Where Dreamers Dare!

The Consultancy Circus

2008-10-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

Consultancy, by its very nature, is a multifaceted job. It requires a huge array of skills for a project to be completed successfully and on time - and with all the involved parties satisfied. As the consultancy industry has become more competitive, consultancy firms have been put under pressure to offer a more comprehensive service that will ensure they continue to win new business. This has further broadened the scope of the consultant, who is now expected to manage increasingly complex projects and offer even greater knowledge and support to the client.

Emerging challenges in Project Management

2008-10-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

From http://news.top-consultant.com/UK/news_story.aspx?ID=5192

Managing complex projects, responding to change and prioritising projects within a programme or portfolio are among the most pressing issues for executives and technical professionals, according to new data from ESI International.

The figures have been released from the company’s Business Challenges and Hot Topics survey, which covered various levels of government as well as several different industries including aerospace/defence, financial services, IT, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and healthcare. Shortfalls in programme management and business analysis skills highlight many of the survey respondents’ concerns.

Among the results are:

-- When managing projects, the most pressing issue is managing complex projects, with 44 per cent of participants choosing this response. Close behind come ‘adapting to changing requirements’ (42 per cent) and ‘developing proper metrics to effectively track progress and outcomes’ (41 per cent).

-- When managing programmes or project portfolios, the most pressing issue, cited by 53 per cent of participants, is responding to organisational and environmental changes that impact the programme. Next was ‘prioritising projects within a programme or portfolio’ (45 per cent).

-- When managing business or project requirements, the most pressing issue (38 per cent) is communicating effectively with team members and stakeholders. A similar number (36 per cent) selected both ‘developing and improving business analysis competencies’ and ‘integrating project management and business analysis roles/functions’.

“The survey findings are important for all organisations because of the essential role projects play in driving organisations forward – from organisational change to new product development. Good project management drives success and, important at this economic juncture, helps organisations do more with less,” said J. LeRoy Ward, ESI executive vice president.

“The saying ‘knowing you have a problem is half the battle’ comes to mind. The project manager and senior executive survey respondents know where the trouble spots lie. Now they need to accurately assess their people’s skills and implement initiatives to close the gaps,” said Ward.

The survey also showed differences in project management challenges between the government and commercial sectors.

-- Managing global projects or dealing with cultural issues was cited as a greater concern to commercial organisations (17 per cent) than to government entities (five per cent).

-- Managing risk of high-profile projects is a pressing issue for 36 per cent of government sector respondents, but only for 26 per cent of commercial sector respondents.

-- When defining requirements, implementing a solution development methodology or determining which one best fits the organisation was cited as a more pressing issue to government sector respondents (33 per cent) than to commercial sector respondents (22 per cent).

The Numerati - interesting!

2008-10-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

Journalist Stephen Baker provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're all entering -- and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists -- and lovers. The implications are vast. Our privacy evaporates. Our bosses can monitor and measure our every move (then reward or punish us). Politicians can find the swing voters among us, by plunking us all into new political groupings with names like "Hearth Keepers" and "Crossing Guards." It can sound scary. But the Numerati can also work on our behalf, diagnosing an illness before we're aware of the symptoms, or even helping us find our soul mate. Surprising, enlightening, and deeply relevant, The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor -- the mathematical modeling of humanity -- will transform every aspect of our lives.

Here is an awesome commentary:

A woman came into my office last week. She's an expert on what's called search engine optimization. In other words, she helps people adjust their websites by putting in just the right words in the right places so that they'll rise to the top of the search results on Google. This is important, because if you or your business shows up on the third or fourth page on Google, you might as well not exist. No one finds you.
She had some bad news for me. The headlines on my blog are terrible for Google. They have jokes in them, irony, references to things that only humans can understand. If I want to get a good Google ranking, I'll first have to make my case, and establish my relevance, to a machine.
I thought about this. In industry after industry, we're being understood and ranked by our data. If the machines cannot find us, the humans never will. Those who figure out best how to organize their data will pop to the top of all kinds of lists. They'll be the first name you see in online dating. They'll be the first choice for the promotion to the Paris office. They may even be the first dog trainer you come across.
For centuries, we developed all kinds of tricks to make ourselves stand out. A whiff of cologne, a firm handshake, a letter of recommendation, a resume with just the right font. That was how we made ourselves findable in the analog age. But now we live in a world defined largely by data. So we have to read the minds of the people who tell the machines what to look for. I call them the Numerati. We have to decode their instructions -- or algorithms -- and then give them what they're after. This type of analysis is going to become the norm in a world managed by the Numerati. If we need any help, you can bet than an entire consulting industry will rise up to help us make our case to machines and hone our own algorithms.

Now, Silicon Valley gets hit

2008-10-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

GigaOm.com reports

"Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives."

read the entire story here

YES bank brings RSS-like feature to online banking

2008-10-09T22:20:00.000-07:00

To add credit to its focus on innovative banking, YES Bank has launched a new online service called Money Monitor for its customers. The new online account aggregation service allows YES Bank customers to control and monitor multiple bank accounts from other financial institutions as well.

The platform, which can be accessed using a single sign on, was implemented by Yodlee Inc – a banking solutions company headquartered in Redwood City, California.

For first time in India, through the online platform YES Bank customers will be able to manage their finances across multiple savings, loan, investment and credit card accounts, thus enabling them to assess their net worth regularly. Customers can access, view, print and receive alerts of all their financial information including online banking, bill payments, brokerage, loans, credit cards, insurance, fixed deposits and reward points information from both YES Bank and other financial institutions though a single user interface.

In order to register for the services the user has to enter the account information of all his/her accounts while signing in.

Demonstrating the new service at a press conference in Bangalore, Ravi Shankar, EVP & country head, Direct Banking & Cash Management, YES Bank said, “It is very important how services will differentiate and help customers choose a bank.”

Read on..

How much molten is tech?

2008-10-09T22:05:00.000-07:00

It seems to be a very shaky state of affairs for the global economy and technology in the high-tech industry. What worried economists six months ago, is having them in an outright panic with "economic rescue" plan that may be on the brink of a depression.

A depression? That may be pushing it. But if you believe this has little to do with the tech industry, think again. That mess on Wall Street means it's hard to get credit--whether if you're a giant company looking to make capital expenditures like new server station, or a start-up looking to buy office furniture or put money down for rent. Wall Street has always been a cutting-edge technology buyer, and that spigot is all but shut off for now. Enterprises are announcing plans to trim or freeze spending, and private customers probably aren't far behind.

On top of that, venture capital spending is on shaky ground, mergers and acquisitions in tech are down, and successful initial public offerings on the stock market are as unlikely as they have been at any point since the dot-com bust. What more, after witnessing a steady increase in billing rates for the last few years, Indian IT service providers could face pressure on the pricing front as demand slows down amidst worsening financial crisis in the US, the largest service market.

Already, we're starting to see signs of growing problems. Rumors are spreading of growing layoffs in Silicon Valley that is already having a global affect, and since the third quarter just ended, it's a good bet that surprising earnings shortfalls could be the big news in the coming days.

Nonetheless, while many may fear a replay of the dot-com bust, what could happen to the tech industry over the next year will be different for a combination of reasons: This isn't a self-made disaster, there's not as much public money on the table, and the rate of spending for Web 2.0 companies has been relatively modest when compared to the wild gold rush days of the late 1990s.

Some analysts feel that the US financial crisis will impact in India after December. IT Secretary Ashok Kumar Manoli said that about 35 per cent of revenue of major IT industries comes from Banking Service Finance Institutions world over, with banks in the US having a major share. "It is too early to say about the impact of the crisis on this."

CII Karnataka Chairman S Vishwanathan who is also the MD of John Fowler India said global uncertain economic conditions was bound to affect the domestic IT companies.

The sunshine industry of Indian economy the BPO firms will be hit by the current global economic turmoil over the next few months and now Nasscom have confirmed this fear as well. However the body is quick to turn this crisis into an advantage for the sector in the longer term.

The BPO-KPO sector in India is facing the heat of the US slowdown, particularly following recent events in the financial markets. Businesses of a host of small and mid-sized firms have taken a further hit in the industry since a major chunk of business comes from banking and financial services firms in the US.

According to a report released by Nasscom, the BPO and KPO industry together generated Rs 1,160 crore revenue and provided employment to 7 lakh people in 2007-08. The share of the US in the Indian BPO-KPO export market was 61 percent, making it the largest contributor to exports in the segment in 2007.

Read on… to explore what CIOs from top-notch companies have to say on the impact of the recession and its effects on their enterprises.

Satish Kotian, Head - IT at Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd reacting to the present global financial situation says, "I do agree that with the global recession the first hit of cost cutting will on IT in any organization."

He says when we discuss about the cost we have to understand the component of the same like recurring cost and new investment. If case of recurring cost we have very less option, best thing we can to hard negotiation with service provider.

In case new investment I do agree that there will be rationalization, there will be revisit the existing policies. e.g. if existing policy is of replacement of Desktop / Lap top in 3 years this will pushed to next year or wait till get clarity on environment. In this environment upgrade market will open-up.

On the other side under recession / cost cutting we can push lot of hidden agenda, like deployment of open source application (Open office, Symphony etc).

"In my view if you able to convince the management that this is right time for investment on IT. In recession market bargaining power is tilted towards the buyer. It also time for getting buy in for lot of automation where organization can cut cost in the long run," says Kotian.

In our organization we will undertake following activities.

* Up gradation of system instead of new purchase wherever it is possible
* Deployment of open source e.g. open office, Symphony etc.
* Hard negotiation on recurring cost.
* We may not invest on new application development, but we have to invest on the support module to existing application software.
* Invest in applications for monitoring / Management infrastructure.

Ajay K. Dhir, CIO of Jindal Stainless Ltd in his comments on the US recession and its impact on his enetrprise says that the recession in the Industry is not a new phenomenon, and we have been seeing cyclical ups and downs in the last 26 years that I have worked in India and abroad. The reasons for recession may vary, and for an organization to ride through the troughs successfully, it needs intrinsic strength, embedded processes, fiscal prudence, long term vision and great leadership.

In our case, we as an organization, especially my function, we have processes in place for our budgets and spend monitoring. The IT budget (capex as well as opex) is planned for a three year window, keeping in view strategic as well as tactical objectives of the organization and aligning the IT vision with the same. The budget is discussed with our corporate management team and then presented to VC&MD for approval. Once the approvals are in place, the revenue allocation is done accordingly and the spend monitored. The IT budget is linked to EBIDTA and not just company turnover, hence it is more realistic and performance driven. If any correction has to be done due to market or industry dynamics, then it is aligned accordingly and spend rolled over to the next period. This way, we are able to keep our projects going as well, by keeping our 'ear to the ground' and eyes open.

Vinay Hinge, GM IT of Raymond Limited in his reaction says like our peers in Industry, we are experiencing constraints on spends and to conserve the cash as much as possible. Some of the initiatives we have taken are:

* Transforming Software Asset purchases in to "Rental" models: For example, we have recently converted one of our BI project (Product licenses +Implementation Consultancy) into a pure service model. We would be paying the vendors monthly rent for deploying his tools and expert consulting.
* In-sourcing of services: Some of the business critical services, which were hitherto outsourced, are now being in-sourced with transferring people from partner to our payroll.
* Deferring of Projects: We are now doing more frequent reviews of our project portfolio and are delaying those projects which are not critical. At the same time, we are re-negotiating the critical projects with vendors for better terms and early delivery dates.

R.D. Malav, VP IT at Jindal Poly Films Ltd. says thet Jindal films has a major export share, and due global recession we are having big challenge to keep our top line and bottom line growth intact, which is very unlikely and change in growth rate is definitely impacting our IT Budget. We have already postponed new Capex for the year. and cutting on recurring expenses also. "Overall IT suffers, if business suffers," Malav reacts.

Ravishankar S, CIO of ING Vyasa Life insurance says that the market conditions, the rapid growth in the Life Insurance industry and the entry of several new players into this segment require us to remain competitive by launching more innovative products and services - and do so speedily. At the same time we are increasing the reach of existing channels and developing new channels and partners. In this scenario, IT investments will remain critical in supporting these business initiatives.

IT spends in ING Life are determined and approved using strong governance structures such as the IT steering committee chaired by our CEO. These spends are based on our IT architecture blueprint and roadmap that is determined and updated periodically. We seek inputs and guidance from our regional office in Hong Kong while making these investments. Our shareholders would like us to continue with our ambitious growth strategy.

Overall, this is an opportune time for all companies in the industry to review their costs including the discretionary spending so as to rationalize expenses. However given the continued strong growth coupled with the need to need to enhance our product/service offerings, there is a need for us to continue to invest in beefing up our IT systems and infrastructure. Hence we do not see any significant impact on the IT spends.

Daya Prakash, Head IT of LG Electronics Ltd says the electronic major is not having any impact as such as of now.

Nagaraj Bhat, Director, Global Information Services- India Delivery Center at Applied Materials says, "we track our global IT spending to around 3 percent of revenue. We have established a Project Portfolio Review Board (PPRB) represented by the Business Unit leaders that is chartered to make decisions on projects that will be executed by the IT organizations."

The process starts with Opportunity Assessment and the project would be classified as Enterprise Strategic, Legal/Regulatory/Business Continuity and Discretionary IT Spends. Discretionary Spends are reviewed relative to business conditions. Some of the IT Foundational projects aimed at improving end user productivity, service level enhancements and aligned to the three year architecture strategy and roadmap are given due importance in the prioritization process.

At Applied Materials, we have been making good progress on optimizing our spend in "RUN" and shifting the IT spend to "BUILD" so that we can self-fund some of our foundational projects. For growing regions like India, IT spends are increasing year over year consistent with headcount growth, new market penetration and value engineering activities. Applied Materials outsource majority of its global IT Infrastructure Sustaining Services and ADMS activities to few IT Managed Services providers in India and one of the push has always been to increase offshore/onsite ratio so that we can deliver more for less.

The great battle in the clouds

2008-10-04T04:04:00.000-07:00

In the run up to this month's Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has started talking up Microsoft's new cloud computing infrastructure. At PDC, MS will unveil a "cloud operating system" that will run .NET applications in the cloud.

Ballmer was reluctant to give away too many details to avoid preempting PDC. He did, however, outline the company's vision. Microsoft already has operating systems for PCs, servers, and mobile systems; the next market the company wants to get into is cloud computing, and so the company needs a new "Internet" operating system. As yet, the new OS has no name, though Ballmer reckoned it would be "Windows something."
The Microsoft CEO said that MS wanted to provide the benefits of browser applications—they're cross-platform and easy to manage—with the benefits of desktop applications—better user interfaces and greater integration. To do this will require a shift in development tools and techniques with the cloud OS forming just one part of the solution.
Some hints of Microsoft's "Software + Services" future have also been given. Although the software giant does not envisage its bread-and-butter desktop applications like Office disappearing any time soon, the company is nonetheless developing services to enable light editing of Office documents from networked locations. This is part of a broader strategy that will see many of its products (SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics CRM) gain extended online capabilities.

Amazon puts Microsoft in the cloud

Microsoft isn't the only company wanting to put Microsoft products into the cloud. Amazon, earlier this week, announced that its EC2 cloud computing service would soon offer Windows (the real deal, not "Windows something") and SQL Server. The Windows EC2 product is currently being beta tested by a limited number of EC2 customers, launching publicly by the end of the year.
Amazon is citing customer demands for Windows media codecs and streaming media as a key driver for this decision. Windows has a rich selection of media software unavailable on other platforms, including support for many legacy formats. Other customer demands include the ability to run ASP.NET web applications on IIS and SQL Server, to take advantage of EC2's scalability.
This move by Amazon is likely to be more than just a response to customer demands. Microsoft is building cloud computing data centers, and with its cloud platform imminent, Amazon will soon face competition for its EC2 product. By offering Windows, Amazon will preempt Microsoft's entry into the market to retain its lead. And it's not just Microsoft that Amazon will be competing with. For high-volume sites, an EC2 ASP.NET platform is sure to be competitive with conventional web hosting facilities.
Microsoft has large data centers of its own, powering Windows Live Mail, Windows Update, and Live Search, among others; the company can certainly run Internet services on a huge scale and is sure to bring that expertise to bear on its cloud services. Amazon is certainly the more experienced company when it comes to offering cloud computing services to paying customers, though, and it's hard to see customers abandoning the tried—if not entirely trusted—EC2 for Microsoft's version 1.0 platform.

How to use LinkedIn - a good crash course

2008-09-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

LinkedIn is one of the best (if not the best) professional networking platform (yes, its a platform, not just a site, as it has been transforming itself quite aggressively in the last one year and it has on-boarded itself to OpenSocial - and here's a sneak peak exactly how exciting that could get!

I found this cool little post on BNet on how to maximize LI in your NW quest -

None. LinkedIn does offer higher-grade accounts for a monthly subscription fee, but don’t upgrade until you’re sure you’ll use it.
Plan to spend at least a full afternoon establishing your profile and network. Then make time to check in at least once a week to see what everyone is up to.
Your E-mail Contacts: LinkedIn allows you to quickly search through everyone you’ve e-mailed and connect to those you’d like to reach.
Well-Defined Goals: What do you want out of your network? Is there a field you hope to move into? A new position you’d like to try? Do you simply want to find other professionals in your field?
Your Company’s Policy: While nearly every company is fine with social networking (even the CIA reportedly has its own internal social network), make sure you understand your company’s policy on confidentiality.

