TCS, Infosys line up to invest in Indore

Indore has emerged as an attractive investment destination for IT companies which are looking to expand operations amid global economic slowdown. According to industry experts, availability of workforce, incentives by the Madhya Pradesh government and availability of facilities are attracting IT companies to invest in the city, known as financial capital of the state.
"These days, five big companies including the likes of Infosys and TCS are investing crores in the IT Special Economic Zones (SEZ)," Madhya Pradesh SEZ Development Commissioner A K Rathore said.
He added that six years after notification as an SEZ in 2006, work has commenced recently at the Crystal IT Park.
A senior official in the Union Commerce Ministry said Crystal IT Park is the first SEZ in the IT sector in which production was commenced for exports. Madhya Pradesh Audyogik Kendra Vikas Nigam (MPAKVN) was given the responsibility of developing the SEZ.
"Impetus has recently begun exporting from the Crystal IT Park. Apart from Imptus, companies like Cleartrail and Intellicus have been given approval for investment," the official said.
Rathore said companies are increasingly looking at investing in Indore as, "There are a large number of engineering colleges from where thousands of talented engineers graduate every year. Apart from that, the air and rail connectivity to the city has improved significantly."
Meanwhile, the state government is also rolling out the red carpet to IT companies and is working towards developing Indore as the new IT destination.
Officials said Infosys has been given 52.64 hectare (130 acre land), while TCS has been given 40.47 hectare (100 acre) on the Super Corridor by the state government.
They said the two IT giants were given the land to develop SEZs at Rs 20 lakh per acre and added that Ruchi Realty Holdings, Impetus and Agroweb Online are also working on similar SEZ projects.

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Huawei to open global R&D centre in India

Despite uncertainties in the telecom sector, Chinese equipment makerHuawei will invest $2 billion over the next four years in India as it looks to aggressively market consumer devices and set up global R&D centre in the country.

The company, which clocked $1.5 billion in revenues from India in 2011-12, is also betting big on the roll out of 4G LTE services in India and is targeting more than 50 per cent share of the contracts coming in.

"2011 was a good year for Huawei because our revenue in India increased about 20 per cent... Last year, we began building a new R&D centre in Bangalore, which will house more than 5,000 people. From 2011, the plan is to invest $2 billion in five years in india," Huawei India chief executive officer Cai Liqun said.

This includes the R&D centre, manufacturing and marketing among others, he added.

The company began work on setting up a research and development centre in Bangalore last year, which is expected to house more than 5,000 professionals. It is investing $150 million in the facility, which is expected to become operational from June 2013.

Besides, it also has a global service resource centre (GSRC) in Bangalore along with a global network operations centre (GNOC), which is its largest such centre outside of China. These centres cater to its clients across 140 countries.

"We are also planning to set up a global technology centre (GTEC) along with the others (existing centres) in Bangalore maybe this year or the next (year). This Centre will focus on providing technical support to clients globally," Liqun said.

He added that GTEC will handle technical issues of customers globally but declined to comment on the number of people that would be hired.

"We have GTECs in China, but this will be first outside china. It is under discussion. Indians have language advantage as well as technology, that is what we want to capitalise on through this centre," Liqun said.

Of the company's $1.5 billion Indian revenues, $1.2 billion was contributed by its network business driven by 3G deployment and network expansion by operators, while the remaining $300 million came from devices like handsets, dongles and set top boxes.

"I think 2012 is a tough year for the whole telecom industry in India because the policy is not clear. Operators are waiting for licences. This period will see no major investment but after all this is solved, we are confident of the Indian market," Liqun said.

Asked about the targeted revenue for 2012-13, Liqun declined to comment but added, "we are in discussion with all players...this year, we are looking at more than 50 per cent of all LTE contracts coming to us".

The company has already deployed 4G LTE network for telecom major Bharti Airtel in Bangalore.

Huawei, which has a low single-digit market share in the mobile phones segment in the country, is also looking at ramping up its presence in the category.

"In three-five years, we want to become one of the top 3-4 players in the Android smartphone space," Huawei vice president (corporate media affairs) Scott Sykes said.

Globally, it is targeting sales of 60 million mobile phones this year and is hopeful that its 'Ascend P1' (launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona) will make waves in India.

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Microsoft to buy Yammer for $1.2 billion

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) agreed to buy online social network firm Yammer Inc for $1.2 billion in cash, which will allow the software company to offer a service like Facebook Inc's (FB.O) to corporate customers.

Talk of a deal had circulated earlier this month, but the two companies only confirmed an agreement on Monday.

Four-year-old Yammer, which has 5 million users of its private, in-company social networks, helps companies' internal communications and collaboration by allowing employees to form groups and interact with each other freely. Companies such as Ford Motor Co (F.N), Supervalu (SVU.N) and Deloitte are customers.

The 400-employee firm will keep its headquarters in San Francisco but will become part of Microsoft's Office unit under Kurt DelBene in Seattle. Yammer will still be led by current CEO David Sacks, a former PayPal executive.

The service should fill a growing gap that Microsoft was struggling to fill with its SharePoint application for creating private websites for intra-company projects.

"This acquisition will immediately make Microsoft a strong competitor in the enterprise social market," said Larry Cannell, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner. "It was a stretch to call the capabilities in SharePoint's MySite feature a social network site."

With Yammer, employees can use a private, online company directory to contact co-workers, form networks, chat, share links and post news. A basic version of Yammer is free, but a subscription buys more security and integration with other company-wide software. Yammer's subscription-based business model makes it different from ad-driven network companies like Facebook or LinkedIn Corp (LNKD.N).

The deal, which values Yammer's users at about $240 each, may ignite interest in companies offering similar services, such as Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N), Jive Software Inc (JIVE.O) and Telligent.

The area of internal networking for companies has attracted other big tech companies such as Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O), which has a similar offering to Yammer called WebEx Social, and International Business Machine Corp (IBM.N) with a rival product called Connections.

Microsoft, which owns a small fraction of Facebook shares, has been looking for ways to make its desktop-bound products more interactive and attractive to its core corporate users and home consumers, and has even been experimenting with its own social network called So.cl (pronounced 'social').

Last year it paid $8.5 billion to buy online chat company Skype, which it is integrating into its offerings, including the next version of Office.

