Shashikant's tiny world

Dear Flipkart, Please disallow guest purchase for registered users

2011-10-04T13:37:00.005+05:30

Flipkart has been / is one of my favourite shopping destination. My dozens of purchases with them have been smooth. Until I hit a block last week.

Flipkart allows anyone to buy without being a registered user of the site. This policy itself isn't at fault. If someone wishes to buy quickly, forcing that user to create account adds friction to the sale. So, that is fine.

Here is what happened with my account. A user placed order on Flipkart and provided my email address in the contact field. His order now appeared in my account. I sent a mail to Flipkart to remove that order from my account. Instead, Flipkart folks called up that user, and changed email address associated with my account to his email address. This effectively locked me out and my orders now were visible to him. Flipkart folks promised to fix this in "next two hours." I waited for a week and asked them to fix the problem. This time they fixed it within a few hours as against promise of one day.

I had asked them to fix this in an earlier mail as well and here I repeat it again. Please do not allow a guest purchase if the email address is already registered with you. If the email address is already registered, ask the user to login to the account.

I don't care about e-commerce bubble in India

2011-08-03T21:44:00.006+05:30

Here is my bullet-point take on the discussion on E-commerce bubble in India.

My earliest online shopping experience is from 2003. I had ordered a dozen music CDs from EBay. Broken CDs were shipped (or they got damaged during shipping.) I returned the CDs but never got the replacement. Multiple mails were ignored by seller and EBay. My trust in online shopping dropped below zero. My experiment of shopping online met an early death.
In last 6 years, I have booked train tickets only via IRCTC. Only once I went to the actual ticket counter when repeated attempts to book tickets for a group failed on IRCTC (blocking close to Rs 10,000 in the process) and those tickets had to be booked urgently.
In last 3 years, I have booked movie tickets on BookMyShow. If I can't book tickets online, I don't watch the film.
After hearing ample praise about Flipkart and Infibeam, I restarted shopping online at the beginning of 2010 with them. As you can see, I am not an early adopter in strictest sense.
In last 18 months, I have bought dozens of books, movie DVDs, phones, printer, laptop bag, laptop cooling pad, portable hard disk and headphones from variety of online stores (Flipkart, Infibeam, IndiaPlaza, Ebay, and more recently LetsBuy.) Collectively I have spent more than Rs 40,000 on these purchases. Every single item has been arrived in excellent condition. My skepticism about getting the delicate printer (actually, print-scan-copy machine) shipped in good condition were shattered when wonderful folks at LetsBuy packed it nicely and sent with BlueDart.
I am not counting ordering Dell laptop on phone as online shopping. The amount of running around required to get a laptop from them is a story of another post.
Point is, my shopping habits have changed irrevocably in the same way IRCTC and BookMyShow changed the ticketing habit.
Excellent discounts, free shipping and cash on delivery are some really strong USPs with which Indian e-commerce services are attracting new customers. While the companies themselves might be losing money to offer these features, they are changing the consumer behaviour in a big way.
I wouldn't be surprised if consumers check the products like phone in a offline store and check the best deal available online before making purchase decision. From my limited experience, as of now, the prices of phones from online stores are not matched by the electronic store in the neighbourhood.
There are going to be companies who will capitalize on this new behaviour. Even though, the current online audience is estimated at 100 million, these are among the people who have disproportionate purchasing power. The opportunity is quite clear.
Now, all players may not have/get the required capital, execution skills or plain luck to be a long term player. A few players who do deliver and tide over the obstacles will own the market. The investors are probably betting that their investment is going to be the one that will turn out to be among the eventual winners.
Frankly, as a consumer, I don't really care if a company gets valued at 1 billion dollar or 3. If some companies get affected when the so-called bubble bursts, I will simply switch to the surviving player. In the worst case, I can go back to shopping the way I used to before 2010, though chances of that happening seem low. And, unless you have material interest in survival of specific companies, neither should you worry about the bubble talk.
Rephrasing the same, some specific companies may or may not survive in the long run, but online shopping as an industry is here to stay.
Well, I lied about the subject. I do care about success of e-commerce companies. I want them to succeed in a big way. Arguably, this is the biggest opportunity that Indian internet industry has seen till now and many startups are well-placed to ride this wave. A few big success stories will put the startup ecosystem in a new orbit.

Computer Science Final Year Project Ideas

2010-11-02T12:58:00.002+05:30

If you are looking for project ideas for your final year course requirements.

Build stemmer for Indian Languages. Read about Stemming on Wikipedia. To put simply, stemming reduce a given word to its root form. For example, if word is "books", its stemmed for would be "book". This is very useful in search. Anyone searching for "book" will also get results matching "books." Presently, there is a Hindi stemmer available in Lucene. It would be great to have stemmer for major Indian languages.
Part-Of-Speech tagger for Indian Languages. Probably this needs ground up work starting from building a tagged corpus. Microsoft has a team working on this. If this is your area of interest, you may land up in that team.

These projects require math + linguistic + computer science skills. So, these are quite challenging.

Most-visited Websites from India according to Google Ad Planner

2010-05-29T11:27:00.009+05:30

Google Ad Planner published the list global Top 1000 sites. I picked the Indian sites from the list. This original list does not have Yahoo India, Facebook/Orkut/Wikipedia/Live (from India), as they are counted under their global site. But you can get traffic for these sites from India with Google Ad Planner. The global rank assigned for these sites is what it would have been if they were included in the list independently. MSN India doesn't have enough traffic to make it to top 1000.

Google has excused itself from this "beauty-contest" list. So there are no numbers for Google.com, Google.co.in and Youtube.com. Other category of exclusion is pr0n, that are included in Alexa's top Indian sites.

(Apologies for bad colour formatting. I am unable to paste the table from OpenOffice, cleanly. And blogger is horribly broken.)

Global Rank	Site	Unique Visitors / Month	Page Views / Month
108	in.yahoo.com	21 M	250 M
126	facebook.com	19 M	2.5 Billion
167	orkut.com	16 M	140 M
234	rediff.com	12 M	960 M
303	wikipedia.org	10 M	89 M
389	indiatimes.com	8.9 M	330 M
501	in.com	7.4 M	89M
578	live.com	6.2 M	160 M
763	irctc.co.in	5.1M	190 M
796	cricinfo.com	5 M	190 M

Should you builld custom search for your site?

2010-05-24T20:26:00.002+05:30

Google has just announced the revenue sharing structure for AdSense. I suppose, recent announcement from Apple about iAds and making the revenue sharing public forced Google to go public on this. After all, they are a huge proponents of "All Things Open." (tm)

According to the announcements, publishers get 68% of revenues for Adsense for Content. This number stands at 51% for Adsense for Search. Adsense for Search is the ads shown by Google when publishers use Google's custom search. Take a look at custom search on TechCrunch. (BTW, it seems, TechCrunch has silently dropped Yahoo BOSS that they had implemented one and half years back.)

Google keeps additional 17% when you use their search.

Now, if publishers is a big player (think TechCrunch), 17% revenue might translate to a meaningful number. These publishers can build a custom search with Lucene/Solr and use Google Adsense for Content on those pages to show ads.

Google custom search is trivial to implement compared to building and maintaining custom Lucene/Solr search. I don't have numbers at hand, but, few thousands dollars seem to be the tipping point where building custom search is a better idea. Just to put a concrete number, I would say, if revenues from Adsense for Search is in excess of $60,000 (per year), custom search is the way to go.

Bunch of thoughts about Google

2009-11-15T16:58:00.002+05:30

Yes, the title of this post is rather poor. There are bunch of ideas in my head for blog post, but many of them need to be polished. The fear of putting something half-baked is embarrassing. But, that also means, many ideas simply die out or lose relevance over time. So, here I am, ready to be ridiculed for these ideas.

Google Upgrades Picasa Storage:

Google unveiled new storage pricing for Picasa and Gmail. Now, you get 20GB for $5 per year. This is 87% lower than earlier pricing. A staggering 87%. At this pricing, if you are using all of 20 GB, the price is roughly 2 cents per GB per month. To see how ridiculously low this pricing is, compare it with Amazon's S3.

Amazon S3 charges 15 cents per month per GB. Amazon also charges for the data transfer. Putting 20GB in S3 costs you $2 at the rate of 10 cents per GB. And reading data out of S3 costs 17 cents per GB. (I am not putting the charges for GET requests on S3, because most of the time it is rounding off error.) In comparison, Google is charging $0 for data transfer. This makes Amazon S3 almost an order of magnitude more expensive if not more.

There is more. Picasa also stores various sized thumbnails to show when you browse the album. I suppose, that doesn't count towards your usage.

It doesn't end here. Google uses Google File System (GFS) to store all of its data. GFS follows rule of 3 - that is there are 3 copies of all the data. The reason being even if one copy is lost (quite routine with commodity hardware), the data still has redundancy. Essentially, per GB per month cost offered by Google is fraction of a cent.

The raw storage costs around 10 cents per GB. That is boxed disk sitting on table. Pretty much unusable. Think about all the costs involved to make it workable - power, machine to connect to, data center, cooling, security, sys admin and so on. The cost of usable storage is actually significantly higher than the raw cost.

Now, you know, why I called this a ridiculously low price.

So, what's the catch? To start with Picasa allows only photos and video (of size upto 1GB) to be uploaded. This storage is also available with Gmail, but Gmail also has a limit of 25MB on attachment size. Unless you are pro photographer or having tons of photos of your kids (my friends do have), it's difficult to hit the limits of available storage.

Then, the next question is if anyway very few need this kind of storage, why didn't Google give 5GB space on Picasa for free instead of current limit of 1GB? Anyway, Google isn't making any money from this $5 per year plan. You may as well earn people's goodwill.

I think, Google is testing waters of "freemium" (yeah, a much abused term, but only one fits the description) with this ultra low pricing. $5 per year won't even register a blip on many wallets. Millions of wallets.

Next idea is to build on this is a backup service. A 100% paid one. Mostly at the price point of $10-20 per year. Comfortably below the Mozys and Dropboxs of the world. Figment of my imagination? May be. But there is non-zero chance that Google will do this.

I really wish Google comes up with competition to S3 at Picasa-style prices.

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Google Closure and the entire toolkit.

As much as I dislike the name, I sense it is utterly useful. Reducing javascript size will ease the stress on bandwidth and will run faster in the browser. Double win for the user. Google is creating tools for developers, spreading awareness about good practices.

Now, some of these tools are actually beneficial for Google as well. Google is strongly suggesting websites to use compression while distributing the text content (html/css/js.) With gzip, 75% or more size reduction is easily achievable on text. When a insanely popular service like Twitter doesn't bother about gzipping its content, you can imagine the (sorry) state of rest of the web.

And you know, Google is hurt every single time the Googlebot hits a site which sends uncompressed content to user. And when Google is crawling Billions of pages every day, you can imagine the bandwidth bill not to be trivial. Small compared to their $22 billion revenues, but not trivial. 75% reduction in that bill would be really sweet.

To lower it's bandwidth bill, Google will push out lots of tool to community. I wouldn't be surprised if they release Google Web Server - Lite edition to the community.

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Minor Crib about Google Adwords:

Google Adwords offers 4 types of keyword match - Broad, Phrase, Exact and Negative. It is explained here.

So, if you are bidding for "tennis shoes"
- Broad Match will show your ad for queries "tennis", "buy tennis shoes", "tennis sneakers".
- Phrase Match will show your ad for queries "red tennis shoes" but not for "shoes for tennis."
- Exact Match will show when the search query is exactly "tennis shoes" and nothing else.
- Negative Match will not show your ad if the specified term appears in search query. For example, the negative word "cheap" will not show your ad for the query "cheap tennis shoes."

I think, there is a need for something more stringent that Broad Match, but less restrictive that Phrase Match. Let's call it "All Keyword Match." The behaviour for this would be to match presence of all specified keywords, in any order, in the query.

So, if my keyword is "tennis shoes", the ad should be shown for "shoes for tennis" but not for "running shoes." That is as long as the query contains both "tennis" and "shoes", the ad should be shown.

Yes, yes, Google's ad matching is quite smart, but I need this control.

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Google Enhancing the ads.

Google now allows enhanced product ads where, you could specify a picture of the product, it's price, payment information, etc. I expect these ads to perform a lot better than existing plain simple ads of "Buy Wii at Low Price." And these are going to be Pay for Action ads and not the typical CPC ads.

Essentially, the retailers are going to build a fantastic shopping search engine for Google. When you search for an electronic item, the rich ads will dominate the vanilla organic search results and attract disproportionate share of the clicks.

So, who gets affected by this? The shopping search engines, obviously. Many of the shopping search players themselves spend aggressively on Google (see here ) But it seems, Google wants to take a hard look at the arbitrage game. For a long time Google has been a spectator in the shopping search space. Google Products (earlier Froogle) is almost as old as the web search on Google. But they never took massive interest in making it a real product. Putting a better shopping search product would have cannibalized their ad revenues in a big way. But, now that the glory days of 30% growth seem a thing of past, they probably want to see how they can extract more juice from existing universe of searches.

Frankly, for someone who runs a vertical search (bandhan.com), this should not be a good news. But, since we operate in a rather unproven market, entry of Google will help us. Yes, you have heard this cliche umpteen times from entrepreneurs who built their companies painstakingly over the years, just to see Google entering into the business and eyeing a leadership position. Trust me, for us it's not just a statement to be issued to the media, but a reality.

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Sorry, right now, I'm too lazy to even proof-read this. Thanks for reading.

How StackOverflow is a competition to LinkedIn

2009-10-15T10:45:00.006+05:30

Last night, I posted a following message to my twitter stream.

"If LinkedIn is a threat to Monster/Naukri, StackOverflow is fast becoming a bigger threat to LinkedIn."

It received following responses.

"Not sure I understand the analogy. How are u equating the two?" - Arjun Ram

"Huh?! How is stackoverflow becoming a threat to linked-in?! Only techies on stackoverflow, right? Linked in is much-much more!" - Navin

"Really? How so? I'm becoming more and more of an online recluse now, so don't have much of my own exp to lean on." - Shyam

I realized, my original message was somewhat esoteric.

Let's start with basic. Job sites like Monster, Naukri connect the active job seekers with recruiters. The candidates upload their resume when they are looking for a change.

