Tata in Fortune's 'Business Person of Year' list

Boston: Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata is among eight business leaders from across the world shortlisted by the prestigious Fortune magazine for its 'Business Person of the Year', an honour that will go to the leader who made the "biggest mark" in business in 2010.

Fortune magazine will name its 'Business Person of the Year' on November 18. The other business honchos in the fray are billionaire Warren Buffett, Apple chief Steve Jobs, Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman, McDonald's CEO James Skinner and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

On Tata, Fortune said his group's Tata Motors unit restarted orders for the "ultra cheap, high-demand Nano car" and "at the high end, has reinvigorated Jaguar." For the title, the publication started with 32 business leaders who had been "seeded and matched-up by the editors of Fortune."  In the process of finalising the winner, Fortune will talk to analysts, consultants, executives and former executives, "those moving markets and those playing them."

Fortune has also asked its readers to submit votes online on "which leader you think made a bigger impact in 2010." The 32 have been narrowed down to eight after two weeks of voting.
In the first week of elimination, Tata won 60 percent of votes and beat micro-blogging site Twitter co-founder Evan Williams to reach the second round, where he beat Jamie Dimon, CEO of global financial services firm J P Morgan Chase by a similar number of votes. Tata is pitted against Buffett in the third round of voting and elimination. On Buffett, Fortune said the Berkshire Hathaway CEO made 2010 the "year of giving it away, getting billionaires to pledge half of their wealth." Commenting on Jobs, the US publication said "antenna-gate did not dent him and consumers can't get enough of his i-world." Apple is now second to Exxon in market cap. Online movie rental company Netflix's Hastings "helped drive its largest foe -- Blockbuster-- into bankruptcy, out-innovating peers at every turn, moving beyond DVDs."

Fortune said Schmidt's Google is "still the only search company that matters." The year 2010 belonged to Google's mobile operating system Android, which now has 25 percent of market.

On DuPont's Kullman, Fortune said the CEO of the products and services company turned DuPont into a solar giant. The company will "hit goal of one billion dollars in photovoltaic sales a year early. Stock up over 30 percent this year." Mulally's Ford is "back in black" after losing nearly six billion dollars in one quarter last year. McDonald's stock has been propelled to an all-time high thanks to sales of coffee, smoothies and a bold push in developing countries, Fortune said. Among the 32 contenders for Fortune's title of business person this year were Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke, Kraft Foods CEO Irene Rosenfeld, Samsung Electronics President Gee Sung Choi, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Ref:http://www.zeenews.com/news663540.html

Ratan Tata shortlisted for Fortune award

Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata is among the eight world business leaders shortlisted by Fortune magazine for its 'Business Person of the Year' award. The winner will be named on November 18.

The others in the fray are: Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett, Apple chief Steve Jobs, Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman, McDonald's CEO James A. Skinner and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

On Mr. Tata, Fortune said Tata Motors had revived orders for the "ultra cheap, high-demand Nano car" and "at the high end, has reinvigorated Jaguar."

Ref: http://www.in.com/news/business-news/fullstory-ratan-tata-shortlisted-for-fortune-award-15963883-184d9a06c7d4d642eb3a66ce0c901952a4fdd092-rhp.html

Amazon App Store for Android

Rumors and reports of an Amazon competitor to Google's own Android App Store were confirmed today with Amazon's invitation letter to developers, posted here on Ubergizmo. The Amazon App Store, while not particularly shocking news, has several important implications that go way beyond just another source of Apps for Android phone users.

The most telling part of the Amazon letter was one little line:

The Amazon App Store will help customers find, buy, download, and install Android mobile applications for smartphones and other connected devices.

"What other connected devices?" you ask? Tablets, tablets, and more tablets. Oh right, and a few million televisions. Remember the Kindle? It's pretty cool and offers a great reading experience for those of us who love books, but how many people are just using the Kindle App on a phone or another converged device that kicks the Kindle to the curb in terms of versatility? The answer, of course, is a lot.

Amazon already sells a huge amount of digital content ranging from e-books to video-on-demand. Their MP3 store is as close as Android comes to a default music store, but video content isn't currently supported on Android and developers aren't exactly clamoring to more closely integrate the Android platform with everything that Amazon sells.

However, when Google TV becomes more widely adopted, then Amazon obviously has a lot to gain if it has an application presence in your home's digital hub. And when Android tablets take off by the end of the year, an Amazon App store will let them leverage the larger form factor in ways they've never been able to on the iPad.

This isn't just about selling movies, music, and e-books, though. Increasingly, the growing ubiquity of smartphones and tablets based on smartphone operating systems means that we live in an App World. If the Amazon brand can become associated with Apps in the same way that it's associated with books (or, more recently, with anything you'd like to buy), then there's yet another revenue stream from Amazon's growing digital portfolio.

