Intel invests on Intel Ultrabook

Intel Capital today announced a $300 million Ultrabook™ Fund to help drive innovation in this new category of devices. As announced at Computex earlier this year, Ultrabook systems will marry the performance and capabilities of today’s laptops with tablet-like features.

Intel Capital Creates $300 Million Ultrabook Fund | Mohith.net

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Nokia completes acquisition of Motally, Inc.

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Motally, Inc., initially announced on August 20, 2010.

Motally's mobile analytics service enables developers and publishers to optimize the development of their mobile applications through increased understanding of how users engage. The service offering is planned to be adapted for Qt, Symbian, MeeGo and Java developers.

About Motally
Motally Inc. was founded in 2008 in San Francisco and has patent-pending technology to ensure accurate data collection and analytic reporting for publishers' mobile sites.

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Nokia to acquire Motally

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Motally Inc., a privately-held US-based company. Motally's mobile analytics service offers in-application tracking and reporting, and is designed to enable developers and publishers to optimize the development of their mobile applications through increased understanding of how users engage. The service offering is planned to be adapted for Qt, Symbian, Meego and Java developers, and Nokia plans to continue serving Motally's existing customer base.

"The acquisition underpins Nokia's drive to deliver in-application and mobile web browsing analytics to Ovi's growing, global eco-system of developers and publishers, enabling partners to better connect with their customers and optimize and monetize their offering", said Marco Argenti, Vice President, Media, Nokia.

Motally currently employs a team of eight people.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the third quarter of 2010.

About Nokia
At Nokia, we are committed to connecting people. We combine advanced technology with personalized services that enable people to stay close to what matters to them. Every day, more than 1.2 billion people connect to one another with a Nokia device - from mobile phones to advanced smartphones and high-performance mobile computers. Today, Nokia is integrating its devices with innovative services through Ovi (www.ovi.com), including music, maps, apps, email and more. Nokia's NAVTEQ is a leader in comprehensive digital mapping and navigation services, while Nokia Siemens Networks provides equipment, services and solutions for communications networks globally.

About Motally
Motally Inc. was founded in 2008 in San Francisco and has patent-pending technology to ensure accurate data collection and analytic reporting for publishers' mobile sites.

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Don’t Give the Tax Credit Too Much Credit

The Home Buyer Tax Credit contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has been given much credit for buoying the housing market. But simple arithmetic shows that the credit’s effect has been minimal.
The law passed in February 2009 included a temporary 10 percent capped tax credit for qualified first-time home buyers. Later the program was expanded to include repeat home buyers, and recently home buyers were given until September 2010 to complete their qualified transaction.
Last week the Federal Housing Finance Agency released its housing price index for May 2010, and yesterday the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index was released. Both show that housing prices have not fallen significantly, if at all, from what they were a year before. News articles have asserted that housing prices stopped falling because of the tax credit and have planted seeds of worry that a housing-market collapse could continue when the credit expires.
The Internal Revenue Service reports that only $19 billion of tax credits have been claimed so far. The average credit was $6,000 to $7,000, small compared with the average sales price for a home of more than $200,000. More importantly, most home sales transactions involved no tax credit because the buyer was unqualified, or perhaps unaware. If these transactions were at all affected by the credit, it was only because they occurred in a wider market in which some transactions did involve credits.

But the wider market is quite a bit wider: the stock of owner-occupied houses in the United States is worth about $14 trillion, with an additional $3 trillion of rental housing. From this perspective, the $19 billion in first-time home buyer tax credits amounts to about one-tenth of 1 percent.
For the same reason, the possible expiration of credit is not an important event for the housing market. The credit was not designed to last more than year or two, whereas houses last decades or even centuries. Most of the value of a house accrues in the decades after the first year or two of its existence.
Certainly some housing construction projects and housing purchase deals were accelerated to conclude before the credit expired. But accelerating a deal is far different than creating a deal out of thin air.  That’s why I expect little, if any, housing price reduction after the credit expires.

