IT company Atos Origin to hire 10,000 in India

Atos Origin is following in the footsteps of larger rival Capgemini and ramping up its presence in India to both boost offshore delivery capability and seek business from the region.

The Indian arm of the 8.5 billion euro IT services provider is the new competition forIndian IT companies, as it plans to add about 10,000 staff to more than double its workforce in India by 2016.

The company started its Indian operations in 2010-11 in Pune, with roughly 1,000 employees primarily servicing the parent company as a delivery centre, but today, it is building its own army of sales and marketing and while bringing down the off-shore delivery work.

"We have tried to drive transformation in English speaking territories and India, which is not only service delivery but also business acquisition," said Milind Kamat, CEO at Atos Origin India.

He added that in the last one year the company made heavy investments in India and outside towards "delocalising" and putting together the team including delivery, sales force, pre-sales and marketing for addressing both global and local markets.

It has got a fast-growing team of sales executives looking at sales in North America and the UK.

"Datacentre and Infrastructure required clients proximity, however we also assist them in remote infrastructure management, but our strength is in ADM, which can be delivered from the India centre at better cost," Kamat said.

In India, Atos has been working on a Cloud Orchestration Platform that won the 2013 NASSCOM Process Innovation Award. Cloud Orchestration platform is designed to help organisations manage their cloud environment and according to the company they have got over 35 clients for the platform.

Atos Origin India is following the lines of many US and then the UK-based IT services firms such as Accenture and Capgemini. Atos entered the Indian market as a delivery center, but slowly started ramping up their sales team to tap local and other markets. Capgemini India, for example, over last decade has increased the workforce to about 40,000 with various centres in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Trivandrum and Salem.

New Apple Retina displays may boast richer colors thanks to quantum dots

Apple's Retina displays have helped the iPhone and iPad reach new resolution limits, and soon Cupertino might do even more with the help of some sci-fi sounding dots.
The US Patent and Trademark Office published four new patent applications from Apple that were first spotted by Patently Apple. The most interesting of these new documents describes using quantum dots in tandem with Apple's microelectromechanical systems shutter control.
As noted in the patent, quantum dots may provide a way for enhancing the color gamut of displays. By replacing the regular LED phosphor, which often leaks out too much light and washes out colors, quantum dot screens can emit a much narrower and more specific spectrum of light.
Without getting into the scientific minutiae of nanocrystals, a quantum dot display, if used, would create richer and more accurate colors.

It's all about the backlight

Besides improving color, the other two patents suggest fine tuning the backlight with quantum dots.
More accurately, a dot-laden backlight sub-stack would produce a module with a mix of prisms, diffusers and light guides. Despite the added items it could be both thinner and more accurate.
Finally, a backlight dimming invention would fine-tune the enhanced backlight system using a stack of red, blue, and green quantum dot sheets to correct for any LED color shift.

Poppycock you say?

Before you blow off the concept as patent pipe dreams, quantum dot technology is already being used in the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7.
When Apple first introduced the Retina display in the iPhone 4, it grabbed eyes around the tech world. Since then though, other device makers have been catching up with 1080p capable smartphones and even higher resolution 4K tablets.
It seems now Apple is looking into newer technologies to put its Retina display back on top, and better color accuracy could be the edge it needs.

Industry voice: Business lessons from 10 years of Facebook

In the past few years Facebook has rapidly grown to attract 1.25 billion users worldwide, make annual profits of $1.5 billion and float on the NASDAQ for more than 100 billion dollars.
It's doing something right. The world's biggest social network recently passed its 10th birthday, and questions are being asked about the outlook for its next 10 years. Whatever the future holds, Facebook has set a great example of how to build an excellent user interface, and that example is one that businesses would do well to take note of.
One of the key reasons behind Facebook's popularity with consumers is the high level of investment – and critical analysis – in its user interface, creating an engaging, positive journey for the user from start to finish and allowing navigation between activities to be simple, intuitive and enjoyable.
Unfortunately, "positive journey" does not describe the user experience of many internal company systems which tend to be designed for usability and functionality but often fall flat on both counts.