Microsoft's Office suite of applications - including Outlook email, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentation program - is the bedrock of most companies' day-to-day working software.

The Office unit is Microsoft's most profitable, contributing 60 percent of its profit last year, and amassing more sales than its flagship Windows operating system.

Microsoft closed down 2.7 percent at $29.86 on Nasdaq.

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Soon, cameras with 1,000 megapixels

Engineers in the United States have built a prototype gigapixel camera the size of a bedside cabinet that can capture an image in a single snapshot with 1,000 times more detail than today's devices.

It is not the world's first gigapixel camera, but it is the smallest and fastest and opens up prospects for improving airport security, military surveillance and even online sports coverage, its developers say.

A pixel is a small light point in a digital image, concentrations of which together form a picture.

Today's cameras capture images measured in megapixels -- a million pixels -- normally between eight and 40 for an average consumer device. A thousand megapixels make a gigapixel, which is thus comprised of a billion pixels.

Most of today's gigapixel images are made by digitally merging several megapixel pictures.

"Our camera records a one gigapixel image in less than a 10th of a second," project member David Brady told AFP of the project reported in the journal Nature.

Gigapixel imaging captures details that are invisible to the human eye and can later be examined by zooming in without losing clarity.

Dubbed AWARE-2, the device is housed in a box of 75 cm X 50 cm X 50 cm -- most of which comprises electronic processing and communication equipment.

The optical system consists of a 2.4-inch ball-shaped lens surrounded by an array of 98 micro-cameras each with a 14-megapixel sensor.

Brady said the optical system on its own weighs about 10 kilograms, but with the case about 45 kg.

"The electronic system shrinks by a factor of four in the next generation, however."

"Our technology is most interesting as the first demonstration of high pixel count and wide field of view imaging at finite focal ranges," said Brady.

The cost of such a camera today would be similar to that of a high-resolution digital movie camera, he said -- about USD 100,000 to USD 250,000.

Brady said the technology could be used, for example, to stream sporting events over theInternet -- enabling viewers to zoom in and watch the game from whatever perspective andresolution they choose.

Similarly, cameras mounted in game parks or at scenic lookouts would allow online tourists to examine a scene in much more detail than if they were actually there.

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How to use Social Media for building a successful business

Learn how to use social media effectively to build a successful business online or offline in this presentation. Not only the content, but also from the presentation design point of view, this presentation is a good example to learn from. ‘Social Media for Business‘ was judged one of the world’s best presentations.

Social Media for Business

View more presentations from Presentation Advisors

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This Facebook app lets you post your last message on Facebook after you die!!

Your Facebook Profiles are virtually indestructible as they will be available to your friends and family even long after you are gone!! Now a Facebook app “If I Die” lets you post a final last video or text message to your Facebook wall, even in the sad event of your death.

The process is simple. You record a video or write a text message. You choose three of your trusted friends from your Facebook profile, who will confirm that you are no more. After it is confirmed that you are no longer in this world, your message will be posted to your Facebook wall. You can record your final video or text message and can change or modify it as long as you are alive.

Confirmation of all three trustees will be required to post the message after your death. “If I Die” Facebook app requires access to your Facebook account to be able to post to your wall.
So if you want to tell something (a secret, your life wisdom etc.) to the world when you are not alive, here is your chance to do it in style.

You can find “If I Die” Facebook App Click Here

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Tour of White House insides through Google Art Project

Want to see how the insides of one of the world’s most famous and iconic presidential palaces look like? Now you can take a virtual tour of White House – The official residence of the president of the United States of America (USA) – through a Google Art Project.

Google has included the virtual tour of White House in its Google Art Project. White House is home of Mr. Barack Obama – President of USA. This initiative was promoted by none other than first lady Michelle Obama.

Through this virtual tour of White House you can see the plush interiors of this grand mansion in 360 degrees and see the living style of world’s most powerful leader and his family.

This art project lets you move through the White House interiors and see the interiors in rich graphic visuals. You can zoom in using mouse pointers and also see decoration from a close angle in detail.

You can access the Virtual Tour of White House Click Here

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New Facebook feature displays Timeline cover pic

Social networking giantFacebook has now introduced a new feature that will show friends' Timeline profile picture and cover photo when you hover over his/her name.

Now, when a user hovers over a name on their News Feed or a friend's profile, Facebook will display not only a profile image, but also a smaller version of a user's cover image, giving the viewer more context on who they are.

The new feature, which looks like a business card, will show your friends' job, a thumbnail gallery of mutual friends along with buttons for messaging and seeing how you have your friends categorized.

The new hover card replaces an older design that is much smaller and shows the same information without cover photos and jobs, The Los Angeles Times reports.

The change appears to apply to both Facebook users and Pages, but users who haven't yet set up timeline still display the older design.

According to the report, Facebook usually tests new features on smaller pockets of users before unleashing them on its entire base of 900 million users, so it's unclear if this is a test or has been fully implemented...

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Mozilla launches Thimble, a new tool that makes creating a website simple

In 1997, making a website seemed like the simplest thing in the world. Of course, it wasn't — there was all sorts of HTML code involved, and making a professional-looking site took almost as much work then as it does now. But there were tools available to make it seem easy — Tripod and Geocities had templates and tutorials, and Netscape Navigator had a decent WYSIWYG web creation tool built in.

Fast forward 15 years, and creating a website seems like an endeavor best left to the professionals. But Mozilla, carriers of the old Netscape crown, wants to change that perception with Thimble, a web-creation tool that promises to make the act of creating a website easier than ever.

Aside from a basic page creation tool, Thimble has a number of interesting tutorials built in to help teach you HTML, and by extension, how to create your own page. One of the tutorials, called Hack a Map, gets you started by showing you some pretty advanced code. But the tutorial isn't about learning the advanced code, it's about learning the basic errors that are causing the page at the left to show up incorrectly. Thimble will show you exactly where the website is broken — say, in showing you where a missing HTML tag should go. Even though you're doing light work, you're doing that work on a complicated page. The whole process feels far more enjoyable than your usual tutorial, as if you're learning by doing something important. Even if that something important is a map filled with a Minecraft pig, CatBread, and a triple rainbow.

If you're curious, you can check out Thimble over at the Mozilla website. And who knows, while playing around with pictures of cats, you might actually wind up learning something.

