Lazy Musings

1. Gaming: I grew up playing Mario. So you can imagine how delighted I was to find the original Mario ; have been addicted since last week. This is not a demo, no software required, no adapted version: This is the one. The games today are good no doubt but the nostalgia of Mario is unbeatable. Like one of my classmates Vikas said when asking me to pass him the link: “Mario was the first love”.

2. Personal outsourcing: Rent-a-coder is the place to go for everything from a simple Excel/VB macro to sophisticated large systems. It’s amazing because it is in the true sense of the word, a value-added-intermediary. It has over 170,000 developers/development firms registered, with projects being posted every damn minute. I am using it to select an individual for one of my projects, and I have got 12 good bids in the last 16 hours. Their escrow payments is one of the biggest success factors, and it is implemented very strictly. Talk about network effects, can another general-coding outsourcing service on the Internet challenge this! Their user interface is way too simple, and in the Web 2.0 world, I would say almost regressive. But the same issue of 100,000s of users are used to it and so change doesn’t come easy (think Amazon, Rediff)

3. I don’t know how popular Skype’s SMS/text messaging is, but is invaluable to me now. You might say why dont I just call my fiance in India, rather than messaging. But its not possible to call all the time, she is busy, I am busy and with short texts sent regularly it’s great. And Skype helps reduce per text bill to 25% of what sucky t-mobile charges

Views on 3 articles that really made me read them completely on FT today:

1. UK considering Tax on Virtual Income: Second Life is having multi-dimensional effects, isn’t it! UK regulators are wondering when should they start charging virtual income, generated and staying completely within Second Life. If you think this is a small amount, think again. Second Life Economy page keeps a running tab: $ 1.59 million was spent in the last 24 hours (that is not a typo, and that is US Dollars ) .Agreeably, almost everyone earning money in SL would be like a business person thus adding the extra complication of establishing Cost Of Sales.   The important issues are:should Linden dollars that remain completely virtual (i.e. are not converted to real currency) be taxable; does a cost-benefit analysis show any point of trying to collect tax on this; and what impact will this have on the users/avatars and their spending. This is just fascinating; FT quotes analysts that Second life may be the 21st century’s avatar of “offshore accounts”

2. MySpace establishing formal US Presidential candidate program:

News Corporation will soon be able to track and monitor online donations made to presidential candidates through its MySpace subsidiary, giving the media group an increasingly prominent role in the 2008 presidential election. This involvement in candidates’ fundraising is new territory for News Corp, which, until now, has limited its interest in presidential elections to media coverage via its print and broadcast outlets.

If you want to prove the power of social networking to anyone, use this data piece! A giant media conglomerate is taking the biggest (by far) online social network places. Wonder if this is what Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson (founders of mySpace) envisioned! But, hey this is interesting. I will try to follow this more in the coming weeks. Just imagine how many entities are being put in a completely new environment here: the candidates themselves (mySpace giving them tutorials to develop good profile pages), mySpace (started and wanted to remain as a music-lovers social network), NewsCorp (what all can mySpace be leveraged for) and the political system itself (the voters!!)

3. US Buy-out funds bids go to record high of $82 billion in May so far: I am out of depth here, but by god these are big numbers.   May has been the month where US buy-out funds have made bids totaling 82 billion USD.

Next question in your mind – maybe the number of deals has gone up.
Answer:  No, they have reduced

Next question in your mind – maybe buyout-groups are bidding as a team
Answer: No, club bids have reduced, are reducing.

Basically, huger deals are being bid for. I guess these groups (1) have the momentum going in their favor right now, both in terms of invested capital and interest from the target companies (2) are confident that these bigger companies have bigger scope for streamlining (no double-edged sword intended) and extracting value

By the way, a small piece of trivia, an Interrobang is the punctuation symbol for combination of  question mark and exclamation mark

One way to make use of a miserable London early-summer day (temperature: 5 degrees!) is to stay indoors and explore one of the museums. Did that yesterday, visited the Surrealism exhibition at V&A yesterday.

Surrealism seems to be very interesting; somewhere between contemporary and modern art, it can be best defined as fantasy bound loosely by reality. Think of the old woman-young woman whom do you see picture; that is surrealism. But so is a lot more things. And this exhibition takes you the stages of development nicely. On the exhibition home page link above is the photo of the lip sofa; a sofa in the shape of lips deliberately made as glassy as possible by Salvador Dali, the biggest name of the surrealist movement. There’s also the arm chair (chair with the back’s edges in the shape of arms), lobster home phone (old-style circular dial phone with a lobster as the talking piece) and jewelery representing lion’s face sprawling out diamonds.

What I really liked was how surrealism was commercialized in interesting ways; by patrons yes, but also by advertising agencies, fashion designers and interior decorators.

