Classified calamity

Small ads are flooding away from newspapers and onto the internet

Search advertising—the small text-ads that appear alongside Google and Yahoo! searches—account for 40% of the online ad market. Another 20% goes to display ads and 18% to classified advertising. But search advertising can also work like a small ad and will increasingly challenge print classifieds as websites develop localised and more elaborate services for online users.

Perhaps the most significant development came on November 16th, when Google started up a prototype service called Google Base. It offers a searchable database of free listings, including small ads which can be narrowed down to postal regions. Among its first offerings were used cars. In time, Google could challenge eBay, whose own auction listings now work much like a giant classified website—especially with its “buy-it-now” options. But eBay charges sellers. Even so, it sold more than 450m items in the three months to September 30th, for almost $11 billion.

22 Qualities that business schools look for..

Business week has an excellent article listing 22 qualities that the business schools look for in a potential candidate. The qualities are:


1. Intellectual ability: A candidate who is smart and easily able to handle the demands of the schoolwork and, ultimately, the business world.
2. Quantitative orientation: A candidate who can "do" numbers.
Analytical mindset: A candidate who is able to think critically and tolerate complex, open-ended problems.
3. Success record: A candidate with a proven run of success.
4. Maturity and professionalism: A candidate who looks, talks and acts like a grown-up.
5. Leadership: A candidate who has created value by being at the helm in group-based activities and is comfortable in this role.
6. Ambition and motivation: A candidate who is aiming for big things and planning to play in the senior leagues.
7. Career potential: A candidate who has what it takes to go to the top.
8. Perseverance and mental toughness: A candidate with evidence of the gritty staying power and self-reliance needed to overcome adversity.
9. A strong, extrovert personality: A candidate who likes people and who is professionally (if not naturally) gregarious.
10. Active orientation: A candidate with a bias to action and getting things done
11. The killer instinct: A candidate who is not afraid of winning and seeing others lose.
12. Personal integrity: A candidate with good interpersonal values and morals
13. Community orientation: A candidate who demonstrates responsibility to community, society, and the environment, and who has an integrated, sustainable view of the role of companies in the world.
14. Team player: A candidate who works well with others and who operates smoothly and constructively in collaborative situations.
15. Diversity contribution: A candidate who brings interesting attributes, experiences, and depth of background to the group.
16. Intercultural experience and tolerance: A candidate who has demonstrated a tolerance for diversity in people and cultures.
17. Creativity and innovation: A candidate who is comfortable with change and ready to use it creatively.
18. Communication ability: A candidate who can write, speak and organize ideas well.
19. All-rounder: A candidate who is more than a suit, and who has an array of interests and passions in other things.
20. Recruitability
21. Likeability: A candidate who people enjoy having around. All else being equal, people always choose people they like as colleagues and co-workers

Three phases in the Indian ITES industry.

There are three distinct phases in the Indian ITES industry.

The first phase had those players that started captive units, such as GE and Citigroup in the mid-1990s. This phase lasted for three-four years when the idea of third party was born and we saw the advent of the Spectramind, CustomerAssets and Msources of the world. We also saw VC-funded companies and niche companies entering the BPO space and, of course, there were the big daddies of IT such as TCS, Infosys and Satyam, who started Intelenet, Progeon and Nipuna, respectively, around the same time.

In the third phase, we are seeing these third-party players moving back to a captive set-up ... look at Eserve, Intelenet. We also are seeing global banks, automobile majors and insurance companies setting up their captive shops here in India, such as ABN AMRO, HSBC, General Motors, Aviva, etc.

The BPO industry has evolved though these various stages but now as these BPO players move up the value chain and execute more specialised functions, we will see the transformation from BPO to KPO (business process outsourcing to knowledge process outsourcing).

Both the industries are complementary to each other. In fact, many BPOs are repositioning themselves as KPO units. Only time will tell how much the media projects KPO as the next big thing.

Break through..

Derek Jones writes about the difference between successful person and an unsuccessful person ...

Have you noticed that the line between a successful person and an unsuccessful person is often just wafer thin. People who are unsuccessful are not necessarily irresponsible, lazy or lacking in character. Many are enthusiastic, hardworking and sincere and they appear to be very much like those who achieve remarkable things. So what's going on?..............