Then the Social Networking boom started where you created a personal profile with information about yourself and bunch on inane things. Social network connected you with your (mostly real) friends for easy communication. The professional counterpart of this idea, LinkedIn, helped you create network of people you are/have been associated with professionally. So, you put up your brief (or long) professional activities publicly. Though, LinkedIn wasn't meant to be a job site like Monster, given the amount of high-fidelity information and social proof, it quickly became an open repository of passive job seekers. LinkedIn realized the recruiting angle to professional networking and is aggressive in pushing recruitment solutions. If you see "Products" line on LinkedIn's home page, you will see links for "LinkedIn Jobs", "Recruiting Solutions", "Jobs Directory." Currently, LinkedIn has 50 million users and adding a million every 12 days or so.

LinkedIn didn't start as a career site, but as side effect of professional networking it has become a threat to Monster. Just like, you know, Facebook didn't start as a photo sharing site, but it quickly became a 5 times bigger than Flickr.

Cut to StackOverflow(referred as SO henceforth). This is a Q&A site for programmers. It is a great resource for every geek who codes for daily bread & butter and occasional beer. Growth of SO has been astounding. It is barely an year old, but it has decimated the long standing leader, experts-exchange. See the traffic graph from Google Trends.

SO also has a built-in incentive system, where it is beneficial for you to register before asking or answering the question. And your public profile contains all your questions, answers and reputation. (Check mine) If LinkedIn's recommendation is a good social proof, albeit with a small problem, your SO profile is even bigger endorsement coming from "random guys on internet."

Given the popularity of SO, they have recently launched Careers section. They already had a job listing, but they careers is more comprehensive solution. An active job seeker would upload the resume. And to filter out non-serious job seekers, it is a paid service for candidates. The recruiters will get an integrated view of a candidate's public profile and private resume. I suspect, if you go through a person's questions and answers, you will get a lot better idea about his/her competence than an hour long interview.

Yes, compared to 50 million users of LinkedIn, SO is still tiny. But, it's growth has been astounding. It does a million page views a day and I have read that almost one-third of world's programmers have visited this site at least once. It currently claims 120,000 active users. SO will soon compete with various product/technology specific mailing lists which are great for one-time solution, but extremely hard to use by subsequent programmers.

Combine it's usefulness, quality and growth, I wouldn't be surprised if grows by an order of magnitude or two in next couple of years. At that time, it will be a formidable force against LinkedIn & Monster as far as hiring techies is concerned.

Challenges for ads in the world of real time search

2009-07-29T23:46:00.001+05:30

Real time search is the newest kid on the block and everyone is quite excited about it. The excitement almost rivals that of the non-existent iSomethingOrOther from Apple. The obvious way to make money is now a decade old - show relevant ads for the search queries.

So far so good. Let's understand how real-time search is different.

1. Trends is a wave. When people are tweeting about something they are creating a wave. Now that essentially means the trends come to you rather than you searching for something. It's almost like news, where most of the time you want to know what's happening right now and may be use search occasionally to dig into the less prominent stories or simply find relevant information from thousands of news stories.

2. Waves die. The promise of real time search is to provide relevant information which is just out of the oven. A very relevant tweet which is 6 months old has almost no value. Contrast this with the Google world where good content gets rewarded handsomely over a long period of time (until something significantly better shows up.)

3. Bar is not high for quality of the content. After all, how much information can you cram in 140 characters? I don't see one tweet to be far superior than the next 10.

How do these idiosyncrasies of search affect the ads.

1. Since trends are coming un-announced, it is hard to catch the trend. In Google world, advertiser roughly know the keywords. They can create ads for those keywords, bid and let google handle the massive ad auction while you sleep peacefully on a soft pillow. You can take a look at your campaign once in a while (a day or a week), tweak a little and again go the soft pillow.

But the real-time search is different game. The google world of adwords will look almost static in comparison. The trends are getting created quickly, you don't have enough time to think of all the keywords & the bid amount, and you need to respond fast.

For example, you are a chocolate company and few people found worms in it. They are very offended by it and it is becoming a trend. You need to go out, put the ads pacifying all the consumers.

How will this be done? Well, I don't know. May be you need a service which gives early warning about possible trend.

2. Since trends die, you need to constantly keep on tuning your ads. You don't have the luxury of soft pillow in this world. You are on your toes all the time.

3. The current discovery model is not geared to handle the micro-trends or long-tail trends. More than 12 million tweets are created everyday. There must be so many trends getting created every hour. How do you sense those tiny trends and target ads for them?

4. Real time search is only about scanning the content. Like say checking headline and going away. You don't care about the quality of headline, just the message. So, ads are not really competing with content for users attention like regular search. This is sweet! If ads are just right, content will lag the ads significantly in terms of user attention.

I don't know if real-time search is for real. For all you know it simply is a mass illusion. But if it shows promise in early stage, we are in for an exciting ride.

Technology developed at IIT Kanpur to be used for National ID card project

2009-06-27T00:32:00.002+05:30

The national Unique Identity Card is the smart card is based on the specifications of Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications (SCOSTA.) [Source:BS] Now, SCOSTA is of interest to me as I have personally seen it developing in the lab back in 2002. SCOSTA has been completely developed at IIT Kanpur. It was the M.Tech thesis Ravinder, who was senior to me. Ravinder belonged to the rare species who manage 10/10 without sweating too hard. The professors involved were Prof Rajat Moona, Prof Deepak Gupta and Prof Manindra Agrawal ("Primes is in P" fame) all from the Computer Science department.

You can check the presentation by Prof Moona to learn more about SCOSTA.

If you need the proof that world-class technology can be developed in India, you don't need to any further. I wish the management gurus of IIM learn something from this. IIMs recently chose Prometric ETS (the company which conducts GRE) to conduct computerized CAT. Apparently, it simply gives you one of the 30 question papers with random ordering of questions, and not completely online and adaptive test like GRE. From whatever little I have learnt about technology in last 10 years, I can assure you developing operating system for smart card is incredibly harder compared to conducting computerized exam however sophisticated.

Go Nandan. Go!

2009-06-27T00:06:00.003+05:30

Nilekani has been appointed the Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India and he will be equivalent of a cabinet minister. I must admit I was quite disappointed with UPA govt's last term and was hoping they will lose election. But a thumping victory has catapulted the mood of the government. And now I have nothing but admiration for the new govt. This definitely marks a new beginning in governance where an eminent, competent person has been entrusted with a major responsibility. According to some estimates this project will have budget of Rs 10,000 Cr spread over 3 years.

But, guess what, not everyone is happy with govt's this decision. Immediately, the red flags of conflict of interest have been waived. Yes, Infosys will be competing to get this project (or part of it as I see.) Nilekani has already resigned from the Infosys office. He has also made it amply clear that he will excuse himself from the decision process which involves Infosys. It seems that's not enough. They are asking what will he do with his some $700 million dollar worth holding in Infosys.

Few things.

First. Infosys is one of very few companies in India which made "Corporate Governance" way of life long before the term gained currency. Nilekani has been an integral part of the process with which they built Infosys. The conduct of Infosys management has been impeccable. (Short exercise. Pull out the list of top paid management executives on India. Check how many of them are promoters of the companies. Check if their compensation was in line with the performance of the company.) If you are asking for highest (and unreasonable) ethical standards from the man who has amply demonstrated it, you need a break. And let's not forget we are the country which elects hundreds of murderers, embezzlers, criminals, rapist, robbers as our representatives.

Second. Let's find out how much Infosys stands to earn if they win the project. The budget of 10,000 Cr will be spent over 6 years. A significant portion of this money will be spent on hardware which includes hundreds of millions of smart cards. (When you buy a new vehicle, the RTO issues a smart card with details of vehicles. They charge Rs 350 for that. If you take Rs 50 per card or $1 for mass production we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, which is significant portion of the budget.) I would be surprised if the actual spend on software is more than Rs 3,000 Cr in all - that is Rs 1000 Crore per year. Obviously this is a huge project and you will have multiple software vendors. Let's say we are talking about 3 vendors. That roughly translates to Rs 300 Crore per year per company. If Infosys is one of the vendor, it will get 300 cr revenues per year. Don't expect the profit margins on this project to be superhigh as there is no labour cost arbitrage.

To put numbers in context, Infosys reported revenues of Rs 21,693 Crores. An additional 300 Cr will hardly change their financials in a tangible way.

For the sake analysis, let's say Infosy's stock prices moves up by 10-15% due to revenues of this project. Now, what is it in this world that Nilekani can do with $800 million but not with $700 million? Nilekani has spent his lifetime to build reputation and name for himself. He is not going to take any action which will jeopardize that pristine reputation. It's foolish if someone thinks he will trade his reputation for few extra millions. Last I heard he didn't own a private jet or a yacht or an island. He seems like a frugal man to me.

It's been 15 years since the start of Voter's ID card project and even today the cards are issued with wrong name and address. This is a himalayan waste of public money. We need competent person to look after such gigantic projects. By making fuss out of nothing, we are scaring lots of good people from corporate world whose expertise govt may wish to utilize. Now, if Deepak Parekh is asked to head a new authority on affordable housing and there are going to be similar noises due to his connection with HDFC, we will keep him away. It would be a shame if such great people, who are willing to commit their time and energy for the larger good of society, are kept away due to some non-issues.

All the best, Nadan!

Google's Twitter problem

2009-06-14T10:35:00.004+05:30

Some folks speculate that Google is launching vertical search for micro-blogging services. Given the lack of competition for Twitter, it means, Google is launching a vertical search for Twitter.

Let's find out how many tweets are generated each month. Twitter gives unique identity to each message, which could be found at the end of this URL. http://twitter.com/kshashi/status/2156645977 That's a sequential number for each message. From my own stream I found this number for 14th June (today), 14th May, ... 14th Jan. (I realized, I should have picked 1st of each month instead. Never mind.) This is not most accurate, but should be close enough. Here is the chart for # of tweets for each month starting on 14th.

For the month preceding 14th Feb, the # of tweets was 91 million. 4 months later this figure stands at 364 million. That's a 300% absolute increase. In another 3-4 months, Twitter will hit the Billion tweets a month mark.

Come back to Google and spare a though about how Google indexes. Google crawls each of these tweets as html pages. Each page is almost 8KB in size. 8KB for information which is closer to 140 bytes in most cases. Storage is not such a issue as Google must already be handling exabytes of data. There is a whole lot of processing on this data before one can extract meaningful information. Each of these html pages need to be parsed to figure out the actual tweet. Almost all of these tweets are never going to have any inlink from other page. So, that processing is wasteful. This wasteful computing is not so much about $$ lost, but the added delay hampers the core offering of "real-timeness." All this processing is necessary as by the time you know this tweet is useless, you have already spent your time to find it uselessness.

I wonder if Twitter will go out of its way to provide fat pipe to Google through which all the tweets are transported. I suspect it's highly unlikely. (Why? I leave it as an exercise for you.) This "problem" is only going to be worse by each day as Twitter's popularity continues to rise. And the solution to this problem has wildly and widely been speculated out there for a long time.

(Yours truly is contributing to this problem in a small way at @kshashi )

Rahman's concert in Pune

2009-06-01T22:17:00.002+05:30

Over a long period of time, as your memories fade and only the prominent ones remain stuck adamantly. But even these memories are mostly remembered in a single evening. Last evening was one such evening. It was Rahman performing live in Pune for the first time. There were enough event management problems, which I am sure, nobody will care to remember after few years. I see many finding themselves at loss of words to describe how great the show was. But I am simply underwhelmed by the show. I liked the show in parts, but I wasn't elated while walking out few minutes before the end.

Well, there were enough good singers with some marquee names like Hariharan performing there. Of course, that is apart from the man himself, who sang beautifully and vividly. Yet, listening entire Delhi 6 album, with liberal sprinkling of Ghajini, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Slumdog Millionaire is not enough for it to etch in my heart. I am not sure which tastes he meant to cater by missing out on Lagaan, Dil Se (only the title song was performed by the man himself), Swades, Rang De Basanti, Yuva, or even Yuvvraj. He sang two beautiful sufi qawwalis - Khwaja (Jodhaa Akbar) and Maula (Delhi 6), but then he missed out my personal favourite Piya Haji Ali (Fiza) which arguably is one his best composition. Overall, the mood of the programme was fast-paced with little room for sombre music. But then what about Chhaiyya Chhaiyya which has achieved a level of popularity no other song has touched in last decade? Or was it the case that Sukhwinder Singh, Sonu Nigam, Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik were not available?

There was another thing which bothered me a lot. It was not a music programme but an entertainment show. With all the fancy stage, lots of painstaking lighting arrangement, dozens of dancers occupying the stage, it was palpable that the show was more for the pleasures of eyes than ears. That made it look like a filmfare award ceremony gone wrong as there were no Katrina Kaifs dancing on the stage. I would have been so much happier to if the performance was sans all the glamour and glitz. I guess, I fall into a minority (or a small cult) which demands such things from music.

Nevertheless, my love for Rahman's music has not diminished a bit.

Congress needs to learn inclusiveness

2009-05-18T21:58:00.002+05:30

The stunning victory of Congress in general elections has surprised everyone including those in Congress. As they have reached the required number comfortably, they are not being lenient with some their allies who switched the sides some time back. That mainly includes Lalu's RJD and Mulayam's SP.

Congress distanced itself from Samajwadi Party for more than 4 years in last term. But, when left withdrew the support, it was SP who came to the rescue of the Congress. How can Congress claim they have nothing to do with SP except when they need SP?

RJD's Lalu Yadav was a key facilitator of UPA govt. Just because the seat sharing agreement went kaput in Bihar and Congress happened to win everywhere else, doesn't mean they show him the door.

Pundits are claiming that the era of big national parties has arrived. I am quite skeptic of that conjencture. My reasons for skepticism? Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, Mayawati, Mamta Banerjee, Jayalalitha, Sharad Pawar.

Congress should be mild with the allies. 5 years is long enough for the tables to turn. And Indian voters have shown their ability to vote out the supposedly "performing" governments earlier.

And I would really really love to see what Mr Manmohan Singh will do in his next 100 days. Also, let's watch if BJP's zeal for black money continues to be at the same level in next 100 days.

