Civil Engg.

Civil Engineering is a profession which caters to the civic needs of humans such as shelter, water, transportation, etc. It essentially deals with design, construction and maintenance of the systems which cater to the human needs stated above. Some of these are buildings, bridges, roads, dams, towers, etc.

Civil Engineering can broadly be defined into the following divisions

1. Structural Engineering: One of the most interesting fields of civil engg. (according to me) deals with the design of structures. Structural engineers may work in tandem with architects in the design process. Nowadays the design is done mostly in softwares but still the role of a structural designer cannot be underestimated.

2. Building Technology and Construction Management: This involves the actual execution process. After software, construction sector is the one which has been having the maximum boom in the last five years. Construction is no more only brick and mortar. It requires high level of managerial skills along with the basic civil engg. Knowledge.

3. Geotechnical Engineering: Geotechnical engineers deal with the soil as the name suggests. They are involved in design and construction of foundation systems. Nowadays there are companies dedicated only for Geotech works as the foundation systems are getting more and more complicated.

4. Transportation Engineering: It can again be divided into two categories one which deals with the design and construction of roads and other which deals with the design of road networks (they decide where to have a flyover, signal timings etc.). If you want to go to US for higher studies this is the field to go into. There is lot of research going on in US in transportation engineering and you can funding pretty easily.

5.Environmental and Water resources Engineering: This division deals with dams, irrigation projects, drinking water supply, waste water treatment, etc. Environmental Engg is one more option for students who want to go abroad for further studies. There is a lot of funding in environmental engg not only in US but also in Europe.

Montevina: The NExT Centrino to be launched by Intel

Intel had been waiting for the right time to unravel it’s brand new mobile platform. Intel calls it the Montevina platform. Montevina is the fifth generation Centrino platform, on which you not only get integrated WiMAX capabilities, but also benefit from chip-level support for both the upcoming laser-disc technologies, Blu-Ray and HD DVD. This almost aggregates the ongoing “format war”, since dual support for the formats is being preferred by an increasing number of manufacturers. It is good for the consumers, but Sony will be disappointed as this is going to nullify their efforts to make Blu-Ray the monarch.

Displayed at the Intel Developer Forum for the first time, the Montevina mobile computing platform has been specially designed to take over the company’s highly successful Santa Rosa notebook architecture. Montevina will host the new 45nm Penryn processor architecture, which means integrated WiMAX capabilities but could not opt for one choice in the ongoing high definition format war. Consumers will win in the end with this approach, as they will be able to watch movies that are exclusive to either format, while Toshiba and Sony sit down, bubbling in a corner.

This is a very appreciable effort from the Intel factories, since it is a chip manufacturer and to offer such support for both disc formats is simply a burden as the two formats commonly share the same codecs: H.264, VC9, and MPEG-2. It is this onboard support for either of the two platform that makes system makers choose either HD DVD or Blu-ray capability, or even both.

Seen overall, this HD format hype shall be easily overtaken by the on-board WiMax support that Montevina caters to.

by Mitesh Ashar

Original Post

Current electricity generation in india

This post was originally posted by NR Meel at our associate blog www.electroscope.blogspot.com and has been crossposted with due permission of author.

Electric power generation in india is done mostly by government sector entities, and are controlled by various central public sector corporations, like National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, National Thermal Power Corporation ,nuclear power corporation of india and various state level corporations.. The transmission and distribution is by the grid corporation ,State Electricity Boards (SEBs) or private companies.

Current per capita power consumption comes to around 600 units (KWH) per year.

Installed capacity

Grand Total Installed Capacity is 132,110.21 MW.( 2006)Thermal power plants·

• Coal based thermal power is 70,682 MW which contributes 53.3 % of total insatalled base· Gas Based
• Thermal Power is 13,691 MW which contributes around 11% of thermal based power·
• Oil Based Thermal Power contributes around 1% of total thermal power

Current installed base of Thermal Power is 85,575.84 MW which comes to 64.7% of total installed capacity from all sourses.

Hydro power plants

India was one of the poineering states in establishing hydro power plants . Current installed base of Hydro Power is 34,654 MW which comes to 26.2% of total installed capacity. Today Hydro sector has turbines as large as 250 MW and single stage projects as big as 1500 MW Nathpa Jhakri .

Nuclear Power Plants

Currently 17 Nuclear Power reactors produce 4,120 MW which comes to 3.1% of total installed base.

Renewable power

Current installed base of Renewable Power is 6,761 MW which comes to 5.9% of total installed base.

