By The Associated Press 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google Inc. has expanded its online suite of office software to include a business presentation tool similar to Microsoft Corp.’s popular PowerPoint, adding the latest twist in a high-stakes rivalry.  The Mountain View-based company planned to unveil the presentation software late Monday, about five months after Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced Google would add the application to its software arsenal. 

The new program will be included in Google’s free software bundle, called “Docs,” which users must be online to employ. And the company will sell a souped-up version to businesses, universities and government agencies for $50 a year per user. As PowerPoint does, Google’s presentation software enables users to create a series of slides with a mixture of text and graphics on each. PowerPoint is widely used in business meetings. 

Google’s software suite already included word processing, spreadsheet and calendar management programs. Microsoft has been reaping huge profits from similar applications for years.  Unlike Google’s applications, Microsoft’s programs are usually installed directly on the hard drives of computers. 

Google executives have consistently depicted the company’s software applications as counterparts to Microsoft’s products.

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posted by:Webmaster on Wednesday Sep 26, 2007  GMP Services Inc has announced the immediate availability of GMP Content Management System 2.0, enabling businesses to better manage their web sites.

GMP CMS 2.0 is an ASP.net 2.0 web application with a Microsoft SQL Server backend that empowers users with effortless and simplistic web site management.

Liane Bate
September 14, 2007
Blogging is becoming a very popular thing in the internet world lately because people are realizing that you can actually make money online now with good blogging techniques. If you know what you’re doing with a blog, then chances are you can monetize it and make a good buck doing it. The problem for most people is that they write up a decent post, but they don’t know where to go from there, and then they think it’s just not working. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in handy.
There are a few decent ways to optimize your blog for the search engines to help you make money online now so that the search engines spider your site and make your posts available when someone does a Google search for a topic within your post.
One way to SEO your blog is to do what you would do with your main website – that is, start with your domain name. For example, my site and blog are about honest money making, so I created the domain, http://www.HonestMoneyMaking.com/blog/ to incorporate the terms “honest money making” in my domain name itself. If you want to attract the “make money online now” crowd, you could use those keywords in your domain. This is a good trick to getting more recognition in and traffic from the search engines. You can do the same for your blog domain name.
The next thing to consider when creating a blog is to modify your blog template so that your main keywords, like “make money online now”, are included in your title, description, and headers. When you do a search and arrive at a new site, you will see a blue title bar at the top of the page, as well as a site description and large headings.
In your template, you can change the words in the “title”, “description”, and “h1″ or “h2″ tags to be whatever keywords you want to attract traffic with. These keywords will be the prominent words in your site’s listings in the search engines, so use a good keyword research tool, and choose wisely!
You may decide to choose 10 or 11 good keywords for your blog, and put the most important ones, like “make money online now” in your domain, title, description, and headers, and then use the other keywords you are targeting within your blog posts. I like to focus on only one keyword per post and sprinkle it throughout the post. Overdoing it can backfire on you and appear more like a spam post that you may get penalized for, so use the general rule of no more than one keyword per paragraph, and you should be okay.
Something the search engines really like is when you place links within your blog posts using your chosen keywords and linking back to your main site, or internal pages of your site. You may even find that the more deep, internal links you have to other pages on your blog or site, the more traffic you will get than if you always point back to just your main site. If I use the keywords “make money online now” as a link in my blog post, I would be better off to point that link to another blog post I made earlier on making money online, for example.
You may already know that the search engines read your site from top to bottom and left to right. This means that if you have a left column for your site, it will read from the top of that left column to the bottom of that left column before actually reading your blog post. This is quite significant to know because this means that the more blog post links you have in that left column pointing to your previous posts, the more easily the search engine spiders will pick up and index those keywords. Make sure you set up your blog template to include your blog’s previous and archived posts on the left.
Don’t forget to make regular daily posts, and ping your blog after each post you make. This will notify the search engines that your blog has new content to spider. If you follow these SEO blog tips, then you will get new traffic to your blog, and find that you will make money online now! Blog traffic can translate to making money if you do it right!
Article source
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=37713

