News

Indianexpress: Precision Group, manufacturers of camshafts, has acquired the business of its UK-based joint venture partner, Clancey Precision Components Pvt Ltd (CPCPL), giving it 100 per cent ownership interest. Precision acquired the company from administrators, who were running CPCPL as the company had gone bankrupt. The acquisition has been funded through internal accruals.

The acquisition will strengthen Precision’s global presence, while creating new avenues for growth and significant monetisation opportunities for the company. Through the move, the company would be able to get access to global markets like Europe, Latin America and Korea and is looking at a total annual revenue of more than Rs 125 crore next fiscal.

Announcing the acquisition, Yatin Shah, managing director of the company, said, “The JV acquisition is important for our long-term business strategy and will remove restrictions on direct marketing which were hitherto bound by the JV agreement. We are also looking at acquiring the business of a German company, which has similar products to the ones we are offering, in a bid to expand our customer base.”

The company has announced setting up a Rs 7-crore machine shop in Uttaranchal to serve specific customer requirements and may also consider setting up another at Chennai to cater to Hyundai’s requirements there. “While our foundry will always remain in Solapur, we will be setting up machine shops as per customer requirement across the country,” said Shah

IndianExpress: For the first time, the State Election Commission will be appointing observers for the civic polls scheduled to be held on February 1.

Till now, the election commission used to appoint observers only for assembly and Lok Sabha elections.
Municipal Commissioner Nitin Kareer said on Thursday that the State Election Commission was expected to announce the names of the observers in a couple of days.

Speaking to the reporters, Kareer said these observers will be of secretary ranks. They would be submitting reports to the State Election Commission on the conduct of election officers and candidates as well as expenses made by candidates and parties on campaigning.

Kareer said expenditure made by candidates and parties on various programmes and rallys after December 13 would be considered for the same.

He said the work of correcting the draft electoral rolls on the basis of 740 objections held valid by the election officer has begun. Final draft of the voters lists would be published on January 3. The election officer had received 1,169 objections to the draft rolls of which 740 were found valid following a scrutiny.

Kareer said the election officer has also sought advise from election commission on 1,280 requests to include names in the electoral rolls.

Indianexpress: It’s an event that tries to explore every aspect of yoga and the science behind it. The Fifth International Conference on Advances in Yoga Research, Education & Therapy in Yoga at Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute in Lonavla began on December 28. The event was inaugurated by Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan.

On till December 31, the conference is being attended by around 900 participants from India and over 89 delegates from the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Germany, France, Indonesia, China, Japan, Thailand, Italy and Australia.

“A lot of cases that we solve at court are due to problems that exist in the human mind. The practise of the purest form of yoga will help cure these problems,” said Balakrishnan, who also released five books on yoga philosophy and Kaivalyadham’s souvenir Swami Vedabharati, president of Sadhana Mandir Ashram, Hrishikesh, Justice D R Dhanuka (retd) and Swami Maheshanadji, chairman of the Kaivalyadham Shriman Madhava Yoga Mandira (SMYM) Trust, were among other dignitaries present on the occasion.

The once-every-three-years conference will witness panel discussions and presentation of over 240 research papers on yoga research. Key speakers include Sat Bir Khalsa, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medicine School, yoga expert Hiroshi Aikata from Japan, MP Suresh Prabhu, Kumud Bansal, former education secretary, Government of India and Union Public Service Commission secretary S P Gaur.

Indianexpress: Eighteen -year-old collegian Tejas Sanjay Salvi (18) , resident of Krushna Keval Township, Kondhwa was killed on the spot when he lost control of his speeding car resulting in the vehicle dashing against a road-side tree on Buchade Road in Range Hills on Wednesday, police said. Salvi was accompanied by four friends three of whom have sustained minor injuries while one—Jabbar Abbas Peerzade (19), resident of Model colony has been admitted to the ICU of Jehangir Hospital for serious head injuries. Doctors have stated his condition as critical.

