Some 75 days giving strong endorsement to the CEO Carol Bartz at their annual general meeting, Internet media technology company Yahoo has dropped her and in a graceless way that we have come to expect from many American corporates , she was, as she says in a memo to staff, “fired over the phone” by Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock.
Perhaps she should count herself fortunate that her employers didn’t duck even this minimal contact. They could practised the ultimate high-tech cowardice and informed her by email or phone text message. I met Ms Bartz on her first visit to India in January of 2005, a friendly, outgoing person, unlike some paranoid, security-surrounded visiting American head honchos I could name : She was then CEO of the Computer Aided Design (CAD) solutions leader, Autodesk. She told me in the few minutes she could spare for an interview with The Hindu: "It's a great feeling of energy, I seem to get out here in India…This is a very exciting place to be in and to work."
At Yahoo she seems to have reinforced this opinion. As PK Jayadevan writes in the Economic Times, Bartz was “very supportive of Yahoo’s India operations”—and with good reason: Over a third of the company’s innovations have flowed from the company’s India-based development centres which she visited in November last. Revenue-wise India accounts for just $ 100million of annual revenue – but Yahoo Mail is a leader in the web-mail sector in this country and fiercely loyal following in areas like Cricket has ensured Yahoo’s sports coverage underpins an Indian Internet audience of nearly 35 million unique visitors every month. Some 250 of Yahoo’s Indian engineers had already moved over to Microsoft Research last year as part of the global deal between the two companies to cooperate on search. It is unlikely that the leadership change will see any significant attrition at the India end of Yahoo’s operations. My friend Sujit John in The Times of India quotes astute IT industry watcher Pari Natarajan of Zinnov Consulting, who observes that Yahoo has retained its top talent in India and indeed, ‘may have a key role going forward”.
Allen Weiner, Research VP at Gartner comments: “ At the micro level, Yahoo many of the company’s headline projects such as Connected TV seem to be moving at a snail’s pace and its social media strategy is and has been, a work in progress at best. Yahoo has some great piece parts—messaging used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide; a sports brand that stands apart from other web properties and strong content plays in news and finance. Yahoo has yet to find a leader who has the vision to frame those pieces into cogent opportunity that would lead a transformation resulting in a 21st century media-technology power”.
We have to wait and see whom Yahoo’s board anoints as that new leader: Both co-founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo ( the latter has been an almost annual visitor for some years during the Yahoo Hack Day events in Bangalore) have generally stayed in the background in recent years and brought in outside talent to run the company.
But whoever signs up as the new CEO may be well advised to follow the pragmatic course of Arun Sarin, former head of the telecom giant Vodafone, who when he first came on board in 2008, wrote into his contract that he could not be sacked by phone or email or any modern means of communication. He wanted to be told the old fashioned way -- to his face, followed by a letter.

In the event, the need never arose: Sarin left with goodwill, before he was pushed. But his precaution only underlines that sensitivity and old fashioned courtesies, have somehow been jettisoned in the so-called developed nations’ corporate embrace of new communication technologies.

As a leader in the brave new world of Cyberia, Yahoo should have set an example – instead it has become a shame-making example of how not to do things. But then why are we surprised? Yahoo was born in the same nation where they gobble up TV reality shows whose high point is a big entrepreneur's catch phrase, delivered with sadistic glee: "You're fired!"
At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, let me say, it is not entirely an accident that an Indian like Sarin, was among to first to say: enough is enough. I do believe in some aspects, we can teach the West a thing or two, that they don’t tell you at Harvard Business School… like being magnanimous and courteous to foes, departing guests -- and sacked employees.

J-Gate, from Informatics India, now world's largest journals database J-Gate the flagship database of Informatics India, the Bangalore-headquartered Indian pioneer in electronic information products and services, has reached a significant global landmark , covering over 25,000 journals and indexing 1.7 million articles every year from these journals, making this arguably, the world’s the largest data base of English language periodicals. http://www.indiatechonline.com/j-gate-crosses-25,000-journals-549.php  

From Santa Ana to Pune... STEC's new innovation centre Pune in Maharashtra state is to host the new Storage Technology Innovation Centre of STEC, the leading, Santa Ana (California)-based global provider of solid-state drive (SSD) technologies and products. The design centre formally opened on September 5, will provide STEC with additional storage software development resources for such products as its recently announced Enhance IO SSD Cache Software
http://www.indiatechonline.com/stec-pune-innovation-centre-554.php  

