Now, Google gets a map for the moon

Google has come up with an interesting way to honor the first manned moon landing, which took place 36 years ago on July 20, 1969. The company has added some NASA imagery to its Maps interface, which enables the users to surf the exact spot where man first landed on Moon.
Google Moon is basically an extension of Google Maps and Google Earth and uses NASA imagery to surf Moon’s surface. You can also check out the exact spots where Apollo astronauts landed.
It can be accessed by clicking on the temporary moon logo on the Google homepage or by visiting http://moon.google.com . The map allows the user to zoom in and out, but you might be in for a surprise if you zoom in too close.

Sources of new ideas for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs frequently use the following sources of ideas:

1. Consumers– the potential consumer should be the final focal point of ideas for the entrepreneurs. The attention to inputs from potential consumers can take the form of informally monitoring potential ideas or needs or formally arranging for consumers to have an opportunity to express their concerns. Care needs to be taken to ensure that the new idea or the needs represents a large enough market to support a new venture.

2. Existing Companies– with the help of an established formal methods potential entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs can evaluate competitive products & services on the market which may result in new and more market appealing products and services.

3. Distribution channels– members of the distribution channels are familiar with the needs of the market and hence can prove to be excellent sources of new ideas. Not only do the channel members help in finding out unmet or partially met demands leading to new products and services, they also help in marketing the offerings so developed.

4. Government– it can be a source of new product ideas in two ways firstly, the patent office files contain numerous product possibilities that can assist entrepreneurs in obtaining specific product information, and secondly, response to government regulations can come in the form of new product ideas.

5. Research & development– Entrepreneur’s own R&D is the largest source of new idea. A formal and well-equipped research and development department enables the entrepreneur to conceive and develop successful new product ideas.

Methods of generating new ideas for entrepreneurs

The following are some of the key methods to help generate end test new ideas:

1. Focus Groups – these are the groups of individuals providing information in a structural format. A moderator leads a group of people through an open, in-depth discussion rather than simply asking questions to solicit participant response. Such groups form comments in open-end in-depth discussions for a new product area that can result in market success. In addition to generating new ideas, the focus group is an excellent source for initially screening ideas and concept.


2. Brainstorming – it is a group method for obtaining new ideas and solutions. It is based on the fact that people can be stimulated to greater creativity by meeting with others and participating in organized group experiences. The characteristics of this method are keeping criticism away; free wheeling of idea, high quantity of ideas, combinations and improvements of ideas. Such type of session should be fun with no scope for domination and inhibition. Brainstorming has a greater probability of success when the effort focuses on specific product or market area.


3. Problem inventory analysis– it is a method for obtaining new ideas and solutions by focusing on problems. This analysis uses individuals in a manner that is analogous to focus groups to generate new product areas. However, instead of generating new ideas, the consumers are provided with list of problems and then asked to have discussion over it and it ultimately results in an entirely new product idea.

Guess the google

Have you seen the cool "Guess the Google" game that Grant Robinson has created? It picks a keyword at random, searches Google's huge repository of images gathered from the web, and places them in a grid of 20 images. You then have 20 seconds to guess what the keyword or theme of these images is. It's quite challenging and addictive!

Cultivating the habit of innovation

To most of us, innovation is a process executed at "special" times when we need to break new ground. Ironically, at those times, we're usually too rusty to be innovative. Why should we save our best efforts for rare occasions?

Awareness
The first trait integral to the habit of innovation is awareness-of yourself and external circumstances.

Curiosity
Curiosity flows seamlessly from awareness. Once you open yourself to the nuances of life, it's hard not to find things that fascinate you and to begin wondering why.
To be curious, you must give yourself the freedom to risk and make mistakes.

Focus
Awareness and curiosity expand your options, but once you move toward a solution, you need to focus-to go beneath the surface and give full attention to what you're doing.

Initiative
Awareness awakens us to what's going on, curiosity lets us gather ideas, and focus lets us nurture particular ideas. But the innovative spirit without action is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Initiative to act gives purpose and momentum to the habit of innovation.

Putting It Together: The Habit of Innovation

Yahoo to carry live space shuttle feeds from NASA

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. will provide live Web video streams of the return of the U.S. space agency's shuttle, the first mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA said on Tuesday.

