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The Economic Times has an interesting article detailing the recent splurge of Indian entrepreneurs who build a successful business, only to sell them off to the first high bidder.

Avnish Bajaj, 33, and Suvir Sujan, 32, on June 22 sold their four year start up venture, Baazee.com to e-Bay for $50 million (Rs 230 crore).

“The biggest satisfaction comes from the fact that what we have done something meaningful and made a difference to the Internet space in India,” says Avnish Bajaj, an IIT Kanpur and Harvard alumnus, commenting on the deal.

I somehow don't see selling off to an American monopoly as 'making a difference to the Internet space in India'. Full Story : here.

The Independent amongst others, is reporting on an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, wherein the writer - Dr Markus Schuelke, details a case where a genetic mutation has led to the spontaneous development of strong muscle tissue in a young German baby boy.

As long ago as 1997, the Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created "mighty mice", twice as muscular as their siblings, as a result of having their myostatin gene knocked out. Decades earlier, cattle breeders had made a similar discovery in developing a strain of cattle called Belgian Blues - animals that produce roughly twice the muscle and only a fraction of the fat of normal herds. Researchers later found that they too had inactive myostatin genes.

The hope now, according to papers published in yesterday's New England Journal of Medicine, is that it will be possible to develop a line of drugs to deplete myostatin, possibly by developing antibodies capable of blocking it. The Wyeth medical research laboratory in Massachusetts has already begun safety tests as a prelude to further research in this direction.

The full report can be read here.

Microsoft has announced that it has decided to boost storage capacities of Hotmail email accounts in keeping with similar moves by Google, Yahoo! and the rest.

Microsoft will boost storage to 250 megabytes for users of its free MSN Hotmail and also increased the size of attachments that can be sent with e-mails, to 10 megabytes from 1 megabyte previously. Users of the free MSN Hotmail before had 2 megabytes of storage capacity.

Microsoft also announced a premium Web service called MSN Hotmail Plus, for $19.95 per year, giving customers 2 gigabytes of online storage and the ability to send 20 megabyte attachments.

The changes will start early in July, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said.

Reuters is carrying this article.

Microsoft has been granted a patent on the use of the body as a data bus [aka 'body bus'].

Patent number 6,754,472 describes a method of transmitting power and data to devices worn on the body, and for communication of data between those devices.

In its filing, Microsoft cites the proliferation of wearable electronic devices, such as wristwatches, pagers, PDAs (worn on people's belts) and small displays that can now be worn mounted on headgear.

The patent also ensures that 'it will be apparent that the body may be that of a wide variety of living animals and need not be limited to being a body of a human being.'

The full story can be read here.

eCommerce Times is carrying a story on steps being taken by MasterCard International to crack down on the alarming number of phishing scams targetting online banking customers worldwide.

MasterCard billed the move as a "fundamental shift" and a "more aggressive approach" to the problem of online identity theft. The partnership calls for NameProtect to detect online scams "in real-time," the companies said in a release, and to cooperate with law enforcement to "dismantle the online tools and venues that are used by identity thieves before they can be used to steal personal information."

Meanwhile, the Anti-Phishing Working Group said this week that it confirmed 1,197 new and different phishing schemes during the month of May and that incidents have grown by 4,000 percent since November of 2003.

One tends to think that they are barking up the wrong tree..

CNN Money is one of many sites carrying a Reuters article on eBay's winning bid for Indian auction site : Baazee.com. The deal is reported to be worth USD 50 million, and will provide a strategic hold on the still nascent Indian market.

But the challenge for any would-be e-tailer in India is to encourage the use of the Internet for shopping. Most Indians still prefer to make purchases after seeing and touching products, and are reluctant to use credit cards for online purchases.

The Baazee deal is set to close in the third calendar quarter of 2004. EBay said it does not expect the deal to materially affect revenue and earnings per share results this year.

I hope that this also paves the way for better PayPal (an online payment site heavily used on eBay, and is also a subsidiary of eBay) support for Indian residents. The full story is available here.

Wired is carrying an article on an upcoming global flash mob scheduled for 2 p.m local time in 76 cities in 32 countries.

People are evidently quite taken by the idea of using e-mail, blogs and the Internet to gather together a group of people who suddenly materialize in public places, do something absolutely inane and then vanish.

Some mobs have joined together to sing Christmas carols. Others have gathered to support then-Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, to attempt to link their laptops to form a supercomputer, to taunt performance artist David Blaine when he was hanging in a box over the River Thames in London or to protest local politics.

I guess some people need some excitement in their lives.. The full article can be seen here.

Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites are all set to make Space history on Monday, as SpaceShipOne readies itself for it's maiden flight into outer space.

SpaceShipOne will start slung under its carrier airplane, White Knight, a jet-powered craft also designed by Rutan. The pair will circle slowly up to an altitude of 15,250 metres (50,000 feet), where SpaceShipOne will be released.

The pilot will then ignite the SpaceShipOne's hybrid rocket motor, which will burn for 80 seconds and should send the craft to at least 100 kilometres (62 miles) - the usual definition of the beginning of space. For three minutes or so, he will see the blackness of space and the gentle curvature of the Earth below, and will float in weightlessness.

Twenty minutes later, after plunging into the atmosphere like a shuttlecock, he will glide it to a landing on the same Mojave runway.

New Scientist is one of many news sources to carry this story.

New Scientist is carrying a report on a new stun gun that can incapicatate entire crowds, that is all set to be made available to military and police forces in the US and across Europe.

A weapon under development by Rheinmetall, based in Dorf, Germany, creates a conducting channel by using a small explosive charge to squirt a stream of tiny conductive fibres through the air at the victim.

Meanwhile, Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), based in Anderson, Indiana, will be one of the first companies to market another type of wireless weapon. Instead of using fibres, the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the target, producing a conducting channel. It will also interfere with electronic ignition systems and stop vehicles.

"We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep," claims XADS president Peter Bitar.

The world is going nuts. The entire article can be read here.

Close on the heels of Yahoo! announcing an increase in its free email storage capacity from 6 MB (megabytes) to 100 MB, Rediff.com India Ltd, the online providers of news, information, communication, entertainment and shopping services has announced the launch of Rediffmail 1 GB (gigabyte), giving virtually unlimited storage space of 1 gigabyte to all its free email users in India and worldwide.

With immediate effect, Rediffmail users will also be able to send through a single email, a message up to 10 megabytes in size.

The Financial Express is carrying this story.