Canara Bank launches 4 more technology products

Bangalore: Leading public sector Bank, Canara Bank, today said it has launched four technology products, enabling cashless services to its customers.

A company release said the Canara Bank Debit Card-Platinum, a premier variant of its Debit Card offers many more benefits than the normal debit card for premier segment customers. It offers higher purchase limit of Rs two lakh per day. The card makes available complementary insurance cover and Global Customer Assistance Service provided by VISA/MasterCard. The Canara Campus Card is a co-branded debit card in association with educational institutions issued to students of identified institutions to facilitate payment of fees.

The card ensures cashless transactions that avoids hassle of handling Cash/Cheque/DD for student/Institution in fee payment. This Card can also be used by student as normal debit card in other merchant locations/ATMs, it said.

Smartphone ownership doubling in America: study

COLUMBIA: The percentage of Americans age 12 and older who have a smartphone has more than doubled in the past year, from 14 percent to 31 percent of the population according to the new national survey from Arbitron Inc. and Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms.The study, released today, is the 19th in a series of studies dating back to 1998.  Among the many other findings•Facebook is now being used by a majority of all Americans age 12 and over (51 per cent); this number was only 8 per cent when Arbitron/Edison Research first measured the social media phenomenon in 2008.
•A majority of American households now have two or more computers (51 per cent); as compared to 24 per cent of households in 2002.
•Usage of online radio is up significantly, with weekly usage of all forms of online radio having doubled in the last five years; self-reported weekly time spent with online radio is now nearly 10 hours (9 hours 47 minutes).
•Daily time spent with TV, Radio and the Internet combined has increased by 20 percent in the last ten years, with self-reported daily usage now at 8 hours 11 minutes compared to 6 hours 50 minutes in 2001.
•Just under one-third of all Americans (31 per cent) have plugged an MP3 player such as an Apple iPod into their car stereo systems.
•One in ten Americans report listening to Pandora Internet Radio in the week before they were surveyed.
•Among the 81 per cent of American households with Internet access, two-thirds now have a Wi-Fi network installed.
•More than one-tenth of all cell phone owners have listened to online radio streamed in their cars by connecting their phones to their car stereo system.


"When you consider the rapid growth in ownership of smartphones in context with the continued rise in the use of social media it becomes increasingly clear that these platforms are fueling fundamental changes in consumer expectations and how they use media," said Bill Rose, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Arbitron Inc.

"What's fascinating about the Internet over the past ten years is the additive effect it has had upon the American media diet, which continues to expand," said Tom Webster, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Edison Research. "Rather than crowding other forms of media off the plate, so to speak, digital media is being consumed simultaneously with offline media, and in venues and opportunities where media might not have been consumed previously."

Since 1998, this notable research series has reported on and analyzed consumer use of the Internet, digital platforms and their impact on radio.

"This study provides further evidence of radio's continued resilience and relevance in today's digital landscape," said Arbitron's Rose.

"The ubiquity of social media usage -- and Facebook, in particular  -- has had an enormous impact upon the ways in which people communicate with each other - which has profoundly affected not only how companies market themselves, but also how they hire and train internally," said Webster from Edison Research.

Desi brands take feisty Indian tablet PC market by storm

Bangalore: There is no doubt that India is warming up to tablet PCs. It may not be the most pulsating of the markets like that of the U.S., Europe or China, but it is picking up slowly. India's tablet PC market is estimated at 25,000 units a quarter, but holds the promise of growing quickly as 3G penetration gathers momentum. Tablets from international companies like Apple and Samsung apart, India has seen some decent tablets from some of the 'desi' players. It all started with Olivepad. And adding to the list, there's the home grown Notion Ink Adam, the $35 government sponsored prototype, and the recently announced $150 tablet from India's largest private service provider Reliance. According to industry experts, this should set the alarm bells ringing for global biggies vying for a piece of the Indian tabletPC marketA time when the iPad reintroduced tablets to the world, India got its first tablet, the OlivePad, launched by Olive Telecom in August 2010. Priced at 25,000, Olivepad became available at the end of October with the update of Android 2.2 Froyo. Olivepad packs in a lot of hardware. It is ideally suited for mobile internet and browsing with 3.5G HSUPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It comes with a 3 megapixel in-built camera, a front camera and a 7-inch capacitive touch screen.

