Orkut launches its Mobile Version and Low Bandwidth Site

Orkut has silently released a low bandwidth version of their site for users with dialup or GPRS.

If you have a slow internet connection or a Pay-Per-MB internet plan you should definitely use the lo-fi version of Orkut. To this this:
Navigate to General Settings
Choose “show the low bandwidth version of orkut” option button.
Hit Save Changes.
Enjoy a faster and low data usage Orkut!

Selecting this option switches your account to a low bandwidth version where images in scrapbook, profile pages and the user’s orkut homepage are disabled.

Orkut also has a mobile version of its site for people who have GPRS enabled on their handsets. The mobile version can be found at m.orkut.com - this mobile version lets you read scraps, receive recent updates from friends and you can also approve or decline new friend requests.

Happy Orkutting!

Google Fights Porn With Copyright-ID Tech

The fight against child pornography is getting an assist from technology designed by Google Inc. to help identify copyright-protected clips on its YouTube video-sharing site.

Four Google employees used their "20 percent time" - during which the company encourages them to pursue unofficial, out-of-the-box projects - to customize the copyright software for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's program for identifying children in sexually explicit photos and video.

Software already has been used to match known images, but when new ones are submitted by law enforcement and service providers, analysts generally make identifications manually, often based on recollections. The center has recently employed facial-recognition technology to make those IDs easier, but with limited success.

With the new Google tools, analysts can also seek matches based on other attributes, such as the color and shape of a couch or the wallpaper pattern in the background of a photo.

Ernie Allen, the center's president, appreciates the new tool.

The center used to be "dependent on the memory of the analyst who was already overwhelmed by the sheer number of content we were receiving," he said, adding that its 11 analysts processed 5 million child-pornography images last year.

Allen said the center's work helps prosecutors build evidence and police locate children who have been forced to engage in sexual acts.

Google's contribution grew out of an existing partnership between the center and leading technology companies, including Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Microsoft Corp.

"The keys here were organization, scalability and search," Google research scientist Shumeet Baluja wrote about the project on a company blog. "In particular, the tools we provided will aid in organizing and indexing NCMEC's information so that analysts can both deal with new images and videos more efficiently and also reference historical material more effectively."

burrp.com Launches Online TV Guide

burrp.com has launched burrp!TV, an online television guide that offers a comprehensive view of what is playing across TV channels in India. burrp!TV will be an extension to the portal's existing offering that currently comprises of local lifestyle listings.

burrp!TV will have features like Search, Time Travel, SMS Alerts, Movie Explorer and will be WAP enabled.

Search is the ability to search television listings for show names, character names, channel or genre, while Time Travel will allow users to view channel schedules 14 days ahead of time. Users can set SMS reminders before a show is about to commence with SMS Alerts and can use the Movie Explorer browser for movies playing across all television channels. Users will also be able to access burrp!TV on their mobile phones through GPRS.

Deap Ubhi, co-founder and CEO, burrp.com said, "Television is an exploding medium in India but surprisingly there are not enough structured offerings in this space. As the Indian audiences grow wider and more diverse, the TV space will respond with more expansive content, creating a greater need to structure information and filter out the noise. That's where burrp!TV comes in the picture, continually helping users to make informed decisions."

The company has roped in media networks such as Star, Sony, Zee and Discovery as well as other independent channels such as Zoom to support the platform with schedules and content.

Currently the portal displays schedules of 14 television channels. The company is in talks with all major national as well as regional channels and aims to tie-up all major Indian television channels by this year.

Gmail Integrates AOL's AIM

Gmail users who love the ease of chatting with their buddies from right within the Gmail interface have one more reason to be happy. Starting today Gmail users can sign into their AIM accounts via Gmail chat and talk with AIM buddies just as they do with their Google Talk friends.

Apart from that, features such as chat history and automatic sorting of buddies based on frequency of communication, will work seamlessly across Google and AIM buddies. This roll out today is in the newest English version of Gmail and will be available in other languages soon.

