From the offset of 2009, the name ‘Satyam’ has been in the news lines of major business newspapers and TV channels. It all started off with the disclosure by Satyam’s founder and then Chairman Ramalinga Raju about the financial fraud did by him and his close colleagues. This scandal rocked the Indian IT business, which was already shattered by the recession and led to a steep decline at the stock market. The Government of India had appointed directors at the Satyam board to find a solution to end this scandal. Finally, Tech Mahindra -The IT arm of Mahindra & Mahindra emerged as the potential buyers of Satyam for $354 million (In 2008, Mr. Anand Mahindra – Vice Chairman of M&M had contacted Mr. Raju for a tie-up, but due to the lack of response from Raju, the alliance didn’t happen.)

There were several eyebrows raised when Mahindra acquired Satyam through the open bid. The primary concern was making the defamed organization a profitable one amid the slow down and merging it with Tech Mahindra. Tech Mahindra’s main intention behind this acquisition is to extend their portfolio beyond telecom. Tech Mahindra, a Joint venture between Mahindra and British Telecom, has 70 of their revenues from telecom and has a very good customer base in Europe. They wanted to extend their reach to US, where Satyam has a good Client base.

Satyam, on the other hand, is diversified: with customers’ in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail and healthcare sectors. Tech Mahindra sees this leverage, when they bid for lucrative projects like ERP, where Satyam has expertise. Though Satyam is calumniated with the corporate fraud, none of its clients have doubt in its ability to deliver. That has prompted Tech Mahindra to go for Satyam.

According to CP. Gurnani, the new CEO of Mahindra Satyam and Sanjay Karla, the CEO of Tech Mahindra; both these companies will bid together for projects to get the leverage of diverse portfolios rather than bidding against each other. Though a comprehensive merging doesn’t look apparent on the cards now, the partnership will catalyze the proposed merger in a couple of years. By that time Mahindra Satyam will re capture its erstwhile structure, which they had before the scandal.

It has been proved that the recession is the best time to start a business due to myriad reasons. The main advantage is that it won’t get worse than the prevailing situation and the expenses to start up a new venture is low compared to boom. For starting a new business or improving an existing one, the entrepreneur should have a good business plan. So, what makes a business plan that stays near to perfect and attracts equity? Here are the important ingredients which makes a perfect business plan.

The Executive Summary

Write this summary last, and make sure it contains the highlights of your plan. Assume your most important readers will read only this section.

The Company

A plan for a startup describes your strategy for creating the legal entity and how the initial ownership will be divided among the founders. It should also include a table that lists startup costs and initial funding. A plan for an ongoing or already existing company should describe the legal form of the business, the company history and the business’s past performance.

What You Sell

Describe the products or services you offer. Emphasize why buyers purchase those things, what benefits they get, and what pain points they have before they buy. Show how much it costs to deliver what you’re selling.

Your Market

Describe your target market, including market demographics, market growth and trends. Include a table that shows a market forecast. Describe the nature of your industry and the competition you have.

Strategy and Implementation

Strategy is all about focus. So focus on certain target market segments, certain products or services, and specific distribution avenues. Forecast your sales and the cost of sales. Define your milestones with dates, budgets and specific responsibilities.

Management Team

Name and describe the key members on your team. Include a table that shows personnel costs. List the gaps in the management team–if any–and show how they’re being addressed.

Financial Projections

Describe your financial strategy and how it supports your projected growth. Include a break-even analysis that shows risk as a matter of fixed vs. variable costs. Include projected profit or loss, cash flow and balance sheets.

In its endeavor to be the leader on the software space, Google Inc has announced its foray into the manufacture of Operating System, with its maiden project named ‘Google Chrome OS‘. Google has already locked its horns with Microsoft on numerous projects and the present one will intensify the competition. Being the 90% market shareholder of the OS market, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this concern. Since Google believes on Open Source concept, if the Chrome OS project is rolled out successfully, then it will revolutionize the entire PC, Laptop and OS markets.

In its official blog, Google explains more about Chrome OS, which aims the Netbook market initially. Google Chrome OS is expected to hit the market by the second half of 2010.

Pocket-sized Dell Mini 10V

The Arrival of Netbooks has turned the PC market upside down as diverse models and players are coming in short span of time. This segment triggered the competition when Acer introduced its first Netbook model Acer Aspire One in to the market. Dell took further long time for foraying in to Netbooks market. They started with Dell Inspiron Mini 9 then followed by Mini 10,12 and now the advanced Mini 10V.

