Apple to launch iPhone 5S on September 6: Report

The latest to do the rounds of rumours surrounding Apple's newest flagship product iPhone 5S is its launch date, which is speculated to be September 6. 

According to Huffington Post, the iPhone 5S may be just over a month away as estimated by a German blog iFun and if true it would mean that the latest iPhone will hit the market earlier than previous versions. 

It was speculated that the reason for delay in the launch of iPhone was the manufacturer's decision to shift to bigger screen sizes as compared to the current 4-inch display. 

Although, there hasn't been any confirmation regarding the matter from the company's side, the German blog stated that 'two new device types' are expected, referring to the varied screen sizes, the report added.

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Indian IT companies may sponsor more green cards

 Indian software companies could step up sponsorship of coveted US green cardsfor employees as part of tactics to mitigate the effects of a planned American law to make work visas harder and costlier to obtain. By doing so, they can expand the pool of employees with access to work in the US, analysts said, giving Indian companies greater leeway as they try and cope with the effects of the planned law. 

The reason companies are planning to increase green-card sponsorships is linked to rules which govern the way visa allocation is counted in a bill passed by the US Senate some weeks ago. The Senate bill imposes caps on the number of work visas companies can seek every year, a limit which depends on the number of H-1B visas for specialty occupations a company already has.

Since the bill excludes 'intending immigrants' who have applied for green cards while counting the number of work visas a company owns, Indian firms are seeing great merit in the idea of sponsoring visa-holders for green cards. "We are already ramping up hiring of workers in the United States and will start offering more green card sponsorships to our employees," said PR Chandrasekhar, chief executive officer of Hexaware Technologies, which is based in Mumbai. "With these steps we think any impact of the rules on us would be very limited." 

The US restricts the number of H-1B visas to 65,000 every year. The Senate bill will raise that to 1.15 lakh, but it mandates higher fees for additional visa applications from companies where over 50% of US staff are already on a temporary work visa. Such companies will also be prevented from placing their staff at client locations in what is known in industry parlance as outplacement . This will make it harder for Indian IT firms which depend on such a model in the US, from where they get nearly 60% of their revenue. "Converting visa holders to green card holders would be a key strategy to mitigate the impact of the bill. If a company puts 90% of the eligible employees on the path to receive a green card, it would exempt them from the outplacement clause," said IDFC analyst Hitesh Shah, who added most IT companies would consider this path. 

A green card is an authorisation to live and work permanently in the United States. To be eligible, the company has to offer employees a permanent job in the United States and apply on their behalf. Unlike a visa, the green card, once granted, frees employees from being dependent on their companies to stay and work in the US. Including lawyer and processing fees, a green card could cost companies $8,000- $10,000 (Rs 4.8-6 lakh) and take several years. Between October 2011 and September 2012, Cognizant filed 1,147 green card petitions, the second most after Microsoft, according to data from Los Angeles-headquartered Myvisajobs.com. During the same period, HCL Technologies filed 81, while Wipro filed 80 petitions, according to the site. Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, HCL Technologies and Cognizant declined to comment . 

However, analysts said these companies are actively considering more green card applications. "More green cards and US acquisitions are options, but there are others, including looking at how much work is doing in the US versus in India in some contracts," said Prashant Ranade, chief executive officer of Nasdaq-listed Syntel. "We are keeping a close eye on the proceedings and will take steps as required." The proposed changes have been passed by the US Senate, but the House of Representatives is considering a different set of bills, which are milder and less harmful for the Indian IT than the Senate bill. 

The restrictive visa rules are coming at a time when Indian software services exporters are seeing signs of demand revival in the United States. Even while they are taking evasive measures to minimise the negative impact of restrictive US visa policies, analysts said that the green card path is not without perils. Once sponsored for a green card, employees would also not be dependent on their employer to continue staying in the United States and might be able to command higher wages.

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Kerala targets 3,000 new IT companies by 2020

 Kerala aims to have at least 3,000 IT companies by 2020 under the state's new Seed Support System for early-stage investment to assist new entrepreneurs under the new IT policy of nurturing "one product startup a day", Chief Minister Oommen Chandy said Sunday. 

Speaking via video link at the Weekend@Startup Village celebrations, he also announced the setting up of a state-of-the-art Kerala Technology Innovation Zone at the Kinfra Hi-Tech park where India's first telecom business incubator, Startup Village, is currently located. 