Capacity addition by 2007

As per data (as of May 2006) shared by Power Ministry, addition power of 19,680 MW will be added in remaining period of 10'th Five Year Plan (2002-2007).

OEE-Overall Equipment Effectiveness

The concept of OEE is quite popular among Manufacturing Industries. It gives a good measure to the concerned authorities that how the Equipment is performing as a whole. It could be of individual stand alone machine or of full line. Though I have known the concept since last 5 years and also have used it many times during my job, but it was also tough to explain it to somebody.

Recently, one of my Professors, Prof Soumish Dev was teaching the concept again as part of Operations Subject. The way he explained it, was simply awesome. I am sharing the same explaination with you.

As can be seen in the picture above. Lets understand the concept from analogy point of view rather than taking it directly to machines and plants.

• Lets assume that there is a student of Engineering, who has 365 days in the year.
• Out of 365 days lets assume that 100 days are for holidays, as no student should study for 365 days. Then 265 days are left. This is known as Loading Time, while 100 days are known as Not Scheduled Time.
• Now, out of planned 265 days of working, student fells ill for aroun 15 days. Now, this gives us actually 250 days, where the student actually worked, and is known as Running Time. While the 15 days are known as Idle Time.
• Now, lets assume that the student claims that at his efficient or effective state of mind an health he can complete 80 pages of a book per day. So, this can be considered as Theoretical Output that is expected during the Running time. So, in this case it would be 250x80=20000 pages in the year. But, actually we found that he has read only 15000 pages. The reasons could be several that reduced his efficiency and effectivenes. So, 15000 pages, is known as Actual Output.
• Now, at the end of the year, teacher took a test of the student. The test was out of 15000 pages he studied during the year. As, the student has read it effectively and efficiently he should have got 100 marks out of 100. But, he got only 70 marks. Now, whats the reason. It means that out of 15000 pages he read only 70% properly. Other 30% was bad quality reading. So, he read only 10500 pages properly and the 4500 pages not properly. So, 10500 can be said as Good Output.

So, now we will calculate the OEE of student during the considered year. It will be comprised of following elements

• Availability i.e. Running Time/Loading Time or we can say actually followed time table w.r.t. planned time table.
• Speed Efficiency i.e. Actual Output/Theoretical output.
• Quality Efficiency i.e. Good Output/Actual Output.

Or if you notice carefully, in the above diagram we have just calculated Good Output/Loading Time.

Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering (sometimes referred to as electrical and electronic engineering) is a engineering discipline that deals with the study and/or application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical power supply. The field now covers a range of sub-studies including those that deal with power, electronics, control systems, signal processing and telecommunications.

The term electrical engineering may or may not encompass electronic engineering. Where a distinction is made, electrical engineering is considered to deal with the problems associated with large-scale electrical systems such as power transmission and motor control, whereas electronic engineering deals with the study of small-scale electronic systems including computers and integrated circuits. Another way of looking at the distinction is that electrical engineers are usually concerned with using electricity to transmit energy, while electronics engineers are concerned with using electricity to transmit information.

Introduction to RFID in supply chain

Prof. John Clendenin, Chief Executive Officer of IC Logistics, U.S., has said “INDIAN ENTERPRISES must draw up plans to incorporate Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to meet emerging global requirements, failing which they will find it difficult to do business in a trans-national framework in the coming years.”

Research firm Gartner, Inc. states: “The use of RFID to capitalize on data flow in global supply chains could be one of the most-significant developments since enterprises first explicitly recognized the importance of information flow in the supply chain.”

Squeezing cost and inefficiency out of the supply chain has been one of the recurring mantras of the industrialized world for the past 50 years. The concept, as we would recognize it, has its roots in the Toyota Production System (TPS) of the 1950s and has been refined and improved significantly over the years to the point where one might expect that the most sophisticated devotees today have optimized their supply chains.

The journey towards perfection, however, never ends. In the very near future, the adoption of sensor-based Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology will allow the creation of the real-time, sensor-connected manufacturing plant. By adding RFID tags to every product, tool, resource and item of materials handling equipment, manufacturers will be able to get better demand signals from customers and the market. RFID will have a significant impact on every facet of supply chain management—from the mundane, such as moving goods through loading docks, to the complex, such as managing terabytes of data as information about goods on hand is collected in real time.