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Written by EditorsChoice   
Wednesday, 05 September 2007
One of the key decisions a company needs to make in offshoring software development is which projects to offshore. You cannot simply offshore “maintenance” projects, because your staff in the U.S. wants to work on new product development. This issue must be carefully thought through and here are time tested and proven guidelines:
1.Business objective: It may sound simple but make sure you clearly define your objectives for offshore outsourcing. Are you going offshore for cost only, for cost and skills, do you wish to use local expertise to develop or customize products for that part of the world? Each of these can lead you to a different list of potential projects.  
2.Adequate resource pool offshore: This issue is not always obvious; but depending on the technologies you employ, you need to ascertain if there is a large enough resource pool. Competition for the right resources in countries like India is intense; if you are in a narrow niche and you need to invest significant training dollars to get the staff up to speed, you need to think through how you can retain your staff. Industry has experienced many instances where one company invested in training key staff, only to find that 6 months later a competitor offered enough incentives for the recently trained staff to leave the first company. A mid-sized company who experienced this is evaluating if they should bring the project back to U.S.  
3.ROI: A small software company recently considered offshoring; the proposal was to offshore the equivalent of four to six developers. The financial analysis indicated that at this level, the overhead needed to establish and manage an offshore effort was significant and the cost savings after considering all associated costs didn’t exist. The company decided against outsourcing. This example points to another criterion for determining whether a project makes sense for offshore –  return on investment. After all, one of the most common reasons for offshoring is to reduce cost.   
4. Deliverables and level of interface with the U.S. team: Can you define clearly what the offshore team needs to do? The more you can do this, the better your chances of success. What is the level of interface? How much interaction does the offshore team need to do with the U.S. team? If you need to provide ongoing (read: some times daily) management guidance, it  will take significant management effort make it successful or worse yet, it may not succeed at all.  
5.Specialized equipment or tools: If your development environment involves specialized tools and equipment, it can impact financial feasibility and schedules; you need to think through the time it will take to create the necessary environment offshore.  
6.Transfer of Information and Training: How long does it take, at what cost and whether you have personnel available to devote to this, in addition to doing their own current tasks?  
7.Cultural fit (Contextual knowledge necessary); is it possible to train offshore personnel within a reasonable time frame? For example, projects that deal with user interfaces are harder to transfer because of the need to understand the cultural issues in the U.S.  
8.Attracting and retaining offshore talent: If you are doing new development or you are in a hot technology area, this will work in your favour. If you are considering dated or proprietary technology with limited market appeal and/or sustaining effort, this will work against you.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/offshore-software-development-how-to-select-projects-that-will-succeed-207696.html
About the Author:
Do you want to learn more about key ingredients for global outsourcing success? 
  http://www.offshoringsuccess.com/web_log.php   
M. M. “Sath” Sathyanarayan was executive at a Fortune 500 corporation and CEO of a startup; now a consultant, author and trainer, he has published a book and dozens of articles on global outsourcing.

