Now, corporates in India go tough to check employee-fraud

As corporates are get increasingly suspicious of their employees, now, they are installing surveillance equipments and are hiring detective agencies to keep an eye on their employees, according to a report by Moinak Maitra of Economic Times.

A Patni spokesperson, explained how the company has beefed up security with an extensive network of surveillance cameras, access control measures with shrill alarms to prevent unauthorized entry, maintenance of daily inventory of high-value items and awareness programmes with teams on IP and security-related issues.

The security business is booming, particularly after the downturn. The employers wants to be doubly sure before trusting their employees. Some companies deploy a complete one-size-fits-all solution with CCTVs and access controls linked to payroll. It not only prevents unauthorized entry but also logs in the time of entry and exit and calculates the number of hours the employee has put in on the workstation all in full glare of the camera. Information leaks in highly confidential meetings are common. This is when the mobile jammers come into the arena. In top secret board meetings, mobile phones of the participants are jammed to maintain confidentiality. Even the sales force and service teams are tracked. In some companies employees' emails are also monitored.

Going by the KPMG Fraud Survey 2010, the heightened sense of security among companies is justified. Among 1,000 respondents from Indian companies, 45 percent say fraud has increased in their organizations and as much as 81 percent say financial statement fraud is a growing syndrome. The survey also gives a roadmap for key risk areas in the future - computer-related fraud, intellectual property theft, bribery and corruption.

"The level of skepticism has gone up post-Satyam and there is leakage in the whole supply chain side. Corporates want to make the system more efficient," said Deepankar Sanwalka, Executive Director-Forensic Services, KPMG and the architect of the survey.

"Access control devices, CCTVs, intrusion detection systems are all linked to each other in the control centre and video analytics is woven into modern-day cameras that can identify the minutest of details in the image and sends out alarms," explains Gaurav Taneja, Director, Crisis and Security Consulting at Control Risks.

Though surveillance levels differ depending on occupations within the workplace, even a well-meaning employee unwittingly comes under the scanner.

Pakistan says no to YouTube

Followed by an order from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), YouTube, the video sharing website, has been blocked by Pakistan, saying that it contains "blasphemous" material. PTA also directed Internet service providers to stop access to social network Facebook, as it was indulged in an online competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad.

Way back in 2007, the video sharing website faced similar kind of ban in the country for about a year. According to a PTA official, some caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were transferred from Facebook to YouTube, and hence, the authority has taken the action.

According to Wahaj-us-Siraj, the CEO of Nayatel, an Internet service provider, the ban will have an impact on the overall Internet traffic cutting up to 25 percent of total Internet traffic in Pakistan.

Google TV: Now Web on TV

Google the internet giant is out to expand its kingdom to the living room with an ambitious new service that lets people mesh television viewing with surfing the Web. Google TV, which has developed in partnership with technology titans Sony, Intel and Logitech and launched on Thursday.

Google TV, is powered by Google's Android software and Chrome Web browser, can be accessed using upcoming Web-enabled televisions from Sony or set-top boxes from Logitech that route Web content to existing TV sets. Sony and Logitech said the sets and boxes will be available in the United States in time for the year-end holiday shopping season and be rolled out internationally next year.

Google TV, which promises to extend the Internet search and advertising giants reach into the lucrative TV ad market. Initially, advertising served on Google TV will be the same as seen now by television viewers or Web surfers but the Internet firm said it is pondering ways to tailor advertising to the platform.

Google TV product manager Salahuddin Choudhary said in a blog post that Google TV will allow TV viewers to get "all the (TV) channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day.

Google is not the first technology company to attempt to unite the TV set and the Internet and a number of electronics manufacturers are already offering Web-enabled televisions or digital set-top boxes.

Yahoo jumped into the Internet television arena more than a year ago, teaming with set makers including Sony, Samsung, VIZIO, and LG to build-in software "widgets" that let viewers link directly to designated websites. Yahoo responded to the Google announcement with word that it is expanding to new devices to expand its reach.

IITian becomes 1st Indian-American dean of HarvardIITian becomes 1st Indian-American dean of Harvard

When Nitin Nohria, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, joined Harvard as a faculty in 1988, none would have thought that a history is in the making. Today, after 22 years he stands to be the first Indian-American dean of the prestigious Harvard Business School.

