ICICI Bank, launched India’s first iMobile, a unique mobile banking platform which is offered on mobile phones. iMobile is a breakthrough innovation in banking where practically all internet-banking transactions can now be simply done on mobiles phones. Customers can now transfer funds to ICICI and Non ICICI Bank accounts just with the click of their mobile. The application covers Savings bank, Demat, Credit Card and Loan accounts. Customers can also pay their utility bills and insurance premium through this facility. ICICI Bank offers this facility free of charge to customers.
Customers who are already registered for mobile alerts will be able to download this application by sending an SMS “iMobile” to 56767661. Customers who have GPRS connection will receive a WAP link for activation. Customers who do not have GPRS can download iMobile from ICICI Bank.com on their desktops. It can then be transferred on to their handsets using either Bluetooth or data cable.
Mr. V. Vaidyanathan, Executive Director, ICICI Bank said, “ICICI Bank has always focused on innovation to improve customer experience. India has only 20 million internet connections and has over 200 million mobile connections. With this application, most features of internet banking will now be available on mobile phones, providing a breakthrough improvement in banking services.” In addition to easy access and anytime anywhere banking, iMobile offers complete security to customers transacting on the mobile phones. Customers will be required to enter 4 digit PIN for entering into Mobile Banking Application, which will prevent unauthorized use of the service.
The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online.
The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search.
The move could mean a big boost for semantic web technologies which have struggled to win a big audience.
Better results
At the moment most search engines, particularly Google, identify relevance for a particular topic using the interconnections between sites as much as they do the text on any single page.
The semantic web promises to change this because it helps to capture the meaning of data on a page and so give machines classifying or searching the web the capability to work out its relevance to a particular topic.
In an entry on Yahoo's blog, Amit Kumar, director of product management for the company's search site, said it was now starting to back key semantic web standards.
Mr Kumar said despite "remarkable progress" being made on how to classify meaning on webpages, the benefits of this work have not been felt by the average web user.
What was lacking, he added, was a compelling reason or "killer app" to use the semantic web technology.
"We believe that app can be web search," he wrote.
Professor Stefan Decker, a director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at the National University of Ireland and a member of the scientific council of the Web Science Research Initiative, said Yahoo had recognised that the semantic web was catching on.
 The semantic web could mean a challenge for Google |
These tags are similar in concept to the familiar HTML labels that help format text and other data on webpages.
Yahoo had realised that there was now enough to index to back up their search engine.
In a similar vein by starting to include the tags and descriptors defined by semantic web standards into its search index, web users suddenly have better reasons to use them.
Dr Decker said the advent of the semantic web promised to make a search much more productive.
Instead of returning a long list of links, a semantic web search engine would be able to understand what type of object, such as a person, was being sought and aggregate information around that
Dr Decker said the promise of the semantic web had spurred visionaries such as Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee.
Only now, he said, was the technology being put in place to fulfil that vision.
Before now, proposing such as thing was like "trying to build a jet plane when the world only had the technology for bicycles."
"It'll mean a quantum leap in productivity and effectiveness," he said.
Professor Wendy Hall from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and a director of the Web Research Science Initiative, said, "With the semantic web we're at the place the web was in 1992."
She added that the move to the semantic web could pose challenges for established companies such as Google which have grown on the back of indexing documents rather than objects.
Dotcom companies were defined by beanbags and pizza but Google, a company that came to prominence after the bubble had burst, has taken that image to a whole new level.
Meeting 'pods' in the style of Swiss chalets and igloos, fireman poles to allow easy access between floors and a slide to ensure that people can get to the cafeteria as quickly as possible are all part of a design of its new European engineering headquarters in Zurich Switzerland.
The building was designed for - and partly by - the 300 engineers who will work there.
The wacky office is both a showcase for Google's unconventional approach to business and a symbol to prove that Google is no longer a US-centric firm.
But as the search giant expands its wings so criticism about its dominance becomes ever louder.
