Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Its hardly few weeks since Aravind Adiga's novel 'The white tiger' won the man booker price. Starting this week I am getting emails from vendors like indiaplaza.in, Crossword etc. about the deals/discounts they are offering for the book. While I was pondering which deal to go with, got a huge shock when I went out for lunch today. The pirated version of the book is already available on roadside shops for 145 rupees (check photo below). In countries like India, piracy spreads faster than the original version. When are we going to realize the importance buying original copies or start innovating around piracy? Related article: Piracy = Opportunity

The San-Francisco bay area of the US is popularly known as ‘Silicon Valley'. Its wealth generation story is well known, where it created umpteen numbers of billionaires over the past three decades. Companies started from the valley literally rewritten the technology entrepreneurship, thereby creating history. The amount of contributions by valley based technology entrepreneurs to the bigger world is unbelievable. Starting from Hewlett-Packard to latest Google every other company has changed the world to a larger extent. These valley based world class product companies, literally created the term Multi National Company (MNC), which is a house-hold name today. It was mainly due to the valley entrepreneurs and their ability to take risk, identifying the opportunity and tapping the correct market had made all the difference. Added to that, world class universities, access to venture capital and world class minds created the ideal ecosystem for entrepreneurship. India is in the similar ...

The famous dialogue "welcome to the real world!" from the Movie Matrix hit my head yesterday. I was watching all major news channels covering news about Jet Airways laying off 800 employees on a single day. Clearly the global financial crisis has hit India, starting with Aviation Industry. Going forward I see it affecting multiple industries, which would result in major job cuts, downsizing and salary cuts. For yuppy Indians, who earned five digit salaries from day one need to face the ugly face of capitalism in coming days. No amount of crying, cribbing, protesting or complaining to political party would help during turbulent times. This is not a typical governmental setup, but the reality -- let us face it! Only who has the capability to adapt will survive during difficult times. Its high time we say Good bye to double digit salary growths and frequent job hopping.

It’s been a month since Apple's much hyped iPhone launched in India. In midst of huge expectations the product hit the market on Aug 22, with Airtel and Vodafone taking up the distributorship in India. In order to boost up the initial sales, both service provides kept their shop open throughout the night. More importantly India's 'tech' city Bangalore was all geared up to welcome this popular Gizmo, where many technologists lined up in the showroom to pickup their phone before their friends. The next day's local newspapers flashed pictures of proud iPhone owners from the city. The first say sales numbers were pretty good and everybody believed iPhone will take off in India in a big day, given its one billion population. Much against the expectations and media hype, the iPhone sales started taking nosedive in subsequent weeks and it has not even crossed 1500 handsets throughout India. It clearly proves that iPhone is a big failure out here. According to Geoffrey Moor...

Got the link for this presentation from one of the blogs. Summarizes important aspects of entrepreneurship.

Author : Subroto Bagchi Price: 399 INR Related posts: Book review: High performance Entrepreneur Book release: Go Kiss the world The first book of Subroto 'The high performance entrepreneur' primarily depicted various aspects of Entrepreneurship. If the first book is all about 'work' the second one 'Go kiss the world' is all about 'life', thus completing the 'work-life' hemispheres. In the year 2006,Subroto delivered his famous speech to the students of IIM-Bangalore on the same title, where he shared some of his life lessons with management graduates. This book is an extension of that speech covering many aspects of his personal and professional life. This book has couldn't come at a better time where India is going through a huge transformation. Thanks to economic policies and availability of talent pool, the number of jobs for young professionals is growing at an exponential phase. Well paid global jobs are getting poured into the country ...

Last week I was watching 'Innovation at work' program in CNBC-TV18, which covered some case studies done in India on the field of innovation. It was interesting to see IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd) as one of the cases, which showed how they built the online reservation system ( http://irctc.co.in ) as 'incremental' basis. Started off in the year 2000 with mailing the printed tickets (i-tickets) to customers, IRCTC has come a long way by offering multiple services like e-ticketing,package tours,budget cab booking and season tickets. Check out some their list of achievements here. Yesterday I was traveling back from my native place to Bangalore in a newly introduced train. In order to confirm train timings I called 139,which turned out to be pleasant experience. There was a well designed IVR system and the support staff was providing a professional quality service in the local language. Upon digging more I learned that IRCTC has outsourced ...

