I would like offer some of my observations and learning’s gained from this event

The finalists of the competition were five groups

Artoo                 -  Development of Cloud Application for Workflow of Microfinance Transactions

Star Wishlist    – Online shopping site for giving marriage gifts  based on a wishlist created by Bride & Bridegrooms

Ixora                  – Development of Cloud application for Biogenetic analysis

Schools            -  Web portal for submitting online applications to schools

Fifth Group     – Waste Management

Panelists  :   Subrato Bagchi,Vinita Bali,Sudhir Sethi,Bipin Chandran

The panelists had done an excellent job in awarding the Artoo, the first prize . To my surprise , the presenters from four other groups just dint have confidence in their business plans at all. Most of the presentations were not complete in the aspects which a VC or an Investor would like see. Marketing strategy was completely missing from most of the presentations. There was hardly any market survey carried out  by the teams with the prospective customers whether they would accept their product , which they were planning to make. Financials were not clearly drawn up explaining  the  sales forecast or cash inflows forecast. There were no statistics to support their forecasts. One of groups was ambiguous about the sources of revenue, and had diverted from the objective of the business. Infact i was wondering , how did these guys even qualify for the final round out of so many aspirants with business ideas.

Some of the learnings  gained from attending this session:

1.         Business Plan should be complete in all aspects most importantly – Market Research,Existing Competitors,Target Segmentation,SWOT Analysis, USP,Positioning Strategy Revenue Model,Cash flow statement,Income & Expenditure Statement,P&L Statement,Marketing Plan,Exit Strategy. I dint see all of these components in any of the presentations

2.        The Business plan should be presented by a person, who is confident  about the business plan and has strong presentation skills , aggressively selling the business proposition to the panel.

3.          Basic principles of preparing power point presentations should be followed – Not cluttering the slides with too much information where the panel is struggling to actually see what is written. The slides should have short points backed up by verbal explanation by the speaker, so that the speaker has the attention of the audience.

4.        Any startup which is seeking funds , should always have a professional and an eminent person on the board of advisors, who is professionally strong in the domain of the business.This is a plus point to attract investors.

5.       Estimations/forecasts of the cash flows should be realistic in nature , should be carefully drawn up after looking at the actual market potential and then the extent to which the market can be penetrated using marketing plans, Sales and Business development

6.     Wherever a specific process of the business plan has to be explained, it is better to do it with diagrams instead of putting up the text on the slides(This was being done with Waste Management group here in the competiton)

7.     All the group members/founders  should have extensively carried out market research , moving out of their cool ac spaces  and running on the fields, to actually know the pulse of their target market.

8.    Explaining why a customer would like to buy your product, if alternate options are available. This could be explained with a Cost Benefit Analysis.

I am eagerly waiting for the next such event , where i want to participate.

In December I was contemplating whether to go for my Six Months Executive Management Program at IIM Bangalore, as I had already completed my MBA in Marketing , not the full time one but the 3 year executive program at Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, New Delhi, which gave me adequate exposure to the concepts of the business management. But my experience here has been very fulfilling and enriching and I am sure i wont get this kind of exposure  in any of the b-schools other than IIM’s and ISB. I should say that Iam lucky to be a student of IIM Bangalore , atleast through this six months programme designed for all armed forces officers on the verge of retirement.

Many officers have visited this campus to take a feedback of this program , whether it would be useful to attend this course. I will say this with full confidence and so do my colleagues who will agree that this program will bring a real difference in their outlook towards the corporate life . Though it is challenging for everyone to get many business concepts right , within such a short span of the course, but it opens up many windows of thoughts for those who really want to jump in entrepreneurship roles.All the professors are very rich ,experienced most of them who have taught in the b-schools abroad after finishing their corporate stints. They bring with both the real life experiences and the theoretical knowledge  to teach us.  The campus has excellent resources of books,digital media,access to many research databases which cannot be easily available to individuals if they want it at their own expense. For those people who want to jump into entrepreneurship roles, there is a NSR Centre which incubates many startups in their initial stages , which means the institute provides funding and office space for an year or two , in case if the business plan gets approved by the institute. Most importantly we get to attend many seminars at National level on Corporate Strategy, Entrepreneurship Games, Industry Experts , Seminars which are so insightful and useful, where we get an exposure to what is happening in the Industry outside. We also get to meet very important people and in case if there is a will to start something , they would act as ur links, who can make your dreams come true  by mentoring and helping us to fulfil our dreams. We  are also very lucky for the fact that we will  get status of IIMB Alumni, which opens up a big network of friends with whom we can interact, share our dreams and discuss the wildest of the wild ideas.