The police identified Salvi’s other three friends as Aditya Deepak Srivastava (17), resident of Kondhwa, Manoj Shivaji Kagade (19), resident of Model Colony and Nikita Jagannath Shinde (18), resident of Ganesh Khind Road.

Gulnaz Peerzade , mother of Jabbar Peerzade said “ My son had gone for a ride with his friends but the reason behind the tragedy is really a mystery. Upon enquiry many residents of the area said that the road was prone to such accidents because almost all street lights are switched off during night time,” Gulnaz said.

Meanwhile, four other accidents resulting in four deaths were also reported in Wanavdi, near Chatuhshrungi, Ghorpadi and in the Deccan area.

BetaNews: The PayPal division of eBay, which operates the Web’s most respected online payment voucher system, is beginning beta trials of a next-generation online payment system, in cooperation with MasterCard. Using what’s described as a virtual debit card, a customer will be able to make a PayPal-authorized purchase using a one-time number good only for that transaction.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the VDC system, the implications of which could be enormous if the trial is successful, is that it generates a new MasterCard number for each purchase. That number will be automatically filled in forms for retailers that accept MasterCard, by way of a browser-based add-in program. Once that number is validated, and a supplemental verification takes place between PayPal and MasterCard, that number would be discontinued.

As PayPal described in an FAQ mailed to prospective beta participants, “PayPal Virtual Debit Card’s virtual card number is a MasterCard number used in place of your credit or debit card number. Each time you make a purchase on a website, a new number is generated. It protects you from sharing your personal credit card number when you shop online.”

It’s the Secure Sockets Layer principle applied to payment transactions: The participating sites agree to a transaction number that’s good for the duration of the transaction itself. It can’t be used for any other transaction, and it becomes invalid after the transaction is complete. If it works, it could conceivably render online credit and debit card number theft a pointless pursuit.

Betanews: In a move that could lead to the integration of such features as inline linear editing on camcorders conceivably as soon as 2008, Samsung announced today it will begin mass production of a single-chip one-gigabit (1 Gbit) low-power double-data-rate (DDR) DRAM package, for use in mobile handsets and small digital camcorders, as soon as the second quarter of next year.

With production beginning soon, it’s very likely that Samsung will have some type of demonstration planned for the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, preliminary festivities for which begin just a week from Friday.

Perhaps the only news source this morning which dug deeper than Samsung’s press release is the Taiwanese electronics industry daily DigiTimes, which reports this morning that Samsung’s new single-die architecture will integrate a temperature sensor feature that will help reduce electric current by 30%. This is achieved by generating its own self-refreshing, location-sensitive signal, called temperature compensated self-refresh (TCSR), when the chip’s temperature exceeds a given point.

This technology is paired with a partial array self-refresh (PASR) that operates like an embedded cache, refreshing only those regions of memory that fall within a set of registers of recently addressed memory, rather than continuously recycling the entire package each and every time.

These two features will be embedded within a package that’s 20% thinner than Samsung’s current double-die 2×512 Mbit stack. With Samsung holding the patents, competitors such as Micron and Elpida may only be able to keep up if they don’t mind the license fees.

BetaNews: The Associated Press reported this morning that Google is expanding a pilot program representing the company’s second attempt to crack the realm of traditional print advertising.

Two months after launching a trial run with 100 selected advertisers and 66 newspapers, the online ad firm will soon be rolling out the next stage of its print publishing campaign in earnest, enabling online advertisers to purchase surplus print ad inventory.

Last November, Google auctioned off ad inventory from about two dozen magazines, to existing customers of its AdWords program. As BusinessWeek reported following the end of that experiment, customers paid as low as $4,000 for half-page, full-color national print ads that would normally sell for over $59,000 apiece. Even then, however, testers found their ads returned as little as 6% of their cost in sales. Kind of makes you wonder how much they would have lost had they paid full price.

Google’s second experiment focused on newspapers, and while more limited in its initial scope, appears far more successful, with ad sales reportedly tripling the company’s expectations.
 

