HP India launches HP Software University

Hewlett-Packard (HP) in partnership with the Indian Institute of Hardware Technology (IIHT) on Thursday announced the launch of ‘HP Software University’ (HPSU). This first of its kind program from HP in the non-enterprise training space aims to address the growing demand of software testing professionals in India.

The program will offer students accredited training on HP Software and a curriculum path surrounding various testing software from HP like Quick Test professional and LoadRunner. Certified professionals would gain access to special HP Software online resources providing the latest in software news, product information, job openings and more.

The university will be initially launched in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Noida, Chennai and Bangalore and HP has plans to add more cities over the next few months.

Keshava Raju, CEO, the Indian Institute of Hardware Technology, said, “Keeping in mind the tremendous market for soft ware testing tools, we have partnered with HP. With this program, our graduates will be equipped with unique skills that will benefit and make them more marketable.

"We want to expose our students to products and technologies used by leading corporations in the real world," he added.

“HP Software University is aimed at providing students a competitive edge in the software testing industry. With HPSU, students and professionals will have access to numerous opportunities in the technology industry," said Neelam Dhawan, Managing Director, HP India.

The HP Software University is the only HP authorized program offering students and professionals the opportunity to attend an official and accredited training on HP Software testing tools.

"The HP software university’s mission is to prepare its students for the real world of business and IT," said Roy Chermana, director, Educational Services - HP Software, APJ. "The program and its students will be directly monitored by an HP worldwide team at each stage right from the inception to final certification."

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Five great products IBM would get by buying Sun

1. VirtualBox. Sun acquired German-based Innotek in 2008. This is a really innovative desktop virtualization product that despite having more than four million downloads needs more visibility. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9062319

2. Q-layer. Sun acquired this company in January. The company, based in Belgium, manages and automates deployment of public and private clouds.

3. MySQL. We all know the Swedes make great companies. MySQL is a next gen database company who will find a welcome home at IBM which loves all things database.

4.Neogent. Sun acquired this identity management company in 2006. This company was really an identity management database building tool. This is increasingly important as database security systems get built, combined and must remain secure themselves.

5. Kealia. I saved the best for last. Andy Bechtolsheim was a Sun Micrososystems founder. He also is about the smartest guy around in networks (He essentially built Cisco's Catalyst 4000 family). While IBM has been moving away from hardware, Andy could be the catalyst for the next gen unified storage,computing, network platform.

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New Gmail features gives users a chance to Undo Send

As Gmail gets ready to celebrate its fifth birthday (on April 1), Google rolls out yet another feature that goes to show that they really have learned a thing or two about e-mailing habits.

Today, the company is announcing Undo Send, an experimental feature in Google Labs that will give users a chance to change their minds about the e-mail they just sent.
   
Who among us hasn’t heard horror stories of e-mails that never should have been sent - maybe it had a major typo or an e-mail trail that wasn’t meant for all eyes? Better yet, what about those e-mails that should have been sent as a “reply,” not a “reply to all.”

Google said most mistakes in an email are spotted just as it’s being sent and that five seconds is actually just enough time to hit the Undo Send button and bring that message back as a draft. From the official Gmail blog post:

This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. For extra cushion, you can increase the time to 10 seconds. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.

It’s not the first feature that Google has added to Gmail to help senders from finding themselves in an embarrassing situation. The company also offers an e-mail attachment detector, which stops a message from going out if Gmail notices that the message references an attachment but none is there.

Something a bit more fun is Mail Goggles, a late-night feature that makes users do a simple math problem to send the message - just to make sure that you really want to send that 2 a.m. message to your ex, begging her to take you back.

Google notes that Undo Send is a Labs feature, one that’s still being refined and could be buggy. The company is asking test users to share feedback on how to make it better.

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Google Chrome goes faster

Google released a new version of its Chrome Web browser, as the search giant continues its efforts to get a foothold in a market dominated by Microsoft Corp.

The new Chrome represents the first major update of the software aimed at the general public since Google entered the browser business six months ago.

According to a post on Google's blog, the new Chrome beta loads certain types of Web pages 25 per cent to 35 per cent faster than the current version of the browser.

It offers Web surfers faster performance and a handful of new features, such as auto-filling of personal information on online forms and a new way for users to drag around tabs of different Web pages within the browser window.

Google was a distant No.4 in the browser market, with 1.2 per cent share of the worldwide market in February, according to market research firm Net Applications.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominates the market, with a 67.4 per cent market share in February, while the Mozilla foundation's Firefox browser had a roughly 22 per cent share. Apple's Safari browser had an 8 per cent share.

Last month, Google officially joined the European Union's antitrust case against Microsoft, describing the browser market as "largely uncompetitive." The EU has charged Microsoft with abusing its dominant market position by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows personal computer operating system.

The new features were previously available to programmers using the "developer" version of Chrome, but Google has now packaged all the updates together into a more reliable beta test version that is available for download.

Google also has a more polished, so-called stable version of Chrome, based on the older beta version.

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Future shock: The PC of 2019

For those of you who want the world at your fingertips, the wait is almost over.
The future PC promises to put nearly everything you could need or want right in your palm.

Think of a souped-up version of today's smartphone, with a monitor that unrolls into a larger screen and a biometric security system that lets you access everything in your professional and personal life from anywhere, with all the data residing in the cloud. Wave it at your car to unlock the door. Order and pay for your morning coffee with a touch of a button. Plug it into a docking station and project that big presentation to your clients. Book a weekend getaway with just a few clicks.

"PCs are going from engines or tools to portals and enablers. The vision of what they'll be in the future is a partner. They'll be participating in the higher cognitive tasks of what people do to get their jobs done," says Andrew Chien, director of research at Intel Corp.

