• NTFS File system optimized for PC
• 2-year limited warranty
• 5 colors: Midnight Black, Arctic White, Pacific Blue, Cool Silver and Real Red
• optional docking station

My Passport Essential SE:

• USB 2.0
• 750GB & 1TB
• MSRP $179-$249
• NTFS File system optimized for PC
• 2-year limited warranty
• Colors: Midnight Black
• optional docking station available in November

My Passport for Mac:

• Compatible with Apple Time Machine
• USB 2.0
• 320GB, 500 GB
• MSRP $99-$139
• HFS+JournaledFile system optimized for Mac
• 2-year limited warranty
• Charcoal Matte
• optional docking station

Read more...

US duo wins Nobel for economics

Two economists who specialise in understanding behaviour and transactions which are not covered by detailed contracts or law shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics on Monday.

Elinor Ostrom, a professor from Indiana University, was honoured for her work on the management of common resources such as fish stocks.

Professor Oliver Williamson of the University of California also became a Nobel laureate, sharing the SKr10m ($1.4m, €1m, £909,000) prize, for his complementary, but separate, work on co-operation and conflict within companies.

The economics prize has been awarded every year since 1969 in memory of Alfred Nobel and is not one of the traditional five prizes. This year is the first time this “new Nobel” has been awarded to a woman.

Professor Ostrom said her first reaction was “great surprise and appreciation”. She added: “There are many, many people who have struggled mightily and to be chosen for this prize is a great honour and I’m still a little bit in shock.”

In a year when many people might think economists did not deserve recognition at all, the Nobel has gone to a branch of economics unrelated to the financial crisis and is unlikely to stir the same controversy as last year’s award to Paul Krugman of Princeton University, a macroeconomist who has commented on the world economic crisis from a Keynesian perspective.

The two economists won their prize for the study of how to enforce rules where detailed contracts or legal frameworks do not exist. Their work has helped to foster understanding on why natural resources are not always degraded, contrary to more simple theories, and why large companies exist, but also outsource some operations.

Prof Ostrom has challenged the conventional “tragedy of the commons” theory, arguing that societies and groups regularly devise rules and enforcement mechanisms which stop the degradation of nature. The traditional theory holds that pollution and depletion of resources would occur because individuals did not recognise their effect on others.

However, she argued that people could manage resources tolerably well without rules imposed by the authorities if rules evolved over time, entitlements were clear, conflict resolution measures were available and an individual’s duty to maintain the common resource was in proportion to the benefits from exploiting it.

Active participation in setting and enforcing rules was the most important feature of such success stories, she found. Prof Williamson also studied economic governance, but within companies. Since much of economic life happens within organisations, he examined how decisions were made, rather than just the decision that was taken.

That helped him develop a theory of why companies exist – they can be efficient at resolving conflict, via the use of hierarchy.

He also found that where transactions were complex or depended on shared knowledge, companies were more efficient than individual contracts would be.

The theory helps to explain the shifting boundaries of companies; why they often abuse their power; and why large companies evolve in certain industries.

Source: The Financial Times Limited. http://ft.com

Read more...

Hacked web mail accounts used to send spam

There has been a marked increase in the amount of spam e-mails being sent from Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail accounts, according to analysts at Websense Security Labs.

Websense said on Thursday that personalized spam e-mails had been sent from the compromised accounts to all of each user's contacts. The e-mails contain links to fake shopping sites, intended to capture sensitive information from the reader.

Earlier this week, Microsoft acknowledged that 30,000 Hotmail accounts had breached, and suggested the passwords for the accounts had been obtained in a phishing scam.

However, some security experts believe that the password breach cannot be attributed to phishing. Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer for security firm Imperva, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the information was likely to have been obtained through key logging.

"The quantity of people hit makes me think that it was key logging--the success rate for phishing is only about one in 1,000," said Shulman. "Secondly, when I went through the list of email account credentials...

Source: ZDNET UK

Read more...

The World's Best Companies

A commitment to innovation, diversified portfolios, aggressive expansion, strong leadership, and a clear vision for the future—these are just some of the strategies employed by the best companies to get to the top of the World's Best Companies/Global Top 40 list compiled for BusinessWeek by management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Two groups stand out: technology and telecommunications companies that have tapped into continuing demand for mobile-phone service and new digital hardware and services, and heavy industry and engineering outfits benefiting from the uptick in infrastructure spending. Have a look at the numbers behind the companies on this list.

