IT 2008-09: Salary hikes & attrition

The average IT sector attrition rate, which was 18 per cent last year has dropped to 15 per cent, according to a survey by IDC, a premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and Dataquest.

Despite the marginal increase in salaries, a freeze on fresh induction, layoffs, cutting down on talent and keeping offer letters on hold, the industry saw a dip in attrition rate to 15 per cent.

The average retention rate, defined as percentage of employees retained out of the total employees as on March 31, 2008, improved to 85 per cent, from 79 per cent in 2008, the survey stated.

The survey results indicate a visible improvement in work environment even though the average salary increases during the year were pared to 1.4 per cent.

The salary increases for employees with less than two years of experience earned 2 per cent increase. Those between 5.1 and 10 years received an average salary hike of 5 per cent and those with over 10 year experience earned four per cent salary increase.

In addition to work-life balance, job security came out as a crucial factor in the survey. The study reveals that there is a drastic fall in the number of people who feel that their job is secure within their company.

The reducing bench and mass layoffs by the larger players seems to have left an impact on the minds of people.

A majority of IT employees said they changed jobs for better salaries and compensation (53 per cent), overseas postings (38 per cent), better job security (18 per cent), flexible working hours (18 per cent) and training and development (9 per cent).

The survey also reveals that companies have become more transparent in their communication with employees giving them a sense of belonging. They have also gone ahead and adopted a higher degree of professionalism in their dealings with employees as well as customers or suppliers.

Another key finding is that more employees are satisfied with the interest shown by their companies as well as their immediate seniors in helping them strike a work-life balance compared to last year.

More employees believe that training has helped them in their all round growth. On the salary and compensation front, a surprisingly high number of employees feel that they are being paid at par with industry standards compared to last year.

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5 Healthy and Unhealthy phones

Researchers have been divided over the effects of cellphone radiation on human beings. While some studies suggest a link between long-term (10 years or more) cellphone use and cancer, many maintain that there is not conclusive or demonstrated evidence that cell phones cause adverse health effects in humans.

US-based Environmental Working Group (EWG) is among the organisations who believe that there is compelling evidence to prove the link between cancer and cellphone radiation. The group recently came out with five safest and five worst mobile phones in terms of cellphone radiation. The study is based on SAR or Specific Absorption Rate. SAR according to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association is “a way of measuring the quantity of radio frequency (RF) energy that is absorbed by the body.” For a mobile phone to get FCC certification in the United States, the maximum SAR level must be less than 1.6 watts per kilogram. In Europe, the level is capped at 2 watts per kilogram while Canada allows a maximum of 1.6 watts per kilogram.

Here’s looking into the EWG’s 5 Best and Worst mobile devices for radiation.

Best: Samsung Impression

Maximum radiation: 0.35 Watts per kilogram (W/kg) (based on reported radiation level when held up to your ear)

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 0.35 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 0.83 W/kg

Best: Motorola RAZR V8

Maximum radiation: 0.36 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 0.36 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 0.86 W/kg


Best: Samsung SGH-T229

Maximum radiation: 0.38 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 0.38 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 0.69 W/kg


Best: Samsung Rugby (SGH-A837)

Maximum radiation: 0.46 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 0.46 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 0.57 W/kg



Best: Samsung Propel Pro (SGH-I627)

Maximum radiation: 0.47 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 0.47 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 0.68 W/kg

Worst: Motorola MOTO VU204

Maximum radiation: 1.55 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 1.55 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 0.58 W/kg


Worst: Blackberry Curve 8330

Maximum radiation: 1.54 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear 1.54 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body 0.99 W/kg


Worst: Motorola W385

Maximum radiation: 1.54 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 1.54 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 1.13 W/kg


Worst: Kyocera Jax S1300

Maximum radiation: 1.55 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 1.55 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 1.18 W/kg


Worst: TMobile myTouch 3G

Maximum radiation: 1.55 W/kg

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)

SAR when held at the ear: 1.55 W/kg

SAR when worn on the body: 1.43 W/kg

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Findings: 13 Percent of Cell Phone Owners Don't Call Anyone

Lightspeed Research has released the results of a multi-nation study about cell phone use--and some of them are strange. For example, 13 percent of U.S. subscribers don't make calls, while 52 percent make at least one call per day. 35 percent never send text messages, but that's at least somewhat understandable.

