HYDERABAD: L’affaire Satyam is poised to take a dramatic turn. In a clear indication that he is all set to retract his confession and deny all the charges, former Satyam chairman B Ramalinga Raju has said that his letter of January 2009 was a mere resignation letter from the post of the company’s chairman and claimed that he was being falsely implicated in the criminal case by the CBI.

In his bail application moved in the AP High Court on Tuesday, Raju said he was the chairman of Satyam Computer Services till January 7, 2009, “when he tendered his resignation.” Further, he submitted to the court that he was falsely implicated as accused No 1 in the criminal case filed by the CBI and that the allegations made against him “are absolutely false and not supported by any credible evidence.”

Completely denying the ‘confession’ in which Raju himself had admitted to several irregularities, the accused No 1 in the Satyam scam is now turning the tables on the CBI and saying that all the charges levelled against him were cooked up by the investigating agency. “The allegations in the charge sheet are that cash and bank balances did not reflect the true state of affairs,” Raju claims now, though it was he himself who had admitted to this in his January 2009 letter.

Raju also denied all the other charges made against him by the CBI based on his confession. They included inflation of sales by generating false invoices, floating of 327 companies, offloading of shares by the accused and other promoters of the company, inflated revenues, publication of falsified figures with respect to utilisation of employees on profitable projects, and that the auditors of the company conspired with the accused deliberately in violation of the auditing and assurance standards.

Former Satyam chairman also denied that there was a criminal breach of trust by him in the matter pertaining to the declaration and disbursement of dividends and that wrongful gain was made by the accused and wrongful loss suffered by investors in shares of the company. Further, he also denied that he and his family members had acquired huge assets during the period in which the accounting fraud was perpetrated.

LOS ANGELES: Nokia has begun looking for candidates to replace Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who has struggled to keep up with nimbler rivals Apple and Google, according to a newspaper report.

Kallasvuo may be ousted as early as the end of July, the newspaper cited a person familiar with the matter as saying. A US based spokeswoman for the Finnish cellphone maker declined to comment, citing company policy regarding market rumours.

“They are serious about making a change,” the source was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

The CEO of one major US high-tech company had spurned Nokia’s approach after meeting with Chairman Jorma Ollila, because that candidate had not been keen on moving to Finland, the Journal cited the source as saying.

Nokia had also flown in at least one other US-based executive to interview for the job, the source added.

Kallasvuo has come under attack from shareholders this year as the stock price waned. Nokia warned on Wednesday second-quarter sales and profits at its key phones unit would come in weaker than expected — the company’s second profit warning in less than two months.

Analysts say it has been slow to innovate amid an explosion of feature-rich multimedia gadgets like the Apple iPhone and devices based on Google’s Android operating system.

Shares in Nokia fell to their lowest in over a year last week. Analysts say Nokia’s market-share position could weaken further in coming months.

NEW DELHI: Reacting to the reception problems in Apple’s latest version of iPhone, iPhone 4, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs asserted that reception issues were a problem shared by the entire smartphone industry, naming specifically rivals Research in Motion, Samsung Electronics and HTC Corp.

However, while Apple CEO didn’t mention Nokia per se, the mobile phone giant issued a statement, claiming that antenna performance has always been a high priority for Nokia. “Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, Web browsing and so on. As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict,” the company said.

However, now Apple’s Smartphone Antenna Performance page has added a video which shows that Nokia N97 Mini, when held a certain way, also shows significant signal loss. Hold the phone in a weak signal area, Apple claims, and it can drop from 7 to 2 bars.

Apple’s Smartphone Antenna Performance page claims. “Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way.” To demonstrate this, the company says that it has tested iPhone 4 alongside other smartphones.

Source:The Times Of India.

NEW DELHI/KOLKATA: The Intelligence Bureau has asked the telecom department to stop Nokia’s popular messaging services in India until they can be monitored, another sign of the growing discomfort of the country’s spooks with similar offerings they view as suspect from a security angle.

The security agency has written to the DoT that it is against the continuation of the Finnish company’s push email service for corporates and consumers that allows the easy management of multiple accounts, said a DoT official familiar with the matter. The communique, a copy of which is with ET, shows that this is not the first time that the agency has brought the issue to the DoT’s notice.

The IB had issued a similar warning against BlackBerry services, another mode of communication favoured by corporate clients, Google’s Gmail and internet telephony firm Skype earlier this month.

