Harish Palaniappan's

This bank called UTI in India was in a financial crisis, and they smartly sold off when market was at its prime couple of years back. They became AXIS bank and all UTI branches and operations became AXIS.. They advertized, with twins in ADs, saying both UTI and AXIS are one and the same, not to worry, just the name is different. I am sure they will be cursing all their intelligence for that concept (of the ADs) now. Because the once happened financial crisis, is back with the bank and they are probably worser than the state what UTI was in to earlier.

I have a savings account with the bank, with some namesake money in it.. Obviously that is not the interesting part...and I am not going to ask you for donations to lift my account balance. Because the bank is doing just that. They are asking all their savings bank customers to put money into the bank to help their bankruptcy.

I got a call today from AXIS bank, a business development officer, who said, the bank's status with funds is not good.. I asked "do you mean.. the *bank's* status is not good? ".. and he said "yes, we don't have enough funds to run operations, and we thought it is a good time to call our known customers and ask them to transfer all their money in other banks into ours.. for the time being, to get us back in shape"

I couldn't feel anything for a while, let alone sympathizing, and after a while I got irritated and asked the officer is this how AXIS bank does business development.. and he got into the same thing.. couldn't feel anything for a while..

So much so, I kept the phone and was thinking what was happening..

Is this something that is there with all banks.. ?
Is this why recently when all banks increased their lending rates by 0.5%, ICICI bank increased its lending rates by 0.75% ?
The only thing that is coinciding financially is the stock market crash.. Did all banks put in a lot of money in to the stock market when the markets were hugely bullish a few months back ? and now that the market has crashed royally they are all crying over the pain of the money ?

Whatever, but we all think all the time, that banks know it best when it comes to managing money. No, they also are run by people like us is the fact.

Get back to some hard work with hard earned money.
If you want to invest in stock market, invest yourself and learn the nitty gritty.. not through mutual funds..

If you want to invest in anything.. invest yourself and learn the area, don't don't trust anybody with all that money.

At the end of day, I keep trying to think on any positive sides in this whole thing to keep my head away from worrying about that namesake money in AXIS bank.. oh yes.. there is a positive side.. I can tell everybody... "A bank...a bank.. asked me help by requesting me money.. imagine how big and rich I should be .. ha.. that's something".

Posted by Harish at 9:33 PM | Permalink

Spider on their website..

this is a website of an active sports accessories company. They have done it so nice and different, you will think real good animation films on websites are not real far from happening.

venom.spyder.com

Posted by Harish at 3:56 AM | Permalink

Living in a country like India could get very exciting especially with the way companies throw up bad to worse services for competitive to high costs for the Indian market. Most Indians, "these companies assume" are not people who know a great deal about the services and providing little call-center based customer service would do to keep them happy.

And not many Indians seem to know or bother that many services like mobile services, internet services, web hosting services are costlier in India than even some developed countries. Not because the technology is difficult here, but because the market demand is huge here and if not jack they can always sell to some harry.

And when you don't get proper services, or importantly correct and proper bills, all you try to do is call up a customer service number and ask. But most customer service numbers in India are run by executives who are themselves less informed and are not well trained to answer questions properly.. and to add to it, you will cry over most of their English and their understanding of your questions in English.

First steps when u have a problem with an Indian company:

1.
If you can, ask the customer executive whether he knows your local language like Tamil, kannada or Telugu, etc., and explain him the problem politely. No, Shouting you should do only when they don't understand what you are saying and wasting your time more than 30 mins on the phone and also not transferring your call to a senior officer after your repeated request.

2.
If the customer executive puts you on hold, or says senior officer is busy can you wait, or says senior officer will call you later, .. simply say you are willing to wait how much ever time it takes and wait for about 20 mins and then they will put you on to a proper guy.
Why that long?
Well like said before.. indian market has high demand on all daily life services like what I mentioned.. so the companies sign-up too many customers and since india is a rising country, the companies are learning having a huge customer base. this might take another 5-10 years for companies to ripen up and provide proper services and help to customers, though they showcase today itself as if they have everything in place.

Thought waiting on hold is a pain both by patience and money spent on phone call, if you are complaining for a mobile service problem to your mobile operator through the same mobile phone, you will most definitely not charged for the call, and most often your calls to such phone numbers will be toll-free.. verify this before your call, so you know you can wait on the line without worries.

3.
Call centers misunderstand their trade. Customer care numbers are all call-centers and the executives there, most of them atleast are not there for solving your problems, but for just a temporary job. so the executives at the first level of the call will try exciting things like cutting off the call if you shout, or putting you on hold and cutting off after 10 minutes.

If you survive through that, and call repeatedly, you will talk to some manager after sometime, and the manager will really most often resolve your complaint like a breeze... make sure you tell him that he take some effort to train his subordinates on the information on handling this complaint, so no other customer or not you again have to wait so long for a useful answer.

4.
Yes, If nothing helps.. or if you are frustrated beyond your limits, you raise a consumer complaint.

This below link will help you understand how to raise a consumer complaint in india, even provide you some links to find addresses of consumer redressal forums and courts near you.
ICRPC: Consumer Guidance for Filing Consumer Complaint with Consumer Court in India

I took you through these steps so long rather than telling you how you can raise a consumer complaint in court, because the process of making a case and submitting it to court and getting a resolution is for obvious reasons much much time-consuming than even the number of hours you are put on hold on a customer care call.

Also, you might be interested in website based consumer complaint forums.. like mouthshut.com, your own blog(if you are a popular blogger), or many other websites you can search from our favority on the dot search engine google.com

Finally, for more information on consumer redressal forums and processes, there are many useful links that will come up in a google search for "consumer india" or "consumer complaint india"

Important end note:
All the best.. but DONT give up.. or become tolerant to problems with services provided by indian companies or even indian government. There are always forums for redressal.. just because some people like us ignore the process because of laziness or willingness to spend the time seeing not much benefits off the result, we are encouraging the "bad service is not bad" attitude with indian companies, government and people.

Remember, more than you, your complaint and your struggle to resolve it is going to help future consumers from not having the same problem or at least not the same bad way like you had to go through.

Posted by Harish at 10:12 PM | Permalink

India is a country that many developed countries are keeping a watch on, to see how fast we are growing, and how they can participate in reaping the goodies.. I am not saying this because I am Indian.

Yes, there are lot of problems in the country with growth and attitude in some sectors, that is at the very early stages of change.. call center services for example, agriculture for example. But, comparing what we have today with how we were 10 years back in a few industry sectors, it is quite a *Show* off growth.

And the growth has been a strong curve in Chennai.

The banking sector revamping from zero ATMs to countless ATMs of every bank in every street corner, the technology space out-growing expectations & growth targets year-on-year, the talent market being flooded with more and more skilled and attitudinal people, the quality of movies, TV programmes, the salary packet sizes these days, the retail market boom, everything just multiplying every other day.

You just sit idle doing nothing for a day in Chennai, you feel little strange and slightly left out, the very next day. I do. Though I don't sit idle for a whole day, I do feel a growing urge day by day seeing things changing around me, right from roads to buildings to new successful companies cropping up everywhere.

If you want to feel the same way, there's an easier way, rather than sitting idle at home... If you are in chennai, all you have to do is visit sathyam theatre complex every weekend, and you will see something about the theatre's infrastructure changed. They keep modifying things regularly. Rather than the theatre management being responsible for the changes, it is demand that makes them alter to people's needs and business's values.