You have to wonder what those 13 percent are doing with their cell phones. Do they use them as paperweights? Maybe just play Snake on them? I assume some of that group have cell phones as emergency-only devices, but that's a pretty large percentage.

The study also reported that women send more text messages than men, with 29 percent compared to 25 percent sending at least one text per day, whereas men and women make the same percentage of voice calls each day. In addition, mobile Web browsing is the most popular daily activity (at 14 percent), while taking photos is the most popular weekly mobile pastime (at 37 percent).

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News of kidnapping off Wikipedia

For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Rohde's value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world.

A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia's page on Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing--a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping.

Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet--even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous.

The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times. In an interview, Wales said that Wikipedia's cooperation was not a given.

"We were really helped by the fact that it hadn't appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source," he said. "I would have had a really hard time with it if it had."

Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan on November 10, along with his interpreter and their driver. Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.

The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

"I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he'd done, what his value to them might be," he said. "I'd never edited a Wikipedia page before."

With his editors' blessing, Moss had already made similar changes to Rohde's "topic page" on The Times' Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Rohde's former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

The Wikipedia page history shows that the next day, November 13, someone without a user name edited the entry on Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal. The unnamed editor cited an Afghan news agency report. In the first few days, at least two small news agencies and a handful of blogs reported the kidnapping.

Around that time, Catherine J. Mathis, the chief spokeswoman for the New York Times Company, called Wales and asked for his help. Knowing that his own actions on Wikipedia draw attention, Wales turned to an administrator, one of several who would eventually become involved in monitoring and controlling the page.

On November 13, news of the kidnapping was posted and deleted four times within four hours, before an administrator blocked any more changes for three days. On November 16, it was blocked again, for two weeks.

"We didn't want it to look unusual in some fashion that would draw speculation, so we would protect it for three days, or up to a month, which is pretty normal," Wales said. He added, "Weeks would go by before there was a problem."

On February 10 and 11, two users added the kidnapping information several times to Rohde's page, only to see it removed each time, and they attached some heated notes to their additions. "We can do this months," one said.

An administrator put a rare indefinite block on the page, then changed that to a temporary freeze. One of the would-be editors posted a note saying: "Not gonna work boy genius. Should have stuck to indefinite."

Most of the attempts to add the information, including the first and the last, came from three similar Internet protocol addresses that correspond to an Internet service provider in Florida, and Wikipedia administrators guessed that they were all the same user.

"We had no idea who it was," said Wales, who said there was no indication the person had ill intent. "There was no way to reach out quietly and say ?Dude, stop and think about this.' "

Last Saturday, after Rohde and the translator, Tahir Ludin, escaped from a Taliban compound in Pakistan, Mathis e-mailed Wales before making a public announcement, and Wales, himself, unfroze the page.

When the news broke Saturday, the user from Florida reposted the information, with a note to administrators that said: "Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG." Joseph M. Reagle, an adjunct professor of communications at New York University who studies Wikipedia, said he was not sure whether its role in suppressing news about Rohde would prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake.

"Wikipedia has, over time, instituted gradually more control because of some embarrassing incidents, particularly involving potentially libelous material, and some people get histrionic about it, proclaiming the death of Wikipedia," he said. "But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one."

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Google News Down with the News of Jackson's Death

Yahoo was not the only site to see traffic spikes in the wake of Michael Jackson's death. So many queries came into Google News in the minutes after the news broke that the search engine giant thought it was under attack, and the site was intermittently unavailable.

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack," R.J. Pittman, director of Product Management for Google, wrote in a blog post. "As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a 'We're sorry' page before finding the articles they were looking for."

