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IndianExpress: Laying to rest speculations about the future of the Pune Bus Rapid Transit System, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh on Friday said that since the final authority lay with the state government, the project would become a reality.

“The state government is all for BRTS and in case of any problem, we will intervene,” he said. The Chief Minister was speaking at the inaugural function of the two-day`Hi-Tech conference` here to promote IT and BT sectors in the state

IndianExpress: As seen in other parts of the world, biotechnology has immense growth potential in India, but for new companies making a foray into the sector, there is hardly any seed funding available.

To address this gap, the government will soon set up a fund to finance start ups in the biotechnology sector.

“We are negotiating with the World Bank for a loan of half a billion dollars and a part if this will be for early stage funding. This will be on the lines of the TDICI Fund, which was also a World Bank funded initiative for technology entrepreneurs,” said RA Mashelkar, director general of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) at the Hi-Tech Pune conference on IT and BT on Friday.

IndianExpress: Having earned the auto and IT hub of the country tag, Pune on Friday got another name: Knowledge City. When Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh was apprised of the city’s educational infrastructure — four universities, 20 engineering colleges and over 5 lakh students — he immediately declared Pune as the `Knowledge City’ of the State.

Deshmukh said Pune is an ideal destination for investments in technology-driven sectors. “According to a recent RBI bulletin, Pune has attracted 20 per cent of the total industrial investment in the country, which is the highest. It also reports the highest exports in the country — almost $2 billion,” he said at the two-day Hi-Tech Pune conference.

IndianExpress: During peak hours, more than 40 per cent of the carriageway of Mahatma Gandhi Road — one of the arterial roads of the city — is eaten up by illegal double parking. The result, traffic snarls during morning and evening hours.

What is increasing the incidence of double parking on the city roads is lack of deterrent action: The traffic police department has no cranes to tow away the vehicles which are parked wrongly

IndianExpress: There’s nothing official about it. Yet, good news is in store for the thousands of Indian students going abroad to study, and the crores of rupees in foreign exchange that get spent in pursuit of these foreign degrees. For the scores of graduates and steadily increasing number of undergraduates who incur around $ 50,000 a year in places such as Stanford, this could indeed be a wish come true.

There’s no denying the fact that top officials from the best universities in the world have been making rounds of India with the express purpose of exploring the possibility of an entry into the country’s very lucrative education business.

IndianExpress: Adobe Systems has released the public beta of Adobe Soundbooth software, an innovative and intuitive audio software product for creating and editing audio, and fixing common audio flaws using visually-oriented tools.

Soundbooth, designed to deliver high-quality sound to Web and video workflows, enables creative professionals to quickly record, edit, and create pristine audio without any training in sound production. It has been tightly integrated with Macromedia Flash and Adobe Premiere Pro that enables users to easily remove noise from recordings, as also polish voiceovers, plus customize music to fit a production.

TechNewsWorld: IBM has developed new chip-cooling technology that employs biological processes similar to those found in tree leaves, roots or the human circulatory system. The technique, called “high thermal conductivity interface technology,” is said to draw twice as much heat off the chips than today’s fan-based methods.

Inspired by the way liquids are drawn away in tree leaves, roots or the human circulatory system, scientists developed a chip cap with a network of tree-like branched channels on its surface. When pressure is applied, it remains uniform and spreads evenly across the chip, with 10 times better heat transport than with current cooling methods.