Bono has released a previously unheard track from The Joshua Tree called Wave of Sorrow on Facebooks iLike application today as a Facebook video. While this certainly is the first and major artist appearance, I’m sure Facebook is on the path to give other social networks (read, Myspace) run for the money. Keep the social networking politics aside — Enjoy the new song!
Leave your feedback to the song here
During the times when I was getting bored, I started playing around with twitter. The idea is simple — communicate with the world in 140 characters or less, either through SMS, IM or plain web. These short messages get broadcasted to people who are either “following” a person or “tracking” words. The notifications can be displayed through the same mechanism viz. SMS, IM, web. These 140 character messages are nothing but 4 broad categories of (a) what people like (b) what they want/intend (c) what they are thinking (d) ideas about stuff.
The most interesting aspect of twitter is it’s public timeline, where it shows real-time messages from people across the globe. This is where it gets interesting. You can track for example “wild fire” or “california” or a particular movie. Like blogs, there is immense amount of publicly available information which can be chopped for further use.
I also see several other future possibilities of applications on top of twitter for creating communities, commerce, and interactions. This may turn twitter into a platform rather than an application in itself. I like to call it TLI (Transport Layer for Ideas (or intutions, intentions or infatuations).
Out of the boredom and coding in between boring Hindi movies, I created twitterarc — a simple application which wraps Ajax on top of the twitter public timeline. There are a lot of cool things which are possible.
Just finished reading the review of V. Raghunathan’s book titled, Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are.
In his book, Raghunathan, a former professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, uses game theory — a branch of mathematics — and related concepts such as the prisoner’s dilemma to explore why Indians so often tend to focus on winning immediate gains at the cost of long-term benefits. He further goes on and theorizes that Indians are privately smart and publicly dumb. He also mentions that Indian’s ability to understand the need for cooperation is very low. Indians believe that cooperation and selfishness cannot go together.
Knowledge@Wharton is carrying an interview with the author. It is a pretty good read.
I was dumbfounded initially, but I would second a lot of the “findings.”
Marwaris comprise of a community of entrepreneurs who originally belonged to the state of Rajasthan in India. In the last 100 years, Marwaris migrated from Rajasthan to various parts of Indian sub-continent. Known for their business acumen, they founded several businesses, trading houses and manufacturing units in various parts of Indian subcontinent including Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh. Examples of a few billion dollar business houses started by Marwaris include the Birla Group (Aditya Birla Group, Zuari Agro, Hindalco, etc.), Mittals (Arecleo Mittal, Bharti-Airtel), Bajajs (Bajaj Auto, Bajaj Allianz), Singhanias (JK Group, Raymond), Ruias (Essar, Hutch Telecom, SK Group), Piramals (Crossroad Mall, Nicholas Piramal) etc.
GD Birla, the legendary industrialist and the patriarch of the Birla Empire, is a well known Marwari. He was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi and was a major campaign contributor to Indian National Congress during the pre and post independence days.
Marwaris have created a large number mid to small size businesses all over India, with high concentrations in Kolkata, Siliguri, Chennai, Hyderabad. Marwari businesses have been run by families with newer generation succeeding and taking over the reins at an early stage and expanding it further. A large majority of first and second generation Marwaris have limited the education for themselves to high school or less and got involved with the family business early-on.
The Marwari business style has been Hands-on, Know-the-Business-Basics style, which can also be compared to the value investing style of Patels, as treatised in Mohnish Pabrai’s The Dhandho Investor. Marwaris have always been considered conservatives, however, with rapid urbanization of India, the Gen X and Gen Y Marwaris from the traditional entrepreneur families have been venturing into politics, policy management (e.g. Bimal Jalan, former RBI Governor of India), operations, etc. A large number of Gen X and Gen Y Marwaris are also breaking away from traditional businesses and taking up positions in local and international corporations in India and abroad. Only time will tell whether the new generation of Marwaris will go back to their ancestral entrepreneur roots or chart a new territory.