Google also reported the largest mobile search spike in its history, with 5 of the top 20 searches about Jackson, Pittman said.

Overall search volume started to spike around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and stabilized by 8pm. The majority of Thursday's hot trends related to Jackson's death, Google said.

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10 Worst tech predictions

Most of us love reading technology forecasts. It keeps us in sync with the times to come. Really? No, if the tech predictions below are anything to go by.

Made by tech czars and some of the biggest names in their fields, these predictions have gone way off the mark. In fact, many read like a `joke' today.

Here are 10 tech predictions that have gone awry (big time).

1. iPod will die by next year

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in February 2005, Sir Alan Michael Sugar, the founder of Amstrad, said: "Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput."

Incidentally, at the time Sugar's Amstrad and Apple were reportedly neck-and-neck in the personal computer race.

As for iPod, In October, Apple set a record for iPod sales outside of the always lucrative holiday quarter. The company sold more than 11 million iPods, an 8 per cent jump in unit growth with a 3 per cent rise in revenue over the year-ago quarter.

2. YouTube will not go far

There's just not that many videos I want to watch," said Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube, in March 2005. At the time YouTube featured about 50 videos. Just two years later, on November 13 2006, YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

Recently, Collins Stewart LLC analyst Sandeep Aggarwal estimated that the video site will generate $180 million to $200 million in revenue this year. And, Aggarwal predicts YouTube's revenue will double next year to about $400 million.

3. No need for a computer at home

"(There's) no need for a computer in the home," these are the words of Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp made in 1977.

Incidentally, he was not the first one to predict such a thing. Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM reportedly said in 1943, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

In the late 1990s, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called PC "a ridiculous device," said today, arguing that while information appliances won't obviate the need for PCs, the latter have hidden costs, create more labour for corporate information technology departments and don't make sense for many users with scaled-down PC needs.

4. Who needs more than 640 KB

In 1981, Bill Gates allegedly said that nobody would ever need more than 640 kilobytes of memory on their personal computer.

However, in an interview to Bloomberg Businees News in 1996, Gates refuted the quote. Here's an excerpt of what he said when asked about the (in)famous quote, "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

"The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known."

"When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space, would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers."

"We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years...." Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.

5. TV won't last

Here's something for all those couch potatoes there. "TV won't last because people would, "soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night," said Darryl Zanuck in 1946. Zanuck is an Academy Award-winning producer, writer, actor, director, and studio executive who played a major part in the Hollywood.

In 1926, Lee De Forest, an American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit, said about TV, "While theoretically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."

6. There will never be a bigger plane built

In 1933, after the first flight of the Boeing 247, a plane that could hold ten people, a proud Boeing engineer reportedly said, "There will never be a bigger plane built."

Similarly in 1904, Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, said "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."

7. Spam will be solved

The problem of spam e-mail messages will be gone within two years, Bill Gates promised in January 2004.

Speaking at a session of the World Economic Forum, Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, said that the company was working on three ways to enable e-mail users to keep spam out of their computers.

The first two, he said, would involve having computers reply automatically to any email messages from senders not known to that computer -- that is, not in the mail list of the email programme installed on the computer -- with a request to solve a problem that could be handled by a person but not by a computer.

The third way, which Gates said was likely to arrive later but be the long-term solution, would require that email messages sent by strangers come with postage attached, the equivalent of a postage stamp.

8. eBay will be huge in China

In February 2005, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, said, "We are on a tear to be the undisputed winner in China." Come, December 2006, eBay announces that it would close its operations in China and become the junior partner to Tom Online, a Chinese Internet portal and wireless firm.

With this eBay became another US firms that offloaded its China Internet investments to local partners. CEO Whitman reportedly spent some $100 million in 2005 on the site, only to lose ground to Alibaba, Yahoo's partner in China.

9. Telephone is inherently of no value

In 1962, Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future wrote, "Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.

