There has been a lot of talk over the BIG IT talent pool in India. Every bureaucrat and market research agency in the country shows towering numbers of colleges and students that they produce.

But the burning question is – Is this talent employable?

The biggest challenge Indian IT industry faces today is the ever-growing gap between graduating engineers and employable graduates. If not checked in time, it might result in a lost opportunity for India Inc. as opportunities will not wait and move towards economies who provide more employable talent at the best ROI.

The main reasons for this gap are:

• Low motivation for top experts to take up teaching as a profession.
• Outdated syllabus, course curriculum, infrastructure, teaching methodologies and content!
• Little or no emphasis in making people "life long learners", primarily because education is spoon fed in most institutions.
• Priviledge to "best education" has been made available to selected class.
• Poor use of technology to spread education to rural areas

There is a lot to rant about the negatives, which we all do. I never liked the way education is imparted in our country and always wanted to grab the first opportunity to change the same.

I am taking a humble step towards my dream project by launching Indus Net Academy in the third week of June 2007. I have coined the slogan as "New Age Education", which is timeless and conveys the feeling behind the project. The initial academic setup will be in a small area of 1000 sq feet, which will be extended as we mature and generate more demand.

Indus Net Academy has been housed in SDF Building, Sector V, Salt Lake, Kolkata for the following reasons:

• Close to the industry!
• Easy availability of successful professionals who might like to share their experience and knowledge.
• Ease of management, since Indus Net Technologies is also located on 4th and 5th floor of the same building.

The purpose of Indus Net Acaemy can be summerised as follows:

• Create employable talent
• Continued education for working professionals
• Accumulation & distribution of knowledge
• Rural education

(From now onwards the team behind Indus Net Acaemy is being termed as "We" instead of "I" since many key members of Indus Net Technologies thinks about the academy the same way that I do and are working tirelessly to make it a success.

Initially, Indus Net Academy will start with career oriented professionally taught courses on:- Web Design, Web Development & Internet Marketing. The course will be taught by experts who are practising these subjects at Indus Net Technologies and serving clients from all over the world. Teaching methodology will be a mix of classroom based core concept delivery, self paced study, research and discussion on important ideas, lab sessions and practical tips from practitioners of "how things are done in real life".

We are further backing up the courses taught in Indus Net Academy with guaranteed jobs by joining hands with companies who need the "industry-ready talent".

Since we have in-house professional talent available in Indus Net Technologies, we chose to start with subjects related to Internet industry. As we move ahead, we expect professionals from different walks of life to be a part of this movement and make a difference – to make the "new age education" dream a reality!

Will keep you posted. Looking forward to a bright future…

Keep an eye on http://www.indusnetacademy.com/

I recently visited Hostorix.com. This is a new hosting company from an Internet marketing veteran – Armand Morin.

I was impressed how Armand has identified a pain that most webmasters feel – Downtime! Aren't we all worried about our website going down? I fail to understand how large hosting companies like Lunarpages, 1&1, Hostgator, GoDaddy etc. overlooked this aspect!

Hostorix hosts website in a Clustered Raid1 Hosting Environment. This kind of a setup distributes the traffic load across multiple servers to improve overall performance. Additionally, all data (web, email and database) are mirrored in real-time and in the event of a server failure our failover application will route all website traffic to the available server keeping your website online until the problem is resolved.

I found that they have all the standard features and the hosting is based on Linux O/S and powered by WHM/Cpanel (which is one of the most popular control panel software I see on the web). So all the standard features (including Fantistico) are there. And like most reseller accounts, they also allow unlimited account creation.

They are priced above normal reseller hosting accounts at around $27/mo. But I think this is worth it, since quality comes for a price and this is not a big price to pay for fail-safe hosting, since it will be easier for you to sell no-downtime hosting to your customers and recover the investment.

So, overall, I would consider this as a great offer. You can sign up for this here.

Please share your experience and feedback about this product here.

I am a big fan of Gmail because of its speed and simplicity. However Gmail makes life hell lot of difficult in some cases -

1. The Threading Bug
While threading, Gmail creates threads based on the "Subject" of the email. It should be "Subject" & "Sender/Reciepient". It is very cumbersome to sort out and read mails in reference when you are dealing with two or more people with the same subject.

It all gets jumbled up.

2.  Keyboard shortcuts
Some of the keyboard shortcuts are so "short" that they get pressed accidentally. This results in a terrible anxiety.

3. Stupid web clips
It is very common to see stupid web clips like "Spam potato salad". They do not make any sense and causes unwanted distraction.

I look forward to see these corrected very soon

Abhishek

Hi Folks,

Google is doing everything in their capacity to weed out spam and return meaningful results for search queries. However it seems that they missed on an important aspect!

Concept

A good quality website will definitely have proper (if not accurate) spelling and grammar. Using advanced spelling and grammer checking routines, it is very much possible to weed out spam and provide higher rank to high quality websites.

Benefits

This approach has many advantages:

1. Quality will get preference over quantity

2. Sites which are ranked lower due to poor quality spelling and grammar have a chance of imporving ranks by correcting spelling and gramatical errors. This will initiate a rush to improve user experience and we will be able to see better quality sites all over.

3. Sites which use more "generic terms" and less "proper nouns" will get higher rank as they are simple to understand and are written with a generic audience in mind.

4. Spam sites which simply puts in pages generated from search results will get totally eliminated as they will have broken sentences.

5. Links farms, FFA, Generic directories can be identified and ignored unless specifically requested by the user.

Implementation

The implementation can be further enhanced by setting up a baseline and quality benchmarks, just the way Google did for link popularity (Page Rank).

Sites can be evaluated on a regular basis based on the following parameters:

• Total number of words in the page
• Spelling errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Gramatical errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Another parameter which can be useful is how the page validates. Is the page full of HTML errors? Is it XHTML validated? Is the CSS validated?
• How often the page have been updated?
• How often the site has been down?

This data can be collected over a period of time and can be be used to determine how the site has improved or declined in quality.

Can it be implemented?

Now the question is – "How difficult is the implementation?"

I have recently been watching some of the changes introduced by Google in order to refine their ranking algorithm:

a) Penalty being imposed for duplicate content
b) Reciprocal links getting lesser weightage than one-way links
c) Usage of Latent semantic analysis (LSA) to find relevant related results

If we consider the total processing power required for each of these refinements, we can safely assume that they have enough processing power to implement spelling and grammar check.

I will not be surprised if Google is already working on this. Therefore it is advised that try to improve the above mentioned parameters before the magical google update strikes you!
I hope to see "quality based ranking" in action soon.
Abhishek