Nokia launched a beta version of the messaging service in April 2009. All leading cellular operators offer the service, which the company’s advertisements claim allows consumers to use up to 10 email accounts on the move.

The service became an instant hit, with the company signing up more than 1 lakh activations a month in India, vaulting it to the top five markets globally. Nearly 50% of Nokia’s E Series smartphones sold in the country get activated for emails.

A Nokia India spokesperson said its messaging email service is still in the beta format in India, and that “the requisite infrastructure required by security agencies is being put in place”. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which has a million customers, and Nokia collectively account for nearly all the corporate email consumers on mobile phones in the country.

Though the IB warnings cast a shadow over their services, it remains to be seen if the DoT acts. The department is yet to move against BlackBerry, Gmail and Skype. The frustration running through the security establishment with DoT’s failure to act is evident in the communique.

“We had raised certain concerns/reservations with regard to security issues of monitoring arrangements, which remain unaddressed till date. But open advertisements in the market indicate Nokia is still going ahead with the launch of these services without addressing security concerns,” the IB said in the communique.

Similarly, the agency has again sought to turn the DoT’s gaze towards BlackBerry, saying services in their current format posed a security threat to the country. The IB had earlier asked DoT to give RIM a 15-day deadline to ensure that all data carries to and from India are in formats that can be read by national intelligence agencies.

After the IB aired its concerns, RIM corporate affairs director Siddartha Dasgupta wrote to telecom secretary PJ Thomas, stating the company wishes to “explain and clarify the standard manner in which data travels or is transmitted when a BlackBerry device is used by a consumer.”

Source:The Times Of India.

NEW DELHI: India has come up with the world’s cheapest “laptop,” a touch-screen computing device that costs $35 (Rs 1500).

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled the low-cost computing device that is designed for students, saying his department had started talks with global manufacturers to start mass production.

“We have reached a (developmental) stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything,” he told a news conference.

He said the touchscreen gadget was packed with Internet browsers, PDF reader and video conferencing facilities but its hardware was created with sufficient flexibility to incorporate new components according to user requirement.

Sibal said the Linux based computing device was expected to be introduced to higher education institutions from 2011 but the aim was to drop the price further to $20 and ultimately to $10.

The device was developed by research teams at India’s premier technological institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.

India spends about three percent of its annual budget on school education and has improved its literacy rates to over 64 percent of its 1.2 billion population but studies have shown many students can barely read or write and most state-run schools have inadequate facilities.

NEW DELHI: Here we go again! India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal has “launched” a $35 computer, evidently a “dream project” of his.

The touchscreen, Linux-based device looks iPad-inspired, but we know little about how it works.

It emerged from a student project with a bill of material adding up to $47, a price that the minister wants to bring down to $10 “to take forward inclusive education”. It promises browser and PDF reader, wi-fi, 2GB memory, USB, Open Office, and multimedia content viewers and interfaces.

Will it die a quick death within this year, or a painful, government-funded one over the next two? I fear the latter. Project Sakshat even has a busy website so it looks like a project well under way.

Remember the Rs 10,000 personal computer, the Simputer, the $100 laptop from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the NetPCs from a host of companies and India’s so-called $10 laptop? How many flops and failures will it take to convince governments — and brave, but misled companies — to get these facts of life tech, products, and life?

You don’t launch products until you have a product to launch. Else it’s vapourware. The Indian government is building up a good track record of vapourware, from $10 laptops upward. Apple, for in sharp contrast, for instance, launches with a million units ready to sell, and midnight queues outside.

You don’t show prototypes unless they are working ones with running apps, backed by a clear game plan to build up a vendor and apps network, and a clear design and specifications — and, preferably, a bill of materials.

It isn’t about the hardware — it’s about the application and the applications (apps) ecosystem. What will it be used for? Who will make those apps? Where’s the developer community? Where is the road map for hundreds of applications?

Apple had it all when it launched the iPhone and the iPad. Product design isn’t one-off. It’s an ongoing process, with software updates, improvements, upgrades, and most of all, growing apps support. You can make a working laptop, but it’s no trivial task maintaining it through the life cycle of the product, ensuring support, firmware and hardware upgrades, and new versions.

