It’s a snowy Saturday in Chicago, but Amy, age 28, needs resort wear for a Caribbean vacation. Five years ago, in 2011, she would have headed straight for the mall. Today she starts shopping from her couch by launching a videoconference with her personal concierge at Danella, the retailer where she bought two outfits the previous month. The concierge recommends several items, superimposing photos of them onto Amy’s avatar. Amy rejects a couple of items immediately, toggles to another browser tab to research customer reviews and prices, finds better deals on several items at another retailer, and orders them. She buys one item from Danella online and then drives to the Danella store near her for the in-stock items she wants to try on.

By Osama Manzar, LiveMint.com

Union information technology (IT) and communication minister Kapil Sibal invited more than 200 people a couple of weeks ago to discuss a revised IT Act the government is working on. Amid the general flow of ideas, I had the chance to put forth a point as well.India has about 250,000 electoral constituencies at the parlia- mentary, assembly and panchayat levels, I said, and more than three million elected representatives. Under the Right to Infor- mation (RTI) Act, 2005, they are all supposed to provide all kinds of constituency related information to voters. Yet, hardly anyone has an official website.

Local search marketing can significantly boost the visibility of your company in the search engines which implies that it will achieve extensively improved coverage to the thousands or tens thousands of people who search - each and every month - for keywords related to your business and the goods and services you offer.

The rebounding of the economy has had a direct impact on the ICT sector in India. The first quarter of 2010 saw spending on computers recover modestly and analysts look forward to greater spending by enterprises this year. To put things in perspective, the total size of the Indian IT market currently US $14.7bn and is projected to increase to US$26.6bn by 2014.