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TCS to pay Rs 8 crore commission to Ratan Tata for FY‘12

The board of IT major Tata Consultancy Services has decided to pay Rs 8 crore as commission to Tata group chairmanRatan Tata for financial year 2012, nearly Rs 6 crore more than what he was paid in FY'11.

TCS paid Rs 2.4 crore as commission to Tata for FY'11. The company in its annual report said that commission is decided each year by the Board of Directors and distributed amongst the Non-Executive Directors based on their attendance and contribution at the Board and certain Committee meetings.

Country's largest software exporter TCS posted a healthy 21.9 per cent rise in net profit for 2011-12 at Rs 10,638.2 crore and said it is on track to outperform the industry revenue growth of 11-14 per cent set by industry body Nasscom for 2012-13.

The company also became the first Indian IT company to cross the ten billion dollar milestone by posting annual revenues of $ 10.17 billion in 2011-12.

The board of directors also count the the time spent on operational matters other than at meetings for determining the commission, the annual report said.

Ratan Tata joined the group in 1962 and was named chairman of Tata Sons in 1991.

TCS also decided to pay Rs 6 crore commission in FY'12 compared to Rs 1.6 crore paid for FY'11.

The commission of TCS Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer also increased to Rs 6 crore for FY'12 compared to Rs 4 crore paid to him for FY'11.

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How Windows 8 Throws Computer Users Under the Bus

Whatever you think of Windows 8’s Metro interface on smart phones and tablets, Microsoft’s decision to force computer users to deal with Metro will needlessly alienate and confuse many of the company's most loyal customers. It’s as if Apple suddenly required Mac users to rely on iOS instead of OS X.

The Metro interface fills the screen with “active” tiles designed to give users quick access to a device’s various applications and functions. On small smartphone screens, it’s an effective and attractive visual metaphor, making better use of scarce real estate than the icon-based alternatives in Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

It also still holds up pretty well on small-ish tablet touchscreens where the relatively large tiles make it easy to select what you want. (It's not a surprise that almost all of the screenshots you see of Metro are of a few tiles filling a small tablet screen.)

So far, so good.

Metro Fails the Big-Screen Test

But as many reviewers have noted, when you stick Metro on a full-sized computer screen, it becomes a bit ridiculous. A sea of tiles swimming on a 27-inch monitor doesn’t make any sense - and how does it look on two big-screen displays?

Despite features that let you organize the tiles, the bigger the screen, the more that Metro turns into a jumbled, confusing mess.

Of course, you don’t have to actually do your work in Metro - and most people won’t. It’s easy enough to move through Metro to get to a more traditional Windows-style desktop. But Microsoft has made the curious decision not to let PC-based users choose to avoid the Metro screen altogether. Unless you come up with some hack or third-party add-on (which most computer users will never do), you’ll still have to navigate through Metro every time you turn on your computer.

That simply doesn’t make any sense from an end-user perspective. Microsoft seems so infatuated with the tablets and smartphones that it’s throwing those boring old computer users under the bus. Sure, Windows 8 includes plenty of cool new features for PC users, but that’s not the point. The company is clearly betting the farm on trying to catch up in the mobile space.

Apple Knows that Size Matters

Apple, meanwhile, is treading much more carefully in this regard. While the latest versions of the Mac’s OS X continue to incorporate features and interfaces from the iOS used on iPhones and iPads, the two operating systems remain clearly distinct, with interfaces optimized for their particular platforms. Perhaps because it makes its own hardware, Apple has a better understanding of the different interface challenges of a 3.5-inch iPhone screen and a 27-inch iMac monitor.

Microsoft is risking a huge backlash here. And it doesn’t have to. All it would take to solve this problem is a simple switch to let PC users avoid Metro if they choose. C'mon, Mr. Ballmer - you want to keep PC users happy, don’t you? So why are you making them pretend they’re using a tablet?

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Infosys, HDFC, Bharti apply for domains, RIL applies for ‘.Indians‘ for IPL team

Reliance Industries have staked their claim to the domain of Indians. '.Indians' is one of the three domain names that the Reliance Group has applied for with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body responsible for coordinating the internet's domain name system as well as assigning generic top level domain (gTLD) names. Reliance has also applied for .reliance and .ril.

As there are no other applicants for the names, they will likely become the property of Reliance. There are over 20 gTLDs allotted to Indian companies, according to ICANN's list of applicants issued on Wednesday. Bharti Airtel has been allotted .airtel and .bharti domain names. Infosys has .infy and .infosys. The Tatas have .tata and .tatamotors. Other companies with their own gTLDs include SBI, Dabur, The TVS Group, HDFC, Lupin and Shriram.

A gTLD is the section of an internet domain name after the final period. In a web address like 'www.website.com', the .com is the gTLD. At this point, there are 22 gTLDs, including .com, .org and .net. In June 2011, ICANN approved a plan that would allow people to apply for new gTLDs.


gTLDs have become a significant investment avenue, and several companies have built business models around investing into them, for later disinvestment at a profit. Applicants had to pay an application fee of $185,000 (Rs 1.03 crore) to take part in the application process. They also face a minimum $25,000 (Rs. 13.9 lakh) annual renewal charge to keep their suffix once it has been granted. Where multiple applications are received for a single TLD, an auction process may be triggered, with the name going to the highest bidder. Out of the 1,930 submissions ICANN has received, 750 were for the same 230 domains. The TLD .cloud has been applied for by seven different companies.

One company, Top Level Domain Holdings, registered in the British Virgin Islands, has applied for no less than 53 gTLDs, including .gay, .vodka, .flowers and .yoga. The .yoga gTLD alone has had three applications, including one from the US and one from a company registered in the Cayman Islands.

ICANN has also issued localized gTLDs in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and other languages. VeriSign has been one of the big investors in this area, applying for Chinese and Arabic gTLDs. The company has also made applications for the Hindi gTLDs, including the Hindi version of .com and .net.

There is a third application for a Hindi gTLD, .sanghatan. The application was made by the Public Interest Registry (PIR), responsible for the .org domain. Other applications by pir.org include .ngo and .ong.

The big names are all there. Google has applied for 101 TLDs, including .lol, .talk, .tech, .team, .search, .shop, .music and .book, as well as .android, .chrome, .google and .youtube. Amazon has applied for .amazon, as well as .save, .shop, .store, .read and 71 other gTLDs. Microsoft is much more low key, with just 11 applications - including .xbox, .bing, .live and .hotmail. In contrast, Apple has just one application, .apple.

