Value Technology

Employee First - HCL Technologies

2012-02-22T12:27:00.001+05:30

The first such articulation in the IT industry—is at the core of our efforts to provide our employees a work environment and culture they take pride in. HCL is committed to provide all its employees the same experience that we promise to external customers—by being proactive and responsive, and through technology and process innovation.

Our HR initiatives strive to provide excellent human resources leadership and expertise to the organization, as also to attract and retain a workforce that is diverse, inclusive and committed to creating quality customer service. At the core of our Employee First philosophy is the concept of talent transformation—recognition and enablement of competencies, as opposed to roles in skilling employees in necessary technical, business and behavioral areas.

The five-fold path [Support, Knowledge, Recognition, Empowerment, and Transformation]. Is about empowering and engaging employees in a unique environment of creating trust through transparency and an inverted organizational structure. It gives employees whatever they need to succeed through various unique initiatives like Career Power, Employee First Councils and ilearn that nurture leaders and give employees the freedom to chart their career path.

In accordance with these tenets, many initiatives have been introduced at HCL to keep the employee first culture alive:

A smart service desk, where employees can raise a ticket on an internal service provider that is SLA-bound. Functions like admin, finance and training have been enabled to serve the employee
A CEO Connect through U & I, where the CEO is personally available to every employee in the organization. He tours every location and holds multiple interactive sessions with discussions and Q&As. This is complemented by a fully functional President’s blog
An Employee First Governing Council, comprising Function Heads who hold Town Hall Meetings and collectively address all employee questions and issues
360 Feedback , where employees have the option to rate their managers and the feedback and rating is made public across the organization
Career Power – We are not prescriptive in the choices employees make. Based on the informed choices that they make, individual career development plans are drawn up which are supported by the company. In an attempt to build this culture in the way we function, HCL has a comprehensive online career portal.

Talent transformationis designed to build behavior based competencies in individuals the world is now not just talking about HCL’s Employee First but also adapting to the model. Our thought leadership through initiatives like Inverting the pyramid where top management is answerable to people below (through Employee Connect portals, Ticket system, etc.); Destroying the office of the CEO – moving away from Center of Command to Group dynamics which nurtures leadership at grass roots; and Open 360 appraisals – where employees can provide feedback on any manager and the results are published in the open in a Portal, is beginning to see the light.

Services - HCL Technologies

2012-02-22T12:18:00.002+05:30

HCL provides services across the following business lines -

Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) - offering services in Hardware, Embedded, Mechanical and Software Product Engineering.
Enterprise Transformation Services (ETS) - offering services in the areas of Independent Verification and Validation, Process Transformation, Data Management, Integration Services, Architecture Services, Disruptive Technology Services, IT Strategy, and Change Management.
Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) - division of HCL Technologies Limited has delivery offices across India, UK and USA
Enterprise Application Services (EAS) - focuses on areas like in ERP, SCM, CRM, HCM, EPM, BI and Middleware. This group is now part of HCL AXON, subsidiary of HCL Technologies, formed after HCL Tech acquired Axon Group plc. for £440m cash offer in 2008.

About - HCL Technolgies

2012-02-22T12:15:00.005+05:30

HCL is a global technology enterprise and a name to reckon with, in the industry. The passion of its founder and the entrepreneurial zeal of its employees have made its Information Technology and Software services arm, HCL Technologies [HCLT], a leading provider of business transformation, enterprise & custom applications, infrastructure management, business process outsourcing, and engineering services. Leveraging its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 26 countries, HCLT delivers solutions across a wide range of verticals such as financial services, manufacturing, consumer services, public services and healthcare. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ which empowers its 83,076 transformers to create real value for over 500 forward looking customers, seeking to shift paradigms and transform the way business is being done.

When HCLT commenced its transformation journey based on the foundation of ‘Employees First’ in 2005, disruptive technologies and new business models were beginning to impact the industry. HCLT had already anticipated the shift from ‘employer driven’ to ‘employee driven’ market conditions. Today, the impact of this unique management philosophy is being recognized and praised worldwide for empowering employees to become the drivers of growth. HCL has also become one of the fastest-growing IT services companies in the world.

“Employees First, Customers Second – Turning Conventional Management Upside Down” – a business book authored by the CEO Vineet Nayar encapsulating HCLT’s transformation journey from 2005, was launched in June 2010. Already a massive bestseller in key markets, the book has won accolades from leading management thinkers and CEOs such as Tom Peters, Gary Hamel, Tony Hsieh, Judy McGrath, and Victor Fung. Covered by leading media groups around the world, the book has already been translated into five languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese, and over 50 Employees First, Customers Second [EFCS] workshops for clients and partner organizations have been conducted in the USA, UK and APAC regions.

