Echoes of an online blogger whom I can sympathize with:

“Monday morning, I again tackled my blog surplus. As I started looking through the blogs I track to decide which ones to weed out, I got reading. And following links. Within half an hour, I had removed three blogs but added nine new ones. By lunchtime I had committed myself to 274 feeds – 17 more than I had started the day with – containing 3,624 items. But hey, it isn’t hopeless. I only have 3,582 more blog posts to read. At present reading speeds, and assuming nothing happens between now and then, I should be up to speed by November 2033.

BBC - Science & Nature - Human Body and Mind - Mind - Flavour and Personality test

Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don’t always know what others are really feeling.

Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain.

Here’s a nice service that caters to small time lenders and borrowers .People who need money request it, and other people bid for the privilege of lending it to them. Prosper makes sure everything is safe, fair and easy

Garnett & Helfrich Capital

Garnett & Helfrich Capital is the first fund to exclusively focus on the emerging venture buyout segment for mid-sized technology spinouts. Formed in March 2004, with $250,250,000 in capital from leading institutional investors and educational endowments and now expanded to $350,350,000, the firm invests in buyouts in the enterprise software, communications and networking, semiconductors, data processing, and internet content/infrastructure segments of the technology industry.

Garnett & Helfrich Capital is actively looking for
acquisition opportunities where the business has ongoing annual revenue
of $40,000,000 to $200,000,000, a positive brand and solid reputation
in the marketplace for technological excellence, and an installed base
of customers who have an enduring relationship with the business.

**Applying Franchise model ( MacDonalds) to Junk:
**
In 1989, university student Brian Scudamore encountered a tight summer job market in Vancouver, BC. It was that summer, while waiting at a McDonald’s drive-thru, that Brian discovered his future career in junk. Brian spotted a beat up junk truck with Mark’s Hauling painted on the side, and was inspired to spend his last $700 on a used pickup and start his own junk removal service.

Here’s one of the fastest growing companies in USA

CITI TRENDS

Headquarters: Savannah
Annual revenues: $290 million
Average annual revenue growth since 2004: 36%

What does it do ?
Citi Trends buys surplus merchandise from hot hip-hop designers and sells it at rock-bottom prices to customers most stores ignore–cash-strapped inner-city teens. “The company has carved out a unique niche,” says Elizabeth Anderson, a retail industry analyst with Cower & Co. in New York City. “Citi Trends has been able to drive growth not only by offering branded merchandise at a lower price point but through a low-cost real estate strategy where the Big Box chains can’t compete.” In 2005 revenues for the profitable chain shot up 42%, and comparable-store sales grew 16%.

MobiTV®

MobiTV, Inc. is the first mobile television and digital radio service provider for cellular, WiFi and broadband enabled devices worldwide. The MobiTV® service is available in the US through Sprint, Cingular, Alltel; in the United Kingdom through 3 and Orange UK; and to Canadian customers through Bell Canada, Rogers and TELUS Mobility; and other regional carriers around the world. The Emmy® Award winning service has more than one million paying subscribers and offers many popular TV channels from content providers such as MSNBC, ABC News Now, CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, ESPN 3GTV, NBC Mobile, CNBC, The Discovery Channel, TLC, The Weather Channel, along with cartoons, music videos, comedy and more. Founded in 1999, MobiTV is a privately-held company headquartered in Emeryville, CA.

It is heartening to see Google and Apple in the top 10 list of companies that MBA’s would work for, post graduation, in a survey conducted by Fortune.com

McKinsey & Co.
Google
Citigroup
Apple Computer
Goldman Sachs
General Electric
Bain & Co.
Johnson & Johnson
The Boston Consulting Group
Morgan Stanley

Here’s How
Some people out there might think that these rules look good in the hind sigh.However there are many firms which are using these principles and doing extremely. May be the hard core pessimist might title the evidence of the recent startup successes as survivorship bias. But I guess its better to get GOING, rather than being a spectator. If you aim for stars, atleast you will hit moon.

Via Dave Taylor :
Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder  : Trait of a entrepreneur
1. The Ability to Hyperfocus.
2. Rapid Fire Mind.
3. Multitasking at Will.
4. High Energy Level.
5. Highly Creative.
6. Quick Learner.
7. Stimulus Seeking Brain.
8. Constantly Scanning your Environment.
9. Great in a Crisis.
10. Risk Taker.