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Deal on Financial Bill

The Senators Richard Shelby, left, Christopher Dodd, center, and Jack Reed during a recess from a marathon 20-hour conference committee on the financial regulation bill.

WASHINGTON

   Nearly two years after the American financial system teetered on the verge of collapse, Congressional negotiators reached agreement early Friday morning to reconcile competing versions of the biggest overhaul of financial regulations since the Great Depression.

A 20-hour marathon by members of a House-Senate conference committee to complete work on toughened financial regulations culminated at 5:39 a.m. Friday in agreements on the two most contentious parts of the financial regulatory overhaul and a host of other provisions. Along party lines, the House conferees voted 20 to 11 to approve the bill; the Senate conferees voted 7 to 5 to approve.

Members of the conference committee approved proposals to restrict trading by banks for their own benefit and requiring banks and their parent companies to segregate much of their derivatives activities into a separately capitalized subsidiary.

The agreements were reached after hours of negotiations, most of it behind closed doors and outside the public forum of the conference committee discussions. The approvals cleared the way for both houses of Congress to vote on the full financial regulatory bill next week.

The bill has been the subject of furious and expensive lobbying efforts by businesses and financial trade groups in recent months. While those efforts produced some specific exceptions to new regulations, by and large the bill’s financial regulations not only remained strong but in some cases gained strength as public outrage grew at the excesses that fueled the financial meltdown of 2008.

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who shepherded the bill through the House, said the bill benefited from the increased attention that turned to the subject of financial regulation after Congress completed the health care bill.

“Last year when we were debating it in the house, health care was getting all of the attention and it was not as good a bill as I would have liked to bring out because we were not getting public attention,” Mr. Frank said. “What happened was with the passage of health care, the American public started to focus on this.”

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said legislators were still uncertain how the bill will work until it is in place. “But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner also praised the conference committee for its work. “All Americans have a stake in this bill,” he said. “It will offer families the protections they deserve, help safeguard their financial security and give the businesses of America access to the credit they need to expand and innovate.”

Legislators had aimed to finish their reconciliation work before President Obama travels to a G-20 meeting this weekend in Ontario, and to approve and deliver a final bill for the president’s signature by Independence Day.

At two minutes before midnight Thursday, some 14 1/2 hours after they began work Thursday morning, members of the House-Senate conference committee approved a final revision of the measure known popularly as the Volcker Rule.

The rule, named for Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who proposed the measure this year, restricts the ability of banks whose deposits are federally insured from trading for their own benefit. That measure had been fiercely opposed by banks and large Wall Street firms, who viewed it as a major incursion on some of their most profitable activities.

“One goal of these limits is to reduce participation in high-risk activity that can cause significant losses at institutions which are central to the financial system,” Mr. Dodd said. “A second goal is to end the use of low-cost funds — to which insured depositories have access — to subsidize high-risk activity.”

Banks managed to wrangle limited exceptions to the rule that would allow them to continue some investing and trading activity. The agreement limits banks’ investments in hedge funds or private equity funds to no more than 3 percent of a fund’s capital; those investments could also total no more than 3 percent of a bank’s tangible equity.

Many Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others, have long engaged in significant amounts of trading for their own accounts, a practice that commercial banks and their parent companies were traditionally less inclined to adopt.

The Wall Street institutions might not have been subject to the new rules except for their decisions during the 2008 financial crisis to convert themselves into bank holding companies in order to gain access to the emergency lending authority of the Federal Reserve.

Most of the first 12 hours of Thursday’s meeting by the committee was spent in recess, as senators and House members huddled with staff members, consulted with Treasury Department officials, were buttonholed by lobbyists, traveled to their respective chambers for votes and waited for proposals and counter-offers to be printed and collated.

After seven hours of additional debate, the conferees approved revisions to the derivatives legislation that would require banks and their parent companies to segregate much of the derivatives trading businesses.

The final restrictions were not as tight, however, as originally approved by Senator Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the chief regulator of derivatives.