Similarly in an internal memo in 1879 Western Union Co said, "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

10. Photocopiers are niche

"The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most," IBM told the eventual founders of Xerox in 1959.

According to Wikipedia, by 1961 Xerox had almost $60 million in revenue, and this value had leapt to $500 million by 1965.

In 1957, the editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, predicted, "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."

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Do you think Someone can Hack your email?

What's the name of the school you attended? What is the first name of your favourite cousin? Well, email services often protect acco
unts with these kind of security questions in case holders forget their password.

Now, a new study in the US has revealed just how easy the answers of such security questions are for other people to guess -- in fact these facts make life simple for hackers, the 'New Scientist' reported.

Researchers at Microsoft have based their findings on an analysis of an experiment, involving 32 email users. Acquaintances of the email users -- people with whom they wouldn't normally share their login details -- were asked to try and guess the answers users assigned to protect their accounts.

The volunteers managed to guess correctly a fifth of the time, raising questions over how secure the commonly used system is, the study found.

However, a second study by software giant Microsoft has suggested a more secure alternative -- relying on trusted friends to vouch for you if an account becomes locked.

"Securing webmail is important because email accounts typically allow an attacker access to other accounts, for example, eBay and Amazon. If I can recover these passwords via your email account then I can spend the balance of your credit card on flat-screen TVs," Ross Anderson of Cambridge University was quoted as saying.

Under the new system proposed by Stuart Schechter and Rob Reeder at Microsoft, users select several "trustees". If a user becomes locked out of their account their trustees receive a message asking them to download a "recovery code". The user must collect codes from multiple trustees to unlock their account.

A group of 19 Hotmail users trialed the system and 17 successfully regained access to their Hotmail account. That 90-per-cent success rate compares favourably to 80-per-cent success rate of the secret question system, say Reeder.

In the trial, most users recovered their accounts within two days. However, when the researchers got users' acquaintances to ask the trustees t
o give up the codes, many of them did so.

Reeder said this attack could be avoided by getting account holders to advise trustees of their role in advance. In the trial, trustees simply received an email containing the code out of the blue.

Rather than replacing the standard secret questions approach, the new method should be an optional choice for users, according to Anderson, who agrees that it is important to train trustees to be appropriately security conscious.

But the idea has promise, said Reeder, pointing out that it is not a new idea to have people use third parties to back up their identity.

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1M iPhone 3G S smartphones sold first weekend

Apple announced today that it sold one million iPhone 3G S phones through Sunday, three days after the device launched, matching last year's sales mark of the iPhone 3G.

"Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. "iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.

The iPhone 3G S sales mark claimed by Apple is significantly higher than analysts' estimates before the weekend. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, for example, had pegged sales at 500,000, then upped his estimate early Monday -- before Apple announced its number -- to 750,000.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology had also expected slower sales this year, and like Munster, had bet on around a half million. "Clearly, surprise is my first reaction," said Gottheil when asked about Apple's one million figure. "I was off by 100%, wasn't I?"

Gottheil added that Apple's sales were "impressive" in the face of the continued recession, but added that in hindsight they shouldn't have been such a shock. "What we're seeing is the adoption curve for smartphones," he said. "People are seeing that they're useful. Apple didn't start the smartphone business, but they made it fun and classy. Typical Apple."

Although Apple sold the same number of iPhone 3G S handsets this year as iPhone 3Gs last summer, it did so in fewer markets. The iPhone 3G S is currently available in only in seven countries; the iPhone 3G went on sale its first weekend in more than 20.

"Even more impressive than the one million," added Gottheil, "is that they were prepared for that."

Apple also said that approximately six million owners of older iPhones had downloaded the new iPhone 3.0 software since its release June 17.

Jobs' statement is the first in an Apple press release since he took medical leave in January for an undisclosed illness that previously had been described only as a hormonal imbalance. Jobs is slated to return to Apple at the end of this month.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal said that Jobs had a liver transplant in Tennessee two months ago, but did not name its sources.

