Cisco today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with CSC e-Governance Services India Ltd. CSC e-Governance Services India Ltd is a private company established to catalyze and accelerate the delivery of various eGovernance services through the CSC framework. The purpose of the MoU is to make education and health care solutions available and to promote social inclusion through CSCs across India. The MoU was signed by Shankar Aggarwal, CEO, CSC e‑Governance Services India Ltd. and Naresh Wadhwa, president and country manager, Cisco India in the presence of John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco; Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer and executive vice president, Cisco Services; R. Chandrashekhar, secretary, Department of Information Technology, government of India; and S. R. Rao, additional secretary, Department of Information Technology.

The Common Service Centres program is a strategic cornerstone of the government of India’s National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) with 250,000 CSCs planned across 600,000 villages. The CSCs have the potential to offer Web-enabled e-governance services in rural areas as well as to provide high-quality and cost-effective video, voice and data content and services in areas such as education, health and entertainment.

Insurance today is one of the biggest earners of most developed economies. While I don’t have the exact figure in US insurance that we pay comprises of a great share of revenue the country earns. Hedging for the future so that it is safe and we have the required funds when we require has made insurance into a billion dollar industry. When we buy insurance what’s the best we can expect? Let’s talk auto insurance for instance. For example where can get we cheapest auto insurance companies so that the future is secure and yet the payment we pay is less.

Well the answer is right here OnlineAutoInsurance.com The site lets us compare offers by different companies and then fnd the cheapest auto insurance. It also gives quotes from different auto insurance companies to let us choose the best rate. It empowers us to select the cheapest rate while picking between ins carriers

Now isn’t that absolutely great. Now only do we pay less, we also get a cover and we know we are safe and our future is in secure hands too. We are protected and that itself is such a great feeling. Noteworthy are a few things. Price sometimes isn’t the only criteria while choosing insurance. As a buyer you need to get into nitty gritty of what’s covered by the insurance and what’s not. You need to be sure that by paying you get it all and therefore it is important verifying car insurance

The more information you have about the insurance companies and their offers the better. It lets you choose the right offer that’s best suited to you. The more information you have, the better offer you can choose which covers more and yet you don’t pay much.

With over 33 major languages and 1652 dialects, India is a nation of diverse cultures and languages. About 95 percent of the nation’s population prefers working in their regional language – while just about five percent conducts its business in English. It is obvious that the disparity in language usage contributes to the digital divide. Since 1998, when Microsoft India identified localization as a key catalyst for effecting ushering in an IT revolution, the company has been working on overcoming the language barrier to computing since.

Today, Microsoft India showcased a host of custom made solutions for the Indian market under its ongoing effort of making technology accessible by localizing its flagship products. The solutions and tools include:

o The Indic Language Input tool is a set of tools that help users enter Indian language text into computers easily and quickly. For example, one can type, For example, one can type “bhaarat mein anek bhaashaein bolee jati hain” for obtaining 2

The Indic Language Input tool is available in two versions; the desktop version enables the user to enter Indian language text directly into any application running on Windows, such as Microsoft Word or Outlook. The web version allows the user to enter text on any web page – such as Live mail or Windows Live Messenger - without requiring software download. The Language Input tool’s visual keyboard enables users to visually select and directly enter Indian language characters. The beta version of the project is available for free download and currently supports ten languages – Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Oriya and Punjabi.

o Windows 7 Hindi language interface pack (LiP) which allows users to experience the latest operating system and its features; Windows Taskbar (Go-to spot for launching programs and switching windows), Aero Shake (Click a window pane and shake your mouse to minimize all other open windows), Peek, Snap (Drag an open window to your screen’s border to automatically re-size it. Snap two different windows to the left and right borders for a perfect comparison), Jump Lists, Multitouch (Interact with your PC with a touch-screen monitor, using your fingers and multi-touch gestures, and Remote Media Streaming (Enables highly secure, remote Internet access to home-based digital media libraries from another Windows 7-based PC outside the home) in Hindi.

