News

Indianexpress: The partnership between the Tatas and Italian car giant Fiat has taken off to the next level with both the sides announcing the formation of a joint venture with aggregate investments of over Rs 4000 crore (over euro 665 million) in a phased manner. This will be the third major automobile investment, after General Motors and Volkswagen, that is coming Pune’s way in the last few months.

With this, Pune is set to become a major car manufacturing hub of Asia. US-based General Motors is setting up its second plant at Talegaon near Pune at a cost of $ 300 million. Volkswagen of Germany has proposed to invest $ 530 million in its first project at Chakan, Pune. The Tata-Fiat JV investment of Rs 4,000 crore underlines Pune’s emergence as a favoured automobile manufacturing destination for some of the global giants. Daimler Chrysler that is currently functioning from a leased facility owned by Tata Motors is planing to set up its own plant in the region. On the home-grown front, Tata Motors (commercial vehicles) and Bajaj Auto (two-wheeler) already operate their units in Pune.

The agreement between Tata Motors and Fiat calls mainly for the creation and establishment of an industrial JV in India, located at the Fiat plant at Ranjangaon, Pune, Maharashtra. “With capacities to produce in excess of 100,000 cars and 200,000 engines and transmissions yearly, at steady state, the Ranjangaon plant will manufacture vehicles for the Indian and overseas markets,” said Ravi Kant, managing director of Tata Motors

IndianExpress: Commuters wanting to travel to Mumbai by taxi need not travel up to the Pune railway station to catch one. Starting Friday, five stands for taxis plying from Pune to Mumbai will become operational at Paud Road, Naidu Hospital, Empress Garden, Hadapsar flyover and near Wakad police station. Each will have 10 taxis and for every two taxis from Mumbai, one from Pune will ply.

The old stand outside the ST stand near the railway station will continue to function. Earlier, the Pune taxis and Mumbai taxis had separate stands. In view of the traffic snarls in the station area, there was a move to unify them. In March, the Bombay High Court ordered that the stands be unified and begin operations from outside the ST stand and for every two taxis from Mumbai, one from Pune should ply.

In May, the Regional Transport Authority (RTA), in a decentralisation move, constituted a three-member panel to decide the locations. The panel included the deputy commissioner of police, city engineer of Pune Municipal Corporation and the Regional Transport Officer and was to submit its recommendations within a month, which was delayed after DCP (Traffic) Ajit Patil was transferred

IndianExpress: It is the next big wave of outsourcing that is hitting the Indian shores. After having successfully made its mark in information technology engineering and legal outsourcing space, it is now the turn of taxmen to seek Indian firms’ help in preparing returns. Having already prepared 3.6 lakh tax returns for the US this year, experts estimate that this figure would touch 16 lakh by 2011 bringing in revenues of $650 milllion.

The reasons are usual: Lack of qualified accountants and rising prices in the form of salaries creating a demand-supply mismatch. “The demand for returns offshoring stems from lack of accountants and excessive workload during the tax season. The number of certified professional accountants (CPAs) and other qualified accountants in the US are just not enough to meet the demands from increasing tax compliance, especially Sarbanes-Oxley related work,” Pune-based research firm ValueNotes’ chief executive officer Arun Jethmalani, who brought out a report, said. The CPAs in the US are equivalent to the chartered accountants in India.

Jethmalani said the US firm got a dual advantage by offshoring filing of returns: Apart for processing it at a faster rate, it also cuts the cost down by 40-60 per cent.

Indianexpress: Two city-based jewellers were robbed of cash and valuables worth Rs 7.72 lakh at gunpoint by three unidentified robbers on Mula Road near War Cemetery, Khadki on Wednesday afternoon. According to the Khadki police, the two jewellers, identified as Dinesh Amarchand Surana (25) and Gaurav Mehta (19) were riding on a motorcycle when they were accosted by the robbers who were in a black car. One of the robbers pulled out a revolver and threatened to kill the duo if they did not hand over the cash worth Rs 40,000 and 70 tolas jewellery totally worth Rs 7.72 lakh kept in a bag. They snatched the bag and sped away, police said.

Indianexpress: A gang of six criminals, operating in the rural areas of Pune and Nashik, was arrested on Thursday morning in a joint operation by the Crime Branch and Anti Extortion Cell of the Pune Police. Acting on a tip-off, teams led by Inspectors Rajendra Joshi, Bhanu Pratap Barge and Bajirao Jagtap under DCP ( Crime) Anil Kumbhare laid a trap and nabbed five of them from Bhau Patil Road in Bopodi where they had planned a major dacoity. The sixth person was nabbed in Nashik on Thursday evening.

The arrested are Sham Ramchandra Dabhade (33), of Koteshwarwadi in Maval, Sandeep Ramchandra Madhure alias Prashant Jadhav (24), of Akurdi, Sangram Lalsaheb Kharchade alias Bhoom Paranda (27), of Paranda in Osmanabad District, Sachin alias Srikant Bharat Bhonsale (20), of Beed and Devidas Vishwanath Kharde (24), of Deolgaon Raja, Buldhana.