Mrs. Lincoln’s proposal that banks be banned from all derivatives activity drew opposition from both sides of the aisle almost since it was introduced this spring. But the provision remained in the Senate bill in part because Mrs. Lincoln was facing a tough primary battle in her home state and portrayed herself as a tough critic of Wall Street.

Mrs. Lincoln won that primary in a runoff, a development that again made legislators somewhat reluctant to oppose her derivatives proposals with the general election looming. Only in recent days did a group of centrist House Democrats threaten to withhold their approval of the entire package unless Mrs. Lincoln loosened her derivatives restrictions.

The group, known as the New Democrat Coalition, includes several House members from New York State, who voiced opposition to provisions that they felt would threaten business and jobs on Wall Street.

Outside of the conference committee chambers, discussions took place through much of the afternoon between Mrs. Lincoln’s staff and groups that have been seeking to produce a compromise derivatives proposal, including other Senate negotiators, Treasury and White House officials, and a group of House members led by Representative Melissa Bean, an Illinois Democrat.

Representatives from the New Democrats met on Thursday with White House officials, according to a House aide, and later presented a proposal to Mrs. Lincoln. At 9:10 p.m., Mrs. Lincoln returned to the conference committee room after a long absence and huddled with Mr. Dodd, who had voiced fears that the derivatives measure would make it more difficult to retain the 60 votes needed to pass the revised bill through the Senate.

The conference committee also reached substantial agreement on a provision that would exempt auto dealers from the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a major victory for one of the most active lobbying groups on the financial bill in recent weeks and an equally disappointing defeat for the Obama administration.

The White House and the Pentagon had both pushed aggressively for restrictions on companies that offered and promoted auto loans, which military officials said were the cause of numerous complaints of consumer fraud by members of the military and their families.

Republican members of the committee in recent days repeatedly offered amendments that were rejected on party line votes and raised issues that Democrats were little interested in entertaining. Republicans repeatedly faulted the majority for not including an overhaul of the mortgage firms Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac in the financial bill; they also raised objections to the bill’s provisions for unwinding failing financial firms, saying that the bill would not rule out future taxpayer-financed bailouts.

Earlier Thursday, Mr. Frank pushed numerous minor provisions of the 1,500-page financial bill toward agreement.

Among the provisions approved by representatives of both the House and the Senate was one that would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the authority to require stockbrokers to protect their clients’ interest when recommending investments, potentially subjecting brokers to the same fiduciary duty as financial advisers.

Members of the committee from both houses of Congress adopted a proposal that would require the S.E.C. to complete a study within six months of the financial bill’s enactment to evaluate the effectiveness of current rules governing those who give financial advice to or sell securities to consumers.

Under current law, financial advisers are required to act in the best interests of their clients, while brokers are held to a looser standard, under which they are required only to consider whether an investment is “suitable” given the time horizon, goals and appetite for risk of a client.

The compromise calls for the S.E.C. to take the results of the study into account when making any rule, but it also gives the commission the authority to impose a fiduciary standard on stock and insurance brokers. The commission may also require brokers to disclose that they are offering only proprietary products and to reveal how much they are being paid for particular products.

By the end of its work on Friday morning, the House and Senate negotiators had substantially completed work on all of the bill’s 15 titles. Minor work remained on technical amendments that would not substantially change the bill’s provisions.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the financial regulatory bill would cost roughly $20 billion over 10 years. The conference committee agreed to pay for the bill by imposing an assessment on large financial institutions; the assessments would be made according to a “risk matrix” that charges higher amounts to riskier institutions.

Mr. Frank said that the assessments — which Republicans called a tax — were an acceptable solution for “the collective errors of many in the financial institutions that caused this set of problems.”

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Maytas Infra with Saudi Bin Ladin Group

The $5 billion Saudi Bin Ladin group was founded by 1931 by the late Sheikh Mohammed Bin Ladin, who is also the father of the world’s most wanted terrorist and al-Qaida founder Osama Bin Laden. The group, which disowned Osama Bin Ladin in 1994 much before he shot to notoriety for masterminding the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks, is now being run by Osama’s half-brother Bakr Bin Laden.

