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Shared supercomputing and everyday research

Ashlee Vance / NYT — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:46:00 GMT

Portland, Oregon: For decades, the world’s supercomputers have been the tightly guarded property of universities and governments. But what would happen if regular folks could get their hands on one?

The price of supercomputers is dropping quickly, in part because they are often built with the same off-the-shelf parts found in PCs, as a supercomputing conference here last week made clear. Just about any organization with a few million dollars can now buy or assemble a top-flight machine.

Affordable technology: The Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the world’s fastest, links thousands of mainstream chips from AMD. AP

Meanwhile, research groups and companies such as International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett Packard Development Co. Lp, Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. are finding ways to make vast stores of information available online through so-called cloud computing.

These advances are pulling down the high walls around computing-intensive research. A result could be a democratization that gives ordinary people with a novel idea a chance to explore their curiosity with heavy computing firepower— and maybe find something unexpected. The trend has spurred some of the world’s top computing experts and scientists to work towards freeing valuable stores of information. The goal is to fill big computers with scientific data and then let anyone in the world with a personal computer, including amateur scientists, tap into these systems.

“It’s a good call to arms,” said Mark Barrenechea, the chief executive of Silicon Graphics, which sells computing systems to labs and businesses. “The technology is there. The need is there. This could exponentially increase the amount of science done across the globe.”

The notion of top research centres sharing information is hardly new. Some of the earliest incarnations of what we now know as the World Wide Web came to life so that physicists and other scientists could tap into large data stores from afar. In addition, universities and government labs were early advocates of what became popularized as grid computing, where shared networks were created to shuttle data about.

The current thinking, however, is that the labs can accomplish far more than was previously practical by piggybacking on some of the trends sweeping the technology industry. And, this time around, research bodies big and small, along with brainy individuals, can participate in the sharing agenda.

For inspiration, scientists are looking at cloud computing services such as Google’s online office software, photo-sharing sites and Amazon.com’s data centre rental programme. They are trying to bring that type of Web-based technology into their labs and make it handle enormous volumes of data.

“You’ve seen these desktop applications move into the cloud,” said Pete Beckman, the director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois. “Now science is on that same track. This helps democratize science and good ideas.”

With $32 million from the energy department, Argonne has set to work on Magellan, a project to explore the creation of a cloud-computing infrastructure that scientists around the globe can use.

Beckman argued that such a system would reduce the need for smaller universities and labs to spend money on their own computing infrastructure.

Another benefit is that researchers would not need to spend days downloading huge data sets so that they could perform analysis on their own computers. Instead, they could send requests to Magellan and just receive the answers.

Even curious individuals on the fringe of academia may have a chance to delve into things like climate change and protein analysis.

“Some mathematician in Russia can say, ‘I have an idea’,” Beckman said. “The barrier to entry is so low for him to try out that idea. So, this really broadens the number of discoverers and, hopefully, discoveries.”

The computing industry has made such a discussion possible. Historically, the world’s top supercomputers relied on expensive, proprietary components. Government laboratories paid vast sums of money to use these systems for classified projects. But over the last 10 years, the vital innards of supercomputers have become more mainstream, and a wide variety of organizations have bought them.

At the conference, undergraduate students competed in a contest to build affordable mini-supercomputers on the fly. And a supercomputer called Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee officially became the world’s fastest machine. It links thousands of mainstream chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Seven of the world’s top 10 supercomputers use standard chips from AMD and Intel, as do about 90% of the 500 fastest machines. “I think this says that supercomputing technology is affordable,” said Margaret Lewis, an AMD director. “We are kind of getting away from this ivory tower.” While Magellan and similar projects are encouraging signs, researchers have warned that much work lies ahead to free what they consider valuable information for broader analysis. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, researchers have developed software that can evaluate scans of the brain and heart, and identify anomalies that might indicate problems. To advance such techniques, the researchers need to train their software by testing it on thousands of body scans. But it is hard to find a repository of such scans that a hospital or a government organization such as the National Institutes of Health is willing to share, even if personal information can be stripped away, said George Biros, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Medical schools don’t make this information available,” he said.

Bill Howe, a senior scientist at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington, has urged research organizations to reveal their information. “All the data that we collect in science should be accessible, and that’s just not the way it works today,” he said.

Howe said high school students and so-called citizen scientists could make new discoveries if given the chance.

“Let’s see what happens when classrooms of students explore this information,” he said.

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New companies introduce ads among tweets

Brad Stone / NYT — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:21:00 GMT

Tuesday was another typical day for John Chow, blogger and Internet entrepreneur in Vancouver, British Columbia. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog.

Sponsored updates: Websites such as Ad.ly and Izea.com are paying users for sharing ads on networks such as Twitter and Facebook

Then he earned $200 (Rs9,320) by telling his fans where they could buy M&M’s candies with customized faces, messages and colours.

Chow is among a growing group of celebrities, bloggers and regular Internet users who are allowing advertisers to send commercial messages to their personal contacts on social networks. For the last month, he has used the services of Ad.ly, a start-up based in Los Angeles, and Izea.com, based in Orlando, Florida, to periodically surrender his Twitter stream to the likes of Charter Communications Inc., the Make a Wish Foundation and an online seminar about working from home.

In October, Chow’s income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. “I get paid for pushing a button,” he said.

It is perhaps the last frontier in advertising—getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers. The idea, according to the entrepreneurs who are developing such services for Twitter and other Web networks, is that people trust recommendations from those they know and respect, while they increasingly ignore nearly ever other kind of ad message in print, on television and online.

Even the Internet giants are warming to the idea of harnessing informal chats between friends to promote their products and services. This month, Amazon.com Inc. said it would start paying commissions to individuals who refer buyers to the site via Twitter messages. (People must first sign up for Amazon Associates, a programme in which Amazon pays Web publishers for referrals to its site.)

But the bigger opportunity may be in matching advertisers with so-called influencers—the more popular users of services such as Twitter.

A number of start-up firms, such as Ad.ly, Izea and Peer2, a division of Creative Asylum, a Hollywood ad agency, are pursuing the opportunity to put persuasive messages into regular dialogue on social networks.

“We don’t want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network,” said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. “All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us.”

For the most popular celebrities and bloggers on Twitter, such advertising can generate a surprisingly sizable payday. Ad.ly and Izea, which runs a service called Sponsored Tweets, say celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and musician Ernie Halter can earn up to $10,000 by sending a single message to their hundreds of thousands of followers.

Izea receives at least 15% of the advertiser’s payment to more popular Twitter users, and up to half for the less distinguished. Ad.ly takes a 30% cut across the board.

While both companies note their celebrity connections and the involvement of big advertisers such as Microsoft Corp. and National Broadcasting Co., they really salivate at the prospect of marrying less notable Internet personalities with the huge pool of smaller advertisers. For example, an expert on cycling, with 1,000 Twitter followers, might agree to send an ad about a new bike helmet—a message that might well be implicitly trusted by his followers.

One problem is that many Internet users eschew the idea of these ads, saying they commercialize authentic dialogue and undermine people’s credibility. “It interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience,” said Robert Scoble, a technology blogger with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, who says he “unfollows” people on Twitter who send him ads.