3-D Without the Glasses

2010-12-19T16:58:00.000+05:30

A new type of display from Microsoft produces multiple images and tracks the viewers' eyes.

Today's 3-D movies are far more spectacular than the first ones screened more than 50 years ago, but watching them--both at the movie theater and at home--still means donning a pair of dorky, oversized glasses. Now a new type of lens developed by researchers in Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group could help make glasses-free 3-D displays more practical.

The new lens, which is thinner at the bottom than at the top, steers light to a viewer's eyes by switching light-emitting diodes along its bottom edge on and off. Combined with a backlight, this makes it possible to show different images to different viewers, or to create a stereoscopic (3-D) effect by presenting different images to a person's left and right eye. "What's so special about this lens is that it allows us to control where the light goes," saysSteven Bathiche, director of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group.

3-D technology has seen a renaissance recently. Thanks to the success of movies likeCoraline, Up, and Avatar, Hollywood is spending more money than ever to give audiences a stereoscopic experience. And electronics manufacturers are racing to replicate the 3-D theater experience in the home. The market for 3-D-capable televisions is expected to growfrom 2.5 million sets shipped in 2010 to 27 million in 2013, according to the research firmDisplaySearch. However, the glasses required to watch 3-D video is a turnoff for many would-be early adopters.

At the Society for Information Display International Symposium in Seattle last month, companies showed off 3-D displays that don't require glasses. These sets often use lenticular lenses, which are integrated into the display and project different images in two fixed directions. But a viewer needs to stand in designated zones to experience a 3-D effect; otherwise the screen becomes an out-of-focus blur.

Microsoft's prototype display can deliver 3-D video to two viewers at the same time (one video for each individual eye), regardless of where they are positioned. It can also shows ordinary 2-D video to up to four people simultaneously (one video for each person). The 3-D display uses a camera to track viewers so that it knows where to steer light toward them. The lens is also thin, which means it could be incorporated into a standard liquid crystal display, says Bathiche.

The idea of tracking viewers to make the glasses-free 3-D easier has been around for decades. One of the big challenges, explainsKen Perlin, professor of computer science at New York University, is that the computers used for eye-tracking were too expensive and too slow to make such a system practical. As computers have become faster and cheaper, viewer-tracking systems have gotten up to speed; other components, particularly those needed to target viewers, have remained bulky and impractical to manufacture on a large scale.

IBM Acquires Cloud Computing Integration Company Cast Iron Systems

2010-05-04T02:35:00.000+05:30

IBM has acquired cloud computing startup Cast Iron Systems to “broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients.” Cast Iron Systems provides a SaaS cloud integration software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cast Iron Systems’ software-as-a-service provides cloud computing integration appliances for large and midsize companies, including Allianz, NEC, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Dow Jones, Schumacher Group, ShoreTel, Sports Authority, Time Warner, Westmont University and others. The company has capitalized on the growing trend of companies running key business applications through software as a service models and cloud deployments.
Clearly, the acquisition represents IBM’s strong push to the cloud, with IBM expecting the global cloud computing market to grow to $126 billion by 2012.Cast Iron’s offerings will help IBM customers integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premise systems and advance IBM’s capabilities for a hybrid cloud model.
This year, IBM bought up health care data management firm Initiate and Intelliden. Last year, IBM acquired six companies, including Guardium, RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

Google Android on Apple iPhone

2010-04-24T01:20:00.003+05:30

Android ported on iPhone

A hacker who goes by the name of David Wang has just done something to prove that platforms of competing smartfone companies can indeed be compromised.

David posted a video on the 'Linux on the iPhone' blog demonstrating how Google Android can be booted onto a first-generation iPhone. He suggested that Android could be ported to all versions of Apple’s smartphones, a move that seemed greeted positively by many of the blog’s supporters.

In his blog, David also said, "At some point this summer, Apple will release the iPhone OS 4, which will include features such as multitasking and an 'iAd' mobile applicationadvertising platform. Lack of multitasking has been one of the traditional complaints lodged against the iPhone, and used as a selling point for smartphones running the multitasking-capable Google Android."

CSS announces suite of cloud tools

2010-04-24T01:02:00.001+05:30

CSS Corp, a provider of IT operations optimization, announced a suite of tools and services to help enterprises, independent software vendors (ISV) and services providers to levearage public, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The CSS suite of Cloud management tools include:
CSS CloudSmart: CloudSmart is an ANT-based automated deployment tool to automate complex enterprise application deployment process on the cloud. ANT tasks and run book automation for deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Eclastic Compute Cloud EC2 are part of the feature set.