The first of the new gTLDs will go live in the second quarter of 2013, with ICANN expecting each batch to take four-five months to process. Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN, said, "This is a historic day for the internet, because the internet is about to change forever. We're standing at the cusp of a new era for online innovation, including new jobs, new businesses and new ways to share information."

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Google pays almost $18.7 million to get domains - .google, .youtube, .goog and .plus

Google wants love. But so do six other companies. They are after .love, actually, a new "top-level domain" that could catch on as .com, .org and .net did.

Love might not prevail, but chances are, at least one of the domains in 1,930 applications for new extensions will. The domains are the letters that follow the dot in Internet addresses, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, revealed the new requests on Wednesday.

Google proved to be one of the more ambitious applicants. It spent almost $18.7 million applying for more than 100 top-level domains, some expected, some not. Not surprisingly, the search giant wants .google, .youtube, .goog and .plus. It was the only applicant vying for .fly, .new and .eat. But it is going to have to fight Johnson & Johnson for .baby,Microsoft for .docs and .live, and Amazon for 17 top-level domains: .wow, .search, .shop, .drive, .free, .game, .mail, .map, .movie, .music, .play, .shop, .show, .spot, .store, .talk and .you.

Amazon also went after .tunes, .got, .author, .smile, .song, .joy, .bot, .like and .call. It does not appear that Facebook applied for any domain. Apple applied for .apple.

The most sought-after extension is .app, with 13 applicants though not Apple, which popularized the mobile application.

"The Internet is about to change forever," said Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of ICANN.

ICANN is expected to approve hundreds of these extensions, the first of which should be in use by next year. ICANN set the application fee high, at $185,000 a name, to try to discourage frivolous bids; still, more than 200 terms are being sought by more than one bidder. ICANN decides who gets ownership of the contested top-level domains.

ICANN will evaluate applicants in batches and consider various objections. Among the objections it will consider are those from rights holders. It would have very likely thrown out an application for .microsoft from an entity that is not Microsoft. The most common objection is likely to be the "limited public interest condition." In those cases, people might object to a profit-making company like Google owning a generic top-level domain name like .love or .fun.
The geographical origin of the applications demonstrates the increasingly international nature of the Internet. While nearly half of the bids are from North America, more than 600 have come from Europe and about 300 from the Asia-Pacific region.

More than 100 of the applications are for extensions in non-Western alphabets. While so-called internationalized domain names have been phased in since 2010, the current expansion could accelerate the globalization of the Internet, Beckstrom said.

"That is going to mean a lot to the people in countries who maybe feel they haven't benefited fully from the Internet," he said.

While there are already several hundred dot suffixes, many of these, including country-specific domain names like .co.uk, come with restrictions. There are only a handful of so-called generic top-level domains, including .info, .net, .org and the popular .com - which, according to supporters of the expansion plan, is running out of capacity for accommodating the digital world's ever-growing addressing needs.

The expansion creates an opportunity for marketers, who will be able to develop websites with addresses ending in their companies' brand names, or an entire category of products or services, like .music or .insurance.

There is also a lingering question about whether the new suffixes are needed at all. Some top-level domains that ICANN has created in previous, smaller expansion rounds have attracted little interest. Many consumers find websites via search engines, rather than typing in an exact Web address. Others are increasingly using mobile applications, rather than the open Internet.

"This is an opportunity for brands, cities and countries to step out of what was this very limited - in my view - environment in which they could promote their brands," said Alex Berry, senior vice president for enterprise services at Neustar, an Internet registry service that is working with clients like New York City, which is seeking the .nyc name. "This is a positive, a once-in-a-generation opportunity that we'll look back on 10 years from now and say, 'Wow."'

The .wow domain, by the way, is sought by Google, Amazon and the online content publisher Demand Media.

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Infosys, TCS, Wipro created 2 million jobs in FY 2011-12

The resilient Indian IT industryhas shared the grave concerns expressed by Infosys' chairman emeritus N R Narayana Murthy and Wipro chairman Azim Premji on policy paralysis in the UPA government holding up reforms and growth.

"Our concerns are no different from what Murthy and Premji have expressed. Key policy issues and executive decisions pertaining to our industry have been pending for long. They require urgent attention of the government if we have to remain competitive in a challenging environment," Som Mittal, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies ( Nasscom), told IANS.

Along with IT bellwethers Tata Consultancy Services ( TCS), Infosys and Wipro, the $100-billion Indian software and services industry contributed significantly to the Indian economic growth story, creating over two million direct jobs and accounting for 25 per cent of the country's merchandise exports, generating $69 billion in fiscal 2011-12.

Alarmed over the failure of the federal government on many fronts and its prevarication over taking tough or quick decisions to revive growth, Murthy was quoted recently as saying that he was saddened by the state of the Indian economy and the crisis of confidence gripping the country due to lack of "big ticket" reforms since 2004.

"There was a huge expectation on the introduction of many reforms by the (UPA) government. There was a lot of confidence that India would do whatever was necessary because the person (Manmohan Singh) who was the face of economic reforms in 1991 is our current prime minister," Murthy told global financial services firm Morgan Stanley recently.

Echoing Murthy, Premji lamented how policy paralysis was hurting investor sentiment. "We are working without a leader as a country," Premji was quoted as saying at his company's meeting with analysts in Mumbai.

Murthy, who co-founded the $7-billion global software major in the 1980s, observed that the government decision to apply tax laws retrospectively had sent a wrong signal to overseas firms on investing or doing business in India.

"The government would have to take steps to do something very positive. It should indicate that it means business, and foreign investors are welcome. This has to happen in FDI (foreign direct investment) because portfolio investments are fickle," Morgan Stanley quoted Murthy saying in its research report.

Endorsing the views of Murthy and Premji, Mittal said that policy paralysis and lack of reforms were hurting even the IT industry as the government had, for instance, not yet resolved the transfer price issue or introduced the safe harbour provision for past and current claims.

"Given the widening current account deficit, we also need the government to take pro-active measures to boost exports and give incentives to promote entrepreneurship in innovative product firms. Providing basic and social infrastructure, especially in tier-two and tier-three towns is another area where the government initiative is wanting," Mittal asserted.

