Most Admired Companies.

Fortune has listed the Worlds' most admired companies..and the list is:

1 General Electric
2 Toyota Motor
3 Procter & Gamble
4 FedEx
5 Johnson & Johnson
6 Microsoft
7 Dell
8 Berkshire Hathaway
9 Apple Computer
10 Wal-Mart Stores

The survey has also listed the most admired companies in USA..The top five are:
1 General Electric
2 FedEx
3 Southwest Airlines
4 Procter & Gamble
5 Starbucks

On Industry wise Rankings,to name a few...

Accenture - IT Services,
SBC - Telecom
Google - Internet Services
Nestle - Consumer food
Nike - Apparels
Toyota - Motor Vehicles
Walt Disney - Entertainment
Washington Post - Publishing

Category: Survey!, Industry!
Read rest of the entry...

Google Page

Google moves into freewebspace market by offering 100MB for every Gmail account user.The Page will be created with 'YourGmailaccname.googlepages.com'. The best part will be the availability of tools to create webpages.Once this service was announced, the new domain went down with multiple users signing in.This made Google to display 'Please submit your e-mail address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts'. Now the service is available to all users!

http://pages.google.com/

Category: Technology!
Read rest of the entry...

Infosys in Pak

Infosys Chairman and founder Narayana Murthy has said that his company was looking forward to setting up a development centre in Pakistan as part of the organization's plans to enhance its global presence and boost human resources

Murthy said that Infosys' priority would be to sell and install its banking package in Pakistan, which would be soon followed by setting up a development centre in the country.

He said that Infosys was growing rapidly, and China was the next place where the company was expanding its operations. (ANI)

Category: Industry!, Software!
Read rest of the entry...

Mittal's Issue

I just thought of writing a post on Mittal's issue...but I became lazy and thought of making it short:)

Whatz the issue?

As Mittal's mode of growth is through Acquiring companies, his company Mittal Steels, the world's largest steel company, is planning to buy the second largest company Arcelor.But the CEO of Arcelor Guy Dolle refuses the bid.

Lakshmi Mittal is the largest share holder of his company, but it's the opposite in the case of Arcelor, where share holders possess the major part. So if Mittal convinces the share holders, then the job would be easy for him, but at present, there are road-blocks in this bid.

Why Mittal wants Arcelor?

On every acquisition made by the Mittal steels, Arcelor was the default competitor which made the Mittals to bid more and acquire the company. This effect was much realized during the acquisition of a Ukraine based company, when Mittal spent around $4.5 billions. This bid price was considered too higher than the actual worth of the company. This bid raised eye-brows of many Industry analysts, of course for Mittal too. Then the idea struck in Mittal's mind when he thought 'Why always fight with Arcelor, let me buy them!' .

The other reason is, if Mittal buys Arcelor, he will have 10% percent of the Global market and he can also fix up the Corporate governance issue being faced by his company. Arcelor is said to have good corporate governance.

Why Arcelor refuses?

The reason is simple, he doesn't want his company to be sold out. Unfortunately he has no control over it. So he is lobbying the politicians in Europe to hinder the bid process. Arcelor's fears are about the family-controlled type of business.The CEO of Arcelor, Dolle has less confidence on Mittal's son Aditya, as he is expected to be a key driver in the merged entity. But Mittal refutes the statement by showcasing Aditya's lead role during the company's first Initial Public offering and at the time of acquiring ISG, the America's largest steel company. After this acquisition, Mittal steel rose to the first position in the steel Industry and Mittal became the third richest man on the earth.

Series of events from the day one:

When Mittal decided to buy Arcelor, he called Dolle for a dinner in his Palace house in London. The CEO of Arcelor came with one of his Board members and Mittal along with his son. As Mittal proposed this idea to Dolle, he refused the bid. Subsequently, Mittal allowed Dolle to take his own time to consider the proposal and he told Dolle that he is expecting a meeting call from him. As Mittal did not receive any meeting invitation, he called up the CEO over the phone. Since, Dolle was in no mood to accept the bid, he told Mittal that 'I am going to hang up as the line is not clear!!!' Clueless Mittal, left a message in his Voice mail for a friendly meeting. As Expected, there was no reply from the CEO.