Gmail users can just click on the upside-down triangle next to "set status here" in their Gmail chat and select "Sign into AIM" from the drop down menu. Once they've entered their AIM log-in information, their AIM contacts will appear intermingled among Gmail contacts, and they can select an AIM contact and chat with them directly.

In February 2006, Google integrated real-time chat into the Gmail email service letting users switch between email and instant messaging without having to think about which they were using. Google also allowed users to keep a history of chats and emails together in conversation threads.

Nokia Introduces Internet Radio Service

With Nokia's Internet Radio service now available and downloadable for free from http://www.nokia.com/internetradio, users can discover and listen to radio shows broadcasted over the internet.

The station directory of Nokia Internet Radio makes music discovery easy, as users can base their search on station name, genre, country or language and can find out what hits are hot around the world with hourly updates of the top ten most popular internet radio stations available on the station directory. Users can also access their favorite stations quickly by adding them to the list of 'Favorites'.

"Most new music discovery occurs while you’re listening to the radio" said Tommi Mustonen, head of the Nokia music business. "By offering the Nokia Internet Radio service on mobile devices, the radio experience becomes more accessible, giving people new ways to find music"

The Nokia Internet Radio application is currently available for download to the following devices: Nokia N82, Nokia N91, Nokia N95 and Nokia N95 8GB. The application is planned to be available later on further devices and will be embedded in selected upcoming Nokia S60 3rd edition devices.

Mass Mailers Top November Security Threats

Fortinet, network and Internet security agency has released a list of the top 10 security threats that plagued networks and users for the month of November. As the data list below shows, it was a collection of Mass Mail virii that have topped the charts. The rise of Mass mailers can be directly linked not only the upcoming holiday and shopping season but also a general increase in online advertising. This lead to the emergence of Virii like Clicker.AC, which has code that is specifically designed to bypass browsers' pop-up blocking technology.

Another example of the increasing sophistication of malware is Stration.JQ, which relies on an advanced social engineering strategy based on dual attachments. While the email received by end users aims at misleading them by providing instructions for personal account access, the innovation lies in the attachments: an "authorization module", which is in fact Stration.JQ, coupled with a PDF attachment containing financial information such as an invoice, a fee analysis, etc. The content of the email and PDF are both intended to stir the user's curiosity and make the request sound legitimate, therefore tremendously increasing the click-through rate of the mass mailer. Unfortunately, any user opening the "authorization module" will turn her/his computer into a bot.

"Hacking legitimate site content to host malicious code has become very common. This month, many trusted Internet sites were unwittingly 'hosting' flash advertisements injected with encrypted redirects, forcing users to visit other sites once the ad was displayed. More determined efforts to conceal malware using trusted sources are likely to be made as we enter into the busy holiday season of December," said Derek Manky, security research engineer at Fortinet. "Examples of adware such as Clicker.AC illustrate the trend in what is becoming the blend between malware and grayware and further emphasizes the need for threat awareness, not only from the end user's perspective, but also for corporations and their affiliates.".Rank Threat Name Threat Type % of Detections
1 W32/Netsky!similar Mass mailer 10.87
2 HTML/Iframe_CID!exploit Exploit 8.21
3 HTML/Clicker.AC!tr Trojan 6.60
4 W32/ANI07.A!exploit Exploit 5.14
5 W32/Stration.JQ@mm Mass mailer 3.11
6 W32/MyTob.CJ@mm Mass mailer 2.42
7 W32/Bagle.DY@mm Mass mailer 2.25
8 W32/Grew.A!worm Worm 2.09
9 Adware/TCent Adware 1.86
10 Adware/Bdsearch Adware 1.71

Nat Geo, Zapak.com Launch Interactive Website

Taking off from National Geographic Channel's new series 'My Brilliant Brain ', Nat Geo and Zapak.com have created an interactive website called Brilliantbrain.

While the TV series celebrates the power of the human mind and examines three groups of genius to answer questions about the origins of genius, the website, www.brilliantbrain.in, features mind-tickling features for viewers to have fun with their mind, check their Genius Quotient and win loads of prizes. These features include mind-games, brain-teasers, multiplayer games where you can chat with other users while playing, blog, ask the expert section, videos of the international and local geniuses featured in the series and more.