NEW DELHI: Effective use of technology for in-house audit processes could help prevent accounting fraud in a company, as it will be easier to monitor the flow of data online, says global consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

A new PwC report, ’2010 Internal Audit State of the Productivity of the Profession Survey’, said that about 48 per cent of Indian companies lack skill and knowledge of data tools used in internal audit software, while 18 per cent have no access to these tools.

“With a predicted increase in scope and responsibility and heightened focus on risks, it is essential that internal audit functions prioritise focus, employ smarter resourcing and skill models and use technology as an enabler,” PwC India Executive Director Satyavati Berera said.

However, a number of internal auditors in India are not convinced that technology has a measurable benefit, with 38 per cent of the respondents to PwC’s survey unable to calculate the benefit.

Of the companies that saw benefits in the use of information technology, 38 per cent said it provides greater coverage, 28 per cent talked about targeted risk testing, 18 per cent were eyeing efficiency and 17 per cent were keen on the ability for continuous monitoring, the study said.

PwC suggested that companies can initiate a pilot project for a technology-enabled audit methodology or audit lifecycle so that an assessment can be made about the opportunity for technology to enhance and streamline that process.

“It is important for raising the performance bar because this year’s survey results indicate that auditors at present are not convinced that technology has a clear benefit,” PwC said.

The role of internal audit processes hold significance in India in the aftermath of the Rs 10,000 crore accounting scam at Satyam Computer Services that was brought to light in January last year by the IT firm’s founder and the fraud’s perpetrator, B Ramalinga Raju.

The firm’s internal audit team head V S Prabhakar Gupta, who is not out on bail, was booked by the CBI for being party to the crime — the largest in India’s corporate history.

Top Indian IT firms have accused Accenture of violating campus recruitment norms by beginning placements in some colleges a semester ahead. Companies including TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant have lodged a complaint with industry lobby Nasscom.

Even a couple of years back, IT companies used to hire engineering graduates a year before they passed out. However, Nasscom asked top colleges last year to postpone their placement season to the final semester. This was done to ensure that software firms would go in for just- in-time hiring, to ensure that they do not over hire in an environment where project pipelines were under pressure.

Nasscom wanted the same practice to be followed for the 2010-11 batch too even though growth has returned to the industry. To boot, Nasscom president Som Mittal wrote an e-mail to senior execs at TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and Accenture last week asking them to continue with the policy. ET has a copy of the mail.

But IT firms allege that Accenture had violated this directive by giving offer letters to students in a couple of colleges based in Pune and Ahmedabad. When asked, Mittal said: “When you are doing this across a very large country, there can be some leakages or emissions , but nothing is at scale. But we have spoken to companies and they said that they will abide by the directive.” Mittal did not, however, go into the specifics of the issue. “It was a gentleman’s agreement and they have broken it. It is a clearly loss of face for the Indian IT industry,” said a person in charge of campus placements at one of the rival firms. The colleges where Accenture has given offer letters are Sinhgad group of institutions in Pune and Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication in Gujarat. Two people involved in the placement process at these two institutes confirmed that Accenture had issued offer letters.

An Accenture spokesman declined to offer comments on the accusation made by rivals . Industry watchers say campuses will see aggressive hiring as growth returns to the IT sector after a tough year. “There is better traction in hiring and this is indicated by higher attrition levels. The normal rules of truce will be forgotten in such an environment . So, if one or two break the ranks, it is a free for all,” said E Balaji, CEO of HR consulting firm Ma Foi Randstad.

“This is just an aberration. Hiring in the last semester is good for everyone so I don’t see why companies won’t align,” Mittal said.

NEW DELHI: IT blue-chip Wipro, whose promoters own 80 percent in the company, said it expects the finance ministry to bring in changes to the proposed 25 percent public float norm for listed companies.

Markets have been debating how the proposed rules would impact Wipro whose chairman Azim Premji’s holding is over 75 percent. Unveiling Wipro’s first quarter earning, Premji declined to comment when asked if he would bring down his stake in the company.

Wipro’s Chief Financial Officer Suresh Senapaty said “PSUs have raised a lot of issues in terms of overhang of 25 per cent… we expect some kind of changes in this regard.”

He said that the government itself wants to “make some changes (in the 25 percent clause)”.

However, Wipro said that the company will comply with the rules.

According to the new rules, listed companies have to have at least 25 percent public holding. They can raise the public holding by 5 percent each year to reach the threshold.

Country’s third biggest software exporter Wipro is part of the benchmark 30-share index Sensex of the Bombay Stock Exchange.