And then today, I put myself to work for the marketing research assignment by Bruce Hardie, one of our really-good marketing professors. Gosh, he has made me sceptical about everything! I mean everything, I wonder if I will ever believe a market research result again. But beyond all that, an interesting bit of info for those who didn’t know (I surely didn’t before this class): Research findings by Forrester, the famous and oft-quoted technology market research firm, is not believed by serious academics and professionals because they do not publish the methodology undertaken to collect the data. Only when you know the methodology can you identify biases (talking to a non-representative sample) and sampling errors (not taking a large enough sample size for the given confidence) in research, and if you can’t do that, how do you believe what they say. So much for my using their data in many, many presentations over the last two years! Oh well, well-learnt for my future.

Amitabh and Tabu in roles that suit them to the T, in a storyline that is as unconventional as it is arguably mainstream,  an NRI-based setting where London is on display in a bubbly manner, a side-story involving a sweet-and-sharp that is gripping and finally crispness that is, simply, refreshing.

If Chini Kum was 15-20 minutes shorter than it is, it would be in one of my fav films. The second half is draggy by about 15 minutes; otherwise, this is what a good movie is all about.

The crispness of dialogs and in general, of Amitabh and Tabu’s relationship, was the highlight for me. The way they understand each other through this crispness is, for me, one of the themes the first half is trying to project out nicely and non-blaring loudly. Zohra Sehgal plays her part to perfection, and the little girl plays it beyond perfection. Tabu.. she is way way ahead as an actress of anyone else in India, and being (not just playing) the character she is portraying.

About Pirates 3, I haven’t seen the second and only bits of the first, but I agree with the reviews that I read after I saw it. Johny Depp is bloody darn good, but I think it may get repetitive if I was seeing the same style for the third time in a setting that is getting more and more random. However, the special effects were certainly special and some bits were real witty; but overall lacked something to bind it together. It was almost like a collection of smaller bits within the movie.

London Business School today hosted its first Art Investment Conference ; Walid, a dear class-mate and a great guy has been raising the awareness as his personal mission over the last year and the crowd attending today was testament of his hard work.

Due to an important class presentation,  I could not attend it but we really are talking about a big crowd for an inaugural event.

Makes me think, how many of the attendees really love the art and how many want to use it for the snob value?

I have started understanding and appreciating art a little bit since shifting to London but a few days ago was my first encounter with Indian art. Professor Nirmalya Kumar gave a short talk on Jamini Roy paintings at the pre-conference dinner of India Business Forum.  Jamini Roy is considered the father of Indian modern art, and some of his mother-son  pieces in bright shades (Nirmalya owns a few that he had brought over) were riveting.

Makes me wonder, how come so few Indians, even of the”educated” ones, know anything about Indian art?

India Business Forum 2007 was a class event.  The theme was Indian Infrastructure and speakers like Shanta Devrajan (Chief Economist, World Bank, South Asia), Mr Rajiv Lall (CEO, IDFC),  Praful Patel (Union Minister, Civil Aviation, Government of India) gave impressive keynote speeches while 3 panels discussed numerous issues. The panelists credentials were as impressive as the keynote speakers: The IOC Chairman, The Reliance Energy CTS CEO, Chairman of the SKIl Infrastructure, CEO of the Economist, Director of Morgan Stanley, Head of the JSW Jindal Group and so many many more

I was helping out in handling the media side of things, and we already have had many press mentions in The Economic Times, Deccan Herald along with the storeis being picked up by Rediff and Zee News. (thanks so much Mr. H.S. Rao at PTI and Ms. Sujata at Reuters) The TV coverage should follow in the next few days as CNBC TV18, CNN-IBN, NDTV and BBC were all covering the event and taking interviews.

A few interesting nuggets from the day:

• Shanta Devrajan  started the day in great fashion, by stressing an oft-forgotten theme: India’s infrastructure deficit can be significantly reduced through reforms that will help existing assets. In other words, don’t just keep thinking and talking of new infrastructure all the time; tremendous value can come out of current infrastructure. The case study of Andhra Pradesh spending more on power subsidies than on the entire state health budget every year for the last 5 years was a true eye-opener!!! Make your power infrastructure more robust and value generating by eliminating subsidies, the farmers dont want them; they would rather pay for power that reaches them than free power which is unreliable, stolen by middlemen etc. I was mesmerized by this point of incredibly useless subsidies that continue because it will be non-popular politics.
• Rajiv Lall spoke really well I heard but unfortunately could not attend his speech. He did talk a bit on the under utilized branch network of Public sector banks, that should help debt penetration in future
• The financing panel had very interesting views on how the Public sector banks are still not asset heavy as required, and there is huge shortage of quality PPP project sponsors like GMR etc. The technical details of how longer-term debt will help infra projects a lot but not given by Indian banks because of their asset-liability mismatch
• Praful Patel mentioned that the multiplicity of agencies needs to be simplified to make Tier II and III airports a success. He also said that our carbon footprint is not comparable to the developed world but we are still employing the best environmental practices for all new projects.
• The High commissioner of India to UK ended the day with witty comments about our choice of venue (royal college of obstetricians and gynecologists). He made many interesting remarks, the best being on grievance management; that India must manage the growing tensions that will come up with high-speed development, between regions, classes, industries.