Nintendo, Google, Apple, Doosan Heavy industries and Hyundai Heavy industries take top 5 spots in the ranking.

For full list :- The World's Best Companies

Source: Businessweek.com

Read more...

IMF says global economic recovery has begun

.The International Monetary Fund on Thursday declared that a global economic recovery has begun led by Asia, also cautioning that the strength of the rebound depended on a rebalancing of global growth.

After a year of being downbeat about prospects for the world economy, the IMF's latest World Economic Outlook revised up its growth forecasts for this year and next.

"The recovery has started. Financial markets are healing and in most countries growth will be positive for the rest of the year as well as in 2010," the IMF's chief economist Olivier Blanchard told a news conference here before the start of World Bank and IMF meetings.

The Fund now expects world output to contract by 1.1 percent in 2009 before growing by 3.1 percent in 2010. This is more upbeat than its last outlook in July when the Fund projected the world economy would shrink 1.4 percent in 2009, before expanding 2.5 percent in 2010.

For full article:
IMF says global economic recovery has begun

Source: Reuters

Read more...

Jack Welch Launches Online MBA

The legendary former GE CEO says he knows a thing or two about management, and for $20,000 you can, too

A corporate icon is diving into the MBA world, and he's bringing his well-documented management and leadership principles with him. Jack Welch, former CEO at General Electric (GE) (and BusinessWeek columnist), has announced plans to start an MBA program based on the business principles he made famous teaching managers and executives in GE's Crotonville classroom.

For full article Jack Welch launches Online MBA

Source: BusinessWeek

Read more...

Business PhD Applications on the Rise

With expenses such as business lunches being curtailed and a dwindling list of new clients, Wayne Nelms knew it was only a matter of time before he would be laid off by accounting firm Grant Thornton.

"The writing was on the wall. I just didn't know when," says Nelms, 36, who worked as senior internal auditor at the company's Baltimore office for two-and-a-half-years. "Then I got the e-mail."

By January he was out of a job and found himself at a crossroads. Reluctant to jump back into the job market immediately, he started exploring his options and stumbled upon the PhD Project, a nonprofit that encourages minority business professionals to earn PhDs and go on to become professors. He'd heard of the program back when he was an MBA student at Howard University but had put it on the back burner after graduation.

For full article: Business PhD Applications on the Rise"

Source: Businessweek

Read more...

Make Your Leadership Case for B-School Admission

Leadership is a word thrown around a lot at many a top business school. In fact, leadership is considered the key to getting your foot in the door of top MBA programs. But what does leadership mean and how do you demonstrate to admissions committees in your application that you're a leader worthy of admission?

To determine if you are leader material, most admissions committees will be scanning your application to find certain characteristics—charisma, relating well to others, communicating well, handling difficult situations with grace, strategizing and having a vision, taking action, persuading others, willingness to take risks, committing to something for the long term, working well in teams, and being a great role model. "It's about leaving a footprint on whatever situation you're in and doing more than a good job," says Stacy Blackman, president of Stacy Blackman Consulting. "Leadership is not a solo effort. You're inspiring others and bringing out the best in them."

For full article Make Your Leadership Case for B-School Admission

Read more...

Survey: 22 pct of Internet users ditch newspaper - Boston.com

Survey: 22 pct of Internet users ditch newspaper - Boston.com

Posted using ShareThis

Read more...

India's MBAs Face Dismal Job Market

Salaries are down by 25%, international offers have dried up, and at some top business schools nearly half the graduates can't find jobs.

Students at Indian business schools are having just as hard a time as their American counterparts landing jobs after graduation, and they are facing one of the most painful recruiting seasons in years, according to a new report.

The job placement figures this year at nearly a dozen of India's top management schools—including four Indian Institute of Management campuses (IIMs)—are more dire than expected, according to the highlights of the 2009 MBA Placement Report, released on Apr. 22 by MBA Universe, an India-based Web site about business schools.

It's a sharp reversal from last spring, when Indian B-school students had what was their best recruiting season ever. This year the average salary across top tier B-schools is down 25%, wiping out the record 20%-to-22% salary gains students made last year.

For full article: India's MBAs Face Dismal Job Market

Source: Businessweek

Read more...

Say WOT? Web of Trust Rates Web Site Safety

Say WOT? Web of Trust Rates Web Site Safety

Posted using ShareThis

Read more...

Conficker Variant Expected to Self-Destruct Soon

Conficker Variant Expected to Self-Destruct Soon

Posted using ShareThis

Read more...