As a former chief executive of HP India Ltd. and an IT services expert with Wipro earlier, Mittal expressed concern over the lack of government support to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) after tax holidays were withdrawn to the industry since 2011.

"Though Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were announced with much fanfare in place of the Software Technology Parks of India ( STPI) for the industry, Minimum Alternative Tax ( MAT) on SEZ income discourages firms from opting for the scheme," Mittal said.

Sharing the industry's concerns, former Infosys director and Manipal Global Education Services chairman T V Mohandas Pai regretted that the UPA government had been simply watching the deterioration of economic activity during the past six months.

"The inability of the political leadership to assume control, take responsibility for economic matters and push the development agenda forward have created an atmosphere where decision-making has almost stopped. Though the government promised to act, we are yet to see any action on the ground," Pai told IANS here.

Noting that the budget for this fiscal (2012-13) had increased taxes by a whopping Rs.45,000 crore when industrial production was declining and under-provided for subsidies to reduce the fiscal deficit, Pai said the government had also brought in retrospective amendment in income tax laws on 28 items.

"What's more, the government had amended the IT (Income Tax) Act from 1961 to nullify the Supreme Court decision in the Vodafone case. The retrograde measure raised the question whether the government could be trusted in policy matters when it was prone to changing the rules with retrospective effort," Pai recalled.

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Nokia cuts 10,000 more jobs as losses deepen

Nokia (NOK1V.HE) plans to cut 10,000 more jobs, bringing the total to one in three staff, as it loses market share to cellphone rivals Apple (AAPL.O) and Samsung (005930.KS) and burns through cash, raising new fears over its future.

In a second profit warning in nine weeks, Nokia said on Thursday that its phone business would post a deeper-than-expected loss in the second quarter due to tougher competition, which it expected to continue.

Once the world's dominant mobile phone provider, Nokia was wrongfooted by the rise of smartphones and is struggling to keep up with Apple, Samsung and Google (GOOG.O). It is also losing market share in cheaper, more basic phones.

Chief Executive Stephen Elop is placing hopes of a turnaround on a new range of smartphones called Lumia, which use largely untried Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) software. But Lumia sales have so far been slow, exasperating investors who have seen its stock crash more than 70 percent since it announced the software switch in February 2011.

"The job cuts and profit warning underline the seriousness of the challenges Nokia is facing, particularly in light of the eye-watering competition from Apple and Samsung," said Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight.

Nokia, whose cash position is increasingly scrutinized by investors, also said restructuring-related cash outflows would be around 650 million euros in the remaining three quarters of 2012 and around 600 million in 2013.

With the cost of Nokia's debt rising, the most bearish of analysts in a Reuters poll last month said the company could even be at risk of default if it fails to slow its cash burn.

Over the past five quarters, the onetime darling of mobile telcoms has eroded its cash pile by 2.1 billion euros - a rate that would wipe out its entire 4.9 billion reserves in a couple of years.

Analysts at JP Morgan said on Thursday they expect operating losses, combined with restructuring outflows, to leave Nokia with 1.63 billion euros cash at the end of next year.

"This is not a comfort zone for a company as large as Nokia," the analysts said.

Nokia's five-year credit default swaps (CDS) were at a new all-time high of 933 basis points on Thursday according to Markit. This means it costs $933,000 annually to buy $10 million of protection against a Nokia  default using a five-year CDS contract and implies a default probability of 55 percent.

Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu said he expects the company to have minimal net cash position at the end of its restructuring.

"We therefore see continued potential downside to the recent stock price and maintain our underperform rating," Ferragu said.

Shares in Nokia were down 16 percent to 1.87 euros, below the psychologically important 2 euros mark, not seen since 1996.

Analysts have said that even with the dramatic fall in the share price, the worsening outlook made it hard to judge how much lower the shares could go.

"I won't comment on the stock price anymore, since it's been seen over and over, that there is no definitive bottom," said Evli analyst Mikko Ervasti.

"People are worried over Lumia sales. I think expectations for the third quarter will be cut," said Nordea analyst Sami Sarkamies.

The 10,000 job cuts, which include the closure of Nokia's only plant in its homeland Finland, bring total planned cuts at the group since Elop took over as chief executive in 2010 to more than 40,000 staff, or every third worker.

Of the latest job cuts, 3,700 will take place in Finland, where the firm will also close its plant in Salo - the last major cellphone manufacturing site in western Europe, the cradle of the global industry.

"This is a major blow. This is due to the operational mistakes made already during the previous CEOs. Maybe the signs of success are running low for Elop too," said Antti Rinne, chairman of labour union Pro.

Nokia said it expects its operating margin in the second quarter to be below the negative 3 percent level reported in the first quarter due to pressure on its smartphone business. It previously forecast it would be similar to or below that level.

On average analysts forecast the second-quarter phone unit margin to be at -4.6 percent, narrowing to -2.2 percent in the third quarter.

Nokia also said it would sell luxury phone business Vertu to venture firm EQT and revamp its management team.

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Bangalore to get India‘s first IT investment region

 Bangalore will have the country's first Information Technology Investment Region (ITIR) for knowledge-based industries, including software and hardwarefirms with entire supply chain, an official said Monday.

"The ITIR is projected to attract global investments to the tune of Rs.2 trillion and create a million direct jobs over the next 10 years," an official said.

The high-powered committee of the ministry of communications and information technology has approved the ITIR proposal from Karnataka and forwarded it to the union cabinet for clearance, which is expected soon.

"The integrated region will be built under the PPP (public-private partnership) model with joint investment by the central and state governments near the international airport," Industry Secretary M N Vidyashankar told reporters here.

The state government plans to float a global tender to select a developer to build the ITIR in about 10,200 acres in two phases.

Land measuring 2,080 acres has been identified for the first phase and preliminary notification issued to farmers for acquisition at the prevalent market rate.

"The knowledge park will be a self-sustainable integrated investment region for setting up software firms, back offices and an hardware park for electronics cluster, including chip designing and manufacturing units, with world class infrastructure facilities," Vidyashankar said.

The region will also have a residential township, an airstrip, high-speed rail network, shopping plaza, hospitals, schools and recreational facilities for the communities living there.

"We have appointed international consultancy firm Deloitte to prepare an RFP (request for proposal) documents and terms and conditions for the global tender to select project developers," the official said.