"His name in the release is a clue," Gottheil said. "It's a confirmation of what Apple has been saying all along, that he'll be back in some capacity at the end of the month. He's clearly stepping back in to a more active management role."

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Search Shares by Google, Bing, Yahoo

Google once again topped the list for search engine share in May according to data from comScore. The company captured 65 percent of all core searches, up about 0.8 percent from April.

Yahoo came in second with 20.1 percent of searches and Microsoft was third with 8 percent, a drop of 0.3 and 0.2 percent respectively.

May's numbers did not include statistics for Microsoft's Bing search engine, which launched in June, but preliminary results from comScore saw growth for Bing.

Total number of searches were down last month, from 14.7 billion in April to 14.3 billion in May.

All the major companies took a slight dip. Google was still number one, but dropped about 2 percent, from about 9.5 billion in April to 9.3 billion in May. Yahoo dropped 4 percent to 2.8 billion searches, and Microsoft dropped 5 percent to 1.1 billion.

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Report: Internet Connection Speed: The Top 10 Countries

At the end of 2008, approximately 19 per cent Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps — a 21 per cent increase over the average global connection speed at the end of 2007.

This is according to the State of the Internet report, a quarterly study by Akamai Technologies, the US-based Internet content distribution giant. The State of the Internet report tracks average connection speeds for countries around the world.

Check out the top 10 nations in terms of average Internet connection speed.

1. South Korea

South Korea rules supreme when it comes to Internet connection speed and broadband connectivity. It is the world’s No.1 with average connection speed of 15 Mbps, ten times the global average!

During 2008, South Korea’s rate of quarterly change appeared to be locked into a cyclical pattern, with quarterly decreases being recorded in the first and third quarters, and increases seen in the second and fourth quarters.

For the whole year, South Korea saw a modest 7 per cent rise in their levels of high broadband adoption. South Korea is also ranked first in terms of high broadband connectivity with 69 per cent connections above 5 Mpbs.

2. Japan

Japan ranks 2nd in terms of Internet connection and high broadband connectivity. Japan ranks 2nd in terms of high broadband connectivity. About 54 per cent of the connections in Japan are above 7 Mbps.

3. Hong Kong

Hong Kong ranks third with an Internet connection speed of 6.9 Mbps. The country ranks fifth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 38 per cent of the connection above 5 Mbps.

4. Romania

Romania is at the fourth position with a Internet connection speed of 5.7 Mbps. The country ranks third in terms of high broadband connectivity with 45% of the connection above 5 Mbps.

5. Sweden

Sweden is at the fifth position with a Internet connection speed of 5.6 Mbps. Sweden ranks fourth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 39 per cent of the connection above 5Mbps.

6. Switzerland

Switzerland has bagged the sixth position with an Internet connection speed of over 5 Mbps. The country however does not figure in the top ten list of countries with high broadband connectivity.

7. Netherlands

Netherlands ranks 7th with an Internet connection speed of 4.9 Mbps. The country ranks 7th in terms of high broadband connectivity with 28 per cent of the connections above 5 Mbps.

8. Belgium

Belgium is at the 8th position with an Internet connection speed of 4.7 Mbps. The country ranks sixth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 31 per cent of the connection above 5 Mbps.

9. Slovakia

Slovakia bags the ninth position with an Internet connection speed of 4.5 Mbps. The country does not figure among the top ten in terms of high broadband connectivity.

10. Norway

Norway ranks tenth with an Internet connection speed of 4.5 Mbps. The country ranks fifth in terms of high broadband connectivity with 38 per cent of the connection above 5 Mbps.

United States is at the 17th position with an Internet connection speed of 3.9 Mbps, up approximately 8 per cent from the average connection speed for the first quarter of 2008.

In terms of Internet connection speed, China is way behind leading economies with an average Internet connection speed of 833 kbps.