Facebook does not allow members to insert paid ads into status updates or profiles. “For us, it goes against the authenticity of the page,” said Brandon McCormick, a Facebook spokesman. Peer2 gets around the ban by offering users points instead of dollars; points are redeemable for Amazon products.

Part of the unease with this emerging form of advertising is rooted in the past. Three years ago, with a service called PayPerPost, Izea paid bloggers to pitch products to their readers. The endorsements were not clearly labelled as ads, and the service kicked up a dust storm of criticism in the blogosphere.

Ted Murphy, the CEO of Izea, a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially “made a big mistake” by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea’s ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers such as “£ad” or “£sponsor”.

One new company trying to add transparency to the business is Likes.com of San Francisco, which plans to introduce its ad network in December. The company encourages bloggers and Twitter users to specify their tastes in restaurants, movies, books and other products, and then to publish those recommendations to their blogs and social network pages.

Advertisers can then see who has favoured their products in the past, and how effective their recommendations have been at getting people to click on links. Depending on the advertiser, bloggers and Tweeters will be paid for every ad they send out, or every time someone clicks on the link.

Every Likes.com ad is clearly labelled as such, and once people click on a link, they are taken to another page that is also clearly labelled as a sponsorship. People are limited to posting an ad from Likes.com once every other day.

“We are trying to limit it, to prevent people from losing their following,” said Bindu Reddy, a former Google product manager who started the company with her husband, Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google engineer. “We know people are queasy about this.”

AmEx takes aim at PayPal with Revolution

Rob Lever / AFP — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:09:00 GMT

Washington: With its deal to buy Revolution Money Inc., American Express Co. (AmEx) is taking aim at the growing market for online and alternative payments, in a challenge to recognized leader PayPal Pte. Ltd, analysts said.

The financial services giant announced plans on Wednesday to buy the Web payments firm started in 2005 by Internet firm AOL Llc founder Steve Case, with the purchase price set at $300 million (Rs1,398 crore).

Analysts say AmEx is most interested in the so-called peer-to-peer services of Revolution, which enables low-cost money transfers among individuals and businesses.

“I think it’s a challenge to PayPal, but it’s more than that,” said Ed Kountz, an analyst who follows financial technologies at Forrester Research.

“AmEx is positioning themselves for more effective innovation, and for the next generation customer.”

Kountz said a variety of new technologies are emerging for person-to-person and alternative payments, but that few companies have been able to get the critical mass with both consumers and merchants to gain a foothold.

PayPal, a unit of eBay, has been able to dominate in this area but Google Checkout has struggled, say analysts.

Kountz said the market is growing with younger customers looking for convenient ways to make person-to-person transactions without cash, and with credit card usage hurt by the financial crisis.

“People are feeling greater comfort with cashless transactions,” said Kountz.

Revolution also aims to compete against traditional credit card firms by handling payments at a lower fee.

Joe Weisenthal at the online analysis site Business Insider said Revolution is “frequently described as a PayPal killer”, but has been unable to grow during the financial crisis.

The action by AmEx comes with PayPal expanding its offerings with new ways to transfer money using mobile phones or social networks such as Facebook.

Revolution “offers a unique card that seems to blend the idea of traditional credit and debit cards with Internet-based payments along the lines of PayPal and Google’s service”, said Jim Kim of the financial technology website FierceFinanceIT. “We’ll see how the other big boys react.”

Kountz said AmEx and Revolution “looks like a good marriage, but the proof will be in the delivery”.

Florida-based Revolution Money sprung from the venture capital group led by Case, with the mission “to drive transformative change by shifting power to consumers”, according to the group.

AmEx hopes to close the deal in early 2010 subject to regulatory approval.

Bhuvan should be accessed by different organisations: Chavan

PTI — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:29:00 GMT

New Delhi: Bhuvan, an indigenously developed satellite mapping tool similar to Google Earth, should be widely accessed by different organisations and agencies for their programmes, Science and Technology minister Prithviraj Chavan said Friday.

He said spreading its appeal among different sections is a major task before the Government. Bhuvan was launched in August this year by Indian Space Research Organisation.

“The biggest challenge before us today is how to make it popular and create a business model model like google earth out of Bhuvan,” he said at a seminar here.

He also asked the industry to talk to the space department under his ministry for its wider use.

Inaugurating the seminar on ‘Geospatial technologies for utilities in infrastructure´, he said geospatical technologies holds immense relevance for various fields in this technology driven world.

According to industry, this segment will grow into a Rs8 billion market in the coming years.

New initiatives by the Government in sectors such as urban planning, power, land records, agriculture and forests will be the major drivers for growth of geospatial industry, he said.

India, China add big buzz to wireless broadband

Doug Young / Reuters — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:17:00 GMT

Hong Kong: The launch of 3G in China and India by the likes of China Mobile and Bharti Airtel could boost wireless broadband worldwide, sparking a boom in new offerings as millions of users sign up for services.

The move to 3G and its likely follow-on, fourth-generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, is also set to help Chinese network equipment makers such as Huawei better challenge Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.

“A lot of people in China and India don’t have fixed line connectivity, so they will look to wireless broadband for their future online access,” said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer of the GSM Association, a mobile industry group, on the sides of a telecoms industry event this week in Hong Kong.

India, the world’s fastest-growing wireless market, with about 490 million users, has been adding about 14 million subscribers each month. The government has pencilled in revenue of Rs35,000 crore ($7.6 billion) from the auction of 3G spectrum.

O’Hara said some 169 million people worldwide have access to broadband-quality wireless service using a 3G technology known as HSPA, generally considered one of the first technologies to provide such speed.

That number is expected to swell to 1 billion by 2012, as operators upgrade their systems and start rolling out 4G, especially in the massive China and India markets, he said.

China took a long-delayed 3G plunge in January when Beijing awarded licenses to its top three mobile operators in the world’s largest mobile phone market, which now has about 700 million subscribers.

Since then, China Mobile and its two rivals, China Unicom and China Telecom have aggressively built their 3G networks, which now have several million users.

“Our big commitment is to HSPA,” Manoj Kohli, CEO of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile carrier, told Reuters on the sidelines of the event.

Looking to 4G

Less than a year after getting its 3G licenses, China Mobile, the world’s top mobile carrier with 500 million subscribers, is already looking past 3G to the next generation, planning to build a trial LTE network in multiple cities next year, Chairman Wang Jianzhou told reporters this week.

Those trials could be followed by the roll-out of a commercial LTE network as early as 2011, said O’Hara of the GSM Association.

The looming explosion of wireless broadband is fuelling a parallel rise in smartphones and other devices and applications optimised to take advantage of the high data speeds with functions such as TV streaming and video downloads over cellphones.

Qualcomm, the world’s largest maker of cellphone chips, is aggressively promoting its new Snapdragon chip optimized for smartbooks, a new category of cellular devices it hopes to pioneer. These devices are larger than smartphones but smaller than laptop PCs.

The company hopes to sell millions of the chips worldwide, Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs said on the sidelines of the show this week, declining to give a timeframe.

The push to 3G and beyond has also added new impetus to China’s Huawei, which has risen from relatively obscurity just a decade ago to become the world’s No. 2 networking equipment provider this year, passing Nokia Siemens Networks.