CSS Cloud Buddy Enterprise: Cloud Buddy Enterprise is a tool that helps organizations take advantage of the capabilities of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) storage.

Also Read: Storage-as-a-service: Cloud Storage

It features an Enterprise Administrator console that manages access privileges/storage limits at the group and user levels. Cloud Buddy Enterprise has multi-mode access such as web, WebDAV, web services and Native Client for Windows to the AWS S3 storage.

It also has an integrated indexing engine, to index all the ?les that get stored on the AWS S3.

CSS CloudBuddy Analytics: Cloud Buddy Analytics is an Open Source web based tool to generate reports about S3 Bucket access. It has an intuitive interface for a rich user experience.

Cloud Buddy Analytics takes care of enabling logging, fetching logs and generating reports and can be con?gured for Multiple S3 Accounts, and could be made available on the network as a multi-user tool.

CSS also announced availability of its cloud enablement services, which include:
· Cloud design, orchestration, automation and testing services
·Cloud monitoring and management services
· Cloud support services

“Nick Sharma, CEO of CSS Corp. “Our cloud computing suite of tools and services are helping our customers truly benefit from the private, public and hybrid infrastructure.”

Wireless services: The race is not about speed but reach

2010-04-24T00:49:00.000+05:30

Bridging the last mile broadband connectivity gap seems to be the latest craze among Indian telcos. No one, not especially the giants of the the likes which include Bharti, Vodafone, Reliance Communications (RCom) and Tatas, wants to be left behind. They want to try their hands on every technology they can afford to.

Gone are the days of dial-up connections, where one used to get an Internet connectivity speed of up-to 56 Kbps, that too over a wireline. Today one talks of megabits over kilobits, and that too over wireless connection, for data, voice and text.

Also Read: WiMAX: The wireless Broadband

Be it LTE (Long Term Evolution), WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), 3G (Third Generation)or WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), the wireless future of India shines bright.

On one hand, where the second generation of communication technology, 2G/2.5G, is set to give way for the third generation (3G). On the other, 4G technologies, such as LTE (the surprise factor of the BWA spectrum) and WiMAX, have also booked themselves a berth in India's race for wireless networks. Not to be left behind is WiFi, one of the longest serving wireless technologies in India today.

Theoretically, WiFi (IEEE 802.11g) can transmit up to 54 megabits per second (Mbps), whereas, WiMAX ((IEEE 802.16e) can provide a speed of up to 70 megabits per second. Coming to LTE, it will be more and and 3G will speed of up to 3 Mbps.

Considering the advanced versions of these technologies, Wireless N ((IEEE 802.11n) of WiFi, which will be rolled out this year, is said to give a speed of 300 Mbps, whereas, WiMAX 2.0, (IEEE 802.16m) will provide a throughput of over 350+ Mbps. Now coming to LTE (Rel 10 and Advanced) they are said to give much more speed than its predecessor.

So, among these technology siblings, who will win the race?

Sudarshan Boosupalli, country head, Ruckus Wireless, notes: “All technologies will co-exist. Today, the question is not about speed, but who will reach the market first and how affordable will their technology be for masses.”

links - text based web browser

2010-04-08T12:06:00.000+05:30

links - text based web browser

Registration open for Google developer conference

2010-01-16T01:05:00.001+05:30

The Google I/O 2010 would be held in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010
Google on Tuesday announced that the registration is open for its developer conference, Google I/O 2010 to be held in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010.
Google I/O features 80 sessions, more than 3,000 developers, and over 100 demonstrations from developers showcasing their technologies. Talk shop with engineers building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications.
According to their blog, The event will be focused on building the next generation of applications in the cloud and will feature the latest on Google products and technologies like Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google APIs and more.
It also said that they are bringing back the Developer Sandbox, where developers from more than 100 companies will be on hand to demo their apps, answer questions and exchange ideas.
To register log in to code.google.com/io.

Google opens Docs for all files, over cloud

2010-01-16T00:59:00.000+05:30

Google Docs will support files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications
Google in its Google Doc Blog announced that it will roll out the ability to upload all file types to the cloud through Google Docs.
Moreover, Google Docs will support files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications. Apart from this, Google Docs also offers 1 GB of free storage for files which need not be converted to one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and for more space, Google offers additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year.
Google Doc would now on support backing up large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives etc.

Your desktop, your way

2010-01-09T23:02:00.000+05:30

Your desktop doesn't have to be a boring graveyard for lost and forgotten files anymore! Transform it with BumpTop. Create the desktop that suits your needs and style.


