Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

Tweet

I happened to attend TedxGateway at NCPA, Nariman Point at Mumbai today. Thanks to Bloomberg for sponsoring my corporate ticket. Overall a fantastic experience with some awesome and inspiring speakers. Here are key take aways:

1. TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading." TED started granting licenses to third parties to organize independent TED-like events internationally. At these TEDx events are prohibited from making profit, although sometimes a fee ($100 max.) can be charged to cover running costs. The licences are free but franchisees are vetted by TED and events are subject to conditions. Speakers are not paid and they must agree to give TED the right to edit and distribute their presentation under a Creative Commons licence.

So, there came about TedxGateway at Mumbai.

Source: Wikipedia

2. Event saw 22 speakers from India and abroad, all with brilliant ideas worth sharing. Most of them being inspiring and top notch speakers. Worth mentioning few:

Mittal Patel:
She runs an NGO called VSSM in Gujarat which works for nomadic communities who are not even registered under census in India and leading unrecognized life. Tradition there is to enter prostitution for girls to earn family income. They can not even own land. Mittal came into act and got few girls married along with getting 20000 official voter id cards for the community.

Cynthia Koenig:
Imagine millions of rural women going several kms to get water for their household. They typically get water by carrying utensil on top of their heads, it is such a painful and time consuming process. Cynthia's organization has decided to made it a history with wello as shown below. She has made the process simple by pulling a wheel in which enough water can be carried. The device is only 750-1000 INR.


Arunachala M.M:
Arunachala is from a poor background in the South of India where he found that women do not have access to hygienic sanitary pads. Recognizing the problem, he created the world's first low-cost machine to produce sanitary towels. This social entrepreneur sells the £1,600 machines directly to rural women through the support of bank loans and not-for-profit organisations. A machine operator can learn the entire towel-making process in three hours and then employ three others to help with processing and distribution.

There were many more speakers but these three touched the hearts and souls of everyone.

3. Overall the event was a huge hit. Though due to inexperienced team it was slightly mis managed, started 45 minutes late, no network coverage, no wifi to tweet, no pads/agenda fliers even for corporate attendees but I am sure they will learn and make 2013 events even better.

Tweet

He counted numbers of political posters up on Mumbai streets while driving to work. In 1.9 kms of stretch, there were 106 posters!!! Now I tried to think who are putting up these posters and why:

1. Political Party workers : To gain political mileage
2. RWAs : To please political leaders and get their society cleaned up
3. Associations like Yuva Morcha : To enter into politics or showoff or become local group leader (good for nothing)

Implications:

1. Illegal hoardings as these are politically driven
2. Revenue loss for local municipal as lot of commercial ads could have been put. I happened to call an ad agency (name confidential) who told me:
Illegal ad rate: Rs. 5000 near signal of Andheri Naka per month (he said "sab setting ho jayegi", it means everything will be sorted with relevant authorities)
Legal ad rate: Rs. 10000 including for same site including undertable payment for clearance in few days
3. Lost cause: Nobody would be looking at them. Damn it, people are fed up.
4. City looks awful. It makes entire surronding look dull.

This is not only trend on Mumbai roads but across the country. I remember me and Paras were going to Ghaziabad, city in Uttar Pradesh adjacent to New Delhi and we came across poster of Ms. Mayavati on every single pole on streets.



What can be done:
1. Public awareness
2. Empowering local municipal to remove such hoardings and not to give up from political pressure
3. Mass rallies from people like us to destroy such posters
4. Ban people in politics whose illegal hoardings are up on streets

These are instances that make me feel that we are living in uneducated and unregulated society. Keep posting your comments on this issue.

Tweet

RailRadar, an application which gives you muscle to track Indian Railways trains in real time. It uses the Google Maps platform to deliver timings, location, station, routes and schedules of more than 6,500 trains on a real time basis.

