Jayakumar Balasubramanian

The Consumer Electronic (CE) market is in a revolutionary phase now. Because of the changing needs of consumers, organizations are forced to come up with new set of products in a very short span of time with more features and less price. Broadly the CE devices are used for Communication (Mobile phones), Storing personal information (PDA) and for Entertainment (Digital cameras, music players). At one end CE devices are marching towards ‘Convergence’ phenomenon, where the above said three elements are integrated into a single device (Say iPAQ) and on another end devices are marching towards ‘Divergence’ phenomenon, where each CE device is produced with a unique purpose in mind. For example latest Sony T5 cameras are having very high resolutions (5 Mega pixels) which are aimed at pro-sumers or photo-enthusiasts. This Convergence and Divergence (C & D) has created huge variety of devices which is making the consumer confused. Irrespective of the type providing connectivity to the Pers...

In the past 18 months alone Indian real estate market has witnessed unprecedented growth. Especially in metros residential property prices has soared as much 70% and in some cases 100% according to Outlook magazine. For a common man living in metros ‘Apna ghar’ is becoming a day-dream because of atrocious pricing. Apart from that home loan interest rate is heading north because of increase in global interest rates. Major Banks like HDFC, ICICI have announced another 50 basis points increase in the home loans. Where all this is heading to? Is the real estate industry in India is in ‘Bubble’ stage which will burst soon? After thinking in this direction I came out with the following observations. Please read on. Compared to other investment vehicles (Stocks, Bonds, Mutual-funds) real estate is different because ‘home’ is more to do with individual’s emotions. For evaluating this vehicle we need to look the ‘Macro’ (Top-down) as well as ‘Micro’ (Bottom-up) economic factors. Coming to Macro...

There are numerous definitions for the word ‘Leadership’. One of the definitions says ‘The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people’s enduring needs’ and my mind cannot think of a better person than Sam Pitroda who is the best example I can ever think of practical leadership. The man who demonstrated for the first time to Indians what technology means and how it can change the whole society. His leadership brought ‘Technology-Business-Society’ together and being a tech-industry professional I have only one word for this person: ‘Hats-off’ For people don’t know who Sam Pitroda is, look into the nearby STD booth in any small ‘Ghalli’ in India. He is the man behind ‘conceptualizing’ the STD booth based business model and made it possible in India’s ‘Ever-challenging’ environment using technology. He founded Center for Development of Telematics (C-DAC) in 1984. He along with his colleagues ‘invented’ the telephone time measurement ...

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become a commonly used and one of the most effective mediums for businesses. One of the major steps towards e-enabling businesses is to have websites hosted in a public domain. These websites should use the latest technologies and create and maintain a good impression among prospective customers, partners and employees. Lot of tools, technologies and off-the-shelf packages are available for website building. Businesses should leverage these technologies and use them effectively in order to build an impression. This write-up covers the technology perspective of building websites and what are the general contents that can be hosted in the website so that it creates and maintains a good impression among its prospective customers, partners and employees. When any person visits website of a particular firm, he/she goes through the contents in the websites by browsing thorough the links. After going through some of the links the user gets a collective experience,...

Author: Dr. P. D. Sharma Price: INR 35 This is a simple book for learning Yoga and Pranayama. Yoga and Pranayama are very ancient but powerful techniques which were invented in India. The ‘Yogis’ who were living in the Himalayas are the originators of these techniques and it came across multiple generations. Today Yoga and Pranayama techniques are scientifically proved that they cure all diseases in a ‘Natural way’. Apart from curing the diseases it also prevents body from getting new diseases. By following these techniques it is believed that ancient Yogis lived for hundreds of years. According to ‘Pathanjali Yoga Sutra’, yoga consists of eight-stages (Yama, Niyama, Asana, Prayanama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi).For normal human beings (like me) practicing various asanas would the best thing to follow. Performing asanas helps an individual to bring ‘Mind’ ‘Body’ and ‘Soul’ into control which is the unique advantage. Various techniques like Aerobics, Gym exercises focus onl...

