Information Technology World

India's Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has decided to push ahead with the third-generation (3G) mobile spectrum auction within the current financial year ending March 31, the Financial Express newspaper reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources.   The auction was set to begin from Jan. 14, but Telecoms Minister Andimuthu Raja said on Jan. 12 some of the differences with the defense ministry were yet to be resolved and that a new date had not been agreed upon. Media reports have said that the auction had been postponed to the next financial year. The auction would now be conducted in the second half of March, with the entire process compressed into 15 days against the earlier scheduled one-and-a-half months, the report said citing unnamed sources. The government, which is fighting a 16-year high fiscal deficit, is targeting to raise around 350 billion rupees ($7.53 billion) through the auction. It hopes to use the proceeds to partly cut down the fiscal

As the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, is officially starting today, search giant Google has kept its tradition of commemorating the special event with its doodle – that too in a revolutionary way, breaking its own tradition.   Though Google has commemorated almost all historic events and days, this doodle makes a difference because it breaks the tradition of keeping the logo small so as it does not intrude the white space, which has become sort of trademark for the Google homepage. The latest doodle has a stylized drawing of the opening ceremony as its background, which stretches right the way across the screen like a long ribbon. In the doodle the 'l' in 'Google' is replaced by an Olympic torch and on the left of the doodle is the print of the Olympic rings. And the mood created by the use of pastel shade of blue also perfectly gels with the season of the game – the winter. If winter comes, how can Google doodle be far behind!

Even though the world is said to be slowly recovering from economic crisis that has seen many giants fall, the recession has taken a heavy toll on Silicon Valley, according to a recent report. "There are clear warning signs suggesting Silicon Valley has entered a new phase of uncertainty, and that our competitive standing is at risk," says '2010 Silicon Valley Index', a report by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network. The report said the economic crisis had resulted in 90,000 job losses in the Silicon Valley region alone between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. Silicon Valley is no longer able to attract the foreign talent which has been its "lifeblood" and funding innovation through locally raised venture capital and public offerings "can no longer be taken as a given," the report said. As per the report, inflows from China and India to the Valley con

Google Inc said it may create a stand-alone version of its Buzz social networking product but won't separate Buzz from its Gmail service, a linkup that has spurred controversy over privacy. Google, the world's No.1 Internet search engine launched Buzz earlier this week in a bid to tap into the fast-growing social networking market dominated by companies like Facebook and Twitter. Buzz allows users to broadcast messages and share photos and videos with friends and colleagues online, similar to Twitter and Facebook. But unlike those services, Buzz is built directly into Google's Gmail and the product automatically creates each users' social network based on the person's most-frequently emailed contacts. "We have considered, among all the other features that we add to Buzz in the future, to create a stand-alone experience in addition to it being in Gmail," Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou told Reuters on Friday. In the days since th