Pakistan's IT exports reach $175 million in 2007-08: PSEB MD: Online News

ISLAMABAD:Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) has reached the figure of USD 175 million annual IT exports during the financial year 2007-08 about USD 13 million more than the USD 162 million target set for the said year.

"We are satisfied with the pace of progress of the local IT sector and ambitious about its further growth in future as this is the only industry in Pakistan that has registered a remarkable growth during the last five years," MD PSEB Talib Baloch said in a recent statement issued here.

Pakistan IT exports of US$116 million for the FY06-07 were also in excess to the set target of US$108 million, he disclosed. "This sector has consecutively registered 50 per cent annual growth in exports for the last five years showing its tremendous potential. If nurtured fully the IT industry could result in voluminous economic and commercial benefits."

He was of the view that the country's annual IT related exports could have been over USD 220 million had the power crisis not hit the national economy. "Longer load shedding hours have adversely affected the productivity of many ICT companies. However, despite these odds, PSEB is hopeful to exceed the targeted volume of exports in the forthcoming year(s)," he added.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan's IT exports reach $175 million in 2007-08: PSEB MD: Online News

Internet overhaul wins approval: BBC

A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris.

The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.

A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved.

"We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated," said Roberto Gaetano, a member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Internet overhaul wins approval: BBC

Speak up: Economist

Translation systems

Jun 25th 2008
From Economist.com

Devices and programs are getting better at translating languages

WARS often boost technological development. In Iraq the armed forces have faced a shortage of translators, both from within their own ranks and from bilingual locals whose lives can be put in peril if they are found to be working for the foreigners. This has created a demand for machines that can translate between Arabic and English. Although some experimental devices have proved unreliable, they are now improving.

A number of two-way translating devices have been under development as part of the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) programme run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. There are three main participants: IBM, BBN Technologies and SRI International.

SRI said recently that it had sold 150 machines to the American government for use in Iraq. IBM has provided troops with 1,000 of its devices which run MASTOR, its multilingual automatic speech translator. Both systems can translate tens of thousands of words between Iraqi Arabic and American English, even when people are speaking outside the laboratory.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Speak up: Economist

Why the future is in your hands: BBC

By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website

Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer.

Convergence has been the Holy Grail for mobile phone makers, software and hardware partners, as well as consumers, for more than a decade.

And for the first time the rhetoric of companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, who have boasted of putting a multimedia computer in your pocket, no longer seems far fetched.

"Converged devices are always with you and always connected," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Why the future is in your hands: BBC

eBay's legal woes: Handbagged: Economist

Jun 19th 2008 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition
The online auctioneer braces itself for some court decisions in France

HIGHFASHIONX, a retailer on the American website of eBay, an online auctioneer, is offering 52 handbags, belts, necklaces, rings and pairs of shoes from the house of Chanel. It also displays something even more exclusive: an apology from Chanel's lawyers. The luxury-goods firm had accused HighFashionX of selling fakes, but its wares were in fact all genuine.

The incident is part of a war between luxury-goods firms and eBay over counterfeit goods—a war that is about to intensify. On June 30th a French court will rule on a lawsuit brought against eBay in 2006 by LVMH, the world's biggest luxury-goods firm, which is demanding damages of €20m ($31m). Further rulings are expected on court cases brought against eBay by Dior Couture, a fashion house, and by L'Oréal, a cosmetics firm. For its part, eBay is launching a campaign in Brussels against firms that, it says, are stifling the development of e-commerce in Europe.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: eBay's legal woes: Handbagged: Economist

Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon: The three survivors: Economist

Jun 19th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
Illustration by David Simonds
What the diverging fates of Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon say about the internet

AND so Yahoo! survives. The internet company—which, at the age of 14, is one of the oldest—appears in the end to have rebuffed Microsoft, the software Goliath that wanted to buy it. It has done so, in part, by surrendering to Google, the younger internet company that is its main rival. In a vague deal apparently designed to confuse antitrust regulators, Yahoo! is letting Google, the biggest force in web-search advertising, place text ads next to some of Yahoo!'s own search results. Google thus controls some or all of the ads on all the big search engines except Microsoft's. Yahoo! lives, but on the web's equivalent of life support.

