Monday, February 23, 2004		Newsscape

Tracing roots

A CD-ROM painstakingly compiled here by a veteran researcher will help South Africa’s 1.2 million Indians - mostly descended from indentured labourers first brought in 1860 - trace their roots. Joy Brain took more than 25 years to compile the information in the CD and discussions are on with publishers and those who can fund the project on whether it should be sold as a commercial product or put into the public domain. The resumption of ties between India and South Africa a decade ago after nearly 40 years of isolation because of apartheid had resulted in a resurgence of interest by local Indians in tracing their roots. The latest work collates all information that was recorded by the authorities in the then British colonial territory of Natal, which brought in the Indians to work on sugar plantations as indentured labourers.

Kamagra

An infamous Website accused of selling fake Viagra pills is reported to be now selling the illegal Indian version of the potency pill. British-run Paypill.com was in the news in January for selling counterfeit Viagra. Last week, the Website was again forced to stop selling fake Viagra after it emerged that it had gone back into business to sell Kamagra, an infamous Indian ‘clone’ of Viagra that illegally uses the drug’s active ingredient, sildenafil citrate. Elsewhere on the Internet, thousands of fake Viagra pills are reported to be sold openly in Britain on the Internet auction site eBay, despite attempts by health authorities to stop the spread of counterfeit medicines. After reports in the British media, eBay — which runs about 21 million auctions every day worldwide — is expected to shut down hundreds of auctions of both Kamagra and Viagra on its British Website.

SMS booms in India

Sending messages on mobile phones is gaining popularity as outbound SMS volumes in India grew by 200.8 per cent to reach about 7.4 billion messages in 2003, although the usage level is still lagging behind other developing markets in Asia-Pacific. "The outbound SMS volumes in India grew by 200.8 per cent year-on-year to reach 7.39 billion messages in 2003. This is equivalent to 35.8 outbound SMS messages per cellular connection per month," research firm Gartner has said. Gartner predicted ample room for growth given that the usage level is still lagging behind that of other developing markets in Asia-Pacific.

The HP Time

Computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. will create a digital archive containing every issue of Time magazine published, which Time will then make freely available to subscribers on its Website, the companies has said. HP said the digital archive would total more than 4,000 issues from 1923 to the present and be available in May. HP will scan every page of every issue of the magazine published by Time Warner Inc., optimise the material and store it using HP technology. Time said it looked at other companies to build the archive but decided on HP because of its consulting, hardware and software offerings, and because of its scanners and printers.