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"This company has the best shot at getting a $10 billion valuation in 3 years .. Thats why I moved over there.. I want to retire when I'm 30 man..".. Remarked a 20 something year old guy, who was walking behind me with a group of friends during a a windy & chilly night in Silicon Valley. That was a prelude to what I was to hear and experience in the next six days in a place which is the epicentre of technology revolution thats sweeping the world. From health care startups working in cutting edge molecular & genetic level analysis to IoT companies working in precision irrigation based on atmospheric parameters, this visit to Silicon Valley really broadened my horizons. Clusters of companies doing advanced work in many fields,  sky-high salaries and stock options, real estate & apartment prices that most people cannot afford,  the way this place has metamorphosed over the last 30 years or so means that chasing wealth is not an optionality but rather a com...

 I'm a great fan of Carrefour Loyalty programs scheme here in UAE. I think Indian retailers ought to learn a thing or two from the way they have designed it, purely from a perspective of maximizing long term profit .. I haven't seen anything close-by to the way this operates - may be its there in the developed markets of West. Carrefour operates this loyalty points scheme - for every purchase, you accumulate varying number of points depending on the items that you buy. Once you reach 500 points, you get a 50 AED voucher.  There are two kinds of underlying point boosting schemes -  on certain days there are things like extra points / double points thats available to anyone who buys certain products  . These are presumably linked to Inventory clearing items.  So, sometimes, you get extra points for buying washing liquid , sometimes for biscuits etc.  Why I feel this is linked to inventory clearing  -  These items are usually set at the start of t...

To Hedge or Not to Hedge - That's the billion dollar question puzzling everyone from industry heads to govt policy makers in the wake of crude oil collapse . Before even attempting to answer that, it may be prudent to to look at the way indices work - and the economics behind it. What should a market index reflect ?  It should be a consistent & fair representation of the underlying supply & demand. Is that the case behind petro price indices ? Lets look at a few data points first. Globally, there are two main crude indices  - Brent & WTI . Brent crude index is computed as a mathematical function of spot & future prices of North Sea oil ( Click for details ) . Similarly, WTI or West Texas Intermediate is function of primary crude contracts settled in Cushing, Oklahoma . Both have different Sulphur content, density etc - which means there are different costs to refiners, though the end - market - Consumers is largely the same For most part of the last 5...

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...

How much is the rupee going to depreciate ? That's a question which the expatriate community keeps asking to every Tom Dick & Harry. The intention is to lock in on the most favorable exchange rate (i.e, highest depreciation ). Similarly when I visited India recently, some of the discussions often veered towards concerns on depreciating rupee as it is increasing the fuel cost.  Now, predicting the level is like a lottery. I'm not going to do that. The level, hinges on a lot of policy decisions by Govt, RBI & even the European Central Bank. Instead I want to write on a set of common misconceptions prevalent in Indian media about this phenomenon 1) Why cannot RBI sell dollars & pop up rupee ?  RBI cannot and should not try intervening in forex market beyond a level. The volume of INR currency market is supposed to be about $40 - $50 billion a day . Now, to seriously make an impact on the exchange rate, RBI will have to release about $10 billion a day ( i.e, bare...

Dear Nokia Share Holders, Over the last few days, you would have read & re-read the so-called open-letters ( letter 1 , letter 2 , & the revolting letter -3 ) many times.. If you were an institutional investor, you would have made handsome profits by shorting your dear 'NOK' if you knew what was coming. If you were a retail long term investor you would have been puzzled with the enduring hold/sell question seeing the wild market fluctuations that were coming minutes after each of those letters. One cannot collectively put blame on all share-holders for the mis-management happening. If your holding is/was small, you would have had absolutely no chance in influencing the decision to pick someone   - who has literally no big background in smart phone business - into the most important position in your dear 'NOK' . However, I cannot selectively address the audience. Hence I've to hold you responsible. What your CEO has done is to make your dear 'NO...

