News (page 3)

The BJP on Saturday unveiled an ambitious "IT Vision" document that it vowed to imple ment if voted to power in the next elections "setting the stage for the next IT revolution in the country". NDA prime ministerial candidate L K Advani, who unveiled the document, said with IT in governance, the Government delivery mechanism would be improved dramatically. "Every Indian would get to know where every single rupee spent on him by the Government goes."

The document vowed a "golden IT quadrilateral" that would take IT to villages, "making IT as ubiquitous as electricity"; talked about making the parameters of broadband connectivity at par with that in the western world; and to make IT an integral part of the literacy drive across the country. "This would also help create as many as 1.2 crore IT-enabled jobs in rural India," said Advani. He said "IT would be used to make national security more robust and expand education and health care services, "especially in telemedicine".

The BJP said if voted to power, the poor would be provided with laptops at Rs 10,000 each. Interestingly, it said manufacturers would have to set up plants in India for this "that would boost the hardware industry in the country".

Interspersing his speech with anecdotes like his first use of the Casio digital diary in early 80s, and a visit to the Microsoft office in the late 90s ("where Indians constituted the one-fourth of the workforce"), the BJP leader said: "A BJP led Government will create a new policy climate where we use technology mainly for India's and indeed Bharat's sustainable development.

Advani, who during his tenure as Union Home Minister, had mooted the idea of national identity cards, also felt that IT could be effectively used to make national identity cards for the citizens. The party also promised to increase mobile phone penetration in five years from 40 crore to 100 crore subscribers.

On the occasion, BJP president Rajnath Singh launched its redesigned website. A host of BJP leaders, including Jaswant Singh, Arun Shourie, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley were present on the occasion. Sudheendra Kulkarni and Prodyut Bora helped prepare the Vision document.

The broader implications are that it allows ISps to control acces to the internet. Vaibhav Kumar Spokeperson, IBF

Bharti Airtel Ltd and Tata Communications Internet Services Ltd, or TCISL, in February adopted a so-called fair usage policy, or FUP, as part of the terms and conditions that govern the use of broadband Internet which puts data caps or download restrictions on unlimited plans.

Another broadband service provider, Sify Ltd, recently indicated to the country's telecom regulator that it too favours limiting unlimited plans.

As per this new usage policy, even those Airtel or Tata customers who have subscribed to an "unlimited Internet plan" will be subjected to restricted Internet usage. Through its FUP, Airtel, for instance, has "defined fair usage levels for unlimited data transfer plans" and "on reaching the fair usage level, the plan speed would be rationalized by up to 50% for the rest of the monthly billing cycle".

This means that in the 256 kilobytes per second (kbps) connection, where Airtel has a download limit of 50GB, once this limit is reached, it halves the speed to 128kbps.

Source: Live Mint Service Providers Set Data Transfer Limits On Unlimited Internet Plans

The prime ministerial candidate of the NDA, L K Advani, is fighting the most formidable political battle of his life. With the onset of the election season, he is set to criss-cross the country as part of his Vijay Sankalp Yatra. He is also busy giving final shape to his alliance's good governance agenda when not talking to prospective suitors, both for pre-election and postelection tie-ups.

While Advani has a choc-abloc schedule for the next three months, it is an agile team of volunteers, working out of 26, Tughlak Crescent office (that Advani likes to call his `extension office' as opposed to the more fashionable `war-room') that has kept his online election campaign running. The volunteers are now taking the campaign to university campuses, besides synchronising it with other off-line activities. Some of the volunteers are on a sabbatical. Some others are keen on a full-time career in politics at a late stage.

Take Mallika Noorani, for instance. The bespectacled 23year-old banker thinks "it's uncool not to be concerned about politics and other larger societal concerns". On a threemonth sabbatical (she works with a multinational bank in Mumbai), she is now managing the content appearing on Advani's website.

Anay Joglekar, working full-time for an embassy in Mumbai, has similarly taken a few weeks off to join Advani's campaign office. After having studied international relations at the Johns Hopkins University, Zorawar Daulet Singh assists the team with inputs on international affairs and strategic issues.

Source: The Indian Express MEET THE BACKROOM BOYS - TEAM ADVANI Management expert, techie, Johns Hopkins alumnus...

that allows ordinary people to take a close look at most parts of the world on their computer screens, using satellite images and maps.

The Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) is planning to launch a similar Web-based service that will allow users to check everything from the exact location of the new restaurant where they have booked a table for the evening to the state of flood-ravaged villages in Bihar.

The new mapping service will be called Bhuvan, which is the Sanskrit word for earth.

"The content generation is taking time. We are doing first (the) internal evaluation and then the (public) launch," said V. Jayaraman, director of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) an Isro unit in Hyderabad that specializes in satellite image processing and distribution. He did not specify a launch date. Earlier, in November, the space agency had set a March deadline for Bhuvan to be operational.