Sometimes i feel that i should come back for the One year Executive Management Program …but not now….enough of studies. Now i really want to put to use what all i have already learnt.

Thank you IIM for making me a much more confident person today , wherein i feel i can go out and reach the top .  I promise that I will make you proud one day !!! very soon

But the upgradation to the new standard  requires huge costs and am not sure how many GSM service providers in India specially the major players like Airtel,Vodafone,BSNL and MTNL have started the migration to this new standard. Have they ?? Is the government monitoring the completion of the upgradation?  Iam not sure of this !!!!

For those guys interested in reading about the GSM A5 cracking and the history , i managed to gather a list of links

“Twitter” is all over the news in the Indian Media, specially  got its attention when Mr Shashi Tharoor, MP, Minister of State(External Affairs)  tweeted “Cattle Class” and “Holy cow” issues. He has more than 10,000 followers now(http://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor).  Many of my friends, created their twitter accounts soon after these  articles about “Twitter” broke out.

Few days back, i was telling my colleagues  ”What Twitter is all about” and how it’s presently being used by individuals for microblogging/social communication as well as organisations for their social marketing . Its become one of the most powerful tools, which provides real time updates about events happening across the world . For eg. During the Mumbai terror attacks, twitter was extensively used for posting of updates by the personnel,who were trapped inside the hotel and those all around the locations where terrorist attacked. Look at a snapshot of twitter during Mumbai Terror Attacks.

Tweets during Mumbai Terror attacks

The “Realtime” power of this platform did attract Google and Facebook , who tried their best to buy out twitter , but in vain. Facebook thereafter integrated a similar platform of its own.    Google has now integrated Twitter’s “Tweets” into their search results.

For all those who must be wondering, why Twitter’s Tweets are so important in search ill explain. There is always a time lag between the time of posting of a news article by a news agency and the time the article gets listed in the google search results.

This time lag may vary depending upon the ranking of the website from 5 mins to 15 days.Previously Google was not in a position to return any search results on such realtime queries.  Google  now queries the  key words on the Twitter platform and provides  twitter search results embedded inside the webpage, which also keeps updating itself  every milli second. You can also go to http://search.twitter.com directly to search for any real time tweets on any specific subject or topic .For eg. I just searched for “Chelsea” in Google. Amongst the results , even the tweets from the twitter are embedded on the search page.

A report by US military intelligence has claimed that the messaging application Twitter could be used by terrorists as an operational tool. Intelligence agencies are now monitoring this platform as future terror attacks will be aided by high technology gadgets and applications like Blackberry,Twiiter,YouTube(encrypted videos) etc.

The report into the increasing security implications of mobile technology envisaged terrorists using Twitter messages, or Tweets, to communicate and share images and locations of future terrorist attacks. “Twitter is already
used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the report said.

“For example, there are multiple pro and anti Hezbollah Tweets. In addition, extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use by ‘hacktivists’ and activis for surveillance. This could theoretically be combined with targeting.”

It notes that Twitter was used extensively by protestors at the recent Republican National Convention to identify the location of police and security guards in an effort to get around them. The report envisages Twitter also being used to identify the location of targets. It cites Tweets from US troops stationed overseas that could be used as information for
selective attacks.

“l’m in Bagram waiting for a flight to Camp Salemo by Kwost in the volatile east of Afghanistan near the Paki border. Hot days cold nights,” was one Tweet cited from an American soldier in Afghanistan that was posted on a publically available forum.Use of Twitter has been gaining ground fast and it is already being used in criminal cases, as well as updating work groups in business about changing goals.

