We are still in process of migrating some of the stuff that might have been left unnoticed, and you can even expect changes/improvements in the interface (or even the logo) in the coming weeks. We would be experimenting and taking your feedback as we go along.

What is Geeknizer?

Read it as one word: “Geeknizer” just like Womanizer. Oh yes, geeks desire for more than one technology.

How does it Impact you?

For Readers: Your experience would be improved by a great extent with not just the new look but Richer content, more tech articles. We plan to grow to multiple authors in the near future and it would just keep on getting better and better. Our privacy policy and Terms of service are going to be better than before and would be available soon.

For Advertisers/Partners: This is not going to impact you at all. We’ve taken utmost care in performing a seamless migration with 301 redirects and Google webmaster dashboard in order to transfer 100% of the traffic from old domain to new domain. Our email addresses (at the moment) are same but we would keep you posted of any changes. All your current deals/partnerships with us still hold true and would continue to do so.

Our new Links

Twitter: Follow us @geeknizer. If you already followed us @taranfx, you don’t have to do it, existing followers have been migrated automatically.

Facebook: Since facebook provides no way to migrate fans, you would have to Like us on new Geeknizer Page.

RSS: We still use the same URL for RSS on feedburner but the content is updated from Geeknizer.

We need your Feedback

We look forward to a great new start. All your suggestions/feedbacks would be entertained int he comments section. If you believe something is broken, let us know.

With everything from smartphones to Internet-linked appliances and cars getting online, the group entrusted with organizing the Web is running out of the “IP” numbers that identify destinations for digital traffic. IPv4 could accomodate only billions of addresses, but IPv6 would do multi Trillions, enough for assigning IP addresses to each grain in Sahara desert.

As of January 23, IPv4 address depletion would happen in 9 days, i.e. February 1st 2011. 40 million IPv4 addresses will deplete in these 9 days.

The pool in the sky is a fast-draining reservoir of IP addresses maintained by the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).ICANN has been calling for a change to IPv6 for years but websites and Internet service providers have been clinging to the old standard since the birth of the Internet.”One of the reasons it has taken so long to change is that there is no obvious advantage or killer application for IPv6.

The number of addresses that IPv6 allows for amounts to 340 “undecillion” (followed by 36 zeroes); enough for a trillion people to each be assigned trillions of IP numbers, according to ICANN.

A full shift to IPv6 will take years, with the remaining stock of old IP addresses being allocated to support the transition.

All major websites have their IPv6 alternates, Google first started this, and hopes to make it primary mode of communication, over the coming years.

Here’s a Video Song dedicated to Depletion of IPv4, old song but explains the current scenario in detail:

IPv4 Address Depletion countdown

• IPv6 Challenges Ahead – Security, Migration. Still Not a Next-Generation.
• IPv4 Usage Report

We write about Latest in tech, Google,  iPhone, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them all @taranfx on Twitter or below:

Now you can point your iPhone towards any foreign language, and get instant translation to your language, without actually have to do any effort, thanks to Word Lens.

This iOS app took merely 2.5 years to complete. The app is priced at $4.99, currently supports only English to Spanish and vice versa using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology which actually identifies the characters and using a dictionary service, translates to other language.

As per the developer, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” And hence this app right now is mostly word for word translation.

The concept is not new, but is more intuitive than what we’ve seen with Google Goggles on Android, iPhone.  Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded.

Word Lens would get more languages in future, which includes major European languages like French, italian,and then brazilian, potugese. Try the app here [iTunes].

Watch the video after a break.

For more iPhone, iPhone apps, Tips n Tricks, Android, Gaming, Tech News, catch us @taranfx on Twitter.

Google has given the biggest number in the industry by acquiring 23 companies, 3/4th of which are venture financed or angel-backed. On the other side of the road, Twitter, still hasn’t figured out a sustainable revenue model, made three acquisitions related to social media and analytics. IBM absorbed much of the enterprise software market and bit on the Hardware side as well.

Microsoft’s silence in 2010 has a solid reason –the biggest acquisition failure of Yahoo! As per CBInsights, the Microsoft is losing out on the top start-up technologies, although, there’s no doubt on how comfortably Microsoft can acquire nearly any (and every) start-up, but they are just not doing it, at least not publicly.

Facebook: Surprisingly, Facebook has jumped ahead of many of the tech companies Cisco, Oracle, etc. Of course, many of Facebook’s acquisitions are of the small tuck-in variety recruiting talent or interesting capabilities for the social networking giant.

HP: Unlike Facebook with it’s smaller acquisitions, HP has been making larger acquisition deals (4 x $1+ billion) with the aim to push technology, products and services to a new level.

