Author: madan

The other day, a friend of mine and I were sitting at a table in the lunch room in office, eating some breakfast. An enigmatic executive officer ( not the CEO, but another X level executive) comes, greets me and sits on the table beside me. his table is at the entrance to the dining area. All of us go on with our lives – talking what we need to talk, and he, immersed in his conversation with someone.

A little while later, a lady come walking up the ramp, physically disabled she was being help by another friend. When they reached the door, they were in the process of pushing- facing some problems since the door is a little tight. At this moment the executive jumped up, and ran to the door and held it open.

Many times, executive officers don’t bother. Its an “accepted rule” that the higher you go, the lesser you do, but sometimes this is carried on very literally. Managers wont bother, even to pick up paper that they drop.

Is it “uncool” to be yourself?
Is it “cool” to be a “disconnected” person?

What ever said, this one scene was quite very touching, and even though i dont work directly under this person, I am glad to know him. 🙂

After Indiana Jones- everyone in america thought Indians ate monkey’s brains. Well, things don’t seemed to have change much. with 17K people surveyed worldwide – a majority of Europeans thought that India topped in poverty- what about 80% of sub-Saharan Africa? what about Zimbabwe and its 7,634% inflation?

When they think of India they think of Gandhi and Taj Mahal, but when they think of Pakistan they think of nuclear, poverty and cricket, the people across the world, said in a survey conducted by BBC. In the survey conducted on the socio-economic perception on India and Pakistan after 60 years of independence from the British rule, the BBC found that the world also associated both countries with poverty. In Pakistan’s case, the respondents also associated it with the nuclear power. The survey, conducted in collaboration with international research company Synovate across 20 countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia Pacific and Australia, questioned 12,670 respondents about their perceptions of India and Pakistan. “It was conducted to coincide with the celebration surrounding India and Pakistan’s 60th year of independence from Britain,” the BBC said. Interestingly, where French, Spaniards, Italians and Danes thought India topped in poverty on the planet, their Eastern counterparts Singaporeans, Japanese and Hong Kong nationals thought India to be a modern nation, high on development and technology.

From a news snippet on Yahoo!.

persons getting fired for not sucking up to the boss! wow! no wonder they are able to strive at 10% annual growth!

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese woman is suing her former employer after falling victim to the company policy of firing staff who contradict their boss three times, local media reported on Thursday.

HWA-1 Enterprise Co Ltd, a light industrial manufacturer based in China‘s southeastern port city of Xiamen, sacked a woman surnamed Ni for refusing to pay fines she incurred for talking back to superiors, Xinhua news agency said, citing a local newspaper.

The company’s policy held that a “first contradiction of superiors” would incur a fine of 30 yuan ($4), a second would incur 100 yuan, and a third would warrant dismissal, the agency said.

Ni incurred a 30 yuan fine after taking umbrage with her factory supervisor for reprimanding her for not filling in a form.

“The factory head told me that, according to company rules, no matter whether management is right or wrong, employees are not allowed to contradict them and must obey,” Xinhua quoted Ni as saying.

Ni was then threatened with a 100 yuan fine for refusing to pay the first fine, and was sacked after she threatened to report her supervisor to the company’s human resource’s department.

The factory’s supervisor, surnamed Cao, said it was his legal right to sack Ni.

“The company can terminate the contract of employees who seriously breach labor discipline or the company’s rules,” Xinhua quoted Cao as saying.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070906/od_nm/china_company_sacking_odd_dc;_ylt=AgdIsul78_lmeXDnfsQZ2hEuQE4F

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised “technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries,” meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor’s invention. “The Achilles’ heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary.”

Clifford’s company bought rights to EEStor’s technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the battery replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor’s short-range, low-speed vehicles.

The technology also could help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scale, a flash-charge for cell phones and laptops.

Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.

“We’ve been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it,” said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics. “Depending on who you believe, they’re at or beyond the limit of what is possible.”

EEStor’s secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor’s proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

Batteries rely on chemical reactions to store energy but can take hours to charge and release energy. The simplest capacitors found in computers and radios hold less energy but can charge or discharge instantly. Ultracapacitors take the best of both, stacking capacitors to increase capacity while maintaining the speed of simple capacitors.

Hebner said vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries.

“The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster,” Hebner said.

But he said nothing close to EEStor’s claim exists today.

For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases.

Yet the speculation and skepticism have continued, fueled by the company’s original assertion of making batteries obsolete – a claim that still resonates loudly for a company that rarely speaks, including declining an interview with The Associated Press.

