The sex epidemic in India especially among call center gals and guys is rising at astronomical heights.

AIDS threat is rising to India’s numerous call centers, where young staff are increasingly having unprotected sex with multiple partners in affairs developed during nights shifts, a top AIDS expert has warned.

While India has made great strides in bringing down its HIV inflection rate, the promiscuity among “Call center Romeos” is a great concern.

The sex activities take place during and after work hours in different places.

“Call centres are now seen as red-light districts,” said anthropologist Shiv Visvanathan.

Some guy who was asked about his Sex life in the call center told, “In the US, kids have affairs before marrying but here it’s seen as a sin. But that’s changing now,” added ruefully.

Groups of yound men and women rent apartments along the beach during the weekends and end up having multiple-partner sex.

Condom vending machines planned at BPOs, ATMs

After malls, multiplexes and pubs, the Mumbai District Aids Control Society (MDACS) is now eyeing the fast growing BPO industry and ATMs to install 3000 new condom vending machines.

The MDACS officials announced this at a Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) conference on business response to prevention, care and treatment for HIV/AIDS on Friday.

“BPO employees belong to the high disposable income group. Usually, all the employees working in this sector are young, mostly fresh out of the college and are from the economically productive age. It is very important to teach them about safe sex, HIV/AIDS during their induction period,” said Dr Harish Pathak, additional project director, MDACS.

The CII, along with the Washington-based World Bank Institute, is already targeting the IT sector across the country and sensitizing its against HIV/AIDS. “A countrywide study has been initiated in all IT and related sectors including the BPO industry. World Bank Institute has created a web portal where all the material is being uploaded,” said Ramnik Ahuja, advisor, health, CII.

The workplace policy with regard to HIV/AIDS came into effect three years back and companies are gradually shifting gears from awareness for their own employees to community participation.

The ILO has estimated that an average of 15 years of working life is lost for an employee affected by AIDS.

Fifty-five delegates from 45 companies and representatives from NGOs and the government participated in the discussion on various aspects of the HIV/AIDS policy for the industry and its implementation in companies that have not adopted it. Of the 5,000 member companies of the CII, only 700 have adopted the policy so far.

BPO employees urged to ‘play it safe’

Aids control society wants them to install condom vending machines in their office
BPO employees are notoriously known to be promiscuous, have access to easy money, and lead a good lifestyle. But if the Mumbai District Aids Control Society (MDACS) has anything to say, Mumbai’s call centres will be in the limelight for a different reason — Aids awareness programme.

The city’s HIV/Aids control body plans to approach BPOs in Mumbai and convince them to install condom vending machines in their office premises or restrooms.

“Most of the BPO employees are between the age group of 19-22 and may lack adequate knowledge about the virus or how it spreads. These youngsters are straight out of college and are more vulnerable. They need guidance and counselling,” said Dr Harish Pathak, additional project director, MDACS.

“We believe that apart from installing condom vending machines, BPOs should also educate their employees about safe sex techniques during their induction. This will help create more awareness among youngsters.”

On the other hand, BPO employees, though nonchalant about the proposal, are irked by the perception that they lead a promiscuous lifestyle. Prashant Karia, senior team manager of Stream International, said that the common belief that high income leads to moral degeneration was wrong.

“Employees working in BPOs are well educated and are old enough to know and understand the importance of safe sex. Also, there are several other sectors that also have high disposable income. So, it will be wrong to say that BPO employees are more vulnerable.”

Although the sentiment is shared by many others employees, Aviroop Choube, former employee of Wipro, welcomed the idea of having condom vending machines within the office premises. “It is partially right that huge salaries are slowly leading to moral degradation. But, there are many youngsters who work in the BPO due to necessity rather than luxury.”

Darshan Karker, former employee of Stream International, added, “Though I support the idea of having condom machines inside the office premises, I personally feel that imparting sex education during induction is a bad idea.”

MDACS, however, doesn’t plan to stop with BPOs. According to Phatak, they have already approached several banks to facilitate the installation of condom vending machines inside their ATMs. “We are planning to rope in ATMs that have more than 200 transactions per day. It will increase accessibility and assure privacy,” he added.

Not to be left behind, even the corporate sector is doing its bit to promote safe sex.  As many as nine corporate anti-retroviral therapy (ART) centres have come up in different states in the last two years, with the most recent one being in Pune.