Startup Village is the first public-private partnership incubator in the telecom sector of the country located here and has already an innovation zone set up byBlackBerry. 

The new hub will have a built-up space of 500,000 square feet with all facilities required for a world class innovation ecosystem and will nurture startup companies across a number of sectors including IT and biotechnology. 

The government's flagship Student Entrepreneurship Policy giving 20 per cent attendance allowance and five percent grace marks for student entrepreneurs has taken effect in two Kerala universities. Similar regulations will be introduced by other universities within a month. 

"All student entrepreneurs will be able to avail of these benefits this current academic year. We don't want our students to aim for a job or a visa after they complete education. We want them to become job creators and transform our economy that way. The government will provide every possible support for any entrepreneurial venture that has potential," said Chandy. 

The government has also allocated Rs.1.5 million for Startup Village's flagship programme SVSquare, to "build a bridge between Kochi and California", enabling young aspiring businessmen and women to experience first-hand the renowned entrepreneurial culture of the global technology capital at Silicon Valley. 

Industries and IT Minister PK Kunhalikutty reiterated that no startup with a potentially great and innovative idea will have to suffer for funding. 

"We have money and we have investors who eagerly want to support such ventures," he said. 

Infosys co-founder and chief mentor of Startup Village Kris Gopalakrishnan called Startup Village a "mass movement that will change Kerala" and praised the government for its support for the venture.

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Why mobile wallet is still a distant dream

During a sweltering heat wave earlier this month, it seemed too hot to wear much, carry much or do much of anything at all. Every time I left the house, I tried to figure out where to stuff my bulky wallet. I always had room for my iPhone, even if it meant carrying it in my hand. But the wallet was one thing too many. 

A truly mobile wallet - one that would let you easily pay for restaurant meals, subway rides or beers at a bar with a quick wave of your cellphone - has long been described as imminent. But it remains elusive. Some innovations have begun to bridge the gap, but most have been a disappointment or have not yet worked well enough for mainstream adoption. 

In 2012, Square, which makes a credit card reader that can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, worked on an innovative credit-cardless system that let people pay for goods without ever pulling out their wallets or phones. When Square users walk into a store in its network, a Square-enabled register shows pictures of their faces, which are used as authentication for payment. But the app can be awkward to use. 

Last summer, Apple introduced Passbook, a digital system for storing boarding passes, movie tickets, loyalty cards and gift cards on the iPhone. But it doesn't do much beyond that, at least not yet. Google worked with major credit card companies and banks to create its Wallet app, which lets people pay for items at some stores by waving their phones but is available only for Android devices. Visa offers two digital wallets, payWave and V.me, but I've never seen anyone use them or signed up myself. And the major mobile carriers in the United States banded together to form Isis, a mobile payments network, which has yet to roll out nationally. 

Starbucks has arguably had the most success with the pay-by-phone idea in the United States. The company has persuaded millions of people to download an application that can be used to pay for their lattes. It works like a digital gift card - but only at Starbucks, obviously, so it's limiting. (The company also invested $25 million in Square and is incorporating Square's technology in its stores.) 

When I complain to friends and colleagues about the inconvenience of fumbling around for my wallet when I'm shopping - and say I wish I could just use my phone instead - they often give me bewildered looks. 

Apparently, that's because paying with a phone today is rarely easier than paying with a credit card. Paying via phone often involves a series of awkward swipes and taps to start the transaction, and the process can be disrupted by spotty wireless connections, low batteries or other electronic hiccups. 

"No one wants to be the guy holding up the grocery line at 6 p.m.," said Joshua Reich, one of the founders of Simple, a banking startup company that gives people free checking accounts and offers them data-rich analyses of their spending and saving habits. "You don't want to look like that dork, the guy riding a Segway." 

Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum who covers the mobile industry, agreed. 

"Mobile payments are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist for most people," he said. "You don't hear people moaning about how hard it is to pay with their credit cards or debit cards." 

The biggest problem for paying by cellphone is that so many kinds of businesses are competing to offer services. Companies as varied as phone carriers, banks, credit card companies and technology startups have had plans to get into the mobile payment business, but many are locking horns over who can profit the most, Dawson said. 

"Everyone wants to be the primary payments provider," he said. 

