BS - Indian Slums - a Research

Unlike the general impression, slums in major Indian cities not only represent complex political and social issues, but also generate a lot of local economic activities, a latest research by the prestigious Stanford Graduate School of Business has said.

"Indian slums are incredibly productive.. (Read Full Article on Business Standard).

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WSJ - Why Companies See Bright Prospects in Rural India

In late May, when India's GDP numbers were released, many were happily surprised. In the fourth quarter of the fiscal year (January-March 2009), the economy grew 5.8% against expectations of less than 5%. For the year, growth was 6.7%, less than the 9% recorded in 2007-2008, but still very (Read Full Article).

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ISB Talk - DEMYSTIFYING THE DRAGON

Brief: In a talk organised by the Emerging Markets club and the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital (EVC) club at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Ramakrishna Velamuri, Visiting Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the ISB, spoke about ‘Demystifying the Dragon- What the world can learn from China’. Velamuri is also (read full article).

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Clean Tech - SSB Aug 09

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My post on the Headstart Network Blog

The August edition of Startup Saturday showcased two of the finest efforts in the domain of clean tech. While the term clean tech is in a lot of discussion, these days, there are a number of concepts that need clarifications, and when it comes to start-ups in clean tech, SSB is always at the forefront with its showcase! In fact, we had rush not just in nominations, but also amongst speakers and the demos in Lightning Pitches - we had more than we could accomodate and till the last minute, this kept us on our toes! So finally, NextGen PMS and AutoBoxx Automation were the ones that comprised the main demos and we had a number of speakers that made us decide about having a panel discussion. The concept of a panel discussion during an SS event was one of the two 'firsts' that we had  - the second one being mentioned next.

One of the newest feather in our cap was the concept of live streaming of the event, thanks to mobisy.com. The idea sprung up from the fact that we needed online videos of the event for archiving and streaming over the Net. In fact, our media partners have always been interested in having a copy of the part they have sponsored and live streaming really served this purpose.

Since this was an experimental effort this time, we have further efforts to improve the quality, lighting, timing and other related aspects of the video. View videos

­The way the volunteers have been supported by the people who attend SSB events was so clear when we faced a hitch in the mobile camera used for live streaming (it's battery went off!) and immediately, one of the members of the audience offered his phone's battery to continue the recording. Thanks to this spirit that SSB events have been so successful in Bangalore.

         

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­ NextGen PMS are involved in the entire green chain, and are involved in estimating carbon waste footprints, and providing energy and emission efficiency measures and implementation plan. It was really a crisp presentation and Abhishek, who is the co-founder of the startup, interacted very well with the audience. He seemed to present a number of complicated topics in a very simplified manner to the group.

Think about managing energy in offices and houses and you got to talk to Ramandeep from Autoboxx Automation. They are not just into this but also in monitoring and tracking of company personnel, outsourced vendors as wel as customers. Their clientele includes banks retailers and telecom companies.

InOutAds was the first one to come up for the Lightning Pitches and went to showcase their approach towards connecting the folks who have places to advertise with the folks who have things to advertise. This was followed by Narahari from Presiding Tech India (They are primarily into Carbon credit and related activities), and Freeman who talked about the iAccelerator program at IIMA. Alleway Info talked about grooming the students entering the job market, and how they are not a placement agency but a source of well qualified and more than normal freshers in to the industry. Daniel from Daniel Power Systems was on stage with his wife and 3 month old kid and showcased his efforts at minimizing power thefts from the supply lines (not from homes) and at optimizing smart grids (without the hassles of having expensive smart switches at home/grids). MASH from IIMB presented the Marketing club efforts by the students and how they are coming up with innovative methods to reach more relevant people. They also mentioned briefly about the upcoming events at IIMB during the networking sessions.

The panel discussion was a very warm one with biggies like Vasudev Avdhani from the Tata Group,  Karthee Madaswamy from Qualcomm Ventures, Elmar Stroomer and Pradeep from Enviu, and Shashidhara K from Blueray Solar joining together with the audience to understand deeper aspects of opportunities in Clean Tech in India, and part of the discussion involved topics such as solar power, rechargeable dance floor, and hybrid autorickshaw project in India.

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­ We had a new concept of categorized business card collection and folks dropped their cards in to boxes with different labels such as web services, product based startups and so on. We also had a graffitti board up during the networking session for people to put in their thoughts about Startup Saturday events! Bangalore Mirror and StartupNews.in were present amongst the audience and did an excellent job of interacting with the audience. The audience enthu was brimming, and was visible during the networking session!

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India's smallest satellite - TOI

Brief from TOI: BANGALORE: These engineering students are in no hurry to have fun after classes. They linger in the labs instead of accepting campus placements. They are on a mission possible: they are busy building the smallest satellite for their country at the Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology, Bangalore. Full Story

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Seth Godin - The bandwidth-sync correlation

Link to Article: Click here. Read on to have a cool analysis of the ways we handle information in our heads(?!). A pic from Seth's post (linked to his post):

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Sharpening some tools?!

Now this is 'also' a good way to look at things that happened in my German and Japanese language courses. My mind went through a series of experiences that we undergo as kids, but never notice. The experiences made me renew my methods of memorizing, practicing, implementing (in short, naturalizing) the process of learning something new. It also helped my brain to correlate seemingly unconnected events that helped me in the process of learning. The differences between Japanese and German are wide in terms of the way of communication, the mannerism used, the characters and pronunciations, and the business etiquette.

It was not a new experience to learn a new language in both cases, given the kind of experiences I have with languages in India. I speak with my wife (my significant half!) using Marathi and Hindi, with my parents in Oriya and English, and with friends in Bengali (Score - 3/5), Bahasa (Indonesian; am very weak in this though!), and with taxi folks using Kannada, Tamil, and/or Telugu (In Telugu, I know expletives, 'How are you' with related conversations, and 'I Love You!')!! Apart from this, at office, I have a team white-board called 'Words of the Day' which I maintain in Japanese and German - this was after an in-house inter-cultural training.

In all this, the point I want to say is that it creates a state of mind that allows encryption/decryption abilities to be honed. It helps improve your emotion-switching skills (which is really important in daily business communication) and also helps you increase your failure/success-handling abilities (think, how!?). It makes you look at fellows in a totally different way (remember, I said 'different'). My ears/eyes/hands and mind got together once more - probably, in this fast world, we really forget to sharpen our basic skills. This was the way I used a seemingly boring matter (for an adult) learning newer languages into something that will help me sharpen my learning speed.

The world is beautiful with (human) emotions. Even animals have emotions (think about babies too!). And I feel excited to know some stuff in sign-language as well (I love spending time with special kids.)

[See a wiki stuff on 'How to learn a new language' Disclaimer! - Don't think I agree to everything on that - everyone is unique in their disability in learning!! ]

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The Concise Guide to Economics

The Concise Guide to Economics

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Mind and Management

There have been a number of times at which I have explained a lot about how the human mind works and how things can be handled better when we are more aware of the dynamics of the world. I am not going to really start explaining scientific theories about the relations between mind and management, but general observations around us are enough for us to realize how we are entangled by this.

If you know more about the mind, it helps. It is like, in India, if you know English better, you can be a better doctor (disclaimer - not universally true but you got the point, didn't you!?) Will get back with some more points after explaining some facts on this topic to my 'significant half'!

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10 Technologies Transforming Sports - Discovery Channel

By Amy Grossman (Click here for full story)

Brief: Nowadays, it's hard to tell the jocks from the geeks. Athletes capitalize on advances from engineering, material science, biomechanics, communication and information technologies to maximize training and performance. And brainiacs develop technologies... (Click here for full story)

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