PayPal, the online global payment company, announced it will open a new development center in Chennai, India, and plans to hire hundreds of technical positions in 2007.

“The setting up of PayPal’s India Development Center is validation of India’s frontrunner status in the global IT scenario” said Shri Dayanidhi Maran, Hon’ble Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology. “The vast knowledge and expertise of Indian technical professionals will help PayPal expand its business, while continuing to provide secure online payment services for millions of Internet customers.”

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With so many IT services based companies making a mark in India (like Wipro,Infosys,TCS and many more) , there is always a question about the product based companies. But slowly and steadily there are product based companies like Motorola,Oracle,NXP Semiconductors and now should I say that the list goes on and on…

Being associated with the Semiconductors industry , it is very important to see the future and the growth expected in this industry.I came across a very good article which on “Indian Semiconductors Association” and believe me I really felt that the future is good for India in the semiconductors field as well 🙂 See the report below:

http://www.isaonline.org/documents/epresentation_dec_19_06.pdf

With the government also investing in companies like SemIndia , the growth prospects for India in Semiconductors field is definitely good.

But as more and more work is coming to India (and China) , there is worry for other developed(and developing) nations.But Jack Welch was right in his book “Winning – the answers” which stated:

”Rather than getting worried about the outsourcing , whole program could be replaced by a permanent green card system(in the US) that would draw skilled workers into a more positive , long term relationship with the American culture – and build a better economic future for all of us.Hence AMERICA’S CHALLENGE TODAY IS TALENT INSOURCING.”

Source : The Economic Times Network
Dated : 06/01/2007

India may emerge as the global chip design capital, but it is the world that will make the capital. This is because chip fabrication and manufacturing facilities are yet to take off here. Indians are designing chips for MNCs for myriad applications – cars, cell phones, medical devices, set-top boxes (STBs), MP3 players, and so on. Yet, India gets peanuts as the chips and products are manufactured elsewhere.

Sample this: In the past year, 85% of STBs have been designed in India by Broadcomm Corporation, Conexant, ST Microelectronics (STM) and others. The global market for STBs is over $7 billion a year. But India captures less than $40 million of this as it is only involved in design and not manufacturing the chips or STBs. The STB that you installed recently is probably designed in India and made in South Korea, China or Taiwan.

PortalPlayer designed the iPod chip, which has a complex hardware layout and software coding, at Hyderabad and the US, but doesn’t make them in India. “Hence, in an over $4-billion iPod market, India got less than $25 million (this comprises salaries and design services). If the chip and the iPod were made in India (most iPods are made in China), India could have captured at least $2 billion,” says Sandalwood Partners managing partner Bob Kondoomori. Sandalwood is a key investor for SemIndia.

Citing another example, Mr Kondoomori says, “Motorola sells over 2 million Razr phones a month – an over $2.4-billion product line. Part of these are designed in India, for which India got just about $20 million. We lose out because we don’t have fabs. For every design that India gives, China is benefiting more. They are making a killing. When design is happening here in a big way, why do we let manufacturing happen elsewhere.”

STM, the $8.88-billion European chip maker, recently announced a made-in-India chip. The 60-people India team took 160 man-months to do the complete hardware and software design of the chip, but it won’t be manufactured in India. The chip is for a digital set-top box and has several features like enhanced security, usability for pay TV applications and interactivity. Says STM vice-president (emerging market region) and India Design Centre director Vivek Sharma: “India is a growing market, but we have enough manufacturing capacity worldwide for another 4-5 years. However, today anything designed in India does find a market worldwide.”

The India Semiconductor Association (ISA) says India will face a $70-billion worth deficit of computer hardware by 2010. Majority of imports will be from China, thus conceding them a major advantage in the worldwide hardware market. The present demand of $24 billion is met by importing two-thirds from China, South Korea, Taiwan, EU and the US.

Chip inputs are becoming increasingly significant in all devices. For instance, the chip usage in the $90-billion medical equipment industry is worth about $2 billion, growing at 17-20% a year. Says Texas Instruments global manager (medical electronics solutions) Shekar Rao, “Everything from patient monitoring devices to pacemakers and scanning machines are going digital. Design is happening in India and I do see some co-location of design and manufacturing taking place, albeit slowly, in India.”

It’s about time India got a bigger push and more end-product manufacturing. Apart from checking the revenue flight for all the hard work done by Indian engineers in designing chips, manufacturing will create over 9 millions jobs directly in India in the next 10 years, according to the ISA.

Just few days after videos/trailers of some unreleased Hindi movies were found on YouTube , some of the videos were offloaded from YouTube and an error message was displayed saying that “There are some legal issues with the Video”

But,while reading some comments for few videos on YouTube,I certainly feel that YouTube should keep a track on the comments as well.It may happen that just like Orkut,questions might be raised on YouTube as well!!

It was the sort of break most Net startups would die for. Chinese tv actress Zhang Yu said notable directors had made her audition on the “casting couch” before giving her roles. To back up her claims, Zhang in November posted videos of two encounters on a Web site called Yoqoo, one of dozens of Chinese YouTube (GOOG) and MySpace wannabes. Thanks to the racy footage–heavily edited to keep things from getting X-rated–traffic on Yoqoo tripled to about 7.5 million video streams a day.

But in China, Yoqoo had little chance to capitalize on the publicity. Shortly after the videos went live, Yoqoo–which is pronounced “yo ku” and means “good” and “cool” in Chinese–got a quiet but firm warning from the government’s Net cops. “Relevant authorities indicated that this has gotten so much public media attention that it would be helpful for us to remove the videos,” says Yoqoo founder Victor Koo. While he insists “there was nothing pornographic” about the content, Koo quickly complied.

The episode shows the promise and the peril of user-generated content and social networking in China: You can get monster traffic with the right video, but you could get in big trouble for showing it. Still, the mainland remains fertile ground for so-called Web 2.0 startups. The country has more than 130 million Internet users, up 30% in 2006. To serve them, China has sprouted scores of homegrown companies hoping to become the next MySpace, YouTube, or Digg. Soon they’ll be joined by the real thing. News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace is in negotiations to set up a Chinese-language version of the social-networking phenomenon. And Google is taking a stake in video-sharing site Xunlei.

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