Happy to see congress voted to power in India

Indian elections results are out and Election 2009 was an unqualified victory for the Congress. Results prove that for the People of India nation comes first rather than the religion which other leaders were trying to play on.

I am happy with result because the election has led to a stable government that will not have to succumb endlessly to the irritations of coalition politics and the threat of a midterm breakdown.

From my little following I can say Congress played it simple strategy wise ( speaking MBA terms now !!)

> It chose a single leader for PM right from the outset. Manmohan singh able, wise and regarded as a thinking man who could lead India out of the economic turmoil. Contrastingly BJP shot its foot by raising debate of national leader as Modi mid way through elections this confused the voters.

> Focus on youth: India has one of largest youth population in the world. By playing cards on this front gave congress a big boost. In the 1990s, the BJP was the natural party of the youth; today, the Congress is the beneficiary of India’s demographic transformation. The party must ask why the children of BJP voters aren’t comfortable voting for the BJP.

In short people voted for rice dhal rather than a kichdi of BJP or third front!!

In terms of delivering value congress now has less barriers in terms of implementing policies which it faced last time. So road is set for economic development of India lets hope people get benefited by riding once the road is laid !

3Iphones make 1 Tata Nano !! Why Iphone is not making grounds in India

Tata Nano or popularily called "people's car" was launched At Rs 1,00,000 ($ 2,500 when announced and $ 2,000 on the launch day thanks to Dollar appreciation against Rupee) Tata Nano is the world’s most inexpensive, yet it is a very modern car that gives 100 Km for a charge of 5 liters of petrol, has a stylish finish and meets the European norms for emission.

It will be interesting to watch Tata Nano unfold in the market over the next couple of years. BBC endorsed it best when it calls Tata Nano a demonstration of Indian ingenuity. !!

The unveiling of Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world, triggers an important event in the car market. The car cost brings down the cost of ownership of an entry level car in India by 30%

So what does tata nano got to do with my title "3Iphones make 1 nano !!Why Iphone is not making grounds in India". The topic of The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid

By C. K. Prahalad proposes that businesses, governments, and donor agencies stop thinking of the poor as victims and instead start seeing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs as well as value-demanding consumers. He proposes that there are tremendous benefits to multi-national companies who choose to serve these markets in ways responsive to their needs. After all the poor of today are the middle-class of tomorrow.

Since India has a huge base of middle class families if the products satisfy the needs of those growing middle class indians then product will be a hit.

We all know Iphone was a paradigm shifter in mobile industry as it made most of the manufacturers to focus on

> User interface
> Touch

The phone is doing quite good overall with 30 million sales worldwide but still iphone is not huge sucess in India these are few reasons I could think of

> Pricing needs to be bang on ! The iPhone is also priced far beyond the reach of even many middle-class Indian consumers. Even though market research company, estimates iPhones cost less than $175 to build, both Apple and Airtel stuck to the approximately $700 price for the phone in India, vs. $199 with a two-year AT&T contract in the U.S. In India, then, three iPhones equal one Nano, the $2,000 car that Tata Motors (TTM) launched in India just two weeks ago. If we see why Nokia has been strongest player in India The price tags of every Nokia mobile phone is very reasonable. I mean, I can still get a GSM mobile phone for as less as Rs. 1200 ( 22 $) in India with all the basic features and that will last long enough to pay me back with my dues.

> Functionality : Indians just use their phones differently. With spotty data coverage and slow download speeds on non-3G networks, the iPhone just doesn't dazzle the way it does in the U.S. Also, Indian customers like to forward text messages; Nearly 70% of them do that at least once a day. Until recently, the iPhone didn't allow users to do that. "It's a big functionality issue" solved only recently

> Competition : Nokia the world leader in mobile industry along with other players launch mobile phones which are customised to indian needs for eg Nokia 1100 which is simple and easy to use phone which has a torch light which people can use during nights in India. Over 200 million Nokia 1100 cellphones have been sold since its launch in late 2003, making it the world's best selling phone handset

> 3G: Iphone is best used when we use it with applications !! such as google maps on iphone. This would need data connection which works best on 3g etc. 3g is yet to be rolled in India even after the promised to auctioned by Dec 2008. so hopefully launch of 3g and wimax

Many things happening in India ..polictics, launch of Nano, india gaining ground in G20 west finally understanding that fortune is "truelly at bottom of pyramid"

Year that was in 2008 !

(Appeared in the Education Times Column of Times of India (Bangalore Edition) on January 5, 2008)

General

· Barack Obama getting elected as the first African-American President on November 4, 2008 and his first speech cheered the whole world.

· Chinese demonstrated their extra-ordinary skills in project execution by hosting Summer Olympics 2008 in Beijing and by winning the largest number of medals in the Games; India created a record of winning the first-ever Gold for individual sport, thanks to Abhinav Bindra

· ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) made India proud by putting Chadrayaan (lunar vehicle) into space on October 22, 2008 and successfully putting MIP (Moon Impact Probe) on to the Moon soil (with Indian tri-color painting on it) on November 14, 2008; they also put ten satellites into orbit in quick succession within tem minutes using an India-made launch vehicle PSLV on August 25, 2008.

· Tate Nano (the $ 2,500 people’s car) that was showcased to the world on January 10, 2008 grabbed global headlines. Singur in West Bengal unfortunately could not house the plant that was set to roll out Tate Nano in 2008, thanks to petty politics; Tate Nano will roll out of Sanand in Gujarat.