It is this quick change and related process that is so interesting to note, happening in places where a decade ago change was not a managed process.

We all know that all our Indian TV channels, for popularity's sake, copy blockbuster Television program formats from the west, like "Who wants to be a millionaire", "Dancing with the stars", etc.,
But the interesting part is.. the tamil versions of the programmes have brought about a change in the way Chennaiites see society, their inhibitions towards protecting culture, their spending patterns, interests in dance / music, opening up to the outside world and accepting the goods of an open society... everything is changing slowly. Though we Chennaiites are accepting all these changes, we don't seem to be in a hurry and we are carefully and selectively working up the change.

Also, Chennaiite parents are known to pester children on studies and giving zero or less importance to co-curricular activities, sports etc., With figures of successful Indian sportsmen increasing by the day, and the way these television programmes make the other activities and careers rewarding as well, a sudden spurt in interest towards co-curricular activities and sports is seen, and children are learning people skills and life skills because of the open society. The already rich talent market is going to be super-rich in another 5 years in Chennai...because Chennai has always been a conservative society.

All these changes around me are so attractive to notice, that I am losing a lot of free time trying to.. understand.. admire.. how and why the changes are happening and what triggers it to happen quick.

A few months back I read in a blog (I forgot which one) that the United States government has changed its definition of India from a "Developing country" to "Transforming country". That acknowledges India's growth internationally.

Posted by Harish at 11:30 PM | Permalink

Someone out there seems to have understood the mega-giga percentage of untapped internet radio market, and has brought out a tricky cute radio for your desk called "Chumby".. its ok if you misspelt it "chubby".

Chumby plays only internet radio, and accepts an wi-fi internet connection as input source. This chumby is still evolving, and so it doesn't yet have the neccessary stuff to play radio out of the box, it needs either a comp, or, any music device with an USB-out, wi-fi broadband.

Don't ask me more.. checkout the chumby site yourself. I don't have a chumby.. but I have already added that to my wishlist.

If you have unlimited bandwidth broadband.. and you have your wi-fi 'ON' all the time.. you should have chumby. It will keep you nice company.

And what not.. like a mobile device, you can use its touchscreen and browse some web I suppose.

For the tricky part, of finding new, free, good radio sources on the internet, chumby supports shoutcast radio servers.. and hence you will have more than 20,000(and growing) of those online free radio broadcasts to choose and play. .. and for this you would love somaFM.com .. they are AD-free.. so you will hear only music.. no DJ voices or commercial breaks.

Posted by Harish at 5:25 PM | Permalink

Finance is a subject close to my heart.. because it has money $$$ in it.. but I never understood too well anything beyond a beginners level. Its probably bigger than software when it comes to terms used, coined words/phrases used, the enormous amount of branches in finance. Also the totally different context of money skills that each branch employs, could overwhelm any expert duck.. let alone a lame duck.

But still...since its close to my heart, I admire all big finance managers, especially the ones who deal with more money that they themselves have never seen piled up. Regarding this part, actually, for finance guys, money is just numbers, and its purely mathematical, it doesn't ring them a bell that anything is so much money and all. You leave a zero they will say "ha ha.. a zero is missing.. correct it", they won't say a crore is missing or a million is missing.

Dr. Manmohan singh, and P.Chidambaram, are anybody's inspiration when it comes to finance in India.. but they are not the real biggies.

While there are many biggies, out there managing and growing the financial strength of some huge india companies, sometimes just growing the business multi-fold by helping company managers invest properly, other times they get a sick company's act together sell off sick areas of its business, feed that to recoverable areas of business and make the company rise up and shine. And actually, this is what any finance-manager-to-the-heart guy would dream of doing.

Meleveetil Damodaran is one such person. If you see his profile, you will be astonished about what he has done. He has minted money for other people wherever he went.. and he does it with a chubby charm we should say.

He is currently the chief of SEBI (stock exchanges and regulatory board of india), and you already know how much atonishing a rise indian stock markets have seen in the past couple of years. We don't want to think it is all because of this man, obviously all companies and india itself is growing up in attitude and economy. But, without a proper regulator, or proper policing what happens to enormous growth is everybody's easy guess. SEBI streamlines the markets with its policies and regulations correcting them often.. in the interest of sustaining the growth in the markets, in turn in the industries, in turn pushing it further into what makes the number the country earns.

Before SEBI, he was a celebrated cheif of IDBI.. actually an industrial development bank.. IDBI standing for Industrial development bank of india, the bank only handled industrial customers, and was considerably sick or not-interesting business when Damodaran took over. He brought in more money to fund the bank's growth by doing many things, of which one was the bringing of the bank to retail customers by opening up its products. That is how, an industrial development bank oddly serves retail customers even today.

Before IDBI, he was UTI chief.. unit trust of india, the mutual fund compay or asset management company, however you call it, is still one of the biggest mutual fund players in the country.

And if you didn't realize yet, all these are government companies.. though they actually have grown so big and make much more money than many well-organized and funded private organizations.

Damodaran is an IAS officer.. Indian administrative service.. and actually not a full-blown financial expert until his first few jobs put him on task to restructure a few sick public sector banks. He has later worked with the Reserve bank of india, and even with the Ministry of Finance of India for five years.

Thanks to his profile, he is very popularly considered the turnaround-er man for indian government's financial priorities.

I remember there were some consideration to appoint him as the finance minister or at a higher level in the finance mnistry when Dr.Manmohan sign's government was formed.. and it ended up like P.chidambaram takes care of finance but will require a manager, strong and extra-ordinaire for managing the big bull SEBI which is a government controlled body...and the obvious fit was Damodaran.

SEBI obviously is the top priority financial body, which the government should control well, to reap financial benefits not only for the people but for government to run economically stronger too. SEBI's success with pulling the stock markets higher and sustaining it higher will directly reflect on indian economy. .All these calculations worked true and people are reaping benefits everywhere.

Ok. all that is fine.. but why did I suddenly jump on Damodaran.

NDTV profit, the financial new channel showed a live video conference of Mr.Damodaran and his SEBI collegues answer questions of Foreign investors regarding some recent policy announcements by SEBI.

Damodaran was answering all questions like a breeze, with no big-shot-iness, and no air of doubts. Mind you.. financial questions can be difficult.. at such a high-level because they need to understand not only GDP, inflation, economy index, etc., but also about fund flows in-to or out-of the country and how a policy decision will or will not affect any of those 1001 parameters.

I didn't understand any bit of the interviews questions or the answers.. but was just admiring this man and his open strength in front of foreign investors who are at the other end putting millions of dollars in india and asking questions on it.

In my employment with companies, I have only come across a couple of indian managers who showed any bold face with clients. Most indian managers are like 'do-whatever-client-says' or 'client-is-king' types.. they keep nodding.

Another admirable finance manager on my fav list.. (who also happens to be chubby charmer) is K.V.Kamath, the CEO of ICICI

Posted by Harish at 12:31 AM | Permalink

Icicidirect.com is an online trading website.. that is what most people know or think.

But icicidirect.com has well updated Market News, research reports, stock performance charts, live share prices from both Bombay(BSE) and NewDelhi(NSE) stock exchanges.

And all that is available for general public, not just subscribers.
It is a web portal... other than being an online trading website.