The non-news of the day

2009-05-18T21:43:00.004+05:30

Consider this hypothetical situation. You visit the fruit market early in the morning. The shops are yet to open and trucks are unloading the fruit baskets. There is only one guy with 20 mangoes in his basket is selling those mangoes. You go and ask the price. 3 days back you bought these mangoes for Rs 200 per dozen. Now this seller senses that he is the only guy selling there and asks you to pay Rs 1000 per dozen. And the entire market goes crazy about this one data point and start screaming the prices of mangoes have gone through roof.

Sound silly? Well, not so much when you see this.

Indian stock markets were shut down today. Well, it has happened earlier as well, but the twist this time, rather first time in the history, is that it was going up and it was closed. Nifty up by some 17% before it closed. The anchors on the blue business channel seem all excited about it. The headlines are gushing over how billions of dollars worth of (paper) wealth was created in just one day.

As usual, the truth continues to be boring. Not many were able to convert their paper-wealth to real, sweet-smelling 1000-Rupee notes. Here is why. The markets were open only for few minutes in the entire day. The total trade on Nifty amounted to Rs 170 Crore. The lowest volume in the month of May was Rs 13594 Crore and the highest turnover was Rs 18634 Cr on 6th May 09. So, today's turnover was barely 1% of the usual volume. And remember, these are not exactly euphoric days. Very few people got a chance to either sell or buy.

Now only if tomorrow, we register volumes of Rs 20,000 Cr which sustains this 20% spike.

The Great Indian Retail Story : Customer's perspective

2009-05-09T20:45:00.003+05:30

The organized retail in India is dot com of 2008. Now that the big boys of Indian retail are in trouble people are trying to find reasons to justify their downfall - high real estate costs, poor logistics, expensive manpower, high leverage, etc. etc. But, here are my thoughts on how that went wrong and how it is still going wrong.

I chose big retail stores (Birla's More, Reliance Fresh, and local Pulse Supermart in Aundh) because they offered choice. In recent months, that edge has effectively gone. The kirana store next door has more brands the big players. Some corporate stragy dudes on paper figures out that keeping only one brand of butter which gives highest margin is cool thing. Well, if you are going to kill my freedom of choice, I am not visiting your store. Your loss, Mr Smarty Pants.
It's not just lack of brands. It's also lack of SKU (stock keeping units.) Sugar is available only in the units of 5 kg. I don't own a mithai shop guys. Local kirana store has more SKUs.
The aggressiveness to push in-house labels also stinks.
The delays at checkout counter are excruciating. The bar-code simply don't work when a every item from Rs 5 to Rs 500 are tagged. Buying few breakfast items means 10-15 minutes in checkout queue. It takes less than 3 minutes in local store.
One of the key assumption was that big retails will be able offer good deals since they have an efficient logistic management system. Well, something is not working fine somewhere in the chain, which means big retails doesn't score nicely on the price front. It costs the same time.

To sum, I have switched back to kirana store to save time and get more choice.

Solving the auto-riskshaw problem

2009-05-09T20:13:00.002+05:30

Every Indian city has an autorickshaw story. Broadly those can be catagorized in two sets - bad and Mumbai. To the best of my knowledge, Mumbai is the only city where citizens are happy about the autorickshaw scene. You land up in the city comfortably past midnight and ask the auto-wallah to ferry you to a place 18 km away, and you can be very sure that he will drop you at designated place without charging a single rupee.

Last week, Pune's rickshaws went on a flash strike for 4 days holding the entire city to ransom. As it is dealing with them on a daily basis is a pain. They refuse to ply to closer place because it is closer. They refuse to ply long distance because it is far. They never charge by meter. Night charges come into play much before what the rule book says. And since they have a very strong union, they are quite fearless about law of the land. The story for every other city is not much different, except for Mumbai, I suppose.

So, what's it that clicks in Mumbai? From my observation, it the migrant population of auto-drivers who have maintained the sanity. I have had couple of bad experiences with Mumbai autowallhs who talked to me in Marathi and conned me. Though, choosing them for ride was had nothing to do with they speaking same language as mine. The local auto-wallahs did it because they knew they can get away with complete disragard to the rules. They know they have a local dada to help them out. (As a matter of rule, I avoided Marathi autowallahs in certain suburbs of Mumbai.)

But, the migrants from Darbhanga, Vaishali, Kanpur or Unnao do not enj0y a powerful hand on their head. They are on their own. That leaves them with the option of working honestly. Also, since they happen to come from a place where work is extremely difficult to find, they tend to be grateful of the opportunity coming in their way and work honestly on that.

So the solution to the arrogance of autowallahs in Pune and other cities is to bring in lots of migrant autodrivers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. If 20-25% of autodrivers are migrants, that's a sizeable population to keep the locals on their toes.

But, this is a pipedream as long as we have the supports of "sons of the soil" theory in every city who are ready to ransack at the drop of the hat.

PS: Yes, it's been long time that I am posting on this blog. Scarcity of the time is one thing. And Twitter helps me broadcast my thoughts in 140 characters makes blogging less compelling.

Bailout

2009-01-14T00:18:00.002+05:30

If there is a competition for one word which dominated the financial world in 2008, "bailout" will be at the top of the chart.

Looks like "Bailout" is the latest export from US to India. Indian govt is considering Rs 2000 cr bailout package for Satyam employees. This amount covers their salaries for next 3 months and some other expenses by the company. And this comes within a week of Govt saying "There is no question of Govt taking over Satyam."

Now, the question is what does govt get out of this transaction apart from the goodwill of Satyam employees?

How will this money be returned to govt? Will it get it from the revenues? Will investors allow that?

What happens after the current bailout package runs out after 3 months? A new package?

Is the govt setting a prcedent where promoters can run away leaving the employees to the mercy of govt bailout?

What happens to the those people who lost job due to bad economic situation? Are they any different? Clearly, they are not at fault for tough economic coditions.

What happens to all the investors who saw their investment dip by 70% in a day? Even they are not at fault. Will govt pay them as well?

There are a lot of "first"s waiting in the wings on this story.

Government's involvement will hasten Satyam's fall

2009-01-11T13:10:00.000+05:30

I am somewhat equivocal about Govt's decision to dismiss current board and put a new one.

Now, this action can be justified by the fact that the current management team declaring complete oblivion of the events at the company, which is difficult to believe, to put it mildly. And the marquee Independent directors on board have also washed off their hands from the issue. With the issue of this magnitude, Govt cannot sit on sidelines as a mute spectator as thousands of employees can potentially be severely affected. To put this in context, do recall Govt's involvement when the troubled Jet Airways tried to get rid of 1900 employees.

But Govt's involvement doesn't really help the situation. Now think about Satyam's customer who rely on Satyam to deliver on their critical work for continuity of THEIR own business. How confident will they be when they will know that the company is run by some representatives, I suppose they will be pretty good ones, who don't have idea about the customers. If Satyam's customers were wary after the incident came to light, I suppose, panic will be the the natural emotion now. And when customers run away, what business will there be?

A classic Zugzwang situation - no matter what you do, you lose.

Satyam : India's Black Swan of 2009.

2009-01-08T23:46:00.003+05:30

I know, I know, you have been reading too much about Satyam. And mostly you also know that I quote Taleb way too often here.

Satyam fits the bill of Taleb's Black Swan event.

It is highly improbable event. How many companies in India can boast annual revenues of 10,000 Cr? A couple of dozens may be out of thousands of listed entities. Now, when was the last time you heard about an Indian company's implosion on first page of pink paper? One could have never thought of a company of this size can implode so fast.

It is high impact event. There is a question mark on the future of 53,000 employees. The erosion of shareholders' value has been swift and huge. Even Unitech lost it's 90% of value over a year. But shareholders had multiple opportunities to exit. Here the events took place at such a rapid pace that big institutional investor exited at the bottom. And there is more to come.

It seems predictable in hindsight event. Now you will see people waxing eloquent about how Satyam's corporate governance or accounting practice had all the clues about this downfall.

OK. Now few more questions.

First, media need not get so righteous about whole incident. Lest we forget, this incident came to light by Raju's own confession. There was no media expose involved in this.
One famous TV anchor is master of making stock market investing look ridiculously simple. I clearly remember him saying that Infosys' profit growth rate is 15% YoY, hence a Price-to-Earning ratio of 18 is fair. Dude, if investing is all about growth rates and PE ratio, you should have been sipping martini at your sea-side villa after making truckload of money on Dalal Street. You may think media has no role to play in investor losing money. But, it is media (print, TV, electronic) which has been responsible for attracting people to stock markets without really informing them about the real risks. Unfortunately, people have to learn about risk the hardest way - by losing their money.

Two. Mr Raju said there was no money on the balance sheet at all. In 2007-08, Satyam paid Rs 5300 cr as salaries. Now, I don't think these are phantom numbers. They must have had few hundreds of crores expenses related to business - travel, office premises, utilities, hardware, software. All the vendors must have been paid too. Then how come there was no money?

Third. The big three - Infosys, TCS and Wipro - stand out shining from this entire episode. They had all that was needed to acquire Satyam. But, they stood on the sidelines watching the Mahindras and the L&Ts tyring to court Satyam. L&T which recently acquired some stake in Satyam must be licking their wounds. Surely, it talks about how the Big Three are really different.

This event is far from over.

Together their IQ stands at 100

2008-12-13T00:12:00.000+05:30

Some 300-odd real estate brokers from Surat have decided not to do any business transactions with Muslims. They cite local support for Mumbai terror operation as their reason.

Here is a suggestion for them. Please get the list of all criminals (murderers, rapists, robbers, extortionists, smugglers, drug-dealers, etc.) from the city police headquarters. Never mind if this list contains names of public office bearers. Sort these unwanted elements of society by their religion. Don't act shocked if your religion figures in that list. Now issue the statement that you will not do any business with anyone from these religions as members of their clan have been involved in heinous crimes.

Do these guys even have some grey cells of rational thinking?

Data card tariff comparison

2008-12-07T17:05:00.003+05:30

In a TV commercial of Reliance Netconnect, they position the USB modem as the SIM card of laptop. The ad is unimaginative, but the essence is if you have laptop, you are going to need the data card. I have tried connecting through my phone, but it simply doesn't work.

I am an user of Reliance NetConnect for almost an year. I can't really say a happy user as I would say about their mobile phone service. It merely addresses the need of the hour like sending mails. No heavy downloads and watching YouTube is blasphemy.

We have subscribed to 1 GB plan, which costs Rs 730 per month (inclusive of taxes.) I recently came across plans of Idea Cellular which are much cheaper. That made me think about state of other operators. So, here is the comparison of plans from various operators. The quality of the service/bandwidth may not differ much from one telco to another. So, price seems to be the only decider.

Telco	512 MB/Month	1GB/month	Unlimited	Data Card Price
Airtel	350	599	999	2999
BSNL	-	-	550	2800
Idea	299	399	849	2490
Reliance	-	650	1500	2490
Vodafone	499	699	-	2999
Tata Indicom	500	650	1099	2499

Notes:

Check tariffs: Idea, Airtel, Reliance, Vodafone, BSNL, Tata Indicom.
Service Taxes and other taxes applicable. Presently, total taxes come to 12.3%.
BSNL service may not be available everywhere.
The bandwidth is generally low. I could top only 300 MB per month when I used it heavily.
BSNL's charges include rental of Rs 150 for voice plan. But, why would use data card for talking?
I haven't compared the cost of additional bandwidth consumed. It varies from Rs 2/MB to Rs 10/MB. But trust me, it's painfully hard to cross 500MB limit.

Verdict: Idea is the clear winner by wide margin. If you are buying a new connection, the decision is obvious.

Unfortunately, you can't switch the operators once you have bought the device. So, the only hope for existing users is to wait for their service provider to become competitive some day.

I had written to Reliance about the offering from Idea and told them how their service is far more expensive. In reply they sent me a long templatized mail describing the advantages of USB data card and one single line saying they are looking into it. So much for "customer care."

I am on twitter

2008-12-06T11:10:00.000+05:30

OK. I finally throw in the towel. After resisting for almost two years, I am on twitter - @kshashi. All thanks to Navin, (@ngkabra). Navin talked about Twitter at last week's Pune Bar Camp. His presentation titled "Why you should use Twitter" is embedded below.

Why you should use Twitter, and how best to use it.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter convince)

Google Trends : Curious inconsistency

2008-12-06T10:38:00.002+05:30

Google trends for websites is a good service if you wish to look for traffic estimate of a website. Interesting part is you can see traffic to a site from various geographies.

I observed some curious behaviour of the service.

Here is chart for Rediff.com's traffic from all over the world.

Here is chart for Rediff.com's traffic from India.

While traffic from India hovers between 2M to 3M visitors a day, for the world, the same number is closer to 1.4M. The traffic for the world needs to be at least as high as that from India. How can it possibly be lower?

The traffic stats for Wikipedia look consistent, though - 3M from US & Japan, 1M from India and so on.

Beats my tiny brain!

Few Questions

2008-12-05T01:56:00.001+05:30

The Home Ministers at Central & State govt and CM have resigned taking "moral responsibility" of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai few days back. During last 5 years of UPA rule, India has become a playground for terrorists. In all these attacks, from North-East to Gujarat and from Kashmir to Bangalore, the number of casualties varied from less than 10 to more than 200 in the latest attack. But, the ministers resigned only after the recent incident. Few questions cross my mind. I am trying to find out the special thing about Mumbai attacks that the ministers have resigned for.

Is it based on the count of fatalities in an attack? Should it be 10, 20, 200? Why not 1?

Is it based on the count of fatalities in terror attacks till the date? (More than 700 have died in 20 major attacks during tenure of this govt.)

Is it because the attacks were targeted at places where the powers-that-be often visit? Surely they don't travel in local trains.

Is it because the innocent victims include foreign nationals?

Is it because the attacks grabbed headlines across the world?

Is it because the event was televised live across the world?

Is it because the leaders of World's Superpower have spoken about an incident in faraway country?

Few more questions.

How gruesome should the attacks be for President of the country to cut short her trip and return? Clearly, this one is not serious enough that President kept touring the South-East Asia during crisis.

Is the death of innocent due to terrorism any different from the death arising due to sheer negligence?

With 60 hours of non-stop coverage on media, why is the information content so less? On one of the evening during crisis, a TV editor held a group discussion with 6 people from different parts of the world and asked them a single question - "Where does this lead to?"