Read the full post!

Paul Newman dies at 83

2008-09-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

The star is no more. Paul Newman died today. While he had a number of roles to remember, I always thought "The Verdict" (1982) - Sidney Lumet was one of his best performances. As a drunkard, fallen, failed, aging lawyer who fights a medical malpractice case against all odds and wins, Paul was unforgettable and his last speech in the courtroom was inspirational. Rest in peace, Paul.

Paul Newman, Star of `The Color of Money,' `Hud,' Dead at 83

By Kathryn Harris and Dan Hart

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Newman, the singularly handsome actor with the ice-blue eyes who starred in such films as ``The Color of Money'' and ``Hud'' while pursuing his interests as a racecar driver, businessman and philanthropist, died yesterday at 83 at his home in Westport, Connecticut, his spokeswoman said.

Newman received a diagnosis of cancer more than a year ago, A.E. Hotchner, Newman's neighbor and business associate, told the Associated Press. Marni Tomljanovic, a spokeswoman for Sunshine, Sachs and Associates on behalf of Newman's Own Foundation, confirmed the actor's death. She spoke in a telephone interview.

Newman portrayed boxers, hustlers and cads in more than 60 films over six decades. He was the popular boxer Rocky Graziano in ``Somebody Up There Likes Me'' (1956), a drifter in ``The Long Hot Summer'' (1958) and ``Sweet Bird of Youth'' (1962), pool shark Eddie Felsen in ``The Hustler'' (1961) and its sequel ``The Color of Money'' (1986), an amoral rancher in ``Hud'' (1963) and bank robber in ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' (1969).

He made his Broadway debut at age 27 in ``Picnic,'' but soon abandoned the stage for a more lucrative film career. Newman ``had a face born for the movies,'' director Joshua Logan said.

...............

An aftermath of the Crash of the Titans

2008-09-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

After the meltdown

You take a week off and all hell breaks loose. It's been the story of my life: I leave a terminally placid office alone for a couple of days and come back to lurid tales of fistfights and overnight sackings. I go to Greece for a week, and the whole financial system collapses. Plus, it rains. This might not seem like such a disaster in the great scheme of things, but I still need some sun this year. If you're as superstitious as I am, you might want to consider bribing me to stay in the country to avoid further catastrophe.

Peering through the little window on the world that is my mobile phone screen, it's hard to get a handle on the tectonic scale of recent events. Banks are disappearing like contestants on a reality show. US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has promised to stop the rot by pouring "hundreds of millions of dollars" into the bottomless pit of debt that is the US housing market.

That's a sum that's worth mulling over. It's not even one of those annoyingly precise "$112.7bn" figures where the rounding error represents more money than you and all your friends and family will see in a lifetime. We're not even getting to the nearest hundred billion dollars here, and a hundred billion dollars is a serious amount of money—a Dr Evil ransom demand.

I'm not normally a fan of assessing public spending in terms of how many nurses you could hire or children's hospitals you could build, but with a hundred billion at your disposal you might face a shortage of sick children. Forget building the odd AIDS clinic in Africa, you could pay for all the medication for everybody there who was ill with anything at all. You could send everyone in Britain on a proper holiday. One where it doesn’t rain.

And yet Hank doesn't know exactly how many of these fabulous banknotes he's going to need to print. And to get what? A moon shot? A Manhattan project for climate change? No, a pile of dodgy mortgages held against worthless houses occupied by people with no money. Honest businesses go bust, but the dodgiest money-lending scam in history is propped up by what may be the last hurrah of the golden age of Western capitalism. It's not exactly the New Deal, is it? One wonders how the ideological taunting of "left-leaning liberals" will play out in the coming US election, once the incumbent administration embarks on the biggest socialist project in the West since the Welfare State.

This being the age of the Internet, the columnists and analysts have instantly rushed to print, to tell us "what this all means." I'm happy to admit I have no idea. Can I have a couple of days to think it through, to at least find my A-level economics notes? I suspect it would take the platoons of PhD students months to work out the possible ramifications of this, and legions more in a few years time to discover what did actually happen.

What is clear is that we are entering a period of unprecedented change, and I say that knowing what a cliché that phrase has been for years now. But people often use change as a lazy synonym for progress, and what we are talking about is being overwhelmed, not by the speed of technology but by the rapid unravelling of familiar structures, of whole ways of life even.

Change is the lifeblood of consultancy, so we are inclined to focus on the positive side of it. It's like life: we eagerly anticipate the new qualification, the promotion, the new baby, and the changes they will bring. We're much less willing to dwell on retirement, the empty nest, the loss of income and faculties. As a result, we tend to approach these kinds of change with much less creativity and involvement than we do the "progressive" ones, and are the poorer for it.

While there's going to be an awful lot to do in the coming years, much of it may seem retrograde or tedious. For a start there's going to be a lot of grunt work, welding together "new" financial institutions, where the old ones weren't that well integrated in the first place. New regulation will require the unpicking of years of careful work to cope with regimes that, ultimately, failed to deliver or even to achieve maturity. The new realities of financial life will probably be simpler, certainly starker. Much of the work might seem a bit like attaching a carthorse to a Porsche. It could all get a bit depressing.

I don't want to get overly apocalyptic; the end of the world has been coming in various forms ever since I was a child. But you can't be complacent—drive an hour from where I'm currently sitting and you can take your pick of the ruins of a dozen mighty empires destroyed by fire, earthquake and conquest. Our current nemesis seems a bit dull by comparison. We didn't have a war or even run out of oil, just that largely imaginary and abstract commodity—money.

It doesn't have to be depressing. Adapting to a new paradigm, like aging gracefully, can be a source of great pride and achievement. Our monument can be the appalling mess we got ourselves into—or the way we get out of it.

"Righteous Kill" - now, now

2008-09-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

It took 40 years, but Robert De Niro finally has made a movie that enables him to utter this line: "Rambo the skateboard pimp was my tenth kill."

http://www.gomemphis.com/news/2008/sep/12/de-niro-and-pacino-together-again-righ/

Am I the only one who's concerned that two of America's greatest living actors are spending their golden years making mediocre to bad movies?

http://www.myvictoriaonline.com/content/view/980434/32/

Sounds sad. Hope they would come together again....and in a more elegant way.

Coppola....Scorsese....where art thou?

The story of the pig-pug

2008-09-19T23:53:00.000-07:00

This is truly hillarious........

I was rushing to the airport when the courier chap caught me and handed over a couple of attractive red boxes from Vodafone. The box was fairly large and had a nice heft to it and the bunch of us in the car played a guessing game about its contents. I briefly fantasised that Vodafone, having mysteriously found out that I had dropped my cell phone so many times that deep cellular damage had occurred, had understandingly sent me a couple of free phones as a freebie. My colleagues snorted at my naïveté and prophesied it would be a clock. Or a torch. Or some other quasi-useful gizmo.

Anyway, to cut the suspense short, I tore open the box with all the weary boredom of a jaded kid getting yetanotherone birthday present – and we all gazed in to see who was right. Let me put it this way — we were all gobsmacked. Nestled inside was a pig. Yup. A pig. About five inches long and three inches wide, if my spatial memory serves me right. A pig with a blackened mouth, pretty heavy at that, made of some sort of resin. And if an ugly pig wasn’t mystery enough, the pig had, on its back, a small hole and impaled in that was something that looked like a grenade pin. The pig was relayed around the car in a quick pass-the-parcel game and the conversation segued into what this thing could possibly be.

“A keychain for a giant key,” someone suggested. But even if you had been able to lug this around in your handbag, that surmise was shot to pieces by the fact that the pin fell out. With no damage or shrapnel, I hasten to add … it merely looked like a grenade pin. Someone picked up the strange pin with this circular end and peered through it. “Hmm, this is a clue,” she said, “If we can figure out what this is, we will figure out the pig-thingy. Maybe you can use it to keep notes – if you ran out of Post-its, you could pierce a note and pin it onto the pig.” Someone else thought it was some sort of stress-buster – slide your finger in and twirl the pig and gave this a try. The pin shot out and the pig flew, almost braining the driver. “See, you have two of them,” I was told, “Maybe they will send you another one and then you will have the full cast for a fairy tale enactment.”

It was all most intriguing but I wasn’t happy at the thought of lugging this hefty animal around with me so I was about to jettison the mysterious pig in the taxi. But the guessing game wasn’t over and I was exhorted by my bunch of mystified friends that I simply had to take it along for the flight. Alas, the security chaps were a bit startled when the pig showed up in all its porcine glory, the odd pin outlined nicely in the scan. The bag was unzipped and the security guy took it out gingerly and nervously pulled the grenade pin, all the while giving me gimlet glances which quite unnerved me. “What is this?,” he asked, suspiciously. I searched wildly for an answer and came up with “A toy”, stopping myself at the last minute from saying, “Du-uh, I don’t know”. It would too tragicomic, I thought, if I was arrested or shot on suspicion for a pig-thing, the identity of which I have no clue. Luckily the grenade-pin came out smoothly and he relaxed. Not to the extent of letting me take it on the flight, however. He weighed it in his hand and did a couple of reflective bicep-curls and then pronounced that it was a danger and I had to either check it in or junk it. Maybe he thought I would threaten to fling it at the pilot or maybe he thought I would use the grenade pin as a dangerously sharp instrument … whatever, I didn’t pause to find out. I abandoned the pig with a strange sense of relief and loss.

The mystery continued to seize us, however, and grew into an outsized mental itch that refused to go away. I caved in to peer pressure and called a knowledgeable friend. The minute I mentioned pig-grenade she burst into loud cackles and said, “Silly, that is not a pig, it is a pug”.

Oh.

“And that’s not a grenade pin, it is a card-holder.

Oh.

“Hmm, so why are they sending me one of the worst-looking-pig-pugs I have had the misfortune to set my eyes on and why do I need a cardholder?” I asked belligerently?

“To put your visiting card in,” said my friend, patiently, when she had mopped her eyes dry. “And what do I do with that?” I asked, still foxed. “Keep it on your desk,” she said, helpfully. I relayed this information to my eagerly waiting group and after stunned silence, the burst of mirth that erupted earned us some more suspicious glances.

Now here’s a newsflash – I know who I am – I don’t need a pig-pug on my desk, carrying my card on its back like a paper howdah to remind me of my identity. So the mystery continued. Who would need a thing like this? Maybe if you were a frontline staff at a hotel or a bank? Then a customer would figure out who you were and could read out your name, assuming the customer was not discombobulated into speechless horror at the sight of the pig-pug. That is a possibility, I suppose. But why Vodafone should assume that most of its customers are frontline staff is another mystery, which I have no energy to delve into.

I still have no idea where this pig-pug promo fits into the marketing strategy. I could call and ask my friend more details into this mystery. But guess what, ever since I moved into this high-rise in Bangalore, my cell signal is … shall we say … a tad erratic. I find that if I lean out of the window at a particular spot, and hold my head in a spondylosis-inducing angle, then the signal works. If I move my head ever so slightly, or do this teeny-weeny shift in my stance, the call drops. For a while, most of my conversations had long patches of silence from my end which earned me huge undeserved compliments of being an excellent listener, till everyone caught on. The loss of signal makes the whole “wherever you go” tagline rather ironic, I suppose, but that’s another story.

Maybe the parcel should’ve come with an instruction manual explaining what it was supposed to be. On the other hand, we might not have had so much fun. Maybe, even as I write, there are Vodafone customers all over the city (the ones who know who they are and who are not frontline staff) playing “guess what the pig is” games, whiling away the time as they wait for a signal to materialise. Or maybe it really is a stress-busting device –I could drop it and stomp on it each time the call drops and that would make me feel so much better that I might not even complain, thus taking the load off the call centres – oh, but I can’t get through anyway, because of the no-signal issue, remember? Sadly, I am now bereft of my pig-pug – by the end of the saga I had become almost fond of its ugly face. I suspect I might have enjoyed having it around to remind me of the unintended hilarity caused by an incredibly weird promo, but that’s life. Somewhere in the garbage heap of the airport sleeps a forlorn pig-pug with (or without) a pin in its back. Goodbye pig-pug.

(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and the co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd. )

Kala Patthar!!

2008-09-07T00:03:00.000-07:00

West Bengal is the largest producer of coal in India. And guess what, now we import coal from abroad!

Ain't our tax rupees well spent, comrades!

read on .... http://indianeconomy.org/2008/08/05/coals-to-newcastle-and-bengal/

Web 3.0? That too with a formula?

2008-09-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

While the versioning looks a bit aggressive, the content is extremely relevant, meaningful and written from a deep-rooted understanding of the web as a strategic platform to win competitive advantage. A must-read for tech stretegy enthusiasts -

http://sramanamitra.com/2007/02/14/web-30-4c-p-vs/

(Author is a Forbes columnist)

Some good links from the same blog -

http://sramanamitra.com/articles/web3/

http://sramanamitra.com/articles/enterprise3/

Here is a follow-up post on that

http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/39109?trk=DXRSS_XML

Indian Retail - to organize or not to organize

2008-09-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

Nice read - http://indianeconomy.org/2008/09/04/resuscitating-indian-retail-industry/

Unorganised and organised retail must coexist and flourish in India…

After almost scaring the Tata Motors away from West Bengal, Mamata Bannerjee has now trained her guns on Reliance Retail. Well, Reliance Retail should be used to being targeted by feisty women politicians. Immediately after coming to power in Lucknow, Ms. Mayawati had earlier undertaken a similar exercise in UP.

All this is taking place when behemoths of international retail are trying to enter the Indian market. Tesco has chosen to come with Tatas, while Reliance has tied up with Wincanton. The big daddy of them all, Wal-Mart is coming to India courtesy the Bharti group.

In the September edition of Pragati-The Indian National Interest Review, Prashant Kumar Singh makes significant observations about the confusion surrounding retail industry in India. He rightly notices that-

The debate over retail in India has been fixated on the growth of organised retail, entry of international retailers and concomitant demise of the traditional retailer. The spectre of ogres like Wal-Mart gobbling small retailers has completely paralysed the government on the policy formulation front; not because of any real concern for small retailers but more out of their perceived political clout. This lack of policy initiatives for boosting and regulating organised retail is unfortunately based on the fallacy that modern retail and unorganised retail are necessarily antagonistic.
…Available data provides sufficient evidence that traditional retail is under no immediate threat from organised retail. With the present rate of growth of organised retail of 45 percent per annum, any structural changes brought about by gradual policy shifts will take at least a decade before unorganised retail feels the heat. This assessment is not to condone continued government stupor towards the unorganised sector on the issues of credit availability, access to distribution channels, and realisation of fair price for the produce. It is, instead, meant to spur the government to initiate concrete measures to support the traditional retailers.
…Given the benefits of organised retail, the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) needs to be analysed. It is fallacious to prescribe FDI as the panacea for all the ills plaguing organised retail. The eagerness of international giants to enter Indian markets can be attributed to saturation of the developed markets and low penetration of formal retail in India. The entry of FDI in retail will tilt the balance between suppliers and retailers, force smaller players to adapt and differentiate, and bring consolidation in the sector. The accompanying direct benefits are substantial: increase in exports due to high level of sourcing from India, incorporation of global best practices, investments in the complete supply chain–especially in technologies relating to cold chain, food processing and IT, increase in product variety and categories, increase in employment, and secondary benefits of modern agriculture and shopping tourism. Moreover, this FDI in retail will arrive without any sops and tax breaks from the government, unlike IT and auto-manufacturing sectors, where state governments have been bending backwards to attract investments.

Prashant Kumar Singh makes a strong case that with the right government policies in place, “the ecosystem of the retail industry in India will then adapt itself to accommodate the two seemingly divergent strands of retailing, evolving into an indigenous Indian retail model”. To read the complete piece titled “Retail in Doldrums“, download the community edition(pdf) of the latest issue of Pragati-The Indian National Interest Review.

Google Chrome, and "all that is called Google is not gold"?

2008-09-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

Source - http://www.businessweek.com//technology/content/sep2008/tc2008093_489920.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Some are calling Google's (GOOG) new browser Chrome an "Internet Explorer killer." Others venture further and call it a "Windows killer." Whether Google's newly launched browser has Microsoft (MSFT) quaking is unclear, but there's no doubt that Google is serious about "organizing the world's information"—and is prepared to shake up the status quo in the process.

It should come as little surprise that Google is entering the Web browser market. The search heavyweight already has a substantial stake in our online activities. Search, check! E-mail, check! Office documents, check! The list of Web applications offered by Google is both long and varied. With its goal of providing all of our online needs, it makes perfect sense that Google would step up and provide a Web browser built to accommodate its applications. With Chrome, Google is betting that more of us will move more of our computing from desktops to online, relying on the vast data centers known as "the cloud." But can Google's Web browser singlehandedly entice us to dump a favorite Web browser and our computer's operating system?

Let's start with the operating system. What's your favorite flavor? Windows, OS X, Linux? Whichever your allegiance, for at least the next several years, you'll need an operating system to boot your computer and store the applications that are still too large and unwieldy to run from inside the cloud. Take iTunes, Photoshop, or PowerPoint. While online equivalents exist, they just can't match the processing power and functionality that come from the applications you run from your computer's operating system.