The highest scorer on the website will win the My Brilliant Brain grand prize, which is a trip for 2 to Washington DC to visit the National Geographic Museum. Besides the grand prize, there are also Nat Geo goody bags along with limited edition Nat Geo telescopes to be won every week on the website.

Rajesh Sheshadri, Senior Vice President - Content and Communication, National Geographic Channel, India said, "My Brilliant Brain is a celebration of the incredible powers of the human mind. The focus of the promotional activities is to stimulate and challenge the minds of viewers nation-wide in an exciting and engaging format, with interactivity being the key. Our online initiative with Zapak.com is our way to reach out to our viewers in an innovative manner. Zapak.com is the ultimate destination for on-line gaming and an association with them has helped us create a unique My Brilliant Brain experience for the netizens."

My Brilliant Brain premieres on the National Geographic Channel on December 10 at 10 pm and will feature international and Indian content. The Indian film titled, 'India's Geniuses' will feature four Indian geniuses and will be hosted by actor, Konkona Sen Sharma.

New Windows Genuine Advantage to Roll Out

Microsoft Corp. is pulling back from a system that disables programs on users' computers if it suspects the software is pirated, opting instead for a gentler approach based on nagging alerts.

Microsoft said late Monday it will roll out the new version of Windows Genuine Advantage with the first service pack for Windows Vista, due in the first quarter of 2008.

When computer users activate a copy of Windows Vista or try to download certain software from Microsoft's website, the Windows Genuine Advantage system scans their PCs for signs of pirated software. As of now, if the tool finds an unauthorized copy of Vista, the glassy Vista user experience disappears and other features are suspended.

In the new version, PC users found to have a pirated copy of Vista will continue to be able to use their computers, but with unmistakable signs their operating system is a fake. The desktop wallpaper will turn black, and a white notice will appear alerting users to the problem. Each time they log in, they will be prompted to buy legitimate software, and every hour, a reminder bubble will appear on the screen.

Users with a high tolerance for irritation can put off switching to genuine software indefinitely, but those who relent and buy a real copy of Windows can do so at reduced prices – $119 for Windows Vista Home Premium, half the regular retail price.

"We want to make sure unwitting victims get a great treatment," said Mike Sievert, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Windows marketing group.

Windows Genuine Advantage collects several pieces of information about a PC during the check, including the serial number on the hard drive and its IP address, but Sievert says none of that can be used to identify individual PC users.

In August, the Windows Genuine Advantage team at Microsoft accidentally updated its servers with computer code that wasn't quite ready for prime time. As a result, Microsoft said "fewer than 12,000" people who tried to validate software over a two-day period couldn't.

Some found legitimate copies of Windows hobbled after the tool labeled them pirated, and an outcry spread across Web forums and technology news sites.

Sievert said the glitch in August was unrelated to the change in how the Windows Genuine Advantage tool will work.

"Microsoft realizes it has to take a different approach with their customers," said Chris Swenson, a software industry analyst for market researcher NPD Group. "If you shut down someone's computer, you're going to anger customers."

Microsoft also said Monday the package of Vista updates will fix two holes in the operating system that have allowed pirates to create counterfeit copies – one that mimics the activation of software by computer makers before a PC is sold, and one that extends a grace period given to people who install new software, before they must activate it.

Sievert said Microsoft plans to offer an update for Windows Genuine Advantage that will run the piracy check regularly without the computer user initiating the process.

AOL Uses Amazon for Video Sales

AOL on Friday scrapped its year-old pay-for-download service in favor of Web retailer Amazon.com Inc.'s technology for selling movies and TV shows online.

Financial terms of the deal were not available, but Amazon said it will share revenue with AOL.

"It's really about focus," said Fred McIntyre, senior vice president of AOL Video, which is owned by Time Warner Inc. "AOL, as a company, is in the process of shifting our focus for our primary business and everything we do towards an advertising business."

McIntyre would not say whether the pay-to-download video business met or missed the company's expectations.

AOL started selling video online last October, but on Friday, its site displayed a large banner promoting Amazon's Unbox service.

