Infosys Does it Again
Professor Sadagopan writes on his site that Infosys does it again – pays out the single largest dividend payment ever by an Indian private sector employer. In the AGM held on 13th June 2004 Infosys formalized its earlier commitment to pay 2,590% dividend payment, as a special gesture to its shareholders on the historic occasion of its crossing the Billion Dollar mark.
It is one more feather to Infosys cap – the first company to start ESOP, the first to list in NASDAQ, the first to announce quarterly results on time every time, the first to move to GAPP accounting, the first to have international professionals on its Board and compensate them as per global market conditions, the first to hire from “best in class†campuses of Harvard & MIT etc., and the list goes on. It is a proud moment for private sector (in the light of politicians “going back†to public sector, it clearly demonstrates that what India needs is “good†companies, ownership is incidental, if at all politicians are serious they should make “public sector companies†go “public†by serving citizens and not move towards making them serve “private interests†of politicians and bureaucrats).
BlogLines
Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines.
I loved this site. Its a great service that has the advantage of not sucking up local resources, and more importantly, is outside my control in terms of news updates. I don’t have to keep clicking the refresh button looking for another seed of info if I have control of my own aggregator, so it’s much better to let someone do the refreshing for me. Seriously.Unlike other aggregators which require you to download and install software, Bloglines runs on their own servers and requires no installation. And since my Bloglines account is accessible through a web browser, I can access my account from any Internet-connected machine.
So no hopping over from one blog site to another now, when you can read all the feeds at one place. There is another option of sharing your feeds, so that people know what you read. Besides this, another good feature is the ability to send the feed as email; so the next time you read anything interesting, you can just click on email it and share it with your friends.
The site design needs a little fine tuning, as the three frame model seems primitive. Besides this, people are also advicing them about their revenue models. These issues are just timely, and will be taken care of as Bloglines grows. A great service indeed. Check it out!!
SpyMac - Another 1 Gb Email Provider
Close on the heels of Gmail comes Spymac, the web storage service from Spymac Network. Spymac is the largest Online Macintosh User Group and is developing under the belief that community is the Internet’s most valuable resource.
It features an email account with 1GB of space with POP and IMAP access (so you can use it in Mail.app); 100MB of web space; 250MB of picture storage space; Public and private iCal hosting; A Personal Blog, Forum, and Picture Gallery; Customizable Content. And all this is FREE.
The question that pops up is, “How do they pay for that?†And sure enough, SpyMac has a section outlining that, right when you register. They are able to make the service free through revenue generated from their Auctions, their Shop, their Web Hosting service, and their Ads.
I have been reading articles and reviews on Spymac and they are not very great. Mostly, user complaints are about the slow email processing, chronic misconfiguration of spymac mail servers which end up causing some days’ delay in receiving emails. Spymac is being used mainly as a POP mail account, but I think the picture gallery and blog space might thrive.
Overall, here is cheers to another email service that has opened up the storage space domain and providing the services for free. I think that the only point where they score over gmail specifically is that there is no keyword scanning and hence no advertisements. So the privacy issues are kept at bay and not tampered with.
Lets see how this finally shapes up. For the time being, go get your username before its taken.
Digital Photography
Photoxels is a nice site on digital photography. There are nice and detailed tutorials on digital photography terminology. Besides this, the site has one-pager format tutorials which give out various tips about taking pictures.
Though the digital camera reviews are not as informative and exhaustive as Steve’s or DCResource, but overall the site makes an interesting reading and is worth a visit.
My favourite forum site for digital photography is DPreview. The site has categorized listings according to the camera models and brands. That makes searching a lot more easier than the usual single forum posting method. I like the ease of usability and the whole concept of the forum site.
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