Why do people think that they are an expert, or at least more competent than the authorities, on India's security problems and offer solutions? Or is it the case that anger and rage have adverse impact on rational thinking?

Why do we call it "India's 9/11", when the termite of terrorism has infested the country since two decades?

Life with Reliance Netconnect

2008-11-28T19:54:00.000+05:30

When Reliance NetConnect launches the splash screen shows a lady from corporate world (see her suit) using netconnect on her laptop. She also has got herself a nice drink (iced tea?) and some snacks packed. Initially, the impression one gets is she has taken a break from the corporate meetings and now enjoying videos on YouTube while sipping her drink.

But, when I started using netconnect, it dawned to me that the connectivity with data card is so poor that you get ample time between you clicking on your inbox and the first mail opening. You could easily finish your lunch and come back. Now, the last time I used the corny was joke was in the days of dialup internet from VSNL some 8-10 years ago. Netconnect reminds of those days.

Netconnect is in market for more than 2 years and they haven't really moved an inch to address this problem. It's difficult to go to a Reliance store and not see some customer not complaining about the poor connectivity with Netconnect. The sales guys meekly offer to note the complaint and try very hard not to look indifferent but fail.

And, some quick research showed that this problem is very much universal with other telcos as well.

Looks like, someone has taken a note of it. ICICI has launched a low bandwidth site specifically to address this problem. This should come across as hard slap in the face of telcos. And again, I must say, ICICI bank has impressed me.

My previous post on ICICI Bank praising them.

Facebook Ads: Missing on instant gratification

2008-11-24T00:22:00.002+05:30

We are experimenting with Facebook ads and one thing we found it to be different from Google AdWords is the lack of instant gratification.

While they probably fear abuse of the system and want to make sure only clean ads go, I suppose this is a very conservative approach. One can justify the monitoring saying this is early stage. But, Google went ahead with instant gratification right from day one. Of course, they must have had the surveillance in place when they went live.

Oh, BTW, I am not much of Facebook person, but I think they have an exceptional team. Their services appear so damn smooth.

India and US

2008-11-16T02:17:00.000+05:30

23rd September, 2008: Sacked employees lynch CEO in office premises (in Noida)

14th November, 2008: Man who lost job at Santa Clara startup killed 3, including CEO and another top executive (The CEO of the company was Sid Agrawal.)

Recursion in films

2008-11-12T21:30:00.000+05:30

In Madhur Bhandarkar's new film Fashion, they show a party when Bhandarkar himself is present and couple of models discuss about how he is researching for his film "Fashion." This recursion on hand is cool and brazen at the same time.

In Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" a self-referential pattern follows. Michael Caine describes it in the film as follows:

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"."

The film follows same pattern of three acts.

Well, I'm not sure, if fractals is better analogy as the bigger components are made of similar looking smaller components.

Will they ever come together?

2008-11-12T12:58:00.000+05:30

While listening to Yuvvraj (I think, I got it wrong) it struck me that Rahman has worked with many top directors/producers for hindi films. Except for the real big gun - Chopras. While I really don't consider films from Chopra stable to be my cup of tea, their position in the industry is unquestionable. It's really strange that they haven't worked together.

A quick search with phrase "Chopra and Rahman" gives a, well, gossip story about how and why they are not coming together in Yash Chopra's next (and last) film.

But, that still doesn't explain the entire decade of not working together.

Not too many rich people out there in India

2008-11-11T23:49:00.000+05:30

iPhone has barely sold 4,000 (Ref pg 25. Via Pluggd) units in India since its launch in August. Is it the case that people don't want to splurge on such expensive devices? I don't think so.

My conjecture is people don't want to look stupid by buying an iPhone. Now, you may wonder, why would anybody look stupid by buying world's coolest mobile phone. The idea is, with iPhone you will be able to do supercool things like browse internet, view maps, take pictures and send it to all your friends on facebook within seconds. But, since there is no a fat 3G pipe for all these bandwidth-hungry apps, iPhone just remains a phone. Now, how is different from buying a defective piece which doesn't have 3G working? None, really. So, anybody who buys a defective piece will look like a fool.

I know, there are things that you can do with iPhone minus 3G, which you can't with other phones. But, in the promos, Apple boasts 3G and the apps as THE thing. If it's not on 3G, it's not an iPhone.

The drought ends. Really?

2008-11-05T09:25:00.000+05:30

After 7 long years, Govt of India finally finds Hindustani vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi fit to award Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award.

Am I happy? Not much actually.

From the recent winners, one could say being an octogenarian is one of the criterion. Except Dr Amartya Sen who was hounoured at the "young" age of 66 after Nobel committee shamed Govt of India. Do the recipients necessarily have to come in their wheel chair to collect the award at Rashtrapati Bhavan? Were they not "good enough" say 5 years back? Because, in last five years, Panditji has only performed at Sawai Gandharva Festival in Pune.

This is a broken system and needs to be fixed soon.

Flash quiz

2008-11-04T20:30:00.000+05:30

Identify the magazine. Bonus points if you can can identify the gender of author.

Now, a good pair of boobs is more than a cosmetic achievement. They became surnames for Raakhee Sawant, Koena Mitra and Mallika Sherawat, to name a few. If you have them taut and toned like Malaika Arora, you can chhaiya chhaiya your recession blues away. If they are luscious and perky like Bipasha Basu's, every beedi will taste like a cigar. If you have them primed and pumped like Shilpa Shetty's, you can even get a half-career. Madhuri Dixit's dhak-dhak size may be an old story. Yet Aishwarya Rai's giggling acceptance of cleavage-happy Armani numbers at Cannes festivals or her deep red Christian Dior strapless gown at the IIFA awards 2008 is no small stride made by the Indian It-Breast

Answer.

If not for occasional good stuff, I would cancelled my subscription to the magazine whose editor still thinks he is at his old magazine.

Too much noise

2008-11-01T21:40:00.000+05:30

The noise about current economic condition is almost unbearable. There is so much data flowing in that it is impossible to distill all the information to some fine wisdom. It's like the task of joining thousands of dots to make dinosaur. But unfortunately just the sheer volume of dots is so overwhelming that most experts can join only few dozen dots and proclaim it is a dog. To put in Taleb-esque way, there are just too many random events and trying to find a pattern in it can be, at best, a futile effort and at worst, downright dangerous. It's not a bad idea to watch less TV with a running ticker at the bottom of the screen or reading less of pink paper.

How companies can exploit current market situation.

2008-10-31T20:45:00.001+05:30

The current stock market situation is unprecedented. Indian stock markets have never fallen this much from the peak. The BSE 500 index, which presents a more realistic picture than the 30-stock Sensex, has fallen 60% from its peak and at its recent bottom it fell as much as 70%. If observed closely, the sample space is filled with stocks which have lost 70-80% of their peak value.

Companies can remain indifferent from the stock market gyrations if they don't have to raise money from capital markets. But, in the growth economy like ours companies are constantly in expansion mode. The ones in a hurry do it aggressively. Since the taps of fund raising have dried, there is very little they can do.

Many of the promoters feel their stocks have been beaten down to unreasonable levels. These are clearly very depressing times for them. Now, how can they exploit this situation?

Three ways.

One. Buy back the shares from market. But, this applies to companies which are rolling in cash. And not many fit the bill. The companies will rather conserve cash for the tough times ahead than spending it on "unnecessary" buy-back.

Two. Buy other companies. Then again, this for companies with cash can afford this luxury. The India's most admired IT company comes to my mind which is sitting on some Rs 8000 Cr cash.

Here is the third and final way. And it applies to all the companies including those rolling in cash and those who have raised billions of dollars in debt. Award stock options to employees. And do it liberally. Keep the vesting schedule to 4 years (or more if allowed by regulation) with one year cliff. That is, if an employee is awarded 100 options with 4 year vesting period, then first 25 options are vested at the end of first year. And then the remaining options can vest on monthly basis.

It locks employees for at least 4 years. There is very little downside on stock prices (I shouldn't say that as theoretically the lowest price for stocks is zero.) So, after some time the stocks will always trade above the strike price. This is a tax-efficient reward as long-term capital gains are taxed at zero percent rate. If employees want to leave before vesting completion, they will leave serious money on table. When the good times return, salaries need not rise again to stratospheric levels if the compensation from stock options is tidy. The company need not worry about either attrition or wage inflation. This also aligns interests of promoters and employees nicely.

Now, is there anything obvious I missed out?

Is this good enough?

2008-10-30T11:34:00.000+05:30

Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand regained the world title for the third time. There are hardly any peaks to be conquered for him. Can we end the 7-year drought of Bharat Ratna by recognizing Vishy as one?

Bravo, Vishy!

Gmail bloat?

2008-10-24T15:32:00.000+05:30

Agreed that email is the second most popular application after search on internet. Violently agree that it is miles ahead of other forms of communication on internet including writing on wall, sending scrap, tweet, IM, etc.

But, does that justify the feature bloat of Gmail?

Thanks, but no thanks. I am quite happy with existing feature set. The only way to make me less happy is to keep on adding features to it.

Zugzwang

2008-10-22T11:36:00.001+05:30

Zugzwang is a term from Chess. From Wikipedia - "It describes a situation where one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move."

The Govt of Maharashtra is in the same position as for as Raj Thackrey issue is concerned. They waited for too long to arrest him. And now that they have done it, the govt still stands to lose. As Raj is described in far more ruthless terms ("urban terrorist") on English news channels, his support base in Maharashtra can only increase.

I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be the cornerstone of his political career and his party comes to power in the next decade. While the English media cluelessly brands him as troublemaker, he is far more articulate, shrewd and perspicacious. The moment the party acquires substantial mass, he will attract the "thinking class," which people generally associate with BJP right now. Then the makeover the party will be complete.

Elephant in the tent

2008-10-20T22:56:00.000+05:30

You must have gotten more than fair share of your dose of Jet Airways story from media. At the end, who won and who lost.

Biggest loser of the episode is, obviously, Jet Airways and the boss Naresh Goyal. When media has mastered the art of making non-news to a sensational story, how did they bungle it this big? Don't they have any HR person in the team? No PR person to mellow down the entire story? Mr Boss almost pleaded complete obliviousness to the matter. If the management didn't consult him on this decision, then rolling some heads on the top would have made us really believe that the decision was taken without his consent. And in case he was aware of the action, then his statement that he wasn't is, umm.. factually incorrect. Either way his reputation has taken a serious dent. Reputation in aam junta may not be of much value to him, but what about the image among the Jet employees?

Next in the loser's list is Jet empoyees. Being terminated in this manner is a huge reason for media to rake up this issue. All they had to do was protest mildly. Immediately, experts would have been called up to give a soundbite. Another panel would have discussed "Is hire and fire way of our culture," etc. You get the point. The mistake of Jet is so grave that they would have realized in the matter of hours and taken corrective steps.

Instead, Jet employees invited Raj Thackrey's MNS (Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) to "help" them out. MNS must have been escatic at this offer. They didn't waste a minute to ride the gravy train. Never mind if it involved helping the very "non-Marathi-Manoos" whom they routinely terrorize. Or if it involves giving instant lessons in Marathi. Or teaching Jet staff that Mr Raj Thackrey is actually "Mananiya Raj Saheb Thackrey".

Getting MNS involved in the matter meant, every political party will extract its pound of flesh. Now, they had Shiv Sena, NCP, Congress and the communist gang vocally joining the drama. In future, whenever there is a minor trouble with white-collar employees, all these guys will make an issue out of it. And why is it such a bad thing? Well, just to give you an example, IBM shut down many offices in Europe because of union troubles. And I have seen that happening in textile industry at my hometown in Solapur. As much as there is disdain about blood-sucking capitalists, let me assure you unionism is the surest way of closing down the industries.

As for Jet, last year they posted a loss of Rs 650 Crore. With no good news in sight, except for the lower crude price, it needs to be watched how long they can sustain such high losses. Just a quick common wisdom on aviation sector. In its entire history of existance, it has not made any money. Now, if people oppose any kind of downsizing in these times, then I suppose they would rather have everybody at company losing the job instead of few.

Biggest Winner? Obviously, MNS. With an army of rowdy followers, such opportunities are Diwali bonus in advance. Now that they have tasted the blood, they will not lose a single such incidence to make their presence felt.

As much as I hope, Jet incident is an aberration, I fear it may become a norm. Then we don't need a full-blown crisis in global markets to return to 5% growth rate.

Gambler and banker

2008-10-19T18:37:00.000+05:30

A quote from a recent forward making fun of investment banker :

What's the difference between a guy who just lost everything in Vegas and an investment banker? A tie.

Well, in my view, there is more.

The gambler had had fun of his lifetime while losing his shirt. He probably was sipping martini while playing roulette. He probably still has something good for day job to go back to. He played with his own money, whereas the bankers played with somebody else's money.

Bravery

2008-10-15T11:30:00.000+05:30

IPOs are more visible when the stock markets are at the top. In fact, the flood of IPOs is indication that markets is at its peak. The sinking market is the worst time for IPO. I mean, when the true blue chips are available at multi-year low, who is going to buy shares of a new company?

Well, just happened to know about a company called Alkali Metals which is doing public issue to raise Rs 25 Cr. Now, that's a minuscule amount compared to the total IPO market. But you have to give it to them for sheer bravery.

SMS Landing Charges

2008-10-11T13:17:00.000+05:30

Verizon Wireless, the #2 wireless telecom operator in US, plans to charge 3 cents SMS landing on their network. Sending SMS costs between 2-10 cents depending on the pre-paid plan you buy. Effectively, the landing charges of SMS is anywhere between 33%-150% of what it costs to send a message. Verizon spokesperson justified the charges saying “It didn’t cost them zero to build or to buy spectrum rights.”

What happens if the same scheme comes to India? Well, it won't. Why? In majority of the markets, users do pay to receive call. In India, too, in early days, such charges were applicable. Results? Not too many picked the call if they didn't know who was calling. In early 2003, incoming charges were eliminated. That definitely was one of the crucial developments which resulted in explosion of mobile services. So, let's not worry about charge for incoming SMS in near future.

What happens to the hypothetical situation when it is applied selectively to only the entities which send bulk messages? It's difficult to completely rule out this possibility.

