Notes on tech

We've moved

2006-09-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

The unimaginable happened. I got sick and tired of the blogger platform (this site is currently hosted on blogger) and moved lock, stock and blog to Wordpress. My new blog is located here: http://anandjain.wordpress.com/

MTNL to launch WiMAX in India

2006-09-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Business Standard reports that MTNL will launch WiMax enabled land line phones in India by 2007. WiMax cellphones will be launched by 2008.

MTNL is also launching IPTV, which will offer internet, voice and TV on a single line. At present, MTNL has 4 million landline subscribers and 3 lakh broadband subscribers.

I use MTNL broadband here in my office in Mumbai and am quite happy with their service. Just that they need to come up with unlimited usage plans.

Cellular connections touch 2.5 billion mark

2006-09-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

Currently there are about 2.5 billion cellular connections the world over. Most of the growth is coming in from emerging markets. It took 20 years to reach the 1 billion connection mark, and just 3 years to reach the 2 billion mark.

The top ten countries for volume of new connections over the last year were China, India, Russia, USA, Pakistan, Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Between them, they account for over half of the growth in the world cellular market over the last 12 months.

A quarter of the growth is coming from China and India. China’s market is still expanding at more than 5 million new connections per month. India has moved rapidly up the top ten list, with the rate of new connections quadrupling over the last 18 months to reach a level very close to China’s.

Source: Geekzone

Gateway of India

2006-09-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, we took a cab down to the Gateway of India. Finally, got a chance to see this marvelous piece of art. The place was shoddy and crowded, however. Nothing much to do there, except to stare at the the magnificent structure. We then took a stroll and then a cab to the station and headed back.

Munnabhai lage raho

2006-09-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

Watched Munnabhai lage raho twice in two days. Its hilarious. Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi continue the laugh riot, so much so that it is much better than Munnabhai MBBS.

I wont spoil the fun with any spoilers, but take my word. Go watch it. Then, watch it again!

Updates

2006-08-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Its going very busy at Burrp!. Last week, I flew down to Ahmedabad to meet up with family, but fell ill with viral fever. Returned back to Mumbai yesterday. Have recovered 85% or so. Hope to be 100% by the weekened.

Currently reading - The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson.

15 websites that changed the world

2006-08-15T04:27:00.000-07:00

Guardian Unlimited has an article that lists the top 15 websites that changed the world. Here is the list:

eBay.com (Auction and shopping site)
wikipedia.com (online encyclopedia)
napster.com* (file sharing)
youtube.com (video sharing)
blogger.com (blog publishing system)
friendsreunited.com (school reunion site)
drudgereport.com (breaking news site)
myspace.com (social networking site)
amazon.com (online retailer of books, dvds etc)
slashdot.org (tech news and forum)
salon.com (online media)
craigslist.org (no frills classifieds)
google.com (search engine)
yahoo.com (internet portal)
easyjet.com (low cost airline site)

* Other than napster (which was illegal), all other sites are still in business. Napster tried to launch in a legal avatar, but hasnt been as successful as earlier.

How to get the new Yahoo Mail Beta

2006-08-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

If you are like a Yahoo mail user like me, but didnt get invited to the new Yahoo Mail beta party yet, despair not. Here is a way to get invited to the party ;)

Login to your regular Yahoo Mail account
Click on Options
Select Account Information (from the left hand panel)
Click on "Edit" Member information
Goto General Preferences
Click on Preferred Content
Change it to "Yahoo UK"
Save your changes

When you go back to Yahoo Mail, you'll now see a page that says "It's the New Yahoo! Mail Beta... and you're invited." Click on "Try Beta Now". Voila!

I love new slick AJAX Yahoo Mail interface.

*Are wondering whether you can switch back to your Preferred Content after getting invited? I just tried it and I can still see the new Yahoo Mail interface.

mumbai.burrp.com is live now

2006-08-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

I apologize for my sporadic posts here. Been really busy working on Burrp!. Finally, we had the first public release. Check it out here.

Tata SKY DTH service launched in India

2006-08-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

Tata and Sky and Tata have finally launched the the launched Tata Sky service in the Indian market. They have launched the service simultaenously in 300 cities, offering 55 channels including Star, Sony, ESPN, Disney, National Geographic, NDTV, Asianet, and TV Today. The cost would be around Rs. 200 per month.

Its been quiet

2006-08-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

Its been eerily quiet for some time now. There is nothing spectacular happening around us that is worth blogging. Or maybe it is just me who is working on Burrp! heads down. Nothing earth shattering happening, other than the usual hubbub related to pesticides in colas, ganguly, politics, terrorism, rains, indian economy etc... Just the same old same old.

Thanks, but we dont need OLPC

2006-07-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

Atanu Dey does a fine job of explaining why:

The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids will become computer savvy and what not.
....
Tens of millions of children don’t go to school, and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards and in some cases even chalk. Government schools—especially in rural areas—are plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a major barrier to girl children.)

Search marketshare in June

2006-07-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

Here are the search market stats for the month of June. Google is the clear leader here. Surprisingly Yahoo is at 23%, while MSN is a long way off before it can claim some respectable share.

On a related note, check out what Ebrahim Ezzy writes about Search 2.0:

What I'm calling Search 2.0 are actually third generation search technologies. To explain the generations:
First-generation search ranked sites based on page content - examples are early yahoo.com and Alta Vista.
Second-generation relies on link analysis for ranking - so they take the structure of the Web into account. Examples are Google and Overture.
Third-generation search technologies are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

Blogs unblocked by the Indian ISPs

2006-07-21T08:05:00.000-07:00

I've been watching this drama from the sidelines, first they blocked entire domains hosting various blogs and then unblocked them due to the pressure from the community.

Ah, well, now we are back in action. More power to the blogs!!

Google's top 20 properties

2006-07-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

Look at the above numbers. They speak for themselves. Google is and remains a one trick pony.

Top 10 outsourcing companies:

2006-07-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

Following are the top 10 companies of which 5 are Indian:

1. Affiliated Computer Services
2. Satyam (SAY)
3. Cognizant
4. Perot Systems
5. Infosys (INFY)
6. Patni (PTI)
7. TATA Consulting Services
8. HCL
9. GenPact
10. Mellon

(source: SourcingMag)

Currently reading: The Wisdom Of Crowds

2006-07-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading The Wisdom Of Crowds by James Surowiecki. So far it is a great read. I am on chapter 3. The author talks about how the collective wisdom of the crowds is more accurate in predicting stuff than just the opinion of an expert.

One thing that occured to me whilst reading this book is, if the so called individual stock market experts were truly experts in predicting the winning stocks, why does their opinion differ with other experts. If they are experts, they should almost have the same intelligence level and more or less the same thought process. Then why dont they all zero in on the same set of stocks always? Why have different opinion?

I guess, I'll find out my answer as I read this book.

Indian cos in the Fortune 500 list

2006-07-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

A total of 6 Indian companies made it to the Fortune 500 list this year. Here is the list:

IOC (Indian Oil Corporation) - 153rd
RIL (Reliance Industries) - 342nd
BPCL (Bharat Petroleum) - 368th
HPCL (Hindustan Petroleum) - 378th
ONGC (Oil & Natural Gas Commission) - 402nd
SBI (State Bank of India) - 498th

SBI is the latest entrant in the prized club. While Reliance did the single biggest jump from number being #417 to #342 this year.

The global top 10 comprises of Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, General Motors, Chevron, Dailmer-Chrysler, Toyota, Ford and ConocoPhilips.

Interestingly, the majority of the companies listed in both the above lists are oil companies.

Internet usage pattern in India

2006-07-10T05:11:00.000-07:00

The general belief is that the typical Indian internet user is a middle class English speaking user from one of the metros.

Well, Econimic Times reports that almost 8% of India's 25 million internet users regularly check out blogs. Nearly 59% of those users are from the middle-low income group and half of the users are from outside the top 8 cities. About 41% of the users prefer a Indian language site, with 17% wanting the sites to be in Hindi. Around 10% of the urban population gets online regularly. About 46% of the internet users access it from the cybercafes.

