Shriram Transport Finance reports 20 pc jump in PAT

CHENNAI: Non-banking finance companyShriram Transport Finance, flagship company of theShriram Group, has reported a 20.1 per cent jump in its profit after tax at Rs 347.30 crore for the quarter ended June 30, 2011. 

The Chennai-headquartered company had registered profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 288.94 crore in the same period of previous year, a company release said. 

For the year ending March 31, 2011, the PAT stood at Rs Rs 1,229.8 crore, it added. 

The total income for the quarter ended June 30, 2011, grew to Rs 1,393.22 crore as compared to Rs 1,233.51 crore, the release said. 

For the financial year ended March 31, 2011, the total income stood at Rs 5,259.71 crore, it said. 

A final dividend of Rs four per share for the financial year 2010-11, was approved by the shareholders and was paid on July 4, 2011, it added. 

As of June 30, 2011, the total assets under management stood at Rs 36,997 crore compared to Rs 36,182 crore as on March 31, 2011.

Microsoft gives manufacturers a taste of Mango

Microsoft announced this morning that the next version of the Windows Phone operating system, code-named Mango, has been delivered to manufacturers, which can begin testing it on their handsets.

The move is one of the final steps before the software arrives on new phones and is delivered to existing users as a software update.

"This marks the point in the development process where we hand code to our handset and mobile-operator partners to optimize Mango for their specific phone and network configurations," Terry Myerson, Microsoft's corporate vice president of engineering for Windows phone, wrote on a company blog. "Here on the Windows Phone team, we now turn to preparing for the update process."

The update, which brings multitasking and a complete overhaul of the built-in Internet Explorer Web browser, wasfirst discussed in February, at Mobile World Congress. Two months later, Microsoft took the wraps off all the planned features, promising to deliver it in the fall.

Mango is the first major system software update to hit Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform since an interim release near the end of March that added copy-and-paste functionality, improved marketplace search, and enabled faster app loading. Microsoft is not counting Mango as an all-out new version of the platform, something the company has not yet discussed.

Microsoft started dishing out a beta version of Mango to mobile developers at the end of last month so that they could test their applications for compatibility with the new features and back-end changes.

Al Franken: AT&T and T-Mobile Merger Will Kill Competition

Sen. Al Franken is urging regulators to pull the plug on a proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.
The Minnesota Democrat says a marriage of the two companies would mean that only three national wireless carriers would remain.
The deal would leave AT&T in control of 43 percent of the market, with Verizon overseeing 39 percent of the industry. To the left-leaning legislator that’s a dangerous recipe.
“The merger of AT&T and T-Mobile would be a major step towards the creation of an entrenched duopoly in the wireless industry,” Franken writes in a 24-page letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. “It would concentrate enormous power over the entire telecommunications sector in the hands of only two companies, and it would incentivize AT&T and Verizon to coordinate prices to the detriment of consumers.”
Moreover, Franken says that the merger will result in decreased competition, less innovation and fewer jobs in a rapidly shrinking mobile landscape.
Franken says that the T-Mobile purchase continues AT&T’s pattern of attracting new customers through mergers rather than by innovation.
“American consumers rely on the DOJ and the FCC to protect competition,” Franken writes. “It is only through competition that wireless spectrum usage will become more efficient, handsets more innovative, customer service more responsive, network coverage broader, and prices lower.”
Franken’s objections second those of his fellow Democrat, Sen. Herb Kohl, but the merger between the two telecommunications companies has recently received corporate support from the likes of Facebook.

Mozilla building mobile OS to battle Chrome

Mozilla revealed preliminary plans today to take the Gecko engine that drives its Firefox browser and turn it into an open-source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets.

Called Boot to Gecko, it is known that the source code will be released to the public "in real-time," wrote Andreas Gal, a Mozilla researcher. Gecko is the rendering engine that powers Firefox and the e-mail client Thunderbird. By contrast, while Google's Androidmobile operating system is open source, the main development work on it does not become available until after Google has green-lit its publication--sometimes not until months afterward.

"We will do this work in the open, we will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process. We aren't trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we're trying to have them run on the web," Gal said in a forum post. Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of technical strategy, said that the Boot to Gecko apps won't use the Android SDK but instead run new and current Web app APIs

He also identified four areas for development. One is new Web APIs, which means building "prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content." This is how the operating system would support current essential mobile features such as telephony, SMS, cameras, USB, Bluetooth, and near-field chips. A second area for development is to build a privilege model, which is a key security feature for ensuring that new features are "safely exposed to pages and applications," he said.

Boot to Gecko will include some low-level Android code for kernel and driver support so that it can run on Android devices. This does not exist yet, and porting it to a new system could prove to be extremely challenging. Then there is the final area of development--that of applications. The idea behind Boot to Gecko is to create a system where native Web apps can run just as well as the native apps for iOS do on that device.

Shaver added that the company is looking at Tegra 2 devices because they offer hardware acceleration of open audio and video formats.

For people who want to get a stronger idea of what Boot to Gecko will amount to, Gal noted that its "starting point" is a device running Firefox for Android as its homescreen, with some custom APIs thrown in. He also admitted in that post that there is an "ultimate goal" to the project, that of "breaking the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world."