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Bangalore: With an investment of around Rs 650 crore, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the state-owned telecom service provider, will launch 3G mobile services in Bangalore in July this year, reported Business Standard. The 3G mobile services will be available across the state after December this year, a senior BSNL official said here.

In South India, Bangalore will be the second city to get 3G mobile services from BSNL after Chennai, where the service was launched in February this year. BSNL 3G mobile services are currently available in 10 north Indian cities.

“In Bangalore 200,000 lines will be provided with the services in the beginning. The customers of 3G services will get three main services like video on demand, video conferencing and broadband on mobile and the tariffs have been fixed,” R Mani, General Manager, Mobile Services, BSNL said. He added that BSNL is currently engaged in installation of core equipment like base station switches and towers to roll out 3G services and by July, it aims to complete the work.

BSNL has already launched Blackberry services in Bangalore under three tariff plans and has introduced three handsets in the price range of Rs 14,000 to Rs 35,000. While, Wipro is providing the backend support, the handsets are being supplied by Bharti Tele Tech.

The third generation mobile service enables a range of upgraded services, including rich voice, data and video services, to the subscribers. 3G makes possible video streaming applications such as Live TV, movie downloads, high speed data download on mobile phones with 3G services enabled. Callers can also see each other on their mobile phone screens.

Shubhendu Ghosh, principal general manager, BSNL Bangalore Telecom District, said the landline subscriber base has grown by 13 percent to reach 188,000 lines during 2008-09, compared to the previous year. Its broadband subscriber base has gone up by two and half times to 250,000 subscribers during year ended March 31, 2009 compared to the previous fiscal.

Washington: U.S. President Barack Obama is leaving no stone unturned in his effort to bring the ailing American economy back on track. Keeping his promises, Obama has announced an end to the years of tax incentives to those U.S. firms which create jobs overseas in places like Bangalore. And instead, the incentives would now go to those creating jobs inside the U.S., in places like the Buffalo, a city bordering Canada in upstate New York.

Announcing the international tax policy reform, Obama said, “We will stop letting American companies that create jobs overseas take deductions on their expenses when they do not pay any American taxes on their profits. We will use the savings to give tax cuts to companies that are investing in research and development here at home so that we can jump start job creation, foster innovation, and enhance America’s competitiveness.”

The new tax laws are expected to hit badly the countries like India, China and Philippines, where U.S. companies have been outsourcing their work. Chastising the current taxation system, Obama said, “It’s a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York.”

The U.S. President further said, “The way we make our businesses competitive is not to reward American companies operating overseas with a roughly two percent tax rate on foreign profits; a rate that costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year.”

Obama wants U.S. companies to remain most competitive in the world. “But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens,” he argued.

Announcing a set of proposals to crack down on illegal overseas tax evasion, close loopholes, and make it more profitable for companies to create jobs here in the U.S., Obama said his series of tax reforms would save $210 billion in the next 10 years.

In order to cater to the needs of enterprises that are running VAX and Alpha Systems, Stromasys, a Geneva-based software company, has opened a representative office in Bangalore.  The India office will serve as a hub for Stromasys’ sales and operations in the Asia-Pacific Region.

The company has appointed Venkat Sundaram as the chief representative for its India operations. He will be responsible for managing the overall business and operations. He has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry.

The VAX and Alpha hardware systems were developed during the 1980s, along with an advance operating system, Open VMS, that is far superior to today’s operating systems. However, now the company’s solution gives a seamless migration from the aging VAX or Alpha systems hardware platform. Talking to CXOtoday, Robert Boers, founder and chairman of Stromasys, said, “The market for cross-platform virtualization solutions in the APAC region is experiencing a phenomenal growth, and having a direct country-specific presence in the region will allow us to serve customers better and achieve further business growth.”

“We know that the Indian Defence forces and labs are all using VAX or Alpha systems for a very long time and need to migrate to newer hardware platforms that are faster, and more energy-efficient industry standard servers,” said Boers.

China, India, Japan and Australia are the major markets for Stromasys in the APAC region and it expects to grow annually at 30% in all these countries.

Commenting on the Indian market, Sundaram said, “Cross-platform virtualization solutions have ample market potential as there are many companies, GoI agencies, and PSUs throughout India that still run mission-critical applications on older VAX or Alpha systems - where the underlying hardware is now End-of-Life and simply needs to be replaced.”

“With our solutions, these companies can now alleviate the problems of hardware obsolescence and greatly reduce their services, maintenance and operational costs of these aging systems,” he said.

The company is targeting about 200 companies in India including Indian Air Force, ISRO, BHEL, ADE, NTPC, and CMC, among others.

Friday, August 29, 2008, BANGALORE: Leading provider of microcontrollers and analog chip maker Microchip Technology will invest $65 million in development center in India over the next five years and expected 300 jobs, the company said here. This is a great news for technology professionals.

“We have set up a new facility to work on integrated circuit (IC) development, microcontroller development tools and corporate information systems,” Microchip vice-president Ganesh Moorthy said in a statement issued here late Friday.

The $1 billion Arizona-based US firm designs embedded control solutions for consumer, automotive, office-automation, communications and industrial-control markets worldwide.

Bangalore development centre works on integrated-circuit development and marketing, microcontroller development tools and corporate information systems, was officially inaugurated today by R. Rajalakshmi, Director, Software Technology Parks of India, Bangalore and Microchip’s executive vice president, Ganesh Moorthy.

“The India centre will play a major role in developing eight bit, 16 bit and 32 bit microcontrollers and digital signal controllers. We have delivered many innovations in microcontroller and digital signal controller designs, besides digital-power and motor-control solutions” Moorthy said.

Microchip ranked by Industry analyst firm “Gartner Dataquest” as world leader in eight bit microcontrollers in 2007. According to the “India Semiconductor Association” Microchip is a largest supplier of eight bit microcontrollers in the Indian sub-continent.