Interesting Stats

Just came across an interesting piece of stats on the current Business India issue.

• Number of years an average Indian and an average Chinese will have to work to buy a 100 sq m home in a prime location in Mumbai and Shanghai: 308 & 233
• Number of years an average American and an average Singaporean will have to work to buy a 100 sq m home in a prime location in Manhattan and Singapore: 48 & 43

Indian IT Companies changing strategy

The Indian IT companies are gradually moving from time and material contracts with clients to a outcome based pricing model. The change is with the aim to move up the value chain as the companies are finding it difficult to cope with the competition hotting up from the global biggies like IBM, HP, Accenture opening up centers in India and negating the cost arbitrage

advantage of the Indian giants as well as mid-size IT companies.

This has made the IT companies here like TCS, Wipro, HCL to rethink the way the conduct their business. They are now targetting non-linear growth from products and platforms as well as consulting and system integration in the effort to become partners for their clients and not just cheap sources of labour.

The graphic here sourced from the iGate website clearly shows the positioning of the outcome based pricing model by the IT Companies in front of the customers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Breakout Nations

I just watched a good discussion on the book Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma on NDTV hosted by Prannoy Roy. It was interesting to listen to young and talented Ruchir on how he has arrived at his list of nations that will stand out, the Breakout Nations as he calls it.Ruchir on NDTV

To arrive on this list, he has relied on his own  theories but based on actual data. The theories he has developed like the Four Seasons Theory discussed on the show are a deviation from the theories economists harp on while pronouncing their complicated judgements. But clearly, the theories have a basis and clubbed with Ruchir’s insights developed during his extensive travels across the world as a fund manager in a top financial company add muscle to his views.

The show also had Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Sunil Mittal and Y Venugopal Reddy. Some interesting views were discussed. One fantastic statement that was discussed which is also in the book was Sunil’s claim that he has not been asked to pay a bribe even once in all of the 17 African countries he is currently doing business.

Another interesting point made by Ruchir in the book which was discussed was that the businessmen in India are finding it difficult to invest in India which is resulting a flight of capital out of the country.  Read the rest of this entry »

Spin-in

Spin-in is a procedure popularized by Cisco for getting products developed outside the company by a startup created by its employees using seed money from the company and then finally acquiring the company.

CISCO had successfully used this trick atleast thrice now - Andiamo Systems, a storage networking company, Nuova Systems, in which its core technology became Cisco’s Nexus switch after its acquisition by Cisco in 2008 and now Insieme which is focused on SDN applications. It is while reading about the Insieme acquisition that I came to know about this unique way of innovation followed by Cisco almost as a rule and successfully.

CISCO even has a trusted team of top engineers who have done the job for the company using the spin-in procedure of innovation in Mario Mazzola, Luca Cafiero and Prem Jain.

WordPress App for Android

I am right now posting this from the update WordPress App for Android from Automatic. The dashboard interface is a bit odd with just icons. There are no description attached to the icons and I had to check each icon to figure what exactly they are for. Also, when I am creating a new post from my Samsung Galaxy fit, the text box hardly allows me to see what I am typing in the landscape mode as most if the screen is occupied by the on-screen keyboard. This makes editing the posts almost impossible.
Hope automatic quickly fixes this and releases a new version.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Dada and his hunger to WIN!

Sourav Ganguly has again proved that you can criticize him but you cannot ignore him. Everytime you write him off, he is back and with a bang. At his age, even his most loyal and fanatical supporters wont expect an innings like what young Steve Smith played. But, he still has it in him to show that he is not fooling around at this level. At yesterday’s match, it showed how much he loves the game still now.

Dada with his boys

I only have respect for Sourav. Of all his qualities, I admire his determination. He could have easily settled in his new career as a commentator. Read the rest of this entry »

Lost World

Just came across this pic posted by a friend in Facebook.

How is Inflation calculated in India?

I had to prepare an assignment on how inflation is measured in India. So, I did some basic study online and thought about sharing the details.

In India, inflation is calculated based on the Wholesale Price Index (WPI). WPI measures changes in price of a representative basket of wholesale goods. The purpose of WPI is to monitor price movements that reflect supply and demand in industry, manufacturing and construction. This helps in analysing macroeconomic and micro-economic conditions.

India is one of the few countries that are using WPI to calculate inflation. Most of the developed countries use CPI or Consumer Price Index. There is a on-going debate on whether India should move from WPI to CPI-IW to calculate inflation.

The WPI data is published every week with a two week lag. As per widely discussed news reports, our inflation rate for Aug, 11 stands at 9.78%. So, how is this calculated.

Basically, by 9.78%, we mean the annual rate of year-on-year inflation rate based on WPI. Inflation rates are regularly updated at http://statisticsofindia.com/tatasoi/.

The WPI data is available at http://eaindustry.nic.in/.

So, the formula for calculation of the inflation from WPI is (WPI, Aug 2011 – WPI Aug, 2010) * WPI Aug, 2010 *100%

(154.9-141.1)*141.1*100 gives us 9.78%.

While drafting this post, I was looking at how to add mathematical equations in WordPress posts. However, it will some time to understand.