IT-BPO revenues from Germany, Switzerland, Austria may grow to $10 bn by 2020

Indian information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors may get almost $10 billion from Germany, Switzerland and Austria by 2020, up from the $2.6 billion they earn from this region across the IT, BPO and engineering services space, against the addressable market size of more than $53 billion.

Business from this region, which is the largest market in Europe, has the potential to grow so much, provided Indian companies take the strategic and tactical steps required to succeed in this market, according to the latest report by Nasscom and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report called ‘Opportunities for Indian IT – BPO industry in Germanic countries’ pegged the BPO market to be around $4 billion and offshored engineering services around $3.4 billion. Germany and Austria each spend close to 2.5 per cent of the GDP on IT, whereas Switzerland leads the norm by spending over five per cent.

“There is a huge demand in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector that has largely remained untapped, and verticals like automobile, manufacturing and logistics have emerged as quick-win opportunities for Indian companies,” said Sankar Ramamurthy, executive director, PreicewaterhouseCoopers.

The report revealed that there also lies a huge opportunity in the large mid-market segment in the Germanic region. It added that over 95 per cent of the enterprises in the Germanic countries operate in chemical, machine building, automotive and electrical sectors and belong to the small and medium size enterprise segment, which is expected to give the most business.

“Largely export-dependent, these economies suffered heavily during the recent financial meltdown but are recovering. Another challenge is of their shrinking working age group and the shrinking enrolments in universities in tech courses,” said Nasscom Vic-President Ameet Nivsarkar.

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MySpace to Cut Two-Thirds of Staff Outside U.S.

MySpace to Cut Two-Thirds of Staff Outside U.S.



PARIS — MySpace, the online music sharing and networking service owned by News Corp., said Tuesday that it planned to close at least four international offices and eliminate two-thirds of its staff outside the United States as it tries to adjust to slowing audience growth and falling advertising. The decision reflects the service’s difficulty in competing with Facebook, whose international audience dwarfs that of MySpace, as well as local players and newly popular services like Twitter, analysts say.

“Facebook seems to have been better at opening up its appeal to more age groups, in more markets,” said Karin Von Abrams, an analyst at eMarketer, a research firm. “Once the momentum begins to build for one site, there’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy to it.”

MySpace said that it intended to cut 300 of 450 jobs outside the United States. The announcement followed news this month of plans to cut about 400 jobs in the United States, about 30 percent of the total there.

“As we conducted our review of the company, it was clear that internationally, just as in the U.S., MySpace’s staffing had become too big and cumbersome to be sustainable in current market conditions,” said Owen Van Natta, chief executive of MySpace. Mr. Van Natta, a former Facebook executive, was named to the post in April, succeeding Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of MySpace.

In May, MySpace had 125 million users ages 15 and older, nearly half of them in the United States, according to ComScore, an online audience measurement service. Facebook had 316 million users, nearly four-fifths of them outside the United States. Over the past year, Facebook’s user numbers have grown by 155 percent, according to ComScore, while MySpace’s ranks have grown by only 9 percent. Despite their popularity, social networks have been slow to attract paid advertising — in part, analysts say, because marketers can use these services more effectively by getting users themselves to spread the word about a music band or a brand.

MySpace, which News Corp. acquired for $580 million in 2005, still collects more advertising than any other social networking site, but sales are falling. EMarketer predicts that MySpace’s ad revenue this year will drop to $520 million from $605 million last year. And outside the United States, advertising has barely caught on; EMarketer expects it to total only $25 million this year.

Facebook does not report its advertising revenue, but EMarketer estimates that it will collect a world total of $300 million this year, up from $250 million in 2008, with non-U.S. markets expected to contribute $70 million of that, up from $40 million last year.

Under the reorganization, MySpace said it would put offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain “under review for possible restructure.” At least four of the offices will be closed, and offices in London, Berlin and Sydney will become regional hubs, MySpace said, adding that the plans were subject to consultation with employees in some of the countries.

Despite its far greater user numbers, Facebook has a significantly smaller international footprint than MySpace, with offices in Britain, Ireland and France. In some big markets, like Germany, both MySpace and Facebook have struggled to catch up to local players like StudiVZ and Wer-Kennt-Wen.