“These ART centres provide free medication to the patients. It is primarily meant for the community rather than the employees,” said Dr Ramnik Ahuja, health advisor, confederation of Indian industry (CII).

Also, about 998 companies under the CII have signed the workplace policy facilitating HIV/Aids positive employees. “At present, it is not necessary to disclose ones HIV status. But, gradually we want to introduce a culture, where people will go for the testing voluntarily,” she added.

Smaller, low-cost PCs are likely to be at the top of the shopping list for technology buyers gathering in Taipei this week for the world’s second largest computer fair, as an economic slowdown in the United States forces consumers to cut back on spending.Shoppers are feeling the pinch from rocketing fuel costs and rising prices, and in the United States the subprime crisis has left lenders less willing to hand over credit, leaving some consumers reluctant to buy new expensive personal computers and gadget heavy mobile phones.

Cheaper, low-cost PCs, such as Asustek Computer Inc’s Eee computer, aimed at emerging markets and buyers of additional computers, may keep growth on track for many computer and component makers.

These PCs, many with longer battery lives and wireless connection features, will share the stage with a line of eco-friendly computers with slimmer, energy-efficient displays and solar power systems, designed to cut power consumption as oil prices soar and consumers seek ways to reduce their environmental impact.

“We don’t have deep pockets now,” said Kevin Chung, manager at Taiwan’s Jih Sun Investment Consulting.

“We really have to watch closely on the buying interest because that is going to be a signal on how the recovery’s strength will be in the second half.”

Asustek Computer, which makes the runaway success Eee PC, will display new, wider-screen models that allow users to do everything from storing video clips in shock-proof flash memory and surfing the Web in coffee shops.

Acer Inc, Taiwan’s most famous PC brand, will also test the water by introducing similar low-cost PCs as it expand into fast-growing emerging markets, including China and India.

“We will launch a notebook different than the ones we’ve sold before and targeted at a new consumer segment,” an Acer spokeswoman said.

Next to Acer’s booth, Intel Corp will be promoting its new processors, as the U.S. chip giant sees a big market for ultra low-cost PCs that can fit in one’s pocket and for the netbook, a PC selling for about $250.

WIMAX

The show’s organizers say a total of 1,725 exhibitors, including foreign technology companies, such as Intel and AMD, will attend the June 3-7 show in Taipei, up 29 percent from last year to a record high.

They arrive at a time when semiconductor and display makers are scaling down their capital spending to ease pressure on the supply side, and when a new batch of computers, mobile phones and game machines have just hit the stores.

Research firm IDC predicts that worldwide PC shipments are expected to rise 13 percent, to reach 296 million units in 2008, and will grow about 10 percent in each of the next two years.

For the first time, Computex buyers can have a quick tour by using trial laptops that have an ultra-high-speed Internet technology, WiMax, built in when they take free shuttle buses, the organizers said.

Many Taiwan PC makers and telecom operators have pinned their hopes WiMax technology winning the battle to be the fourth-generation mobile standard of choice.

Global spending on WiMax infrastructure, including base stations and equipments, is likely to grow to $3.5 billion in 2011, more than tripling from 2006, according to IDC.

“WiMax has been getting much chatter and with players like Sprint and Google coming in, its a huge push for the technology,” said Rosemary Ho, Chairman and CEO of Global Mobile Corp, a WiMax license holder in Taiwan.

Intel has also made a big bet that mobile WiMax will take off soon, even though many large operators in developed countries are throwing their weight behind a rival technology, known as Long Term Evolution.

Site’s agreement with all states except Texas pledges to protect younger users

When Kathy Frazar heard the operators of Facebook.com had promised to boost safeguards to protect younger users from online predators and shield them from inappropriate content, she was encouraged but not relieved.

The West University mother said she has no plans to stop using the parental-control software she installed to keep track of what her 14-year-old daughter does on the Web, including the wildly popular social-networking site Facebook.

TIGHTER SECURITY

Among other changes, Facebook has agreed to:

• Ensure companies offering services on its site comply with its safety and privacy guidelines.

• Keep tobacco and alcohol ads from users too young to purchase those products.

• Remove groups whose comments or images suggest they may involve incest, pedophilia, bullying or other inappropriate content.

• Send warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an adult.