The hapless performance of Mini 9,10 and 12 forced Dell to come up with a robust model, which can capture some market share in this segment. The drawbacks of the former models were the lack of good memory and hard drive space. Mini 12 was expected to become a leader however; its limited memory slot and hard drive pushed them out of the competition. (Dell Inspiron Mini 12 has 1GB DDR2 memory slot and 80 GB Hard Disk)

Mini 10V Tech specifications

Processor – Intel^® Atom^TM N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512K L2Cache)

Operating System – Microsoft Windows XP

Memory – 1GB,DDR2,533MHZ

Hard Drives – 160GB SATA HDD 2.5 inch 5400RPM

Display – 10.1″ Widescreen 1024 x 600 WSVGA (WLED)

Apart from these, Mini10V comes up with 1.3 MP webcam, Blue tooth module and for power there are 3 cell & 6 cell Li-lon batteries.

Battery Performance

With the 3-Cell battery , it gives a max of 3 hours and 6-cell battery exhaust after 6.5 hours.

Price – $375

While there is no doubt that good SEO consultants can help drive more traffic to your site, many small businesses cannot afford a good consultant.  But you don’t need to despair if you can’t afford an expensive SEO consultant.  If you are one of those DIY type business owners, this article will help you create a fairly decent search-engine optimized site.  Even if you plan to use a web design/development agency and not do it yourself, you can demand that they create a site that complies with basic SEO tenets.

Here is how to go about placing yourself on the right side of search engines:

1. Keyword analysis – This should be done before you start building your site.  If you already have a site, you may have to tweak your content based on the results of this analysis.  Know what keywords are used by your customers to find you.  This may not be industry jargon words.  A good tool to start with is Google’s Keyword Tool.  You need to identify the keywords or phrases that have high volume but less competition.  Once you identify the keywords for a page, mention it a few times on that page.  Do not over-stuff your page with keywords.  Search engines penalize keyword stuffing.  Write naturally, but don’t forget to repeat your keywords a few times.
2. Make sure every page on your site has a proper title tag, meta keywords and meta descriptions.  Again, there is no need to repeat your keywords too many times, but your keyword should be there on the title tag, as it’s the most important tag from a search-engine perspective.
3. Search engine friendly URLs (SEF).  You need to have meaningfully named URLs that accurately describe the page content.  Example: www.example.com/camera/dslr/nikon/D5000 is better than www.example.com?product_id=123.  Carefully choose your URL names and structure.  Now, how do you create search-engine friendly URLs?  You can provide URL rewriting rules in .htaccess if you are using Apache; but it is cumbersome to manage.  Many content-management systems like Drupal and Wordpress support SEF, so if you are using these, you’ve got yourself covered.  Most web app development frameworks like Symfony also support SEF.
4. Provide textual description for all non-text elements like images, audio and video.  For example, use alt tag with images.  This will help the search engine better understand your multi-media content.  This has the added benefit of making your site accessible.
5. Search engine bots should be able to spider all your content even if the content resides in a database and are dynamically displayed.  For example, your products may be sitting in your product catalog table in a database, but should create a static looking page for each product.
6. Make effective use of heading tags like h1 and h2 to showcase the relative importance of text.  Your important text should be text and not images.
7. Use ordered lists for creating menus rather than using tables.
8. The anchor text (hyperlink to another page) should contain keywords that describe the target page.  Instead of writing “Click here for D5000 details”, it’s better if you write “check out the D5000 digital SLR camera“.
9. Avoid duplicate content issues.  If example.com, www.example.com and www.example.com/index.php all point to the same page, you should consider one of them as the primary URL.  If you designate www.example.com as your primary or canonical URL, then the other URLs should be permanently redirected to the canonical URL.  You can redirect by using the HTTP 301 code.  Also consider storing the session id or affiliate parameter in a cookie and then redirect the URL with parameters to the canonical version.
10. Never copy-and-paste content from other sites.  You may be violating copyright laws and incurring duplicate content penalty. Likewise, if you are getting your content from a syndication service, check that the same content is not syndicated to other sites.  Do a Google search on your content and if you find that your content has been copied by someone else, file a DMCA request with Google.
11. What if you have multiple top-level domains? Like example.com and example.net?  If you plan to have identical content on all these sites, do a permanent redirect to your primary domain.
12. Multiple language versions of your site – I would say use a different sub-domain for each language.  Example: fr.example.com for French and de.example.com for German.  Using the same URL for different language versions is not a good idea.
13. Block search engines from seeing admin panels, HTTPS content etc by using the robots exclusion protocol.  Password protect those pages you don’t want the outside world to see.
14. How do you know if Google has indexed all your pages?  Search for site:example.com on Google.  It will return the number of pages indexed.
15. Externalize CSS and Javascript.
16. Follow XHTML 1.0 strict standard.
17. Reduce the amount of code in your page, and maintain a good content-to-code ratio.
18. Speed is important.  Your pages should load fast and should not timeout.
19. Use microformats to describe your data.
20. Last but not the least, build quality in-bound links.

