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.”

Be very careful when you go clicking all over Facebook. Facebook, as well all know is a bedrock of tons of applications that make sure that you spend as much time as possible on the website, a boon for Social media for sure. These applications are catchy, interesting, engaging and completely viral. But the next time you Grant Access to one of these applications to access your basic information (your profile, your friends list, your wall etc) make sure you won’t be handing your private info directly into the hands of the marketers, who sooner than later would surely bombard you with promotion schemes and even sell your profile information to others!

The latest Privacy concerns to hit Facebook come from the same place. One of the most popular games on Facebook, Farmville did just that. It was recently accused of improperly sharing identifying information about users with advertisers and Web tracking companies.

Now that’s a grave privacy risk that had previously led thousands of users to Quit Facebook and with these allegations being confirmed as facts by Facebook itself, we surely see a user backlash in the very near future. It’s about time the Facebook pulled up its socks and went for broke in terms of providing atleast user satisfaction in privacy.

The all new Highlight Search extension is definitely a great new extension added to the Chrome web browser by Google. The new feature lets you search for the highlighted text on a page by bringing in a magnifying glass right below the highlighted text. In very simple words, this cool new extension lets you search for keywords much more quickly and easily.

By either clicking on the icon or the keywords itself, search-box with Autocomplete enabled appears for you to search quickly and easily. A tiny Google Search overlay box with that word would appear once the word is highlighted and the word would already be there in the search box.
Along with this, an auto-suggest drop-down would also be populated just in case you’re looking for something related.

What this does to search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing in general is yet to be seen though.

With 11,641 users already, the extension is getting downloaded at the rate of knots!

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

That’s right! Google is publicly testing the new Preview feature for their search results and it works like a dream, atleast for the user. For the Pay per click professionals out there, mmm.. not so much. Well we won’t mince our words here and say that from a user perspective, the preview feature is amazing. It gives you a big and clear view of the website/landing page if you hover over the magnifying glass located alo0ngside the search result. The better part of this feature is that Google even highlights the part of the page which contains the text you have searched for.

The feature, as thought previously, would’ve required an extension to be installed, before making it functional to a user. But after re-checking, the feature is working smoothly for users who don’t have the said extension installed. Great news for search engine optimization then? Err.. not so much we guess!

What may get the PPC experts wound up is the fact that the preview results would literally eclipse the paid search results displayed on the right-hand-side of the screen. Also there might be a situation when websites might start experiencing a drop in the click-through rates. SO it’s about time that the websites got their house in order. The design of your website might attract or repel your future customer, even before he/she visits your website.