Microsoft kept partners in dark about Surface

Microsoft kept its personal computer partners largely in the dark about its plans to launch a competing tablet computer, with some long-time collaborators learning of the new gadget only days before its unveiling, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The secrecy that shrouded the Surface tablet risks alienating Microsoft's hardware partners, and marks a departure from the software company's tradition of working closely with hardware companies to test and fine-tune every new product.

It also underscores how Microsoft is starting to take pages from Apple Inc's playbook, keeping its cards close to the vest as it works to reinvent its Windows franchise and jump into the hardware business.

The earliest that Microsoft's personal computing partners were told about the tablet was last Friday, just three days before it was shown to the media at an event in Los Angeles, according to sources in the U.S. and Taiwan technology industry who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Windows chief Steven Sinofsky made a round of telephone calls but gave only the barest details on Friday, neither revealing the name of the gadget nor its specifications, two people close to Microsoft's partners told Reuters.

As such, Microsoft's main partners remained "in wait-and-see" mode and had to monitor the news for details, one of the sources said.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told reporters the company had informed its largest hardware-manufacturing partners about the tablet. A company spokesman declined to say how much of a heads up the partners were given, or to elaborate further.

Sources at Acer Inc and Asustek Computer Inc, the world's fourth and fifth largest PC makers respectively, said the first they had heard of the new tablets was at Ballmer's news conference on Monday.

"No senior executives heard about the news last week," said an Acer executive, who added they were still seeking details. "We're quite surprised."

Acer shipped nearly 10 percent of PCs in the first quarter of 2012, with Asustek accounting for 6 percent, according to research house IDC.

The Surface marks a major strategic shift for Microsoft, ahead of the expected release of its new Windows 8 operating system by the fourth quarter of this year.

Microsoft is now pitting itself as a direct competitor, breaking with a 37-year old model where it had licensed its software to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Dell Inc or Hewlett-Packard Co, which made the machines.

Competing head-on with PC makers may damage a relationship that has long dominated the computer world, where nine out of 10 PCs run on Windows. Analysts pointed to similar concerns in the Android smartphone world surrounding Google Inc's decision to buy Motorola.

"The strategy may affect the willingness of device manufacturers to work so closely with Microsoft, as it will now be viewed as a competitor as well as a partner," said Andrew Milroy, vice president of ICT Research for Asia-Pacific at Frost & Sullivan in Singapore.

Driving Microsoft's shift, say analysts, is the growing clout of Apple, whose iPad is threatening the market for notebook computers. Notebooks are still largely a Windows business, but its growth is a fraction of the tablet market.

SEO (Revolution in Internet Marketing)

Every day millions of people use Internet for their businesses. Surveys show that more than 85% of Internet users find new websites by using search engines. The internet has become a highly visible and competitive marketing resource for your business.

We at Permute IT Pvt. Ltd. are a pool of online marketing professionals with immense expertise and experience. Your company can have the best looking website in the world, but if no one can sees it, your efforts are totally vain. Most often, people have interest in what you do and they will use a search engine like Google or Yahoo! to find the most appropriate websites to visit.

Permute IT SEO strategy is the cheapest, fastest and best way for marketing a brand, company or services to generate more business to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a web site. We can optimize our website by organic search or sponsored search.

Studies have shown that organic search listings are clicked on more often than the sponsored or paid search listings–that’s why it is so crucial that companies optimize their websites for the best possible placement. Building a business online is neither easy or quick. It takes time and dedication to generate desire results. You need to monitor your internet marketing strategy to make sure that you are getting the results, that is, you’re able to advertise your product and service to your target customers. This help you to achieve a significant place in the global markets.  A successful Internet marketing strategy will include not only link-building and search engine optimization, but also includes social media networking, keyword analysis, high-quality content creation, web development and web design.

You can use Search engine optimization service for our businesses and organizations to build brand-awareness, promotion of products and services, generate web site and social network channel traffic, viral buzz and incoming links to their web sites. To successfully building an online business you must go through the following points for positioning your online business for many years of success.

1. Ability to Acknowledge your expertise
2. Niche your way to riches
3. Boost sales, repeat business and customer loyalty
4. Expand customer base and target audience / Increase referrals and word of mouth
5. Build online relationships
6. Create several "stay in touch" devices
7. Don't expect overnight success.

Research says that
More than 93% of consumer’s worldwide use search engines to locate web sites. (Source: Forrester Research)
More than 85% of qualified web traffic is driven through search engines. (Source: User Survey)
Near about 75% of search engine traffic never scroll past the first page of results. (Source: User Survey)

Security researchers to present new 'CRIME' attack against SSL/TLS

Two security researchers claim to have developed a new attack that can decrypt session cookies from HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) connections.

Websites use session cookies to remember authenticated users. If an attacker gains access to a user's session cookie while the user is still authenticated to a website, the hacker could use it to access the user's account on that website.

HTTPS should prevent this type of session hijacking because it encrypts session cookies while in transit or when stored in the browser. However, the new attack, devised by security researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, is able to decrypt them.

Rizzo and Duong dubbed their attack CRIME and plan to present it later this month at the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The attack exploits a weakness in a particular feature of the TLS (Transport Layer Security) cryptographic protocol and its predecessor, the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol, which are used to implement HTTPS.

All SSL and TLS versions are affected and the exploited feature is commonly used in SSL/TLS deployments, Rizzo said Thursday via email. The researcher declined to reveal which feature is vulnerable before the attack's presentation at Ekoparty.

The CRIME attack code, known as an agent, needs to be loaded inside the victim's browser. This can be done either by tricking the victim into visiting a rogue website or, if the attacker has control over the victim's network, by injecting the attack code into an existing HTTP connection.

CRIME doesn't require browser plug-ins to work; JavaScript was used to make it faster, but it could also be implemented without it, Rizzo said.

The attacker must also be able to sniff the victim's HTTPS traffic. This can be done on open wireless networks; on local area networks (LANs), by using techniques such as ARP spoofing; or by gaining control of the victim's home router through a vulnerability or default password.

For the attack to work, both the victim's client and the server hosting the targeted website need to support the vulnerable SSL/TLS feature, Rizzo said.

Rizzo confirmed that the HTTPS implementations on some popular websites are vulnerable to the attack, but declined to name any of them.

CRIME was tested successfully with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. However, other browsers could also be affected, Rizzo said.

Mozilla and Google have already prepared patches that block the attack but they have not yet been released, the researcher said.

Last year at Ekoparty, Rizzo and Duong presented an attack called BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS), which was also capable of decrypting HTTPS session cookies. That attack affected SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 when used with certain cipher suites.

Mitigating BEAST involved upgrading to TLS 1.1 or 1.2, the latest versions of the TLS protocol, or prioritizing unaffected RC4-based cipher suites for older versions of the protocol.

However, the mitigation solution doesn't work for CRIME because, in addition to exploiting a feature that is present in all versions of SSL/TLS, the attack is not dependent on a particular cipher, Rizzo said.

According to data from SSL Pulse, a project that monitors SSL/TLS implementations across the Web, 72 percent of the Internet's top 184,000 HTTPS-enabled websites were still vulnerable to the BEAST attack at the beginning of August.

-Permute IT Pvt. Ltd.

Permute IT Pvt. Ltd.: IT sector hiring youth to lead emerging technologi...

Permute IT Pvt. Ltd.: IT sector hiring youth to lead emerging technologi...: IT companies looking at emerging technologies like social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing (SMAC) are turning to younger pe...

IT sector hiring youth to lead emerging technologies

IT companies looking at emerging technologies like social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing (SMAC) are turning to younger people to lead these areas.

The younger professionals tend to be more tuned to these technologies and more easily adapt to them. 

- Permute IT Pvt. Ltd.

Naresh Nagarajan, senior VP and head of ecosystem business incubation in HCL Technologies, says the company's mobility team is headed by a 30-year-old and its advanced analytics is headed by someone who is 32.

HCL Technologies is planning to make SMAC a $1 billion business in the next five years. Procuring talent for these new technologies is tough. The turnaround time is slower as the technologies themselves are relatively new, and the talent pool is limited.

For this reason, many of those who are hired for these positions do not come with a background in these areas, notes Medhury.

"Cloud capability doesn't exist as yet," says Deepak Jain, global head of work force planning and development in Wipro Technologies. Wipro, he says, is hiring domain consultants and architects who understand the virtualisation engine and demonstrate integration capabilities. "You need professionals who have launched web solutions to understand what it means to design cloud solutions. Unlike mobile solutions, where it's easier to find a Windows or iOSprogrammer, people who design cloud solutions come with a combination of storage or platform skills; the rest is imparted through hands-on lab experience," he says.

Infosys Technologies is focussing on a mix of incubation and focussed talent sourcing for cloud, mobility and product development. "These are futuristic technologies therefore this initiative. We also look at start-ups as one of the hiring grounds. This is important as new hires from such organisations bring in a keen sense to explore and create new things," says Nandita Gurjar, group HR head at Infosys.

Venkat Shastry, office managing director in executive search firm KornFerry Bangalore, however feels that in some cases you may need leaders who are fairly senior. "Though you need people with web-scale kind of skills, services companies are hiring talent to create IP-based offerings and therefore need core technology experts or those with a digital legacy. Such people needn't be very young," he says.

Google SEO: New Changes to Know

Google has released a long list of changes that the search engine made in April 2012, and many are directly related to how search engine optimization professionals will engage in their profession post Penguin. 

Permute IT Pvt. Ltd. has listed some of the most important changes related to Google SEO below by generalized category, which focuses on the search experience for consumers as much as anything of note for SEO professionals. In line with previous search quality change reports, Google has assigned codenames for each change which does make it easy to keep track of the impact of the changes in the future. 

And now, on with the Google SEO changes to know! 

Increase base index size by 15%. The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.

New index tier. We keep our index in “tiers” where different documents areindexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

No freshness boost for low quality sites. We’ve modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified as particularly low-quality.

More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.

Fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results. We’ve rolled out a change designed to show fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results.

More efficient generation of alternative titles. We use a variety of signals to generate titles in search results. This change makes the process more efficient, saving tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality.

More concise and/or informative titles. We look at a number of factors when deciding what to show for the title of a search result. This change means you’ll find more informative titles and/or more concise titles with the same information.

Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.

Anchors bug fix. This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.

More domain diversity. Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.

Microsoft unveils Office 2013

This is Permute IT series where we keep you updated on the critical evolution of cloud computing.  Our top stories are:

Microsoft unveils Office 2013: Cloud based, touch friendly, and Skype

Microsoft Corp unveiled a new version of its Office suite tailored for tablets and other touch screen devices, in the company’s largest-ever overhaul of the workplace software it relies on for much of its profit. The revamped Office, touted by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer as the most ambitious version so far, takes advantage of cloud computing and is designed for use with the upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

WSJ Earnings Preview: Cloud Computing Still Bright Spot for Software Cos 

While information technology spending remains muted amid a challenging global macroeconomic environment, businesses' continued investment in cloud services remains a bright growth spot for major software companies. Earlier this month, technology research firm Gartner Inc. reported worldwide information technology spending is on pace to reach $3.6 trillion this year, a 3% increase from last year. Gartner reported there has been little change in business confidence and consumer sentiment in the past quarter and noted the short-term outlook calls for continued cautious IT spending.

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• Procedure, Trigger
• XML
• ADO.NET
• ASP.Net page Life Cycle
• ASP.Net Server controls
• AJAX

Permute IT Pvt. Ltd. helps you gain increased visibility into service delivery by helping you develop business focused processes and governance models. We deliver Information Technology (IT) Outsourcing services with the same level of transparency. Including dashboards that show you how well we are performing. You can leverage our information technology services for each phase or bring us in at a particular point based on your specific need. Whatever you decide, our experts are adept and add immediate value at every stage of the information technology (IT) outsourcing project. We deals in 1. Website Designing 2. Software Development  3. E- Commerce Development 4. Portal Development  5. Search  Engine Optimization (SEO) 6. Professonal Training 7. Web Hosting 8. Content Development  9. Domain Registration 10. AMC of EPBAX, Telephones & Cables