· Terror strike takes a heavy toll on India in the year 2008; Bombay terror attack on the “iconic” Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay on November 26, 2008 (India’s 9/11) and its scar will take years to disappear. This year saw terror attacks in Jaipur (13^th May), Bangalore (25^th July), Hyderabad (26^th July), Delhi (13^th September).

· Major tragedies strike India in 2008; Kosi flood in Bihar (13^th to 27^th September) affects millions; Himachal Naina Devi temple tragedy (2^nd August), Jodhpur temple tragedy (30^th September)

· Chinese earthquake in May, Myanmar cyclone in October, and blasts in Pakistan in October impacted many in the world

· Tripura, Meghalaya & Nagaland in March, Karnataka in May, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram & Jammu-Kashmir get newly elected State Governments in 2008.

· Left parties withdrawing support to Manmohan Singh-led Government, and the support extended by Samajwadi Party made the Government very weak

· Inflation going past 12% in June 2008 hurts the common man most; luckily, it started climbing down by the end of the year.

· Rupee that was at Rs 47 / USD appreciated to Rs 38 /USD in before crashing to Rs 50 / USD by the year-end.

· Tatas did India proud by acquiring Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford in May

· Reliance starts pumping oil from Godavari basin and expect to get about 16% of India’s oil needs

· NASA Phoenix lands on Mars surface on June 1, 2008

· Private sector built green-field airports in Bangalore and Hyderabad started operations on 23^rd March and 23^rd May respectively.

· 123 Agreement (Nuclear Agreement) was signed by USA and India on October 10, 2008

· Central Government notifies the Sixth Pay Commission; the salary differentials between private sector and the government to reduce substantially; salaries for academic staff to increase dramatically.

· The “Sub-prime” crisis in the housing sector in the United States causes a global financial tsunami in November 2008 that is set to impact all the countries (including India); US Government nationalizes Freddie and Fannie, bails out AIG and Meryl Lynch; Lehman Brothers declares bankruptcy; the three US auto majors get bailout; Toyota set to declare losses the first time ever in 71 years. USA talks of 750,000 job losses in the year. Indian IT industry too will be affected, though it is too early to assess the impact

· Oil prices that started at $ 60 per barrel in January shoot up to $ 143 in November before crashing to $ 37 in December

Products

· Apple launching iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008 in USA (and August 22, 2008 in India) brought 3G and “Touch” to mart phones in a big way. Blackberry launches “Bold” in September and “Storm” in November; Nokia launches N96 in August, 5800 in October, N97 in November; Samsung launches Innov8 in November and Omnia in December; Sony Ericsson launches Experia in November; Palm launches Centro & Treo 800W; Apple and Blackberry push Palm way down – 8% by year end from 36% earlier) in smart phone sales.

· Ultra-thin notebook computers saw action along with low-cost “Netbooks” (small footprint, low power consumption and less expensive notebooks). Apple launched MacBook Air in January; Lenovo launched x300 in May

· Netbooks enter mainstream; sell more numbers than Apple iPhone; Asus Eee PC and Acer Aspire dominate

· Firefox 3 browser was launched on June 17, 2008; creates history with record downloads within a week

· Intel “Atom” processor (that consumes very low power) enters “Netbook” market and targets mobile users (including smart phones)

· Intel also announces next generation Core i7 processors; Intel engineers do India proud by designing an energy efficient processor for Xeon server

· Google enters mobile phone space by announcing G1 on October 22, 2008 (based on Android operating system); it also launches “Chrome” browser in September

· NVidia launches “Telsa” personal super computer in India

· Titan launches Braille watches for blind at Rs 995 along with National Association for Blind in November

· Microsoft launches Windows 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 in May; also beta versions of Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Azure (cloud computing product); their “Silverlight” platform to counter Adobe Flash during Chinese Olympics gains traction

· DTH (Direct To Home) started gaining momentum with Reliance and Airtel announcing their products during Dasara and Deepavali season respectively (October and November)

Marketplace

· Japanese Daiichi Sankyo acquiring Indian pharma major Ranbaxy for $ 4.6 billion was indeed a big ticket acquisition; Infosys bid to acquire UK-based SAP practice company Axon was nullified by HCL Tech putting a bid for a higher price and winning it for $ 753 million; other acquisitions include Mindtree acquiring Aztec Software, Birla-owned IDEA acquiring the first Indian mobile service provider Spice for Rs 2,720 Crores and Times acquiring job portal “DICE” from Cyber Media. Swan Telecom and Unitech selling off within months of taking GSM license smacks of corruption.

· Globally, IT leader HP acquired EDS for $ 13.9 billion; Oracle acquired BEA for $ 8.5 billion. Verizon acquired Alltel for a whopping $ 28.1 billion; Microsoft bid to acquire Yahoo fails; JDA acquired Supply Chain software vendor i2 for $ 346 million; McAfee acquired Secure Computing for $ 465 million.

