WSJ (via Tech Review) reports on research which uses "gene comparison techniques to identify word patterns from different news sources describing the same event."

The scheme could eventually allow computers to more easily process natural language, produce paraphrases that could be used in machine translation, and help people who have trouble reading certain types of sentences.

Given a sentence to paraphrase, the system finds the closest match among one set of lattices, then uses the matching lattice from the other source to fill in the argument values of the original sentence. The prototype can produce as many as 20 paraphrases per sentence, according to the researchers.

The Register writes on "Sun's decision to end-of-life every Cobalt product, including the elegant Qube and RaQ systems, with no replacements planned. And with Cobalt's demise ends a couple of eras - one of dotcom hype-driven investments and another marking the death of the server appliance."

I think that there is still a market opportunity for server appliances - focused not on data centres, but on SMEs. This means selling one server at a time. It is what I see as the future of Pragatee: server appliances that form the IT infrastructure for SMEs.

Rediff has a summary:

- Man of the Year: Deepak Puri of Moser-Baer
- Fastest Growing Company: Moser Baer
- Lifetime Achievement Award: Vijay Bhatkar
- Pathbreaker Award: Ashok Jhunjhunwala

The Economic Times has an interview with CK Prahalad. Excerpts:

Take Wipro, TCS and Infosys as potential models of what multinationality means. You will find their cost, given the size of their global operations, measured in terms of people working abroad, is incredibly low compared to traditional MNCs like GE, IBM, Siemens or Philips. The reason is fairly simple. They have no legacies to change, they’re starting from zero. And they were under tremendous cost pressure from day one, so they had to develop new ways of communication, co-ordination and management. That’s quite unique and different from building standalone, country-by-country organisations with their own infrastructure and then changing it to global business management.

The new MNCs like Wipro or TCS are all multi-focal companies where the key manufacturing operations are in one part of the world but the customer-facing operations are in another part of the world. Their revenues may come from a part of the world where they don’t necessarily dominate. It’s a very different configuration from what the traditional MNCs had to start with. Not only will Indian MNCs emerge as a major force, but they will have the opportunity to rewrite the book on how to manage global operations. They will show us how to create low cost, highly effective, real-time systems. The good news is we are starting with real-time 24/7 as a starting point.

We are inventing so many things we don’t take credit for. Take call centre operations. Few people know what it takes to train young Indian men and women who have strong accents, to speak English as if they were born in Ohio. We’ve developed accent neutralisation capabilities. And we train not one or two people but a hundred thousand people to take on a persona for eight hours a day which has nothing to do with reality. In other words, we efficiently play-act and that’s the innovation.