Indian IT bellwethers TCS, Infosys and Wipro have shown interest in setting up their software development centres in the region.

"Companies in the region will be entitled to tax and other incentives similar to those being provided under the SEZ (special economic zone) policy by the central government," Vidyashankar added.

Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are the other two states which have proposed similar investment regions in their respective states.

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Facebook pays interns more than Google

The world's most popular social networking site Facebook pays its interns nearly $74,000 (Rs 40.7 lakh) a year in a bid to attractyoung talent, according to a report.

According to a report by Business Insider,Facebook pays comparatively more than most other tech companies, so that young talented people that may not choose a more established company like Google. Software engineering interns, for example, earn $74,700 (Rs 41.1 lakh) a year, reports a newspaper.

The report also revealed that other staff members at Facebook get paid pretty well, with at least 10 roles commanding six figure salaries . According to the report, senior software engineers are commanding the most coin at Facebook, getting a salary of $132,503 (Rs 72.9 lakh).

Software engineers, also called coders, are the most valuable workers because they turn the ideas fired at them by Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team into reality.

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Google buys mobile document maker Quickoffice

Google on Tuesday said it had acquired the software firm Quickoffice, which allows users to create and edit documents on mobile devices. 

The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, helps Google compete against Microsoft and others in the mobile space with the software allowing users to view, edit and create documents compatible with Microsoft formats such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. 

"We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It's been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users," Quickoffice co-founder Alan Masarek said. "Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google." 

Alan Warren, Google's engineering director, called Quickoffice "a leader in office productivity solutions." 

"Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device. Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we'll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite," Warren said on the Google blog. 

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TCS plans to hire 60,000 freshers in FY12-13

 The country's biggest IT company Tata Consultancy Services has already made campus offers to 43,604 students across 389 colleges for fiscal 2013, the company's annual report released on Monday said. The company plans to hire around 60,000 freshersduring the current fiscal.

The number of non-Indian nationals among itsemployees has risen to 7.3% during 2011-12, from 6.9% in 2010-11 and 5.9% in 2009-10. The company now has a non-Indian employee baseof 17,329, a quantum jump from 9,536 in 2010. The growth shows a great focus on localization of talent.

Some 1,898 out of the 39,969 net additions during 2011-12 were in-sourced from customer organizations, constituting 4.7% of the net additions. The company had a talent retention rate of 87.8% during the last fiscal, which the report said is the highest in the Indian industry.

Aggressive expense management, the report said, has helped the company in offsetting the increase in manpower cost. TCS has managed to maintain its EBITDA margin within a band over 2004-05 and 2011-12. The margin was 28.9% in 2004-05 and 29.5% in 2011-12). Though manpower costs increased by 550 basis points during this period (from 45% of revenue to 50.5%), this was offset by aggressive cost management. Non-manpower expenses declined by 620 basis points during this period (from 26.2% of revenue to 20%).

TCS's payout ratio (excluding special dividends) has steadily increased over the years, from 27.6% in 2004-05 to 37.2% in 2011-12. In addition, it paid out substantial special dividends in two of the last three years (Rs 2,280 crore in 2009-10 and Rs 1,820 crore in 2011-12). Of the total cash generated during this period, about 40% has been returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and about 9% has been spent on acquisitions.

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Hired by Twitter for 80 lakhs per annum, IITian from Madhya Pradesh heads to California

It's a dream come true for 22-year-old Swapnil Jain, a computer science graduate from IIT-Delhi. Swapnil, who hails from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, has been offered a job by micro-blogging website Twitter - at a whopping package of Rs. 80 lac per annum.

He is moving to California in October to start his new job.

"Twitter has offered me a software engineer's job during the placement in IIT-Delhi. It was my dream to work for companies like Twitter or Facebook. I have worked very hard and my efforts have paid off," he said.

Swapnil says this is the first time in the last two years that Twitter has hired someone from India. And he is thrilled.

"I want to represent my country and hope that I'm able to make my family and city proud," he said.

Swapnil credits his success to his family, especially his parents. His grandfather, Babu Lal Jain, is a well-known lawyer in Vidisha and his father has a jewellery showroom.

"I am very happy. He made this possible through his hard work and dedication," said Swapnil's father Sanjay Jain.

 

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60% employers to monitor their employees‘ Facebook, Twitter pages by 2015: Gartner

Many employers already monitor their workers' Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages - but the practice is set to increase, a new report has revealed. 

A new report by data analysts Gartner has claimed that by the year 2015, 60 per cent of employers will monitor social media pages of their employees. 

The 'Big Brother' monitoring will be driven by security worries about employees leaking information or talking negatively about their workplace. 

"The growth in monitoring employee behavior in digital environments is increasingly enabled by new technology and services," the Daily Mail quotedAndrew Walls, research vice president of Gartner, as saying. 

"Surveillance of individuals, however, can both mitigate and create risk, which must be managed carefully to comply with ethical and legal standards," Walls said, 

Most employers will use their monitoring to prevent security breaches - but simply having the technology at their disposal will be a huge temptation to managers who want to know more about their staff. 

"The development of effective security intelligence and control depends on the ability to capture and analyse user actions that take place inside and outside the enterprise IT environment," he said. 

Walls predicts that the practice, which is increasingly common in America, of asking for Facebook passwords as part of job interviews, will fade out of fashion. 

Earlier this year, Facebook said it has "seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people's Facebook profiles or private information." 

Debate over the legality of employers forcing job applicants to hand over their passwords has raged on since the rise of social networking. 

It has become common for managers to review publicly available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. 

But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks. 

Companies that don't ask for passwords have taken other steps -- such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview. 

Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.

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MPs can now use iPads with Lok Sabha going Wi-Fi

 Lok Sabha members would soon be able to use iPads in the house with a parliamentary panel clearing Wi-Fi connectivityin the lower house of parliament. The facility is already available in the Rajya Sabha.

According to Lok Sabha Secretary General T.K. Vishwanathan, the National Informatics Centre(NIC) has been asked to extend Wi-Fi facility to the lower house before the monsoon session, scheduled to begin in July. "We plan to install Wi-Fi at the earliest...we have asked the NIC to do the needful," Vishwanathan told IANS.

The move will help the Lok Sabha secretariat pursue its paperless office plan, which aims to reduce paper use in printing a large number of reports and documents and instead make them available on the website.

