india Archive

Wipro has announced that they have reached an agreement with Citigroup to acquire Citi Technology Services Ltd. Citi Technology Services Ltd. is the India-based captive provider of information technology services and solutions to Citi entities worldwide. The deal is valued at $127 million and also includes a service contract between Wipro and Citigroup for six years. The service contract covers infrastructure, application development and maintenance.

Citi Technology Services provides support for Citigroup in 32 countries and has over 1,600 employees. The deal is set to close in March 2009. In addition to the $127 million in cash, the deal also includes the delivery of at least $500 million in service revenues over the period of the six-year contract.

Citi’s online Web services sure has changed since the days when I was on the team who built the first online credit card management app.

India-based Rediff has announced the launch of a new service this week named "web-in-mail". Rediff positions the service as perfect for those who have their Internet web browsing blocked in some way (e.g. corporate, education, spouse, etc.).

What you do is send an email to Rediff with the desired webpage in the subject. You can also use commands to search Google and Rediff as well. Rediff says the webpage will be emailed to you in moments although in my testing some pages took several minutes and some never came. Those that did arrive did so without a stylesheet which means one LONG column of text. If all you want is to read the stories and don’t mind scrolling past all of the navigation, web-in-mail might work very well.

One interesting note about how the service works. In the email you receive with the webpage, all of the links are changed so that if you click on any of them, a new email is started which will also be sent to Rediff to grab the linked page. Pretty interesting!

While this new service clearly needs some work in timing and style, it is a pretty nifty idea. Now they need to add a scheduler function and the ability to send html-formatted rich emails.

DeskAway is a new project management service that sits between the very basic and the very advanced project management tools. There’s certainly a sweet market for tools like DeskAway – the keys are marketing and user adoption. Right now 37Signals appears to dominate the small business semi-geeky project management space with Basecamp. CN sponsor Zoho also offers a popular project management service called Zoho Projects.

The tool itself is your pretty standard Web project management tool. Nothing really stood out as an "omg" type feature – except apparently there is some chatter across the Web that DeskAway’s reporting features are stronger than those provided by 37Signals.

I like their "10 reasons" page — they need to add more comparisons to other players in the market. To win at this game in the U.S., DeskAway has to get more aggressive. Or start outside, perhaps in their home India and then move here once user adoption grows. Pricing starts at ad-supported free through their top plan at $99/month.

Another time tracking service we reviewed (actually it was one of our first reviews!) is Toggl. They launched a new version back in February and so far I hear very positive things.

Yahoo has launched their local search into India this week into four major cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. The local search in India works very much like the local search in the U.S.  To be honest, I don’t use Yahoo Local – I’ve been more of a Yelp’er or lately also searching via address using Google Maps. Though playing with Yahoo Local this morning, it’s pretty robust. I like how it aggregates reviews from across the Web in addition to those from Yahoo Local, offers an interactive map and a variety of alternative suggestions for other topics in the location I am in. I don’t see anything very innovative, the information is just presented in a very usable format.

On a more serious note, It appears that Yahoo Local India is easily hackable by injecting script code into a review and you can do basically anything from that point. Sridhar was able to create an iframe with Google in the body (see the screenshot below). He also notes that anything way more malicious could also be injected.

I tested this hack on the U.S. version of Yahoo Local and was unable to reproduce the security issue. When I entered any script code and clicked submit, the system removed the code within the script tags and prompted me to add more content.

I have submitted a ticket to Yahoo to get them to fix this.

MySpace is announcing the public launch of the MySpace India site today. The site is a dedicated community designed for Indian users of the social networking service. MySpace has partnered with Star TV, and Indian television network, to create an original network television program “Campus Star”, similar to American Idol here in the U.S.

Some of the MySpace executive team are in India this week to help promote the new site. There will be a variety of parties and events throughout the week. On April 21, MySpace will hold a “devJAM” workdshop in India. The “devJAM” workshops allow local developers to meet with MySpace staff and discuss development topics with regards to building on the MySpace platform. 

MySpace also recently launched a Korean site along with a Spanish U.S. site.

Mashable Editor Adam Ostrow has the lead on a breaking story about Pluck being acquired by Demand Media. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but Pluck powers some of the largest newspaper social networks including at the Washington Post, USA Today and Fox News. Demand Media has raised over $350 million in funding to-date.

Ostrow notes, "In a conversation with Rosenblatt and Pluck CEO Dave Panos this morning, the two likened the move to that of Google with AdSense, first building a successful network in-house, and then branching out to offer the same tools and advertising sales clout to other web publishers. To execute this strategy, Pluck will begin offering a revenue share with publishers, versus the current licensing model the company employs. Third-party publishers will also enjoy the traffic benefits of being part of Demand’s burgeoning network."

Pluck also powers BlogBurst which allows bloggers to syndicate their articles to major newspapers and news distribution outlets. CN is a member of BlogBurst.

Earlier this week, Mzinga acquired business white-label social networking provider Prospero. So which one of the other large white-label social networking players is next to be acquired?

Update: TC has a source quoting the acquisition at $75 million cash.