India has been ranked at a dismal 115th among 223 countries in terms of average Internet connection speeds. India has an average Internet connection speed of just 772 Kbps compared with the global average of 1.5 Mbps.

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Reports: Top Global IT Vendors

Worldwide IT services revenue totalled $806 billion in 2008, an 8.2 per cent increase from 2007 revenue of $745 billion, according to Gartner Inc.

Thanks to six to eight months of `business as usual' in 2008 and then approximately four months encountering the beginning of the global economic downturn, the IT industry could manage a decent growth.

So, who were the vendors who led the growth chart globally in terms of revenue and marketshare. Here's over to the top 5 IT services vendors of 2008 (as per Gartner estimates).

IBM

Across all IT services, IBM continued to be the worldwide market leader, with 7.3 per cent of the total marketshare. The Big Blue recorded IT services revenue of $58,891 million during the year. The company registered a growth of 8.8 per cent over the previous year. In the year 2007 IBM clocked revenues of $54,145 milllion. Incidentally, there was no jump or fall in the company's global marketshare, which remained a constant at 7.3 per cent.


Hewlett-Packard

With its acquisition of EDS, HP moved into the No. 2 position, but with the difficulties of integrating the EDS business, its revenue grew only 1.9 per cent in 2008, considerably below the overall market growth rate.

The company's IT services revenues for the year 2008 stood at $38,584 million, vis-a-vis $37,866 million in the previous year. HP's global IT services marketshare saw a marginal decline, falling to 4.8 per cent in 2008 from 5.1 per cent in the previous year.

Accenture

The third biggest global IT services vendor is Accenture. The company's IT services revenues stood at $23,732 million in 2008. The company witnessed the highest revenue growth during the year, 15.1 per cent. Accenture's marketshare in the global IT services stood at 2.9 per cent, recording a marginal increase over the previous year's 2.8 per cent.

In the year 2007, Accenture recorded a revenue of $23,732 million.

Fujitsu

At no. 4 is Japanese electronic giant Fujitsu. The company's IT services revenues stood at $20,432 million in 2008. Fujitsu too witnessed an above industry growth of 9.6 per cent during the year. The company's marketshare over the previous year, however, remained constant at 2.5 per cent.

In 2007, Fujitsu recorded an annual IT services revenue of $18,646 million.

CSC

Fifth largest IT services vendor in the year 2008 was US-based Computer Sciences Corp (CSC). Fourth US company in the top 5 list, CSC's IT services revenue for the year stood at $17,112 million. Like HP, the company's growth too fell below the industry's average growth rate (8.2 per cent) at 6.6 per cent.

CSC also saw a marginal dip in its marketshare, which fell from 2.2 per cent in 2007 to 2.1 per cent in 2008. CSC's recorded a revenue of $16,059 million in the previous year.

Others (including Indian vendors)

With an almost 80 per cent marketshare, the other IT services vendors earned a revenue of $16,059 million in the year 2008. These vendors grew almost at the same pace as the industry average, with a growth rate of 8.3 per cent.

India-based vendors grew 12.9 per cent in US dollars in 2008, down from 39.8 per cent growth in 2007. India-based vendors were impacted early in the economic downturn. This would be expected, as these providers sell especially heavily to the financial sector and typically lead with offshore application development services, which are relatively easy to delay in tough times.


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Home computer is bad for your health

The number of people hospitalised by home computers has risen seven-fold in recent years, researchers say.

Record numbers are tripping over cables or being injured when carelessly-placed equipment falls on them.

Children are particularly at risk, according to the study of 78,000 reports at U.S. hospitals of computer-related injuries between 1994 and 2006. The number of serious accidents rose 732 per cent over the period.
child on computer

Researchers say children are particularly at risk of computer related injuries

The study, by researchers in Columbus, Ohio, was reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

In Britain, computer-related accidents in the home rose from around 800 in 1995 to 2,100 in 2002.

Many of the accidents were caused by the mass of cables and wires that trail over the floors of home offices and spare bedrooms.