We all know how omnipresent piracy has become in India. For example, I came across the following advertisement (check out the picture below) board in Chennai for refilling inkjet cartridges and laserjet toners. Even though refilling is not legally approved by printer manufactures, its an organized industry in India. Check out their website for more details and check out their interesting caption "Almighty gives only one life, but ASHCOM gives 6 lives", thereby saying that they can smartly refill the cartridge 6 times before getting rid of it forever. In a country where regulations doesn't exist or taken for granted, its impossible to expect people to buy cartridges/toners every time they run out of ink. The piracy is not restricted to cartridges alone. In Bangalore, everybody would have seen roadside bookshops having pirated copies of "best selling" books (recent addition: Go kiss the word by Bagchi) for 50-100 rupees. And I don't need to talk about softwa...

I was watching some videos about 'Bottom of the pyramid' idea by C.K.Prahlad. One of their case studies was about Aravind eye clinic, which was amazing. Check out the video to get a 'eye opening' business model.

One of my friends just got back from US and gave me a pack of stride chewing gum, which he bought there. More than the gum, their cover design fascinated me, because it embedded excellent word of mouth marketing messages (check out the pictures below). Here are some of the interesting things I have learnt: They have smartly used caption -- "The ridiculously long lasting gum",by mentioning "Good for you, bad for us". Excellent sense of humor in their messages (even the cover cuttings include smile), while conveying the marketing message indirectly. Asking customers to participate in conversation by logging new ideas into their website Overall its a very interesting design, thus provides a reason for people to talk (crux of word-of-mouth marketing). They have not spent anything extra to spread marketing message. Embedding marketing messages along with a product is a great idea. Next time you buy a product (be it a chewing rum or gadget) watch out for its cover design...

Came across this interesting picture which reflects my current thinking. May be Dilbert put is too bluntly calling Marketing as a 'fraud'. In reality (based my real time experience) it doesn't matter how great a particular product/service is. It is all about how well it can be marketed and sold to customers. Business/Entrepreneurship happens when the customer signs a cheque and nothing else is more important than that.

Last Friday there was a book release function held in Crossword Bangalore. Famous strategist and professor C.K.Prahlad and his colleague M.S.Krishnan launched the book and spoke about what new age of innovation is all about. For more details check out their website . As businesses are growing globally, it becomes critical to provide a great 'experience' to each of their consumers. Every consumer is unique with their own choice and providing great experience comes with having proper offerings. This is what they call 'N = 1', where N denotes the unique customer experience. In order to provide a great experience, companies end up sourcing resources from multiple sources, which they call 'R = G'. Prof.CK quoted the famous example of Apple iTunes business model, built around their revolutionary product iPod. Every user of iPod has their own choice of music (Classical, Rock, Pop etc..) which is unique to him/her (N=1). In order to provide N = 1,Apple sources music con...

Found a very interesting sponsored 'no parking' board this afternoon. It reads: 'just give a MISSED CALL to xxxxx and get information about Bangalore (picture below)' In their website the caption is mentioned as 'A new gateway to Bangalore just a missed call away' :) This is a really cool marketing technique, which generates instant word-of-mouth.

This is the third book by Chetan Bhagat. I have never read fiction ever since the reading habit caught into me. Chetan's Five point someone (FPS) changed my habit by taking me back to my good old college days. With similar expectations I bought this book and I would say I am fairly happy with the book. The most interesting point about Chetan is the canvas he uses to paint the whole story. He used business, cricket and religion as a background in this book (similar to IIT in FPS). The story starts with three friends Omi, Ishan and Govind belonging to lower middle class family in Ahmadabad. These folks are perceived as not-so-smart kind among the neighbourhood. With his passion towards building business Govind pulls in his buddies to start a shop, selling cricket accesories inside the temple's shopping complex owned by Omi's uncle. Ishaan (the local cricket buff) offers free coaching tips to customers, thereby creating a good reason for people to visit their shop. As the busi...