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Filed under: Outsourcing

September 11,2007
A rising tide of software development service providers have more ISVs outsourcing core components
Outsourcing and offshoring are not just for IT services and business processes anymore. A small but growing niche of providers targeting R&D for application development is coming to the fore.
I’m not sure which came first, the demand for software development services or the service providers themselves, but my guess is that, like all trends, it is probably a case of the need for something new perfectly timed with the technology that makes it possible.
The concept itself has been around for a while. Companies such as General Motors were among the first to employ what the manufacturing industry calls contract manufacturers. As part of the model, GM enlists other companies to manufacture almost all of its cars’ components, which are then delivered to GM for assembly. The major PC manufacturers do this as well. In fact, PC manufacturers even leave the assembly to OEMs.
The software industry, however, has been slow to adopt this model. But now, thanks in part to SOA outsourcers’ ability to deliver components to ISVs, software companies are beginning to catch on to this development strategy — one that engineering companies such as Ford, Boeing, and Nortel practice routinely.
Software development outsourcers work with the CTO rather than the CIO, says Peter Harrison, CEO of GlobalLogic, one such service provider.
Typically, an ODM (original design manufacturer) will work with a customer to create the design. As with hardware, software contract manufacturers then take on anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent of product development. In many cases, especially with startups, says Harrison, a company comes to GlobalLogic with just an idea, and GlobalLogic helps give the idea shape and texture.
Within the past three years, the concept of code libraries and reusable code and processes has taken on a new meaning, says Bob Kramich, vice president of business development at DarwinSuzsoft, an outsource service provider based in the United States and China.
Reusable processes are key to contract software manufacturing. What an outsourcer has developed for one customer can now be repackaged for another, reducing development time and cost. For example, in mobile software development, memory utilization is a big issue that when solved can be used many times over. And then there is all the back-end synchronization with the hub. Such challenges are common to most mobile development endeavors, says Kramich, and they can be solved rather quickly by outsourcers who have done it for customers many times over.
Other recurring components include security and data encryption, plus the need for performance testing and optimization. All these things are consistent across every application.
Part of what is driving this trend is the nature of today’s startups, which are more likely to be launched by business-oriented investors than technologists. To these individuals, the idea of outsourcing the design and development of software at a lower cost than building an in-house infrastructure is very appealing.
As this trend grows, development will accelerate, and the cost of software will go down. There will also be more competition, as the bar is lowered for buying into the creation of a new product.
GlobalLogic’s Harrison believes the model will also result in more user-friendly applications tailored to business users. As opposed to SAP, for example, which built everything but the operating system, including the application server, the message queue, and the whole stack, these days there is a greater willingness among software vendors to adopt third-party processes and components. After all, it frees them to focus on the differentiating aspects of their solutions, rather than having to create every possible layer.
Harrison, however, believes that even companies’ crown jewels will eventually go this route.
“The days of the three- to four-year Vista product lifecycles are coming to an end,” Harrison says.
Of course, as predicted here numerous times, eventually these software service providers will create their own application solutions and sell them back to the enterprise, thus bringing the trend full circle.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 11, 2007 03:00 AM

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Published 09/17/2007 - 12:00 a.m. GMT 

(PressMediaWire) - Applying to outsourcing services is one of the main progress trends in the world IT-market. Today under IT-Outsourcing the wide spectrum of services is implied, but this term entered into the use only a few years ago in particular due to custom software development. There are two types of outsourcing: inland outsourcing and assignment of works execution abroad -offshore outsourcing.
The leading user of offshore services is the USA, in less degree - countries of Western Europe. At the end of 90th of past century a lot of factors were instrumental in the splash of this market, foremost - a natural process of globalization. However then forgotten today, but very sensational at that time Problem 2000 played a noticeable role, when demand on routine programming services grew enormously. Next important factor was an economic crisis at the beginning of present century, which forced western customers to cut down expenses on IT sector and search more cheap methods of IT solutions.
Now in the USA up to 40% companies use services of IT Outsourcing. Today the tendency of entering into the contracts of all-in-one prevails in the world market of IT Outsourcing. That means that all of IT Outsourcing works are passed to one company. At the same time experts suppose that soon development will become multisourcing that is passing separate IT directions to the different companies.
Criteria of choice of outsourcer must be the same as at the choice of any contractor. It is ability of organization to fulfill its promises. It is necessary to look at a management, team. The client should inquire standard documents and regulations to define the process of services providing and in what form periodic reports will be given. Company-service supplier and its subdivision, rendering IT-services, must be stable and trustable.
The further information on Outsourcing problems and solutions is presented at outsourcing-groups.com. This is a free articles portal dedicated to IT Outsourcing.

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