SEGMENTING ONLINE ACTIVITIES

And, while Google Chrome's strength comes in its ability to segment online activities—an open tab playing a live video stream won't slow down the remainder of your Web browsing—it still needs an operating system at its foundation. For evidence that Google Chrome is not yet ready to replace an operating system, consider the browser's limitations at launch. Despite two years of hard work, Chrome can't run without Windows and it won't run at all on Apple's OS X or Linux.

Then comes the question of Chrome's potential for wresting market share from Google's rivals. Can Google really launch a new browser and expect to grab some of Internet Explorer's 72% Web browser market share and Firefox's 20%? Chrome certainly started off strong. On its opening days, according to analysts at Lehman Brothers, free downloads reached an astounding 2% of the market. Lehman predicts that the new browser could reach 15%-20% market share in just two years. In other words, it's likely to be big, but not dominant.

What's more, Google Chrome is not yet proven as a revolutionary Web browser. Google technicians emphasize that its architecture is different, and predict that it will handle computing intensive software applications better than its rivals. But most of the Web surfers who downloaded it on its first day came to face to face with a bare-bones browser with few of the add-ons and plug-ins available on the others.

BRAND OF GOLD

What Chrome can boast is the Google brand. While not everything Google touches turns to shareholder gold, its brand works wonders. The company could launch a new brand of laundry detergent, and we'd likely clear grocery store shelves of the stuff. You can bet that Google's fans will jump at the chance to download a Google-branded browser, so they can check their Gmail, look-up their Google Maps, and search for laundry detergent on Google.com.

It's our infatuation with the Google brand, more than the technology inside, that will boost Chrome's market share and further extend Google in our daily Web activities. As for being a Windows or Internet Explorer killer, don't count on it.

Steve Jobs - you can't write him "off", Bloomberg!

2008-08-31T00:21:00.000-07:00

Apple fans, tech aficionados, corporate trackers and Internet readers all over the world were crestfallen when they read about an obituary of tech czar Steve Jobs which was fired by financial newswire Bloomberg to its subscribers. ( Watch )

Had the man who reinvented himself, a moribund Apple Inc, and just about every rule in the game of personal electronics with iPod, and then in telecom with iPhone, finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer?

No, the man was alive and kicking even as a red-faced Bloomberg -- usually sharpshooters when it comes to financial news -- had missed the mark by miles.

The gaffe happened when the American agency decided to update its 17-page stock obituary on Steve Jobs, and someone accidentally published it in the process. The story, which was meant to be sent to Bloomberg's internal wire, accidentally slipped out to its subscribers. And all hell broke loose!

The story that ran 'Hold for release' - 'Do not use' couldn't actually have been stopped as it was simply too big for global financial markets. The jitters subsided later when the agency promptly retracted it.

The story was titled “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder, Arbitrator of Cool Technology, XXXX” and had a byline of editor Connie Guglielmo. The obituary had marked blank spaces for Jobs's age and cause of death to be filled in. It traced his life, achievements and surprisingly had quotes from rivals like Microsoft's ex-chairman Bill Gates.

As it transpired, Jobs was clearly hale and hearty, even though he has previously battled pancreatic cancer, raising inevitable concerns over his health.

Gossip website, Gawker.com was one of those which picked up the obituary and published it, from where it was picked up by many blogging sites. Later, it also printed the retraction by Bloomberg, including the original notes, which was quick to come by.

Bloomberg editors Joe Winski and Cesca Antonelli sent out an apology of an apology: "An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted.”

Though no major harm was done: Few people recoiled in horror, fewer still gasped as the mainstream media seemed to have missed the little ‘devil’ of a news. And no, Apple stock did not crash!

But the Internet media was quick to lap up the gaffe, and announce tongue in cheek, that Apple's iconic CEO had clearly come back from the "virtual jaws of death", an euphemism that succinctly outlines the harsh competition permeating modern journalism.

Though common journalistic practices involve preparing obituaries of famous personalities, celebrities and politicians, but this has been the biggest goof-up of its kind in the annals of world journalism.

The incident did serve as a reminder about people’s worries over Jobs' health in the past few years.

We reproduce a part of much-talked about ‘obituary’ that Bloomberg sent out accidentally.

JOB, STEVE. APPLE FOUNDER, TECH VISIONARY. UPDATED AUGUST 2008

HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE - HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE

Steve Jobs's birthday: Feb. 24, 1955
BIO UPDATED AS OF 2008, by Connie Guglielmo

APPLE PR CONTACTS: Katie Cotton — -redacted- and Steve Dowling: -redacted- or -redacted-
People to contact for comment:
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: -redacted-
- Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple's iPod division. He's now
chairman at Palm. Contact Lynn Fox in PR.
- Heidi Roizen: venture capitalist who once dated Jobs: -redacted- or -redacted-. Heidi knows a lot of Silicon

Valley insiders and may put us in touch with others, including
A C Mike Markkula, the first VC to back Apple.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle (one of his best friends); contact
Deborah Hellinger in Oracle PR. -redacted-, -redacted-

- Jerry Brown (personal friend) and California AG. Try GARETH
LACY at -redacted- IN OAKLAND; -redacted- CELL, -redacted- or press office: -redacted-

- Al Gore: member of Apple's board of directors
- Bill Gates: Microsoft was among the first developers of Mac
software
- Bob Iger at Disney: who bought Pixar from Jobs
- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and member of Apple's board. Send
note to -redacted- or try David Krane: -redacted- or -redacted-

- Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp (Apple began using Intel
chips in its Macs in 2006). Contact Tom Beermann: -redacted- or
Bill Calder on -redacted-. Both in Intel PR
- Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Contact Shawn
Dainas in PR: -redacted-
- John Lassiter and Ed Catmull: Pixar-nee-Disney executives. Try
Zenia Mucha, -redacted- or Jonathan Friedland, -redacted-, in
corporate PR at Disney.
- Guy Kawasaki, one of the first Apple evangelists -redacted- or -redacted-

- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, who bought an early circuit
board for the game Breakout from Jobs and Wozniak. (pr is being
handled by his daughter, Alisa Bushnell. her cell is: -redacted-; work is -redacted- work/message;-redacted-)

Even God can't save this Country!!

2008-08-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

From http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/aug/05house.htm

"Even God will not be able to save this country," a fuming Supreme Court on Tuesday said while slamming the government for its refusal to amend the law for launching criminal prosecution against those who illegally occupy official houses.

"We are fed up with this government," the apex court said, adding, "They don't have the guts to differ with the opinion of the clerks."

"Even God will not be able to save this country. In India even if God comes down, he cannot change our country. Our country's character has gone. We are helpless," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi said.

The apex court said PILs are being filed before it by people who are vexed with the approach of the government on various issues.

"You complain about judicial activism when you are in power. When you are not in power you come to us for remedy," the bench said.

The bench gave vent to its anger as Additional Solicitor General Amarender Saran bluntly told the court that the Centre had decided not to amend Section 441 IPC (criminal trespass) for prosecuting squatters of Government accommodation in the country.

The government took the stance that the existing provisions provided under the Public Premises Act was sufficient to evict those unlawfully occupying government accommodation.

Moreover, it claimed that out of 99,100 government houses only 300-odd dwellings were under unauthorised occupation for which had been made to evict them. But this did not satisfy the apex court which said the Government does not have the guts to take on the offenders

The best review of The Dark Knight

2008-08-02T22:21:00.000-07:00

This is copied from http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stranger-heath-ledgers-joker/

Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.

***

It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.

I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.

In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.

What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?

***

I advise you to hire a poet.
-Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust

First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).

The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.

The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.

The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.

***

In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)

That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.

Donal Trump doing a CPM?

2008-06-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

From Forbes.com

LONDON - Michael Forbes was until recently an unknown fisherman in an obscure town in the north of Scotland.

Obscure, that is, until the day billionaire Donald Trump, who has Scottish roots, showed up at his footstep with a big, fat check ($900,000) to buy his rundown 23- acre property--as it stands in the middle of Trump's golf course ambitions.

Trump's project includes two championship courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy and spa, 950 time-share vacation villas and 950 holiday homes that will sell for a minimum of $1 million.

Forbes, a proud salmon fisherman who works from sunrise to sunset, told Forbes.com Trump is messing with the wrong man.

"He knows it's not for sale ... I haven't had second thoughts, and will never have," Forbes said, recalling the days when Trump allegedly sent "bullies" to his property to try to push him out. "They told me they would make my life a misery."

He recalls how Trump went "mental" because he wouldn't sell his house and that's when it got personal. "He really pissed me off. I would rather give it away than to him. He picked on the wrong guy," said Forbes, whose family has lived in the sand dunes at Balmedie, Aberdeenshire for 40 years.

Forbes, who has no connection to Forbes Media LLC, became a symbol of defiance and proud Scottish nationalism. Outside his property a sign reads "No Golf Course" and he embodies the feeling many Scotts have against the power real estate developer from New York City.

Feelings that have transpired this week as a public inquiry led by the Scottish government will have the final decision to give the okay to Trump's plans. Dave Morris, an environmentalist, spent some time questioning Trump on his development plan.

"He seemed to have no idea of the rights to public access over his land," Morris told Forbes.com. Under Scottish right-to-roam law, members of the public have right to wander all over Trump's golf course.

"He showed complete ignorance and said he was ready to make no concessions," Morris said. The inquiry is expected to last a month. But even if the government rules against the project, politicians still have the power to overrule the decision on the basis of economic gain.

As for the ongoing public inquiry, Forbes said: "I reckon they will vote against it. And Trump will have to pack his bags and go home."

Too bad Trump didn't leave a number where to be reached just in case on a remote day Forbes changed his mind.

Indy > Russian Dictators

2008-05-31T08:09:00.000-07:00

Action:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/24/russia.indiana.jones.ap/

Equal and Opposite Reaction:

LMAO!!!

Mike Nichols is back

2008-01-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

The highly talented Mike Nichols is back as a director once again, and this time with Charlie Wilson's War. The cast is, as expected, fantastic with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and the unforgettable Seymour Hoffman. Reviews are good and the film a nice different touch as always with Nichols. He has proved himself time and again with different genres, like The Graduate, Catch-22, The Birdcage and Wolf - all as different as possible. This time its a political movie and as Dan writes here, Mike seems to have pulled another winner! Highly recommended!!

Pontigrity (from Once upon a Time in Asstralia)

2008-01-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

"Johnny, Johnny"
"Yes, Papa"
"Eating sugar?"
"No, Papa"
"Telling Lies?"
"No, Papa"
"Open your mouth"
"I think if you are actually questioning my integrity ..., you should not be standing here."

No points for guessing who the Johny is!!!

A Tale of the Poor Rich India : P Chidambaram @ HBS

2007-11-25T09:22:00.000-08:00

Speaking in Harvard Business School's Spangler Auditorium before a filled-to-overflowing audience comprising students and faculty from across the University, including HBS, Harvard Law School, and the Kennedy School of Government, Chidambaram told a tale of two Indias - a country rich in natural and human resources but unable to take full advantage of them because of the prevalence of poverty (a third of the population of 1.1 billion people lives on an income of less than a dollar a day), inadequate schools and health care, and interest groups that favor the status quo rather than progress.

The full story at
http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/mahindra.html

Greatbong reviews Nandigram

2007-11-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

As usual, a compelling piece by GreatBong.....but also a very grim statement of what our own state has become......how Nandigram represents a real statement of political opportunism and how the equally evil two parties are using the people of Bengal, yet again.......a must read for any Bangali and "open mind for a different view" post...

http://greatbong.net/2007/11/21/the-killing-fields-of-bengal/

TATA TEA scores with this ad

2007-11-15T10:25:00.001-08:00

Laughing my head off!!!

2007-11-15T10:19:00.000-08:00

Last time I laughed my head off, it was when Bappi Lahiri sued someone for plagiarism!!! Now, the best was yet to come. Seems like T-series has sued Google (Youtube) for the same. It's a funny world out there!!!
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Internet_/T-Series_drags_YouTubecom_to_court/rssarticleshow/2543708.cmshttp://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Internet_/T-Series_drags_YouTubecom_to_court/rssarticleshow/2543708.cms

Heil Hitler; Heil the Taliban; Heil Bush; Heil Modi; Heil the CPM;

2007-11-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

Thankfully, Vladimir Ilyich did not have to see this! Well done CPM, now you are truly red!

Google's latest Buzz : OpenSocial

2007-10-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

With Social Networking capturing more and more mindshare of the web 2.0 universe, Google has played its own stroke. They are coming up with OpenSocial, a Platform where most of the social networking vendors will come together and converge. Let's see if this ambitious convergence really bites of from MySpace/Facebook pie.

Here's the BW report - http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2007/tc20071031_631820_page_2.htm

Here's a fundoo blog post - http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/30/details-revealed-google-opensocial-to-be-common-apis-for-building-social-apps/

The First Indian-American Congressman

2007-10-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

A portrait of Dalip Singh Saund, the first Indian-American Congressman, will be unveiled in the US Congress at an official ceremony next month.

The unveiling ceremony honouring Saund, who was also the first Asian in Congress when he won a seat in 1956 by representing California, will be held on November 7.

Born on September 20, 1899, to a Sikh family in Chhajulwadi, Punjab, he came to the US in 1920 to attend the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1924 he graduated having earned MA and PhD degrees in mathematics.

He thereafter remained in the US, becoming a successful farmer.

However, life was not easy for an Indian in the 1920s. Anti-immigrant sentiment was running rampant across the country, as reflected in the passage of laws such as the Quota Immigration Act of 1921, the Cable Act of 1922 and the
National Origins Act of 1924.

In 1923 the Supreme Court had issued an opinion that Indians while designated as Caucasians were ineligible for citizenship because they were not "white".

Subject to prejudice and discrimination, prohibited from owning the land he farmed, his American wife having been stripped of her citizenship for marrying an "alien" man, Saund, however, did not waver in his pursuit of the American dream.

He became a founding member and the first president of the India Association of America.

The primary task of the association was to secure citizenship rights for Indians.

Building a national organisation, establishing an effective lobby on Capitol Hill, the association was able to convince Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce of Connecticut and Congressman Emanual Cellar of New York to introduce legislation granting naturalisation rights to Indians and Filipinos.

The act was signed into law by President Truman in 1946.

In 1956 Saund was elected to the US House of Representatives. He served for three Congresses.

In May 1962, he suffered a severe stroke, which left him unable to speak at all or walk without assistance, thus ending his Congressional career. He returned to California and died on April 22, 1973, in Hollywood.

The portrait unveiling is part of a programme to enhance the fine arts collection of the House and to include important members of the House.

The other US representatives to be honoured under the programme are James Madison of Virginia (1789-1797); John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts (1831 -1848); Abraham Lincoln of Illinois (1847-1849); Jeannette Rankin of Montana (1917-1919; 1941-1943), the first woman elected to the US Congress; Joseph Rainey of South Carolina (1869 -1879), the first African American elected to the US Congress; and Romulado Pacheco of California (1877-1883), the first Hispanic-American elected to the US Congress.

No surcharge on credit card payments: Banks

2007-10-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

If nothing else, this would make consumers think twice before flashing their credit cards. For some years now, it has been observed that certain merchant establishments-especially budget jewellery, electronics and grey market outlets-ask customers to shell out about 2% extra for purchases with credit cards.

Why this extra charge? After all, credit cards only add to footfalls and are ultimately good for business.
This is how it works. A banker elucidates that merchant establishments must pay a certain fee for using a point-of-sale terminal (swipe machine) to the bank that installs it (the acquiring bank). Evidently, some pass on this charge to consumers.

All card-issuing banks TOI spoke to, and the Credit Card Holders' Association of India specified that merchant establishments cannot do so. Says a senior banker, "In the US, there is a law that the type of payment should not have any impact on the price... Unfortunately, in India, merchant establishments fall outside the purview of banking regulations."

A Mumbai consumer was recently asked to pay 2% more for cosmetics worth Rs 1,575. She chose to use cash instead. Last week, a Mumbai banker himself paid Rs 120 extra for a cellphone purchase because he didn't have enough cash on him. Says Sachin Khandelwal, head, cards group at ICICI Bank, "Typically, there is a fee a merchant agrees to pay for a terminal... If a merchant tries to recover it from customers, they must walk out." Khandelwal also advises consumers to report such cases to credit card-issuing banks.

"We may then blacklist them (the outlets) and remove our terminals." An official at another card-issuing bank adds, "It is a bad practice. If someone charges 2% above MRP, you should report it to a consumer forum, irrespective of the value."

This 2% rule, however, is relaxed for railway tickets and at some petrol pumps, says G V Giddappa, general secretary at Credit Card Holders' Association. In case a petrol pump has a tieup with a card, the amount is charged back into the card, a banker adds.

The senior banker asks, "Railways can save on the fee, but merchant establishments can't. How fair is that?" Ultimately, though, it is the consumer who gets inconvenienced and ends up paying more. Bankers say it is mostly shops with "wafer-thin" margins who charge extra to avoid additional "discount". Also, grey market shops and certain jewellery showrooms discourage card use to avoid taxes, they add. The charge works as a deterrent.
Consequently, cash purchases mean more unaccounted transactions.

Most times, shops are upfront about such a charge. However, in case a shop fails to inform the consumer or the consumer notices the charge on the payment slip, most banks do not reverse the charge. As a bank official says,
"The overcharging has been done by the merchant and not the bank."