10 Most Anticipated Ultraportables and Netbooks of 2009

10 Most Anticipated Ultraportables and Netbooks of 2009

Posted using ShareThis

Read more...

MBA programs re-evaluate in response to financial crisis

MBA programs re-evaluate in response to financial crisis

Posted using ShareThis

Read more...

Internships: B-Schools Get Creative

At some schools, half of the first-year MBA students still don't have summer jobs. The solution? On-campus, and in some cases unpaid, positions.

Every Friday morning like clockwork, Ken Keeley, executive director of career services at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, runs a program on his computer that tracks job and internship placement figures for students. His end-of-the-week ritual has been especially gloomy this spring. Out of the 210 MBA students in the first-year class, only 55% had landed a summer internship by mid-April, leaving nearly half of the class scrambling to land internships before the end of the school year. It's a sharp change from last year, when 81% of students had secured summer jobs by this time, says Keeley.

"The biggest surprise to all of us in the industry has been how huge an impact the economy has had on internships," says Keeley. "We all knew it would hit graduate students hard, but I think we were caught off guard."

For full article: Internships: B-Schools Get Creative

Read more...

Busiest airports in the world

This is a list of the thirty busiest airports for passenger traffic, based on finalized 2008 data from the Airports Council International.

Since 1998, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in the United States has been the world's busiest passenger airport. Numbers represent the number of passengers enplaned and deplaned with passengers in transit counted only once.

1. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport - 90,039,280

2. O'Hare International Airport (Chicago) - 69,353,654

3. Heathrow Airport (London) - 67,056,228

4. Haneda Airport (Tokyo) - 65,810,672

5. Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport - 60,851,998

For complete list Busiest Airports in the world

Read more...

India adds record 15.6 million mobile users in March

Indian mobile operators added a record 15.64 million customers in March, helped by the expansion of networks to smaller towns and rural areas, data from the telecoms regulator showed.

The mobile subscriber base in the world's fastest-growing wireless market rose by 50 percent, or more than 130 million, to 391.8 million in the 12 months ended March, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said.

India is the second-biggest market for wireless services, lagging only China which has more than 600 million users.

Indian operators had added 15.41 million customers in January and 13.45 million users in February.

The country also had about 38 million fixed-line subscribers at end-March.

Source: Reuters

Read more...

American B-School Realigment

The MBA marketplace in the USA is now entering a critical period. It used to be a given that if you graduated from one of the nation's leading top-20 programmes, it would be easy to secure a dream job. The eternal spring of high salaries and bonuses, which was the 'norm', is currently at an end. Students such as Jeremy Booth have downsized their expectations. He told Roger Mitchell at WCW in New York that he would either alter his career objectives or look for something else to fulfil short-term objectives, settling for something less.

For complete information American B-School Realignment

Source: mba4success

Read more...

The College Visit 101

A campus visit can make your business school application sing. After having spent some time among potential classmates and professors—taking in the scenery, seeing where you might live, and observing how this business school might help you fulfill your goals—you can better answer the question, "Why should you attend this program?" While making a campus visit is not a requirement for applicants, it can help you describe the harmony between you and a particular school in your application—and therefore it can improve your chances of getting accepted.

For complete article: The College Visit 101

Source: Businessweek

Read more...

Opportunity Knocks: Careers in Finance

Speak to potential MBA candidates and ask them about their career objectives. Chances are you will hear the litany of venture capital, private equity, and investment banking. Not a surprise considering the lucrative salaries and challenges of the financial services industry. This sector is booming and can never seem to find enough talent. The City of London holds many attractions for recent MBA grads with its professional opportunities on a global scale coupled with unequalled cultural advantages, fine dinning, and lifestyle.

For more information: Opportunity Knocks: Careers in Finance

Source: mba4success

Read more...

In times of recession: What now for MBAs 2009

The meltdown of the financial world in 2008 has left many professionals reeling and wondering what is next in their lives. Looking at the statistics of the number of applicants to world's best MBA programmes, the numbers are skyrocketing. The business schools are thrilled and they are literally spoiled for choice among the best and brightest not to mention the most ambitious. Applicants who might have sailed in to schools such as Wharton or INSEAD in years past are often put on the waiting lists. Many are rejected outright and don't understand. They have good grades from an excellent undergrad programme, showed promise and all the key traits the business schools target. And yet, they were not accepted.

For more information In terms of recession: What now for MBAs 2009

Source: mba4success

Read more...