RFID is a technology that uses radio waves to identify objects automatically. The applications of RFID have been found in all kinds of consumer products and industrial equipment. RFID, which has the same purpose as a bar code, provides a unique identifier for the objects. The most significant advantage of RFID over the bar code is that the RFID does not have to be positioned precisely and can function approximately 20 feet from the scanner. RFID technology not only can help businesses satisfy customer requirement, but also increase productivity to stay competitive.

RFID technologies hold the promise of closing some of the information gaps in the supply chain, especially in retailing and logistics. As a mobile technology, RFID can enable “process freedoms” and real-time visibility into supply chains. RFID promises to revolutionise supply chains and usher in a new era of cost savings, efficiency and business intelligence. The potential applications are vast as it is relevant to any organisation engaged in the production, movement or sale of physical goods. This includes retailers, distributors, logistics service providers, manufacturers and their entire supplier base, hospitals and pharmaceuticals companies, and the entire food chain.

The technology in brief:

RFID is a generic technology concept that refers to the use of radio waves to identify objects(Auto-ID Center, 2002). RFID tags have both a microchip and an antenna. The microchip is used to store object information such as a unique serial number. The antenna enables the microchip to transmit object information to a reader, which transforms the information on the RFID tag to a format understandable by computers.

(The system as shown in Figure 1 consists of an interrogator or a controller, one or more transponders or tags.)

CMMI

“SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS WITH CMM”
ABSTRACT
“Understanding how software works will help to know how it can fail”
Abhishesh Kumar Sharma (AKS)
There are always these three questions going in the mind of any software implementers [19]:
Why is it so expensive to support and maintain my software products?
What is the reliability of our product?
What is the average cost of one software bug?
Software development organizations do not respond well to the process improvement innovations related to software development. Fear surrounds the thought of trying something new; this fear is accentuated by constant pressure to produce the product on time and within budget. Until recently, the vast majority of software companies did not view software development process management and improvement to be of strategic importance to the future of the company. Process improvement and its relationship to software quality, cost, and ability to meet schedules were never considered to be either useful weapons or, very often, differentiating factors against the competition. Nonetheless, a well-managed software development process can be viewed as an iterative process of information exchange and allows software development organizations a clear view and understanding of available information, providing a foundation for analysis and management of the software process based on hard facts and not vague assumptions. To be able to withstand the pressure of competition, to save money, and to improve the quality of production software, a progressive software development organization needs to realize the necessity for implementing and managing an efficient and effective software development process [16].
This paper presents the conceptual model of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) which is being examined of multiple relationships between measurable process quantities and characteristics. The quality in software project management has evolved over a period of time and CMM has matured to a significant level that almost all software companies follows this model. The next big model used is the ISO for the quality but CMMI has upper hand in advancement of tools and techniques [22].
Although CMMI has matured to enormous level but still many short coming has been found while following the procedure mentioned in the CMMI technical specification. Lots of research has been done in this upcoming field but still there is lot of scope for improvement hence this paper is going to discuss the shortcomings of CMMI and will provide many new tools to help overcome these problems.
The concept of system thinking has been used so that the various ideas will focus on the relationships between the parts forming a purposeful whole [3, 6, 11]. The concept of system dynamics has been incorporated as that will give the continuous view of events. Feedback from the external environment has formed the integral part of the model development. Organizations will be able to design, build, and implement high-quality software products in spite of unexpected organizational and personnel changes, implementation of new technologies, or changes in customer requirements.

An Overview of Nuclear Energy

Hello friends

This article was originally posted by Mr NR Meel at the associate blog http://electro-scope.blogspot.com/. With his due permission we are reposting it here.

An overview of nuclear energy

The main use of nuclear energy is to generate electricity. This is simply a clean and efficient way of boiling water to make steam that drives turbine generators. Except for the reactor itself, a nuclear power station works like most coal or gas-fired power stations. Nuclear energy is best applied to medium and large-scale electricity generation on a continuous basis .The fuel for it is basically uranium.

It is clean, safe, and usually cost-competitive, that is why nuclear energy is used to make the steam.

Nuclear energy has distinct environmental advantages over fossil fuels, almost all its wastes are controlled and managed, that is why, nuclear power stations do not cause any pollution. The fuel for nuclear power is unlimited, considering both geological and technological aspects. That is to say, there be plenty of uranium in the earth's crust and furthermore, well-proven (but not yet fully economic) technology means that we can extract about 60 times as much energy from it as we do today. The safety record of nuclear energy is better than for any major industrial technology.

Initially it was seen as more convenient and probably cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives such as coal, gas and oil. That was when the technology was first developed for harnessing the power of the atom in a safe and controlled manner, in the 1950s. Since then the question of sustainability has emerged, giving rise to a more sophisticated foundation.