· HP annual turnover crosses $118.4 billion as of October 31, 2008 a record by any IT company (including IBM)

Technology

· HP researchers discover the 4^th circuit element (after Resistor, Conductor and Capacitor)

· MIT researchers demonstrate “wireless” electricity (may change power charging for mobile devices), “raw solar” (will help wider adoption of solar energy) and thermoelectric cooling (might help data centers)

· HP and QualComm announce “Gobi” chip for mobile phones

· Blue-ray wins the standard war in DVD storage format

· Lenovo and Apple launch super slim laptop products using advanced technology

· Sony announces “TransferJet” with speeds of up to 375 Mbps

· Zephyr solar plane clocks more than 83 hours of unmanned flying

Indian IT companies

Indian IT companies top the IAOP (International Association of Outsourcing Professionals) list of Top 10 global outsourcing companies with Infosys (3^rd), TCS (6^th), Wipro (7^th), Genpact (9^th) and Tech Mahindra (10^th) in the fray

Indian IT services revenue touches $ 52 billion by March 2008 (NASSCOM); IT services (including ITES) generate 1.6 million jobs; Karnataka benefits with IT /ITES jobs exceeding 500,000 (STPI November 200

Infosys headcount touches 100,000; gets included in “Global Dow” – 150 most innovative global companies

Wipro enters African markets by starting office in Morocco and Ethiopia

HCL acquires Axon for $ 753 million

Airtel (India;s largest mobile service provider) reaches subscriber base of 83 million by November

WNS gets $ 1 billion (over 10 years) contract from Aviva

Reputation Institute in USA puts Tatas in the 6^th position (out of Top 200) globally

TCS starts 1,000 seat facility in Ohio, USA

3i-Infotech turnover crosses Rs 1,000 Crores in 2008

MNC companies in India

· Nokia rolls out its 200 millionth handset out of Sriperumbudur plant (near Chennai) in India

· Motorola plant commences production in April in Sriperumbudur (near Chennai)

· Dell laptops roll out of Chennai factory

· CSC talks of doubling India count from 16,000 to 32,000 (before meltdown)

· Chicago-based Agile software major “Thought Works”, expands in India

· Virtualization major VmWare expands India operations

· Fab-less semiconductor major ARM expand India operations

· Yahoo Labs start in Bangalore

· Juniper Networks increases headcount in India significantly

· Sutherland talks of 10,000 seat BPO in Chennai

· Semiconductor major (earlier part of Motorola) FreeScale

expands India operations

· French IT services major Steria has big plans for India

· Citix to invest $ 200 million,

· Intel 6-core energy efficient Xeon processor for servers is designed in India

· Hyundai starts second car plant in Chennai

Telecom

· Policy muddle in 3G and WiMax licenses, controversy surrounding the sale of Swan & Unitech Telecom stall India’s telecom growth story

· Mobile phone subscriber base to cross 380 million by Dec 31, 2008 (it stood at 374.13 million as of Nov 30, 2008 with monthly additions exceeding 10 million as per TRAI)

· IP telephony becomes legal from August 2008

· Japanese telecom giant DoCoMo enters India thru Tate Telecom

· India’s first 3G phone rings on December 13, 2008 thru MTNL

Education & Research

· Six new IIT’s start at Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad

· Indian Institute of Science celebrates the century year starting May 27, 2008

· Supreme Court upholds OBC reservation excluding “creamy layer”

· ACM Infosys Foundation Award for computer science takes off – Prof Daphne Koller is the first recipient

· Indian Science & Engineering research Council (on the lines of NSF in USA) gets Parliamentary approval in December

· Government starts 100,000 scholarships for outstanding high school graduates; SBI launches 100,000 merit-cum-means scholarships

Applications

· Reserve Bank of India announces “mobile banking” guidelines

· Airlines shift to 100% e-ticketing from June 1, 2008

· Hughes to provide Internet connectivity across trains using their satellite network

· Electricity Exchange take off in 2008

Infrastructure

· Airtel laying US Japan cable

People

· Barack Obama is the next US President

· Bill Gates steps down from full time Chairman position in Microsoft; Yahoo Founder Chairman Jerry Yang retires

· Nepal monarchy is gone; get its first President, Parliament and a new Prime Minister

· Pakistan gets a new President and a Prime Minister; democracy returns

· IIT Kanpur educated Dr Subba Rao is the new Governor of Reserve Bank of India

· Chandu Bhave is the new SEBI Chairman

· India-born Lakshmi Mittal-controlled Arcelor Mittel has annual revenue exceeding $ 100 billion in 2008

· Bharti Mittal of Airtel joins ITU Board (the first for any Indian)

· Kiran Karnick gives charge of NASSCOM President-ship to Som Mittal

· Former Prime Minister VP Singh, spiritual guru Maharshi Mahesh Yogi and social worker Baba Amte pass away

Visitors to India in 2008 include

· Prime Ministers of UK, Turkey, Nepal, French President, Syrian President and Prince Andrew

· CEOs of IT companies (ARM, FreeScale, Microsoft and RIM), FMCG majors (Coca-Cola, Pepsico, and Unilever), automation major Schneider and defence electronics major Thales

· Rupert Murdoch

· Presidents of Cambridge University, Oxford University, UC Berkeley and Purdue University

· Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus

· Presidents of Royal Society, UK and IEEE Computer Society, USA

Interesting numbers

· India’s student population in USA in 2008-09 (94,000)

· Anil Ambani Power IPO subscribed 173 times (Rs 11,760 Crores)

· Foreign Exchange reserves start at $ 240 billion, surge to $ 343 billion, crash to $ 240 billion and rise to $ 250 billion)

· World lost $ 10 trillion in year 2008 stock market crash (the biggest ever)

· SWITCH (Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCSm Cognizant and HCL) holds 2.4% of global IT outsourcing ($ 667 billion)

· India’s GSM mobile subscriber base crossed 200 million; overall mobile subscribers crossed 300 million in March and 385 million in December

My home town Belgaum

I was amazed by this pic taken in Belgaum. It sort of gives new perspective or view to see belgaum :). Coincidentaly the place from where this pic is shot seems to be just meters away from my home sweet home in Belgaum. See the google maps link to my home

Bring it on says Belgaum i am very pleased to see it grow.. Although we hear rumours of tata project or IIT etc to be in Belgaum it has changed its image from pensioner's paradise to creating a niche in education, health industry, wide range industries from IT to hydraluics, Indal etc. I hope the growth continues ! This video shows it all

I am proud to be a Belgaumite and would love to contribute something to its growth sometime in my life.

