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

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...

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.

For the past month or so the Indian rupee is getting stronger against the American dollar, which has come down to 39 INR compared to 45 INR. This is already bleeding Indian services companies and their Q3 numbers speaks for that. When the rupee was getting weaker these service companies used to make 4-5% of their margins just by keeping their money in dollars and converting them back during the results announcement. Nowadays Indian service companies are mulling multiple options to resolve this problem -- six day working week, reduced hike for employees, productivity improvement, moving to lower cost geographies (like China and eastern europe) etc. With STPI tax sops are getting withdrawn by 2009 , Indian IT companies are having challenging times ahead. Let me take the example of product R & D happening in Indian companies as an example. Of course value creation can be done at multiple levels apart from R & D as well. Majority of MNCs which are having their engineering centers i...

Here is some of my favorite magazines! These mags are targeted to a specific audience, providing vital information. I started liking these type of stuff as they are catering to my interests. They also give altogether a 'positive' outlook of India . 1. Dare ( http://www.dare.co.in ): This is published by cyber- media completely focused on Entrepreneurship. They started the print edition from Oct '07 and the website is yet to be populated. Got a chance to read their Nov '07 and found it very interesting. It covered various aspects of Entrepreneurship -- new business ideas, VC/private funding, value creation and guest columns by successful Entrepreneurs. I also learned that their advisory committee consists of stalwarts like C.K.Prahlad, N.R.Narayana Murthy, Kanwal Reiki etc. Welcome effort from cybermedia! 2. Smart techie ( http://www.thesmarttechie.com ): This is a technical career magazine launched from Bangalore , which is a sister concern of Silicon India . I foun...

Looking at my blogs in a critical mood a few days back, I was both happy and a little guilty. Happy for the fact that my blogs cover a variety of topics, but guilty for the fact that they do not provide much of my views on my love for technology. Wanting to keep pace with the happenings at the technology arena, I have started co-authoring an exclusive technical blog- 'tech trends, impacts and innovation' , with some like minded people. It has proved to be an immense pleasure for me and has provided me with a sense of fulfillment to be a part of this blog space. It would be wonderful to hear your views about the blogs.

In his bestselling book ‘The world is flat’ , author Tom Friedman illustrates his ‘flat world’ concept. For people who have not read the book, let me give a quick background. The three billion people from India and China are much more empowered and connected today. It started when India opened up the economy and China signed the WTO agreement for open trade. Fuelled by these open trade policies, the ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘Off-shoring’ are the latest buzzwords for western world organizations for leveraging the eastern world. According to Friedman, this new worldwide phenomenon has leveled the competing field and the whole world has become flat. I really enjoyed reading the book mainly because the author extensively traveled to various geographical regions, met people, experienced the changes personally and came up with his conclusions. Now, let me look from the reverse angle and ask some questions to myself: Is the world really flat from India’s perspective? Can I do the same things from Ba...