Correction: Corrects US dollar amount in headline and first and second pars

NEW DELHI, July 15 Asia Pulse - India’s largest telecom company by revenue Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd plans to invest around US$1.2 billion in its Wimax project.

“We are looking at investing around US$1.2 billion in the Wimax project,” BSNL Director (Finance) S D Saxena said.

The company aims to roll out wireless broadband connectivity through WiMax technology commercially this year, especially in urban areas. Initially, it will start its operations in three states — Maharashtra (excluding Mumbai), Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh.

It also plans to set-up 50,000 IT-enabled kiosks called common service centers (CSCs) running on Wimax technology, across the country.

However, BSNL is waiting for required spectrum for rolling out the Wimax services. Once the 3G and WiMax policy is spelt out by the Department of Telecom (DoT), both state-run operators BSNL and MTNL will get automatic spectrum allocation, while private players have to bid for the radio frequencies. “But a lot depends on the government’s announcement on 3G and Wimax and the allocation of spectrum,” Saxena added.

Earlier this year, the telecom major has also partnered with Soma Networks of the US for WiMax solution deployment. The deal between the two companies is based on a public-private-partnership where the US based company will also invest in technology for WiMax roll out and both the companies will share the revenue.

The complete deployment is for a period of three years. Recently, a Springboard report stated that India will be the largest market for WiMax with an estimated market share of 35.7 per cent in terms of revenue in the Asia-pacific region and with 15.8 million subscribers by 2012.

In an attempt to boost its search-ad business, Yahoo has begun a project that lets anyone build a customized search engine atop the Internet company’s technology.

(Credit: Yahoo)
The service, which enters public beta testing Wednesday night, is called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). With it, someone can build an independent Web site with a search box, pass users’ queries to BOSS, process the results returned by Yahoo’s search engines in any manner, and display the results.

Essentially, BOSS is a bid to enable others’ search innovation then share profits from the results. It’s also the most significant example to date of Yahoo Open Strategy, the company’s effort to expose its own technology for outside developers in an effort to become a more indispensible part of the Internet.

The BOSS API (application programming interface) to Yahoo’s search is free to use, but BOSS partners that succeed will be required to show search ads, said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search.

“We fully expect it to expand the footprint of Yahoo search advertising on the Web,” Raghavan said. “There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners, but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising.”

That’s a strong statement, given Google’s rapid ascent and strength in that very market. Even Yahoo, faced with intense shareholder pressure and a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft, has tried to hitch itself to the Google star through a search-ad deal with its rival.

But BOSS is an interesting idea nonetheless. Yahoo hopes to attract both entrepreneurs and researchers–it has formal BOSS partnership with Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other educational sites–and it’s got more in-depth with some business partnerships the company plans to announce later.

Yahoo already has launched a program called SearchMonkey that lets programmers augment Yahoo’s search results with richer displays of information–for example by adding starred reviews or addresses to restaurants listed in search results. That’s a skin-deep change compared to what BOSS permits, though, where outside sites can completely alter the order of search results, filter out particular results, display results only of a particular variety, and combine the Yahoo data with internal data.

Yahoo offered some examples of what could be done with BOSS. One idea is a visual search presentation that shows miniature versions of the Web pages atop the textual results. Another, social search, could be used to spotlight results relevant to attributes drawn from a person’s social network.

Among those who are trying out BOSS are social search site Me.dium and natural language processing site Hakia.

Setting up a competitive search requires prohibitively large financial resources, Raghavan said. Yahoo estimates roughly $300 million to cover expenses such as staff and the hardware to constantly index new Web pages, analyze the index, and handle queries.

Stephen Cornforth has been appointed by Allianz Commercial to serve in the newly created position of property and casualty underwriting manager at the Chelmsford branch.

Cornforth will be tasked with creating technical underwriting solutions and fostering business relationships in the local area.

He brings over two decades of insurance experience to his role, and has held a broad range of positions during his lengthy career.

Cornforth has expressed his delight at his appointment, praising Allianz Commercial’s track record and his new colleagues.

Australian shares fell 0.4 percent to a near two-year low on Tuesday, as financial firms such as National Australia Bank Ltd (ASX: NAB.ax) came under fresh pressure on worries about further fallout from credit markets.

However, firm oil and gold prices lent support to the resource sector, limiting losses.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index .AXJO fell 19.9 points to 4,901.1 by 0014 GMT, a level not seen since July 19, 2006. ($1=A$1.03) (Reporting by Geraldine Chua, Editing by Mark Bendeich)

In-browser social network Me.dium is expanding its services Wednesday night with the launch of a new social search tool. It pulls in regular old Yahoo results as part of the company’s freshly announced BOSS platform (see news story here), while combining them with social results from other Me.dium users.

Me.dium founder David Mandell is calling the new system “Crowd Rank” and says it’s not about how content links with other content, but how it links up with other users who are visiting these sites. Based on the data from people with the Me.dium sidebar or toolbar installed, the engine will get its own community-specific results that Mandell thinks will be more valuable than something merely indexed by machines.

That’s not to say it’s completely nixing those machined results. The social layer comes secondary to the service’s main search, which will simply pull up Yahoo results. The extra value here is in the Me.dium community metadata that’s wrapped around each link. Included is rank, velocity (how fast it’s moved up in the results), crowd level, the last time a Me.dium user visited the site, along with how long most are spending there. It will be getting this data from two sources, both the social sidebar as well as a toolbar, which is launching as part of the service. Privacy will be the same for both products–as you can turn off tracking of sites you’re visiting with two clicks.

Users looking for deeper integration with their in-browser search will have to use the toolbar or sidebar for the time being. Mandell says an option to use it in the top corner of compatible browsers like Firefox should be coming in the near future.

Willis Group Holdings Limited has appointed Will Thoretz to serve as vice president of group communications, with immediate effect.

He brings with him a quarter of a century of experience and leaves behind VNU N.V. (now The Nielsen Company) where he worked as senior vice president and chief communications officer.

In his New York-based role, Thoretz will have responsibility for communications strategy both internally and externally across the globe.

He will also be tasked with leadership of the communications teams based on London and New York.

Thoretz is to be directly responsible to Valerie Di Maria, senior vice president and director of Group Marketing and Communications.

Valerie Di Maria has welcomed Thoretz to the firm, paying tribute to his tremendous experience particularly in media relations and financial communications.