Google India has launched driving directions for users of Google Maps. Users can now navigate around locations using Google Maps on their desktops and mobile phones using landmarks like petrol stations, banks, schools, railway stations, bus stops, local businesses & traffic circles and signals. India is the first country globally to get this feature on Google Maps.

In India, Google has collected good landmark data through user-created “Points of Interest” in Google Map Maker. Google’s new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on importance, and closeness to the turns that the user is making and other available signals. With this launch, Google will now combine landmark data, counted turns (”the 2nd right”), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most relevant and useful.

source: ET

IT company Mahindra Satyam plans to appoint 1,000 freshers by December 15, a top company official said.
“The process is on and we will give appointment letters to 1,000 freshers out of the 8,000 selected during campus recruitment by December 15,” Mahindra Satyam’s Chief People Officer Hari Thalapalli told reporters on the sidelines of a conference here today.

He, however, said that the company might not call all of the remaining 7,000, who got selected during campus recruitment.

Asked if employees at Mahindra Satyam have been given any hike or if a hike was on the cards, Thalapalli refused to comment.

source: business-standard

Bangalore: A senior executive at Indian outsourcer Infosys Technologies’ business process outsourcing arm has resigned, a spokesman said on Thursday, two days after the division’s chief executive quit.

Joydeep Mukherjee was heading the knowledge process outsourcing services at Infosys BPO, the spokesman said without giving details.

On Tuesday, the company said Amitabh Chaudhry, who took over as the chief executive of Infosys BPO in March 2006, had submitted his resignation.

source: IBN

CAPE CANAVERAL: NASA’s Atlantis shuttle blasted off Monday with a haul of spare parts for the International Space Station and some microscopic worms that could explain muscle loss in space. The shuttle and its six astronauts left Florida’s Kennedy Space Center without a hitch for a 11-day voyage to deliver assorted gyroscopes, ammonia tanks and other equipment to the ISS.

“A perfect launch, right on time,” said a spokesman for the US space agency as the crew reached orbit — hurtling at a speed of more than 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) per hour.

With only five launches left before the 2010 retirement of the shuttle fleet, NASA officials said the parts were essential for extending the life of the space station, where the crew is due to dock on Wednesday.

“This flight is all about spares, basically, we’re getting them up there while we still can,” said mission director Brian Smith, “you’ll see this theme in some of the flights that are going to come after ours as well.”

This fifth and final shuttle mission for 2009 is scheduled to include three space walks to store hardware on the exterior of the space station and bring US astronaut Nicole Stott, who has been on the ISS since August, back to earth.

But the crew will also get to conduct some science, with the help of some ground-breaking worms.

source: indiatimes

NASA HAS announced that there is water on the moon. The evidence of this water was discovered after the NASA spacecraft LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observatory and Sensing Satellite) discovered water ice beds at the lunar south pole, when it impacted the moon. Cabeus – the lunar south pole crater was intentionally impacted by LCROSS on Friday, October 9.

The LCROSS spacecraft, which was built at a cost of $79 million, crashed the lunar surface so that scientists could probe the debris for the presence of water. The project scientist Anthony Colaprete, who is also the principal investigator for NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, said “Indeed yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount.”

YourBillBuddy.com service finds the tariff plan most suited to your usage, ensuring that you pay the minimum bill amount.
To ulitilize the technology that YourBillBuddy offers, all that you have to do is register for free, input all some of your bill information, and from there, the site can give you a recommendation of what service you should be using to save you the greatest amount of money
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The major providers across India – Airtel, Hutch, Reliance, TataIndicom, BSNL and Spice are supported by YourBillBuddy.com. They intend to cover all regions in India and are actively working on the same. To use the service, all you need to do is tell us your usage either by uploading E-Bill (pdf format) or specify minimal high level usage data using our Recommendation wizard module.

Google is happy to announce today that they have signed an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company based in San Mateo, CA. AdMob is a great Silicon Valley story — founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui when he couldn’t find good ways to generate traffic for his mobile site. Over the past few years, Omar and his talented team have built a thriving company with great mobile advertising products, and we are looking forward to having them join the Google team and work with us on the future of mobile advertising.

Google’ve written in the past about how mobile phones are becoming an increasingly indispensable part of our daily lives, and continue to see how great devices with full Internet browsers and vibrant app marketplaces are driving an explosion of usage. In fact:

* iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google’s 5x mobile search growth over the past two years
* And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]

Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. Google believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That’s what has excited about this deal.

All those who have played Klueless must be knowing what a phenomena klueless is! This is the time of the year when all other works come to a standstill and the madness of klueless takes over. People forget all their works and their bosses to surpass one level.

This year Klueless5 will be launched on 5th november and it promises to be even bigger n better. This is a part of the annual festival of IIM indore . This year it is called as “Ahvan” . I just can’t wait to play and see my name in the hall of fame as last time.

Ever wondered which would be the strategic technologies that have the potential to significantly impact an organisation’s growth in the next three years?

Here’s over to the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010
1. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers.
2. Advanced analytics: Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution.
3. Client computing: Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC
4. IT for green: IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials.
5. Reshaping the data center: In the past, design principles for data centers were simple.Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty.
6. Social computing: Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information.
7. Security – activity monitoring: Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources.
8. Flash memory: Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards.
9. Virtualization for availability: Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications.
10. Mobile applications: By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web.

Chirantan Patnaik has successfully broken the current world record made by a US citizen last year for the longest continuous play session on ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ of 28 hours and 1 minute.

An official of Guinness World Records told reporters from London that Patnaik’s endeavour, made in the presence of independent observers and under public scrutiny last month, was recently verified by them.

“The longest continuous play session on Grand Theft Auto IV is 40 hours 20 minutes, by Chirantan Patnaik (India), at the offices of the gaming blog NeuralChaos.com from 4-6 September 2009,” Karolina Thelin, PR executive of Guinness World Records said.

With support from from online gaming portal Zapak.com, Patnaik began playing the game at his Mumbai residence from 10 am on September 4 and ended at around 2 am on September 6.

“We have always believed in the potential of Indian gamers. Chirantan’s success is a proud moment for the Indian gaming industry. This will encourage more youngsters to take gaming seriously,” said Rohit Sharma, COO of Zapak Digital Entertainment, who had also appointed observers during the event.

Patnaik, who works with a private equity firm and is also a certified scuba diver, said it was his passion for gaming that motivated him to set the new world record.

“I began playing video games since I was in the third standard. Gaming, has since then, been my passion as well as a hobby,” the 26-year-old said.

source: zeenews