The deal with ZENN Motor and a $3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a “game changer” as Clifford put it.

ZENN Motor’s public reports show that it so far has invested $3.8 million in and has promised another $1.2 million if the ultracapacitor company meets a third-party testing standard and then delivers a product.

Clifford said his company consulted experts and did a “tremendous amount of due diligence” on EEStor’s innovation.

EEStor’s founders have a track record. Richard D. Weir and Carl Nelson worked on disk-storage technology at IBM Corp. in the 1990s before forming EEStor in 2001. The two have acquired dozens of patents over two decades.

Neil Dikeman of Jane Capital Partners, an investor in clean technologies, said the nearly $7 million investment in EEStor pales compared with other energy storage endeavors, where investment has averaged $50 million to $100 million.

Yet curiosity is unusually high, Dikeman said, thanks to the investment by a prominent venture capital group and EEStor’s secretive nature.

“The EEStor claims are around a process that would be quite revolutionary if they can make it work,” Dikeman said.

Previous attempts to improve ultracapacitors have focused on improving the metal sheets by increasing the surface area where charges can attach.

EEStor is instead creating better nonconductive material for use between the metal sheets, using a chemical compound called barium titanate. The question is whether the company can mass-produce it.

ZENN Motor pays EEStor for passing milestones in the production process, and chemical researchers say the strength and functionality of this material is the only thing standing between EEStor and the holy grail of energy-storage technology.

Joseph Perry and the other researchers he oversees at Georgia Tech have used the same material to double the amount of energy a capacitor can hold. Perry says EEstor seems to be claiming an improvement of more than 400-fold, yet increasing a capacitor’s retention ability often results in decreased strength of the materials.

“They’re not saying a lot about how they’re making these things,” Perry said. “With these materials (described in the patent), that is a challenging process to carry out in a defect-free fashion.”

Perry is not alone in his doubts. An ultracapacitor industry leader, Maxwell Technologies Inc., has kept a wary eye on EEStor’s claims and offers a laundry list of things that could go wrong.

Among other things, the ultracapacitors described in EEStor’s patent operate at extremely high voltage, 10 times greater than those Maxwell manufactures, and won’t work with regular wall outlets, said Maxwell spokesman Mike Sund. He said capacitors could crack while bouncing down the road, or slowly discharge after a dayslong stint in the airport parking lot, leaving the driver stranded.

Until EEStor produces a final product, Perry said he joins energy professionals and enthusiasts alike in waiting to see if the company can own up to its six-word promise and banish the battery to recycling bins around the world.

“I am skeptical but I’d be very happy to be proved wrong,” Perry said.

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/N/NO_MORE_BATTERIES?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

So, my mother forwards an email comparing water to Coke. And Adsense does this!!!

The strongest evidence that IBM’s big bet is paying off came a few weeks ago when it announced its second-quarter results. Revenues were up a strong 9%, to $23.8 billion. Every division reported healthy growth, including the long-troubled IT services group, where revenues rose 10%. But confirmation that the strategy is succeeding trickles in almost every day with announcements of major IT services contract wins in India or Russia. No wonder IBM’s stock, trading at about $112, has risen by 50% over the past year—even after pulling back some in the market’s summer swoon.

For IBM, aggressive globalization works. In fact, over the next few years, its approach could emerge as a model for other companies trying to capitalize on the globalizing trend without being hobbled by it.

Leading by Example

The model is simple. Under the old multinational rubric, IBM created miniature versions of itself in each country or region where it operated. That turned out to be a cumbersome and expensive way of doing business. So IBM now sets up shop wherever it can find the right talent at the right price. It has a global supply chain based in China, a global IT service delivery system based in India, and a global financing back office in Brazil. The company has set up new management systems to coordinate these activities.

These changes haven’t come easily. IBM seems to be in a constant state of upheaval: More than 20,000 jobs have been eliminated in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan even as the work force has grown beyond 50,000 employees in India and 10,000 in China. “This is a huge shift for IBM, but I believe it’s necessary if we are to capture the benefits and step up to the challenges of a globally integrated economy,” Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano said at an IBM-sponsored Forum on Global Leadership on July 25 in Washington, D.C.