Cisco: Cisco which has record of making large number of acquisitions had been slow this year with only 4 mergers.

We write about Latest in tech, Google, iPhone, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them all @taranfx on Twitter or below:

Though Oracle’s CEO has no say for it, but as being Industry’s Highest paid Professional, his comments are worthy of being mentioned.

In a reply to the HP boards of directors decision to removee the CEO Mark Hurd, sent to the NY Times as per allthingsD:

“The H.P. board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago. That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them.”

“What the expense fraud claims do reveal is an H.P. board desperately grasping at straws in trying to publicly explain the unexplainable: how a false sexual harassment claim and some petty expense report errors led to the loss of one of Silicon Valley’s best and most respected leaders.”

Professional talking, Larry has nothing to do with this, but what might matter for him is his game partner, who had been taking on Tennis tournaments with him.

Related: Top Tech CEO Salaries List 2009-2010

Its always good to have the opinions from world’s most Lavish CEO, who’s famous for his passion, attitude & confidence. After all, what is the Difference between Larry Ellison and God? God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellisson!

We write about Latest in tech, Microsoft, iPhone, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them @taranfxon Twitter or below:

It all began on March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name. It was  “Symbolics.com” and it fueled the .COM domains, the TLD that now makes up 70% of the web.

Today, exactly 25 years later, life B.C – Before .Com must be really strange.

Ironically, Symbolics, who are still running as Symbolics.com, should have been celebrating this day in the history but when contacted were not even aware. In the same year of symbolics.com, only six entities registered a .com, one of six top-level domain names created a year earlier in a reorganization of the early Internet’s naming bureaucracy. At the time, .cor (short for corporate) almost beat .com as the designation for commercial Internet addresses.

By 1992, there were around 15,000 .com domains were registered,  and today there are  84 million domain names, including 11.9 million e-commerce and online business sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance-related sites and 1.8 million sports sites.

According to a study released today by the Information Technology & Information Foundation, the annual economic benefits of the commercial Internet equal $1.5 trillion, which is “more than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy and government investment in R&D combined.”

Today, VeriSign claims 53 billion Website lookups every day.

A brief look at the First 10 .com domains:

1. Symbolics.com – March 15, 1985
2. BBN.com – April 24, 1985
3. Think.com – May 24, 1985
4. MCC.com – July 11, 1985
5. DEC.com – Sept. 30, 1985
6. Northrop.com – Nov. 7, 1985
7. Serox.com – Jan. 9, 1986
8. SRI.com – Jan. 17, 1986
9. HP.com – March 3, 1986
10. Bellcore.com – March 5, 1986

Source: iwhois

We write about Latest in Tech, Google, Do-it-yourself (DIY), iPhone, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them all @taranfx on Twitter or below:

TechCrunch, which had recently moved on to WordPress’s cloud along with GigaOm, and other popular blogs are all equally impacted.

Update: WordPress.com is back for good. It was long one about 110 minutes. More info after a break. More info at bottom

However, the wordpress team is well-aware and hard at work attempting to get things back up and running. But this brings bad news for all those bloggers who are using inbuilt comment system that relies on akismet to prevent spam.

There’s no word on what caused the problem but as mentioned, there are over 9.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com (see chart below). It’s seen an exponential rise over the past 4 years with thousands of new blogs still being added every day.

The impact is highest we have ever seen, more updates on this, stay tuned.

Update: WordPress has the official word on it:

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

write about Latest in tech, Android, iPhone, Tablets, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them@taranfx on Twitter or below:

Internet: Worldwide Speed upgrades will up trend, average speed of internet worldwide will rise by 20% and become cheaper. Web applications would grow in number and capability. Mobile Internet usage will increase by 25-35%.

Browsers: Internet browsers see four super powers: Firefox 4 vs. Chrome 5, vs. Opera 10.5 and IE9 rising from ashes. Firefox gains majority of the market, IE follows.

VoIP: Google voice integrated with Gizmo5 make new things possible. Skype will give Google voice head-to-head competition when both of them enter the same territory.

User Interface: HTML 5, Flash, Silverlight: We will see some serious improvements in User Interface with Flash 10.1 and Silverlight going big on the Internet.  HTML 5 will mature and we would see more usage in Blogs, websites, portals making the UI even more powerful. All three will enter mobile market making the Mobile Web interface equally intuitive and capable.

Cloud Computing: Few of the Cloud computing ideas like Windows Azure, Google App Engine get large number of adoption.  Idea of Cloud Gaming On-demand takes momentum. Few cloud apps, services die for good.