The contribution Nuclear energy around 16% of the world's electricity. It is more than the world used from all sources in 1960. Today 31 countries use nuclear energy to generate up to three quarters of their electricity, and a substantial number of these depend on it for one quarter to one half of their supply.The questions of safety, economics, waste management, transport of nuclear materials, radiation, and avoiding weapons proliferation are all addressed in some detail.

Safety

From the beginning, safety of nuclear reactors has been a very high priority in their design and engineering. About one third of the cost of a typical reactor is due to safety systems and structures. The Chernobyl accident in 1986 was a reminder of the importance of this, whereas the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 showed that conventional safety systems work.

At Chernobyl in Ukraine 30 people were killed (mostly by high levels of radiation) and many more injured or adversely affected. This reactor lacked the basic engineering provisions necessary for licensing in most parts of the world (other reactors of that kind still operating have been significantly modified). At Three Mile Island in the USA with a similarly serious malfunction, the effects were contained and no one suffered any harm or injury.

Economics

Nuclear power reactors are expensive to build but relatively cheap to operate. Their economic competitiveness thus depends on keeping construction to schedule so that capital costs do not blow out, and then operating them at reasonably high capacity over many years. By way of contrast, gas-fired power plants are very cheap and quick to build, but relatively very expensive to operate due to the cost of their fuel. With rising gas prices, and the high cost of moving coal long distances, nuclear plants are generally competitive with both gas and coal in most parts of the world, and becoming more so.

Wastes

Nuclear power produces wastes, which are restricted and managed, with the cost of this being met by the electricity customer at the time. It does not produce any significant wastes, which are dispersed to the environment. It therefore avoids contributing to increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Transport of nuclear materials

Safety is the prime requirement with nuclear transports, particularly those of highly radioactive spent fuel, and the record is remarkable. Shielding, and the security of that shielding in any accident, is the key with any nuclear materials, especially those, which are significantly radioactive. There has never been any radiation release from an accident involving such materials. For instance, spent fuel is shipped in large and extremely robust steel casks weighing over 100 tonnes, and each holding only about 6 tonnes of fuel.

Radiation

Ionizing radiation, such as occurs from uranium ores and nuclear wastes, is part of our human environment, and always has been so. At high levels it is hazardous, but at low levels it is harmless. Considerable effort is devoted to ensuring that those working with nuclear power are not exposed to harmful levels of radiation from it, and standards for the general public are set about 20 times lower still, well below the levels normally experienced by any of us from natural

Avoiding weapons proliferation

The initial development of atomic energy during and immediately after the Second World War was to produce bombs. An early concern when the atom was harnessed for controlled civil use was that this nuclear power should not enable more countries to acquire nuclear weapons. Through the United Nations, procedures were set up to ensure this, and in fact they have been perhaps the most eye-catching success of that body. No nuclear materials such as uranium from the civil nuclear fuel cycle have ever been diverted to make weapons. In fact today the whole picture is reversed in that a lot of military uranium is being brought into the civil nuclear fuel cycle to make electricity, which is widely seen as a positive development, unimaginable 40 years ago.

introduction to bioinformatics

BIO INFORMATICS.,the name itself gives us the whole meaning involved in the branch.It is the branch of biology dealing with informatics.Tonnes and tones of data is released daily from the wet labs,scientists,researchers etc.This information is useless unless it is sorted out in a manageable manner



Friends this is 21st century,every century had its own marking in the educational history.tn the same way this century is named as the INFORMATIC ERA.The two most important and the booming fields informatics and biology are combined in a very appreciable manner to form this bio informatics.

Bioinformatics involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution.
The terms bioinformatics and computational biology are often used interchangeably. However bioinformatics more properly refers to the creation and advancement of algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems inspired from the management and analysis of biological data. Computational biology, on the other hand, refers to hypothesis-driven investigation of a specific biological problem using computers, carried out with experimental or simulated data, with the primary goal of discovery and the advancement of biological knowledge. Put more simply, bioinformatics is concerned with the information while computational biology is concerned with the hypotheses. A similar distinction is made by National Institutes of Health in their working definitions of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where it is further emphasized that there is a tight coupling of developments and knowledge between the more hypothesis-driven research in computational biology and technique-driven research in bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is also often specified as an applied subfield of the more general discipline of Biomedical informatics.
There are many databases and sites which deals with bio informatics..The most important and the basic one is the NCBI database,which help us in having the basic information about the proteins,chemicals,3d structures etc.The site for NCBI is
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
there are many sites and softwares ,useful which i’l be posting them in a short while.