You can go to www.icicidirect.com
General public can use any tab/link other than the Login link which is for subscribers who have trading accounts with icicidirect.com

For example, you can learn about the company TATA TEA, by this navigation:

icicidirect.com > click on 'Research' link > click on 'my research' link in that page >
click on alphabet 'T' > and then on stock name TATTEA.

You will see information (this page) on the company right from its incorporation to what is news from the company today.

Excellent resource. Though the content is meant and targeted for investors or share traders, much of it can educate you on a lot of your favourite companies, like information on when they started, what is their growth, etc., and the content from this /other pages can collectively educate you on a considerable part of the entire business of the company itself.

Posted by Harish at 1:08 AM | Permalink

Below link produces some proof and serious facts about how China (and probably many Asian countries including India) is pushing stuff into the US market for better profits and easier marketing.

The facts stated in the post are one of those articles that clearly drive the importance of "quality, and ethical business" on the face of modern business which fuels profitable and competitive business strategies.

http://6ampacific.com/2007/07/21/contaminated-food/

On the face of all this, we are expecting the 2008 olympics. I hope China doesn't contaminate the 2008 olympics into some big trade gimmick and ethically keep it a sporting event.

In my opinion, even if one person suffers a serious illness (leave alone death) due to contamination of food items, the company should be slapped with sanctions and legal consequences which will hurt its business's bad ethics.

Posted by Harish at 1:59 AM | Permalink

The information on starting or registering a business in india, is not one of those things that are very well available. The government staff who do it, don't want any layman to be informed, because their bread and butter is in the bribe money they get on each and each thing they do to accept your registration to helping you understand what and how to do it.

But things are better with egovernance now.. read on. I think the company registration stuff is one of the first things to be a successful egovernanance project for India.

About this post:
I am setting up this blog post, and will be updating it regularly as I find more information on this and other interesting areas of starting businesses in India.. also I plan to write posts on my experience over years in helping people operate or handle their businesses... in the context of Indian companies only.

If you have something to share/add/suggest, you can email me at harish.palaniappan @ gmail.com and I will find time to discuss with you and add your information and experiences in this blog as well.

Information On Companies, Acts, and processes in India

May be these links help to kick-off your information collection drive:
Starting your own business in India
Forming a company in India
Starting a business - by doingbusiness.org
The Indian Ministry of company affairs website
Starting a business in singapore

MCA21 : Online company registrations and other e-form processes
The Indian ministry of company affairs has setup an online governance website since september 2006 (delayed by almost 6 months) with the help of Tata consultancy services.

* Note: Before you read further, understand that this post is not updated regularly when the ministry of companies of india's policies or processes change.. so you should look at this as a starter only.. and do find for yourself more information at the Registrar Of Companies offices around India.. or in the mca21 website.

Types of companies:
In the different types of companies that can be registered (or that can be created in India at all legally), there's no possibility of starting a single person company.. At a minimum, you can only start a private firm with 2 directors.

But, the government has been recommended by an expert committee, to add a new class of companies which is proposed as 'One person company' and probably may have OPC Pvt. or OPC Pvt. Ltd. as the ending name of the company.

If this recommendation is approved (which probably will be by amendments in the companies Act), then there will be a possibility of registering One Person companies in India. As of now, you atleast make a friendly legal entity as a director apart from yourself, like your mother or wife, or some friend, and register your company as a Private company with minimum 2 directors.

Though it is technically bad that India hasn't still recognized 'one person companies', practically it is better to register as a private company since that will avoid further paper work when your 'one person company' grows to have employees which then requires a conversion in your registration or possibly re-registration.

-- continuted --

Continue reading "start-up registering business in india ?" »

Posted by Harish at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Saw this thing recently.. A google ADsense AD but with culture specific language text for 'ADs by Google' and 'Advertise on this site' links at the bottom of the AD.

Saw this on chennaionline.com, a particularly very AD based regional news portal in the Tamil language.

Somethings are interesting and notable, thought I agree and everybody knows that every bit of a thing that Google does is quite hyped up by the community around since its a favorite company for getting every big thing free on the web.

Posted by Harish at 8:05 PM | Permalink

If you wanted to learn how NOT to do business.. especially if you are a new startup, you should learn from the guys at dreamhost. Dreamhost is a webhosting company.

You should read the below link and issues quoted before you consider hosting your website with dreamhost, EVEN if they are giving you server space for free.

Dreamhost is really starting to suk

Read below a response from a dreamhost support

----- Excerpts of a long STUPID response from dreamhost support -----

--- [harpal 11662296] request response on server problems. ----

To my question on uncomfortability of their downtimes per day, and the number of times they restart a server:

I'm sorry that you're not happy with the fact that we can restart the
server any number of times a day, but please keep in mind that this is
something that we do only when necessary. Would you prefer that if a
server locks up, that we do not restart it as we have reached some sort
of restart limit? That could leave your server and all of your websites,
email, etc... unavailable for quite some time. I hope now you see that it
is good that we can restart a server as many times as needed.

Restart services isn't something that we do for fun... we only do it when
it's required. You'll likely also find that there are hardly any
companies around that will say that they reboot servers only a certain
number of times per day.

Also keep in mind that your server has not been restarted for nearly 4
days. [That means, 4 days of stability is a great achievement at dreamhost]

To my question on whether they can provide me links to their uptime guarantee or maintenance window terms:

Unfortunately I can not provide you with any links regarding server
uptime or server maintenance as we provide no guarantees to either. We do
not provide any sort of uptime guarantee, nor do we guarantee that
maintenance will be performed only at certain times or a certain number
of times.

[ Yes, they are real replies by top officials in the dreamhost server maintenance and customer support divisions.]

To questions on the phone.. dreamhost support team lazily said that "your downtime problems are because I live in India and probably we don't have better connections here". To which I stated that my customers who use the service on my website in countries like australia, USA, UK, etc., also have the same problems with reaching my server, he simply said, "these countries that you are saying are all far away from our datacenter in brea, california, and possibly they also dont seem to have good connections to our servers for which we can't do anything."

For innocents: Dreamhost is dying as a webhosting business.
Reason: Focus on money, for losing focus on upgrading hardware and services, and for losing focus on importance of servicing customers who have paid money.

May they rest in peace.

Posted by Harish at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You could study what all constitutes a good, usable website, from many 100's of web resources, research papers, marketing websites, ..probably even schools, colleges, or from the best source.. they say 'the equivalent of 1000 better teachers'.. 'books'.

But think... nothing better than watching people argue on the subject.

So read this quick link (below), and its comments definitely for the arguments, and bravo you probably will be able to submit a paper on website usability design, or even, could be, a paper on usability design in general.

http://nandz.blogspot.com/2007/02/indian-website-usability-report.html

Posted by Harish at 4:51 PM | Permalink

You probably know them, have heard of them, or seen their Ads. But I would still go ahead and talk about them for they are rockstars who deserve any amount of branding that can happen.

While many small companies try split across the web advertising space, for probably web is the cheapest entry point or whatsoever they misunderstand, companies like WebChutney are the people who strive and raise the brand value of Web media itself, raising its advertising interactiveness with innovative thinking, refreshing new interests into the sector, and actually keeping the web advertising sector itself alive of all the crap and spam its eating up. And on this, they stand tall.

I wouldn't also do the same thing of comparing webChutney with Google or Yahoo, though these days any web-based product or service goes through that comparison cycle. Google, Yahoo are not media companies, neither are they advertising companies again popular belief. Google and yahoo are content enablers or sometimes producers, so people like webChutney are their clients.