The police recovered a foreign-made pistol, a pen pistol, six live cartridges and sharp weapons, chilli powder, maps, two bikes, five cellphones and Rs 35,000 in cash from them. Crime branch officials claimed the gang is involved in the recent kidnapping of a Pimpri-Chinchwad based industrialist for a ransom of Rs 20 lakh.

TechTree: Western Digital has launched My Book Pro Editions for Indian market, a move from the company to provide its Indian customers with high end, reliable, and efficient storage as well as grow its market share in the country.

My Book Pro Edition, which is targeted at small office and home office (SOHO) power users who require large capacity and high-performance external storage, is a unique, book-shaped silver enclosure that stands vertically, leaving a tiny footprint, and sits naturally on desktops and bookshelves.

My Book Pro Edition combines triple interfaces including FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0; features backup and system recovery software, and is available in capacities of 250 and 500 GB.

The company says that the drive is designed for reliability with an enclosure that employs shock protection for the drive inside and is well-vented to ensure proper air circulation for cool drive operation and long-term reliability.

Additionally, My Book Pro Edition II has been introduced for small-office environments where large amounts of content are managed, such as groups of creative professionals, as well as consumers who have highly valuable libraries of music, photos, and video. The drive provides the users, easy-to-use, automatic and highly reliable way to securely store and back up important digital content.

My Book Pro Edition II can be set by users to reserve half of its capacity to mirror users’ data in real time using RAID technology, the RAID 1 setting. In addition to capacities as large as 1 terabyte and two RAID options, the new system features advanced backup software as well.

TechTree: Airtel has come out with a new service for its landline customers, wherein the company is making the monthly payment of bills a hassle-free task.

The company said that Airtel landline customers can now pay their landline bills by calling on 080-41144114 at no additional service cost and a call from Airtel landline to this number is absolutely free.

This service involves customers paying by their credit card, and Airtel guarantees that all credit card information will be kept completely confidential and secure, as the company is utilizing industry standard security technology used for credit card transactions.

According to Airtel, the process of payment of the bill is very simple. An interactive voice recognition based system guides customers to pay the bill, which simply includes entering the landline number, then the credit card details, and finally they have to confirm their intent to pay. Immediately after this process, one gets a confirmation of the successful completion of the payment in the same call.

On successful launch of this service, Prem Pradeep, Chief Executive Officer - South Central, Airtel Broadband and Telephone Services, said, “Airtel strives to offer convenient services to its customers and this is a step in that direction. Airtel is the first to offer this service to its customers in Karnataka, India.”

TechTree: ViewSonic has announced that it will enter the year 2007 with its entire LCD monitor line meeting the requirements of Microsoft Windows Vista client operating system.

The company said that moving forward, all displays offered in the value, graphics, professional, and X Series will carry the Certified for Windows Vista logo, which ensures reliability, stability, security, and proper installation, as well as the ability to take advantage of the latest Windows innovations and functionalities.

Announcing this initiative, Alan Chang, General Manager - APAC, ViewSonic, said, “For more than a decade, ViewSonic’s LCDs have provided users with display technology that is synonymous with innovation, performance, and value. By providing Vista certification across our desktop display line, ViewSonic is ensuring that customers have the display technology available to optimize their desktop experience.”

According to ViewSonic, the new Windows Vista operating system compliments the company’s aim to provide users with the benefits of greater productivity and ease of use. For example, the Windows Sidebar feature is a pane on the side of the desktop that organizes ‘gadgets’, giving consumers easy access to the applications they use most such as calculators, Web services, and media players.

BBCNews: Anyone wanting to view an obscure 19th Century tome from the vaults of the British Library will be able to look for it online from Thursday.
Microsoft is releasing its Live Search Books, a rival to Google’s Book Search, in test, or beta, version in the US.

The digital archive will include books from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto.

Books from three other institutions will be added in January 2007.

All the books currently included in the project will be non-copyrighted but later it will also add copyrighted work that publishers have given permission to include in the project.

“We feel very strongly about copyright. We don’t do any mass scanning of in-copyright works,” said Danielle Tiedt, the general manager of Live Search Selection for Microsoft.

Initially the database of available books will be searchable from the book search engine’s home page or as a category on the main Windows Live Search page.

Later Microsoft plans to integrate all the books scanned into its general search engine.

BetaNews: Mozilla earlier this week issued a public beta of the next version of its Thunderbird e-mail client, making enhancements to the overall design of the product as well as improved support for extensions, the plug-in architecture for the application. In addition, new features including the use of tags as a way to organize e-mail, and forward and back buttons to cycle through e-mail much like web pages were also added. The beta is available for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

In separate news, Mozilla delayed an expected security release for versions 1.5 and 2.0 of its Firefox browser. Originally scheduled to be delivered automatically to users starting this Tuesday, the update has been pushed back to December 19. No reason for the delay was given.