India Unveils World’s Cheapest Laptop $35

Keeping India’s economy in mind, where average middle class students can’t afford to buy a good configuration laptop that costs between $500 and $1000, India HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has unveiled a low cost affordable laptop for the student community.

It's the world’s cheapest fully functional laptop, with a price tag of just $35, making it much cheaper than the currently existing laptops in the market.  It can easily be purchased by most of the students belonging to middle and low income family segments.

The fully functional prototype includes motherboard, processor, RAM, internet connection facility, memory, display and touch screen capability. The base model will also include PDF reader, internet browsers and video conferencing facilities, and the prototype model comes with modular expansion capabilities to allow students to easily upgrade it.. The HRD ministry is in the process of talking to laptop manufacturers about mass production for the Indian market.

The operating system for these laptops will be open source Linux that can be installed free of cost. With very optimistic plans by the HRD minister, the laptop will be commercially launched for
higher education institutions in India by 2011.

The ministry is also proposing that the cost ultimately be reduced, first to $20, and then to just $10. The product has been researched under the sponsorship of HRD Ministry, with technical assistance from India’s two premier technology institutes – IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIS (Indian Institute of Science).

On one hand, it is a big boost to the student community, in my opinion. It is really a technical revolution to deliver a full-fledged working laptop at such a low cost.

But, on the other hand, the limitations of the laptop have not been disclosed so far. A vision of bringing down the cost of this model to just $10 seems to be overly optimistic. Let’s see which global player comes forward to deliver this model for mass production. Also unspecified is a control mechanism to keep the product from being misused by the commercial non-student community.

Overall, if this project succeeds, it is going to get a huge and warm welcome from the whole student community of India.

Windows Phone 7: Is Microsoft 'all in'?

Microsoft representatives — all the way up to Steve Ballmer — have repeated on many occasions the mantra that the company is “all in” with the cloud. Microsoft likes that vow so much that it even made it into a logo for its cloud services.

This public display of affection for cloud computing has some of us wondering, though, whether the company is just as committed to the mobile market. When Windows Phone 7 was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona back in February, it generated a lot of excitement and some good reviews. The fresh, simple Zune-like interface, so unlike the old Windows Mobile, definitely captured the interest of phone fans around the world (Figure A).

Figure A

The Windows Phone 7 interface is similar to that of the Zune HD.

At this year’s TechEd North America in New Orleans in June, many of us got a chance to see some Windows Phone 7 devices and play with a large demo of the interface. I especially liked its intuitive nature. With every smartphone I’ve owned, there have been some functions that I couldn’t figure out on my own and had to resort to reading the manual. I didn’t encounter that with the Windows Phone 7 interface; everything was straightforward and easy.

And it does this without just copying the iPhone’s basic idea

Google's Acquisitions Continues

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

http://technorati.com/blogging/article/facebook-microsoft-and-more-the-companies/

Stop tweeting against your bosses, your employer has a check on you

Bangalore: People who share any kind of opinion about their employers or the organization in which they are working could land their career at stake. Many organizations are going online to have a pre-employment check by assessing their Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, MySpace and LinkedIn profiles. As a part of assessing an employee's profile, companies are hiring third party verification agencies to see the presence of a prospective employee in the digital world, reports Shilpa Phadnis & Mini Joseph Tejaswi from Times of India. 

Employees might land to trouble while posting information about companies on their social networking sites. "Hiring is a very subjective process, and HR managers have the freedom to hire or reject a candidate based on his or her online social networking behavior," said Nandita Gurjar, Group Head (HR), Infosys Technologies.

Recruiters go through the LinkedIn profiles while hiring employees in the middle senior management level. "It started with IT hiring, but is spreading to other industry verticals," says Madan Padaki, CEO of skill assessment firm MeriTrack.

Ajay Trehan, Founder and CEO of background screening firm Authbridge, says one of his clients rejected a candidate for a director's position because they found a discrepancy in his graduation year mentioned in the company records and on LinkedIn. "When we did a due diligence, we found that he had failed in 1979 but he had not revealed that to our client," says Trehan.

In order to have a check on employee's profile is soon going to be a part of general hiring process in many companies. Recruiters of many companies feel that such an initiative is very necessary.