Conveniently Capitalist

2008-10-10T11:07:00.000+05:30

When the business is growing through roof, Capitalist ask Govt to stay out of their way as much as possible so that they can drive at 200 kmph. But, when things turn sour, the very Capitalists beg to Govt to save them and the economy.

Printed Wikipedia

2008-10-05T20:31:00.000+05:30

While traveling by train couple of days back, it struck me that how my brain has wired to check the references on Wikipedia. Much of the time I spend on wikipedia is mostly for amusement. It kicks off with a need to find something and then within few clicks I wander away from the original article. That's the beauty of Wikipedia - it's hard to get bored if you just want to read random stuff about a topic.

Old-fashioned that I am, the immediate thought that came to me was need for a printed Wikipedia. Now, by no stretch of imagination this a novel idea. In fact, it is already available in the market. It contains about 20,000 articles and sells at 20 euros. But, it is in German. :(

Now, for my pleasure reading, I am not looking for an encyclopedia with 20,000 articles. I want something in 300-400 pages, though this is not a non-negotiable size. Given the size it makes sense to have articles about a certain topic in this book, say Economic Ideologies. It will touch the ideas such as Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, etc in the depth which is just good enough to carry some interesting conversation with a guru of this field.

So, how do we go about it? Well, here is my genius idea.

There is a product called Wiki Slices from my prior company. I am not sure if it is still supported. You can enter a topic and it will create a slice of Wikipedia for you for that topic. It could probably be tuned to provide a slice of certain size (by word count or article count.)

There is a startup in India which offers on-demand publishing - Pothi.com. On-demand publishing means serving the long tail. It probably doesn't matter to them if a book is selling few tens of copies or hundreds or thousands.

Now blend these two ideas. If Pothi.com offers say 1000 books which are essentially the slices created by Webaroo's technology, Pothi is suddenly serving pretty large market.

And here is the kicker. Why should you be restricted at 1000 titles? Why not 10,000? Or 100,000. The Pothi team will initially seed few topics. Since Wiki Slices can be created by anyone, a user can create custom Wiki Slices. If others like that slice, they can just order a copy of that. There will be a very competitive list of Best-Selling Slices. I am sure there is some Web-2.0 jargon for this activity, just that I am not much in sync with fast moving world.

The author of the blog article on German Wikipedia wrote:

The real question, however, is why anybody would want to buy a printed and abbreviated version of Wikipedia. After all, you lose all of the advantages of full-text search and the ability to edit articles in this printed text.

Well, simply put, I don't care about searching the book, much less about editing it. I just want to READ the damn thing.

Now, where is my complimentary copy?

Pune CYG 2008

2008-10-04T23:43:00.000+05:30

Pune is hosting Commonwealth Youth Games 2008 starting next week. Bunch of random thoughts:

It's mascot has very a web-two-dot-oh name - Jigrr. A missing vowel and a double letter.
Commonwealth Nations are the countries which were ruled by British Empire. Does that mean the games are meant to remind us of our (not so glorious) past or part of it?
Pune is shining. No, no. Not on the infrastructure front. The roads are still delightfully uneven. But there are lots of shiny new board telling where those pothole-filled roads will take you, provided you happen to reach the other end intact. Somebody has made killing in those shiny sign boards.
Punekars are in for some serious traffic troubles in next week as the powerful people visiting city wiill bring traffic to a grinding halt. I almost missed my train last time when Madam President visited Pune. If you happen to stay in Baner, Aundh or Pashan, things are going to be real bad for you. Joining some classes of Art Of Living for a week may be good cure to rising bloodpressure.

Policy Hypocrisy

2008-09-30T22:51:00.000+05:30

Starting 2nd October 2008, smoking will be banned in public places. The health minister, who is very enthusiastic about ban on smoking, quoted that the cost of healthcare due to tobacco is higher than the revenue entire tobacco industry.

Here is a simple question. If Govt thinks so passionately about its anti-smoking stance, why doesn't it simply ban all the business activities related to tobacco? To start with they should ban tobacco farming. Shutting down a big company like ITC would be another good step given that they make 90% of their profits from tobacco products. Banning import of cigarettes is the next step. Our Left friends may not like that idea much since it means banning import of Cuban cigars.

There is one minor glitch in this whole shut-down-the-tobacco-business part. Govt loses a money spinner account. Every year, the govt increases the taxes on tobacco products and still you don't see morchas taken out in protest. Govt knows that very well.

So there are you are. Govt hates nicotine and still loves it for the money it brings in to the kitty.

Online is the way. Really?

2008-09-26T18:14:00.000+05:30

When I used Facebook in its early days, one thing I couldn't ignore was the sliders in the network activity settings page where one could specify you want more photos in stream and less about groups. That slider was so much like Windows volume control. It simply didn't look html.

Facebook opening up its platform was called as the OS of the web. Now they have redesigned their service and one could see their aspiration to be the Operating System of the Web percolating down from function to aesthetics.

While everybody says OS is slow crawling towards redundancy as all you need is to fire a web browser, on the web they are trying really hard to give you the feel of the OS. My tiny brain finds this schizophrenic.

Desktop-based TODO list

2008-09-24T23:53:00.000+05:30

As much as desktop apps are going out of vogue, for a old fashioned guy like me, I still need those desktop apps. One of those nifty utility is desktop based TODO list - Stickies.

Thank you, Tom Revell.

Process and Results

2008-09-23T19:39:00.000+05:30

What is more important - the process or the result? Pause for a while and make up your mind.

Good.

Did you just say the result matter a whole lot more than process? I offer you a counter-argument here. All the investment banks did the same thing from the start of this decade till they went bust. Apparently, they leveraged something like 30x of their net worth. Think of it this way. You have earnings of Rs 100 and you buy something worth Rs 3000 expecting it to go to Rs 3200. But if drops to Rs 2900 or lower, you lose your networth. These investment banks faced the same problem except that their networth went into negative zone.

So, while these companies were taking huge risks and making profits, they were praised for their aggression. The same amount of risk took them down. And now they are blamed for being reckless. It's the same action, but different results received different response.

This is not an argument about process being a better yardstick than result. This is just a thought that sometimes the results are not good indicators of the processes.

This is broadly the idea of the book "Fooled by Randomness," where Taleb tells us that good results might be just because a random event or what is referred colloquially as "plain dumb luck."

Contrast

2008-09-23T00:23:00.000+05:30

Some large companies are filing for bankruptcies. Some large companies need the shelter of the US govt or other larger companies. Some companies have lost 50-90% of their market cap which runs into hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all gloomy picture out there.

And then there is Microsoft. They plan to buy back their shares worth $40 billion. Which means they are earning a lot more (and a lot faster) than they plan to spend. Now, this is not such a bad problem, especially in the light of the havoc in financial world. But, isn't there a better use of this cash? I am sure the super-talented team at Microsoft must have given it a serious thought.

How about buying some of the companies out there? I am sure there are enough of them on sale at right price. What will be their source of cash when they buy, say, Facebook for $15bn? Or are they confident that by the time they want to buy entire Facebook, they will again be flush with cash?

Or how about leaving some cash on the table? I mean, charging users a little less. Like say $0 for Windows Vista. At least they will buy some goodwill in this way, because the $40 bn buyback hasn't really perked up their stock.

Of course, all these are possibly stupid ideas from a clueless guy who doesn't know how to run companies, let alone a supremely successful 8000-lb gorilla. (Yes, it is 8000 lb and not 800 lb.)

GigaOm ad

2008-09-16T22:21:00.000+05:30

Saw this ad in the RSS feed of GigaOm.

300 bn mobile handsets?!

Be scared. Very scared.

2008-09-13T14:14:00.000+05:30

When the tele-marketeers call us to sell credit card, personal loan, insurance, financial planning, etc. the generic crib from us is invasion of privacy. We always wonder how this information comes to these people. And more importantly, where all our personal information is scattered.

Previously I have blogged about availability of journalists' email contacts. But it pales in comparison with recent spam peddling contact information. It offers name, address, email, mobile number of variety of groups. Sample this. They offer contact information of Demat account holders, mutual fund investors, credit card holders in various cities along with their credit limit, city-wise frequent fliers, professionals with income of Rs 10+ Lacs, high networth individuals, car owners, high-end car owners, etc.

This simply indicates the amount of lekage at the financial institutaions like banks, mutual funds, telecom companies, and other such supposedly trustworthy places. Are these organizations actively selling out our details? If not then, are they aware that some unscrupulous elements are having a field day with this sensitive data? What are they doing to plug such vast data leak? Are they taking any legal action when they find somebody indulging in such practices?

These are some hard questions which I don't think any organization is ready to answer.

Meanwhile, presume that all your contact detail along with other sensitive personal information is out there in public. It will take shock factor out whenever something unexpected happens.

News and Almighty

2008-09-09T20:28:00.000+05:30

Some wise person has said something to the effect "Don't confuse news with the truth." And wise person, supposedly from media industry had pronounced that news has to be sensational.

The power of Google is almost obvious for everybody who has heard the word internet.

What happens when you mix these two? Here is the epitome. A not-so-popular news site published a six-year-old article about an airline filing for bankruptcy on their website mistakenly. Google swiftly and sincerely picked it up and published as headline. In matter of minutes, the stock fell by 75%. The price was depressed only for a few minutes. But that duration is sufficient for somebody to make a killing (and somebody to lose shirt.)

So, repeat after me. News is not the truth.

I was conned!

2008-09-05T10:21:00.000+05:30

That thought brushed me gently, but the excitement of watching Wall-E so much that I quickly forgot it. The obnoxious dudes at E-sqaure, Pune had shamelessly snipped Pixar's short film, Presto, at the beginning of Wall-E.

The wait of few months is already bad enough. These guys made it worse by snatching the joy of short film. Of course, they charged us top money. I feel conned. sob sob.

I am tired

2008-09-03T22:29:00.000+05:30

I am so tired of the noise about the latest piece of software from internet's big daddy. So tired that I am not going to even mention it. Get over it, people. As of now, it only has the big name to boast about. Thanks, but no thank. I will check it out after six months.

Is Tata just another profit-mongering company?

2008-09-03T19:47:00.000+05:30

If Mamta Banerjee's allegation against Tata were to be believed, Tata is just another corporate group with sole motivation of making profit, as much as it can, with complete and utter disregard to the welfare of the society, country and people.

The blokes at Greenpeace also think the same who make noise at Tata Steel's annual meeting. 10 activists buy 1 share each, raise questions at the meeting and insist that they will talk only to Ratan Tata. And then publish the account of their bravado on their website. Folks, here is an idea I wrote about, which even the company will be happy to comply - doing away with the annual reports. Meanwhile, realize that the reports you received were printed on a very lively branch of a tree.

Here is some trivia Ms Banerjee and Greenpeace should pay some serious attention. From Tata Group's website,

"Two-thirds of the equity of Tata Sons, the Tata Group’s promoter company, is held by philanthropic trusts which have created national institutions in science and technology, medical research, social studies and the performing arts. The trusts also provide aid and assistance to NGOs in the areas of education, healthcare and livelihoods."

And this is over and above the contribution by individual group company.

So, Ms Banerjee wants us to believe that Tata's are adopting anti-people policies so that they can reap huge profits, which will, ironically enough, go towards philanthropy.

If a group with high ethical standards of business faces such hurdles, are we sending the signal out there that India is a place to do business only if you can buy your way out?

Wall-E

2008-09-03T19:09:00.000+05:30

Fanboi Alert: Yours truly is a huge fan of animation films.

Na Umra Ki Seema Ho Na Janm Ka Ho Bandhan

Jab Pyar Kare Koi To Dekhe Kewal Man

Well, that's what Wall-E is all about. She is iPod white, beautiful, young and super-powerful robot from an advanced space-station, Axiom. He is a rusted robot whose job is to collect waste on earth. But, he is gifted with an overdeveloped sense of curiosity to make his "life" meaningful. And he is 700 years older than her. How can they fall in love? Well, it just happens.

I have nothing new to say about the film which has not been said already. All I can say is Pixar has, once again, set the new gold standard for animation movies. I hope, Pixar/Disney gather enough courage and push for the Best Picture at Academy.

Go, get awestruck by the beauty of this film!

Photo Source: IMDB

Minor things

2008-08-27T10:13:00.000+05:30

Every time a new search startup is touted as Google-killer, I can not help smiling. From last 7 years, this is one destination which I visit in each web browsing session. They keep on tweaking minor, which are so subtle that they generally won't be noticed. One such subtle thing I happened to notice blew me away.

I was looking for the usage of the word "unviable." For the record, this word is not in the WordWeb. Do you know what Google suggested as the search term? Go, check it out yourself.

Google understands search a whole lot better than any other company in the world. That's the collective wisdom of thousands of Googlers accumulated in last 10 years. It's hard to unseat them. Especially when they are working so hard.

Fantasy world

2008-08-20T18:17:00.000+05:30

The Telecom Regulator TRAI has proposed to ease the VOIP norms. Everybody thinks that will push the long distance and international call rates even lower.

At the user end, to get cheap VOIP you need the following

A nice broadband connection
An expensive IP Phone

Broadband penetration is at 4mn (compare that with 300 mn cellphones.) And you won't spend Rs 6000 for a IP landline so that you can make calls cheaper.

Now, only if there is an telcom operator who uses VoIP backbone, passes on the benefits of VoIP to the end customers. But, shouldn't backbone already very cheap. I mean, the telcos have thousands of kilometers of optic fibre. So effectively, there is no advantage in technology.

The only variable remains is that of interconnect charges for carrying voice calls to different network. It can't be zero for obvious reasons. They seem to be as close to free. Makes me wonder how further down the rates can go. The only thing that can happen is 'talk and sms all you can' for a certain amount.

Just put things in perspective, early in this decade, some of the long distance call rates used to be as high as Rs 18 per minute. International calls (to USA) were charged at Rs 60 per minute. The tariffs have already crashed by 90-95 percent. They won't move down any further.

So, next time you see a telcom expert on news channel saying that long distance call rates will get cheaper, say loudly, "Liar!"

Then and Now

2008-08-20T18:04:00.000+05:30

Then : The commercials of TVs used to highlight the surround sound, 3-D sound and other fancy features of TVs which were supposedly meant for auricle pleasure. But, the TV signal coming via cable used to deliver mono audio!