EE

My dear friends this is my first article,in this i gave you some information about the fieid of electricals and electronics.
The Field
Electrical and electronics engineers conduct research, and
design, develop, test, and oversee the development of
electronic systems and the manufacture of electrical and
electronic equipment and devices.
From the global positioning system that can continuously
provide the location of a vehicle to giant electric power
generators, electrical and electronics engineers are
responsible for a wide range of technologies. Electrical and
electronics engineers design, develop, test, and supervise
the manufacture of electrical and electronic equipment.
Some of this equipment includes broadcast and communications systems; electric motors,
machinery controls, lighting, and wiring in buildings, automobiles, aircraft, and radar and
navigation systems; and power generating, controlling, and transmission devices used by
electric utilities. Many electrical and electronics engineers also work in areas closely related to
computers.
Many authorities believe that the two fields of "electrical
and electronics engineering" and "computer science and
engineering" have now established separate identities,
although they still have much in common. Because of the
breadth of the field, however, general statements about
"electrical engineering" include electrical, electronics,
computer engineering, computer science, and related
areas of arts and sciences in the broadest context and
application.

JIT-Jidoka (Autonomation)

Hello friends

This is my third article in series of Toyota Production System and JIT. The earlier two ones were Toyota Production System and Kanban.

I was recently writing the research paper on 'What are the true enablers of JIT?', and one of the true enabler under consideration was 'The enhanced information exchange between supplier and buyer'. In order to prove it to be enabler I presented the following discussion.

Another evidence, strengthening the notion of usage of information systems in JIT from the very start is Jidoka or Autonomation. This is a system, where quality assurance is made a prerequisite of JIT implementation. This is a information system, where if the quality of the product comes out to be bad for considerable number of consecutive times, then the signal is sent, which shuts down all the lines which act as customer or supplier to the defects producing station. This is done to maintain the continuous flow in JIT. If, the signal is not sent, then due to shortage of input material the customer lines will run without actually producing anything. Similarly, if the signal is not sent, then the supplier lines will keep on working leading to overproducing the output product, which the customer station (the defect producing station) would not be able to accept. And above all this is done to bring the immediate focus of everybody on the defects. This focus leads to the immediate remedy of the problem most of the times.

Now, how this signal is generated. In the traditional automobile environment, the operator or the authorized person on the defect producing station pulls the hanging rope (above the station). This rope is connected to all the lines. And pulling the rope from any point leads to the shut down of all the connected lines.

The method of generating signal was modified to electronic means, when the rope was replaced by a button available on all the stations. This button, when pressed via common electrical supply shuts down all the connecting production lines. And immediately, the Andon board, with all the stations labeled on it, starts indicating that problem is occurring on a particular station. And recently, with the improvement of Internet and Information Technology this is done by use of sophisticated electronics and software.

This system was enhanced and implemented to an extent, that even the supplier and customer plants were sometimes stopped by the signal.

ONE LAKH CAR CONCEPT

Ratan tata had a dream of substituting two wheelers on road . this developed into emergence of a ONE LAKH CAR CONCEPT, which is said as the chairman’s parting gift to the Indian auto industry.

The criterion was simple, to produce a small car with four doors, cheap to run and conseable to produced in different parts of the country.

Beginning with styling , this car could be said as funky, starting from the zing DNA which was modeled on the smart and looked much like the Daimler Chrysler micro-mini ,the car is now evolved. It sports a sleek, but blunt front end which is reminiscent of the recent of recently launched ZEN ESTILO .

The engine is at the back thus there will be little space behind the back seat and the rear hatch. So luggage space will be premium and be one of the draw backs os the car. The rear hatch will provide access to the engine which will be below the rear seat, the folded over seat presents the luggage carrying option.

It’s a two cylinder engine and 660cc for a petrol engine and 700 engine. The company is planning to launch the petrol engine and later the diesel one.The diesel engine will be two cylinder common rail engine with a specially designed injection system developed by BOSCH for low cost two cylinder engines .Mileage has been reportedly to be 26kmpl in tata internal test and company is trying to increase it to 30. we can expect around 24kmpl on the road .

The two dorrs on the either side are tiny,especially the rear ones. How ever they offer comfortable ingress/egress considering the height of the car. Considering the height of make and rear engine,inside spacing is premium make. One thing is sure, it’s a city car and could be out of place on high ways.

