By Arup Nag

Wonder if it is a hotel room or a guest house, they all look the same!

Trying to remember the day or date is just too much of an effort. I need more sleep though that is no guarantee that those extra minutes would add up to the rest the body craves for. The mind has already started working, scanning the never ending list of “to do’s for the day”. I make an effort anyway. Turning sideways the blank wall says “hello!”

Thinking of their untold stories I drift off to s (more…)

Internet has got a nutcracker-like hold on book publishers. It is forcing a shift from paper to e-books, which shaves off margins and fuels piracy. It is now prodding many writers to self-publish their books and find readers on their own.

For long, self-publishing was seen as the last gasp of the failed writers. Not anymore. 2011 may well go down as the year self publishing came of age. In the Kindle 100 top selling ebooks of 2011, there were 18 self-published titles.

Many self-published (more…)

Indians like to watch either cricket or films on screen, be it TV or PC or mobile. But there is a smaller but rapidly expanding audience with a broader taste in life. Here is a list of 2011’s 5 most popular online videos, which became a rage on You Tube, and had very little to do with films or cricket.

1) Flash Mobs are cool. They stop busy people right on their tracks in streets and breathe in a fresh air of cheer and zest. The most successful effort so far, at least on You Tube, happ (more…)

A young man approached an expert and asked what advice he had for a non-technical person. “Try to get technical,” said the expert.

In the last few years PCs, mobiles and tablets have spread like virus and digitised everything they have touched. Organisations and professionals across a wide spectrum of industries have come under pressure to learn how technology works and deploy it to their benefit. Even if you do not intend to code for a living, knowing programming basics will give you (more…)

Is Kolaveri Di better than Roja or Mungaru Male or even Shakalakka Baby? So, why is this unlikely candidate considered a hit with the masses?

For several weeks in October-November, the Kolaveri production team were observed talking up the song on social-networking websites. There was also an unauthorised “leak” of the audio version.

Allegedly trying to make the best of a worst situation, the team put together a promo video and released it on YouTube on November 16. So, how did the song (more…)

By the middle of 2012, Android’s app repository ‘Market’ is likely to overtake the current industry leader, Apple’s ‘App Store’.

Google, which controls the mobile operating system, Android, said early this month that the Market had registered 10 billion downloads. This is behind the 15 billion apps downloaded from App Store so far. But Market downloads are accelerating and currently gliding at a rate of one billion apps a month. Android took 22 months to reach its first billion (more…)

Did you know that the elite management consultant McKinsey has 21 software products, which fetch it millions of dollars in revenue. Even minus the consultancy business, McKinsey would be a sizeable software company on its own.

Ford likes to think that it makes sophisticated computers on wheels, not just cars. It has begun to load its cars with wifi, sensors and software to run all mechanical functions. Now it wants to network all its vehicles to open a steady stream of information on user (more…)

Thierry Breton, the CEO of Atos, Europe’s largest IT services company, created a mild media tremor last week by ‘banning emails’ in his company. Atos employees spend up to 20 hours a week on emails, only 10 per cent of which are of any use. So, they will be better off using wikis, chats and other tools instead of emails, reasons Breton.

Will Breton’s announcement set off a new trend, given that it is quite fashionable to groan about email overloads? Tech journalist Mike A (more…)

Net Optics, Vupen Security, FinFisher, HackingTeam… The names of these software companies may not ring a bell; but they are a growing tribe of companies that are offering products to help governments intercept your communication.

Governments have a legitimate need to monitor communication on mobile networks and internet to check criminal activities. For a long time the surveillance technologies were home grown or custom made, though there have been a few companies making popular surveillan (more…)

In the fast-paced tech industry, a succesful company is expected to mature in about 10 years. Google, 1998, has hurried past adolescence and already looks like the grand-uncle of dotcoms.

But Indian IT companies, which have been around for three decades or more still suffer from growing up pangs, though it is unfair to compare them with a pure tech play like Google.

Indian companies shot into prominence when their western clients started shifting grunt work to tap cheap labour in the co (more…)