Kumar Mahadeva, founder of US based software services company Cognizant Technologies, has raised a $225-million fund to invest in Indian companies.

Kumar has teamed up with Ramanan Raghavendran, who had earlier raised a fund called Connect Capital, to raise this fund under Kubera Partners on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Mr Raghavendran is an experienced private equity fund manager and has worked with firms like Insight Venture Partners, General Atlantic, TH Lee Putnam Ventures and McKinsey in his past avatars.

LSE Alternative Investment Market (AIM) is increasingly becoming favoured to raise funds for making investments in Indian sectors or companies. About 15 Indian and India-focused companies have raised funds on AIM in the past one year. They have raised over $4 billion from AIM

Read More @  Economic Times

Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Suzlon are planning expand their network to Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts “in a big way” as per assurances given by the companies to Minister for Industries Katta Subramanya Naidu at an investors’ meeting, here on Monday.

According to Mr. Naidu Wipro had assured to set up an information technology park on 100 acres of land either in Dakshina Kannada or Udupi with an investment of Rs. 1,800 crore. The company had plans to invest Rs. 180 crore on the project in the first stage. According to the company, the park would create jobs for 15,000 people.

Mr. Naidu said that TCS had assured to invest Rs. 640 crore on 100 acres of land. It had plans to provide employment to 20,000 people.

Suzlon had plans to set up a windmill at Padubidri in Udupi district with an initial investment of Rs. 500 crore. It had agreed to raise the investment to Rs. 1,000 crore in a phased manner to provide employment to 3,000 people, he said.

Read More @ Hindu (24 Jan ’07)

Microsoft’s research lab in India has teamed up with Indian outsourcer Infosys Technologies to research issues in software engineering.

The focus of the new collaboration is not on generating intellectual property but on solving problems in the area of software engineering, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, said Tuesday. Most of the joint research will be published and put in the public domain to benefit the software development community, said Rashid, who did not rule out that certain intellectual property would be created and shared by the two companies.

Doing research with Infosys on software engineering is interesting for Microsoft Research because of Infosys’ experience with large and complex projects, said Padmanabhan Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research Lab India in Bangalore.

“Infosys works on a large number of large enterprise software projects for a variety of clients, and that experience is useful when we do research in software engineering,” he added.

Read More @ InfoWorld 

Minister of IT and Communications Dayanidhi Maran will on Wednesday launch software tools and fonts in various regional languages for free distribution to the common man.

The Minister will release seven CDs of Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu together, an official release said here today.

The language tools and fonts would also be available on www.ildc.in and www.ildc.gov.in for free downloads online by the net surfers.

The CDs have been developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), an autonomous scientific society under the Administrative Control of Department of Information Technology…...

Read More @ Economic Times

The Mobile Value Added Services (Mobile VAS or MVAS) industry could be worth nearly a billion dollars (Rs 4560 crores) by the end of 2007, from its current size of Rs. 2850. These findings are a part of a new report jointly prepared by the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International.

A break up of the total market size of Rs 2850 crores reveals that P2P (person to person)

SMS or Text Messaging, continues to dominate the industry with Rs. 1140 crores,

followed by Ringtones,

including Caller Ring Back Tones (CRBT) at Rs 1026 crores;

P2A (Person to Application) and A2P (Application to Person) at Rs 428 crores;

Games and Data at Rs 171 crores and

others (MMS etc) at Rs 86 crores.

The P2P SMS revenue is accrued completely to the……………….

Read More @ Cellular-news

Aircel, a leading mobile phone service provider company and market leader in southern states and the North-East with more than 4.5 million customers, has announced the launch of its pre-paid service in Kashmir. 

This pre-paid service of the company was formally launched by Rohit Chandra, chief executive officer, North and East Zone, Aircel Ltd today. Several senior Company officials, some political leaders, bureaucrats and leading businessmen and industrialists were present on the occasion.

While speaking on the occasion, Mr Chandra announced that Aircel…………………

Read More @ Business-standard

New Delhi: He is perhaps one of the most emphatic voices of India’s booming IT sector.
So when the Founding Chairman of Infosys N R Narayana Murthy comes out strongly and unequivocally about his commitment to capitalism, it certainly raises a few eyebrows.

In an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar on Devil’s Advocate, Murthy categorically stated that if India needed to solve its problems of poverty, it better embrace capitalism.

“I believe that is the only hope we have. I agree with that. The responsibility of the government is to ensure that people are happy and prosperous. And if people want to be prosperous you need to have economic growth

Read More @ CNN IBN

Infosys Technologies and its chief executive, Nandan Nilekani, have lately taken a couple of steps which offer a glimpse into how the two are evolving on their journey towards a single goal – becoming a “globally respected” brand.

In this there is a triple emphasis on being global, challenging the established industry leaders and being respected.

In a break with tradition which earlier forbade working directors other than the chairman from joining other boards, Nilekani has recently joined the Reuters board. All working directors can now join one such board to get a feel of how global firms work so that they can make Infosys a truly global company.

Read More @ Business Standard