While I was studying engineering, there was a huge fan-following towards this Open-Source / Open Standards in technology.. I guess thats still there.. Microsoft is/was seen as the villain.. Linux was the holy grail of computer science folks.. 6-8 years have passed by after that .. Now, the villain is Apple , with its tightly controlled iOs,Appstore ecosystem.. And the perceived open-angel is Google with its Android ecosystem. Steve Jobs in his various interviews and talks insists a profound point about this open-ness. "Ultimately customers are not bothered about whether the product is open or not..They are bothered about the experience with the product"... There is this nice NYTimes article that I came across recently.. They are comparing the Mac-Windows phase with iPhone-Android 'battle' now. In the quest for perfection in experience, Apple has largely kept a close-knit system. In the quest for economies of scale, Android has taken a lot of manufacturers into it...

     When someone makes a very flashy statement , it quickly catches the imagination of the public..News sites repeat it again and again because of its sensationalist value..If you read in general about the global financial industry, this statement wouldn't have missed you last week -  " When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else's house and then committing  arson ".. A very catchy statement made as an accusation against Goldman Sachs recently..However if you dig a bit deep into this extremely interesting case, you would find that this statement is metaphorically wrong to be used in this context. At the heart of this entire quagmire is this structured financial product called 'Synthetic CDO's' .It actually seems to be like a gambling instrument.Player A thinks that a particular market ( in this case the housing mortgage market ) will tank. He thinks that he can profit out of...

    About an year back, I blogged about Google Phone .. Quite a few developments have happened in this area after that..And a few days before, Google came up with its first Android based phone  , manufactured by HTC..        Quite a few of the applications in this G-phone or G1 happens to be similar to what I thought about last year.. quoting Larry Magid's article, " there is already an application called iSkoop that lets you make free or inexpensive international and domestic calls using Skype".. -- This is a key point to Google's overall strategy..10  years later ( or maybe even before that ),  G-phone will be a device just to connect to internet..No SIM card as such..U'll talk to people using G-talk ..Just take the g-talk in your phone, tap the person's user ID, and make a call.. No complicated maths like STD/ISD rates or anything like that..Infact, the much hyped about number portability will come into existance this way..i.e, as long as u have ur gmail ID...

Sponsored Review : Online Casino Blue Book Have you ever wondered why people are addicted to gambling ? When you see James Bond movies like Casino Royale , where people splurge cash like anything , have you wondered whether this level of a gambling really happens ? The answer is a resounding yes... And the site that I'm reviewing has got lot to do with being a gateway to online gambling :) Best things that I liked about this site 1. The simple game explanations.. Baccarat , black jack , poker ..and so on -- When Daniel Craig won Poker in Casino Royale, how many of us truly understood that game ? Hunting for online tutorials is a pain..These people have a nice intro to all those popular casino games.. No matter what people say, I love learning card games .. And whenever I get some free time, I'm going to learn these things.. 2. Online Casino Links -- I don't have money or credit to gamble.. Hence I cannot test those..But they have a seemingl...

I knew my blog is reasonably popular..But I didnt know that its popular enough for web-masters to get their site reviewed through my blog..Sometime ago I signed up in ReviewMe! , partly out of curiosity , partly because I had some free time.. Yesterday, someone placed an offer through ReviewMe!, to review their site through my blog..And the promised amount is 20$ .. ( which is almost equivalent to 800/- Rs ) .. Just curious about this particular site..Has anyone tried ReviewMe! before ? And do they pay as they promise ? Their payment terms promise that once the total amount that they owe us crosses 25$, they will pay..Now for thats just completing this review and scouting for another review through their site...But still skeptical about their payouts..Anybody had any prior experience with this ? Please comment here or mail me if you had any experience with ReviewMe! . Anyway I'm giving a shot..Will be putting up the site review soon.. Ajith

Caution :- Heavy technology – business related article.. Quite long too.. People who are not interested, please skip .. This is an article which can bring brickbats or bouquets to me some time later :) Over the last few months, blogosphere has been abuzz with news about a mobile phone that Google is about to launch. The frenzy over this so called G-phone has reached such proportions that people have started coming out with imaginary designs of the G-phone.. Being someone who is extremely interested in this search – revenue related Google business or rather g-business, I’ve too joined the group by launching a g-phone blog and hoping to rake in some ad-revenues :) .. However, this post is not just about speculation ..This post is about some facts of the search industry and why does it make sense for Google to get into mobile phone related business . The Search – Revenue Entangle Some people laugh at Google’s pay-per-click policy. And most of us can count usin...