Hyundai Eon was the most online searched new car in 2011

According to an offline study conducted by AC Nielsen on behalf of Google India, the top 10 most searched new car launches in 2011 were Hyundai Eon, Mahindra XUV 500, Honda Brio, Tata Manza, Maruti Kizashi, Toyota Liva, Hyundai Verna, Nissan Sunny, Skoda Rapid and Ford Fiesta respectively. In terms of query volume growth, bigger and higher-end cars like SUVs emerged to be the fastest growing car segment with 83 per cent growth YoY, followed by premium cars (82 per cent), sedans (75 per cent), luxury cars (74 per cent) and finally hatchbacks (53 per cent). The survey that was carried out at car showrooms in top 8 metros has revealed that one in two car buyers conducted research online before arriving at the dealership. The survey also revealed that of those who had researched their purchase online, over 50 per cent changed their choice of car brands after uncovering new information on the web. Respondents reported that they used the web to research and compare prices, watch online videos and find images, do competitive analysis, find dealer contacts and read both expert and user reviews. Most car buyers also rated OEM's or, in other words, the carmaker's website as the most important and trustworthy source of information. Of the 50 per cent respondents who went online, 42 per cent said they used search engine as the first source of information, just behind the opinions of friends and relatives' (47 per cent). The survey also revealed that Auto is among the fastest growing vertical on Google, with query volume growth of over 70 per cent year on year. In addition, in 2011 mobile queries grew 125 per cent year on year; from smartphones, the query volumes were almost double at 242 per cent. Buyers rated internet more important than TV or print media for auto-related content, thanks to fast, easy access to necessary information and rich media formats such as online video. Over 56 per cent car buyers also choose to watch videos online as part of their research, with over 48 per cent rating YouTube as the destination and a important source of information on the Internet. On average, car buyers spend 9-12 weeks researching before arriving at their final decision, and of those who turned to the web for assistance, over 90 per cent of shoppers used a search engine to learn more about the cars they were interested in buying. Rajan Anandan, VP and Managing Director of Google India, said "This offline study substantiates the growing number of auto-related searches we've seen on Google search in India. Auto is among the fastest growing vertical in terms of query volumes on Google. Most OEMs have not yet tapped the full potential of the digital medium and we hope this study will help them understand and engage the Indian consumer online."  
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Hyundai-Eon-was-the-most-online-searched-new-car-in-2011-12898

In.com undergoes a makeover; launches new music player

Web18's horizontal portal In.com has undergone a redesign. The portal has also launched a new music playerwhich streams music across multiple genres and languages. The homepage also houses a link the In.com Hindiwebsite and services like mail, news, videos, TV and games can be accessed from the homepage. The new homepage houses classified services from Ask Me and city specific event listings from Burrp. The Live TV section has live feeds integrated from TV18 channels and the Network18's recently acquired Eenadu TV Network channels. However the homepage has given a separate link for Colors channel and has not integrated it with Live TV. The new music player has been integrated with the portal's music section and clicking on any song to play, opens up the player. The new player also houses In.com's Artiste Radio which the company had launched in August 2011. Another section that gets prominence in the new homepage is the 'Devotion' section which houses music, videos, wallpapers, e-books and horoscope. The earlier homepage had a devotional section which only had songs and albums. The new homepage has however done away with the section 'Find' which, in the earlier design, provided search services for Jobs, Movie Tickets and Matrimonials. The new homepage also doesn't feature the shopping section and the site Shop.in.com redirects to HomeShop18.com, the company's TV shopping and ecommerce firm.  
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/In-com-undergoes-a-makeover-launches-new-music-player-12899

The New Indian Express moves from ExpressBuzz.com to NewIndianExpress.com

  The New Indian Express has been moved from ExpressBuzz.com to NewIndianExpress.com. The publication first launched online as NewIndPress.com and was later rebranded under the name ExpressBuzz.com. Now, nearly four years on, the site has undergone a further evolution. The new site went online on Monday, June 4, 2012  will give the site a recognizable connection to the look and feel of the newspaper in print, while keeping the interface dynamic and user-friendly. NewIndianExpress.com is also looking to incorporate user contributions and forum-based interactions that will give our users a voice on the net. The New Indian Express is an Indian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper published by the Express Publications and based in Chennai. It was founded in 1932 as the Indian Express, under the ownership of Chennai-based P Varadarajulu Naidu. In 1991, following the death of the then owner Ramnath Goenka, the Goenka family split the group into two separate companies. Initially, the two groups shared the Indian Express title, and editorial and other resources. But in 13 August 1999, the northern editions, headquartered in Mumbai, retained and renamed Indian Express as The Indian Express, while the southern editions became The New Indian Express.  
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/The-New-Indian-Express-moves-from-ExpressBuzz-com-to-NewIndianExpress-com-12936