Tim (http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/executives/timdavie.shtml) is a good speaker; his presentation  slides were very picture-heavy and that makes for a good discussion-style talk. It was during the QnA however, that Tim showed why he is considered one of UK’s top marketeer, answering with  style,  substance,  clarity and insight.

Lets ponder over a few interesting points that he stressed on:

• Doesnt matter what role you are in, you gotta love content if you want to be good in the media business
• the strategic question “what business am I really in”, as per the media value chain, is the question every senior management is asking themselves – and the answers are not easy.
• Quality becomes even more important for this wide choice and easy control  world; 6/10 just wont do, you need 9/10
• BBC  has always delivered great-quality content suitable for the long-tail; so mobile is a synergetic channel
• The test for the under20 generation is “do I want to share this media piece”
• Cross-media measurements are becoming crucial to have
• BBC’s business model is “great quality content” + “trusted guide”; backbone-d by the best unbiased News worldwide

I can see that I am not being able to capture the ethos of a good session in bullets here; more to come in a day or two on this

16 Apr: Google acquires Doubleclick: $3.1 billion
30 Apr: Yahoo acquires Right Media: $680 million
18 May: Microsoft acquires AQuantive: $6 billion

A few points of interest here:

- With online advertising being their modus operandi for a while, is this not way way too late?

- Dunno whether you noticed that Microsoft is again playing catch up in the online space, and at huge premiums. When exactly will they wake up & be agile or just give up on copying?

Dear old FT Magazine, as usual some very interesting articles this week.

One of them (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5b3df528-02aa-11dc-a023-000b5df10621.html) by Tim Harford discusses carbon footprints of different regions in the UK.

Read it, it’s damn interesting and very short; but here’s a summary set of statements if you dont want to click on the link to read it:

1. “London’s Mayor’s office informs me that London emits 40 per cent less carbon dioxide a person than the national average”

2. “The Office for National Statistics reports that Londoners produce much less household waste than anywhere else in the UK. From the same source I learn that London’s households are the most likely to have no cars”

3. “London, like other big, dense cities, is good for the planet. That fact seems to surprise people. After all, cities are polluted places. But we need to make a fair comparison. There are 7,600 times more people in London than in Ashton Hayes, but if you took 7,600 villages like Ashton Hayes and tried to cram all of them inside the M25 you’d have a struggle. The first step, I suppose, would be to build a few thousand skyscrapers and fill them with gardens and garden sheds.”

4. “But it is worth remembering that Londoners – like the citizens of New York, Tokyo and many other dense cities around the world – have found a way of life that combines green living with wealth and economic dynamism. It turns people into unconscious, even unwilling, environmentalists.”

Here’s my questions, if anyone wants to have a discussion on this:

1. How believable is this? Specifically, did this author take into account all form of commercial footprint of London? I mean 40% less than national average with manufacturing already dying here seems steep. I understand the population in London is many times anywhere else but still.

2. If this is truly the case, what does that say about “oh the purity of the countryside; I just want a break out there” school of thought

3. If this is truly the case, how should the whole PoA for lowering global carbon footprint be changed (if at all)?  Should the criteria for carbon emission reduction differ for cities and villages in UK?

4. If this is not the case, then is there a fundamental flaw in carbon footprint estimations being followed?

not being critical, just want to learn more on this topic

Instead of going to McDonalds for the Fillet-o-Fish I felt like, I was lazy and stopped at the Spanish place next to home. San Miguel’s Restaurant & Tapas Bar is quite a cool place, with live music and well-known for its ambience and food.

So I come in, sit at a table with my Economist for keeping me company, and this 40-something lady says “are you alone, join us if you want”; and so started an hour of great conversation. It was two Irish friends, a guy and a girl, having their brandy having just finished their dinner.
We talked about literally everything: how Ireland and India have similar cultures because of being family-oriented (and the flags are similar, I reminded them!), how the Irish cricket team now is finally known in Ireland, how emails make our life event-driven now (and how Blackberry email responses can honestly wait till you get to work), student loans in UK. I mean everything

And it ended with the lady dancing to the live music and finding a partner with another restaurant 60-odd year old guest, who then later talked about his 3 ex-wives!!

Sometimes random encounters can be great fun