Google PCs to start as televisions; in 7 seconds or less

Reuters — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:05:00 GMT

California: New Google Inc software will start up a computer as fast as a television can be turned on, the search company said on Thursday as it showed off its Chrome operating system designed for PCs that do their work on the Web.

Google gave the first public look at its Chrome OS four months after declaring its intention of developing the PC’s main software, a move that pits it directly against Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc.

True to Google’s Internet-pedigree, the Chrome OS resembles a Web browser more than it does a traditional computer operating system like Microsoft Windows, matching Google’s ambition to drive people to the Web -- where they can see Google ads.

Google said the software will initially be available by the holiday season of 2010 on low-cost netbooks that meet Google’s hardware specifications, such as using only memory chips to store data instead of slower hard drives, the current standard.

Netbooks running Chrome OS will only be able to run Web applications and the user’s data will automatically be stored on the Web in the so-called cloud of Internet servers, Google executives said at an event at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters on Thursday.

“It’s basically a Web browsing machine,” said Altimeter Group analyst Charlene Li, referring to the netbooks powered by Chrome OS.

Such a machine is made for a world of near-constant, extremely fast Web connection, without the type of software that made Microsoft famous, since most of the work would be done by big machines on the Web which take directions and send information to relatively uncomplicated devices like a Chrome PC.

Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management for Google’s Chrome OS, said that computers running Chrome OS will be able to start in less than seven seconds.

“From the time you press boot you want it to be like a TV: You turn it on and you should be on the Web using your applications,” Pichai said.

Google said it is giving away the software for free, similar to its Android smartphone software, with the idea that improving the Web experience will ultimately benefit its Internet search advertising business, which generated roughly $22 billion in revenue in 2008.

“They’re doing it to get further and further entrenched in whatever people are doing to go online, whether that’s a browser, an operating system or in applications,” said Todd Greenwald, an analyst with Signal Hill Group.

“If Chrome is the OS then the attach (access) rate on Google searches will be a lot higher,” he said.

But analysts noted that the differences between conventional PCs and Chrome OS netbooks might give some consumers pause.

“If they view it from the conventional perspective, then it falls short,” Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said of Chrome OS, citing its lack of compatibility with traditional software and its limited offline capabilities.

Google officials said Chrome OS netbooks will be able to provide some functions when offline, but that the product was primarily designed to be connected to the Internet.

But Valdes said if Google can deliver on the products’ promises, such as fast performance, then consumers may view Chrome OS netbooks as distinct class of products with attractive benefits.

“I think that it’s initially going to appeal to small subset of the general consumer population,” said Valdes. “The question is can they build on that and expand that over time.”

Google made the computer code for the Chrome OS available to outside developers on Thursday, allowing developers to tinker with the software and potentially design new applications to run alongside it.

With Chrome, Google is seeking to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Corp’s Windows, which runs on nine out of 10 personal computers.

The Chrome OS also challenges makers of traditional, desktop software, including Microsoft and its lucrative Office suite of productivity software, since Chrome OS only runs Web applications.

Google’s Pichai, noted during a demonstration on Thursday, that Chrome OS-based PCs would be interoperable with Web-based versions of software, such as Microsoft’s online version of its Excel spreadsheet.

Google said all data in Chrome will automatically be housed in the so-called cloud, or on external servers, but also cached on the computer’s internal hardware to boost performance.

If a person loses their netbook, Google Engineering director Matt Papakipos explained, they can buy a new one, log in and within seconds have a machine with access to all the same data as their previous device.

Mumbai no longer ‘meri jaan’

Seema Chowdhry and Samanth Subramanian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:45:00 GMT

New Delhi: On the Facebook group “Mumbai Terror Attacks: I condemn it” (membership 35,166), a new condolence message was posted on 15 June—mourning not a victim of the attacks last year, but the defeat of the Indian cricket team in a Twenty20 match.

A year is a long time in social networking. Facebook groups that sprouted like mushrooms last November, decrying political opportunism and the Centre’s weak security measures, have now become semi-comatose. Offline, citizens’ groups have similarly turned muted, or they have tried to storm the political establishment they once decried.

Until last November, Sathya N., 21, worked at Nirmal building, Nariman Point, near the Trident hotel in Mumbai. After the three-day carnage, when many of her friends were talking about participating in candlelight vigils or meeting groups of people hungry for change, Sathya was busy signing up with online groups forbidden by her parents to participate in the marches.

Sathya joined as many as four Facebook groups. “There was so much raw emotion around those days,” she says over the phone from Mumbai. “I found it easier to deal with my feelings by taking part in online discussions and urging friends to join these groups.”

But by February, things had changed.

“When I look back, I feel if I had not been working in that area at the time, I don’t think I would have been so traumatized or willing to seek out strangers on the Internet to express my feelings,” she says. “Now that emotion has sort of died down.” Sathya hasn’t posted a message on these groups in the last nine months because she says “there has not been much activity on these anyway”.

Evidently, Sathya is not the only non-active member across these groups. Many have seen no activity from members since December; those that have, are littered with off-topic posts. These Facebook groups have thus turned into platforms for random discussions unlinked to 26/11, its impact on Mumbai, or ideas that can bring about the change they once sought.

Protest march: A peace rally organized at the Gateway of India on 3 December 2008. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint

Among the last few posts on “E.N.O.U.G.H.” (857 members) was an open letter, written on 2 December, to L.K. Advani, asking him to stop “pretending that you care about this country”. On “People Against Terrorism—We Must Take A Stand” (1,997 members), the last post from 27 April talks about why people must vote. “Mumbai Terror Attacks: I condemn it” includes a 27 March post discussing India’s fear of Pakistan; on 11 August, a post advertised a business opportunity for all Mumbaikars.

On “One Million Strong for Bombay” (23,601 members), a 9 October post concerned the activist Hansel D’Souza, chairman of the Juhu Citizens’ Welfare Group, the Citizens’ Consensus candidate for the Andheri (West) assembly constituency; an earlier post involved the schedule of the Jazz Yatra. On “The Black Badge for Bombay” (853 members), the last post, from 31 August, wonders if Pakistan is a pawn being used by China against India.

“The idea behind ‘Black Badge for Bombay’ initially was to keep the pressure on so that the reaction to the attacks in terms of government preparedness results in concrete action,” says Somasekhar Sundaresan, the group’s creator. “The government has now set up a combat force in Mumbai, which was the stated immediate objective of this movement and pressure group. After that, we needed to move on.”

Sundaresan admits that the posts have not been updated more frequently because he hasn’t worked hard enough to get people interested in newer issues. “Most of my discussions about civil rights movements are restricted to five or six friends who are members of this Facebook group too,” he says. “It is easier to talk to them because I meet them professionally and personally often.” “The Black Badge for Mumbai” has also been unable to organize offline meetings.

What these groups lacked, according to Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, was a dedicated team to keep the momentum going. “They don’t have intelligently incremental action points that keep their audiences increasingly engaged,” he says in an email interview. “The creators often underestimate the importance of offline activities that will keep their audiences motivated. Finally, many of them take their membership for granted and don’t bother sending regular updates or even an occasional thank you.”

