Innovation in insurance

THE famous scientist Albert Einstein once said, “Try not to become a man of success, rather try to become a man of value”. Some people and corporates are lucky to be both. The not-so-strong business ethics of modern corporate houses still pervades local groups and companies known over the generations for sound business practices. The House of Habib is one among them.
Incorporated in 1942, the Habib Insurance Company Ltd has grown up to be a strong, profitable company. A significant feature that catches the eye is its board’s policy of maintaining a fair balance between the retention of earnings and distribution of dividends to shareholders.
A cursory glance at five-year figures shows a progressive increase in profitability, with the company reporting its highest profit-after-tax (PAT) of Rs244m for the year ending December 31, 2013.
For all these years, the company shared the bounties with shareholders, with cash dividends ranging from 25 to 35pc for shares of par value of Rs5. Even in the fateful year 2008, when corporates in Pakistan suffered the repercussions of the global economic crisis and the company went into red to the tune of Rs391m, its board did not deny investors a return and paid cash and stock dividends at the same rate of 12.5pc. The bonus payouts have been intermittent, with the recent high of 25pc paid for 2013.

Habib Insurance has extended the scope of the traditional fire, marine and motor insurance business in an innovative way to include allied perils such as riot and strike, malicious damage, explosion, earthquake and burglary in the fire segment

http://www.dawn.com/news/1119132

Sony keeps optical discs alive with storage startup acquisition

Sony's push to get enterprise users to store data on optical discs has received added momentum with its acquisition of a Facebook-linked startup focused on optical storage.

Led by former Facebook executive Frank Frankovsky, Optical Archive in California will develop new optical disc library systems for corporate clients' "cold storage," which hold data that aren't accessed often but are preserved for a long time. Examples of such data are photos on social media sites and regulatory or legal documents.

The move marks the entry of Sony, which developed the Blu-ray disc over a decade ago, into data center storage, a market it has shied away from partly due to the limited capacity of its optical discs amid the explosion of cloud-based storage.

The struggling electronics maker wants to convince enterprise users to move from tape storage and hard drives to optical disc libraries by emphasizing that discs feature longer lifetimes, higher data throughput rates and lower cost.

The move reflects the view of companies like Sony, Facebook and Panasonic that optical media like Blu-ray discs have a future in business applications even as consumers turn away from them in favor of content streamed over the Internet. A 2014 report from Generator Research, however, predicted that revenue from DVD and Blu-ray sales will likely drop by 38 percent over the next four years.

Frankovsky is known for heading Facebook's Open Compute Project Foundation, a group focused on sharing designs for data center hardware. He left his job as vice president of hardware design and supply chain operations at the social network last year to set up Optical Archive. He will remain CEO, a Sony spokeswoman said.

Last year, Facebook said it had built a cold storage system from 10,000 Blu-ray discs. The system holds a petabyte of data and cuts costs by 50 percent and energy use by 80 percent compared to a Facebook cold storage system that uses hard disk drives.

The movement toward optical storage comes as Sony and Panasonic announced a new optical disc called the Archival Disc. With the same dimensions as Blu-ray discs and geared to enterprise storage, it's designed to have a lifetime of 50 years, with initial capacity of 300GB, and later 500GB and 1TB.

The new discs, scheduled to be launched this summer, do not need a special storage environment with constant temperature or humidity and do not require air conditioning, offering lower power consumption over linear tape-open technology (LTO), a magnetic tape storage format.

- See more at: http://www.itnews.com/internet-based-applications-and-services/93196/sony-keeps-optical-discs-alive-storage-startup-acquis#sthash.AWtap0b7.dpuf

http://www.itnews.com/internet-based-applications-and-services/93196/sony-keeps-optical-discs-alive-storage-startup-acquis

NASSCOM launches cybersecurity task force

NEW DELHI: National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) and Data Security Council of India have launched NASSCOM Cyber Security Task Force. 



According to a statement from the trade body, the task force aims to build India as a global hub for providing cyber security solutions, developing cyber security R&D plan and develop a skilled workforce of cyber security experts. 

The task force members will include industry leaders across IT, BPM and internet, heads of user organizations like banks and telcos as well as representatives from the government and academia. 

Rajendra Pawar, Chairman, NIIT will chair this task force. The task force over a 12 week period will identify the key priorities and build the detailed action plan for the sector. 



NASSCOM says the vision of the task force is to build the cyber security industry in India from the 1% market share to 10% by 2025; a trained base of 1 million certified and skilled cyber security professionals and build 100+ successful security product companies from India. 

Rajendra Pawar, chair, NASSCOM Cyber Security Task Force and chairman, NIIT, said, "Securing the cyberspace has become an important priority for governments, businesses and citizens across the world. In line with the Prime Minister's vision of making India a cyber-security expert nation and his recent exhortation to the industry, we have created the cyber security task force. This task force aims to make India a global hub for providing cyber security solutions including cyber security products and services. The task force will focus on the four key pillars of Industry development, Policy enablement, Technology development and Skill development." 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/NASSCOM-launches-cybersecurity-task-force/articleshow/47417994.cms