Wireless carriers, desperate to bolster their revenue, are reluctant to hand over potentially lucrative streams to companies like Apple and Google, which already make billions from devices and the software that runs on them. Banks and credit card companies are also rolling out mobile checking services and applications, both to impress their younger users and to keep a hand in a game where billions of dollars are at stake annually, largely from the endless parade of small fees racked up with each purchase. And industry heavyweights like PayPal and Groupon are also scrambling to get their own offerings into the market. 

It's tough to persuade major retailers to spend money to work with Google Wallet or Apple's Passbook, for example, when so many other options are still on the table. And what is popular today might be outdated in a few months. 

Part of the reason that Starbucks' own app works so well is that the company invested significantly to build out the infrastructure in its stores - sleek phone-scanning kiosks and mobile apps that work reliably and efficiently. 

"There is a lot of reluctance in installing a lot of technology, especially if they aren't sure it'll take off," said Rob von Behren, one of the lead engineers at Braintree, a payment services company that powers and processes transactions for popular services including Uber, the mobile taxi service, and Airbnb, the travel rental site. This reluctance leads to an "infinite waiting period and slows the growth of an industry," he said. 

Von Behren was one of the creators of Google Wallet before he left to work at Square and later at Braintree. He said that while his Google team's original goal was to simplify online purchases, it quickly realized that nudging mobile e-commerce forward seemed more urgent. 

A large portion of shopping begins on cellphones, but getting to the final checkout remains a challenge because entering payment information on a small screen is clumsy. And most traditional big-box retailers that could build infrastructure to support mobile payments came of age "in an era where there wasn't network connectivity," making it harder to update their cashier software, payment methods or loyalty programs, von Behren said. 

He ultimately decided that working with legacy retailers to create a system for in-store shopping with cellphones was a "tremendous juggling act." He added, "It kind of worked and it kind of didn't." 

But a new generation of innovation is coming, he said, so he thinks that wide use of pay-by-cellphone systems will arrive eventually. 

Braintree recently acquired Venmo, a company that lets people send money to one another via simple text messages. In addition, some promising newcomers say they are working on more complete alternatives. 

Clinkle, a startup, has persuaded a notable roster of venture capitalists to funnel $25 million into its mysterious and forthcoming mobile payment services. And a new company, Lemon, is working on its own digital wallet. 

I guess I'll have to wait and see. For now, I've come up with my own workaround for hot weather: securing my credit card and driver's license to my iPhone with a rubber band. But it's not what I had in mind when I pictured paying with my phone.

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IBM launches integrated security solution

IBM has launched an integrated security intelligence solution that helps organizations identify key vulnerabilities in real-time, while reducing total cost of security operations. IBM QRadar Vulnerability Manager gives security officers an overview across their entire network, helping them to quickly strengthen and fortify their defenses. By aggregating vulnerability information into a single view, security teams can see the results from multiple network, endpoint, database or application scanners where it can be quickly reviewed and managed.


More than 70,000 security vulnerabilities exist today, with more than a dozen more being reported every day. The rapid expansion of social, mobile and cloud computing can further increase the number of potential vulnerabilities, expanding the threat landscape. 

Part of the IBM Security Intelligence Platform, QRadar Vulnerability Manager (QVM) combs through security holes to help close them to potential exploits, excluding those hidden behind firewalls, associated with inactive applications or otherwise unreachable from external attacks. By simply activating a license key, this new software can automatically scan the network and perform the analysis helping security teams more effectively direct their limited staff resources. "Security Intelligence is about putting all the available data into context, and making it useful for each client's unique security needs," said Brendan Hannigan, GM, IBM, Security Systems Division.

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Ministry of External Affairs to launch mobile app

The ministry of external affairs will launch a smartphone application on Monday evening to inform users about its services and keep them updated on happenings on the diplomacy front. 

"MEA to launch its mobile app: will be launched on July 29 (Monday). The app is available for Android and iOS platforms," public diplomacy division of the ministry tweeted on Sunday. 

The MEA will be the first government department to have a mobile app for smartphone users. 

It will provide details of all citizen-centric services of the MEA like passport, visa for those travelling to India and Haj related details among others.

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Facebook hashtags fail to take off: Study

This ain't Twitter, hashtags don't work here! 

Using hashtags in Facebook posts may be a fun strategy for companies trying to grab the attention of consumers, however, it doesn't appear to be paying off, a new study has claimed. 

The study by a social media analytics firm showed that although 20 per cent of Facebook posts among top brands now include hashtags, however, there is no evidence that such tactics is influencing their engagement. 