Meanwhile, the fastest-growing major social networking service worldwide has been Twitter, whose user numbers have grown more than tenfold over the past year, to 37 million in May, according to Comscore.

News Corp. said Tuesday that it had named Rebekah Wade, editor of the British tabloid The Sun, as chief executive of its British newspaper arm, starting Sept. 1, Reuters reported from London.

As head of News International, Ms. Wade would continue to report to James Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman and chief executive Europe and Asia, who will also become executive chairman of News International from the same date, the company said.

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Nintendo, American heart group join to tackle obesity

The American Heart Association has teamed up with Japanese entertainment giant Nintendo to harness its Wii consoles and encourage Americans to exercise more to counter a soaring obesity problem.

Nintendo, whose Wii consoles with motion-controlling sensors took markets by storm in 2006, is working with the AHA in order to cut the risks of heart disease among Americans, their websites said.

According to the AHA nearly 70 percent of Americans do not get enough regular physical activity. Obesity, a major health problem in the US, is a determinant of cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in the country.

The association said that the average American spends more than eight hours a day sitting and recommends all adults to get at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week and 60 minutes daily for children.

Nintendo will carry the AHA logo on its active-play video game products including the Wii, the Wii Fit Plus, and the Wii Sports Resort.

The US has seen a dramatic increase in obesity during the past 20 years with roughly one in three adults considered obese, according to government statistics.

Nintendo hopes to reignite the Wii's sales, which have declined since its launch, and is banking on software aimed at increased physical activity as competitors such as Sony prepare to launch their own motion-sensing equipment.

The Kyoto-based company said earlier this month that games such as "Wii Sports Resort" and "Wii Fit Plus" helped raise the console's total lifetime sales to 70.93 million units, a record in the firm's history.

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Facebook security flaw revealed

Facebook security flaw revealed




Social networking site Facebook temporarily disabled its chat system after a serious security flaw was revealed which allowed people to view chats and pending friend requests of their Facebook friends.

The security flaw, discovered Wednesday by technology website TechCrunch, related to a feature on Facebook that allows users to preview their own privacy settings, telegraph.co.uk reported.

"There is a major security flaw in the site that, with just a few mouse clicks, enables any user to view the live chats of their 'friends'. Using what sounds like a simple trick, a user can also access their friends' latest pending friend-requests and which friends they share in common. That's a lot of potentially sensitive information," the report quoted TechCrunch's Steve O'Hear as saying.

In a statement, Facebook said: "For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends. Our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly."

The report said recent changes to the way Facebook shares its users information with other users and third parties have drawn criticism from privacy watchdogs and US senators.

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China Mobile expresses interest in iPad

China Mobile, the world's biggest cell phone operator, said Thursday it was interested in selling the iPad, and that talks with Apple over the sale of iPhones were still ongoing.

"China Mobile has been in constant talks with Apple over cooperation issues," Rainie Lei, a Hong Kong-based company spokeswoman, told AFP by telephone.

"China Mobile has expressed an interest in iPad."

China Mobile is developing an electronic book business and company chairman Wang Jianzhou said Wednesday that the operator was interested in providing e-text to Chinese users via the iPad.

Apple has not yet officially launched the iPad in Asia, but a "grey market" trade in the touchscreen portable tablet computer has boomed in stores from Singapore to Seoul to Beijing.

The California-based firm launched the much-anticipated gadget on the US domestic market last month and has announced it will be offered for the first time outside the United States on May 28 in nine countries including Japan.

China's grey market in Apple products developed to satisfy demand for the iPhone, which was only officially introduced in the country in October by China Mobile's rival China Unicom - more than two years after its US launch.

But Wang said China Mobile, which had 539 million users as of the end of March, still hoped to provide the iPhone to its customers.

"The key issue at the moment is that we would like the new-generation iPhones to use TD-SCDMA standard," he said.

TD-SCDMA, or Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access, is China's home-grown standard for 3G telecom services - technology that can transmit images and video at high speeds.

China had a total of 776.9 million mobile subscribers at the end of March, the largest number of any country.

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Pic of the Day - 20th May

A Sri Lankan man carries his catch at the sea front as it rains in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Friday, May 21, 2010. Sri Lankan government says that 19 people have died in floods, earthslips and hazards caused by strong winds during a week of heavy rain across the country. (Photo: AP)

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