Yahoo!'s descent, first gradual then sudden, during this decade marks a surprising reversal of the fates of the only three big internet firms to have survived since the web's earliest days. Back in 1994 Jerry Yang and David Filo, truant PhD students at Stanford, started to publish a list, eventually named Yahoo!, of links to cool destinations on the nascent web. Around the same time, Jeff Bezos was writing his business plan for a website, soon to be called Amazon, for selling books online. The following year, Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American, put an auction site on the web that would become eBay.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon: The three survivors: Economist

'Shake-up' for internet proposed: BBC

By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website

The net could see its biggest transformation in decades if plans to open up the address system are passed.

The net's regulators will vote on Thursday to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.

If approved, it could allow companies to turn their brands into domain names while individuals could also carve out their own corner of the net.

The move could also see the launch of .xxx, after years of wrangling.

Top level domains are currently limited to individual countries, such as .uk (UK) or .it (Italy), as well as to commerce, .com, and to institutional organisations, such as .net, or .org.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: 'Shake-up' for internet proposed: BBC

Pakistan Ranks Above Iran and Indonesia in the Newest E-readiness rating by The Economist Intelligence Unit

By Saad Sarwar

Pakistan ranked sixty fourth in the latest e-readiness ranking released by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Pakistan's ranking has come down one spot from 2007 when it was ranked sixty third. However, Pakistan is ranked above Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Indonesia, Azerbaijan and Iran. India is ranked fifty fourth while the top spot goes to the US, followed by Hong Kong, Sweden, Australia, Denmark and Singapore.

For the complete report on E-readiness by EIU please click here.

LinkedIn raises $53m in funding: BBC

LinkedIn, a networking site for professionals, has raised $53m (£27m) of new funding from investors.

The financing by venture capitalists values the Silicon Valley start-up at more than $1bn, reflecting investor confidence in online communities.

Bain Capital Ventures led the site's latest round of funding, giving investors a 5% stake in the firm.

Existing partners Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Greylock Partners also invested in the site.

The company has so far raised a total of $80m in funding after the latest round of money-raising, the site's fourth so far.

The company, which is profitable, makes money from advertising and premium subscriptions.

LinkedIn's European chief executive Kevin Eyres said the firm's business model was different to that of many start-ups of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: LinkedIn raises $53m in funding: BBC

Firefox fans download 9,000 copies a minute: CNN

NEW YORK (AP) -- In just five hours, the new version of the Firefox Web browser had as many downloads as its predecessor got during its entire first day, the software's developers say.

Firefox 3 reached 1.6 million downloads by early evening Tuesday to match Firefox 2's first-day downloads.

In the opening hours, Firefox's Web site was distributing nearly 9,000 copies of the free software every minute.

Downloads continued Wednesday as Firefox supporters sought to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The category is new, and Guinness World Records must certify it, a process that could take a week or longer.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Firefox fans download 9,000 copies a minute: CNN

Honda makes first hydrogen cars: BBC

The Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the first ever commercial production of a hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle.

The medium-sized four-seater, called the FCX Clarity, runs on hydrogen and electricity, emitting only water vapour.

Honda claims the vehicle offers three times better fuel efficiency than a traditional, gasoline-powered car.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Honda makes first hydrogen cars: BBC

Samsung's Instinct Doesn't Ring True As an iPhone Clone: WSJ

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

The parade of iPhone lookalikes continues. Soon after Apple announced the first iPhone a year ago, factories in Asia, at the behest of U.S. phone carriers, were asked to respond to the sleek, touch-screen device. Some already have reached America; more are coming.

The latest to arrive is the Samsung Instinct, to be introduced by Sprint on June 20. I've been testing the Instinct, and while it isn't a bad phone and has some features the Apple product lacks, it's no match for the iPhone. The manufacturers haven't replicated the iPhone's greatest strength: beautiful, powerful, breakthrough software.