Beleaguered Hyderabad-based infrastructure firm Maytas Infra, which was earlier promoted by disgraced Satyam founder B Ramalinga Raju’s elder son Teja Raju, has decided now to rope in global construction conglomerate - the Saudi Bin Ladin group - as co-promoter of the company along with Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS).

IL&FS replaced the Rajus as promoter of Maytas Infra in September 2009 following a Company Law Board order dated August 31, 2009.

The Hyderabad-based infrastructure company is all set to allot 1,54,59,133 equity shares of the company through the preferential allotment route to SBG Projects Investments Ltd, a Mauritius-based arm of the Saudi Bin Ladin group, Maytas Infra informed the bourses on Saturday.

However, the company did not disclose the price at which the deal was struck with the Saudi BinLadin group, which will hold 20% of the post issue paid up equity share capital of the company on a fully diluted basis after the allotment.

Even as the infusion will dilute IL&FS’ stake in Maytas Infra from the existing 37.01% to around 30%, both IL&FS and BinLaden group will be make a mandatory public offer in accordance with the takeover regulations of the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

The announcement comes just three days after a strong buzz about the company inducting a potential Middle-Eastern investor sent the company’s scrip soaring by 10% on the BSE on Wednesday to hit a 52-week high of Rs 215.15 a share.

Maytas Infra’s operations came to a grinding halt after Ramalinga Raju’s confessions in January 2009 that he cooked Satyam’s accounts as banks who had extended loans worth nearly Rs 2000 crore to the infrastructure firm froze all accounts.

Faced with a liquidity crunch and a crisis of confidence, the company lost several projects including the prestigious Rs 12,000 crore Hyderabad Metro Rail project last year and even a government nominated board taking charge of the company could not prevent the company from posting losses of over Rs 490 crore for fiscal 2008-09.

Soon after IL&FS took over the company in September last year, Maytas has been trying to infuse liquidity in the company and renegotiate its corporate debt restructuring package with the lenders.

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RIL AGM - Undertone in the Markets of Reliance AGM

The domestic equity markets continued to hover near the neutral line in late-afternoon trades as the annual general meeting (AGM) of Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries (RIL) failed to bring any major surprises for the street. The undertone in the markets turned cautious following conclusion of the AGM. The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) companies were the worst hit at this point of time. RIL was also trading with a cut of more than half a percent in trade. High beta — metal, realty and banking — shares were also witnessing some profit booking from marketmen. Meanwhile, positive European stocks and sustained value picking in capital goods, consumer durables and auto stocks was keeping the downside in check on the local bourses. The market breadth on the BSE turned negative; the losers outpaced the gainers in a ratio of 1591:1149 while 92 shares remained unchanged.

The BSE Sensex shed 1.10 points or 0.01% to 17,615.59. The index touched a high and a low of 17,721.99 and 17,557.54, respectively.

The BSE Mid-cap index dropped 0.15% while the Small-cap index rose 0.01%.

The main gainers in the BSE sectoral space were Capital Goods (CG) up 0.76%, Consumer Durables (CD) up 0.60%, Auto up 0.42%, Information Technology (IT) up 0.39% and Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) up 0.24%.

On the flip side, Metal down 0.64%, Realty down 0.60%, Oil & Gas down 0.57%, Bankex down 0.27% and Power down 0.14% were the main losers in the BSE sectoral space.

Meanwhile, cement manufacturers are finally feeling the heat of the heavy capacity addition that has run ahead of the demand scenario, and is resulting in sharp decline in prices in most of the regional markets.

The talk of oversupply in cement industry is not new. In fact, immediately after the global slowdown surfaced and the growth in the Indian economy too decelerated sharply, cement industry was believed to have worst prospects on account of large capex projects to be commissioned in the coming two years.

