Thursday, February 21, 2008 Ng: Encouraging news By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
DESPITE fears of a US recession, here is a piece of encouraging news: It is estimated that the size of the business process outsourcing (BPO) market will continue to grow.
Last year, the BPO market was estimated to be at $28 billion, with India getting more than $10 billion of the pie.
But Everest Research says the addressable BPO market (meaning the BPO that can possibly be outsourced) will grow to anywhere between $220 billion to $280 billion by 2012. This is due to the advances in technology, in access as well as in software, which allows more jobs that were difficult to do remotely before to be conducted offsite. That is 10 times the already big pie of today!
NEW GENERATION DVD. If you are a digital disc enthusiast, one of the most recent development is that the battle of the next generation DVD is now over.
In the last four years, a fight has ensued as to who would be the standard for the next generation DVD.
There were two camps that was waging the war (akin to the earlier fight between Sony’s Betamax and Panasonic’s VHS). On one side was a consortium lead by Sony, which tried to introduce the Blu Ray that could hold up to 50 gigabytes. On the other platform is Toshiba, which called its format HD DVD that can hold a maximum of 30 gigabytes.
Initially, it did looked like HD DVD was going to be ahead. In fact, six months ago, Dreamworks and Paramount said it would drop Blu Ray and do HD DVD. However, the past two months have seen a series of events that hit the HD DVD hard. Within a few weeks, Warner, Net-Flix, BestBuy and Wal-Mart all said they would support Blu Ray.
On Feb. 19, 2008, Toshiba announced that they would halt the production and further development of the HD DVD format.
As the battle clears (there are hundreds of thousands of HD DVD players that were sold, which essentially became orphans now), I hope that the development of various players and discs for sale using the Blu Ray format will speed up as consumers and manufacturers are now clear on what standard to adopt.
DATING SITES. I don’t visit any of these sites, but I thought this might be something of interest to many readers. These are the five leading dating sites in the United States, according to hitwise.com.
The top in the list is www.plentyoffish. com, followed by www.eharmony.com, www.singlesnet.com, www.personals.yahoo.com and www.true.com.