Serpico

2007-10-14T06:19:00.000-07:00

It's amazing........It's incredible...but I feel like a criminal 'cause 
I don't take money.

We loved Frank Serpico....and we loved Al Pacino playing him.....its so amazing to
see a man who dared to take on an entire police department for his integrity...and
he existed in real life......


and here he is!!! Check out Frank Serpico's blog! Oh, how I love the internet!!!

This is what I call marketing!!!

2007-10-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Check out this site!! http://www.airtel.com/

Now, this is what I call marketing!! When u gotta get them, get their traffic first! :)

Do a 1991 on cricket

2007-09-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

Not unlike other unrepentant fans of Indian cricket, I have been feeling pretty low ever since our ignominious exit from the World Cup. Although we managed to defeat England recently, there is something rotten with our cricket and it lies in the monopoly of our cricket board (BCCI). I am no cricket expert but I do know something about how organisations work and the damage that monopolies cause.

BCCI is reminiscent of our ugly days of the Licence Raj, when you could choose any TV channel as long it was Doordarshan and fly any airline as long as it was Indian Airlines; you could queue up and wait forever for a telephone, a gas connection or an Ambassador car. Our lives changed after 1991 because economic reforms brought competition. Waiting lines disappeared, prices came down, quality went up, and service improved. If there is one lesson we have learned as a nation, it is that competition can transform the lives of citizens, producers, and even regulators.

Some areas have not experienced reform, however. One of these is electric power; another is cricket. Like the old department of telecom (DoT), our cricket board is both a player and an umpire. It is the only buyer of cricket talent, the only supplier of matches, the monopoly controller of cricket infrastructure and the sole regulator.

Despite its tall talk, BCCI has not bothered to nurture talent. If it had there would be a hundred Kanga Leagues in a hundred Indian towns. BCCI is mainly focused on 11 players for the national team. That is why no one watches Ranji Trophy matches. Hence, the market for cricket players remains tiny, not unlike the market for telephones before the reforms. Just as DoT was politicised — you needed a political connection to get a phone — so is the BCCI, whose corrupt and dysfunctional state associations are run mostly by politicians. With Indian agriculture in deep trouble, why is the honourable minister of agriculture — who is head of BCCI — worrying about 11 men in whites? No wonder that a nation of a billion people cannot produce a decent cricket team.

Things are about to change, however. A new venture, the Indian Cricket League (ICL), will soon begin playing cricket with six local teams, and this will grow to 16 in three years. When 176 players play cricket on television night after night, millions of viewers will judge them, and talent will no longer remain hidden. After that rishwat and sifarish will not get you selected by the state cricket association. ICL could become a nursery for talent like the professional sports leagues in America and Europe, and India might even field a world beating cricket team soon. BCCI will, of course, fight tooth and claw to defend its monopoly, but it will fail in the end. For Subhash Chandra, the man behind ICL, knows how to break monopolies. It was his Zee Television that broke the Doordarshan's monopoly in the 1990's.

India was a sick economy in 1991. It took the medicine of competition and went on to become the second fastest growing economy in the world. The same could happen to Indian cricket. Competition is like a school in which companies learn to improve. Competition created excellent companies like Infosys, Airtel, Jet Airways, and ICICI Bank. Indian Cricket League could also become a world class brand and international players will vie to play in it. So BCCI, stop playing spoilsport! Become a regulator and a selector of the national team, and leave all the rest to the private clubs. Let's do a 1991 on Indian cricket.

The Cell heats up!!

2007-09-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

A sneak-peak into the hush-hush gPhone -

Getting Inside Google's gPhone

Google's gPhone Draws a Crowd

V for Vendetta

2007-09-16T11:48:00.001-07:00

Interesting slideshow -

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/01/0111_revenge/index_01.htm

Hirak Rajar Deshe

2007-08-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

Chandril delivers a true masterpiece in theatrical style - http://www.anandabazar.com/26rabipro.htm

We're Sixty!!

2007-08-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Well. we've our share of problems, and we've got population explosion, zero-ethics politicians, corruption and what not (don't expect me to complete this list in near future!). But, with all that, we're 60....and we roar in many fronts! Vande Mataram!

And salute to those who gave their lives to make us free.......let the sacrifices of those live forever in our minds....

English Verbatim

Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai
Dekhna hai zor kitna baazu-e-qaatil mein hai

Karta nahin kyun doosra kuch baat-cheet
Dekhta hun main jise woh chup teri mehfil mein hai
Aye shaheed-e-mulk-o-millat main tere oopar nisaar
Ab teri himmat ka charcha ghair ki mehfil mein hai
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai

Waqt aanay dey bata denge tujhe aye aasman
Hum abhi se kya batayen kya hamare dil mein hai
Khainch kar layee hai sab ko qatl hone ki ummeed
Aashiqon ka aaj jumghat koocha-e-qaatil mein hai
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai

Hai liye hathiyaar dushman taak mein baitha udhar
Aur hum taiyyaar hain seena liye apna idhar
Khoon se khelenge holi gar vatan muskhil mein hai
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai

Haath jin mein ho junoon katt te nahi talvaar se
Sar jo uth jaate hain voh jhukte nahi lalkaar se
Aur bhadkega jo shola-sa humaare dil mein hai
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai

Hum to ghar se nikle hi the baandhkar sar pe kafan
Jaan hatheli par liye lo bhar chale hain ye qadam
Zindagi to apni mehmaan maut ki mehfil mein hai
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai

Yuun khadaa maqtal mein qaatil kah rahaa hai baar baar
Kya tamannaa-e-shahaadat bhi kisee ke dil mein hai
Dil mein tuufaanon ki toli aur nason mein inqilaab
Hosh dushman ke udaa denge humein roko na aaj
Duur reh paaye jo humse dam kahaan manzil mein hai

Wo jism bhi kya jism hai jismein na ho khoon-e-junoon
Toofaanon se kya lade jo kashti-e-saahil mein hai

Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai.
Dekhna hai zor kitna baazuay qaatil mein hai.

The Poem ( Devnagari version)

सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है
देखना है ज़ोर कितना बाज़ुए कातिल में है

करता नहीं क्यूँ दूसरा कुछ बातचीत,
देखता हूँ मैं जिसे वो चुप तेरी महफ़िल में है
ए शहीद-ए-मुल्क-ओ-मिल्लत मैं तेरे ऊपर निसार,
अब तेरी हिम्मत का चरचा गैर की महफ़िल में है
सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

वक्त आने दे बता देंगे तुझे ए आसमान,
हम अभी से क्या बतायें क्या हमारे दिल में है
खैंच कर लायी है सब को कत्ल होने की उम्मीद,
आशिकों का आज जमघट कूच-ए-कातिल में है
सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

है लिये हथियार दुशमन ताक में बैठा उधर,
और हम तैय्यार हैं सीना लिये अपना इधर.
खून से खेलेंगे होली गर वतन मुश्किल में है,
सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

हाथ जिन में हो जुनून कटते नही तलवार से,
सर जो उठ जाते हैं वो झुकते नहीं ललकार से.
और भड़केगा जो शोला-सा हमारे दिल में है,
सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

हम तो घर से निकले ही थे बाँधकर सर पे कफ़न,
जान हथेली पर लिये लो बढ चले हैं ये कदम.
जिन्दगी तो अपनी मेहमान मौत की महफ़िल में है,
सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

यूँ खड़ा मौकतल में कातिल कह रहा है बार-बार,
क्या तमन्ना-ए-शहादत भी किसि के दिल में है.
दिल में तूफ़ानों कि टोली और नसों में इन्कलाब,
होश दुश्मन के उड़ा देंगे हमें रोको ना आज.
दूर रह पाये जो हमसे दम कहाँ मंज़िल में है,

वो जिस्म भी क्या जिस्म है जिसमें ना हो खून-ए-जुनून
तूफ़ानों से क्या लड़े जो कश्ती-ए-साहिल में है,
सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है
देखना है ज़ोर कितना बाज़ुए कातिल में है

The Poem (Urdu Version)

سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے

سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے
دیکھنا ہے زور کتنا بازوئے قاتل میں ہے

کرتا نہیں کیوں دوسرا کچھ بات چیت
دیکھتا ھوں میں جسے وہ چپ تیری محفل میں ہے
اے شہید ملک و ملت میں تیرے اوپر نثار
اب تیری ہمت کا چرچہ غیر کی محفل میں ہے
سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے

وقت آنے دے بتا دیں گے تجہے اے آسمان
ہم ابھی سے کیا بتائیں کیا ہمارے دل میں ہے
کھینج کر لائی ہے سب کو قتل ہونے کی امید
عاشقوں کا آج جمگھٹ کوچئہ قاتل میں ہے
سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے

ہے لئے ہتھیار دشمن تاک میں بیٹھا ادھر
اور ہم تیار ھیں سینہ لئے اپنا ادھر
خون سے کھیلیں گے ہولی گر وطن مشکل میں ہے
سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے

ہاتھ جن میں ہو جنون کٹتے نہیں تلوار سے
سر جو اٹھ جاتے ہیں وہ جھکتے نہیں للکا ر سے
اور بھڑکے گا جو شعلہ سا ہمارے دل میں ہے
سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے

ہم جو گھر سے نکلے ہی تھے باندہ کے سر پہ کفن
جان ہتھیلی پر لئے لو، لے چلے ہیں یہ قدم
زندگی تو اپنی مہمان موت کی محفل میں ہے
سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے

یوں کھڑا مقتل میں قاتل کہہ رہا ہے بار بار
کیا تمناِ شہادت بھی کِسی کے دِل میں ہے
دل میں طوفانوں کی تولی اور نسوں میں انقلاب
ھوش دشمن کے اڑا دیں گے ھمیں روکو نہ آج
دور رہ پائے جو ہم سے دم کہاں منزل میں ہے

وہ جِسم بھی کیا جِسم ہے جس میں نہ ہو خونِ جنون
طوفانوں سے کیا لڑے جو کشتیِ ساحل میں ہے

سرفروشی کی تمنا اب ہمارے دل میں ہے
دیکھنا ہے زور کتنا بازوئے قاتل میں ہے

The Urdu Script was used as a base from here and then modified and amended.

English Translation

The desire for struggle is in our hearts
We shall now see what strength there is in the boughs of the enemy

Why do you remain silent thus?
Whoever I see, is gathered quiet so...
O martyr of country, of nation, I submit myself to thee
For yet even the enemy speaks of thy courage
The desire for struggle is in our hearts...

When the time comes, we shall show thee, O heaven
For why should we tell thee now, what lurks in our hearts?
We have been dragged to service, by the hope of blood, of vengeance
Yea, by our love for nation divine, we go to the streets of the enemy
The desire for struggle is in our hearts...

Armed does the enemy sit, ready to open fire
Ready too are we, our bosoms thrust out to him
With blood we shall play Holi , if our nation need us
The desire for struggle is in our hearts...

No sword can sever hands that have the heat of battle within,
No threat can bow heads that have risen so...
Yea, for in our insides has risen a flame,
and the desire for struggle is in our hearts...

Set we out from our homes, our heads shrouded with cloth,
Taking our lives in our hands, do we march so...
In our assembly of death, life is now but a guest
The desire for struggle is in our hearts...

Stands the enemy in the gallows thus, asking,
Does anyone wish to bear testimony?...
With a host of storms in our heart, and with revolution in our breath,
We shall knock the enemy cold, and no one shall stop us...

What is that body that does not have hot blood in it,
How can a person conquer a Typhoon while sitting in a boat near the shore.

The desire for struggle is in our hearts,
We shall now see what strength there is in the boughs of the enemy.

Introduction to service-oriented architecture: What is SOA?

2007-08-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

Service-oriented architecture is a technical concept – but non-technical readers can benefit by understanding the basic, underlying concepts. This overview of service-oriented architecture is appropriate for both business and technical staff. The following is an excerpt from SOA for the business developer: Concepts, BPEL, and SCA, by Ben Margolis; copyright 2007. It is reprinted here with permission from MC Press. Still want to learn more? Read the full chapter, "Introduction to service-oriented architecture: What is SOA?"

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a way of organizing software so that companies can respond quickly to the changing requirements of the marketplace. The technology is based on services, which are customized units of software that run in a network.

A service:

handles a business process such as calculating an insurance quote or distributing email, or handles a relatively technical task such as accessing a database, or provides business data and the technical details needed to construct a graphical interface
can access another service and, with the appropriate runtime technology, can access a traditional program and respond to different kinds of requesters — for example, to Web applications
is relatively independent of other software so that changes to a requester require few or no changes to the service, while changes to the internal logic of a service require few or no changes to the requester

The relative independence of the service and other software is called loose coupling. The flexibility offered by loose coupling protects your company from excessive costs when business or technical requirements change.

A service can handle interactions within your company, as well as between your company and its suppliers, partners, and customers. The location of service requesters can extend worldwide, depending on security issues and on the runtime software used to access a particular service.

In most cases, the requesting code has no details on the service location. Like the requester, the service can be almost anywhere. The location is set when the network is configured, and changes to the location are sometimes possible at network run time.

SOA implies a style of development, with concern for the business as a whole and with an increased focus on modularity and reuse. SOA isn't only for new code, though. Migration of existing applications is especially appropriate in the following cases:

The applications are monolithic, combining the logic of user interface, business processing, and data access, with update of one kind of logic requiring your company to test multiple kinds of behavior.
The applications are hard to understand — first, because the logic is monolithic, but second, because logic was repeatedly patched rather than rewritten as requirements changed. Updates take extra time as developers try to decipher the logic, and as the complexity grows, additional errors accompany updates.
The application inventory has duplicate logic. Requests for change are unnecessarily disruptive, requiring changes in several places.

From the point of view of a business developer, a change to SOA is a change in emphasis, and many aspects of the job are unaffected. Consider the task of function invocation, for example. When you invoke a function, you aren't concerned with the internal logic of the invoked code or with how the function receives arguments or returns a value. Similarly, when you code a service request, you care only about the syntax for requesting the service. At best, service requests are as easy as function invocations.

Service-oriented architecture and open standards

In many industries, companies adhere to standards that allow for greater prosperity than would be possible if each company followed its own proprietary rules. Standards in housing construction, for example, ensure that manufacturers of pipes can benefit from economies of scale in pursuit of a larger market than would be available in the absence of industry-wide standards.

The primary benefit of SOA standards is that they make services interoperable, which means that services can communicate with one another, even if each implementation is written in a different computer language or is accessed by way of a different transport protocol (software that oversees the runtime transmission of data).

Standards also ensure that an SOA runtime product can support Quality of Service features, as described in Chapter 2.

SOA standards are open in the sense that any software manufacturer has the right to use those standards when developing an SOA-related product. In addition, the process of creating and revising the standards is based on a political process that is more or less democratic. Any interested party has the right to participate in all meetings that lead to decisions about a standard.

Each company that works on an open standard seeks a text that matches the company's marketplace strengths. The competition among those companies is one reason for the long delay in making a standard final.

Several major organizations oversee development of open standards for SOA:

Later chapters give you practical insight into standards that are in effect or under consideration, and Appendix A describes several others.

Open standards are distinct from open source, which is source code that you can learn from and use in your own projects, with certain legal restrictions. Opensource implementations of Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO), for example, are being developed in the Tuscany incubator project of the Apache Software Foundation. For details and code, see the following Web sites: http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany and http://www.apache.org.

Structure of a service-oriented application

A service-oriented application is an application composed largely of services. Often, the invoked services are in a hierarchy, as Figure 1.1 illustrates.

The topmost level contains one or more integration services, each of which controls a flow of activities such as processing an applicant's request for insurance coverage. Each integration service invokes one or more business services.

The second level is composed of services that each fulfill a relatively low-level business task. For example, an integration service might invoke such business services to verify the details provided by an insurance-policy applicant. If the business services return values that are judged to mean "issue a policy," the integration service invokes yet another business service, which calculates a quote and returns the quote to the software (for example, a Web application) that invoked the service-oriented application.

The third level consists of data-access services, each of which handles the relatively technical task of reading from and writing to data-storage areas such as databases and message queues. A data-access service is most often invoked from the business layer.

Great complexity is possible. Some integration services, for example, provide different operations to different requesters, and some invoke other integration services and are said to be composed of those services. Many applications, however, fulfill the three-level model described here.

Data as a Service

2007-08-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

QUESTION POSED ON: 24 July 2007
What is data-as-a-service? What are the benefits of data-as-a-service?

EXPERT RESPONSE
The concept of data-as-a-service (DaaS) basically advocates the view that -- with the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA), which includes standardized processes for accessing data "where it lives" -- the actual platform on which the data resides doesn't matter. With data-as-a-service, any business process can access data wherever it resides. Data-as-a-service began with the notion that data quality could happen in a centralized place, cleansing and enriching data and offering it to different systems, applications or users, irrespective of where they were in the organization or on the network. This has now been replaced with master data management (MDM) and customer data integration (CDI) solutions, accompanying a master data "hub" on which the golden record of the customer (or product, or asset, etc.) resides, and is available as a service (e.g., "Get Customer") to any application that has the services to access it.

