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Google boss Eric Schmidt resigns from Apple board

Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt has resigned from the board of Apple because of potential conflicts of interest, Apple said in a statement Monday.

The move comes as the two companies increasingly find themselves competing in the same arena. Google's Android operating system power phones that are a major rival to Apple's iPhone, while its Chrome browser and its plans for a Google operating system also compete with Apple's products. Schmidt has been with Google since 2001 and on Apple's board since August 2006.

"Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

"Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's board," he added.

"I have very much enjoyed my time on the Apple board; it's a fantastic company," said Schmidt in a statement. "But as Apple explained today (Monday) we've agreed it makes sense for me to step down now."

IRCTC aka Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation

As a subsidiary of the Indian Railways, the primary function of IRCTC is to provide superlative catering, ticketing and tourism services. Depending upon the distance that the train has to cover IRCTC either attaches a pantry car to the train or provides meal on any one of the stations en-route. Additionally, the subsidiary also provides Indian Railways Catering services on the stations.

IRCTC also handles Indian Railways Reservation through its website. Within a few minutes, you can book your ticket and even get Indian Railways Ticket Confirmation. Apart from reservation, several other things can be done on the site like the different trains between important stations can be ascertained; the PNR status can be checked; the tickets can be upgraded, modified and even cancelled.

The next important function of IRCTC is to provide top-class tourism services not only to foreign tourists, but also to domestic tourists. To fulfill the needs to different kinds of passengers, IRCTC provides a wide assortment of tourism packages like budget package, deluxe package and luxury tourism package. The most popular package is Bharat Darshan in which important tourist destinations of India are covered.

"Gmail to eclipse Yahoo Mail In India"

Vizisense, an audience measurement tool from digital marketing firm Komli Media, has launched monthly rankings of websites based on traffic from India, and the first edition throws up some interesting results.

Gmail is just a million unique users short of overtaking Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Mail, a much older web-based email service. Globally, while Gmail has been growing, it is nowhere close to threatening Yahoo Mail’s leadership position.

Yahoo is India’s preferred portal, while Google (NSDQ: GOOG) leads by a vast margin in search and Google properties Orkut and YouTube leads social networking and photo/video sharing segments, also by significant margins.

A year into the launch, Web18’s In.com has more traffic than Indiatimes.com in the portals segment. In.com is also the fifth most popular mail service, and Indiatimes Mail doesn’t figure in top five.

MakeMyTrip.com is the most popular travel commerce site, second to railways site irctc.co.in, which has double the traffic. MakeMyTrip is followed by Yatra.com and Cleartrip.com.

Info Edge’s properties Naukri.com and 99acres.com, respectively lead the jobs search and real estate search segments, while matrimonial search is led by Consim Info’s Bharatmatrimony.com.

Ebay.in is the top ecommerce (B2C) site while Alibaba.com leads the classifieds (B2B) segment and Clickindia.com leads the classifieds (B2C) segment.

Detailed rankings across segments are here. Detailed notes on Vizisense’s methodology is here (pdf). Data includes visitors from cyber cafes.

Reuters

Dell India gets notice for over-pricing products

Computer major Dell India has been issued notice by a district consumer court here for allegedly over-pricing products and supplying a faulty laptop to a customer.

A consumer court in Shalimar Bagh, while issuing notice to Dell India earlier this week, asked the firm to file its response by Dec 21, the next date of hearing.

The court was hearing the plea of Archer Softech Pvt Ltd through its advocate Ankur Raheja, who alleged that the Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop it bought for Rs.69,164 turned out to be faulty. He also said that the company was not ready to replace or repair the product.

"Except the hard-disk and processor (which are of Toshiba and Intel make, respectively), almost each and every part has either been replaced or is not functioning properly due to manufacturing defects and poor quality of spares supplied for the laptop," Raheja told IANS.

He added that his client had to run form pillar to post to get spare parts for the laptop and its servicing, which also resulted in loss of business. He has demanded that the company return the amount paid by the consumer for the laptop and a compensation of Rs.400,000.

The complainant also alleged that Dell is over-pricing its products, charging consumers much more than the maximum retail price (MRP).

"There is no doubt that Dell India's aim is not just profit but extraordinary profit by exploiting Indian customers. That is why the prices for laptops and especially parts are always charged on the higher side in India," Raheja said in the complaint.

He said that the company had charged much more than the MRP for a battery. The cost of the battery, printed on the box, was Rs.2,100 but the company charged Rs.5,152, he alleged.

"We have contacted the company on many occasions but lame excuses were provided by the irresponsible staff. And on some occasions, no response was received," Raheja said.

Bharti, MTN yet to finalise merger deal

Indian telecom major Bharti Airtel and South African telecom giant MTN are yet to finalise their much-awaited merger deal, a senior official said here Friday.

"There is nothing as of now," a Bharti spokesperson said adding the company would update markets only Monday.

Earlier the companies had said the talks on the deal would be concluded by July 31.

The companies revived talks in May this year.

Earlier this month, the market regulator had permitted Airtel and MTN to go ahead with their proposal to buy each other's shares in a $25 billion deal without the latter having to make an open offer in Indian equities markets.

The talks between the two telecom giants had collapsed earlier after Airtel rejected MTN's proposal that would have made the Indian firm a subsidiary of the South African company.

Following that, the South African group had started negotiations with the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, which also failed.

Firefox claims billion downloads

Firefox users now have one more reason to be happy, according to Mozilla Foundation, Internet surfers have downloaded the open source Firefox browser more than one billion times, the software's distributor, the Mozilla Foundation, said Friday.

The browser is the strongest current rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which once controlled over 90 percent of the browser market but has seen its dominance steadily eroded by Firefox.

Firefox now accounts for some 22.5 percent of all active browsers, compared to Microsoft's 65 per cent share, according to the tracking firm Net Applications.

Firefox, which grew out of the now defunct Netscape browser in 2004, reached the 500 million download mark just 17 months ago. Its rapid adoption since then could be further accelerated by Microsft's decision to offer users a choice of browsers on all PCs sold in the EU to avoid anti-trust problems by regulators there.

Last year, the foundation set a new world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours when the third version of Firefox was downloaded more than 8 million times.