Just because they are an advertising company particularly targeting the web media, its not to be misunderstood that they are lower than companies that target publications, magazines, or television. The media (or medium) is the only difference. WebChutney seem to have the same innovative thoughts, vigour, rigour, and all that were probably seen in companies like 'Rediffusion DY & R', 'Ogilvy & Mather' and the likes.. when they were also as young. WebChutney is 6 years old start counting since 1999. And seems like they are powered by bucks of one VC 'Russian Hill ventures'.

WebChutney is rated the one of India's coolest companies.

You should see their virals to see their award winning campaigns.

Posted by Harish at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Where there is a billon [$], there is a way..
Where there are a million [employees], there are ways..

Globally more and more large businesses seem to be converting their targets of business growth based on factors like millions and billions. rather than net profit, net percentage growth, or returns per share, like it used to be.

Why, a few months back, the too giant search engines Yahoo, and Google, fought in public media claiming theirs as the most used search by people, ...becos they had a billion directory listings, or million searches per month.

Whatever... the scenes are changing.. probably triggered by IT industry we can say, because, only IT companies started the idea of reaching a billion $ turnover as a big milestone ahead of their competitors who were less than a billion $. Though the difference could be sometimes just a few millions, the latter probably feel themself smaller when compared to the competition which is already making 1 billion$.

Having worked for Cognizant technology solutions, chennai, india, i remember how many mails of motivation and inspiration we used to recieve from corporate heads across the globe in the excitement to reaching the 1 billion $ target, right from the day when we were only 600 million $]. Sometimes it used to look like unless the company made that money, it wasn't happy with what it had. And to make it more obvious, Cognizant gave all its staff an Apple iPod with 10gb disk space in celebration of achieving the target. No, I had left the company before the target and did get calls from friends saying they wished i still worked there so that i could have got one.. iPod.

Such celebration and boosters happen in many companies on many occassions, i dont mean it only happens in IT, or neither do I feel all this is unneccessary. .. but it happens "more" these days, is the point.

Indian railways always had a hell a lot of employees, which we indians always knew from childhood, but suddenly in 2004 people seemed to have drummed it around, and Indian railways was recognized for its 1,583,614 strong employee base by the ..who? Guiness book of world records.

I am not sure whether the railway employees got an iPod or not, but sure it made some news and celebration... and sent the message across to the world, right on time in 2004, that India is a labour intensive country.. and arguments at college as to whether being an Indian is a pride or not, started having statements like "we got guiness record for largest number of employees in an organization, has China got it?"

This slowly seems to have evolved into a tradition.. the numbers.. earlier we used to see importance of numbers only with the balance sheet of public companies. And I dont think increasing employee numbers to 1 million was considered a target which large companies were eager to achieve, 20 years back.

Recently there was some more news.. about another largely-employed organization in India, the Indian Army. I remember in my younger days I used to get bored watching the republic day parade on TV.. they used to keep walking and more soldiers keep coming.. all from morning 7AM or so, till close to Noon. And you had to wait hours to see a mouth-gaping view of the latest defence equipment India had, till 1000 or odd soldiers marched past... like some kind of a break between the sea of soldiers we had that equipment coming.

Ah! yea about the recent news... it seems like, Recently, indian IT companies are in the interest of taking HR lessons from Indian Army and Walmart on managing more than 10,000 strong employee base.

About walmart, it seems it has 1 million and odd employees. For a supermarket chain, that is a whopping number. If walmart employees itself bought their stuff from walmart, the company should find no difficulty making profits.

Bottomline:

Is having more employees, a strength or weakness of a company?
We could debate that. Imagine putting 50 people on a project which might as well do with 10. I think that would sink the project, its costs and its timeline in managing the extra 40 all the time.

Is a billion dollar company really "The" big/best company, shouldn't we factor that as to, "With what employee base, or customer base, they achieved that target?"

Anyways, we assume that corporate heads are in-the-know when it comes to numbers and how it affects (or effects) their show.

And after all this reading.. if you are not carried away thinking about your company size, or your neighbours family size, etc., you can read this interesting article on 'IT cos taking lessons from Indian Army and walmart'

In the meantime.. let me sharpen my conversion skills on how much is a million in lacs and billion in crores.. everytime i see those words millions and billions., i remember i need to work on this. Uh! ...one of the effects of learning the british system, while the british themself seem to have started talking in American system.

Posted by Harish at 11:02 PM | Permalink

The software giant of yesterday, Microsoft corporation is probably become too old for the business. I have my reasons to say that.. been using microsoft products for much over 10 years, and being a software programmer and engineer myself, i have been observing their products, the list of changes that they call features in their new products, etc.,

Microsoft still maintains its benchmarks...

Comparing them to companies like google, or products like linux operating systems, would actually only mislead that Microsoft is still strong. but when you can see what they are creating these days, to their benchmark levels they used to have 4 or 5 years back on their products, you would see that their benchmark hasnt changed, they still have the same standards, which is the problem.

With growing demand for more automation in software, any interesting company, any alive company to put it straight, would only increase their standards or benchmarks, but microsoft i wonder is turned the other way and looking interested in only marketing.

Microsoft's top planning bosses aren't getting the facts. And with bill gates planning to relieve himself from active chairmanship in 2008, i feel from 2008 people will see Microsoft as only yet another small software company around the block rather than being an important / cohersive player in Technology.

"Hype wont sell anymore in software. ."

I wish (i can only wish) Microsoft's marketing stop being busy creating a hype around each and every feature they are including in the products, and let the product speak for itself, like other companies do.. like digg.com, or google's products.

Open-source goes brave

People are today bravely giving away a huge chunk of good work in free/open-source software, and every other company have started respecting this brave community.. and some companies have even started donating, or contributing to this community which is bringing the next boom to software sure down in 2008 or 2010.

Whereas, Microsoft, still doesn't want to recognize the open-source community as any valuable atleast officially. For marketing purposes though, Microsoft still tries to post technical capacity comparisons of their products with linux servers, or google like products etc.,

The very idea that microsoft compares its commercial products/services against a free/open-source product talks pages about Microsoft's benchmark levels.

How much alive is Microsoft Live?

The other day i was intrigued by the way microsoft's live mail beta was working.. it just was eating all the errors gracefully and failing without doing anything most times.. sure its mouth was full of errors.

"Eating your Cooking..."

I was happy that finally Microsoft people write code for their own intelligent browser IE developing the 'Live' services, and sure they are feeling the pinch in every painful part of that browser.

"First eat your cooking, then you know"... same things with Microsoft's Local, the mapping environment. sometimes they work good as comparable to Google Maps but sometimes they just dont respond.. (in the background that means they are hiding an error and keeping quiet as if nothing happened).

Microsoft's Hotmail and live team, the browser-based service developers should learn a 50 or 52 things from the way yahoo's new live mail, or google's services work.

Competing new areas...

Forgeting all these failures Microsoft seems busy trying to enter a new product area - MP3 players to compete with Apple's ipod. Sure, MP3 and many popular formats were actually initiated into the technology sector by Microsoft.. but those days are fine.. today "more" is word (not just for using in Microsoft Marketing campaigns but also in product functions and features).

Are Microsoft managers not seeing the failures at the end-point, or, are they ignoring all current customers and moving on to new ones..