For Amazon, which launched the Unbox video downloading service in September 2006, the AOL deal is its second high-profile win in recent months. NBC Universal decided in September to sell episodes of its newest TV shows through Unbox, after failing to reach an agreement with Apple Inc. to offer them on iTunes.

Amazon launched Unbox in September 2006. It offers thousands of television shows, movies and other videos from more than 30 studios and networks. TV shows cost $1.99 per episode, and most movies cost $7.99 to $14.99.

AOL isn't the only Web player to cut the pay-for-download video model and focus instead on ad-supported video. In August, Google Inc. stopped selling and renting movies and TV shows, in favor of promoting YouTube, the viral video sharing site it bought last year.

Askville.com Now Open to All

Open to a select number of users since its initial beta launch last December, Askville.com is now available to all Amazon.com's customers around the world.

Askville.com is a website where users can ask and answer questions, and discover answers to questions on everything from how to buy an HDTV to the best way to lose weight.

Askville.com users who share their knowledge by answering questions will receive Quest Gold, which, for a limited time and while supplies last, can be redeemed for $100 or $50 Amazon.com Gift Cards. The amount of Quest Gold a user earns is tied to how well they answer questions on Askville.com and what level of expertise they have reached in a particular topic (users earn experience points in specific topics when they answer questions and are promoted to higher levels within each topic as they continue to submit high-quality answers in those topics).

"Finding information or getting good advice is hard enough when you are searching the Internet by yourself," said Joseph Park, Director of Askville.com. "Askville.com allows you to ask a question to a community of users who are willing to help you find that information or give you advice from their own personal experiences, which makes the discoverability of information much more efficient. Plus, it is a lot more fun interacting with real people versus looking at a list of website links from a search engine." "Not everyone finds what they are looking for on the web," said Park. "We believe Askville.com can help users find information while also making it a fun experience by sharing your knowledge with other curious, like-minded people."

Users who are not Amazon customers and have a cell phone in the U.S. and Canada can still gain access to Askville.com by authenticating themselves via mobile phone.

Askville.com plans to launch another website called Questville.com where users will be able to use their Quest Gold for various activities and a chance to get other rewards.

Facebook Revamps New Advertising System

Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook Inc. has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies.

Under the changes outlined late Thursday, Facebook's 55 million users will be given greater control over whether they want to participate in a three-week-old program that circulates potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activities.

Facebook provided two different opportunities to block the details from being shared, but many users said they never saw the "opt-out" notices before they disappeared from the screen.

With the reforms, Facebook promised its users will now have to give their explicit consent, or "opt-in," before any information is passed along.

The concessions were made after more than 50,000 Facebook users signed an online petition blasting the system, called "Beacon," as a galling intrusion that put the Palo Alto-based startup's pursuit of profit ahead of its members' privacy interests.

More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.

Unless instructed otherwise, the participating sites alerted Facebook, which then notified a user's friends within the social network about items that had been bought or products that had been reviewed.

Facebook thought the marketing feeds would help its users keep their friends better informed about their interests while also serving as "trusted referrals" that would help drive more sales to the sites using the Beacon system.

But thousands of Facebook users viewed the Beacon referrals as a betrayal of trust. Critics blasted the advertising tool as an unwelcome nuisance with flimsy privacy protections that had already exasperated and embarrassed some users.

Some users have already complained about inadvertently finding out about gifts bought for them for Christmas and Hanukkah after Beacon shared information from Overstock.com. Other users say they were unnerved when they discovered their friends had found out what movies they were watching through purchases made on Fandango.

If Facebook adheres to the new "opt-in" standard, "it would be a significant step in the right direction," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org, which launched the petition drive to revamp Beacon just nine days ago. "It also says a lot about the ability of Internet user to band together to make a difference."

The backlash against Beacon illustrated the delicate balancing act that Facebook must negotiate as the company tries to cash in on its popularity without alienating the users fueling its success.

Beacon is a key component in Facebook's "Social Ads" program, which is vying to make more money from the rapidly growing audience that uses the social network's free services as a place to flirt, gossip and share personal passions.