Hashtags provide users a way to group messages of similar content. 

Researchers show that posts using the newly introduced hashtags perform only as well as those without it, suggesting that users are not yet finding brand posts by their tags. 

The study showed that visual content is by far the primary driver for engagement on Facebook. 

Pictures posted by top brands average more than 9,400 engagements, which includes likes, comments and shares, per post, while videos average more than 2,500, 'BusinessNewsDaily' reported. 

Researchers said when it comes to text posts, brands must walk a fine line. 

Analysis of more than 500 status updates from the top brands shows that the longer a status update is, the less engagement it typically receives. 

However, if a status update is too short -- less than 50 characters -- it may not be long enough to capture viewers' attention or provide the necessary context to drive the number of likes, shares and comments a company would like. 

"For most brands, Facebook is no longer just a network; it has become the hub of their social marketing efforts and one of the most effective ways to engage with fans," said Adam Schoenfeld, CEO of the firm Simply Measured.

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Social media help track property lost in Holocaust

When Cati Holland checked her email a few weeks ago, she was surprised to find a message saying she was eligible for compensation for her grandmother's Berlin store that was seized by the Nazis more than 70 years ago.

It wasn't spam or a phishing attempt or even a legitimate note from a German official working to track down victims and their heirs. Rather, it was from an Israel-based social media genealogy company that is using the internet to help match property stolen by the Nazis to heirs of the victims.

"My grandmother told me so many stories about the store - about the beautiful dresses and fancy hats they made, the wealthy customers who wore them," Holland, 75, told The Associated Press by phone from Hadera, Israel.

"But we always thought everything had been lost after my parents fled the Nazis. It never even occurred to us to claim any kind of restitution. I was completely surprised about that email."

Since the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany has paid around 70 billion euros ($92 billion) in compensation to the victims of the Holocaust. More than two million people have received lump sum payments or an ongoing monthly pension. The state of Israel has received around 1.7 billion euros ($2.2 billion), according to the German finance ministry.

Part of the compensation was earmarked for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, a private New York-based organization that works to secure restitution for survivorsand their heirs. Descendants can come forward to claim their family's assets until the end of 2014 if they find their original property on a recently released list by the Claims Conference, called the Late Applicants Fund.

Over the years, the search for the heirs has become more complicated because most of theHolocaust survivors have died. Descendants also don't always have detailed knowledge of their family's former assets.

But the rise of social media has offered new opportunities to track heirs and close the books on one of the darkest chapters of German history.

"We are only just seeing the huge impact that social media will have on Holocaust history," said Robert-Jan Smits, the director-general of the European Union's commission for research and design. "We are moving from dusty archives to digitized databases."

One of the driving forces behind the new push has been Gilad Japhet, CEO and founder of Israel-based MyHeritage, a social media website with about 70 million registered users worldwide that lets individuals build their own family trees online.

A few months back, Japhet read a report about the Claims Conference's list of over 40,000 buildings, stores and factories that could not be matched with their original owners. Japhet matched some names on the list to the millions of names that users had posted on MyHeritage's family trees online.

"I thought my chances of finding any of the names on the website of MyHeritage were not looking good since experts have been searching for them for decades. But I still wanted to give it a chance," Japhet said. "I chose some very rare names from the list and to my surprise the second name I put in was already a match."

Japhet put together a team of five employees and had them write a computer program that automatically matches the names on the Claims Conference's list with those on the virtual family trees. So far, they have been able to match about 150 names on the list with names on the family trees. They expect to continue working on this project for several more months.

In the case of Cati Holland, MyHeritage initially contacted her son-in-law Eran Karoly. He had posted a family tree which included Recha Cohn, Holland's grandmother and the owner of the Berlin store, which was located on the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm boulevard in the western part of the city. Holland's grandparents escaped to South America shortly after the Nazis took over in the early 1930s and ended up in Israel many years later.

Holland filed an application for restitution to the Claims Conference and is now waiting for a response. The level of compensation depends on various factors, such as the value of the property and how many people will apply until 2014.

"I filled out the forms and sent in birth certificates and several photos," Holland said.

The Claims Conference itself says it has "received hundreds of applications" for the Late Applicants Fund but can't say for sure how many of them were due to MyHeritage.