Quotes Worth Reflecting - Bertrand Russell

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge"
.What I believe

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness"

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. "
.A History of Western Philosophy

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. "
.Autobiography

"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. "
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization

"As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. "
.An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. "
.Unpopular Essays, Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

I like the way you are thinking...

Little Johnny was sitting in class doing math problems when his teacherpicked him to answer a question.
"Johnny, if there were five birds sitting on a fence and you shot one withyour gun, how many would be left?"
"None.", replied Johnny. "'cause the rest would fly away.""Well, the answer is four," said the teacher.
"But I like the way you arethinking."
Little Johnny said, "I have a question for you now. If there were three women eating ice cream cones in a shop, one licking her cone, the secondbiting her cone, and the third one sucking her cone, which one is married?
Well," said the teacher nervously, "I guess the one sucking the cone?"
"No," said Little Johnny, "the one with the wedding ring on her finger.But I like the way you are thinking.

The Teacher Fainted...

Style over Talent...

Player Discrimination is getting rampant in india,it will hinder the growth of talented and quality players.

Sania mania rules over grandmaster Koneru Humpy,excelling in a non-spectator sport, world no.6, and our very own Bengali lad, 25-year-old Ritwik Bhattacharya who is world number 62 in a similar game and that's squash and also Rohini Rau , clinched her maiden national sailing women’s title recently at Hyderabad .

Raging Bullishness

Indian Express has an article regarding the Raging Bullishness in BSE


Now that the Sensex had crossed 8,000, the perennially optimistic are eyeing 10,000. But if the Sensex were to comprise of 300 penny stocks instead of 30 blue chips, it would probably have soared well beyond the 16,000 that was recently predicted by a regulator........

Circular trading

A group of Delhi-based investors have written several letters to the Sebi chairman pointing to four specific stocks that are being manipulated by generating huge volumes. This is done by simultaneously buying and selling large quantities of shares from different terminals to create the impression of huge investor interest and enormous liquidity. Market sources say that manipulators usually ensure that the terminals are often located at different cities to create the impression of wide-spread investor interest. ..

Kitabkhana

Kitabkhana

Rare Images..

Exemplary Leaders

Tim Berners Lee -- Founder of the World Wide Web

Picture taken when Microsoft was started

Steve Woznaik(sitting) and Steve Jobs of APPLE Computers.He was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn't get any better name for his new company.So one day he told to the staff: "If I'll not get better name by 5 o'clcok today, our company's name will be anything he likes..."so at 5 o'clcok nobody comeup with better name, and he was eating APPLE that time...so he keep the name of the company 'Apple Computers'

Bill Hewlett(L) and Dave Packard(R) of HP. Behind them in the picture is the famous HP Garage. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.And the winner was NOT Bill... the winner was Dave.

Ken Thompson (L)and Dennis Ritchie(R) ,creators of UNIX.Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'.B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie)He later called it C.




Larry Page(L) and Sergey Brin(R), founders of Google.Google was originally named 'Googol'.After founders (Stanford graduates) Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor...they received a cheque made out to 'Google' !... So they kept name as GOOGLE


Gordon Moore(L) and Bob Noyce(R) ,founders of Intel.Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce'.But that was already trademarked by a hotel chain...So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics... INTEL




Andreas Bechtolsheim , Bill Joy, Scott Mc Nealy and Vinod Khosla of SUN(StanfordUniversity Network) MicroSystems.Founded by four StanfordUniversity buddies.Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him;Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it;and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer...SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.



Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his OS.Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix).He thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to name it Freax (free + freak + x). His friend Ari Lemmk encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded.Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax. Linus like that directory name and he kept the name of his new OS to LINUX...


Picture taken when INFY was started. This picture was found in the album of the clerk who took this picture...

Chinese, Americans Truly See Differently

Chinese, Americans Truly See Differently, Study Says

Chinese and Americans literally view the world differently, according to a new study, which found that the two groups tend to move their eyes in distinctly different patterns when looking at pictures.

National Geographic News, has an interesting article about the study,

"Westerners tend to be analytical and pay more attention to the key, or focal, objects in a scene—for example, concentrating on the woman in the "Mona Lisa," as opposed to the rocks and sky behind her.