The Lok Sabha secretariat had approached the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) on security last year after the Intelligence Bureau raised some objections to extending the facility to the lower house.

Incidentally, no such permission from the IB was required when the facility was made available to the upper house, said officials.

Informed sources said the JPC on security, which had been pursuing the matter for about a year, resolved it with the IB last month.

The Wi-Fi facility is expected to help over 300 of the 543 Lok Sabha MPs who have purchased iPads under a scheme in accessing routine information like notices, bulletins, list of business, questions and answers and other reports during the session.

Under the scheme, MPs are provided Rs 50,000 to buy an Apple iPad or Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The paper used for such communication can be saved if the MPs start checking out this information in a digital format using iPads, officials said.

Congress MP Deepa Dasmunsi told IANS: "It is a good thing...Wi-Fi facility will help me get information quickly...we had asked for it in the lobby and the Central Hall area."

In order to persuade parliamentarians to use the iPads to access various documents supplied to them in hard copy, the Lok Sabha secretariat held a familiarisation workshop last year.

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The 7 deadly sins of software development

Companies today are often so focused on growth that they commit one (or several) software development sins. As a developer at RightScale, a SaaS cloud management solution, I have borne witness to, and at times even been guilty of, the following temptations.

1. Lust

Getting other people to lust after your products can be very profitable. But software developers often lust for perfection, which can cause major problems. Mitch Kapor’s failed personal information manager, Chandler, is a good example of how this kind of desire can lead to a downfall. Kapor had founded Lotus, and Chandler was supposed to be the ultimate PIM. The project had plenty of upfront funding, wizard programmers and no real deadlines. These endless resources gave the team the illusion that perfection was achievable. But perfect never happens in software, because it’s fractal in nature. You can spend an infinite amount of time optimizing a very small part of the whole program. Chandler ultimately failed, because they were building a product that no user had asked for. By the time version 1.0 finally shipped, the rest of the world had already moved to the cloud and mobile devices.

2. Gluttony

Every company and developer is aware of software bloat, but many don’t understand how bad it really is. The problem is that hardware is improving so fast that developers believe they can afford to be gluttons of CPU cycles and memory. However, the sticking point is power consumption. Battery technology is only slowly improving, and cloud computing by itself does not conserve energy. So, writing smaller programs that consume fewer resources is about the greenest thing that you can do as a programmer. Also, if we assume that the average number of bugs per line of code is constant, then smaller is in fact better.

3. Greed

Arguably, we are in another valuation bubble right now, especially in the IPO market, and it’s easy to get greedy. The problem is that greed leads to short-term goals, which leads to technical debt and long-term slowness. The more features we hack in, the harder it becomes to maintain the whole product. Especially with large customers, it’s easy to bow down and implement a custom feature or one-off that may have a negative return on investment in the long run. If your one large customer decides to leave, what are you left with? Think strategically, and remember that your customers will appreciate a rock-solid product – they are rarely expecting it.

4. Sloth

Sloth is apathy, not laziness. An apathetic programmer is the arguably the most detrimental, because he has zero interest in quality. On the other hand, a lazy programmer can be a good programmer, because laziness can drive long-term efficiencies. For example, if I’m too lazy to type in my password everywhere, I might create a single sign-on feature. Or, if I’m too lazy to manually deploy software, I will instead write an automatic deployment tool. Laziness and scalability go hand in hand.

5. Wrath

Although many software engineers seem peaceful, underneath the surface often lurks a passive aggressive personality. Take a look at source code comments to see examples of this hidden hostility. Usually profanity in source code is proportional to technical debt. However, it is vital that your engineers are not milquetoasts. Beware of the programmer who does not ask questions or who will use any text editor willingly. Good programmers have strong opinions about almost everything, but they also appreciate lively debates.

6. Envy

Envy can be very dangerous in software development. Envy for other products often leads to feature creep. If someone mentions feature parity, you should ask, “But do we need it?” The ultimate killer feature is simplicity, but simple to use is hard to design. Also, it is easy to lose focus when you are constantly watching what other companies are doing. Imagine building towers out of Legos. Would you rather build one tower at a time or many towers in parallel? The parallel approach only works if the towers are identical. Otherwise, you spend too much time context switching. Agility is not the same as half-baked. And doing one thing well is still underappreciated.

7. Pride

On a small scale, excessive pride can lead to “just trust me” behavior that adds risk to the system.  On a large scale, it can lead to missing the next megatrend. When your employees start laughing at your customers, watch out! A lot of great companies have fallen due to excess pride. If your company rule is no hot patching of a production system, be assured that there will be a “trusted elder” who does exactly that on a regular basis. And eventually that behavior will lead to a system crash.  When your small startup is finally king of the hill, just remember: Only the paranoid survive.

Magne Land is currently the scrum master and tech lead at RightScale, a provider of multi-cloud management. Prior to RightScale, he worked for Citrix as a software engineer.Land enjoys running up the hills of Santa Barbara, doing 200-mile relays and drinking beer afterwards.

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Networked devices may grow two-fold to 2 bln by 2016: Cisco

• With increasing popularity of high-speed internet services and proliferation of tablets and smart phones, the number of networked devices would double to around 2 billion in the country by 2016, networking company Cisco has said.
  
  "In India, there will be two billion networked devices in 2016, up from one billion in 2011," Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast said.
  
  Globally, the forecast projects there will be nearly 18.9 billion network connections, almost 2.5 connections for each person on earth, compared with 10.3 billion in 2011.
  
  "The Asia-Pacific region alone will have almost 46 per cent (8.7 billion) of the global network connections," Cisco VNI said.
  
  The internet traffic in India will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 64 per cent between 2011 to 2016.
  
  "There will be 502 million total internet users in 2016, up from 127 million in 2011," it said.
  
  The government too is according top priority to increase the internet telephony in the country.
  
  It has said rules for internet telephony would be relaxed under the National Telecom Policy as it envisages increasing penetration of telecom services in rural area from current level of around 39-70 per cent by 2017 and 100 per cent by the year 2020.
  
  "Internet plays a pivotal role, for emerging countries like India, to address its ambitions...Increasing video consumption, fuelled by adoption of new technologies like 3G and 4G and the government's efforts towards the last mile connectivity will be the key drivers," Cisco India and Saarc Senior Vice President (Service Provider) Sanjay Rohatgi said.
  