RailRadar has been developed by Centre for Railway Information System and uses a top level colour coding system to mark trains as blue and red. Blue arrows indicate trains running on time while red arrows are those which have been delayed. Users can use the + and – buttons to zoom in and zoom out of the map.

Clicking on an arrow will reveal train details and its route on the map. The details include the train’s number and name, last stop, station at which it will halt next and the train’s status as on-time or delayed in minutes. The real time status will generally be on a 5 minute delay.

Few observations:

1. Ease of use
2. Google Maps interface which looks familiar
3. Website loads quickly, no comparison with sucking IRCTC site
4. Most importantly, it gives loads of information like estimated arrival, halt duration, last stop, train status, exact location, timetables.

In nutshell, it is welcome step with right use of technology.

Tweet

Tweet

How many times we have came across the quote - "vo engineering kar raha hai". It means he is studying engineering. Literally, everyone is pursuing engineering in India it seems thanks to exponential growth in engineering colleges and IT companies recruiting in masses.

I tried to analyse how once a novel and rare profession has lost its sheen now. Here are my findings:

- Growth of "advertised" engineering institutes:

Institutes spun fantastic tales about multinational corporations falling over each other to recruit its students.  They rarely focus on  quality education and building skill set, grooming students. It is all about fancy hoardings and large ads in newspapers.

PurpleLeap, a Pearson and Educomp company, released the findings of its survey of 34,000 students from 198 engineering colleges across the country: only one out of ten graduates from Tier 2, 3 and 4 colleges is readily employable, and one-third are unemployable even after training.  

- IT Companies recruiting like cats and dogs:

IT companies, according to analysis done by Nasscom and Evaluserve, spend $1.2 billion every year on training. Had the engineering schools churning quality grads, this money would go straight to their bottom-line. Infosys's Mysore campus has trained 100000 fresh graduates so far, at a cost of $6000-7000 per employee.   That's a whopping $600-700 million knocked out of the company's profits over ten years.

Since companies are recruiting, thanks to some pathetic recruiting HR executives, students are getting paid easily. Starting salaries are over INR 350000 which is more than pocket money at young age of 20-21.

- Simple Economics: Demand & Supply:

There are 1.5 million engineering seats in India today, up from 500000 five years ago. This is way beyond the demand for engineers. Himanshu Aggarwal, the CEO and co-founder of Aspiring Minds, says that the IT sector absorbs around 200,000 engineers in a year, and the demand from the other sectors can't add up to more than that.

Fortunately or unfortunately, many of unemployed students get onto B schools which are again in plenty in India. Few join non engineering jobs and others continue family businesses as engineering degrees are good for marriage purpose.

- Return on Investment:

College perspective - An engineering college can cost more than INR 150 million and if my cash flows are correct (have accounted for capitation fees as well) then payback happens within 5 years.

Parents perspective - Student can payback within 2 years if he/she gets a job otherwise higher education is deemed as prestigious and is matter of social symbol. If nothing, he can do MBA for sure and then ROI calculations get further extended.

Student perspective - None, they don't have a perspective on ROI. They are running in mad race. 

Being an engineer, I understand these parameters and have been on receiving end. Hopefully, society will grow up and change engineering trend to something better.

Tweet

Reserve Bank of India kept key Repo and Reverse Repo unchanged today in its announcement. However, it decided to cut Cash Reserve Ratio by 25 basis points to 4.5% in its mid quarter review of the monetary policy on Monday. CRR is the minimum proportion of deposits that banks must hold with the central bank. The CRR reduction is expected to inject Rs 17,000 crore liquidity into the banking system.

Effects Analysis:

1. G-Sec Yield

Immediate - Indian Government Bond 8.15% 06/11/22 which is current 10 Yr Treasury note yields shot up after the annoucement.

Medium term: Yields can soften a bit on shorter end of the curve going forward.

2. The country's largest bank, State Bank of India has slashed interest rate on select retail loans including home and auto loans. Private sector banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank have reduced their deposit rates by upto 50 basis point.