Apple computers announced their second quarter results on April 19, 2006. During this Q2 Apple’s revenue grew 34% YoY and 41% increase in earnings. The interesting point is Apple has sold 85,2600o iPods in Q2 alone. My mind started thinking ‘How on earth any company can sell so many music players in a single quarter given the fact that iPods are costlier than other digital music players? What makes iPod so unique?’ Now cut to Bangalore, India and walk into MTR restaurant near Lal Bagh. Every customer need to stand in a huge queue or book an appointment to get into the restaurant because it is very crowded. Most people who walk into MTR order for ‘Rava Idli’ (A spicy south-Indian breakfast item).But the same Rava Idli is available in every other restaurant in Bangalore with cheaper price and similar quality. Now my mind is again thinking ‘Why on earth people stand in queue and eat the MTR Rava Idli and ready to pay more?’ Even though examples given above belongs to totally two differen...

Title : Guide to Investing Author: Robert Kiosaki ISBN: 0446677469 This book is written by ‘Rich dad poor dad’ famous author Robert Kiosaki. This is the third book in the series and mainly talks various aspects of Investing. Robert has his highly educated dad whom he calls as ‘Poor dad’. He calls him poor because all he did was worked for somebody and remained poor during his retirement time. Robert’s calls his friend’s dad as ‘Rich dad’ because rich dad built a huge amount of wealth by building businesses. In the year 1974 Robert takes comes out of his marine-cop job in Vietnam and starts learning his investment lessons from his ‘Rich dad’. The book consists of three parts. The first part Robert discusses about four major elements of personal finance. They are ‘Income’, ‘Expenditure’, ‘Assets’ and ‘Liabilities’. He explains how rich people make their ‘Assets’ generate the ‘Income’ and how poor people spend their lifetime by paying up for the liabilities. In the second part Robert exp...

Very recently came across a scenario while searching in the web and got to know about the real usage ‘Caching’ facility that is provided by Google. While searching the web I found the information I was looking for and clicked the link. But the contents in the page were moved and the page was having something other than what Google search page showed in its initial page. So it means that the contents of the web page are moved. I now tried the ‘Cached’ button in Google and got contents which I was actually looking for. In computing ‘Cache’ memory comes under the dynamic memory similar to Random-Access-Memory (RAM) and stores the ‘frequently’ accessed contents since the contents are frequently accessed the processor picks the contents from Cache instead of RAM. This increases the processing speed. Storing the contents in the Cache depends on various fundas like spatial, temporal characteristics. Also this Cache gets refreshed periodically. In normal PCs the ‘Cache size’ is in the order of...

Title : Success Vs Joy Author : Geet Sethi Price : INR 95 This book is written by Geet Sethi the famous billiards player. This book is based on his thoughts and discussions with his friend Sunil Agarwal. Sethi started playing billiards when he was 13 year old and found playing billiards gave him extreme amount of ‘Joy’ than anything else. Till date he is playing the game and achieved great things in billiards. Sunil on the other hand was also interested in billiards but took a different path because of society compulsion and finished his MBA from IIM-Ahmadabad. He is a big leader in the corporate world now. He has achieved what the society calls as ‘Success’ but he is not having the ‘Joy’ feeling what Sethi felt by playing billiards. This leads to the main theme of the book: Which is important ‘Success’ or ‘Joy’? According to Sethi ‘Success’ is doing things for other’s (Say society) sake whereas ‘Joy’ is doing things that individual’s inner self feels or in other words what an individ...