About 33% of the internet users bought train tickets online. Almost 25% of the internet users are using it to conduct net-banking.

Italy football champions - 2006

2006-07-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

Italy won over France in the penalty shoot-out. This is the fourth time in history that Italy has won the World Cup. In the past, Italy had won world-cup championships in 1934, 1938 and 1982.

The Myth of the New India

2006-07-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

A New York Times op-ed titled "The Myth of the New India" states:

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor.

This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.

Here is the eye-opener part:

Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

I would say that within this one geographic India, there are several socio-economic Indias. There are the ultra rich that drive Bentleys and there are ultra poor that cannot even afford the two meals per day. And everyone else falls in some vignette in between. Now having stayed in India for the past 6 months, I have seen that not everything is as rosy here as portrayed by the media (both Indian and foreign).

Re-entry into the blogosphere

2006-07-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Fellow readers,

I know I've been away from this blog for quite some time now. Its almost taboo in the blogging world to be away for so long. Ah well, sometimes you do what you got to do. Got my priorities straightened out. Got some work done. Check out the burrp blog to know what we've been upto lately.

Finally life seems to have settled down to the point where I can start blogging again. I need to get back into the rhythm of blogging. It will take some time, but I'll get back to my usual blogging self.

Thanks for your patience.

Yours truly.

Burrp press coverage

2006-06-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Somehow the word leaked and there was some press/blogger coverage regarding Burrp!. It was covered here, here and here as well as some other places (too lazy to provide a URL). The visitor count to our blog and the homepage shot up. So far so good. So now people are anticipating something to be released soon.

We are really busy setting up the office from scratch (ok, resist your first, create the universe jokes) and hiring developers. As of now, we dont even have internet connectivity at our offices. So that's why the posting on this blog is slow. But it will resume as soon as some of the dust settles and I get back to my regular schedule.

You can check out the burrp! blog in the meantime.

Slow posting

2006-06-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

Posting will the slow for the next few days. I am in Mumbai right now and dont have decent connectivity.

India has 100 million mobile subscribers

2006-06-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

At the end of May 2006, India had total fixed line subscribers at 47.40 million, while mobiles exceeded 101 million. India has a paltry 1.5 million broadband subscribers now. Here is a graph that shows the rate at which Indian mobile subscriber base is growing:

Here is the 100 million subscriber club:

China – 408 Million (March 2006)
USA – 170 Million (January 2006)
Japan – 141 Million (January 2006)
Russia – 130 Million (February 2006)
India – 101 Million (May 2006)

source: Metric 2.0

Air Deccan offers low fare on its stock ride

2006-06-12T23:24:00.000-07:00

India's first low cost air carrier's shares lists at waaay lower prices. Due to the recent turbulence in the Indian stock market, Air Deccan's stock fantasy flight went southwards. They offered stock in the Rs. 146-175 price band. The stock price as of now stands at Rs. 90.80.

I wish their air fares dropped so quickly. Now their stock price gives a totally new meaning to low cost airline.

Craigs supports net neutrality

2006-06-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

Craig Newmark of craigslist.org wrote an article for CNN in support of net neutrality. Here is an excerpt:

William L. Smith, the chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., recently told the Washington Post that BellSouth should, for example, be able to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. or vice versa. "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket," Smith said. "In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground."
In my view, executives like Smith forget that they get the use of public resources, like the airwaves and public rights of way, on which they have built their businesses and made a lot of money. As such, they shouldn't be able to squeeze out some Web sites in favor of others. This would be a betrayal of the public trust.
You, the consumer, should be able to choose which sites you want to visit without the telecommunications companies interfering. What it really comes down to is this: The telecommunications executives say we should trust them to provide a level playing field of service, but can they be trusted to play fair?

Dow Jones launches BRIC Index

2006-06-09T03:51:00.000-07:00

With the increasing investor attention in economies of the emerging markets, the Dow Jones Indexes just launched the BRIC Index. It is a blue-chip index of the 50 of the largest and most actively traded companies in Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). BRIC 50 Index is designed to provide balanced representation across four markets, targeting five stocks for Russia and fifteen each for Brazil, India and China.

The Indian companies that have made the cut are:

* Reliance Industries
* Infosys Technologies
* ITC
* ONGC
* ICICI Bank
* Larsen & Toubro (L&T)
* Tata Motors
* Hindustan Lever
* Tata Steel
* Hindalco Industries
* State Bank of India
* Tata Consultancy
* Satyam Computers
* HDFC
* Suzlon

The current market cap of the BRIC index companies stands at over USD 436 billion.

India's growth issues

2006-06-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

A friend sent in an excellent article in the Economist, that brings forward the problems facing India as it continues its growth:

The higher rates of growth are essential, however, if India is to find jobs for the 70m or so young people who will join the labour force in the next five years; if the 260m who live on less than $1 a day are to be lifted out of poverty; if the benefits of India's business success are to be shared by the 70% who live in the countryside; and if India, in 15 years' time, is to become something like China today, in its living standards if not in its authoritarianism.

It also suggests how to fix the issues:

First is more liberalisation, continuing the good work of the past 15 years, opening India's markets even wider to competition and reducing the role of the state in the economy. Second is the improvement of India's woeful infrastructure, the biggest bottleneck in the race for growth. Third is a change in India's labour laws, which act as a serious obstacle to labour-intensive manufacturing. Fourth is education, which is not only failing to prepare the rural poor for work off the land, but is also no longer equipping enough talented young graduates with the skills that have fuelled the services boom.

I agree with all the points, but want to strongly support point #2 - Infrastructure.

Billionaires in China

2006-06-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg has a story on China's Billionaires (its a PDF doc). Here are some interesting facts that I found:

China has 7 billionaires
400 entrepreneurs with a networth of atleast $60 million
300,000 millionaires
Huang Guangyu, founder of Gome Electrical Appliances Holding Ltd, is the richest man in China. Worth $1.7 billion.
In Beijing, 1 billion square feet of office and residential space is under construcction. That equivalent of three Manhattans. ( I can attest to this, I saw a lot of construction going on when I visited Beijing earlier this year)
China ranks third worldwide in the sale of luxury goods.

Here is the list of the 7 billionaires:

Huang Guangyu, worth $1.7 billion. Industry: Retail.
Yan Jiehe, worth $1.5 billion. Industry: Construction
Chen Tianqiao, worth $1.5 billion. Industry: Internet, online games
William Ding, worth $1.3 billion. Industry: Internet, online games
Xu Rongmao, worth $1.2 billion. Industry: Real estate
Larry Yung, worth $1.1 billion. Industry: Diversified
Lu Guangqiu, worth $1.0 billion. Industry: Auto parts

India crucial for IBM

2006-06-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

NYTimes writes on how India has become a crucial component in whatever IBM is doing:

"A significant part of any large project that we do worldwide is today being delivered out of here," said Shanker Annaswamy, I.B.M.'s managing director for India, who presides over what is now the company's second-largest worldwide operation.

From 9,000 employees in early 2004, the number has grown to 43,000 (out of 329,000 worldwide), making I.B.M. the country's largest multinational employer.

In recent months, the technology hub of Bangalore has become the center of I.B.M.'s efforts to combine high-value, cutting-edge services with its low-cost model.

For instance, the I.B.M. India Research Lab, with units in Bangalore and New Delhi and a hundred employees with Ph.D.'s, has created crucial products like a container tracking system for global shipping companies and a warranty management system for automakers in the United States. Out of the second project, I.B.M. researchers have fashioned a predictable modeling system that helps track the failure of components inside a vehicle, a potentially important tool.