Next what, compete with motorola and nokia and make micorosft mobile phones.??

Bottomline:

The company Microsoft is become old, and old thinkers are making stereo-type decisions in there... and the activity in the company is probably "stale".. i wonder microsoft is going to end-up stagnating for sometime like IBM was in the 1990's and we all know whats of IBM today (the just another hardware company).

Posted by Harish at 6:28 PM | Permalink

Everyone knows its bad to use CRT computer monitors since constantly seeing the monitor harms the eye, ..but still they sell it. Constant use of Mobile phones subjects the brain and our most sensitive organs in the head, to constant high frequency wave bombardment. ..they will still sell it.

"There are these small small things that are bad, but still we are living better", says our conscience already ..before we think of complaining.

Are we living better really? Are these health hazards small issues that we can ignore?

Asbestos is bad for health: We returned a French ship which tried to get dismantled in India, but if you want to buy asbestos products, we have lots here.
When indian newspapers were hot with the arrival of a French carrier said to have around 500 tonnes of asbestos, the asbestos market here took a dip. The nation-wide association of asbestos dealers made advertisements in leading newspapers that what they sell is not harmful.. their justification-"Asbestos comes in many forms, the form that is harmful is '...', while we don't make that in India, we make only '...' form of asbestos which is well below the limits of hazard".
Two weeks later, one newspaper (which also carried the earlier mentioned Ad), had an article that said whatever the form, asbestos is proven to be a hazard, quoting public experiments and technical papers. It had one line which mentioned that although we know some technologies or products are bad, we are unable to ban things because a big market would already be established and thinking otherwise.

That's business for you.

The big Sale
"What is making money, can't be bad to health"... and even if it is, so what, "I will have the money to take care". So, it ends up like a compensation for accepting the issue.

Would you bother if somebody said, Air conditioners actually spoil your health.. but.. its true. You still don't bother switching off.

Everyone knows that cola drinks are better cleaning agents for our toilets, than cooling agents for our body. And that they are packaged with lots of carbon-di-oxide gas. Who bothers. Coca-Cola is said to be the most recognized brand the world over.

The world works on events...like in programming. As long as nobody is said to have died drinking a bottle of coca-cola once in a while, then its ok to be sold. (Even if they would die, I am sure cola people would market it as coolest poison with the same spirit).

"India is our fastest growing export market".. said the American President Bush when he visited india in March 2006. Now, he should have definitely said that to every country he visited with a change.. replace country name with the current country. That's how marketing works.. Bush is not the only one who does that.
Every marketing person does that.. and in every industry.. be it good or bad.

There is a democratic and polite way of marketing something.... even if its know to be bad.
Very good examples are cola, tobacco, alchohol, ... and very importantly missed in such hazards, 'weapons'.

They could sell weapons that kill lots of people between two democratic countries, because of the sincerety they have in growing.. and nobody questions...because the marketing say its in the country's defence interests.
That's the world today.

Harm's distance
Is all this happening only today, or was there health hazardous technology way back also. Why are we blaming it on the growth we have today, is it just because we want to quickly point at things and close the issue.

It could be said that Technology hazards were actually more in earlier days, since those days there weren't much protection options or proper treatment for the hazards. We were growing and we had to take it.

We could say something like Harm's distance. This distance was there in old days. But today, small children use computers, starting to harm themself quite early... and its bad because they didn't choose it, we force it.

I read an article a long time back somewhere, which clearly stated how children getting to learn computers are indirectly having to waste lot of time knowing about things like computer virus, restarts, using the mouse..., and all those things that they won't use and quite unneccessary until they are adults.
So true. Why the hell should a four year old kid be so eagerly encouraged to learning Microsoft Windows.. more than watching butterflies in the backyard...When will he watch them, when he is 18?

In my first employment I had the chance of working with a school principal for some time. The lady used to say so very often that children should not be forced to studies or technology stuff, because kids are there only for seeing colors, playing with objects, being curious with butterflies trying to catch them, etc.,

Keep the distance
Firstly, May children be children and they don't need to start having symptoms of carpal-tunnel syndrome in their wrists because of too much use of keyboards, and stuff like that. Dont be so eager to see your kid be the youngest one to clear a Microsoft certification.

Second, when you are at home, consider yourself a normal human being and give yourself the pleasure of being that.. 'Away' ..from your office, your technology gadgets like mobile phones, and if possible wear a soft thick glove before you put your hand into the microwave. Take care like somebody in the hospital would...because if you land up there, you will not have TV, microwave, or mobile phones in the hospital, so when you have them use them only when needed.

Third, We cannot avoid health hazards...unless you makeup to be a buddist monk or dalai lama.
Live with it. just like you can't do anything to stop that email Spam.

Keep selling / buying hazardous Technology, but do make attempts to discourage yourself and others from using it.... atleast Future would be sensible then.

Posted by Harish at 7:39 AM | Permalink

Current Internet time is @078beats said a website... i clicked to find out what is internet time, and landed up with the below information (read from TimeAndDate.com)

The swiss watch company 'swatch' came up with a new internet time concept.

As per this, all machines connected to the internet can be referred to be in one timezone with one time calculation. And the units for this will be 'beats'... instead of dividing a normal day by 12 day hours and 12 noon hours which invariably differ across timezones, swatch came up with the beats where a day is divided into 1000 beats, and one beat is approx. 1min and 23 secs. All machines on the internet can start on the same base and have beats as the time under which an action is performed.

This way, the lots and lots of redundant code that exists on all internet run websites and applications can be done away with and things could be made easier. That way this internet time concept is good..

But, swatch has given the internet time some disadvantages, by opting to have a new timezone called BMT instead of GMT or UTC.. BMT means Biel Mean Time, which is the place in switzerland where swatch's head office is located (hey.. swatch is looking for obvious brand benefit, if the concept becomes popular).

This... giving up of GMT for internet time and introducing another mean time, which could only make the problem more complex, finally hasn't yet got a people following and just remains a concept unused.
Another drawback seems to be its system of calculating beats on a fresh mechanism of 1000 beats per day, ... instead it could have been better if the unit time seconds where to be used.

Though swatch missed the concept in inventing a new concept.. that's "make it people friendly if you want people to use it".... ... it seems like swatch has not missed the concept on what a good usable website is.. swatch.com's design and usability is great. and i loved it. the image posted is from the website. have a look. www.swatch.com

Posted by Harish at 6:02 AM | Permalink

Businesses world-wide have the effect of not just boosting the economy of nations, but also teaching people how to live-with, cope-with and solve problems, at the same time keeping the billions rolling.

This article on cnnmoney.com was interesting.
Best-kept secrets of the world's best companies

Another article on most common blunders in services companies.. was on Entrepreneur.com
Biggest Customer Service Blunders of All Time

That should be a nice read for finishing the day.

Posted by Harish at 6:52 PM | Permalink

This post is for people who are in line with news about software industry.. Pardon me to write technical content.. but this is getting interesting about the future of Windows technologies.

Story So Far...
When Microsoft launched .Net, all the world's programmers had a shock and protested, since .Net was, and is, slowly replacing every other microsoft programming language like 'the lovely' VisualBasic, 'the solid' VisualC++.

What happened to the protest.. did Microsoft do something?
Many technology bloggers suggest that programmers forgot the protest since web boomed and everyone was busy creating web applications. Even today, in my opinion out of every 100 applications we develop, only one or two are windows applications, others are web based.