Some of the above items need further explanation.  However, there is a wealth of information available in blogs and online articles.  So start digging and learn more on this interesting topic.

We all know that there are a number of search engines on the Net but most of us invariably turn to Google to search for anything and everything we need. Although it often meets up to expectations, there have been times when even Google cannot seem to retrieve what we are looking for.

Here’s a new and useful search engine specially designed to solve this problem. Search3 has recently launched its beta search engine www.search3.com, This search engine allows you to search for an item in different search engines all at once. You can choose among Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and Ebay for web search. For image search, you have Flickr as an additional choice.  The search results are displayed in a three-column format depending on your choice of search engines. The founders plan to add new search engines in the coming days to give users a wider variety of engines to choose from.

Currently, this search engine provides only web and image search. But more categories like health, real estate, etc. will be included shortly.  A mobile version and iPhone app for the service will also be rolled out soon.

With search3.com, users can now compare and decide for themselves which search engine gives them the best results. But the people who are really going to benefit from this tool are SEO professionals who now have a convenient means of comparing page ranking for their websites in different search engines.

Do read up more on search3.com features before you decide to integrate it into your web browser.

WhatWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) was formed in 2004 with focus on HTML and APIs for web applications.  Specification document for HTML 5.0 is in progress.  The document gets updated on a regular basis.  Check out the document at http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html.  Getting our head into the document is tedious and cannot be made to fit into one page.  So here we will glance over a few new elements to get a picture of how HTML 5.0 is going to be.

Div Element

Header, footer, nav, aside, article and section are new elements that will replace div.  The complexities of div have paved way for these elements.  Instead of having so many div tags inside the code, HTML 5 gives the capability to use separate element for each purpose.  During modifications, identifying a particular portion thus becomes easy. These two snapshots will give an idea of how the simplification is going to work.

Audio Video Elements

Recently, audio and video have mass migrated to Internet.  HTML 5 provides the ability to treat audio and video as web pages without the need for plug-ins to play them. That is, audio and video will be natively supported by the HTML 5 compliant browsers.  The debate on whether to use a standard format or to support all formats is still on.  These elements are expected to contain textual content for every video, audio brought in the web page.  Such a provision will enable information to be conveyed through non-supportive browsers.  Internet users with debilities will also have the accessibility to web content.  Here is a lookup.

<audio src=”Martinluther.mp3″>

<p>I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.</p>

…</audio>

Few More Elements

Time element will help browsers,  search engines and web crawlers identify time from web pages.  Images are brought through the figure element.  Captions of the image are always associated with the image.  This will allow the user agents to understand more about the image.  Dialog is a another new element and it comes up with 2 sub tags: dt, dd.  dt will indicate the speaker and dd will indicate the dialog.  Here is an example:

<dialog>

<dt>Fay</dt>

<dd>Jerry, could you show me how to hold the racket?</dd>

<dt>Jerry</dt>

<dd>Sure Fay, it’s just like shaking hands. Hold your hand out as though you were going to shake my hand… </dd>

<dt>Fay</dt>

<dd>Do you mean like this?</dd>

<dt>Jerry</dt>

<dd>Right, like that. Then put the racket in your hand, like this. </dd>

</dialog>

There is more in HTML 5.  Seeing by the way developers are contributing to its specification, we can sure expect fascinating behaviors in web pages soon. Most importantly, you can contribute too. Here’s how:

Subscribe to the WhatWG mailing list: http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list

Participate in discussions: http://forums.whatwg.org/

Comment and post blogs: http://blog.whatwg.org/

Links to articles on HTML 5:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/How_HTML_5_Is_Already_Changing_the_Web

Going through the number of times WCAG is mentioned in Twitter and blogs, I find that it has not got the publicity it deserves. Most developers tend to think of accessibility as a luxury they cannot afford. Consequently it finds its place way down in their priority list. However, as we shall see, making a site accessible will not cost you a lot. And accessibility is not only aimed at addressing the needs of disabled, but people who use text browsers, low resolution monitors etc. Thus if your site is designed with accessibility in mind, you will surely see more traffic to your site.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for developing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) documents. The first version, WCAG 1.0, was published in May 1999. The latest WCAG 2.0 was released on 11^th December 2008. The primary intent to publish these documents was to make web content easily accessible to everyone irrespective of any disabilities. WCAG 2.0 is designed in such a way that it is simpler and easier to understand for the web developer community. The document is built on four foundational principles. Then, there are few guidelines provided under each principle. Each guideline is challenged by different testable success criteria. Satisfaction of all these criteria will make the web site conform to WCAG. Let us go through the four principles in brief.