o MSN Yuva – One stop online Hindi channel for the globally connected youth of India. It offers a window into every aspect that interests Gen X, from sports, to entertainment, to career counseling, to the latest news. It offers features like Dosti – a social networking site in Hindi, Dil Se – An online confession box help that helps finding solutions to one’s most intimate/personal problems with the choice of keeping or revealing one’s identity and Fun Tadka – The fun quotient which provides Bollywood’s latest gossip, film reviews, tips on love & romance etc.

o Internet Explorer 8 in 18 additional languages on Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 Language Packs which will allow users to access like InPrivate Browsing, Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

o Language Interface Packs (LIPs) in 12 Indian languages – Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu - for MS Office and Windows. A total of 45 additional soft (virtual) keyboards, which are free to download, are also available in these 12 languages.

o Windows Live, which includes e-mail, Instant Messenger, online storage, photo gallery, social networking, calendar, online storage, personal home page, and more, in seven Indian languages. The languages are Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

o In Microsoft’s most significant initiative to reach out to Indic developers, the Captions Language Interface Pack (or CLIP) has been launched for Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, and Tamil. CLIP is a tool that uses a tooltip caption to display translations for user interface items in Visual Studio 2008. This is the first tool specifically designed to help students and beginner developers in India use the product in their own language.

o IL-POST (an annotation framework for Indian languages), wikiBABEL (a community-oriented multilingual content creation portal) and MINT (an algorithm for mining multilingual news corpora) developed by Microsoft Research India aimed at creating resources to enable computational linguistics research in Indian languages.

Microsoft has been working on language computing in India since 1998, since the first India visit of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The idea was to usher in the IT revolution in the country in a phased manner – and localization was identified as the key catalyst for effecting this development. In 2003, Microsoft India launched Project Bhasha, a cohesive effort to bring together governments, the academia and research institutions, the local ISVs and developers and the industry associations on a common ground for promoting local language usage in IT. The www.bhashaindia.com portal is India’s leading community for Indian language computing.

Mahindra Satyam, the brand identity of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. (NYSE:SAY), a leading global consulting and IT services provider has signed a new four year offshore contract with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading IT companies. KMD, which specializes in the public sector, signed a renewed contract with Mahindra Satyam for the next four years worth approximately $48 million ending in December 2013. The new contract is an extension of a previous contract that was due to expire this year which involved the supply of application development, testing and application support services particularly in the area of SAP which is a growing business for the Danish IT company.

The new contract involves stronger partnership and multi-fold increase in business commitment with offshore work conducted in a development centre in Bangalore, India. The scope of application development work covered will primarily include SAP, as well as other technologies such as Mainframe applications, .Net, Java, BizTalk, WebLogic, PL/1, Sharepoint and MQ Series.

According to Lars Monrad-Gylling, CEO of KMD, “We have chosen SAP as a strategic technological platform for our development work and consider it a common cornerstone to enable coherence between systems, global market standards and to offer our customers greater openness and freedom of choice. Mahindra Satyam’s outstanding competencies in this area were a major factor in our decision to extend the contract.”

He added, “The offshoring project with Mahindra Satyam allows KMD to achieve even greater growth in the SAP development area and allows us to offer customers a reduced time to market. We consider Mahindra Satyam among the world leaders in their field and the two companies have already been engaged in a highly successful partnership.

C P Gurnani, CEO of Mahindra Satyam commented, “We view this significant contract award as a great endorsement of the quality of work we have already delivered and a real testament to the success of the partnership that has developed between the two companies. We look forward with anticipation to the next phase of this relationship.”

While there are tens and hundreds of online casino games when it comes to choosing the right ones even the most professional gamers would be at a loss. The reason probably if of plenty. How does one choose the right ones?

Casino Gambling Index comes bang in to resolve this problem. From casino slot games to finding the good ones you get it all over here. The design is friendly and getting information so easy. You can choose from the Top Rated casinos to so much more on this site. Now comes the best part. I check out a lot of sites and very few, I really mean, very few sites have a criteria of fairplay, integrity and transparency while choosing the good casinos. This site does it really well. While most sites do listing based on their affiliate income etc. this is one site which gets ethics while choosing the right casino. So let’s say you want to choose us online casinos for usa players, this site does it so well that it’s absolutely awesome.

