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Simon Ball elected as new Member of the Board of Leica Geosystems

At Leica Geosystems' General Shareholder's Meeting held today, new Member Simon Ball was elected to the Board to replace the outgoing Philip Yea. The Board now consists of: Mario Fontana (President), Markus Rauh (Vice-President), Hans Hess (Executive Director and CEO), Klaas Jan Beek and Simon Ball. Simon Ball (b.1960) has a broad experience in Corporate Governance. Prior to this he held various executive management positions at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson (1985-1998) and Price Waterhouse & Company (1981-1985). Mr Ball holds a degree in Economics from University College, London, and since 1984 has been an Associate of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (A.C.A.).

Visit:- www.leica-geosystems.com

Lizardtech announces native MrSID viewing support in MapInfo MapXtreme

LizardTech Inc. has announced that its industry-leading MrSID® file format will be supported natively for viewing in the MapInfo® MapXtreme® 3.0 product. With MapXtreme providing native support for reading geo-referenced MrSID format files, users can dramatically reduce the costs and time associated with working with high-quality, high-resolution imagery for GIS analysis over the Internet. MapInfo Professional® also supports the MrSID file format. MrSID, the image format standard for geospatial professionals, reduces high-resolution images to less than five percent of their original file size while maintaining original image quality. MapXtreme, MapInfo's powerful mapping server, enables companies to share maps and critical business information via the Internet and corporate intranet. Developers can implement MapXtreme quickly and inexpensively to allow companies to visualize their data on maps.

Visit:- http://www.lizardtech.com/company/pressreleases/press_release.pl?icategoryid=1132

Autodesk Press Announces New AutoCAD 2002 Books

Autodesk Press - an imprint of Thomson Learning and a provider of educational resources for the AutoCAD market - has announced the upcoming publication of a professionally oriented series to help CAD teams learn and upgrade to Autodesk's AutoCAD 2002 software. The three new titles are written with the professional AutoCAD user in mind, and every user level is covered by one of these books namely AutoCAD 2002: Migration Manual, AutoCAD 2002: Complete and AutoCAD 2002: Professional. The books are written by AutoCAD authorities and experienced authors Bill Burchard and Dave Pitzer, along with Complete co-author Art Liddle. The authors' thorough coverage of material is conducive to efficient self-training, while assuming that readers are curious and capable of learning quickly. All three books will be available directly from Delmar.

Visit:- http://www.delmar.com/

The Amanda Company Announces Joint Development of GPS 'U'Track Product

The Amanda Company, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., a supplier of call processing software and systems for industry-standard PC platforms, today announced an agreement with RGAP Innovation, Inc., to develop a tracking product combining significant technologies that have already been developed by the two companies. The companies are developing the Amanda.Portal- "U"Track. It will integrate RGAP's Global Positioning System and wireless GSM and CDMA technologies with Amanda's Internet and Public Switching Telephone Network and Unified Messaging-Communication content. The product has entered alpha testing with an estimated release date in the fourth quarter of 2001. The product will be useful to the automobile, trucking, security, insurance industries and consumers allowing a customer to, for instance, ascertain the location of his car by simply dialing a number.

Visit:- www.taa.com

World's smallest GPS receiver system ready for mass production

Fastrax Ltd, a Finnish company specializing in GPS receiver technology for small portable devices, has secured EUR 6 million in its second round of funding. Roughly the size of a postage stamp, Fastrax's main product is the world's smallest and lowest power consuming GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver system. GPS positioning technology is rapidly entering into mass-market applications such as mobile phones, sports accessories and handheld computers. The fastest growing segments deploying GPS are transportation and asset tracking (telematics). "In the near future, GPS technology will grow to play a major role in positioning applications used in portable handsets," said Pekka Lundmark, Managing Partner of Startupfactory and chairman of the board of Fastrax. "GPS adds a new element to current positioning in mobile networks since it can locate a mobile terminal extremely accurately, within a few meters in all three dimensions. Fastrax's founders and the current management team have many decades of combined industry experience working with GPS development at Vaisala. This experience gives them a special vision for the future of GPS," Lundmark concluded.