Social Media: 2009 was year of rise of Social Media with large adoption of Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook: Facebook would double in 2010, get new UI, but will continue to struggle on Privacy issues as Zuckerberg tries to Open up facebook fight Twitter.

Twitter: Twitter adoption would be more amplified, primarily on the mobile. 2009 was year of micro-blogging, 2010 will become year mobile journalism, social news. Twitter will see new innovations that would make it more maintainable, business friendly. And Twitter finds new ways to earn apart from Realtime search deals with Google and Bing.
Other smaller social networks will lose independent identity, will combine with bigger ones.

Entertainment: BluRay is the defacto standard for movie. 3D television makes way to consumer homes. Few TV broadcasts go 3D HighDef. OLED TVs rise and compete LED, LCD with higher priced, thinner screens. HD Radios broadcast start on local stations, True HD audio comes to music. Most cellphones get 720p HD video recording.

Gaming: New Direct X 11 games arrive Making Windows the best platform for Gaming; PS3 and Xbox 360 follow. Cloud based Gaming on-demand rises in U.S., finds its way to other regions of the world.

Search Engines: Yahoo will continue to decline, struggle to get fractions of share. Bing on the other hand will acquire more smaller search companies and will continue the same ratio. Google will snatch share from Bing and other smaller competitors. Goole will get faster with Caffeine and hence have capacity of indexing upto 50% more pages than it does today in the same amount of time, making the world’s largest search engine, even bigger.

Operating Systems: Windows 7 will continue to grow, however, Mac OS will stay stable. But taking into account Mac OS X from iPhone, iPod Touch, Tablet, it will grow by a significant number.  Snow Leopard will become a start of the Art OS. Most Unix/Linux Operating systems will stay at the same level. Few XP users will migrate to Ubuntu instead of Windows 7.  Solaris could see some serious adoption in the corporate world after Oracle-Sun hardware deal. On Mobile side, Symbian will see end-of-life, WinMo, Blackberry, Palm OS will decrease by a significant number, however, Android will deepen its roots into smartphone industry.

Open Source: Open Source will continue to grow as economy recovers. Open Source Projects would become more powerful, competitive.

Gadgets: 2010 is overwhelmed with Gadgets. We will finally see a Tablet, a MID, a True Multipurpose Phone.

Phones: Google’s dream on Nexus One get little appreciation, adoption. However, with 50+ android launching in 2010, Android will capture 30% of the smartphone market. iPhone 4G will set a new bar for others to follow. Windows Mobile 6.5 becomes a story of the past, declines heavily.

Notebooks/ Tablet: Nothing in particular here, Netbooks, Notebooks will become thinner, lighter and more powerful replacing most desktops. 2010 is year of Tablets. Apple iTablet will set a standard for other to mimic. Nvidia Tegra platform and several similar others demonstrate True power with mobility.

Fate of Tech Giants

Microsoft: 2009 was average for Microsoft with only good thing coming out was Windows 7. 2010 as predicted by most, could be worst. With Windows Mobile 7 getting delayed, again, Microsoft loses hold on Mobile industry. Zune will struggle to grow with some serious competition from Apple. Bing, as already discussed will not do anything exciting. IE9 will give the falling Internet Explorer some oxygen until Firefox, chrome

Google: Google will continue to innovate in Open Source and new Web standards making the dream of Chrome Os truly practical by speeding up the web, web applications and making them more powerful. Google Wave will makeup its lost pride. Android, as discussed, will bring good things to google becoming the second most popular smartphone OS after iPhone. Google will finally think about making Google Phone 2 ,which would be truly competitive on price and features funded by ads.

Apple: Last 3 years had been good for Apple, thanks to Steve Jobs.With good innovations coming on iTablet and iPhone 4G, apple will continue to grow. WWDC 2010 becomes the most hyped and awaited event of the year.

IBM: IBM, the hardware/software giant will see a stable trend gaining more from software services than from hardware.

Oracle/ Sun: The Biggest Tech Deal of the 2009 will fianlly see a merger in early 2010. The merger will be followed by Oracle stepping into hardware space packaged with Software for ERP, Telecom, etc. Oracle had good gain in  2009, 2010 would be a lot better.

Cisco: The Networking Giant will step into Serious 4G LTE networks, beating Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens in the Telecom sector. Juniper and Huawei will continue to challenge Cisco with innovations specially in Routing, Switching and Video. Cisco will pioneer in video and step into new sectors: virtualization, search engines, Hardware in course of time.

Join us while we walk into 2010:

Tech Predictions of 2010

Here is a wallpaper to encourage the coming New Year (Click to maximize)

The moment of joy was expressed by AMD CEO Dirk Meyer. He  said the settlement leads both companies will bring a  “new era”  in the chip industry.