East Asians, by contrast, tend to look at the whole picture and rely on contextual information when making decisions and judgments about what they see, said Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.."

[.....]

"Americans are looking at the focal object more quickly and spend more time looking at it," he said. "The Chinese have more saccades [jerky eye movements]. They move their eyes more, especially back and forth between the object and the [background] field."

[....]

Nisbett and his colleagues believe that this distinctive pattern has developed because of the philosophies of these two cultures. "Harmony is a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis on how things relate to the whole," says Nisbett. "In the West, by contrast, life is about achieving goals."

[....]

"Westerners are taught to pay attention to objects that are important to them, to have goals that they can follow," he said. "East Asians are more likely to pay attention to the social field. ..."

[.....]

Nisbett traces the origins of the variation to at least 2,500 years ago. At that time collaborative, large-scale agriculture was the primary driver of the East Asian economy. For most workers, economic survival required paying attention to the person in charge as well as co-workers in the fields. Context was important.

By contrast, ancient Greek society—the prototypical Western society—was characterized by individualistic activities, such as hunting, fishing, and small-scale farming.

Google, the ultimate deflator..

Post by Robert Young

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. At this stage, I think it should be more along the lines of Honda’s original mission statement, which was, “five Honda’s in every garage” (e.g. car, motorcycle, lawnmower, etc.). I say that because it certainly seems, with every new Google service that comes to market, my garage… er, desktop, is filling up with their stuff! So, what is Google’s master plan? These days, that’s the big question everyone seems to be asking (it used to be: “What’s the next killer app?”). Just to add more fuel to the fire, I’ll speculate alongside the rest of you. But before I provide my answer to the big question, allow me to digress a little to provide some background and perspective.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that Google’s success has largely been based on their ability to be highly counterintuitive. For instance, they started a search engine when everyone thought that game was over. They started to place ads in search results when everyone thought it was highly controversial. They introduced simple text ads when everyone was developing rich media ads. They designed an ad engine to rank the placement of ads by their effectiveness (click-through-rate) when everyone else was placing ads based on the CPM rates they were able to sell. Their performance-based ad model enabled them to initially build their business on “mom-n-pop” small business advertisers (generating billions of dollars in revenues from the long tail) when everyone else was chasing after Fortune 1000 brand advertisers.

More recently, Google has introduced services that clearly indicate their desire to build a comprehensive “platform,” one that challenges Microsoft’s dominance in this area head on (Gmail, Desktop Search, now GD2, and Google Talk). So what is Google’s master plan? I believe they are once again going counterintuitive, but in a manner that hits Microsoft where it hurts most. Google will make Microsoft’s entire strategic plan and mission, which revolves around the continued proliferation and dominance of the desktop PC operating system, obsolete by making Google itself the operating system. The model they are pursuing is very similar to Sun Microsystems’ (Jonathan Schwartz’s) vision of turning computing into a utility, like electricity. The only difference is that Google is already almost there.

To some extent, Google is bringing back the architecture of the mainframe to render Microsoft obsolete. In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that “plug-in” to Google’s massive server grid and application services. With the increasing price/performance of CPUs, memory, bandwidth, and storage, Google’s strategic edge will be based on their advantageous cost of processing bits. And as long as users are comfortable sharing their private data and behavior with Google, all services will remain free (and supported by advertising).

It’s not too difficult for me to imagine a day, very soon, when I rely on Google for almost all my computing needs and I buy hardware devices based on such criteria. That’s the day Google will have become my operating system. We all know that the internet has a deflationary effect on the assets of every industry it touches, whether it be printing & publishing, media & entertainment, telephony, etc. If what I pose above is indeed true, Google is using the internet to systematically devalue Microsoft’s assets. Perhaps there will be a day on Wall Street sometime in the future that’ll be known as “Microsoft’s Black Monday.”
In Random

Technology Levels the Business Playing Field

Hal R. Varian writes,

"When we think about the economic impact of information technology, the first companies to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo. But the biggest impact on the economy may well show up in small and medium-size enterprises."

[.....]

