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Dell notebooks will be available in retail stores in India for the first time, the company said Tuesday.

The company hinted that it would make this move last week, saying it planned to increase its presence in China and India, two of the world's biggest emerging markets for computers. Dell already has a relationship with one of China's largest retail chains, Gome.

In the announcement, Dell said it plans to offer Inspiron desktops and notebooks, and XPS notebooks through Indian electronics outlet Croma. Dell has a presence in India, but prior to this announcement, only via direct sales channels where customers could call or order a PC online.

The move to make its PC available in retail stores follows a strategy the company began laying out almost a year ago when it first announced it would offer some PCs through Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. Since then the Texas PC maker has added U.K. electronics retailer Carphone Warehouse, Bic Camera in Japan, Gome in China, Staples, and Best Buy.

Yahoo announced Monday that it has joined forces with the Pune, India-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in order to support research in cloud computing, a way to outsource hardware and software to service providers rather than host it locally. Under the terms of the agreement, researchers will be able to use the EKA, a supercomputer owned by CRL that contains 28 terabytes of memory, 14,400 processors, 140 terabytes of disks, and a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second.

According to CRL, EKA is the world's fourth fastest supercomputer.

"We are excited to partner with Yahoo to advance cloud computing research in India as it opens up a new arena of exciting opportunities," Gautam Shroff, a member of CRL's steering committee, said in a statement. "We are initiating dialogue with leading Indian academic institutions to collaborate on research using cloud computing."

At the core of Yahoo's involvement is its role in the Apache Hadoop project, for which it opened an open-source research and development center last November. Yahoo and CRL's announcement was timed in conjunction with the inaugural Hadoop Summit, sponsored by Yahoo and the National Science Foundation-funded Computing Community Consortium.

As the U.S. market becomes increasingly saturated with computers, Dell is looking eastward for new markets in which to sell its wares.

The Texas PC maker said Thursday it plans to increase its presence in China and India, the Associated Press reports.

"This year, we plan to introduce 50 percent more notebook platforms than we introduced last year, including exciting new products aimed exactly at Chinese customer needs," CEO Michael Dell said at a news conference in Beijing. He added that machines meant for needs of Indian customers would also be part of the plan.

Dell is the second-biggest PC maker worldwide, but in China lags behind Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, and Asus. Dell raised its profile in the country last fall when it agreed to sell its computers through local retail giant Gome. On Thursday the company said it will be expanding to 1,200 cities in China by the end of 2008, a giant leap from the 45 cities in 2007.

As concerns over a weakening U.S. economy grow, some economists anticipate consumers here will be spending less. But PC makers already know that the U.S. is not the place to expect giant profits--much of the growth in the PC business these days is coming in emerging markets, where many consumers are making their first computer purchase.

"When we look at the potential for expansion, we do see enormous opportunity ahead," Michael Dell said. "As far as the U.S. goes, I think the U.S. will be OK, but not the fastest-growing. We expect more growth in Asia."

What separates the mobile handset winners from the losers? The answer seems to be success in developing markets like China, India, the Middle East, and Africa.

On Thursday Nokia announced that it had sold a record 133.5 million mobile phones during the fourth quarter of 2007. This figure was up by more than a quarter from the same period a year earlier, boosting its overall market share to 40 percent.

Meanwhile, Nokia rival Motorola reported Wednesday that shipments of its handsets had fallen 38 percent during the quarter, pushing its market share down yet again to 12 percent, the lowest level since 2001. But Motorola isn't the only handset maker struggling; Sony Ericsson has also had trouble growing its market share. The company, which targets the high-end market in Europe, only grew its market share in 2007 by 2 points to 9 percent.

So what has Nokia been doing right and Motorola and Sony Ericsson been doing wrong? The main difference seems to be in how the companies are addressing the developing markets.

Nokia reported that it saw the strongest growth in sales in the Middle East and Africa. Shipments here were up 52.3 percent. Asia-Pacific and China also saw strong sales growth, while sales in mature markets like North America fell during the quarter.

But what is different about Nokia is that it's also been making money in these markets. For the fourth quarter of 2007, Nokia boosted profit by 44 percent, to $2.68 billion, on sales of $23 billion. While Nokia clearly benefits from the high production volumes, the company has also been aggressively working to keep costs down. This has meant changing packaging for products sold to emerging markets and closing a factory in Germany in an effort to reduce overall costs.

Meanwhile, most of Nokia's competitors, including Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, have had problems addressing the low end of the market. Part of the problem is scale. Producing products in higher volumes allows companies to get better deals on components so that they can produce individual phones more cheaply. So as Motorola's sales volumes go down, it actually hurts the company as it tries to address the cost-competitive low end of the market.