Yahoo will make official online video from the 12-day Discovery shuttle space mission available in Microsoft Corp. Windows Media format to millions of Internet users at http://www.nasa.gov/ and on Yahoo's own site.

Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) also will promote video from the space mission, slated to launch on July 13, throughout its heavily-trafficked network of sites.



NASA said the agreements enable it to provide Internet access to the feeds at no additional cost to taxpayers.

NASA shuttles have been grounded since Columbia disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003. All seven crew members died.

India is now 10th largest economy

India is now amongst the top ten economies in the world.According to the World Bank gross domestic product rankings for the year 2004, India stands the tenth largest economy in the world with a GDP of $691.876 billion.The table below gives the rankings for the top 20 economies in the world.The rest of the rankings can be had at the World Bank Web site for the GDP figures:
http://www.worldbank.org/data/quickreference/quickref.html

Total GDP 2004
Rank	Country	($ billion)
1	United States	11,667.515
2	Japan	4,623.398
3	Germany	2,714.418
4	United Kingdom	2,140.898
5	France	2,002.582
6	Italy	1,672.302
7	China	1,649.329
8	Spain	991.442
9	Canada	979.764
10	India	691.876
11	South Korea	679.674
12	Mexico	676.497
13	Australia	631.256
14	Brazil	604.855
15	Russia	582.395
16	Netherlands	577.260
17	Switzerland	359.465
18	Belgium	349.830
19	Sweden	346.404
20	Turkey	301.950

Source: World Bank, July 2005

Taiwan is not included in the World Bank statistics. Rankings include only those economies with confirmed GDP estimates.

Kolkata! India's new IT hub

* Wipro, which set up a sprawling 17 acre campus in Kolkata's Salt lake in November 2004, is now planning to get another 50 acre plot in Rajarhat, the proposed IT hub in east Kolkata.
* Tata Consultancy Services is also eyeing similar space in the park.
* That is not all. Major IT companies such as Satyam Computers, ITC Infotech, HSBC Electronic Data Processing India (HDPI), ICICI OneSource and Gecis will set up their centres in the city shortly.
*
Even the existing companies like IBM, Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) and SkyTECH Solutions are on an expansion drive. In fact the state IT department promises to spring some more surprises in the next one year.

Does it means that Bangalore is loosing its CHARM !

Interesting facts about Interesting people...

Hitler loved animals, and was quite merciful towards them. History's most feared man was also a strict vegetarian.

Pictured here in his judo gear, Putin was originally turned down by his judo instructors. The teachers didn't think that 14-year-old Vladimir was tall enough.But young Vladimir didn't lose hope. Today, Russian President Putin has a black belt in judo!

Late Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was deeply interested in politics, so much so that it took him seven years to graduate!
Not without a sense of humour, Yasser is known to have guests wait so he can watch his favourite television show, Tom & Jerry!

At age four, the Dalai Lama was named the Supreme head of Tibet!
Having authored over 500 books, his primary hobby still remains collecting and repairing watches!

India to outsource maths coaching to U.S.

The latest business to be outsourced to India in the US is maths coaching.Into the breach steps a handful of Indian companies such as Career Launcher India Ltd, which provide maths tutoring through two US online tutoring companies and directly to students," the article informed.
Software developed by Career Launcher, says the article, allows teachers and students to talk to each other during the live session. They can even see each other through a Web camera.

The report noted that two things have led to this unique outsourcing: One, US students are doing badly in maths. American 15-year-olds ranked 24th among 29 industrialized countries in a study of maths skills released last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Ratio of women in IT industry rising steadily

Its not just in Western countries that IT industry has employed more women. The trend is changing in India too. The proportion of women in the Indian IT services workforce is rising steadily, and may touch 30 percent this year compared to 24 percent in 2004.

"We are definitely seeing an increase in the ratio of women in the Indian software services industry. In 2004, the proportion of male versus female workers in IT services was 76:24, while in contrast, in the BPO industry, the ratio stood at 31:69. Based on our interaction with various IT companies, we estimate the ratio this year would stand at about 70:30 in IT software services," Kiran Karnik, President of Nasscom, said.

This is quite interesting as increasing number of women in such a segment indicates that more women are entering professional streams such as engineering, B. Tech and M C A.