3. The 25bps CRR cut would boost bank profitability by Rs2,000 crore, much higher than Rs75 cr cost reduction that a 25bps repo rate cut would have effected

Note: Screenshot is GIY screen of Bloomberg and data shown in it is property of Bloomberg L.P.

Tweet

Today, education institues have become money minting shops and marketing is done to lure candidates only to play with their future. Parents and students have limited choices as quality institutes like IITs, IIMs are limited and even government have diluted these prestiguos brands. I feel Amity University, IIPM and likes should focus on quality teaching and stop faking. If they produce good grads, no advertisement will be required.


Source Links:

Tweet

What is Indian Retail market shape?

Predominately, The Indian retail sector is unorganised. It consists of "kirana" stores or small stores in every corner of the road. They are typically managed by single owner or family members. These are pan shops, general stores, convenience stores and multi commodity vendors.

FDI in Retail Approval

Henry Ford, the genius inventor once famous said,"Don't find fault, find a remedy”. Is it the mantra followed by Congress, mind you not UPA as all parties are not together on FDI. India’s Cabinet unveiled plans to liberalize foreign direct investment in a broad range of sectors including multi-brand retail, a move that could allow foreign supermarkets into the country.

For many, this is seen as bold move from scam ridden government, indicating slowing economy might actually take Congress ultimate seat from New Delhi.

Different perspectives

Adi Godrej, president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, welcomed the move and said publicly government has “restarted the reform process.” He further added this is a major step in the right direction and “this will not only end a long standing uncertainty in policy making but also boost investors’.

R.V. Kanoria, the president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said  FDI in retail announcement “reflects the resolve of the government to usher in a retail revolution in the country and also signal to the investor community that India is committed to furthering reforms.” He said this move will infuse new technology and help improve supply-chain infrastructure.

Kishore Biyani, managing director of Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd ., the country’s biggest retailer by market capitalization and sales, said: “The opening up of the multi-brand sector to foreign direct investment will provide us opportunities to bring in foreign investors in various business like our home retail, electronic retail, food retail businesses.”

Leading consultancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers India, estimates that opening up the retail sector will lead to significant improvement of supply-chain infrastructure, which will help reduce food waste by 30% to 40%.

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, a spokesman for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, bashed Congress move by saying FDI will hurt small traders.  “We are in favor of reforms but such reforms will not help our troubled economy. Unfortunately the government is not sensitive to small businesses that will be adversely affected by this move. They seem to have rushed into this decision without much thought,” added Mr. Naqvi.

My view on FDI:

- Organized players will rope in huge investments which will help India in longer run as "kirana" shops can not put such massive investments.

- Significant improvement in supply chain infrastructure which will eliminate wastages and enhance operational efficiencies.

- It will create millions of jobs from front end to back end helping youth getting food at end of the day.

- Various middlemen will be made ridundent and hence farmers & end consumers would be happy.

- These organised relatiers are registered hence pay sales tax, income tax, octroi and other government duties which will boost government revenue (which can ulitised for India's growth if Congress alliances do not end up eating all of the money through corruption).

Tweet

After have downloading Office 2013 for many months, I finally installed and tested it. Though there are not many new changes, however following are worth mentioning.

Much-improved interface

Office 2013 has got much improved interface, doing away with the sometimes-distracting 3D look of the Ribbon, and adding swaths of flat color. It's far easier on the eyes than earlier versions of Office.

The File tab (previously called Backstage) has been revamped, to great effect. For example, when you create a new document now, you get to see thumbnails of available templates. There's a lot more as well, including simple ways to make the Ribbon disappear and then come back when you need it.

Full editing of PDF files

How many times you have found PDF files very hard to work with since editing is just not on.

No longer. Word now opens PDF files, and gives you full editing capabilities. You can save the resulting files as PDFs or any file type that Word supports. This, by itself, is reason enough to upgrade.