His latest work include a combined effort with his colleague Rakesh Khurana to instrument an oath for businesses globally. Nohria and Khurana were also the protagonists behind the introduction of the MBA Oath in 2009 that emphasized on the ethical behavior of MBA grads.

Though one of the highest profile HBS professors, Prof Nohria was not necessarily the most obvious choice for the job. Many insiders predicted that senior associate dean Srikant Datar or Carl Kester, deputy dean for academic affairs, would be appointed. However, his experience within India and his stints at London Business School made him the right choice to bring in a global perspective to the dean's position.

The 48-year old leadership professor will serve as the 10th dean of Harvard Business School by succeeding the current dean Jay Light. The chemical engineer turned professor Nohria, accepted the role on Tueday and will resume his post from July 1st. "I feel a profound sense of responsibility for continuing Harvard Business School's proud legacy of ground-breaking ideas and transformational educational experiences," he says. Currently he is the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at the century-old institution and co-chair of its Leadership Initiative.


Some of his students also recall how he, along with his brother-in-law Bharat N. Anand, the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, are known for their hospitality and the receptions to celebrate Indian festivals and its culture. "As his student, I found his discussion techniques and detailing immensely informative and thought provoking," said Manoj Kumar, managing partner with the Hahhurabi and Solomon, a legal and corporate consultancy firm.

"Prof. Nohria also made the curriculum and case studies very relevant to issues in the Indian business context. He deserves a special mention for making the programme so very insightful," Kumar added.

Nohria received his degree in chemical engineering in 1984 from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, which also awarded him with its distinguished alumnus medal in 2007.

He then received his doctoral degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management in 1988 where he earned an outstanding doctoral thesis award in behavioral and policy sciences.

Following that, he joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 1988, became an associate professor five years later and then served as the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration since 1999.

His current academic interests include the theory and practice of leadership, the study of human motivation, the analysis of management practices critical to corporate success, and the strategic and organisational challenges of globalisation.

Among his 16 books, the latest -- "Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice" - has been co-edited with his Harvard colleague Rakesh Khurana and reflects a colloquium he organised as part of Harvard's centennial in 2008 to stimulate serious scholarly research on leadership.

"Nitin Nohria will be a wonderful dean of Harvard Business School," said Jay Light about his successor. "He is widely respected within our extended community as a perceptive scholar of leadership and as a thoughtful and able academic leader."

Passwords are passe but biometrics not yet Passwords are passe but biometrics not yet viable

Biometric logins that use fingerprints, voice recognition or identify people by the way they type are not yet a viable option in portable devices like netbooks, palmtop computers and smart phones.

Biometric logins look set to replace conventional passwords for accessing online banking and credit card services, online payment companies and even internet stockbrokers.

However, smart phones and other portable devices do not currently have the sophistication to be adapted easily for biometric technology.

Moreover, users are likely to be reluctant to carry yet another device and its electrical charger along with their smart phone simply to login to their bank account when not at their desktop computer.

James Pope of the College of Business Administration, University of Toledo, Ohio, and Dieter Bartmann of the University of Regensburg, Germany, explain that the security of online financial transactions is becoming a problem, especially as security loopholes in login systems and web browsers emerge repeatedly.

Simply logging in with a password looks set to become technically passe.

"Passwords have been widely used because of their simplicity of implementation and use but are now regarded as providing minimal security," the researchers say.

As repeated scare stories about hacking and identity theft pervade the media, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about online security.

Further development of e-commerce and banking will be stifled if the issues of fraud and identity theft are not addressed, a University of Toledo release says.

While biometric readers are being adapted for desktop computers, they are seriously lagging behind in portability and compatibility with smart phones and other mobile computing devices.

The findings were published in the International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing.

Majority of PC for teens to be touchscreen by 2015

The immediate productivity gains promised by the flood of touch-enabled devices coming to market in 2010 will be slow to materialize in the enterprise, according to Gartner.

"What we're going to see is the younger generation beginning to use touchscreen computers ahead of enterprises," said Leslie Fiering, research vice president at Gartner. "By 2015, we expect more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens, up from fewer than 2 percent in 2009. On the other hand, we are predicting that fewer than 10 percent of PCs sold to enterprises in 2015 for mainstream knowledge workers will have touchscreens."

Ms. Fiering said that although touch and pen input are not new to the PC industry - both have been available, largely as niche products for vertical industry applications, for over 20 years - there is renewed interest in touch input today. Multitouch on smartphones and the Apple iPhone phenomenon have shown users how useful touch can be with the right implementation, and Apple's introduction of the larger iPad has set off a wave of speculation about changing the industry.

