Trade2Gain ties up with HP

Hewlett-Packard India (HP) and Trade2Gain have formed a strategic partnership to further B2B e-commerce in the country. Under the alliance the two companies will work together in a number of areas including integrating each other’s e-commerce infrastructure and technology as well as joint marketing initiatives.  Trade2Gain recently launched an auction site for surplus assets and inventory for the Indian market. It will leverage HP’s e-services offerings to augment the functionality of its e-commerce market place and deploy HP servers. The latter will be using the Trade2Gain auction services to dispose its surplus assets and inventory. In addition to hosting its e-commerce services on HP servers, Trade2Gain will also leverage solutions like e-speak. The partnership is a part of HP’s e-services strategy, where it would work closely with various players in the Internet.

 

Hope Bags Order from Tourism Ministry

Hope Limited will be undertaking an IT project for the Ministry of Tourism. The assignment entails setting up of the country’s first Touch Screen Passenger information kiosks at various tourist points like airports, railway stations, and bus stations. The first phase of the project involves development and installation of 20 kiosks at four metros. The kiosks would incorporate complete Global Information Systems (GIS)-enabled information system in a multimedia format. These kiosks will be rich in data content and provide a comprehensive information on everything of the interest of a tourist. Ranging from monuments to soul refreshment or emergency service.

 

 

PwC, Bharti BT Join Hands

 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Bharti BT have signed an agreement to set up a joint initiative to help clients understand the design and bandwidth issues on Wide Area Network (WAN). The collaboration extends to several WAN applications and showcasing of these applications on a VSAT network. The VSAT network has been established between WAN Competency Center at PwC’s Technology Center at Calcutta and the Bharti BT Hub Station in Bangalore. Through this lab, prospective implementers of WAN applications such as ERP, as well as clients of PwC and Bharti BT will now have a chance to evaluate the performance of various applications on a VSAT network before taking a decision. Whereas, PwC’s consultants will be able to simulate clients’ network load and accordingly do capacity planning of bandwidth, using Bharti BT’s VSAT technology. Together, the two companies hope to leverage the facility to get mindshare and marketshare in ERP market.

 

“Through this unique alliance, we will be able to help businesses choose the required bandwidth to get optimum response time over the WAN. Widely documented, precise data, pertaining to recommended network topology, software and hardware configuration, bandwidth allocation.”

 

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Seagate Technology Acquires Xiotech

Seagate Technology Corporation has completed the acquisition of Xiotech Corporation, a virtual storage and Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions provider. The company designs, manufactures, and markets high-performance, application-driven storage solutions. Under the terms of acquisition, the shareholders of Xiotech will receive approximately $360 million in Seagate common stock option upon closing. Seagate expects to account for the acquisition as a purchase transaction. It anticipates that it will incur a charge to operations in the current quarter of approximately $111 million. Xiotech Corporation will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate.

 

 

Now—it’s E-mail Via Phone

Design Expo Network Private Limited, an Internet-based company started by two IIT engineers has now launched two websites called www.my sawaal.com and www.shubyatra.com .

While the first one is a personalized portal with facilities for users to customize their pages according to their requirements, the later, as the name suggests, is a travel guide on India.

p class=MsoBodyText style='margin-right:-.35pt;text-align:justify;tab-stops: 432.0pt'>Sawaal.com includes e-mail access on the phone by dialing a set of numbers provided for their city. The user will have to key in the correct login and numeric password and follow the menu read out on the phone by the Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The customer will then read out the number of new e-mails and the content of the new e-mails (optional) to the user. The company maintains a mail-through-phone server for user authenticity verification and to read out the mails.

p class=MsoBodyText style='margin-right:-.35pt;text-align:justify;tab-stops: 432.0pt'>This server fetches mails for the registered users, phrases them in a readable form and then stores it in a hierarchy of directories. A test-to-speech conversion hardware and software is also being used to read out the e-mails over the phone without compromising the privacy of the mail. The e-mail, still remains on the web site for the user. The facility is currently provided free of cost except for the normal telephone charges. This facility is currently constrained to Mumbai, the company is yet to extend this facility to other cities.

 

Whereas, the site on travel, shubyatra.com has list of various tourist places coupled with information on festivals, hotels, weekend getaways, train and air travel guide, honeymoon tours among others. One added section on the site is Unseen Horizons, which provides information on the not-so-frequented places in India.

 

 

AMD Unveils Voice-ready Ethernet Switch Solution

AMD has announced that it is bringing voice-ready switching to the enterprise desktop with the introduction of the SwitchIT portfolio of Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps switch devices and reference platforms.

 

The SwitchIT F12 and F12M devices will address the enterprise network market requirements, delivering switching technology benefits such as increased bandwidth, security and prioritization of time-critical traffic. The company’s SwitchIT technology will provide a complete system solution for switch manufacturers, and will enable network managers to accelerate the transition to entirely switched enterprise networks. This device provides one dozen 10/100 Mbps ports and one gigabit port with integrated Media Access Control (MAC) functions, as well as an expansion port for multi-chip system solutions.

To support end-to-end priority, both SwitchIT devices have built-in quality of service management to provide wire-speed prioritization of packets. With a 16-bit microcontroller interface, the device will enhance network performance by supporting industry standard link aggregation, IP multicast filtering, Remote Monitoring Management (RMON), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Spanning Tree, Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN), and port mirroring. Alternatively, the SwitchIT F12 device is a plug-and-play, unmanaged device that does not require a CPU—even for features such as traffic prioritization.

 

Websites

Delhi-based Info-X Software has launched, what is claimed to be India’s first auction site for corporates and individuals. So far, the company has spent ten lakhs for developing this site called koolMaal.com.

It has been designed to provide a platform to buyers and seller and to facilitate buying and selling goods and belongings throughout the country. The site maintains a composite database of the products that sellers may put up on the site. A seller can log on anytime and put up their products for sale without having to pay for the service. The sale is then taken up as an auction by the site and displayed to buyers.

At the end of a specified time ascertained by the seller, the seller gets a list of potential buyers and their bids. From this list he can chose his buyer. KoolMaal.com will also provide a platform to host and demand services free of cost. As of now all the services on koolMaal.com are free. Info-X Software is confident that by the end of second year the company would break even and then it will go for banner ads and make money out of it.

The site has a celebrity column option, under which a celebrity puts his/her personal things they wish to sell. The proceeds of these sales will go to Helpage India, with whom koolMaal.com has tied up.

The site looks exciting and has the potential to attract “hits,” but whether the company is actually able to breakeven after two years or it becomes a part of a bigger site, remains to be seen.