Thursday, April 26, 2012

AICTE to launch academic networking website and job portal


The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has planned to launch an academic networking website along with an in-house job portal and a repository of doctorate papers to check duplication and cheating. The academic networking site proposes to interconnect 7.5 million students enrolled across AICTE-approved institutions linked through email IDs.
The AICTE is also readying Project Factory, a repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all post graduate projects in an online bank. These abstracts of research work will be available to industry stakeholders and research labs so that those interested can easily contact the student concerned and take it forward.
The AICTE e-governance project envisages an employment portal that proposes to store every student’s semester-wise results online and link it with his CV. This CV will automatically be forwarded to industry HRD heads whenever there is a vacancy suited to the student. This central database will link up with an industry database of 8,000 stakeholders and help facilitate the placement process.
AICTE had also recently deployed Microsoft Corporation’s Live@edu in more than 10,000 technical colleges and institutes throughout India. The project will be implemented over the period of next three months. Live@edu is a hosted communication and collaboration service that offers email, Microsoft Office Web Apps, instant messaging and storage to AICTE’s more than 7 million students and nearly 500,000 faculty members, for a total reach of 7.5 million users.

Google launches Google Drive; upgrades Gmail to 10 GB for all users


Google has launched Google Drive, a cloud storage service where users can upload and access all of their files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond. The service is offering new users 5GB of storage for free with upgrades starting at 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. Google also increased the free storage in Gmail from the existing 7.5 GB to 10 GB to all users.
“Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future,” Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps, Google has said in a blogpost.