It was perhaps the need to sustain momentum that drove some of the offline citizens’ groups into the political sphere. Anil Bahl allied his Let’s Rebuild India with the Professionals Party of India. A group called Jago Mumbai turned into the Jago Party, which fielded a candidate in the Lok Sabha election from north-west Mumbai. (He lost.) “We decided that we couldn’t do anything alone,” says Bhuresh Barot, a working member of the Jago Party. “You need to be in power to do anything.”

As his party’s south Mumbai coordinator, Barot witnessed a rapid dissolution of voter outrage back into voter apathy; in the Lok Sabha election, the turnout stood at 43.3%. “The main reason seemed to be that voters thought they already knew the ideology of every party,” Barot theorizes. “And they decided they simply didn’t have faith in the candidates.”

Residues of faith do remain, however, in the power of social networking. Ruben Mascarenhas, a 22-year-old member of the Yuva Satta movement in Mumbai, believes that intelligent use of social networking sites to generate awareness is what will eventually usher in many revolutions in the country. “Post-26/11, I realized that online activism is not just about the euphoria that comes with creating a group or having 500 people sign up in a matter of days,” Mascarenhas says. “You also need the energy to sustain these groups.” He says he knows now that creating online groups with fewer but committed individuals, who give ideas and work on them, is a better model to follow than signing on strangers who will invest just a few minutes online.

The 26/11 online groups lost their followers, Abraham argues, only because “there was no unified vision of where these groups wanted to go. Properly designed advocacy efforts on the Internet such as that of Michael Geist from Canada, who managed to block anti-consumer changes to the copyright law by using a Facebook group, will and can work”.

That may be true. But it may also just be as Barot says: “People got busy. This is Mumbai. This is a fact of life.”

seema.c@livemint.com

Gaming’s biggest launch remains unmoved by 26/11 controversy

Krish Raghav — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:45:00 GMT

New Delhi:Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a new video game that some gamers say channels imagery from the Mumbai terror attacks for one of its early levels, made $550 million (Rs2,552 crore) in sales in its first week of release—or more than the last Batman movie.

The game, released on 10 November for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC formats, shifted 4.7 million units ($310 million) on its opening day in the US and UK alone, higher than The Dark Knight in its opening weekend ($158.4 million). It is the most successful video game launch yet, beating previous record holder Grand Theft Auto IV, which sold 3.7 million units (approx $300 million) on its first day in 2008.

The controversy was set off in the first week of November when footage from one of its early levels, called “No Russian” leaked on the Internet before launch. The level, set during a fictional terrorist attack on Moscow’s airport, was described by leading gaming news site Gamespot.com as “reminiscent of last year’s mass killings in Mumbai, India.”

A small 10-minute stage in the game’s first act, “No Russian” sees the player taking the role of an undercover operative embedded with an ultranationalist terrorist outfit as they open fire on unarmed civilians in Moscow’s airport before proceeding through the terminal and into the runways.

The modus operandi of the in-game terrorists, clad in kevlar armour and carrying automatic weapons as they move through the airport, echoes the Mumbai attacks, as does the atmosphere of the stage itself—screams and wails and confusion reign with security forces attempting to move in and intervene.

It is possible for the player to choose not to fire on civilians, but neither can he/she intervene to stop the massacre taking place. The game does, however, offer the option of skipping the level altogether. “It pops up a warning before the level starts that the content could be potentially disturbing or offensive,” said a spokesperson for World-Wide CD-ROMS Ltd, the Indian distributor for the game. The game released last week in Indian stores and is priced at Rs3,499 (for the console version) and Rs1,299 (for the PC).

Response to the controversial level has been divided.

Some, such as gaming blog Fidgit (http://www.fidgit.com), have called it “unnecessary, cheap and disgusting”, calling out developers Infinity Ward Inc. for a lack of sensitivity. “I thought of Fort Hood. Mumbai. Columbine. Things I don’t particularly care to think of in a glib action game.” The post is accompanied by a photograph showing the aftermath of the attacks on the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. It’s a scene echoed early in the level, as the player passes the airport waiting areas up staircases draped with bodies.

Tim Bissell, writing for blog Crispy Gamer (http://www.crispygamer.com), said “I hope the designers will have the maturity to recognize the difference between testing the conscience to make a serious point and shocking the conscience as a kind of pointless test.”

Hot seller: A screen shot from Modern Warfare 2.

But some gamers disagree. Review site 1up.com called the level the “emotional zenith” of the game’s story, writing, “Hopefully this signals a step forward for the “video game as art” debate, a move from electronic toy to a true multimedia device for conveying adult stories to adults.”

Other felt the level could not be considered in isolation from the rest of the game. “I think we’re taking [the level] out of context. It probably makes sense within a story setting,” says Gopal Sathe, editor of blog Split-screen.com. Activision Publishing Inc. echoes the same sentiment. “The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold-bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them,” they said in a statement on 28 October. In the same week, a viral video promoting the game was pulled off the Internet after criticism that it contained a coded homophobic slur.

The Call of Duty franchise is a series of first-person video games for both the PC and consoles. A majority of them are set in World War II, except for Modern Warfare 2 and its prequel Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Those two games were influenced by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, with stages, for example, referencing “shock and awe”, the military doctrine used extensively in that campaign. The series is popular both commercially (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold at least 13 million copies worldwide) and critically, and is recognized for its polished setpieces, cinematic sweep, and attention to detail. Activision also runs a non-profit foundation called the Call of Duty Endowment that donates to charities that work with US army veterans.

Karnataka doctors use iPhone to screen infants for eye diseases

Seema Singh — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:13:00 GMT

Bangalore: Toggling two iPhones, each downloading live data from patients in Kolar in Karnataka and Kolkata in West Bengal, paediatric retinal surgeon Anand Vinekar showed on Thursday how high-resolution retinal images can be received on the phone, diagnosed and a digitally signed medical report sent to the patient in any remote location.
The move marks the debut of the iPhone in healthcare applications in India, and taking the first step is Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology in Bangalore, which has launched a telemedicine programme that will screen rural and semi-urban infants for a potentially blinding condition called retinopathy of prematurity, or RoP.
All premature babies, with birth weight less than 2kg, are at risk of RoP. Of 27 million live births in India every year, around 8% are premature and 15-20% of them could go blind due to RoP if not screened and treated on time, say Narayana Nethralaya ophthalmologists.
The hospital has been running some programmes in a few districts of northern Karnataka for screening RoP and other common conditions including ocular cancers. But speedy access to the retinal images, diagnosis and treatment posed some challenges, says its chairman Bhujang Shetty, leading to the development of a software suite in collaboration with i2i Telesolutions.
The partners say the new pilot will now extend throughout Karnataka and run for three years, during which they expect it to spread to other parts of the country. “The Central government has shown keen interest in taking it to other parts of the country,” he said, as it is already supporting the programme under the National Rural Health Mission.
“If an infant needs treatment, it needs to be given within 48 hours or else the retina detaches, causing permanent blindness,” said Dr Vinekar, the project coordinator at Narayana Nethralaya.
Making its software compliant with the US Food and Drug Administration’s Dicom (digital imaging and communication in medicine) standards, i2i says its solution can be used anywhere in the world.
What it has developed is an end-to-end online treatment regimen—from data acquisition, transmission to eventually issuing a medical report in a PDF format and finally sending it across over iPhone with the doctor’s digital signature.