Applicants who qualify for restitution will have to wait until the program's deadline on December 31, 2014, the Claims Conference's chairman Reuven Merhav wrote in an email.

As for Japhet and his team, they have made clear to the claimants that they don't want any money in return for their efforts.

"In my emails to the users, I always write that we don't want any money for doing this, nor part of any restitution they will get," said Japhet. "We do this as a mitzvah - which in Judaism is a good deed."

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Facebook cheating as painful as real-life infidelity: Study

Couples who discover online acts of infidelity are as traumatized by it as they would be if the cheating was committed in-person, according to a new study. 

Texas Tech University found that although the stages of coping with online infidelity are unique, the infidelity itself creates similar emotional experiences for the partner who was cheated on. 

"This is very important because there is a line of thought that if the infidelity was discovered online, or confined to online activity, then it shouldn't be as painful," said Jaclyn Cravens, a doctoral candidate in the Marriage & Family Therapy Program and lead author of the study. 

Cravens and her team found that many of her clients' relationship issues stemmed from online infidelity thanks to an increasing number of people using social media sites, especially Facebook. 

"We used Facebookcheating.com to determine the coping process for people who have discovered a partner's infidelity on Facebook," Cravens said. 

"We discovered several main themes and were able to create a process model that moves through different stages of the ways people deal with the information," she said. 

The model includes five stages. First, there are warning signs: the partner who was cheated on notices gut feelings and/or suspicious behaviour on the internet, such as minimizing windows, habitually clearing out browser history and adding passwords. 

Next, the individual either takes it upon themselves to investigate the warning signs, or the individual accidentally discovers the infidelity. 

The third stage is damage appraisal where the individual determines whether the discovered acts was or was not a violation of the relationship. 

If the individual determines that the act or acts were a violation of the relationship, he or she either confronts or avoids the partner. Sometimes the individual decides that the evidence wasn't concrete enough to be able to approach partner. 

Others retaliate, which typically includes posting messages online or sending a message to the third party, or the third party's partner. The last stage includes making a relationship decision. 

"For many couples, step three can be very difficult because couples often don't have clearly established rules about online behaviour. They aren't totally sure whether or not something can count as cheating," Cravens said. 

Regardless, she said the emotional impact for the party who has discovered online acts of infidelity is no less severe than acts committed in-person. 

"People have ability to be more vulnerable online, which facilitates a greater emotional response. This can be just as devastating if not more devastating than an offline response," she said.

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TCS, Infosys, Wipro see hiring fall in Q1

Hiring by TCS, Infosys and Wipro, which account for a major chunk of job opportunities in the sector, slowed down by a hefty 60% in the April-June quarter as the big three hired only around 3,400 persons.

In the April-June 2012, these three companies had hired over 8,700 persons on a net basis.

The country's largest IT company TCS added 1,390 persons in the June quarter this year, against net addition of 4,962 persons in the year ago period.

Infosys hired 575 persons during the quarter against 1,157 net additions in the same period last year.

Wipro added 1,469 people to its IT services division in June quarter compared to over 2,600 people in the year ago period.

In the January-March quarter, the three companies had hired over 16,500 persons.

While TCS and Infosys saw gross additions of 10,000 each during June 2013 quarter, net addition subtracts the number of people leaving the company from the gross additions.

Experts consider the net number as a better indicator of actual increase in staff count.

"IT companies are cautious in their hiring plans currently. They are hiring on requirement and project basis," Uday Sodhi of job portal Head Honchos said.

Hiring in the sunrise sector has been sluggish for quite a quarters as the outsourcing industry is under duress amid clients cutting back on IT spends fearing a further weakening of the economic conditions.

TCS while announcing its results this month had said that its hiring had come down due to low attrition rate. The company witnessed a low attrition rate of 9.55% for IT division and 15.77% for BPO segment.

A recent survey by IT industry body Nasscom had said that attrition rate in the IT sector has come down to around 14% in 2012-13 from 19% in 2010-11 for IT and KPO segments.

The survey, which rated TCS, Infosys and Wipro among top five IT employers, also said that hiring by companies would grow at a slower rate this year.

Moreover, there has been a change in hiring pattern by software and services companies, which may lower net additions this year, it said.

Project based 'just-in-time' hiring is the dominant way at present, it added.

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Techies sought after by automakers, not just IT companies

US automakers have embarked on an ambitious drive to hire software "codaholics," an effort that is increasingly pitting Detroit against its technology partners in Silicon Valley.