TechTree: Latest reports indicate that the much touted Gen-Next HD DVD format is not invincible after all…

The story doing the rounds is that a hacker who goes under the name, “Muslix64″ was upset at not being able to view his HD movies on his computer set-up, and as such, set himself a seemingly impossible goal - that of cracking the AACS specification in four weeks. He ended up doing so - in just eight days.

Apparently, the dude went about the ordained task quite meticulously. He first bought himself a HD-DVD drive to plug onto his PC, plus a HD movie.

Somewhere down the line, the realization dawned upon him that he could not play the HD flick simply because his video card was not HDCP compliant, and he had a HD monitor plugged with a DVI interface.

What “Muslix64″ did next was to complain to the doom9 forum about the AACS specification, saying it was not at all fair for someone to own an HD monitor and then not be able to watch an HD movie that had been paid for.

The result: in six days’ time, the title key of the flick appeared in Muslix64’s memory, which meant that he had managed to decrypt the movie in all but one afternoon. Not counting the one day that he spent fixing problems such as frame skipping, etc, it took “Muslix64″ but eight days to crack code.

“Muslix64″ even put together a small program titled “BackupHDDVD”, a Java-based command line utility to decrypt HD movies.

The chap went right ahead and made a small video called “AACS is Unbreakeable” wherein one can see the output of ‘BackupHDDVD’ while decrypting. One can also see the playback of a decrypted movie, and upload it to YouTube.

TechTree: According to a release from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), a not-for-profit industry body registered under the Societies Act, there is a newfound confidence in online shopping, with consumers of all ages and backgrounds increasingly using the Internet to shop. The IAMAI release says e-commerce is booming.

In fact, with the Yuletide spirit in the air, e-tailers are expecting a revenue increase of over 50 percent and a traffic increase of more than 75 percent.

President of the IAMAI, Subho Ray, says, “This season means good news for e-tailers who hear the jingle on their cash registers as they expect their revenues to double, and the traffic to go up by over 75 per cent. There has been a huge increase in consumer confidence when it comes to online shopping.”

Given the current trends, IAMAI is confident that India’s e-commerce market will zoom to nearly Rs 2,300 crores by the end of the current fiscal, registering a 95 percent increase over last year.

The IAMAI release goes on to say that most Web sites and online stores, like multi-storied malls, are sporting the festive look this season. They are boasting all the Christmas essentials; a Santa Claus, an X’Mas Tree, Frosty the Snowman, the Ginger Bread Man, Mistletoe, snowflakes, and bells.

What’s more, customers are actually doing their shopping from these online stores and Web sites in the hope of circumventing the hustle and bustle of crowded malls and traffic snarls.

One such Web site, Fabmall.com, has gone and designed a special store, and is retailing wines, plum cakes, Christmas cakes, flowers, Christmas trees, scented candles, gift hampers, books, music, movies, the works, to net buyers.

TechTree: LaCie has introduced a new, encrypted version of its biometric access hard drive.

The SAFE Mobile Hard Drive, as it is called, comes with Encryption - with new DES or Triple-DES hardware encryption in 40GB, 80GB, and 120GB capacities.

According to company sources, the new encrypted model allows people to choose between different levels of security depending on their needs. LaCie SAFE with Encryption is helpful for transferring and carrying sensitive data without fear of misuse, unauthorized access, or intellectual property theft. Only fingerprint authentication grants access to the drive.

Compact SAFE drive casing is small enough to fit comfortably in a pocket or a bag.

Marie Renouard, LaCie Product Manager, said, “We have incorporated the latest access control and encryption technologies, and now offer two security level choices for addressing any professional or individual need for completely safe data storage. SAFE is the best deterrent for snoops who try to access your private files whereas SAFE with Encryption is better for those who need absolute security for their data.”

LaCie SAFE Mobile Hard Drive with Encryption guarantees the highest-level protection for confidential files by employing hardware encryption in addition to biometric access technology. Data stored on the drive can be encoded in either DES (56-bits key) or Triple-DES (128-bits key) mode. The encryption key depends on a 24-character pass phrase stored onboard, making each drive unique and impossible to hack. Up to five different users can be registered with customized access privileges such as read/write or read-only.