India

RajIV, an Andhra Pradesh government undertaking, has received a private sector fillip following tie-ups with companies like ICICI, Hutch, Naukri.com et al. in bringing broadband connectivity to villages across the state.

"There are around 20 other companies, including seeds and fertiliser companies, that are looking at expanding their reach through Internet as well as physically through our kiosks," Myneni said. This apart, there are some organisations that are looking at tying up with the consortium to provide weather information, etc, to farmers as well.

Lightreading has an interesting write-up on the steady influx of venture capital funding into Indian telecom equipment manufacturing start-ups.

It's an outgrowth of the earlier investment waves, says Sanjay Nayak, Tejas's CEO and managing director. "So many large companies were doing outsourcing that a huge talent pool got exposed to their knowledge," he says. "We could literally pinpoint good people with experience."

C-DAC is spearheading an initiative to setup a national grid computing network named Garuda. The grid will include India's indigenously assembled supercomputer - PARAM Padma, and will interconnect research institutions - IIT, IISc etc. - across the country. The initiative has received a grant of Rs. 145 million from the Department Of Information Technology.

Bill Gates, in a speech in Bangalore, announced a talent search contest - 1337ly titled 'Code 4 Bill' - to recruit the best India has on offer. The contest is scheduled to commence in January and will feature eight stages that will include technical and analytical tests along with face-to-face interviews. The winners (20 of them) get to intern at Microsoft India and eventually get assimilated by Microsoft Redmond.

Full story: Times of India.

With the announcement that Microsoft are planning on investing USD 1.7 billion into India (over four years), the total amount in terms of investment plans announced over the last 11 weeks has touched USD 10 billion. Most of these investments are scheduled to go into research and development.

Besides Microsoft [USD 1.7 billion], Cisco [USD 1.1 billion], Intel [USD 1 billion] and SemIndia with AMD [USD 3 billion] make up the bulk of the rest.

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BSNL has gone on a renewed marketing blitz to attract more customers to its broadband service. The latest move includes a reduction in the HCL PC + BSNL Broadband offer, dropping the price down to Rs.500 per month. Moreover, the monthly modem rental of Rs.100 has also been dropped.

Besides the PC combo, BSNL are also offering discounts and freebies to dial-up users and new phone subscribers. All this is in a bid to meet a target of 1 million subscribers (previously an ambitious 3 million) by the end of this financial year. The current BSNL subscriber base stands at a modest 235,000.

The Hindu has an article on the possibility of a Subsidised/Free PC named "iT" making it into the Indian market. The idea behind this project is that these computers will be distributed for free but are supported by - for want of a better term - "Adware".

The keyboards that come with these PCs have a set of large and prominent keys that link to the services provided by various companies. These companies in turn pay large sums of money to be linked via these keys, thus offsetting the price of the computer.