New Year cheer: 8.5 lakh new jobs, 20% pay hike, say experts

It may rain jobs in the new year as companies are gearing up to add over 8 lakh new employees to their payrolls and dole out salary hikes of up to 20 per cent to best performers in 2014, say experts.

As per estimates of various human resource consultants, the year 2014 seems very promising for job market unlike 2013, when hirings went slow across mid and senior levels and recruitments were done only to replace 'key' gaps.

In the new year, the country is likely to witness a huge surge of opportunities for job seekers with more and more corporates investing in their businesses.

"Yes, 2014 looks bullish on hiring. 2014 will be seen as a good happening year from the jobs perspective as the global economy is improving and India being one of the largest service provider for the global market," leading executive search firm GlobalHunt MD Sunil Goel said.

According to industry estimates, over 8.5 lakh new jobs may be created in the calender year 2014. The issuance of new banking licences will be a major contributor, while IT, healthcare, agri-business, infrastructure and education sectors are also likely to witness robust hiring trends.

"Last calendar year was not good either for job seekers or for employers due to uncertain and fluctuated economical and political conditions. 2014 is coming with positive vibes for jobseekers and expecting to create 8.5 lacs new jobs in different sectors," Rajesh Kumar, CEO, MyHiringClub.com & FlikJobs.com said.

With regards to salary, the average hike for most sectors is expected in single digits, while top performers can expect pay rise of around 15-20 per cent in 2014, experts say.

"This New Year is going to bring cheer for employees with a salary hike of double-digit of at least 10-12 per cent. In 2014, companies are expected to revise the compensation package and explore a more motivational approach," Indian Staffing Federation Vice President Rituparna Chakraborty said.

"All indications are that the average increase will be around 10 per cent across the industries. However, as pressure is mounting on companies to keep its growth intact, high achievers will be getting increase better than last year, which may range between 15-18 per cent in different sectors," GHCL Ltd VP and Head-Human Resources Rajesh Tripathi said.

Echoing similar sentiments, Vdopia's spokesperson, Preetesh Chouhan, VP-APAC, believes ideally a high performer receives an incremental hike of 12-15 per cent in comparison to an average rise in salary.

According to Changeyourboss.com CEO Bhupender Mehta, sectors like services, mining, construction and infrastructure are expected to up their hiring activities and companies are expected to give 12 per cent average salary hike.

Lighthouse Partners' Managing Partner Rajiv Burman said a new government in 2014 should emphasise on promoting growth and therefore hiring trends will also improve. The pay hikes could be 5 per cent for average performers and 10-20 per cent for high achievers, he said.

Cloud storage startup Dropbox looking to woo corporates

Dropbox weathered Steve Jobs' anger and his desire to kill it but it now has a tougher challenge on cards: getting myriad businesses and corporations across the world, including India, to sign up for its service. The cloud storage startup has made headway among consumers, restless internet surfers and download addicts but is only now starting to woo corporations, big and small.

It has tied up with Salesforce.com and Dell to penetrate the business market and has seen strong growth in the space. Dropbox also plans to expand in India in the next two or three years.

"A lot of companies have a strong engineering presence in India; Google certainly does, and it would make sense to put things like user operation centres here.

We don't have a specific timeline for it, but I would be surprised if we didn't have something here," Sujay Jaswa, business development head at Dropbox, told ET. Jaswa added that the company had just begun its international expansion last year and was going to open its first Asia-Pacific office in the first quarter of 2014.

Started by two MIT graduates, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox was named the fifth most valuable tech startup after Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and Groupon by US tech blog Business Insider. The San Francisco-based startup, which counts U2 musicians Bono and The Edge as investors, has about 200 million users globally and is reportedly seeking to raise $250 million, according to media reports. The latest round is expected to value the company at $8 billion, about $1.5 billion for every year of its existence.

Jaswa, who asked the founders for a job while carpooling to a concert in Silicon Valley, is the first non-MIT hire at the firm.

Dropbox offers storage on the cloud and then syncs that account to various devices. Storage up to 2 GB is free and more than that has to be paid for — a common 'freemium' model among start-ups. While there are other cloud storage companies, Dropbox's early-mover advantage among consumers and the fact that it allows users to boost storage by inviting friends to the service gives it an edge.

  "If you look at paying clients, it's quite huge. I would say we are quite comparable to many publicly-listed software-as-a-service companies," Jaswa said. Dropbox's growth, and heady valuation, comes at a time when it is up against deep-pocketed players like Google, Microsoft and Apple in the cloud storage space something industry experts attribute to the fundamental change the company is helping drive in personal computing — where files can be accessed wherever and whenever, regardless of the operating system.