Vote for it : Belgaum IT company in top 30 of hottest start ups in India !!

Right now it is in 9'th position ...do vote for it by dec 22 in TATA NEN Hottest Startup

Vayavya Labs of Belgaum in top 30 for TATA NEN Hottest Startup Awards

The TATA NEN Hottest Startup Awards are a result of the combined efforts of TATA, a rapidly growing business group in India with significant international operations, and the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), a non-profit organization, and India's leader in entrepreneurship education.

Vayavya Labs, (Tata NEN hottest startup details) a Belgaum based IT/ Internet/ Software developer has been nominated in the top 30 hottest startups. Voting lines will open from 25 Nov and will be open until December 22. 5 winners will selected after December 22.

Vayavya Labs offers tools, which target the semiconductor, & design services firms. The flagship product DDGen (US patent pending) attempts to de-mystify the device driver development for embedded platforms.

why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India

Gaurav makes a very good case why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India after Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).

Social media practitioners often talk about it in cryptic “conversation is an art form” terms, but you can break down the social media delivery process in six discrete steps that correspond to the oft-quoted Listen -> Understand -> Engage model:-

1. Data collection
2. Data mining
3. Data analysis
4. Insight delivery
5. Consulting
6. Solution delivery

If you look hard at these six steps, you’ll find that many of them are driven by dynamics that make them very susceptible to outsourcing –

Sudhakar Ram writes below in his column about the first two waves after that i have posted column on third wave of outsourcing !! interesting read go on

As a participant in and observer of the Indian IT industry for over two decades, I can clearly see that software and services exports from India have gone through two waves and that a Third Wave is now unfolding.

Wave 1, which we can trace to the 80s and 90s, clearly established that Indian IT professionals were competent and could be trusted to deliver world-class work. This was the staff augmentation era of the industry, largely serviced through onsite services.

Wave 2, starting off in the mid-90s and currently at its peak, established India as an offshore programming destination. With labor arbitrage as the basic value proposition, Indian companies established large offshore development centers that had competent technical staff, mature CMM processes and world-class infrastructure. While the trigger for Wave 2 was the offshore initiatives by companies like GE, Motorola, Nortel etc., the Y2K bug gave it the necessary momentum. Although things slowed a bit after the dotcom bust, the shrinking IT budgets actually gave an impetus to large Fortune 500 companies to use offshore centers as a mainstream sourcing option.

India Making Millions Servicing U.S. Social Media Ecosystem

By Daya Baran at October 19, 2008 8 Comments

While U.S. companies struggle to figure out how to monetize social media, India’s tech industry has quietly figured out a way to make hundreds of millions (maybe billions) by servicing it. Everything from simple comments on blog posts, to breaking sophisticated Google CAPTCHAs, Craigslist listings, Gmail invites, Yahoo personals, MySpace profiles, YouTube uploads, Facebook friends, and now I hear Twitter tweets are all being performed in India on behalf of social networking sites, blogs, photo sharing, video, and other social media and Web 2.0 sites that depend heavily on online advertising as a revenue source are using these services to boost traffic and users.

For a mere $2 a thousand CAPTCHAs can be solved and a thousand blog comments or MySpace friend requests can be sent generating lots of traffic and links for that property and hence, increasing its online ad revenue. Workers in India process the data using CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

In fact, entire social media and online advertising campaigns featuring cool graphics, widgets, RSS feeds, and other sitewide interactive features are being created and executed from India. “Anything that can be outsourced is being outsourced today in India,” said Rajdeep Sahrawat, vice president of Nasscom, or the National Association of Software Service Companies, an Indian software industry trade organization that closely monitors trends in outsourcing.

India is no longer a call center outsourcing destination. It has rapidly become a global hub servicing the U.S. social media ecosystem and as well as the higher knowledge industries. Services such as tax filing and preparation, medical diagnoses, legal work, and financial portfolio analysis are turning to India for sophisticated knowledge processing and analysis work. A start-up that provides such services is PreMedia Global and in two years, it has grown from a brother-and-sister operation to a company with 900 employees. Initially, they considered launching a call-center operation, said co-founder Kapil Viswanathan, who studied engineering at Stanford University. However, they quickly saw that the nature of outsourcing was changing. “High-end, knowledge-based services — that’s where the growth is coming from,” he said. “We think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The California Fair Trade Coalition said virtually any job that uses a computer could be outsourced, and it argues that U.S. trade laws should be changed to make it more difficult for companies to send work overseas. “Those countries have large and rapidly growing pools of talented people with much lower incomes than people with similar skills in the United States”, Imelda Abarca, director of the coalition. But other experts say the threat to high-end American jobs is overstated. India remains “an undergraduate factory,” said Raffiq Dossani, a Stanford University researcher who studies higher education in the South Asian country. “This limits the kind of work that can be outsourced to India.”

Pervez Sikora, a former U.S. newspaper executive who is now chief operating officer for 2AdPro Media Solutions said he’s been approached by Silicon Valley companies that want to outsource their marketing work. It is not just U.S. companies that are flocking to India. European, Japanese as well as Arab companies are tapping into India’s legions of highly trained graduates that India’s vast college system produces every year. But the number of U.S. companies using these services is expected to increase due to the financial crisis which is forcing them to cut costs.

And, it is no longer simply tech companies that are looking to cut costs using these services - Disney, DreamWorks, and drugs manufacturing companies are also tapping the India pool. “We are getting multiple inquiries a day”, said Todd Brownrout, chief marketing officer at 2AdPro, which expects to expand from 350 employees to 1,000 next year. Two years ago, it was a tough sell to convince newspaper executives that someone sitting halfway across the globe could produce ads that are accurate and on-time. Sanjiv Gupta, chief executive of Hyderabad-based Pressmart, which provides Internet technology services to publications, argues this outsourcing model can be applied to editorial content. “It’s outsourcing of creativity,” he said.

While the debate continues over just which American jobs may be vulnerable to outsourcing, executives like Sikora acknowledge that the new global economic order is forcing Americans to reposition their careers. “People have to understand how jobs are changing and start reinventing themselves,” he said. “No one will be able to stop this now.”

Where Are The JOBS In India

An interesting read in TOI today !! Purely shows how outsourcing/growth of india is still Intact

Where Are The JOBS In India

Citigroup on Tuesday cut 53,000 more jobs, triggering fears of more layoffs by other companies across industries. TOI, however, has decided to be contrarian. Instead of only writing about pink slips, it hunted out companies that are actually hiring. Here’s the lowdown on

FINANCE & CONSULTANCY
SBI to hire 25,000 new hands, according to bank chairman O P Bhat. The fresh recruitment will be done this fiscal – 20,000 in the clerical cadre and 5,000 supervisory staff
Bank of India to hire 10,000 over the next few months. This, on top of over 30,000 fresh recruitments in 2008-09. In the next 2 yrs, the bank plans to take in 75,000 Accenture will hire 10,000 people in India by 2010, says COO Stephen J Rohleder
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, top global mgmt consultants, looking to hire 3,500 in India in 3 yrs
MetLife, a new private insurance co., will recruit 30,000 agents and 2,000 managers by March 2009, says CEO Rajesh Relan
BPO
Aegis BPO Services will add 1,000 people per month this fiscal
CAMPUS HIRING
IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta say all their students have got placements for next year
INFOTECH
Tata Consultancy Services to hire 30,000-35,000 people this year, says a spokesperson. TCS made 24,789 technical campus offers for 2009-10, a 13% jump over this year
Infosys is sticking to plans of hiring 25,000 people this fiscal, says CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan. Infosys has made around 20,000 offers for next year
Satyam plans to hire 8,000-10,000 people this fiscal, according to its HR head, S V Krishnan
MANUFACTURING
L&T will hire 10,000 people over the next 3 yrs, according to CMD A M Naik
Maruti has decided to hire 1,000 fresh hands despite the sluggishness in the auto sector, says a company spokesman

Ever wondered why Americans are more “private” than the BRIC countries

Ever wondered why Americans are more “private” than the BRIC countries..
I found a interesting hypothesis on how the attitudes of people towards privacy ( broadly in terms of social network) of different countries in world !!






India could be seen as both highly social and also not afraid of government action. And Brazil would be highly social (Gaurav calls Indians and Brazilians “hyper-social”), but Brazilians seem somewhat afraid of government action (see their recent wiretapping scandals).
This model has lot of questions unanswered but I really appreciate the thought process in collecting data..read further for more information
https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/blogs/isdyahoofellow/hypotheses-about-privacy-attitudes/

Optimism wanes as crisis reaches India

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7676719.stm


- My view India wont be effected as US UK but there is some amount of effect on finance and housing market in india. My view is that Indian growth is domestic growth so it will be least impacted however impact will be there but not as a earthquake rather a small tremour.

will miss you dada

Ganguly announced his retirement !! This was bit of shock to me but it was inevitable with the way selectors were ploying around him.

Few great things I like in him

Most important thing I like in Ganguly, is the way he made an amazing comeback into the Indian cricket team after being thrown out.. It was a huge mess.. & only the will power and determination of Ganguly that got him back into the team..

He is a great guy who had one of great offside shots and would come down the track and smack the bowler! Best compliment to his offside shots is well exemplified by Rahul Dravid , "on the off-side, first there is God, then there is Saurav Ganguly."

I love his leadership skills he would always back his decisions and never afraid to experiment. I would say he is the person who brought "never give up attitude" to indian team. This attitude has infected others too :) present breed of youngsters i feel are the fruits of his seeds.


Hail dada.... you are true sportsman and your life is inspirational not only to upcoming cricketers but your leadership spirit, innovative skills, never give attitude can be applied to all spheres of life.

Sourav Ganguly - Winning is Everything

US recession has least impact on India !

Following my earlier post in india about recession in india ...here is one good reason why recession didn't effect India

Source

Sonia Gandhi should thank Finance Minister Chidambaram for resisting proposals to put part of India's foreign exchange reserves into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, which would buy equity shares in top global companies. Such a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF)—an idea backed by eminent economists, the Prime Minister and the Planning Commission—would have suffered huge losses because of the collapse of global stock markets since January.

Neither Opposition politicians nor the public would have been satisfied by explanations that stock markets yield high long-term gains, notwithstanding short-term fluctuations. The Left Front would have accused Chidambaram of gambling away the country's precious assets in casino capitalism. Others would have accused top Congress politicians of having been bribed or arm-twisted into making dubious investments.

The government would have protested its innocence, and pointed out that the SWFs of many other countries—from China and Abu Dhabi to Singapore and Norway—had also suffered in the market slump. But Indians are quick to see scams when anything untoward happens. The reputation of politicians is so poor that many voters will believe accusations of manipulation and venality.