The two companies also sealed a five-year cross license deal and said they would give up any claims of breach from their previous license agreement.

“While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development,” AMD and Intel said in a joint statement.

Under the terms of the settlement, Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion. Also:

• AMD and Intel both get patent rights in a cross-licensing pact;
• Intel will give up any patent claims against AMD;
• Intel will agree to adhere to business practice provisions;
• And AMD drops all pending litigation against Intel.

Today marks the beginning of a new era… one that confirms that the game has changed for AMD. It is an important milestone for us, for our customers, our partners, and most important – for consumers and businesses worldwide. In addition, it represents the culmination many years of litigation and regulatory engagement. And we are optimistic that it will usher a new era for our industry.

We look forward to healthy competition with the mutual respect one would expect between world-class competitors.

It remains to be seen if this settlement marks a new chip era, but the “healthy competition” Meyer refers to will determine AMD’s fate.

Shares of AMD jumped 23 per cent to $6.55 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon. Intel shares were halted. Intel now expects spending in the quarter to be $4.2 billion, up from $2.9 billion.

So the “new Era” is about to begin where chip manufacturers respect the competition? What do you think?

Subscribe to Twitter updates, or RSS, join Facebook fanpage for more Snow Leopard, iPhone updates.

Her credibility has been in question since a while. Investors were amazed when she quoted Yahoo was never a search company.

As per the  Guardian news

According to regulatory filings, Bartz has made two major stock sales in the past nine months – more than $830,000 (£500,000) in March and a further $1.14m in June.

While executives are entitled to sell the options that they had been given, he said that Bartz was sending the wrong message by exercising so many of her stock options so soon after joining the company.

“Two million already cashed out for Bartz is too much, too soon, doesn’t really fit with her ‘I didn’t need this job as I was retired’ image she portrays” says an investor.

She is entitled with a monthly salary of $1m and her max annual bonus goes upto $4m. In return to the company, she ain’t doing anything positive.

Bartz is not the only one in the selling race. Other high-level executives have sold shares including Mike Callahan, Yahoo’s general counsel, selling approximately $1.35 million worth of stock options.

In an internal memo, Bartz said

“We are the largest media property on the internet. So get out of the sugar low – we have work to do. Stop staring at our navels, stop arguing with each other. Stop debate, debate, debate and let’s focus on the competition.”

In its latest financial results, the company said that revenue for the past three months was down 13% from the same period last year to $1.5billion, while profit rose slightly to $141m.

Bartz’s influence appears to have had little impact on the company’s bottom line so far, however, with her biggest achievement being the agreement earlier this summer to hand over control of Yahoo’s search engine business to Microsoft. Though investor’s reacted negatively to that business deal, we are still not sure where Yahoo is heading.

The buyers will pay eBay $1.9 billion in cash, which includes a loan from eBay of $125 million, for 65 percent of the company. EBay will retain 35 percent equity investment in Skype, which is on track to take in more than $600 million in revenue this year.

The deal values Skype at $2.75 billion, higher than many analysts had expected for the calling service. Many analysts thought eBay grossly overpaid when it acquired Skype in 2005 for $2.1 billion.
This deal comes during a very public battle between eBay and the founders of Skype, who are threatening to cut off one of the key peer-to-peer technologies that power and have expressed interest in rebuying their company. It’s even possible they are also part of the sale – we just don’t know yet.

In addition, the buyer group also includes Andreessen Horowitz, a new venture capital firm headed by the former Netscape co-founder, Marc Andreessen; Index Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm that was an early investor in Skype; and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

“This is a great deal, unlocking both immediate and long-term value for eBay and tremendous potential for Skype,” John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We’ve acted decisively on a deal that delivers a high valuation, gives us significant cash up front and lets us retain a meaningful minority stake with talented partners.”

“Skype is a strong stand-alone business, but it does not have synergies with our e-commerce and online payments businesses,” Mr. Donahoe added. “As a separate company, we believe that Skype will have the focus required to compete effectively in online voice and video communications and accelerate its growth momentum.”

History & Facts

eBay acquired Skype in 2005 in a deal that has come to be viewed as one of the most awkward technology pairings of the decade. Meg Whitman (CEO then) led the charge to acquire Skype for $2.1 billion plus bonus incentives for Skype’s shareholders that later increased the price past $3 billion.

Ms. Whitman paid a hefty premium to outbid Google, which she viewed at the time as invading eBay’s core businesses of e-commerce and payments. But Google’s forays into those areas, like the Google Checkout service, have met with less success than once forecast.