While Logitech's first foray into Google TV completely misses the mark in terms of price, when Google TV goes mainstream (and it will in much the same way that Android has in the smartphone market), then apps that let users instantly buy whatever they see on TV, in movies, on YouTube, or via Google's universal search all on Amazon will add a few more billions to Amazon's bottom line. Already, the Amazon App for Android allows users to take a picture of an item and then receive an email with a link to the item in the Amazon Store when Amazon processes the visual search.

Plenty of analysts have already suggested that Amazon's App store can bring a new level of credibility and quality to Android phones as well. The Android Market is seen by many as one of the weaker features of the platform with inadequate abilities to sort out the body function apps from the great content. This hurts developers, users, and the platform as a whole. Applying an Amazon model to an App Store, though, with great user reviews and interaction, high-quality content, and generous international revenue models for developers is a win all around. Even if you're Google and Amazon's store eats into your own App Store revenue, the existence of a great App store brings more people to Android, regardless of which store they use.

While an Amazon App store represents a bold business move for Amazon, positioning them to leverage a platform that will pervade phones, tablets, televisions, cars, and a variety of other "connected devices" in the next few years, it also represents credibility and a serious investment in Android by one of the strongest brands on the Internet.

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Ref:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/amazon-app-store-for-android-not-just-for-smartphones/2527?tag=nl.e550

2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

The 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report is out, including the hype cycle for emerging technologies.
Before I dive into this hype cycle in more detail, I want to point out that although the emerging technologies hype cycle tends to be one of the most visible hype cycles we publish, it's by no means the only one. We have published over 75 hype cycles so far for 2010, and they're still coming, along with over 2000 individual technology entries with definitions, recommendations and other info.
Back to the emerging technologies hype cycle specifically – we saw a number of themes arising this year, including:

• User experience and interaction, including devices such as media tablets (iPads etc) and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and interaction styles such as gesture recognition and tangible user interfaces
• Augmented reality, context and the real-world Web. Augmented reality is a hot topic in the mobile space, with platforms and services on iPhone and Android platforms, and it represents the next generation as location-aware applications move toward the plateau. Other elements such as 4G standard, sensor networks and context delivery architecture are evolving more slowly, but they will play a key role in expanding the impact of IT in the physical world.
• Data-driven decisions. The quantity and variety of digital data continue to explode, along with the opportunities to analyze and gain insight from new sources such as location information and social media. The techniques themselves, such as predictive analytics, are relatively well established in many cases; the value resides in applying them in new applications such as social analytics and sentiment analysis.
• Cloud-computing implications. Cloud computing is just topping the peak, and private cloud computing is still rising. Cloud/Web platforms are also featured, along with mobile application stores, to acknowledge the growing interest in platforms for application development and delivery.

Hype cycle aficionados will notice that technologies often seem to "drop off" the emerging technologies hype cycle after a year or two. This is simply because we have finite room on the graphic, but doesn't mean that we think those technologies are not worthy of further coverage. In most cases they continue to be tracked on one of the many other hype cycles we produce.
If you're a Gartner client you can see more details in the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2010 as well as access the other hype cycles in the Hype Cycle Special Report.
Ref: http://blogs.gartner.com/hypecyclebook/2010/09/07/2010-emerging-technologies-hype-cycle-is-here/

How Android works

Please refer to the diagram (courtesy of Google) shows the "20,000 foot" view of Android.

Some parts of Android will be familiar, such as the Linux Kernel, OpenGL, and the SQL database. Others may be completely foreign, such as Android's idea of the application life cycle. You'll need a good understanding of these key concepts in order to write well-behaved Android applications.

 

Let's start off by taking a look at the overall system architecture–the key layers and components that make up the Android stack.

Starting at the bottom is the Linux Kernel. Android uses Linux for its device drivers, memory management, process management, and networking. However you will never be programming to this layer directly.

The next level up contains the Android native libraries. They are all written in C/C++ internally, but you'll be calling them through Java interfaces. In this layer you can find the Surface Manager (for compositing windows), 2D and 3D graphics, Media codecs (MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, etc.), the SQL database (SQLite), and a native web browser engine (WebKit).

Next is the Android runtime, including the Dalvik Virtual Machine. Dex files are more compact and efficient than class files, an important consideration for the limited memory and battery powered devices that Android targets.

The core Java libraries are also part of the Android runtime. They are written in Java, as is everything above this layer. Here, Android provides a substantial subset of the Java 5 Standard Edition packages, including Collections, I/O, and so forth.

The next level up is the Application Framework layer. Parts of this toolkit are provided by Google, and parts are extensions or services that you write. The most important component of the framework is the Activity Manager, which manages the life cycle of applications and a common "back-stack" for user navigation.

Finally, the top layer is the Applications layer. Most of your code will live here, along side built-in applications such as the Phone and Web Browser.

One of the unique and powerful qualities of Android is that all applications have a level playing field. What I mean is that the applications Google writes have to go through the same public API that you use. You can even tell Android to make your application replace the standard applications if you like.

In the next installment we'll take take a closer look at the components in the Android Application Framework.

Ref: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/how-android-works-the-big-picture/515