Take 1. High Real estate prices. I was traveling to Bangalore last month and got a chance to meet a few entrepreneurs who are looking at the food services sector for new businesses. The thing which was stopping them was the prohibitive cost of real estate as part of their total operations cost. The slice of real estate expense could be easily between 20% – 30% which leaves little wiggle room for product pricing, labor costing and equipment.
Take 2. India Inc.’s overseas acquisitions. Indian companies’ appetite for acquisitions has increased drastically. In the first 6 months of 2007, India Inc. has struck more than 500 deals worth $55 billion. This started with $5 billion in 2005, $25 billion in 2006 and aiming to cross $100 billion in 2007. How are these buyouts funded? Simple, the companies leverage their balance sheet, the price of the equity in the stock market and a very positive credit rating for India. In the Tata-Crous deal, Tata Steel cobbled together a loan of £3.5 billion ($6.8 billion) from Standard Chartered, Credit Suisse, ABN Amro and Deutsche Bank. Smelling the success of past deals like this (a la Warburg Pincus making $700m from a $300m investment in Bharti-Airtel), big-name U.S. Private Equity firms like Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and General Atlantic Partners, etc. have started pouring money in India. Only yesterday, Blackstone has coughed up $165 million for a 50% equity stake in Gokaldas Exports, which supplies to Gap, Nike, London Fog, etc.
Take 3. Inflation and credit crunch. Due to over-investment in non-organic areas, the money is flowing to non-core sectors like real estate and stock market further fuelling the cycle of increased cost of living and increasing salaries. The prices of essential commodities are rising faster than the rest of the developing countries. An upward march of rupee vis-à-vis dollar by 8% has curtailed the inflow. However, the flipside to the rupee appreciation was the wrath export units are facing with competition from other cheaper destinations like Pakistan and Bangladesh. To further control money supply, banks have increased interest rates — which have helped control inflation, but tighten the credit to businesses.
Take 4. Global subprime mortgage crisis. A lot of banks and Private Equity players are part of the subprime downward spiral in the US and Europe, also happen to be the players in India Inc.’s growth. The subprime losses are being touted at $150 billion in US alone. The clear outcome of the subprime crisis is a change in risk appetite of banks and FIIs who are pouring money in India and tightening of the money supply to cover their subprime losses.
India’s GDP is being pegged at around 10% but this has not made any dent for the common man. Government’s monetary policies are very cyclical without any insight into longer term plans for expansions and fiscal policy. This day all the factors are working in favor of India Inc. any cyclic change or even a 20% drop in stock market (it had a 200% run-up in last 2 years) would reverse India’s fortunes in the shorter term.
Today is August 15th. 60 years ago in 1947, India gained Independence from United Kingdom which was a culmination of more than 100 years of freedom struggle. Quoting India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru in his famous Tryst with Destiny speech, I salute to the nation.
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance….. We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again. “
At 60, India is rediscovering again with it’s GDP at 10%, Per Capita Income at $734, and literacy rate at 65%. There’s a long road ahead.
I was surprised to see a lot of hubub around Rediff. Only 2 days ago, I had my own bout of poor customer experience with Rediff. Have you seen their shopping site? Sucks, big time. The strategy may be good but their execution, quality control and customer service is really poor. I purchased some floral basket to be delivered for a birthday. A dozen roses tied as a bouquet was delivered instead. More than 24 hours has passed and there is no response from customer support.
Look at their e-mail below, the development team does not even bother to test the e-mail, The e-mail is annotated with my riff.
More coverage at:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=8b214346-2d70-42c8-b113-a9ac6da8f165&&Headline=Google%2c+Yahoo+may+be+eyeing+Rediff
I’m on for a cross-country India trip covering 7 cities in 5 weeks. I’m flying Cathay midnight tonight. While scanning the blogosphere for the local news, I found that last week’s flight to Hong Kong from San Francisco International was stranded on the tarmac for 7 hours and never left. Scarry :[
Interesting discovery: Mark, a colleague of mine was also in that flight.