Also, the timing of the Instinct is unfortunate. It was designed to go up against the first iPhone. Sprint even has a Web site (nowisgood.com) comparing the two devices. But the Instinct will go on sale only three weeks before Apple and AT&T start selling the new 3G iPhone, the second-generation model announced earlier this week. This second iPhone model corrects some of the first model's main weaknesses, wiping out some advantages Sprint hoped the Instinct would have.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Samsung's Instinct Doesn't Ring True As an iPhone Clone: WSJ

Your number's up: Economist

Illustration by Belle Mellor

Networking: The internet will run out of addresses unless a new numbering system is adopted. After years of inaction, there are now signs of progress

NOBODY would expect a city water system designed for 1m residents to be able to handle a 1,000-fold increase in population in just a few years. Yet that is what the internet's fundamental addressing scheme has had to accommodate. When the network was first established there were only a handful of computer centres in America. Instead of choosing a numbering system that could support a few thousand or million addresses, the internet's designers foresightedly opted for one that could handle 4 billion. But now even that is not enough.

The addressing system, called internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), cannot keep up with the flood of computers, mobile phones, hand-held gadgets, games consoles and even cars and refrigerators flooding onto the network. Nearly 85% of available addresses are already in use; if this trend continues they will run out by 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a think-tank for rich countries, warned in May.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Your number's up: Economist

As Microsoft Walks Away,Yahoo Enters Google Ad Pact: WSJ

Moves May Prompt
Industry Scramble,
Regulator Scrutiny
By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG and JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
June 13, 2008; Page B1

Microsoft Corp. abandoned its pursuit of Yahoo Inc., opening the way for Yahoo to complete a search-advertising pact with rival Google Inc. that pits the industry's two biggest forces against Microsoft.

Microsoft told Yahoo that it was no longer interested in pursuing a takeover, even at the $33 a share it offered for the Internet company last month. That price would have valued Yahoo at nearly $50 billion.

Microsoft also unsuccessfully floated an alternative proposal to acquire Yahoo's search business. It isn't clear how Microsoft valued the business, but as part of that deal, Microsoft said it was prepared to acquire an additional 16% of Yahoo for $35 a share, or about $7.73 billion, according to people familiar with the situation.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: As Microsoft Walks Away,Yahoo Enters Google Ad Pact: WSJ

So much for the scare stories: Economist

Jun 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Illustration by David Simonds

New evidence shows that the gains outweigh the losses

BRITONS have long been fairly sanguine about traditional forms of globalisation such as trade and international investment. But the outsourcing of work formerly done in Britain to foreign countries has aroused fears, not least because it opens up the protected underbelly of services to international competition. Until now hard evidence of its overall impact on the British economy has been elusive. New research* should dispel most of the anxiety for those who prefer crunchy facts to scary myths.

Economists at Nottingham University's Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre delved into the accounts of over 66,000 firms in order to trace the effects of offshoring. Big companies with overseas affiliates are the most assiduous offshorers. Accordingly, the study paid particular attention to 2,850 British multinationals with foreign subsidiaries.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: So much for the scare stories: Economist

Pakistan joins world’s lowest telecom tariff club: The Post

Associated Press of Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: India can no longer claim of being amongst the world's lowest telecom tariffs", as Pakistan boasts of far more competitive mobile services, especially for international (ISD) calls.
So while Indian telecom consumers have been celebrating the benefits of competition and low calling rates, they can now happily push operators and telecom regulators to lower their tariffs further.
The international calls to some of the most frequently called countries from India and Pakistan - such as United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Germany and Hong Kong - present a stark comparison of how Pakistani mobile users are so much better-off than the Indians.
"Pakistani operators offer such ISD calls at rates as low as (Pakistani) Rs 1-1.99 per minute. In comparison, Indian mobile subscribers are still paying Rs. 5-6 per minute to call these countries.
In some cases, the ISD rates from Pakistan while calling mobile phones in these countries are slightly higher, but far lower than those available to Indian consumers," says Shalini Singh, a renowned journalist of India, wrote in an article recently published in a leading Indian newspaper.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan joins world’s lowest telecom tariff club: The Post

The Worlds Biggest IT Tower to be in Pakistan: Daily.pk

The multi-million rupee IT Tower project will take about 2 years to complete after which it will be the biggest call center in the world, said City Nazim Mustafa Kamal.

The call center in Sydney is presently regarded as the biggest with 8,000 call seats but the IT Tower in Karachi will have 10,000 call seats under one roof.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: The Worlds Biggest IT Tower to be in Pakistan: Daily.pk

City unveils huge wireless network: CNN

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma (AP) -- When Oklahoma City firefighters received a report that a body had been buried in a shallow grave at Lake Overholser, they consulted detailed topographical maps from the field as they pinpointed where to look.

