Technology - Livemint.com

Tweet like a champ

Sidin Vadukut — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:32:00 GMT

New Delhi: Seesmic.com is a one stop shop for a multitude of Twitter clients, pieces of software that allow you to post, read and interact with Twitter updates without actually using the Twitter.com website. But the most easily accessible one is Seesmic’s web application. You can log into the application from any browser and then do everything you would do on Twitter.com and much more. You can follow trending topics, search for terms, see profiles of users, follor or unfollow them and even reduce unwiely long URLs into short ones.

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And you can do all this without ever leaving the comfort of that one browser window. Seesmic uses a serious of easily manipulated columns to help you simultaneously browse multiple streams. And, if you find that too confusing, you can switch to a more conventional email inbox view to see all your updates.

For a quick demo of Seesmic’s web app see this week’s episode of the Playstream series.

IT cos cautious on growth, eye M&A

Sumeet Chatterjee and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty / Reuters — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:38:00 GMT

Bangalore: India’s top IT firms expressed optimism about a gradual recovery on Wednesday but stopped short of flagging a sharp rebound in the near term on uncertainties about the strength of the global economic resurgence.

Executives from the companies, hit by a collapse in demand caused by largest downturn since the Great Depression, told the Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore that overseas firms were gradually turning to them in the search for cost savings. However, sluggish technology spending by Western clients, moderate fees, a stronger rupee currency and rising competition from global rivals such as IBM and Accenture are likely to keep them away from past years’ heady growth rates.

“We are more comfortable with the environment now than at the beginning of the year,” V Balakrishnan, chief financial officer of Infosys Technologies, seen as a trend-setter in India’s showpiece outsourcing sector, said at the summit.

“Most of the companies are feeling much better about the economy now than they were some six, eight months back. But will they go overboard (in IT spending)? I don’t think so, because they are still cautious about the environment.”

The overall outsourcing sector has been on a roll in recent months following a brutal slide in demand at the end of last year as turmoil in the financial sector, software firms’ key client base, led to cancellation or postponement of contracts.

India’s mid-sized software services company HCL Technologies said on Monday it had won a contract worth $200 million from British insurer Equitable Life.

Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro have also announced deals in recent months from companies such as oil and gas major BP, mobile operator T-Mobile UK, brewer SABMiller and Volkswagen.

Suresh Vaswani, co-chief executive of IT business at Wipro, India’s No. 3 software exporter, said the deal pipeline had improved in the first half of the current fiscal year that began in April, compared with the immediate post-crisis period.

“The recovery is taking place slowly,” he said. New York-listed Wipro is betting on a demand uptick from its financial clients, which produce about a quarter of its revenue, as consolidation in the sector boosts demand for technology.

Mahindra Satyam -- earlier known as Satyam Computer, a company that was rocked by India’s biggest corporate fraud and subsequently sold -- is also adding new clients, said Atul Kunwar, president of its global operations.

Optimism about a growth rebound has sent Infosys shares up 118% this year, in line with a surge in the sector index and outperforming the broader market that has risen 78%. Tata Consultancy has soared 194%.

“The market is hoping the next financial year will be much better growth-wise than this year or last year,” said Srividya Rajesh, a fund manager with Sundaram BNP Paribas Asset Management, which holds Infosys and Tata Consultancy shares in its portfolio. “But whether the sector has got out of the woods or not will be known only once the technology spending patterns become clearer early next year,” she said.

Indian IT firms provide services ranging from managing complex networks and call centres to software coding, and their clients include Citigroup, Credit Suisse, General Electric and BT Group Plc.

The sector’s scorching pace of growth has halted as many top customers were badly bruised by the recession, forcing them to tackle severe cost cuts and leaving little room to boost technology spending.

Pricing Environment

Balakrishnan of Infosys said while demand for fee cuts from clients had abated thanks to the economy’s limping back to life, the No. 2 IT exporter did not see prices going up in the short term as customers were spending selectively on technology.

“You will live on similar pricing environment for some more time till the supply demand situation changes more in favour of demand,” he said. “As long as the pricing remains stable, we are OK on the margins.”

But a 12% rise in the rupee against the US dollar from a record low in early March could have an impact on profit margins, Balakrishnan said.

Every one-percentage-point rise in the rupee crimps margins by 30 to 50 basis points at top IT firms that bill more than half their revenues in dollars. The companies hedge some portion of their revenue to deal with the currency volatility.

“If the pricing pressure and the rupee rise happen at the same time, then it will be a challenge for the companies,” said Rajesh of Sundaram BNP Paribas Asset Management.

Small is Beautiful

Indian software firms are looking to expand in markets such as Asia-Pacific and Europe to cut their dependence on the U.S. market, which brings in more than half the sector’s $60 billion revenues but has been badly hit by economic and market turmoil.

Infosys, which has built up a cash pile of nearly $3 billion, said it was looking to buy firms in sectors such as consulting, utilities and healthcare to boost its presence in geographies such as France and Germany, Balakrishnan said.