Organize BumpTop lets you create piles, just like you do in real life. But with advanced search and sort capabilities, you'll always find what you're looking for.	Customize BumpTop lets your style dictate the look and feel of your desktop. With dozens of themes to choose from, you can find the one for you. Serene blue or firely flames, change your desktop to suit your moods.


Visualize BumpTop lets you visually connect with your desktop. Pin important files or sticky notes to your wall so you don't forget them. And with BumpTop, more frequently used files get bigger and heavier so you can find them easily.	Socialize BumpTop lets you stay connected to your friends and family right from your desktop. Create a photo frame on your wall to watch your friends' photo feeds, or toss a photo to a Twitter or Facebook widget to share it with your social network.

IT: Cloudy days ahead

2010-01-09T00:05:00.000+05:30

While the hype is yet to subside and there are a number of questions yet to be answered, it is slowly becoming mainstream

In the information technology industry there has never been a dearth for buzzwords.
While the decade that just went past us began with Y2K, it was quickly followed by SOA, BPM, RIA, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 – the list goes on. But the end of the decade heralded a new buzzword that has since been much talked about, written about, sliced and diced in all possible ways – yes, I am talking about "cloud computing".

Cloud Storage: No more a security nightmare
While the hype is yet to subside and there are a number of questions yet to be answered, it is slowly becoming mainstream. All indications so far suggest that cloud computing is here to stay and is going to have an impact on all aspects of IT.
While there are many definitions of cloud computing, the one that I think makes most holistic sense is the one given in Wikipedia: "it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them".
In the first wave of outsourcing enterprises outsourced non critical IT tasks such as application maintenance and in the second wave business processes that are of not any competitive advantage (example, payroll processing) were outsourced.
Cloud computing could bring in a third wave, where non-critical data and computing will be outsourced. While this is not entirely new (Salesforce and Google has been there for many years now), the impact is going to be more widespread.
Cloud computing platforms now offer the CIOs a much wider avenue to look at enterprise applications and data. This will force future IT strategies to include cloud computing and decide what needs to stay within the enterprise's data center and what can be migrated to the cloud.
Cloud computing does not necessarily mean access is always over the Internet. Therefore infrastructure may need to be relooked at in the form of 'private clouds' that could host multi-tenant applications and data stores.
Advances in cloud computing also provide an opportunity for product vendors to look at web as a primary (and increasingly the sole) channel for delivering the functionality and services. Products delivered over the cloud are automatically deployed and therefore delivery becomes a non-issue.
The maturing of web 2.0 technologies and RIA has made the browser to give as powerful a user experience as a traditional smart client does. More and more ISVs are adopting this route. For certain other products, such as middleware softwares, cloud computing paradigm offers fresh challenges.
These softwares now need to manage integration of enterprise and cloud based application. As cloud computing becomes more prevalent, there will be business processes that will span across the enterprise as well as cloud and middleware softwares will have to evolve to support this paradigm shift.
Application development is another area that will be impacted by cloud computing. Developers will have to start learning and experimenting with cloud based technologies such as Microsoft Azure. Development and deployment on the cloud tends to be a lot easier where you bypass the entire hardware/software approvals and procurement process.

Conventional IDEs are evolving to support this new paradigm. Software engineering processes will have to be revisited to account for cloud based application development. In the cloud, basic software development lifecycle activities such as configuration management, build and release management, performance testing, etc. have a whole new dimension.
In the pre-cloud days, developers used to worry about interoperability between multiple technology stacks and platforms. With cloud in the picture, interoperability and integration will have to be looked at from a new perspective.
Cloud computing will also have an impact on IT service providers with newer opportunities in the cloud space. In the early days of cloud adoption opportunities might be related proof of concept development, prototype development and may be even platform evaluations. But as the platforms mature, there will be opportunities for migration of traditional custom enterprise applications, data and storage to the cloud.
There will be integration and business process management opportunities that will involve applications running in an enterprise's data center and public cloud based applications.
While cloud computing could bring about a vast array of innovations and will have a widespread impact across the information technology landscape there are several concerns surrounding cloud computing that will have to be allayed before we see full-fledged mainstream adoption. The most important ones are around security and reliability.
How secure is the data that is stored on the cloud? How is the user privacy maintained? How are SLAs defined and met? Recent outages of public cloud infrastructures including Google and Amazon does not build confidence in the new paradigm. There are other concerns such as lack of standards for interoperability, and potential vendor lock-in.
But even with some of these concerns, the advantages that cloud computing offers outweigh them. This is a computing paradigm that offers great promise and one cannot choose to ignore. So better prepare for the cloudy days ahead!
The author is head of Collabera Labs.