The US share price of Citibank, the world's biggest bank, plunged from $56 last year to a low point of $19 last week. Citibank was hit, along with many other top banks, by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US. Now, investment experts will find much logic in all SWFs investing a bit in companies like Citibank, since it is the biggest bank in the world. Yet, had Chidambaram set up an SWF, and had it invested in Citibank, Opposition politicians would have screamed “scam” after the latest price crash. Marxists would have claimed that the US had arm-twisted India into investing in sinking banks as a price for the nuclear deal!

Now, there is indeed an economic case for a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Many countries with surplus forex reserves—mostly oil exporters, but also China and Singapore—have set up SWFs that invest in equities. The total assets of all SWFs are almost $3 trillion. India has experienced a huge inflow of dollars in recent years, raising its reserves to $ 290 billion, vastly in excess of any balance of payments needs.

In a seminal paper two years ago, economist Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary, made a strong case for developing countries to put excess reserves into stock markets. He argued that, for balance of payments security, a country's forex reserves should equal one year's short-term debt. As an abundant precaution, he assumed that countries would hold reserves of double that amount. Even after that, he calculated, 121 developing countries would have excess forex reserves of $2 trillion, equal to 19% of their combined GDP in 2004.

He further pointed out that these reserves yielded pathetically low yields when invested in short-term gilts—the traditional, safe practice. History showed that investment in equities would yield far more, despite short-term fluctuations. So, Summers proposed that all developing countries should put excess reserves into SWFs that would invest in shares. In India's case, he calculated that the additional yield from such an SWF would be 1 to 1.5% of GDP (or Rs 40,000-60,000 crore) per year.

This was by no means the only rationale for SWFs. Fast growth had made China a massive importer of raw materials, and so its government invested in commodity companies globally. Indeed, it gave massive sums in foreign aid as an additional sweetener to African commodity producers.

Many in India wanted to follow suit. Their aim was not simply to earn a higher yield on forex reserves, but to secure long-term sources of raw materials—oil, gas, coal, non-ferrous metals, even palm oil. The ONGC invested in several oil and gas ventures abroad. Tata, Birla and Sterlite invested in foreign mines for commercial reasons, unrelated to deploying excess forex reserves.

However, Chidambaram and RBI Governor Y V Reddy opposed any SWF for India. Reddy said SWFs were appropriate for countries with mineral windfalls (such as oil exporters), but not India. Indeed, India ran a modest current account deficit, and so needed to import dollars. Now, the world had flooded India with far more dollars than it could absorb, but this was not a structural surplus.

Chidambaram took refuge in a further technical argument. He said that SWFs made sense for countries with excess savings, reflected in a fiscal surplus. But India ran a large fiscal deficit.

However, these technical economic arguments pale besides the political ones. The stock market is seen by both Opposition politicians and the general public as a dodgy place full of crooked manipulators (remember Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh). Making money on the stock market is seen as risky, if not actually sinful. Indeed, the Left front has stymied attempts to put pension/provident fund money into Indian equities.

In these circumstances, Chidambaram has shown sound political judgement in refusing to set up an SWF. This might in the long run yield some financial gains. But it carries short-term risks, as has just been demonstrated by the slump in stock markets. So, it needs to be avoided in the run-up to the next general election.

Why india is better then China

Very nice article by Shashi Tharoor in TOI

In an April 20 column, I argued the case for Sino-Indian economic co-operation, suggesting the two countries had complementarities that could make such co-operation mutually beneficial (as some companies in both countries are already proving). I also dismissed any talk of comparing India to China, arguing that the two countries' systems are so different that we simply can't compete with China in the growth stakes. Lest some readers infer from this that i think China is superior to India in every respect, let me assure them that they are wrong.

Certainly, in absolute numbers, the Chinese are way ahead. Their export of electronic goods now tops $180 billion a year. One out of every three shoes exported in the world is made in China. They make 75% of the world's toys. Foreign direct investment is at the level of $70 billion a year (for comparison, India gets $15 billion). Shanghai alone has nearly 4,000 skyscrapers (more than all of India, and exceeding Los Angeles and Chicago combined). China has built an estimated 60,000 kilometers of expressways in less than two decades and will soon outstrip the total length of the US highway network. Per capita income has risen nearly 10-fold since 1978 to over $6,000 a head, and the number of people living in absolute poverty has dropped from 425 million two decades ago to 26 million today. The population is almost totally literate; life expectancy is reaching developed-country levels. This year, China is expected to overtake Germany to become the world's third largest economy, behind the US and Japan. It won't stay Number Three for long.

Against this, though, are a number of factors suggesting that not everything is rosy in China. Economic growth has occurred at breakneck speed, but that means some necks have been broken: the human cost of development has not been negligible (population displacement, farmers thrown off their lands, villages flooded by dams, mounting pollution, low-wage labour in appalling conditions, widening disparities between the rich and the poor, an absence of human rights and few checks on governmental abuses). The Chinese have seen great and rapid improvements in their Internet access, but Beijing employs some 40,000 'cyber-police' to monitor politically-undesirable activity on the Web.

Equally important, China's success has not just been China's; a disproportionate share of the benefit goes abroad, to the foreign companies who have set up factories in China. It has been estimated that of the $700 American price of a Chinese-made laptop, only $15 remains in China. Only four of the country's top 25 exporters are Chinese companies, according to Forbes magazine's Robyn Meredith, who adds that in practice, 'Made in China' really means 'Made by America (or Europe) in China'. The Chinese financial system also leaves much to be desired. Where India has been running sophisticated stock markets since the early 19th century — and Indians are so skilled at doing so that they got the Bombay stock market up and running within 24 hours of the 1992 bomb blasts — China is new at the game, and not particularly adept at it.