Skype in mobile push ahead of spin-off

Joanne Chiu and Huang Yuntao / Reuters — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:48:00 GMT

Hong Kong: Skype is talking with mobile handset and network companies to install its trademark Internet telephony service, an executive said on Thursday, as it seeks growth drivers before being spun off by parent eBay.
Skype had formed a strategic alliance with Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 Group and was seeking similar tie-ups with other mobile operators and handset makers, Russ Shaw, Skype general manager for mobile, said in an interview.
Skype already comes pre-installed on some cellphones, though carriers in general have been reluctant to actively support the service as it circumvents their lucrative domestic long distance and international calling business.
More coverage: A file photo of a woman speaking on a mobile phone in Beijing, China. Skype says the list of potential partners includes wireless network operators in China, an important market for the firm. Stefen Chow/Bloomberg
“We’ll have some really good things to share about additional carrier relationships. That will be around next year,” Shaw said.
He added that the list of potential partners included wireless network operators in China, which is an important market for the company.
“We’ve had discussions with them (Chinese carriers),” Shaw said. “It’s not going to happen immediately, but I think over the coming months we hope to have some fruitful discussion and be able to demonstrate good work and relationship.”
He declined to give names, but China’s mobile market—the world’s largest with more than 600 million subscribers—is dominated by three firms, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
Skype is also talking with carriers in North America, Europe and other Asian markets.
EBay is selling Skype to a group of investors in order to focus on its core online auction and payments business. Shaw said the disposal is on track to be complete by year end.
“It’s a positive change. The new investors, I think, can bring a lot of experience into the business,” he said. “It (the eBay sale) makes us an independent company again, we’ll be private but independent and it’s a good thing for us.”
Facing growing competition from other high-profile services, including Google Inc.’s Google Voice, Skype is mostly used on desktop computers.
But it wants to move into the fast-growing mobile field, which is getting a boost from the roll-out of high-speed mobile broadband services worldwide that are necessary to make its voice-over-Internet services function smoothly.
Skype, whose technology has allowed legions of consumers to make practically free long-distance calls over the Internet on fixed lines, has made the move into mobile by seeking deals with operators such as Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 Group.
It also announced a deal with Nokia earlier this year to preload its software in Nokia N900 model, and Skype software has been downloaded onto seven million Apple iPhones. Established in 2003, Skype has more than 520 million registered customers who use the free Web service for voice, video or text communication. But despite its size, its revenue is relatively modest—at about $551 million in 2008—as the company has had a difficult time getting users to pay for its largely free services.
Skype aims to nearly double its annual revenue to $1 billion in two years.
Shaw shrugged off concerns that the company will pose a threat to mobile operators, and said the service could even help some carriers attract new subscribers and retain existing ones.
“Initially carriers are wondering what could Skype bring, is Skype a threat or is Skype actually doing something different?” he said.

Bookmarking for busy people

Sidin Vadukut — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:02:00 GMT

New Delhi: Instapaper is a remarkably simple bookmarking tool, but one that is full of clever features.
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Activating the service involves a simple sign up, and dragging and dropping a small bookmarklet. The next time you come across a web page you don’t have time to read, click the Instapaper button and the link is saved for good.
Later, when time permits, browse through the list at leisure. But Instapaper let’s you do a lot more: you can read the articles in clean plain text, download them, print them and even ship them to your Kindle.
Of course there is an iPhone app as well. For a video demo of the simple but robust Instapaper service see this week’s PlayStream video tutorial.

HP launches wireless, touch-screen printers

PTI — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:34:00 GMT

New Delhi: Hewlett Packard (HP) on Thursday launched its range of touch-screen and wireless printers ‘HP Touchsmart series’ priced at Rs6,000 onwards.
“We think touch screen will become a common feature across printers going forward,” HP India Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) president Ravi Aggarwal said.
The company, which has about 75% market share in the All-in-One (AIO) category in India is looking at consolidating its position further.
The AIO category includes a combination of printer, copier and scanner.
“We have a 75% market share in the AIO category and would look at building this further,” Aggarwal said.
HP vice president (Consumer Go-To-Market and Inkjet and Web Solutions - IPG Asia Pacific and Japan) Christoph Schell said India accounted for about 15% revenues of the division in the region.
“India is an important market for us. In the Apac region it accounts for about 15% of the revenues of the Imaging and Printing Group and we want to increase this further,” Schell said.
Quoting a Technopak report, HP said the Indian touchscreen market is expected to hit $9 billion by 2015, growing at a CAGR of 14%.

Skype in talks to install svc in mobile phones

Reuters — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:24:00 GMT

Hong Kong: Skype said on Thursday that it is in talks with mobile handset and network companies to install its trademark Internet telephony service as it seeks growth drivers before being spun off by parent eBay.
Skype had formed a strategic alliance with Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 Group and was seeking similar tie-ups with other mobile operaters and handset makers, Russ Shaw, Skype general manager for mobile, told Reuters in an interview.
“We’ll have some really good things to share about additional carrier relationships. That will be around next year,” he said.
He added that the list of potential partners included wireless network operators in China, but declined to be more specific.
Established in 2003, Skype has more than 500 million users and the company aims to nearly double annual revenue to $1 billion in two years from $551 million in 2008.
eBay is selling Skype to a group of investors in order to focus on its core online auction and payments business. Shaw said the transaction was proceeding smoothly and could close on schedule in the fourth quarter.

Facebook’s unfriend is word of the year

Belinda Goldsmith / Reuters — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:47:00 GMT

New York: Unfriend has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy bent.
Unfriend was defined as a verb that means to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook. “It has both currency and potential longevity,” said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary programme, in a statement. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year.”
Other words deemed finalists for 2009 by the dictionary’s publisher, Britain’s Oxford University Press, came from other technological trends, the economy, and political and current affairs.
In technology, there was “hashtag”, which is the hash sign added to a word or phrase that lets Twitter users search for tweets similarly tagged; “intexticated” for when people are distracted by texting while driving, and “sexting”, which is the sending of sexually explicit SMSes and pictures by cellphone.
Finalists from economy were “freemium”, meaning a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, and “funemployed”, referring to people taking advantage of newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests.
In the political and current affairs section, finalists included “birther”, meaning conspiracy theorists challenging President Barack Obama’s US birth certificate, and “choice mom”, a person who chooses to be a single mother.
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Is doomsday coming? Maybe, but not in 2012

Dennis Overbye / NYT — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:54:00 GMT