  "In India, there will be 212 million fixed line internet users in 2016, up from 85 million in 2011," Cisco VNI said.
  
  Not only the users, average fixed broadband speed is expected to grow 4.2 fold to 6 megabits per second (Mbps) in 2016 from 1.5 Mbps in 2011.
  
  Globally, the average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase nearly fourfold, from 9 Mbps in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016.
  
  
  
  

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How Do Top Android Developers QA Test Their Apps?

A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use.

Needless to say, that post pissed Android supporters off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS.

So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got:

Red Robot Labs: (Backed by Benchmark Capital. Veteran founding team from EA, Playdom and Crowdstar. More than 3.5 million downloads. They currently have the #27 top-grossing game in the Google Play store.)

Red Robot uses about 12 devices in-house and has a quality assurance team of two people. They then use a U.K.-based company called Testologyto get further coverage with 35 handsets.

“I applied a common sense filter,” says co-founderPete Hawley, who hails from EA and has more than 15 years’ experience in the gaming industry. He goes by an 80/20 rule in trying to identify a low number of devices that will cover the widest amount of users. They start with the basic data from Google that shows overall distribution ofdifferent versions of Android and screen size densities. Then they look at their analytics to find which devices are most widely used by their players. Finally, they’ll look at player requests and support tickets.

He says it’s good to be selective about which devices to support, especially with all sorts of lower-end handsets coming in from Asia.

“Saying no to players with small, poor, outdated phones or old OSs is important too,” he says. ”Overall, I’d say the process of staying on top of all the handsets, carriers, OS’s and carriers wasn’t as hard as I expected. It’s not a great deal of work to keep the 80 percent well-covered.”

Here’s a snapshot of how Red Robot’s device distribution looked last fall. (It’s a very fragmented pie!)

Pocket Gems: (Backed by Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures. More than 70 million downloads. Newer to Android, but they had two of the top 10 grossing iOS games for all of last year according to Apple’s iTunes Rewind. #35 top-grossing game in Google Play.)

So Pocket Gems’ QA testing is actually run by a former Air Force colonel(!) named Ray Vizzone. They use a little more than 40 devices evaluated in a matrix they explain in the video below. They make sure they include both tablets and phones and then high-resolution and low-resolution devices. They also make sure to include all five major graphic processing units (GPUs) including Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra, Mali and Vivante.

Their QA process is designed to be hyper-speedy as the gaming industry has changed in some fundamental ways over the last few years. Like what Zynga has done in the social gaming industry, today’s mobile games are more like services rather than finished products you pick up off the shelf. So they require constant updates with fresh content every few days.

For the San Francisco-based startup, quality assurance testing is a 24-7 process that involves teams both in the U.S. and abroad. After the U.S. team designs and performs tests during the day, they hand their work to an offshore team that has all of the exact same 40 or so Android devices. This team does extra compatibility testing overnight and files all of the bugs into a defect tracking system, which go back to the U.S. team in the morning.

Pocket Gems tests all features in three phases. They have 1) new features testing 2) integration testing and 3) release candidate testing. Even as developers design new features for their games, Pocket Gems’ QA teams are already at work designing tests for them so they can be checked the moment they’re ready. Once those features are stabilized, they’re integrated into the games and tested a second time.

“As the bugs are found and fixed during integration testing, the product managers and test leads begin their risk assessment as to when to freeze the code base in preparation for shipping,” co-founder Harlan Crystal explains. “Once this decision is made, a full regression test pass is started.”

That final pass involves a full suit of tests that examine memory, performance and device compatibility. “If we don’t find any new or critical bugs during this RC test pass, we bless the bits and ship it!” he says.

View this document on Scribd

Storm8: (More than 300 million downloads. Totally bootstrapped. Four games in Android’s top-grossing 50. Founders are early Facebook alums.)

Storm8 uses between 30 and 50 devices, which they divide into groups of high-end, mid-range and low-end devices.  They intentionally buy devices for each category. After they launch games, they have the apps send back different KPIs (key performance indicators) back to the company’s servers.

“This way, we can tell if we need to further fine-tune a certain class of devices, or even specific devices, to squeeze the last bit of performance from the devices,” says chief executive Perry Tam.

Animoca: (More then 70 million downloads. Backed by IDG-Accel and Intel Capital).

After the original post ran, Animoca ran a longer piece explaining why it does quality assurance testing with so many devices. The main reason is because the company has a huge user base in mainland China and other parts of Asia where there is a plethora of lower-end and non-compatible Android devices (meaning phones that are based on the OS but aren’t certified to run Google applications or the official Android app store).

“If we had taken the approach that 90 percent compatibility is good enough, we’d be lacking support for 7 million of [our] downloads,” the company explains. “Several millions of consumers would have had a bad experience as a result of our decision, and our app revenues would probably be short by around 10 percent.”

Keep in mind that Animoca is not exactly a young company. It’s a mobile gaming-centric arm of a more than 10-year-old company called Outblaze that has focused on digital media and apps for years. So they have lots of experience in doing compatibility and quality assurance testing.

The company’s chief executive Yat Siu feels that their comprehensiveness is a part of why they perform decently on the platform, with “double-digit” millions of dollars in revenue per year from Android. Animoca doesn’t have any games in the top-grossing 50 right now in the U.S., but they make up for it with high rankings in Asian markets and in the sheer number of apps they publish per year.

Conclusion: If this still freaks you out, just remember that it was way worse in the days of feature phones. (At least, that’s what Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka tells us. Rovio says compared to the J2ME/Brew era, Android is actually easy! They had to make more than 50 games before they created uber-hit Angry Birds.)

Just for reminders about how hard it was then, here are two slides from JAMDAT’s original IPO slidedeck in 2005. JAMDAT was the seminal mobile gaming acquisition of the feature phone erawhen they were bought by Electronic Arts for $680 million. The company had to spend five years building relationships with more than 90 carriers in about 40 countries and it was standard to support about 400 devices.

So while Android fragmentation seems like a headache, your dad’s mobile app maker was trudging seven miles uphill in the snow QA testing with 400 different phones and dealing with business development people from a hundred carriers.

It’s also easier now with specialty shops handle mobile QA testing now like Testology, which Red Robot uses, and uTest. That said, the very biggest developers still want to do most everything in-house.

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