BANGALORE: Mumbai-based software products and services provider Infrasoft Technologies has mandated three investment banks including Avendus Capital to look for acquisitions in the US in the range on $10-15 million. This comes on the heels of Infrasoft's acquisition of the financial services business of KPIT Cummins in October this year.

Infrasoft is amongst a host of small-sized companies that are making acquisitions despite global economic conditions looking uncertain. Srividya C G, partner, valuation services, in advisory firm Grant Thornton, said the IT sector has done the most number of M&A deals this year.

Companies say that technology services with evolved business models and pricing mechanisms are vital for customers even during difficult times. They have become partners as opposed to pure vendors to clients. Grant Thornton data shows that overall M&A deals in the first 10 months of this year amounted to $33.6 billion, a fall of over 21% from the year-ago period. The number of deals fell to 523 from 662. The corresponding figure for IT stood at $3.3 billion compared to $0.68 billion in the previous year. The number of deals fell marginally from 102 to 99. This includes some large-sized deals concluded by companies like Wipro, iGate and Genpact.

While acquisitions by larger technology companies have slowed down, smaller sized companies have kept up the momentum.

Investment bankers say that falling valuations are helping sustain the interest for acquisitions. Srividya said tech players have not been very successful in developing capabilities organically and are thus looking to make buys to fill these gaps.

Cloud technology for instance has been a focus of many acquisitions in recent times with companies like Aditi Technologies and Vembu Technologies making acquisitions in the space.

IBS Software, an IT solutions provider catering to travel, transportation and logistics industries, acquired Moveo Systems to drive its enterprise mobility offering. "With this, IBS can widen its service offerings and speed up innovative practices," said CEO of IBS, Rajiv Shah.

Hanuman Tripathi, group MD of Infrasoft, said that it is easier for smaller companies to make acquisitions. For large companies, managing scale is difficult. Also, it is an easier decision for a niche player to add specialized capabilities through acquisitions than for a larger generalized player. It is not only the pure technology players that are making acquisitions. Internet startup Flipkart and BPOs like EXL and Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) have also bought companies over the last few months. HGS in August acquired Canada-based customer relationship management company Online Support (OLS) for $78 million.

"Despite the economic uncertainty, several clients are in discussion to grow existing relationships. We also have strategic plans to grow newly acquired businesses and verticals," said Partha Sarkar, global CEO of HGS. However analysts warn that there have been instances in the past of acquisitions going sour, especially during downturns. Subex is a reminder of how chasing growth has risks.

Pictures and specifications of what people believe will be the first BlackBerry device based on Research In Motion's (RIM) forthcoming BBX operating system (OS) have appeared on the Net via technology blog The Verge.

The design of the touchscreen device — which has been dubbed the BlackBerry

London — is a far cry from RIM's iconic (and flailing) BlackBerry candybar handsets. However, the BlackBerry London draws aesthetic inspiration from the clean lines and metallic detail seen on RIM's Porsche Design P9981 handset which was introduced in October.

The London is "thinner than the iPhone 4," writes The Verge and "allegedly is equipped with a TI OMAP dual-core CPU clocked to 1.5GHz, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and a 2-megapixel front-facing shooter."

Technology blog BGR backs up the claims and reveals that the device "should in fact launch as the company's first BBX-based smartphone."

According to the two blogs, the launch date is still a long way off; the BlackBerry London may not be available until the third quarter of 2012.

ZDNet editor in chief Larry Dignan comments on Twitter that, "RIM's rebound always seems just a few quarters away." With Mobile World Congress (MWC) coming up in February 2012 and a slew of powerful new smartphones on the horizon RIM will have to act fast to stay competitive.

HTC will reportedly unveil "the most the most powerful smartphone the world has ever seen" during MWC. The Android smartphone will be shipped with a Nvidia quad-core processor and will feature a cutting-edge 4.7" display.

If you’re one of U.S. Cellular’s 6.1 million customers and you’ve been just aching for a Windows Phone handset, your only option so far has been… erm… deal with it.

Deal no longer! This morning, U.S. Cellular added their first WP7 handset, the HTC 7 Pro, to their arsenal.

As one of the first WP7 handsets that Microsoft ever showed (and as the handset that Sprint launched as the “Arrive” back in February), this thing’s not exactly brand new — but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Not that anyone who can afford a $200 phone is really a “beggar”. but still.

Speaking of which, the HTC 7 Pro will set you back $200 after contract and $100 mail-in rebate.

NEW DELHI: Continuing with its efforts to provide assistance to anxious students, Delhi University will be assisting admission seekers with web chat facility for an hour on select days, an official said.