However, riding on the fiscal stimulus and rapid recovery in Indian economy, the industry somehow managed to keep the oversupply ghost at bay and prices never saw the kind of fall that was expected in any region during the fiscal 2009-10. A part of the reason was buoyant growth in demand as construction activity picked up, while the delay in planned capex projects also helped keep supply under control.

Hero Honda up 1.90%, L&T up 1.50%, M&M up 1.24%, BHEL up 1.10% and Jindal Steel up 1.07% were the major gainers on the Sensex.

On the other hand, RCom down 1.80%, Reliance Infra down 1.59%, ICICI Bank down 1.54%, Sterlite Inds down 1.45% and Maruti Suzuki down 1.31% were the major losers on the index.

A leading economic think-tank, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), has maintained its earlier projection of Indian economy growing at the rate of 9.2% in the current fiscal year. CMIE???s projection is a full one percentage point higher than the RBI???s (Reserve Bank of India) projection as well as 0.7% higher than the government forecast.

‘We expect gross domestic product to grow by 9.2% in 2010-11 compared to a 7.4% in 2009-10,’ the CMIE said today in its report on the state of the domestic economy. The CMIE has been maintaining this growth forecast since March this year.

The S&P CNX Nifty slid 2.65 points or 0.05% to 5,272.20. The index touched a high and a low of 5,302.30 and 5,254.20, respectively.

HCL Tech up 2.63%, Hero Honda up 2.07%, L&T up 1.41%, Jindal Steel up 1.34% and M&M up 1.21% were the top gainers on the Nifty.

On the flip side, BPCL down 2.49%, RCom down 1.98%, ICICI Bank down 1.70%, Sterlite Inds down 1.67% and Rel Cap down 1.66% were the top losers on the index.

Among other Asian indices, Shanghai Composite trimmed 1.84%, Nikkei 225 slid 0.04%, Straits Times slipped 0.01% and Taiwan Weighted dipped 0.30% while Hang Seng increased 0.56%, Jakarta Composite advanced 1.12%, KLSE Composite gained 0.47% and Seoul Composite rose 0.24%.

European markets were trading in the green after a flat-to-negative start. CAC-40 added 0.44%, DAX rose 0.38% and FTSE 100 gained 0.60%.

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AOL sells Bebo

Los Angeles: Internet company AOL has sold Bebo, the social networking site it bought two years ago for $850 million, to a private investment firm Criterion Capital Partners.

Bebo, which launched in 2005, has failed to match the huge popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter. Earlier this year, AOL announced plans to sell or shut down Bebo because it was unable to provide the "significant investment" needed to prevent its decline as a business.

The company did not disclose the amount paid, but analysts have speculated that it would be just a fraction of what AOL paid for it.

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Microsoft Business Division

The Microsoft Business Division produces Microsoft Office, which is the company's line of office software. The software product includes Word (a word processor), Access (a personal relational database application), Excel (a spreadsheet program), Outlook (Groupware, frequently used with Exchange Server), PowerPoint (presentation software), and Publisher (desktop publishing software). A number of other products were added later with the release of Office 2003 including Visio, Project, MapPoint, InfoPath and OneNote. The current version of the Microsoft Office suite, for Windows, is Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.

The division also develops financial and business management software for companies. These products include products formerly produced by the Business Solutions Group, which was created in April 2001 with the acquisition of Great Plains. Subsequently, Navision was acquired to provide a similar entry into the European market, resulting in the planned release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV in 2006. The group markets Axapta and Solomon, catering to similar markets, which is scheduled to be combined with the Navision and Great Plains lines into a common platform called Microsoft Dynamics.

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Apple iAd vs Google Ad Market

San Francisco: Apple has started creating threats to Google in the fast growing ad market through its mobile advertisement efforts. According to a report by Reuters, in the first eight weeks of selling iAds, Apple has got $60 million worth of commitments for mobile ads to run in 2010's second half, from 17 blue-chip brands including Unilever, General Electric and Citigroup.

BGC Financial Analyst Colin Gills said that he believe mobile ads represent an important new revenue stream for Apple, which could potentially account for close to 10 percent of the company's revenue by 2012. The company reported revenue of $36.54 billion in 2009.