• Review users’ profiles when they ask to change their age, ensuring the update is legitimate and not intended to let adults masquerade as children.

“I think that we as parents can’t rely on somebody to protect our children,” she said. “We need to be involved by monitoring their contact and what they do on the Internet.”

Founded four years ago

On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook signed an agreement with a task force of attorneys general from the District of Columbia and all states except Texas, pledging to create and improve safety and privacy features. These efforts include tightening controls on user requests to change his or her age; restricting searches by users 18 and older to prevent them seeking out underage users; immediately severing links to pornographic Web sites; and aggressively removing content and images flagged as inappropriate.

Facebook was founded four years ago for college students, and until September 2006 users were required to have a .edu in their e-mail address. It is now open to anyone, and, with 70 million active users, it trails only MySpace.com among the Web’s largest social-networking sites, according to Internet tracking firm Comscore.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott declined to sign the agreement, as he did a similar agreement in January with MySpace. Abbott claims that neither Facebook nor MySpace will “adequately protect younger users until an age-verification system is effectively developed and implemented.”

In a phone interview, Abbott called the agreement “half-baked,” and said that despite the agreement’s endorsement by other states,” it papers over the problem and leads Texans into a false sense of security that their children are safe on Facebook.”

Abbott cites case

According to Abbott, social-networking sites have access to technology that can verify the age of its users, but ” they don’t want to spend the money on it, or are afraid they will lose users.”

“They can get it done and they know it,” he said.

Abbott cited the case of James Lee Butler, a 57-year-old Texas resident accused of using MySpace to masquerade online as a 14-year-old boy. According to Texas Cyber Crimes Unit investigators, Butler established a rapport with and e-mailed child pornography to a child in Illinois until he was reported to authorities by the child’s mother. He pleaded guilty in March to possessing child pornography and was sentenced to five years in prison. He must register as a sex offender after his release.

Abbott said an age-verification program would have prevented the crime.

“Our case against James Lee Butler demonstrates why age verification is a critically important safety measure,” he said.

Parental involvement

But Parry Aftab, an activist for protecting children from online dangers, denied that the technology exists.

And if it did, she would still be concerned.

“The last thing I want is a large database of kids that some pedophile group can hack into,” said Aftab, executive director of wiredsafety.org. “In my opinion, given what I know, I don’t think it exists. If it does, we’re going to find it.”

Facebook officials declined to comment on Texas’ abstaining from the agreement, but the company issued a statement from Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly.

“Building a safe and trusted online experience has been part of Facebook from its outset,” Kelly said.

That’s just not enough for moms like Frazar.

Every little step helps, said Frazar, but parents should not depend on Facebook to protect their children. She monitors her daughter’s online activities with a computer program that flags any inappropriate exchanges between her daughter and anyone on the Web and notifies her immediately by e-mail.

“If parents would just take the time,” said Frazar, “they would be totally shocked with what their kids would do on the Internet.”

Officers of the Colombo Crime Division with the assistance of representatives of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) conducted criminal raids against distributors of illegal business software in Colombo marking the beginning of greater focus and crackdown on business software piracy distribution and business software under-licensing in Sri Lanka.A total of 3 outlets at a leading shopping centre in Bambalapitiya were raided and 412 illegal software CD’s seized by the Police during the raid. These targets are primarily dealing in illegal computer software containing trademarks and copyright owned by business software companies such as Adobe, Autodesk, Corel, Microsoft, Symantec and McAfee to name a few, all members of the BSA.

Most of the suspected pirated software found involved business software commonly used for photo editing, animation rendering, web and computer-aided designing, anti-virus protection and productivity suites (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, personal time and information management tools).

The search warrants were issued by Additional Magistrate of Mount Lavinia Ms. Darshika Wimalasiri, while the raids were conducted by A.S.P Nuwan Vedasinghe and S.I Shantha Vithana under the supervision of the Director of the Colombo Crime Division S.S.P Anura Senanayake.

According to S.S.P Anura Senanayake, Director, Colombo Crime Division who was on-site during the simultaneous raids, “I strongly encourage all computer dealers and software resellers everywhere to ensure that they only sell legal and original software to avoid facing the full consequences of the law. We will continue to monitor the situation and we will be conducting continued enforcement against software pirates until piracy is wiped out. Innocent consumers and traders simply need to be protected against this criminal trade which is costing millions in losses to the industry, as well as the government in the form of taxes. We recommend and remind all businesses to respect the law of the country by purchasing and using original software and avoiding dealing with vendors who sell pirated or unlicensed software.”