Why Web applications attracted the developers?
Businesses and corporates are now totally webby about software.

Right from HR management applications, to banking applications, to end-user free service like chats, addressbooks, .. everything is web-based today. Even some anti-virus solutions are web-based these days.

The developer community marketed the web rightly because they like it.

The web gives a huge relief to developers because of the fact that the end-user only needs to have a web-browser no-matter which web application he is using. This eliminated a bigger worry of making an application work on every PC given the huge number of choices in hardware and OS these days.

Microsoft's success with the bigger problem:
Imagine,.. All your customers are glued to a set of technologies that you developed, and this technology is largely becoming outdated and supporting it is counting on your resources which want to develop new and better technologies..
Could there be a better victory than your customers allowing you to removing the old stuff and replace it with new ones.

This happened for Microsoft. Because developers and technologists were busy (and still busy) with web-based technologies like DHTML, XML, blogs, RSS, ASP.NET and the likes... Microsoft had success in establishing .NET without frowns from the developers who determine whether any technology succeeds or not.

With this success behind it, Microsoft is planning more such revamp to its existing technology.

New technology is good, better and it helps evolve more better software. But more than this, its good to software industry for reasons of more work.

The Future..
Everyone of us have heard about Microsoft working on things they like calling Whidbey, Yukon, Longhorn etc., And that Microsoft is planning releases of all these new software in the coming years.

What's on store:

Whidbey - A new .NET (which suggest to be more backward "INCOMPATIBLE" than the already existing .net version which doesn't support any old applications developed in languages like Visual Basic, Visual C++ etc.,)

Yukon - A new SQL Server

WinFX - A replacement for Win32 and NTFS fiesystem itself they say.

Longhorn OS - Already called 'Windows Vista' and ready for launch, suggests to support .net applications more than non-.net applications. A microsoft support guy also told me 4-5 months back that the WinFX system which will be part of longhorn is the reason delaying longhorn's (or Vista's)launch.

ASP.NET 2.0 - A new ASP.NET framework that claims to be upgrade of the existng web programming framework of microsoft.

God... that's everything.. the win32 system is being changed, OS technology is getting changed, Database server, and .NET framework which will be the base of future windows OS's ...are all going to change.

Windows technologies are going to change.

That means, all application that run on Visual basic or C++ technologies, will need a partial migration(if not total migration) to new technology.

This is to take advantage of the new changes, or who knows windows software may not run itself on the new platforms if they aren't migrated... because doubts and rumours are looming large that backward compatibility has been of less priority to Microsoft while developing the new techonlogies.

A new boom in desktop / windows based applications underway?
To me all this looks like.. there are going to be more migration projects to convert outdated technology(Visual basic, VC++ and win32) applications to newer technologies, ... very similar to projects we see today to migrate ASP to ASP.NET, or VB to VB.NET.

The Launch party
Microsoft is planning to release all new technology within 2008, gradually with all their usual hype, claims, and promises...which worked for .NET's launch in 2000.

Its worthwhile noting here that Microsoft worked on .NET's launch for almost 2 years, from 2000 to 2002.. .NET and new OSes like WinXP were marketed non-stop.

Why India would benefit?
> Because migration projects are generally considered for outsourcing.
> Outsourced projects go to countries where cost is low, resources are high, quality is satisfactory and promising.
> India has successfully created a promising pool of software resource headcount continously in the past 5 years.

Migration projects are not new software development, but same old software re-wired with new technologies.

Also, when migration is only to upgrade the technology and the software needs to functionally do the same things like before, people only tend to spend less money on the migration... moving such projects to the outsourcing pool.

If you don't trust me on why I feel India will benefit,... then think about why Microsoft is all of a sudden tempted to invest $1.7billion in its Indian operations without doing this all these years when outsourcing was already hot. Bill gates who recently came to India announced about this investment plan of $2billion.

Indian software industry needn't worry on getting projects, and can concentrate only on building resources for the demand expected.

Posted by Harish at 8:37 PM | Permalink

There was a guy, a 'Whiz kid' in mechanical engineering who fixed a motor to his bicycle and drove it around with all the pride. This guy was Mr.Honda... and the vehicle later developed into a 'Motorcycle'..(the one that we all drive so badly in India)

Popular myth: Honda got into big busines when the company exported motorcycles to the America visionizing a huge demand for motocycles. Honda instantly sold great looking motorcycles to the americans.

The truth: Those were the days when motocycles were driven by leather-Jacketed, oil smelling, teenage rebellions in America...the early 1970's. Mr.Honda was especially confident of the 250cc and 305cc machines he sent across to the US.

[Wait a minute.. ??.. if you are in India you probably may not see such cc vehicles in near future, not even import them... since its unneccesarily powerful and dangerous for India and hence banned.]

The large machines that Honda sent to US had a unique handlebar designed like Buddha's eyebrows. This.. Mr.Honda thought would be a unique selling point(USP)

But Buddha's eyebrows weren't interesting to the biking rebellion in the US. Honda company executives were treated discourteously whichever dealer they approached.

Later came, Honda's supercubs, the 50cc machines (like our T V S 50's in India). The supercubs were exported to US, but not for the market... it was for Honda employees for their own personal transport around the concrete jungle of Los Angeles.

It was then... the US people got interested in Honda seeing the supercubs... also at this time Honda had problems with the reliability of larger cc machines. So all effort was put into selling the supercubs which later became US's best selling motorcycle... Advertizing also helped a major extent... thanks to a great slogan. The slogan was invented by a University of california undergraduate.

"You meet the nicest people on a Honda"... (probably attacking the biking rebellion :0)

And so Honda started making waves... and is ruling many core market segments since then.

Today..of course Honda is not one company.. its a group of companies and is into high power bikes, concept cars, solar powered vehicles, water scooters, small jets, lawn mowers, custom made vehicles..and what not.

Some picture treat for those who read till here..

Posted by Harish at 6:57 PM | Permalink

"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but, you can't fool all the people all the time."

Now, here.. the above proverb makes more sense in the context that I read it in most marketing books right from college. Lincoln seems to have got irritated by some marketing executives at his door. he he.

"The greatest risk of all is the risk of going unnoticed... after all that struggle with life"

Posted by Harish at 3:56 PM | Permalink

Category: Business

For your question: Why are we discussing BMW in this blog today?

When you see the great athletes, what is for most of us impossible is made to seem effortless.

Understanding corporate successes through the achievements of the successful, makes success seem too easy - John Kay in 'Why Firms succeed'

Have you felt what John kay states.. its an interesting feeling of motivation when you see or read about successes.. it drives you to succeed.. and so we are talking about BMW, and I plan to write more about successful people or companies in this blog..

BMW - the IBM of automobiles

Firstly, BMW is not British Motor Works like I have been thinking so long.. poor me..it is Bayerische Motoren Werke a German company.

I also thought BMW is famous for its luxury cars. But some historical reading about the company tells me that BMW's core market focus is high performance sedans (those beasts of vehicles), and motorcycles. Also, the company is known more for its product quality which is always above expectations.

The company today stands tall like the blue chip of automobiles, similar to IBM for computers.

BMW is one of the German companies that benefited...and still benefits.. from the efficient educational system of Germany. This country Germany is one of the frontrunners of technology innovations and has produced many blue, white, pink and many chips for many industries.