Google is dominating internet ads for years through its search engine and now the company is enlarging its business to the web connected gadgets. Though the company doesn't reveal the size of its mobile advertising business, analysts believe annual revenue will be nearly under $500 million and primarily generated from mobile search ads.

As consumers increasingly turn away from their PCs and use smartphones to access the Internet, Google has developed a smartphone operating system, Android, that is now offered on devices made by 21 different hardware vendors.

According to the research firm Gartner, Android was the fourth-ranked smartphone operating system worldwide in the first quarter with 9.6 percent market share, while Apple's iPhone was number 3 with 15.4 percent.

To compete in the apps market, Google has developed a product dubbed AdSense for Mobile. And last month, the company closed its third-largest acquisition ever, shelling out $750 million for AdMob, an advertising firm that specializes in serving ads within smartphone applications.

About iAd

iAd rich media ads offer a dynamic and powerful new way to bring sight, sound, motion, and emotion into the hands of consumers with full-screen video, audio, games, maps, and more. iAd rich media ads allow users to interact with advertising without having to leave their app. With the iAd Network, developers now have a new, easy-to-implement source of revenue. Apple sells and serves the ads, and developers receive 60 percent of advertising revenue.

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Apple iPad sales crossed 2 Million in U.S.

Washington - June 2nd, 2010: Analysts has predicted that the sale of iPad will reach 1.5 million units in the quarter ending in June. Now, the figures released by Apple shows that the company has sold 2 million iPads since its launch in U.S. on April 3.

The company released the figures three days after its entry into the mass market - Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

To put the sales figures in perspective, the iPad reached sales of two million units in just two months, whereas the first version of the iPhone sold only a million units in the same time frame.

The iPad is yet to match the sales of the iPhone 3G, which sold three million units in its first month.

Apple, which recently launched the iBookstore in the UK, also claimed that the iPad's success exceeds that of any of the Mac and desktop products recently launched.

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Cisco to introduce its services in Saudi Market

Riyadh: According to an announcement made by Cisco, the company has been chosen by Telecom Company (STC), a leader in providing integrated communications services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to introduce managed data center services to the Saudi market.

The contract, involves the strategic collaboration that combines best-of-breed virtualization, networking, compute and storage technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware, with end-to-end vendor accountability. It represents the first Vblock Infrastructure Package (VIP) win for Cisco in the Middle East, will be delivered by Cisco partner Wipro.

In the past decade, data centers are changing in areas like architecture, new technologies, application architectures, regulations etc. causing one of the most comprehensive IT infrastructure transformations. With Cisco's managed data center services, STC will be able to meet the challenge to address these changes.

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Tony Blair into Indian-born billionaire's U.S. firm

London: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has landed a job as adviser to Indian-born billionaire Vinod Khosla's U.S.-based venture capital firm, says he shares a "clear vision" with the tycoon, "one of the earliest leaders in cleantech investment."

Blair is to lend his expertise and "global relationships" to the California-based Khosla Ventures, which specialises in promoting environmentally friendly technology, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

Vinod Khosla is one of the founders of the computer firm Sun Microsystems. The 55-year-old tycoon has a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.1 billion. He says that the world should look for technological breakthroughs to find "clean" alternatives to oil, coal, cement and steel.

Blair said: "Solving the climate crisis is more than just a political agenda item - it's an urgent priority that requires innovation, creativity and ambition."

"I share a clear vision with Vinod, one of the earliest leaders in cleantech investment, that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond will have a tremendous impact on our environmental future," a statement quoted Blair as saying.

His appointment to the Silicon Valley firm was announced Monday at a summit for the firm's investors in Sausalito, near San Francisco, the media report said.

Blair told the Wall Street Journal that the job was "not a pro bono" role.

Khosla said the arrangement would allow him to "ask Tony for advice" and he told the WSJ: "Tony's going to help us in many areas that techie nerds like us in Silicon Valley don't understand."