Others were caused by badly designed desk layouts, or equipment falling on its owner.

Some of the patients suffered from bangs to the head after equipment fell on them. Others were hurt clothes were snagged on sharp corners or when they tripped on cables.

Muscle strains caused by lifting heavy boxes was also common.
Monitors caused most of the accidents – although the introduction of lightweight LCD displays led to a fall in the percentage of total accidents caused by screens after 2003.

Dr Lara McKenzie, who carried out the study at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Centre for Injury Research and Policy, said: 'Future research on acute computer-related injuries is needed as this ubiquitous product becomes more intertwined in our everyday lives.

'Given the large increase in acute computer related injuries over the study period, greater efforts are needed to prevent such injuries, especially among young children.'

In Britain, computer-related accidents in the home rose from around 800 in 1995 to more than 1,800 in 1999 and 2,100 in 2002 - the latest figures available. Since then the figures are thought to have shot up dramatically as home computers become increasingly popular.

A third of the incidents in 2002 involved a child under the age of 15, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa).

Most computer related scrapes are minor. However, some can be life threatening.
One case in 1998 involved a six-year-old boy who was burned by a fire caused by spilling a drink on a computer.

Whenever a piece of equipment or activity such as home-computing becomes more popular, the number of people being injured in related accidents does tend to increase,' a spokesman for Rospa said.

We noticed a particular rise in computer-related home accidents towards the end of the 1990s as computers became 'must have' items.

Accidents always happen more easily when you're rushing, so if you're carrying a computer do take care to look where you're going and don't try to lift too much equipment in one go.'

Playing computer games for more than seven hours a week can alter your biological clock, leaving you sleep-deprived and open to a host of health problems, U.S. scientists have warned. Doctors believe the bright light of a computer screen may suppress the hormone melatonin which helps regulate the normal sleep-wake cycle.

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Top producing Unit for Nokia, Chennai, India

Nokia’s Chennai factory is now the Finnish giant’s largest cellphone manufacturing facility by volume in the world, edging past China.

China has two factories while Chennai has one. Nokia’s Chennai plant has now gone past the larger of the two Chinese factories, which till date was the company’s largest in the world.

While the company refuses to divulge the annual capacity at its Chennai factory, a senior member of its global planning team said the unit is now indeed its largest manufacturing facility. Unofficial reports suggest Chennai manufactures over 100 million phones every year.

Interestingly, women make up over 70% of the 8,000-strong employee pool at the Chennai plant and are involved in a mix of running productions lines, maintenance and assembly & testing operations.
Nokia operates nine state-of-the-art mobile phone manufacturing units in India, Finland, China, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Romania and Hungary.

“The Chennai factory is the largest in Nokia’s global ecosystem, although the dynamics in terms of product line vary in each market. But the international markets that we serve out of Chennai have seen the largest growth in terms of volume. At present, Nokia ships GSM phones from the Chennai factory to over 50 markets spanning South-East Asia-Pacific (including Australia), India, the Middle East and Africa,” said the senior official who did not wish to be named.

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Report: Internet economy has created 1.2M jobs

Job boost comes with 10% of sales now being made online

As the automobile industry sheds jobs, it comes as good news that over the last decade or so the Internet has created 1.2 million jobs, many paying higher salaries than average, a new study finds.

Internet business contributes 2.1%, or $300 billion, to the total GDP (gross domestic product) of the U.S. And IT and related online business may be faring better in this recession than they did in the dotcom bubble of 2000-2002, still growing revenue but at slower pace.

Consumers are now making 10% of their retail purchases online, with the exception of groceries, on the Internet, and Internet-based advertising has increased four-fold since 2002 to more than $20 billion, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and one of the authors of the study along with Hamilton Consultants Inc.

The study, considered independent, attempts to measure the so-called Internet economy. It was prepared for the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in New York, which represents a variety of Internet and media companies.