Privately held Facebook already is believed to generate more than $150 million in annual revenue after just three years in business, but it's under pressure to accelerate its growth.

Microsoft Corp. raised the stakes last month by paying $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake. The investment valued Facebook at $15 billion - an assessment that will require the company to become a lot more profitable in the next few years.

Skeptics have questioned Facebook's market value, given the company's brief existence and the inexperience of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who started the social network in 2004 while he was still a Harvard University student.

This isn't the first time that Facebook has done an about-face after introducing a feature that raised privacy concerns. Last year, Facebook rolled out a "news feeds" tool that tracked changes to users' profiles. After thousands of users rebelled, Zuckerberg issued a contrite apology and added a way to turn off the news feeds.

This time around, a customer support representative expressed Facebook's regrets in a Wednesday night note that foreshadowed the changes made Thursday.

"We're sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans," Facebook's Paul Janzer wrote in a posting addressed to Beacon's critics. "We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends." Janzer also acknowledged Beacon "can be kind of confusing."

Zuckerberg, whose stake in Facebook is worth $3 billion, thought Beacon's referral system would be seen as friendly product endorsements that generated more sales than traditional advertising. He hailed the distribution of peer recommendations as advertising's "holy grail" when Beacon was introduced earlier this month.

But Beacon may lose some of its luster with the tougher privacy controls. That's because fewer people typically participate in services with opt-in provisions.

Testers See Windows XP Passing Vista

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system is about to get faster and Windows Vista isn't, according to a report that caused a stir online this week as industry watchers speculated that a zippier XP could keep customers from upgrading to Vista.

Microsoft, however, said it's too early to evaluate the two service packs it plans to release next year.

Early versions are already in the hands of testers like Devil Mountain Software Inc., which helps big financial services companies track trading-floor computer performance.

Wellington, Fla.-based Devil Mountain Software ran several versions of XP and Vista through a test simulating common desktop computing tasks. It found the original Vista performed 50 percent to 100 percent slower than the prevalent XP Service Pack 2, or SP2.

Vista SP1, due out in the first quarter of 2008, barely improved the operating system's performance.

But XP SP3, scheduled for the first half of 2008, did improve on XP's earlier performance, running 10 percent faster than SP2.

That's a strike against Vista for IT professionals on the fence about switching, according to Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer.

Kevin Kutz, director of Microsoft's Windows Client group, said the company is working on speeding up tasks like moving files between PCs, but it's a work in progress.

Michael Cherry, an analyst for research group Directions on Microsoft, said it's impossible to say if Microsoft has started tuning Vista SP1 for speed. Even if XP gets faster, consumers and businesses may still switch to Vista.

''It might be an acceptable thing to me if it were slightly slower but more stable,'' Cherry said.

Benjamin Gray, an analyst for Forrester Research, said businesses will upgrade to Vista regardless, to ''stay current with Microsoft's support life cycle.''

Defense Ministry Watches Orkut Closely

The defense ministry has taken steps to ensure that military secrets are not leaked through the social networking site, Orkut, though no violations have been reported so far, parliament was informed Wednesday.

"Defense personnel are periodically sensitized to nuances of military security and the implication of sharing classified information with strangers on social networks. They are also aware of the implications of such sharing under the Official Secrets Act," Defense Minister A.K. Antony said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.

"No report pertaining to sharing of classified defense information on social networking sites involving defense service personnel has come to the notice of the government," he added.

According to the minister, directions have also been issued to "take stern action against defaulters" using the Internet at large for passing on defense secrets.

Antony also detailed the steps being taken to ensure that foreign intelligence agencies did not gain access to India's military secrets through the Internet.

These included sensitization of defense and civilian personnel at all levels, with special attention paid to new entrants at training institutes; regular policy guidelines being issued for compliance; and checks/audits undertaken by in-house teams to locate any breach, the minister stated.

Google To Enter Hosted-Services Market

The rumors about Google's entry into the hosted-services market have been circulating for sometime now. However these rumors may soon become reality, as it has just been reported that Google is all set to unveil a whole slew of services on this front.