The personal computer has been a corporate workhorse for decades. And while it has evolved, becoming slimmer and more mobile, in many ways it still resembles those old terminals tethered to the mainframe. But the next decade will bring dramatic changes, as the PC evolves past the standard desktop and laptop units to amalgamations of computing devices and their peripherals.

This future PC will be smarter, too. It could discreetly remind you of the name of an acquaintance and alert you when it's time to take your medicine. It will be your colleague, your butler -- and possibly your friend.

For Complete story click here computerworld.com

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Google launches GrandCentral as Google Voice

GrandCentral was known as a free service for US residents that gives user a permanent local phone number that all other numbers (office, mobile, etc..) can forward to. The basic idea of GrandCentral is, one phone number for all your phones. As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number.

Google acquired GrandCentral in 2007 for $50 millions.Google today relaunches the service and renamed to Google Voice. Google Voice is still in closed beta stage but the company expects to open the service up to the public within the coming weeks. Google Voice will be free to use and users will also be able to place free U.S. calls through the service. International calls can be made for a small fee (lower than Skype's or your wireless carrier) with credits purchased via Google CheckOut. Also, Google Voice will remain a solely U.S. based service. You can read more at Google.com

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Google Adsense Launches Behavioral Targeting

Google is wading into behavioral ad targeting in a big way today. It will start placing cookies on consumer’s browsers to collect information about their interests whenever they visit sites that show AdSense contextual ads. Then it will show ads targeted to those interests to the same person as he or she browses the Web on other sites that also serve AdSense ads (which is a large portion of all commercial sites).

Since Google already knows what each site or page is about, it will use this information to place each user in one of 600 subcategories of interest. If you visit tech blogs often, you are probably interested in technology. If you visit Trulia, you are probably in the market for real estate. Through AdSense, Google can now target ads not only based on the context of the page you are on, but also based on the context of the pages you have visited in the past, even if you are on a site that is completely unrelated. For instance, as a completely hypothetical example, it might show you a real estate ad targeted to the towns you were searching on Trulia when you visit a gadget blog.
Not only will Google now target ads at you based on your interest, but it will also let you target yourself. Anyone can go to Google’s Ad Preferences Manager and see exactly how Google is categorizing their interests. (Most people will probably see nothing right now, since this program is only being rolled out on a test basis and will gradually expand). Now, here’s the really smart part: Google lets you add or remove any interest. In effect, it is inviting you to declare what kind of ads you wan to see. You can also opt out of the program completely.

While most people will probably never bother to tweak their ad preferences or even be aware that they can, this represents an important new precedent in online advertising. Why should the ad networks be the only ones who can determine how to target ads at consumers? Why not let the consumers self-target if they care to do so?

Google knows that its interest-based targeting algorithms need a lot of work. Even if it can get just a small percentage of people to correct the algorithm, that data theoretically could be applied to other people with similar browsing patterns. Google gets to say that it is giving users more privacy and control, while collecting really valuable data that will help make its targeting more effective. In the online ad game, whoever can target the best can charge the most.

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Apple Releases New iPod Shuffle With Speech Capabilities

Apple today released a redesigned iPod Shuffle. Even smaller than the last one, the new iPod Shuffle has no playback controls on the player itself--instead, the playback controls are on the headphone wire. This change does beg the question: What happens if you lose the bundled headphones? Does this rule out using third-party headphones?

The big new feature is the iPod Shuffle's inclusion of Apple's VoiceOver technology. VoiceOver on Mac OS X is Apple's built-in screen reader for the visually impaired. On the iPod Shuffle, VoiceOver will read you the current song's title and artist information with a touch of a button. The function was added to iTunes last fall.

According to Apple, VoiceOver now makes it possible to switch between playlists on the iPod Shuffle. The iPod Shuffle is multi-lingual, and knows how to speak 14 languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Greek, and Dutch. This begs another question: What happens if you play a song tagged as explicit? Apple's press release makes no mention of what happens, but wouldn't it be amusing if it spoke a warning to you? Imagine: "I'm afraid I can't play that, Dave."

The new iPod Shuffle costs $79 and stores 4GB worth of music, or roughly 1000 songs. If you want one, you'll need WIndows XP SP3 or Windows Vista (or Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher), and iTunes 8.1.

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Eight Fixes for Vista’s Worst Features

Ask anyone who has seen Spider-Man 3: Good ideas seldom survive bad execution. The developers of Windows Vista had some great design ideas, but poor implementation turned many fine concepts into lousy, annoying features. To be fair, Vista inherited most of these well-intentioned flaws from earlier Windows versions— but it either failed to correct them or didn’t even try. Here are eight of Vista’s most irritating flops, with quick fixes and workarounds.

User Account Control

People do some things in Windows—such as install destructive apps or edit the Registry—that merit a stern “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” warning. Such situations may even warrant asking users to prove they’re administrators before letting them continue.

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Maharashtra wants Google Earth censored

The Maharashtra government is examining legal options to censor Google Earth and curb it from showing sensitive locations to prevent terror attacks such as what happened in Mumbai, a minister said Tuesday.

"We want Google Earth censored. We shall submit a proposal to the centre and other concerned agencies to implement it as soon as possible," Minister of State for Home Naseem Khan told IANS.

Khan explained that the state government has been concerned about the issue since learning that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai Nov 26, 2008 were aided by Google Earth satellite maps through the internet.

"We have scores of sensitive and ultra-sensitive locations in Mumbai, Maharashtra and the rest of the country that can be easily viewed on Google Earth maps. We want at least sensitive locations like defence installations, government headquarters, legislature buildings, important places of worship, ports, docks and other similar sites to be left out on the satellite maps," he added.

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