Offered by the Dean, Students Welfare, the link to the web chat would be available on the varsity's website — www.du.ac.in. The chat session would be organised between 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on June 3, 6, 8 and 10.

"There will be a real time interactive question-answer session where students will be able to ask questions related to admissions in various undergraduate courses," said a varsity official.

"The information will be provided by the experts in the field. Different experts will be available at different time schedules," added the official.

Apart from the chat facility, the varsity Monday launched its own page on Facebook for direct interaction with students.

Further, two telephone helplines each in south and north campuses and a community radio would also be working towards calming the strained nerves of the students.

LONDON: Mark Zuckerberg , founder of social networking giant Facebook, has said that email would fade out, just like the letter did, as it is slow and informal.

The 26-year-old made the claim as he launched the Facebook's new messaging service, which integrates all web and text-based communications and works instantaneously.

The service, perceived as a direct rival to Google's Gmail, marks a new front in the ongoing and increasingly bitter battle between Facebook and Google to gain the loyalty of users.

Zuckerberg revealed that, as rumoured, the 500million people signed up to Facebook would have access to a 'Facebook.com' email address.

Entire conversation histories going back years will also be saved into users' accounts and Spam will be completely filtered out, he claimed.

"We don't think that a modern messaging system is going to be email," the Daily Mail quoted Zuckerberg, as saying at a press conference in San Francisco.

"We want people to be able to communicate in whatever way they choose: email, text or Facebook message," he said.

Facebook's new email system is modelled on instant messaging and on-line chat and will allow people to simplify their communications regardless of how they choose to do it.

Texts, email or instant messages will all come into one 'feed' and users can respond in any way they want.

Zuckerberg said that he was changing Facebook because young people found email was too much of a 'cognitive load'.

He said of the new programme: "It's not email. It handles email… along with all the different ways you want to communicate."

"The goal of this product is to make it that we can seamlessly integrate across all of these different products very easily," he added.

In my mind, Google TV  is about the most interesting product idea in recent gadget history. It’s poised, ready, not to disrupt the TV industry, but rather provide consumers true on-demand options with no extra work on the networks’ part. There’s nothing particularly novel about Google TV, but the whole concept is wrapped up as such a nice package that’s it’s hard not to like it — that is, if you can look past the first generation jitters. The platform isn’t particularly ready for general consumption just yet as it seems it fell victim Google’s “release early, release often” mantra. But it’s only going to get better with each release.

I spent some time this afternoon talking to Google TV’s product managers, Salahuddin Choudhary, about what’s wrong with the platform today and where it’s going. Let’s just say my interest was restored. Google TV will live up to its potential.

John and I worked on several of CrunchGear’s Google TV posts together as we both have units installed at our homes. We both noted that the Chrome browser seems stripped down, almost unusable for general web browsing. This was by design. Apparently Google found from various focus groups that people preferred the full-screen experience rather than having a browser on their HDTV that showed the URL bar, tabs, and all the rest standard on a desktop browser. The primary purpose of Google TV’s browser is to watch videos, not peruse Facebook or Amazon. This might change, though.

Salahuddin commented that they are working on making “the core browser tools more accessible.” after I droned on and on about how it’s a missed opportunity to at least not have those user elements be optional. I wasn’t the only one that had a hard time finding the URL bar. (it doubles as the search bar) They seem to understand user experience is key but I’m not sure it’s a top priority like it should be, a criticism that applies to the Android Marketplace as well.

I stated in our review that Google TV seems half-baked. That’s particularly true when it’s noted that apps won’t hit the system until 2011. But sometime next year, the entire Android Marketplace will appear on Google TV. Yeah, all the apps are coming to the Google TV platform: Angry Birds, Google Earth, Robo Defense. They’re committed, for better or worse, to support the entire back catalog. If you thought an iPhone app looks horrible upscaled to 2x on the iPad, just wait until the Android port hits your 50-inch LCD.

Of course I was assured that they are working on the scaling and they might look fine, but smartphone apps are fundamentally different than Google TV apps. I’m expecting a lot of disappointed GTV owners once the Android Marketplace hits the platform and they install their favorite Android smartphone apps.

But there’s going to be another sort of Android app. One designed just for Google TV and a “full range of developers” are already on board. The few apps of Pandora, NBA Gametime, Netflix are really just a proof of concept. They were included to show what Google TV could do, but I would argue that they added to the half-baked taste. Besides Netflix and Pandora, the rest are officially meh.

We talked briefly about the content provider’s stance and blocking of Google TV, but there was no hint of concern or worry like I expected. Google TV is looked upon internally as a product that works with cable, not against it. Video web portals like Hulu are just one source of content for Google TV. It also links up with Amazon VOD and Netflix, which, while they’re pay sites, do offer a fairly extensive library of content that’s free from ads. “It’s up the networks,” Salahuddin said when asked about the blocking situation.