Sify acquires travel company

2006-06-05T05:53:00.000-07:00

Sify announced the acquisition of a leading online ticketing company Globe Travels (The site looks quite goofy, though). As I had written earlier that the online travel sector is heating up in India. This acquisition marks Sify's entry into the fast growing online travel business, particularly e-ticketing, the category with highest revenues and fastest growth in online ecommerce today. According to a press release issued by Sify:

The potential for the growth of travel & ticketing arrangements online in India cannot be underscored. India today is considered to be one of the fastest growing airline markets in the world in terms of new airlines and the number of aircraft on order. According to the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IMAI), the number of Indian Internet users is slated to grow from the current 38.5 million to over 100 million by 2007-08. As Internet users grow, the number of people making travel arrangements online is expected to increase substantially in future. IMAI has projected a total of $ 262 million in online transactions for 2005-06, of which 57.85% or $ 152 million is expected in the travel and travel related sectors. Airline ticket sales online are expected to account for $ 88 million, railway ticket sales will follow with $ 63 million. The growth of online sales of air tickets has been given a further impetus by the IATA deadline of December 07 for 100% online ticketing in India, with the airlines promoting online tickets with special fares and benefits, as well as alliances.

Mobile growth coming from India and China

2006-06-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

India and China are driving the mobile growth worldwide. This should come as no surprise, but here are the numbers to back it up.

China is adding about 5.4 million subscribers a month
India is adding about 5 million subscribers a month.
US is adding about 2 million a month.

That means that China and India together provide 5x times the growth as compared to the US.

China has added 67 million new subscribers in 2005 and is currently over the 400 million mark.
India has added 37 million new mobile subscribers in the last 12 months, nearing a total mobile subscriber base of 100 millions.
US has added 25.7 million subscribers in 2005 to reach a total subscriber base of 208 million

India has a mobile penetration of just over 1%. So there is a long way to go before the growth peaks. It would be interesting to find out whether India's population growth is at a faster rate than the mobile penetration or not :-)

Source: Metric 2

India economy grew by 9.3%

2006-06-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

Indian economy grew by a robust 9.3% in the first quarter of 2006. The growth drivers of the economy were higher farm production and consumer spending.

Source: Metric2

Its monsoon time

2006-06-01T01:49:00.000-07:00

Ahmedabad received its first rainfall this afternoon. It had been drizzling last night, but the real outpour started at around 12.30ish today.

pitter patter pitter patter.... the air smells nice, the temperatures have cooled off. For a primarily agricultural country like India a lot depends upon timely and consistent rainfall. Hope we do good this year.

Happy Birthday Ashna!

2006-05-31T02:23:00.000-07:00

We are celebrating Ashna's 2nd birthday today. Woohoo!

Discover interesting places

2006-05-30T23:28:00.000-07:00

To find out interesting places the wikipedia way, try the new wikipedia + google map mashup called: WikiMapia. You can move your mouse around the world map and click on interesting places and check them out on the map and get information about the place simulatenously.

Green shoe option

2006-05-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

I was going through the prospectus of an upcoming IPO and ran into a term called "Green Shoe Option". Curious to find out what it meant, I did some search queries and found:

A green shoe option is a clause contained in the underwriting agreement of an initial public offering (IPO). The green shoe option, which is also often referred to as an over-allotment provision, allows the underwriting syndicate to buy up to an additional 15% of the shares at the offering price if public demand for the shares exceeds expectations and the stock trades above its offering price.

The Green Shoe Company was the first issuer to allow the over-allotment option to its underwriters, hence the name.

If you keep your mind open you will always learn something new everyday.

Arjun Singh interview on IBN Live

2006-05-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

By now you must've heard/read IBN's Karan Thapar's interview with Arjun Singh on the OBC reservation issue. Here is a funny thing that I noticed. Goto the video version of the interview on IBN's site. Right click on the video player on the webpage and click on properties. Notice that the URL of the video is "http://static.ibnlive.com/data/videos/devil_arjun_singh.wmv" and what is the name of the video ? - "devil_arjun_singh".

btw, here are an excerpt from the interview:

Karan Thapar: In which case, lets ask a few basic questions. We are talking about the reservations for the OBCs in particular. Do you know what percentage of the Indian population is OBC? Mandal puts it at 52 per cent, the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) at 32 per cent, the National Family and Health Survey at 29.8 per cent, which is the correct figure?

Arjun Singh: I think that should be decided by people who are more knowledgeable. But the point is that the OBCs form a fairly sizeable percentage of our population.

Karan Thapar: No doubt, but the reason why it is important to know 'what percentage' they form is that if you are going to have reservations for them, then you must know what percentage of the population they are, otherwise you don't know whether they are already adequately catered to in higher educational institutions or not.

Arjun Singh: That is obvious - they are not.

Karan Thapar: Why is it obvious?

Arjun Singh: Obvious because it is something which we all see.

Karan Thapar: Except for the fact that the NSSO, which is a government appointed body, has actually in its research in 1999 - which is the most latest research shown - that 23.5 per cent of all university seats are already with the OBCs. And that is just 8.5 per cent less than what the NSSO believes is the OBC share of the population. So, for a difference of 8 per cent, would reservations be the right way of making up the difference?

Arjun Singh: I wouldn't like to go behind all this because, as I said, Parliament has taken a view and it has taken a decision, I am a servant of Parliament and I will only implement.

Karan Thapar: Absolutely, Parliament has taken a view, I grant it. But what people question is the simple fact - Is there a need for reservations? If you don't know what percentage of the country is OBC and if, furthermore, the NSSO is correct in pointing out that already 23.5 per cent of the college seats are with the OBC, then you don't have a case in terms of need.

Arjun Singh: College seats, I don't know.

Karan Thapar: According to the NSSO - which is a government appointed body - 23.5 per cent of the college seats are already with the OBCs.

Arjun Singh: What do you mean by college seats?

Karan Thapar: University seats, seats of higher education.

To check out the complete interview click here.

Indian PC market growth

2006-05-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

The Indian PC market (both desktop and laptop) grew by 30%. There are now 4.6 million PCs out here in India.

HP had the highest share at 18%, HCL had 14% and Lenovo has a 9% share. That sums up to 41%, what about the remaining 59%? I guess that is the share of the assemblers - the neighborhood guy who assembles a PC for you from parts sourced locally. Wow, that means that the assemblers beat the combined Indian marketshare of the big daddy's of the worldwide PC market.

Notebooks have taken the big leap in India as well. The notebooks grew at a rate of 177% year over year. I know people who have bought laptops even if they will never carry it anywhere. Part of the reason seems that a laptop occupies much smaller space as compared to a desktop and you know how important free space is in the house. So you dont need to buy a special table for your notebook, dont need to block extra space and with all the dust in India, you can safely put your laptop in the bag once you are done with your work.

Numbers sourced from CIOL

Travel is hot in India

2006-05-25T04:56:00.000-07:00

Interestingly the toursim and travel sector is quite hot in India. Just recently four new travel sites got funding to develop their products. Hopefully as more airlines and more travel sites appear, the traveler would benefit the most.

One travel site that I am keeping an eye on is called Yatra. It has some solid and experienced promoters behind it. There are names like Reliance, TV18, Norwest Venture Partners.

Indiatimes new travel portal

2006-05-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

Times of India's IndiaTimes launched a new travel portal today, so I decided to take it for a spin. On their site they show logos of various Indian airlines like Go air, Jet Airways, Air Sahara, Air Deccan, Kingfisher airlines, Indian etc etc, so I am guessing that for the airfares they search across all the airlines. From the first impression it seems like an Expedia like travel portal, where you can make air and hotel reservations at the same time.

Lets see how it performs when it searches for flight availability and fares. For my hypothecial trip, I punched in the following details - traveling from Ahmedabad to Mumbai one-way on 5th June via the cheapest available option.

It gave me the following results:
The cheapest option available on the Indiatimes travel portal was Rs. 1874 for a one-way fare. Thats darn expensive. So the next thing I did was to try the same thing on GoAir's website. Here is what I got:
Their fare was Rs. 1950. Thats pretty darn expensive too. So lets try SpiceJet now:

SpiceJet's fare was unbelievably low. Just Rs. 898 (I guess thats pre-taxes) for a one way flight from Ahmedabd to Mumbai. Seems like a hell of a deal to me, given that the flight is on a decent time in the evening. Its not even a red-eye flight.