CoCubes.com acquires skill assessment firm S Quotient Analyzers

Gurgaon-based student engagement and campus hiring platformCoCubes.com, funded by Ojas Ventures of NS Raghavan has acquired SQuotient Analyzers, a skill assessment firm. Post acquisition, a 5-people team from SQuotient have joined the 80 strong CoCubes team  to create an impact on the careers of students across the country. Saurabh Misra, Managing Director, SQuotient Analyzers will now move in as Vice President, Learning and Assessments with CoCubes.com. CoCubes.com started in 2007 as a unique mobile and web enabled technology to help students get an equal opportunity to build a career. Within 4 years, CoCubes has managed to get 2000+ colleges online with over 400 corporates including 4 of the Top 10 IT companies hiring through their online platform. With the recent acquisition, CoCubes gets an in-house capability for assessment content for corporates to use for student evaluation on campuses. Harpreet Grover, Co-founder and CEO, CoCubes, says "Our corporate clients can assess upto 60,000 students at a go on our online platform. Until now, corporates used their own assessments or worked with external vendors with whom we used to integrate. While our platform would support both of these, we will now also have in-house capability to generate assessments content. We believe that given the demand supply gap where there are probably 2L good jobs for 50L graduating engineers, assessments for fresh hiring should be free for corporates." "It is exciting how we, as one common entity, will now power employability in students of our partner colleges and on the other hand, be a complete assessment solution for all our corporate clients" said Saurabh Mishra.  
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/CoCubes-com-acquires-skill-assessment-firm-S-Quotient-Analyzers-12939

Some Facebook Interns Are Earning $6,000 a Month [REPORT]

Willing to work for virtually free to land an internship at a prestigious company? You might not have to work for pennies if you go after a gig at Facebook. According to career site Glassdoor.com, software engineer interns at Facebook can bring in up to $8,700 a month — the equivalent of what would be $104,400 a year. However, the site notes that the average salary for a software engineer intern is about $6,036 a month, a Glassdoor spokesperson told Mashable.   The average pay for other non-software engineer interns at the company is about $5,862 for this year alone. But if hired full time, Facebook software engineers garner about $111,453 a year, while senior engineers can bring in about $132,000, according to Glassdoor. Facebook declined Mashable's request for comment. However, it's important to note that software engineer interns typically earn a high salary. In fact, the average software engineer intern at Google gets paid $5,991 a month, and Exxon Mobil tops the list with $6,508 a month. Other top-paying tech companies for interns include Amazon ($5,489 a month), Microsoft ($5,462) and Apple ($4,770). Other companies gracing the list include Yahoo, BP, Intuit and Dell. Overall, the average software engineer intern earns about $5,666 a month, Glassdoor said.
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Some-Facebook-Interns-Are-Earning-6-000-a-Month-REPORT--12940

Project Magenta is Linux-based mobile OS that aims to replicate iOS on generic hardware

Without getting into too many details, here is what little is known about this Open Source Magenta Project: Magenta is an implementation of Darwin/BSD on top of the Linux kernel. It is made up of a number of kernel and userland components that work together. It is fully binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0 (as in, it uses the same binary format). It runs on ARM 7 Hardware currently, but what is the goal? The final goal is probably recreating the iPhone OS 1.0 stack. I think this is a pretty feasible goal, considering the fact that there are so many open source libs that can be used to replace the proprietary libs used by Apple. Just as an example:* CoreGraphics -> Cairo-> FreeType-> libpng/jpg* Celestial -> Various open source media decoding libs.* UIKit -> Chamelleon The project does not wish to build a platform that can run Apple's App Store apps; it appears to just aim at running iOS. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Project-Magenta-is-Linux-based-mobile-OS-that-aims-to-replicate-iOS-on-generic-hardware-12953

