Masala Today

The 18th Annual Conference of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC), organized in association with the Himgiri Nabh Vishwavidyalaya (HNV) and supported by UNESCO, opened yesterday in New Delhi, India. The AMIC Annual Conference is an important event on the Asian media calendar; it attracts eminent international speakers and participants from the media industry and academia. The AMIC Conference is open to academics, media industry professionals, government agencies, policymakers, regulators, UN agencies, donors, research groups, civil society organizations, independent consultants and students. More than 500 delegates from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the Americas are expected to participate in this year’s event, under the theme "Media, Democracy and Governance: Emerging Paradigms in a Digital Age". The 18th AMIC Conference features high-profile keynote addresses, plenary and parallel sessions. It provides a critical space for both media profession

New Delhi: The battle over standards for the multi-billion dollar e-governance projects is once again hotting up. IT majors like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have shot letters to industry bodies — Nasscom (for software) and MAIT (for hardware) — and the Department of Information Technology (DIT), protesting over the inclusion of clauses which allow for ‘multiple standards’ and ‘royalty on software’ versus a ‘single’ standard and ‘free’ software.At the second meeting of the apex body on standards for e-governance held on June 17 this year, all the members approved Unicode 5.1.0 as a standard for e-governance applications for all 22 Indian languages (except Kashmiri). They also approved the Open Type Font as a mandatory standard for e-governance applications. With regard to metadata (name, age, sex, etc. for land records and the like) and data standards, too, there was a consensus.However, it was on the draft policy on ‘Open Standards’ that the differences emerged. While Nasscom pre

NEW DELHI - India’s software exporter Infosys Technologies has bagged a 10-year e-governance contract from the Ministry of Commerce to develop an e-business portal that will give businessmen easy access to government information.In the first three years, the government would spend Rs 15 crore in the project. However, the total value of the contract was not disclosed.“(At the end of 10th year) we expect this project to be expanded to cover the whole country and provide over 200 Government-to-Business services as well as other value added services by suitable private vendors,” Commerce Minister Anand Sharma told reporters after launching the portal here.E-Governance is the latest business opportunity segment for Indian IT companies, who are facing slowdown on export front.IT firm TCS had earlier bagged two big ticket e-governance projects—online application portal of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and the online Passport project of the Ministry of External Affairs. With the Unique Ide