So I guess, the best option for travelers is to try their searches directly on various airline sites instead of relying on a travel portal like the one launched by Indiatimes. Unless a travel portal can search across the airlines and come up with the cheapest (or the most convenient) option for the traveler, they wont feel too motivated to use the portal.

Traveling to Gandhidham

2006-05-21T03:37:00.000-07:00

I'm heading off to Gandhidham tonite to attend a social function. I've never been to the Kutch region of Gujarat. I do remember reading about it in geography books in school and wondered why we needed to study geography at all :-) Ofcourse, geography was never taught to us as a means to know and understand the various other regions of our state/country/world. We had to mug up the lessons just to score points in the tests.

So now that I have to travel to Gandhidham, I got curious about that place. I wanted to know a bit about Gandhidham, the Kutch region and the touristy spots around the city. So I went online and tried doing some Google queries and nothing came up. Wikipedia had a okayish blurb on Gandhidham, but other than that there was hardly any information on the net.

One thing that you have to get used to in India, is the lack of information online. India related sites have pages missing and someone's personal email id for a contact info. Thats nuts.

Okay enough ranting. So I am traveling tonite and would be out for 3 days. So no blogging. I'll try to ask the locals there for touristy spots and take plenty of pictures. Will post the pictures when I get back.

Google Web Toolkit released

2006-05-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

Google has released a Web Toolkit that primarily helps developers add AJAX capabilities to their applications.

You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

This is neat. No messing around with browsers and/or javascript quirks. Just write your code in Java and then it gets converted into HTML/Javascript by the toolkit.

Investing in India

2006-05-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

Ran into a story on CBS Marketwatch on long term investing in India. Here are the key points:

A net $5 billion in overseas capital has entered the [Indian] market in 2006, on top of a 2005 inflow of $10.7 billion.
Gross domestic product grew 8.1% in 2005. For the current year, the Asian Development Bank predicts a 7.6% growth rate.
"The country is going to grow for the next 10 years or longer," said Devesh Kumar, head of equities at ICICI Securities in Mumbai. "Investors who come here for the long term will do fine. But in the midterm, there may be volatility in the market."
The Bombay Stock Exchange, founded in 1875, is Asia's oldest but also one of the world's most modern, with all trading carried out electronically. And India's roughly 2,500 actively traded companies offer a diversity of investment possibilities that's unusual in a developing economy.
Indian law doesn't allow foreigners to buy shares locally, so the only way to purchase specific stocks is to buy ADRs.

Spam thesaurus

2006-05-16T02:41:00.000-07:00

These are the various spellings of the word "credit" used by spammers to get the message thru the spam filters.

crejdit, cqredit, ccredit, crxedit, credimt, credijt, curedit, crhedit, credtit, credsit, criedit, credvit, credoit, creldit, credrit, ciredit, crefdit, credpit, credsit

Fortunately, my gmail account rightly classified each and every message with the above variations as spam.

The emperor's new codes

2006-05-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Been working on Burrp! all the time, hence the reason for no posts since the past few days.

The site is looking more and more better with every check-in. Ofcourse, no one has access to the site, except for the select few eyeballs (that simply means the Burrp! founding team).

We'll soon release the site for a private alpha. Stay tuned.

Finding the number of feed subscribers

2006-05-10T01:38:00.000-07:00

These days its almost impossible to find out an accurate number of people reading your feed. First of all, there are people who directly access the blog/feed thru a feed reader installed on their desktop. These can easily be counted.

Then there are feed consuming sites like Bloglines which have their own subscribers who read your feed. So Bloglines makes one request for the feed and then serves it out to multiple people. Subscribers who subscribe to your feed thru readers such a Bloglines are difficult to count, unless you ask Bloglines for help. But there are many sites out there providing services like Bloglines.

So counting the accurate number of readers to your feed is an almost impossible task.

Results 1-10 of 100 gazillion

2006-05-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

I was doing some ego surfing today. You know the kind, where you search your own name /site in major search engines, to see whether you appear in the top 10 results (for the curious people out there, mine did appear in the top 10. Yaay!).

The one thing that still puzzles me is, why do search engines show you the insanly large number of total matches for your query. Who cares about the total number of matches? Does anyone go thru all the results? Probably not. People would check out the first 2-3 pages, and if they cannot find what they are looking for they would either change their query or try with a different search engine.

I would rather have the search engine just show me the a total of 5 result pages with 10/20 results.

Improving road conditions in India

2006-05-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

I am still catching up with my blog posts from earlier. One post that I had marked for later reading was Rajesh Jain's post on "Revolution on the Roads".

It effectively summarizes the current chaos on the Indian roads and how the traffic situation can be improved and streamlined. I totally agree with him.

Update - Actually the entire series titled "Revolution on the Roads" is worth a read:
Travel options
Cars and choice
Real Highways
Mobile Lifestyle
Random Thoughts

Short term market mentality

2006-05-08T23:15:00.000-07:00

I am surprised at the short term gain stories carried by the Indian financial news sites. Shouldnt they be preaching long term investing?

Sometimes I think that the Indian stock market is in a bubble. Why? Well, people talk about shares during parties. Everyone you know invests in the stock market for short term gains. They will buy any share you recommend (hot tip!). If, unluckily, you dont invest in stocks then you are out of the conversation.

Interview with Jack Ma - Alibaba.com

2006-05-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

SFGate has an interesting interview with Jack Ma - the founder of Alibaba.com. Alibaba is the largest business to business trading/commerce site in China. He candidly answers questions on how he learnt English, how he started Alibaba, Chinese censorship and the internet spread and usage in China.

Here are some highlights that I'd like to share with you:

Q: Over here, it probably took five years or so for a lot of people to feel comfortable buying products on the Internet. How many people in China feel comfortable shopping on the Internet?

A: We have 19 million registered users on Taobao, and every day we have more than 50,000 new users.

Q: Nineteen million isn't that many people in China.

A: That's why you have to have patience if you do anything in China. You have 1.3 billion people. You have 110 million registered Internet users.

So when my friends say, "Jack, I don't want to buy things online," I say, "You're not my customer. My customer is the guy who's 20 years old, 25 years old." I wait for them for four or five years. Today's young people are the future customers. We grow together with them. That's why I don't squeeze money out of the Taobao sites today.

Q: Do you plan to take your company public?

A: I would rather build up our company strong and then go public. I want China to create a company that can create value for a long time like a GE, IBM or Microsoft. Now everyone gets an IPO, cashes out and leaves and then the company fails. We think that Alibaba is a company that can improve people's jobs. We've created a lot of jobs with Taobao. This is something to last for centuries. We're not in a hurry.

Q: It's interesting that you say one of your priorities is to make China better. We get the impression talking to a lot of American companies that taking care of Americans is not necessarily a priority for them.

A: Improving China is what I can do today. If Alibaba goes bankrupt, 400,000 companies in China will go bankrupt. They rely on Alibaba.

Q: What surprises you most about America?

A: Five years ago, what really surprised me -- the passion, the innovation. Today I see that in China.

Connecting rural areas - Project e-Bharat

2006-05-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

In the sunday edition of the TOI, there was some news on how the Gujarat goverment is planning to bridge the digital divide. Here are some excerpts, with my commentary in italics:

The Gujarat government has taken the lead to bridge the digital divide. As many as 750 villages out of 14,000 provide online services for farm and agriculture related information. Thats about a 5% coverage

Another 6000 villages offer offline computer based services like issuing birth and death certificates and farmer caste certificate. This offline service is being converted to an online service and would soon be available in 9000 villages.

At the end of the day what matters is efficiency and transparency. I bet, the farmers dont care whether the service is online or offline, performed with a typewriter or a computer. Almost none of the farmers would own a PC as such.