Auto-created bookmarks

This new feature will prove to be a big productivity-booster for those who work with long Word files. Save a Word file and then open it at some later point, and you have the option of jumping to the location you were when you last were working on or viewing the file. No more scrolling and search -- you jump straight there.

In-Office image search

Finding images to insert into Office documents such as PowerPoint presentations has never been an easy experience. That changes with Office 2013. From right within Office, you can use Bing search (you were expecting maybe Google?) to find suitable images, and then pop them right into any Office document.

Excel's QuickAnalysis tool

If you're not a spreadsheet jockey, figuring out the best way to analyze and present data can be a puzzler. No longer. With Excel's Quick Analysis tool, just highlight the data, and Excel will offer suggestions on the best way to format it, analyze it, present it, and more. Even experienced Excel users will welcome this new feature.

Tweet

The power grid collapsed because some states apparently drew more power than they were authorised to do to meet the rising demand during the summer, said chairman of the state-run Uttar Pradesh state Power Corporation Avinash Awasthi. The power deficit was worsened by a weak monsoon that lowered hydroelectric generation and kept temperatures high, feeding the appetite for electricity.


Weak Monsoon: Farmers have now started using energy-intensive water pumps for irrigation to save their recently sown crops which pushed up demand. Also, hydro-power accounts for about 20 per cent of installed power capacity but reservoirs have only 24 per cent of the water they can hold -- just about half of what they carried at this time last year.

Politics: Many state governments give farmers free or near-free electricity, triggering a vicious cycle. The policy of selling electricity to consumers at politically correct prices is making the things worse.

Coal Supply: Coal shortage also chose the right time to trigger the crisis. The industry has advocated abolishing a 1973 Act that nationalised coal mining. Changes to the law are expected to allow professional miners to scout for and mine coal.

Distribution: The government-owned distribution monopolies in the states have all but lost their ability to buy power because their political bosses force them to sell it cheap, sometimes free, to voters. This opportunism is hurting the economy: the government estimates unaccounted for sale of power in India, at a third of the total, costs the country 1% of its gross domestic product.

The road ahead

Introduce competition in all three areas of the business - generation, transmission and distribution - to enhance productivity and contain leakages. Create an independent watchdog that can withstand the political pressures playing on different links of the nation's power supply chain.

Finally, free up pricing to make consumers more responsible for the electricity they use. This has been the broad course of electricity reforms the world over.

Tweet

As seen in old Hindi movies, trade unions, on back on militants, are creating problems for businesses to grow. This has been phenomenon in Gurgaon for quite sometime. The violence at Maruti Suzuki's Manesar factory, which killed one senior employee and injured close to 100 others, bodes ill for the future of not just Maruti but also the industrial hub of NCR.

Tweet

Slower growth and high volatility, Reserve bank is expected to cut Repo and Reverse Repo rates by 25 basis points in its policy review on Monday, 18th June, 2012.

What are current rates?
Repo Rate - 8%
Reverse Repo Rate - 7%

RBI has room to support economic activity as industrial production growth remains weak  and inflation is under sub 10% level.

The industrial production grew at just 0.1 per cent from a year ago in April. Meanwhile, the wholesale price index based inflation rose to 7.55 per cent in May from a year ago because of higher food and fuel prices.

 Bloomberg survey on Reserve Bank of India policy suggests all major economists predicting 25 basis points rate cut. Only Religare and Bank of Baroda economists are predicting 50 basis points, rest all either suggesting 25 basis points or no change.

Tweet

Earlier this week, ratings agency Standard and Poor's raised concerns over India's investment grade ratings and said India could be first BRIC nation to lose this grade status. This event was rather predicted as India factory output data came flat in April. I am not a big fan of S&P or Moody ratings, this reminds me how they failed during 2008 crisis to correctly rate derivatives instruments. If they can't rate few instruments, how can they rate giant economies. Having said this, I would concentrate not on rating agencies but mainly on Indian economy.

