Today in Tech: Domestic Market; Dell Blackstone & Icahn; Bangalore's C...

TCS, Infosys & Domestic IT MarketThe news that TCS is close to signing a Rs 1,100 crore systems integration contract  from India Post, just a week after Infosys bagging deal to manage the postal network's rural operations underlines the increasing importance of domestic market for Indian IT companies. Domestic market was largely ignored by Indian IT players till IBM woke everyone up by signing a huge deal with Airtel. These days hardly any analyst meet or press conference winds up without a reference to performance in Indian market. The conversations, however, are mostly around IT Services and not around BPO. Are there indications that it will change?I recently spoke to Pavan Vaish, who co-founded Daksh, a BPO, and continued to head it for about 10 years after selling it to IBM. (Another co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal went on to found Helion, a VC firm). Pavan is now the global COO of a legal process outsourcing company called UnitedLex. Mr Vaish said it will remain an IT Services story, rather than a BPO story, for a few more years. In fact some global players who tried tapping the domestic BPO market had to pull back their efforts, he said. Dell deal: Three bids; three questionsThe Dell buy back deal is getting more and more interesting. Bloomberg reports, "Dell Inc. said it got proposals from Blackstone Group LP (BX) and Carl Icahn that may be superior to Michael Dell’s $24.4 billion buyout plan, putting pressure on the founder to sweeten his terms or switch allegiances."Here's a quick summary Growing up in the Knowledge SocietyLeela Fernandes reviews  Nicholas Nisbett's book in Economic and Political Weekly:

Growing up in the Knowledge Society presents an ethnographic study of the ways in which individual middle-class men interact with and are shaped by the IT industry in their daily lives. The book locates itself within scholarly debates on the knowledge society and approaches the IT industry through an anthropological lens that focuses on the cultural dimensions of technological change. In particular, the book identifies cybercafés and IT training institutes as sites that serve as social and cultural spaces for the negotiation of the identities, social relationships and aspirations of young middle-class men. The book provides a detailed analysis of the spatial organisation and varied sociocultural practices associated with Bangalore’s cybercafés.

I haven't read the book myself, but the reference to IT training institutes and cybercafes make the research seem somewhat dated. There was a time when these two defined the growth of IT. No longer. Also of interestYahoo buys Summly

• Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO), the largest U.S. Web portal, is buying Summly, a mobile startup run by a 17-year-old, for about $30 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. ~ Bloomberg
• Got a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you're out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who's just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. ~ Reuters

• White space has the advantage that low frequency signals can travel longer distances. The technology is well suited to provide low cost connectivity to rural communities with poor telecommunications infrastructure, and for expanding coverage of wireless broadband in densely populated urban areas. ~ Google

• The gaming company looks to have snapped up Atul Bagga, an analyst formerly of Lazard Capital Markets, to be the new VP of finance at Zynga, according to a recent change in Bagga’s LinkedIn profile. ~ AllThingsD

• “To me, this is not just the next smartphone. This has the power of a laptop. This is not just a smartphone anymore. This is your personal computing power. Think about what you can do with that. How many personal computing devices do you carry? Why not unify this to one device that executes all your computing needs?” ~ BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins to ABC news

• "Search-amplified risk": the more options put in front of someone, the more they overestimate their chances of a jackpot. The participants with the large number of choices searched more, and ended up seeing the "risky" events more frequently, but didn't look into it enough to find the probability of actually winning.  ~ Popular Science

• Thousands of startup companies see mobile computing as their chance to strike it big. Technology Review's top picks.