Now: The iPhone 3G is in India at a hefty price tag of Rs 31,000-36,000. Well, the Indian telcos are still fighting with each other, Govt and the regulator on 3G spectrum.

Essentially, people in India don't need by "I'm Rich" app. Buying iPhone is sufficient.

LinkedIn is huge!

2008-08-17T17:34:00.001+05:30

This post is almost repetition of what I wrote four months back. Since then, LinkedIn has raised money at ten-digit valuation. Substantially lower than YouTube's price tag, but they are still in the game.

All the LinkedIn come to me in RSS Reader via a private feed. It is difficult not to notice the traffic on that feed. On an average there are 20+ items per day in that feed. Which means those many new connections or activities in my network on any given day. I'm no Robert Scoble and my network has barely 100 connections. Which means 20% of my connection are active on any given day. That is simply huge because LinkedIn is not a hangout joint like other fun social networks.

Given it is already so popular it needs the boost of platform-ization for it to sustain the growth. When it is open as platform, they can let thousands of ideas develop around the LinkedIn ecosystem. And few of those ideas will have the potential to be real money spinner. Let's see how they manage on this front.

BTW, apparently, I am user of LinkedIn since January, 2005.

Coincidences and few rants

2008-08-12T20:04:00.000+05:30

First of all, I am not going to apologize for my hiatus as this blog is not a daily fix for none of the dozen of you and secondly, I consider it an exercise in hollow narcissism.

Have you heard about the movie "Amu"? It boasted Konkana Sen Sharma as leading lady. That was 2005, but Konkana was a big name in offbeat movies even then. Did you just read 2005? Why would somebody talk about a movie which is more than three-and-half year old? Well, here the chronology of events.

Amu is a film based on 1984 riots erupted after Indira Gandhi's assassination. I watched this film in January 2005 at Pune Film Festival. Some of the crew members present at screening told us that the censor board approved the film after using their shiny scissors at couple of places. The crew was seemingly upset with the cut. We could watch the original film as it was in a film festival. Frankly, since there was nothing provocative element in the film, nothing would have been missed with censor board showing its supremacy.

Then I waited for the film to release so that some of my friends could watch a good - not great, though - film about riots as backdrop. And the wait continued. And continued. The reason was fairly obvious to me.

And it's obviousness couldn't get any clearer. Yesterday Amu was released on DVD. Now, it is understandable that sometimes tiff between producer and director can delay the launch of DVD as it happened with Lagaan. But, in this case the director herself was the producer. The delay is just perplexing.

Now here is interesting piece of trivia.

The film stars Brinda Karat in a significant role. Yes, the same CPM MP Mrs Karat who is wife of CPM boss Prakash Karat.
Brinda Karat is aunt of Shonali Bose, the director and producer of the film.
In Jan 2005, it had been barely 6 months for Congress in office with the crutches of CPM. Obviously CPM will avoid faux pas as the film would come across an embarrassing reminder for their partner - Congress.
The celluloid was sitting nicely in briefcase for an eternity.
After "barking" for almost 4 years, CPM withdrew their support for govt last month.
DVD is released within a month of CPM dissociating themselves from Congress. Now they have do their bit to damage Congress' credibility in whatever small way they can.

Congress will not get hurt in the process as hardly 100-odd well-wishers of CPM and few movie buffs will spend Rs 300 for this. But, just like a Bhagat Singh movie raises your respect for the hero a notch, the bulldozer of Congress will get a minor dent.

******

While I am at movies, let me crib a little move. Jaane Tu... is on its way to become one of the largest hit of year, didn't had the "kinnng" kind of buzz around it. Many told me its a neat movie. Even Amitabh Bachchan thought was fresh film. My personal opinion is that the writer Abbas Tyrewala manages to keep the movie in the territory of silly while director Tyrewala was all set to push into stupid zone. [gratuitous advice] Tyrewala, please go back to writing. There aren't many like you around.

Read Baradwaj Rangan's article on Aamir Khan: The Creative Art of Compromise. I think Aamir Khan is one over-rated person in the film Industry. In an interview to Outlook in 2007, he said , "I genuinely feel the role of cinema is to entertain. A filmmaker is not meant to educate an audience."

4 months later and just before the release of Taare Zameen Par, he goes on "It's a race to get 99.9 per cent but what do we truly learn? Why is intelligence about reading, writing and math?... yada yada yada"

There is hypocrisy or some such word for this.

Animation is the new Java

2008-07-02T15:33:00.000+05:30

During (the heady days of) 1999-2000, the advertisements from software training institutes were big enough to justify their own supplements. A typical ad would boast you to teach "Java, VB, VC++, Redhat Linux, Oracle, ERP, SAP, MS-SQL, Networking!" Essentially, they used to pick the keywords from the weekly jobs supplement and use them in their ads. Then, of course, the meltdown happened and it was never the same again.

Last evening I noticed an ungodly increase in canvassing by animation training institutes. Buses, auto-rickshaws, bus stops, bill boards were all too conspicuous with ads of animation and visual effects training institutes. (This is in Pune.) Numbers from NASSCOM on the animation industry were routinely quoted. And so were references to bunch of hollywood films.

Are these all signs of animation becoming an industry as big as the ITES aka BPO?

Wall-E releases today

2008-06-27T17:55:00.000+05:30

Today the Gods at Pixar will unveil Wall-E, their latest masterpiece. Predictably, it has received rave reviews from critics. Not that their reviews really matter to the world. As Antan Ego, the food critic from Ratatouille, puts it "In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment."

The movie is enjoying a whopping 98% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. The devotees of Pixar are busy lynching the two blasphemous critics.

I can do nothing but wait for a gazillion seconds before it arrives in India.

My previous posts on Pixar - Cars and Ratatouille.

Picture Courtesy: Pixar via NYT

First Mover

2008-06-27T12:38:00.001+05:30

[August 2007] I wrote First Mover Advantage is Dead

[June ~~2008~~ 2005] Don Dodge writes First Mover vs Fast Follower - Who wins?

Update: Don wrote this article 3 years back and republished it couple of days back.

Hmmm.... go, smirk and call me an idea stealer.

Who is your competitor?

2008-06-26T00:01:00.000+05:30

A few years back Nokia became the world's largest camera manufacturer ahead of Canons and Kodaks of the world, thanks to the camera phones.

Now, Facebook is the #1 photo sharing website. It has approx 6.5 billion photos, almost thrice of Flickr, the standalone numero uno destination.

Silent Evidence

2008-06-25T02:09:00.000+05:30

Were you amused to see a bell, the kind which you see in Hindu temples, in Pizza hut when you saw it for the first time? I was. The idea is if you are happy with the food and service, you ring the bell (dong! dong!) and the entire staff shouts back the gratitude in unison - "Thank You!" During the 40-60 minute dinner you might hear the bell a dozen-odd times. It almost acts as a reminder that the food you are eating is delicious and waiters are extremely courteous and prompt.

But, what about all those people who did NOT ring the bell because they were less than satisfied with the food or service? Well, the system is designed such that you don't notice those responses. They don't have an electric bell which creates cacophony and staff will apologetically shout "Sorry." This is what is called silent evidence. The evidence which disproves a theory or conjecture simply doesn't show up. You need to ask for it.

On one of the stock investing groups some folks gloat about their acumen of stock picking by showing multi-baggers (the stocks which returned say 10x of investment) from their recommendations. What they don't talk about is the recommendations which have sunk to 20% of their recommended buy price. Or the history of all of their recos and cumulative returns. Those data points will give me a whole lot confidence. These multibagger recos will be classified as outliers till there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

Whenever you are given a theory with some data supporting it, ask if there is data which shreds this theory to dust.

Amnesia, greed and black swan

2008-06-22T17:33:00.000+05:30

Today's Business Line has a news item regarding promoters increasing their stake in their companies by borrowing funds at 14-18% interest rates. The rationale being the current prices are "rock-bottom" and make it a juicy level to buy.

Exactly 3 months ago, promoters of Orchid Chemicals suffered a big blow for doing exactly same. They borrowed money to increase the stake. The collateral offered was their own shares. A Black Swan event hit them really hard, where the financiers sold the collateral as the stock fell below a certain threshold. Mr Rao of Orchid called it a "mistake."

Go Green. Shun the Annual Reports.

2008-06-22T17:04:00.001+05:30

It is that time of the year when my hobby of stock market investing generates a sizeable number of mails. The annual reports of the companies start flowing in every week. These reports are of printed on A4 size paper (glossy ones in case of big names) and have more than 100 pages each. They are so huge that our humble mailbox can't take these reports, which forces the postman to fold and awkwardly put it in the mailbox. Also, postage paid for these reports is upwards of Rs 20.

Now think of the utility value for these reports on which so much of money and paper has been spent. I personally don't even look at it. If I need some information from the report, it can easily be downloaded from their website. If any company doesn't provide its annual report in pdf format on their website, it's time to revisit the decision to invest in such a company. In this age, when holding stocks for a few weeks qualifies as "long term investor" or people buy/sell stocks just because there is a positive or negative speculation on a business channel, it is too optimistic to think that majority of investors evaluate companies by going through their annual reports. Essentially average lifespan of the annual reports is somewhere between 18 to 42 seconds. That is a colossal and criminal waste of paper and money.

I can bore you with details of the number of investors in the large companies and size of their annual reports. But you can easily appreciate the magnitude and save efforts on my part.

Here is my suggestion to SEBI. Make filing of annual report mandatory in pdf format for companies and post it on the website of SEBI and the exchanges (BSE, NSE) where it is listed. Investors are sent a small booklet highlighting the achievements of the company. If somebody is interesting in a physical copy, they can SMS their demat account number to a short code. (Stock investor base is much larger than the internet penetration, so there should be a way to get printed copy.) The company will send the annual report in all its printed glory to those investors who have explicitly requested a copy of the same. Imagine all those forests we are leaving for future generations. And all the investors' money saved. It will give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Final twist to this idea is to take it global. Why should the average American or Chinese or Brazilian investor be different? If SEC adopts this idea in USA, other countries will follow the suit someday. Greenpeace can then pursue this matter vigorously across the globe.

Now, where is my Nobel Peace Prize?

Photo courtesy: Myself

Minor solutions needed to fix major annoyance

2008-06-18T10:38:00.000+05:30

One of the curse of being a nerd is the insatiable urge to understand behind-the-curtain things. It is a curse because when things go wrong, you speculate which components in the entire chain are broken. Let me give you an example.

Our Tata Sky subscription was about to end on 17th June. At 1900 hrs on 17th June, the subscription was renewed for next month by paying charges through credit card on their website. At 0030, comfortably past midnight, they send me SMS to remind about subscription. Now, there are two problems. If my TV connection is unavailable for a few hours, world is not going to come to an end. Would the bosses at Tata Sky like to receive SMS at midnight saying "Yay, Shashikant has renewed his service!" No, right? Exactly my point. It can wait for few more hours. The second problem is this annoying message was sent with stale status. I could easily visualize, they have a service which queries database at an interval of 10-20 minutes to find subscribers who are up for renewal in that hour. Now the folks who designed the DB kept only date and time was set, by default to, 0000 Hrs. So, subscriber renewal condition is valid immediately after midnight. Since reminder service is not a critical service, somebody thought it's OK for it to operate on slightly dated copy of the database. They probably don't understand that it's always the eleventh hour that forces people to act.

Nice work, Tata Sky!

Same goes for Reliance communication. They send the reminder for bill payment with a request to "ignore the message if already paid."

Compare this with the alerts from ICICI Bank which sends the messages in the morning for the transactions done late in previous evening. (Now, I don't know if they send debit alerts immediately, which they should.) On a similar occasion ICICI folks impressed me. I have ICICI credit card and bank account. At an ATM I mistakenly used credit card instead of debit card to withdraw cash. First attempt to enter PIN, obviously, failed. In the middle of second attempt it dawned to me that it's a credit card. The system noted two failures.

Next morning ICICI folks called me to confirm that it was indeed me who had attempted it. They helpfully suggested me if PIN needs to be re-generated. But I politely refused as it doesn't fit in my own rulebook on credit card.

PS: While you are at it, read about how Reliance treated Rahul (hint, it's not nice) when he complained to them about goof-ups on their side.

Statistics and Lies

2008-06-18T01:20:00.001+05:30

Found this (little old) story linked from a group.

2 divorces for every 5 knots in Mumbai

This headline claims that a staggering 40% marriages end up in divorce. Here is their methodology. Count the number of weddings registered in last five years. Count the number of divorce cases filed in last five years. Compare them. Tada!

After reading the article, any person with IQ of mid-to-high double digits can figure out that sample set used in both cases is different. They should have counted the divorce cases filed where the couples were married during the period under observations. Well, then those facts would not have been so sensational. Somebody rightly said, media sells sensationalism, not news, definitely not facts.

World Record

2008-06-17T23:55:00.001+05:30

Frankly, I never understood and bought the hype surrounding Firefox 3. Now, Firefox has been my primary browser since its infancy, when it was blazingly fast. In spite of the serious performance issues with Firefox 2.x, my loyalty was never under attack, thanks to bunch of add-ons and the mild reluctance to switch to IE. In fact, I posted a Firefox trick to save few minutes of entire lifetime.

Still, I set aside my thoughts saying it doesn't hurt to download the FF3 if millions of download is going to make it a headline in NYT. But, no. They let me down. The site was not designed to handle this kind of peak load. Classic case of marketing getting ahead of the operations.

Enough of record crap. I will revisit when you site is up AND most of the add-ons are working.

Namesake

2008-06-08T00:07:00.000+05:30

I met Sonia Gandhi on Facebook and played poker with her. Really! Here is the evidence.

BookMyShow

2008-06-03T13:59:00.000+05:30

Recently, on this blog, you read about Bookeazy, a service for booking movie ticket online. I got a chance to use another similar service - BookMyShow. I am sucker for good movies and bargains. ICICI credit card along with BookMyShow is running a buy-one-get-one offer for movie tickets. Though it has various string attached - only on weekends, only two free tickets per month, only on "cheap" (priced less than Rs 250) tickets, etc. - it still is works fine for me.

So, here are quick notes comparing these two services from my view point. YMMV.

