Bangalore-based BPO Easiprocess is ready to set up its new office in Pune, which can house 500 employees in one shift.

The expansion of the new office is in view of potential third party clients that Easiprocess is confident of securing shortly.

Presently, Easiprocess has two offices in Bangalore - one that is functional and accommodates 100 workers and another that serves as a Disaster Recovery site.

Sparsh BPO Services, an arm of Intelenet Global Services, has announced that it has kicked off its new delivery centre in Puducherry.

The inauguration of new delivery centre is a part of Sparsh plans to offer customer support services for mobile service operator Aircel in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

According to the sources, the delivery centre would serve Aircel's prepaid and postpaid customers in Tamil Nadu circle.

The conglomerate also claimed that with an initial headcount of 1600, the centre is a major BPO employer in puducherry.

In a bid to offer greater freedom to corporates in pricing their equity shares, the finance ministry has decided to ease the norms for issuance of foreign currency convertible bonds (FCCBs) and equity through ADRs (American Depository Receipts) and GDRs (Global Depository Receipts).

The move would facilitate companies in pricing securities at competitive rates in the current times of pessimistic markets.

As per the new norms, the pricing of ADR/GDR issues would be based on the stock prices prevailing in the domestic market in the past two weeks.

The government of the country has sanctioned a pact with the United Arab Emirates to allow any number of airlines to fly to each other's destinations and foray into commercial agreements and code-share.

Under the proposed pact, both countries would be entitled to designate any number of airlines for functioning mutually agreed services and enter into cooperative marketing arrangements like code- share or other commercial arrangements.

According to the sources, the designated airlines would be free to decide tariffs at reasonable levels.

Novartis, a leading Switzerland based multinational pharma company, has informed that it has linked up with USV, a leading healthcare company to sell its anti- diabetic product Galvus in India.

According to the sources, the tie up with USV is a part of Novartis plans to pitch its proposed product against Merck's Januvia by pricing it lower - in the Indian anti-diabetic market which saw total sales of Rs 1,672 crore till June 2008.

The internet provided a kaleidoscopic view of happenings in Mumbai from the time the first shots were fired.

Through blogs and file-sharing websites, those held up in the turmoil rapidly provided accounts from the ground plus links to the best news reports appearing on the web.

One rich source of information was ‘Twitter’ that offers text-message-length information . Its Mumbai thread provided a stream of clips, not all precise, from observers on the ground, with some details of deaths, military blockade, clashes, and even the suspected names of terrorists.