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Reliance Industries (RIL) stock updates

Bangalore: Angel Securities is bullish on Reliance Industries (RIL) stock and has recommended a buy rating with a target price of Rs. 1,260. In a possible move towards reconciliation, the boards of RIL and Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), on 23 May, signed an agreement cancelling the non-compete arrangement they had entered in January 2006.

The two sides had signed a simpler non-compete agreement that will restrain RIL from setting up gas-based power projects until 2022, thus the sector will remain with the ADAG group. The move offers an opportunity to both the groups to enter sectors that had earlier been reserved for one of them until 2016. With the cancellation of the non-compete agreement, issues such as first right of refusal in case of a majority stake sale by companies covered under the agreement ceases to exists.

Angel believes that the move is also likely to be positive for RIL as it opens up newer growth avenues to redeploy huge cash flows, which the company is likely to generate. With the recommended target price of 1,260, if the stock is bought at Monday's closing price of Rs. 1021.45, the percentage of gain would be 18.93 percent.

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Google search engine market data released

Reston, Virginia: The monthly comScore rankings of the U.S. search engine marketplace is released for the month of April. A total of 15.5 billion core searches were effected with Google sites leading the market with 64.4 percent share of core searches.

Yahoo sites followed the order with 17.7 percent while Microsoft sites accounted for 11.8 percent. Both Yahoo and Microsoft saw an increase in their market share, going up by 0.8 and 0.1 percent respectively. This was the result of introduction of new site navigation experiences that tie content and related search results together within several channels.

Ask Network and AOL LLC rounded off the top five in the search market with 3.7 and 2.4 percent market share.

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Warren Buffet to enter the Indian insurance market

Mumbai: Warren Buffet, the Chief Executive of the Berkshire Hathway would visit India next year for the acquisition of majority stake in a state owned general insurance company. Sources planning his visit next March told that, he would discuss the issue with the Union Government, reports Shilpy Sinha of Business Standard. The rules do not allow the government to shed stake in the four public sector general insurance companies- New India Assurance, United India Insurance, National Insurance and Oriental Insurance.

Berkshire works on the business lines of Insurance and reinsurance. Buffet had told earlier about India being one of the possible investment destination for Berkshire investments.

Orissa-born Ajit Jain, who runs the reinsurance business, might get the succession of Berkshire Hathway. Overseas investors are currently operating through liasion offices in India reinsurance as none of the market players have set up an Indian reinsurance venture.

The rules bar foreign investors from holding more than 26 percent stake in an insurance company. The sources added that Buffet's fallback option had been to set up a general insurance company in India or acquire a significant stake in an existing company.

Even if the government has proposed to increase the ceiling to 49 percent, Buffett cannot have a majority control, though he can be the largest shareholder, with the remaining stake split between Indian players.

The government is intending for a merger instead of selling stake to private players. Besides the four companies making profits, thanks largely to the investment income, there is no immediate need to raise equity. Also, "with offices spread across the country, there is no need for major expansion," said an executive at a public sector company.

New India Assurance being headquartered in Mumbai is the largest player and has had a strong focus on corporate lines, mainly due to the fact that it is headquartered in Mumbai, the country's business and financial hub.

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Wipro to gain criminal tracking project

New Delhi: IT major Wipro is all set to win a deal which intends to electronically link police stations nationwide and digitize criminal records for flawless flow of information in one of India's largest e-governance projects, reports Surabhi Agarwal from the Mint.

According to the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project, the company emerged as the lowest bidder among eight finalists in the auction for the Rs. 2,000 crore. CCTNS is one of the 27 missions under the government's National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), which was unveiled in 2006. The project will digitally integrate at least 14,000 police stations as well as nearly 6,000 higher offices such as district police headquarters, commissionerates and state police headquarters. It will also link state crime record bureaux with the National Crime Record Bureau to create a database with real-time access.