Private Facebook profiles aren’t quite as hidden as many users might think they are. Pages that are supposedly restricted are visible to anyone using searches based on religion, sexual orientation or relationship status.

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian announced the flaw on Tuesday. A quick search by Wired News for women in a major U.S. city who were interested in random hookups with men revealed the names and photos of two high school girls, including one ninth grader.

Like many social networks, the increasingly popular Facebook allows its users to mark their profile page as private, semiprivate or open. However, even if you mark your profile to be visible only by friends, that doesn’t change how you turn up in Facebook searches or whether your profile is open to indexing by search engines.

Instead, users looking for privacy must also change their preferences under search, else their profiles will be indexed by internet search engine spiders and their names, photos and personal data fields will be searchable by any Facebook member who is a fellow member of a “group” such as a school or geographic area that the user elects to join.

For instance, if you are a Facebook member of your college, you could run a search to see all the people who are Christian women who are lesbians, all the women interested in women or all the Muslim men into other men. Your search results will likely include people who thought they marked their information as private, but didn’t also change their search settings. (These links all require a valid Facebook account.)

Searchers still can’t click through to the full profile for members who chose to make the profile visible only to their Facebook friends.

Soghoian first discovered the discrepancy in September 2006 and revisited it after speaking with attendees at a privacy conference last week, who suggested that the setup could violate European privacy standards.

Soghoian, a graduate student previously known for disclosing holes in both airport security and Firefox browser extensions, contends that the number of people whose private profiles show up in search results is clear proof that Facebook’s options are too confusing.

“There is an easy way to fix this at the individual level,” Soghoian said. “But the fact that so many people haven’t done it easily demonstrates that opt-out privacy doesn’t work.”

Facebook is no stranger to privacy concerns. Last September, the networking site faced a minor riot from its members following a unilateral change in how other members learn of changes to a user profile.

A Facebook representative did not respond to a request for comment and Soghoian says his attempts to reach Facebook’s privacy person were foiled when a receptionist told him that the individual did not take outside phone calls. A company representative responded to an email to privacy@facebook.com by thanking Soghoian for his note and said that the company would “certainly keep it in mind.”

Facebook users who set their profile to private and want to keep their name and photo out of searches can do using the search preference page.

Story update: A Facebook representative responded to Wired’s inquiry after deadline June 27 with an announcement that it had changed the behavior of its privacy settings.

“Facebook offers sophisticated search and privacy controls and is constantly making improvements based on feedback from our users,” the spokesman wrote. “We have since updated the advanced search function so that profile information that has been made private by a user, such as gender, religion and sexual orientation, will not return a result.”

Story update, Oct. 9, 2007: The Facebook search flaw discussed above was first made public in a 2005 paper (.pdf) written by Carnegie Mellon University professor Alessandro Acquisti and Ph.D. student Ralph Gross.

University of Virginia computer science student Adrienne Felt poses for a photo on Thursday, April 17, 2008, in Charlottesville, VA. Felt has researched the issue of online privacy as it relates to third-party applications that people routinely download on Web sites such as Facebook.

Sarah Brown is unusually cautious when it comes to social networking. The college sophomore doesn’t have a MySpace page and, while she’s on Facebook, she does everything she can to keep her page as private as she can.

“I don’t want to have to worry about all the different online scandals and problems,” says Brown, an education major at St. Joseph College in Connecticut. She’d like to control her personal information and keep it out of the hands of identity thieves or snooping future employers. “It’s just common sense.”

It sounds like her info is locked down and airtight. But is it?

Turns out, even the privacy-conscious Sarah Browns of the world freely hand over personal information to perfect strangers. They do so every time they download and install what’s known as an “application,” one of thousands of mini-programs on a growing number of social networking sites that are designed by third-party developers for anything from games and sports teams to trivia quizzes and virtual gifts.

Brown, for instance, has installed applications on her Facebook page for Boston Bruins fans and another that allows her to post “bumper stickers” on her own page and those of her friends. It’s a core way to communicate on social networking sites, which allow friends to create pages about themselves and post photos and details about their lives and interests.

People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they’re set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.