Nasa said last week that the world was not ending—at least anytime soon.
Last year, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which is good news for the habitually jittery. How often do you have a pair of such blue-ribbon scientific establishments assuring us that everything is fine?
In spotlight: A wallpaper from the movie 2012.
On the other hand, it is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.
CERN’s pronouncements were intended to allay concerns that a black hole would be spit out of its new Large Hadron Collider and eat the earth.
The announcements by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the form of several website postings and a video posted on YouTube, were in response to worries that the world will end on 21 December 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close.
The doomsday buzz reached a high point with the release of the new movie 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich, who previously inflicted misery on the earth from aliens and glaciers in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.
In the movie, an alignment between the sun and the centre of the galaxy on 21 December 2012, causes the sun to go berserk with mighty storms on its surface that pour out huge numbers of the elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos. Somehow the neutrinos transmute into other particles and heat up the earth’s core. The earth’s crust loses its moorings and begins to weaken and slide around. Los Angeles falls into the ocean; Yellowstone blows up, showering the continent with black ash. Tidal waves wash over the Himalayas, where the governments of the planet have secretly built a fleet of arks in which a select 400,000 people can ride out the storm.
But this is only one version of apocalypse out there. In other variations, a planet named Nibiru crashes into us or the earth’s magnetic field flips.
There are hundreds of books devoted to 2012, and millions of websites, depending on what combination of “2012” and “doomsday” you type into Google. All of it, astronomers say, is bunk. “Most of what’s claimed for 2012 relies on wishful thinking, wild pseudoscientific folly, ignorance of astronomy and a level of paranoia worthy of ‘Night of the Living Dead’,” Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and an expert on ancient astronomy, wrote in an article in the November issue of Sky and Telescope.
Personally, I have been in love with end-of-the-world stories since I started consuming science fiction as a disaffected child. Scaring the pants off the public has been pretty much the name of the game ever since Orson Welles broadcast “War of the Worlds,” a fake newscast about a Martian invasion of New Jersey, in 1938.
But the trend has gone too far, suggested David Morrison, an astronomer at the Nasa Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who made the YouTube video and is one of the agency’s point people on the issue of Mayan prophecies of doom. “I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money,” Morrison said. “There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck.” Morrison said he had been getting around 20 letters and email messages a day from people as far away as India scared out of their wits. In an email message, he enclosed a sample that included one from a woman wondering if she should kill herself, her daughter and her unborn baby. Another came from a person pondering whether to put her dog to sleep to avoid suffering in 2012.
All of this reminded me of the kinds of letters I received last year about the putative black hole at CERN. That, too, was more science fiction than science fact, but apparently there is nothing like death to bring home the abstract realms of physics and astronomy. In such situations, when the earth or the universe is trying to shrug you and your loved ones off this mortal plane, the cosmic does become personal.
Morrison said he did not blame the movie for all this, as much as the many other purveyors of the Mayan prediction, as well as the apparent failure of some people, reflected in so many arenas of our national life, to tell reality from fiction. But then, he said, “my doctorate is in astronomy, not psychology”.
In an email exchange, Krupp said: “We are always uncertain about the future, and we always consume representations of it. We are always lured by the romance of the ancient past and by the exotic scale of the cosmos. When they combine, we are mesmerized.”
A Nasa spokesman, Dwayne Brown, said the agency did not comment on movies, leaving that to movie critics. But when it comes to science, Brown said, “we felt it was prudent to provide a resource”.
If you want to worry, most scientists say, you should think about global climate change, rogue asteroids or nuclear war. But if speculation about ancient prophecies gets you going, here are some things Morrison and others think you should know.
To begin with, astronomers agree, there is nothing special about the sun and galactic centre aligning in the sky. It happens every December with no physical consequence beyond the overconsumption of eggnog. And anyway, the sun and the galactic centre will not exactly coincide even in 2012.
If there were another planet out there heading our way, everybody could see it by now. As for those fierce solar storms, the next sunspot maximum will not happen until 2013, and will be on the mild side, astronomers now say.
Geological apocalypse is a better bet. There have been big earthquakes in California before and probably will be again. These quakes could destroy Los Angeles, as shown in the movie, and Yellowstone could erupt again with cataclysmic force sooner or later. We and our works are indeed fragile and temporary riders on the earth. But in this case, “sooner or later” means hundreds of millions of years, and there would be plenty of warning.
The Mayans, who were good-enough astronomers and timekeepers to predict Venus’ position 500 years in the future, deserve better than this.
Mayan time was cyclic, and experts such as Krupp and Anthony Aveni, an astronomer and anthropologist at Colgate University, say there is no evidence that the Mayans thought anything special would happen when the odometer rolled over on this Long Count in 2012. There are references in Mayan inscriptions to dates both before the beginning and the ending of the present Long Count, they say, just as your next birthday and 15 April loom beyond New Year’s eve, on next year’s calendar. So keep up those mortgage payments.
©2009/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Nasa launches space shuttle Atlantis

AFP — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:10:00 GMT

Florida: The shuttle Atlantis has blasted off carrying vital supplies and spare parts for the International Space Station to push its life past the 2010 retirement of the aging shuttle fleet.
Atlantis launched at 2:28am on Monday from the Kennedy Space Center near Florida’s Cape Canaveral carrying six astronauts and some 27,000 pounds (12,300 kilos) of gyroscopes, ammonia tanks and other equipment.
“A perfect launch, right on time,” said a Nasa spokesman after the shuttle reached orbit about eight minutes into its flight, hurtling at a speed of more than 24,000 kilometers per hour, Nasa said.
Moment before the lift-off, launch director Mike Leinback wished the crew godspeed, declaring: “All the vehicle systems are outstanding today, the weather is near perfect for a good lif-toff today.”
Space agency officials said the mission was crucial as just five more shuttle launches remain before the planned September 2010 retirement of the fleet and the spare parts will add years to the space station’s life.
“You’ll see this theme in some of the flights that are going to come after ours as well,” said mission director Brian Smith. “This flight is all about spares, basically, we’re getting them up there while we still can.”

