Understand the technologies driving mobile banking , the implications to banks and financial institutions and what it takes to make money through mobile banking.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is outsourcing of business functions generally performed by white collar and clerical employees to achieve various benefits such as cost savings, better quality and ability to focus on core competence....

Over the past decade or so, India has emerged as an attractive destination for offshore outsourcing. Companies all over the world are offshoring many different processes to India to harness the benefits offered by the country. Many Fortune 500 companies have either outsourced their processes to India or set up their own captive centers in the country, thus validating India’s value proposition for an offshore services hub.

The Information technology (IT) Outsourcing and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market in India is growing rapidly. According to the estimates of NASSCOM, Indian offshore IT and BPO market is worth USD 17.6 billion, which is about 44 percent of the total global IT and BPO offshoring market (about USD 40 billion).

Customer service is an important business process that firms carry out to ensure satisfaction and retention of their customers. Though it is a non-core activity of an organization, it helps in creating goodwill of the company since the company caters to the wants and needs of its customers. Customer service is a key parameter that differentiates a company from its competitors. Earlier, companies used to carry out customer service in-house, but due to benefits such as focus on core competency, cost savings, quality and flexibility, which are applicable for business process outsourcing as a whole, many companies are outsourcing customer services now.

Information Technology (IT) outsourcing is the outsourcing of information technology and systems operations to a suitable third party technology solutions provider. Companies outsource their IT development and management tasks to vendors to achieve benefits such as financial savings, technical capabilities and marketplace agility. The regular advantages of outsourcing such as focus on core competency, cost and quality are the driving factors for IT outsourcing as well.

This article details the basics behind outsourcing and outlines different outsourcing modes and also the advantages to outsourcing.

Business Method Patents are legal means of providing protection and exclusive ownership rights to individuals or companies for their business processes, product or service that are mostly implemented by computers.

Patents granted to software programming techniques and computer-implemented inventions are generally grouped under the term software patents. They include features of an invention that may be implemented, partly or wholly, by software.

Patents of living organisms, that can include plant and animal species, and related biological and biotechnology-enabled inventions, are classified as patents on life forms, or bio-patents. The USPTO demystifies IP concepts in its website, and also explains them to the younger generation thus: “If you are an intellectual property owner, you should protect your rights. If you are a user, you should respect them. It is just as wrong to steal intellectual property as it is to break into a home, steal a car, or rob a bank.”

A patent is a Government-granted exclusive right, or a set of specified rights, to an inventor, or a person who claims to be the true and first inventor (or the discoverer of a new process) to make, use or sell an invention, usually for a specified term. It may be granted for such novelties, (criteria for which are defined in law)