But that’s not true if they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to “know who I am and access my information,” which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to the terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to spruce up their pages and to flirt, play and bond with friends online.

News Corp.’s MySpace, which has about 117 million unique visitors each month, recently added an applications platform, giving developers access to the profiles of anyone who downloads them. Unlike Facebook, though, MySpace users don’t have to include their names on their profiles.

So what do these third-parties do with the information? Sometimes, they use it to connect users with similar interests. Sometimes, they use it to target ads, based on demographics such as gender and age (something Facebook and MySpace also do).

Facebook and MySpace say they hold application developers to strict standards — and boot them if they don’t comply. They also point out that some information, such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers, aren’t made available.

But experts who track online security issues think there’s too much personal information flying around out there, with few guarantees that it’s safe. They also think social networkers have little understanding where their information goes and how it’s used — and as a result, have a false sense of security.

“I suspect that there’s a whole lot of clicking without a lot of thinking,” says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project who studies privacy issues. “So much of this sharing happens in a way that users don’t see the consequences. It’s kind of a big, black hole.”

Part of the risk stems from Facebook applications being created by anyone, some of them tech-related companies and others individuals with know-how. And they could be anywhere in the world, as is Jayant Agarwalla, co-founder of Facebook’s popular Scrabulous application, a takeoff on the game Scrabble.

Reached by e-mail, he says Scrabulous does use demographic information to target ads that show up as a person plays the game. But Agarwalla, who’s based in India, stresses that that information is provided in “real time” and not stored. “In my humble opinion, users have nothing to worry about,” he says.

Some would argue that it’s much like trusting an online vendor with your credit card information.

Still, it’s an honor system, says Adrienne Felt, a computer science major at the University of Virginia. A Facebook user herself, she decided to research the site’s applications and even created her own so she could see how it worked.

Most of the developers Felt polled said they either didn’t need or use the information available to them and, if they did, accessed it only for advertising purposes.

But, in the end, Felt says there’s really nothing stopping them from matching profile information with public records. It also could be sold or stolen. And all of that could lead to serious matters such as identity theft.

“People seem to have this idea that, when you put something on the Internet, there should be some privacy model out there — that there’s somebody out there that’s enforcing good manners. But that’s not true,” Felt says.

Last year, Facebook users revolted when the company started using a tool called Beacon, which tracked its users’ purchases and actions at dozens of Web sites and then broadcast the data on the pages of the users’ friends.

Beacon has since been scaled back.

By comparison, the issue of personal information going to application developers, both on Facebook and now MySpace, has remained relatively quiet.

Jonathan Gaugler, a 26-year-old New Yorker, is one who finds targeted ads on his Facebook page a bit too invasive.

“Getting married? Do your registry here!” read one recent ad that showed up. Another on his fiancee’s page was advertising for egg donors for fertility clinics.

“Creepy,” Gaugler says.

He keeps his Facebook activity to a minimum as a result — and rarely downloads an application because he doesn’t want to be further targeted.

But many others are much less cautious, seeing the risk of social networking “as low and the reward as high,” says Patricia Sanchez Abril, an assistant professor at the University of Miami’s business school who studies privacy law.

“It is the chosen mode of communication of everyone they know. So if you’re not in it, you’re just not in the loop,” she says. “There’s a lot of peer pressure.”

What they don’t realize, she adds, is that there is little legal backup if their information is used in a way they didn’t intend.

“This is an area that’s completely unregulated. Yes, there are contracts. But if the receiving end doesn’t abide by the contract, you’re still out of luck,” Abril says.

And applications, she notes, are only one worry when it comes to online threats.

A social networker’s friends can, for instance, give access to personal information or photos in a profile. That happened to the call girl involved in the recent sex scandal with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Researchers at Indiana University also published a study last year showing how they “scraped” information from students’ social network profiles. Posing as people’s friends, they then used the information to fool the students into providing their university ID and password on a bogus external Web site.

Whether the profile is private or not, users should limit the information they post, said Tom Jagatic, one of the researchers and now a senior information technology consultant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’s good advice, says Jeremy Miller, a fraud investigator based in Nashville, Tenn., but he wonders how many will heed it. He uses MySpace and sees people who routinely list everything from their income to phone numbers on their profiles — and don’t even bother to make their profiles private.