The science of predicting an earthquake

Jacob P. Koshy — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:23:00 GMT

Ghuttu, Uttarakhand: Perched at an altitude of 6,000ft, among the scenic peaks of the Lower Himalayas and the verdant Bhilganga Valley, a group of mild-mannered scientists are pottering around their instruments, eagerly awaiting the next big earthquake.
Precursor watch: Researcher Naresh Kumar adjusting a gravimeter. Ramesh Pathania / Mint
“At least a 6 (in magnitude) and within a 200km radius,” says Naresh Kumar, a researcher in his mid-30s, with the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG) in Dehradun. Since 2007, Kumar has been shuttling between his workstation in Dehradun and Ghuttu, a charming hamlet 200 rubbled-and-winding kilometres away.
Unknown to even most of its local population, Ghuttu hosts India’s first coordinated attempt at studying earthquake precursors—or warning signals to a coming earthquake. The laboratory, called the Multiparametric Geophysical Observatory, atop an isolated hill, is much more than the six white rooms spread across an area slightly more than half a hockey field.
Each of these cramped quarters hosts instruments such as gravimeters, essentially ultrasensitive weighing machines, and specialized magnetometers that measure minute changes in the gravitational force, the ups and downs of the magnetic field surrounding the rocks within a 50km radius, as well as continuously survey the radioactivity of the water table in the vicinity.
There are the workhorse seismometers, too, which have long helped scientists pinpoint the intensity and location of an earthquake. But these other instruments, which continuously stream data via a VSAT satellite connection to Dehradun, are helping these scientists create an electromagnetic profile of the rock structure in these parts.
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“In another decade, we should be able to quantify whether we can record earthquake precursors of earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above,” says Baldev Arora, former director, WIHG, and credited with setting up the laboratory.
Since the 1970s, scientists internationally have been mapping prominent earthquake-prone zones such as the San Andreas Fault, which runs across California, for unusual electromagnetic signals, or structural fissures and strains in the rock patterns. Such signals are a sign that pressure, or vast reserves of heat and radiation, are bubbling up over time between tectonic plates that are continually moving and at various times may collide, diverge or slide against one another.
These energy vents begin to disturb the rocks that lie on these plates and leave a variety of signatures that are picked up by magnetometers or gravimeters.
Current theories say that the Indian land mass, which rests on a plate called the Indo-Australian Plate, is sliding along another massive structure called the Asian Plate, which includes China and Japan.
The ensuing energy release from this friction not only created the Himalayas, but also spread along a line called the Main Central Thrust (MCT), a 2,500km long zone that stretches from Bhutan to well beyond India’s western border. This line hosts several tectonic rocks, ones that are perched along one another and by virtue of their unsteady nature are subject to changing gravitational pulls and pressure, that are most likely to trigger earthquakes.
Even though India doesn’t see as many significant earthquakes as parts of the US or Japan, it has lost several thousand lives to earthquakes in the 20th century.
Though the most vivid earthquakes in India’s memory may be the Bhuj earthquake of January 2001 in Gujarat and the Latur earthquake of September 1993 in Maharashtra, experts say that historically quakes are far more frequent in northern and north-eastern India. The government’s latest seismic zoning maps list Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and parts of Delhi as category 4 and 5—making them the most earthquake-prone regions in the country.
“In putting up a centre over here, we’ve made a balanced, well-thought-out gamble,” says Arora. That’s because India’s biggest earthquakes in the last century, such as the Kangra quake (7.5 magnitude) in 1905, and the Bihar quakes in 1934 (8.6 magnitude) and 1950, were all along different points in MCT. Given the volatility of MCT, a big earthquake—of at least 6.5 magnitude—within a 50km radius of Ghuttu is imminent. “This region has not seen a big one in 200 years. So it’s only a matter of time,” Arora emphasized, without specifying a time frame.
Apart from Ghuttu’s coordinates—it is a mere 5km off the MCT fault line—what worked in its favour was the abundance of so-called hard rock, which makes it easier to record shifts in gravity and the magnetic fields, as well as its relative isolation from human settlements.
“In Srinagar, when we were testing some of these instruments, most of the readings on the instruments were from people kick-starting their scooters,” says Arora.
Recent significant earthquakes such as the 1991 Uttarkashi and 1999 Chamoli earthquakes are located around MCT, but were of less than 7 magnitude.
The vagaries of gravity and magnetic fields apart, scientists here are also looking at the concentration of radon gas—a by-product of uranium decay—in the water table as an earthquake precursor. The metric has gained importance ever since Chinese scientists included such data to accurately predict the 1975 earthquake in Haicheng, China.
However, the scientists at Ghuttu are yet to sense success. The researchers add that a “small” earthquake, 60km away, that touched 5 on the Richter scale didn’t generate any unusual early warning signals on the gravimeter that weighs about a tonne and boasts an ultrasensitive niobium sensor bathed in super-cooled liquid helium, and that is even sensitive to footsteps.
Still, “there were changes during the earthquake, but the magnetic fields and the radon did show some unusual readings a few days before”, says B.I. Khandelwal, another scientist who does 20-day stints atop the lonely hillock, “at least once in two months”.
The researcher, who is responsible for everything from taking readings twice a day on the magnetometers to ensuring a steady power supply for the gravimeter, says he is used to the solitude and the silences.
“It does get boring, because the newspapers don’t come here. But now it’s much better,” he says. The comfort comes from power cuts lasting a “mere” 6 hours compared with outages lasting as long as 7-15 days at a time earlier. Also, the newly installed Airtel tower nearby means he can have uninterrupted conversations with his family instead of climbing the nearby water tank and banking on stray, ephemeral signal.
But the occasional leopard is still a worry. “I never leave this place without a bat,” Khandelwal says of his occasional nightly trips to the village for provisions and newspapers.
Despite several instruments and rigorous monitoring, most earthquake precursors are still iffy.
“In 1976, the very next year (after the Haicheng quake), the Chinese completely missed a huge quake, and the radon levels were normal. Similarly, the San Andreas Fault was to throw a major quake in the early 1990s, but all that we got was a 5 magnitude one—that too 11 years later. So, nature always surprises us,” says Arora.
jacob.k@livemint.com

Stem cell banking, a Rs100-crore business in India

PTI — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:37:00 GMT

New Delhi: Almost non-existent a few years ago in the country, stem cell banking is now a flourishing business with more and more people wishing to store their baby’s cord blood as a form of bio-insurance, even though it comes at a heavy price.
Cord blood storage is fast gaining momentum as a less traumatic alternative to treat neurological illnesses, and as a guarantee for the family against a host of diseases.
Stem cell treatment is a therapy in which new cells are injected into damaged tissues and banks generally charge anything between Rs60,000 and Rs80,000 to harvest the cord blood for private use.
Increased awareness about the benefits of stem cell therapies has led to mushrooming of several firms providing treatment and blood storing services in less than six years.
According to Stem Cell Global Foundation (SCGF), a Delhi-based organisation promoting research, stem cell banking is a Rs100 crore business in India and at an annual growth of over 35%, it is expected to touch Rs140 crore by 2010.
The overall market for stem cell research is also growing very fast and it could reach Rs2,200 crore by next year, said Karan Goel, chairman and founder of the foundation.
“The reason behind the exceptional growth is because therapies using stem cells are giving hopes to millions of patients afflicted with chronic diseases and not responding to conventional treatment,” Goel said.
According to Goel, ”Market growth estimates for other Asian countries, except China, are less than that for India.”
While there are currently seven institutes which provide the cord blood storing facilities, over 15 institutes are involved in research and therapy.
LifeCell, the first such organisation to bring this concept to India, claimed that about 20,000 parents have so far banked their baby’s cord blood stem cells with it.
Cyrobanks India, another major player, said to have gathered more 15,000 clients since it made an entry in the country four years ago.
“It’s a growing field and we are confident with the growing awareness, more and more people will come forward to store their baby’s cord blood,” said Asim Ghazi, a spokesperson for Cyrobanks India.
According to health experts, the stem cells collected from the cord blood of a newborn are very rich that can differentiate into blood and immune system as well as heart, brain, spinal and pancreatic tissues.
“These stem cells have the power to regenerate, repair or replace damaged cells in the body,” said Dr Sonia Naik at Sitaram Bharatia Institute of Science and Research, New Delhi.
“It is like an assurance for the child and its family members,” she said, adding a child’s stem cells have a 25% chance to match for a sibling.
Dr Anoop Mishra, head of diabetes and metabolic diseases, Fortis Hospitals, said stem cells are also ideal for treating genetically inherited disorders of metabolism.
”If you have a family history or are worried about a predisposition to certain diseases, cord blood banking could be your ray of hope,“ said Mishra, who recently undertook a clinical trial using stem cells to cure diabetic foot.
Globally, stem cells are used to treat over 130 diseases and it is estimated that more than 500 clinical trials are being done to develop therapies using stem cells.
“The cells can be used in allogenic or autologous transplant for Haematopoietic regeneration in diseases like thalassemia, leukemia, cancers and many more,” Dr Naik said.
However, people are little skeptical about procedure being adopted by the laboratories to store the cord blood as there were no regulatory norms.
But allying such fears, Ghazi of Cyrobanks said banks adopt highly advanced technology in preserving the placenta umbilical cord after the baby is delivered and the cord cut.
“This blood is sent to a bank where it is processed and preserved by freezing them in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196 degrees Celsius,” he said, adding through the procedure blood can be safely stored for 600 years.
However, these facilities come at a very heavy price.
“There is a fee for service in case of private donation as the cord blood product is owned by the mother. In case of public donation the parents do not incur any charges,” said Ghazi, adding that with increasing number of clients, the fees will also go down.