Recently, I heard one of friend said "India is destined to grow but China is determined to grow". I thought a lot about this statement, checking the growth of other BRICs. China and Brazil both have slowed but India's GDP figures are the worst in last 9 years. It gives me a feel that "All is not well".  I analyzed the situation mainly from three points:

1. Government failure since 1991 Liberalization: India was thought to grow due to its large customer base, high savings and foreign investment that would come up. A deeper look suggest that India was growing at 6% till mid 1980s and situation today is not different. With quarter ending March, growth was 5.3% as opposed to expected 6%. People who were involved in liberalization are considered to be GOD and VISIONARIES but rather than this, India grew on human optimism.

2.  Finances: Rupee depreciation to 55-56 level, depressed government bond yield and high gross bad debts with restructured loans in Banks. RBI firepower is limited to push up rupee, but we still feel decent as oil prices went down luckily. Brent is trading in range of 81-83 dollars a barrel. Banks are forced to buy government bonds, more borrowing means corporates can not raise much.

 3. Politics and corruption: Baba Ramdev estimates 10 lakh crores of Indian black money sitting abroad. This much money can not be made by fair practices and made to sit idle in a foreign land. Policy is at complete standstill, coalition government is unable to pass key reforms of FDI. Over 10 lakh crores of government revenue was sacrificed by ManMohan Singh for coal blocks. Reason given by his government was we want poor to benefit, I believe if this was the intention then government should have taken this money and distributed to poor by creating more true jobs. All knows how much money in getting looted by UPA flagship money making scheme of NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act).

Perhaps India will bounce back. And if that doesn't happen, there could be a miracle where public rise to the occassion and excercise right to vote and throw out this corrupt government. I am still bullish about India, remember "India is destined to grow" and would bet my money on it. Hopefully the small pieces of growth & economy will start coming togther sooner than later.

Tweet

JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, suffered a trading loss of at least $2 billion from a failed hedging strategy. This post looks at deeper reason and analysis of what triggered this loss.

What happened?

It is believed after the entire loss math that JP Morgan did hedging or rather entered into bets with CDX family of investment grade, popularly known as Markit CDX IG. The Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index is composed of 125 equally weighted credit default swaps on investment grade entities, distributed among 6 sub-indices: High Volatility, Consumer, Energy, Financial, Industrial, and Technology, Media & Tele-communications. Markit CDX indices roll every 6 months in March & September. Current series is 18.

With index, your exposure is broken into various assets rather than one CDS or company. Since it was Investment Grade, JP Morgan believed these companies would never default or credit spreads would remain low.  Let us look at CDX IG Series 18 movement for 5 years, the credit spreads widended in April and May. If JP Morgan betted against increase in spreads and named it only hedge then trouble was round the corner.

Even if these companies may not default, but from pure trading perspective JP Morgan positions into CDX made a loss due to credit spread widening. Since the size of exposure was huge, losses were also huge.

The results:

1. JP Morgan stock tumbled on New York Stock Exchange. It has been more than 20% loss in stock prices since the news is out.
2. Regulators and lawmakers are now likely to push Dimon for more details about the trades. Those details will guide how regulators now view the issue and its impact on the Volcker rule, said Karen Petrou, managing partner of Washington-based Federal Financial Analytics.

3. Likely changes in risk management of banks globally. CEO, Jamie Dimon opposition to Volcker rule to ban proprietary trading by big banks may be criticized.

Courtsey: Bloomberg, Markit

Tweet

Tweet

Last quarter Apple sold iPhones like banana in China, the figure touched 8 million. No doubt that it is the best smart phone available, still I think it is unsustainable going forward.

This exorbint sales helped Apple post record breaking profits in U.S. Analysts have praised the effort and seem too bullish for my liking. I have three main reasons why it seems tough:

A.) More than half of 30 million iPhones in China are unlocked and being used on unathorized China Mobile that limit the user experience to 2G only.