It does not raise policy implications, but IAB officials said the data will help them make the case for self-regulation on issues such as privacy. Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of IAB, said the report is the "first rigorous, comprehensive look at the size scope and impact of the interactive advertising ecosystem."

Deighton said the finding could help make the case for a move away from employer-based health care, which he called something out of the Middle Ages, to a system that makes it easier for people to start new businesses without having to provide health coverage.

The study's job estimate is based on people who work directly in building or maintaining the Internet's infrastructure, conduct advertising and commerce over it, and other direct uses. The number of indirect jobs supported by Internet-related activities may raise the total number of jobs by 1.54 million, or to slightly more than 3 million supported jobs.

E-commerce companies, as well as those that deliver the physical goods, were the major employers, with more than 500,000 of the 1.2 million jobs. Internet service providers followed at 181,000. Content-related employment was estimated at nearly 60,000, and software as a service, 31,500.

John Yaglenski, who runs the independent Walt Disney World travel information site Intercot.com, along with 35 volunteers, was at the announcement today and said that that regulation that imposes new requirements and restricts information collection could have a serious impact.

Yaglenski said he has privacy policies clearly outlined on his site and believes the industry is capable of regulating itself. "If the government steps in and regulates the industry to the degree that it has done in some other areas it could really affect our livelihood," he said.

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Report: Thursday Search Stats Put Bing Ahead of Yahoo

For a brief shining moment on Thursday, Steve Ballmer's quest for Bing to become the number-two search engine was achieved. Microsoft's Bing.com search engine surpassed Yahoo to second-place in searching on Thursday, though preliminary results from Friday put it back in third place.

In the United States, Bing captured 15.64 percent of searches, ahead of Yahoo's 10.32 percent, according to data from StatCounter. Globally, Bing had 5.56 percent of searches, still slightly ahead of Yahoo, which was at 5.17 percent.

Google still dominated searches on Thursday, with 71.99 percent in the U.S. and 87.66 percent worldwide.

As of Friday morning, however, Bing and Yahoo were battling it out for search dominance in the U.S.

Yahoo bested Bing with 10.75 percent of searches compared to Bing's 10.08 percent. Globally, Yahoo had a bigger lead, with 5.55 percent of searches compared to Bing's 3.73 percent.

Microsoft unveiled Bing at the D7 conference last week in California. A preview version of the site went live on June 1 and it made its formal debut on June 3.

Interest in Bing fluctuated throughout the week. In the U.S., Bing captured 5.52 percent out of the gate on June 1 and jumped to 9.13 percent the next day. By Wednesday, it dropped slightly to 8.4 percent but jumped to 15.64 on Thursday, the day after the launch.

Global statistics were similar, starting the week at 2.07 percent, experiencing a slight dip on Wednesday and reaching its all-time high of 5.56 percent on Thursday.

"It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner," Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, said in a statement.

Report: Earth's Atmosphere Disappearing Faster than Mars

We're not saying Earth will soon go all Total Recall on us and require humans to walk around in radiation-shielded space suits. But a new Discovery report indicates that researchers were recently "stunned" to find out that our planet is losing its atmosphere faster than both Mars and Venus are--neither of which have significant magnetic fields. That could have major implications for what we thought was true about Earth's atmosphere. And it's likely due to the sun.

"We often tell ourselves that we are very fortunate living on this planet because we have this strong magnetic shield that protects us from all sorts of things that the cosmos throws at us -- cosmic rays, solar flares and the pesky solar wind," said Christopher Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in the article. "It certainly does help in some of those areas but ... in the case of the atmosphere, this may not be true."

The theory is that Earth's magnetosphere is actually helping the sun's energized particles strip away a tiny fraction of Earth's atmosphere, according to a separate National Geographic article--meaning that we're losing oxygen and hydrogen faster than neighboring planets.

Even so, scientists say that we still have several billion years left of atmosphere. But the current puzzle is: if Earth, Mars, and Venus all started out in a similar fashion at the beginning of the Solar System's formation, why are their atmospheres behaving so differently?


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