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100,000 residents now have the Aadhaar number

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PCQ Bureau
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Lakshmamma from Tumkur, Karnataka received the 100,000th Aadhaar number. “Crossing one lakh enrolments in this short span of time is a welcome milestone for us,” Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of the UIDAI, said. “And the credit for this goes far beyond the UIDAI team. A lot of people — state government officials, the enrolling agencies, as well as the UIDAI team, its TDU (Technology Development Unit) , PMU (Project Management Unit), sabbatical resources and volunteers are working together, and put in substantial effort towards getting the enrolments done.”

On September 29th, 2010, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issued the first Aadhaar number to Ms. Ranjna Sadashiv Sonwane, a tribal woman from Tembhali village in Nandurbar, Maharashtra by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. The issue of Aadhaar numbers to the residents of Tembhali marked the launch of the initiative, and the beginning of an ambitious operation to issue 600 million Aadhaar numbers in the next four years to Indians across the country. Over these last six weeks, the UIDAI has rapidly ramped up enrolments for the Aadhaar number across seven states — Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Life Insurance Corporation of India and Indira Gandhi National Open University have also come on board as registrars for Aadhaar numbers, and have started enrolments. More registrars are expected to begin Aadhaar enrolments in the next few weeks.

Shri Nilekani said, “The emphasis in Aadhaar enrolment continues to be India's poorest and marginalized residents.” Accordingly, Aadhaar enrolments have begun in rural areas across the seven states, and with the homeless in Delhi.

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Juniper's next-generation core router to meet rapidly expanding bandwidth needs

Juniper Networks' T4000 Core Router, powered by the Junos operating system, provides the scalability and flexibility required to meet rapidly expanding bandwidth requirements. At 240 Gbps/slot, the T4000 is the industry's fastest and densest IP/MPLS router, built and optimized for transport networks, the service provider backbone and major peering points around the world. With four terabits of line rate throughput in a half rack chassis, the T4000 is purpose-built to facilitate the continued rapid increase in multimedia applications, including enterprise collaboration and mobile video conferencing as well as new and emerging cloud and research applications.

The T4000 is being introduced as Internet traffic patterns are increasingly more dynamic with video, cloud computing and mobile applications placing new demands on the network. ABI Research projects that U.S. mobile data traffic will grow more than 500 percent in the next four years to reach more than 3,200 petabytes by 2014. With Internet traffic expected to increasingly include some form of video, the higher network core capacities of the T4000 will be essential to meeting subscriber expectations of reliable connectivity to rich media content.

UMO 2010 Seminar: Creating technologies that enhance usability and better living

The Computer Society of India (CSI), Chennai Chapter, organized a three day event, International Seminar on Usability Matters — UMO2010, between 11 — 13 November 2010 at Savera Hotel, Chennai. "Good Design For Better Living" was the theme chosen for the Seminar. The deliberations during the two-day seminar focused on integrating the quantitative, qualitative, formal, semi-formal and informal practices into the software development life-cycle to engineer user-centric products and services.

The first day of the event discussed communication, which is about "Making Life Easy" and user friendly. It was emphasized that technology should be made simpler for people to use. For instance, a cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob.

The new design paradigms must include research methods that allow organizations to capture the experience whenever the user is interacting a given artifact and the interaction is unmoderated and asynchronous with the researcher's schedule - even in the middle of the night, and from any time zone and independent of the delivery channel - cell phone, PDA, laptop, kiosk and any operating system. The two-day Seminar began with a lucid and comprehensive discussion on Usability practices by Prof. D K Subrahmanian, President FAER & Event General Chair.

Dr. Anirudha Joshi, IIT, Mumbai followed up with the Industrial design practices. Dr. Anil Pande, VHS spoke on “Speech Based Interfaces” and human response to such interfaces from the Neurosurgeon's perspective. Mr. Kevin Devasia, Apollo Hospitals, Chennai spoke on the Usability of ICT in Telemedicine based on the rich experience Apollo Hospitals has in this area. Mr. A P Guruswamy, DGM, Indian Bank spoke about the Banking Sector. Mr. Sanjay Sharma, Polaris, Mumbai outlined a pragmatic framework for Usability in Practice.

A one-day handson Workshop was conducted on 13 November 2010 with all the materials used in Usability activities. Prof. D K Subrahmanian spoke on problem-solving with user-centered practices. Mr. Sourabh Dubey, Oracle India, Bangalore was the workshop leader. He was ably assisted by Mr. Guru Guruvayurappan Sainarayanan, Cognizant, Chennai and Mr. Balaji, PayPal, Chennai.