This news which has been broken by WSJ is expected to be ready by very early next year and will reportedly include a limited amount of free space with extra space available on payment basis. Over the last year, online storage services are increasingly becoming popular as user-driven content rises and these services make it possible for a user to easily access their content from any browser and a net connection.

However despite this announcement, the fact remains Google is entering the market late. Direct rivals like Microsoft, Amazon and majors like EMC Corp. have already unveiled their own version of these services. Will Google be able to succeed against their altogether larger rivals... only time will tell.

Google Expands Into Alternative Energy

Google Inc. is expanding into alternative energy in its most ambitious effort yet to ease the environmental strain caused by the company's voracious appetite for power to run its massive computing centers.

As part of a project announced Tuesday, the Internet search leader and its philanthropic arm will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a quest to lower the cost of producing electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind and the sun.

If Google realizes its goal, the cost of solar power should fall by 25 to 50 percent, co-founder Larry Page said in an interview.

The Mountain View-based company initially hopes to harvest cleaner-burning electricity to meet its own needs and sell power to other users or license the technology that emerges from its initiative, dubbed "Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal."

"If we achieve these goals, we are going to be in the (electricity) business in a very big way," Page said. "We should be able to make a lot of money from this."

Google joins a long list of other prominent companies striving to become more environmentally friendly amid mounting concern that pollution from coal, oil and other so-called "dirty" power generation is causing potentially catastrophic climate change.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, made a major commitment to renewable energy two years ago. And technology leaders like Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. are trying to become more energy efficient.

Google's initiative will likely stand out because of its financial muscle and its renowned brand, said Nicholas Parker, chairman of the Cleantech Network, a group that tracks investments in alternative energy.

"This is like a shot across the bow," Parker said. "It shows there are people willing to put their oars in the water to get the job done."

Google ended September with $13 billion in cash - a stockpile that's expected to grow as the company continues to mine growing profits from its search engine, which has become the hub of the Internet's most powerful advertising network.

The notion of an Internet company diversifying into the alternative-energy business isn't as incongruous as it might seem.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has often cited the company's ever-expanding power needs as one of his biggest worries, and Page and co-founder Sergey Brin have long been interested in electric cars and other inventions related to alternative energy.

Google's headquarters already draws some of its power from one of the country's biggest solar power installations.

What's more, Al Gore, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts to educate people about the perils of global warming, has been a Google adviser for several years. Page said the former vice president influenced Google's decision to accelerate its investment in renewable energy.

Just how much electricity Google requires to power the hundreds of thousands of computers that run its search engine and other online services is a closely guarded secret.

But there's little doubt Google's power demands will escalate as the company introduces more free products and services that will require even greater computing capacity.

Next year, for example, the company reportedly will unveil a service that will allow users to store a wide range of their personal files on Google computers. Page declined to comment on the report in The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.

"As Google grows, we don't want the business to become part of the problem. We want to be part of the solution," said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org.

Toward that end, Google aims to produce one gigawatt of power from renewable energy at prices below the rates of electricity generated at coal-burning plants. One gigawatt power would be enough to supply the needs of a city the size of San Francisco.

Page predicted the goal could be reached in a matter of "years, not decades."

The push into the energy industry serves as another reminder of Google's belief that it can harness technology to make the world a better place.

"We do like to take advantage of our noted ... position to motivate the world and do things that are good," Brin said during a Tuesday conference call with reporters.

Google intends to spend at least $20 million next year to finance renewable energy research and hire more experts in the field. At least 20 to 30 new employees will participate in the project next year, Page said, though he hopes the number will be larger than that.

Google.org will invest "hundreds of millions" in companies specializing in renewable energy, Page said. The philanthropic arm, which sits under the umbrella of the Google Foundation, will draw upon its holdings of nearly $2 billion worth Google's stock, which gained $7.57 Tuesday to close at $673.57.

Google.org already is working with two outside companies: Pasadena-based eSolar Inc., which specializes in solar thermal power and Alameda-based Makani Power Inc., which specializes in wind power.