"Even the success of the big Internet companies rests, in large part, on the fact that they provide advertising and sales platforms for small enterprises. EBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo all make it possible for small businesses to reach national, and even global, markets, that were previously inaccessible."

[.....]

"The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago."

Another TITANIC is Ready( World's Largest ship !!!)

Queen Mary 2, the world's largest, longest, tallest and widest passenger ship ever conceived is ready to sail.
QM2 was built in the Alstom Chantiers de L'Atlantique shipyard in Sainte-Nazaire, France at a total estimated cost of $780 million USD.

So, she is the most expensive ship ever built.

On January 31, 2004, its maiden 14-Day Voyage started from Southampton and will reach Fort Lauderdale via Funchal, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas, Bridgetown and Charlotte Amalie.



Length: 345 meters / 1132 feet

Gross Registered Tonnage: Approximately 150,000 gross tons

Passengers: 2620

Crew: 1253

Top Speed: Approximately 30 knots (34.5 mph)

Power: 157,000 horsepower, Environmentally friendly, gas turbine/diesel electric plant

Strength: Extra thick steel hull for strength and stability for Transatlantic Crossings.

Cost to built: $800 million dollars approximately


Charge details:

- 12 Nights Cruises from $2,449
- 10 Nights Cruises from $1,689

Some comparisons:

QM2 is 147 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower ( 984 ft.)

QM2 is more than 3 ½ times as long as Westminster Tower (Big Ben) (310 ft.)

QM2 is only 117 feet shorter than the Empire State Building (1248 ft.)

QM2 is more than three times as long as St. Paul 's Cathedral (366 ft.)

QM2 is as long as 36 double-decker London buses (31 ½ ft. each)

QM2's whistle will be audible for 10 miles.












A magnificent Spa will include one of the ship's five swimming pools, and together with the adjacent Winter Garden, will provide a health, fitness and relaxation area of over 25,000 square feet.

Numerous smaller lounges, alternative dining venues and specialized rooms will also welcome travelers during the crossings.

Amazing Liger..

The 10ft Liger who's still growing...

He looks like something from a prehistoric age or a fantastic creation from Hollywood.

But Hercules is very much living flesh and blood - as he proves every time he opens his gigantic mouth to roar.

Part lion, part tiger, he is not just a big cat but a huge one, standing 10ft tall on his back legs.

Called a liger, in reference to his crossbreed parentage, he is the largest of all the cat species.

On a typical day he will devour 20lb of meat, usually beef or chicken, and is capable of eating 100lb at a single setting.

At just three years old, Hercules already weighs half a ton


He is the accidental result of two enormous big cats living close together at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species, in Miami, Florida, and already dwarfs both his parents.

"Ligers are not something we planned on having," said institute owner Dr Bhagavan Antle.

"We have lions and tigers living together in large enclosures and at first we had no idea how well one of the lion boys was getting along with a tiger girl, then loo and behold we had a liger."



50mph runner... Not only that, but he likes to swim, a feat unheard of among water-fearing lions.

In the wild it is virtually impossible for lions and tigers to mate.

Not only are they enemies likely to kill one another, but most lions are in Africa and most tigers in Asia.

But incredible though he is, Hercules is not unique.

Ligers have been bred in captivity, deliberately and accidentally, since shortly before World War II.



Today there are believed to be a handful of ligers around the world and a similar number of tigons, the product of a tiger father and lion mother.

Tigons are smaller than ligers and take on more physical characteristics of the tiger.



Look at the size of the head on this thing..

10 yrs of yakking, SMSing, MMSing

Mobile service in the country just turned 10 on Monday — and the child is healthier than ever.

[....]

In those days mobile handsets, with a limited choice, cost at least Rs 45,000 and a minute of talking left you poorer by Rs 16.80. Rentals ranged between Rs 400 and Rs 600 per month.,,,,
[....]

The mobile story saw two turning points: introduction of revenue sharing between operators and the government in August 1999 and the advent of free incoming (calling party pays) in July 2003

India Enters the Top 10..

