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New Delhi: Leading telecom operator Bharti Airtel has made access to online social networking site Facebook free for its over 130 million subscribers, said the company. The offer will, however, be available only for two months till Aug 31.

The Facebook site will be available in English, Hindi and five more Indian languages - Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam.

"For the two-month period, the partnership enables Airtel customers to access Facebook's full mobile site faster and at no data cost from their Airtel mobiles via m.facebook.com," said an Airtel statement.

Customers, accessing mobile Internet for the first time need to SMS 'FACEBOOK' to 54321 to take advantage of this offer.

Bangalore: Technology firms Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro and QuEST, apart from private sector aviation companies such as Mahindra Aerospace and L&T , are among the vendors currently in discussions with the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) for providing software, designing and manufacturing around 500 regional transport aircraft, reports Peerzada Abrar from The Economic Times.

India's ambitious civil aviation program (RTA-70 ) is aimed at building planes for carrying 70-90 passengers on short haul flights, and rival similar aircrafts from ATR, which currently dominates the country's skies.

Officials at NAL, the premier agency spearheading the project, confirmed that alliances are being worked out. "Negotiations are on with various private players like TCS, Infosys, Wipro to provide expertise in software, hardware and product development," a senior NAL official said on conditions of anonymity. The design and development of the prototype is estimated to cost about Rs. 5,000 crore and is expected to be ready by 2015-16 for flight trials.

Of the 500 planes, 200 will be sold to Indian defence, 200 to civil aviation companies and 100 units are to be exported. The project committee will explore the need to go in for a public-private partnership (PPP) at the beginning, so as to involve the Indian aerospace industry, which will be responsible for production at a later stage and marketing and servicing subsequently, officials added.

At the peak of the project, about 500 people from state-run agencies and around 2,000 people from the industry will be involved.

According to Roddam Narasimha, one of India's top aerospace scientists and a member of the high-powered committee for the country's national civil aircraft development project, RTA-70 is just a step in building a successful and globally competitive civil aviation program. "Public-private partnership is part of our vision for this project. We never had a civil aeronautical aircraft programme, nor have we made serious attempts," Narasimha said. "On the other hand, China is very far ahead of us. They are challenging Airbus 320 and Boeing 737 and may actually move ahead of them," he added.

China's answer to Boeing and Airbus is the Comac C919 aircraft. Its introduction was low-key , a move consistent with how Chinese firms prefer to operate overseas.

The aircraft designed and built entirely in China, will compete directly against industry leaders Airbus 320 and Boeing 737 after completing flight trials in four years. It should be available commercially by 2016.

"You will be surprised to know that 10 years ago, Indian Aeronautics was ahead of China. We had developed some of the key technologies on our own such as Carbon Fibre Wings and Flight Control System. India should take an initiative for a Civil Aeronautics Flight Programme. This project is a step in that direction," said Narasimha.

As trained people in the aerospace area are limited, the committee will rope in design experts from state-run organisations such as Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to share some of the project workload. The committee is headed by former chairman of ISRO, G Madhavan Nair.

The project committee has decided to form nine sub-committees to prepare reports on various parameters such as choice of engine, composite materials, avionics, landing gear, control systems, short haul runways, setting up of design bureau, hiring people, engaging the industry and infrastructure required for operating the regional transport aircraft service.

"The major projects have got delayed, not because we lack capabilities, but due to indecisiveness at the policy level. We want to develop an aircraft that serves not only India, but the world," said Narasimha.
The committee hopes the prototype will be rolled out in the next 5-6 years for flight testing and certification for initial operational clearance. By then, it plans to have production facility in place with the industry.

Besides Nair, CSIR director-general Samir K Brahmchari, ISRO chairman K Radhakrish

nan, DRDO chairman VK Saraswat, NAL director AR Upadhyaya, HAL chairman Ashok Nayak, Space Commission member Roddam Narasimha, Hinduja Automotive vice-chairman V Sumantran and Kinetic Engineering director Arun Firodia are the members of the high-powered committee.

New Delhi: The country's largest insurance company, LIC, plans to recruit around 10,000 employees in the current fiscal to give a push to its growth plans.

"We are planning to hire a good number of people this year as well. We intend to hire 10,000 people this year across the various cadre," LIC Managing Director A K Dasgupta told PTI.

Last year, LIC hired same number of people across various cadre including some lateral recruitment for the first time.

Of the total, about 5,000 development officers would be recruited in line with the growth plan, he said.

Besides, the corporation is planning to recruit people in class I cadre, specialised cadre like legal etc, he added.

At present, LIC has about 1,15,000 employees including about 21,000 class-I officers.

Meanwhile, LIC is also planning to expand its overseas presence by setting up a subsidiary in Singapore.

The company brings an IT management platform that allows businesses to monitor, control and automate their "computing endpoints", such as laptops, desktops and servers from a single view.
It also boasts the built-in intelligence that can identify which devices are not in compliance with IT policies and recommend security fixes or software updates to 500,000 machines in minutes. In a statement, Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli software, said: "BigFix automates some of the most time-intensive IT tasks across the most complex global networks, helping save organisations significant amounts of time, labour and expense. BigFix's real-time visibility and control for globally distributed computing devices will complement IBM's existing smarter datacentre offerings and strengthen our ability to build security into the fabric of the enterprise."
The company also highlighted this acquisition as its eleventh in the security-related field since 2006. BigFix will become part of IBM's software group.
This story originally appeared as IBM acquires BigFix to advance smart data center vision on ZDNet.com.