Bookeazy offers booking for E-square, which is closer to my home. BookMyShow doesn't. Bookeazy : 1 BookMyShow : 0. (Remember this is "my" viewpoint.)
ICICI offer is only with BookMyShow. Bookeazy: 1 BookMyShow : 2
BookMyShow charges Rs 15 per ticket compared to Rs 5 by Bookeazy. Bookeazy: 2 BookMyShow: 2
Inform your friends about movie. Provided by both. Bookeazy: 3 BookMyShow: 3
BookMyShow is "pay as you use" model as against "pay Rs 900 deposit" of Bookeazy. Bookeazy : 3 BookMyShow: 8
No registration on BookMyShow. Bookeazy: 3 BookMyShow: 9
Both services claimed to offer choice of seat, but Bookeazy follows auto-selection, and BookMyShow's selection failed. Bookeazy: 3 BookMyShow: 9

While it is evident that BookMyShow is a better service, I will continue to use both services opportunistically.

How to lose money - the boring way.

2008-06-02T01:25:00.000+05:30

You can lose money, if you have enough to begin with that is, in lot of fun ways. You visit the casino in Macau and lose to glory. You can trade in stock futures and options, speculate on commodities, take punt on currencies, etc. These activities may not be as much fun as casino, but you can no way call them boring.

The boring way to lose money is to put deposit in the bank. Seriously. With inflation officially crossing 8% mark, which I strongly feel is understated, it has crossed the 1-year interest rates on fixed deposit in some of the banks. This is not to suggest that one should go on spending spree. The old wisdom of saving for the rainy day still stays valid.

Flash video to text conversion

2008-05-31T13:09:00.000+05:30

YouTube brought videos to internet. Really. The idea of making webpages embed the video provided instant gratification which was missing in "Click here to download the video in wmv format." A whole lot of interesting content is now available via this medium. But it has created a new problem. In the good ol' days, the transcripts of interviews at conferences were sincerely prepared and put on web. The videos have made these people lazy. Why prepare transcript when people can actually see the live people talking? Well, for one, I can read a whole lot faster. Secondly, I really don't need to associate faces with names. So here is my tiny idea to address this problem.

The service will sport a google like text box with a button titled "Get the text." You can copy-paste the URL the page on which video is embedded. Once you click on "Get the text" button, it will ask you take a chai break. Meanwhile, the service will get the page, fetch the video on the page, extract the audio, then use some speech-to-text converter to prepare the text. It can also label the voices as "person 1", "person 2", etc. Once you are back, you can specify the actual names for "person 1", "person 2," etc. Bingo! You have the interview transcript ready.

As Scott Adams says, you will either find this idea impossible to implement or you will point out that somebody has already done it.

Sarin times his exit just right

2008-05-28T00:59:00.001+05:30

In July 2006, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin survived the shareholder revolt. Two years later when Sarin managed to bring the company back in black (shouldn't they call it green for the colour of money?), he has decided to hand over the reigns to deputy. The adjectives used in headline to describe Sarin's move are "shock"(BBC), "surprise"(Forbes) and "unexpected"(NYT).

In past, I have talked about timing exit in the context of Sachin Tendulkar. To repeat, one should leave when people ask "why now" instead of "why not now." In that sense, Mr Sarin has got the timing immaculate. Kudos to you, Sir!

[Update] Om Malik suggests, "Sarin should move to Bharti Telecom and help that company become a global telecom." Some 3 years back, Sarin entered India by acquiring 10% stake in Bharti. I suppose, he picked 10% because he couldn't pick 51% or 100%. Mr Mittal patiently explained to everybody that that Vodafone will not be a big brother. Few months later, Vodafone acquired Bharti's rival Hutch and liquidated their holding in Bharti (and earned a tidy profit in a short term.) At that time, Sarin gave the commands to Hutch team to become # 1 player in 3 years by beating Bharti and others. After so many eventful days, how likely it is that Mr Sarin will join Bharti with Mittal as boss?

Innovative Menu Card

2008-05-24T09:28:00.001+05:30

Recently, we visited a restaurant of Speciality group, whose flagship chain being Mainland China. Here is the photo of a page from their menu (apologies for lousy quality of the photo.)

Noticed anything unorthodox? The prices of the dishes are printed in words and not in numbers!

Many restaurants write only the name of dishes along with prices in the right column. Some of the fancy places write name of the dish, brief description and the price. Now, even if the place is fancy, price does play a role in making the choice for dishes. With listing prices in numbers, customer is prone to a cognitive bias called anchoring. We quickly decide what the "high", "low" and "reasonable" prices are. The right hand column helps you quickly eliminate the dishes which you think are outrageously priced, or the ones which are on the lower side (assumption being the potion will be too small.)

By eliminating the luxury of such quick scan, this restaurant forces customer to read the menu and order what they would like to have. Each dish does mention its price but customer can no longer figure out what prices are "low" or "high" as there is no anchoring.

Very Clever!

You are wrong, Kiruba

2008-05-23T12:43:00.000+05:30

Kiruba Shankar has recently started writing a column about blogging, new ways of communication, etc. in Business Standard. In today's column he talks about cybersquatting. His intentions are noble - advising companies to protect their identity on the net. Except he gives one advice which is completely orthogonal. He suggests companies to buy domains which have adverse impact on the business. For example, according to him companies should not only book MyCompany.com, but also, MyCompanySucks.com, MyCompanyCheats.com, etc.

There is only minor problem. If one wants to create a domain where they can pour their hears against the company, they can do it in thousands of ways. Well, if MyCompanySucks.com is not available, how about MyCompanySucksBigTime.com or SayNoToMyCompany.com?

I guess, business can't thrive by containing the ill-will towards the company.

World's Longest SMS...

2008-05-22T18:51:00.000+05:30

... was sent by Shah Rukh Khan to his Kolkata team. Really!

This SMS has 2441 characters (480 words). If we consider the fact that SMS has 160 character limit, this message was broken into 16 pieces. I guess, each team member will read one piece to stitch it together.

Oh, yeah, the first "S" in the acronym stands for "Short."

Infinite memory

2008-05-20T20:34:00.000+05:30

Recently, I was searching for something on blogs, but I found many of the results to be dead links. Those links unfortunately and surprisingly are not available with Google search. And Google's Blog Search doesn't give link to cached copy. Which is weird and almost gives the impression that Google doesn't consider the content from blogs worth "wasting" 30KB disk space on.

Google Reader does something smart like remembering as many posts as it can, but then it just works off the feed and fails for partial feeds.

I wish some service with infinite memory comes up soon.

Bookeazy - Booking tickets in Pune

2008-05-20T16:06:00.000+05:30

Bookeazy is Pune based startup for online movie ticket booking. While I have booked tickets online for Adlabs and PVR, the experience on Bookeazy is quite different (really!)

Few nice things:

Track the movies you watched and share it via RSS.
Serendipitous feature : Inform your friends about booked ticket by SMS.
Cheap. Like Rs 5 per ticket.

And not-so-nice things:

Deposit : It's not pay per booking model. You have to pay (refundable) deposit of an amount equivalent to the ticket prices at signup. Deposit Rs 600 if you wish to book 4 tickets, Rs 900 for 6. This has multiple problems. This is a really high barrier for users. I can't book more than 6 tickets in one go. At the multiplex, when I tried to pay by card, their machines refused to work leaving me in an embarrassing situation. They should move to pay for tickets model. Bookeazy team, please fix this as I want to buy 10+ tickets for Wall-E in June/July.
No seat selection. Real bad.
Losing the context and login info. I had to sign up multiple times when the use flow changed.

On the whole, I like for sheer convenience. Rs 5 per ticket to beat the traffic hell? Any day!

Careful about what you wish for?

2008-05-14T19:19:00.000+05:30

The SMS rates are high in India. Very high actually. They charge Rs 1 for local SMS and Rs 2 for national SMS, which incidentally is how much it costs you to talk to that person for whole 60 seconds. I wished for new revolution which could bring down the SMS prices to earth. Well, there you have a step closer.

Reliance Mobile has launched two plans for postpaid subscribers. In a package called SMS Lite subscriber can send 100 SMSes (local + national) for Rs 25. The other grand offering being SMS Mega which gives 1000 SMSes for Rs 60. That's virtually unlimited. While I am happy to see these development, I am personally unaffected due to my age.

This is only a partial step as it is only for postpaid subscribers who probably account for 10-15% of all mobile users. Not sure if there is a similar plan for prepaid customers. The website does not contain any information about this plan.

I can already see Twitter addicts (via Vakow bridge) jumping with joy.

OK, probably last post about Amitabh's blog

2008-05-14T00:06:00.001+05:30

Few days ago, I wrote this (Yeah, quoting your own stuff is embarrassing)

Media which thrives on celeb gossip should be scared of this trend (of celebrity blogging). With blogs, celebs don't need media. They can just redirect all the media people asking for an exclusive to their blogs.

And just days later, I find myself reading my own mild prophecy. Today, Amitabh published his email interview with Times of India journalist on his blog. This puts media in double jeopardy. On one hand they have lost readers, a small percentage you may argue, of this interview in print. Also, now, journalist can't put the masala twists to make a catchy headline. People already know what he has said, or they can verify what he said.

He also posted some photos, I don't know if it was movie or an ad film, on his blog. These photos will never be seen anywhere else.

As somebody said, a small step for BigB, a giant leap for the industry.

Postpaid plan for Reliance Mobile

2008-05-13T18:41:00.001+05:30

Minor utility post for Reliance Mobile customers.

If your monthly usage is Rs 700 or more, consider switching to MyRoaming 475 plan. This has rental of Rs 475. The call rates are Rs 0.50 per minute for local (landline & all mobile), long distance is Rs 1. You get Rs 250 worth of talktime (local+long distance) and Rs 250 worth roaming talktime.
Earlier my plan was Rs 299 rental, which had all calls charged at Rs 1 per minute and no free talktime. With this plan there is a potential saving of Rs 574 (500 local minutes at Rs 1 + 250 roaming - Rs 176 extra rental.)

Off-topic curious observation. Only for Reliance Mumbai, Maharashtra and Goa are treated as single circle. For rest of the service providers, Maharashtra and Mumbai are separate circles thereby making users pay for roaming charges when the move in or out of Mumbai. I thought, with unified license, or otherwise, the definition of a "circle" has to be same across telcos. Anyway, for once, I am on the right side of the unfairness.

How much discount did you receive?

2008-05-10T01:27:00.000+05:30

While we always notice the extra cost attached to a service with fine print (always looks suspiciously at the number which has a star with it), the fine print with benefits is hardly noticeable.

I shop at More, the retail chain from Birla group, for groceries and other essential stuff. Occasionally, they provide cash coupons with the purchase. The scheme (well, we'll see how it is a "scheme") works as follows. They provide a cash coupon of Rs 50 on the bill of Rs. 500. Simple math tells us they are offering 10% discount. When inflation is running more than 7%, that's a neat sum.

Now the fine print. You can redeem the coupon only on your next bill of Rs 500. So, essentially, you got Rs 50 on purchase of Rs 1000. That's a 5% discount.

Since when you shopped for the first time, you must have had bill more than 500 but less than next multiple of 500, i.e. 1000. That amount doesn't get any cash coupon. So, in a hypothetical case, purchase of Rs 990 will give a coupon of Rs 50. The same applies when you redeem the coupon. You see where we are heading. Since the bill will shoot Rs 500 mark by a margin which doesn't get any discount coupon, actual discount may be less than 4%. Still good, but not as cool as it seems at first glance. Somebody didn't say ignorance is bliss just like that.

There is a lesson here. Our minds perceive actual cash discount different from the percent discounts. eg. Pizza Hut routinely run the campaign of 50% off on next pizza if you order a top-range medium pizza. Now, if there 2-3 people, they don't need the second pizza and feel let down with such offer. Pizzahut is trying to to increase individual order size instead of increasing volume. They can increase the volume if they adopt More scheme.... er, strategy. If they give a nice shiny coupon with Rs 50 printed on it, people will give it a thought before deciding to "waste" it.

Is Amitabh's blog ghost-written?

2008-05-07T12:20:00.000+05:30

Sheece says, in a comment on my previous post, that Amitabh's blog is written by a ghost.

Amitabh has responded to such queries negatively and emphasized that the blog is written by him and only him. Given the sprinkling of some not-so-public information, it surely must be coming from the man himself. But given the rate of publishing posts (one entry per day) and the length (600-1000 words per post), it looks highly unlikely that he is writing the entire post on his mac. Now, I am not somebody with great flair for writing. So an average meaningful post takes anywhere from 20-40 minutes. Sometimes even more. Amitabh may possess natural ability to express his thoughts so well in writing. But, it is hard to believe that he puts his thoughts across in a lengthy piece in an impeccable manner, day in day out. And so much of effort is being put in arguing against the trash written in a tabloid. He surely has better things to do.

Well, I have reason to believe that blog is indeed written by ghost. Amitabh may have a conversation with writer to put across his ideas. The writer then goes about finding what trash is written by a nobody in a tabloid read by only people in the tinseltown and write a polished rebuttal of the same.

Asides, if anything, media which thrives on celeb gossip should be scared of this trend. With blogs, celebs don't need media. They can just redirect all the media people asking for an exclusive to their blogs. Aamit Khan no longer has to give 682 exclusive interviews and answer the most innovative question "How does it feel to wear two hats - of actor and director - for the same film?" with almost rattaoed, "When I am just an actor, I practice my scene and directly come on the stage. But, in this case, Aamir, the director has to understand the shot with all actors and technicians. Then play the actor role by wearing different hat. It's difficult, but enjoyable."

Imagine if these celebs record a small video of themselves talking about say current film, post few "raw" photos from the shoot on their blogs, they will make media redundant. Don't bet on if. Bet on when.

Lazy searching with Firefox

2008-05-06T01:27:00.000+05:30

Many times, we know we are going to click the first search result on Google for the given query. If you are searching for IMDB page of Iron Man, simply put in "iron man imdb" will result into IMDB's movie page as first search result.

The typical steps for that are typing google.com in address bar, hit enter, enter search query, press enter, wait 0.5 seconds for search result page and then click on the first link.

Minor optimizations in this can be done by entering search query in the Firefox search bar, which is next to the address bar. Also, you may argue that "I'm feeling lucky" is available if you are visiting Google's home page. But then, search is such reflex activity that you don't want to think while searching.