New controller-free video gaming sys from MS

2010-01-08T23:59:00.000+05:30

Also announces a number of new games for the Xbox

Microsoft has announced Project Natal, a new controller-free video gaming system, which reads a players body movements with cameras and mimics them with avatars on screen, will be available for purchase by the holiday season this year.
The announcement came at the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)here.

Microsoft has demonstrated the system at another trade show last year, but had not set a release date until Wednesday. It is still unclear how much the system will cost, although Microsoft says Natal add-ons will work with its existing Xbox 360 gaming console.
Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president for entertainment and devices, announced a number of new games for the Xbox, including a new edition of the popular game Halo, which is due out in the spring.
"What Star Wars is to film and what Harry Potter is to fantasy books, Halo is to the gaming industry," he said.

MySpace announces developer challenge

2010-01-08T23:54:00.000+05:30

MySpace announces a developer contest to find new developers to write compelling applications on the MySpace social networking platform
The social networking site MySpace has announced developer challenge for developer community to find new developers to write applications on MySpace.

In a blog post by Amy Walgenbach, a spokesperson for MySpace said, competition is aimed at encouraging further innovation from the developer community. We believe the best onsite and offsite integrations with MySpace are not here yet and the MySpace Developer Challenge intends to find them. We also want to reward innovative developers big and small and recognize them as much as we can.

The contest enable developers to create new MySpace application, integrating our Real-Time Stream API, Open Search API, Photo Upload API, or by integrating MySpace on the iPhone.

Elaborating on time-frame, criteria and rules for MySpave Developer contest Walgenbach said, The challenge also features monetary and promotional prizes, to be given out to those developers whose submissions are picked by our panel of judges.

The categories for MySpace Developer Challenge includes, Most innovative use of the Real-Time Stream API, Best new MySpace app, Most innovative use of the Open Search API, Most innovative MySpace Integration on Mobile and Most innovative use of Photos.

Submissions for the Challenge will be accepted January 4 through Feb 24, 2010 and winners will be announced at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco in March 2010 added Walgenbach.

Dell's slate runs on Android

2010-01-08T23:50:00.000+05:30

The company announced the arrival of this new gadget at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

Dell Inc showed off a small slate computer that it could bring to market this year, exploring yet another type of device designed for computing on the go.
So-called slate and tablet PCs are a hot topic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, ahead of a highly anticipated device from Apple Inc that is widely expected to be unveiled in late January.
Dell's slate has a 5-inch screen and runs on Google Inc's Android mobile operating system. Dell declined to provide other details, or say definitively if the new gadget, which looks like a large smartphone, would hit the market.
On Wednesday. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer displayed a Hewlett-Packard Co slate that which was considerably larger than Dell's.
Michael Tatelman, Dell's vice president of consumer sales and marketing, said the company is testing a number of different screen sizes as it pushes further into the mobile market.
Dell recently released its first smartphone, the Mini 3, which is on sale in China and Brazil, and will be available in the U.S. on AT&T Inc's network.

FB.Me ' The shortest link to Facebook

2010-01-08T23:41:00.000+05:30

Largest social network uses .ME to provide easy access for users on the go

In a world where every character counts, .ME is helping Facebook save its more than 350 million users valuable digits, with the launch just weeks ago of new URL shortener, FB.Me.

Facebook fuels jealousy in relationships

Millions of Facebook users post status updates, share photos and comment on friends' posts using mobile SMS products on a regular basis. FB.Me provides a simple and secure solution for increasing the amount of content users can view in those constrained environments.

"We could not be more pleased with Facebook's choice of dot-ME as the domain extension for its URL shortener," says Predrag Lesic, chief executive officer of the .ME Registry.

Demand for iPhone apps passes Facebook

"For the social media site's vast community of users, the benefit of using this shortened URL is immediately clear and the increased awareness of dot-ME as a domain extension will be astronomical. It is a win-win," he added.

"Its hard to believe dot-ME launched only a year and a half ago," adds Lesic. "In that short amount of time, our ccTLD has become an integral part of Internet identities for so many online businesses, bloggers and personal Web sites worldwide. Clearly, they see the intrinsic value of the extension's personalized branding and ability to instantly create a 'call to action' using minimal characters and maximum impact."