HP-3Com deal raises stakes in tech M&A battle

Ritsuko Ando / Reuters — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:01:00 GMT

New York: Major technology companies seem to be launching multibillion-dollar acquisitions every other week, and those who don’t join the race may be at risk of getting run over.
Hewlett-Packard Co challenged Cisco Systems Inc this week by announcing a $3 billion deal for network equipment maker 3Com. It came after Cisco stepped up its dealmaking and expanded into the server market to compete with HP, IBM and Dell Inc.
“I think this is the start,” said Ronald Gruia, analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “Once you have one acquisition, you can have a cascading effect.”
The motivation behind this wave of dealmaking by the tech majors is to broaden product portfolios and provide for all of customers’ IT needs -- from computing, security, storage and networking to online videoconferencing.
HP’s 3Com deal comes after a string of M&A news including Dell’s deal for Perot Systems Corp, Xerox Corp’s deal for Affiliated Computer Services Inc and Oracle Corp’s deal for Sun Microsystems.
IBM, which bid for but failed to win Sun, has been comparatively quiet on the dealmaking front, doing some smaller deals to expand its services business and signing sales partnerships but nothing viewed by Wall Street as a game changer.
Pressure is mounting on technology companies to diversify to satisfy shareholders’ demands for more dramatic sales growth as the economy recovers, analysts said.
“There are three big enterprise infrastructure vendors today: IBM, HP, and now Cisco. And they’re all competing against one another,” said Broadpoint AmTech’s Brian Marshall.
Smaller, niche technology firms, on the other hand, are increasingly open to buyouts as a way of securing a solid sales channel. A smaller company bought by a large vendor like Cisco or IBM could turn into a serious competitor overnight.
M&A deals are also a response to customers looking for simpler and cost-efficient ways to run data centers, which are struggling to cope with increasing data traffic.
“All of us are under pressure in the IT environment to allow businesses to do more with less,” VMware chief executive Paul Maritz told Reuters in an interview.
“People are trying to say, rather than selling everything piece by piece on an a la carte basis, requiring customers to be their own master chefs, we’re going to sell more prepackaged meals here.”
Brocade, Riverbed, F5
Companies like Riverbed Technology Inc and F5 Networks Inc, which specialize in supporting faster and more secure online applications, are widely seen as possible acquisition targets.
F5 shares have risen 75% in the last six months, though Riverbed is up only 18%. Both companies trade at around 25 times forecast 2010 earnings.
And while HP’s offer for 3Com made it look like Brocade Communications Systems Inc may have missed out, some analysts said the switching and storage networking company is still an attractive target.
“I think Brocade is still definitely in play,” Gruia said, adding that IBM could be a buyer. Brocade shares have fallen more than 12% since HP announced the 3Com deal.
Most analysts, however, said IBM is likely more interested in expanding in software and services than hardware. It has bought business analytics company SPSS Inc for $1.2 billion.
“They’re really going to focus on software because that’s where the value and the real margin structure in growth is,” said Marshall.
Analysts say HP and Dell could also do more deals, and many see network equipment maker Juniper Networks Inc eyeing M&A to compete against Cisco.
Other acquisition targets include wireless technology firms as well as companies specializing in online video, analysts said. They are particularly focused on Polycom, whose bigger rival Tandberg is being courted by Cisco. The Tandberg deal is not yet final as some shareholders are seeking a higher price.
Partnerships
Polycom CEO Robert Hagerty said that rather than find a buyer, it was trying to boost sales partnerships with vendors like HP and IBM. That is similar to the strategy at Brocade, which has forged more deals with IBM and non-Cisco vendors.
Analysts said depending solely on such partnerships may leave many companies vulnerable. Resale partnerships can be cast aside when one party enters an M&A deal with another.
For example, video network infrastructure company Radvision is a close partner of Cisco, but analysts say some of its sales are at risk if the Tandberg deal goes through.
But some also note that acquisitions themselves are high-risk endeavours. Cisco chief John Chambers has said that around 90% of acquisitions fail, in general.
“As we all understand, the vast majority of acquisitions fail, and truly meaningful strategic alliances have an even poorer success rate,” Chambers told analysts recently.
The cross-Atlantic merger of Alcatel-Lucent, which posted its 12th straight loss in the third quarter, is widely cited as a failure.

Constellation of satellites needed for disaster management

PTI — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:00 GMT

Mumbai: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has stressed on the need to have a constellation of satellites with multisectral sensors to predict, mitigate and manage disasters.
“Exactly how many satellites an effective constellation would need is still open for debate. No single satellite can hope to meet all these needs. Rather, what disaster managers need is a constellation of satellites carrying a range of sensors,” Director, Space Application Centre Isro, Ranganath Navalgund said from Ahmedabad Thursday.
The constellation plan is a part of the ‘Umbrella Plan’ of the organisation, he said.
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, needing varying data during the disaster cycle of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, Navalgund said.
Many studies suggest at least eight satellites, with dual capability sensors can collect both high and low spatial resolution data, and an equal split between optical (including thermal) and microwave instruments.
“The satellites should also be agile, they should allow rapid changes in camera orientation so that a disaster area can be kept in view longer,” he said.
However, India currently makes use of data from different satellites which are already operating for disaster management.
Even yesterday’s cyclone ‘Phyan’ in Arabian sea was tracked by INSAT-3A Kalpana and recently launched Oceansat-2 with KU band and scatterometer, he said.
Crucially, different situations need data collected in different wavebands — like optical and near infrared data can map land use or assess agricultural droughts.
“But to track a cyclone’s eye, or monitor flooded areas beneath cloud, microwave sensors are needed,” Navalgund said.
In flood monitoring, this can pose a real problem.
Low spatial resolution data can map out large inundated areas, but relief efforts really need more detailed, yet still timely, data on infrastructure, like submerged bridges, drains and roads,“ SAC director said.
A constellation of polar-orbiting satellites, equally spaced around a sun-synchronous orbit to provide continuous coverage over any given place, could solve this, he said.
Such a constellation, designed primarily for disaster management, could offer more frequent data in the right part of the spectrum and India is planning on these lines.
Geostationary satellites, predominantly designed for weather forecasting, are good at spotting a cyclone’s forming, tracking its movements, and predicting land fall points. But they don’t usually carry microwave sensors, which are needed to estimate a cyclone’