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Twitter, Facebook Costs High
According to a recent survey by Morse, the popular social networking sites are costing British businesses 1.38 bn pounds a year in wasted time. The survey on 1,460 office workers found that more than half of office workers used these social networking sites for personal use during working days, and admitted to wasting an average of forty minutes a week each.

Firstsource Bags Award
Firstsource Solutions has announced that it has won the 2009 National Outsourcing Association (NOA) Award for Best Telecommunications, Utilities and High-Tech Outsourcing Project. The award recognizes the valuable services delivered by Firstsource to a premiere telecom client. Firstsource has over 500 employees in Belfast, and over 300 in Mumbai for this client. This is the fourth consecutive NOA award for Firstsource.

Infy MAKEs it Again
Infosys Technologies has been recognized amongst the top sixteen Asian companies to be listed in the prestigious Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Study, 2009. Infosys has won the Asian MAKE award six times in the past, and is among the leading five Indian companies in Asia to have won the award this year. The 2009 Asian MAKE panel has recognized Infosys for developing new products/services/solutions, and enterprise knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Pepsi Says Sorry
Pepsico issued an apology over its not-so-soft iPhone application that promises to help men score with (read seduce!) two dozen stereotypes of women. Following the controversy the soft drinks major sent an apology on popular microblogging service, Twitter. Our application tried to show the humorous lengths guys go to get women, the message read. We apologize if its in bad taste and appreciate your feedback. However, despite the apology, the application has not been withdrawn.

Twitter Crosses 5 billionth Mark
Twitter crossed the major milestone of 5 billionth tweet with the former Current Media executive, Robin Sloan, posting a tweet in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only Oh lord. A third-party application called Gigatweet has been measuring the services total tweet count for some time now, and last week some onlookers picked up on the fact that it was getting awfully close to 5 bn. Sloan nicknamed his historic tweet The Pentagigatweet. Twitter has over 5,014,593,120 tweets and is still counting.

Google in Hot Chinese Copyright Soup
Google seems to be in trouble over Google Books, as a Chinese copyright group accused the Internet giant scanning Chinese books for its online library without authorization. According to an AFP report, quoting the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), at least 17,922 books had been scanned and included in Google Books. The books involved the works of at least 570 Chinese writers, CWWCS said.

Twitter Guards Press Freedom in UK
Twitter grabbed the baton from the mainstream media in the race to protect the press freedom and environment when Trafigura, a British oil trading company, tried to prevent The Guardian newspaper from publishing a query tabled in the British Parliament in relation with its dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. Labour MP, Paul Farrelly had sought to know the kind of measures the ministers had taken to protect press freedom, following an injunction obtained by Trafigura and its law firm, Carter Ruck, against the publication of a report into the matter. When The Guardian was prevented from publishing anything related to Farrellys question, Twitter was flooded with details of the question, while two blogs and magazine Private Eye published the full text, completely undermining all calculations of Trafigura.

IT to Rebound by 2010: Gartner
The IT industry would return to growth by 2010 with predicted IT spending rising to a total $3.3 tn, a 3.3% increase from 2009, says Gartner. The IT industry is exiting in its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2%. The report also mentioned that the worldwide enterprise IT spending would struggle more with IT spending dropping 6.9%. For more than 50% of CIOs the IT budget will be 0% or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011. In 2010, spending on hardware will be flat. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4% in 2009, with revenue of nearly $1.9 tn. In 2010, telecom spending is forecast to grow 3.2%. Worldwide IT services spending is expected to a total $781 bn in 2009, and it is forecast to grow 4.5% in 2010.

Facebook India Developer Contest Winners
Facebook has announced the results of its India Developer Contest, a competition kick-started in July that invited Indian developers to design and deliver innovative Facebook applications and Facebook Connect Integrations. From close to 100 applications submitted by developers across India, Grabbler, a unique word-building game conceived by developers at iPlaySocial, has been declared the winning application. In the Facebook Connect category, Muziboo.com, an audio sharing platform for musicians, podcasters and sound professionals, won first place. The winners will receive a cash prize of $4,000 each. Runner up applications PVR Cinemas and Bill Share received the second and third position to win $2,000 and $1,000 respectively, while Green Mango and ExamCrunch were ranked as runners up in the Facebook Connect category to win the same cash prize.

Nigerian Scam Police Shut Down 800 Websites
In what is named Project Eagle Claw, Nigerias anti-corruption police have shut down around 800 scam websites, and also arrested the members of eighteen syndicates, in a drive to curb cyber crime. The EFCC is finetuning its security modalities with Microsoft and upon full deployment, the capacity to take down fraudulent emails will increase to 5,000 monthly. Further it is projected that advisory mails to be sent to victims and potential victims will be about 230,000 monthly.

Google, Microsoft Most Talked About
Google and Microsoft emerged as the most discussed technology brands in India in the first Digital Brand Index (DBI) for India by Edelman, an independent public relations firm. Google and Microsoft, who topped the rankings by way of volume of conversations, secured approximately 20% and 12% of all monitored conversations, respectively. Meanwhile, Yahoo!, Intel, and Sony completed the top five list, securing 14% of overall conversation amongst them.

Murthy Sets up VC Fund
Infosys co-founder and chief mentor, NR Narayana Murthy has set up a venture capital fund. To raise fund for the new venture, Murthy has sold 8 lakh shares of Infosys, the software exporter informed the Bombay Stock Exchange. This amounts to 0.13% of total shares of Infosys. Murthy would use the funds to set up a venture capital fund that would help young entrepreneurs, and would primarily invest in India.

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