What now?

Mittal is trying to convince the European leaders and of course the Arcelor. He is touring all over the Europe to get the job done. Now Arcelor is ready to consider the offer, if Mittal moves to all-cash deal mode. But for which Mittal is not ready as it proves too costly.Morever, Mittal says the share holders of Arcelor are happy with the deal as the share price increased dramatically, as he proposed the bid. But Dolle refused by saying 'it saw a marginal increase before the bid itself'. Morever Mittal allayed the fears of Job loss that may cause due to the acquisition.

When Mittal was asked about his next move on the occasion of bid failure, he said ' I am very confident on its success!'

Category : Personality!, Controversy!, Industry!
Read rest of the entry...

Life at Google!


Src: Time

Category: Pictures!
Read rest of the entry...

When there is heavy competition in Indian Media....things go this way!

This is a News published in Indian Express!

"Aishwarya Rai got stung by a bee and shooting was post poned for 5 Hours". If the media continues to move in this direction...then i cant imagine a futile news than this!

Category: Funny!, Media!
Read rest of the entry...

Not 'Just another' Search Engine!

Krugle..Did it sound like Google? krugle is not 'Just another' search engine..But it's developed for a purpose. It indexes a pool of source codes from Open source programmers and it will return only source codes as results. It is a search engine for programmers!It's expected to give a thrust to 'Open-Source' Movement, which is not as successful as it was expected.It is expected to go live, next month.As the concept of resusability is on the rise, this search engine can crete more 'ctrl+c-ctrl+v' Programmers :-)

Though there are Code search engines like Koders and Codefetch,Krugle differentiates itself by allowing programmers to annotate the code and document it. The other features would be saving your searched results and an unique URL for the saved results.You can just E-mail the URL to your friends.

Category: Technology!
Read rest of the entry...

VMail
Taking another step in the world of communication, Hyderabad based NowPos ( Now Possible) Online Services Pvt Ltd. launched the world's first voice mail service.You can send your recorded voice as an E-mail and it comes for free. Even if you don't have a NowPos account, you can listen to the message. As no lunch comes for free, a ten second ad will be played before you hear the actual message. This is expected to make its presence felt more in personal E-mails.

Category: Technology_
Read rest of the entry...

Pay me for reading this post!. I may not be joking... since this may happen in the near future for US citizens. According to the latest report 'major phone and cable companies released white papers that outline strategies to transform the free and open Internet into a billable revenue-generating machine. According to an article in The Nation, 'industry planners are mulling new subscription plans...establishing 'platinum,' 'gold,' and 'silver' levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even email messages that could be sent or received'.

If you want to break easily into the lucrative internet business, the prominent winning formula is 'Provide high value to the users for free of cost'. When the content providers (like Google, Yahoo...) are charged by the phone companies for delivering their content, then obviously they would impose charge on their users to pay the phone companies. The problem with the phone companies is, when users are paying them for using their pipes to access internet( The charge we pay for Net access), why the content providers are not paying them, who are gaining revenues from the users by delivering contents through their pipes. Though it seems to pay them a double price, phone companies are trying to generate money from it. This kind of tough rules will definitely hinder the growth of internet and the game would look ugly when you demand the users to pay them for sending an E-mail. It is just like pressing the rewind button in the technological world.

It will be a restricted access to users and you can't expect 'Breaking news' from companies like Google and Yahoo on their new venture and thus will hinder the flow of creativity. This could also lead to direct and indirect job losses. As Internet serves as the medium of knowledge sharing, it impacts the growth of invention. The denial of paid service is quite evident in today's Internet, as you and I rarely or never have paid it.