The Government of India is going to spend Rs. 6000 crore to provide 100,000 multi-purpose kiosks in villages by 2007. These kiosks will serve has a single point contacts for a variety of community services like e-learning, e-training, e-health etc etc.

My questions are:

Will all villagers have access to the kiosk technology or will the upper caste villagers restrict access to themselves? Who ensures equality of access?
How will people access the kiosk? A 101-key keyboard is almost useless in the villages. The access has to be thru touch-screen and voice technology.
Will they provide just one kiosk per village? Will people queue up to use that terminal?
Will this work in villages that suffer frequent power outages and extreme temperatures?

Maybe the government has good answers to the above questions. I am just not aware of the answers.

Bangalore - growing pains

2006-05-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

With power outages, potholed roads, rising salaries, deteriorating quality of life plaguing Bangalore, can it keep up the pace at which is it growing? Can it truly transform itself into a world class city comparable to the world class companies having setup shop there.

Consider this statistic: Bangalore houses 1,700 software companies, employing about 310,000 people who last year earned more than $4 billion in salary. The city houses 7 million residents who ply 2.3 million vehicles.

Read this story in the SFGate, which highlights the issues Bangalore is facing today. How companies are reconsidering their plans to setup shop (or expand their current offices) in Bangalore. Maybe this is a golden chance for tier-II cities which can capitalize on Bangalore's problems.

Wake up Gujarat, smell the opportunity!

Yahoo wants a slice of the Indian market

2006-05-05T05:37:00.000-07:00

Terry Semel (Chairman, Yahoo) and Jerry Yang (Cofounder, Yahoo) are in New Delhi trying to gauge the Indian internet market. They expect India to be in the top 2-3 markets sometime in the next 5 years.

Semel said that his $5.3 billion company had identified some firms for acquisition, which can be concluded soon. He claimed, "We have a strategy of build, buy and partner globally. In India, we continue to follow the same. But in the last two days we have met many companies for all three strategies, including potential acquisitions."

Source: EFYTimes

WiMAX in Ahmedabad soon

2006-05-05T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Ahmedabad municipal corporation has invited "expression of interest" from companies who can provide blanket internet coverage to the city, using technologies like WiMAX.

The targeted area is around 500 sq kilometers and would cater to over 100,000 internet users (i think this is a gross under-estimation) in the city.

This makes Ahmedabad the third city after Pune and Bangalore which are considering citywide wireless internet access.

Source: The Times of India, Ahmedabad edition

Some updates from the TOI newspaper, Sunday edition.

Two firms are likely to qualify for the project - Intel and Motorola, as they meet the expression of interest requirement. Intel is already a project consultant for a similar project in Pune, while Motorola has done it in several European cities. The selected company would have to implement the project in 6 months. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) will provide the basic IT infrastructure for facilitating the project, while the selected company will be responsible for operation and maintenance. AMC will setup 10 umbrella's or towers (I dont know what this means) for the connectivity at a cost of Rs 7-8 crore rupees (about USD 2 million). A Wimax tower can cover a range of about 50 kms.

Dial #300 for Harry

2006-05-05T05:12:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin wrote about Sleepy's "Dial 300 for Harry" policy:

It's a post about the phone on the Sleepy's salesman's desk. Our sales guy, who was outstanding by the way, explained that all 400 stores in the chain are owned by one guy, and that the instructions are clear: if there's anything in the store, anything important, that's broken and not fixed within 72 hours (including policies, prices, inventory, whatever), his job is to pick up the phone and dial 300.

And Harry Acker, the owner, the billionaire, answers. "This is Harry." And you tell him and he fixes it.

Isnt it interesting? I bet, Harry almost never has to pick up the phone. After all, who wants to receive a phone call from the boss asking why it took more than 72 hours to fix something.

Good indian financial info site

2006-05-05T03:29:00.000-07:00

I think, I may have finally found a good enough Indian financial info site - MyIRIS. The user interface is not overtly user friendly, but has all the numbers and financial figures, charts, news etc conveniently placed.

Huawei to invest in India

2006-05-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

According to this Business Standard report, the Chinese telecom major - Huawei, is going to invest $100 million in India. They will also setup a manufacturing plant in India.

This is the first time I've heard of a Chinese company opening up a manufacturing plant in India. Unbelievable, huh?

Isnt China supposed to be the manufacturing megahaven? Readers, India has a long way to go before it can compete with China on manufacturing. The last paragraph in the story clarifies their seemingly insane step to setup manufacturing in India: "The company realised it needs to set up a manufacturing base locally so that it may bid for BSNL contracts, and has sought government approval for the same"

Interesting concept

2006-05-01T03:52:00.000-07:00

Check out this site: rustic holidays. These people take city children to spend a week in the village. As a kid who grew up in the city, I have no clue how life is like in the village. All my relatives including my grandparents live in a city. So there is no way I could've experienced the good-and-peaceful idyllic village life.

I bet that there are others like me, who spent their childhood in the city without being near a village ever. Wouldnt it be great for them and their childrn to go down and spend a few days living the village life. Bathe in the pond, pluck fruits from the trees, trek the hillocks, feed the cows and get some tan (ok, i made the last one up). Preferrably away from their laptops and cellphones. Although, ironically villages in India do have cellphone coverage now.

The Rustic Holiday guys are doing it only for Maharastra. But, I guess such a concept would work across India. I would love to spend a week of my time in a village in Rajasthan or Kerala.

Feed flood

2006-04-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

I was on a vacation for 10 days and now have about 800 new posts across the 24 odd blogs that I subscribe to.

So even if it just takes 30 seconds to read or skim past a post, its going to take me 400 minutes of nonstop reading to cover them all.

Light posting

2006-04-26T03:58:00.000-07:00

Posting will be light for a few days as I am traveling. Presently, I am in Lucknow.

Getting rail tickets in India

2006-04-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

I am going to travel to New Delhi tonite and then to Lucknow. As there are no direct flights to Lucknow from Ahmedabad, so I'll have to make a stopover in New Delhi, spend a couple of days there meeting relatives there and then head over to Lucknow.

During my previous trips, I have used the Spicejet and GoAir websites to get my tickets done. This time my travel plan was a bit convoluted. I am going to fly Ahmedabad to Delhi via Spicejet. Then take a train (Swarn Shatabdi, AC Chair) to Lucknow and finally fly back to Delhi on Deccan Air and then to Ahmedabad on Spicejet.

For my ticket reservations I got online. Air Deccan had a decent enough website. Not very intuitive, but good enough. The site played well with Firefox. So no qualms there.

To purchase a railway ticket a few years ago, your only two options were to either waste your entire day at the railway reservtion counter standing in a serpentine queue, or to give some extra undertable money to a ticket tout and have him waste his day standing in the queue. Sometime ago (2001 ?) Indian Railways put up a website to allow you to check train timings, availability and even to book tickets directly. I have gotten so used to getting tickets done the old way that this sounded too good to be true. Being an online enthusiast, I decided to get onto the Indian infobahn to get my rail tickets.

I was pleasantly surprised. For something as archaic as the railways, their website's functionality was great. The UI of their site is a bit confusing with flashy stuff and tickers and other gimmicky stuff, but I'll give them a close 8/10 on the functionality. I was able to find information on all trains between New Delhi and Lucknow, find the availability (including the number of seats remaining to be booked) and then finally book the tickets.

The railways website offered many options to pay for the tickets. Pay by credit card, pay by direct bank transfer etc. We went for the direct bank transfer from my ICICI bank. They even gave me an option for paper tickets or paperless tickets. Finding this stuff too good to be true, I went with the paper ticket option. I didnt want to goto the railway station and then explain that I got my tickets online. So I figured that having a paper ticket in hand is always better than your ticket in cyberspace.

The site stated that the tickets would be delivered in 2-3 days via courier, after the purchase. I booked my tickets done at 11.15 PM and the tickets were delivered the next day at 10.30 AM sharp. Talk about underpromising and overdelivering. Unbelievably fast. They even sent me a confirmation email when I booked my tickets. For the functionality they offer, I would go to the extent of saying that the railways website by far trumped the airline sites in terms of functionality.