Mobile-based Security for BPO Employees

Even as the rape and murder of a Pune call center employee by her cab driver is fresh in everyone's minds, a software analyst has developed a mobile phone-based system that may provide better protection to BPO staff in transit.

"After two cases of rape and murder of female call centre employees, BPO firms have an uphill task so far as security is concerned. And here comes our system - simple and effective," said Chennai-based V M Sankaran Nampoothiri, who is currently associated with the software firm LatticeBridge in Chennai.

"The GPS-based systems are not adequate as India have not developed maps for every single nook and corner of our cities. However, our system 'Webtra' will work everywhere as it is mobile technology-based," he added.

As soon as an employee gets into a cab, he/she will log on to the mobile phone and send an SMS to a centralised number and after five minutes, a message automatically goes to the employee.

"If he or she does not respond to the message, a call will follow after five minutes. If the person fails to respond, the system will declare a crisis alert. The transport department will then call the family or any close friend of the person and all other employees who are slotted in the cab," he said.

"It is really foolish to expect that a person in trouble will be able to call any helpline or office. For us, it's not communication but break of communication that is a good alert."

Nampoothiri claimed that two BPOs - one each in Bangalore and Chennai - were currently using his system, but scores of others were in talks with him.

Earlier this month, a Wipro call centre employee in Pune was found raped and murdered by her cab driver. Last year, a Bangalore-based woman employee had faced a similar fate and the culprit was again the cab driver.

Nampoothiri said there were six reasons for delay in arriving in office or reaching home - traffic, mechanical failure, diversion from original path (indicator of a possible crime), bad health, accident and delay by staff.

"Our system has a data base of thousands of hospitals across the country and this can help employees and companies rush them to a nearby hospital in case of emergency," said the analyst, who was in Delhi to meet some leading BPO firms in the national capital region.

When asked about false alerts and subsequent chaos that the system may create, the analyst said: "Since these employees are young, you can expect them to ignore messages but they will be on their toes. Due to their negligence, the system may sound 90 percent false alerts but the remaining 10 percent will be of great help."

The analyst, who has been associated with the industry for 16 years, said the cost of installing the system could be around Rs 350 per person per month.

"If a company wants to install the system with speech detectors, the cost will be more. A speech detector could translate at least 10 languages and scores of regional accents into English. This will help in deciphering the voice and language of a cab driver and employees," said Nampoothiri.

Yahoo! Mail Now Fully Accessible

Yahoo! India Research & Development has made its new Yahoo! Mail "fully accessible" to people with different disabilities.

The company maintains that with this, people with visual and other disabilities will be able to use Yahoo! Mail Classic with similar ease as other users and that it will work on all standard screen reader software.

Assisted by Yahoo! Accessibility Guru Victor Tsaran, the Yahoo! India R&D team in Bangalore played pivotal role in making the new Yahoo! Mail fully accessible. The company maintains that it has a dedicated team of accessibility experts who ensure that Yahoo! products benefit all users with disabilities but it istill is important that users familiarize themselves with the screen reader and screen magnifier software before using Yahoo! products with Accessibility features.

With basic Internet connectivity, any user with physical disabilities can experience the new Yahoo! Mail, said the company.

Facebook Users Complain of New Tracking

Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.

Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on ''No Thanks.'' It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

Users are given a second notice the next time they log on to Facebook, but they can easily miss it if they quickly click away to visit a friend's page or check e-mail.

"People should be given much more of a notice, much more of an alert," said Matthew Helfgott, 20, a college student who discovered his girlfriend just bought him black leather gloves from Overstock for Hanukkah. "She said she had no idea (information would be shared). She said it invaded her privacy."

The girlfriend was declining interviews, Helfgott said.

An Overstock.com Inc. spokesman said no one was immediately available for comment Wednesday.

Facebook has long prided itself on guarding its users' privacy, but the walls have gradually lowered. In 2006, a "news feeds" feature allowing users to track changes friends make to profiles backfired when many users denounced it as stalking and threatened protests. Facebook quickly apologized and agreed to let users turn off the feature.

The new program lets companies tap ongoing conversations by alerting users about friends' activities through the feeds. About 40 Web sites have decided to embed a free tool from Facebook, known as a Beacon, to enable the marketing feeds.

