Indian IT concerned over property tax hike proposal

Concerned over the proposed steep upward revision of property tax on them, IT companies here are expected to meet senior state government officials within a couple of days over the issue.

The Chennai Corporation Council passed a resolution yesterday seeking to increase theproperty tax for IT companies ranging between 50 to 200 per cent hike.

"We have been getting calls from several IT firms and agencies since morning. We are planning to meet the Government and discuss the matter during the next two days..", a senior official of an IT industry body told PTI.

Expressing apprehensions that the move would affect the industry, the official said small companies and start up firms should be spared from such steep hike.

"The government by way of encouraging start up IT companies may relax the norms to companies whose turnover is less than Rs 5 crore..," he said.

He also said the government should ensure proper infrastructure facilities for IT companies. "It cannot be a one way process. It should be two way. If they are increasing the property tax they should ensure provision of infrastructure facilities (to IT companies)", he said.

After Bangalore, considered the country's IT capital, Chennai has a number of IT firms with several of them setting up base on the Old Mahabalipuram Road also known as the IT corridor.

According to Software Technology Parks of India, IT exports from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry reached Rs 46,791 crore in 2011-12, up 10.8 per cent from Rs 42,210 crore registered during the previous fiscal.

Top calendar apps for iOS, Android, Windows

There's a software category, an important one, where there's no standard design or set of features: calendar. Each one seems to have evolved on its own Galapagos island.

Take the new calendar app in Windows 8. So much of Windows 8's touchscreen mode is modern, updated and fresh — colour, gestures, typography — that you'd expect an equally modernized calendar app at its heart. Wow, would you be wrong.

You can't drag vertically through the Day-view column to create an appointment. You can't drag an appointment to reschedule it. You can't record an autorepeating appointment like "Monday, Wednesday, Friday" or "first Tuesday of the month."

If you could mix and match the best of all the motley calendar apps, here's what you might come up with.

Give us an alternative to tabbing from Start Time to End Time and typing numbers into a New Event box. Let us drag to indicate a meeting's length. Or give us speech — intelligent speech, like Siri on the iPhone. ( Google, Apple's Calendar for the Mac, BusyCal and, in particular, the iPhone app Fantastical can all do this.) Here again, you're not fiddling with a dialogue box to enter a new event.

Microsoft's greatest calendaring effort remains Outlook, the e-mail program that comes with some versions of Microsoft Office. Outlook has its detractors, but one thing it got right is integration with your e-mail and address book. Some calendars, like Apple's Calendar and BusyCal, offer a "heat map." It's a year view in which deepening colours in the yellow-orange-red scale indicate increasingly busy times of your life.

Why are we limited to words when our gadgets are digital? We should be able to put pictures, voice recordings, videos and documents on our calendars, too.

Any decent calendar program lets you put appointments into categories like Home, Work and Social. The really good ones, like BusyCal and VueMinder Lite (free for Windows), also let you put those categories into groups.

What else should be there? Reminders — via text message , e-mail or pop-up bubble. Invitations to meetings and events, and RSVP's. Duplicate removal. Smart timezone adjustment.

Finally, it goes without saying that all modern calendars should sync. To our other computers. To our phones. To the Web. We should never, ever have to enter an appointment on more than one machine.

The world's software makers have made great strides helping us manage our money, our phone numbers and our files. Now how about equal time for time?

How to convert your Windows 8 PC into a touch device

There is a common gripe with Windows 8. Though it's really good on touch devices, it's not so good on devices where you use the good old mouse. For example, to close an application on Windows 8, you have to swipe down the screen from the top. While the gesture works fine on a tablet, it feels a bit counter-intuitive on a desktop or a laptop.

"Normally, as a Windows user, you would still look for a close button," says Moorthy DS, managing director of Hi-Tech Solutions. The company has developed a handy little device that can transform your non-touch Windows 8 desktops and laptops into a touch device via a stylus called the e-Touch Pen.

Though you cannot use your fingers as the direct interface on the screen, the stylus is far more intuitive than using the mouse. And when tested with the swipe-based game Fruit Ninja, the device was fluid and very responsive.

The device consists of two parts and works on a combination of ultrasonic and infrared technology. It has a receiver that can be clipped onto a screen and a stylus pen which acts as a transmitter. A small magnetic strip is stuck onto the side of a screen.

The receiver is clipped onto the magnetic strip and connected to the computer via a USB port. The clipped-on receiver is an infrared device which helps in positioning the stylus. The stylus transmitter is a battery-operated, ultrasonic device which has a few brushes at the end which can pick up vibrations when the pen is moved on the screen.

The signals are then transmitted to the receiver which knows where the pen is being placed on the screen. Since the gestures for touch interface are already a part of Windows 8, the device just ports into it and there is no need to install additional software.

"Windows 8 is a touch-based operating system and it's great for a tablet. But for desktops, there is a difference of about Rs 8,000 to Rs 9,000 between touch and non-touch screens," says Moorthy.

He says the device can be used on screens as big as 22-inch and costs about Rs 5,000.

Hi-Tech Solutions was started in 2007, and has a slew of products and accessories like portable document scanners and paper-to-digital devices.

How to boost your PC‘s memory

If your computer seems to be running slowly and acting as if it does not have enough memory installed, you can use software that comes with the operating system to see what is going on under the hood.

On a Windows system, open the Task Manager program by right-clicking on the Windows task bar and choosing Start Task Manager. (You can also use the keyboard shortcuts of Control-Alt-Delete or Control-Shift-Escape to summon the Task Manager.)

In the Task Manager window, you can see all the programs, services and processes currently running on the computer. You can also use the Task Manager to close an application that is not responding.