Yahoo offers text msg mobile Web search

Yahoo Inc is rolling out a service that lets users in the United States tap the Internet media giant's Web search using text messaging, matching a service now offered by rival Google Inc.

Yahoo also said that it was expanding its Yahoo Search on Mobile, which was previously available only on advanced phones such as the Treo. Now, the service yields a full Web search on virtually any phone with a color screen.

The latest mobile search move by Yahoo comes as Web search firms are looking to boost business by providing services to users while they're on the go and away from their personal computers.

Both the SMS Web search and the Yahoo Search on Mobile services use shortcuts that take less time for users to input their queries.

For example
A user would send a text message to shortcode 92466, which spells Yahoo on a telephone keypad, with the text "pizza 94104" to retrieve a list of pizza restaurants near that Zip code.

What not to say in your proposals

Instead of being afraid of saying something wrong that causes you to lose the whole proposal, you should be more concerned with saying a bunch of little things that dilute your message. This happens far more often. Maybe it's because people take a while to get warmed up before they start writing anything decent. Many of the examples below are things that people often write out of habit to help them get started. You can write a better proposal just by breaking these habits.

It's not about you. Your proposal should be about your customer. Instead of saying:

* When you were founded
* Who the founder was
* How much you have grown
* How long you have been in business
* How big you are
* How many employees you have
* How many cleared staff you have
* How many locations you have
* What your mission is
* About your other customers
* Where you are located
* We're ISO certified
* We're certified in...

Say how your size, age, location, or other qualification will benefit the customer. Make it about them and not about you.


Miscellaneous Don'ts

* Don't tell the customer what their needs are. If you feel the need to document the requirement, do it in the form of a statement about what you are going to do to fulfill the requirement.

* Don't summarize requirement. You can show your understanding by stating what you will do to fulfill the client's needs. When you summarize the requirement, it's redundant with the RFP and runs the risk of being patronizing or just plain wrong. When you say what you are going to do and how the customer will benefit, they will recognize it as something they need (or at least something close).

* Don't use passive voice. It's a grammar thing. If you don't know what it is, look it up. It's important.

Google to back broadband venture

Google Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Hearst Corp are investing about $100 million in Current Communications Group, a start-up that offers high-speed Internet connections over electricity lines, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Which Indian IT company is the best? Can you guess!

Think scale. That's the caption on Infosys' annual report. Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro would agree. All three have been growing relentlessly, cashing in on the outsourcing wave. TCS, which has been around for two decades, leads in revenues.

However, it will take a combination of a robust business model, savvy marketing skills and the ability to read the market to scale new heights. Which one has what it will take to succeed from here on?
So here is the Performance bar. Will help you to find the Answer.

Internet may not remain free, fear US technophiles

A pair of Supreme Court rulings this week is stoking fears that the internet is becoming an ever-more centralised platform for entrenched corporate interests, the antithesis of the digital commons envisioned by technophiles and civil libertarians.

But others predict that innovation will actually be encouraged by the rulings, since they create a framework of sorts for how to build businesses in the digital age.

The American Civil Liberties Union argues that the rulings portend a worst-case scenario in which oligopolistic broadband giants control websites, e-mail and internet telephone services. That could turn the internet into the opposite of what it is today: an inexpensive forum for public expression easily accessible to independent voices, from bloggers to unaffiliated political candidates.

Open source industry group offers free server software to Australian schools

Open Source Victoria (OSV), an industry cluster of more than 60 open source and free software providers, has responded to a group of IT teachers who want a simple way to test and deploy Linux servers in schools with a free server software CD.

OSV has developed a free product called LiveLAMP, which is a bootable CD that turns a spare computer into a Linux development server for students to practice and publish programming exercises in over a dozen languages with hundreds of development tools.

Sun distances itself from Linux

Sun Microsystems is scaling back its desktop Linux plans, the company said at JavaOne this week.

The decision means that Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) will in future be marketed less as a Linux platform and more for Solaris and Sun Ray installations aimed at developers, said John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice-president of software, at the San Francisco trade show.

JDS was initially based on Suse Linux, now part of Novell. Sun first introduced a Solaris version of JDS in October 2004. "You can see what we introduced last week as the first step in expanding the platform support for JDS and extending that user interface to Sun products," said Susan Jefferies, product line manager with Sun's User Software Group, at the time. "We're definitely merging to single user interfaces across the product line."