While writing our comprehensive Google TV review, I couldn’t help but feel that the system could be a game-changer, but only if given enough time. I worried that Google wouldn’t give the platform time to mature, but those fears were somewhat subdued knowing that Sony dumped a good deal of money into developing and marketing two major products. They would keep Google on track, I thought. But after talking to Salahuddin, I feel my original fears were unfounded. Google is in this for the long haul. Google TV will be given the time it needs to grow into a consumer platform.

Oh, and my final question of “Is Google TV coming to the PS3?” was met with a surprised chuckle and quick “no comment.” So yeah, Google TV is coming to the PS3. Somehow. Maybe. I really don’t know.

Revisions: Inserted the proper name of the product manager.

Are you facing Facebook  fatigue? Do you want to knock off your Twitter feeds? Or get rid of a stalker on the line? Well, the reasons to leave the social web could be many, but one way to do it is through web suicide. A website, called suicidemachine.org developed by group of Dutch and German geeks allows you put the noose around your online alter-ego.

They claim to have created a software that can delete all private content, links and relationships at one-tenth the time it would take for a person to do it by himself: 52 minutes using the web suicide machine against a 9 hours & 35 minutes if one plans a web exit manually.

Once you hand over your log-in details and click Commit, the program will methodically delete your info — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections — much like users could do manually.

What appeals to many of the site's boosters is the simplicity of the exit. When trying to close an online account, users are often asked to fill out a questionnaire. More important, their information and connections aren't then erased; they're just unpublished. By deleting all your data, this website says, your private information is snuffed out on website servers. Rough estimates say that 3,000 people have gone to the gallows.

But everybody doesn't think the proposition is cool. The site was blocked by Facebook recently, citing a violation of users' privacy. "How can I be sure that my data is not backed up by these guys?" remarked Hari Vaid, a professional.

NEW YORK: Worries over internet  privacy have spurred lawsuits, conspiracy theories and consumer anxiety as marketers and others invent new ways to track computer users on the internet. But the alarmists have not seen anything yet.

In the next few years, a powerful new suite of capabilities will become available to web developers that could give marketers and advertisers access to many more details about computer users' online activities. Nearly everyone who uses the internet will face the privacy risks that come with those capabilities, which are an integral part of the web language that will soon power the internet: HTML 5.

The new web code, the fifth version of Hypertext Markup Language used to create web pages, is already in limited use, and it promises to usher in a new era of internet browsing within the next few years. It will make it easier for users to view multimedia content without downloading extra software; check email offline; or find a favourite restaurant or shop on a smart phone.

Most users will clearly welcome the additional features that come with the new web language."It's going to change everything about the internet and the way we use it today," said James Cox, 27, a freelance consultant and software developer at Smokeclouds, a New York City start-up company. "It's not just HTML 5. It's the new Web." But others, while also enthusiastic about the changes, are more cautious.

Most web users are familiar with cookies, which make it possible, for example, to log on to websites without having to retype user names and passwords, or to keep track of items placed in virtual shopping carts before they are bought.

The new web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user's hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data. That could include a user's location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, emails and a history of the web pages visited.

The new web language "gives trackers one more bucket to put tracking information into," said Hakon Wium Lie, the chief technology officer at Opera, a browser company.

Or as Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum in California, said: "HTML 5 opens Pandora's box of tracking in the internet."The additional capabilities provided by the new web language are already being put to use by a California programmer who has created what, at first glance, could be a major new threat to online privacy.

Samy Kamkar, a California programmer best known in some circles for creating a virus called the "Samy Worm," which took down MySpace.com in 2005, has created a cookie that is not easily deleted, even by experts – something he calls an Evercookie.

Some observers call it a "supercookie" because it stores information in at least 10 places on a computer, far more than usually found. It combines traditional tracking tools with new features that come with the new web language. In creating the cookie, Kamkar has drawn comments from bloggers across the internet whose descriptions of it range from "extremely persistent" to "horrific."Kamkar, however, said he did not create it to violate anyone's privacy. He was curious about how advertisers tracked him on the internet. After cataloging what he found on his computer, he made the Evercookie to demonstrate just how thoroughly people's computers could be infiltrated by the latest internet technology.

"I think it's OK for them to say we want to provide better service," Kamkar said of advertisers who placed tracking cookies on his computer. "However, I should also be able to opt out because it is my computer."Kamkar, whose 2005 virus circumvented browser safeguards and added more than a million "friends" to his MySpace page in less than 20 hours, said he had no plans to profit from the Evercookie and did not intend to sell it to advertisers.

