Scenario, Afterthoughts & Prompts

Your first teacher always happens to be your parents. While mother takes the route of inspirational stories and soft techniques, father goes the real life experience way and we all know that those lessons set the direction and speed of our life. Every child is unique and unique are their characteristics and behaviors. So, a benchmark or comparison does not help much; rather it hurts the prospects more. I am not a parent, so, I am definitely not the right person to dole out any advice on parenting, but there are lots of things which I learnt from my father, which proved to be very useful in my professional life; though those were not meant to be a professional advice from my father. Since I was an talkative, arrogant kind of child who use to be more busy in doing multiple things in one go rather than focusing on one and was very short on one thing, which is ‘attention’, my father had his tough task cut out for him. Though never realized then, but any other person would have changed th...

I was listening to panel discussion consisting panel members like Rajdeep Sardesai and Arnab Goswami on YouTube other day and it left me amused (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w9bgAdFYXM). These people were discussing about the role of media in creating a wave in favor of Shri Narendra Modi, who is Prime Minister of the country now. Why I was amused listening to them because, in this discussion, journalist brigade were smacking with certain kind arrogance about their status. They seems to be still living in the elitist era where level of education in the country was low and flow of information was restricted in the country. They seems not to acknowledge the fact that India’s literacy rate has increased over a period and this is same country, which boasts more than 900 million mobile connections, more than 150 million board band connections, more than 100 million Facebook users and many thing more. What remains intriguing that their eyes are fixed on some 27% of the population of th...

In my course of “Entrepreneurship through the lens of Venture Capital” by Stanford University, I was listening to  by Mr. Howard Hartenbaum, Partner, August Capital on “Funding Your Startup” and on one of the question on whom do they fund or not fund, he answered that he try not to fund a business run by couple(man-wife, live-in partners etc.). Reason he gave for doing so was the uncertainty in personal relationship may adversely affect the business relationship. I automatically connected to this assumption when I heard the Preity Zinta-Ness Wadia conflict story and Preity Zinta had to come out saying that she will not sell her stake in their joint business venture “Kings XI Punjab” IPL team.  During last six years when I started harboring the dream of quitting my job and becoming an entrepreneur and last four year, since actually quit the job and became one, I have met various people, I have seen various people becoming business partners and ending up sooner than later with...

Religion is one of the most binding and unifying factor across globe. People become religious for various reasons; for peace, to escape the harsh reality of this world, to get their wish fulfilled which they otherwise feel can’t be achieved by their effort and so on and so forth. But to be a successful entrepreneur or a better manager, one should be religious person as well. There are five solid reason listed below for being so: 1) Religion teaches you to be ‘disciplined’ : I am for sure don’t know details about my religion, so knowing the details of other religion is out of question for me. But having seen everybody practicing their respective religions, one thing I can say that they follow it in disciplined manner. Order may be different, but discipline occupies a prominent place in every religion. Similarly, to make any business successful, one needs to be disciplined. Without discipline, one will surely squatter away the time and resources. 2) Religion teaches yo...

Google is powerful, we all know that. After all, more than two-third of search traffic in US and European countries, almost all search traffic in country like India goes to Google direction. And more traffic means more pages and information getting optimized taking Google page ranking algorithm in to mind. Many do it right and many others do it right at the same time, so there is always tough fight to be top ranked in Google search. This competition forces many to take the route, which is not appreciated by Google. If somebody is looking for steps to screw his SEO campaign, then few of them are given below: 1) Try to manipulate the search by organizing search through deceptive means : Google is founder and propagator of open world order. It earns big money through Google Adwords and shares the pie with site owners, where it sends the traffic, through Adsense. Sometime back I read an article about the nefarious design of getting organic search ranking. There are numerous...

There are many players in India trying to get into the space of e-books sales and the scenario also seems to be conducive. Country already has a population of more than 1.2 billion and maximum number of people falls between the age group of 18-45. Not only that, country has always been at top edge of technology advancement. Now-a-days, we have wide range of smartphones and tablets available in the price range of Rs.3500/- to Rs.45,000/- and the total number of available devices are huge; in scores of millions. According to some survey, India is showing good appetite for e-books and digital content.   So, everything makes a perfect business sense. But it is easier said than done for new entrants. They should incorporate following six strategies to make their business successful:         1. Free Apps sucks battery; have a dedicated e-book reader as well : Most of the smartphones and tablets in the country run on Android OS, which is open source and ha...