Britain’s finance minister will unveil a plan to woo investment from emerging markets such as China and India, while also promoting British business talent overseas, two newspapers said.

Gordon Brown, the man seen as most likely to succeed Tony Blair as the next British prime minister, will announce the strategy as part of his 10th annual budget speech on Wednesday, The Times and The Financial Times reported.

Central to his bid to attract more foreign funds is a shake-up of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), the agency responsible for marketing Britain abroad, The Times said, citing unnamed government sources.

Experts from the private sector are to be brought in to help with the "transformation" of the agency under new chief executive Andrew Cahn, a former industry director of British Airways, the newspaper reported.

Mr Brown will ask Mr Cahn to change the way Britain is marketed "particularly in high growth countries such as India and China," The Times said.The agency will be urged to work with academics and business people in various countries to attract more research and development to Britain.

The global outsourcing industry could face sweeping consolidation in the next two years, mainly driven by low-cost global competition and broken business models, according to a report by Forrester Research, an independent technology and market research company. The report says that even the top-tier Indian firms will have to rely on acquisitions to compete with global giants like IBM, EDS or CSC.

The report titled "Are Barbarians at the Gates Of Outsourcing?" delves into the potential buyouts of global outsourcers by private-equity firms as well as the trend among the outsourcing industry’s long-standing leaders’ scramble to buy or be bought. It indicates that leading equity buyers believe there’s an opportunity to make money fast in the outsourcing space, and that mergers and acquisitions could dominate this space mainly due to double-digit growth in new deals, long-term contracts, and the popularity of outsourcing.

Further, given the recent hostile takeover attempts in this space globally, the report sets expectations of seeing many of the leading outsourcers making aggressive moves to protect their businesses.

These strategies will range from acquiring other competitors to acquiring their own stock. Already, there are firms (like EDS, CSC, ACS) that have made moves on these lines. For the top-tier Indian firms, the report asserts that they will likely have to acquire either BPO firms with vertical industry knowledge or infrastructure outsourcers with experience of managing servers, desktops, or networks.

The market for online and mobile music is set to grow exponentially in India as broadband finds increasing traction. Wait, that’s a no-brainer. Everybody knows that. Let’s start again. The market for online music is going to grow humongously in the coming years, thanks to broadband. And to the availability of secure platforms which will enable consumers to download digital music, by paying for the tracks. AirTel has just announced a musical initiative with its Easy Music, in which Bharti’s pre-and post-paid customers can download songs from AirTel’s outlets around the country, either as a HelloTune or a ringtone.

While downloading of music and ringtones has caught on like wildfire as Indians’ enduring love affair with the mobile phone and film music compels them to pay for the service, industry players say that it will be the downloading of digital music online which will a huge business. "When Apple Computer launched the iPod in 2003, and offered legal downloads of music, it created a whole new marketing channel for music marketed," says Sudhanshu Sarronwala, CEO of Soundbuzz, a firm which hopes to do in India what Apple did in the United States.

How does Soundbuzz’s model work? "We have license arrangements with 60 labels, which gives us the right to offer the music for downloading," says Mr Sarronwala, who, in an earlier avatar, helped set up and give the initial buzz to a channel called MTV in India. "And we have tied up with Tata-VSNL and Bharti broadband, which will enable their customers to download music from our website." The technology for downloading the music and, more importantly, ensuring that digital rights are not violated, is based on Microsoft’s .NET platform.

"Digital rights management is very important for online music sales because the software, by Microsoft, and other vendors, ensures that songs legally dowloaded cannot be sent out on the Internet by customers to their friends and relatives. The legally downloaded tracks can be burnt into a CD, though, and played on an MP3 player, or the PC," Mr

Sarronwala said in a telephonic interview from Bangalore on Tuesday.Soundbuzz, which Mr Sarronwala claims is the only company in India, so far, to offer a music download service, will be tying up with other broadband providers to make the service more broadbased. "Downloading of digital music is going to be huge because it is relatively inexpensive to download a song from the Internet, and with the use of broadband on the rise, it could be a phenomenon," he said.