Germany's education system teaches basic technical skills to a very big portion of the population, unlike many countries where people educated in technical skills are only 50% of population or lesser. (That makes me feel jealous of germans.. since Indian educational system is like a museum in itself until post graduation.)

Hey, have you seen the BMW headquarters in Munich, Germany.. If you are one of those few people, I am happy for posting the picture of it here..

The building is an architecture marvel and is of national importance to Germany.. as much as the company itself. This again reminds me of IBM, the company, which I read was very often called a National treasure for the Americans.

Posted by Harish at 3:38 PM | Permalink

Its easy to express yourself writing books, or blogs, or having a web portal, and voicing your voice through a medium your company has.

But if you are a search engine company and you want to raise your views through this search engine how would you do it, that too without adding a new web link to the page or some inner page in the search engine.

Google has its way of expressing..

Linking keywords to the "I'm Feeling lucky" button.

For example, type the word "failure" in the search box and click the "I'm Feeling lucky" button, to see what google team feels as the topmost failure in the world.

Adding caricatures to the google brand image on the search engine website.

Suppose its christmas, your visit to google.com would be slightly different. In the interest of finding the search results many people miss this..

Google's logo on all the pages.

Yes the images look different from the normal google brand image just to imply the festivity or some occassion.. On a 'Christmas day' you could find a christmas tree part of the google logo.

What better, if you don't get the festivity linked with the caricature in the image, then right-click on the image and see its 'Properties'. The name of the image will have the occassion in it.

For example google logos with expression.. visit here.

Posted by Harish at 3:30 PM | Permalink

Heard of the Tuvalu islands?.. (pronounced Too-va-loo)

No!.. ok.

Heard of costliest internet domain suffix .tv ?

Yes!.. Good. Like every nation has been given a suffix on the internet, like .in for india and .cc for canada, the tuvalu islands got the lucky .tv suffix which incidentally has brought the tiny tiny distant islands into perspective of the world. Hailed, as the fourth smallest country in the world tuvalu islands is making good money with the selling of .tv domains to such extent that it got enough money by 2000 to join the united nations given its small size, population and economy.

The executives at a company Idealabs Inc., in california were quick to estimate the potential of the domain suffix allocated to tuvalu islands, and took full exclusive license to sell .tv domain names to customers through the company dotTV (http://www.tv). Through the deal tuvalu islands would be paid a huge sum for every year in royalty and licences for a decade to come.

Tuvalu has around 10000 people in its country and only 27 square miles in size (should be approx 70 sqkm). It is the fourth smallest country in the world in terms of area - behind the Vatican City, Monaco and Nauru. In terms of the population it is the second smallest, with only the Vatican City having fewer people.

The country made big money through its jackpot with internet. Other than the .tv domains, the country earns steady revenue through its ISD code 688 which became popular because of the sequence (again lucky) through which lots of phoneSex calls are routed by various countries. The island though feels embarrased on this aspect.

Another core revenue earner for tuvalu is stamps.
Since achieving independence in 1978 from the british who ruled till then, much of Tuvalu's foreign earnings have come from the sale of its postage stamps.

Related links:
BBC Report: Tiny tuvalu joins UN
Tuvalu islands website
Tuvalu News: Tuvalu will be paid $50 million in royalties for .tv
wiki - on idealab
Idealab official website

Posted by Harish at 1:15 PM | Permalink

Looks like people are bored of reading content online.. given that almost all businesses have entered into online modes parallel to their offline businesses. Be it reading News, or, looking for a map of Chicago, or, reading a friend's thoughts... its all text, text, text now.

Everything in life all of a sudden started becoming Text, adding up to the already busy SMS messaging mediums.

No, Its not unfortunate. People like doing up things online, because, being online is easier and even costs less money (but more time, looks like nobody bothers about this very often.)

So, its now obvious that there should be businesses which provide services that can talk-enable a website.. for a real low price. Yes, they are there...but even more popular in recent years.

And you say, "What's so inventive about this.. I have seen some talking characters on sites even in 1999". Yes! but back in 1999 or till last couple of years how many people did you know use this for business, or how often have you heard some business say it improved sales 10% because of the talking characters?

That's what is happened in the past couple of years and now!

One such service called 'SitePal' of oddcast Inc has expressed its case study that it can improve your business considerably with very little costs. Check up their case study

Oddcast claims it has got more than 3000 customers for the service, serving around 65 million characters every month.

Yes! that number is the News. I believe it was never this popular until recently.

While a lot of news has been already talked-off of the opportunities virtual talking characters open-up for online marketers, many people have been campaigning for years for the idea of implementing virtual characters to bring near-to-real study environment for online distance learning programs.

In my opinion:
Talking on your websites definitely makes people know about you or your work easier than reading those numerous pages. And a plain end-to-end graphical demo would be nice but it wont be as effective as these talking characters because people start feeling you make the demo presentation with an eye of marketing alone, whereas these talking characters dont open a new demo page, and just talk the content that actually relates to what is there on the website of your business.

Sideline: I am not setting this up on this webpage.. huh! I know you really love and enjoy reading my content! Lets keep it that way ;o)

Posted by Harish at 10:56 AM | Permalink

Firstly, talking about cinema and especially Tamil Cinema(India) is not to be considered gossip. The kind of activity that's happening
in this industry is worth a lot of respect for the skill involved.

I am very sure, soon people are going to talk about management skills available in the tamil film industry, like they spoke about mumbai's
dabbawallas last year.

Dance choreography
First and foremost are the dancers and dance choreographers
of tamil cinema. And... only, Raju Sundaram and Prabhu deva in that context.

For the past 5 years whatever these fellas have done to tamil cinema songs is unforgettable... and never repeatable.

When there's a song on screen, I only watch the dancers behind the hero and /or main actors in the film. I will tell you something. Try to watch the dancers on the screen one by one and their movements. Each one's eyes, actions will reveal to you that they are enjoying the dance and all focussed on only enjoying it with perfection other than anything that's happening around them, not even looking at how the other fellow is dancing.

They are the best examples i can find in the world for team work. The best team is that of raju sundaram & prabhu deva's group. Watch two-three or 10 popular tamil songs in the same manner. You will find something interesting. The dancers in 9 out of 10 songs will be the same set, or atleast the first row of dancers will be same. They are all working for raju sundaram. Check up if you don't believe me.

And, I believe raju sundaram, and prabhu deva are one of the best managers of india.
Dance Choreography is about managing people, and making them dance... and more so its about finding steps that suits everyone's body and brings the best moves of dancer's body. Yes, there are too many parameters they keep track of, and for each actor the parameters are different.

I am totally excited about the dance in tamil films these days... I mean, even if 60-150 people dance, the choreography is like, not even a single person is out of sync or is not giving the best of him. So much involvement will happen only if everyone accepts the manager and understand the task ahead.

And you would be as excited as me, if you can get to see the sets, surroundings, men & material with which people shoot films in tamilnadu. Its all directed, coordinated as easy as wearing a shirt. And, these tasks are commendable work which goes without recognition unlike the behind-the-scenes video on a jackie chan film.
...
Back to prabhu deva.. and raju.
While prabhu deva is busy with becoming an actor - and recently in becoming a director, raju is all focussed on his men and the business. Prabhu deva directed a telugu film which was a boxoffice hit in south india. Prabhudeva occassionally and selectively does choreography for films other than pursuing his new found career in acting directing etc., Mentioning about prabhudeva and raju, we have to make a mention about upcoming dance choreographer nagarjun. All three are brothers. Nagarjun shows up his skills now and then with songs like Hamma hamma - Of bombay, and films like Ghilli (the mega hit of all tamil films in 2004).