The financial information provided by China's companies, especially those in the large governmental sector, is notoriously unreliable, and standards of corporate governance are low. There are no world-class Chinese companies with sophisticated managers to match Tata or Wipro or Infosys. China's capital markets are weak and its banks inefficient: the Chinese banking system carried an estimated $911 billion in unrecoverable loans as of 2006, mainly to government firms. State-owned enterprises still account for half of China's economic assets. China has yet to master the art of channelling domestic savings into productive investments, which is why it has relied so extensively on foreign direct investment.

And the world has yet to develop any confidence in China's legal system (where a contract still means whatever the government says it means). In other words, it still lags behind India on the 'software' of development — not just technical brainpower or engineering know-how, but the systems it needs to operate a 21st century economy in an open and globalising world.

And then there's politics. Whatever you might say about India's sclerotic bureaucracy versus China's efficient one, our tangles of red tape versus their unfurled red carpet to foreign investors, our contentious and fractious political parties versus their smoothly-functioning top-down Communist hierarchy, there's one thing you've got to grant us: India has become an outstanding example of the management of diversity through pluralist democracy. Every Indian has been allowed to feel he or she has as much of a stake in the country, and as much of a chance to run it, as anyone else: after all, our last elections were won by an Italian woman of Roman Catholic heritage who made way for a Sikh to be sworn in as PM by a Muslim president, in a nation 81% Hindu.

And our largest state is being ruled by a Dalit woman, from a community once considered 'untouchable', who bids fair to rule the entire country if she can make the coalition arithmetic add up right after the next election. She wasn't promoted by the Brahmin elite in New Delhi; she rode to the top on the ballots of her political base. Contrast this with Beijing, where political freedom is unknown, leaders at all levels are handpicked from the top for their posts, and political heresy is met with swift punishment, house-arrest or worse. India's politics means its shock-absorbers are built into the system; it has endured major road-bumps without the vehicle ever breaking down.

In China's case, it is far from clear what would happen if the limousine of state actually encountered a serious pothole. The present system wasn't designed to cope with fundamental challenges to it except through repression. But every autocratic state in history has come to a point where repression was no longer enough. If that point is reached in China, all bets are off. The dragon could stumble where the elephant can always trundle on.

Go Kiss the World!

Today @ IIMB, there was a very nice talk by Subroto Bagchi.. Mr. Subroto Bagchi is the Co-founder of MindTree..

The audio file can be downloaded from here: http://coffeewithsundar.com/SubrotoBagchi.mp3

Hope you enjoyed listening to it.. I am sure, it will make you introspect!

Two years back, Mr. Bagchi gave a talk to the class of 2006 (@ IIMB) on defining success.. He concluded the talk with the words “Go Kiss the World!”.. These were the same words which his blind mother told him before her last breath. And this talk @ IIM Bangalore inspired Mr. Bagchi to write his book - “Go Kiss the World!”

The following is the talk which Subroto Bagchi gave 2 years back. This was taken from here: http://www.mindtree.com/subrotobagchi/iim-bangalore-speech/#more-1

Subroto Speaks

Go Kiss the World

I delivered this speech to the Class of 2006 at the IIM, Bangalore on defining success. This was the first time I shared the guiding principles of my life with young professionals.

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was, and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system, which makes me what I am today and largely, defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government- he reiterated to us that it was not ”his jeep” but the government’s jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary.

That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family driver, as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother’s chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was neither gas, nor electrical stoves.The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

He used to say, “You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it”. That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons.

We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply,” We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses”. His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”.

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term “Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan” and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”. Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world.

In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.

My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion.

Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.

Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said,

“Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and God’s speed. Go! kiss the world.

Bangalore is global No 2 Tech Spot

Great news :0))

As per the latest global tech spot list of Silicon.com, Bangalore is only next to Silicon Valley.

http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/techhotspots/ lists the top 20 global hot spots

1. Silicon Valley
2. Bangalore
3. London
4. Tokyo
5. Boston
6. Cambridge
7. Shanghai
8. Tel Aviv
9. Seoul
10. Beijing
11. Chennai
12. Pune
13. Singapore
14. Helsinki
15. Moscow
16. Hong Kong
17. Hyderabad
18. New York
19. Sydney
20. Shenzhen

India & China have 4 each; US has 3 and UK has 2; while Australia, Finland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Russia and Singapore have 1 each.

Interestingly America has 3, Europe has 4, Middle East has 1, Australia has 1 while Asia has 11!