B.)  Apple is far from getting right product for China market. It is a pain to use iPhone for texting as Chinese input on iPhone is not user friendly. Multiple Chinese bloggers and community experts have expressed their concern. The only option is to jailbreak and install third party software to make iPhone work smoothly.

C.) The third seasons arises from first two. Since Chinese users have unlocked and jailbreak their phone, they can download App Store applications for free. Chinese apps are limited Siri does not work in China.

Apple iPhone comes with entire ecosystem. In China, it seems this ecosystem is broken. Local players provide much better solution to Chinese users at fraction of cost.

Tweet

Google has come hard to big blog networks with huge links and term them as "Fake SEO" techniques. Below is screenshot of what big webmasters are receiving:

When did it start?

It seems all the buzz started with de-indexing of large link networks. It means that Google will remove these networks (inter-linked, self sustain planet of sites) from its crawler. Strangely, few of these networks have been running for years and made millions of dollars already.

Why is it happening?
Few of the reasons that I have collated are:
> Involvement in any artificial link networks
> To and fro content from low quality blogs
> Usage of link blasts
> Excessive use of rich anchor text
If you have used one or more of above, then removing it is the only way out.

If you’ve received this message, then remove the links and send reconsideration request to Google. It might not restore your lost rank but still worth trying.

Tweet

Today, I got a call from a good friend who was asking for benchmark lending rate charged from bank. He was looking to finance his home loan and was confused with these terms. I thought I should write a post on this topic clarifying few of these complex terms.

Prime Interest Rate

The bank minimum charges prime interest rates for any lending, mainly to its prime (trustworthy) customers. There rates are bare minimum, on top of which it lays additional interest rate based upon default risk/trustworthiness of a customer. But do not confuse this with the benchmark prime interest rate.

Benchmark lending

Benchmark lending rates are used to determine prime interest or lending rate. One common benchmark for PLRs is LIBOR. LIBOR stands for London Interbank Offered Rate. This is the rate at which banks in London loan each other funds in the money market. In India, we have MIBOR (Mumbai Interbank Offered Rate). Below is the screenshot of LIBOR 3 month over a period of time.

Tweet

Microsoft has decided to keep us guessing if windows phone 7 apps will run on windows 8.


In short, Windows Phone 8 is the son of Windows 8, which tallies with previous rumors that WP8 would even use the Windows 8 kernel. Taking a quick gallop through ancient history might seem a bit obtuse, but back in reality this is a no-brainer for Microsoft. Windows Phone 7 apps are just Silverlight apps, and Windows Phone 8 apps will almost certainly be XAML-based Metro apps. Microsoft has already said that WP7 and WP8 apps would work on Windows 8 with only a few changes to the code — but really, there’s no technical limitation that would prevent Microsoft from providing a framework that can run WP7 and WP8 apps as-is in Windows 8.

There are practical concerns, however. For a start, Windows Phone 7 apps are designed for low-res (800×480) portrait displays, while Windows 8 will generally be used in landscape orientation and at much higher resolutions. Thanks to the Metro style’s reliance on geometric shapes and typography, scaling itself probably won’t be an issue, but I foresee a lot of apps that hug the left and make very little use of the rest of the screen. The Windows Phone and Windows 8 app stores are obviously quite different as well — the approval processes are completely different, for a start — but this isn’t an insurmountable issue.

Tweet

Tweet

I know this is rather a controversial post this time but I feel it is important to express my experience of Mumbai.

Its been almost a year since I moved to Mumbai. At the start, I did not like Mumbai and everyone whom I interact still don't. People who I always turn for advise said that I will start liking it, however its been on the other side, now I hate Mumbai. This post is why I started hated this once a beautiful city.