The earliest adopters of touch-enabled devices will be consumers who rarely deal with legacy issues. They will be looking for entertainment and casual gaming applications. Gartner predicts that iPhone and touch-enabled smartphone users will want to extend the multitouch experience to their PC computing. iPad and the overwhelming majority of slate, tablet and touch-enabled convertible devices planned for 2010 will have a consumer focus.

Touch-enabled devices will have slow adoption in the enterprise, due to heavy requirements for typing and text input, Gartner analysts said. The "muscle memory" of mouse users and the potential problems of moving a user's hands from the keyboard to the mouse will create particular adoption barriers for knowledge workers. Instead, consumers and education will be the earliest adopters of touch-enabled PCs and notebooks.

One of the key target usages for the next wave of tablets will be media content consumption (movies, newspapers and e-books), and the real success driver for entertainment devices will be the content delivery ecosystem. If this category succeeds, it will create greater market awareness of and demand for touch in other PC applications.

As prices drop, education will become a major market for touch and pen-enabled devices. Younger children just entering school find direct manipulation on the screen a natural way to interact with their computers. Older students are already using pen input to annotate class material or capture formulae and graphics that can't be recorded with keyboards (for math, chemistry and physics classes, among others). However, most school districts do not want to support two separate devices - one for touch and another for pen. To deal with the differing requirements of the different grades, most districts are looking for dual-input screens that support both touch and pen in a single device.

"Consensus among the Gartner client U.S. school districts is that over half, and possibly as many as 75 percent, will be specifying touch and/or pen input within the next five years," said Ms. Fiering. "Consider this as the precursor to a major upcoming generational shift in how users relate to their computing devices."

Conversely, enterprises will be slow to adopt touch input for mainstream knowledge workers. The long tail of legacy enterprise applications that don't leverage touch, and the large contingent of mouse-trained employees, will make many enterprises doubt the business case for adding touch - and any additional costs - to PC hardware standards. However, employees are increasingly bringing their own PCs and technologies to work, whether sanctioned or not, and as with other consumer technologies, enterprises will eventually be forced to acknowledge the use of touch for their mainstream knowledge users.

Touch and pen are already being used in many enterprise vertical applications for field service, law enforcement and clipboard replacements. Touch is also being used in many customer-facing situations like information kiosks and automated teller machines (ATMs). This trend will grow as touch-enabled hardware prices continue to drop and application software gets more sophisticated. Restaurants, retail and healthcare providers (for patient admittance, charting and patient records) may be among the largest adopters.

For workers immersed in graphics data analysis, touch will extend the value of the datasets as users directly manipulate the resulting graphs. Software support will be the big issue. Over time, as more touch-based graphics analysis applications become available, the features will move down market for mainstream employees, but not in the near term.

Gartner expects progress to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. No single "killer application" will change the market overnight; rather, there will be an incremental introduction of user interface and ergonomics improvements, drops in hardware prices and increases in touch-enhanced software.

"As with many recent technology advances, touch adoption will be led by consumers and only gradually get accepted by the enterprise," Ms. Fiering said. "What will be different here is the expected widespread adoption of touch by education, so that an entire generation will graduate within the next 10 to 15 years for whom touch input is totally natural.

Microsoft to bring Silverlight platform to set-top Microsoft to bring Silverlight platform to set-top boxes

Software giant Microsoft announced that it will launch new products and initiatives at the 2010 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show next week in Las Vegas.

The company said it is working with System-on-Chip (SOC) partners Intel and Broadcom to deliver support for reference designs that will provide complete Silverlight platform to set-top boxes, connected TVs, Blu-ray Disc players and other devices.

Microsoft also unveiled details about Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 4 and announced the upcoming release of Silverlight Media Framework 2.0. The latest version allows providers and broadcasters to encode content once and deliver it to Silverlight- and non-Silverlight-enabled devices. Version 4 also supports smooth multicast streaming, along with third-party encoding products and Microsoft Expression Encoder.

Silverlight Media Framework 2.0 is claimed to allow users to distribute media content with almost no coding. The framework is essentially an open-source version of the player used by NBC, NRK and CTV for the recent Olympics coverage.

"Our vision is to bring Silverlight to every screen, and as we continue to expand the capabilities and resources for Silverlight and IIS Media Services," said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft.