Communications of the ACM

News track

News Track

By CACM Staff
Communications of the ACM, October 2006, Vol. 49 No. 10, Pages 9-10
10.1145/1164394.1164404
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In 1981, seven young Indian engineers founded a tiny firm in a cramped apartment after begging the Indian government to allow them to buy a Western computer. What transpired over the next 25 years is now known worldwide as Infosys, a $2 billion outsourcing giant with 58,000 employees and a market value of $22 billion. It is second only to Tata Consultancy Services in terms of the size and scope of its outsourcing landscape and it's about to go into even higher gear by expanding business and high-tech consulting services in the U.S., China, and Europe. USA Today reports Infosys is hiring 25,000 new employees this year alone—one of the biggest hiring sprees in recent memory by a global corporation. In an ironic twist, the company recently hired 300 newly minted U.S. engineering graduates from top colleges to live at its new $280 million training center in Mysore, India. The center houses sports facilities, movie theaters, and residence halls for thousands of "freshers" and "Infoscions" who stay several months studying computer science and global business practices. After training, the American engineers and business students will return to Infosys offices throughout the U.S.

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Iraq's Cool Factor

Iraqi teens are no different from their global counterparts when it comes to cell phones; all want the latest and hippest model with the most bells and whistles. But in Baghdad, the names of those models reflect the current state of affairs. The most popular cell phone among teenage Iraqis is the Apache, named after the popular U.S. military helicopter. Another model with a serious cool factor is the Humvee, followed by the Afendi (Turkish for "dapper"), and the Allawi (a reference to the former prime minister Ayad Allawi). The New York Times reports that in an environment where hanging out with friends can be life-threatening, cell phones offer a welcome lifeline to human contact. There are now 7.1 million cell phone subscribers in Iraq, up from 1.4 million two years ago. Indeed, billboards for phones are among the only ads updated regularly in Baghdad. Visible cell phone towers outnumber mosque spires in Sadr City 15 to 2. While the top phone models run as much as $800, most people rely on $10 to $20 prepaid cards rather than monthly plans. And while text messages and images often reflect political commentary and local humor, the most cherished use of the phone is to ensure family and friends—often dozens of times per day—that they are safe.

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Segway's Segue

It's been five years since the battery-powered, self-balancing Segway personal transporter (PT) debuted with some lofty predictions about changing the world, or at least the face of transportation worldwide. But Time reports that while the Segway has made some inroads with its more expensive models in the commercial market, including security agencies, consumer market sales have been less than modest. Not to be deterred, Segway inventor Dean Kamen went back to the drawing board, and the result is an upgraded PT designed to reach beyond early adopters to the mass market. Introduced in mid-August, the $4,955 Segway i2 (and offroad-x2) turns in the direction the rider leans. The old steering grip has been replaced by a new control shaft that sways with the rider to maneuver the device. Marketers hope that establishing Segways in the security market will inspire cautious consumers to follow (just as the pager made the leap from doctors to the mass market). Kamen still envisions car-less downtowns around the world in a decade or so, but in the meantime he hopes to find his niche market: "Anybody with a set of feet. There are 6.2 billion of them out there."

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A Picture Is Worth Even More Spam

Image-based spam is the latest format to confound consumers, email filters, and security officials. In fact, by August image-based scams accounted for 21% of all spam, almost twice what it was at the beginning of the year. Marketers were quick to pick up on the fact that consumers were more likely to read email if it contained an image or a graphic of some kind. Moreover, deploying image-based spam is more difficult to detect than text-based spam. This latest spam uses technology that varies the content of individual messages via color, background, picture size, and font type so they appear—to spam filters—to be distinct messages. The spam is delivered to consumers and organizations through millions of bots. This surge in spam has also devoured more space in email systems because each message is more than seven times larger than typical text-only spam. Experts contend most image-based spam comes in the form of stock scams, much of it from "spam gangs" in the U.S. and Russia.

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Blog-Free CEOs

As much as chief executives in the computer industry expect consumers to blog to their heart's content using (hopefully) some of their companies' tech tools, the blogging phenomenon stops before it reaches the corner office. In fact, Jonathan I. Schwartz, the top executive at Sun Microsystems, is the only Fortune 500 CEO blogger. The New York Times reports it's not just technology chieftains who steer clear of blogging. Outside the computer field, only one other Fortune 500 company has a CEO who calls himself a blogger—John P. Mackey of Whole Foods Market. His missives, however, tend to consist of reprints of speeches and interviews posted a half-dozen times over the last 10 months. Schwartz, on the other hand, has been posting his impromptu thoughts five times a month for the past two years and industry observers say the effort has earned him credibility through his willingness to put in public view his unfiltered ruminations on a regular basis. Says Schwartz: "My No. 1 job is to be a communicator. I don't understand how a CEO would not blog if committed to open communication."

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Sponge Count

The same technology that tracks baggage and shoplifters may soon stop doctors from inadvertently leaving or losing surgical sponges inside patients. A recent study found that medical personnel left foreign objects, most often sponges, inside patients' bodies in one out of every 10,000 surgeries, causing complications or even death, reports Reuters. Doctors at Stanford University School of Medicine have been testing sponges embedded with RFID tags, reporting they accurately alerted physicians when they deliberately left a sponge inside a temporarily closed surgical site and waved a detector wand over it. The size of the chips used, however, were too large for real-life procedures and would need to be much smaller for practical use in sponges and other surgical instruments. Said Dr. Alex Macario, a Stanford physician who led the study, "We need a system that is really fail-safe; where, regardless of how people use this technology, the patient doesn't leave the operating room with a retained foreign body."

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The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2006 ACM, Inc.

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