NIIT Technologies has announced the results for the three month period ended December 31, 2008.

During its third quarter, the IT services firm has posted a fall of 52% in its consolidated net profit, which stood at Rs 168 million as against Rs 347 million during the corresponding period of the last year.

The company said the decline in net profit was mainly because of currency fluctuations, the dollar’s appreciation against the Indian currency and the weakening of the pound, which shaved Rs 32.8 crore off its net profit.

After witnessing a huge rally yesterday (Jan 14), Indian equities belled the day on a weak note following negative global cues causing a massive sell-off.  

The 30-share index, BSE Sensex opened at 9,098.08, down 272.41 points from its last closure. After few minutes of trading, Sensex slipped below the 9,000 mark.

Realty stocks hit the most followed by information technology, metal and banking sectors. The annual inflation rate is likely to be announced later today.
 

According to people familiar with the company’s plans, Software giant
Microsoft is mulling over major job cuts across its various sections.

But,
plans for job cuts have not yet been announced, and the company
(Microsoft) could end up discovering suitable methods in order to cover
up costs.

A Microsoft representative declined to comment on hearsays related to job cuts.

During
recent weeks, it had also been rumored that the figure of potential job
cuts is expected to be far less than the 15,000 positions.

With the intention to expand its impressive line up of ‘Cheetah’ enterprise-class hard drive family, Seagate has launched two new hard drives including the ‘Cheetah 15K.7’ and ‘Cheetah NS.2’.

The company claims that the new drives will help hit the liquidity crisis by offering up superior levels of system performance, capability, consistency and lower power usage.

The company said that the Cheetah 15K.7 drive delivers the fastest performance of any 3.5in drive, whereas the Cheetah NS.2 has the lowest power requirement of any 3.5in Tier 1 drive.

A list of some of the important words to watch for the year 2009 has been created by world-known dictionary compiler Collins. A number of words included in the list have been reported to be originated from web-based activities.

As our lives highly influenced by the social networking websites; the next revised edition of the dictionary will see the entrance of several associated words along with a number of terms related to our activities over the web.

By the end of this month, Shortcovers hopes to be turning iPhones into electronic books, which would be done via the launch of a mini-application that allows the users to read books, short stories or other written works on Apple-made smart phones in a direct challenge to electronic book devices sold by Amazon and Sony.

Following when Shortcovers clears Apple's vetting process and makes it to the virtual shelves of iTunes online App Store, Shortcovers software will be available for free download.