But the deal sizes would be smaller, with target companies revenues at about $400 million to $500 million.

So far, Indian outsourcers have shied away from blockbuster deals despite having the required financial muscle and instead focused on acquiring smaller IT divisions to tap opportunities in select areas or geographies.

Reliance Globalcom doubling data center operations

Reuters — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:59:00 GMT

Hong Kong: The global unit of India’s Reliance Communications will more than double its data centre operations over the next 18 months, in a bid to compete with world leaders such as AT&T and BT, its CEO said on Wednesday.

Reliance Globalcom is planning to add 1 million square feet of new data centre space to complement its existing 600,000 square feet in India and 250,000 square feet outside the country, CEO Punit Garg told Reuters in an interview in Hong Kong.

“We should be adding half of that in the next six to seven months,” he said. “The rest would be in the next 12 months after that.”

His unit, which now generates about $1.6 billion in annual revenue, or nearly a third of Reliance Communications’ total, has notched breakneck growth in recent years as it leverages its Flag global cable network acquired earlier this decade to become a world player.

That growth should remain brisk, but could slow somewhat from the rate of about 20% in the third quarter versus second quarter levels, Garg said.

“I expect quarter-on-quarter high single-digit (growth) consistently,” he said. “When I look at our backlog, I’m confident we’ll continue with this story for at least the next four to six quarters.”

Reliance Globalcom is the world’s biggest direct owner of undersea cable networks following its Flag purchase, with some 65,000 miles of cable covering 60 countries.

It sells capacity on the network to many of the world’s major carriers, including U.S. firms AT&T and Verizon, France Telecom and BT in Europe and KDDI Corp and SingTel in Asia.

But such carrier deals only account for about 20-25% of its revenue, with the rest coming from its sales to corporate customers for more lucrative telecoms services like those supplied by providers like AT&T and BT to global companies.

The doubling of its data centre space is partly designed to cater to its growing global clientele, as demand for such capability grows with the global take-off of broadband services that allow for the quick transfer of large amounts of data.

“You get revenues today not for capacity, but for services,” Garg said. “Enterprises pay not for capacity but services.”

NSE joins Twitter club

PTI — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:28:00 GMT

New Delhi: The National Stock Exchange (NSE) has joined the fast-growing ‘Twitterati´ club, and to start with the bourse has begun posting live quotes of its benchmark index Nifty on the micro-blogging website Twitter.

With this, NSE has become the first Indian bourse—and so far the only one—to have a presence on Twitter, which has become a favoured short-messaging social networking website and can be accessed through mobile phone and internet.

Outside India, exchanges and indices having established their presence on Twitter include Nasdaq of the US and London Stock Exchange’s FTSE.

NSE currently posts quotes of its Nifty index, including the current level as also the highs and lows, every 10 minutes during the market hours and plans to expand its presence to other information for investors over the time.

In just about a week of its launch, the NSE has already registered about 1,600 followers for its ‘tweet´ messages, which are capped at a maximum of 140 characters per post. So far, about 500 tweets have been posted on the exchange’s page on the Twitter.

An exchange official said that the NSE has distinguished itself from other bourses with its presence on Twitter.

The exchange aims to add some more indices and tools on the social networking site on coming period.

“To start with, it’s a live ticker of Nifty only, but it will change over the time. Through Twitter, an investor can be in touch with the market,” the official said.

With Twitter, the investors can reach the NSE with their mobiles only and need not log onto Internet through computers.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables a user to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters.

A user can send and receive tweets through the Twitter website or short message service (SMS) on mobile phone.

NSE’s rival Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), the oldest bourse in Asia, is yet to join Twitter, but recently launched a redesigned version of its website.

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.
Loading video...
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%.

The playcast: Of (Google) doodles, car racing and weird voice acting

Krish Raghav and Sidin Vadukut — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:47:00 GMT

download podcast
Welcome to another edition of the Playcast. This week, we have two interviews, a literal blast from our video game past and yet another edition of Beautiful Tweeple.
To start off with, we have an interview with Dennis Hwang, who does all those clever little google doodles on the Google home page. Krish caught up with Hwang while he was in Delhi to announce the winners of the India leg of “Doodle for Google”, an international competition for schoolchildren to design an iteration of the Google logo. They talk about the origin, process and sometimes-problematic nature of the Google doodles.
Our next segment is a little excerpt from a collection of the 50 worst video game voice overs courtsey the website www.audioatrocities.com
We then move on quickly… from game voice acting to game designing. Krish chats with Rajesh Rao of Dhruva Interactive – a game studio that has worked on racing games like Need for Speed, Project Gotham Racing and Pure. Rajesh tells us more about the differences in various kinds of racing games, and developments in the racing game genre.
And of course we end with Sidin taking the floor for yet another edition of Beautiful Tweeple…
Enjoy!

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