Apple launches "Resolutionary" Tab, Wal-Mart buys Social Calendar app, Mahindra Satyam posts impressive growth

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Tim Cook, CEO of Apple launched the first ever 4G LTE enabled Tab with best ever retina display of 2048x1536 pixels resolution in the market which added another feather in company’s cap. The new third-generation tab has been termed “Resolutionary” by Apple. On the other hand, Microsoft released “Windows 8 Consumer Preview” which has been specifically designed for touch devices based on Metro interface. Windows 8 is expected to be launched in late 2012 to be followed by launch of mobiles and tablets based on this operating system.

Nowadays, technology is being used extensively to peek into one’s life. In a similar line, to intensifying competition in retail sector using technology, Wal-Mart has acquired the Social Calendar, a Facebook app allowing them to dig deeper in their customer’s lives and using opportunities like birthdays to promote their products. Nokia, which had launched “Nokia Money” two years back as a mass platform for delivering mobile payment services has decided to axe its financial services arm in India by exiting from “Nokia Money”.

Lean IT: A new dimension to Information Technology

Twenty first century marks a new era of technological advancement and entrepreneurship. With it, all the business firms throughout the globe require some sort of investment in technology, especially information technology (IT).

It is clearly evident that the penetration of information technology (IT) in business activities is almost reaching its pinnacle. While the focus in the previous few decades has been on how to implement IT into business and how to reap good returns from IT, now there is a paradigm shift from the view of IT as an “asset” to IT as a “commodity”. This commoditization approach towards IT mandates that there should be a check on the “cost” involved in IT and the expected “return on investment”. Thus we arrive at the epoch of Lean IT, with a sole objective of cutting down the wastages in the IT investment so that overall supply chain costs could be curtailed. Even though the concept of “lean” was popularized first in the automobile industry through Toyota Production System, this phenomenon was primarily employed into information technology system by Dell Computers, whose aggressive cost effective “make to assemble” strategy was one of the first Lean IT initiatives adopted so far. Nowadays, Lean IT is more regarded as an industrial philosophy rather than just a technique.

Financial Inclusion: Role of Information Technology

‘Financial Inclusion’ the buzzword:

“The future lies with those companies who see the poor as their customers” - C.K.Prahalad

Financial inclusion is delivery of banking services at an affordable cost to the vast sections of underprivileged and low income groups. In a country like India where financial services are a distant dream to millions of people, there has been a considerable lead from the government and other financial institutions towards financial inclusion. Implementing this in India is a gargantuan task. Strong determination from the government is necessary to make sure that the financially excluded segment of the society is ensured access to financial services and timely and adequate credit when needed by vulnerable groups such as weaker sections and low income groups at an affordable cost. It is to be noted that stress is given to accessibility of credit at an affordable cost to the disadvantaged sections of the society.

For most organization the recession had put on hold non-essential IT spending to a large extent. Now, with the economy rising again, expenditure in IT is expected to increase.

The pressure to compete by reducing cost and having efficient process would further mean that companies would increase their expenditure on building enterprise level IT infrastructure. Technisource, a technology staffing and services company with clients ranging from the mid-market to global Fortune 500 companies, predicts the following four trends that will define IT priorities of an organizations in the near future.

Mobile Technology: Android & its future

Android – the talk of town, but what so great about it that it is said to give stiff competition to Apple’s iPhone and is said to almost remove our trusted Symbian OS from the market.

Experts say the difference between the two is same as between Windows and Linux, android being the Linux and Symbian being the Windows, but for a layman who is not interested in whether the code is opened sourced or closed, what attracts them to it…????

With the increased pace of life and shrinking time people need everything in the palm of their hand, everything happening with a touch. Hence it all boils down to one point, which system provides the best applications?