Many people hear data-as-a-service and think "outsourcing." While outsourced data is possible, we don't recommend it. We think companies should manage and own their own data assets--again, the platform matters less and can thus be outsourced if the business processes and data are solid. We see architecture groups enabling de-facto master data hubs and offering them as a service to ensure the sanctioned "single version of the truth" is available to everyone.

Responsibilities of the information architect

2007-08-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

Acknowledgment : http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid91_gci1267010_tax302190,00.html?track=NL-520&ad=600164&asrc=EM_USC_1978746&uid=5505931

QUESTION POSED ON: 03 August 2007
What are the typical responsibilities of an information architect? The aim is to have the information architect form part of the business intelligence team, and that this person will also have insights to our IT strategy.

>
EXPERT RESPONSE
Historically, information architects were responsible for the design and usability of Web sites and other software applications. More recently, we are beginning to think of information architects as the coordinators of information flow through the enterprise. This view encompasses much more than the user experience of a particular application. This information architect is responsible for modeling all applications across the enterprise and the logical data flows between them. In this sense, the information architect is an integral part of the business intelligence (BI) team, but their focus includes more than the BI and data warehouse components alone. I agree that this person should have insight into the IT strategy. In fact, the information architect should be partly, if not entirely, responsible for it. Information architecture, these days, spans disciplines of data warehousing, business intelligence, master data management, enterprise information integration (EII) and others.

I would list the following as the high level responsibilities for the information architect:

1. Responsible for expressing the enterprise vision for the applications and the data flows between them
2. Responsible for modeling and maintaining the enterprise data models
3. Responsible for extending the data models to the application architecture
4. Responsible for coordinating the integration and service-oriented architecture (SOA) between applications

Web 2.0 goes Desi!!!

2007-07-28T00:09:00.000-07:00

Here I would put the list of some Indian sites which have joined the Web 2.0 bandwagon and are seemingly doing a fairly good job. Keep an eye on this space -

http://www.watblog.com/
http://youmint.com/ - Social NW with free SMS!!
http://funpiper.com/
http://www.watconsult.com/
http://www.watjob.com/
http://yaari.com/- Another Social NW with free SMS!!

Potter-onomics!!

2007-07-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

It’s easy to disregard the old cliché that truth is stranger than fiction. But then consider Harry Potter. The story of how the franchise was built makes the schools of wizardry; epic battles and a menagerie of fantastic creatures seem commonplace by comparison.

The transformation of brand Harry Potter is rich in fairytale archetypes, a change that evokes The Ugly Duckling with a dash of Cinderella thrown in. There’s something genuinely magical about the way it’s morphed from an unknown solitary book a bare decade ago to an industry that is today estimated to be worth roughly $6 billion.

And in the tradition of the best fairy tales, almost no one saw the change coming. Marketing gurus, social scientists, bookstore owners, even the publishers, had little inkling of how successful Potter would be. Especially since it started unobtrusively enough, reading like Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series with some magical elements grafted in.

Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer, JWT, and one of the world’s most clued-in trendspotters admits, “I did not expect Harry Potter to reinvent books — since books were supposedly off-trend when Potter was released. I feel Potter buzz is a decade-old but perhaps it’s more recent than that.” Pottermania took even globetrotting marketing guru and author Martin Lindstrom by surprise: “No one expected this. Several publishers turned Harry Potter down.

I heard about the potential success when the manuscript was at auction in New York. As the price climbed I realised this was about to be a great success... and it was.” One of India’s first champions of Potter, R Sriram, consultant and former CEO of Crossword, recalls having encountered Potter at a book fair in London.

Only the first two books were out at the time, and in spite of acknowledging Rowling as a very promising author, Bloomsbury was not going overboard with promotions.

Crossword ordered 250 copies of the first books, and according to Sriram, they weren’t particularly fast moving. Just a few years later, people would be queuing up as early as 5 am to pick the latest instalments. Sriram says, “Little did we know that Rowling would compete on an equal footing with Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan.” Especially since Rowling did not fit the profile of an author likely to rake in billions.

Salzman admits, “Rowling was also off-trend. She wasn’t Candace Bushnell spinning her sexcapes for singletons but rather an unknown who sprang from the anonymity of the talented and impoverished.”

It wasn’t until the imminent release of Book Four that Pottermania got the world well and truly in its grip. It was bolstered by an all-too-rare announcement from the author that one of the characters in the book was going to be murdered. Ever since, each book has delivered an impressive bodycount, driven by Rowling’s Sibyl-like proclamations.

The announcement that two of the central characters won’t live to see the end of Book Seven has set off a virtual parallel industry analysing previous books for clues to the latest. It’s likely the franchise will have ended with a bang, an initial opening that will be unprecedented in publishing history.

Far from putting people off, the increasingly grim tenor is one of the main reasons for its growth. For instance, unlike most previous books targeted at children, Potter and his friends haven’t spent their entire lives stuck in a sanitised pre-pubescent limbo. Sriram says, “The publishers have managed to track the target audience. As they age and grow, the books have grown with them.

It’s evolved just ahead of the market and effectively enlarged it with every passing year.” Lindstrom praises the flawless release strategy, likening it to the hype campaign surrounding iPhone. “It plays on magic. Harry Potter is released at a minute past midnight, not at 9:00am like everyone else.”

Potter is a favourite with parents for having dragged a generation obsessed with Playstations and violent TV shows back to reading. And while Sriram believes the so-called decline in reading was exaggerated, he admits Potter has brought a new generation of kids to book stores.

An audience that bides their time between books, moving on to other fantasy writers like Philip Pullman, Eoin Colfer and Jonathan Stroud: “It’s obviously not just Bloomsbury but other publishers who’ve realised there was a phenomenon in the making. A rising tide lifts all ships.”

Possibly the largest reason for Potter’s success, though, is its ability to draw in adults as well. The older target audience gets hooked, according to Lindstrom, since “Grownups are no longer all skilled readers. Many have become simple readers which is exactly why simple books hold appeal.”

While kids pester parents to buy and then read the books, parents in turn have found them enjoyable enough to support the franchise. Salzman recalls there being no evidence of a generation gap by 2003 when it came to Harry Potter — it was either embraced or hated, but invariably inspired passion.

It managed to move from being a niche franchise to a mass favourite: “Harry Potter is about and for everyone. The leap to mass is something that only masses can engineer. I see many comparisons between Harry Potter and everything else that has sprung from the cultural zeitgeist and stuck these last few years. In fashion, the comparison has to be H+M, chock full of accessibility and style.”

John Gerzema, global chief strategy officer, Y&R does a quick analysis using the Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) study to find brands similar to Harry Potter: “iPod, iTunes, Mini Cooper, Pringles, Wii, Playstation, Sirius Satellite Radio and Universal Studios — innovative pioneers that are cool, trendy, intelligent, and fun as well.”

Besides Potter’s good wholesome entertainment plank, at least a part of the target audience is rooting for Rowling. Though no longer the underdog of the publishing world, it’s felt the less obvious reasons for the franchise’s success have a lot to do with the author herself. Says Lindstrom, “Mystique surrounds her; a lady who rarely speaks with the press and prefers to conduct meetings with kids only.

There’s the fact that she wrote the ending of the last book 12 years ago and locked it in a safe! The fact that people were trying to break into her house to secure a preview of the ending.

The fact that people are trying to ban her books as they are supposed to attract the devil!” In the initial days, Rowling was personally involved with branding. Sriram recalls the author sending Crossword a hand-written letter thanking everybody who celebrated Harry Potter’s birthday, one of the many promotional exercises that the store hosted. He says a tad ruefully, “Post that, it was impossible to get anything personalised from her.”

But if there was any danger of the franchise falling off the map with Rowling withdrawing from the public eye, the films kicked in to keep even the older books alive. In fact, more than the popularity of Book Four, it was the film version of The Philosopher’s Stone that brought in many first-time readers. Says Sriram: “The combination of film and book has been killer.

They feed into each other. It was a niche following before, the films made it broad based.” The movies may have lagged behind the plot, but have resulted in a huge push for the back catalogue. The books and films have taken centrestage “getting out of review pages and straight to page 1” says Sriram, resulting in huge free publicity.

The rumours and revelations around each book have resulted in an almost incessant buzz on the internet. Lindstrom says, “Word of mouth has been Harry Potter’s main driver.”

The jury is out on whether Potter can take other brands along for the ride, though. Rowling has been fiercely protective, actively avoiding a Star Wars-like situation where a much-beloved series was diluted by a spate of irrelevant tie-ins.

The brand has primarily been experienced through books and the movie. Salzman says that apart from Time Warner, Potter is less of a brand showcase and more a brand in its own right.

Lindstrom is among those who think the brand has spread itself too thin: “It benefited LEGO, in the beginning and Time Warner over time. But no one over the entire period. The franchise was given to far too many and the price was far too high.” According to Gerzema, though, the brand shows signs of decline: “Harry is not for everyone, but is recognised as a mover/shaker.”

An area of concern is that Knowledge (a parameter on BAV) is significantly higher than Esteem — indicating that people know more about the brand than they like it, a definite sign of a wear-out effect. Gerzema believes, “It could signal they are looking for other options for entertainment. Esteem has been growing slowly, so it’s not that Harry wore out his welcome, but to say he’s overexposed, is probably an understatement.”

However, for Sanjay Luthra, managing director, Mattel Toys India, Potter still works his magic — to a far greater extent than other more well established franchises: “Harry Potter’s core target audience is kids between seven and 16 (seven to 12 for movies, and 10 to 16 for books).

Unlike with Superman or Spiderman, where the TG is young children, Harry Potter isn’t a very big property. But as kids grow older, they grow out of Superman and Spiderman and start taking to Harry Potter.” Even the entertainment options are more in the area of card games like Harry Potter Uno, which cuts across older TGs.

Launched in India on July 1, the response has been “phenomenal”, with a week 1 off-take of 42%, as opposed to the average of 25% that follows most new properties. While the average monthly off-take is 50%, Luthra adds that Mattel India expects Harry Potter Uno to have a figure close to 80%-85%: “Kids stay with Harry Potter much longer — for anywhere between eight to 10 years.

They get into Potter through movies at the age of six or seven, and then graduate onto the books by the age of 10 or 12, and stay loyal fans till 15-16. A burst of activity around Superman will sustain interest for three to five months, but a Harry Potter activity lasts much longer.”

To cap it all, there’s the all too finite lifespan of the franchise. Even casual fans are aware that Potter is going to have only seven books worth of adventures, crunching the commitment required from a reader.

All the speculation, drama, suspense and intrigue are around a finite set of facts. Salzman says, “It is time for the run to end and seven years is a terrific tenure for a fad or for a trend at a stage where speed isn’t even fast enough. I think the brand will have a greater value if it’s not extended for now and if history and nostalgia drive its valuation in the next few years.”

Microsoft, Digg in advertising pact

2007-07-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday it reached an agreement to be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on Digg.com, a popular Web site that lets readers recommend online articles to others.

The three-year agreement between Microsoft and Digg, which has more than 17 million visitors a month, provides a boost to the world's largest software maker's efforts to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing online advertising market.

The two companies said they would also work together on future technology and advertising initiatives.

Digg challenges the long-held journalistic assumption that editors know best what people want to read and allows readers to "digg," or vote for a story to push up its rankings.

Microsoft has a similar advertising agreement with another hot Web property, social-networking site Facebook.com.

Shares of Microsoft fell 14 cents to $30.66 (14.93 pounds) in afternoon Nasdaq trading.

Money for Nothing...........

2007-07-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

Have a look at this

Salary & Govt. Concessions for a Member of Parliament (MP)

Monthly Salary : 12,000

Expense for Constitution per month : 10,000

Office expenditure per month : 14,000

Traveling concession (Rs. 8 per km) : 48,000 ( eg.For a visit from kerala to Delhi & return: 6000 km)

Daily DA TA during parliament meets : 500/day

Charge for 1 class (A/C) in train : Free (For any number of times)
(All over India )

Charge for Business Class in flights : Free for 40 trips / year (With wife or P.A.)

Rent for MP hostel at Delhi : Free

Electricity costs at home : Free up to 50,000 units

Local phone call charge : Free up to 1 ,70,000 calls.

TOTAL expense for a MP [having no qualification] per year : 32,00,000 [i.e. 2.66 lakh/month]

TOTAL expense for 5 years : 1,60,00,000

For 534 MPs, the expense for 5 years :
8,54,40,00,000 (nearly 855 crores)

This is how all our tax money is been swallowed and price hike on our regular commodities.......

And this is the present condition of our country:

855 crores could make their life livable !!
Think of the great democracy we have.............
PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ALL OF UR FRIENDS.

Bill @ Harvard

2007-07-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

BillG finally graduates and delivers a speech @ Harvard commencement.

The speech is

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree."

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I'll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson has called me "Harvard's most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn't even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn't guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world's first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world's inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you've had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren't being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can't be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don't … care." I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent."

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it's easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It's hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don't know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks "How can I help?," then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.

Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that's why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation."

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.

What for?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world's most privileged people learn about the lives of the world's least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.

Ethics and its decreasing importance in today's India

2007-07-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

MEN AND IDEAS

Public ethics

GURCHARAN DAS

My wife and i have been feeling pretty down recently since perhaps the most popular president in Indian history is about to be dethroned in unseemly backroom horse-trading. We have tried to console ourselves, saying that politics is competitive by nature and what else can you expect from political parties who are only ruled by self-interest. What finally lifted our spirits, however, was the news that our niece had landed a good job. She called to say that she had signed a lease for a lovely room at an ‘unbelievably low’ rent. But after two weeks she was in tears. She had arrived bag and baggage at her ‘new home’ to find that the villainous landlord had given away her room on a much higher rent. She blamed her plight on the ‘greed of capitalism’.
I told her that the landlord is not at fault for wanting more rent; he is guilty of breaking an agreement. She could go to court but it would take a lifetime to get justice. What had failed my niece was governance not capitalism. If our courts enforced contracts speedily, the landlord would not have dared. People behave more morally in the capitalist countries of the West because the rule of law allows one to be good. On the other hand, millions of workers in the government of India do not work because they have the ‘socialist’ guarantee of a lifetime job. Their moral failure, it seems to me, is far greater than the landlord’s.
My niece’s room hunting woes soon got submerged by murky reports that had the potential of gravely damaging the highest office in the land. Indeed, what should we make of the news that the frontrunner for the President, Pratibha Patil, had started a cooperative bank whose licence was cancelled by the Reserve Bank four years ago? The bank, it seems, gave Pratibha’s relatives ‘illegal loans’ that exceeded the bank’s share capital. It also gave a loan to Pratibha’s own sugar mill which was never repaid. The bank waived these loans, and this drove the bank into liquidation. The government liquidator of the bank, PD Nigam, said this week, “The fact that relatives of the founder chairperson (Pratibha Patil) were among those indiscriminately granted loans and that some illegal loan waivers were done has come up in our audit.” Six of the top 10 defaulters in Pratibha’s bank were linked to her relatives.
If these facts are true, then it is a serious moral lapse. If allegations against Pratibha Patil are just ‘mudslinging’ as the prime minister says, then the charges will not stick. However, if she does become President and the charges turn out to be true, then the citizens of India will punish the UPA government in the only way that they can, and that is by throwing it out at the next elections. In the meantime, severe harm would have been done in diminishing the President’s office as well as the Indian nation.
Whether it is presidential or capitalist ethics, the starting point is the recognition that both democratic politics and capitalism are based on competition and this is what keeps people honest in the long term. Both democracy and capitalism are decentralised systems where no single person is in charge. Adam Smith wrote more than 200 years ago that when millions of self-interested individuals act in their own interest in the marketplace, an ‘invisible hand’ promotes the common good of society. However, institutions are not perfect and the examples of my niece’s landlord and the UPA presidential candidate teach us that ethics matter profoundly in our democratic capitalist system.

Walmart, CPM and the truth

2007-07-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

Swaminomics Article in today's TOI - takes on the Wal-mart global business model and how that is unfit for India, Why Walmart in dependent on Bharti and why is CPM opposing Wal-mart.

Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest multinational. Yet, its business model, which has conquered the US, is totally unsuited to Indian conditions.
Historically, MNCs have had high profit margins arising from quasi-monopolies in technology and finance, and political influence translating into protectionism. In the US, trade unions fought for a bigger share of the surpluses, and obtained the highest wages in the world. In effect, MNCs and the trade unions shared monopoly profits garnered at consumer expense.
Wal-Mart has defied this model. Far from seeking high margins, it has relentlessly cut prices and kept profit margins so low that competitors give up. Its profit margin is just 3% of sales. Prices at Wal-Mart can be half or less than at major department stores. Wal-Mart quality is often poor, though that is improving.
So, unlike historical Numero Unos, Wal-Mart has risen by cutting instead of raising prices, by reducing instead of increasing profit margins, by catering to the masses rather than the well-heeled, and by using the cheapest rather than the most expensive workers. Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard University estimates that Wal-Mart’s lower prices benefit US consumers directly by $18 billion a year. Besides, Wal-Mart obliges rivals to cut prices. The net benefit, according to consulting firm Global Insight, is a whopping $263 billion. This dwarfs anti-poverty programmes. The greatest beneficiaries of Wal-Mart are the poor.
Wal-Mart aims at scale economies of every sort. By buying massively, it pays least to suppliers. It has massive stores with acres of parking space to accommodate hordes who drive in. This strategy needs cheap land, so Wal-Mart stores are typically in urban peripheries, small towns and rural areas. Petrol is cheap in the US, so Americans happily drive an hour or more to a Wal-Mart store 30-40 miles away.
Conditions are totally different abroad, so Wal-Mart has often failed in other countries. Ghemawat says that the further Wal-Mart goes from the US the worse is its performance. It shut down in Germany after losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and sold out in Korea too. It now accepts the need to adapt to local conditions, but adaptation erodes the power of its US model.
Land prices have skyrocketed in India, so a US-style superstore would have to be situated miles outside a big city. I simply cannot see wellheeled Indians driving for hours to a big store on the outskirts of Delhi
or Mumbai. Unlike in the US, the poor and lower middle-class in India do not have cars or cheap petrol to facilitate long-distance shopping.
So, small shopkeepers will easily compete. They typically evade sales tax. Many pay low rents because of rent control. They are located close to consumers, and provide home delivery at no extra cost. Some even provide credit. Even if Wal-Mart is cheaper, many consumers will opt for the convenience of local shopkeepers.
To succeed in India, the Wal-Mart model needs major surgery. It can procure imported goods cheaper than anyone else. But its Indian partner, Bharti, knows the local market much better. On balance, Wal-Mart needs Bharti more than the other way round.
Given Wal-Mart’s limitations, why is the CPM so opposed to its entry? The party says it is worried that small shopkeepers will suffer. Yet, it seems hilarious that a party sworn to protect the poor from the bourgeoisie should suddenly pose as a defender of the bourgeoisie, and oppose lower prices for the poor.
What’s happening? Well, ideology obliges the CPM to oppose the biggest MNC. More important, the Left is outraged by the company’s anti-union policies. To keep prices low, Wal-Mart seeks only nonunionised labour, and has closed stores rather than accept unions. Some critics claim that Wal-Mart pays less than the minimum wage. In fact, it pays around $10 per hour, fractionally less than the average for all US retailers. Critics think Wal-Mart should pay much more than small companies, and offer higher health and other benefits — that is what Numero Unos have done in the past. But Wal-Mart says it is dedicated to the philosophy of everyday low prices, and gives priority to the consumer over the worker.
In theory, the Left represents the poor. In practice, it represents the labour aristocracy — the big trade unions. These unions provide CPM with cadres that are invaluable for fighting elections. The poor do not provide any such assistance. So, the CPM will always favour unions over the poor. This explains why it is so outraged by Wal-Mart.
Note that Wal-Mart has been welcomed in China, where it has supplemented rather than supplanted small shopkeepers. In the coming year, Wal-Mart will set up 20 new stores and remodel 65 existing ones in China. In keeping with the need to adapt to local conditions, Wal-Mart has even accepted unionisation in China.
The lesson is clear. The CPM should welcome Wal-Mart into India. Once it is here, India’s labour laws will oblige it to accept a trade union. The CPM should seek to control that union. What a communist victory that will be!

WHO MAKES THE APPLE I-POD? IT'S NOT APPLE FOR STARTERS...

2007-06-29T04:30:00.000-07:00

Who makes the Apple i pod? Here’s a hint: It is not Apple. The company outsources the entire manufacture of the device to a number of Asian enterprises, among them Asustek, Inventec Appliances and Foxconn.

But this list of companies isn’t a satisfactory answer either: They only do final assembly. What about the 451 parts that go into the iPod? Where are they made and by whom?

Three researchers at the University of California, Irvine — Greg Linden, Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick — applied some investigative cost accounting to this question, using a report from Portelligent Inc. that examined all the parts that went into the iPod.

Their study, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, offers a fascinating illustration of the complexity of the global economy, and how difficult it is to understand that complexity by using only conventional trade statistics.

The retail value of the 30-gigabyte video iPod that the authors examined was $299. The most expensive component in it was the hard drive, which was manufactured by Toshiba and costs about $73. The next most costly components were the display module (about $20), the video/multimedia processor chip ($8) and the controller chip ($5). They estimated that the final assembly, done in China, cost only about $4 a unit.

One approach to tracing supply chain geography might be to attribute the cost of each component to the country of origin of its maker. So $73 of the cost of the iPod would be attributed to Japan since Toshiba is a Japanese company, and the $13 cost of the two chips would be attributed to the United States, since the suppliers, Broadcom and PortalPlayer, are American companies, and so on.

But this method hides some of the most important details. Toshiba may be a Japanese company, but it makes most of its hard drives in the Philippines and China. So perhaps we should also allocate part of the cost of that hard drive to one of those countries. The same problem arises regarding the Broadcom chips, with most of them manufactured in Taiwan. So how can one distribute the costs of the iPod components across the countries where they are manufactured in a meaningful way?

To answer this question, let us look at the production process as a sequence of steps, each possibly performed by a different company operating in a different country. At each step, inputs like computer chips and a bare circuit board are converted into outputs like an assembled circuit board. The difference between the cost of the inputs and the value of the outputs is the “value added” at that step, which can then be attributed to the country where that value was added.

The profit margin on generic parts like nuts and bolts is very low, since these items are produced in intensely competitive industries and can be manufactured anywhere. Hence, they add little to the final value of the iPod. More specialized parts, like the hard drives and controller chips, have much higher value added.

According to the authors’ estimates, the $73 Toshiba hard drive in the iPod contains about $54 in parts and labor. So the value that Toshiba added to the hard drive was $19 plus its own direct labor costs. This $19 is attributed to Japan since Toshiba is a Japanese company.

Continuing in this way, the researchers examined the major components of the iPod and tried to calculate the value added at different stages of the production process and then assigned that value added to the country where the value was created. This isn’t an easy task, but even based on their initial examination, it is quite clear that the largest share of the value added in the iPod goes to enterprises in the United States, particularly for units sold here.

The researchers estimated that $163 of the iPod’s $299 retail value in the United States was captured by American companies and workers, breaking it down to $75 for distribution and retail costs, $80 to Apple, and $8 to various domestic component makers. Japan contributed about $26 to the value added (mostly via the Toshiba disk drive), while Korea contributed less than $1.

The unaccounted-for parts and labor costs involved in making the iPod came to about $110. The authors hope to assign those labor costs to the appropriate countries, but as the hard drive example illustrates, that’s not so easy to do.

This value added calculation illustrates the futility of summarizing such a complex manufacturing process by using conventional trade statistics. Even though Chinese workers contribute only about 1 percent of the value of the iPod, the export of a finished iPod to the United States directly contributes about $150 to our bilateral trade deficit with the Chinese.

Ultimately, there is no simple answer to who makes the iPod or where it is made. The iPod, like many other products, is made in several countries by dozens of companies, with each stage of production contributing a different amount to the final value.

The real value of the iPod doesn’t lie in its parts or even in putting those parts together. The bulk of the iPod’s value is in the conception and design of the iPod. That is why Apple gets $80 for each of these video iPods it sells, which is by far the largest piece of value added in the entire supply chain.

Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.

Trump partners Kiyosaki, authors book

2007-06-29T03:32:00.003-07:00

Trump slams Bush

2007-06-29T02:37:00.000-07:00

Reliance Commnications Customer Service : Joke of the Millenium

2007-06-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

While India Inc leaps towards creating an exemplary service-based economy, Reliance Communication still continues to line up jokesters for its customer service! Here is a classic story of the same :

http://broadbandblog.in/448/reliance-webworld-express-a-horrific-tale/

Help Animals on Cruel Factory Farms

2007-06-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

Billions of chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms are never allowed to spend a single moment of their lives doing anything that is natural and important to them.

From birth until slaughter, these animals are either crammed by the thousands into warehouses or confined to cages and pens so small that they can barely move. Most of these animals will never feel the sun or breathe fresh air. Each day brings more physical pain and psychological trauma. Their deaths are the final injustice, as they are killed in a cruel and painful manner.

You can help end this cruelty to animals today by making a tax-deductible gift to PETA.

Factory farms are the biggest cause of animal suffering in the world. However, PETA has won several historic victories for animals that have sent shock waves through this cruel industry in recent months. Our actions are changing how some of the world's biggest meat buyers and producers do business—and improving the lives of literally billions of animals who are used for food.

But there are still countless animals who need our help. I hope that you will support PETA's ongoing campaign to reform factory farming. Making a donation today is the most effective action that you can take to stop the suffering of the greatest number of animals.

Your support is helping PETA transform the entire animal agriculture industry. For example, PETA has worked behind the scenes with Burger King for the past six years. As a result of our efforts, the company recently announced a series of animal welfare reforms that are changing the face of commercial animal farming.

Burger King will now start purchasing more of its animal products from farms that do not confine hens to cruel battery cages or keep sows trapped in hideous gestation crates. The company is also rewarding its suppliers for adopting a much less cruel method of chicken slaughter. These changes will mean less painful lives and deaths for billions of animals.

In response to Burger King's and other companies' new purchasing demands, Smithfield Foods—the largest pork supplier in the world—announced that it will phase out the use of all gestation crates in its farms. Just a few days later, Canada's largest pork producer, Maple Leaf Foods, announced that it will follow suit. Almost simultaneously, Cargill Foods—another of the world's biggest pork producers—pledged to stop using gestation crates in half its farms immediately.

Thanks to your generosity, PETA is changing how the world's cruelest industry treats the animals it uses. But there are still holdouts. Some companies, like KFC and its chicken suppliers, continue to choose cruelty. To keep the pressure on the animal agriculture industry, we must do more than we ever have before, and we are counting on your continued support.

Together, we can spare billions of chickens, pigs and cows the agonizing lives and violent deaths that they now suffer in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Now is our moment to make important changes that will stop animal suffering.

Thank you for your immediate response.

Sincerely,

Bruce Friedrich
Vice President for Campaigns

P.S. Factory farms aren't going away any time soon. PETA can do the most good by changing how billions of factory-farmed animals are bred, kept and killed. Please support PETA's efforts to reform factory farming by making an online donation right now.

Some good articles on Master Data Management

2007-06-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

Gartner and Forrester frameworks designed to combat confusion around MDM technology options

Forrester is saying "buyer beware" when it comes to MDM technology investments

seven master data management best practices

learn how to build a business case for MDM

an introduction to MDM basics,

a discussion of MDM trends

conversation about MDM and CDI, including a discussion about MDM ROI

Building Publish Post a customer data integration business case: Project specifications

All thanks go to SearchDataManagement.com 's classy BI newsletter

Harry Potter Can't Save the Day

2007-06-11T23:28:00.000-07:00

An insight-fool article!

One of the big headlines circulating today is that, while next month's final installment in the wildly popular Harry Potter series should drum up major traffic for booksellers, there is a negative twist -- the boy magician is also a huge drain as bookstores try to gain advantage over one another. This is no surprise to many of us, though. In such a cutthroat industry, even an amazing phenomenon like Harry Potter can't quite save the day.

Back in February, one analyst upgraded Barnes & Noble's (NYSE: BKS) stock thanks (at least partially) to Harry's imminent arrival. However, at the time -- and since then -- many of us have mulled the idea that booksellers like Barnes & Noble and archrivals Borders (NYSE: BGP) and Books-A-Million (NYSE: BAMM) don't have much to gain through the actual book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, given the air of mutually assured destruction that's going around.

All the booksellers -- including Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) -- have been slashing the price for pre-orders of the book, which is obviously one way to try to funnel Harry Potter business to their own businesses, but it also does a number on their margins. Fanfare can cost money, too, if some of the physical booksellers want to throw midnight release parties as they have done in the past. Of course, when it comes to the bookstores, the hope is that the customers who come in for the book, even at its deeply discounted price, will snap up other items while they're in the stores. Let's hope so, for shareholders' sake.

Publisher Scholastic (Nasdaq: SCHL) may have seen that its runaway hit franchise is coming to an end and boosted the price for the hardcover up to $34.99, but lots of people are currently pointing out that booksellers are slashing half off the cover price in order to drive traffic.

Big hits drive traffic to booksellers, but it's still tough going for Borders and Barnes & Noble, both of which have been pushing hard to get a leg up on the competition; their loyalty programs offer deep discounts to try and lure more and more customers (from one another). Amazon.com is no stranger to discount pricing, either, but at least it offers many different types of products and has the edge of its original tagline, "the world's biggest bookstore" -- it's much easier to find anything you want at Amazon.com, even if what you're looking for resides further down the so-called Long Tail of commerce.

Given the competitive landscape, investing in bricks-and-mortar bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble just doesn't appeal to me these days; they're hard-pressed to be able to turn even blockbuster hits like Harry Potter's latest adventure to their advantage, profit-wise, and that's really saying something. (And of course, with this installment, Harry Potter mania will come to a close.) Until they can figure out innovative ways to create loyal customers without slashing prices on their bestsellers, it's hard to foresee sustainable growth ahead.

For related Foolishness, crack open a good article:

Some of us believe there's little magic for booksellers.
Harry Potter's magic comes back.
What's the "Long Tail"? We asked Wired editor and author Chris Anderson about it in this interview.

Amazon.com is a Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation. Borders has been recommended by Motley Fool Inside Value.

Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned. The Fool's disclosure policy knows the secret of the Sorting Hat.

Offshore outsourcing must for Indian cos

2007-06-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

Indian organizations facing IT skills shortage and second-class treatment from local service providers must consider offshore outsourcing, advices research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.

Demand for skilled IT personnel is exceeding local supply with rapid economic growth aggravating the problem, observes Gartner. Local chief information officers (CIOs) find it hard to manage the shortage as internal business units become even more demanding in the area of IT requirements and schedules.

"Local service providers lack adequate focus on the Indian domestic market, widening the demand-supply gap by not allocating enough quality resources for Indian customers," said Linda Cohen, vice president of Gartner's IT sourcing group.

The challenges and market conditions require Indian CIOs to look beyond the limits of their own geographical boundaries, much like their Western counterparts.

Gartner predicts that Indian companies will increasingly go to offshore in their sourcing strategies, which will result in outsourcing deals offered by some Indian companies that include higher end parts of service delivered from other parts of the world.

"This global sourcing model will become business-as-usual for Indian organizations," said Arup Roy, senior research analyst for Gartner's IT services market group.

Indian companies will increasingly source IT skills from nearby Singapore and Hong Kong. The market has already seen the first signs of this trend, adds Roy who cites the example of the Indian embassy which outsourced its visa collection and delivery services to a US company.

"Many Indian IT firms with operations spread across the U.S. and Europe are now outsourcing a part of their administrative work locally."

Gartner recommends innovative programs for retaining talent and alternative sources of talent like recruiting from small and mid-tier cities. It also suggests evaluating offshore outsourcing or staff augmentation from other parts of the world to create a sense of competition among the local vendors, potentially increasing their focus on local opportunities.

The absurd story of the relative corporate tax burden

2007-06-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL

- The absurd story of the relative corporate tax burden

Cutting Corners Ashok Mitra

The Economic and Political Weekly continues to surprise. Perhaps only the Dutch periodical, Ekonomist, shares with it the idiosyncrasy of combining comments on contemporary political, economic and social events in the first half with serious, often abstruse, articles on grave themes in the social sciences in the later pages. Juxtapositions of this nature can pose problems. Separating the mundane from the profound is not always that easy a task. This is where the EPW scores. It has met the challenge with rare panache. Even the presence of papers with formidable-looking mathematical equations has failed to scare away its readers who include members of academia as well as policy-makers. Some of the articles it carries in the latter half of the journal have acute relevance to contemporary problems affecting the polity and the economy.

Consider, for instance, the issue of May 19 last. It carries a fascinating article, “Corporate Size and Effective Corporate Tax Rate”, summarizing the results of an empirical work undertaken by a young, hitherto-unknown scholar, Atulan Guha. His institutional affiliation is not mentioned, but that hardly matters. The message his paper puts across should make one sit up.

The sample Guha chose for his investigation consisted of panels of Indian private companies mentioned in the database published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the reputed Mumbai-based research institution. This was, in a sense, the only source available to him, since the ministry of finance does not publish detailed data on the collection of corporation tax at the company level. The ‘proxy’ data covering the period, 1992-2001, were fed into an econometric model. The results Guha arrives at are startling. The simple-minded may have an idealized view of the system of taxation: the bigger the size of the company, the larger its capital stock and the magnitude of its turnover and gross profits, the higher must be its tax liability. But no; Guha has discovered it works the other way. The effective tax rates, that is, actual taxes paid by firms as a proportion of their gross profits, are inversely correlated with their size. The larger companies pay taxes at lower rates while relatively smaller-sized firms are charged at higher rates. A topsyturvy situation, you and I will be tempted to say. In the kind of society we subsist, this is how the cookie crumbles.

Guha speculates on the factors which lead to this kind of a denouement. A number of things appear obvious. Bigger firms enjoy larger benefits in the way of write-offs for depreciation and obsolescence. They often have a substantial turnover of exports, thereby qualifying for further tax concessions. None of this tells the entire story though. The bigger the firm, the greater, Guha is sanguine, is its ability to hire accountants and tax experts who are conversant with the nooks and corners of the entire range of tax exemptions a company can lobby for and avail itself of.