Simple tools

Simple tools like instant messenger, to supplement emails, or a central news feed that allows employees to flag relevant developments to their whole team at the click of a button, can go a long way towards improving functionality and user experience simultaneously.
Internal business systems should be designed to increase employee engagement and productivity, but the biggest challenge facing new systems tends to be adoption – the very problem Facebook has been so adept at solving.
The most common obstacle to adoption is marketing and awareness, however within a business the audience is, by default, captive, so surely it should be relatively easy to encourage internal adoption of new systems? However, the big struggle that businesses face is to build a system which is functional, engaging and enjoyable to use.

Rewards

There are great rewards available to companies that follow the examples set by popular consumer websites – such as Facebook, Twitter and BuzzFeed - and use these to encourage adoption and integration of the systems that are central to their own business models.
Whilst part of the appeal of these sites is the non-commercial content, the user interface should not be underestimated. Plenty of social media competitors attempted to steal the crown of those we all know and use today, but it was those which created and continually evolved the most intuitive and effective user interface which now lead the market.
Facebook's interface is the result of ten years of R&D by some of the best and most well funded minds that Silicon Valley has to offer. Companies wishing to develop their own systems will struggle to find a better source of inspiration."

IBM weighing up sale of semiconductor operation

IBM is looking into the possibility of selling its semiconductor manufacturing operations, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Big Blue has appointed investment bank Goldman Sachs to search for potential buyers, but may also be searching for a partner if whole sale of the semiconductor business is not possible. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is looking to sell off its manufacturing operation but will keep its chip-designing capabilities.
Besides designing chips for use in its own systems, IBM Microelectronics offers foundry and design services, which it uses to manufacture chips for other companies such as Nintendo.

Setting up shop

The New York-based firm lays claim to having some of the most powerful chips in the world, something that helped develop its AI supercomputer Watson. The supercomputer has been developed into a major part of IBM as it looks to become geared around software and services.
IBM has been shipping parts of its business in recent weeks, selling its low-end server wing to Lenovo, as well as searching for buyers for its SDN technology. Shedding the chip division, however, represents a big move from a venture the company has put billions into nurturing.
Potential buyers have been earmarked in the form of manufacturing groups Global Foundries and TSMC.

Google Unveils $999 Chromebox For Video Conferencing

With an aim to make business meetings easier and less expensive, Google has built a new video conferencing system. Dubbed as ‘Chromebox’, the device uses Google+ Hangouts and Google apps like Calendar and Gmail, to brings meetings to anyone, from anywhere.

Priced at $999, Chromebox system provides high-definition teleconferencing for up to 15 people at a time. The Core i7-based ASUS Chromebox setup comes with a remote control with QWERTY keyboard, an HD camera and microphone for conference rooms.  In addition to the hardware costs, Google will charge businesses $250 per year for management and support. Currently, Google offers only Asus Chromebox, but it said  it wants to release additional hardware configurations in cooperation with HP and Dell in the coming months.

“Meetings need to catch up with the way we work—they need to be face-to-face, easier to join, and available from anywhere and any device. Starting today, they can be.“ Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google product management, wrote in a blog post. People without Chrome hardware can join meetings from other locations as long as they have a Gmail account. Laptop screens can be added for viewing wirelessly, and telephone users can also dial in for audio conferences.  The Chromebox also supports some other existing third-party video conferencing platforms, such as Vidyo and UberConference.

Google said that the Chromebox  will be released later this year in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain. Unfortunately, no information about India launch was mentioned.

Google Updates Search Engine Results To Prioritize Music Videos

Google has rolled out a new update to its search engine which will give videos more priority in search results. The update has rolled out worldwide. Normally when you search for a music video on Google, videos, mp3s and wikipedia links are given priority. However, with the new update, when you put in the name of song, the first link that returns will be a Google Now card which shows the video link and also additional information about the artist.