“It’s kind of a status symbol, so privacy takes a back seat,” says Miller, who works for Kroll Inc., a risk management consulting firm. “It’s much like people saying you shouldn’t carry your Social Security card around in your wallet.

“But a lot of people still do it.”

Scholarship programme for undergraduates launched

Virtusa Corporation, one of the leading information technology (IT) services companies operating in Sri Lanka and a globally renowned IT solutions provider, announced an innovative scholarship programme in collaboration with leading universities in Sri Lanka to expand the IT workforce capacity.

The Virtusa Placement Engineer Scholarship programme is an innovative initiative to support work-study approach to obtaining a degree in IT. The programme brings together students, academic institutes and Virtusa in the process of students obtaining an IT degree. The students study part time at a reputed academic institute while gaining work experience at Virtusa. Virtusa provides financial assistance, on-the-job training and learning assistance to students to complete their degree studies while gaining significant exposure to a real-life, world-class working environment. The programme aims to increase IT graduate capacity by increasing the success rate of open and distance education programmes. During the first phase of the programme, the University of Colombo, the Open University, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) and IDM Computer Studies students will receive opportunities to participate in the programme.

The Virtusa Placement Engineer Scholarship Program is part of Virtusa’s Campus Reach corporate responsibility initiative, which is aimed at positively influencing the quality and quantity of IT graduates in Sri Lanka.

Speaking at the launch ceremony held in Colombo, the chief guest, Minister of Public Administration and Home Affairs and The Chairman of the Cabinet Subcommittee on Human Resource Development, Minister Karu Jayasuriya, said, “The IT and BPO industry has a significant potential to become the number one industry for Sri Lanka in terms of foreign earnings, and can be an avenue for creating a large number of professional jobs in the country. It is encouraging to see Virtusa taking a leadership position in the process of expanding workforce capacity, which is essential for the growth of the industry.”

“This innovative approach will significantly improve the success rate of open and distance degree programmes, and will assist in creating highly-employable IT graduates. We are glad to be able to extend this opportunity to talented individuals, who will now have a chance to participate in the worldwide IT boom.” said Madu Ratnayake, General Manager, Virtusa Sri Lanka. “With many Virtusans participating as volunteer lecturers, student mentors, curriculum developers and a host of other academic support programmes, we aim to create global opportunities for talented youth and support the development of the IT industry in the country,” added Ratnayake, explaining the company’s philosophy behind the Campus Reach initiative.

Virtusa is a global information technology (IT) services company providing IT consulting, technology implementation and application outsourcing services. Using its enhanced global delivery model, innovative platforming approach and industry expertise, Virtusa provides cost-effective services that enable its clients to use IT to enhance business performance, accelerate time-to-market, increase productivity and improve customer service. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Massachusetts, Virtusa has offices in the United States and the United Kingdom, and global delivery centres in India and Sri Lanka.  “Virtusa” is a registered trademark of Virtusa Corporation.

Lankan blue chip buys 44% stake in Quatrro Finance and Accounting Solutions for $ 5.7 m

John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) said last week it has invested US Dollars 5.72 million for a 44% equity stake in Quatrro Finance & Accounting Solutions Private Limited (Quatrro F&A).

Quatrro F&A is the India based Financial and Accounting (F&A) business of the Quatrro group, headed by Raman Roy.

JKH and Quatrro in 2006 announced a partnership to develop a business process outsourcing (BPO) business in the Asian region, initially focusing on India and Sri Lanka. Quatrro F&A has acquired the Chicago based Financial Process Outsourcing LLC (FPO) in a structured financing transaction using a combination of instruments including debt and equity.  FPO is a niche player in the F&A outsourcing vertical, focusing on small and medium enterprises. FPO currently has facilities in the USA and Mumbai with approximately 500 staff. The F&A outsourcing vertical has grown rapidly over the last few years as the cost advantages from labour arbitrage are compelling. It is expected that Quatrro F&A would in due course have a facility in Sri Lanka.

