The growing popularity of online bus ticketing web sites like Redbus.in, Tickevala.com, Yatra.com, Theluxurybuses.com, Abhibus.com, Indiabusticket.com and Checkouttrip.com is spurring online travel company Makemytrip.com to join the crowd.

Makemytrip.com’s Chief Marketing Officer Sachin Bhatia told The Economic Times:

The online bus-ticketing business is likely to witness robust growth in the coming years. We are aggressively planning to foray into this sector and are looking for tie-ups with some of the budding online bus-ticketing portals.

Although air travel is growing in popularity with the middle class, road networks in India are said to carry about 85% of the country’s passenger traffic.

Buses have a reach into the hinterlands of India that trains and planes just cannot match.

Makemytrip.com, which claims to be India’s largest e-commerce company, started off with air ticket booking for NRIs and then branched off into hotel reservations, car bookings, budget travel packages and holidays in India.

Two male Indian Ph.D students were killed at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, USA.

The students Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam were both shot once in the head.

The double homicide took place on LSU’s campus late in the evening on Thursday, Dec. 13.

The homicides are said to have occurred at the Edward Gay Apartments, located near the intersection of West Roosevelt Street and Gov. Claiborne Drive, adjacent to the LSU Band practice field.

The names of the two students suggest that they could be from the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. 

The New York Times reported that Allam was in the chemistry program and Komma was a biochemistry student.

The apartment complex in which the students lived is in sight of the transition office of Louisiana’s Governor-elect Bobby Jindal.

Microsoft put out a public beta of its Hyper-V server virtualization tool on Thursday, well ahead of its original scheduled arrival date of Q1 of 2008.

Hyper-V will be a feature of some versions of the upcoming Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft is making the Hyper-V beta available with Windows Server 2008 RC1 Enterprise for download at http://www.microsoft.com/ws08eval.

The final version of Hyper-V is set for release within six months of the RTM of Windows Server 2008.

Virtualization lets companies save on hardware costs by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single machine and is a key enabler of server consolidation.

Microsoft’s Hyper-V tool will compete with products from virtualization leader VMware.