That wouldn't have been possible without access to the city's new Wi-Fi mesh network, said fire Capt. Jim Kruta, who held a display of the network applications with police and other city officials outside City Hall.

"We pulled up a topographical map and were able to see where the water had receded and where someone might try to bury a body," Kruta said, adding, "We actually did find it."

The $5 million Wi-Fi network system covers a massive 555-square-mile area and was funded with money from a public safety sales tax and city capital improvement funds.

City officials say it's the largest city-owned and -operated Wi-Fi network in the world.

The network, which is used only for public safety and other city operations, includes 1,200 nodes, or routers, attached to street lights, utility poles and other spots across the city.

It's structured as a "mesh," meaning that if one node or router goes down, another fills its purpose.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: City unveils huge wireless network: CNN

Rummaging through the internet: Economist

Jun 5th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Computing: New techniques to navigate and gather information online promise to revolutionise web browsing

THE web has changed in many ways since it first emerged in the mid-1990s. The first web pages contained only text, and there was a big debate about whether pictures should be allowed. Today, by contrast, it is quite normal for pages to be bursting with photos, animated graphics, video clips, music and chunks of software, as well as text. In one respect, however, the web is unaltered: the clickable hyperlinks between pages are still the way users get from one page to another.

But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink—not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things.

All that information, of course, can already be accessed by web users willing to root around, opening a series of new browser windows or tabs. The goal of Hyperwords, Mr Hegland says, is “reducing the threshold” of satisfying curiosity, by making the quest faster and easier. Later this year he will release a new version that extends this trick beyond the web browser, turning any word in any window into a clickable “hyperword”.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Rummaging through the internet: Economist

Battlechips: Economist

Jun 5th 2008 | SANTA CLARA

From The Economist print edition

As once-distinct markets start to overlap, chipmakers come to blows

FOR YEARS the chip industry had only one story: AMD's David pitted against Intel's Goliath, as the two Silicon Valley firms fought it out in the market for microprocessors that power PCs and servers. But a flurry of announcements this week shows that things are no longer so simple, and chipmakers that once ruled separate markets have started to come into conflict.

Intel has long dominated the market for PC and server chips, but there are two other big classes of processors: those for high-end graphics and for mobile phones. Most graphics chips are made by ATI Technologies (now part of AMD) and Nvidia; most mobile handsets are powered by processors based on technology from ARM Holdings, a British chip-design company.

These markets have been largely separate because different processors need to be good at different things: PC chips must be able to run ever more complex software; graphics chips have to be good at rapidly crunching data in parallel streams; and handset chips must balance performance with power consumption. But the borders between these markets are blurring as the PC matures and portable devices become more elaborate and capable.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Battlechips: Economist

IBM aims to cool chips with water: BBC

A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said.

Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of "hair-width" cooling arteries.

They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components.

The technology was demonstrated in IBM's 3D chips, where circuits are stacked one on top of the other.

Laying chips vertically, instead of side by side, reduces the distance data has to travel , enhancing performance and saving critical space.

"As we package chips on top of each other....we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don't scale," explained Thomas Brunschwiler at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory.

"In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling."

For more on this article, please click on the following link: IBM aims to cool chips with water: BBC

From blueprint to database: Economist

Jun 5th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Computing: Aircraft and cars are designed using elaborate digital models. Now the same idea is being applied to buildings

THE advent of powerful computers has enabled architects to produce stunning images of new buildings and other structures. No proposal for a big project is complete without a photorealistic rendering of how the final design will look, or even a virtual walk-through. Perhaps surprisingly, however, those fancy graphics tend to be used only for conceptual purposes and play no role in the detailed design and construction of the finished structure. For the most part, this is still carried out with old-fashioned two-dimensional elevation and plan drawings, created by hand or using computer-aided design (CAD) software. “It’s still a 2-D profession,” says Shane Burger, an associate architect at Grimshaw, the firm that designed the Eden Project, a domed botanical garden in Cornwall, at the south-western tip of England.

