Wire Connected

Every February, the great and good of the Indian technology industry meet in Mumbai to discuss and plan the year ahead. The annual Nasscom India Leadership Forum is like the World Economic Forum in Davos, except it’s all about outsourcing. Stars such as John Chambers from Cisco and the “core competence” academic CK Prahalad mingle with the IT folk and business cards fly through the air like confetti.

When I arrived in Mumbai this year, I expected the conference to be focused on two key topics: The reaction of the IT industry to the global economic crisis; and the Satyam financial scandal. But surprisingly, the conference agenda focused more on green IT than anything in the news.

To recap, Satyam was the fourth-largest Indian technology firm, just outside the big league, but still with multibillion-dollar revenue and impressive clients including Merrill Lynch, Nestlé and Caterpillar. The founder, Ramalinga Raju, perpetrated a massive financial fraud that only came to light in a confessional fax to the board on 7 January this year. Though the fraud is still being unwound and evaluated, it involved overstating the firm’s number of employees and revenue over a period of years and could be worth more than $1bn (£693m). Raju is now in a jail close to Hyderabad until a trial being billed as “India’s Enron”.

The government feared that a major scandal in India’s high-tech industry could cause a loss of investor confidence and market uncertainty ­ and all in a general election year. It drafted in a team of respected industry veterans to create an interim Satyam board to prevent the firm imploding. After all, this is a service company ­ if clients suddenly lose trust and flee en masse, there is nothing.

The interim board succeeded in holding the company together by convincing major clients that there would be no overnight change in service levels. With that in mind, the former Nasscom president Kiran Karnik should be particularly praised. His charming demeanour has calmed the nerves of several jittery Satyam clients.

But what happens next? Companies such as L&T Infotech are waiting to scoop up Satyam at a fire-sale price, but a detailed restatement of the accounts is yet to take place. It is likely a suitor will acquire the firm before a full audit is complete, because clients will flee if some certainty is not restored soon ­ though at a suitably discounted price for adopting unknown assets and liabilities.

With all this going on, it might have been expected that Nasscom would provide a forum for analysis. Perhaps it is too early to determine an outcome, but at least some informed discussion could have prevented it feeling as if the topic were not approved for any official debate.

Professor Phil Taylor is an outsourcing expert from Strathclyde University and he was disappointed. He said: “There are three issues I want to hear about that are not being discussed openly: Satyam; the economic crisis; and the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November. These are all important events, but they seem to have been filtered out of the main conference discussions to the detriment of the event. If we could have had an open discussion about Satyam, for example, it could have helped foreign delegates to understand what is going on and perhaps see why they don’t need to be concerned.”

I echo Phil’s comments. When India wants to talk to the world about IT achievements and prowess, the uncomfortable topics must be included in the discussion. These are the real areas where investors need to feel comfortable and to skirt around such issues implies avoidance and creates uncertainty.

Fox said on Thursday it has ordered two more seasons of animated comedy “The Simpsons,” ensuring the show that started in 1989 will surpass “Gunsmoke” as the longest-running prime-time U.S. television series.

“The Simpsons” will start its 21st season in the fall, after last year tying the longevity record of “Gunsmoke,” which ended in 1975 after 20 seasons. Its second season in the two-year deal will come in 2010.

The cops and courts show “Law & Order” on network NBC has run for 19 prime-time seasons, starting in 1990.

“The Simpsons” has won 24 Emmy Awards and was already the longest running animated series on prime-time television in the United States. It was created by cartoon artist Matt Groening.

The Simpsons are a family of five made up of dull-witted father Homer, good-intentioned mom Marge and kids Bart and Lisa and Maggie, who all live in a town called Springfield that serves as a microcosm of the United States.

It has featured the voice work of major celebrities in guest starring roles, from Paul McCartney to Elizabeth Taylor, and it casts a comedic glance at weighty issues, including racial discrimination, world affairs and religion.

In 2007, “The Simpsons Movie” hit theaters and went on to make more than $527 million worldwide.

“Gunsmoke,” a western about straight-shooting lawman Matt Dillon, began in 1955 during TV’s black and white era, and later switched to color. Sam Peckinpah, who went on to make the 1969 western classic “The Wild Bunch,” was among the many directors on “Gunsmoke,” which starred James Arness as Dillon.

After being shuttled to various locations over the past two weeks to protect her privacy,  the 21-year-old star was photographed this weekend on the beach in Punta Mita, Mexico. She previously logged short stints in Los Angeles and her native Barbados.

Photos of her south-of-the-border sojourn ran in today’s print edition of the New York Daily News and quickly turned up online. She does not appear to show any of the bruising that was so clearly visible in her leaked police photo.

The images were reportedly snapped at a private villa on Saturday, a day after she celebrated her milestone birthday in L.A. Aside from a few backseat shots, it’s the first time Rihanna’s been photographed in public since the Feb. 8 altercation with Chris Brown that left her hospitalized.

Yesterday the L.A. district attorney’s office said the investigation was still open and no decision on charges has been made.

We can file this latest announcement as something that was expected, Roku has taken their support for Amazon’s Video on Demand out of private beta and made it available to all.  Of course, even though this was expected, it still serves as good news, and this announcement has made my Roku player quite a bit more appealing.

The new support comes in the form of a software update, which is in the process of being rolled out for all Roku owners to install.  Once the update is installed, you will then have access to browse, rent or purchase any of Amazon’s more than “40,000 movie and TV titles,“ many of which become available the same day as the DVD release.

One drawback is that Amazon currently lacks any HD video; the content is currently limited to DVD-quality.  For a set top box that now supports Netflix, Amazon VOD, and also has built-in Wi-Fi to cost only $99 sounds like a good deal.

