Infy On The Cloud !!

Infosys has announced its cloud strategy as part of its Infosys 3.0 transformation. The company has appointed about 2000 engineers on cloud offerings and expects about 50%-60% of workloads to shift on the cloud in next five years, yielding significant revenues for the IT behemoth.

Business platforms was incorporated as a special business unit in Infosys and cloud is a offering under that. The cloud offerings are divided in two distinct categories, the first includes traditional services such as consulting and integration in the cloud domain while the second is the actual on-demand offering that it is building.

Infosys has decided to move away from the most common cloud services today—Infrastructure-as-a- service, thereby maintaining its position as a services firm in the eyes of the analysts while moving up the value chain considerably by creating far more Intellectual property- based products.

The company stated it would not offer infrastructure as a service—the typical low-value offering in the cloud—unless “it is part of an end-to-end offering for select clients, who are not keen to get onto standard public cloud.” In fact, it has Amazon Web Services as an ecosystem partner in its cloud offering. Being conservative, Infosys said it would continue to follow the asset-light model.

Infosys has been actively migrating its existing platforms to the cloud with a dozen more to follow. Finacle Lite, a cloud version of its popular Finacle core banking software is available on the cloud. Moreover, it offers a mobile apps platform for mobile operator by building concepts on edge platforms like for mobile banking, medical tourism, etc.

Plug-In That iPod !!

Ever heard the saying 'music is food for the soul' ? Well, you should have - because it's not just a saying, it's concrete fact. And it's not JUST food, it's very nutritious food. Recent research has shown that music has profound effects on the body and mind. Also known as music therapy in some circles, what is being practiced now is using music to help in different fields of medical science such as helping cancer patients, children with ADD, pain management, to cure depression, ease muscle tension, and many more.

Research shows that music with strong beats can stimulate brainwaves to resonate in sync with the beat, with faster beats bringing sharper concentration and more alert thinking, and a slower tempo promoting a calm, meditative state. Music brings lasting benefits to your state of mind, even after you've stopped listening. These changes directly affect other bodily functions. Breathing and heart rate can also be altered by music, thus being able to counteract the problems caused by chronic stress and promoting health.

Music, in general, helps to bring about and keep a positive state of mind, keeping anxiety and stress at bay. It keeps the mind high and optimistic and brings about many other benefits such as loweing blood pressure, boost immunity, ease muscle tension and more. With all these benefits of music, don't you just feel like plugging in that iPod to a set of speakers and giving your mind the rush it craves.

If The Web Were...Black ?

How many of you have heard of the phrase 'cloud computing' in recent months ? Quite a few, eh ? However, have any of you heard about 'black computing' ? I doubt it, since I've just coined the term myself (Ha !). What I'm leading to by this zealous new phrase is that we could start a whole new era of surfing the internet with only black web pages.

It's a proven fact that on the humble monitor, a black screen takes less energy to be displayed than a white screen, with all the colours coming in between. The difference isn't small, it's quite significant at almost 15-20% of energy consumed. Now for a single user that's not saving much in a day. A few watts maybe ? However, put the entire world wide web on the chart and results will start forming in front of your own eyes. We could save enough energy to power a small country, just to put in terms of practicality.

A Google-based search engine named Blackle does exactly this. If you visit the website, you'll see a minimalistic design and absolutely no traces of colour. It's a black search engine, just as the name suggests. Having been released in January 2007, it has been gaining momentum ever since and brags a saving of over 2.5 MW of energy just by bleing colourless. Now that's no joke. That's enough to idle a car for more than a month. If all the websites were black, you'd take just about every car off the road wouldn't you ?

It might sound like an outlandish idea at first but if you really give it some thought, the concept is as clear as darkness.

To visit the Blackle website click on : http://goo.gl/Khhyy

Set Top Box - The Monster !!

Whoever thought that the refrigerator was the primary power guzzler in an average household thought so because it made sense, didn't it ? Indeed it does make sense, however all of those people were terribly mistaken. The proud owner of that crown is the harmless little set top box.

You may reason against this but I'll give you a couple of reasons against your reasoning. Number one, the 'standby drain' - these devices are never really turned off and keep on consuming a large chunk of the energy that they consume while they're on. Number two, the digital video recording equipment that most set top boxes now-a-days carry - so now, even while the telly is off, everyone wants their favourite TV shows to be recorded for later and this consumes a lot of energy as well.

An average 21 cubic foot Energy Star refrigerator comes close, consuming 415 KWh/year but the set top box cum HD-DVR clearly aces it by consuming 33 KWh/year more. Whoever thought this could ever happen clearly has the gift of foresight as even a wild fluke would be incredulous (to say the least). I wonder what will break the STB's dominance, a mobile phone maybe ?

24 Hours In A Day !

The wind isn't always blowing. The tides aren't always changing. The Sun isn't always shining. However, a solar plant in Spain has implemented technology which will let it overcome this problem and produce power for 24 hours continuously.

It uses the Power Tower design, where a centrally located tower is surrounded by a field of mirrors in concentric circles that concentrate the Sun's heat onto the boiler on the tower, which produces steam which in turn fires a turbine. Now all this is completely ordinary for a solar power, however the factor separating out this plant from the rest is that it uses molten salt as a heat transfer fluid. This allows for the storage and generation of electricity even after the Sun goes down.

The 19.9 MW Gemasolar(as it is named) Plant boasts of a production of about 118 GWh of energy per year compared to the meagrely 40 GWh generated by the 21.2 MW Solarpark Calaveron plant. This is a step in the right direction for renewable energy technology.