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But now these sites and dozens of smaller ones have something those marketers want: the attention of tens of millions of young people who increasingly avoid television commercials. So companies from Procter & Gamble to J. P. Morgan Chase, like so many lonely teenagers, are tricking out their online profiles and trying to make friends on the Web.

The sites are trying to move beyond banner ads and develop ways to integrate marketers into the fabric of their online communities. For example, marketers encourage the sites’ users to become “friends” with characters from their ads, and are experimenting with more elaborate campaigns that take advantage of the word-of-mouth effects of networking sites.

Big Internet companies are getting into the game, eager to profit from selling ads on these sites. Google agreed to pay the News Corporation $900 million over three and half years for the right to sell advertising on MySpace, the largest social networking site, where people create profile pages and receive messages from friends. And last week it agreed to buy YouTube, the fast-growing video-sharing site, for $1.65 billion.

Microsoft sells ads for Facebook, the second-largest networking site, and for Windows Live Spaces, its own blogging service.

“When blogs and Spaces first came out, people said no one would be willing to advertise on them,” said Joanne K. Bradford, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for advertising sales. “Consumers have voted. They said this is where I’m spending my time, and if you want to find me here, you have to get used to the fact that everything is not pretty and rosy here.”

Back in June, IBM's (IBM) Chief Executive Sam Palmisano lit a traditional Indian lamp to kick off the company's largest-ever town hall meeting in Bangalore. Then he announced to his 43,000 Indian employees--an eighth of his global workforce--that IBM would invest $6 billion in India over the next three years.

It was a significant event for IBM--but it was an even more significant moment in the history of the global IT service industry. Palmisano heralded a new chapter in outsourcing, one where the big global players like IBM and Accenture (ACN) will lord it over the upstart Indian offshore IT services companies.

For the last two decades, the Indians pioneered and dominated the outsourcing game. Companies like Infosys (INFY), Wipro (WIT), and Tata Consultancy Services (TACSF), with their low-cost global delivery of services model, were able to leverage their talent at a low cost and deliver competitively priced IT services.

They specialized in providing such things as application development, infrastructure support, and business process outsourcing (BPO) to cost-conscious, top-tier multinational clients. The Indians disrupted the existing business models of high-priced consultants like IBM and Accenture, which saw their IT service revenues dwindle in recent years.

But now these Western players are turning the tables on their Eastern rivals. Corporate leaders are seeking more than cost efficiency to help boost profits. They are looking for innovation from their IT consultants that will help them increase their revenues. Here, global players like IBM and Accenture are coming out tops.

COMPETING THROUGH OPERATIONS First, they are starting to beat the Indians at their own game by expanding the size of their offshore workforce to keep up with the competition for talent. IBM has more than quadrupled its Indian technical staff in recent years and is catching up with Accenture, which has already drastically expanded its offshore services capabilities.

Secondly, while using their offshore locations like India to help customers save costs, these Western consulting firms are now using their industrywide expertise to create global innovation networks (GIN), which they can tap into to create competitive new products and business models for their customers.

According to a recent survey of top-level executives sponsored by SAP (SAP), 55% of corporate leaders worldwide report that new business models--organizational structures, competencies, processes, and partnerships that define how a company operates--will confer a greater strategic advantage than new products and services by 2010. And both IT and business execs tell us that consultants remain one of their top sources for such business innovations.

This is where the Indian and other offshore providers lag. Offshore vendors are currently telling clients: "We will free resources for you to innovate." To which chief executives at client firms are now responding: "No, we want you to help us innovate." When Satyam (SAY) and Infosys talk about "process innovation" or "service innovation," they mean applying Six-Sigma or agile development techniques to optimize their own internal IT service delivery processes, not to innovate their clients' industry-specific processes and services.

And while Wipro and Tata Consulting employ research and development teams that can help firms innovate their products, they are not trained to deliver what chief executives care about most: new business models. So, offshore outsourcers need to align their interpretation of innovation with their clients'.

TEAMS OF INNOVATORS Here, smart Western consultants have sensed and seized the opportunity. Here's how they work. These players are upgrading their own global delivery infrastructure to deliver not just technical services like applications development, but also business innovation services. That's where the global innovation networks come in. These are global ecosystems of internal and external partners that collaboratively design and deliver business innovations that clients want.

For instance, the software activities of IBM's Center for Business Optimization, whose consultants help reengineer and optimize clients' business models, are done in Bangalore by PhDs trained in operations research. In one current project, these Bangalore-based PhDs are working with IBM's logistics experts in Zurich and Japanese software engineers in IBM's Yamato Software Lab to jointly develop and deliver a scalable supply-chain optimization model to European and Asian clients.

Ditto for Accenture, whose Institute for High Performance relies on India-based MBAs to devise industry-transforming business models. And Deloitte's Intellectual Asset Management practice relies on a 100%-virtual innovation network, tapping a global expert network of 300-plus respected scientists, engineers, and physicians to help clients worldwide maximize their intellectual property (IP) portfolio value.

Are you in a knowledge and data processing business where you would like to develop a continual relationship with your customers? Would you like to provide regular updates about your business, hobby, or passion? Would you like to encourage sharing of knowledge and comments amongst your users?

Would you like to have a site based on one of our sites that you have recently seen? And would you like all of this possible in record time? At prices that range from Rs 50 K per year to Rs 500 K per year?

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Moinak has taken the whole OS and created an abridged LiveCD version. The significance here is that this OS does not require installation as it can run from the CD itself.

ISRO officials said the system would be under Indian control, and the space and ground segments as well as receivers will be built in the country. ISRO and the Airports Authority of India are already implementing a satellite-based navigation system for civil aviation called Gagan. Officials said the department has identified satellite navigation as an key area and a massive investment in this programme is slated for the 11th Five-year Plan.

• Massive industrial growth combined with increasing investment from Western companies has elevated the Asian giant from 12th place into tenth, just behind Spain, Canada and China.
• It is now worth $692bn (?393bn), and fuelled by an economic growth spurt of 7 per cent over the last two years, has overtaken traditional rivals Korea and Mexico.

• Yet beyond the numerical similarities in terms of GDP, the world?s seven largest economies in 2003 are still the world?s seven largest economies in 2005 - only India is advancing through the rankings, and at a rate that could shake up the status quo.