Google widens lead in U.S. searches: comScore

Internet search firm Google Inc took its widest-ever lead in the U.S. search market in March, according to new figures released on Wednesday by comScore.

Google had a 63.7 percent share of the 14.3 billion U.S. searches in March, up 0.4 percentage points from February, and above the 63.5 percent level that was its previous high.

Source: Reuters

Read more...

Spammers scourge to inbox and environment

There are plenty of reasons to hate spammers. Add this to the list: They're environmentally unfriendly.
A report being released Wednesday by security company McAfee Inc. finds that spammers are a scourge to your inbox and the environment, generating an astounding 62 trillion junk e-mails in 2008 that wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million U.S. homes for a year.

Source: BusinessWeek

Read more...

How to make the most of an MBA fair

But given the investment of time, effort and money that an MBA demands, there is no substitute for meeting the admissions personnel of possible schools personally. So how do you go about making the best of the event?

Source: topmba

Read more...

Options for MBAs Without Jobs

New grads needing work can choose between three strategies.

In about a month, I'll have an MBA—but no job. I'm at a respected school, my GPA is 3.5, I've got two years of retail consulting experience and great references, and I've been doing all the right things to get hired. Please help.—Anonymous, Chicago

Source: Businessweek

Read more...

Extracurriculars: The Extras That Count

Impressing an MBA admissions committee is sometimes as simple as telling a good story about your interests, your activities, and yourself

Like everyone in junior-high gym class, business school admissions committees want some of the cool kids to play on their team, too. One way to show the admissions committees at top business schools that you're a cool kid—someone who is more than his standardized test scores and résumé—is through your extracurricular activities. "No business school wants a class of nerds or workaholics," says Linda Abraham, president of the admissions consultancy Accepted.com. Although you can get into business school as a traditional candidate, who likely tutors or works for Habitat for Humanity or sits on a board for some company or nonprofit, there's no denying that the more unique your extracurricular activity, the more you can use it as a way to stand out from the other applicants.

Source: Businessweek

Read more...

Microsoft search engline lags at home

Microsoft's new search engine, Live Search, has gotten off to a slow start, even among company workers who are not widely using the service, an executive says.CNET News reported Monday that Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said the company's share of the search market has been disappointing.

About half of the company's workers -- while on duty -- are still clicking on Google and other portals to conduct their Internet searches, the report said.

Read more...

Netbook computers spark corporate interest

One possible future of mobile computing is on display in classrooms in Fresno, Calif., where the public school district has deployed 10,000 Hewlett-Packard Co. "netbooks" with an upgraded Cisco Systems Inc. wireless LAN.

While the term "netbook" has no formal definition, it typically applies to a class of mobile computers that are smaller and lighter than conventional laptops and have lower-resolution displays that are 7 to 11 inches in size. Netbooks, which are made by vendors such as HP, Asus, Acer and Dell, typically have small hard drives or none at all, and they rely on less-powerful CPUs than standard laptops. To some critics, that adds up to a crippled notebook PC.

Read more...

EBay buys Korean rival's stake for $413 million

EBay Inc has agreed to buy a controlling stake in South Korean online retailer Gmarket Inc for $413 million, at a 32.5 percent premium, news service eDaily reported on Monday.

The long-discussed deal would help U.S. online auctioneer eBay emerge as a dominant player in South Korea's customer-to-customer online market by taking control of its key competitor.

Source:Reuters

Read more...

Another Try for a Microsoft and Yahoo Deal

In a development that can't be too surprising but may revamp the Internet landscape, Yahoo (YHOO) Chief Executive Carol Bartz and Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer have started talking about forging Internet search and advertising deals.

Source: Businessweek

Read more...

On the Net: College too expensive? Try YouTube

College too expensive? Try YouTube.

It might seem counterintuitive to look for higher education alongside Avril Lavigne music videos, but the video-sharing site has become a major reservoir of college content.

The Google Inc.-owned YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/edu).

Source: Associated Press( Hosted by Google)

Read more...

Putting a Price on Social Connections

Messaging with the boss much? Maybe you ought to be. Workers who have strong communication ties with their managers tend to bring in more money than those who steer clear of the boss, according to a new analysis of social networks in the workplace by IBM (IBM) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Source: Businessweek.com

Read more...

Master's of Financial Universe

When Rachel Gordon decided to pursue a master's degree at American University's School of International Service, she realized that she would need a more in-depth knowledge of finance if she wanted to pursue her interest in emerging markets. Having already graduated with an undergraduate business degree—Gordon was a marketing, accounting, and international business triple major at Northeastern University—the ambitious 25-year-old was wary of pursuing a general management degree like an MBA.