Purple cow : Another smart service where people might just be willing to pay 1 $ for little traffic to their sites

When you ask someone “What time is it?”, you rarely hear “one thirty three”. But why? Perhaps they haven’t spent the time needed to keep their watch accurate to the minute. And perhaps they judge that “one thirty” is all the precision you really care about.

Yet when introduced to the volume of a ball, one hears it is 4/3 pi r3, rather than it is “one half the volume of the box the ball came in” (1/2 d3). As with “one thirty”, this simpler approximation is only off by 5%. But how often does one hear the simpler version? Often, it helps to get a simpler version of a lot of aspects we deal with , mainly to get the big picture, to recall at a later point of time and also to recount it effortlessly.

Via Will Price :

The three traits great entrepreneurs  share are :

• Passion,

• Adaptability,

• Not taking themselves too seriously.

“We should work like the rain. The rain just falls one rain drop after another. It doesn’t ask: Am I making a nice sound down below? Will the plants be glad to see me? Millions and billions of raindrops, only falling.” – Jakusho Kwong (1935 - ), American Zen Buddhist Monk

5 Ways to Start Fresh How do you better the odds that you’ll succeed at a new start? Serial entrepreneur Kamran Elahian has made a life out of starting over. Here are his hard-won lessons for starting fresh – and starting smart.    

1. Write a mission statement. You’ll never do work that matters unless you define what matters. Elahian gave himself a sense of purpose by writing a mission statement for his life. He succinctly outlined his big-picture goals. Then he mapped out how he would get there.    

“We should work like the rain. The rain just falls one rain drop after another. It doesn’t ask: Am I making a nice sound down below? Will the plants be glad to see me? Millions and billions of raindrops, only falling.” – Jakusho Kwong (1935 - ), American Zen Buddhist Monk

5 Ways to Start Fresh How do you better the odds that you’ll succeed at a new start? Serial entrepreneur Kamran Elahian has made a life out of starting over. Here are his hard-won lessons for starting fresh – and starting smart.    

1. Write a mission statement. You’ll never do work that matters unless you define what matters. Elahian gave himself a sense of purpose by writing a mission statement for his life. He succinctly outlined his big-picture goals. Then he mapped out how he would get there.    

“Success is never final, and failure never fatal.”

There’s one product which was launched in 2001 and became a 3 billion grosser by 2004. This product entered and fought with one the most dominant player in the toy industry Mattel Inc ( Barbie) . MGA’s entertainment Inc.’s toy Bratz has ventured in to an area where a few have ventured and survived. Not only has it survived but has overthrown Barbie’s dominance in the toy industry. How did Bratz knock Barbie off is a great learning for any marketer . Here’s the Link

Judy’s Book :

What’s the word in your neighborhood? - Here’s a beautiful service. When broadband penetration reaches every home in India , ok atleast middleclass household, there will be someone who will build this app. Imagine this service coupled with the federated information management system where the contact information of the local businesses never becomes stale. Ok, that’s asking for too much to begin with…Atleast the copycat version also would do..

“Success is never final, and failure never fatal.”

Indian airlines are seeing a lot of activity these days. One of the gaps that needs to be filled is that of reverse auction…Why is there no reverse auction site aka priceline version in India ? Hmmm..Is it an implementation issue or is it too early for service providers to get the airlines to listen to the customers’s price point ?
Or is there one already ?? Its too hard to keep up with zillions of sites popping by,,,May be there is one, but certainly it has not created a buzz till now…

Will Vinton studios : Another example of a company which believes that employees are entrepreneurial in nature and hence it is better to create a culture to hone it rather than stifle it.

Via Jstrande:
To attract the very best artists, and then to give them plenty of reasons to stay, Vinton has instituted programs and policies that are designed to show his support for the artists he hires. The Walkabout, for example, is a program that allows employees to take a 13-week paid hiatus, or Walkabout, that gives them the time and the freedom to work on their own projects. Every year, the program results in two or three short films, as well as many other personal projects. The logic behind Vinton’s decision to implement the program is unassailable: The best people will find a way to produce their own films, whether he wants them to or not. So why not make it harder for them to leave his company by encouraging them to produce projects of their own on his premises?

YourManInIndia
Now this definitely falls in the category of a purple cow.

• Focus - Superbly focused on niche NRI population who want to get things done quickly and don’t mind paying a fee for the same

• Stands out from the rest of the crowd like  banks who offer financial services etc.