If the internet goes to the private parties then the Government should accept another monopoly in the internet business, as AT&T did in Telecom. Monopoly in Internet will have adverse effect on the daily-life of the society as 'everything is online today'. If a private company holds the lines in a state, then it can start a News website and make it available for free, whereas the other sites will be a paid one. Then, as every thing is paid, users tend to go to that particular free news site and thus may end up in a manipulated (favorable) news about a particular (political) party who may have backhanded the phone company. It's left to your thoughts about the adverse effects of a monopoly in any segment.

Though this model is not yet implemented, there are chances for a Government to adopt this, if the ruling party chances upon a considerable gain from the model. To help ensure that their 'vision' succeeds, the phone and cable lobbies are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communication policy laws. Both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have a far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Hope I continue to write and you can also read it freely!


On the bottom line, this news is strengthening the rumor about Google. As I wrote in one of my previous posts, Speculating Google's venture in creating a new backbone for the Internet .It was buying the cables laid by companies during the late 90's amidst the boom, which later turned into a bubble and it busted.If the rumor is true and phone companies succeed in their proposal then 'Google would be the happiest company'. Read more....

Category: Interesting News!,Technology!
Read rest of the entry...

It's a subject of concern for Indian IT companies for their dependency over US on outsourcing.A major chunk of their revenues is generated from the North American companies.This causes the 'Hue and cry' in India, when a debate over outsourcing bill raises in US parliament.This would be followed by reports on 'Advantages of Outsourcing' by Indian firms and they end up in saying 'Outsourcing is not evil'. This would be backed by Outsourcing analysts and Strategy thinkers around the world. This kind of dependency on US resists Indian government to stand independently on International Issues. To avoid the dependency, Indian MNCs like Infosys and Wipro are taking measures to amend their revenue ratio from US and to concentrate more on European countries.And the News is "Outsourcing and offshoring among European businesses is set to increase as boardrooms continue to pressure their CIOs for more IT cost savings, according to a new report". 58 percent of the respondents show interest in Outsourcing and the other 39 is for offshoring.The report adds that by 2008 almost 50 percent of the European companies will be outsourcing or offshoring.
It's all the good news for countries leveraging outsourcing and the next question would be 'who is the grabber?'.
Read rest of the entry...

Src :Guardian

This would be the World's most Expensive photograph. It's the 'Pond-Moonlight' by Edward Steichen.It was taken on Long Island in 1904 and broke the world record price for a photograph when it was sold for more than $2.9m.It's a kind of foto that only musuems can acquire, that may be a factor for the high cost!

Category: Interesting!,Videos and Pictures!
Read rest of the entry...

Despite advances in several technologies, we haven't seen a great revolution in the designs of Keyboard, Mouse, CPU or Monitors. It's the same mold with few variations in sizes. To encourage designers to think outside the box, Microsoft teamed up with the Industrial Designers Society of America, Dell and HP to sponsor the Next Generation OS PC Design Competition. 200 Hundred Teams from 33 counties participated. Interestingly, an Indian was among the two winners, who received the Chairman's award from Bill Gates for his proposed alternative PC design that replaces paper notebooks and heavy textbooks. Indian Kinder Garden kids really need it. The other award was to a student for his 'Bookshelf' concept, a machine designed to simplify the management of digital content and copyrights. Each will receive $50,000.

Have a look at the future School bag!


Souce : BusinessWeek

Here's a design named 'Binary plant', Re-thinking of a Desktop PC. The designer says 'Studies suggest that when people interact with nature, they have a healthier and more balanced life'



Souce : BusinessWeek

Category: Technology! , Interesting News!
Read rest of the entry...

As I was watching the television, a News appeared stating that 'Students of New York University(NYU) and ten more universities ban coco-cola in their campus' and it did not stop there, 70 More universities have planned to back New York University's protest. I didn't remember any hyped reason for the students' protest. I was thinking in America's point of view, until I learned that the students are protesting in support of Plachimada, a village in kerala. Coco-cola has been accused of contaminating the ground water and there were continual protest from the villagers which was heard by the students in United States. The students are also against the Human Rights Violation in Columbia.