Source: Businessweek.com

Read more...

IBM, Sun Micro talks collapse over price: source

IBM's talks to acquire smaller computer and software rival Sun Microsystems Inc broke down on Sunday after Sun rejected IBM's $7 billion offer, a source with knowledge of the matter said.

The collapse of negotiations, if final, is likely to hurt Sun's shares as a buyout was seen as a means of survival for the once-storied Silicon Valley company, which has been losing market share. A deal would also have helped IBM compete more effectively against rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co.

Source: Reuters.com

Read more...

Why MBA bashing is unfair

How long does it take to earn the Master of Business Administration qualification? One year of full-time study? Two years? I have just received delivery of two new books. One is a hefty, serious-looking tome called The 30 Day MBA. The other is a lighter, jollier number. Its title? The 80 Minute MBA.

Look on Amazon and you will find that a 12 hour, one day, 10 day, vest pocket, portable and fast forward MBA are all available as well. But it could be dangerous to be seen reading any of these books at the moment. Scapegoats are still being sought for the crisis in world markets. MBA graduates make a convenient target.

Source: Financial Times

Read more...

Google’s Phone Apps for the Blind, and Everyone Else

The featureless glassy screens of touch-screen phones may seem like a forbidding barrier for blind users, who often rely on tactile clues to feel their way around. But a pair of engineers at Google, T.V. Raman, who is blind, and Charles Chen, who is sighted, have developed software that makes the touch-screen T-Mobile G1, which uses Google’s Android software, more accessible to blind users. They hope the technology will also be useful to anyone who needs to operate a phone without looking at the screen, like drivers.

Source: The New York Times

Read more...

Nokia: Calling America with a new smartphone

What do soccer club Manchester United, singer Robbie Williams, and Finnish handset maker Nokia (NOK) have in common? They're all hugely popular in most of the world, but have only a handful of fervent followers in the U.S. Now Nokia, with 37% of the global mobile-phone market, is making a new push to boost its meager 8% share in the U.S.

Read more...

Apple's iPhone, an Indian Flop, Prepares for China

The failure of Apple's iPhone to make a dent in India's lucrative telecom market may hold lessons for its upcoming push in China

Take the most talked-about phone in recent history and launch it in one of the fastest growing cell-phone markets in the world, and you'd expect fireworks. But in India, where carriers Vodafone (VOD) and Bharti Airtel (BRTI.BO) have been offering Apple's (AAPL) iPhone since last August, unsold phones are stacking up at shops around the country. Apple won't break down sales figures by country, but a senior Airtel executive confirms analyst estimates that total official iPhone sales here have yet to touch 15,000 handsets

Read more...

Google forms $100 million venture fund

Google Inc is forming a $100 million fund to invest in early-stage start-up firms.

The fund, to be called Google Ventures, will be wholly owned by Google, but will operate as a separate entity and will seek investment opportunities to maximize returns rather than looking for investments that strictly fit with Google's strategic vision.

Read more...

Another Google Killer Dies

When Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales launched his search service Wikia Search in late 2006, he was hoping to “fix Internet search by working to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.” Meaning he was hoping to do a number on Google.

Read more...

HP Is 'Studying' Android for PC Use

If Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest PC maker, were to install Google's operating system on netbooks, Microsoft Windows could face strong competition.

Move over, Microsoft. Hewlett-Packard may give Google the entrée it needs to provide the go-to operating system for new lines of mass-market notebook computers.

Read more...

American B-School Realignment

American B-School Realignment

The MBA marketplace in the USA is now entering a critical period. It used to be a given that if you graduated from one of the nation's leading top-20 programmes, it would be easy to secure a dream job. The eternal spring of high salaries and bonuses, which was the 'norm', is currently at an end. Students such as Jeremy Booth have downsized their expectations. He told Roger Mitchell at WCW in New York that he would either alter his career objectives or look for something else to fulfil short-term objectives, settling for something less.

Read more...

Web-Based Crime Jumps 33%

Web-Based Crime Jumps 33%
Reports of Internet-based crime jumped 33% in 2008, according to a group that monitors Web-based fraud.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center said in its annual report released Monday that it received more than 275,000 complaints last year, up from about 207,000 the year before. The total reported dollar loss from such scams was $265 million, or about $25 million more than the year before.

Read more...