And therein lies a problem, for even when it is generated by computer, a 2-D line drawing is just that: a bunch of lines. “There’s no structure that tells you that this line is a wall, stair or window,” says Chuck Eastman, a professor of architecture and computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “If you changed a window you would have to rebuild the wall around it to make it bigger or smaller.” Given that even a small building can require thousands of drawings, and producing drawings traditionally accounts for a big chunk of an architect’s fee, making changes can be a costly and time-consuming business. “If you adjust the shape of a building late in the game, you would have a lot of drawing to do,” says Mr Burger. Moreover, such drawings give no indication of the cost of construction. Instead, architects have to keep a schedule of materials that they continually update as the design progresses. Alter the design, and you also have to alter the entire schedule.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: From blueprint to database: Economist

Google accused over privacy law: BBC

By Maggie Shiels
BBC News, Silicon Valley

Privacy groups are accusing Google of violating California law in its reluctance to provide a direct link to its privacy policy on its homepage.

The search engine giant is being asked to write the word "privacy" alongside other information links.

"It's a short, seven-letter word and in the world of privacy it's a very important word," said Beth Givens of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Google says its policy is easy to find and it gives "accessible information".

'Not rocket science'

The issue has been building momentum following a series of blogs in the New York Times questioning Google's compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003.

The law requires any commercial website that collects personal information about its users to "conspicuously post its privacy policy on its website".

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Google accused over privacy law: BBC

Intel faces $25.4M antitrust fine: CNN

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's antitrust regulator said Thursday it will order Intel Corp. to pay 26 billion won ($25.4 million) for violating fair trade rules.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission said in a statement Thursday that it was issuing the order because the semiconductor giant offered rebates to South Korean computer companies and undercut competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Intel immediately criticized the ruling and said it would consider its options, including a possible appeal.

"We're disappointed and we completely disagree with the findings," Bruce Sewell, Intel senior vice president and general counsel, said in Seoul.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Intel faces $25.4M antitrust fine: CNN

Rewired: Economist

May 29th 2008 | HONG KONG

From The Economist print edition

The long-awaited reorganisation of China's vast telecoms industry begins

BY ANY measure—revenues, employees, customers—it is the largest industrial reorganisation ever. And, reflecting how business is done in China, it was announced in the most modest way, with a posting on a government website on May 24th. The country's telecoms industry, with nearly 600m mobile subscribers, 360m fixed-line customers and $244 billion in revenue, will be reconfigured. Six companies will be collapsed into three, each spanning mobile, fixed and broadband services.

China Mobile, the world's largest mobile operator by subscribers, will merge with China TieTong, the smallest fixed-line operator. China Telecom, the country's biggest fixed-line operator, will acquire one of the mobile networks run by China Unicom, which will merge its remaining mobile operations with China Netcom, another fixed-line operator. A sixth operator, China Satcom, will be taken over by China Telecom.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Rewired: Economist

Dell joins cut-down laptop market : BBC

Dell is joining the burgeoning ranks of companies offering cut-down laptops, called netbooks, aimed at the developing world and general consumers.

The laptop was shown by Michael Dell to the editor of website Gizmodo at the All Things Digital Conference.

According to the official Dell blog, Michael Dell "positioned it as the perfect device for the next billion internet users".

Dell has not released pricing or specifications for its first netbook.

A number of firms are expected to enter the netbook market this year.

The market is being driven in part by the work of the One Laptop Per Child programme, the success of the Asus Eee PC and the availability of chips, made by companies like Intel and Via, designed for low-cost, low power consumption devices.

Hewlett-Packard has announced a cut-down laptop which will be powered by Via's processors, and Acer is also entering the market.

More than 3.6 million netbooks, which cost less than $500, are expected to be sold this year.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Dell joins cut-down laptop market : BBC

Facebook 'violates privacy laws': BBC

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

A Canadian privacy group has filed a complaint against the social networking site Facebook accusing it of violating privacy laws.

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic has listed 22 separate breaches of privacy law in its country.

Clinic Director Phillipa Lawson told the BBC that, with over 7 million users in Canada, "Facebook needs to be held publicly accountable".

Facebook rejects the charge, claiming some of the highest standards around.

The basis of the complaint, filed with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, states that Facebook collects sensitive information about its users and shares it without their permission.

It goes on to say that the company does not alert users about how that information is being used and does not adequately destroy user data after accounts are closed...

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Facebook 'violates privacy laws': BBC