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In an attempt to cope up with the subscriber losses at its fixed-line phone business, Verizon Communications Inc is planning to slash close to 13,000 jobs at the division this year following a slump in expected fourth quarter revenues.

Chief Financial Officer John Killian said that the cuts will follow reductions of a similar size as in the last year. This year’s eliminations shall equal to 11 per cent of the staff at the unit with about 117,000 in the workforce at the year end.

The company’s sales grew 9.9 per cent to USD 27.1 billion, however short of the USD 27.3 billion estimate. The fixed-line revenue fell 3.9 per cent.

The company’s pretax expense was USD 3 billion last quarter related to job cuts, pushing it to a net loss of USD 653 million. This is in sharp contrast to the USD 1.24 billion profit last year.

It’s amazing how an entire economy has been created around Wordpress. A simple blogging platform has turned into zillions of new things from a newspaper site, to a classifieds site, from a CMS to so many other things. Even Matt mustn’t have thought Wordpress would create such a big revolution. College students are making money creating simple plugins that add value in some way. Designers make money selling great designs. For the user no longer does he require tutions of HTML, PHP, ASP etc. Wordpress makes it so easy for everyone to publish.

Sadly there is also an other side to it. Today I read a very interesting post on Wordpress Automation Fraud People looking to use Wordpress as an easy money making solution need to realize pure content created from the mind is what www wants and what Google likes.

There is some great news for readers. Kindle is now available on your Blackberry. Simply down and app and get it started and you have access to over 400,000 Kindle books. All this on your mobile phone.

It would be futile to ask for for all the functions of Kindle on your mobile phone but the app does have the necessary functions like auto syncing the last page read, annotations between different devices, bookmarks and Whispersync to sync between your computer and other Kindle supported devices.

The TV industry sees yet another joint venture. Will an across the shores partnership work this time? From Times Warner to Fox Studios almost every production house worth its name is investing in India. This time its Zee and Mail.

Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (Zeel) has entered into a joint venture with US-based digital media company Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC) to launch an online and mobile entertainment portal.

The company has appointed Arvindra Singh Kanwal, who has 23 years of experience in business strategy, marketing, sales and operations, as the CEO of the joint venture. He has worked Hindustan Unilever, Sony Entertainment Television, Indian Express Online Media Ltd and Rediff.com.

Utiba, a leading global supplier of mobile commerce platforms for mobile operators and financial institutions, today announced its association with MyWay IPTV for its electronic top-up solution.

This association highlights the capability of utilizing a retail presence enabled by electronic media to distribute or collect payment for an electronic commodity and marks the beginning of an interesting trend in the country.

Smart Digivision have entered into long term contract with BSNL and MTNL under the brand name MyWay IPTV to provide interactive video services to customers in 54 large cities across India.

Speaking on the Occasion, Kapil Dev Kumar, Chief Operating Officer, MyWay IPTV said “At MyWay IPTV it is our constant endeavor to provide quality services to our customers. Association with Utiba enables us to provide our customers easy recharge option so that they can enjoy hassle-free, seamless service. We chose Utiba because they have extensive domain knowledge, superior technology and a focused attitude towards mobile financial transaction domain.”

Justin Ho, co CEO, Utiba said “With our association with MyWay IPTV we have taken Electronic top up beyond the telecom infrastructure. This has actually initiated an interesting trend in India where services of providers other than MNOs are paid through pre-funded wallets of the retail chain and the same logic can be extended to a host of other services like utility payments, ticketing etc. We have witnessed success for this model with some of our installations in other countries. This is one step short of the customer eventually using his own wallet to make such transactions. We are very excited about the prospects of these services picking up in India and wish great success to this venture and would like to thank MyWay IPTV to have offered us this opportunity to work with them.