It was tech to begin with and then came the turn of customer services and now it’s Education that is becoming the next big thing in business outsourcing. The natural destination of business outsourcing throughout the world has been India, and that too for a very  long time.

India has always been the hub of technology and education and it was only a matter of time when Education too became one of the services added to the long list of outsourced serviced to India. Picture elementary kids sitting down everyday with headphones and mics over their heads in a school in London. They are connected to their teacher a few thousand miles away in a remote village in India. This is not a hypothetical situation; rather the current reality!

A company that goes by the name of BrightSpark Education, a London-based company set up last year, is employing and providing training to 100 teachers in Punjab to teach kids from the Ashmount Primary School in North London, to begin with. The teachers are put through the grill of coming to terms with the teaching methodology in Britain, so that they can perform accordingly when they are connected to their pupils through an interactive online tutoring program.

Most of you would be guessing about the kind of feedback that was gained from these pupils. Surprisingly, it was better than expeted and almost all the students liked the performance and the teaching methodology of the new outsourced teachers. The school and the parents too gave thumbs up to the same and more schools are expected to follow suit. The one-on-one sessions not only cost about half of what personal tutors in Britain charge but are also popular with pupils, who enjoy solving equations online, said Rebecca Stacey, an assistant head teacher at Ashmount.

“For children, it’s a novelty that catches their attention for longer and engages them in a different way,” Ms. Stacey said. “Eleven-year-olds aren’t always enthusiastic about math classes, so any way we can make it more fun for them is good.”

This is How Google Celebrated The Music Legend, John Lennon’s Birthday.

Amazing dedication. The Google Doodle commemorates the 70th birthday of John Lennon by integrating the Google Doodle which when clicked on plays the John Lennon song – I’m a Dreamer.

An amazing way to show an amazing gesture.

Happy Birthday John Lennon

If you haven’t gone through today’s Times of India newspaper as well as the Economic Times, then you did miss out on the first ever print ad by Google in India. The Google Chrome advertisement that read Fast.www in bold, covered the entire last page of both these newspapers and it certainly was an eye catcher.

The last advertisement by a brand that generated this much interest was Volkswagen, but that was in a league of its own in innovative advertisement. What this print ad of Google bring to the mind is “What finally prompted Google to come up with an advertisement, after such a long presence in India?”.

As our last post about Google’s 12th birthday clearly stated, times are changing and the Search Engine giant is facing stiff competition from many sides – the biggest competitors being Facebook and Apple, on two very different fronts. But we wonder if this print ad was prompted by the recent launch of Internet Explorer 9 by Microsoft. Could it be a measure to kill the already decreased usage of Internet Explorer in India, because apart from this reason, frankly there wouldn’t be any other. Especially because almost the entire net-surfing population of this country predominantly uses Google Chrome.

If you have an opinion, feel free to share it with us.

As Google celebrates its 12th birthday with a pretty little cake doodle, we assess how like any other startup, Google too begun with a humble approach. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. Since then the Search Engine giant has ventured into almost every industry possible, so much so that lately it has been accused of prying into the sensitive information of users, available through its huge data base and using the same to come up with customized ad campaigns as well a controversy on the selling of such sensitive information to the highest bidders among the corporates.

The 12th birthday of Google marks an era in which it is at a constant tug-o-war with Facebook on one hand and Apple on the other. Although the war between these internet and technology giants begun on separate fronts, but it is surely getting converged with the convergence of technologies.  With 500 million plus users, Facebook has dealt a major blow to Google in the area of user-time-spent as well as the pay-per-click targeted and customized ads.

Apple on the other hand battles Google on the technology front and the companies are predicted to be at loggerheads in the mobile advertising category as Apple had come up with its iAd. Where Google announced its Android Froyo, Google TV, mobile ads and streaming media, Apple too announced its Apple Tv.

Google begun its journey of  global internet domination in an era where social networking was at a very very nascent stage and Apple wasn’t that big. But now, with both Facebook and Apple becoming forces to reckon with and new start-ups gaining momentum, competition is getting stiffer for the Search Giant. Innovation remains the key