Notion Ink Adam entered the scene with the features of the Galaxy Tab in a price point better than the Olivepad. Like the iPad, the Adam also sports a 10-inch screen with a resolution support of 1024x600. Its other features include a 178 degree rotating swivel camera, a touchpad at the back, pixelQI screen to facilitate sunlight reading and a radio to go with it. It has got a dual core ARM processor based on the NVIDIA Tegra chip and ULP GPU. There is also 1GB DDR2 and 8GB onboard storage. Notion Ink Adam tablet PC is priced between $375 and $425 ( 17,000- 19,000). However, it does not have a local distribution network and is sold mainly through the company's website.

In the first half of 2010, Infibeam.com, one of India's largest e-commerce site launched Infibeam Phi tablet which is similer to Amazon Kindle device. Priced at 14999, Infibeam Phi is an 7 inch touch screen media device comes with 8GB inbuilt memory with expandable memory up to 32 GB via micro SD card. Phi runs ARM9's 600 MHz processor. Phi has Wi-Fi but doesn't have Bluetooth or microphones on-board.
In this list of 'desi' tablets, the next one to come is the $35 government sponsored prototype called Sakshat that hardly looks posh. The tablet is said to have 2GB memory, run Linux, be able to connect to the internet over WiFi, open PDFs, and even play YouTube videos.

Recently, India based IT Service Company HCL has come up with three tablet PCs with prices starting from 14, 990 for the base model to 32, 990 for the highest speced model. The HCL ME range tablets are all based on Android 2.2 OS instead of the newer Honeycomb OS. The last time HCL associated with tablet PCs was during the Indian government's effort to launch a $35 tablet Sakshat, though the deal with HCL fell through.

Adding to all these, two Indian mobile phone manufacturers Lava International and Micromax Informatics are also planning to launch their own tablet PCs in the Indian market by July-August. Both Lava and Micromax expect demand for tablet PCs to touch a lakh unit by the end of 2011.

The demand for tablet PC devices has boomed globally much beyond the initial estimates of market research firms like Gartner. Till December 31, 2010, Apple sold 15 million iPads worldwide. Driven by this, Gartner estimates worldwide media tablet sales of around 54.8 million units in 2011, up 181 percent from 2010, and surpass 208 million units in 2014. Sniffing the possible profits in the growing tablet PC market, a lot of domestic players are showing interest in rolling out their own devices. The competition has heated up, and all the players will try the hardest to take the center stage, which is an important concern for the global players as well.

Dell bets big on India

Leading computer manufacturer Dell plans to invest more in India to expand its operations besides hiring more people in the next one year.

The second largest PC-maker globally also hopes to cross the $2 billion annual revenue mark in India soon.

“India today offers a fantastic opportunity to use technology for a wide range of applications. We see a tremendous opportunity for growth of the PC segment in this country…$2 billion is the milestone that our India team is now working on,” Dell CEO Michael Dell told journalists at an event organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry here on Tuesday.

Dell already has around 23,000 employees in India and looking at adding a ‘few thousand' more people in its Indian workforce, which is now the second largest employee base outside the U.S. Dell's business activities in the country include research and development and manufacturing in Sriperumbudur near Chennai (Tamil Nadu).

Three focus areas

Pointing out that the company sees good growth for its business in India as the PC penetration level hovers around just 20-30 PCs per 1,000 people, Mr. Dell said in India, the company had adopted three focus areas — growing its India presence in the hardware business; entering into education and healthcare segment for the production of customised products and services; and managing and servicing offerings sold in India.

Dell saw its revenues in India grew by 37 per cent last year, while its consumer business grew by 41 per cent. Dell's small and medium businesses unit and public sector vertical grew by 52 per cent and 41 per cent, respectively. Speaking at the event, Prime Minister's Adviser on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovation Sam Pitroda said India was starting to build four IT data centres in Poona, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar and Delhi, while the government had agreed to set up a data centre in each State capital. This initiative would help in providing IT solutions for realising social and economic welfare gains for the people.

“Innovation holds the key to India's ability to compete and solve problems for people at the bottom of the pyramid. With that in view, the Centre has set up a National Innovation Council. We have decided to request the State chief ministers to create State-level innovation councils and are asking Central ministries to constitute industry-related innovation councils,” Mr Pitroda added. 

‘Supermoon’ to be visible on Saturday

An exceptional celestial treat is in store for sky gazers as ‘supermoon’, the biggest and brightest full moon of the year which will be closest to Earth in 18 years, will be seen in the night sky on Saturday.

“The ‘supermoon’ will be closest to the Earth in 18 years tomorrow and will appear to be the biggest and brightest of 2011, Director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) C.B. Devgun said on Friday.

Saturday’s full moon will be around 10 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter as compared to other full moons during the year, he said.