The price is expected to lie between 1.1 -1.25 lakh

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING is the one of the oldest departments .
A mechanical engineer had ,has and will have a good demand.
Each and every industry begin put up needs a mechanical engineer and its a VAST subject.
This particular branch has many sub divisions ,which may be broadly divided into
1)Heat& thermodynamics.
2)Manufacturing.
3)Machine design.
4)Machines.

HEAT & THERMODYNAMICS

This can be defined as the heart of the mechanical engineering.
This mainly deals with the heat which may be further divided into
a)Refrigeration and Air conditioning, which may be further divided into crogenics (dealing with temperatures below 120k)
b)Combustion :This deals all the combustion processes taking place in engines.
c) Heat transfer:This deals with processes like convection,conduction,radiation which are being used in the development of solar energy concepts,thermal power plant engineering etc.
d)GAS dynamics : This particular area is developing htese days and lot of reasearch is going on these days in computational fluid dynamics.

Manufacturing:

This is another important part of the mechanical engineering mainly dealing with the various conventional and modern methods of producing machine parts and processing techniques.
This you can say is a kind of dry subject where u come across various machines used for producing parts.
In this area the importance is given for developing methods to get parts machined parts with greater surface finish and quality,reducing wastes during producing parts,developing new modern methods for solving the problem of huge waste.
The modern methods include processes of converting one form of energy to another in order ot get parts machined .ex:using water jets,lasers,electron beams etc to remove material.
A lot of research is going on these modern methods which is quite interesting..

Machine design:

In the current world a lot of credit is begin given to manufacture things with grater compactness.This is what is begin dealt in this part.
this has huge huge demand ,like designing of cars of very small size.
This mainly deals with the designing of parts to work under particular constraints, taking decisions like which material can be used to replace a particular material for many reasons like weight constraint,thermal behavior etc.

To conclude this is a very interesting area with a lot of thing to be explored

Machines:

This part may be said to contain many things which we can see in daily life having greater usage and importance like automobiles,fans,turbines etc.
This part will provide you with the basic concepts and working principles of the machines.This one too is an interesting area with a lot to be explored.

Patents uncovered!!!

Nowadays, the product life cycle is decreasing day by day. Well, the reason could be globalisation, enhancement in communication& transportation technology, increase in disposal income and many many more. But, its a fact that today we demand more and more every day. For instance, one can compare the number of car models that were available 10 years ago to the number of car models available today. And the rate of introduction of new variants or new models is increasing day by day.

This phenomenon, leads to cut throat competition among companies in the market. The only solution they have is to come out with the better, trendier and new model as compared to present ones. But, the problem is that it requires lot of efforts in terms of money, time and training. So, it may happen that a new molecule of drug or new engine in the car has taken more than 20 years to be developed. So, the company just introduces the new model to compete. But, the technology an information in market spreads immediately, and even the small and insignificant players come up with the imitation of the new product in very short span of time at lower rates.

Now why, the small players can come in the market at lower rates. The cause is simple. The original product company spent lot of money in developing the product, and the company needs to get ROI for the development. But, these small imitators invested nothing so they can produce it cheaper.

How companies take out ROI?

The governments in the world do understand the significance of research and innovation based products. And wants to encourage them in a way, that the companies can get decent amount of ROI ( Return of Investment).

The government do consider another aspect of this. The aspect is that it wants to encourage all the people to go for innovation. So, that the whole race, country or humanity progresses. But, if somebody has worked on some particular innovation. For example, lets assume that discoverer of Fire has patented the technique to create Fire. Now, according to patent rights, this inventor only can give rights to anybody to use, sell or work further on this technology.Then, if this guy didn't give rights anybody then what would have happened of all the progress of millions of years. Secondly, what if there was another guy who had the similar idea of creating a fire, but was not knowing that this has already been patented. The second guy, according to rights of patents can't even work on this idea.

So, in a way giving rights for unlimited period or unlimited channels, can instead of encouraging can discourage humans for research and innovation.

The latest trend is that the companies around the globe outsource the Patenting Procedure and Protection of the same to KPO's (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) like Evalueserve. KPO's keep a watch on all the new developments which can affect the Patent of the Client.

Till date, best source of keeping the watch on these Patent developments is this site http://uspto.gov/

I have used this site exhaustively, to understand the patents of competitors of the products I was working upon, and will suggest you, including the budding engineers (students) to make it a habbit to go through this site, for the products one is interested in.

Regards

Prabal