So now you can imagine, a platform which has become a global search platform for “Realtime news” in such a short time  due to its simplicity and user friendliness, has also become a powerful and dangerous tool which can aid terrorists for real time communications.

During that 34-year period, India ranked sixth among all countries in terms of terrorist incidents (behind Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and Spain), the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which maintains the database at Maryland, reports in a press release addressing the Indian attacks.

The terrorist attacks generally fall into three categories:

• Sieges against a building or some other edifice (such as the most recent attacks in Mumbai)

• Bombings (in which the intent was to destroy a specific facility)

• Assassinations.

START’s Terrorist Organization Profiles (TOPs) include info on 56 known terrorist groups in India, including the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which carried out attacks in Mumbai in recent years.

The GTD is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
This database provides information about 80,000 terrorist attacks happening worldwide such as perpetrators and targets and the number and fate of hostages taken (including how long they were held before being released or executed). All of the GTD’s information is available for free to the public.

START is planning to add the latest information/data over the next year to make the database updated till2007. The consortium also reports that it uses more than 75 people with expertise in six language groups to collect information for its database.

In trying to keep up with the real meaning ,Oracle Corporation , is really trying hard  acquire  Sun Microsystems , in an attempt that would give straight competition to IBM, the global leader in System Solutions and Engineering and reach the top . After the recent clearance by the U.S. Department of Justice for the deal , the open source communities were deliberating the future of MySql and Java. Thanks to EU, that it has presented its objections to the proposed acquisition. To this  Oracle has publicly claimed that the hyper-protective bureaucrats of the EU’s Commission have demonstrated “profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics”

However there are mixed responses to this merger. Ecommerce Journal says that Oracle’s previous acquisitions of “InnoDB” and “BerkeleyDB” did not affect their licensing policies and further supported the development and support to these two products. SAP has real concerns about customer choice in the database market and the future open licensing of Java.

Open Database Alliance, united its efforts to ensure that Sun’s MySQL database software would live on as a cheaper and open source alternative, really did attract the EU’s regulators

MySql , an open source database is presently being used by facebook,amazon and even this blog site, hosted by wordpress. Millions of websites which are hosted using linux and mysql, do not incur anycosts for the OS and the database saving about 2000-4000 US $.  So there is a real worry about the open licensing of the MySql post acquisition.

I feel that MySQL should be separated from the deal and allowed to be spin off as  an separate independent company to pursue its mission. Iam sure Larry Ellision would dump the deal in such a case. lets wait and watch

This was done to understand the benefits in monetary terms , which would help the pay commission to arrive at the pay scales which are acceptable by the government employees,specially when there have been huge demands by all the govt organisations to be at par with upward spikes, in the CTC’s of the private sector during the economic boom. But here we stand today happily in the midst of an economic recession, boasting about the nice package, a secured job and a relaxed life. Cheers!! Lets have some beer and kababs

But still one would always like to know about where they stand when compared to their private counterpart. XLRI has really done a good job in arriving at the CTG of all the employees , when the true and accurate cost estimates are not available from the government sources.Thanks to our governments transparent systems where you can see closed boxes marked “confidential” and nothing more than that. I just hope that RTI would be able to extract that information in future and put that for public perusal, while justifying their fiscal policies with a near accurate fiscal deficit policy.

Some of the important findings for those who dont have time to go through the report

(a) A compensation consists of two components name “Transactional” and “Relational” returns.Transactional consists of Monetary and Non Monetary which an employee perennially receives. Relational returns are Self esteem,Self satisfaction.
(b) CTC only consists of the Transactional Returns , Relational returns cannot be quantified in monetary terms
(c) Calculation of CTG by following table below: Multiply the Index value with the Basic Pay

CTG calculation of a Defence Officer

(d) Components of the Pay

Components of Pay - LtCdr/Maj

Source : XLRI,Jamshedpur report of CTG calculation for Sixth Pay Commission

I hope you guys enjoyed this article.Please gimme feedback if any

Is this “India Shining” ? i doubt