The idea is that if users see a friend buy or do something, they'd take that action as an endorsement for a movie, a band or a soft drink.

But it also raises privacy concerns.

Mike Mayer, for instance, saw a feed item saying his boyfriend, Adam Sofen, just bought tickets to "No Country For Old Man" from movie-ticket vendor Fandango.

"What if I was seeing 'Fred Claus'?" said Sofen, 28. ''That would have been much more embarrassing. At least this was a prestigious movie.''

In some cases, companies can buy an ad next to the feed item with the friend's photo. Although Fandango didn't do that, Mayer, 28, still found Beacon unsettling.

"If my identity is going to be used to promote something for someone else, that seems problematic," said Mayer, who was previously employed in online advertising. "It could be a misrepresentation of my purchases."

Fandango officials referred inquiries to Facebook, which issued a statement defending its practices. Facebook officials have also said advertising supports the free service.

"Beacon gives users an easy way to share relevant information from other sites with their friends on Facebook," the statement said. "Information is shared with a small selection of a user's trusted network of friends, not publicly on the Web or with all Facebook users. Users also are given multiple ways to choose not to share information from a participating site, both on that site and on Facebook."

Users are able to decline sharing on a site-by-site basis, but can't withdraw from the program entirely.

On Wednesday, Facebook launched a mechanism for users to indicate what types of news feeds they like and dislike. Individuals could possibly use that to lower the frequency of marketing items, though the company has said they won't be able to reject them completely.

Liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org formed a protest group Tuesday and had more than 6,000 members by Wednesday. The group is calling on Facebook to stop revealing online purchases and letting companies use names for endorsements without "explicit permission."

"We want Facebook to realize that their users are rightly concerned that private information is being made public," MoveOn spokesman Adam Green said, adding that Facebook could quell concerns by seeking "opt in" consent rather than leaving it to users to "opt out" by taking steps to decline sharing.

Facebook user Nate Weiner, 23, said he uses a tool for the Firefox Web browser called BlockSite, which he says prevents sites from sending data to Facebook.

"What if you bought a book on Amazon called 'Coping with AIDS' and that got published to every single one of your friends?" he said.

Sabeer Bhatia Unveils Live Documents

Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia has launched a software product called Live Documents, which he claims has all the features of Microsoft Office 2007 and is available online for free.

"Live Documents will give you the same experience of Microsoft Office 2007 - which costs USD 400 - for free online," said Bhatia. "Live Documents mean Microsoft Office 2007 will be available in a browser. Many users can access a document simultaneously."

Live Documents has been developed with Java and Flash and it would work across platforms, he said.

With regards to security he said, "Documents would be completely secured on the Net. They are encrypted in the back-end. The user can give digital rights on who should open the document."

"If Live Documents makes 1 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues, then we would earn USD 200 million a year. If Live Documents makes 10 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues then our revenues would be USD 2 billion a year in the next three to four years", said Bhatia.

Live Documents has been developed by his Bangalore-based company InstaColl.

Bookmark Improvements New to Firefox 3

A new version of the Firefox browser, now available for testing mainly by developers, offers improvements on finding frequently visited Web sites and tools for running Web applications without a live Internet connection.

The Beta 1 version of Firefox 3 released this week still has problems, including the inability to run newer Web-mail programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., and a final version for consumers isn't expected for several months.

But it offers a window on what's to come.

Many of its new features concern bookmarks, an area typically slow to change in the browsing world. You can now add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. And a new ''Places'' feature lets you quickly access sites you recently bookmarked or tagged and pages you visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.

There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list - similar to what's already available on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Offline Web support - for example, letting you compose Web mail while offline to send after you're back online - is bound to come in handy as more software developers design programs to be run completely over the Internet, eliminating installation complexities.

But Web developers must add the Firefox offline functionality to their sites, so the usefulness of this feature will be limited at first.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.

Versions for Windows, Mac and Linux computers were released Monday by Mozilla, an open-source community in which thousands of people collectively develop free products, mostly as volunteers.