Google Maps offers driving direction in India

2009-12-19T20:15:00.000+05:30

Google has collected good landmark data through user-created "Points of Interest" in Google Map Maker

Google India announces the launch of landmarks in driving directions for users of Google Maps. Users can now navigate around locations using Google Maps on their desktops and mobile phones using landmarks like petrol stations, banks, schools, railway stations, bus stops, local businesses and traffic circles and signals. India is the first country globally to get this feature on Google Maps.
Indians are more comfortable finding way on the streets using landmarks. Typically many roads in India are not marked with road signs and even if they are, the signs are not visible. In some cases people do not even know the road names. For instance, a friend asks you for directions to your house for a new year party, or to that nice picnic spot you recommended to celebrate a new year's eve, you scribble some lines on a piece of paper or explain that they should take a turn from a petrol pump or a bus stop or a grocery shop! Google today enables this activity online and share with friends and family.
In India, Google has collected good landmark data through user-created "Points of Interest" in Google Map Maker. Google's new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on importance, and closeness to the turns that the user is making and other available signals. With this launch, Google will now combine landmark data, counted turns ("the 2nd right"), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most relevant and useful.
Google is providing two kinds of landmarks - to identify where users need to turn, and to provide confirmation that they're on the right track. Google also encourages users to help make directions even better for millions of users in India by enriching landmarks data via Google Map Maker.

Develop embedded apps with ease

2009-12-19T19:56:00.000+05:30

The MS .NET framework integrates with Visual Studio, making it extremely easy to build applications for small, resource constrained devices
Embedded application development has come a long way from writing code in error prone assembly language. Earlier writing code for a device needed high level programming skills, but a lot has changed now. If you know how to write code in C# you can still write code for smaller devices.

On top of this, embedded development has been further boosted with the availability of IDE?(integrated development environment) support. One example of this is .NET Micro Framework which contains a subset of .NET libraries for building embedded applications for resource constrained devices.

The high point of this framework is its integration with Visual Studio that provides embedded developers a good ecosystem for writing applications. Besides providing ability for writing code, the .NET Micro Framework also provides a hardware emulator for rapid prototyping and debugging.

These emulators can also be extended for different hardware. This framework can run on small 32-bit processors and there is no requirement for a memory management unit in the processor. Instead of using a full version of an operating system, the .NET Micro Framework uses a scaled version of Common Language Runtime that sits directly on hardware with very low memory (RAM) requirements. Now the question arises why should one use this framework when there are other Microsoft embedded technologies available like Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded?

The answer is that the .NET Micro Framework uses the lowest resources as compared to the other two. This framework provides an abstraction that allows the application to be separated from the hardware platform. The code specific to the hardware platform is fed into a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) so that the .NET Micro Framework and applications can be moved to new platforms without any difficulty.

Sun Microsystems unveils advanced cloud security tools

2009-12-19T17:54:00.000+05:30

Delivers Open Source Cloud Security Tools for public, private and hybrid clouds

As part of its overall strategy to help customers and partners build public and private clouds that are open and interoperable, Sun Microsystems, Inc. on Thursday unveiled innovative open source cloud security capabilities and announced support for the latest Security Guidance from the Cloud Security Alliance.

Sun is steadfast in its commitment to providing best practices and technologies that help users safeguard their critical data in the enterprise and in the cloud. The introduction of Sun's Cloud Security architectural building blocks will help deliver enterprise-grade cloud services that are highly secure, available and easily manageable when used in public, private or hybrid cloud environments. Leveraging the built-in security capabilities of Sun's Solaris Operating Systems, including Solaris ZFS and Solaris Containers, the security tools help in securing data in transit, data at rest, and data in use in the cloud, and work with cloud offerings from leading vendors including Amazon and Eucalyptus.
Along with introducing new security tools today, Sun also announced support for the Cloud Security Alliance's "Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing – Version 2.1." Sun privacy and security experts have been instrumental in the industry-wide effort to develop the security guidance and have been active participants in the Cloud Security Alliance since its inception. The new framework provides more concise and actionable guidance for secure adoption of cloud computing, and encompasses knowledge gained from real world deployments.
"Sun's technologies, best practices and work with leading industry organizations like the Cloud Security Alliance help provide our customers and partners with a framework for securing data in cloud environments," said Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems.
Sun also published a new white paper, "Building Customer Trust in Cloud Computing with Transparent Security," that provides an overview of transparent security and the ways in which intelligent disclosure of security design, practices and procedures can help improve customer confidence while protecting critical security features and data, improving overall governance.
"Security remains one of the major concerns for enterprise customers moving to the cloud," said Glenn Brunette, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's new security tools will help address several of these fundamental issues and enable customers to realize the benefits of cloud computing while also managing risk and safeguarding critical assets."
Sun today announced availability for several open source Cloud Security tools including:
-- OpenSolaris VPC Gateway: Provides customers with greater choice and flexibility when connecting their systems to the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. The OpenSolaris VPC Gateway software enables customers to quickly and easily create a redundant, secure communications channel to a Virtual Private Cloud without the need for proprietary networking equipment.
-- Immutable Service Containers (ISC): Delivers architectural patterns with associated deployment strategies that collectively define a highly secure foundation for service delivery. Incorporating many of the security features of the OpenSolaris Operating System, including Solaris ZFS, Solaris Containers, and Solaris IP Filter and Auditing, the ISC architecture leverages service compartmentalization and improved integration techniques to create virtual machines with significantly improved security protection and monitoring capabilities.
-- Security Enhanced Virtual Machine Images (VMIs): Using many of the techniques developed for the Immutable Service Container project, Sun created several security-enhanced VMIs for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These virtual machines leverage industry accepted recommended practices including non-executable stacks, encrypted swap and auditing enabled by default. Beyond simple OpenSolaris images, Sun has also published integrated software stacks such as Solaris AMP and Drupal built on these security-enhanced images.

