Indian IT‘s temporary hiring to double by 2020

The percentage of flexi hires in the IT sector is expected to double to 20% by 2020 as IT companies increasingly outsource non-core activities and focus on high-margin businesses, said a report by the flexi staffing body Indian Staffing Federation (ISF).

"IT firms are swiftly adopting the practice of hiring flexi staff in order to beat margin pressures, maintain lean benches and also facilitate just-in-time hiring in a highly volatile market. Keeping the current situation in mind, we are expecting more and more IT companies to adopt staffing as the preferred means to man their projects," said K Pandia Rajan, president of the ISF. The flexi staffing industry in the IT sector touched $950 million last year, growing 15% in each of the last three years.

The Indian flexi staffing industry employs 1.3 million people; they form 3% of the organized sector employment. This number is expected to touch 9 million and comprise of 10% of the organized workforce by 2025. About 79% of workers in the flexi staffing industry fall in the 21-30 year age group, indicating that flexi workers are hired mostly at entry and junior level positions.

Traditionally, IT companies focused on application development and maintenance, but that's increasingly getting commoditized, pushing IT firms to explore other high margin businesses like consulting where billing is proportionate to deliverables. "The IT sector is moving towards the cloud and virtualization that will create new roles in the industry focused on outcomes," said Nagendra Venkaswamy, MD of India and South Asia at Arista Networks.

"Flexi workforce makes up for 10-15 % of our staff right from highly specialized R&D resources to tech support. With people plugging into their devices on the go, there is a huge shortage in areas like mobile device management," said Pallab Bandopadhyay, HR director in Citrix Systems.

Venkaswamy highlighted how the staffing companies should raise their bar by partnering with IT companies in their growth story. "The staffing industry is where the IT industry was in 2000, when 40% of what the IT companies did was to provide staffing solutions to their clients. So it's important for staffing firms to rise above transactions and add value by contributing to the business outcomes of the client's companies," he said.

Read More

Hot sub-Rs 10,000 cameras

I want a digital camera for under 10,000 with at least 8X optical zoom and a 15MP image sensor. The shooter should be user friendly and lightweight; Wi-Fi is preferable though not mandatory. 

--Ramesh Srinivasan, Santosh Kadam, Mohit Khanna

There are several cameras that can be picked up for under 10,000, with very little difference in terms of image quality when you compare their output. All these shooters are capable of good snapshots in daylight, but tend to suffer from some noise in low-light photography. This is because all these devices are equipped with smaller image sensors when compared to what is found in DSLRs and more expensive bridge cameras. Still, all these gadgets are more than capable of good 'holiday' and 'birthday' pictures.

Of the lot, our first choice is the 16-megapixel Nikon Coolpix S6300. It sells for around Rs 9,000. It is a well built device that boasts of good image output, and it even performs decently in low light due to its backlit CMOS sensor (usually, most cameras in this price range use CCD sensors that are a little less sensitive to light when compared to CMOS). The S6300 comes with 10X optical zoom (focal length of 25mm-250 mm). This makes it a suitable travel companion. The camera uses a rechargeable battery pack - and the only noticeable issue, if it matters to you, is the lack of robust manual control. The Coolpix S6300 is best used on auto or its different preset modes. If you like to set your own exposure and shutter speed before clicking an image, this is not the right device for you.

The second camera worth considering is the 10-megapixel Canon IXUS 510 HS. This camera is available for Rs 8,500 (approx). In terms of image quality, this device is clearly the best in its price range, capable of vivid and sharp photographs. Other than image quality, the USP of this camera is its Wi-Fi capability and touchscreen control. Using the latter, for example, users can set their focus area by merely tapping on the screen. The camera is equipped with a CMOS censor and offers 12X zoom (28mm-336 mm focal length). Unlike most cameras, the IXUS 510 HS doesn't support SD cards; it uses microSD cards. And yes, this is another camera that is best used in auto mode, especially since accessing various settings through its touchscreen can be a bit cumbersome.

Our final recommendation is the 16-megapixel Canon PowerShot SX160 IS. It sells for around Rs 9,500. This shooter is not as pocketable as the Coolpix S6300, but it has certain unique advantages: The biggest reason to pick this over the Nikon is that it offers full manual controls, if a photographer wants it. It also has a much bigger reach with its 16X optical zoom (focal range 28mm-448 mm). The only issue with PowerShot SX160 is its battery. The camera uses standard AA batteries, which may turn out to be an expensive proposition when compared to the rechargeable batteries that IXUS 510 and Coolpix S6300 use.

Read More

Apple has grand vision for TV market: CEO

After computers, Apple is now eyeing to take the TV market by storm following a hint by CEO Tim Cook who said that the company maintains 'a very grand vision' of improving the already experimented Apple TV. 

Cook said that the television experience today is just the same as it was 10 to 20 years before and nothing has changed much to make people love the experience. 

The company's earlier experimental product, Apple TV, which is a fairly limited set-top device, selling more than 13 million since the device was launched has been but a learning experience for the company that Cook called a 'hobby', a report by Fox News said. 

Cook claimed that the Apple TV tried to address some of the problems of the TV viewing experience. 