• Market Size - 25 million Population , obviously not all NRIs would use it. But even if 10% have some sort of work that needs to be done in India, be it filing tax returns, arrange for travel for parents, etc….that’s a cool 2.5 million target base

Garage gyan 101 Lesson Revisited

What is the difference between a business model and revenue model?
A business model is the umbrella term used to describe the method - position in the value chain, customer selection, products, pricing – of doing business. Simply put, a business model describes how a business positions itself within the value chain of its industry and how it intends to sustain itself, that is to generate revenue.
Mobile e-business is not so much a technological problem anymore. It is a business model dilemma for firms that want revenue and a marketing problem for firms that want to sell a convenience with sound economics.

Do you know what an REIT is ? Its a form of investment vehicle that has a lot of advantages for investors looking to invest in real estate..Check out this link for more info - REIT

Who is Sir Alan Sugar ?

Sir Alan Michael Sugar (born 24 March 1947 in Hackney, London) is an English businessman of Jewish descent. He has an estimated fortune of over £800 million and was ranked 55th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2005. He left school in Hackney and started selling fruit and veg out of a van.He is a donor to the British Labour Party. In 2005 he stepped into the BBC TV series, The Apprentice. The American version of the show, starring entrepreneur Donald Trump, had already proven popular in the USA.He was knighted in 2000 for his contributions to business.
Sir Alan believes that discipline is the most important characteristic of an entrepreneur.He believes that there needs be a stonge desire to be self sufficient. Only then a person can make a difference in his life as well as other people’s lives. Also one needs to be aggressive to get things done. Any slack behavior is immediately reflected in the work. Here is how, Sir Alan describes ann entrepreneur:

One of my Colleagues was asking me about Day Light saving time, and I immediately remembered Seth’s posts on the DST. To the people who do not know the history of DST, it is pretty interesting to get to know about the concept and its usage in the current era.The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time (called “Summer Time” in many places in the world) is to make better use of daylight. We change our clocks during the summer months to move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.During DST, clocks are turned forward an hour, effectively moving an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.
Link : A wonderful piece of stuff explaining DST in detail

“Design rules now” is one of the takeaways of purple cow and I cannot help but notice the various pointers to the same direction by authors, entrepreneurs, investors, and whole bunch of people. Beauty in things be it design part or execution part was always cherished by customers, but in this ever commoditizing world, it becomes even more important.
There are a zillion aspects to the design angle. Let me atleast get my first post on design. Lets talk about typeface. If one delves in to it, there are actually a lot of aspects that go in to , selecting the right typeface for the text.Legibility and readability are the hallmarks of a good typeface. Here are a few tips to choose the right typeface
1.Pick a typeface with similar character widths
2.Medium height to width ratio
3. Medium x- height ( x-height is the height of the lowest case character)
4. Look for small variations in stroke weight
5.Watch out mirrors in alphabets
6.Avoid overlarge letters
7.Avoid quirkiness as the text becomes difficult to read

Writely Acquired:
This application came in to Web 2.0 space and I remember very well that it did not create a WOW effect to me at all…But here I see that it is acquired by Google!!.
A similar app, Instacoll was developed by Bangalore guy and it is still struggling to kick off..Whats the difference ? Some food for thought…

The last 2 days have been pretty horrible for me as I was bedridden. I could not work on anything except some slides in a pitch which  I had to send to a client. However  I managed to reread a wonderful book by Seth Godin - " Purple Cow" . There are zillions of examples in the book which suggest that companies which stay remarkable in their offerings are the only ones that are going to survive. Seth’s ability to bring home the point of Purple Cow from a diverse variety of stories is mind boggling. Page 136 and 137 of the book are worth a million dollars to any company, be it a startup, a growing company or a mature company. Here are the main questions that are posed which will make any company situp and strive to be remarkable:

Let’s start by looking at some of the basic numbers on the demand side and the supply side

Demand Side

• First time home affordability is at a 20 year low.

  • Prices have risen by 25% in the last 3 years

  • In 2003, the average starter home price was $144,500. As of the last quarter of 2005 it was $181,100. In just three years, new “starter” home prices have risen 25%!