JKH and Quatrro believe that Sri Lanka has the potential to be a major location for F&A outsourcing due to the skill level of finance and accounting professionals in Sri Lanka and the availability of qualified accountants, particularly for higher verticals of F&A. The investment in Quatrro F&A is a step forward in JKH’s plans of building a regional BPO business. JKH currently has BPO facilities located in Gurgaon and Colombo with approximately 550 staff. With the investment in Quatrro F&A, JKH’s presence in the BPO business will be significantly enhanced. Quatrro, founded by Raman Roy, is a BPO company focusing on pioneering new service lines, geographies and business models in Business Process Outsourcing.  The company provides a range of vertical and horizontal service offerings, which are targeted towards global clients in North America, Europe and Asia.  Quatrro’s solutions encompass Risk Management and Fraud, Technical Support, Finance and Accounting, Market Research, Knowledge Services and Mortgage Processing. “Creating value through innovation” is the cornerstone of Quatrro’s business philosophy.  The company is on a constant mission to provide its clients with innovative solutions at lower costs through a combination of tools, platforms and business processes.

(The Bottom Line)

Final vote overwhelmingly in favour; input from 87 national bodies contributed to an improved specification

After more than 14 months of intensive review, a Joint Technical Committee of the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) (http://www.iso.org) has concluded its formal process to evaluate Ecma International’s submission of the Draft International Standard (DIS) 29500: Office Open XML (Open XML).

Early this month ISO/IEC announced that more than 87 countries participated in a process culminating with the ratification of Open XML as an ISO/IEC standard. The details of the vote are as follows: 86% of all countries supported ISO standardization, well above the 75% required of this group for formal acceptance, and 75% of the Participating countries (known as P members) supported standardisation, also well above the 66.67% required of this group for formal acceptance. Open XML now joins HTML, PDF and ODF as ISO/IEC recognised open document format standards. This is a positive outcome for public and private sector customers and technology providers who want to choose the format that best meets their needs and want to have a voice in the ongoing evolution of this already widely adopted standard. Similarly, it is a significant validation for government policy makers committed to promoting technology-neutral, market-driven policies that enable choice, opportunity, competition, and local economic development. Microsoft looks forward to continuing to work cross-industry, including with competitors, to address customers’ real interoperability needs.

“With 86 percent of voting national bodies supporting ratification , there is overwhelming support for Open XML. This outcome is a clear win for the customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of this widely adopted standard,” said Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft Corp. “The input from technical experts, customers and governments around the world has greatly improved the Open XML specification and will make it even more useful to developers and customers. We are committed to supporting this specification in our products, and we will continue to work with standards bodies, governments and the industry to promote greater interoperability and innovation.”

Sri Lanka, represented by the Sri Lankan Standards Institution (SLSI), opted to vote “Abstain”.

Endorsing Open XML as a standard, the President of the Sri Lanka Association for Software Industry Mr. Udaya de Silva states “ SLASI has always promoted choice with multiple products & standards of high acceptance. We have supported Open XML, as ODF and Open XML are expected to meet different needs in the marketplace and will be suited to different case scenarios. We believe that a fundamental level of choice engenders more innovation. Users should have a choice and these different formats would evolve to meet their respective use case scenarios over time. Open XML will also enlarge the field of vendor-neutral, open standards choice for governments, businesses, consumers and the ICT industry. This inclusive approach widens alternatives consistent with the industry/public interest.”

The open standard has gained broad adoption across the software industry for use on a variety of platforms — including Linux, Windows, Mac OS and Palm OS. Hundreds of independent software vendors and platform providers around the world — such as Apple Inc., Corel Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Microsoft and Novell Inc. — are developing solutions using Open XML that offer real value for IT users around the globe. Independent research has concluded that use of Open XML is likely to expand further over time.* Thousands of companies have expressed support for Open XML and its ratification by ISO (http://www.iso.org) and IEC at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org.

Those working withOpen XML can attest to the benefits of this open file format in the areas of file and data management, data recovery, interoperability with line-of-business systems, and the long-term preservation of documents. The formats are optimized for the level of precision and detail that facilitates carrying forward billions of existing files. Open XML file formats are uniquely capable of integrating other types of systems and data with Open XML documents, while maintaining a clean, simple separation of presentation Open XML markup) and data (custom schemes and instances thereof). This means that organisations can use Open XML formats to report information from other applications and systems without having to translate it first, which is a key innovation for developers seeking to incorporate real-time business information into their documents, or those who seek to “tag” documents with their own categorization system to improve their understanding of the documents’ contents.

More information aboutOpen XML, as well as available solutions using the open standard specification, is available at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/inuse.aspx.