The cloud will cost you, but you’ll be happy to pay

Today, conventional wisdom suggests that cloud computing will bring increased efficiency to computing markets, which will then decrease costs. Cloud computing will allow organizations to cut IT spending and help relieve pressure on IT budgets. It's a nice vision, but that's not going to happen.   The good news is that you're not going to mind that your cloud computing budget will be higher than what you're paying now for IT, because you'll be able to do more. And here's why. Coal and clouds, an unlikely pair. The secret to this counterintuitive state of affairs was explained back in 1865 by a British economist named William Stanley Jevons who was investigating the use of coal within the British empire. Jevons wanted to understand the forces shaping the demand for coal and estimate the time to exhaustion for British coal mines.   William Stanley Jevons image courtesy of Wikipedia. During his investigation, Jevons noticed that, counter-intuitively, increasing the efficiency of coal-burning machines did not, in fact, slow the overall consumption of coal. In fact, he saw that the more efficient the coal-burning machines got, the more coal was consumed, at an ever-increasing rate. Efficiency, it seemed, actually made coal consumption increase, not decrease. This is now known as the Jevons Paradox.   The paradox is explained by noting that multiple forces are working together. While increasing efficiency reduces the individual fuel consumption of a single machine, it also reduces the cost to run that machine. The reduced cost, in turn, makes the machine economically viable in a number of new applications. While each machine is more efficient, the overall demand increases for the machines themselves, leading to an increase in fuel consumption, coal in the case of Jevons' original investigations. So what does that mean for cloud computing? Jevon's Paradox has influenced IT for decades. For instance, in 1943, Thomas J. Watson, the Chairman and CEO of IBM, was rumored to have said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." While this sounds silly on the face to modern ears, the irony is that Watson would have been right, if not for Moore's Law and Jevons' Paradox — if the world had been static and computers were still as inefficient and costly (in constant dollars) as they were in 1943, we might still be looking at a world market of five units. But over the decades, the invention of the transistor and other technologies helped fuel a relentless increase in computer efficiency. As computers have become more efficient and dropped in price, we have found new applications for them and ended up spending more and more on them, in accordance with Jevons' Paradox. So when it comes to the cloud, we will likely continue to spend more each year on IT. However, with spending shifting into cloud computing as opposed to traditional forms of IT, this rise will be accompanied by a correspondingly greater increase in economic benefit. This is an important point: Jevons' Paradox has two forces at work. The increase in consumption results from increased application of the technology to new problems, and this only happens if those new applications are economically viable. And "economically viable" is code for "makes you money." Jevons' Paradox and the cloud meet in the real world.   Intel's transistors at 32 nanometers. More transistors helped pave the way for cheaper computing. I was recently speaking with a large bank that told me that cloud computing is allowing them to pursue projects that previously were unviable. For instance, if a new application could deliver $500,000 in revenue, but had IT expenditures of $1 million, it simply couldn't be pursued. Using cloud computing, IT costs have dropped, allowing them to pursue smaller projects that would not otherwise have been viable.   So, the number of projects is increasing, which is leading to increased aggregate spending, but with correspondingly greater revenue. Further, the savings associated with projects that would have been feasible even before costs dropped can be plowed back into application development rather than sunk on infrastructure. It's important to note that any individual firm may or may not see the effects of the Jevons' Paradox. In other words, the effects will be distributed across the economy in a lumpy fashion. Some enterprises are "IT intensive," using IT as a primary input into the business process (think banking and financial services). Those firms will see the greatest effect from Jevons' Paradox associated with cloud computing. But there are other enterprises that are IT insensitive (think logging and mining, for instance). These firms need some information technology capabilities, but IT is not a primary driver of project-level business cases. Increasing IT efficiency is unlikely to allow them to pursue additional projects. Thus, any IT cost savings can drop more directly to the bottom line and IT spending in these firms will go down. So, Jevons' Paradox predicts that with increased IT efficiency in the form of cloud computing, actual spending will continue to increase. But with that increased spending will come greater economic return for everybody as new projects that were previously unviable can now be pursued. In the same way that Jevons saw coal use increasing, fueling the industrial revolution, cloud computing is poised fuel a 21st century computing revolution.
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/The-cloud-will-cost-you-but-you-ll-be-happy-to-pay-12954