@rgumental @dvisor

Robert Shiller, one of the winners of Economics Nobel 2013 defines speculative bubbles as  “a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increase.” This attracts “a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of the investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others’ successes and partly through a gambler’s excitement.” Few years back, from about year 2000 onwards, this trend has been in focus in Kerala. Practically nowhere in the state, you can buy small plots of land at less than a lakh INR per cent. Aided by the easy availability of credit, people have been gobbling up land, villas & flats in every nook and corner.  Lot of people, especially middle class have been clinging on to the moto " Real Estate prices never go down " or " As long as there is black money, real es...

I met an acquaintance of mine a few days back. Usually that person's facebook updates don't come in my news stream. However, couple of inconsequential updates on FB over the last few days from that person ( not 'liked' by anyone, not the most recent one in my stream ) has appeared prominently in my news stream.  How could facebook give prominence to such an activity in my stream ? My conjencture is that facebook may be doing a location matching . My phone is always connected to net..And, facebook app may have been on as well. I'm supposing that may be true for this particular person as well. So, FB may be doing a location based hypothesis that we have met , and based on that, highlighting the updates more prominently..  Interesting, but kind of creepy. After seeing this interesting Ted Talk (  http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html  ) sometime back, I think we are nearing an age where science fiction  & fantasy in some dimensi...

Advertisements are a great way to sense the economy and industry.. Couple of years back telecom advertisements were all about coverage, sms cost, call cost etc. All the players were competing on call plans, coverage ( remember the vodafone pug ads? ).. Today, it is moving slowly into parameters like trust ( Idea ads )..  The industry matured in such a way that it was pointless to compete more on call or data prices or network coverage. These were taken as granted.  Someone had to breakoff from the usual mode of competition into something else. Airtel tried it first, Idea followed ( what an idea sirjee - i think this was actually a wasteful campaign which did not reinforce or bring about anything new ).. Idea seems to have got its act correctly in the second wave of ads focussed on Trust. And, by far, it has been doing good financially as well Another sector that is slowly getting into this mode of competing on something intangible is banking. Ads in banking were mostly ab...

Stephen Elop has been compared with Trojan Horse by the Finnish media for his fire-sale of Nokia to Microsoft..I think that has been a euphimism. The first character that comes to my mind when I think about this last Nokia CEO is Gordon Gekko - the incomparable wall-street icon of evil immortalized by Michael Douglas.. After having done a sale and leaseback of Nokia HQ ( a classic Gekko storyline, if I remember correctly), Elop was left with no other option but to sell it off . To be fair with Elop, i think he lost the plot initially itself when he linked Nokia with windows OS .. That deal was perhaps the most one-sided deal ( favouring Microsoft ) coming from a company that was still in a dominant position in mobile world.. Elop has the unique distinction of taking down Nokia share price by about 65%. When I think about Ballmer, the departing CEO of Microsoft, I can't think of any better example than the following Dilbert cartoon strip ==>   http://www.cloudave.com/877/d...

There is this interesting case thats going on in US now. It started as US Govt vs Apple . It is now more and more looking like Apple vs Amazon . The key underlying point highlighted by US govt is that Apple forced a change in pricing policy of ebooks which resulted in an increase of prices across the industry. Circa 2009 December , Amazon ruled the roost in ebook industry with a market share of about 90% - monopolistic by any standards. They had a peculiar pricing policy at that time. Regardless of the book, you would end up paying $9.99 as the price. From Amazon's perspective, it was a clear ploy to capture the market. Obviously, publishers did not like a distributor setting the pricing policy. In other words, it was an unstable monopoly. And such markets are ripe for disruptive innovations. Enter Steve Jobs with iPad , the wonderful product that has kept me hooked on ever after that. One of the lesser noticed things that Apple did at that time was to enter into a different ...

To the vast Indian middle class who are always cribbing about the problems of Government , corruption, and much more, if there is a simple service that you can do the nation, just sell your gold.. Why ? Because one of the aspects that you are consistently lamenting is the inflation. And a huge contribution to that is the falling value of rupee which makes the imports costlier, especially fuel, which has a multiplier effect on prices of most consumer goods..One of the most important contributors on rupee fall is our current account deficit ( in simple words, we import more than the export ) .  And one of the main contributors to this is the ever increasing gold imports for domestic consumption.  If you sell your gold, atleast the supply in local market will increase and should bring down the pressure on rupee. The savvy marketers over the last few years have found a way to tap into the Indian attraction towards the yellow metal by this non-sense called Akshay...