Ebay Wants to Put Skype in your Pocket

Ebay Wants to Put Skype in your Pocket

For years, Internet calling service Skype has been trying to land its popular software where its customers are yakking most: on their mobile phones.

After repeated experiments aimed at getting consumers to use Skype for cell phones, the eBay unit may have a winner. On Mar. 31, the company will release a version of Skype for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch, as was previously speculated in the blog GigaOm.

Read more...

Stocks Safe for Long Run?

Stocks Safe for Long Run? Not Necessaliry
Seeing a decade of gains erased in a relatively short period has many investors guessing when the stock market will turn around.

However, hanging on for a rebound may not be the best choice, according to a new study by University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Lubos Pastor and Wharton School professor Robert F. Stambaugh, titled "Are Stocks Really Less Volatile In The Long Run?"

Read more...

Intruder Alert

Intruder Alert
A remarkable new invention from Tel Aviv University — a network of tiny sensors as small as dewdrops called "Smart Dew" — will foil even the most determined intruder. Scattered outdoors on rocks, fence posts and doorways, or indoors on the floor of a bank, the dewdrops are a completely new and cost-effective system for safeguarding and securing wide swathes of property.

Read more...

With Sun, IBM Aims for Cloud Computing Heights

IBM (IBM) is in the midst of negotiating to acquire Sun Microsystems (JAVA) at a critical time for the tech industry. A major shift is at hand in the way businesses handle computing tasks, and giants such as IBM and Sun are under pressure to alter the way they operate. Neither company would comment on the potential $6.5 billion deal, but it's clear that if IBM adds Sun's Internet technologies to its arsenal, it will be better poised for what comes next.

Read more...

Business Week Top 50

Here's the annual list of the 50 best corporate performers. To arrive at the BusinessWeek 50, they ran data screens on all of the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, focusing on sales growth rate and return on invested capital. All the companies are measured over time, to reward sustained performance, and compared against other companies in the same sector, to enable them to identify the best performers within their peer group. A board of BusinessWeek editors reviews the list, bringing the judgment that purely financial measures alone can't provide. You can sift through the interactive ranking below, to see how the BusinessWeek 50 companies stack up on any number of financial or qualitative measures.

This list has the Usual suspects like Google, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T. But, there are a lot of new companies in the list.

Here's the list Business Week Top 50

Read more...

Latest news

US economy falls 6.3% in fourth quarter
The US economy shrank in the fourth quarter at its fastest rate since 1982, revised official figures showed on Thursday, as corporate profits fell at the sharpest pace in 55 years and jobless claims continued to climb.

Updated commerce department data showed US gross domestic product contracting at an annualised rate of 6.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with last month’s estimate of 6.2 per cent. That previous 26-year record came after an overly optimistic January projection that the economy contracted by just 3.8 per cent in spite of anecdotal evidence of a more severe downturn.

UN Urges $1,000 billion for developing world
Ban Ki-moon, United Nations secretary-general, on Wednesday called on Group of 20 leaders to support a $1,000bn stimulus package for developing countries threatened by the global financial crisis

Read more...

India vs New Zealand 2nd test match

Link1
Link2
TVU Link

Read more...

New metasearch engine leaves Google, Yahoo crawling

New Metasearch Engine
One day in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to type a query into an online search engine and have it deliver not Web pages that may contain an answer, but just the answer itself, says Weiyi Meng, a professor of computer science at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Read more...

Today's business news

Internship Hiring is Tanking
Citing budget cuts, decreased workloads, and downsizings, companies say they expect a 21% decline in undergraduate internships, and MBAs are not immune either.

Top Hedge Fund Managers Do well in a Down Year
The financial crisis may have turned much of Wall Street’s wealth into dross, but a select group of hedge fund managers has managed to maintain a golden touch that might make King Midas blush.

YouTube being blocked in China
Google said Tuesday that its YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China.Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official Xinhua news agency of China on Tuesday said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video that appeared to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

Is Antarctica Getting more popular?
LAST month, on its next-to-last day of a 15-day Antarctic tour, the Ocean Nova, carrying 65 passengers and a crew of 41, ran aground in Antarctica and was stalled for more than a day. Damage was minor (some flaking paint and dents to the hull), and all passengers on the cruise, run by Connecticut-based Quark Expeditions, were safely transferred to another ship. But the incident, the fourth maritime accident in three years involving excursion vessels in Antarctica, is raising concerns about the dangers of fast-growing tourism in the region.

Read more...