The Student Leader of NYU, Crystal Yakacki said 'We were very inspired by the communities in India who have refused to allow Coca Cola to stomp all over them like it is used to doing all around the world. We are trying to offer solidarity with that movement'. It is going to make a great impact for the Cola Giant as NYU alone houses around 66,000 students in its vast campus.

The students decided to protest after visiting the village in January'06. This protest may be a significant beginning for any injustice caused in the other part of the world. In this web era, there are no means by which you can stop News spreading around. It's unlike in yester years, where Media had been bribed for disguising and manipulating the news. If coca-cola had really speculated this kind of reactions from Universities, it could have stopped the news from reaching them. All this is not plausible thru services like blog, where it serves as an alternative to the media. Blogs' contribution was enormous at the times of Tsunami where it helped the world communities to realize the real impact of the disaster, and thus paved the way for Massive contributions to the victims. Though it's a well-known fact that Coco-cola is contaminating the ground water in Kerala, the spokes person of coco-cola in US said that 'The students are Misinformed'(Even after the Kerala Pollution Control Board has ordered to close down the plant). Still services like Blog are yet to make a great impact and have to prove themselves as an alternative to the media. In near future we can expect more incidents like this, which makes us to realize the borderless world.
Read rest of the entry...

From Zero to Million Dollars.

In the recent years, a respectable number of rages to riches stories evolved due to striking 'ideas and innovations' in the Internet. The definition for Rage and rich may be different in each case, but definitely the difference in their bank balances before and after their venture, really made a massive difference. A celebrated story would be the Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Google (1996), which has the market cap of $120 billion, $20 billion more than 60 years old HP. These two guys were the Ph.D students in the Stanford University, who really broke their head to come up with a Search algorithm.

Also, know about this 21 year chap from a middle-class family and an under-graduate, who made a Million Dollar with no major investment and it's all to do with a simple idea.He's Alex, who wants to pursue his Post-Graduation in Business Management, but the hindrance was to pay the fees to pursue his studies. He was in a lousy job after three years of his UG, before he came up with this crazy idea. The base from which the money has been generated by Google and Alex is the same. It's advertising. The idea form Alex is simple; he bought a domain name, hosted the website and offered the home page for advertisers to have their firm name or logo displayed. The domain name is Milliondollarhomepage.com(which can be reached easily thru search with any of the terms). But how many can advertise and how can he generate a million dollar from it?

He divided his homepage into Ten thousand 100 pixel blocks and he rented out every hundred pixel for 100$ ie.. One pixel for a dollar. Alex says 'The reason for selling them in 100-pixel blocks is, because anything smaller would be too small to display anything meaningful'. The website will have the same home page and will never be changed. He says advertisers that 'You will have a piece of internet history! '.But, how did he manage to popularize his site? Once he sold few hundred pixels, his account balance increased by $1000. Then he used that money to pay for the press release which was picked by BBC and the rest is as usual. This news whirled around the net thru E-mails by a friend passing to his friends and so on. Now his website's home page has been completely sold out and he is a Million dollar man.

Alex used to brainstorm himself on various ideas that can generate him huge money. When he was 8 he used to sell pictures, draw cartoons, make comics, photocopy them and sell them at school for 30p. Alex briefs that defining moment 'So anyway, after an hour of two of jotting random things on paper, the idea seemingly popped out of nowhere. Almost like my subconscious mind had been ticking over in the background, working it all out. So it just kind of happened. That's about it. I scribbled it down and within about 10 minutes a picture of what needed to be done had emerged'. Now he has planned to use the remaining amount for ventures like this, as he says that similar crazy ideas are in the queue. As expected many started similar kind of WebPages but none succeeded like Alex.