Companies to use Dropbox include venture firm Accel Partners, location tagging start-up Foursquare, education site Khan Academy and travel site Kayak. "Prior to Dropbox, we put all event files onto flash drives — and usually two people carried them.

Now, all we need is Dropbox for Business," Dixon Chan, IT Director, Accel, said in a case study on the firm's use of Dropbox. The company has come a long way since Steve Jobs vowed to kill it in 2011. Apple had tried to acquire Dropbox and when Jobs couldn't buy out the company, he said it would come after its business, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said in a Salesforce.com conference in November.

Six months after that meeting with Jobs, Apple launched iCloud — its cloud storage platform — and in his penultimate keynote Jobs said the product was geared at taking out Dropbox. "It was a tough day. I'll never forget that day. I'd just walked in and Drew called me over to his computer and we're watching it (the keynote) and it was intimidating because Steve Jobs was the most iconic business person of our generation.

So, we were both like, 'this is going to be tough'. But our success validates our technology." Jaswa said.

Now, far from death, Dropbox has mutual fund investors like Fidelity on board, according to a Reuters report citing data from Morningstar, giving the funds a headstart when the company goes public. Other funds with stakes in Dropbox include funds owned by Morgan Stanley and T Rowe Price. Venture fund Sequoia and hedge fund Valiant Capital also own stakes in the company.

"Their growth has been exponential even with competition and they have executed really well. They are the classic case for being able to attract new users by allowing people to invite friends. It's viral and it's simple," Mukund Mohan, CEO-in-residence of the Microsoft Accelerator and a Dropbox user, told ET.

Tech forecasting firm Gartner predicted last year that the personal cloud would replace the personal computer as the center of users' digital lives by 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice-president at Gartner.

"Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

PARAM Supercomputer among the most power efficient systems in world

India's supercomputer PARAM Yuva II, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has been ranked first in India, ninth in the Asia Pacific Region and 44th in the world among the most power efficient computer systems as per theGreen500 List announced at the Supercomputing Conference (SC 2013) in Denver, Colorado, in the US, an official release said here Wednesday.

Supercomputers, in general, consume a lot of electrical power and produce much heat that necessitates elaborate cooling facilities to ensure proper operation. This adds to increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a supercomputer. To draw focus towards development of energy efficient supercomputers, Green500 ranks computer systems in the world according to compute performance per watt, thus providing a world ranking based on energy efficiency.

Kapil Sibal, minister for communications and information technology, said supercomputing is very important for all-round advancement in the country, and the government is planning a big impetus for capacity-building and advanced research and development in this area.

He said he would expect many more contributions from C-DAC, as a key player in this endeavour.

IIT Kharagpur creates record, more than 1,000 students get jobs

IIT Kharagpur has set a record among all IITs with more than a thousand of its students securing cushyjobs in the first phase of campus placements, officials said today.

Around 1,010 students of the Kharagpur campus accepted job offers in the first round of placements which ended in December.

At IIT Mumbai, there were 900 offers while IIT Delhi got about 750 offers and IIT Kanpur had around 700 offers.

IIT officials said, Kharagpur has achieved a new record with the maximum number of students getting jobs in the IIT system in one phase.

In addition to big names like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Shell, Deutsche Bank, ITC, Schlumberger, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Abbott and EXL, start-ups like Flipkart and Housing.com were the ones who made multiple offers in dual figures.

The highest package offered was from a US-based company which has signed an IITian for an annual salary of USD 1.25 lakh (around Rs 77 lakh).

The highest domestic package was of Rs 37 lakh. Two new dual degree programs - Financial Engineering and Engineering Entrepreneurship - proved to be a big hit with 85 per cent students from those courses being placed.

"The programs not only demonstrated acceptability by the industries, but projected the vision of IIT-Kgp for launching novel initiatives," said Prof Sudhir Kumar Barai, in-charge of training and placement, of the institute.

The number of companies offering placements have also increased this year with 195 organisations coming this time.

Barai said another 79 engineering students have accepted pre-placement offers from other companies.

HP may cut 34,000 jobs by October due to falling PC sales, adverse market conditions

Struggling with falling PC sales and adverse market conditions, US-based technology giant Hewlett- Packard (HP) expects to eliminate up to 34,000 jobs by October this year as part of its multi-year restructuring programme to cut costs.

The company will incur about $4.1 billion in aggregate charges, which includes severance and other charges.

In July last year, HP had estimated eliminating about 29,000 positions through fiscal year 2014 as part of its restructuring programme, which was started in 2012. However, details on which locations would be impacted by the decision were not disclosed. "Due to continued market and business pressures, as of October 31, 2013, HP expects to eliminate an additional 15 per cent of those 29,000 positions or a total of approximately 34,000 positions," HP said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The programme will now cost the company about $4.1 billion in aggregate charges, instead of the earlier estimate of $3.6 billion, it added. "HP expects approximately $3.5 billion to relate to workforce reductions, including the EER programmes, and approximately $0.6 billion to relate to infrastructure, including data center and real estate consolidation, and other items," it said.

