News

Indianexpress: WHEN the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) started the walking plaza on MG Road in January, it was to provide a hassle-free experience for shoppers. For nine months, except on a few occasions, the walking plaza has been regular.

However, for the next two weekends— December 23, 24, 30, 31— the board has decided to suspend it. The reason: The unusually high number of shoppers and the PCB’s inability to control the traffic on East Street, the bylanes and Tarapore Road.

Vehicles have to park and ply on these roads on Saturdays and Sundays when MG Road is closed to facilitate the walking plaza.

Cantonment Executive Officer SK Sardana said, ”We took into account the traffic scenario during festive seasons in the Cantonment area. MG Road is the most crowded road and it becomes difficult both for the Board and the traffic police to manage things during walking plazas in festive seasons. Moreover, people want to shop and leave as quickly as possible. It has been observed by the Board that the shoppers visiting MG Road multiplies during Christmas and New Year. The suspension will help them shop quickly and leave.”

Indianexpress:  THE Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC) has joined select medical institutions in the country for conducting advanced research in stem cell therapy. Lt Gen Saibal Mukherjee, Director and Commandant of AFMC said the institution had been selected to participate in two prestigious research projects by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.

The AFMC will also conduct a national Continuing Medical Education (CME) programme Stem-Cells-’06 on Saturday and Sunday to take stock of recent advances made in this field.

According to Col Harsh Kumar, Head of the Department of Transfusion Medicine, AFMC, the accent of medical research has shifted towards development of cell based treatment of diseases. Therefore, application of stem cell therapy is being increasingly viewed as a feasible line of treatment for many diseases.

The CME will be inaugurated by Vice Admiral S S Byce, Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Western Naval Command while the key note address will be given by Surg Vice Admiral V K Singh, Director General, Armed Forces Medical Services.

Indianexpress: TRAFFIC on the expressway came to a standstill on Thursday morning for three hours after a crane caught fire near Amrutanjan bridge.

According to the Highway Safety Patrol, the incident occurred at 11 am when a 24-wheeled Pune-bound crane belonging to Oasis Raja Company weighing some 200 tonnes caught fire after a short-circuit in its engine.

Though the whole crane burned down, no one was injured in the incident.

The Lonavla Police and Highway Safety Patrol diverted traffic via the old Mumbai-Pune highway.

Three fire tenders belonging to the Highway Safety Patrol and Lonavla and Khopoli municipal councils rushed to the spot and battled for three hours to put out the flames.

Deputy Superintendent of Highway Safety Patrol HG Sonawne said, “The crane caught fire while it was heading towards Pune. The crane’s engine heated up while negotiating the Khandala ghat. We put out the fire after three hours. No one was injured.”

IndianExpress: In a few months time, a five-rupee coin will be all you need to charge up if you own an electric bike and have a base in Pune. And this one charge will keep the bike running for 50 km — at a time when the next best thing are the `economy bikes` that claim around 90 kms a litre of petrol at a cost of Rs 52. In other words the e-bikes are offering an economy of scale that makes it five-fold cheaper than the conventional bikes.

The city is likely to get its first rapid charging station by January end, followed by vending machines over the next three months. The stations will ‘fuel up’ the vehicles in 7-10 minutes as opposed to the 8-hour charging format presently followed. While RK Rims, manufacturer of Snappy and Matrix bikes, which has sold over 3,000 electric bikes in the city, will be the first to set up a charging station, other players like Ace Motors and Electrotherm India will follow suit over the next few months.

“We will have our first charging station in Pune as electric bikes are very popular here. Stations will be set up at five places, starting with one in the Deccan area,” said general manager (sales and marketing), RK Rims, Dipankar Basu. The company will follow up the Pune initiative with stations in Kolhapur, Nagpur and Vasai in Mumbai.

TechTree: Lenovo has unveiled feature-rich notebooks that cater to home consumers and the SOHO segment in India.

The company said the new Lenovo 3000 series Y300 and Y500 notebooks incorporate the company’s pioneering biometric face recognition technology that enhances data security and allows these notebooks to be used by multiple users seamlessly.

The incorporated face recognition feature is supported by Veriface software, and takes a digital snapshot of the user, extracts key features of the user’s face, and creates a digital map that becomes the system’s “password”. The technology recognizes multiple users, and logs onto the Windows operating system and other applications without requiring users to remember a single password. In the event of an unauthorized attempt, the notebook photographs the user, and stores the image in a log for verification.

The highly portable Y300 notebooks, which are targeted at tech-savvy and security-conscious consumers, feature a 13.1-inch wide-screen, 1.3-mega pixels camera, and an integrated slot-in optical disc drive; and weigh in at 1.78 kg without battery and 2.03 kg with battery.