The reason behind any successful company is very simple : customer satisfaction. With global competition increasing day-by-day, companies are going beyond just satisfying customers. Companies are focusing to provide nice 'experience' to their customers by taking care of very small things. Recently I came across one such experience. I have been using Airtel's mobile connection for the past five years. This Tuesday (24th June) marked one more year of my existence in the earth. I had some a query regarding this month's mobile bill and dialed 121 (Airtel's customer support) for clarifying it.Upon choosing the basic option "Information regarding your account", an automated message promptly said "Airtel family wishes you a very warm and happy birthday". It was a pleasant shock for me to hear that message just by choosing the basic option. Within seconds, the automated software could recognize my number, match with my date of birth and play appropriate...

Yesterday I attended 'Startup city' event organized by SmartTechie magazine. More than 40 companies showcased their products and services in the event. There were many interesting keynote addresses and panel discussions held as a part for the event. The event was kick started with inaugural keynote by Ashish Gupta from Helion Venture partners . He spoke about various stages/milestones of a startup and challenges at each phase. His venture capital firm has invested in many of the early stage entrepreneurial ventures. I have heard Ashish's pod cast some time back, but it was a good experience listening to him live. Followed by that there were some panel discussions with participants from companies like Microsoft, Sun, Amazon etc. I was not that interested in listening to them, primarily because they perspective changes (or rather looks out of phase) when big company's senior executives start talking about entrepreneurship. The real cool thing was the produc...

After reading Andy's word-of-mouth marketing (WOMMA) book , I was thinking my favorite WOMMA examples. Here is the list came right on top of my mind Example Word-of-mouth strategy Bata chappals Pricing their products with ‘95 paisa’. (Rupees 199.95, Rupees 99.95 etc...). It has created hell lot of talking among consumers and even today. If not anything Bata has provided an interesting reason for people to talk about them. Costs nothing! Virgin Mobile Increasing customer base is the top priority of Indian telecom service provides. Virgin mobile has come up with their new idea of ‘paying for incoming’. Nobody knows about the intricacies yet. But it has already generated enough word of mouth among people by making them curious. Check out more details here. Gmail When they started it, only gave accounts to power users with some specific number of invitations. It created curiosity am...

Author: Andy Sernovitz Price : 24.95 USD How smart companies get people talking? As an engineer it’s quite possible to think everything from a technological perspective. Most of technologists think what if they have some ‘cool’ product they can build a business around it. In reality only 15% of overall product cost is spent towards engineering the product. Remaining amount goes for marketing, sales and support functions. No matter how much ever better the product is (in terms of technology, cool features, price and performance), if it is not marketed properly it will be a failure. Most of the technology startups fail not because of their technical expertise, but mainly because of their inability to market and sell the product. In fact, marketing determines the success or failure of these ventures. Coming to marketing, quite some numbers of methods were invented over the years. For a startup/entrepreneurial venture (which is of my interest), its hard to invest heavily on some of the ...

How much globalization is good? Can we allow global players to come in essential areas like agriculture, food and fruits? For quite some time I am not able to see Indian apples (especially himachal pradesh apples) in many of the retail shops like Reliance Fresh, More and Food world. Almost all apple shelves are occupied by Australian and Washington apples. This news item claims that Washington apple is looking India as one of the potential markets. What will happen to Indian apple producers? Will they be able to compete with the global players or foreign companies will dominate the market?

Chennai based New Horizon Media (NHM) has raised the second round of funding from Beacon India Private Equity Fund. I have been following NHM company for the past three years. They are mainly into regional language publishing. To start with they published few non-fiction books in Tamil and went on publishing in English, Children books and Malayalam. Check out more details from their website. Coming to their books, I have read about 6 books published by NHM. Check out the book reviews of Marketing Mayajalam , Charlie Chaplin which are published them. Almost all the books are priced less then 100 rupees, which very much affordable for an average Indian consumer. Added to that paper quality, cover design and bigger fonts makes the reading as a pleasant experience. I have also listed to one of their audio books about 'Emotional Intelligence' and found it useful. Stay tuned for reviews of remaining 4 books. Areas like book publishing is one of the fragmented areas in India today. ...