TopNews

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.

In its ongoing attempts to bring about a reduction in its costs and to raise funds for developing `Atlantic' hybrid model, Fisker Automotive - the Anaheim, California-based electric hybrid automaker behind the `Karma' plug-in hybrid
- has reportedly held talks with prospective strategic partners.

According to an AllThingsD report, a strategic announcement by Internet search giant Google is apparently in the offing this week, with the company likely to bring on Street View images to its mobile Google Maps Web app.

The disclosure, coming from a review on Google Maps for Android by AllThingsD's Walt Mossberg, implies that Google is trying to fortify its hold on mobile maps, especially after Apple's iOS 6 maps fiasco.