Whereas, the Y500 notebooks, which are targeted at security-conscious consumers and multimedia enthusiasts, feature an integrated Dolby Home Theater system, a subwoofer, an integrated slot-in optical disc drive, 15.4-inch wide screen, 1.3-megapixel camera, and an integrated TV Tuner card with Remote Control

TechTree: Mozilla has reportedly released security updates for versions 1.5.x and 2.0.x of its Firefox Web browser, as also for its Thunderbird mail client and its SeaMonkey program suite that includes a chat client and a Web site building tool.

Most of the security updates are labeled “critical” by Mozilla.

In a statement, the company said, “As part of the Firefox 2.0.0.1 and 1.5.0.9 update releases, we fixed several bugs to improve the stability of the product. Some of these were crashes that showed evidence of memory corruption, and we presume that at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code with enough effort.”

The latest round of updates fixes flaws in Mozilla products such as problems with RSS feeds, as also in the way in which JavaScript is used in email.

Besides, users of Thunderbird are advised to disable JavaScript so as to prevent unauthorized code from affecting their systems.

The new updates also fix the way in which the browser renders graphics on certain Web sites, plus the way in which it renders custom cursors through CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.

Techtree: NIIT has reportedly announced the launch of ‘Integrated ANIIT for Engineers’ (IAE), a five semester IT curriculum for engineering students.

The company said that IAE, which is a dual-qualification program to be pursued alongside engineering studies, would open up a new stream to prepare IT professionals.

As per industry estimates, nearly two-thirds of 300,000 engineers passing out of colleges in India every year need re-skilling to be readied for demanding IT jobs.

According to Vijay K Thadani, Chief Executive Officer of NIIT, this initiative of integrating IT curriculum into learning offered to India’s engineering graduates, while they are still at college, will greatly improve their IT readiness and availability of relevantly skilled IT manpower, which will in turn fuel the growth of the industry.

The company is launching the new program initially in the southern cities of Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, as South India produces 54 percent of engineers in the country, and also offers a huge job opportunity for these students. Later on, the program would be extended to all parts of the country in phases.

Techtree: Nintendo has partnered with Opera Software to make Opera the official Web browser for the Wii game console, and to provide a free trial version of the Opera Web browser.

In a joint statement, both companies said that Wii owners who are connected and have activated the Wii Shop Channel, could download a free beta version of the Opera browser to begin surfing the Web from tomorrow.

It is learnt that when Wii users download Opera, it will activate the ‘Internet Channel’ on the Wii, and allow them to use the console to browse the Internet on their television, using the motion-sensitive controller to move a cursor, as a mouse does on a PC.

Besides, the browser, which is Abode Flash-enabled, actually facilitates Internet on television screens, allowing users to browse with ease and visit Web sites. The pointing abilities of the Wii Remote is an added attraction, with which users can click on links they want to see, or zoom into any part of the screen through the motion of the controller

BetaNews: In an effort to become more relevant in the search market, Ask has begun to quietly test a new three-paned interface for its search results, bringing together the strengths of its parent company InterActiveCorp’s varied holdings.

Ask holds about a 5.9 percent search share according to research firm comScore Networks, and has shown some upward momentum in recent months. However, this remains far behind market-leading Google, who had a 45.4 percent share as of October of this year.

Publicly accessible at askx.com, the front page of the site looks very similar to that of competitors Google and the recently launched Windows Live Search. However, the similarities end there. Once inside, search result information is split between three columns.

The design of the search results page is quite similar to that of AskCity, it’s revamped local search portal released earlier this month. That too attempts to utilize the various IAC sites, much like Ask X will do.

In the first pane on the left of the page, Ask provides a control panel to allow the user to change the scope of his query, run related searches or launch a new one altogether.

BetaNews: In an effort to become more relevant in the search market, Ask has begun to quietly test a new three-paned interface for its search results, bringing together the strengths of its parent company InterActiveCorp’s varied holdings.

Ask holds about a 5.9 percent search share according to research firm comScore Networks, and has shown some upward momentum in recent months. However, this remains far behind market-leading Google, who had a 45.4 percent share as of October of this year.

Publicly accessible at askx.com, the front page of the site looks very similar to that of competitors Google and the recently launched Windows Live Search. However, the similarities end there. Once inside, search result information is split between three columns.

The design of the search results page is quite similar to that of AskCity, it’s revamped local search portal released earlier this month. That too attempts to utilize the various IAC sites, much like Ask X will do.

In the first pane on the left of the page, Ask provides a control panel to allow the user to change the scope of his query, run related searches or launch a new one