The Palo Alto-headquartered firm recorded a charge of about $1.2 billion in fiscal 2013. The company expects to record these charges through the end of HP's 2014 fiscal year. HP follows November-October as fiscal year. As of October 31, 2013, HP has eliminated about 24,600 positions. HP's annual sales have declined from $127.24 billion in 2011 to $112.3 billion in 2013, mainly due to declining consumer interest in PCs and printers.

However, the company has been able to return to profitability in fiscal 2013 with net earnings of $5.1 billion against a loss of $12.65 billion in the previous financial year.

Microsoft Skype's Facebook, Twitter accounts hacked

The Syrian Electronic Army, an amorphous hacker collective that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for hacking into the social media accounts of internet calling service Skype.

The group also posted the contact information of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's retiring chief executive, on its Twitter account along with the message, "You can thank Microsoft for monitoring your accounts/emails using this details. #SEA"

That message was an apparent reference to revelations last year by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that Skype, which is owned by Microsoft, was part of the NSA's program to monitor communications through some of the biggest US internet companies.

A message posted on Skype's official Twitter feed, apparently by the hacking group, read: "Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments. More details soon. #SEA"

Similar messages were posted on Skype's official Facebook pages and on a blog on its website before being taken down in late afternoon. The SEA later tweeted out copies of the message "for those who missed it."

Representatives for Microsoft could not be reached for comment.

The NSA's practices essentially made Microsoft and other technology companies partners in government surveillance efforts against private citizens in the United States and elsewhere.

Last month Microsoft joined seven other top technology companies in pressing President Barack Obama to rein in the US government's electronic spying in a meeting at the White House.

Media companies, including the New York Times and the BBC, have repeatedly been targeted by the Syrian Electronic Army and other hacker activist groups that deface websites and take over Twitter accounts.

Obama and his national security team are trying to decide what recommendations to adopt from an outside panel's review of the NSA's activities.

A US District judge in December ruled that the US government's gathering of Americans' phone records is likely unlawful and raised what he called "serious doubts" about the value of the so-called metadata counter-terrorism program.

A second federal judge ruled later in the month that the program was constitutional, raising the likelihood that the issue will be settled by the US Supreme Court.

This week, a monitoring group said the death toll in Syria's civil war, which began in March 2011 as peaceful protests against four decades of rule by Assad's family, had risen to at least 130,000.

No WhatsApp behind the wheel please!

Using social media or calling people while driving is a common sight nowadays but even the simplest distraction behind the wheel can put a young driver at risk.

Dialling cell phones, checking SMSs, eating and talking to passengers - this multi-tasking among teens while driving greatly raise their risk of crashes and/or near-crash incidents, says a new study.

"Novice drivers are more likely to engage in high-risk secondary tasks more frequently over time as they became more comfortable with driving. The increasingly high rates of secondary task engagement among newly-licensed novice drivers are worrisome as this appears to be an important contributing factor to crashes or near-crashes," warned Charlie Klauer, group leader for teen risk and injury prevention at the transportation institute's Center for Vulnerable Road User Safety in Virginia, US.

Traffic studies show that drivers from 15 years to 20 years of age represent 6.4 percent of all motorists on the road, but account for 11.4 percent of fatalities and 14 percent of police-reported crashes resulting in injuries, said the study conducted by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.

"Any secondary task that takes the novice driver's eyes off the road increases risk. A distracted driver is unable to recognise and respond to road hazards, such as the abrupt slowing of a lead vehicle or the sudden entrance of a vehicle, pedestrian, or object onto the forward roadway," added the study, published in the journal New England Journal of Medicine.

Klauer and her team compared the results of a one-year, 100-car study with drivers between 18 and 72 years of age with an average of 20 years' experience and an 18-month study of 42 teens who had drivers' licenses for less than three weeks.

Participants from both studies drove vehicles outfitted with data acquisition systems, including cameras and a suite of sensors which collected continuous video and driving performance data for the duration of both studies.

A secondary task was considered a contributing factor to any crash or near-crash event if it occurred within five seconds prior to or within one second after the event, said the study.

The data revealed that compared to experienced drivers, novice drivers engaged in secondary tasks less frequently during the first six months.

However, they matched experienced drivers between months seven and 15, and were engaged in non-driving tasks more often than experienced drivers during months 16 through 18 - a two-fold increase in risky distractions during the last three months of the study.

"Newly-licensed novice drivers are of course at a particularly high crash risk, in part because driving is a complicated task and novices tend to make more mistakes when learning a new task," said Klauer.