The civil liberties lobby is hot on its heels with questions about what it plans to do with all the data it is collecting while others question its expansion into new areas - with its purchase of advertising outfit DoubleClick causing particular controversy.
Google stresses that it puts users before making money but an 18% drop in its share price at the beginning of the year proved that it wasn't immune to the US economic downturn and some question how long its good intentions can last if profits continue to fall.
Access all areas
It does, without doubt value its staff very highly and engineers are particularly important - over half of the company is made up of them.
They are best served, according to Nelson Mattas, vice president of engineering, by both a creative work environment and a flat, open working structure.
At a press day to launch its new research and development centre, he explained the serious point behind the 'fun office'.
"The lava lamps, free food and games are all part of the Google culture. It is informal and a structure that isn't dictated from the top," he said.
The unconventional design of the office represents what Google hopes is a free flow of information through all parts of the company.
"I was very surprised that on day one of joining Google I had access to every piece of code, design document and confidential information, said Mr Mattas.
A database of all ongoing projects allows engineers to easily locate expertise and a scheme known as 20% time offers engineers the chance to take that amount of time off from their key objectives to "go do something new".
It has proven itself, spawning features such as Google News which was built as a 20% project by an engineer frustrated about the availability of news following the 9/11 attacks.
For Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management at Google, the balance of work and fun is just about right.
"Beyond the good food and cool office it is the case that every conversation that you have here is one of substance," he said.
Pepsi versus Coke
 Engineers apparently love the slide |
Google recruits from the best universities in the US and Europe and now has 12 engineering offices around Europe.
In Poland engineers are working to improve the relevancy of search, while engineers in Denmark are developing virtual machines to improve the speed of applications.
In Israel, engineers have designed Google Trends, a feature that offers users a way to analyse and compare various search terms.
So for instance users can compare the popularity of search terms such as Obama versus Clinton and see the cities where the different US candidates were most popular.
"The tool was developed to understand what people search for in order to improve search but we realised that this information can be useful for everyone else," explained Yossi Mahas, the head of engineering at Google's Tel Aviv office.
It has thrown up some fascinating facts. A comparison between Coke and Pepsi shows that in New Zealand people are more likely to search for Coke while in Turkey and India, Pepsi dominates.
Searches about troubled star Britney Spears show a very direct correlation with her media exposure as well as revealing that there are currently 800 ways to misspell her name.
London has become the European headquarters of all things mobile and alongside its much talked about mobile operating system Android, Google is also working on projects aimed at improving mobile search and tying it ever more closely with location.
Search for a café in London and mobile users will be given results showing the distance away from their current location and the phone number of various establishments.
"The use of location is changing behaviour. People are going to areas that they don't know and just opening up Google maps," said David Burke, a mobile engineer at Google.
Users first?
 Fireman poles offer quick access between floors |
Engineers work in small teams of three or four, which is reflected at the Zurich HQ with small offices, each of which comes with the requisite 'bean bag' meeting room.
Whiteboards are everywhere, allowing ideas to be written down wherever they are thought up and there is a heavy emphasis on the idea that work and play can co-exist.
Other areas include a games room, a library in the style of an English country house and an aquarium where over-worked Googlers can lie in a bath full of red foam and stare at fish.
Google is keen to present itself as the company that 'does no evil' and 'puts users first', statements that are becoming more challenged as the company becomes ever more powerful.
A question at the open day about Google's involvement in China - where search is heavily censored - brought a compromise response: "Our approach in general is users first but we are also obligated to the local laws of the countries we operate in," said Mr Mattas.
A query about how Google Maps deals with politically sensitive areas such as the Palestinian territories was deflected by the head of the Israel office while a question about how the firm can reconcile being both the provider of ad tools and the seller of media space drew the answer: "They can be complementary".
The questions about Google's role as the provider of the world's information are likely to get louder but few doubt that it is setting new standards in how to get the best out of employees.
And Google assured the more cynical members of the press that the slide is used every day.
Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer.
Convergence has been the Holy Grail for mobile phone makers, software and hardware partners, as well as consumers, for more than a decade.
And for the first time the rhetoric of companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, who have boasted of putting a multimedia computer in your pocket, no longer seems far fetched.
"Converged devices are always with you and always connected," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Last year Nokia sold almost 200m camera phones and about 146m music phones, making it the world's biggest seller of digital cameras and MP3 players.
In the coming year the firm predicts it will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones as personal navigation becomes the latest feature to be assimilated into the mobile phone.
Form and function
Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, said: "All of those single use devices - MP3 players, digital camera, GPS - are collapsing onto the phone."
"We are going past the point where this was a phone with a few other things," he said.
Symbian's operating system shipped on 188 million phones last year and a third of those came with GPS.
"We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications; all converging," said Luis Pineda, from mobile phone chip firm Qualcomm.
Convergence is being driven by a combination of software, services and hardware. 
More and more people are snapping shots with a handset
The first phones powered by a chip running at 1Ghz will hit the market later this year, seven years after the first desktop chip broke the gigahertz barrier.
Qualcomm's 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset will debut inside a number of handsets, including some from Samsung and HTC
"It's a first in the industry for a wireless chipset," said Mr Pineda.
As well as raw horsepower Snapdragon also features a dedicated application processor, as well as the ability to handle 12 megapixel digital photos and up to 720p high definition video imaging.
Mr Clifford from Symbian said the mobile industry had to deliver multi-function devices which did not compromise.
He said: "When we look at what is collapsing on to these devices and people's expectations with their experiences on single-use specialized devices there is going to be rising expectations."
Chip shop
More than 90% of the world's mobile phones are powered by technology created by British firm Arm. It designs chip architectures that it licenses to semiconductors makers such as Qualcomm and Broadcom.
Ian Drew from Arm said future mobile phones demanded ever more processing power.
But building chips with greater processing was not a straightforward, he said.
"If you look at a typical phone the first thing you have got to do is get within the half a watt envelope. 
Nigel Clifford, Symbian
"It needs to get into your pocket. And there's no fan. It needs to work for days rather than hours."
He added: "When you start adding multi media experiences - such as 3D graphics, video, and games - there are two ways to do that: you can get bigger and bigger processors or you have multi core where you can switch off a processor when you don't need it."
Arm is demonstrating a chip architecture, called Coretex A9, that will offer four cores, or processors, on a single chip.
Symbian has been working with Arm on future uses for multi-core mobile phones.
"You can use massive amounts of processing if you need it. But if you don't you can power down the cores that aren't required," said Mr Clifford.
Symmetrical Multi Processing will drive the next generation of applications on a phone, he added.
"Silicon vendors are looking very seriously at how they integrate SMP."
Mr Clifford added: "The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it's going to be mobile."
He said gaming would be the next feature to collapse into phones. 
The gaming abilities of handsets are rapidly improving
"That is one of the next single usage devices that will start feeling the pressure from the mobile device," he said.
3D graphics acceleration is becoming standard on many of today's mobile phones and specialists like Nvidia have joined the market.
Mr Clifford said today's most powerful mobile phones, such as Nokia's N96 and NTTDoCoMo's 905 series have the same power as a laptop from 2000.
Nvidia's APX 2500 chip has enough 3D graphics acceleration to handle Quake 3, a PC game from 1999, on a mobile phone.
Handset owners were also beginning to expect the same online experience they have on their desktop PCs on their mobile phones.
"Web 2.0, social networking and video sharing; that's a real driver of horsepower," said Mr Drew from Arm.
He added: "But you need to be able to get data in. The next generation of mobile phones need high performance radios - they will have high data rates that will enable this content to be streamed to you."
Symbian is working on technology called Freeway to give phones the ability to move seamlessly between wireless networks, like wi-fi and cell networks like 3G and 4G.
"We don't want people to feel the mobile web is a second class experience."