The Indian space agency will use images taken at least a year ago by its seven remote-sensing satellites in orbit around the earth, including Cartosat-1 and Cartosat-2. These satellites shoot images as small as a car on the street, to build a three-dimensional map of the world. Details such as roads and soil patterns on the maps would be available only for the Indian region, however.

Bhuvan, which uses highresolution images, will comply with India's remote sensing data policy, which does not al low online mapping services to show sensitive locations such as military and nuclear installations. High-resolution images are those that show locations of 1 sq. m or less on earth.

Source: Live Mint Bhuvan: Isro's answer to Google Earth

Malhotra's website, designed by his daughter Anupama Malik and granddaughter Megha Malhotra, was launched by party leader L K Advani at state party office. ``BJP was the first political party to launch its website in 1998. I launched my website sometime back and now my longtime colleague is launching his website,'' Advani said at the function.

Anupama is a research scholar at IIT, Delhi while Megha is a student of National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. The website projects Malhotra as a `Man of Vision' and also a leader who is out there to bring revolutionary change in the city, if voted to power.

The site also features messages from former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani besides a photo gallery of various aspects of Malhotra career in public life.

This website also contains black and white photographs from Malhotra's past, including the ones of taking oath as the chief executive councillor of Delhi. There are also photographs of the leader participating in social, cultural and sports activities and some on his foreign tours.

Starting in April, the century-old, Boston-based publication that is known for its international and analytical news coverage said it will push daily stories onto a revamped website and roll out a magazinestyle weekly.

The non-profit newspaper, which has won seven Pulitzer Prizes, produces a daily paper Monday through Friday that is distributed through the mail with an annual subscription rate of $210 a year.

Monitor editor John Yemma said the moves, which could result in a reduction of 10-15% of its business and editorial staff of 123, are aimed at cutting the company's $25.7 million (Rs128 crore) budget.

He said the new model of shutting down the daily newspaper and focusing reporters' efforts on the website could be a blueprint for other newspapers.

"By freeing people from the print production ball and chain, we make a much more competitive website and we will help the journalists be much more competitive," he said. "Everybody seems to recognize that print is on its way out." The move comes as US newspapers struggle with sharp drops in circulation and advertising dollars and more readers turn to the Web for their news, classified ads, and other information.

Newspapers across the US suffered an average circulation drop of nearly 5%, according to data released on Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Monitor's circulation fell from a peak of 230,000 in the early 1970s to about 52,000 today.

In an effort to hold on to readers, many newspapers have been investing more time, money, and staff to make their websites better, while some smaller, local publications have stopped printing a daily paper altogether to focus on their online operations.

"I think we are going to hear of this happening a lot more. I know there are a lot of newspapers teetering on the brink of instability," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader for the Florida-based Poynter Institute, a non-profit resource for journalists.

"We don't know whether this will be a last dying gasp or whether it will be the first steps of transformation," McBride added.

On a warm day, in the deserted Knowledge Park in Greater Noida, Sanyam Jain stands at an intersection with a clipboard in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. He looks intently at his surroundings--a bus stop, a food kiosk, a photocopy shop--and makes quick notes.

Then, looking at his phone, he sets off at a purposeful pace down the road, looking like a prosperous surveyor with a lot of surveying on his mind. "Everything in Greater Noida is far away from everything else --even simple things like photocopy shops," he says. "People need to know where they are."

Later that night, after his wife is asleep, Jain will log on to Google Map Maker and mark the photocopy shop--as well as the bus stop, the kiosk, and the names of half-a-dozen colleges--on the Google Map of Greater Noida. And he'll add more the next day and the next, just for the satisfaction of seeing his township swell in detail online.

From being simply a practical tool to find the nearest Chinese restaurant, the launch of Map Maker two months ago spawned an excuse for many people to go offline--to set off on mapping sorties, as Jain does, and to help refine the maps of Indian cities and towns in their own time.
Also Read Wikimapia now has competition from Google's Mapmaker

There's no underestimating the power of local knowledge, Jain points out, sounding a little like a bank motto. "A satellite picture would never have been able to capture areas like Chandni Chowk in New Delhi" --areas, he explains, that consist of tiny, labyrinthine alleys invisible from space. "Or even that kiosk, for instance."

Google had fully intended to rely on this local knowledge, as Mint reported at the time of Map Maker's launch in late August.

In that sense, it resembles Wikimapia, a similar collaborative mapping tool that was launched in mid-2006 and is now a cartographic directory of more than seven million locations across the world.

When much of Google Maps still consisted of basic satellite photos, Google began releasing Map Maker in instalments. "First we asked our employees to build the areas they knew, then phased it to the friends and families of employees," says Lalitesh Katragadda, the creator of Google Map Maker.

Google Maps works as a simplified graphic overlay to satellite pictures; a road on the satellite image will show up as a road on Maps only after it has been traced and labelled.

Map Maker opens that activity up to everyone, relying on the crowd sourcing for breadth and accuracy much as Wikipedia does.