As part of the deal, Ms. Whitman also allowed Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, to maintain ownership of the core peer-to-peer technology behind the Skype service. The founders invested that ownership into a separate company, called Joltid, which is now battling eBay in a British court over rights to make changes to that technology.

At the time, Ms. Whitman said the deal with worth it because Skype’s calling capabilities could be woven into the eBay marketplace, allowing buyers and sellers to facilitate their purchases. But those synergies never materialized and in 2007, eBay wrote down $1.4 million of the acquisition.

Ms. Whitman, who left eBay last year, is now a Republican candidate for the governor of California.

“The purchase was a serious mistake by Meg Whitman. It was an attempt to buy growth which investors saw through instantly,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. But, Mr. Lindsay said, the new deal surpassed his expectations for what Skype could generate in the initial public offering that eBay had once planned for 2010. “I think investors will be really happy with this.”

Although eBay has said it was planning an initial public offering for the Skype division in 2010, it has been talking to various companies and investment groups interested in buying the service. Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis approached private equity firms earlier this year in hopes of making a bid for their old firm but did not meet eBay’s price.

Last month, eBay also negotiated with Google over buying Skype, according to a person briefed on those discussions. But Google ultimately walked away from a potential deal, fearing that continued litigation could leave it vulnerable to huge damages.

Google also worried that owning Skype might alienate wireless carriers, who offer their customers phones running Google’s Android software, the person said.

After falling precipitously the last few years, eBay’s shares have jumped 53 percent this year on strength in its PayPal payments business and positive changes in its core auctions business, including improved usability of the site and more “buy it now” auctions.

In early trading on Tuesday, eBay’s shares were up about 1.4 percent, to $2.45.

Watch the video -

After the years of Lawsuits held against the Piracy Giant, today Swedish district court has ordered the Internet service provider(ISP) that used to power PirateBay, to stop servicing The Pirate Bay immediately or the ISP could face heavy fines of 500,000 Kroner ($70,600 US) a day. The Pirate Bay’s ISP had no choice but to comply and disconnect the website from the Internet.

If you are Torrent fan, no doubt you love PirateBay. It’s indeed a sad day in the history of P2P and File-sharing. The most popular BitTorrent tracker in the world appeared to be inaccessible to many in the U.S. on Monday morning but the blog TorrentFreak reported that the site had found a new connection to the Web and there were reports from readers that they were able to log on to the site. Citing a source close to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak said that the tracker was still down but would be back up on Tuesday.

The take down of The Pirate Bay comes 3 days earlier than expected, as the site was going offline on August 27 or legalize the site before then, which was unlikely to happen. Black Internet, The Pirate Bay’s largest bandwidth supplier is not the only connection to the Internet the website has, technically the website could go back online until other ISP’s are sent cease and desist orders.

“This is absolutely ridiculous. The Court seems to consider themselves above the Constitution”, said the leader of The Pirate Party, Rich Falkvinge.

As one of the world’s largest torrent trackers goes offline, dozens more will surface in its place. The Pirate Bay had over 25 million unique peers and 3.6 million registered users downloading from its website.

The future of The Pirate Bay is uncertain as the owners will face one year in prison and a fine of $2.4 million US.

A Mysterious Update: A Pirate Bay insider has told sources they have “got a new connection to the net” for their website. The owners of the website were prepared for take down actions such as today’s and have secured another Internet connection for the website, with minimal down time. The Pirate Bay should return by tomorrow morning for almost all users.

The Pirate Bay team added this, “The MAFIAA has spent millions of dollars and endless amounts of time to get this ban in order. Our guess is that they also bribed a bit to get it since it violates so many laws not only in Sweden but also in the EU, not to mention violations against human rights. And what do they have to show for it? 3 hours of partial downtime.”

An executive with Black Internet told Swedish newspaper SvD that the court informed the company that it would either shut off The Pirate Bay or face penalties. The founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright violations last April.

The executive told the newspaper that Black Internet is not the only ISP servicing The Pirate Bay but is probably the largest. He said none of the other ISPs were affected by the decision. He added that the company is considering options.

It’s unclear how long Black Internet will be forced to stop service for The Pirate Bay. The company may not be able to resume service until the appeal filed by The Pirate Bay founders is settled, SvD reported.

The news comes on the heels of a victory for the founders of The Pirate Bay.

Sweden’s government run debt-collection agency, commonly referred to as the bailiff, said it could find no attachable assets belonging to three of the four founders of the site. A group of media companies had asked the bailiff to collect the $4 million a court had awarded them after finding the four Pirate Bay founders guilty of copyright violations.