Visit:- http://www.fastrax.fi/

Asia News

Transmitter-tagged turtles go missing

Bhubaneswar: Scientists have lost track of transmitter-tagged Olive Ridley turtles sent off from the Orissa coast in April, and fear the animals have fallen prey to nets used by mechanised trawlers.

The experiment was undertaken as part of Operation Kachhapa to study the movement of migratory turtles about which little is known in the scientific community, said project co-ordinator Biswajit Mohanty. Indian and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) researchers released four transmitter-tagged turtles at the Devi river mouth on the Orissa coast in the third week of April.

Three of them have been untraceable since June 26 and the fourth from August 10, Mohanty said. Scientists suspect that the endangered turtles have died. Initially, the four marked turtles moved in different directions in the offshore waters. Subsequently, three of them moved in circles off Orissa and Andhra Pradesh while one went off south to the Sri Lanka coast, Mohanty said.

After June 26, the scientists did not receive any signals from three of the turtles. The satellite traced only one turtle, named Chandra, off Sri Lanka on August 10. There has been no sign of that turtle too since then. It is feared that the turtles have fallen prey to nets used by mechanised trawlers operating in the Bay of Bengal and off the Sri Lanka coast. "This is distressing news for all of us," he said.

Indian scientists conducted the turtle tracking experiment under the guidance of Jack Frazier of the US-based Smithsonian Institute's Conservation and Research Centre.

Each of the four Olive Ridleys was fitted with a 600-gm Kiwisat transmitter manufactured by a New Zealand company. A switch ensured that the platform transmitter terminals were switched on only when the turtles surfaced.

French company ARGOS decoded the transmissions, received by weather satellites positioned in a polar orbit circuit, and informed the scientists of the turtles' positions. Sea turtle migrations are complex and defy logic. Loggerhead sea turtles, for instance, undertake the longest breeding migration, travelling about 12,000 km. Many scientists acknowledge there is a huge gap in knowledge about sea turtles and their biology.

Nobody knows when mass nesting starts or how long it continues. Though the mass nesting sites are broadly known, there is uncertainty regarding the exact stretch of the beach where turtles nest in a particular season, Mohanty said.

"Over the past six years, we have counted more than 70,000 sea turtles dead on the Orissa coast. However, Operation Kachhapa estimates that the actual mortality is much higher. This can lead to an irreversible decline of the breeding population," Mohanty said.

Source: Times of India

Chinese Ed Ministry to Import IT Textbooks for Colleges

College students will be able to access the world's latest information technology (IT) soon as the Ministry of Education has decided to import advanced IT textbooks from the United States and other developed countries.

These textbooks will be recommended to, not imposed upon, universities across the nation that offer better teaching conditions for computer courses, said Zhang Raoxue, director of the ministry's Department of Higher Education, at a press conference Wednesday in Beijing.

The universities will be encouraged to teach IT courses in English, or a combination of English and Chinese.

The move is to help college students grasp IT skills earlier on in their studies, said Zhang.

The first textbook, 20 copies of which have been imported, and which covers such subjects as computer networking and electronic commerce, has already been circulated by the Higher Education Publishing House.

Zhang said China has a huge IT market. According to a skills development plan for the 10th Five-Year Plan period (2001-05) from the Ministry of Personnel, IT software specialists will increase to 3 million by 2005. Currently, 738,000 college students are studying IT courses.

He added that the country will also import textbooks on bio-technology, economics and finance for use in universities.

The ministry's spokesperson said the introduction of textbooks is to satisfy students' demand that outdated textbooks be replaced.

Source: China Daily

Indian IT center boost

Bombay-based global information technology giant TATA Consultancy Services (TCS) has opened its first European software research and development center in Budapest with an investment worth $60-100 million.

The center, which will supply the business’s European clients, is TCS’s 24th such global off-shore research and development unit.

TCS was established in 1968 as part of the TATA and Sons group, India’s largest conglomerate, which this year is 133 years sold.

"Our strategy is to produce world-class quality at the lowest possible cost," said Subramanian Ramadorai, President and CEO of TCS.

"For TATA, Europe is an extremely important market," he said, explaining that TCS had been active in Europe over the last two decades.

"However, this is our first fully-fledged European research and development center." Ramadorai explained that TCS’s reasons for choosing Hungary (over Romania, Poland or the Czech Republic) included the fact that the country had the best workforce for the business.

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