They've turned me into a fan! Woohoo!!

Driving in India

2006-04-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

Get a sense of how the traffic flows in this side of the world. Surprisingly there are fewer road accidents as compared to the West. Bite that.

(feed readers might have to open this post in a browser window. you will get to see a youtube video)

A thesaurus would come in handy

2006-04-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

When your job is to write about bullish Indian stock market, no doubt you will run out of synonyms. Check out this story in Business-Standard that talks about today's rally (emphasis mine):

CS zoomed to a high of Rs 2,099 in opening deals. The stock finally ended with a gain of 5.7% at Rs 2,013. Wipro rallied 5.5% to Rs 570. Satyam surged over 4% to Rs 862, and Infosys advanced 3.3% to Rs 3,335.

ONGC flared up over 5% to Rs 1,308. Reliance moved up 4.7% to Rs 891. Larsen & Toubro added 4% to Rs 2,639.

Bajaj Auto soared 8.5% to Rs 3,004. Hero Honda rallied 3.5% to Rs 879.

Cipla spurted 3% to Rs 680. Dr.Reddy's, too, gained nearly 3% at Rs 1,510.

Reliance Energy surged 3% to Rs 638. NTPC was up over 1% at Rs 140.

Bye Bye Moto

2006-04-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

Today was my last day of work at Motorola. This time, I moved the cheese myself ;-)

Now, I'll be working full time on Burrp!.

Driving competition crazy

2006-04-16T23:49:00.000-07:00

Guy Kawasaki's recent post on driving the competition crazy has this gem:

2. In 1986 British Airways ran a promotion to give away 5,200 seats for travel on June 10th. Virgin Atlantic Airways ran ads that said, “ It has always been Virgin's policy to encourage you to fly to London for as little as possible. So on June 10 we encourage you to fly British Airways.” The British Airways promotion generated a lot of news coverage, but most of the news coverage also included a mention Virgin's funny ad. It cost British Airways a lot more than Virgin to get this coverage.

Check out his blog for the 5 other stories.

Cars in Japan and India

2006-04-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

They have 55 million cars in Japan. India has 6 million cars. And I thought Indian traffic is so screwed. Wonder how they manage the traffic in Japan, it being a much smaller country.

Debian kernel compile

2006-04-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

Waiting for the Debian kernel to compile so that I can sleep. Its almost 3.40 AM here.

I am resuscitating my server. Plan to bring back "FooBar Search Alerts".

Update:
The kernel recompiled successfully and now I have SMP (multi processor) support on my server.

Here is how you can recompile the Debian kernel to enable SMP support (or perform any other tweaks):

Caveat: This worked for me. I am not sure it will work for you or not. Take the usual precautions. Backup your stuff. Read the Debian documentation. Ask the experts. My server is an Intel x86 Dual proc machine.

apt-get install kernel-package libncurses5-dev fakeroot wget bzip2
cd /usr/src
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.16.tar.bz2 (you just just goto http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel and find a kernel version that you want to install. I am not getting into the how and why).
tar xjf linux-2.6.16.tar.bz2
cd linux-2.6.16/
make menuconfig

This should open up a menu like configuration. You can go around and tweak all the options. Be sure to enable support for SMP and specific the number of processors.

One you are done, exit.

make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image

cd ../
dpkg -i kernel-image-2.6.16_custom.1.0_i386.deb

At this point, you have installed your ner kernel. So reboot the server.
One it comes back up (hope it does) try: uname -a

Have fun!

Sensible risk taking

2006-04-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

Paul Kedrosky quotes a NY Times story on Ed Viesturs (The first American to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000 meter peaks without oxygen) on his rational approach to risk taking while climbing.

He is known for his equipoise and sensible approach to dangerous undertakings. In 1988, on his first attempt on the 29,035-foot Everest, Viesturs turned around 300 feet from the crest. On the 26,289-foot Shishapangma, he stopped 20 feet from the top. He is nothing if not courageous, and sometimes the greatest courage is to turn around from a fight you may not win.

Sometimes turning back is more courageous than to keep going.

Ambani's SEZ in Navi Mumbai

2006-04-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

I had earlier written about Mukesh Ambani's plan to build a Special Economic Zone (henceforth SEZ) in Navi Mumbai. Now Business Standard has some more scoop on the size, logistics and the ambition. Here are a few highlights:

Development of 14,000 hectares.
Reliance will invest Rs. 25,000 crore ($5.5 billion) to make it happen.
Plans to have residential complexes, amusement parks, hotels, hospitals, shopping malls, 18 hole golf course, its own airport, sea-link tranist to Mumbai, 6 lane highway connectivity to Mumbai and living conditions on par with the some of the best cities of the world.
The completed SEZ will require a power plant to generate over 1,000 MW of electricity and about 300 million litres of water will be required every day.
It will be home to a million people.
The development is going to happen in a phased "cluster" approach. Each cluster will comprise of 5000-7000 acres. They will develop the land, telecom, sewage, road etc for that cluster before moving on to the next one.
Estimated completion time for the first cluster is end of 2010.

Time will tell whether Mukesh Ambani can pull this off or not. It is by no means a small feat.

Good business & market related site found

2006-04-15T04:19:00.000-07:00

My quest to find a nice and clean Indian business/economy/market related site has helped me find the Business Standard website. It has a clean user interface, timely updates. No gimmicky scripts or flashing banners. So far no 404s or any other nonsense.

Top 10 sites for March 2006

2006-04-14T03:31:00.000-07:00

Thought, you would want to know. The top 10 sites for 2006 (so far)

Site	Visitors (in millions)	Time spent (in hours: minutes)
Yahoo	105	3:28
Microsoft	99	0:50
MSN	95	1:52
Google	93	1:00
AOL	75	6:13
eBay	55	1.59
Mapquest	40	0:12
Amazon	40	0:23
Real	36	0:43
MySpace	36	2:09

If these werent from Nielson//NetRatings, I wouldnt have believed the numbers. Here are my suprises and observations:

Microsoft gets more hits than Google. Now the microsoft.com site serves a totally different audience than the www.google.com website.
People spend a lot more time on eBay than I had thought. And waaay longer time on MySpace.
It takes about 12 minutes to find directions on Mapquest
People spend more time on MSN than Google.
Real is there in the top 10 list. Maybe people are spending 43 minutes looking for that free Realplayer.
The clear winner above is Yahoo. Both in the number of visitors and the time spent on the site.
AOL primarily (still) serves dialup users and they spend 6 hours online on the AOL site. Hey, if you need to spend 6 hours online, get yourself a broadband connection and ditch AOL.

Check out the above PDF report on some interesting numbers on the top ad spenders.

$550 billion required to make India a powerhouse

2006-04-14T02:55:00.000-07:00

The Investment Commission, headed by Ratan Tata, has submitted a report to the Indian government, which states that India needs an investment of $550 billion in the next 5 years to make it an economic powerhouse. The other members of the Investment Commission are HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh and HLL ex-chairman Ashok Ganguly.

The commission has identified 9 high priority sectors for growth. These are roads and highways, energy, civil aviation, textiles and garments, automobile components, real estate, construction, tourism and food processing.

Some notable numbers from the report:

Power sector needs investment of $140 billion in the next 5 years
Coal sector needs investment of $30-40 billion double its capacity
Telecom needs investment of $22 billion in the next 5 years
Road sector needs investment of $30 billion in the next 5 years

Source: Business Standard

More tweaks to the blog

2006-04-14T00:19:00.000-07:00

If you noticed, I added Google search to the right. Technorati search wouldnt show up any search results so I gave it a boot. Also for people landing on this blog through search engines, I added my profile information and the Google search box to the individual item pages as well.