1. It stinks big time. Wherever you look, its dirt and blackness. Bad politics and people loving gutters is a norm here.
2. Rains and world best sewage system: I don't think any word is required. 4-5 months when it pours in mumbai, it makes mumbai the worst. How can people live in flood for half of the year? For rest half, it is extremely humid.
3. Annoying taxi and auto wallas: It is quite tough to find taxi and overcharging is omnipresent. Forget those third class local trains, has anyone seen "Delhi Metro".
4. Few Marathi people like talking local language and take pride. God tell them that National Language in India is "Hindi", please talk in that if other person is not from Maharastha.
5. Unsafe: I don't feel safe, girls safety has been raised after recent incidents.
6. Expensive: You get shit for best of dollars. Moreover, no one wants to interact with each other, too much ego to this small life.
7. Lost night life: Not enough now. With few pubs and discs, people call it night life. How many times you can go out in one year and there aren't many options apart from pubs. People who don't drink, I can only say sorry.
8. Food: Believe me, the so called best "Bade Mia" is not even close of any Delhi roadside food. I just hope someone tell the stupid restaurants here how to cook even decent food.
9. Blasts everywhere: In last one year, it is very sad to see 2 blasts happening in Mumbai. If Mumbai police is most incompetent then why should people living here suffer. Get few commandos from Delhi.

For many, this post may seem anti-Mumbai but the point is the city has lost its charm and even true Indian like me doesn't enjoy it. Having cribbed so much, I would like to suggest Mumbai Turnaround 3 formula:

World class - sewage system, public transport and affordable living. We can see some projects not get approval in mid of city if our Marathi ministers go for break in Tihar. Anyways, it seems unlikely in near future so overall Rating of Mumbai:

If I count 20 cities of India, then I place Mumbai at 20. I can't think any worse city than this in India.

Tweet

Tweet

Today I found interesting case study of Pagalguy.com created by prestigious IIM Bangalore. I have read 100s of case studies (not by choice) during my stay at International Management Institute, premier B School in India. I primilarly read Harvard Case studies which are treat to read. Few points that I found worth sharing on this:

1. Ill written. I have seen few case studies developed by our Indian B -schools but none of them come closer to Harvard case studies.

2. Looks like marketing document of Pagalguy. Main purpose of case study is to discuss the company, challenges facedby it and a situation on brainstorm upon. I found these key points missing. Apart from reading, I could not find a way to discuss it in my classroom.

3. Document touches only how the organization started, I would like to challenge about future. Don't you want students to discuss future and strategy required of dot com space in India.

4. Far too much advertising rate info. I know numbers are important to make case study but too many numbers make it a mess. Students will find hard time to make sense out of that information.

5. No lesson learnt. I personally feel reading one page wikipedia like page on pagalguy.com would be more useful than wasting my time on that 13 page note.

Conclusion: I know it is easy to criticize but our world class B-schools need to work on producing some serious quality case studies to make impact at global stage.

Tweet

According to 9to5Mac, "reliable sources" at Foxconn tell the blog that workers are gearing up to start production on the iPhone 5. At this point, however, there are several models floating around, so it remains to be seen what the final version will entail, but they all include a few similar features.

Tweet

The ultra low-cost Aakash tablet is mainly aimed at students and focusses on overhauling the Indian education through technology. The government is already providing the Aakash tablet at a subsidised price of Rs. 1,730. Soon, you will get the tablet on rent in your college libraries. The device will feature pre-loaded video lectures for subjects such as engineering, science and humanities. The duration of rental will be decided by the respective college. According to reports, the government aims to provide the Aakash tablet to about 220 million school and college students. The move is likely to help the government reach its target.

The government has already distributed about 10,000 units of Aakash since its launch in 2010. However, the units have been given on undertaking that they will return them after using for some months. The government has now set its sights on the Aakash 2, the upgraded version of the Aakash tablet.

The commercial version of the Aakash tablet, UbiSlate 7 has already sold out. The UbiSlate 7+, the upgraded version of the UbiSlate 7, is also sold out till February. There's no word from DataWind on when it will resume pre-booking for the UbiSlate 7. Meanwhile, DataWind has urged the customers to be more patient as it works to deliver the tablet within stipulated period of time.

Tweet