Bizframe's Android data capture app for Bihar e-gov task
Bizframe, the Bangalore-based provider provider of mobile business applications, has helped the District administration of Munger, Bihar monitor the schemes under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGHS) in its panchayats ( village self governing units). The administration has used Bizframe’s Mobile Inspector application running on Android smart phones to provide instant reporting features including image/ photographs and GPS location. http://www.indiatechonline.com/bihar-deploys-bizframe-android-app-553.php

SAP's India team crafts an emergency citizen helpline The India development team at SAP, has created a helpline application to aid Indian citizens with critical, immediate alerts during emergencies. The application will also provide real-time instructions and an expansive resource guide and information for emergency care on mobile devices like smart phones and tablets. http://www.indiatechonline.com/sap-emergency-helpline-app-for-india-550.php
Security, the major concern; technology the key to e-biz in India: Terrapinn survey http://www.indiatechonline.com/e-commerce-in-india-561.php  
IndiaTechOnline comment: India fell off Apple's map during the Steve Jobs years… . As tech world hails Steve Jobs, Apple’s resigning CEO, let’s not forget: India was his blind spot … and faithful fans have paid the price http://www.indiatechonline.com/steve-jobs-and-apple-in-india-547.php  
IndiaTechOnline Comment: Post-Narayana Murthy era begins for Infosys….We remain uneasy with the much praised ( by other media) process, that resulted in one of the outside experts in the committee charged with finding a successor to Narayana Murthy, ending up as a candidate himself and eventually as the person chosen to be Chairman… And we are somewhat aghast at the flurry to name entities within Infosys after Murthy: http://www.indiatechonline.com/narayana-murthy-era-ends-at-infosys-542.php  
Coop-etition in silicon! Two tech leaders join to launch an automotive safety solution in India.
Freescale Semiconductor and the Bosch Group’s Automotive Electronics division have joined hands to create a state-of-the art reference platform for an automotive airbag for the growing automotive safety segment in emerging markets such as India and China. http://www.indiatechonline.com/freescale-bosch-airbag-reference-design-544.php  
IT People-1: Konstantin Klein is new MD for Xerox India http://www.indiatechonline.com/konstantin-klein-md-for-xerox-india-54.php  
IT People-2: Sanjay Viswanathan is new MD-CEO at Sonata http://www.indiatechonline.com/sanjay-viswanathan-ceo-at-sonata-55.php  
IT People-3: PVG Menon, new President of Indian Semiconductor Association. http://www.indiatechonline.com/pvg-menon-isa-president-51.php  

Now a Tablet avatar for the car! Indian GPS navigation leader, MapmyIndia, India’s leader in, ha launched a tablet PC variant for the card that combines car navigation,entertainment with a 3G Internet connection. http://www.indiatechonline.com/mapmyindia-carpad-309.php  
As tablets break Rs -10,000 barrier, Mercury enters India market with the mTab, Leading computer peripherals player Mercury( a brand of the Singapore –headquartered Kobian Pte Ltd, has enters the tablet market with a below Rs 10,000 7-inch model -- Mercury mTab is fuelled by a 1.2 GHz 3-Core processor, Mercury mTab. With Optional 3G slot and extendable memory up to 32 GB. http://www.indiatechonline.com/mercury-mtab-tablet-launch-in-india-307.php  
What downturn? Footloose Indians fuel online travel business, as airlines open new regional routes.
http://www.indiatechonline.com/india-online-travel-trends-and-industry-events-308.php  

IT's a 3-D season here...

HTC Corporation has unveiled the HTC EVO 3D in India -- providing the ability to capture , view and share 3D imagery. http://www.indiatechonline.com/htc-evo-3d-106.php
Vivitek projector converts 2D into 3D video
http://www.indiatechonline.com/vivitek-d5-series-projectors-107.php
Lenovo IdeaCenter B520 all-in-one PC with 3-D
http://www.indiatechonline.com/lenovo-ideacenter-b520-all-in-one-pc-105.php