The term ‘Supermoon’ was first coined by Astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979. According to him, it is a situation when the moon is slightly closer to the Earth in its orbit than average, which is 90 per cent or more of its closest orbit, and the moon is a full or new moon.

On Saturday, the moon will be only 3,56,577 km away from the Earth, the closest while at the full moon phase in 18 years.

Earlier, there were supermoons in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005.

Regular situations of full moons coinciding with the moon’s closest point to Earth in fact happen after about every one year, one month and 18 days when it is about 3,63,104 km away from the Earth, Mr. Devgun said.

“This is because the moon’s orbit is an ellipse with one side 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other. In the language of astronomy, the two extremes are called ‘apogee’ (far away) and ‘perigee’ (nearby),” Mr. Devgun said.

At the closest, our natural satellite moon lies roughly 3,56,630 km from the Earth compared to its average distance of 3,84,800 km from the planet.

“The moon will not only shine brighter but will also appear bigger as compared to other full moons during the year,” he said.
The full moon will be at its best at around 3:30 a.m. R.C. Kapoor, a retired professor of Indian Institute of Astrophysics said.A perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system or "supermoon" is a full or new moon that coincides with a close approach by the Moon to the Earth. The Moon's distance varies each month between approximately 357,000 kilometers (222,000 mi) and 406,000 km (252,000 mi) due to its elliptical orbit around the Earth (distances given are center-to-center.The name SuperMoon was coined by astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979, defined as:

    ...a new or full moon which occurs with the Moon at or near (within 90% of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit (perigee). In short, Earth, Moon and Sun are all in a line, with Moon in its nearest approach to Earth.

(The phrasing "within 90% of its closest approach" is unclear, but an example on Nolle's website shows that he means that the Earth–Moon distance is in the lowest tenth of its range.)

The term supermoon is not widely accepted or used within the astronomy or scientific community, who prefer the term perigee-syzygy. Perigee is the point at which the Moon is closest in its orbit to the Earth, and syzygy is a full or new moon, when the Earth, the Moon and the Sun are aligned. Hence, supermoon can be regarded as a combination of the two, although they do not perfectly coincide each time. Syzygy may occur within a maximum of 12 hours from perigee during a supermoon, and 1 hour from perigee during an extreme supermoon.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100421111353

NASA spacecraft becomes first to enter Mercury orbit

 Washington: A NASA spacecraft, after over six years of space travel, has become the first to enter the orbit of Mercury, the agency said Friday.

The Messenger spacecraft began the orbit insertion manoeuvre at 0045 GMT Friday, RIA Novosti reported.

"NASA's Messenger spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury. This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system's innermost planet," the NASA website said. It took the spacecraft more than six years to enter the orbit of Mercury, the least explored planet of the solar system.

To reach its destination point, the spacecraft, launched in 2004, covered over 7.8 billion km. It followed a route through the inner solar system, which included one fly-by of Earth, two fly-bys of Venus, and three fly-bys of Mercury.

Engineers will check how the spacecraft's systems are sustaining in Mercury's harsh thermal environment, and equipment will be turned on March 23. The scientific mission will begin April 4.

Mercury is the smallest and the densest planet among the four terrestrial planets, including Venus, Earth and Mars. Before the Messenger mission, only 45 percent of Mercury's surface had been photographed by a spacecraft. The previous mission was Mariner-10, launched in the 1970s.   

Japan nuclear plant firm gets Twitter

TOKYO: Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which operates the quake-hit Japanese nuclear reactors, opened an official Twitter account, immediately drawing more than 117,000 followers.

"We sincerely apologise for causing serious worries and trouble over the accident at Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant, radiation leak, planned blackouts," TEPCO said in its profile in Japanese on the micro-blogging site.

TEPCO said it planned to provide information about radiation leaks and blackouts through its Twitter blog, which has already attracted 117,838 followers in the first six hours with only two messages.

Its first tweet was about the threat of major power blackouts in the capital unless electricity use was reduced in the aftermath of the massive earthquake and tsunami. Prime Minister Naoto Kan had authorised managed outages to prevent any sudden major supply disruption, as electricity supply has fallen sharply since the quake-tsunami disaster hit power plants.

The Tokyo-based power company follows accounts of local news media, regional authorities, Twitter users offering messages on earthquake alerts and support for quake victims.

TEPCO has been under fire over delays in disclosing information related to the plant, where helicopters dumped tonnes of water in a desperate bid to cool reactors crippled by the earthquake to prevent a catastrophic meltdown.

Its Twitter account is @OfficialTEPCO available only in Japanese.