I love traveling mainly because it gives me a chance to catch upon my readings. One such occasion chanced upon during my visit to chennai this week . I devoured 3 books in three days! You can imagine how book starved I am, since my office work for the past 1 month did not give me any breathing space to read.Now about the books.The first book was by Daniel H Pink titled " A Whole new mind" . The second was a series of articled edited by Seth Godin titled " The Big Moo" and third, another book by Seth Godin - " The Purple Cow". In this post I want to give a overview of what Daniel Pink has got to say in his book A Whole New Mind

A company started by 2 MBA friends which has been featured in the Inc Magazine in 2004 and 2005 does something interesting. It acts as an interface between energy traders and energy producers , which in most of the cases are plants run by private enterprises. Energy Producers install a product from Genscape which is helps the energy traders get real time energy generation and transmission. What’s unique about the company was they closed on the gap which was : to measure something that was not measured before and sell the measured information to customers.

“Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.”   - Pirsig

        A job is only a short-term solution to a long-term problem. - Roberto Kiyosaki

Via Jeff Cornwall :

A no nonsense approach to fail on paper. Its better to assess gaps and opportunities before impulsively jumping in to the business. The same opinion was voiced by Micheal E Gerber in his book E-Myth where he used the term technician’s seizure . It captures the situation where a person,  a technician who is good at one skill thinks that he should start a business with out giving thought to various aspects of the business that go along with it

A company started by 2 MBA friends which has been featured in the Inc Magazine in 2004 and 2005 does something interesting. It acts as an interface between energy traders and energy producers , which in most of the cases are plants run by private enterprises. Energy Producers install a product from Genscape which is helps the energy traders get real time energy generation and transmission. What’s unique about the company was they closed on the gap which was : to measure something that was not measured before and sell the measured information to customers.

“Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.”   - Pirsig

FICO score is one of the most important component of the decision making process by the banks while giving a loan to the customer. Hence it is important to understand the various components that go in to it and also evaluate the important variables that go looked in to while analyzing Credit Bureau data.

FICO score takes in to account 4 components

• Payment history - 35%

• # of accounts paid as agreed

“It is not how much you do, but how much love you put in the doing.”

Now a startling discovery on way - drugs to enhance wall street trader’s performance!
 Link : Investing and Drugs:

Google in China:
Whatever the intentions and consequences of the move be, in the end content sharing is much better than content policing. Hope the chinese realize this and become a super economy much faster than the current pace

Google in China:
Whatever the intentions and consequences of the move be, in the end content sharing is much better than content policing. Hope the chinese realize this and become a super economy much faster than the current pace

One can vastly innovate marketing if one is keen on observng customer behavior very deeply. Here is a small story of 4 young lads who innovated their soft drink stand so that they could sell more drinks.There were 4 young lads who were running a stand in the warsaw train station. They observed the crowds, they noticed a recurring pattern: In the minutes before trains arrived, people would stand on the

One can vastly innovate marketing if one is keen on observng customer behavior very deeply. Here is a small story of 4 young lads who innovated their soft drink stand so that they could sell more drinks.There were 4 young lads who were running a stand in the warsaw train station. They observed the crowds, they noticed a recurring pattern: In the minutes before trains arrived, people would stand on the

As my current work involves analyzing the US Mortgage industry, henceforth I would be posting a daily/weekly/fortnightly to chronicle the Mortgage Industry news / analysis / opinions. In the past few months, I have realized that the mortgage industry is an ocean of knowledge where the thirst of knowledge for a person like me can take years to get quenched , which is all the more reason I am glued to it and excited about.

digg.com - I was introduced to this site recently and it makes me reflect the extent to which the democratization of media content has taken place in the web2.0 space.Here’ what digg does:

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
How to promote stories to the homepage

digg.com - I was introduced to this site recently and it makes me reflect the extent to which the democratization of media content has taken place in the web2.0 space.Here’ what digg does:

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
How to promote stories to the homepage

There’s a new book in the market that I came across - " The art of demotivation "
Initially I thought it was a joke or a prank being played. But later realized that it was indeed a book
In a nutsheel the author seems to say the following :
_
Dr. Kersten addresses this issue in his revolutionary section on “Responsibility Displacement,” which discusses the sad trend of businesses failing to blame employees for their mistakes. As Dr. Kersten writes, doing so “rob(s) employees of the dignity inherent in being moral and economic agents with the right to experience the consequences of their actions” (156). In the world of Radical Demotivation™, “It’s not my fault” just doesn’t cut it.