News

IndianExpress: FROM curry powders to low-rise jeans, Pune market has been a testing ground for different products. And now it is turn of the two-wheeler companies to test out their latest product: Battery-operated bikes.

With fuel prices on the rise, the two firms — Pune-based Ace Motors (E-bikes priced at Rs 26,500) and Ahmedabad-based Electrotherm India (YOBikes having seven models and priced between Rs 13,999 and Rs 23,249) — are planning to cash in on their battery-operated two-wheelers by catering to the young population of the city.

The bikes, that will be below 25 cc, will be gearless with a top speed of 25 kmph and will be able to travel between 60 km and 70 km on a single seven-hour charge. ‘‘These e-bikes have a power below 25 cc and do not run above 25 kmph. Hence, they do not require registration and payment of road tax, nor do they require a driving licence to drive them,’’ Rs 28-crore Ace Motors managing director Kumar Raval said.

IndianExpress:  Suresh Nimbalkar, a 22-year-old resident of Ekatanagar in Dhanori, died on May 7 when his motorbike slammed into an electric post near Tingarenagar on Alandi Road.

THE Alandi Road electric post is one among the 646 posts that have been identified by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) that is yet to be removed from the city roads. For over two years, these Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) posts have been standing as life threatening hurdles on the roads and despite the Maharashtra Energy Regulatory Commission (MERC) directive the posts were not removed.

IndianExpress: OVER 25 years after it was first published, the genre of ‘graphic novels’ is slowly catching up in Pune. If Will Eisner’s A Contract With God published in 1978 was the first novel to be classified in the graphic novels’ category made famous by Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Holocaust memoir Maus, it was only in 2004 that Penguin published the first graphic novel by an Indian author — Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor.

Two years later, when Phantomville came out with The Believers — written by Abdul Sultan and illustrated by Partha Sengupta — it caught the fancy of Pune bibliophiles. ‘‘These novels have a niche segment of readers and is still picking up in Pune. I believe that they may be a trend in the future,’’ says Crossword bookstore head in Pune, Shital Desai.

IndianExpress:  WANAVDI police have arrested Sami Fazal Khan (21) and a minor armed with sharp weapons on NIBM road on Saturday night. According to a complaint, the police received a tip-off that the armed persons along with their accomplice were planning for a dacoity. When the police reached there, they found two of them, while the other three Imitiaz Afzal Khan, Sonu Vishwanath Vile and Shankar Longmal Chatani managed to skip.

IndianExpress: ROHIDA Rambhau Garad from Mangalwar Peth has lodged a complaint at Pimpri police station saiyng that an unidentified person fled with machines and machinery parts from the Swastik company in MIDC block, Chinchwad. The complaint states that betweem March 20 to June 16, when the company was locked, the unidentified person got into the shed and took away the machines worth Rs 1.05 lakhs.

IndianExpress: IN a bizarre incident, Ganesh Sopanrao Potbhare (24), a doctor hailing from Rajewadi village in Beed district, has been arrested by the Nigdi police for alleged involvement in kidnapping a 20-year-old student and forcing her to marry him.

The arrest was made after the victim, staying in Nigdi area, lodged a complaint. The police is looking for Potbhare’s accomplice Arjun Shinde

BBC.news: The world’s fastest silicon-based microchip has been demonstrated by scientists in the US.
The prototype operates at speeds up to 500 gigahertz (GHz), more than 100 times faster than desktop PC chips.

To break the world record, the researchers from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology had to super-cool the chip with liquid helium.

InformationWeek: Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched a technology preview of Robotics Studio, a Windows-based development environment for creating robotic applications.

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms, the company said. Early partners include the LEGO Group.

“We’ve reached out to a broad range of leading robotics companies and academics early on in the development process and are thrilled with the positive response from the community,” Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group, said in a statement.

NEWS.com: Hewlett-Packard is folding the company’s Global Operations unit into three other divisions as part of a massive restructuring plan announced a year ago.

Three of HP’s main business groups will absorb the logistics and procurement duties once handled by Global Operations, the company said Tuesday in a press release on the company’s Web site.

CEO Mark Hurd announced last July that his reorganization of the company, which included more than 14,500 jobs, or about 10 percent of the staff, would save the company $1.9 billion each year beginning in 2006.

CNN.com: The major Web browsers are getting facelifts as they increasingly become the focal point for handling business transactions and running programs over the Internet rather than simply displaying Web sites.

The upgrades are the latest skirmish in the browser war that started in the mid-1990s and led to Microsoft’s triumph over Netscape. The battles reignited in 2004, when Mozilla’s Firefox launched and revealed new avenues of development.

On Tuesday, Opera Software ASA is releasing its Opera 9 browser, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox are in line for major overhauls later this year.