At this point, the future of the site, at least in name, appears to rest with the software maker Global Gaming Factory X, the software maker and operator of Internet cafes. The company said in June it would pay $8 million to acquire The Pirate Bay and the deal is supposed to close on Thursday. But Swedish regulators halted trading in Global Gaming on Friday over questions about the company’s financial readiness to complete the transaction.

At the very least, the launch of a new Pirate Bay, one with authorized film and music copies, is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

But there is a good news for Pirates and Bad news for Authorities -

PirateBay backup exists - Several Terabytes of Torrent tracker data – and It’s not hard to bring it up again. It could be up anytime soon. As per Torrentfreek.com -

The Piratebay moved their servers to the Netherlands and is (almost) fully functional. They changed the title of the BitTorrent tracker to “The Police Bay”.

Both companies had been stepping forward in similar markets like Mobile platforms, PC OS; which have bought them into a Competition rather than a Partnership. Ofcourse, it wass nothing to do with Apple’s rejection of Google Voice App.

Apple said in a statement that the company and Schmidt reached a mutual decision to split ties as Google enters new markets that directly compete with Apple’s iPhone and Mac operating systems.

“I have very much enjoyed my time on the Apple Board; it’s a fantastic company,” said Schmidt in a statement. “But as Apple explained today we’ve agreed it makes sense for me to step down now.”

Schmidt has been with Google since 2001 and on Apple’s board since August 2006. He had been an active member of the community and had played an important role in triggering apple’s meetings. He had contributed alot with his ideas that could help both Google and Apple to monetize.

And now when the interests collide, their visions have started to diverge, as each of them look into their product specific interests.

But what surprised us was the Market response. Normally, their collaboration is considered good for the industry. Even though this is a bad news for innovation, market showed +ve results:

Shares of Google rose 1.9%, while Apple’s stock gained 1.6%.

Rising Competition.

“Eric has been an excellent board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple board member will be significantly diminished.”

The Bill-ionaire, today, urged India to move away from the current strategy of low-cost labor towards high-end research and development to keep its giant IT sector competitive. On a visit to New Delhi, he called on the Indian government to speed up its commitment to R&D and to boost low number of home-grown PhD students.

Gates told a panel discussion that India’s “IT success story” should strive to add value and move away from low-cost labor as other developing countries play catch-up.

“At first some of that (IT boom) was built on low-cost labor. And, of course, as time goes on, you don’t want to have that as the only differentiator and it’s not a sustainable thing, because others can come along with that as well,” Gates said.

India’s R&D sector has made progress in recent years and attracted some big foreign hitters, including Microsoft, Google R&D in keeping with its IT and service-driven economic boom. But hampered by structural problems and a lack of government commitment, India’s R&D still lags behind the United States and Asian rival China. China has more than 1,100 R&D centers compared to 800 in India.

“Leading companies here are contributing a lot of ideas and techniques. Even more of that has to happen and bring it to its full potential,” Gates said. “You’ve got to get the government, universities … and companies like Microsoft to deepen their commitment to R&D.”

India produces several 100s computer science PhDs a year — a fraction of China or the U.S. — even as it exports a large number of students abroad. While English-speaking India is cheaper than China for R&D, New Delhi gives few incentives to researchers.

Currently, Indian market is more into service than into Product manufacturing. There is a focus shift of industry that is needed for India to endeavor.

Looking at the current PhDs, the number looks low. The worst thing is most of the TOP leading institute post-grads like from IIT, which is among the Top educational institues in the world,  move to US or other countries for better research prospects, due to lack of infrastructure in today’s Indian market. This is causing a major Brain-drain.

IIT is known for producing brilliant minds though with simplicity. The IIT students have proven their competency even at the graduation levels. A lot of the sponsored researches from Intel, Microsoft, Google, AMD happen within IITs, without any encouragement from government.

R&D in other fields like manufacturing, construction, machinery is still fair in number. Why not IT too ?

Beijing offers incentives like tax breaks for R&D centers, and special economic zones provide infrastructure for hi-tech and R&D industries. Indian government structure has not encouraged any such activities yet.

May be it’s the time to step forward from the great Indian Leader Manmohan Singh, the world’s most educated Prime Minister, to come-up with policies that could encourage Research and development, leading to a better future for Indian IT industry.

Video from Indian News channel:

Generally speaking, operating costs tend to be cheaper in a recession. Talent is easier to find because of widespread layoffs and dissatisfaction. It’s easier to find a more talented resource relatively at a lower cost. The competition is usually less fierce because, frankly, many players are taken out of the game.