Facebook users need to be very careful these days.  The popular social networking site has been hit with a new wave of malware that pretends to be one of the thousands of third party apps available on the site.  One of the most dangerous is the newest version of the Koobface worm, which turns the machines it infects into zombies and adds them to a botnet.

Another rogue program that made the rounds last week, causing havoc as it did so was an app called “Facebook-closing down!” which sent fake notifications to users saying one of their friends had reported them to Facebook for terms and services violations.  Anyone who clicked on the link in the fake alert was directed to the app, which then sent the same fake alerts to all their friends.  Since the fake alerts actually named the friend who allegedly did the reporting, a lot of drama and hurt feelings ensued.

A third malicious app going around is called “Error Check System” which sent fake alerts from the user’s friends saying they had experienced problems accessing that users profile.  Like the “Facebook-closing down!” app, clicking on the link sends the same fake alerts to everyone in the users friends list.  Experts say both apps harvested email addresses and other personal info as they spread.

Facebook has since shut down both apps, but you can be sure new ones will pop up in their place.  The only way to protect yourself is to be careful of what apps you use, and click with caution.  A little common sense helps as well - if someone actually were to report you on Facebook or any other site, you would never be told exactly who it was.  Enjoy Facebook, but be picky when it comes to using the site’s third party apps.

Eye-Fi is, perhaps, best known for their memory cards that automatically transmits photos from your digital camera to your PC, wirelessly.  Taking that idea one step further, Eye-Fi announced two new SD cards, the Eye-Fi Share Video and Eye-Fi Explore Video, that also transfer videos automatically.  In fact, Eye-Fi finds that half of all digital camera owners use their digital camera to shoot videos, over an actual video camera or cell phone. 

According to comScore, more than 144 million videos were watched online this past year, so videos being uploaded to the Internet has become extremely popular in the past few years and this popularity has boomed with the emergence of YouTube.  Faster Internet connections have also made videos more popular to watch and use.  Now, Eye-Fi has embedded technology into their cards that automatically upload your videos to either YouTube or Flickr.  In addition to these services, the cards have the ability to upload videos and pictures to social networking websites such as Facebook. 

The two SD cards both have storage capacities of 4GB and they automatically geotag the photos and videos.  All you need is a good Wi-Fi connection to start the uploading process.  The 4GB Eye-Fi Share Video will retail for $79, while the Explore Video will sell for $99.  The Explore costs more because it gets you a year of hotspot access.  Both of these are set to be available later this month and will be on sale at Apple Retail Stores, Best Buy Retail stores, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and Costco.com. 

Ed McMahon, the longtime sidekick to Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” has been hospitalized for nearly a month with pneumonia and other medical problems, a spokesman said on Friday.

Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman said McMahon, who turns 86 next week, is currently in the intensive care unit of an undisclosed hospital.

“It’s serious. He’s an 85-year old man with a number of medical issues going on,” Bragman told Reuters.

He said one of McMahon’s medical problems is pneumonia, but he declined to confirm or deny an online report from the TV show “Entertainment Tonight” that the performer also had been diagnosed with bone cancer.

McMahon’s hospitalization follows a difficult year for the veteran TV celebrity, most famous for his nightly “Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!” introduction of Carson for 30 years and for his hosting the TV talent show “Star Search.”

He made headlines last summer when he defaulted on a $4.8 million mortgage on his six-bedroom Beverly Hills mansion. He later found a buyer for the house to avoid foreclosure.

McMahon blamed his financial woes on having broken his neck about 18 months earlier, leaving him unable to work. He also sued Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, accusing the hospital of failing to diagnose the neck fracture after he fell and of botching two subsequent spine operations

The discrepancy between an individual's perceived social isolation (ie., loneliness) and the number of connections in their social network is well documented. Yet, few details are known about the placement of loneliness within, or the spread of loneliness through, social networks. Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, we show that loneliness occurs in clusters within social networks, extends up to three degrees of separation, and is disproportionately represented at the periphery of social networks. In addition, loneliness appears to spread through a contagious process even though lonely individuals are moved closer to the edge of social networks over time. The spread of loneliness is stronger for friends than family members and stronger for women than for men. The results advance our understanding of the broad social forces involved and suggest that efforts to reduce loneliness in our society may benefit by aggressively targeting the people in the periphery to help repair their social networks and to create a protective barrier that can keep the whole network from unraveling.

Online gambling firm Betfair hopes to take advantage of the redundancies affecting UK IT departments to recruit experienced workers to support its international expansion and new product development.

Staffing will be a top priority for new Betfair chief technology officer Tony McAlister, who started in January. “We think this is a good opportunity to invest in the future from a resource and technology standpoint. The idea is to make Betfair a destination workplace and hire the best talent on the planet,” said McAlister.

“A lot of these talented people have been put out of their jobs and my goal is to take advantage of that. Now is the best time to shop for new talent, but we will do it in a very methodical manner. I want to be much more prescriptive about the skills I am looking for.”

This year will see Betfair boost its mobile offering, so the firm will be on the lookout for professionals with experience in that field, as well as staff who can help with any major code rewriting for its core platform.

The company’s 350-strong team, which is already supported by a near-shore facility in Romania, will also seek to attract more international talent.

“I would like to bring much more global experience and different cultures into the business and these employees will be based across the world doing different things,” said McAlister.

“If you are going to do more in the mobile space, you need to have people in the US and Asia as that is the cutting edge of mobile technology. It is hard to manage, but the benefits far outweigh the difficulties.”

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