Update: Hackers threatened to bring down his site, if he fails to pay them a ransom. Alex resisted and said 'If you pay them, new attacks will start'. Now the site works normally.

Category: Interesting News!,Technology!
Read rest of the entry...

Some Good News!

There were some concerns in the Indian IT industry in recent days in terms of Infrastructure Issues, rising wages, preference of china over India, US relations, BPO Security issues, Terrorist attacks etc.. These flashing news gave a murk to the IT industry being watched by the Global companies. But now we have some good news!

Reuters reported that 'India's information technology industry would continue its upward surge, growing by 28 percent in the financial year to March, despite increasing infrastructure bottlenecks, an industry body estimated on Thursday'. Kiran Karnik said that 'The BPO story is continuing to be robust and strong, and the engineering services is getting more important'.

The Strategic Review 2006 came with some promising ideas to drive the industry. They came with five key points. Enhancing the talent pool, improving urban infrastructure, philosophy of operational excellence, Catalyzing domestic market development and actively promoting an uncompromised agenda towards global free trade.

Also Check this, India is taking advantage of the globalization of the IT industry. and India's tech firms overcoming infrastructure woes.
Read rest of the entry...

'Fon'd of sharing?


Innovation is unlimited in case of Internet. As technology advances much business arise around the technology. A European software venture has developed a technology where you can share the WI-FI access infrastructure with your friends. (For those who are new to WI-FI: In simple, you can access the internet in wireless mode. The data will be transmitted from a device located at a near by spot, named 'hotspot'. To access that device your laptop or system will be authenticated for which you should be a subscribed user to that provider. Normally, it's expensive to be a registered user.)

The Spanish company named 'Fon' has created a software, by which you can share your connection and of course the charges with your friends. They believe this to succeed, considering the high cost in registering a WI-FI account. Though, this seems to be violating the rule of sharing the account, the service providers expect more revenues to be generated in the WI-FI market, as most users resist themselves from costly registration
Now, this company has been backed by Google and Skype and hence this idea is expected to have a large presence in the internet arena.

Some threats:

One plausible issue in sharing would be the number of users being allowed to share .In future, you can expect a person to get some subscriptions as 'Wholesale' and start the 'sharing' business. And of course you can expect competitors in this idea too .When it comes to multiple users, the connection speed will be sluggish than a Dial-up connection and this will be accepted by infrequent WIFI users. At this conjecture, the service providers will lose the customers who can afford to subscribe, but resist themselves(from subscribing) by compromising the speed. This can be eliminated only by providing some limitation in sharing, which can be done only by service providers (Again don't rule out competition in 'number of shares' by service providers!!).

And interestingly, the man behind the software proposed the idea in his blog. After receiving positive comments, he ventured in developing the product.

On the bottom line, if you see the latest hits in the technology, the denominator will be 'sharing'.To name a few.. Wikipedia, Blogs, podcasts,del.icio.us and now the WI-FI share. Today, through innovation like blogs, people get to know the feasibility and feedbacks about their ideas. It's unlike in yester years where many ideas weren't transformed into reality due to their qualm in feasibility.
Read rest of the entry...

Google's internet plan.

Few months earlier, there were more rumors bout Google's foray into diverse industries and this led to the 'great ride' for the Google’s stock. But that didn't last long and the Google was much in the news for the Consumer Electronic Show, rumors over acquisitions and for its debut in china. Now Google has a renaissance, it is an old news but with fresh proofs.

'Google is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol (IP) network, a private alternative to the internet'

Few months back, I remember an article in Business week..speculating Google's venture in creating a new backbone for the Internet .It was buying the cables laid by companies during the late 90's amidst the boom, which later turned into a bubble and it busted.

If Google succeeds in creating an exclusive network for its purpose, then you can expect the whole internet connection for lower cost or for free. And Google will make the cash in their usual way of advertising. For this rationale, Google can block its rival sites to the consumers. Also, by defining a protocol it can create a new means of communication medium, thereby developing an alternative for VOIP. Going forward, it can be a Mobile manufacturer and these developments could lead to a monopoly in this technological world.

