Thought Garage

Indians won two Bronze and two finalist nominations at 2004 Young Guns International Advertising Awards.
http://www.ygaward.com/
Awards List

In the 'maverick media' category, Ambience Publicis has bagged a bronze for its work on Snehi, a Delhi-based organisation that works for the rights of abused children.
In the 'Outdoors: community service and charity' category RMG David's Nests won a bronze for an innovative hoarding done for WWF-India.
Ambience Publicis has also bagged two finalist nominations for its work on Western Union Money Transfer in the print single and print campaign categories.

http://www.agencyfaqs.com/news/stories/2004/11/30/10367.html

India's Neeraj Bhasin and Rupalli Mehraa won the first and second prize respectively in the 2004 Commonwealth Vision Awards, awarded in a ceremony held on friday 26th Nov,2004 at the Royal Commonwealth Society in London.

http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/nov/29awards.htm

Bangalore based Ittiam Systems emerges as the world's most preferred supplier of DSP based intellectual property in world-wide DSP Professionals Survey for 2004 conducted by Forward Concepts.
http://www.ittiam.com/pages/news/pres-rel-20041124.htm

Its an amazing feat for Ittiam made it to the top in just 4 years after its inception. Ittiam was founded in 2001 in Bangalore, India.

This is a nice tool, a stand alone editor to edit/post without ever explicitly logging in to the blog web site. This is a test blog using this tool. Nice and easy now to post a blog. Updating a blog is also very simple and quick.
http://www.wblogger.com

The ninth edition of the study entitled "2004 VII Hundred" conducted jointly by the New York weekly News India-Times and Ventures International Inc says, top 100 companies owned or run by Indian Americans, generated $2.3 billion in revenues during 2003 and provided jobs to 18,491 workers. Productivity is at $124,000 per employee. Details of Top 5
http://sify.com/news_info/news/nri/fullstory.php?id=13350582 Only 21 listings were from the software sector, followed by 19 for professional services and 17 for manufacturing. The eligibility criteria for participating in the study: 1. privately held 2. controlled by (CEO,President) must be Asian Indian origin 3. Minimum sales of $1 million Ninety-two firms had made it to the 2003 list, as per the 8th edition of the survey, collectively generating $2.2 billion in revenues, providing jobs to 18,337 employees. Productivity is at $120,000 per employee. Comparing 8th and 9th editions, the difference is only $0.1 billion in revenue. $2.3Billion …

Six "Made In India" Innovative Software companies have been shortlisted by NASSCOM for 2004 "IT Innovation in India". These companies will present their road maps in the next NASSCOM meet in Mumbai in feb, 2005.

These six made in to the finals, from a spirited 96 counterparts.
Beehive Solutions Ltd,
Compulink Systems Ltd,
Liqwid Krysal India Pvt Ltd,
PACE Soft Silicon,
Srishti Software Pvt Ltd and
very well known among certification aspirants Whizlabs Software Pvt Ltd

NASSCOM aspires to showcase the expertize and help them to become world leaders in the area of specialization.
http://www.nasscom.org/innovation/

This show CBS's '60 Minutes' was broadcasted a long time back, but I came to read this comment recently, and I was shocked to see the emotional interpretation media and Indians who believed it to be true.

"Well, my son, he probably wanted to do computer science at IIT. To do that, you have to be in the top 200 and he couldn't do that, so he went to Cornell instead....I do know cases where students who couldn't get into computer science at IIT, they have gotten scholarships at MIT, at Princeton, at Caltech." -N R Narayanamurthy Founder, Infosys in an interview to CBS's '60 Minutes' on India's IIT Jan 17, 2003.

This may be true, that his son and many other Indians could not get in to IITs but got in to American universities and even got scholarships there. Considering the population of India and the intake of IITs, there will always be such a fierce competition. There is a large queue for Maruthi cars in India, but you get a Mercedes Benz almo…

Instead of living in Utopia, this foundation does what needs to be done at grass root levels, promotes innovation at every facet of life and finds value for it. The NIF was set up by the Government of India four years ago to help these unsung heroes find a platform to showcase their knowledge. Supported by the Honey Bee Networks, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Shristi and various local NGOs, the foundation helps Indian innovation by identifying, documenting and protecting the intellectual property rights of the grass root level innovations. The NIF has selected 13,000 grassroots innovations based on traditional knowledge for commercialization.http://www.nifindia.org/
http://www.nifindia.org/presentation/index.htm

Also Organizes various events like the Annual Business Competition "Disha" - http://disha.scai.org.in/ with support from IIMA to promote the cause.

Three Indians won Oracle Editor's choice Awards 2004.

Rajesh Kumar - Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Grid Control
Jyotika Patel - Portal Developer of the Year 2004
Venkat Tipparam - Java Developer of the Year 2004

Published in Oracle Magazine Nov/Dec 2004
http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/04-nov/o64awards.html

The 2004 Global Indus Technovators Awards have been announced.
http://technovators.mit.edu/winner04.php

The Global Indus Technovator Awards have been instituted to recognize and felicitate 20 distinguished innovators of Indus origin working at the cutting-edge of technology that may be harnessed for far-reaching applications.
http://technovators.mit.edu/index.php

9 Indians achieved their spots in this year's list of "100 Top Innovators" (under the age of 35) chosen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Technology Review" magazine.

The magazine is accessible only on subscription. Read info at various news web sites. Complete indians list is available at the first link:
http://news.indiainfo.com/2004/11/08/0811nri.html
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-916533,curpg-1.cms

India remains top, for the third year with an increase of 7% in student enrollment in US universities, while overall enrollment dips by 2.4%, as reported in
Open Doors 2004, the annual report published by the Institute of International Education(IIE).

Posted in a Press release at
http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=50137

Two of the best brands of India, Airtel and Reliance place India on top at the World Communication Awards 2004 by winning 2 of 12 honours. Airtel was voted as the Best Brand and Mukhesh Ambani of Reliance was voted as the Most Influential Person in Communications.

The awards were declared on 11th October,2004 in London.
http://wca.totaltele.com/index.stm
See all the nominees for "The most influential person in Communications"(the list includes CEOs of all top telecoms, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), to get a feel of who Mukhesh Ambani has won against, and how much it mean to India to win such an honour. http://wca.totaltele.com/poll/poll.aspx
Reliance Infocomm http://www.relianceinfo.com/Infocomm/index.html
Airtel http://www.airtelworld.com/

"Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?” “There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.”
“In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?” - Excerpts from a speech by DR. A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM, President of India
I remember this email that was flying around for a long time with title, “A must read for Indians”, with excerpts from a speech made by president Abdul kalam. People read it, praised it, forwarded to all on their buddy lists. After a while, it is forgotten like any other forwarded article. I wish, at least some people would start looking at India little differently and start doing some thing different which might change this shameful image.

Honestly speaking this is true for…

There is a large number of resources both online and offline available for SCJP exam preparation. Not all of them are effective, particularly if you have limited time to spare, like me. The following are the short-listed resources I have used to pass the SCJP exam(31st october,2004). I got 56 answers right out of 61 questions and scored 91% . It took 3 weeks for me to learn the fundamentals of Java language and specifically prepare for the exam. If you have limited time, the following list of resources, which I consider very effective, may help you too. Books “HeadFirst Java” by Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra - If you are new to Java, this is the best book, as it explains the concepts in a very humorously engaging way. And this book has a variety of presentation techniques to illustrate and emphasize the concepts. “Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide” by Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra - This book covers every thing required for the exam in the same style as in …