U.S. online video viewing off 12 percent in February

U.S. Internet users viewed 13.1 billion online videos in February, down 12 percent from January, although viewing on Hulu grew 42 percent in the period, research firm comScore said on Tuesday.

The overall decline was mainly due to the fact February was a shorter month, with three fewer days than January, ComScore said in a statement released on Tuesday.

U.S. Online video viewing off by 12 Percent

Read more...

Why Money messes with your mind

Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.200-why-money-messes-with-your-mind.html?full=true

Read more...

Sixth Sense in Practice

This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

Read more...

Latest business news

India could be the next target

Fear and loathing are on the rise in the United States. Right now the emotions are focused on AIG and Bernie Madoff—deserving targets for populist ire. But mob passions can’t be controlled, so there are huge risks to the United States and the world if the mob and its emotions start to rule. The greatest dangers are that the government won’t be able to rescue industries and institutions that should be rescued to keep the economy from totally tanking, and that protectionism will take hold both in the US and worldwide.

Wall Street's Economic Crimes

The financiers at AIG were awarded millions in bonuses because their contracts were based on the transactions they completed, not the consequences of those transactions. A 32-year-old mortgage broker told me: "I figured my job was to get the transaction done…Whatever came after the transaction—that was on him, not me." A long list of business executives have reaped sumptuous rewards even though they fractured the world's economy, destroyed trillions of dollars in value, and disfigured millions of lives.

Read more...

Latest business news

World trade to fall 9 Percent

Global trade will shrink by 9 percent this year in the most devastating collapse since World War II, the World Trade Organization said Monday.

Why Asia has the world's best airports
Practically every traveler has a nightmare story about airports. There are the long queues for security screenings, surly customs and immigration officers, and flight cancellations or lengthy delays. But in Asia, a number of airports have come a long way in making the preflight hours more pleasant for passengers.
At Last, Tata Motors' $2,000 Nano
Tata Motors' overdue launch of its tiny ultracheap car for the masses is fraught with limited supply, factory delays, and a growing field of rivals

JP Morgan denies report it plans to buy new planes
Investment bank JPMorgan Chase said on Monday it had no plans to purchase new corporate jets or build an airport hangar until it has repaid the funds it got through the U.S. governments Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Read more...

World to U.S. B-Schools: Thanks, but No Thanks

International students, worried about future job prospects, are turning down elite U.S. business schools in favor of MBA programs in their home countries 

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/mar2009/bs20090319_113428.htm?chan=bschools_bschool+index+page_top+stories

Read more...

Prepaid wireless takes off

It looked, for a while, like the wireless industry might shrug off the worst of the recession. AT&T (T), the biggest U.S. phone company, in January reported a respectable 13.2% increase in fourth-quarter wireless sales, fueled by strong subscriber gains. Things were looking up this year, too. Surveys showed consumers would rather reduce purchases even of food and clothing before ditching cell phones. 

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090319_409723.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

Read more...

Best US Business Schools 2008

Responsiveness to the community's needs, academic rigor, relationships with top recruiters, and dedication to excellence are among the qualities necessary for a business school to be considered one of the best. Every two years, BusinessWeek consults students, recruiters, and academic research to determine which business schools fit the bill. Here's this year's look at the best U.S. full-time MBA programs.

Top Business Schools

Read more...

India vs New Zealand - Day3

Link1
Link2

Read more...

Fortune 1000 Companies

List of Fortune 1000 Companies

Read more...

100 Best Companies to work for 2009 - CNN Money

Even in this economy, some companies are going out of their way to please employees. This year, there's a new no. 1, as Google slips to no. 4. See detailed profiles of the top 100 employers, including interactive maps, key perks, contact information, and more.

Top 100 companies to work for 2009
Top 100 companies by size

Read more...

Latest news

Online travel agencies duke it out for bookings

Online travel agencies, eager to spur spring bookings in the recession, are locked in a price battle that has some of them cutting fees and reimbursing customers if the price of their trip falls after they book.

Read more...

India vs New Zealand 1st Test - Day 2

Link1

Read more...

India vs New Zealand 1st Test Highlights - Day 1

Day 1 Highlights

Read more...

Latest finance and business news

IBM May Finally Take Sun Out of Its Misery
After months of knocking on doors at HP and Dell, Sun Microsystems may have found itself a buyer.The WSJ reports IBM made a $6.5 billion offer to buy Sun -- a 100% premium over its closing price Tuesday.The deal, which would be IBM's biggest ever, could close as early as this week.