-- Cloud Safety Box: Simplifies managing encrypted content in the Cloud. Using a simple Amazon S3-like interface, the Cloud Safety Box automates the compression, encryption and splitting of content being stored in the cloud on any supported operating system including Solaris, OpenSolaris, Linux and Mac OS X. Sun is working with its customers and partners worldwide to build and deploy public and private clouds that are open and interoperable. The Sun Open Cloud Platform, powered by Sun's industry-leading software, hardware and storage, delivers cost-effective, scalable cloud infrastructure.

Building cloud applications for Windows Azure

2009-12-19T17:45:00.002+05:30

Azure development will become a part of Visual Studio 2010 to be released soon. Until then, you can download Azure SDK and Azure tools & use them in Visual Studio. Here we will create and deploy a Cloud application on Win Azure

Windows Azure platform is created to help developers write, distribute and manage Web application and Web services on the Internet. Azure provides on-demand computation and storage services that allows Web applications to scale them on Internet simply by changing the configuration parameters. Azure is an operating system for the cloud, using which developers can host and manage their applications as services on Windows Azure platform.

Windows Azure supports both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments -developers can use Ruby, PHP, and Python to develop Azure Services. Azure supports a seamless development experience and is well integrated with Visual Studio.

Setting up development environment in Visual StudioYou can download the Azure SDK and Azure tools and use them in Visual Studio. In order to create an Azure application, the pre-requisite operating systems are Windows Vista with SP1, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7. You would also need .NET framework 3.5 with SP1 installed. Additionally, the development machine should be configured with IIS 7 (with ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation). Also it requires Microsoft SQL Server (or express) 2005 or 2008.

To develop Windows Azure application you would need either of the following: MS Visual Studio 2008 SP1, MS Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 or MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1.

Once you have the required IDE, you will need Azure SDK and Azure tools for Visual Studio to start developing your first Azure application.

Apple issues security updates for Mac OS X

2009-12-08T00:15:00.000+05:30

The new Java version fixes at least 14 vulnerabilities in the version designed for OS X 10.6 systems
Apple last week pushed an update for Leopard and Snow Leopard systems that plugs a large number of security holes in Apple's version of Java, a package installed by default on those Mac OS X systems that enables a number of multimedia Web applications.
The new Java version fixes at least 14 vulnerabilities in the version designed for OS X 10.6 systems; the package put together for 10.5 Macs corrects more than two dozen security flaws. Mac users can grab the patches via Software Update or from Apple Downloads.
The patch fun continues into Tuesday of next week, when both Microsoft and Adobe are scheduled to issue updates to plug security vulnerabilities of their own. Microsoft said Thursday that it plans to issue at least six security patches (each patch fixes at least one -- but often multiple -- security flaws). Half of those updates will carry a "critical" rating, Redmond's most dire.
Adobe said it plans to issue software updates to nix security flaws in its Flash Player and Adobe AIR applications. The company also confirmed the existence of a flaw in Adobe Illustrator on Windows and Mac systems, amid reports that instructions showing attackers how to exploit the flaw to break into vulnerable systems was circulating online. Adobe said it expects to publish a security advisory on Monday with further information on the Illustrator flaw -- including a schedule for an update to resolve the issue.