Just ask Raj Nair, who leads global product development for Ford Motors. Nair said he lobbied his niece to join the second-largest US automaker as an engineer. But her passions lay elsewhere. She now works for Microsoft, Ford's partner on its in-car entertainment and communications technology.

"The auto industry is so much more high-tech than people realize," Nair said in an interview early this year. "So we're really competing against West Coast industries."

Four years after a sweeping industry restructuring that included massive job cuts, Ford and its US rivals need to hire thousands of engineers at a time when software is playing a much more prominent role in vehicle design than even a few years ago.

Millions of lines of computer code increasingly govern core vehicle functions like braking and air-conditioning. Electronic parts including sensors and microcontrollers, used in laptop computers and smartphones, are the backbone of such vehicles.

The shift has General Motors, Ford and Chrysler vying for a new kind of talent - engineers with software, electronic and computer network skills - that has typically ignored Detroit. It has forced the auto industry to sweeten salaries and seek to burnish Michigan's image as a good place to work - no easy task, the automakers concede.

Ford is about halfway through its goal of hiring 3,000 salaried employees this year, as part of its largest hiring blitz in more than a decade. The bulk of these jobs will be engineers and IT specialists who will be based in Michigan.

GM chief executive Dan Akerson has said he wants to hire thousands of "codaholics" to write software applications for GM's lineup of vehicles.

But those same candidates are also fielding attractive offers from other industries - including the likes of Apple and Google. Executives, engineers and recruiters expect the war for talent only to intensify over the next several years.

"You look at the huge growth in the computer industry, cell phones, all the other technology that has become more interwoven in our daily lives," said James Kolhoff, GM's global chief engineer of transmission and hybrid controls.

"That's pulling on the same types of skill sets that we want to recruit in the automotive industry," he said.

The car as a computer
This spring, 15 teams of students from US and Canadian universities gathered in a large workshop next to a desert Army base in Yuma, Arizona, as part of the EcoCar 2 engineering competition. The event, sponsored by GM and the US Department of Energy, calls on contestants to modify a Chevrolet Malibu sedan to make it more fuel-efficient.

For GM, events like this are crucial to attracting people like Amanda Hyde, 24, who is working on a masters degree in mechanical engineering at Ohio State University.

Hyde described herself as a minority among her peers for being a bona fide car nut who "gets chills" whenever she opens the hood of a car. This summer, she is an intern at GM's proving grounds in Milford, Michigan.

"As a mechanical engineer, I mourn a little bit that the car is turning into a computer," said Hyde, who competed in the EcoCar event in May. But she adds: "You can't make it at a major automaker without an understanding of software."

Earlier this month, Ford offered free software updates to its hybrid owners to boost gasoline mileage - a type of update that would not have been possible just a decade ago.

The role of computer systems in the vehicle is growing as consumers clamor for "connected" cars that can sync with smartphones, provide real-time traffic reports or parallel-park themselves.

Ernst & Young predicts that 104 million vehicles worldwide will have some form of connectivity in the next dozen years. That is more than five times the 20 million such cars expected to be sold this year, the consulting firm said in a recent report.

"So many things that we're controlling via software such as the active grille shutters, how we manage cooling and temperatures - all of those were mechanically controlled in the past," Nair said.

"As a percentage of product development, there is a much heavier focus on the electronics and software side than five, ten years ago," he said.

Competition to intensify
The competition has already pushed up starting salaries for software engineers and forced recruiters to redouble their hiring efforts. There are five software and electrical engineering jobs for every college graduate in these fields, said Garth Motschenbacher, director of employer relations at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Five years ago, auto engineers were willing to accept starting salaries between $50,000 and $45,000, said Matt LePage, lead technical recruiter for GTA Staffing, a Dearborn, Michigan-based firm focused on the auto industry.

Now, starting annual salaries can be two-thirds higher, ranging from between $65,000 and $75,000 or even higher, according to LePage and others including staffing firms and university officials.

"We do recognize that the cost of living is very different here than in the West Coast," said Felicia Fields, Ford's vice president of human resources. "So we're not trying to match that. We're paying competitively for this area, and that's where the vast majority of these jobs are."

In many ways, the explosive growth in Silicon Valley today mirrors the boom in Detroit about a hundred years ago when Henry Ford more than doubled worker wages to $5 a day. In recent years, however, the US auto industry and Detroit itself have been marred by job losses and diminished prospects.

