Oil higher in Asian trade, trading above USD 50

Oil prices were higher in Asian trade on Thursday, pushed up by a smaller-than-expected rise in US crude reserves, analysts said.

New York's main contract, light sweet crude for May delivery gained 70 cents to USD 50.08.

Brent North Sea crude for May delivery advanced 59 cents to USD 52.18.

Prices received a mild boost from the latest US energy report released yesterday, which showed the country's crude stocks increased by a smaller margin than the industry had forecast, analysts said.

The weekly Department of Energy report showed crude reserves rose by 1.6 million barrels in the week ending 3rd April 3, lower than the gain of 1.9 million barrels that analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires had predicted.

"The increase in US crude oil inventories was less than some had feared," said David Moore, a commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.

Oil prices are down significantly from record peaks of above USD 147 reached in July last year, pulled down by worries about the global crisis, but Algeria's energy minister had an upbeat outlook.

"The global economy is starting to pick up, especially in the United States," Algeria's energy minister Chakib Khelil said on Wednesday.

Google addresses newspaper woes

The majority of newspapers should be online, says Google boss Eric Schmidt, amid criticism it should share some of the millions it makes from newslinks.

Media owner Rupert Murdoch has questioned if aggregators like Google should pay to use content.

The Associated Press is to sue to protect its content at a time when the industry is losing readers to the web.

"I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants," Mr Schmidt told newspaper bosses.

"These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you [annoy] enough of them, you will not have any more," he warned the Newspaper Association of America's (NAA) annual conference in San Diego.

While he praised the way newspapers initially embraced the internet, Mr Schmidt said they had since dropped the ball allowing the likes of Google to take over content distribution.

"There wasn't an act after that. You guys did a superb job, and the act after that is a harder question."

"Fair use"

In a question and answer session at the end of his keynote address, suggestions that Google and the internet were eroding the intellectual property rights of newspapers was downplayed by Mr Schmidt."From our perspective, there is always a tension around fair use - and fair use is a balance of interest in favour of the consumer."

Industry analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell told the BBC this was the wrong way to look at the argument over how Google profits from newspaper content.

"The real question is, 'Is it fair for news companies to produce all this content for Google and for Google to keep the lion's share of revenue?'

"What we should be focusing on is 'fair share'." said Mr Doctor.

In a blog post, the search engine giant claimed it did provide a financial kickback for newspapers through online advertising.

"We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models - whether news sources choose to host the articles with us or on their own websites," wrote Alexander Macgillvray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property.

"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month."

Techmeme, which is an aggregator of technology news, agreed that the value of what they did was in driving traffic back to the original publisher of a story.

Much-awaited booking for Tata's Nano starts today

The much-awaited bookings for Tata Motors's Rs one-lakh car Nano opens on Thursday across the country for a limited period of 17 days.

It is understood that Tata Motors itself has sold over 75,000 booking forms from its 218 outlets across the country, although the forms are available at over 30,000 locations across 1,000 cities at company dealerships, branches of State Bank of India and other preferred financiers, and outlets of Westside, Croma, World of Titan and Tata Indicom.

When contacted, a company spokesperson said 'response is progressively increasing everyday', but declined to divulge details.

In a statement the company said it has joined hands with 18 banks and financial institutions to help customers with the booking process and to provide retail finance facilities.

The booking amount ranges between Rs 2,850 and Rs 4,110 among different banks.

While the interest rates on the loan amount would vary between 9 per cent and 14.25 per cent, customers would have to spend Rs 3,468-Rs 4,431 as insurance premium, the company said.

Those, who do not want to avail the financing facility, can book the car directly by paying an amount between Rs 95,000 and Rs 1.4 lakh depending upon the version of Nano.

The company said deliveries would be in a phased manner and within 60 days of the closure of bookings on 25th April, it would process and announce the allotment of 1,00,000 cars in the first phase of deliveries, through a computerised random selection procedure.

Nano, touted as the world's cheapest car, would be available at Rs 1.23 lakh-Rs 1.72 lakh (ex-showroom, Delhi).