The report said that although the CEO refused to announce a proper TV set but maintained that the product continues to be an area of great interest to the company.

Read More

Motorola: First made-in-US Moto X phone coming

Cellphone pioneer Motorola announced Wednesday that it's opening a Texas manufacturing facility that will create 2,000 jobs and produce its new flagship device, Moto X, the first smartphone ever assembled in the US. 

The company has already begun hiring for the Fort Worth plant. The site was most recently unoccupied but was once used by fellow phone manufacturer Nokia, meaning it was designed to produce mobile devices, said Will Moss, a spokesman for Motorola Mobility, which is owned by Google. 

"It was a great facility in an ideal location," said Moss, who said it will be an easy trip for Motorola engineering teams based in Chicago and Silicon Valley, and is also close to the company's service and repair operations in Mexico. 

The formal announcement came at AllThingsD's D11 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, from Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside. 

Texas Governer Rick Perry's office administers a pair of special state incentive funds meant to help attract job-creating businesses to the state, but Moss said the Republican governor did not distribute any money to close this deal. 

"Motorola Mobility's decision to manufacture its new smartphone and create thousands of new jobs in Texas is great news for our growing state," Perry said through a spokeswoman. "Our strong, healthy economy, built on a foundation of low taxes, smart regulation, fair legal system and a skilled workforce is attracting companies from across the country and around the world that want to be a part of the rising Texas success story." 

The factory will be owned and run by Flextronics International Ltd., a Singapore-based contract electronics manufacturer that has had a long relationship with Motorola. 

Assembly accounts for relatively little of the cost of a smartphone. The cost largely lies in the chips, battery and display, most of which come from Asian factories. For instance, research firm iSuppli estimates that the components of Samsung's latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, cost $229, while the assembly costs $8. 

In December, Apple said it would move manufacturing of one of its existing lines of Mac computers to the US this year, reversing decades of increasing outsourcing. The company has come under some criticism for working conditions at the Chinese factories where its products are assembled. 

Some other manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard, have kept some PC assembly operations in the US. 

Moss said the Moto X will go on sale this summer. He said he could provide few details, citing priority secrets. He said the idea from the beginning was to bring manufacturing back to the US. 

"It's obviously our major market so, for us, having manufacturing here gets us much closer to our key customers and partners as well as our end users," he said. "It makes for much leaner, more efficient operations." 

But Motorola will still have global manufacturing operations, including at factories in China and Brazil. 

"Fact remains that more than 130 million people in the US are using smartphones," Mark Randall, Motorola's senior vice president of supply chain and Operations, said in a statement, "but until Moto X, none of those smartphones have been built in the USA."

Read More

Facebook starts verifying high-profile accounts

Social networking giant Facebook today announced that it has started a new feature that allows users to identify official pages and profiles of celebrities, brands, journalists, businesses etc. Microblogging website Twitter already has this feature, called Verified Accounts. 

As part of this initiative, Facebook will add a Verification Badge to the profile/page in question, so that users are assured of authenticity. The company said, "There is no action required for Page admins to add a verification badge. In the coming days, we will automatically verify the largest Pages on Facebook that are at the greatest risk of duplication. At this time we cannot accept verification requests for all Pages." 

Official pages and profiles that do not get the Verification Badge (a small blue-coloured tick mark) can contact the company via its help centre to address the issue. They can also report fake profiles and pages to Facebook. 

The new Facebook Verification Badges will appear alongside the name of the page/person, when users hover over the name of a page, in search results as well as News Feed in desktop as well as mobile modes. Apart from that, the badges will also be shown in stories about users liking a page as well as in "Pages You May Like" suggestions.

Read More

‘Deleted‘ Snapchat photos hit the internet

Photographs shared via popular photo-sharing app SnapChat have been reportedly leaked on other websites without users' knowledge. 

SnapChat, which claimed that all the photographs shared on the app remain visible for only ten seconds, overlooked its minimal technical prowess leading to users storing the photographs forever. 

In a report by New York Daily News, app users are finding their private photos on sites like SnapChat Leaked without their consent. 

The Facebook page of SnapChat Leaked, snapchatleaked.com, received 5,34,000 likes in just 20 hours before being suspended by Facebook for violating its policies as users started using the page to bully others. 

SnapChat Leaked said that it is working with Facebook on this issue. It further added that the images are user submitted and most see it as fun and getting 'Facebook Famous'. 

This has given a rise to vindictive revenge porn where the exes and scorned lovers are lashing out on their partners by submitting their intimate photos to erotic websites, the report added.

Read More

Apple CEO calls Google Glass difficult

Google's wearable technology Google Glass, which has been gaining a lot of uncertainty about its usage and subsequent abuse related to privacy concerns, did not find a clear admirer in Apple's CEO Tim Cook.

Cook, while addressing a conference, said that the product by Google is not only difficult in terms of wearing the technology on the face but also acquiring it for $1,500, reports CNN.

Cook questioned whether people would actually want to wear the technology on their faces.

Speculations about the company unveiling an iWatch have been rampant and Cook also hinted towards entering the 'wearables' market someday but did not give out specifications saying that there is a lot of scope for exploration in this space.

Read More