Automakers are redoubling their recruiting efforts to combat that image, by showing how they have changed since the 2009 economic crisis that pushed GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy.

Pitching the Detroit area as a desirable place to live has also been a perennial challenge, one that grew a little tougher after the city filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection last week.

Fields said Ford recruiters are told to address those issues head-on, while also promoting the positive elements of the region, such as the burgeoning development downtown, sports teams and Michigan's natural resources.

"The incredible competition for technical people in so many companies and so many industries, it is much more difficult," she said. "We can't just pick a number and find all the candidates. We have to work much harder."

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Amazon enables faster content delivery for Indian customers

Indian users of Amazon Web Services (AWS), of which there are 8,000 today, can now deliver content to their customers significantly faster than before.

AWS, one of the world's biggest cloud service providers, has launched edge locations - physical servers with software and services -- in Chennai and Mumbai, which reduces the number of network nodes that data needs to touch when being delivered from one point to another. Previously, the closest edge location was in Singapore.

Delivering data from centralized servers could involve delays, or latency as it's called in internetparlance. Having servers at the 'edge' of the internet can eliminate long delivery routes whenever possible. This is done by optimizing routes by mapping paths across the internet to avoid trouble spots, compressing content, and replicating data packets. It is even done by keeping frequently used data in these `edges' so that they do not have to be fetched from remote data centres every time they are needed.

Akamai has been the leading company providing such 'edge' locations.AWS now has a network of 42 edge locations around the world. Shane Owenby, MD of AWS's Asia Pacific operations, told TOI from Singapore that the company's model was significantly different from competitors in that users only paid for what they used, as in cloud services in general. "We don't have any long term contracts or minimum usage requirements as our competitors do. So if at some point you don't have content to deliver or you don't need the same speeds, you can reduce your edge service requirement," he said. 

Cloud services have been a big hit with startups in particular, and increasingly with enterprises. Among Amazon's 8,000 customers in India are Eros International Media, a motion picture production and distribution company that uses AWS for streaming video, content conversion and storage, MPS, a publishing services company, Playblazer, a platform that helps those building games, Vserv.mobi, a mobile ad network, Zovi, which designs and manufactures apparel, Classle, an online social learning platform, and redBus, the bus booking portal. 

Cloud services obviate the need to buy expensive computing infrastructure and software, because you can obtain these over the internet and pay only for what you use. This also means that you don't have to hire engineers to maintain your IT infrastructure. In short, clouds reduce cost dramatically.

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New nanotech may help make lighter laptops, slimmer TVs

Researchers have developed new materials that function on a nanoscale, which could result in the development of lighter laptops, slimmer televisions and crisper smartphone visual displays. 

Known as "giant surfactants" - or surface films and liquid solutions - the researchers, led by Stephen ZD Cheng, dean of University of Akron's College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering, used a technique known as nanopatterning to combine functioning molecular nanoparticles with polymers to build these novel materials. 

The giant surfactants developed at UA are large, similar to macromolecules, yet they function like molecular surfactants on a nanoscale, Cheng says. The outcome? Nanostructures that guide the size of electronic products. 

Nanopatterning, or self-assembling molecular materials, is the genius behind the small, light and fast world of modern-day gadgetry, and now it has advanced one giant step thanks to the UA researchers who said that these new materials, when integrated into electronics, will enable the development of ultra-lightweight, compact and efficient devices because of their unique structures. 

During their self-assembly, molecules form an organized lithographic pattern on semiconductor crystals, for use as integrated circuits. 

Cheng said that these self-assembling materials differ from common block copolymers (a portion of a macromolecule, comprising manyunits, that has at least one feature which is not present in the adjacent portions) because they organize themselves in a controllable manner at the molecular level. 

Cheng, who also serves as the RC Musson and Trustees Professor of Polymer Science at UA, said that the IT industry wants microchips that are as small as possible so that they can manufacture smaller and faster devices. 

He pointed out that the current technique can produce the spacing of 22 nanometers only, and cannot go down to the 10 nanometers or less necessary to create tiny, yet mighty, devices. The giant surfactants, however, can dictate smaller-scale electronic components. 

He said that this is exactly what his team is pursuing -- self-assembling materials that organize at smaller sizes, which are less than 20 or even 10 nanometers. 

The story has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

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