Kotak Life Insurance launches e-insurance

Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance Limited (Kotak Life Insurance) announced the launch of its e-Insurance portal through which a customer can buy life insurance online.

A customer can select the plan of his choice and opt for monthly, quarterly, half yearly or annual premium payment mode.

After filling the proposal form, the customer could opt to pay policy premium using either net-banking or credit card.

The Proposal Deposit Receipt (PDR) is issued online after payment confirmation. Purchases are transacted through a highly secure transaction environment. Customer can schedule an appointment for pickup of mandatory documents on the portal itself for final issuance of policy. On receipt of documents (and reports of medical tests where required), policy hard copy is dispatched to the customer within 4-6 working days.

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Opera rolls out Opera Mobile for Android

Opera said its browser offers faster page loading than its rivals and better connections at lower-speed or congested netorks thanks to its data compression feature.

Norway's Opera Software unveiled on Tuesday its Opera Mobile browser for Google's Android platform, expanding its offering for the world's second largest smartphone software system.

Opera said its browser offers faster page loading than its rivals and better connections at lower-speed or congested networks thanks to its data compression feature.

Opera's Mini browser, which directs traffic through the Norwegian firm's own servers, has been earlier available for Android.

Healthcare IT spending in India to grow at 22% from 2009-13, finds Springboard Research

Healthcare IT spending in India is expected to grow from US$ 274.2 million in 2009 to US$ 609.5 in 2013, growing at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22% from 2009-2013, says the latest “IT in the Healthcare Industry - Emerging Trends and Market Opportunities in India” report from Springboard Research. The report revealed that hardware accounted for the largest proportion of total IT spending in the healthcare vertical with 55% share, followed by software and IT Services at 25% and 20% respectively in 2009. The Springboard Research report found that 23% of the healthcare respondents who currently use or plan to use Cloud Computing cited “reduced hardware infrastructure costs” as well as “simplified resource and server provisioning” to be the primary reasons for adoption. Though Cloud/ SaaS applications help healthcare enterprises in reducing their operating costs, the high initial investment, integration with existing systems and lack of knowledge hinder the adoption.

According to the report, HIS is the largest IT solution implemented for healthcare which drives majority of the tier 1 private enterprise investments. As high as 94% of respondents cited implementing HIS while 85% of the respondents mentioned to have invested on clinical information system

Trend Micro's security report: SMBs more concerned about virus attacks than data theft

According to a recent global survey by Trend Micro, viruses, trojans, data-stealing malware, and data leaks were rated as big IT concerns among small businesses. The survey included 1600 end users across the globe. On average, 63 percent of small businesses were most concerned by viruses, 60 percent by trojans, 59 percent by data-stealing malware (malware designed by cybercriminals specifically to steal data), followed by 56 percent by data leaks - the intentional or unintentional sending of sensitive or crucial information outside the corporate network. Phishing scams and spam were least concerning among the small businesses surveyed.

Small businesses are less prepared, less aware of data loss. Despite these worries, the survey found that across all countries, small organizations are less likely by 23 percent to have preventative data leak policies in place than large companies. The survey found that the most prevalent forms of IT protection against data stealing malware is installing security software, restricting Internet access and implementing security policies. Even then, 21 percent of small business employees still say that their IT departments can do a better job at protecting them on potential risks associated with data-stealing malware. More alarmingly, more than one third (35 percent) of employees in small companies indicated their IT department could have done a better job educating them about data stealing malware.

Adobe Launches Acrobat X in India

The Samsung SCX -3201 is equipped with Samsung's unique Print Screen button, which provides a quick and easy way to print content. The 'Eco-Print” button on the OP panel provides economic and easy print-outs in 2 —up and 600 dpi resolution while saving paper, toner and time. Further , the SCX — 3201 has a Soft Power button located in the Front Panel which not only makes it easy to use but also avoids unnecessary power consumption. The AnyWeb print software allows consumers to drag and drop content from different sources and consolidate into one page and maximize the overall user experience of the SCX-3201. It has a 32 MB memory , Toner Saver Mode and a monthly duty cycle of upto 5000 pages. The Samsung SCX — 3201 is priced at Rs. 8999/- with a Full Starter toner.

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