Rural mobile phone users in India overtake urban: Juxt study http://www.indiatechonline.com/juxtconsult-india-mobile-phones-study-2011-545.php
Indian BPO biz still rules: NASSCOM
The BPO industry in India has grown 16 times in size, in the last decade to reach USD 16.9 Billion (including domestic) in the fiscal year 2011, says the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). India remains the leading BPO destination, accounting for over 37 per cent of total global sourcing BPO revenues, followed by Canada and Philippines. http://www.indiatechonline.com/nasscom-bpo-summit-2011-543.php 
India's anticorruption movement, harnesses social media, tops 1 million mentions per hour: Vangal http://www.indiatechonline.com/vangal-analysis-of-social-media-and-anna-hazare-539.php 

All the numbers in our exclusive Indian IT Snapshot: http://www.indiatechonline.com/snapshot.php  

KAVG Summit on Animation, Visual Effects & Gaming Bangalore 15-16 September 2011, NIMHANS convention centre. Organised by Department of IT, BT & ST Govt. of Karnataka and the Association of Bangalore Animation Industry (ABAI) http://abai.in/article.html  
TiECon 2011 New Delhi, 30 Sep 2011
The 11th annual conference to be organised by The Indus Entrepreneurs’ Delhi-NCR chapter has planned a series of events to be of interest to budding entrepreneurs and a host of successful entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ecosystem players. http://www.tiecon-delhi.org/  
Cloud Computing World Forum India Mumbai, 12 October 2011, JW Marriott
A free-to-attend event featuring all he key players within the Cloud Computing and SaaS market providing an introduction, discussion and look into the future for the ICT industry.
http://www.cloudcomputinglive.com/india/  
Travel Distribution Summit India ( online travel industry and technology)
Mumbai, 12-13 October 2011 http://events.eyefortravel.com/tdindia/index.asp  
Bangalore IT.biz 2011
Bangalore, 18-20 October 2011. The flagship IT event of the Karnataka government. http://www.bangaloreit.biz/IT_2011/index.php  
NASSCOM PRODUCT CONCLAVE 2011
Bangalore, 9-10 November 2011, Taj Vivanta http://www.nasscom.in/nasscom/templates/flagshipEvents.aspx?id=61152    
NASSCOM Game developers conference Pune 11-12 November 2011 http://ngdc.nasscom.in/  
International Conference on Web Services Computing Kochi, 14-15 October 2011 SCMS School of Technology and Management
Focus Areas Web services standards and formalizations, Web services modelling, Semantics in Web services, Web services supporting Cloud Computing, Web services QoS (e.g., security, performance, reliability, fault tolerance, etc.). mcaevent@scmsgroup.org
46th National Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India.  Ahmedabad, 1-3 December 2011 “ICT4U: Touching the Lives of Everyone”, focuses on use of ICT in various aspects of life. http://www.csi-2011.org/  
India Telecom 2011 International exhibition and conference New Delhi, 7-9 Dec 2011, Pragathi Maidan
FICCI-Govt of India Dept of Telecom. www.indiatelecom.org  
NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference
Beijing, China, 14-15 Dec 2011 China National Convention Centre http://www.gputechconf.cn/en/home.html
7th e-India 2011
Gandhinagar, Gujarat, 15-17 Dec 2011
e-gov, digital learning, e-health http://www.eindia.net.in/2011/  

Are you organising an upcoming conference or trade show in the Middle East/Asia/Pac region that will interest the Indian infotech community? Send us the details in a mail to feedback@indiatechonline.com  with Event Watch in the subject line and we will be happy to feature it in this section.

Formula 1 2011 : the official game ( Codemasters) for PC, Xbox360 and Playstation3

The new edition of the F1 videogame is launched globally on September 23 – the day of the Singapore Grand Prix. This year India is a new entrant -- the Airtel Grandprix takes place in Greater Noida on Oct 30 -- and the circuit is included in game along with 18 others. The player will be able to play as any one of the 24 drivers for the 2011 season, in all 12 teams. As well as race modes, Formula 1 2011 includes season, time trial, and race weekend modes

This is the first game in Full HD and 3D and recreates each circuit from paddock to pit to track, letting players graduate rookie to F1 professional. Find all the famous cars here – including Force India’s Mercedes. A new play mode called Co-op Championship allows a pair of players to assume the avatar of a driver and constructor -- remember in F1 teams must construct their own cars. International price approx US $ 77. India prices not announced. http://www.formula1-game.com  

POSTED 2011-09-12

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