BMW’s Indian made cars to come out later this month

Germany based luxury car maker BMW would be rolling out their first Indian manufactured BMW cars later this month. The company would be rolling out their 3-Series model cars.

The company has this unit established in the South Indian city of Chennai. They are expected to begin production of their 5-Series cars by June this year.

They are aiming to manufacture around 1500 cars at this plant per year at this moment. BMW Group Chairman Norbert Reithofer spoke about their plans: “we are commencing production in India later this month with an assembly unit that will produce around 1,500 units.”

BMW Group’s General Manager (Regional Marketing) for Asia Pacific, Christoph von Tschirschnitz added: “We have set a target to touch the 1,500-units sales mark in 2007 with the launch of the Chennai plant later this month.”

BMW’s Mini car is expected to arrive on Indian shores by 2009. BMW Mini’s Vice President (Brand Management) Kay Segler had this to say: “We are looking forward to introducing Mini in India by 2009, for which tests are already in the process.”

Intel to develop more energy efficient processors

Microprocessor Company Intel has said that they are planning to further reduce the size and power consumption of its computer processor products in the coming years.

They are going to develop processors which are smaller and more energy efficient as the market demand and preference for such products is increasing.

The company has already managed to reduce the size of its chips by 75 percent since the last year. Power consumption has also been reduced by around 50 percent.

A company official said that microprocessors produced in 2008 will also be 85 percent smaller than 2006 chips. Christian Morales, the company’s vice president and general manager of Europe, the Middle East and Africa said: “The ultimate goal that we have is to have a system on a chip, a highly integrated solution.”

Commodore Gaming now launches high end gaming PCs

Commodore Gaming has announced that they are now going to sell high end gaming machines through a new subsidiary.

The company unveiled a new range of PCs specially designed for gamers at the CeBIT technology show in Germany.

At the moment, they are offering four models: the entry level Cg, the Cgs, Cgx and “extreme level” Cxx. The extreme edition machine comes loaded with the GX6700 Intel quad-core processor, two Nvida 8800 GTX graphics cards, 4GB of memory and an ASUS nForce motherboard. Sounds yumm.

These machines would come powered with the Microsoft Vista 64-bit version and would have new “Ice Cube” cooling components plus independently controlled LEDs. Gamers would be able to fully customize their PC’s configuration and machines will be fully tested prior to shipment.

The company is also offering a “revolutionary painting process” and gamers would be able to order their machines with specially selected designs. Commodore Gaming CEO Bala Keilman said in a statement on these new plans: “From beginners to professionals, Commodore Gaming ensures that only the very best components are provided to deliver the ultimate PC gaming experience. We also wanted to bring something new to the market, in the spirit of our Commodore heritage, and have worked hard to design a fully personalized product.”

Google Calendar

Google’s long awaited ajax based calender is out.
Update :Google calendar is now LIVE.
More info:
www.google.com/calendar

Windows Vista on use on less than 1 percent of PCs

It’s been a month since Microsoft officially launched the Windows Vista operating system in the market. And research has shown that the operating system was being used on less than 1 percent of PCs tracked in February.

This was mentioned in a survey report released by Aliso Viejo-based Net Applications Inc.

This makes Vista currently the sixth most used operating system. Interestingly, Windows 98 has a larger market share. However, we can give Vista the benefit of the doubt considering it is pretty new in the market and most consumers are going to upgrade to it when they buy a new machine.

The report claimed that Vista’s exact share was 0.93 percent. Windows XP topped the list with a market share of 84.3 percent, followed by Windows 2000, with 4.8 percent.

Mac OS X on PowerPC machines had 4.3 percent, while newer Intel-based PCs running OS X had 2.1 percent.

Net Applications added in the report that these statistics are generated from data from the browsers of visitors to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites.

Sony unveils Bravia Internet Video Link

Sony has given out more details on their upcoming product Bravia Internet Video Link. This product has been designed to connect most of its 2007 television lineup to the Internet.

This device when connected with a compatible Sony TV would allow the user to receive video programming from a number of online services.

They can receive programming from services like AOL, Yahoo! and Grouper in addition to Sony’s own Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony BMG Music. Even RSS feeds are going to be supported.

The company added that they are currently in talks with video sharing services like YouTube.com for their support on this platform.

Randy Waynick, senior vice president of the Home Products Division at Sony Electronics added in a statement: “The new BRAVIA models will soon expand the world of home entertainment with the touch of a button. We are going to be opening a whole new avenue of programming to American consumers, which has been by and large constrained to the PC.”

NW-A800 series: Sony launches video enabled Walkman players

Apple is currently the market leader when it comes to video enabled digital media portable players with its iPod Video range of products. Creative is another major player in the market. Microsoft too entered this segment with the launch of Zune player.

Now, Sony has entered this segment by launching their first digital video Walkman. The company has showcased their NW-A800 series of Walkman products.

The series has three models: the NW-A805, A806, and A808. These three models have the same feature set but have different sizes of memory.

The devices come with a 2-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) panel with QVGA resolution (240 pixels by 320 pixels). Sony claimed that video can be seen in both vertically and horizontally position.

Sony added that the audio playback on the device is supported in a number of flavors of Sony’s ATRAC compression. They are supplying tools along with converting Windows Media Audio, MP3 and WAV files to ATRAC. Sony added that MP3 is still supported by using this media would lessen the battery life. The players support MPEG4 H.264/AVC encoded files.

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