On a Mac, open the Activity Monitor program. Go to the Applications folder, then to the Utilities folder and double-click on the Activity Monitor icon. On Macs with the Launchpad feature, just click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, click the Other icon and open Activity Monitor.

Here, you can see the amount of system memory being used, what programs and processes are currently running and other system information. Apple has more information about using the Activity Monitor and steps for quitting a frozen or memoryhogging program on its site.

Google may soon replace passwords with physical keys

Search giant Google is set to kill off passwords and is experimenting with USB keys, mobile phones and even jewelry that can act as a physical 'key' to give users access to their account.

The firm's security experts including an Indian are set to publish their findings next month, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

In the upcoming issue of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, Google Vice President of Security Eric Grosse and engineer Mayank Upadhyay will detail what is basically a physical key with a 'smart chip' embedded inside it.

"Along with many in the industry, we feel passwords and simple bearer tokens such as cookies are no longer sufficient to keep users safe," the pair write in their paper, according to Wired.

To log, users simply place the tiny Universal Serial Bus (USB) drive into their computer.

The firm is also believed to be experimenting with wireless chips that are already built into some mobile phones, and can even be built in jewelry.

"We'd like your smartphone or smartcard-embedded finger ring to authorise a new computer via a tap on the computer, even in situations in which your phone might be without cellular connectivity," the team writes.

"One option uses a tiny USB key called a YubiKey. When the user plugs the key into a latop, they are automatically logged into all of their Google accounts - without ever having to type in a password," they explain.

"Another option uses a 'smartcard-embedded finger ring to authorise a new computer via a tap on the computer," they said.

The firm is also believed to be addressing the obvious problem with the system users losing their 'key' and is thought to be developing a simple system to replace them.

However, the pair admit that they will have to rely on websites to support the scheme.

"Others have tried similar approaches but achieved little success in the consumer world," they write.

"Although we recognise that our initiative will likewise remain speculative until we've proven large scale acceptance, we're eager to test it with other websites," they say.

Samsung launches Galaxy Grand phablet at Rs 21k

Samsung India has launched Galaxy Grand Duos with dual-sim functionality, bringing another phablet to the market just a day after Micromax announced its Canvas HD with 5-inch screen. The company said it will retail the device with a flip cover in the box and price it at Rs 21,500.

The all-new Galaxy Grand Duos has a 5-inch WVGA TFT screen and is powered by Android4.1 (Jelly Bean). This smartphone runs on a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and has 1GB RAM. Samsung has continued with the design language it introduced in the Galaxy S III in this smartphone as well.

At the back, the smartphone has an 8MP camera with LED flash, while there is a 2MP snapper on the front. Available only in an 8GB variant, the device's memory capacity can be raised up to 64GB via microSD card. Running on a 2,100mAh battery, the Galaxy Grand Duos has connectivity features like 3G, 2G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, S Voice and microUSB. Other features of the device include Direct Call, Smart Alert, Popup Video and AllShare Play. Galaxy Grand will also have multi-app functionality, allowing users to access two apps simultaneously.

A Samsung India executive said that if a user is taking a call on one sim, Galaxy Grand Duos' auto-forwarding feature will automatically redirect an incoming call on the other sim to the first connection.

Micromax recently claimed that it has shipped more phablets than Samsung in the country. At the unveiling of Canvas HD, the indigenous manufacturer said it shipped 1.98 lakh phablets, while Samsung imported 1.89 lakh units of its Galaxy Note and Note II tablets.

Infosys market cap jumps by $4 billion, more than Fiji‘s GDP

Shares in Infosys closed up 16.8 per cent on Friday after stellar third-quarter results and an unexpected rise in its fiscal year revenue estimate, adding $4.07 billion to its market capitalization, more than the GDP of Fiji.

Infosys' 16.8 percent jump almost single-handedly kept the Sensex in the black, with 26 of its 30 components closing lower, including index heavyweights Reliance Industries and tobacco major ITC.

Fiji's gross domestic product stood at $3.81 billion in 2011, according to the most recent data available from the World Bank.

India's No.2 software services provider Infosys Ltd raised its revenue forecast after posting stronger-than-expected quarterly profit, triggering a 15 percent surge in its shares, set for their biggest gain in more than a decade.

Many investors had dumped shares in the company after a string of disappointing quarters eroded Infosys' reputation as the sector bellwether, putting pressure on CEO SD Shibulal to win more deals and make the firm more profitable.

"We continue to gain confidence from a strong pipeline of large deals," Shibulal said in a statement. "We remain cautiously optimistic about the January-March quarter."

The Bangalore-based company unexpectedly raised its sales forecast for the year ending March 31 to at least $7.45 billion, including $104 million in additional revenue following its acquisition of Switzerland-based consultancy Lodestone Holdings.

That would be a rise of 6.6 percent from a year earlier, compared with a previous forecast for a 5 percent increase.

New deals, including 13 in Europe, helped boost Infosys' revenue. Spending on IT services by capital markets clients such as investment banks and brokerages has also improved, Ashok Vemury, head of Americas and manufacturing, told reporters in Bangalore after the earnings announcement.

Clients that have signed big contracts with Infosys, including Harley-Davidson, also accelerated spending during the quarter, he said.

However, some analysts said it was still too early to predict a recovery for the company.

"We are positively surprised by Infosys' performance, and need to study the durability of Infosys' comeback," JPMorgan said in a research note.

Analysts had expected Infosys to trim its annual sales growth to as low as 3.3 per cent after the company warned last month that US clients had cut back on projects and delayed signing big deals.

"The market was slightly predatory, given that the last two times the company has disappointed, but this time the organic guidance is better ... which I think will be taken positively," said Rikesh Parikh, vice president for markets strategy and equities at Motilal Oswal Securities in Mumbai.