The P1 from Sony Ericsson comes with all the makings of a perfect mobile. Complete with Opera 8, Stereo Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity supporting VoIP will make this little gadget a fast mover from the shelves.

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http://gadgets.in/content/view/96/58/

India has recently opened up for possible large scale semiconductor manufacturing. Though India has been leading in the are of chip design it lacked manufacturing facilities. Its one of the fastest growing markets for electronic equipment and hence semiconductors.

The Union Govt released an investor friendly Semi Conductor Policy on 22nd February, doling out a capital subsidy of up to 25% (22% if the unit is in an SEZ). The subsidy offered is in the form of tax breaks and interest-free loans. The Fab units located in SEZ would have the additional operating benefits under SEZ Policy! This is expected to fire up the competition to set up foundries in India. The exponential growth in mobile phone services, broadband, IP TV, digital cameras, MP3 Players, gaming devices etc is at present fully dependant on imports of semiconductors.

Richard Stallman, the celebrated founder of the GNU, FSF, author of many programs including the EMAC and what not, made a visit to NIT Hamirpur to give a lecture on " Software and Freedom". This is one of his first visit to a technical institution in the country. Read more aboutthe visit here.http://www.himvani.com/news/index.php?s=richard+stallman&searchbutton=Go%21

The growing Indian IT market has started attracting global E-Business biggies too.

Trilogy E-Business Software, best known for cutting-edge analytics and configuration solutions, with development centres in Bangalore and Austin, has launched YourBillBuddy.Com.

The site helps users find out the best mobile plan suited for their needs. The service works by requesting users to upload past bills. The system analyzes these bills and using a database of currently offered plans by different service providers it recommends the cheapest plan based on the user's calling pattern.

Indian companies are finally breaking into the Web 2.0 party. The latest to join
the bandwagon is Pixrat - which is a kind of del.icio.us for photos.

The functionality is pretty similar to del.icio.us, although they also support personal bookmarks. There is also a popular page, which ranks most bookmarked images. They differ from flickr in the sense that they won't host your photos, but will just bookmark photos which are already online.

Talking about grassroots adoption of technology (and a more cutting edge open source one at that) what Kalyan saw is definitely not what you would normally expect.

While traveling from Mysore, Kalyan came across this bus sporting the famous firefox logo.

Buissnessworld India is running a very good story on semiconductor industry in India. Some key points are :

1) Indian semiconductor industry has grown from $1 billion to $3billion in last four years.
2) There is a ecosystem in place now which consists of chip vendors, OEMs, EDA companies, design services, fab, chip testing, fab equipment companies etc.
3) Cadence and TI working together to define and develop low-power design methodologies.
4) Some good example of the ecosystem. TI's DaVinci chip used by Ittiam
5) Lots of new start-ups in Bangalore as part of the ecosystem.
6) Most interestingly, the presence of two companies Tessolve and Applied Materials, who are in Bangalore in anticipation of chip manufacturing activities. Tessolve is into chip testing and Applied Material is into manufacturing fab equipment!
7) Static RAM group in Cypress's Bangalore group.

Read more here. You may need to register with the site to access the article.

India is seeing boom years. With the market better than ever, and increasing technology penetration, we are on a roll. This is marked with increased technology penetration in India, including computers and e-mail (something that a lot of us take for granted). CNet News.com has an article on how India is top target for spam.

"India's rapid adoption of new technology has left its PC users struggling to cope with high levels of spam, according to a report released Wednesday.

Ninety-one percent of e-mail traffic sent to Indian PC users is spam, according to e-mail security company MessageLabs, which warned that the rate of technological advancement has outstripped growth in security awareness."

Microsoft has understood the potential of the Indian market and its need for solutions custom built for India like localization of languages. Techtree has an article on Microsoft launching a Windows XP Starter Edition for India. Quote:

"Microsoft has launched "Windows XP Starter Edition for India," the latest version of its local language operating system which was introduced last year.

Microsoft says the new version has been released in response to extensive feedback from first-time users, and promises to offer multi-language support allowing them to seamlessly switch between English, Hindi and Tamil as computing interfaces.

The latest version introduces beginners to computing by providing a simple operating system for entry-level PCs. It incorporates features specifically designed for beginners such as customized support in local languages, bi-lingual user interface, pre-configured PC settings, etc. "

It has also introduced Works 8 - a productivity application suite.

NowPos (short for Now Possible), a tech startup based in hyderabad has unveiled vMail , which according to the company is a "web-based e-mail service that brings in a new paradigm in e-mailing - of using voice - recorded, encrypted, delivered and retrieved in a unique way, making the 'sound files' on NowPos the smallest in size in the Internet space"

vMail, if it is really as good, steps into the rarefied field of technology innovation from India.

Read more at Business Standard and VC Circle.