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According to fresh rumors making rounds of late, software giant Microsoft - which already has its own branded Surface Windows RT-based tablet scheduled for launch later this month - is apparently working on new strides into the hardware arena --- with a Microsoft-branded Windows Phone 8 smartphone.

Seeing the slow progress in the implementation of the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress, India's Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan has appealed to the signatories to "fast track" the ratification.

Natarajan also assured that India was committed to the covenant and stressed that the Indian government had already kicked off the ratification process.

The coal ministry will charge even government-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL) a "reserve price" for the coal blocks allotted to it, a senior coal ministry official revealed.

The official told Business Standard that the ministry had decided to not to allot any coal reserves for free. The coal ministry has recently allocated 116 blocks to the public sector company, and most of these coal blocks are yet to be explored.

Consumer spending in India and China together will triple, and the consumer markets of the two countries will worth a whopping $10 trillion by the end of the current decade, as per a book by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) titled "The $10 Trillion Prize."

According to the book, Indian consumers would spend around $3.6 trillion, while Chinese consumers would spend nearly $6.2 trillion annually on consumer goods by 2020.

In an agreement which will strengthen Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA unit as the fourth-ranking US wireless carrier, the German company is reportedly close to finalizing a T-Mobile merger deal with smaller competitor MetroPCS.

On Tuesday, at Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, the database giant said that rather than being merely a "marketing application," social networking should serve as a fundamental technology for other cloud applications.