Perceivable

The first principle implies that any content that is displayed on the website must be perceivable. The dictionary meaning of the word perceivable means ‘To achieve understanding of’, ‘To become aware of directly through any of the senses, especially sight or hearing’. In our context, it means that anyone who accesses the web for content should be able to apprehend the information that is presented.

There are four guidelines furnished to illustrate this principle. The first two coerce to provide text alternatives for non-text content and time-based media. This would enable the user to enlarge or render in whatever tactile form as needed. The third guideline focuses on the structure and presentation of the content. A simple design that complies to the standards will reduce the complexities when there is a requirement to extract content and present to debile users. Sometimes distinguishing foreground information from background can become difficult. The fourth guideline helps avoid this conflict and focuses on making information distinguishable. Success criteria are determined on color, contrast, background audio, text images and many more.

Operable

The second principle deals with the operability of the user interface components. Users can come across situations where they are not able to interact with the content due to issues in links, user controls and other navigation.

The first guideline under this principle recommends making all the functionality of the content available from a keyboard. This does not outweigh the use of mouse and other interfaces. On the contrary, it means that complete dependence on these devices must be forgone. The guideline also cautions of keyboard traps and advices methods to keep the user away from them. The other guidelines focus on ensuring that the users will be able to complete the tasks required by the content with their own individual response times. For every time limit automatically set by the content, it requires the user to have options to turn it off, adjust and also extend the limit. They also caution the design about seizures mainly occurring due to excessive use of Flash. The last guideline recommends helping the users in their navigation to find content. There are 10 success criteria listed to check whether a user is properly guided.

Understandable

Understandability is the next issue the document addresses. The principle mainly targets the people in the lower part of the intellectual group. It compels the developer to make the content easily available in predictable ways and also help the user avoid and correct mistakes.

The first guideline stresses on making the content readable and understandable. Success criteria are set on languages, abbreviations and pronunciations. It also speaks about restricting unusual words or phrases including idioms and jargon. The other guidelines show light on making the pages predictable and providing assistance to the user in mistake-prone sections. Using instructional labels and help pages can assist the user in different areas.  Detecting errors and reporting immediately, as and when the user is inputting information is also a better method of assistance. These together form the success criteria for this principle.

Robust

The last principle is the most important of all the four. It checks the robustness of the content. Accessibility by user agents is checked here. There is only one guideline and it speaks about the compatibility of the content with the current and future technologies. Avoiding deprecated features of W3C technologies makes the site more compatible. Success criteria are designed for custom user interfaces to check compatibility.

Adhere to the guidelines suggested in WCAG 2.0 will bring in more traffic. Therefore it is essential from the developers’ point of view to know these standards and make them a part of our work.

Link for further study:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

Are you a busy Internet professional or website owner who’s finding it difficult to sign into several micro blogging accounts to post your business topics? It can be quite a tedious and time-consuming process to log into each of these accounts and individually post your news.

SPNBabbble solves all that for you. With an SPNBabble account, all you need to do is enter a single posting and voila! It gets published simultaneously in Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Tumbrl, and Friendfeed. You will of course need to be a member in all these communities.

Well, doesn’t that make social media networking a lot easier for you? What’s more, many of SPNBabble’s features are similar to Twitter. So Twitter users are going to find it quite easy to operate this plugin.

SPNBabble also has other features, which are:

• SMS messaging
• Direct messaging
• IM message
• Hash tag usage
• Search
• Groups

SPNBabble is specially developed for website owners, web masters, web developers, web designers and business professionals. An offshoot of SiteProNews, this site is in the Jayde Online Network and deployed using Laconica software.

More features are planned in the future to give connectivity to other micro blogs. With this, SPNBabble is surely on its way to becoming a hot favorite among web publishers!

Google has added some new features to its already existing features which would make life simpler for its users. Google’s engineers are working round the clock in Google Labs, adding new features to make Gmail more popular and ahead of its competitors. One feature which is very useful is importing your emails and contacts from other accounts to Gmail.

Gmail users can easily import all their emails and contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL accounts. All a user needs to do is enter his Webmail account details (user name and password) into Google’s service and over the next 24 to 48 hours, all his emails and contacts will be automatically imported to his Gmail account.

Google now also lets you test drive Gmail. The company offers a 30-day test-drive mode for users to decide whether they like Gmail or not. The feature, presently available to new users, is likely to be extended to current users soon.

Google has also added a search widget in Gmail, which enables users to search the web without opening a new browser.

The new feature shows a search box onto the left side of Gmail inbox. When a user types in a search, a window (like a chat window) appears at the bottom of the screen with search results.

These are some of the new features that Google has added in its Gmail service. To know more about the latest features in Gmail, just visit Google Labs where a whole lot of gadgets and features await you.