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indianexpress:  Despite receiving poor response to the auction of its bus routes from private players so far, the Pune Metropolitan Transport Corporation Limited (PMTCL) has decided to stick with the plan in a bid to improve its bus services and generate revenue.

“We will think of alternative ways to get private players interested,” said Subrao Patil, chairman and managing director of PMTCL, while speaking to reporters on Thursday. “The fact is that the idea has evoked poor response despite our lowering the conditions. So it has become necessary for us to look for ways to make the process more attractive,” Patil said.

The PMTCL had identified around 65 bus routes for the auction, to improve the bus frequency and generate revenue, for the newly formed company following the merger of the Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) and Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Transport (PCMT) early this year.

The PMTCL plans to recover its losses from other routes by earning revenue from the routes auctioned to private operators. This will save capital investment on new buses for the company and the only expenses it will incure will be fuel and maintenance of the existing fleet.

Patil said there were no bidders to the first tender inviting private players to participate in the auction on selected routes. “The re-tendering process initiated after pre-bid discussions got only one private player interested,” Patil added.

indianexpress:  Having spent eight years and four months behind the bars over charges of procuring classified documents from the Ammunition Factory, Khadki, and smuggling them to ISI, and Pakistani national Sayeed Ahmed Mohammed Desai, 48, will walk free after being sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment (RI) by a district court here on Thursday. The Court will continue proceedings against six other accused in the case who are from Mumbai and Pune and are currently out on bail.

Desai, who had been arrested by Sahakar Nagar police on June 14, 1999, had pleaded guilty to all charges on Wednesday. Chief Judicial Magistrate Dr Y Chawre sentenced Desai to seven years each under section 3 [1 (C)] of the Official Secrets Act and IPC section 120 B pertaining to criminal conspiracy, besides three years of RI each under section 14 of the Foreigners Registration Act and section 12-b of the Passport Act, to be served concurrently. The court further imposed fines of Rs 30,000 and Rs 20,000 failing to pay which he will be liable to undergo an additional term of two and a half years.

Responding to pleas by Desai’s lawyer Vidyadhar Koshe, the judge clarified Desai would have to undergo imprisonment only in event of his failure to pay the fines. Chawre further directed the city police to fulfill the necessary procedure to send Desai back to his country by contacting the Embassy.

Before the conviction advocate Koshe had urged the Judge to consider the evidence rather than convict Desai on the basis of his admission of guilt alone.

indianexpress:  University of Pune (UoP) vice-chancellor Narendra Jadhav on Thursday denied media reports that 200 students from Bahrain faced expulsion from the UoP for overstaying their visas. Jadhav said that while no international student has so far been expelled or deported, some students have merely been asked to submit documents needed for visa extension as required by the External Affairs Ministry.
A report by a Gulf-based daily created a furore on Thursday when it announced that the students had been asked to pay a fine of

$ 200 each, failing which they would be expelled from the UoP. Jadhav claimed that a “mountain was being made out of a molehill.”

“There are 227 Bahrain students enrolled at the university. While a significant number have all their documents in order, there are many who have not produced the requisite documents for extending their visas for another year on expiry of the initial three-month visa granted by the Foreign Regional Registration Office (FRRO). This is according to Government of India regulations, and the students have been instructed to do so accordingly,” said Jadhav.

Even if the students failed to submit the documents within the stipulated time, the fine imposed would not be as high as $ 200, Jadhav said. “In fact, the fine amount specified by the government is $ 30,” he said. He added that he had already cleared the matter with the concerned authorities at the FRRO and the students themselves, who have agreed to comply.

indianexpress: Differences within the ruling alliance in the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) came to fore on Thursday as party leaders exchanged heated arguments over deciding on the honours of inaugurating the two multi-storey parking structures of the PMC.

Minnerva building for parking near Mahatma Phule Mandai and a multi-level mechanised parking at Sambhaji Park on J M Road are both awaiting inauguration and mayor Rajlaxmi Bhosale proposed that the NCP would like to do the honours.

However, leaders of the Shiv Sena and BJP demanded that their party leaders should also be given honours of the inauguration as they are also part of the alliance.

After some debate, it was finally decided that District Guardian Minister and NCP leader Ajit Pawar will inaugurate the parking at Sambhaji Park while Shiv Sena legislator Arvind Sawant and BJP legislator Vinod Tawade will be the chief guests for the function.

The honours of inaugurating the Minnerva parking were given to state BJP chief Nitin Gadkari while Pawar and Sawant are to be the chief guests.

indianexpress: For those who couldn’t make it to Stanford, well, Stanford is coming to them. The Stanford School of Engineering, California, will hold its first executive education programme titled ‘Design, Innovation and Manufacturing’ in India, in Pune this month. The programme will be held from October 15-19 at Tata Management Training Centre (TMTC), which has collaborated with Stanford in the endeavour.

“A team from the University had come down to TMTC, wanting us to team up with them on this program. It matched our philosophy, so we decided to go in for this mutually symbiotic relationship,” said TMTC director Commodore Dilip Mohapatra, adding that both sides are looking at a long-term partnership. “Depending on the response for this workshop, we will work out successive programmes.”

