San Francisco - Networking giant Cisco reported a 4.4-per- cent rise in quarterly profits Tuesday as the company recorded its first-ever quarter in which sales topped 10 billion dollars.

The Silicon Valley company, the world's largest maker of the routers and switches that run the internet, posted a fiscal fourth- quarter profit of 2 billion dollars, or 33 cents a share. That's up from 1.9 billion dollars, or 31 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter as sales rose to 10.4 billion dollars from 9.4 billion dollars a year ago.

For fiscal year 2008, the company reported net sales of 39.5 billion dollars, up 13.2 per cent from 34.9 billion dollars in sales in 2007. Profits were up 9.8 per cent to 8.1 billion dollars from 7.3 billion dollars last year.

Polaris Software Lab Ltd has signed up a professional services contract with AIG Global Services to offer up software services to American International Group and all its partners throughout the world.

R. Srikanth, Polaris Executive Vice President and CFO, stated, “Since we will be providing IT services to AIG, the parent company and all its affiliated companies around the globe, it is a significant transaction for Polaris.”

Mr. Srikanth did not reveal the size of the contract nor the anticipated revenue from the deal.

London, Aug. 5 : The two regional development agencies of the British Midlands – East Midlands Development Agency and Advantage West Midlands are becoming increasingly focused on Indian companies who are looking to expand into the research and development space. 

With world-class universities and institutes who are offering ground breaking research in the field of alternative energy sources, the British Midlands region is poised to become one of the most preferred destinations in the world for undertaking research and development.

Indian companies will now be able to battle problems of greenhouse gases and help make India a better place for the future generations with expert guidance for the region.

Everyone on the planet can be connected through seven links in a chain of contacts. It is established by the study conducted by Microsoft’s instant messaging network.

The researchers have confirmed that all persons are just six degrees from actor Kevin Bacon. The deep study of instant messaging networks used Microsoft's Messenger IM service to come to the conclusion.

London, August 5: Microsoft has started a new research project, Midori, to develop a software program that will help uncouple Windows from a single PC.

The company has revealed that a decision to develop Midori was taken because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology, and the way people use it.

"If you think about how an operating system is loaded, it's loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine. The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware," the BBC quoted Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, as saying.

The market for “notebooks” is expanding day by day, and on Monday, the popular laptop company, Lenovo introduced a low-cost mini-notebook called the IdeaPad S10.

This mini-notebook by Lenovo has a 10 inch screen and a keyboard which is 85% the size of a full keyboard. IdeaPad S10 is powered by Atom processor which was recently released by Intel for mobile internet devices.