The card do look like a video which can be played right there on the search result but it is an image link to the video page. Most of the results are sourced from Youtube and there have been instances where other video sites like Vimeo and Daily Motion are also returned.

Here is a snapshot of the search result that I got.

Most of the videos being shown are pulled from official video channels of artists but there might be exceptions. Seeing a video screenshot in the search might help users to figure out if it is the right video that they want to watch, however otherwise it does not enhance the user experience as such.

Adding more song and artist information to the cards that pop up would be useful. Secondly, being able to play the video right there on the search page would also reduce the number of steps to accessing content.

Snapdeal to invest heavily in technology to reach its target of $1 billion by 2015

Snapdeal.com, one of the better known names in the clutter of the vibrant Indian e-commerce industry in India, calls itself a technology company, rather than an e-commerce firm. The fact that their tech team comprises 1/5th of their overall workforce in India is some testimony to that statement. Close to 95% of all technology that Snapdeal uses, is developed and implemented in-house. It is little wonder then that Snapdeal, which grew over 500% in the year 2012-13, aims to reach its target of $1 billion in topline revenues by 2015, riding on the back of technology.

"The biggest investment Snapdeal is going to make in the next couple of years is going to be in tech. Whether it is in technology processes, infrastructure, platform or team. Investment in technology is going to be disproportionably higher than any other function. Everyone in the management is perfectly aligned that this is a tech company," emphasizes Amitabh Misra, VP- Engineering, Snapdeal.com

Tech and product development are closely aligned at Snapdeal.com. Internally, product management team creates a roadmap for technology. "We have business goals and we align them with tech scalability. We follow a very data driven culture in product and tech. There are a lot of core engineering activities we undertake to make sure that our technology moves faster than our scale," elaborates Ankit Khanna, VP- Product Management at Snapdeal.

The key areas where Snapdeal is using technology to optimize costs include supplier side automation and functions like customer care and delivery. "We reduced customer care costs by half in less than 3 months on the back of a bunch of tech processes. In the near future we plan to invest heavily in mobile and seller side technology. We want to supply everything everywhere and we are sure that technology can help us do that," says Khanna.

As of now, mobile accounts for about 30% of Snapdeal's traffic. By 2015, the company expects mobile to contribute more than 50% to its overall traffic. Snapdeal launched its native mobile apps about 3 months back and has already seen close to a million downloads.

The other key technology area that Snapdeal is looking at, much like its rivals Flipkart and Myntra, is big data analytics. "There are two channels through which we reach out to buyers- the first is through website on PC or mobile and the second is through emailers- we use analytics differently for both these channels," says Misra. On the Snapdeal site for instance, if two customers come they would see very different home pages. "So we try to give them a customized experience right from the homepage. Their home screen listings get decided from what they browsed in their last visit to the site." All of these analytics are built in-house, some of it using on the big data technology.

"We collect all the user behaviour including navigation, preferences and clicks on our systems. We are crunching 15 million data points every 3 hours," says Misra. Search is the other place where Snapdeal has implemented machine learning. Display of products is also algorithm driven and is often a combination of users' history combined with what Snapdeal wants to promote. Apart from consumer oriented analytics, Snapdeal has also started doing a lot of seller driven analytics. "We started automating our supply chain when our number of sellers started jumping. We have 20,000 unique businesses selling on the site and are looking at reaching 100,000 sellers in the next couple of years," says Misra.

Beyond tech investments, Snapdeal is also looking to take their vernacular offerings further. They already have Hindi and Tamil options and will launch in five more languages this year.

The company is also hopeful of reaching its $1 billion target sooner than 2015. "If growth is an indicator, then we'd reach out $1 billion target in revenues sooner than 2015," says Misra.

Misra is also not ruling out enhancing his technology team through acquisitions. "We would love to explore acquisitions but it is tough to find good acquisition targets in this space. It's eventually about getting engineers on board and we find we can get better hires off the market than acquisitions. But we are open to exploring acquisitions."