Security issues rain on cloud computing

2009-12-07T23:55:00.000+05:30

This is a big challenge, and companies are wrestling with it

As more data reside in distant computers connected via the Internet — or the cloud — just where in fact does the data reside, who controls and has access to it, and who is responsible for any legal or other problems that arise?
Answers are in the process of being ironed out in legal settings, corporate boardrooms and the court of public opinion.
"This is a big challenge, and companies are wrestling with it," said John Magee, vice president of product marketing for security software leader Symantec (SYMC).
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Recent case in point: Mobile carrier T-Mobile's service for the Danger Sidekick phone was disrupted in October when systems failed in a cloud computing data center hosted by Microsoft (MSFT). The outage resulted in the loss of contacts, photos and messages for thousands of T-Mobile customers.
Microsoft, which traced the problem to third-party technology providers, said it recovered most and maybe all of the lost data. And T-Mobile sent $100 gift cards to affected customers.
But the Danger episode raised red flags about the dangers of cloud computing.
Can Be Cost-Saving Approach
Cloud computing uses remote data centers for data processing and storage. Companies can cut their tech costs by using cloud computing. Consumers use cloud-type services all the time for things like e-mail and photo-sharing services. Users simply access data and software over the Web.
Companies, though, remain mostly in the dark about how regulatory compliance will play out in the cloud, tech observers say. Problems will start to grow as more corporate data get distributed across the cloud, predicts Symantec's Magee.
"There is an issue here and it's having an impact on a lot of customers I talk to," Magee said. "People are wrestling with these legal points. This is not just about technology."

Teen Internet addicts more likely to self harm

2009-12-07T23:49:00.000+05:30

According to a study, 10 per cent of the students surveyed were moderately addicted to the Internet, while less than one percent were severely addicted
Teenagers who are addicted to the Internet are more likely to engage in self-harm behavior, according to an Australian-Chinese study.
Researchers surveyed 1,618 adolescents aged 13 to 18 from China's Guangdong Province about behavior such as hitting themselves, pulling their own hair, or pinching or burning themselves, and gave them a test to gauge Internet addiction.
Internet addiction has been classified as a mental health problem since the mid-1990s with symptoms similar to other addictions.
The test found that about 10 per cent of the students surveyed were moderately addicted to the Internet, while less than one percent were severely addicted.
The students ranked as moderately addicted to the Internet were 2.4 times more likely to have self-injured one to five times in the past 6 months than students without an addiction, said Dr. Lawrence Lam from the University of Notre Dame Australia.
The moderately-to-severely addicted students were almost five times more likely than non-addicted students to have self-injured six or more times in the past 6 months, Lam and his colleagues from Guangzhou's Sun Yat-Sen University reported.
"In recent years, with the greater availability of the Internet in most Asian countries, Internet addiction has become an increasing mental problem among adolescents," the researchers said in their study published in the journal Injury Prevention.
"Many studies have reported associations between Internet addiction, psychiatric symptoms and depression among adolescents."
They said their results suggested a "strong and significant" association between Internet addiction and self-injury in adolescence even after accounting for other variables previously associated with the behavior, including depression, family dissatisfaction, or stressful life events.
They said this suggested that Internet addiction is an independent risk factor for self-injurious behavior.
Experts interpret Internet addiction, among other things, as feelings of depression, nervousness, moodiness when not online, which only go away when the addict gets back online.
Fantasizing or being preoccupied about being online are other signs of Internet addiction.
"All these behaviors may be rooted in some common ... factors that require further exploration," they said.

Visual WebGui to reveal cloud application platform

2009-12-01T23:23:00.000+05:30

With the Visual WebGui Cloud Application Platform developers can now deploy their applications to Windows Azure with the click of a button with no re-writes or new programming skills needed

Gizmox, the developer of Visual WebGui Web & Cloud Platform has announced that it will reveal its application platform atop Windows Azure and its development framework, Visual WebGui web/cloud platforms offers the only push-button .NET desktop legacy application migration path to Windows Azure.

With Visual WebGui enterprises will be able to migrate to Windows Azure, by reusing their existing Windows software code on Windows Azure without re-write or re-engineering. The process is as simple as copying and pasting the Windows code into VWG, selecting Windows Azure run in Visual WebGui SDK, and run said a press release.

"With our unique unrivalled legacy applications migration to Windows Azure, and the ability to run them as responsive as and as rich as desktop's, with proven unhackable security, we have crossed a new threshold," said Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox,

Among the key benefits highlighted by Visual WebGui, its new cloud application platform will consume 50 per cent CPU and 10 per cent bandwidth compare to other solutions, resulting in additional dramatic cost saving benefits for users. The company is about to release assessment tools that will allow proper cloud planning and managing: pre-deployment calculating of cloud running costs, remote monitoring, tracing and reconfiguring for application optimization and provisioning.

"Visual WebGui presents a great opportunity for Windows Azure customers and enterprises that wish to move to the cloud," said Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft Corp. "With a push-button method, Gizmox has made the process for migrating to Windows Azure easy."

Peled noted, "Visual WebGui offering is no doubt one of the most significance for enterprise cloud applications. We see the enormous interest it arises and we expect to lead enterprises to cloud migration."

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