Recessions can also help executives figure out how to improve products, services, and processes internally and for customers. Ideally, the creative thinking that’s needed to weather the storm of an economic downturn can lead to new markets and revenue streams. “Innovation originates from challenges,” says Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a Noida (India)-based global IT services company.

HCL recently partnered with Xerox (XRX) to provide tech support for corporate customers using Xerox systems meant to reduce the amount of wasted paper. The systems themselves were inspired by the dual challenges of helping to save the environment and the need to slash office expenses during the downturn.

Inventing cost-effective and time-saving processes becomes a priority in a downturn, and it’s an area of interest for companies and organizations in a variety of fields, from high tech to health care. “In a recession, you can innovate to be more efficient,” says John Kao, author of the book Innovation Nation and the head of Deloitte’s Institute for Large Scale Innovation.

Mergers/Acquisitions

Recession is the time when major of the Mergers and Acquisitions are triggered. Though multi-billionaire companies can go bankrupt in months, there are always new owners to overhaul the system. The Fall of Sun Microsystems, Nortel are the best examples. Though they fall for bad, Innovation-driven Big Fish eats them and keep them in a more safer zone.

Mergers are driven by effectiveness of cost at which they can be done. Recession is the best time, the market being down, a good bargain is available to the bidder, no matter what is the financial state of the company on radar.
Lessons to Be Learned

Some companies are always left Recession-resistant. Best example is for Apple. Apple reported quarterly profits jumped 15%. With sky high sales for Mac, iPhone, Apple once again proved the key to survive in recession is Innovation. Innovation at technology, flashy gadgets, quality, and rumors among it’s fans .

Smart companies will continue to apply the innovation lessons learned during today’s tough times even when things pick up. The innovative processes, products, and services that hatch now can help executives understand how to curb costs or take risks on fresh ideas when the economy rebounds.

Innovation is all about, how companies are finding creative ways to come up with new products and services faster and more efficiently—with fewer resources. Industry has to look at the current recession through a variety of lenses to rethink how to approach innovation tactics even as R&D budgets have been slashed. Smart companies are finding inventive ways of keeping employees motivated and creative even when morale is low. We need to look into the benefits of outsourcing innovation in areas ranging from industrial design to corporate strategy.

All these strategies help us to prove that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

The news, reported first by the Mac Observer from what I can tell, isn’t that surprising. Psystar was under financial strain from trying to battle Apple in court while maintaining a business. As Mac Observer noted, the Psystar bankruptcy may indicate that its legal backers may have dropped out. However, Psystar blames the economy and suppliers’ increasingly difficult credit terms for its problems. In any case, 9 to 5 Mac reckons that the Northern California courtroom battle between Psystar and Apple is mired in limbo.

Psystar workers confirmed the bankruptcy and the filing appears to be made last Thursday.

In a petition (download petition PDF and declaration), Psystar claimed 1-49 creditors with assets of $0 to $50,000. Liabilities were $100,001 to $500,000.

Meanwhile, Psystar owes Carr & Farrell, the lawyers for Apple vs. Psystar suit, more than $88,000, DHL almost $13,000 and the IRS nearly $12,000. The fact that Psystar couldn’t pay its credit card processors or its shippers casts some doubts on plans to launch new Mac clones and even a netbook. The bankruptcy news comes following a small but significant victory over Apple in the courtroom.

In one of a bevy of filings (see PDF), Psystar blamed the economy for its financial woes:

Due to the weakened economy, Debtor has had no alternative but to commence these Chapter 11 proceedings. Debtor sales have been greatly affected by the decrease in consumer spending. The financial crisis has also caused creditors to tighten up their terms and become more demanding for immediate payment. Debtor’s vendors due to their own financial problems are not being able to supply all necessary items to allow Debtor to produce their product, thus, forcing Debtor to pay higher prices for parts in order to fulfill customer orders in a timely manner and to assure satisfaction with the product. These factors seriously contribute to the Debtor not being able to turn a significant profit in each sale. Debtor has continued doing business in this manner with diminutive profit in hopes of a turn around in our present economy but find that the long term roots of this crisis can only be overcome by directly implementing the restructuring of Debtor s business plan and can only do so with the requested Chapter 11 protection. Debtor plans on emerging from this Chapter 11 with a strong and effective plan to make an increasingly higher profit and still provide the consumer with the product that they have grown to enjoy and trust. Debtor possesses valuable intellectual property which will be implemented in a well thought out and more profitable business plan.

Here’s the list of the top 20 creditors:

Meanwhile, there’s a hearing that was scheduled for today to keep Psystar’s bank accounts. Psystar doesn’t want to close its bank accounts and open new ones due to the administrative burden. Typically, bank accounts are closed when a company files for bankruptcy and new ones are opened. That move closes the books on the past company and the reorganizing one. Psystar maintains that if it can’t continue with its existing accounts it won’t be able to continue operations.

