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‘Digital India initiative to drive infrastructure changes’

The government’s smart cities and Digital India initiatives have gathered maximum attention from the IT sector as these projects will rely heavily on information and communications technology. John Fowler, who is executive vice-president of Systems at business software firm Oracle, believes that some of the activities like Digital India initiative are going to drive infrastructure changes. “People will want to look at using new hardware and software to build a secure infrastructure for Digital India and that is where we want to try to help as we build very complete hardware and software solutions that work in very highly scaled and highly secure environment,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interaction. 

Indian-descent software engineer shares Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting

A software engineer of Indian descent shared The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in growing recognition of the importance of using information technology tools for reporting as well as for presentation.

Palani Kumanan, who is a software architect and technical lead with Dow Jones that publishes the Journal, was a part of the winning project's graphics team, according to Michael Siconolfi, the newspaper's investigations editor.

The Journal won the top journalism award announced Monday for its mammoth investigative project, "Medicare Unmasked." The series mined data obtained from the US government after a prolonged legal fight.

The Journal articles exposed fraud and waste in Medicare, the government health insurance program covering about 43 million senior citizens and about 9 million people with severe disablities. The exposures led to Congressional inquiries and criminal prosecutions.

Kumanan, a graduate of the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, developed the interactive database on Medicare billing used to analyse government payments made to over 880,000 medical service providers, including doctors and hospitals. From the this mountain of data, readers were also able to use an interactive database created on the newspaper's website to find for themselves information about various medical service providers and analyse it.

In the digital age, coding and software applications are becoming essential journalism tools and training institutions have begun incorporating them into journalism curriculum. Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, for example, has been offering a dual-degree program in journalism and computer science.

Journal's Geeta Anand, who is now based in India, shared a Pulitzer in 2003 for reports on corporate scandals. The next year, a series on rationing in healthcare that she worked on was a Pulitzer finalist.

Last year, Vijay Seshadri won the poetry Pulitzer Prize for his collection, "3 Sections," and in 2011, Siddhatha Mukherjee, a doctor and medical researcher, received the Pulitzer non-fiction book award for "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."

Govt plans $10 billion investment in two semiconductor plants

In line with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s flagship ‘Make in India’ programme, the centre plans to spend billions of dollars to put in place an ecosystem for electronics manufacturing in the country.

The government plans to invest $10 billion in two computer chip manufacturing facilities that are due to come up, R.S. Sharma, secretary, department of electronics and information technology, said on Thursday at the first “Indian Electronics Expo” that was organized by the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council.

Sharma also said that India will invest $400 million to develop a microprocessor.

Mint had reported in January that India was planning to develop its own microprocessor design unit to cater to the growing demand for electronic devices.

“These are part of the initiatives that we are taking to create an ecosystem that lays the focus on high-ended innovation,” said Sharma. “We have created a dedicated fund known as the Electronics Development Fund to leverage the use of venture capital funds to promote more start-ups in the country.”

India imports 65% of the electronic products sold in the country, mainly China-made.

If the situation is left unchanged, the country’s electronics import bill may well surpass its oil import expenses by 2020.

While the demand for electronics hardware in India is projected to increase to $400 billion by 2020, the estimated domestic production could rise to $104 billion only, creating a gap of $296 billion, which has to be met through imports, according to a 2014 report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. Ltd.

India has been considering setting up semiconductor manufacturing plants since 2007, but it was only in September 2013 that the government approved the setting up of two chip-making units, which are expected to draw Rs.63,000 crore investments.

The two approved consortia are led by Jaiprakash Associates Ltd, which is teaming up with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Israel-based TowerJazz, to set up a Rs.29,000 crore unit in Greater Noida, and Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., which is in a partnership with French-Italian electronics and semiconductor makerSTMicroelectronics NV and Malaysia-based wafer manufacturer Silterra, to set up a Rs.34,000-crore fab facility in Prantij, near Gandhinagar.

“China is undoubtedly the major producer of electronic goods. Of late, many electronics giants are embarking on a China-plus strategy, mostly focusing on India,” said Sharma. “Coupled with the ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ programmes initiated recently by the government, the renewed interest in electronics production in India can help the country achieve the target set for zero import of electronics into the country by 2020.”

Xiaomi Mi 4i: Top features, full specifications and ridiculously low price Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/technology/story/xiaomi-mi-4i-price-features-specifications/1/431828.html

Xiaomi on Thursday launched the Mi 4i smartphone. The company calls it the flagship Mi phone though that is an assertions many are likely to differ with. The phone has the Snapdragon 615 inside it, which is a mid-range processor irrespective of whether it is generation1 or generation 2, and we would not call the Mi 4i a flagship Xiaomi phone. But that doesn't mean it is not nice. In fact, the Mi 4i is mighty impressive and has enough in it to become the most popular Xiaomi phone launched so far.

The reason why the Mi 4i is such an impressive phone, at least on paper, is because it is packed with features that seem to be useful and not just put into it for the sake of marketing reasons. It looks like a complete package and yet has a fairly low price.

But before we take a look at the top features of the phone, let's quickly tell:

Processor: Snapdragon 615. Four cores run at 1.7GHz + four others at 1.1GHz

RAM: 2GB

Storage: 16GB (for now 32GB and 64GB versions not announced in India)

Display: 5-inch with 1080P resolution

Cameras: 13-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel front camera

Body and design: Plastic body, unibody design, rounded corners, thin bezels, metal buttons, 130 grams

Battery: 3120 mAh

Connectivity: Dual SIM, 4G support in India, WiFi AC