And what an idiot I would be, if i didnt mention, prabhu deva's excellent choreography of Hritikh roshan for Lakshya. Prabhu's steps presented by Hritikh was the ultimate way prabhu could have ever presented dance to people. The song Main aisa kyon hoon -of Lakshya took Hritikh back to fame as the best dancer in hindi film industry...Hritikh already had touched fame with his dance for his first film....cch cchh i forgot the name.. something pyar...

And when I talk about prabhu deva choreographing Hrithik, I remember the song where prabhu choreographed actress Kajol. The song won prabhu deva a national award.

Sometimes, I myself have thought that prabhu deva isn't any interestingly skilled person. My perception was so because he was terribly bad on expressions when it came to acting. He has definitely improved a lot these days. But, now I tell myself, dance is about body.. and the language the moves speak. .. expression is presentation.. sometimes, with some too good dancers, you can bear bad expressions...atleast with prabhu deva... considering that neither prabhu deva nor his brothers were trained by proffessionals.. or had the opportunity to learn acting or expressions ...off the scene, until past few years. Though his professional training is not something we should be bothered about, I am discussing things with the context of understanding the men's work, their failures and stuff.

Sure, prabhu deva and brothers have more homework to do with expressions, if they are planning to show up next time on screen.. and should improve their presentation adjacent to their skills, to make things better.

But sure, prabhu deva and raju sundaram turned trumps all the way for their hardwork and understanding of relation between body and dance.

Posted by Harish at 11:48 PM | Permalink

Yes, asia is slowly surrendering to it.. its fast spreading. Even faster than SARS, and even deadlier. The world is caught up with infrastructure fever.

Every business, every enterpreneur, every employed individual, is thinking about acquiring land, buildings, apartments, or some extra space than what they have got.

Its fast catching up in China, india, and almost all asian countries.

In Chennai, India
I used to see ads in the paper for buyers .. for buying finished buildings or under-construction spaces, or posh commercial complexes.

But this week i saw something different.. lots of ads on paper requiring land for construction in chennai.. every popular building promoter and construction company advertized requesting land owners/ old building owners to react, promising more-than expected money, without a condition, if neccessary "will pay in cash" was the word.

That's huge demand... That's when you start begging, and will surrender more than it deserves.

What triggered the demand?

So much Money around...
Chennai is now filled with money makers..business has been good and growing multi-fold last year, and already this year. I thought it was just software, but every business was thriving in demand. People got more money, well-paid salaries, growing businesses, and good demand for good products.

Though... surprisingly, prices have not been increasing because of the demand(except for real-estate).. thats good. it helps the demand survive longer.

Theres more money inflow.. flowing into chennai, by way of more people migrating into the city. More businesses are establishing their branches here overwhelmed by the growth.

So many people needing more space...
More people are migrating into chennai, 99% of them on job transfers and because their business spread. This catapulted by lower infrastructure interest rates about 6-9%(not very low compared to many countries offering loans at 2-3%), has had everyone think real-estate. More money in hand always tempts. People are buying houses for their own, businesses are buying huge amounts of land for constructing their offices. Businesses already having good offices in chennai, are also getting on the bus and expanding business spread with new office spaces.

"Growth needs space"
As things grow, they eat up more space.. or only when theres more space, can something in it grow bigger.

Minds need more space to think better and manage bigger, growing businesses. People need more living space to fit their family and everyone in, and still have space to stretch.

The infrastructure fever is got to make asian countries bigger and better developed. The western countries had this fever a long time back, while asians were very resistant to growth and lived with the what was available.

Now that, western countries find a space crunch, and their spaces are almost saturated, they are getting their investments flowing into us...countries like india and china. This money shifts hands as bigger salaries, bigger costs on products, and make way to indian pockets.

Labour costs and infrastructure development costs are low in asia compared to the western reality. So, this investment is getting the western countries their due of business, more work outsourced and completed cheaper. So they are not minding losing the money to indian pockets.. for sometime.. till they start getting their ROI.

While its a win-win both sides, its always the investor who takes back the bigger pie. It might be different with Asia though.

Asians, having deprived for a long time of learning good business, and earning bigger salaries, will find it easier to work the demands of these investors, earn higher, and very importantly learn the job better than the investor.

In Asia, growth needed space.. but was not feasible so long... now, we will witness asia grow as bigger as its size in comparison to size of other continents... literally.

Posted by Harish at 1:31 PM | Permalink

Lets get to the Truth.

People of advertising agencies should be thanked for making things interesting sometimes.. There have been a lot of Ads that connect with our thoughts, or, get a laugh out of us.

Recently I visited this website of one of India's top rated Ad agency... Rediffusion | DYR

Its not their work or their name that caught me.. but their website content.

Website content writers for companies, are typical boredom-bringers... having read contents of various caompanies I can say that. If not for some interesting bloggers, I would not be interested in this thing myself.

Anyway.. what did i read.. Here it is.. I am sure u 2 like it.

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"You may be reading this whilst thinking about appointing a new advertising agency (in which case we suggest hitting the links on your left right away). Or, you may be reading this because it's your coffee break, and you don't like solitaire. You may be reading this to understand why your bright young kid made advertising his career.

You may be reading this because you’re hoping to find a query button. You may be reading this because you're that bright young kid wanting to make a mark in advertising and marketing. You may be reading this, hoping somewhere in this ramble of words, you’ll find the name of a supplier you need.

You may be reading this because you’re the morality brigade checking for obscenity in advertising. Whatever your reason to read so far, we’d like to say, welcome to RDYR Lounge!

RDYR Lounge is just the place to keep pace with the Indian advertising industry."
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from Rediffusion (in context of displaying their work only)

Interesting? May be u like more of them like I did. Check them Rediffusion | DYR

Posted by Harish at 11:59 AM | Permalink

In the world of computers, different operatings systems pose different looks and usage interests.. They aptly call it "look-and-feel".

If you tried linux flavors like Redhat linux's Fedora, you have rather experienced "the difference".

I have been working on a Java project on a apple mac for sometime.. my office bought a cool new white emac for the same and everyday when i have to do something on it, it has been a pleasure... though i call it a portable TV-set ;-) rather than a computer. If you had one, you will agree more with me on this "TV-set" term...I bet :o).

Apple mac's not only have a different OS, but altogether a different hardware to use. If you
didnt know, you cant install a Mac operating system on any other hardware other than apple. Thats some marketing.. keeping your business with yourself., rather than allowing the world to produce hardware compatible for your software like Microsoft does. They do have the risk of being dumped by the market since its only dumping of one company's products.

Anyway as of now Apple exist. I would leave the argument of whether they are right in this, for another day.

With mac, a lot of things are different.. obvious enough for a regular windows user for years, u cant expect a mac os, or a linux to perform like microsoft's operating system... but if you see it on thier side, apple does what it does best. images, and graphics rendering.

You should view a photograph of yourself on a mac, and then on a windows or linux machine and os. You will find a great amount of clarity in the picture and sharpness in the colors. That explains why apple is happy with only hardware manufactured by them.

Posted by Harish at 1:34 PM | Permalink