Motorola's executives see scalability as an issue going forward. But Motorola CFO Tom Meredith said that the company also needs to build more targeted products at the right price points.

"We need to be not so much a producer of volume to get scale," said Meredith during the company's conference call with analysts and investors on Wednesday. "We've got to produce the right design point with the right features and functionality at the right cost. And if we do that, scale will be less of an obstacle than it is perhaps today."

Even though Nokia currently dominates markets like China and India, competition is on the way. Sony Ericsson on Thursday said it plans to launch four handsets over the summer that will target India, a country that added more than 8.2 million cell phone users last month. But most experts agree it will take a long time before Sony Ericsson or anyone else can catch up to Nokia.

Europe loves the VW Beetle, the Renault Twingo, and the Smart. The U.S. has the Mini and will finally get the Smart, too. And recently India proudly presented the spiritual successor to all of these--the $2,500 Tata Nano, a "people's car" that is widely gushed about, not only for its surprisingly slick design but also for its innovations.

In recent years, ecoconcerns, design savvy, and an (urban) willingness to quest for practicality have fostered the trend toward specialized cars that are as small as the niches they serve. While the idea of a small car is not new, in the case of the Nano, and that's an interesting addendum, the miniaturization of the product goes along with a miniaturization of price, development process, and distribution model. The Nano is the world's new "cheapest car," it was developed and designed by an off-site micro-organization, and it operates with a decentralized distribution model that allows the suppliers who assemble the car to also sell and service it directly to the consumers. What you can learn from Tata: shrink the product, shrink the feature list (no frills!), shrink the development team (no red tape!), shrink the price (ultra low cost!), and shrink (localize!) assembly and distribution. Think small, score big.

In fact, nano is the new big. Language is always a good indicator of cultural shifts. There is talk of the "Nano-effect," of "nano-sphere," and the magazine Nanowerk observes that, "Over the course of the last 12 months, the LexisNexis database of newspaper articles records 239 stories referring to nanotechnology in the British press. In the same period there have been 239 stories referring to 'iPod' and 'nano'."

India's Economic Times even proclaims the "coming Nano Age:"

"Small is getting a big play. Part of the push is coming from companies eager to stuff cell phones with value add-ons and another is about demonstrating technology that is smart, simple, small and beautiful. (...)Nanotech products or small, nifty gadgets may not be cheap, as the emphasis is not on price cutting but efficiency at a small scale. Though it remains to be seen whether, the Tata Nano, a nanotech medical device or a pocket printer, will set the cash counters ringing."

On Thursday BBC News gave us a child's view of the $100 laptop. The article reads like a techie version of Jim Carrey's breakout movie The Mask, with Rufus Cellan-Jones as the star. The laptop, which came by way of Nigeria, unleashes incredible intuition and abilities in young Cellan-Jones:

... Read more

I used to think customer service and technical support were givens: you either did it well or failed in business. After all, if you don't support your customers, what have you got?

Now I'm not so sure. The multiyear trend of outsourcing service calls--primarily to India--seems to have consumers endlessly frustrated. The big question is: does it matter?

Conventional wisdom says we're frustrated because American jobs are being outsourced. But anecdotal evidence from my own personal focus group suggests that we may have gotten over the outsourcing thing, only to hit a snag on the support itself not being up to snuff. ... Read more

The debate between personal privacy and national security continues to rage on, but privacy advocates in India have recently been dealt a blow with the news that keyloggers will be installed in the approximately 500 Internet cafes serving the city of Mumbai. According to a report in today's Ars Technica, "cybercafe owners must agree to the installation of the software or else they will lose their licenses." Given that terrorists seek to hide their identities and are known to frequent Internet cafes in order to stay anonymous, the government hopes to thwart terrorism by monitoring computer activities in the cafes.

Vijay Mukhi, the president of India's Foundation for Information Security and Technology, defends the decision to install keyloggers stating, "The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screenshots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data. The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter which part of the world they operate from. This is the only way to patrol the Net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age." But will such surveillance practices actually stop terrorism or will they just leave everyday citizens feeling uncomfortable using Mumbai's cybercafes?

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First it was China. Now India and Brazil. The rout of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) standardization efforts is now essentially complete. When the world's fastest growing economies reject Microsoft, Microsoft has a problem.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about India's and Brazil's separate rejections of Microsoft's attempts to standardize its Open Office XML. Microsoft is holding out hope that if it resolves all 200 of India's complaints with its submission, it will have OOXML approved.

Yes, but this largely misses the point.

... Read more