7/7 TERROR. First photo
Want to see what's probably the first eyewitness view of the London terrorist attack? Looks like it's the one sent by Adam Stacey via his camera phone, writes Deepak Mankar.
A destination-related study of North American and European companies’ outsourcing was recently done by Weissman Centre for International Banking at Baruch College and The Paaras Group. As expected, India is leading the pack with a 91 percent share of the IT pie, an 80 percent share of Contact Centresand 90 percent of BPOs. The other countries’ shares of IT, Contact Centres and BPO sectors respectively are: Philippines 17% 20% 0%; Central/South America 13% 40% 10%; China 9% 0% 10%; Singapore 9% 0% 0%; Ireland 5% 5% 25%; Spain 4% 20% 0%; Malaysia 4% 20% 10%; Eastern Europe 4% 0% 0%; Australia 4% 0% 20%. alwayson-network.com
Then there’s the Gartner finding that 15% of Singapore IT companies outsource their work offshore. The quantum of work offshored to Australia is estimated around 7 - 8%. By 2007, Gartner expects 70% of deals to be multi-sourced. channelnewsasia.com. Anew Economic Policy Institute study showed that the US software industry lost 16% of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004. Moreover, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that IT companies laid off more than 7,000 American workers in Q1 2005.
And, according to the most recent data from the National Science Foundation, 1.2 million of the world's 2.8 million university degrees in science and engineering in 2000 were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, with only 400,000 granted in the United States. apnews1.iwon.com. (Outsourcing developments are succinctly covered by this blog: blogs.zdnet.com immediately previous coverage of outsourcing by this column (‘SECURITY BREACHED. Outsourcing to India under fire'. ‘NOT AS GOOD AS BEFORE. Report on outsourcing'. And ‘OUTSHORING BOOMING. US$17.2 billion earned in 2004 – 2005.) is at hindustantimes.com.
SOFTWARE WAR. China versus India.
In ‘Reality Bites, Part Two: Is It Really China vs. India?’ David Scott Lewis, IT E-Strategies’ President, has this to say from his hands-on experience in China: “It's often said that in software development China is only five or so years behind India and is catching up at a breakneck pace. Not true, at least not in the enterprise software or IT outsourcing sectors.” Also: “In the offshoring world, even if India Inc. were to sit on its hands for the next five years, there are too many reasons why it will take much more time for the domestic (in China) firms to mature to the current level of even the Tier 2 Indian IT outsourcing firms.” alwayson-network.com.
RIGHT TIME RIGHT NOW. For e-startups.
Joe Kraus is perhaps best-known as one of the founders of Excite. Right now, he heads the startup JotSpot jotspot.com. So, he’s ideally placed to compare the present times as compared to the olden days as far as e-business launchesgo. Here’s his assessment in a nutshell about the current times: "it's a great time to be an entrepreneur". Excite, he recalls, required $3 million in pre-launch funding as compared to JotSpot which needed only $100,000.
He explains the difference by citing cheaper hardware, free software, offshore programmers who work for a song and search-engine marketing that’s much less expensive than the mass media advertising on which millions of dollars were blown up in the dot-com era. "More people can and will be entrepreneurs than ever before," is Kraus’s cheerful prediction. bnoopy.typepad.com. Learn more about Joe Kraus here: bbc.co.uk.
WEAR AN HONORTAG. Be identifiable and credible.
Even after almost a decade of participative journalism, the identity and credibility of the source (“Who's speaking? Can I trust you? How am I to interpret what you say?”) remain a source of worry. A realistic though somewhat over-simplistic solution to the problem comes from Dan Gillmor who wrote ‘We the Media’ oreilly.com. He’s proposed a rudimentary system, ‘HonorTags’. honortags.com.
These tags are machine-readable metadata indexing services like Technorati technorati.com can keep track of. Using it, bloggers and commenters can identify themselves in any of the several roles honortags.com, e.g., journalist, professional advocate, enthusiast/fan, personal observer or inventor of fiction. This rather naïve, self-tagging taxonomy of roles is bound to be abused, say the critics. Gillmor is following a principle of the open-source software community, though: ‘release early, release often’. His identity tagging concept is worth watching as it evolves. catb.org. Find this column’s coverage of taxonomy and ontology at hindustantimes.com (‘ONTOLOGY. Onto what?’).
CELL READING. Instead of only blab-blab-blabbing, buddy.
Check out the partial list of cell phones on which one can download and use BuddyBuzz. It’s the brainchild of a recent Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab experimental project by Dr. BJ Fogg. It lets you read news from CNET and Reuters and content from leading blogs including Slashdot, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Robert Scoble among others on your mobile phone. buddybuzz.net. As I don’t own or use one, I cannot try it out. But Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz seems quite gung-ho about it. Try it at your own risk, buddy. researchbuzz.org.
7/7 TERROR. First photo by 'a citizen'.
Want to see what’s probably the first eyewitness view of the London terrorist attack? Looks like it’s the one sent by Adam Stacey via his camera phone to Alfie Dennen who owns Alfie's Discotastic Moblog moblog.co.uk. It was then quickly picked up by the Sky TV channel sky.com (Sky called it “a passenger's camera photo").
BBC bbc.co.uk too used it with the cautious caveat: "This photo by Adam Stacey is available on the Internet and claims to show people trapped on the underground system." Here’s how Alfie Dennen answered a query of a London School of Economics researcher, Gordon Gow: "Yes, my moblog was the first source, the image was sent to me by the author Adam Stacey via e-mail sent directly from his camphone. The vectors for distribution were then picturephoning.com, followed by Wikipedia, followed by SkyNews, Associated Press, ynet.co.il, and then the BBC and the Guardian." Worth a read also are ‘Witnesses to History’ and ‘Camera Phones Lend Immediacy to Images of Disaster’ letters.washingtonpost.com. A short movie shot with a camera phone by someone trapped in the subway is available at nbc4.tv.
TAKE THE RAIL ROUTE? Not IT, for goodness’ sake.
“In a string of essays and interviews since his landmark 2003 Harvard Business Review article, Mr. (Nicholas) Carr continues to question the importance of IT. In a May 2003 ComputerWorld interview, he defined IT as ‘the processing, storage and transmission of data’ — all of which, he said, ‘is actually becoming part of the general business infrastructure, just as the rail system became part of the infrastructure in the 1800s and the electric power grid became part of the infrastructure in the early 1900s’," writes Gregory Ness, Director (Marketing Programs), Jupiter Networks, in ‘Will IT go the Way of the Railroad’. He thinks not. Find out why. alwayson-network.com.
GOOGLE TOOLBAR. For Firefox.
The Google Blog announced the release of its toolbar for Firefox. This is the first Google product designed specifically for a non Internet Explorer browser. webpronews.com. This version of the toolbar has no pop-up blocker because Firefox has one built in, but it does have all of the regular features of the Google Toolbar, including PageRank and the much maligned AutoLink feature.
Those of you who are fascinated by the brazenly bizarre happenings on the Net may want to take a peek at pirated-sites.com. It’s “a portal of pilfered, plundered and otherwise not original”. The Wired story on piracy (‘The Shadow Internet’) is here: wired.com.
That's all for now though there's plenty more out there. Join me again next week, same place.
Copyright (c) 2001- 2005 by Deepak Mankar. All rights reserved. Deepak Mankar, an advertising practitioner on the creative side since 1965, is also intensely passionate about the web and web content creation. Read his online articles athttp://www.asiaondemand.com/. Website:http://www.addgandhi.com/original/. You may e-mail him at dmankar@bom8.vsnl.net.in