Dell's New Adamo Surfaces, Mac Sales Decline, Mixed News for Google, and Layoffs Coming for MySpace

Dell is launching its answer to the Macbook Air today, the Adamo. Pictures started to trickle in from the South by Southwest conference yesterday, and bloggers were mostly fawning

Read more...

Did B-Schools create the crisis?

Focus on Individualism

Business schools have created the crisis we’re in, says Dr. Peggy Cunningham, the new director of the School of Business Administration at Dalhousie University, Canada, in an interview published in Monday’s Globe and Mail. Having left a tenured position at Queen’s University, Cunningham wants to restructure the Dalhousie business school program around a core concept of responsible leadership.

Read more...

Ind VS New Zealand 1st test live streaming

Flash Link 1
TVU Link
TVU Link

Read more...

Free Movies on IMDB

IMDB which is the database for all the movies, now provides with streaming of Videos. The streaming includes Full-length movies, full-lenght TV episodes, trailers, clips, independent and short movies.

Full-Length movies
Full-Length TV episodes
Indie films and shorts
Clips
Trailers

Read more...

St. Patrick's Day

Today is St.Patrick's Day. It is celebrated on March 17th of every year to remember Saint Patrick on his day of death. It is national holiday in Ireland. This day is also celebrated widely in Canada, USA, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand.

A detailed description on St. Patrick's Day and St.Patrick in Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick's_Day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick

Read more...

Latest business news

Nokia to lay off 1,700 worldwide

Nokia Corp. said Tuesday it will lay off 1,700 people worldwide to cut costs, as the global economic downturn strikes deeper into the mobile phone sector.

Citi, Morgan Stanley look to sidestep bonus caps: report
Anticipating restrictions on bonuses, officials at Citigroup Inc and Morgan Stanley are exploring ways to sidestep tough new federal caps on compensation, the Wall Street Journal said.

Read more...

Business News from around the world

World Bank head urges help for poorer countries

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has urged international finance officials to make the plight of developing countries a priority as finance officials meet here to hammer out a plan to deal with the global downturn.

Read more...

Latest business news

Citigroup CEO awarded $10.8 million
Citigroup Inc awarded Chief Executive Vikram Pandit $10.82 million of compensation in 2008, a year when the government propped up the bank with $45 billion of capital.

Wall Street open higher building on 4 day rally

Wall Street rises moderately in morning trading, extending rally into a 5th straight day.
Investors buoyed by comments on the economy from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sent stocks mostly higher Monday. The Dow Jones industrials and Standard & Poor's index rose for a fifth straight day.

Atlantic City isn't recession-proof

In the 20 years he's worked on the Atlantic City boardwalk, Joe Lochs has never seen business this bad.
Lochs, 54, makes his living giving rides to casino patrons in a "rolling chair," a three-wheeled, wicker-sided buggy that he pushes up and down the boardwalk between casinos, shops and restaurants.

Oil falls to $44 after OPEC keeps output steady
Oil fell to around $44 a barrel Monday after OPEC decided to leave existing output targets unchanged.
OPEC agreed Sunday to enforce existing output curbs more strictly, rather than introduce new ones, to help heal the global economy even though crude oil inventories have remained relatively high and fuel demand has been weak.

Don't see Satyam as going forward
According to iGATE CEO Phaneesh Murthy, shareholder loss in Satyam could be around $100 million. However, he believes that it is tough to put number to overall liability of Satyam. He expects number of serious bidders to come down dramatically and doesn't see Satyam as $2 billion revenue company going forward.

Tatas' debt to cross Rs 1-trillion mark
Tata group's total debt is set to exceed Rs 1,00,000 crore in the current fiscal, but it appears comfortable on the liquidity front, a report has said.

Read more...

Telugu TV Channels live streaming

Zee Telugu
Maa TV
TV 5 News
TV 9

Read more...

England VS West Indies Only T20

Eng vs WI T20

Read more...

Homes of the Billionaries

Homes-of-the-Billionaires
In today's tough economic climate, Warren Buffett is setting a good example. The world's second richest man lives in the same five-bedroom, gray stucco house he bought in 1958 for $31,500.

That's right. Legendary investor Buffett, 78, still calls his humble digs in Omaha, Neb.'s Happy Hollow suburb home, despite a $37 billion fortune. That famous folksiness is, of course, in keeping with his investment philosophy. "If you don't feel comfortable owning something for 10 years," he once told a reporter, "then don't own it for 10 minutes."

Read more...