Calls are out to Psystar’s lawyer and I’ll update as I find out more.

Source: Zdnet

The IEEE will launch programs aimed to improve the quality of engineers available to India’s IT industry.

IEEE, an association of technical professionals, plans to launch a training and certification program in India in tandem with industry and educational institutions, to get around the problem of falling standards at the country’s engineering colleges.

Only 26 percent of engineers that graduate in the country can be directly employed for technology services by India’s outsourcing industry, according to a joint study by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) and management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.

But for a few top engineering institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), most of the engineering colleges in the country provide students with mainly theoretical training, and very little exposure to real-life situations, Muriyankulangara V Ananthakrishnan, senior member and chairman of the Mumbai section of the IEEE Computer Society, said on Friday.

As a result, the IT industry has to invest in training engineers before they can start working on projects, he added.

The IEEE plans to introduce through educational institutions its Certified Software Development Associate (CSDA) and Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) certificates.

These certifications were offered to individuals in India previously, but they were not supported by a formal faculty. IEEE now plans to set up virtual classrooms that will include faculty both from educational institutions and from industry, Ananthakrishnan said.

IEEE’s aim is to make Indian engineering education more relevant to industry, he added.

The quality of engineering education in India could further deteriorate, as new engineering colleges are being set up to meet the demand for engineers from the IT industry. It is difficult, for example, to get good faculty, as the best teachers are typically moving to jobs in industry for higher pay, Ananthakrishnan said.

The CSDA is designed for graduating computer science and software engineering students, while the CSDP certification is targeted at mid-career software professionals, IEEE said.

There were articles over the net which said “will Obama TAX the internet?” LOL. it looked funny but its true. “If he could, he would”. If he was CEO of GOOGLE, he might have down that easily. Taking his steps onwards, President Obama unveiled tax code changes Monday he said could curb offshoring, but analysts and tax experts believe the plan will have little to no impact on the megatrend that threatens as many as one-in-four IT jobs at large companies.

The criticism boils down to this: It isn’t the tax code that created the offshore outsourcing industry over the last decade; it’s the low cost of highly skilled labor.

President Obama didn’t address the wage gap today, but he is arguing that the tax code has played a contributing role in the growth of offshoring, and that includes high-skilled outsourcing.

In his remarks, he cited a major Indian IT outsourcing center, Bangalore, as one of the places that has benefited from tax loopholes. The U.S. has developed “a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York,” Obama said.

These tax loopholes give companies that create jobs overseas the ability to take deductions on expenses “when they do not pay any American taxes on their profits,” he said.

The proposed tax changes, which must be approved by Congress, may affect IT vendors that run subsidiaries overseas by denying deductions for offshore payments on things like payroll expenses, said Alan Appel, a tax attorney at Bryan Cave LLP in New York.

“By denying the deduction, the hope is that it will be more expensive to operate offshore and it will give incentives to create jobs in the U.S,” Cave said.

The proposed tax code changes is about as close as the White House has come to addressing the issue of IT offshoring. Whether the administration ties the use of the H-1B visa, which is heavily used by Indian offshore firms, is still a question mark.

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said last week that the U.S. should increase the supply of foreign workers and said the H-1B cap is keeping wages high, protecting workers from global competition and creating a “privileged elite” in the U.S.

The major motivation for moving work overseas is the difference between salaries in the U. S. and overseas. A job that pays US$100,000 here may only cost one-sixth that in India, said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of the Everest Group, a outsourcing consultancy in Dallas.

“If there is a tax consequence here it’s de minimis to the overall impact” of outsourcing, Bendor-Samuel said. In any case, he said, “this idea that people are doing outsourcing to avoid taxes is simply wrong.”

Sang Kim, a partner in the international tax practice at DLA Piper, also said he doubts that the legislation will impact outsourcing. “The argument is that it should stem the flow of jobs leaving the U.S. but the reality is I don’t think the jobs are moving outside the U.S because of tax policy,” Kim said.

If anything, the tax code changes could accelerate the flow of jobs overseas to offset the larger tax bite, he said.

Kim said there could be unforeseen consequences to the tax changes. A foreign country could, for instance, could offer subsidies to U.S. firms to create jobs as a way of mitigating any tax impact, he said.

The Hackett Group, whose clients include many multinational firms, reviewed data collected from 200 companies to find that at companies with revenues of at least $5 billion, as many as one quarter of IT jobs will be moved offshore by 2010.