Shruti Speak's

 By:- Josy Joseph, TNN In the face of incessant attacks on its crucial networks, the government is finalizing an elaborate plan to upgrade India's cyber security capabilities. By stepping up protection levels, putting in place real time command- and- control centers and delineating responsibilities among various agencies, the government hopes to take on the onslaught of international cyber attacks on its critical infrastructure.  Among the proposals are dedicated command- and- control centers to monitor critical infrastructure real time, and computer emergencies response teams for key sectors such as power and elaborate protocols for all involved. Senior sources told TOI that the cabinet committee on security " should approve in a few weeks" the multilayer security plans to protect India's critical infrastructure. " the NSA (National Security Advisor) and the cabinet security are working on the final plan." sources said. On top of this plan...

By- Rajat Pandit, TNN After the first four "real" battlefields of land, air, sea and now increasingly space, India needs to get serious on the virtual front as well. The country should begin planning a full-fledged military cyber command, instead of the current piecemeal and disjointed steps to bolster cyber security, grappling as it already is with incessant online espionage and other attacks from China, Pakistan and others. This was the clear takeaway from the deliberations on cyber security and cyber warfare at the high-profile Munich security conference on Sunday, even though hardly figured in the discussions. experts said, the emergence of "cyber weapons" like the Stuxnet Software "Worm" that was used to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, had changed the entire security ball game, almost on a par with the use of nuclear bombs in 1945. "Someone used a cyber weapon in peacetime to physically destroy what the nation(Iran) could describe as ...

By: Diptiman Dewan children understand better when they see than when they read.If technology can be made an enabler to let children study subjects with a visual dimension added to books. learning is faster and consequent and dropouts rates of students also decline. "computers bring about a dramatic change from the mundane process of learning at school and reduce dropout rates, as seen in pilot projects we have conducted in Karnataka. using networking technology, teachers and students can see each other real -time.while kids from multiple villages can see and hear one other on screen, they also take the same class together. every child is audible and visible in the different classrooms," explains Aravind Sitaraman, President, Inclusive Growth, CISCO. Cisco is using networking technology to educate children in rural areas. "one teacher- many classrooms" is a method followed whereby students can see the teachers and what he or she teaches; the teacher can point...

Has the giant online retailer Amazon managed, quite legally, to avoid paying any corporation tax at all to the UK in the past year? That is the eye-catching accusation in the Guardian, following a report in a trade publication, the Bookseller. Amazon will not confirm that it has managed to do this. The accusation hinges on the fact that since 2006, its UK business has been a subsidiary of its European headquarters in Luxembourg. As a result, anyone buying anything from Amazon in the UK makes a payment to the retailer in Luxembourg, with the profits taxed there rather than here. That is despite the fact that Amazon employs hundreds of staff in the UK, at several large depots, selling tens of millions of items each year to millions of UK customers. "Amazon EU serves tens of millions of customers and sellers throughout Europe from multiple consumer websites in a number of languages, dispatching products to all 27 countries in the EU," Amazon said. "We have a...

Today the search for the world’s best customers routinely takes retailers across international borders, and many American merchants are finding big spenders in new markets. The stakes are high:  JP Morgan  estimates that global e-commerce will grow by 20 percent this year, to $680 billion worldwide.  Much of this growth will come from “power shoppers,” elite consumers who annually outspend 90% of their peers. Power shoppers place bigger orders, they come back sooner, and they buy more frequently. For merchants selling internationally through FiftyOne Global Ecommerce, cross-border power shoppers accounted for more than 40 percent of 2010 sales, and more than half in many countries. Power shoppers were easier to find in some places than others, though, and their spending patterns were remarkably different around the world. Where they Live Canada produced the most cross-border power shoppers (37 percent of the worldwide total), followed by Europe (26 percent...

The first ball in the Indian e-commerce game has been bowled. But was it a no ball? While believers celebrate each new round of investment poured into e-commerce startups, cynics are crying hoarse that the boom will pretty soon go bust. In a free-wheeling chat with ET, Rajan Anandan, head of Internet giant Google's India operations -- quite obviously a believer -- makes a spirited argument endorsing the view that e-commerce is booming in India. Once again. To build his argument, Anandan takes a trip down memory lane and points out that the world's largest online retailer Amazon.com went public in 1997 when there were merely 50 million internet users worldwide. India crossed 100 million users last year despite poor internet penetration and sluggish internet speed. It is a big number, says Anandan because it makes India the third largest internet market in the world by number of users. "Our estimates are that on an average, these 100 million spend about 16 hours a we...

E-commerce - the term sounds nearly old-fashioned by now. Aren't we all doing our shopping online? Well, no. E-commerce is still puny. By some estimates it makes up a mere 5% of all retail. But it is growing rapidly. Some of the data points are startling: The Chinese online market place Taobao, for example, sells 800 items a second . German car maker Volkswagen deals with its suppliers online, in a business-to-business market that turns over 2bn euros a year. E-commerce 1.0 was all about discovering the web and setting up the first online shops. They were imitations of the offline world, with virtual shelves providing breadth and depth of product. Version 2.0 saw these websites transformed into clever multimedia portals that tried to engage users. They were not just about "pull" , where shoppers searched for a specific product and bought it, they were also "push" - convincing customers to snap up that special deal, to follow an impulse, says Ms de R...