Online career and recruiting firm Monster Worldwide has said it will buy Yahoo!’s jobsite HotJob for $225 million in cash.

The companies have also entered into a three-year ‘commercial traffic agreement’ in which Monster would become provider of career content on Yahoo!s home page in the US and Canada. The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter of 2010.

Monster Worldwide said, “it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Yahoo! HotJobs, a leading online recruitment website, from Yahoo! for $225 million in cash,” a statement on Wednesday said.

Internet firm Yahoo! has been cutting cost and closing its under performing businesses like the GeoCities web-hosting site. The company also sold its e-mail technology unit Zimbra to VMware for an undisclosed amount.

Yahoo! said it “remains focused on its core businesses on fitness equipment and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers”.

“Monster will be able to offer its employers a significantly larger pool of candidates across diverse geographies and industries,” the company said.

Yahoo! acquired HotJobs in 2002 for $436 million.

Japanese electronic and entertainment major Sony Corp today posted a gain in net income at 79.2 billion yen ($870 million) for the period ending December 31, 2009 on account of a robust growth in PlayStation 3’s sales.

In the year-ago period, the company had a net income of 10.4 billion yen, Sony Corp said in a statement.

The company’s revenue rose to 2,237.9 billion yen in the quarter under review to 2,154.6 billion yen in the same period last year.

Sony said it posted a robust growth due to surge in PlayStation 3 sales following a price cut.

The company sold about 6.5 million units of PlayStation in the current quarter as compared to 4.5 million units in the same quarter last fiscal.

For the full-year ending March 31, Sony narrowed its loss forecast and expects a net loss of 70 billion yen from an earlier estimate of 95 billion yen loss.

The company’s revenue forecast remain unchanged at 7.3 trillion yen.

The firms’ sale of PlayStation 3 has been understood to have moving northward after Sony cut the price of its model by 25 percent to $299 in September.

Sony’s network products and services business has swung into a profit during the quarter with a net income of 19.4 billion yen from a loss of 5.9 billion yen in the year-earlier period.

The sales inched up by 1.9 percent to 606.1 billion yen despite of the heavy competition by Samsung HDTV and others.

If you aim for the sky, you may reach the treetops - and that may well be true of the Indian IT-BPO industry. The 1999 Nasscom-McKinsey report, which fired India’s IT ambitions then, had fixed a target of $50 billion in IT auto insurance quote and BPO exports by 2008.

Slow but steady

The expectations were set and re-set over the years, through new reports by Nasscom and course corrections were necessitated due to the global economic downturn. It is finally in FY10 that the industry has managed to hit the $50-billion mark.

“In those days, the McKinsey projections were done on a calendar year basis. Hence, the forecast of $50 billion exports was for December 2008. In that sense, we are only a year late, despite the fact that industry has been through a dotcom bust and more recently the global economic crisis. But for the recent downturn, we would have been able to meet the original target,” the Nasscom President, Som Mittal, said.

Mittal recounted that when the industry had first set its sights on the $50-billion export milestone, it was met with disbelief. “We are pleased that we have been able to meet that forecast by FY10,” he said.

Nasscom report

It may be recalled that the 2005 Nasscom report had stated that India can clock export revenues of about $60 billion by 2010. It also said that the export growth can be further accelerated through innovation by industry members.

In FY09, when the global crisis struck, Nasscom said that the IT and BPO exports would hit $60-62 billion mark only in FY11. As it turns out, according to the latest outlook, the IT and BPO export revenue is expected to touch $56-57 billion by FY11

In its initiative to promote IT Kerala as a brand, the Department of Information Technology (IT) has brought out a coffee-table book named IT@Kerala — The Smart State.

The book depicts the journey of Kerala from being known as God’s Own Country to becoming a destination for IT investment. It speaks about Kerala in its entirety, its IT infrastructure and industry, and how it has become a smart State with smarter professionals in addition to its famous truck accessories

The book gives an overview of Kerala’s IT industry, highlighting the strengths and the growth potential of IT in Kerala. The infrastructure laid down for the IT industry are detailed in the book covering the plug-and-play model of IT parks, government policies and frameworks favouring IT and testimonials by the top companies in Kerala. It gives a clear depiction of Kerala’s culture, lifestyle and other factors that make the State not just a tourist destination but also an IT hotspot.

“Kerala has put its commitment to the development of IT in bold letters and we intend to follow this development plan to a comprehensive realisation in a time-bound manner, as we envisage information, communication [ICT] and technology as the prime driver of the State’s economy. We have developed our IT policy with the idea of inclusive growth, to enable socio-economic transformation possible through ICT to reach every single citizen of the State, simultaneously benefiting IT sector investors as well,” Ajay Kumar, Principal Secretary, IT, said.