Offtopic

2006-04-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

Now that Salman Khan is behind the bars for shooting the chinkaras. I cant resist but come up with some funny headlines:

The buck stops here
Deer Salman
When the star struck
Star behind bars
Shooting star
Kya Buckwas hai
Judge to Salman, dont buck buck
"Buck"le up, you are going for drive in the jungle
Isse chahiye hamdard ka chinkara

Take it easy folks, I am just being funny. No offense meant to anyone. Just chill.

What I learned today

2006-04-12T01:47:00.000-07:00

To manage time more efficiently, finish up any task on your plate as soon as you get to it. Basically, if you are looking at your inbox - reply, delete or file the mail. Deal with all mails right then and there. Dont leave anything for later. You will never reach to it, once it gets burried under a pile of new emails.

The same rule applies for blog subscriptions as well. Read the posts and be done. Dont just skim the post and mark it for reading later. I had 200 posts that I had marked to be read later and that was 6 months ago. I cleaned up my subscriptions, nuked the 200 to be read posts and started afresh.

Even in the offline world. If you have any task to be worked upon, just work on it and get it done. Never leave anything lingering for tomorrow. Tomorrow it will be out of sight and out of mind.

Buy and download an antivirus

2006-04-11T04:48:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased a new laptop in China and now needed to load it up with a good antivirus. I strongly believe in purchasing a licensed version of a good antivirus. Its not worth the headache to get a pirated copy for something as critical as this.

Being in India, its virtually impossible to goto a store and just purchase a copy of an antivirus (Honestly, I didnt even try. Maybe they sell Antiviruses... but a download is just a click away!). So what better medium to download an antivirus than the internet itself.

As a satisfied McAfee user for about 4+ years, I set forth to their site to purchase an antivirus and download it. The McAfee antivirus was priced at $29.99 after a mail-in-rebate. So they'll charge you around $50 and then send back a check thru the mail-in-rebate. Now that doesnt work out well someone who is going to download stuff in India. Even then I proceeded merrily, only to realize that McAfee wont sell you the s/w, unless you use Internet Explorer for the purchase transaction. WTF? You want me to specifically use MS Internet Explorer for this. Hell no. What has a browser got to do with this anyway? I gave up on McAfee.

Next stop, the Norton antivirus from Symantec. My work laptop always had a Norton A/V and I was comfortable using it as well. Purchasing the Norton A/V was pretty straight forward. Select the product, punch in your credit card details and voila, you can start downloading the software. The Norton A/V cost me $39.99, but it didnt have any of the mail-in-rebate nonsense. It took about 10 minutes to download the A/V and install it.

Hello Moto V3i

2006-04-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

I finally made the switch from the clunky Treo 600 to the sleek-n-shiny RAZR V3i. The packaging and the presentation are just perfect. It kinda creates the same anticipation as when I first opened my iPod box. I know, I'm a bit late to the iPod and the RAZR party, hey but what the heck - better late than never.

This one has bluetooth, an iTunes interface, a 1.2 MP camera and a lot of other goodies. It even came with its own stereo headphones. I'll spare you the review. I'm sure plenty of people and their mom's have written reviews about the RAZR V3i.

Mail client for Gmail

2006-04-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

While returning back from China to India, I realized that I needed offline access to my Gmail emails. My Singapore airline flights didnt have any Connexion access from Boeing. Besides, even if they had the service, I am guessing, it would be a big ripoff. So better to be offline and get some work done. Gmail supports POP access, though you will have to enable it from within Gmail*.

So to get offline access to my Gmail emails, I installed Thunderbird from Mozilla. Its from the same folks that brought to you Firefox. Wikipedia has a nice chart comparing various email clients. For me it was either Eudora or Thunderbird. On a hunch, I went with Thunderbird. This arrangement doesnt need a local spam checker, as these emails are already processed by Gmail before they get downloaded by Thunderbird.

Thunderbird supports multiple identities. Thats a big relief for me. I receive emails from atleast three different mail addresses on my gmail account. Now I can manage them from within Thunderbird. Though I still need to figure out how to get my mails from different accounts organized in different folders.

Once you install Thunderbird, you can find out the number of unread mails directly from within Firefox. There are a couple of mail related menu items under Tools.

Now that I am comfortable getting the maximum mileage out of Firefox by using extensions, maybe I could try out some Thunderbird extensions as well. Thats the true power of open source and having a large developer community.

* Gmail even provides good enough instructions to configure various mail clients for POP access.

What I learned today

2006-04-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

That a PPS club sticker on your boarding pass lets you use the First Class lounge of Singapore Airlines :-)

Bye bye China

2006-04-07T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today was my last day here in China. I was given a huge farewell lunch by my team. About 20 people showed up for lunch.

I cant wait to reach India and finally work full time on Burrp!.

India through my rose colored glasses

2006-04-06T02:42:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or is India attracting a lot of funds? I've been following VC Circle blog since quite some time and noticed that every other day some new India related fund gets announced.

Here is a sampling from the last month (from the VC Circle blog):

And this is just from the last month. The list just keeps going on and on and on.

Yahoo UI library

2006-04-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are into web development, check out the Yahoo UI library. They provide a cross platform library of web based UI controls like Calendars, Sliders, Tree views.

Testing your home grown components with every browser/os/platform combination can be a pain in the you-know-where. Yahoo has tested their components and they have a chart for that as well.

This significantly lowers the amount of UI work and the headache that goes along with it.

Any Indian stock market related good sites?

2006-04-04T02:14:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know of a good enough Indian stock market related site, that does not make you want to smash the keyboard against the monitor? I am looking for a clean user interface, no typos and updated news. Is this too much to ask?

So far I've tried ICICIdirect, Rupya and Moneycontrol. The last one is a CNBC site. And let me tell you, they ALL suck big time. My frustrations with these sites being 404 - page not found errors, there are typing mistakes, I see stupid text scrolling all over the sites. I could still tolerate all this, but the worse part is that these sites dont have the latest (breaking) news. Most of the news on their sites is not even updated daily. Hey, I could buy a newspaper instead. They dont even tell me the frequency of the stock quotes. Is it a day old, a week old, or updated to the minute?

Moneycontrol has polls expert on various IPOs. But they only ask the same two experts on virtually all the IPOs. C'mon, you can do better than that.

I really like the interface of the Marketwatch website . Can someone make an Indian site, thats atleast close to that in the UI and functionality department?

Comment spam

2006-04-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

Since the past couple of days, I've started receiving some comment spam. Some guy called "Aaron Keogh" would post a comment about his company (I am not mentioning the company name nor linking to it) asking me to blog about their newly launched product. This guy would post the same comment on various posts of this blog, irrespective of the topic of the post. A quick google search revealed that the same message has also been posted on various other blogs.

Tactics like these are NOT going to get your product evaluated by anyone. No blogger is going to think, "Gee, this guy is polluting my blog with his comment spam, let me review his product". This is plain spamming and not product marketing. Screw stupid companies who think that spamming blogs will somehow increase sales.

I've enabled image verification for posting comments on this blog. So next time you post something you will see a little squiggly image. Enter the text on that image and your comment will get posted.

Killing the competition

2006-04-03T01:46:00.000-07:00

I've begun reading "The Art of the Start". Guy Kawasaki makes some excellent points in the book, one of them being - the purpose of your organization or product should not to destroy the competition, the purpose should to make something meaningful that provides value to the customer. It should get the people to buy the product or use the service. No company ever destroyed competition without having a loyal customer base of its own.

This makes perfect sense. Do people buy Toyotas because they want to drive GM out of business. Hell, no. They buy Toyotas because they find a good car that fits their needs, within their requirements.

So this makes me wonder about all those companies that want to kill the iPod. They have announced iPod killers many times, but havent succeeded so far. Guess why? They make products to to kill iPod. They dont aim to make products that provide value to the customer. The Apple folks got it right. They made something so much easy to use that people voted with their money. That is the reason that iPod still rules and the competiting products are lost in oblivion.

At Burrp! we are focused on making something that people really want to use. We dont want to kill the competition. The competition gets killed as a by product of a loyal customer/user base.

