Jellyfishes the size of sumo wrestlers are creating new problems for the Japanese fishing community. "It's a terrible problem. They're like aliens," says Noriyuki Kani of the fisheries federation in Toyama, northwest of Tokyo

CNN reports:

A slimy jellyfish weighing as much as a sumo wrestler has Japan's fishing industry in the grip of its poisonous tentacles.

Vast numbers of Echizen kurage, or Nomura's jellyfish, have appeared around Japan's coast since July, clogging and ripping fishing nets and forcing fishermen to spend hours hacking them apart before bringing home their reduced catches.

Maglev technology is responsible for those super-fast trains we get to hear about running in Japan and China.

CNN is reporting that Maglev technology would soon be used to power elevators in Tokyo.

Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corp. will employ so-called maglev technology -- capable of suspending objects in mid-air through the combination of magnetic attraction and repulsion -- to control the lifts, it said in a statement.

Wired is running an article on how Seagate has been able to increase hard drive densities by aligning bits of data vertically, rather than horizontally as is done currently.

The new approach that aligns bits of data vertically rather than horizontally enables Seagate -- and other drive vendors -- to further boost the density of drives without increasing the risk of scrambling data....By storing bits in a vertical, or perpendicular, arrangement, engineers are able to boost capacity by taking advantage of the real estate that is freed up.

Seagate's new drive, the Momentus 5400.3, was being shipped as of Monday, the Scotts Valley, California-based company said. The shift to perpendicular recording allows it to bump up the maximum capacity of its notebook drive to 160 GB from 120 GB.

Read more here.

Infrastructure problems have started taking their toll on Banglore's software industry. Software majors have started cutting down their expansion plans for the city and are also reducing their future hiring plans.

"Travel time in Bangalore has expanded a lot. The industry has grown very large and is now growing faster outside of Bangalore. All software companies are saying their hiring here for the 2007 fiscal year will be far lesser than for 2006," says Infosys CFO T V Mohandas Pai.

IndianExpress reports.

Microsoft has unveiled its Virtual India Project, an online interactive map of India modeled on Microsoft's virtual Earth.

The map supports a resolution of 1:1M and 1:8000 specifically for Bangalore city. Standard features like tagging and view specific permalinks are included. Also included is a multi-lingual capability supporting English, Hindi, Kannada and Tamil.

The only spoiler could be your bandwidth, with the approx. 100kbps speed that my provider doles out in the name of broadband, it required a lot of patience to check out the nitty-gritty.

Find the online map here and more information on the project here.

What is wrong with India, and what will it take to set it right. This is pretty much the summary of Lee Kuan Yew's address at the 37th Jawaharlal Memorial Lecture on 21st Nov 2005 in New Delhi.

Two months later, Atanu Dey takes the message apart and gives his take on what Lew really wanted to say and why India should listen.

Take in more of his incisive commentary at IndianEconomy.org.

S. Mitra Kalita writes an interesting article on the Washington Post citing the changing face of IT outsourcing to India over the last couple of years.

"Before he supervised teams, wooed American clients over dinner or sat in a Northern Virginia boardroom alongside U.S. executives, Constancio Fernandes wrote computer code for a living.

That's how it started in the late 1990s - American businesses ordered up software applications, and Indian programmers such as Fernandes dutifully delivered. But somewhere along the way, Fernandes became more confident and outspoken. He began questioning the Americans and suggesting cheaper, faster ways to run their businesses. They listened."

Read the entire piece here.

Big investments and huge markets are pushing India to become a global production base hub for small cars.

India can boast of world class capabilities in the production of small cars owing to its strong domestic market. Of the 800,000 cars sold in the country in the last one year, 600,000 were small cars of engine capacity up to 1,300 cc. And the market could just explode if Tata Motors succeeds in bringing out its Rs 1-lakh car.

Business Standard reports on the recent big ticket investment by Maruti.

The recent rush of VC funds in India would have most entrepreneurs salivating. However, not all ideas are up for grabs.

Vineet Buch, a venture capitalist at BlueRun Ventures gives his take on what looks promising in India in 2006.

In the list are more consumer Internet initiatives, mobile value-added services, component manufacturers, fabless semiconductors, clean technology and ofcourse good old software services with a sprinkling of products.

WiMax, it seems could be well be the technology which could propel
India into a wired future. WiMax promises a wireless solution to the "last mile" connectivity problem.

Anand parthasarathy reports on WiMax and more, from the recently held Indian Wireless Broadband summit.