They are equally cognizant of the various loopholes in the tax structure. In some cases, these highpriced tax advisers can fudge the accounts in such a marvellous manner that revenue officials are totally bamboozled. Guha also hints at the likelihood of the greater ability of the bigger firms to hire top-notch lawyers who argue their case with super aplomb, starting all the way from the level of junior tax authorities through the rungs of tax tribunals and further on through different layers of the judiciary. With presumably a twinkle in his eye, Guha drops, at the next state, a half-hint: the big cheeses in the corporate sector are in a position to either arm-twist or otherwise ‘influence’ officials in the department of revenue to get tax assessments adjusted in their favour. The modalities of such influence-peddling are well known and hardly need to be spelled out in detail.

Guha is more explicit about a fourth reason he adduces for the effective relative lightness of the tax burden for bigger firms: it is their nexus with the political administrative system. What he implies is fairly obvious. The fat cats in the corporate sector have the ability to maintain a close liaison with the political top brass. In a rigidly hierarchical institutional arrangement, there are ways and ways of applying moral suasion from the top; where tax assessment is concerned, the benefits of such suasion accrue to the larger firms.

It is a class-biased society. Guha’s findings will not put to shame either the corporate sector or the government’s revenue-collecting apparatchik. Nor will it embarrass the politicians who rule the roost. There can, however, be some major spin-offs on account of the manner the tax system has been made to operate in favour of the richer corporations. The government foams in the mouth while exhorting each and all to participate in the free market where every one is supposed to have equal clout. The reality is simply not so, as the regime of effective tax rates so vividly illustrates.

Small and medium-sized entities in the corporate world will soon learn the lesson this kind of tax regime imparts. To survive and prosper in such a milieu, the smaller firm will quickly decide to come to an arrangement among themselves and cultivate the art of being big. Given the built-in inequity in the effective tax rate structure, small- and medium-sized firms will convince themselves that only the big is beautiful; they will begin to think in terms of forming carte-type organizations of their own — or in terms of mergers. Some legal impediments may exist making it inconvenient to form cartels or arrange amalgamations.

Devices nonetheless exist through which an informal system of collusion can be worked out by the relatively smaller firms. By coming to a tacit understanding with one another in the matter of purchase of inputs, pricing of products and regulation of output, they could develop enough power and bargaining capability to draw the same respect and attention from the revenue authorities as are accorded to the biggies in the corporate sector.

The capitalist system as currently unfolding in India would, in any case, have hastened the arrival of a network of monopolies with near-total command over the economy: the ‘tax breaks’ that the top layer of the corporate sector enjoys will further advance the dawn of that ethereal day. And one can have a fair hunch of the total fiscal anarchy likely to ensure once the giant-sized special economic zones are ushered in. Ask not what the SEZs will do for the nation; ask what further blessings the nation can shower on the SEZs. Given this frame of mind of the political masters, nothing need be left to the imagination.

There is a tailpiece, though, to this absurd story of relative tax burden. For nearly fifty years now, a group of economists, particularly those trained in London and Chicago, have been haranguing the policy-framers on the advantage accruing from low tax rates. They have based themselves on the so-called Laffer Curve, according to which the elasticity of income of tax collections — or whatever the jargon is — is greater than unity, meaning thereby that a lowering of the tax rate will yield a more than proportionate increase in tax revenue.

Guha’s research ought to set everybody to rethink on the soundness of the proposition. If the tax rate is lowered, there would be that much of extra money in the kitty of a company with the help of which it could hire more accountants and more smart lawyers to explore fresh and fresher avenues of tax avoidance; it would, at the same time, have a larger slush fund at its command from which consideration money might be offloaded to tax officials and ruling politicians. Adieu, Arthur Laffer!

Good QnA Sites

2007-06-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

Any more in mind? Please leave a comment.

http://www.linkedin.com/answers?trk=tab_answers

http://qna.live.com/

http://answers.yahoo.com/

http://qna.rediff.com/

PETA Exposes more cruelty on animals

2007-05-31T03:47:00.000-07:00

Companies that torture, kill, and exploit animals depend on people's ignorance. They go to extreme lengths to hide their hideous abuses from the public. So PETA goes even further to uncover the truth.

KFC thought that it could hide the fact that its suppliers' workers delight in torturing chickens. Fashion designers thought that they could cover up the fact that many of their "raccoon fur" coats are actually made from dogs who are killed and skinned alive in China. And medical laboratory Biosearch believed no one would ever know that its employees were dripping caustic substances into terrified kittens' eyes.

They were all wrong. Thanks to PETA's undercover investigations, the world has seen graphic evidence of the horrific cruelties that these companies are perpetrating. Once we've exposed the abuse, it's only a matter of time before it stops. You and I have seen it happen time and again.

PETA's investigations have forced hundreds of the largest and best-known companies to stop hurting animals. It is your support that drives our lifesaving work. By making an online donation to PETA today, you can help us take down the next corporate abuser that thinks no one is watching.

Your donation is crucial because these investigations require an enormous amount of resources. We must create a fake identity for our investigators and get them hired at companies that are abusing animals. Every day, our investigators must appear to be doing their jobs — while actually videotaping the horrors that they see. They can't quit until we have enough proof to take to the public.

I often fear for the safety of PETA's undercover investigators. But I know that they do it because our investigations are the only hope for animals who are tortured and killed behind locked doors.

Please make a special donation to support our investigative work in behalf of animals today. Your donation will send this powerful message to every company that abuses animals: You have no refuge, no safe haven, nowhere to hide.

With gratitude,

Ingrid E. Newkirk
President

P.S. By supporting PETA's undercover investigations, you are refusing to allow animal suffering to take place in silence. With your support today, the world will learn about the violence inflicted upon animals used by the cruelest industries. Thank you for speaking up for these forgotten animals.

IN INDIA GRANDMA COOKS, THEY DELIVER...

2007-05-29T00:11:00.001-07:00

this article published in the New York Times takes a closer look at the dabbawala system that is a rampant in Mumbai...perhaps the most profitable business that is there today..No wonder they deliver lectures at IIMs teaching the intricacies of the business. Looks like dabba is the name of the game...
For more on this read the article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/business/worldbusiness/29lunch.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

2007-05-09T11:41:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia has started to hit the big time. Accordingly, several critical articles have come out, including "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as "When Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive".

These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully. I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia. (I have since left the project.)

Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue. These problems could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem. If the project's managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary.

Read the remaining article here

Beer Purush

2007-05-09T00:25:00.000-07:00

Fight for the Earth

2007-05-06T04:10:00.001-07:00

http://exnorainternational.org/index.html

The Ones who thought and then, fought

2007-05-06T04:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.5thpillar.org/

how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?

2007-05-06T01:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/aug/13inter.htm

A father fights for justice for his dead soldier son

2007-05-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

http://specials.rediff.com/news/2007/apr/23slide1.htm

FOCUS ON YOUR STRENGTHS, NOT WEAKNESSES..

2007-04-29T08:34:00.001-07:00

Marcus Buckingham knows enough about good management to know he's not a good manager.

Before launching a career as a management consultant and author of such books as First, Break All The Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently and The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success, Buckingham served as head of The Gallup Organization's strengths management practice. He was a manager, and he didn't much care for it. "I wasn't terrible, but I had no appetite for it," said Buckingham, who spoke about management and leadership at the Wharton Leadership Conference on June 9. The conference was sponsored by Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management and Center for Human Resources.

According to Buckingham, the best managers share one talent -- the ability to find, and then capitalize upon, their employees' unique traits. "The guiding principle is, 'How can I take this person's talent and turn it into performance?' That's the only way success is possible." And yet not everyone has that knack, Buckingham said. If he has learned anything from his years spent interviewing the best minds of the business world, it is this: Truly great managers, and truly inspiring business leaders, are rarer than many think. "Some of you in this room may not have that talent," he said. "If not, management can become a thankless task."

Checkers vs. Chess

How to tell a good manager from a bad manager? According to Buckingham, it's simple: Bad managers play checkers. Good managers play chess. The good manager knows that not all employees work the same way. They know if they are to achieve success, they must put their employees in a position where they will be able to use their strengths. "Great managers know they don't have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them .... A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them."

It may sound elementary, but a quick glance around the business world indicates that many companies have yet to grasp this simple concept of putting people's strengths to use, Buckingham said. That's because the business world -- and the world at large -- is obsessed with weaknesses and finding ways to fix them. Buckingham cited a recent poll that asked workers whether they felt they could achieve more success through improving on their weaknesses or building on their strengths. Fifty-nine percent picked the former.

"A great manager sees the folly in this," said Buckingham, who has interviewed some of the business world's most successful leaders for his books. "A great manager knows he or she will get the most return on investment by working on strengths." Buckingham has seen this management style work. He just doesn't see it often enough, and he believes too many workers spend too much of their time doing things they don't like to do or simply aren't good at doing.

Buckingham co-authored his book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, in hopes of kick-starting a management revolution that will push mangers to focus on strength. In the book, Buckingham and co-author Donald O. Clifton describe 34 distinct worker profiles -- "Learner," "Achiever" and "Developer," among others -- and offer advice on how those personalities can best be put to use. "Most people are not using their talent at work at all," Buckingham said.

So how can managers tap into the talent they have in their organizations? Buckingham said a good first step is to determine what employees are good at. The tasks they learn quickly, the talents they naturally exhibit and the jobs they feel good about doing are hints about their inherent strengths. Once those strengths are uncovered, a good manager will put them to use. "You can only win as a company when you get your people into positive numbers," Buckingham said.

Optimism and Ego

Managing employees successfully is a rare talent. Even rarer, Buckingham said, is the ability to lead. And all good managers are not necessarily good leaders.

"I do think there is a rather keen and distinct difference between managing and leading," Buckingham said. The chief responsibility of a leader, for example, "is to rally people for a better future. If you are a leader, you better be unflinchingly, unfailingly optimistic. No matter how bleak his or her mood, nothing can undermine a leader's belief that things can get better, and must get better. I believe you either bring this to the table or you don't."

Along with that optimism, great leaders can also bring big egos -- and that's not a bad thing. While some have blamed the business world's recent string of scandals -- Enron, WorldCom and others -- on bloated executive egos, Buckingham disagrees. It's not ego that ruined Ken Lay, but rather a lack of ethics. There's a big difference, Buckingham said. And considering the responsibility facing business leaders to build a future for their companies, a big ego might be what is needed.

"If you are going to lead, you better have a deep-seated belief that you should be at the helm, dragging everyone into that better future," he said. "Virtually nothing about a leader is humble. I'm not saying they are arrogant, but their claims are big." Buckingham said successful leaders must find a "universal truth" to rally their followers. These universal truths stem from the basic human needs, fears and desires that unite all people, across all cultures. They also happen to be great tools for leadership.

Take, for example, one of the great human fears -- fear of the future. "We all share a fear of the unknown," Buckingham said. "The problem for the modern-day leader, of course, is that you traffic in the future." Buckingham says some the best leaders can overcome this fear -- and build confidence among their followers -- with a weapon of their own: clarity.

By presenting a clear message, and backing up their message with actions that support it, top managers of such companies as Tesco, Best Buy and Wal-Mart have rallied employees to their cause and enjoyed bottom-line success as a result, Buckingham noted. "The best way to turn anxiety into confidence is this: Be clear. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear." Former New York City Mayor Giuliani provided a good example of effective leadership through clarity, Buckingham said. When Giuliani took office in 1993, he could have turned his attentions just about anywhere; America's largest city certainly had its share of problems.

But Giuliani set one specific, clear and focused goal for his administration. He would reduce crime and improve quality of life for residents. Then he laid out three simple ways he was going to start making that happen: He announced he would get rid of the window washers who pestered New York City drivers; clean subways of graffiti and then keep the vandals away; and make all cab drivers wear collared shirts. The issues were, on their surface, minor. But they were relevant to his citizens. And by setting three immediate goals -- and then achieving them -- Giuliani was able to build trust among residents and respect among his workers. That trust carried over as he tackled larger challenges, and within a few years of his arrival, the FBI named New York the safest big city in America. "You can do a lot worse than pick just a few areas you want to take action on right now," Buckingham said.

Clarity of purpose has also been a driving factor in the success of Tesco, the British food giant that has more than 2,000 stores and 360,000 employees worldwide. When Terry Leahy took over as CEO in 1997, he decreed the company's focus would be, from that point forward, to serve the housewives of the world. Then he went out and did something to prove he believed in his focus: He added more checkout lines in all his stores, a move that led to significantly higher labor costs but also won over his customers and sent a message to his employees that they were there, as Leahy had proclaimed, to provide courteous, efficient service.

"That kind of clarity builds confidence in people," Buckingham said. Today, Tesco is one of the three largest retailers in the world, and Leahy's success provides a handy leadership lesson. "When you want to lead, start with the future." Buckingham said. "Get specific. And get vivid."

The "Do Nots" of Networking

2007-04-28T11:14:00.001-07:00

The "Do Nots" of Networking

Recruiters' Top 10 Complaints

2007-04-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Recruiters' Top 10 Complaints

Send letter to India by just writing an email!

2007-04-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

the once ancient public sector enterprises of India mc. have slowly started to renovate themselves and make smart use of technology, and here's a great example of the same. The Indian postal department has now started giving an option to send letters to India by just writing an email, and the source is made available at fairly low cost (if you are not in India). Here's the url - http://www.indiapost.gov.in/IndiaPost-E-Post.html

An Article from PETA Newsletter

2007-04-21T00:56:00.001-07:00

Dear Friend,

As an eyewitness to the barbaric practices that take place behind the scenes at Ringling, I'd like to tell you exactly what happens so that you can help me spread the word to people who still think that circuses that use animals are good family "entertainment."

I joined Ringling last April because I wanted the opportunity to work with animals every day. I was totally unprepared for what I saw.

The public has no idea that Ringling's handlers are taught to keep the animals afraid. I saw the elephants, horses, and camels get hit, punched, beaten, and whipped by circus staff members. Everyone from the head of animal care to totally inexperienced handlers abused animals. The abuse did not take place once in a while; it happened every day.

Witnessing this abuse left me a nervous wreck. I routinely complained to my supervisors about what I knew was outright cruelty to animals, but I was told repeatedly that I was overreacting. Just a few months after I'd joined, I quit Ringling because I couldn't stand the cruelty inherent in the circus any longer.

I was an animal lover before I joined Ringling. Now, I am also an animal activist. I have joined PETA's efforts to stop the horrific violence inflicted on animals by Ringling.

I am a mother of five children, and having seen what goes on behind the scenes at Ringling, I will never again take them to a circus that exploits animals.

Among all the horrors I saw behind the scenes at Ringling, one event stands out. That was the day I saw Ringling's head trainer viciously assault a sweet elephant who was chained by her front and back legs, unable to escape from the blows. For at least half an hour, the trainer beat her with a bullhook—a heavy, steel-tipped club that Ringling's handlers use frequently. At one point, I saw the trainer swing the bullhook into the elephant's ear canal with all his force as she screamed in pain.

That particular trainer was known to have a violent temper. On June 11, 2006, I saw him lead two elephants, whom I believe were called Luna and Tonka, within inches of a man who was videotaping them. Luna and Tonka are Ringling's most aggressive elephants, and I was shocked that the trainer would so recklessly endanger this man's life. I then saw the trainer attack the man with his bullhook. It was only later that I learned that the person the trainer had threatened worked for PETA.

The PETA staff members who tracked our tour stood in stark contrast to the bullies working for Ringling. I observed the tireless PETA staff members from afar and was impressed by their composure, dedication, and compassion. That's why I knew I had to tell PETA everything I'd seen when I decided to leave Ringling.

Now that I've come forward, I know that PETA—and members like you—will make sure that Ringling faces consequences for its heartless cruelty. Let's make sure the elephants' story is told.

Sincerely,

Archele Hundley

I can only imagine the kind of resources it takes to put investigators on the road in order to follow a company like Ringling for an entire year. But if it weren't for PETA's willingness to do so, no one would ever know what's being done to Ringling's animals. Thank you for supporting their work.

Google to launch Online Powerpoint rival

2007-04-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

Google is adding a feature to its Docs & Spreadsheets Web-hosted software that will enable people to create presentations and slide shows, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Expo here.

http://news.com.com/Google+treads+on+PowerPoint+turf/2100-1032_3-6176889.html

A Study in Usability

2007-04-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

I wanted to sample the usability of Web Applications to actual business users and how they perceive value. In order to do the same, I went ahead and created a survey at LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/enterprise-software/TCH_ENT/36530-4256932

The advantage of a global community like LinkedIn is we always get high participation from people who really think and try to innovate. Without an exception, the answers show some real insights from real users of Applications. I think all of us developers might periodically learn something from the end-users and align our priorities. Hope everyone finds the survey as useful as I did.

Synopsis

This discussion has added so much value that I decided to share it over here...it has been truly global and I can't thank enough the few good men who participated in the discussion...so many horizons are opened when we get exposure to such a rich group of users...

My Question:
--------------------
When you use web-based business applications, what is the single factor you appreciate the most?

I would appreciate to-the-point answers, like "Speed" or "Less no. of postbacks" or "Lots of tooltips/help links" etc. However, your comments are definitely invaluable and could not understate their importance by any means. So feel free to give a one-word reply and then expand it.

Intention : Being a business application developer, my sole parameter for success is "Quality as perceived by the end-user". Want to increase that score.

Ed Lass, Albany says

OK, I'll bite:

Results for the user--the app gets the job done better than if it didn't exist.