Kickstarting my 'technical' area of my blog with this.Got this information from one of my ex-collegues. Adobe Acrobat reader (Version 6.0 or later) supports 'reading' functionality.The key combinations is given below.I tried it and its really good.The voice quality is not that good but worth giving a shot. Ctrl+shift+b : To hear the entire Document Ctrl+shift+v : To hear the page Ctrl+shift+c : To resume Ctrl+shift+e : To stop

Off late I am able to witness three different types of markets for various products and services. Apart from Enterprise markets and Consumer markets which existed till 2000, there is new and emerging ‘Small-And-Medium-Business (SMB)’ in growing economies like India and China. The Sensex Bull Run which existed till a month back was mainly driven by these SMBs which come under ‘Mid-cap’ and ‘Small-cap’ stocks. I believe India’s future growth will mainly depend on these SMBs. I was brought up in north-western part of Tamilnadu, India which is known for its enterprising people and industries thanks to visionary Entrepreneurs and excellent educational institutions. This north western part consists of places like Coimbatore, Tirupur, Salem, Erode and Karur. Coming to numbers Coimbatore district alone exports whopping 10,000 Crores (Around 2500 million USD) outside India and big names like ‘Wal-Mart’ uses materials exported from this area. A PriceWaterHouseCoopers - CII (Confederate of Indian...

The latest news is: " Apple computers shutdown their operations in Bangalore ".Even though the reasons for the shutdown it not very clear the message from the western world is very clear "You cannot bet only on your cost effectiveness for long term”. This news takes back me to back to 2003 to one of the excellent speeches I have heard so far. It was by one of the top executives of my organization.Eventhough I am not remembering exact words what he spoke on that day following I could clearly remember the summary. Here it is: "In 1970s and 1980s Ireland was one of major the hub for computer manufacturing. In 1988, no fewer than seventeen computer vendors from different parts of the world ran assembly facilities in Ireland. Because of this unprecedented boom, costs went up and during 1990s companies started shutting down their operations in Ireland. But Ireland folks re-invented themselves the started building software firms in Ireland. Today these software firms stand...

Andrew S Grove (Ex-CEO of Intel corporation) in his book ‘Only the paranoid survive’ talks about an important term ‘Strategic Inflection Points (SIP)’.An SIP is nothing but a point in time in which the company needs to change very much and that SIP determines the success or failure of the company. Change in company strategy in terms of the service that company offers, corporate mergers, change in the company positioning can be examples of SIPs. For the past 3 years, the company that I am working for gone through a corporate merger and it’s been tremendous experience for me. I am not going to take the names of the companies because I believe learning’s are important than company names. I would any day bet on my learning’s rather than the company. From the organization’s standpoint mergers are very crucial for their existence. Inventions like Internet, power of PC computing and advanced technologies are re-writing the meaning of the word ‘competition’. In order to keep ahead of the compe...

Long time back I forwarded this picture to group of my friends group and it tickled an interesting discussion among us. If you see the picture there are lot of 'managers' are surrounding an engineer or a worker managers are simply watching and the engineer (people like me) are doing the hard work. This throws up an interesting question 'What do these managers really manage?' According to my experience there are two types of manager roles that are existing in the hi-tech industry as of now: 1. Delivery managers: These managers are basically a techie and moved to management ladder because of experience in software engineering and responsible for software engineering deliverables guy mainly operates within the 'software life cycle' starting from requirements gathering,design,coding,testing,release. 2. Business managers: Basically come from MBA background and manages any one of the non-engineering areas like HR,Finance/Biz development,Strategy of the company. As far...

Aeron a 33 year old, north-western American left me in a total shock when he asked me 'Hey Jay! I saw in the TV that Indian stock market is crashing. Is it so ?'.Of course this is the last question you expect from Aeron a car driver who drops and picks me from my work place. He hardly has a college degree and he knows about Indian stock market crash.Whats happening around me? Inside my mind a sudden statement came up 'The sunrise in the east'. My mind was wandering on some of the events that has happened in the past one and a half months. The receptionist in my office enters my country name as 'India' without even asking me, The April edition of Newsweek a famous US magazine has got the cover story 'The new India’. Every day in Wall-Street-Journal, the financial newspaper of the US has at least one column about China. Yes! I am experiencing it personally! The eastern part of the world is indeed raising. I also did some more reading and pondering with myself ...