Besides managing the police force better and strengthening the national security, this system will let any individual's police record to be tracked from anywhere in the country within minutes. Wipro's task will be to build a so-called core application software (CAS), that all states will have to adopt. The initial contract for CAS is said to be around Rs. 40 crore, while each state will have to spend Rs. 60-70 crore to meet the requirements of the project.

Home Minister P. Chidambaram recently said the CCTNS project must meet its 2012 completion deadline under the 11th Five-year Plan. "Though we are still working on the timelines, Wipro will have to finish the project before a year," said a home ministry official.

TCS, Infosys Technologies and Tech Mahindra, Dublin-based technology firm Accenture and French company Capgemini SA were among the other bidders for CCTNS. The Nataional Institute for Smart Government, a joint venture between the government and IT industry lobby group Nasscom, is the consultant for the project.

However, according to officials of the home ministry and the department of information technology (DIT), the final terms and conditions are being worked out and the contract could be announced as soon as within the next 10 days.

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Free Android phones for Adobe Employees

Bangalore: Last week, Apple snubbed Adobe and heavily criticized its Flash software. Adobe in turn announced it will no longer try to pitch Flash for iPhone. Now, Adobe has decided to support Google's Android platform and it plans to demonstrate a version of Flash for Google's Android software in May at the Google I/O conference. The company wants to make sure its employees use those phones: it's preparing to give away Android phones running Flash to employees, according to sources, reports CNET.

Adobe and Google want to encourage Adobe employees to spend as much time using Android and the Flash Player 10.1 as possible. Google is planning to give every Google I/O attendee their choice of a Motorola Droid or Nexus One. In an event for Google Apps, Google has already given away free Nexus Ones to an audience of CIOs.

It's also not clear if this will be a perk just for Adobe developers or for the entire 8,600 employees Adobe has worldwide.

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India to produce more MNCs by 2024

Bangalore: India is expected to overturn China by 2024 as the principal source of new MNCs from the rising markets, with over 2,200 domestic firms forecasted to open overseas operations over the next 15 years.

Jairaj Purandare, India Leader for Markets and Industries, PwC, said, "It is encouraging to know that India will replace China as the largest source of new multinationals in the emerging world from 2018 onwards. The key drivers for this are the relative increase in both investment intensity and openness that the Indian economy offers.

The report says the number of companies from rising markets choosing to set up operations abroad has increased in the past five years, partly due to the rapid speed of globalization and the revolution in information and communication technologies. This trend is expected to continue over the next 15 years, as new MNCs from emerging economies rise in prominence on the global economic stage.

Indian and Chinese companies would lead the way in seeking new markets abroad, which will be joined by companies from Singapore, Russia, Malaysia and South Korea, who will continue to produce a large number of new MNCs.

The global consultancy major used econometric techniques to project the number of new multinationals arising from a sample of 15 emerging economies over the next 15 years. The countries analyzed are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Ukraine and Vietnam.

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HP acquires Palm

Palo Alto: Ending months of speculation about the fate of the struggling smartphone maker, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it will buy Palm for $1.2 billion. Under the current deal approved by the two companies' boards of directors, HP will pay $5.70 cash per share of Palm, a 23 percent premium to its closing price on Wednesday of $4.63.

With this move HP can intensify the competition in the smartphone market, which it had entered earlier. In 2003 after acquiring Compaq, HP launched its own iPaq line, which runs on Microsoft's Windows mobile platform. However, the device gained little traction in a smartphone market crowded with competitors.

Today, PC makers Dell, Lenovo and Acer are all pushing into smartphones, which offer advanced services such as streaming video, email and GPS in addition traditional voice calls. But experts feel that Palm gives HP a product that stands apart from rivals offering a slew of devices tied to operating systems by Google and Microsoft. "Palm's innovative operating system provides an ideal platform to expand HP's mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices," said Todd Bradley, Executive Vice President, Personal Systems Group, HP.

With only about six percent share of the smartphone market, HP faces an enormously uphill battle in trying to once again become a major player in mobile. Nonetheless, Palm users and developers can breathe a sigh of relief as the threat of a sudden death to the smartphone maker has been removed by HP.

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