NEW DELHI: After the reverses it has suffered, including the loss in last year's national election, BJP is now — almost literally — facing an 'identity theft', allegedly at the hands of the Congress.

And the clash in the virtual world promises to be fierce. On Sunday, the party announced it had served a legal notice to Congress, accusing it of "petty, pickpocketlike theft" of its online identity.

The notice, served on September 27, accuses Congress of clandestinely creating a web portal in the name www.bjp.com which, it claimed, was diverting users to the Congress website. The address of the official BJP website is www.bjp.org .

BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitaraman said the ruling party had not responded to the notice. The Congress, however, dismissed it as "politicizing" of a "technological problem".

The cyber ambush was noticed when BJP managers noted a sharp fall in online hits at its official website even after the Ayodhya verdict. A check revealed the existence of www.bjp.com, which was directing puzzled users to the AICC site.

"The BJP sent a legal notice to the Congress on a matter of petty theft… a theft so low… of its political rival's identity. A pickpocket-like theft… but the ruling party has not yet responded to it officially," Sitaraman said.

The theft might not be more than an irritant but it seems to have got under the skin of BJP which sees itself as cyber savvy and looks for support on the internet. "Political parties register in dot org format and it is commercial establishments which have dot com websites. But some time back, bjp.com was created by somebody… we do not know who," Sitaraman said.

Party leaders said as the website was "masked" and linked itself to the Congress website, it was important to know who was behind it, hence the legal notice.

Sportsmen may be complaining about sub-standard facilities ahead of the troubled Commonwealth Games, but for employees of India's sunshine IT sector, it's time to get pampered as companies look to dole out mid-term raises, promotions and a larger share of variable pay over the next two months.

"Market dynamics have changed over the last few months. Almost every sector is hiring, which makes it difficult for IT companies to retain talent, especially those who have some specific domain expertise," said Vati Consulting CEO Amitabh Das. "Things are likely to change by the end of 2010, after measures such as salary hikes, promotions and variable payouts are taken."

Driven by the need to retain talent and keep employees motivated, companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro are planning to give out lucrative variable payouts, promotions or moderate salary hikes to their employees. Infosys, the country's second-largest software exporter, is planning to give promotions to its staff across levels in October. Those elevated will also be given a promotion-related pay hike. Wipro, which gave out an average of 9% hike to its employees in February, may also consider another round of raise in the next few months.

According to Wipro joint CEO (IT Business) Suresh Vaswani, "It's not that we will not look at it (mid term hikes). It's not that we will only go by the cycle because markets change, customers' situations change." Along with salary hikes, the company had also given 20,000 promotions and restricted stock options to employees earlier this year.

Although many of the IT firms had declared salary increments and promotions during the first half of this year, attrition remains a concern. Attrition had eased during the global economic downturn, but has again gained momentum since the beginning of this year, in some cases up to 25%. India's IT sector battled attrition rates of up to 40% during the boom years of 2004-05.

To counter this, companies are trying to retain staff with generous raises. Infosys, for instance, did not increase staff salaries in April last year due to the global economic slowdown, but declared increments last October and again in April this year. It also elevated about 5,400 employees in April. Junior to middle-level employees received salary raise of between 13% and 17%, while increments for senior management was 10% on average. "The intent is to retain employees and keep them engaged.

They should feel adequately rewarded and valued. We ensure this by keeping the compensation structure in line with market standards," said Infosys head of human resources Nandita Gurjar. While Infosys is offering a combination of promotions and salary increments to those getting promoted, TCS is luring employees with a larger share of variable pay to retain talent. For the quarter ended June, it has already paid employees 100% of their variable pay.

Wipro's strategy is on similar lines too. The third biggest IT services exporter has assured staff that they will get a guaranteed variable pay of 100% for every quarter this year. Unfortunately, this cheer may remain restricted to the IT sector. Others like FMCG, consumer durables and auto sectors are not planning to give another round of hikes. Cola major PepsiCo India last gave a mid-term hike in September 2007, after doling out annual increments in March in the same year.

"Our decision to give mid-term hikes is driven by market forces. We benchmark our salaries as per industry standards and whenever we see a gap, we decide to give mid-term hikes and bridge that gap," said PepsiCo India ED-HR Pavan Bhatia. Other companies such as LG Electronics and Maruti Suzuki say they prefer to stick to their annual appraisals and increments process.

Hewitt Associates principal for performance and rewards consulting, Sandeep Chaudhary says companies had doled out mid-term hikes in a few sectors in 2007, but the same buoyancy is yet to return in 2010. "Very few companies would evaluate giving mid-term hikes because majority are yet to see business and talent justify the same. Also, return on compensation spend is the focus, and even though growth is back, organisations will balance it with fiscal consolidation and prudence."