Brand new look + search capability

2006-04-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

For people reading this entry through their feed aggregators, check out the brand new shiny look of the blog. I've also added a search box to enable searching across the blog.

MSFT - a growth stock?

2006-04-01T18:19:00.000-08:00

Atleast that is what Barron's thinks about Microsoft. For those of you who dont have the subscription to Barron's, I'll summarize:

On the recently announced Microsoft Vista delay, Barron's says that sofware delays are normal with large software products. To give you an idea of the size of the product we are talking about - Microsoft Vista is 50 million lines of code. Bigger than anything they have ever created.
Vista is the most significant upgrade since Windows 95. They are also launching an extensive revision to Office around the same time, in 2007.
According to an analyst quoted in the report, Microsoft's total revenue growth should jump from 8% in fiscal 2005 to the low double-digits in each of the next three years, with profit improving from $1.16 a share last year to $1.32 in fiscal 2006, $1.54 next year and $1.75 the following year. The analyst thinks that the stock is 25% undervalued.
Ballmer says that the spending environment is very very good. Companies are making smart IT investments. He too thinks that double digit growth is possible.
Another analyst says that Microsoft is underplaying the improvements and features in Vista to reduce the short term impact on their partners, until Vista is launched.
Vista will drive an extra $1.5 billion in revenue for Microsoft over the product's first 18 months.
Microsoft strategy for expanding revenue is - a) Unit growth in number of PCs. b) Piracy reduction in India and China. c) Sell premium versions of software.
The combination of Office 2007 and new versions of some of Microsoft's server offerings provides a lot of that business-intelligence software functionality. This means that more avenues to make money.

Of the challenges facing Microsoft, Barron's notes that Linux, Apple and Google have all become better and stronger competitors. Suprisingly (to me atleast!) Microsoft views IBM as his company's primary rival in the corporate computing market. The way Ballmer sees it, to meet your needs, you can buy software from Microsoft, or hire consultants from IBM.

Personally, I am not sure about the Microsoft stock doing a supersonic again. I think that more and more people are buying Apple computers. Dont underestimate the word-of-mouth effect here. More and more people are getting used to doing things online. So stuff which earlier required a PC, can now be done online through a browser, thanks to faster internet and better online services. This is significant in countries like India, where not everyone owns a PC. You goto a cybercafe, get your work done online and signoff. Linux is definitely gaining ground. Competition has started sinking its teeth into Microsoft's cash cows.

Having said the above, I must also say that I recently bought some MSFT stock. Contrarian? You decide.

(unfortunately, this post coincides with April 1st - April fools day. But it is not an April fool joke. I did buy 50 shares of MSFT and Barron's has the above as its cover story)

The Art of the Start

2006-03-31T23:36:00.000-08:00

Currently reading "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki.

Actually, I've wanted to read this book for a while but none of the bookstores in Ahmedabad (India) have this book. I even tried the bookstore at the Singapore Airport and bookstores in Beijing, but without any luck.

Running out of all options, I finally wrote an email to Guy himself and asked him whether he has an audio version or a PDF copy of the book that he could send across. He replied that although he didnt have an audio or a soft copy version, he would mail me the book. So two days ago, I received the book.

So that is how I got my copy of the book. btw, Guy writes a blog as well. Its worth subscribing to.

Search rankings

2006-03-30T17:28:00.000-08:00

Neilsen//NetRatings just published their numbers on the search market share.

Predictably Google had the highest share at - 48.5%

IRS sounds like ToysRUs

2006-03-30T07:28:00.000-08:00

"At first I thought well, IRS kinda sounds like Toys R Us maybe won't be so bad. Maybe they have a sense of fun about it, you know." - Jerry Seinfeld

I feel sorry for his children

2006-03-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

Ballmer speaks out in an interview with CNN.

Do you have an iPod?

No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

Both he and his children are missing out on arguably the top two innovations of this decade. Both work pretty well. Both have huge brands and almost a cult like following. Ballmer might as well buy and iPod and use Google to experience why these two products rock. Ballmer, get out of your castle.

DLF planning a $2 billion IPO

2006-03-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

DLF is one of India's major real estate developers. They are known for converting a rusty town called Gurgaon into a modern township. Now they are planning an IPO of $2 billion. Yeah, you read it right - $2 Billion. Check out the complete story on the DLF IPO.

Fa Piao

2006-03-26T20:23:00.000-08:00

Fa Paio is a receipt that you get when you purchase something or avail a service in China. You can ask for a Fa Paio for pretty much anything - whether you take a cab, eat out in a restaurant, do grocery shopping etc. It is different from the bill they hand out at the end of a transaction. The bill is issued by the establishment, while the Fa Paio is more like a government issued receipt. So you got to ask for it. It is issued in currency like denominations.

The Fa Paio is used by the Chinese government to track down the transactions and make business owners pay the taxes. Now the ingenious idea here is that each Fa Paio has a stratch lottery on it. You scratch off the covering thing and you might win a lottery. This incentivises people to ask for a "Fa Paio" at the end of a tranasaction. Smart, isnt it? In a place where cash is the king, its a great way to keep track of transactions by the government.

Wouldnt it be nice to have such a system in place in India?

Por fin viernes

2006-03-24T00:22:00.000-08:00

aka "Its finally friday".

Nuclear style

2006-03-23T01:41:00.000-08:00

Bush-style "nucular," the American-mode "noo-clear," the Punjabi istyle "new-kilier," and the Malayalee zstyle "noog-lear."

from here

Popularity of Bollywood songs

2006-03-22T16:54:00.000-08:00

One of my colleagues has a Saathiya title song based ringtone. No big deal, except for the fact that this is in China and my colleague is, as you would've guessed by now, Chinese.

She had no idea that this was a Bollywood movie song. She said that she just liked the music. Then another guy in the office showed me his collection of video clips of Bollywood songs. He had Veer Zara, Mohabbatein and a few others on his PC. Totally unbelievable. Even when I went to the Zhongguancun marketplace to buy a laptop, they were playing an oldie Bollywood song.

When I was in Seattle, I used to regularly lend cassette tapes to the parking lot attendant. He was from Ethopia and was a big fan of Bollywood music. Infact he said that back home he had a huge collection of hindi songs.

Although these are just a couple of examples, I am sure there are other (non-indian) people that like Bollywood grooves. There is no good enough place on the web, from where I can purchase Bollywood songs for, lets say, 99 cents. Ofcourse, apart from Bollywood music, India also produces a ton of other music - Ghazals, Bhajans, Indian bands etc. There is an opportunity here.

There are tens of underground sites where people can download hindi songs. Why not make it a legit business? Why not come up with a simplistic interface and just cater to the I-love-bollywood audience? Now that a lot of foreign music houses (like Vivendi, Universal, Sony) are entering India, wouldnt it be easier for Steve Jobs to cut a deal with them for Indian songs as well?

Padma Bhushan Shri A. K. Hangal

2006-03-21T01:58:00.000-08:00

If you know me personally, you know my love for the A. K. Hangal. Ever since I started wathing movies, A. K. Hangal has always played the role of an old guy. He is the perennial oldie goldie of Hindi films. He was played an old guy in Abhimaan (1973), he played an old guy in Paheli (2005).

Here he is in receving the Padma Bhushan award from Indian president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. He looks cute, na?

Network is the computer

2006-03-20T08:08:00.000-08:00

Check out this post by Jonathan Schwartz the COO of Sun Microsystems. He talks about the computing grid that Sun in building and how it is going to simplify the life of CIOs.

Though, I am not sure whether Sun will be able to strike gold or not, I do love the vision. Making a generic computing grid is a huge challenge. There are all sorts of computing grids. When you use Google to search for something, you are tapping into Google's grid. When you participate in an auction on Ebay, you are tapping into Ebay's grid. But to make the grid generic enough, such that it can be accessed by anyone for any need, it very difficult.

If they make it simple and compelling enough, they will surely strike gold.