Reasons for indian mobile industry boom

Making talk cheap

Manoj Kohli

Mobile telephony is increasingly taking the shape of a mass movement in India. The country is adding eight million new subscribers every month. With over 260 million consumers, we are now the second largest market in the world. Today, the mobile is an essential device for the masses, a sea change from the times when it was regarded as a luxury.
Telecom is a rare sector where tariffs have gone down despite inflation reaching a three-year high of 7.5 per cent. Call charges have fallen by about 95 per cent from its 1997 level of Rs 16. At Re 1 per minute, Indian mobile tariff is the lowest in the world, despite the fact that taxes and levies still account for as high as 30 per cent of revenues. An average American pays around Rs 13 per minute. UK and France have a rate of around Rs 7-8. Brazil, which is often compared to India, has a call rate of more than Rs 6 per minute.
People often wonder how this seemingly impossible task of cutting tariffs on a continuous basis has been achieved.The dream story of Indian mobile industry has been about constant innovations to achieve hyper growth and bringing down costs. In 2004, a unique business model of outsourcing networks and IT applications to strategic partners was tried out. This business model not only helped optimise cost but made the cost structure more predictable. Today, this has been replicated by other operators in India and globally.
Rapid network roll-out and deep distribution has been the mantra for Indian operators. Today, the mobile network covers over 70 per cent of India’s population. The mobile companies have been able to create a deeper retail footprint than FMCG marketers. What has also helped is that the price of handsets has also come down tremendously.
Mobile tariff innovations over the years have played a big role in the rapid penetration. Free incoming calls, lifetime-prepaid cards, recharge coupons as low as Rs 10 were all innovations which opened the service to a huge mass of potential customers. Along with the sharp drop in the rates, there has been increasing simplification and transparency in the tariff plans.
It is not just the local tariffs that have beaten India’s inflation though. Long distance and roaming rates has also seen bursts of huge cuts. While national long distance rates have fallen from a peak of Rs 24 to Rs 1.50, international long distance rates have dropped from Rs 96 to a low of Rs 7. Roaming rates have fallen from a high of Rs 10 to Re 1. Broadband rates too have been cut rapidly. In fact, customer additions in broadband have taken off by more than 50 per cent during the last one year alone.
Indians are heavy mobile phone users. An average Indian talks more than 500 minutes in a month, which makes India second among all nations on mobile phone usage. Two important demographic changes have made this possible. For millions migrating to urban cities, it is the only means of keeping in touch with families and friends. The other important change lies in the fact that 25 per cent of world’s under-25 population lives in India.
Telecom continues to beat inflation hands down. But it’s not just about beating inflation. The sector is effectively adding to everyone’s purchasing power by slicing off cost of communication continuously and significantly. Add to that the sector’s ability to create opportunities for direct and indirect employment all around. By making communication affordable and widely available, the sector is aiding the productivity of even the remotest farmer and shopkeeper in the country. In fact, we have just started realising the huge multiplier of speed, efficiency and productivity effect that the sector has on other sectors of the economy.
The telecom sector will face a stiff challenge of coping with increasing inflationary pressures on all its input costs to maintain the affordable tariff levels in the next few years. However, the good news is that the sector will continue to overcome any recessionary or slowdown trends in the economy, as there is still another 800 million population to be covered as well as the pent-up desire of a billion Indians to connect with each other.
The writer is CEO of a telecom company.

Trends the social use of handsets in India and China…

Emerging (Markets) Telephony

• listen

Tuesday June 5, 2007 8:57AM
by Imran Ali in News

Looks like Nokia’s heeding the research of staffer Jan Chipchase in their design of handsets for emerging markets.

Matt Web noted in his recent keynote at Reboot, that a new range of Nokia phones addresses the social use of handsets in India and China…

They’re for the emerging markets of India and China. There, the context of use of the mobile is the whole village.

• The phone tends to be shared by a family, so each one stores 5 distinct addressbooks
• There’s often one mobile per village, which is rented out. These home can have pre-set call time/cost limits, so make renting out easier. They come with a built in business model
• It turns out that after voice calls and texting, two major uses of a phone are as a clock, and as a torch. So there’s an external screen showing the time, and a torch built-in
• There’s a teaching mode
• And these phones are cheap. Like, 40 euros cheap

I’m impressed to see such a huge corporation building products in such a progressive way.

Well done Nokia :)

Innovate or Perish

Source :Innovate or Perish

Taking a clue from the oft-repeated notion of “publish or perish”, I talked of the need for “innovate or perish” in the Sun Technovate event in Mumbai, on the eve of Sun Founder & Chairman Scott McNealy’s second visit to India. There were nearly 200 CIO/CTO in the audience.
My pitch was simple; innovation is happening […]
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Taking a clue from the oft-repeated notion of “publish or perish”, I talked of the need for “innovate or perish” in the Sun Technovate event in Mumbai, on the eve of Sun Founder & Chairman Scott McNealy’s second visit to India. There were nearly 200 CIO/CTO in the audience.
My pitch was simple; innovation is happening all around in India, accelerating in the past 5 years, both inside and outside IT. It could be
Infosys Global Delivery ModelIttiam becoming the “world’s most preferred DSP IP supplier” within three years of starting in 2001 and retaining it for 3 years in a rowKashyap perfecting slowly but steadily the concept of “public toilet” through “Sulabh Sauchalay”Reliance launching Rs 777 Classic phonesRobosoft starting 700-seater Tech Park in sleepy Udupi (known only for low cost restaurants)HiCal Magnetics supplying components for NokiaCosmic Circuits re-designing low-end electronics items for ultra-low costlow cost eye surgery in Arvind Hospitalslow cost heart surgery in Narayana Hrudayalaorthe slew of low cost water purifiers.
Innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage to serve the 5 billion people in the “bottom of the pyramid”; innovation provides 10-20 times (not percent) cost and time savings.
Naturally, without innovation India Inc cannot remain competitive in the long run

Reliance launches entry level phones at Rs 777

Reliance launches entry level phones at Rs 777
May 16th, 2007
It is interesting to see Reliance pursuing the low-cost, high elasticity market of offering new phones at Rs 777 virtually wiping out “second hand” phones in the low-end category. Such low cost option also reduces the entry barrier. It is interesting to remember the Rs 25,000 price point that the bulky Nokia 6610 had in 1996-1998 time frame; we have indeed come a long way.
Unfortunately the political establishment that talks of “aam admi” is so busy wasting money on all grandiose projects that do good neither to the Government nor to the citizens but never take a moment to celebrate the real benefits “aam admi” gets, thanks to technology. One hope to see a generation of politicians who will genuinely work for the common man and woman of India.