The purpose of this program, according to a release from Stanford University, is to address the Indian firms’ need to launch more innovative products and refine their existing manufacturing processes to deliver cutting-edge products and services. Stanford alumni Naushad and Farhad Forbes of Forbes Marshall have helped to identify this need and forge the Stanford-India alliance. “We felt the time was right for Indian companies to get worried about how to sustain the growth which is possible only through product innovation,” said Naushad Forbes, who had earlier arranged a programme with the Stanford faculty six years ago for a restricted few in the business world. This is the first time a programme that is open to all has been organised.

indianexpress: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) is facing trouble retaining land reserved for various development projects in the 23 villages that were merged in the civic body’s limits in 1997. The encroachment issue was raised by Congress leader Ulhas Bagul and Shiv Sena corporator Mahadeo Babar in the Standing Committee meeting on Wednesday.

The two pointed out that almost ten per cent of the reserved land had been encroached upon. “The civic administration admitted that there was encroachment on the reserved land, but clarified that it is limited to 3 per cent of the total reserved land in the 23 villages,” Bagul told reporters.

In the 100 sq km of the area that came under the PMC jurisdiction ten years ago, 11 per cent of land is reserved for roads and 14 per cent for other development projects.

The PMC has now decided to take up the demarcation process of its reserved land through a private agency and complete it within six months. The process of land acquisition for the 200 km DP road in this area will be done simultaneously to avoid encroachment.

techtree: BenQ has just launched its stylish BenQ-Siemens EF51 mobile phone, which the company claims, is crafted specially for ‘musicaholics’.

A Gen-Next hybrid music phone, the EF51 is styled like a trendy MP3 player, with dedicated MP3 controller keys located on the phone’s shiny EZmusic to make it easy for users to operate their music.

The EF51 supports almost all mainstream audio formats, including WMA, MP3, AAC, and AAC+. It allows users transfer Windows Media Player songs from their PCs to their phones, and download music from nearly all online music stores.

The 20 pre-set FM channel function lets users store all their favorite FM stations. The phone allows users ‘record’ songs playing on the radio.

The EF51 features 20 MB built-in memory, with a MiniSD card slot for expandability. With the unique ‘Speech-to-Music’ feature, users need to just call out the song title, and the phone plays the requested song automatically.

Besides, the phone features 6-Band EQ modes and speakers for 3D surround stereo sound, and comes with high quality stereo earphones.

Apart from being a musical power house, the EF51 also offers a sprint of camera features such as: a 1.3 mega pixels camera, special color adjustments, digital zoom, multi-shot capability, self-portrait capability, etc.

pcmag: Gateway on Thursday announced the XHD3000, a 30-inch widescreen monitor that the company is touting as the world’s first “quad-HD” display capable of rendering 2560×1600 pixels.

ADVERTISEMENT The new Gateway XHD3000 30-inch Extreme HD Display will be available via www.gateway.com or 1-800-GATEWAY, as well as technology and electronics retailers that sell Gateway products. It is priced at $1,699.99.

Of late, OEMs like Dell have tried to differentiate themelves and their brands by offering premium monitors, which they can pair with boutique systems. To date, however, Gateway has not offered a boutique line, and the company is in the process of being acquired by Acer.

The “quad-HD” label derives from the fact that the display can render four times as many pixels as a 720p display, Gateway said. In addition, the display’s integrated Silicon Optix Realta HQV processor will even upscale 1080p high-definition video to 1600p, the company said.

pcworld: Toshiba Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Thursday announced plans to launch the Advanced Interactivity Consortium to extend interactive features in HD DVD, a high-definition format, in an effort to attract more users.

Both companies are stout HD DVD supporters. Microsoft offers an HD DVD player add-on for its Xbox 360 gaming console and Toshiba is integrating HD DVD drives in its PCs. The rival format, Blu-ray Disc, is supported by Sony Corp. and movie studios Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and The Walt Disney Co.

The consortium will be a platform for companies to collaborate on improving the digital home entertainment experience and bringing advanced interactive features, including Web-enabled features, to digital downloads that go to DVDs, PCs, gaming consoles and cell phones.

Bringing companies together will ensure interoperability of HD DVD players and services, said Hisatsugu Nonaka, corporate executive vice president for Toshiba, in a news release.

beta: On the very same day that the president of Matsushita Electric, the parent company of Panasonic, proclaimed at the CEATEC electronics show in Chiba that the format war for high-definition recorders was already over in Japan and customers there had already overwhelmingly chosen Blu-ray, Toshiba showed a prototype of an HD DVD recorder capable of burning up to two hours of 4 Mbps MPEG-4 high-definition video. That video is apparently being burned using a red laser — not blue — to an ordinary DVD-R, DVD-RW, or DVD-RAM disc.

As first reported in English by CDRinfo, Toshiba’s RD-X7 would not be the first high-def recorder to support DVD - Sony has a handful of Blu-ray recorders planned for this holiday season. But it would be the first to support a new file format adopted just three weeks ago by the DVD Forum, caretaker of the HD DVD format, called “HD Rec.”

Based on preliminary information, Toshiba is probably achieving that two-hour span of 1080p red-laser recording using dual-layer capacity DVD-Rs (8.5 GB), not single-layer (4.7 GB). Still, it’s a head-turning feature that could take advantage of some latent similarities between DVD and HD DVD mechanisms that Blu-ray consoles cannot exploit.

But it doesn’t appear that product will be ready for Christmas, although two other Toshiba models without the HD Rec feature remain scheduled for release in Japan for the holiday season.

As news continues to emerge from CEATEC, there doesn’t appear to have been any sighting of Samsung’s BD-UP5000 dual-format player. Earlier this week, one enthusiasts’ blog cited an unnamed source as stating the dual-format player would be delayed from its intended October release, and that another high-end Blu-ray model would be cancelled.