An article from indianeconomy.org

The World Bank has recently updated its development indicators. Among the indicators updated are the GDP figures and the per-capita figures. According to the updated numbers, India’s $691 billion economy has just overtaken South Korea to become the 10th largest economy in the world (and the 3rd largest in Asia). China has moved into 7th place now with its $1.6 trillion economy. India’s share of the world economy has gone up to about 1.7%, while China’s has gone up to about 4%. The U.S. still dominates the world economy with a 29% share. A look at the top 10 also reveals why the G8 is an anachronism. Russia is not in there. China will probably overtake Italy in the next couple of months. Spain has a larger economy than Canada. And India ought to enter the top 8 in the next couple of years. Among developing countries, Mexico, Russia, Brazil and Turkey also feature in the top 20.

Best SMS of the Year:

How amazing!! - A mother makes her son "INTELLIGENT" in 20 years, but a
girl makes him "STUPID" in 2 mins.

Second Best:

Arguing with a girl is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. After some
time, u realize that u r getting dirty, but the pig is actually
enjoying.


Third Best SMS:

Boys go to college to develop the mind; girls go to college to catch
them before this happens.

‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ syndrome

R Ramaraj, CEO of Sify has written an excellent article in today’s Financial Express.

"Do you jump out of bed with great enthusiasm on a Monday morning? Monday morning! Must be kidding, right? Why is it almost a given thing that work is the last thing someone wants to do? We hear words like repetition, boredom and stress as an inherent part of working, instead of challenged, invigorated and productive."


"In the past, people took up a profession according to their aptitudes. One became a baker, carpenter, trader or ironsmith, based on aptitude, training and skill. Today, we tend to ignore our aptitudes and, instead, focus on academic qualifications. I believe that this has led to stress, unhappiness and the ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ syndrome."

"But the truth is, you must enjoy what you do to look forward to going to work. For that to happen, choose something that enables you to use your natural talents and aptitudes, in addition to academic qualifications. Only then will there be a passion in you for what you do."

Wanning Galaxy of Author's in India

The Guardian presents an excellent article about the gradual decrease of indian writers...

" Seven years ago, publishers descended on Delhi in search of the next Arundhati Roy. But, writes William Dalrymple, the future Anglophone Indian bestsellers are more likely to come from the west ..."

"Arundhati Roy could not have happened without VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth: in particular Rushdie's 1981 masterpiece Midnight's Children liberated Indian writing in English from its colonial straitjacket. It also gave birth to a new voice, one that was exuberantly magical, cosmopolitan and multicultural, full of unexpected cadences, as well as forms that were new to the English novel but deeply rooted in Indian traditions of storytelling. It won the Booker, as did Nai-paul's Bend in the River. Then, in 1993, Seth produced his massive - and magnificent - A Suitable Boy. Rushdie's prediction that "Indians were in a position to conquer English literature" seemed about to be vindicated."

[....]

Roy fingered what is without doubt the strangest aspect of the renaissance of Indian writing in English: the extraordinary degree to which, at least at its highest levels, it is now almost entirely written by the diaspora. As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction. It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog.

[....]

Nevertheless, the sheer scale of this diaspora of India does remain an odd phenomenon. From the 1890s through to the 1930s, most English-speaking readers received their notions of India through the mediation of British-based writers such as Rudyard Kipling or EM Forster. That briefly changed between the 1940s and 1970s with the rise of Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali and RK Narayan, deeply rooted writers who really lived and breathed the air of the India they wrote about. But by the 1980s, London again became the place of mediation with the rise of Rushdie and his ilk - except that New York (the residence of Ghosh, Gita Mehta and Lahiri), Toronto (Mistry and Michael Ondaatje) and even rural Wiltshire (home to Naipaul and Seth) now had to be added to the major centres of Indian writing in English.

[....]

As for the future, there is at least a lot of writing going on. The Indian superstars of the 80s and 90s - the Rushdies, the Ghoshs, the Seths and Chandras, the Mistrys - are still in their 40s or 50s and presumably have at least another 20 years of great books in them. Most are still at the height of their powers, and developing in a fascinating way: look at the spectacular way Ghosh's work has grown and matured since The Circle of Reason. Most still visit India very frequently, still think of themselves as Indian (or at least as hyphenated Indians: Indian-Americans, British-Indians and so on), and some may even move back here when they come to give up their day jobs - in contrast to previous generations of emigrants who usually left India for good.

Same scene different seasons