The six-star hotel will occupy the top 17 floors of Hong Kong’s tallest building, the 484-metre International Commerce Centre (ICC), the South China Morning Post reported.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus suggested the “social business” project to the company, which normally focusses on trendy, expensive sportswear for people who want to project a sporty image.

“We believe that India holds tremendous potential for the Michelin group in terms of establishing a world class manufacturing facility,” said Prashant Prabhu, president, Michelin Africa-India-Middle East.

The rise in demand for automobiles has prompted several Indian and foreign tire makers to invest in the country. These companies are betting not only on the increasing demand in the local market but also want to use the low-cost manufacturing base in India for exporting tires.

SMS and other value-added services form 10% of the Indian telecom industry’s annual Rs 1 lakh crore-plus revenues. The current regime followed by telecom operators is `bill and keep’. This means your operator keeps the entire amount that he bills you for the SMS and pays nothing to the network on which the SMS is sent. This is for two reasons. First, the proportion of traffic across networks is roughly equal, and second, the cost of termination is negligible.

Trai has so far refused to regulate SMS tariffs along with some other tariffs under what is known as forbearance. Forbearance is usually adopted by regulators when they believe that competitive markets are working and tariffs reflect true costs. As it turns out, the true cost of sending an SMS would never have come to light if new entrants had not been forced to sign interconnection agreements with existing operators at a price that is far higher than the actual cost.

Mark Hurd

The Palo Alto, Calif., company—the world’s largest tech company by revenue—also preannounced positive fiscal fourth quarter results. It posted an 11% jump in operating earnings and an 8% decline in revenue from a year ago, beating analyst estimates. In a sign the tech industry is leaving the recession behind, it also raised its revenue forecast for the fiscal year.

By buying 3Com, a onetime leading tech company that has fallen on tougher times this decade, H-P is aiming to goose its growth. The move also puts H-P more squarely on the turf of Cisco Systems Inc.

David Donatelli, H-P’s executive vice president in charge of the division that sells computers and networking gear to big customers, said 3Com has a better set of networking products for large corporate clients than H-P currently sells and a market share of more than 30% in the China networking market. With the deal, Mr. Donatelli said, “we get industry-leading products.”

“We’re very happy to extend our holiday Wi-Fi gift to the millions of people who will spend time in airports over the next few months,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience atGoogle.

The Seattle-based pioneer of web-retailing Thursday said it earned $199 million in the third quarter compared to $118 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue rose 28 percent to $5.45 billion.

As per the new plan, the customers will be charged one paisa per second for all local and national long-distance calls within Bharti’s network and 1.20 paise per second for calls to other networks, the company said in a statement.

The new business will offer the banking products of HSBC Australia as well as refer customer enquiries to HSBC India, The Age reported Tuesday.

“Australia has one of the fastest growing Indian communities in the world, numbering some 240,000, so this new service makes commercial sense,” Graham Heunis, head of personal financial services for HSBC in Australia, was quoted as saying in a statement.

Spot gold was bid at $1,062.55 an ounce at 0957 GMT against $1,055.25 late in New York on Monday.

Tata Manza will be based on their popular and trusted platform of Tata Indica Vista and will be available in both diesel and petrol models.

“We are currently working on how best we can come back to the state in a major way. It’s all currently on the drawing board,” Tarun Jhunjhunwala, president of Reliance Industries, told reporters.

“The metro on Yamuna Bank to Noida section is likely to start by the first week of December this year. The opening of the section depends on delivery of trains, which are likely to come by November,” E. Sreedharan, DMRC managing director, told reporters here.

The Forbes list has four Indian entities – RIL, Bharti Airtel, Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services – among the top 10 firms in terms of market value, while RIL and Tata Steel feature in the top 10 league in terms of sales. The Indian league has four newcomers this year – Adani Enterprises, Axis Bank, Jindal Steel & Power and Tata Consultancy Services – and among the Indian firms returning to the list include Bharat Heavy Electricals, Larsen & Toubro and RIL.

China has again outdone the rest of the Asia Pacific with the most number of firms (16) represented in the league, followed by India with 13 entities. “The mainland firms together with five from Taiwan and three from Hong Kong account for almost half of the entries, giving Greater China the biggest regional representation on the list,” Forbes said.

Priced at Rs.21.03 lakh for the 2.5XL variant and Rs.25.4 lakh for 2.5XV at showrooms in Delhi, Teana is powered with 2.5-litre six-cylinder VQ engine, the company said in a statement.

Speaking to IANS over phone from ISRO’s launch centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, M.Y.S. Prasad, associate director, Satish Dhawan Space Centre said: “Preparations are already on for the launch of GSAT 4 — the communication satellite using the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). The rocket assembling process has started.”

“The state government has not abandoned the township project. It is not turning down the proposals from Wipro and Infosys. Only the way it was to be implemented has been kept in abeyance,” Left Front Chairman Biman Bose told reporters here.

Bose said Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had briefed a meeting of the Front on the logjam surrounding the IT project.

The company also launched a limited edition of the Fazer and SZ Series models, priced between Rs.66,500 and Rs.73,500 ahead of the upcoming festive season.

“We are expecting almost three times the sales in the two months of the festive season (starting October),” said Yamaha chief executive and managing director Yukimine Tsuji.

“The one percent subvention would be for the first 12 EMIs (equated monthly instalments) on loans up to Rs.10 lakh,” Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

In the proposal, which was released on the internet Thursday, Google said that its micro-payment system would be up and running within the year and would enable simple payment of one cent to several dollars.

According to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s (Assocham) Financial Pulse study, tax expenses for companies under the infrastructure status have gone up because of improved realisations.

This has contributed to better margins and improved bottomlines of such companies, thereby increasing their tax liabilities.

I have noticed that ever since our economy went into recession, people have been finding ways to monitor their finances more than ever before. In these times when sources of income are scarce, one needs to be really careful about how much he spends.

Motorola, which has tested the new next generation technology, called Long-Term Evolution (LTE), is all set to start trial services of 4G that can offer 70 MB per second (Mbps) download speeds on a mobile phone by the end of this year.

The well known game reality show ‘Who Want to be a Millionaire’ asked such a trick question on Google.

MTNL is offering these exciting tariffs for the home plans for Unlimited Broadband users. This offer would go into operation automatically from the first day of September 2009.

Air India will increase the number of flights to reduce inconvenience to passengers, Mr Patel said. It is not known if Paramount Airways will join its private sector peers in the strike.

The minister said that the ATF tax was an issue even before the private carriers started operations. Painting a desperate picture of their situation, industry lobby body Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) said unless the government helps them by lowering taxes on jet fuel and bringing down airport charges, their survival is in doubt.

The strike notice has been served by the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) — an umbrella organisation representing nine unions of officers and other staff in the banking industry, of which Virk’s union is also a member. The government had asked the unions, which claim membership of over a million staff, to hold talks with the Indian Bank Association (IBA), which is a representative body of bank managements, as also with the chief labour commissioner.

The main demands are wage increase, a better social security net and a proper policy for giving jobs to the family members of deceased or disabled employees on compassionate grounds.