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Microsoft plans to expand its operations in India over the next couple of years by opening centres in new locations. At present, the software major is present in 12 Indian cities- Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi Indore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune, Nagpur, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh.

Jean-Philippe Courtois, president (international operations), Microsoft said that they intended to expand their operations in India to 30 centres over the next couple of years.He said that they had one of their biggest research lab’s in India. Their focus on India would continue to grow, he added.

Microsoft also plans to increase its headcount in the country. Courtois said that they would increase the headcount from the existing 5,000 by a couple of thousand. Courtois was in Bangalore to discuss e-governance initiatives for the Karnataka government. Microsoft has submitted a letter of intent to launch the ‘paper-less office’ concept in the government.

Sudhakar Rao, principal secretary to Karnataka chief minister H.D.Kumaraswamy, said that Microsoft has evinced interest in implementing the ‘paper-less office‘ project across all departments in a phased manner in the state. He said it would eliminate the dependence on paper work in government offices. This would help the state serve the public better, he added.

Initially, Microsoft will launch the ‘paper-less office‘ concept in Karnataka’s IT&BT department. This project will run on a trial basis. Subsequently, it will be extended to other departments. The letter of intent submitted by Microsoft enables the government to use the company’s software applications for e-governance projects.

The project will not have any financial implication on the state. Microsoft and Karnataka are expected to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) shortly to implement the e-governance projects. Microsoft has declared many plans for India in past too, many being CSR motivated.

After having heralded the multi-core PC era last year delivering the quad core and other multi-core processors, Intel is witnessing strong sales of the new-gen processor families, officials said.

Company officials said Intel had shipped 60-70 million multi-core processors including roughly a million quad core processors in the past one year. Intel’s quad core brand is positioned as four brains inside a single microprocessor. However, company officials would not give statistics on the numbers obsorbed by the Indian market.

Phil De La Zerda, Intel’s Director of sales and business development of developer products division said over 200 universities across the world were now having multi-core processing as part of their curriculum. In India, about 250 colleges are understood to be in the process of including multi-core processing in their curriculum with some having already done so.

Narendra Bhandari, Intel’s director for Asia Pacific said the forecast was that 80% of the total procesor sales would soon be of the dual-core variety, which enabled significant power savings while enhancing performance, and that in course of time the trend would come to mobile phones as well.

Other players in the industry, too, have multi-core processors, pointing to the new generation of processors being the norm in the days to come, officials said.

De La Zerda said future programmers would work in the parallel environment, making use of the multi-core processors. It is estimated that once the programs are ready fir parallelism, longer battery lives would be a natural offshoot.

Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets small online tools that function like mini-Web sites for its latest push into advertising.

The online giant said that a Gadget Ads program would provide tools for advertisers to run widget ads in Google’s AdSense network. Marketers can use space within these display ads on Google’s network to show videos, offer chats with celebrities, play host to games or other activities.

If consumers like the widget ad, they can save it onto their desktops or on their profile pages on sites like Facebook and MySpace. The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ads rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google’s adsense network.

One big advantage of the technology is that the consumer does not have to click through to a Web site. A weather widget, for example, would constantly update the weather report in a particular area. More than 48 percent of Internet users in the United States - over 87 million people - now use widgets, according to comScore, which measures Internet use. Some of the most popular widgets on Facebook, for example, are the “Top Friends” tool, which allows people to go to their best friends’ profiles with a single click, and iLike, which lets users add music to their profiles.

Christian Oestlien, a business product manager at Google who is overseeing the new ad program said that the consumers were pulling in content from multiple sources. He said that it was what they were calling the componentization of the Web. The Web was sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces, he added.

Many widgets have been built by media outlets, like Lucky Magazine’s shopping widget, which features fashion and beauty products. And some companies, like Slide, are developing networks of widgets made by individuals that advertisers can place ads within.

Brands like Sierra Mist and Honda Civic have also been creating their own widgets as a way of providing content or tools to potential customers. Google is hoping marketers will pay to place these widgets throughout its AdSense network.