Rs.600 cr Bank loan for satyam

The cash-strapped Satyam Computer Services would borrow Rs 600 crore ($130 million) from banks to meet its working capital requirements, the company confirmed on Thursday after a two-day board meeting here.
“This funding, along with healthy collections, is expected to help the company tide over its financial challenges,” the IT bellwether said in a statement, but did not name the banks, which had sanctioned the funds.
Satyam also reaffirmed that the January salaries for its global employees and February salaries (fortnightly) for its US-based staff have been paid from internal accruals.
“Completing the complex financial restatement exercise, including announcement of third quarter results and ensuring prudent financial operations will be the primary focus in the next few weeks,” Partho Datta, who has been appointed as one of the two special advisors to the board, said.

Datta, a veteran chartered accountant, will be overseeing the financial operations of the company.

Former Tata Chemicals managing director Homi Khusrokhan is the other special advisor appointed to assist the six-member Satyam board.

The board also appointed A.S. Murty, a Satyam veteran, as the new chief executive of the IT bellwether with immediate effect.

Murty was Satyam's chief delivery officer, responsible for delivery excellence and leadership development.

“Murty is a Satyam veteran of 15 years, who has been in its forefront since January 1994. He brings to play a deep understanding of the organisation, proven expertise in leading a business unit, overseeing global delivery, nurturing customer relationships and spearheading the entire gamut of the human resources function,” board member Deepak Parekh said in a statement.

C. Achuthan, former presiding officer of the Securities Appellate Tribunal and a Satyam board member, chaired the two-day meeting.

Google Version 3.0

Yes you saw it right.Google Maps for Mobile, the native S60 version, just hit v3.00 an hour ago.It looks awesome and very user friendly as always. Several new features and minor improvements in the user interface have been provided. The main change is the addition of Google Latitude, a way of finding your friends on the map. To grab your own copy of v3.00, go to m.google.com and click on ‘More’ and then ‘Maps’.

Go download and try it out. Thank you google.

Some Screen shots for You as above.

Key to energy in Uranium

Theoretically, India should set up 40,000-mega watt reactors by 2020 to meet its energy requirements and become energy-independent by 2050, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar said on Thursday.

Even after the most optimum use of energy resources including the available thorium and uranium reserves, “we will face an energy deficit of 400 giga watts by 2050.” One giga watt is 1,000 MW.

Dr. Kakodkar was addressing an interactive session on “Perspectives on Evolving Nuclear Power Programme” organised by the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce here.

Energy Value

Emphasising the importance of uranium import, he said: “Importing uranium has specific advantages … spent uranium has much larger energy value … it will be the source of energy that will multiply to breach the energy deficit gap in the coming years.”

Importing uranium under the international civil nuclear programme would not compromise the country’s autonomy in nuclear programmes.

“The international civil nuclear programme will be pursued without any compromise on domestic autonomy and on the pursuit of usage of nuclear energy for whatever purpose.”

Dr. Kakodkar also laid stress on the importance of thorium in the three-stage nuclear programme being pursued by the country’s scientists.

“We have one of the largest thorium resources in the world that can be used in the three-stage programme … a 300-MW thorium reactor will come up very soon … the objective of the programme is to reach a stage when the country can make full use of its thorium resources.”

Admitting that there were delays in operationalising uranium mines, Dr. Kakodkar said exploration was on and new mines were expected to start functioning soon in Karnataka and Meghalaya.

Potable water from air

HYDERABAD: They are now making water from thin air, literally.

Jalimudi village in East Godavari district will get 1,000 litres of potable water every day, produced from air. The water station, the first of its kind set up in any village in India, has begun trial runs.

“The water… has been sent for quality tests and it’s been certified fit for consumption,” Meher Bhandara, director of WaterMaker (India) which manufactures the units, told The Hindu over the phone from Mumbai.

Projected as a boon to people in rural areas, especially in the coastal regions, the system runs on electricity and uses the refrigeration technique to condense water from air. Blower driven air is made to pass through filters and a refrigerant is circulated leading to condensation of water, which is collected in a holding tank.

The efficacy will depend on the relative humidity and temperature. “Each machine will produce water if the humidity is between 70 and 75 per cent and the temperature between 25 C to 32 C,” Ms. Bhandara said. If these are high, there will be more water.

The machine, which costs about Rs. 3 lakh, was installed in Jalimudi by the company free of cost.

Galactic Spectacle

GALACTIC SPECTACLE: The spiral galaxy NGC-4921 with a backdrop of more distant galaxies in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope, released on Thursday. It was created from 80 different pictures using yellow and near-infrared filters.

Pak investigators find Bangladesh link to Mumbai attacks

Islamabad (PTI): Pakistan's probe into the Mumbai attacks is likely to indicate that the incident was the handiwork of a network of Muslim fundamentalist groups in South Asia as investigators have found evidence of a Bangladeshi connection, according to a media report.

The report on Pakistan's investigation is likely to indicate that the attacks were carried out by "an international network of Muslim fundamentalists present in South Asia and spread all the way to Middle East" while making a case for regional anti-terror cooperation, the influential Dawn newspaper today quoted its sources as saying.

The daily said Pakistani sleuths were "closing in on a Bangladeshi connection" to the attacks and had "evidence of not only the involvement of a banned militant organisation, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami of Bangladesh, but also of its role in planning the attack and training the terrorists".

A reference to this is likely to be made in the report on Pakistan's investigation, the daily said. It is widely expected that the report will be made public and shared with India later this week.

The Pakistani investigators were also trying to ascertain "if at least one of the Mumbai attackers was of Bangladeshi origin", the newspaper said.

Diplomatic and other sources told PTI that the Pakistani security establishment and the senior-most American diplomats here had been referring to a possible Bangladeshi connection to the Mumbai attacks in the past few days.

Both Pakistani security officials and US diplomats have also been making a case for "larger regional cooperation", the sources said.

Though the contents of the Pakistani report are a tightly guarded secret, the Dawn quoted sources privy to its contents as saying that it would "emphasise that the Mumbai incident is not strictly a Pakistan-India issue".

Pakistan's High Commissioner to Britain Wajid Shamsul Hassan had said in a recent interview with an Indian TV channel that investigations had revealed the attacks were not planned inside Pakistan.

His remarks were described by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi as "hasty".

Besides the Bangladeshi connection, there were "clear indications that some of the planning for the attacks was done in Dubai and there is also an element of local Indian support", the Dawn reported.

"Investigators believe it would have been almost impossible to plan and execute an attack of this proportion and sophistication without the local Indian support – a fact India is shying away from," it reported.

How Microsoft Outlook ruined a birthday party

If you like to order a cake at Wegman's bakery, you can simply email them a personalized message that will be printed on the cake.

A lady in NY followed the same procedure and ordered a birthday cake over email but here’s what they delivered on her birthday - a cake with some HTML icing.

It turned out that she used Microsoft Outlook to send her email but Wegman’s email system failed to recognize the proprietary HTML tags of Outlook and hence this goof-up.

This is best explained by an employee of Wegman - "we just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don’t have time to check. and if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them."