If IBM’s strategy continues to pay off, it could become a model for other large corporations to follow. Just as IBM found that it couldn’t compete well against super-efficient, low-cost IT outfits in India, other industrial giants are at a disadvantage against upstarts from the U.S. and elsewhere that are tuned for the new global realities. They’re being forced to make wrenching changes, as well. “For the past 20 years, people have been talking about what the company of the future should be. IBM is actualizing those ideas,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Shifting Workflow and Revenue

While shifting work overseas to lower-cost locations has helped make IBM’s huge tech services business more competitive, there’s a lot more to the strategy than labor arbitrage. IBM also has improved its effectiveness by redesigning business processes, automating work with software, and bringing all of its increasingly global capabilities to bear on behalf of clients. The company uses the same processes in India that it does in France. That makes it possible to shift work to wherever employees with the right skills are available. As a result, at any given time, fewer people are sitting on the bench waiting for a job to be assigned to them.

And by hiring tens of thousands of people in developing nations, IBM gains more than the benefit of low-cost labor. It’s also helping to build strong economies that are now becoming sizable markets for its goods and services. Revenues from the so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—now represent about 5% of IBM’s total sales and are growing at 25% per quarter. Strategic outsourcing contracts from Indian companies grew nearly 150% last quarter. “These are the markets that will hypergrow over the next few years, and IBM will grow even faster there,” says Michael Cannon-Brookes, vice-president for strategy in emerging markets.

IBM still faces fierce opposition in IT services from both India and Accenture. There’s plenty of competition in its software and computer hardware businesses as well. But, thanks to its globalization strategy, it’s no longer the slow-moving, inefficient, and overpriced giant that it was just a few years ago. Globalization is here to stay, and so, apparently, is IBM.

source: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2007/tc20070810_700113.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Revolves around two things.
1. Cricket.
2. Bollywood.

Yesterday a sentencing locked away an actor for 6 years. All news channels stopped other news- like the DJ take over, Iraq, CR’s visit to the middle east everything to run constant updates. A court has pronounced someone guilty – that usually means he/ she is. Unless proven otherwise. Now, after 14 years the sentence is passed and it becomes” tearful” – the country is up in arms about this- the verdict is too harsh – well, why arnt they thinking about the 245 families who lost their loved ones because someone wanted to look macho with AKs and Dessert Eagles?

Anyways – the news is only talking about this. Where are we going ?

Audi’s latest results have put analysts in a tizzy. They are expecting that if the current trend of Audi’s sales continues – it will overtake BMW in operating profits by 2010 and by 2012 it will overtake the operating revenues. Analysts expect the rate of growth of Audi to be at 10% per annum for the next three years about 3 times that of BMW. All these are fueled by the new models launched by Audi.

The sights trained on Audi after the 1998 launch of the Audi TT, never did the industry expect a car subsidiary to catch up with main manufacturers. Audi is successfully wielding the same growth strategy premium-market leader BMW deployed in 2000 to outsell Mercedes. Audi, Germany‘s No. 3 premium automaker, is on a tear to expand its lineup of high-performance cars such as the posh Q7 SUV and the A5 coupe, and it’s employing head-turning design to steal customers from the competition.

The numbers tell the story. In the first half of 2007, Audi’s worldwide car sales rose 9.8%, to 509,079, as revenues rose 12.4%, to $24 billion. Global sales at BMW were up 4.5%, to 730,285, by comparison, while Mercedes’ fell 3%, to 591,200. First-half revenues at Audi rose 12.4%, to $24 billion. Mercedes edged up 1%, to $34 billion. BMW releases first-half financial results on Aug. 1.

With the growing brand awarness – older models, that usally have a lifespan of 3- 4 years usually decline – however, the Audi A4- a Six year old Audi starts at $28000.

Audi managed to sell 162,900 A4 sedans in the first half of this year, up 1.5% over the same period a year ago. And now it is planning to unveil a new-generation A4 in September, which should give it yet more room to run.

In the first half, Audi’s U.S. sales rose 13%. Until recently Audi sold its cars in the U.S. through Volkswagen dealerships, which muddled its image by association with a mass-market brand. In markets such as Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, upscale glass-and-steel dealerships have opened, helping to lure buyers with higher incomes. The edgy, minimalist design of the new dealerships exudes upmarket ambience.

However….
Audi is not just selling more cars, it’s making more money on those cars. First-half earnings zoomed ahead as more expensive models and an increasingly tony brand image reaped higher margins per car. In the first half, operating profit increased 39.5%, to $1.38 billion, and net profit rose 67%, to $937 million. That puts Audi’s 6.4% operating margins on a par with Mercedes’ long-term returns and very close to BMW margins. Audi’s management vowed two years ago to be the world’s most successful premium car manufacturer by 2015.

Another travel site launched in beta, they need advertising revenue – so they place ads. What are these ads? For other websites offering better fares! 🙂 what is the world coming to!