Roshan Shah, Canada says

Minimal Clicks to get to what I want and fast loading of page and small forms to fill if any.

Devesh Dwivedi, Washington DC says

User friendliness: The application should be very user freindly and by that I mean easy to comprehend and apply/use as well. It should be a breeze and not a plop of technical junk. I love more advanced features and functionalities but if it comes at the cost of user friendliness, I won't buy that. - My two cents:)

Alok Jain, Washington DC says

If this is your sole prameter, I would suggest putting some time understand users and their needs.

The importance of any factor depends on users and context. For e.g. for a call center app used by young guys speed is important because their success parameter is dependent on number of calls they can handle. While in Internet banking feeling secure and having precise control/clarity is much more important than speed.

You could apply various techniques to find users' priorities, best would be to just go and observe them and talk to them.

My Take -

I totally agree with that "everyone can't like chocolate ice cream"! Different segments, age groups and job roles will definitely have different priorities and they cannot be judged by a one-size fits all approach. However, what i am trying to accomplish with this question is getting the opinion of different users in different professions and see if I can really find out any common subset - a pattern which would then give us a basic set - after which the specialization would come.

Shane O'Neil ,Canada says

Integration ... Software as a Service (SAS) companies that "get it" develop an API. Importing and exporting data is a necessity; however, an API allows the customer the ability to integrate the web based app with other applications for more flexible functionality, back end integrations and reporting.

From a software provider perspective, APIs can form the basis of a partnership and create stickiness. There is an investment from the client perspective to code to the API. To change vendors means new development cycles and hence a new investment so you'll have to really suck at what you do to make the client go through that pain. Clients will be more forgiving.

An API will also allow the client to develop functionality against your app that may be important to them, but off-strategy or a lower priority to the you.

Two cents. Hope this helps.

Vinod Kumar, Greater Boston Area says

I would extend upon Roshan's answer and say - Usability.

Usability has 2 parts - Intended & Perceived. Intended usability is quantitaive, can be measured by some of the factors that Roshan mentioned - e.g. no. of clicks it takes to go from one place in the application, to another. Perceived usability is subjective - It is how the user views the software as being user friendly.

Paulo Arancibia, Argentina says

A minimum number of click and postbacks by each action and a good balance of color.

Thierry Thomas, France says
Portability: it should really run the same way on any browser.
And speed, of course!

Fred Held, Greater Los Angeles Area says (I love this discussion!)
Sorry for the wordiness, but I love talking to developers.
1) Gets the job done faster, easier, 24/7 availability, remote capability
2) Help really works and does not send you to FAQ. I have NEVER found an FAQ that met my needs. Why that is done is amazing to me.
3) Chat help is incredible. I don't care if it is outsourced to the Congo as long as the person helps me and it is available 24/7
4) Mobile capability, over 40 percent of IBM Global services employees work from their home office small office or mobile locations. This trend is accelerating globaly.
5) Reliability and work is not lost due to a system glitch. An example of "cave man" designs is the clarification tool on linkedin. It crashes and gives a 1970 type meaningless insulting error report and the work is lost. Remember the now famos windows error message. " a fatal error has occured" WTF does that mean.
6) Intuitive usability, I can not say too much about user testing for usability. When at IBM we spent a lot of time on the system we were developing for our client on this. We created a user group who we tested. One such group were truckers. That was fun going to truck stops.
7) Downward compatability. MS and IBM are known for not providing this and forcing the user to upgrade making all the work done in the past unusable. This is bad marketing since the investment in this work far exceeds the cost of the upgrade.
8) How do you measure "Quality as perceived by the end-user". here is an example of IBM's Intranet ran by Mike Wing. They measure the soft stuff very well. A key question answered by the user population is the following. "What percentage of the time do you used the Intranet in your work to find out information versus co-workers and your supervisor" In 1994 they started measuring this the exact same way every year. They gained a lot of information in the survey and used the process of continous improvemnt. They then set a paremeter of succes. The paremeter was when 50% of the time the employee used the Intranet ot get the necessary information or help, they have achieved success. In 2000 they crossed 50% and started accelerating towards much higher numbers.

Once again I apologize for such a long answer but I am passionate about helping developers with rigid requirements documents, small budgets and tight time frames create software that is loved not loathed.

My Take -

I agree with you - "Don't make the customer think" should be the mantra for every web developer....because if I do, someone else won't and the customer would go to him....and web 2.0 is really a revolution.....its not just a technical overhaul....but it signifies the control going back to the customer...the web merging with "customer is the king" philosophy...I would go as far as to term as "The biggest revolution so far in the largest democracy (the web)"

what we really lack is to know that "Am I making that guy happy to whom the tool is being rolled out by the management?" Because at the fag end of the day, that is success to me.....to enable the user smile a bit more...as the system makes his life easier...proactively shares some of his real life work load...I don't want to make him grim with a 200 page user manual :) ...and customer satisfaction is THE GOAL for me....not knowledge of all the technologies or mesmerizing funda over recursive algorithms (though I would be more than glad to have both :) )...... even Simon and Garfunkel sang "Keep the Customer Satisfied" [;)]

Only thing I don't agree with you is the FAQ think....I have often been greatly helped by them:)....

Sachin Palewar, India says
I appriciate simple interfaces much like google and straight-forward navigation so that its intuitive and visitor doesn't feel lost and confused.
In technical terms use of Web 2.0 technologies and Usability concepts play an important role.

Alexander Samarin , Switzerland says
I think, first, you have to define "Quality" in your sentence.
My favourite - flexibility of business applications.
My experience shows that the business people like when their separate requests for change are quickly implemented in existing systems/applications. These changes are typically small (from the point of view of the business) and unpredictable.

My Take -

I couldn't agree more with ur answer...but one thing I want to point out is that you are talking more from the perspective of the management rather than that of the end-users. Extensibility would be a priority for the guy who sanctions the project budget...i.e. if I wanna add x functionality which was not there, I would like to shell out much less dollars than I did for the system implementation...it should be incremental and not break/recreate existing functionality....but that is something we devs nowadays usually keep in mind from the very design phase....however what we really lack is to know that "Am I making that guy happy to whom the tool is being rolled out by the management?" Because at the fag end of the day, that is success to me.....to enable the user smile a bit more...as the system makes his life easier....I don't want to make him grim with a 200 page user manual :)

All in all, a thrilling discussion, am overwhelmed :)

LinkedIn rocks!

Keep on Rockin in the Free World

2007-04-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

There's colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she's done to it
There's one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

The kid who turned down $1 billion!

2007-04-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

They say u should always keep dreaming. And he sure believes that. We may remember the two Youtube founders - who sold their dream venture to Google and giggled like excited kids......This guy has held back...and refused a billion.....way to go, kid!

Link here

SFI Barbarism at Jadavpur University Campus

2007-04-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

Update from The Telegraph : read here

Update from The Statesman : read here

Brawl in JU after SFI loses engineering faculty too WTI students say the SFI brought in CPI(M) hooligans to bash them up, members of teaching and non-teaching staff too lent a hand Express News Service

Kolkata, April 5: The Nandigram issue has apparently decimated the Student’s Federation of India — the students’ wing of the CPI(M) — in the Jadavpur University this year.

Following its loss in the Arts Faculty and Science Faculty elections, the SFI suffered its most humiliating debacle at the engineering faculty elections that was held today. While at the Science Faculty, We The Independent (WTI) bagged all the 4 seats, at the Engineering Faculty, the Democratic Students Forum bagged all the 5 seats.

All three elections were held in the last 10 days. And today’s results finally triggered trouble, with the SFI members allegedly unleashing terror on the campus.

Just when 200-odd representatives of We The Independent (WTI) — the students’ organisation which won the Science Faculty student’s union elections — set out to celebrate their 500-margin victory over the SFI, pandemonium broke: they were allegedly roughed up by their SFI counterparts. The WTI said the SFI had gathered CPI(M) hooligans and hoodlums from outside to beat them up.

Allegations and counter allegations flew thick and fast.

Students from the science faculty heaped accusations on SFI members. “They are absolutely frustrated because we have won all four seats in the 950-student faculty. We won by a margin of 500. Seven of our boys had to be taken to EDF Hospital for treatment of the injuries,” said a WTI member.

The most embarrassing claim made by the students was that some teachers also joined the SFI in bashing up the WTI boys. “Even teachers beat up the students in the Science Club room. We were also beaten up in the non-teaching staff office room. We are submitting a deputation to the Vice-Chancellor demanding the suspension of these teachers,” said Shesadri Mitra, one of the WTI students who also filed an FIR at the Jadavpur police station. The faculty tried to cool down the tense atmosphere.

Prof Swadesh Ranjan Roychowdhury, HoD, Chemistry, said: “We have instructed the students to write down their complaints and demands and submit it to the vice-chairman. There is no use increasing tension by flaring tempers.”

“It is obvious that a certain political party is trying to get back their stronghold after losing in every faculty and hence creating the ruckus... this is a desperate attempt to get back to power,” said another professor on condition of anonymity.

Sougata Roy, the general secretary of the JU Non-teaching staff union, which owes allegiance to CPI(M), however, said: “The WTI members were shouting anti-SFI slogans and suddenly got inside the Science Club and started beating up the SFI students. They also got inside our office and vandalised it. Now they are misrepresenting facts to cover up their follies.” None of the SFI members were available for comment.

Learning Nandigram Lessons by Praful Bidwai

2007-04-06T04:16:00.000-07:00

Learning Nandigram Lessons

By Praful Bidwai

26 March 2007
Khaleej Times

West Bengal's Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist
(CPM), has barely pulled back from a potentially self-destructive
disaster following the Nandigram carnage by adopting an 8-point agreement.

This acknowledges that the March 14 Nandigram incident, in which 14
people were gunned down, "was tragic" and won't be repeated; the
government "will not acquire any land in Nandigram for any industry"
and the police "will be withdrawn in phases".

The agreement says the Front's partners will "meet more frequently" to
take "all important political decisions... after discussion."

The agreement became possible primarily because of the public outrage
Nandigram caused and the tough stand taken by the CPM's main
partners-Communist Party of India, Forward Bloc, and Revolutionary
Socialist Party. They condemned the police firing as undemocratic and
"brutal and barbaric", and threatened to withdraw from the government.

Critical here was the role of the Grand Old Man of Bengal politics,
former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu. He said the CPM is running
"one-party rule in this state. It doesn't look like a coalition
government at all..." He reprimanded Chief Minister Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee, and told the Front's non-CPM leaders to quit if the CPM
doesn't change course.

The agreement represents a victory for the people - and forces of
sanity. The victory was costly. And yet, it doesn't settle all issues:
Will the Front completely abandon its Special Economic Zones (SEZs)
policy? Will it refuse any truck with Indonesia's Salim group - a
front for the super-corrupt Suharto family-for whom 10,000 acres was
to be acquired in Nandigram?

Will it revise Bhattacharjee's "industrialisation-at-any-cost"
orientation, with total disregard for social and environmental
consequences? And will the CPM consult its allies on policy issues in
advance, rather than throw the weight of its 176 seats in the
294-member Assembly, against their 51 seats?

It's necessary to place Nandigram in context. The immediate cause of
the violence there wasn't land acquisition, put on hold after popular
protests in January. It was the CPM's attempt to regain control of the
area for its "cadres". The "cadres" brook no challenge to their power.
But on January 7, they faced the people's anger. Many were driven out.
They were itching to come back.

Nandigram wasn't solely a fight between the CPM and assorted
Opposition groups, including the Right-wing, thuggish Trinamool
Congress, backed by the Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind and other factions, which
had collected arms and blockaded the area. Like the TMC, the CPM too
employed strong-arm methods, revealed by the arrest of 10 of its
cadres. The blockade was a spontaneous people's initiative. As CPM
general secretary Prakash Karat admitted, the local "people turned against
us."

The plain truth is, CPM apparatchiks instigated Black Wednesday's
operation to settle scores in the "cadres'" favour by using the
state's might. They imposed collective punishment, an obnoxious
method, on the residents.

The 4,000-strong police didn't use non-lethal anti-riot water cannons,
rubber bullets and smoke grenades until their utility was exhausted-as
mandated by police manuals.

The police shot to kill. Most bullet injuries were above the waist
level. Many people were shot in the back. At Bhangabera Bridge, the
police pumped 500 bullets into 2,000 people.

The Central Bureau of Investigation has gathered evidence that CPM
"cadres" also fired into the crowd, many disguised in police uniform.
It recovered 500 bullets from them. It also found a 657 metre-long
"blood trail", which suggests "a gunny-bag holding a body was being
dragged".

It will take long to heal the wounds of Nandigram. It's worst outrage
to have occurred under Left Front rule in West Bengal. Even Karat
concedes that the firing was "disapproved by the people of West
Bengal... [who] have a high democratic consciousness."

The pivotal question is whether the CPM will learn the right lessons
from Nandigram. Or else, it'll forfeit its greatest gains, which have
ensured its victory in election after consecutive election for three
decades - a record unmatched in any democracy.

Sadly, Bhattacharjee hasn't lost any of his zeal for
"industrialisation-at-any-cost". Bhattacharjee has a crude, dogmatic
view of history, which sees industrialisation of any kind as progress.
He fails to understand that corporate-led neoliberal industrialisation
doesn't produce the collective Blue-collar worker (Marx's proletarian)
and that it lacks the employment and social potential of classical
capitalism. Rather, it bases itself upon
Whiter-collar workers, is extremely capital-intensive, and creates
enclave-based growth.

Neoliberal industrialisation involves capital accumulation through
expropriation of livelihoods. A progressive state must not condone it;
rather, it should discipline and regulate capitalism in the interests
of society.

But for Bhattacharjee, the Tata car plant at Singur, being built on a
neoliberal pattern, is the model. In reality, it's a stark case of
crony capitalism, with subsidies equalling a fourth of its capital
costs! It's also an instance of elitist, socially inappropriate,
high-pollution industrialisation.

Bhattacharjee is also an unreconstructed believer in "stages" of
historical development. For him, semi-feudal India must first achieve
capitalism and then attempt socialist reform. He says he's working
strictly within "a capitalist framework".

This view severely underestimates the possibilities for social
transformation available within India's backward capitalism and for
progress towards a more just society free of social bondage and
economic serfdom.

For Bhattacharjee, the ideal model to follow is China, with its giant
SEZs like Shenzen, unfettered freedom for multinational capital, and
legalisation of private property. He should know better.

Shenzen is a workers' nightmare, where no labour rights exist. The
mere loss of an identity card can reduce workers to destitution.
Chinese vice-minister Chen Changzhi has just revealed that 80 per cent
of the 1.84 million hectares of farmland earmarked for industrial
development was illegally acquired.

The Left, especially the CPM, must decide whether it wants to fight
for socialism, or merely manage capitalism Chinese-style, however
honestly. If it chooses the second option, it will go into historic
decline. It must also make a decisive break with the undemocratic
organisational culture it has inherited, which punishes dissidence and
encourages a "my-party-right-or-wrong" attitude.

Unless the Left undertakes ruthless self-criticism, it can't effect
course correction.

Worth seeing once, but falls WAY short of an epic

2007-04-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

I am a die-hard Frank Miller fan(also Tarantino/Rodriguez enthusiast) and I loved the comic-book action depicted in 300, but only so much! I loved every inch of Sin City. But, I have some problems with this movie, and I think that stops it short of what it could have achieved.

1. Voice over - this film has a weak voice over. In Sin City, the cold, detached VO was one of the USP. But the voice used here is just not upto the magnitude the film tries to portray.

2. As an actor, Gerard Butler is just not powerful enough to act Leonidas - he shouts a lot and inspires a little - the lines he had could have given him a chance to make him immortal in the heart of epic movie lovers,but he fails to deliver the dialog with that mastery - sorry for the unfair comparison - but can't help thinking about Viggo as Aragorn / Russell as Maximus when I see something like that -and sadly Gerard has a hard time to live upto the expectation - screws up badly.

Still, worth a see. Entertaining, but memorable? No Sir! Frank Miller's Sin City was UNFORGETTABLE, this is just time pass.

Creating a Positive Professional Image

2007-03-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

As HBS professor Laura Morgan Roberts sees it, if you aren't managing your own professional image, others are.

"People are constantly observing your behavior and forming theories about your competence, character, and commitment, which are rapidly disseminated throughout your workplace," she says. "It is only wise to add your voice in framing others' theories about who you are and what you can accomplish."

There are plenty of books telling you how to "dress for success" and control your body language. But keeping on top of your personal traits is only part of the story of managing your professional image, says Roberts. You also belong to a social identity group—African American male, working mother—that brings its own stereotyping from the people you work with, especially in today's diverse workplaces. You can put on a suit and cut your hair to improve your appearance, but how do you manage something like skin color?

Read the story here

Wall Street Journal Most Reputed Companies of 2006

2007-03-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

The ranks are out here .............

Look at the top name :)

Rocks!

PUSH TO FIX OZONE LAYER AND SLOW DOWN GLOBAL WARMING

2007-03-15T03:58:00.000-07:00

A good concern really but will china agree as they are one of the largest manufacturers of air conditioners that use the hydrocloroflurocarbons HCFC's which causes so much damage to the ozone layer and also deter the healing process of an already damaged ozone layer..if they do how will it affect its market and if it doesn't what will be the implications???
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/business/worldbusiness/15warming.html?ref=business