Another report says that, the technology industry has also been alive with talk that the Google $100 machines will be less like a standard home PC and more like a television: in effect, one of the first convergent devices between the internet and television. While offering the standard PC applications, the 'Google Cube' will also offer interactive content from a variety of sources while retaining Google branding and displaying Google advertising.

Though Google is giving a tough competition to Microsoft in the online arena, it is yet to propose a real challenge in software products. As Microsoft has completely established in the products side, Google can bet Gates only if it can make a revolution. The new internet network and the low cost PC could be the solution in dominating them. It can be like this, the low cost or free internet can work only in the low-cost PC and this PC can only engage Google's software (Sun is in pact with Google in deploying software). This blend is viable as 'the low cost or free internet' will be an alluring proffer to the consumers. But, on the bottom line the regulators must ensure that 'another monopoly' should not be created, as every one can play in the ground.
Read rest of the entry...

Business through SMS.

Among the current revolutions happening in the world of technology, mobile communication has been exploited in diverse fields. Though the world is fast moving into the third generation mobiles, it is still a long way to go in developing countries like India where the penetration of high end mobile technology is indolent. So, the small and middle tier companies are betting on affordable technology like sms to market their products also they are trying to develop new business from these low-end technologies. To name a few, they market their products through SMS,I have also heard of shop owners in a plaza advertising their products by pushing sms to the crowd. Also companies are selling mobile numbers to bank executives by which they can market their products to the customers. Another lucrative business on the move is consensus between Entertainment industry and Service providers, where the former sell the tones, wallpapers and downloads to service providers. Besides, we also know how the reality shows and quiz shows like KBC generate cash through sms.

Now a company has planned a SMS interactive TV where the mobile subscribers are allowed to interact with television sets by playing games, quizzes, instant chatting etc..all this happens in the real time.In this scenario the service provider, the technology provider and the Channel broadcaster are in consent to deliver the end results. If this happens to be a success then you can expect many followers. But I am not sure about the level of success it can generate, as the amount of time spent in front of television by office goers and business persons is less. This is expected to hit the Indian market by February.

Category: Technolgy!, Business!
Read rest of the entry...

For an IT Industry to flourish, the main ingredients are the competence to execute the job and branding the competence to the world. In case of India, the current need is the branding. Among the three IT biggies, Infy brands itself by getting listed in NASDAQ, Wipro showcases its R&D activities to attract clients and TCS has the name TATA in it. TCS has another feather to add in its cap and this ensued in the World Economic Forum, which was held at Davos. Last year, TCS bagged the Ferrari deal and now the software is ready to get executed in the next Formula-1 race with Schumacher in the driver seat. In Davos, TCS displayed the Ferrari car with 'Powered by TCS' tag on it, being watched by delegates from all over the world. This can be one of the best branding ever for a services company and this happened at the right stage. This can help TCS in attracting Auto Engineering companies and we can hope TCS to have a chunk in GM's outsourcing contract.

Also, read this 'Tech guru puts Infy and TCS on notice'.
Read rest of the entry...

Wipro's Turn??!

One of the big breakthrough in the Indian IT Industry was ABN-AMRO's $2.2billion deal. It was the first ever biggest outsourcing contract, also it started the trend of multi-vendor outsourcing. Ok it's all the known news!. when we speak of AMRO deal we can't forget TCS and Infosys, which had the largest share of the pie(IBM apart). But many were surprised on the behemoth Wipro's share. Which was null.But, now I hope its going to be the other way round. The News is 'General Motor(GM) to award outsourcing contracts valued at $15 billion'. One of the biggest outsourcing contract till date. And Sources say that Wipro may bag a part of Maintenance and Management tasks. Though the actual numbers for Wipro are not known, TCS and Infosys are not in the News.
Read rest of the entry...