Egypt oversold being a top offshoring spot?

Before Egypt turned off the Internet, the country had received increasingly high marks from leading analysis firms as a promising offshore outsourcing destination, despite the nation's political risk.

When it comes to outsourcing, there are some things that analysis firms can no doubt do well. They can assess the labor pool, the educational system, and cost of business -- anything that can be measured and quantified. But as Egypt's political turmoil demonstrates, it's very difficult to predict the sweep of history.

Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney released an annual index this week that measures the attractiveness of offshoring locations, and it put Egypt fourth on the list after India, China and Malaysia.

Source url : http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9207680/Was_Egypt_oversold_as_top_offshoring_spot_

Indian continue to be on top in offshore outsourcing

India has been the world's favorite destination for offshore outsourcing but its service competitiveness and cost efficiency is being challenged by many other countries like Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia, according to a latest research.

It is already the most successful country among the offshore locations and continues to score very well across all the 10 criterion was said by IT consultancy firm Gartner in its latest report.

However, the rapid growth of the business in neighboring China is posing tough competition, according to the report that also revealed the debut of eight new countries in the list of Top 30.

Though the attractive cost structures of Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia create tough competition for India, while China remains the most prominent challenger in terms of scale, but India maintains it's position.

Year 2010 was eventful for IT

China is No. 1 in the supercomputer sector. The government was fair to target the three sectors with huge demand in domestic market disallowing monopolies to form. Still it's difficult for Chinese firms to compete Microsoft's software services and intel for it's chips.

In mid of November, China’s Tianhe-1 topped the world’s supercomputer rankings. The machine features thousands of graphics chips and is capable of achieving a sustained performance of 2.5 petaflops, or 2,500 trillion calculations per second. It was the first time China surpassed the United States in the sector. US-based Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Jaguar system ranked No. 2.

The supercomputer, which requires high-end chips and server computing technologies, is a serious measure of a nation’s advanced IT technology and research ability. A supercomputer works for both industry and public sectors.

Google in talks to buy Groupon

Google Inc. may be close to buying online discount service Groupon in a deal worth as much as $6 billion in what would be the search company's largest acquisition ever, according to published reports.

The talks were reported by the technology blog All Things D and by The New York Times, which cited unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.

Google and Groupon had no comment Tuesday.

The size of the deal would put it well above Google's largest acquisition to date, its 2008 purchase of DoubleClick for $3.2 billon.

Groupon, a 2-year-old startup based in Chicago, offers daily local bargains ranging from yoga classes to discounts from national retailers such as Gap and Nordstrom Rack. Buying Groupon would give Google an increasingly popular outlet for local merchants that hope to lure in more prospective customers. That's a lucrative space that Facebook entered recently with its Deals service. Google and Facebook are increasingly competing for online eyeballs and the ad dollars that follow them.

Source url : http://gadgets.ndtv.com/shownews.aspx?id=GADEN20100161804&Sec=NEWS&pfrom=Top-Tech

Removing website pages from Google: Keeping some pages confidential

Keeping Content Out Of Google’s Search Results From the Start


Ideally, information that you don’t want in Google’s index won’t end up there at all. The best ways to ensure this are:


* Require a login to access the information

This method, of course, not only keeps Google out, but ensures that only those you want to view the content are able to. You would use this method, for instance, to keep personal information like credit card and social security numbers private and to manage access to premium content.


* Use the Robots Exclusion Protocol to block search engines from crawling and/or indexing the content

You can block content using a robots.txt file, a robots meta tag, or an X-Robots tag in the page header. Using a Disallow statement in the robots.txt file keeps Googlebot from crawling the page, although the URL itself may still end up indexed. Using a noindex robots meta tag on the page allows Googlebot to crawl the page, but keeps Google from indexing the page contents or displaying the URL in the search results. (Note that while the Noindex directive in robots.txt has been unofficially followed by Google, it hasn’t stated support for this directive officially, so it’s not an ideal way to ensure content remains out of Google search results.)


Source url : http://searchengineland.com/removing-pages-from-google-53086

Prediction outsourcing

Importance of website content

Practically all over the internet trying to explain what maquis a good site will tell you,'Content is King'and' You need a good content' but I think it is still not taken seriously enough in webmasters. There are many places around that have no real content, not original or are just boring. What many people don't realize is that good content does not just keep your visitors interested, and give you a good work. It can also help you promote your site.

Ascending search engines ignore the traditional method to read the meta tags keywords and descriptions, as they often are abused by users. Instead, search engines like Google now read the whole page and use it to generate results. Obviously, the more pages and words you have, the more chances you have or are returned as a result.

Likewise, if you have good content, other sites link to your content, and this will bring even more visitors to your site. Links to your pages will also increase your ranking in Google counts links to your site.

The main reason for having a good content, however, remains that it will make your website popular among the visitors and give you a good chance of surviving and doing well. So as you can get a good content on your site?