There is a neat thing called keyword bookmarking in Firefox. You can associate a keyword with a URL. Once a keyword is associated with URL, you can visit the URL by typing the keyword in address bar. A twist to this concept comes with ability to program this bookmark. Here is how you go about it.

1. Organize Bookmarks -> New Bookmark.
2. Enter title as Lucky (or whatever you want)
3. Paste this URL in Location ^* : http://www.google.com/search?q=%S&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky
4. Give keyword as "lucky" without quotes.
5. You are done.

Now when you wish to perform "I'm Feeling Lucky" search, type in "lucky [your query]" in the address bar and you'll land up on the result page!

There I save a few minutes of your only life.

(Bhavin first taught me the keyword bookmarking trick. Thanks are due to him.)

* For the curious souls: Notice the %S in the search query. That's a variable which replaced by the parameters following the keyword while forming the actual URL.

Amitabh vs Aamir

2008-05-05T02:04:00.002+05:30

You expected Amitabh Bachchan vs Shah Rukh Khan, right? That's so old. Now, the two film icons have entered into the world of active blogging. Amitabh is learning the baby steps of blogging with the perennial favourite topic - media criticism. His enthusiasm is visible with the frequency of posts. Hope, it doesn't die down due to fatigue.

So, who wins my attention? Answer is Amitabh. His blog has RSS feed, though partial, which I am not very comfortable with. Aamir Khan's blog doesn't have an RSS feed. So much for excellence that Aamir stands for.

I am accepting the bets for predicting the next celeb-blogger. How about Mr Scindia, the young minister handling IT portfolio? Don't bet on any of the cricketers, who are on a 50-day tour of India playing matches at every halt. Nevertheless, Dhoni or Yuvraj may have a podcast which they can record while sitting on the side bench.

Links: Amitabh' Blog and Aamir's website... err.. blog.

*222 : Customer care number for Reliance postpaid users

2008-05-02T13:19:00.000+05:30

Minor utility post.

Reliance Mobile's customer care number *333 is simply not accessible from my cell. Neither is 3033-3333 (from Pune.) Finally 022-3033-3333 worked.

You will be greeted with the message that the new, supposedly exclusive, customer care number for postpaid users is *222.

Also, be prepared to receive the stock answer "Sorry, Sir/Ma'am. Our systems are under upgradation. Please call us after half an hour."

Trillion Dollar Company : Courtesy Google Finance

2008-04-30T21:15:00.000+05:30

Well, actually multi-trillion dollar company. See here.

Asides, Google Finance UI is so un-google.

Blogger habits I don't like

2008-04-23T00:43:00.000+05:30

Ganesh lists 10 bad habits of bloggers. Thankfully, yours truly is not guilty on any of those charges. Of those, "partial feed publishing" is the top one. If you are publishing partial feeds, you better be a media house or an exceptionally good writer. The only non-media house partial feed I read in last few months is that of Scott Adams. He reverted back to full post again. (Thanks, Scott.)

Here is my addition to Sagaro's list.

Link every other word to wikipedia or its first result on Google. Relax, folks. Those top sites don't need your link love. Google has already figured it out.
Link bots. Those who link to any and every story from Mid-day/Mirror to NYT with supposedly pithy one line insight on the topic make a boring read.
Blogs which disable the comments on their blog. Don't give me this-is-my-goddamn-blog argument. Even Scott Adams accepts comments.
Those who read something from other top blog and repackage it as their own. For example, they read a review from Baradwaj Rangan's blog and write your own review by selectively picking Baradwaj's astute observations. Intellectually lazy and dishonest lot.
Those who use more than 5 "I"s in each post.

Mr Premji was so right!

2008-04-18T19:33:00.002+05:30

Three years ago, when Vivek Paul, the then CEO of Wipro, called it a day at Wipro, he didn't had anything flattering to say about his boss, Mr Premji. He almost claimed that he had taken the company where it was then.

Mr Premji had given a terse reply - "We don't need a CEO."

Three years is a long enough period to validate the statement. Well, the truth is crystal clear. Mr Premji was bang on with his assessment. 3 years later, Wipro's performance speaks for itself. They have doubled their profit from Rs 1600-odd Crores to more than Rs 3200 crores.

So, what's the biggest strength of Wipro?Or of Infosys and TCS, for that matter? Looks like the secret sauce is the organizational structure of the company. There seems to be enough redundancy in place to ensure that the company is not dependent on performance of one individual or a group of star performers. "Nobdoy is indispensable" seems to be the unsaid mantra.

Unrelated trivia. Wipro announced a dividend of Rs 4 (in addition to Rs 2 interim dividend) per share for the last financial year. Mr Premji's share of the total dividend? Rs 696 Crores! Oh, yeah, it's tax free.

Gmail is watching your clicks

2008-04-18T02:55:00.001+05:30

All the URLs in Gmail, when clicked, are redirected via gmail. The gmail's redirecting URL looks like this:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&view=js&name=js&ids=vsdmtasdfambkr

This simply means they are tracking all of our clicks. They already track the clicks on search results, which doesn't sound that bad. But, email? Yikes.

Photo: Sheece

Fixing non-existent problem

2008-04-15T18:39:00.003+05:30

Department of Telecom's technical arm TEC has come up with suggestion to migrate all the mobile phone numbers from 10 digits to 11 digits. The reason given being the explosive growth of the subscribers, which currently stands at 240 mn.

Now, theoretically, in 10 digits I can count till 10 billion, which is like 9 times the population of the country. Certain amount of fragmentation is inevitable as numbers need to be allocated with a set numbers sharing prefix to a telco in each circle. Even if we assume that in the next general elections, political parties to provide one cellphone for each person in the country - way better and sensible than an idiot box per home - we will require around 1.1 bn numbers. Add the fact that number portability will kick in soon, where number will belong to subscriber and not to the telco, India needs exactly 1.1 bn numbers. That is barely 10% of what is possible with 10 digit scheme. Why we need 11 digit scheme to support 100 bn numbers is beyond my imagination.

PS: I really think one cellphone per family, if not person, is quite cool election promise. For the first time, I will rally for an outrageous election promise.

"Self-indulgant outpourings"

2008-04-14T18:02:00.000+05:30

"Now, everybody knows blogs are designated spaces for the self-indulgent outpourings of fevered minds..."

Thus wrote some journalist at Outlook.

Right, blogs are self-indulgent. But, what about your sweeping assertion without any logic, reason, facts or statistics? How uncool is that? If I read such trash on some blogs, I am OK with it. Nobody has hired them based on their writing skills and intelligence. They don't get paid for their writing. Their work is not reviewed by an editor. But in your case, Ms Anjali, we are paying to read your trash.

Your cover story calls IPL as "tamasha." You hate the smell of money associated with T20 and rue that the game has lost its soul. How about your own publication which takes out Cricket special every year? Or the fact that 90% of the time the only sport you cover is cricket? Don't the same questions apply to the media of which you are part of? Come off, the high pedestal guys!

As for the blogs, at least, nobody will be found dead writing about Facebook in 2008.

Luxury of Number Portability

2008-04-14T13:12:00.000+05:30

The ball is rolling for mobile number portability in India. Number Portability means subscribers can retain the number even if they switch the service provider. An independent company is being formed to handle portability.

The user (dis)satisfaction is more or less same across the telcos. With portability user will earn right to sulk for a new operator instead of current one. And probably it will cost them precious $$. can see a steady flow of users switching service and thereby making telcos richer. If this move was meant to give telcos incentive to try harder to retain existing subscriber by offering better service, sadly, I would say this well-intentioned move will fall flat.

I see this phenomenon spreading across all businesses. They try ultra-hard to acquire a customer. But, the same alacrity is completely missing when it comes to retaining the customer with excellent service.

LinkedIn's good-to-have problem

2008-04-14T01:25:00.001+05:30

The rise of LinkedIn in last couple of years has been phenomenal. They have grown from 5 mn in March, 2006 to 20 mn users 2 years later. While these numbers may appear small compared to Facebook, the comparison may not be entirely fair. Acquiring a new user on LinkedIn is far more difficult as the barrier of creating complete profile is considerably higher. It's almost your resume.

While champagne bottles may get uncorked to celebrate 20 mn users, the achievement has its own set of problems, the ones which are classified as "nice-to-have." The foremost problem is the site is terribly s-l-o-w. It takes like forever to load user landing page. I smell a lot of DB queries running behind. LinkedIn is not IRCTC that I'll wait for 20 seconds for a page to load. If the same experience continues, my visits to the site will drop further, which is not very high to begin with.

The second problem, which is not as scary as the first one, is quality, or lack thereof, of questions posted in Tech section. I've subscribed to the feed for web development and I see a lot of generic queries being thrown around. Many of them need to read, patiently, ESR's howto. May be they should have a rating system for questions and provide ability to subscribe to queries with a certain minimum acceptance.

LinkedIn is headed to be really big, if they iron out these minor problems. We may hear some eye-popping number as their valuation in 2008. It may not be as high as Facebook's $15 bn, but my guess is it would be higher than YouTube. Reason? Well they have tons of users who are ready to swipe their credit cards if a useful service is available. How may sites can boast that?

BTW, India seems to be hooked up with LinkedIn.

Dull defence for fee hike at IIM

2008-04-11T21:46:00.001+05:30

I generally avoid posting about current hot topic in the media as there are already enough sane voices weighing in. My two cents on a minor side issue will hardly be worth your time. But, allow me to talk about this issue.

The steep hike in fees at IIMs, predictably, was criticized by one and all. The only people defending the decision were the ones who took the decision. Even the faculty members at IIMs seem opposed to such move. Of course, on PPP basis, the fees of Rs 11 Lac for 2 yr course probably makes it one of the most expensive MBA courses in the world. And IIMs don't figure in top business schools of the world. So the criticism is not entirely unjustified. While this price tag is in the reach of only super-wealthy, IIMs have diffused the issue a bit by handing out substantial scholarships.

Two arguments provided by the camp which defends the hike. One, the cost of running the institute is high and it needs to be recovered. The institutes want to reduce their dependence on the strings-attached largesses from the govt. One alternative is to increase the fees. Second argument being since IIM graduates land up plum jobs after MBA, they should pay up for that education till last paisa.

Both arguments are wrong.

The first argument is, mostly, given by the administration of the institute. Considering fees to be one of the top revenue source is very unimaginative thinking. This revenue can grow by either increase in student intake, which is almost static for decades, or by increase in tuition fees which has to be kept "reasonable." The administration just needs to take a look around the world to understand how top institutes in the world generate the money. They generate knowledge. There is a strong emphasis on research. Harvard's HBR costs $200 in annual subscription. They don't command that price because those Fortune 500 corporations don't care if it's $200 or $2000. They do it because they generate ideas. Such universities generate enough funds from research to have a company to manage those funds. With all those brilliant, average IQ of 170, students at IIMs, the focus seems to be on creating consumers of knowledge. Institutes need to be stretch their creativity a little for better utilization of these students.

The second argument comes from the think tank outside the institute. It's too politically incorrect an argument. This line of defence is given by those wearing capitalistic hat. They want market economics at play. This line of thinking is broken as it reduces IIMs to glorified employment exchanges. In that case, I really don't want a single rupee from my tax to go to these institutes. This high-end placement agency is as useless to the country as the Govt's 5-star hotels which guzzle tons of money and are affordable to the 0.1% of the population. These institutes are not, and never, just meant to create high-end investment banking/consultancy/[current hot industry] jobs for its students. Jobs happen to be side-effect of something and the end in itself. These institutes stand for excellence, in whatever diluted form, in our country where mediocrity is norm. Their purpose is much more utopian, even though reality is far from it.

If institutes want freedom to raise their resources, good for them. But, then they can't crib about lack of funds when govt hands them money and asks to increase student intake. You can't have it both ways.

High transactions charges on foreign currency transactions

2008-04-10T23:48:00.000+05:30

The thrill of spending money in other currency, especially US Dollar, with credit card was ephemeral as I stumbled upon what can only be termed as giant fine print fraud. My prior purchases in USD were limited to buying subscription of MIT Tech Review and Wired some 4 years back. As the amount involved was small I could only confirm the exchange rate to be almost close to the publicly available rate. (Asides. At my prior company, I had subscribed these magazines with company's US address. Suffix the name with PUNE and it be delivered at my desk after couple of weeks of actual delivery in US. All thanks to ultra-efficient internal courier service from Mountain View to Pune. Ah, one of the countless perks, I really miss.)

But, recently, when I did a transaction in USD of slightly bigger amount, I learnt hard way the meaning of fine print. Apparently, all the foreign currency transactions incur 3.5% additional charge on my ICICI bank credit card. Call to the bank revealed that the charges are from Visa, the card issuer. I checked out credit card from HDFC Bank, HSBC and Citi, but everybody is charging 3.5%. It is difficult to see if those charges are actually by Visa or these banks have formed a cartel on that. To top the agony, this is money attracts additional 12% service tax. So, in all, you end up paying almost 4% extra. I couldn't think of any good reason for this 3.5% ransom. The currency movement is one parameter which could impact the bank's earnings. But the currency movement is tracked in the third decimal place of INR. The exchange rate is generally quoted as 39.884 which means, even 0.1% movement is considered big. So, I have safely labeled this as daylight robbery without any firearms. Sob, sob.

If you know any other credit card whose charges are low (ideally 0%) for foreign currency transactions, please let me know.

Predicitions about future are difficult

2008-04-08T00:04:00.000+05:30

Two months ago, Mr Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel had this to say about the new telco players.

"All new players will collapse within 36 months. These firms will take at least 12 months to build their network and 24 months after that they will struggle to survive in the market. I feel it does not make a viable position."

Now, he has this to say about Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), in which Virgin is the first player,

"With the kind of low tariffs we have in India, I don't think MVNOs can succeed"

This is what a telecom analyst had to say about Bharti in 2001.

"The mobile telecom players will die soon. It will take billions of dollars of infrastructure to support mobile users. At the sky high rates of Rs 16 per minute, the user base can hardly cross 10 million mark."

Ok. I made up the last quote. But, it is a completely plausible quote. Mr Mittal proved all the analysts wrong by a wide margin. So, why does Mr Mittal believe that nobody can out-Mittal telecom business once again?