Blogging is so 2005...

Robert Scoble (often touted as the father of corporate blogging) is moving on...and moving on he is from big daddy, Microsoft. The more interesting question is where he is going - PodTech
As the name speaks, the company hosts podcasts of tech events/ news. They currently have the Tiecon-East/ Boston podcasts.

Podcasts cut-out the media middlemen who hitherto helped them to reachout to consumers (despite increasing costs, TVs and radios continue to have a declining marketshare and mindshare anyways). My wife who sells Unilevers' personal products to unsuspecting consumers through traditional media should be seriously worrying about this.

7th richest Indian - Tulsi Who?

If you've still not heard of Tulsi Tanti - you will. Head of Suzlon Energy, the wind power company that recently went public in India pushing Mr. Tanti right on top of the billionaire pile - well, at least on paper. The IPO did enough to catch the eye of The Economist - here's the article.

India in the fast lane - Time

Here's the cover story from this edition of Time magazine and headline-page of CNN.

The interesting thing about anything that gets written in Time is a clear indicator that the story has become mainstream - it will be read, believed, and imbibed by Middle America. From the standpoint of India as a destination for future global investments, I expect that the activity will reach a pace of urgency and possibly a scramble soon. As with any space, the early adopters will have a distinct advantage.

Don't get sore, get smart - The Economist book review

Debate on outsourcing - article from The Economist

THE political heat around outsourcing has cooled as the threat it once seemed to pose to western service jobs has diminished. The emphasis now is on improving the process of outsourcing, both at home and offshore. In other words, if you have to do it, try and do it better. This book is a good place to start learning how—especially the penultimate chapter. Called “Five Key Areas to Focus On”, it looks at financial engineering, legal issues, communications, human resources and tax.

Read on...

Buy the book - Smarter Outsourcing

My Indian Tutor

Tutorvista just raised $2M in VC money from Sequoia Capital. The company has 90 tutors in India teaching kids in US and UK for a flat fee of $100/ month or $19.99/ hour. They have 1 employee in the bay area for sales and marketing. And it looks like they are doing a great job (read the comments from Epinions) below. The Company was founded by K Ganesh, founder of CustomerAsset and ICICIOneSource - he also is on the board of Marketics.

Is management education next in line?

Here are someone's comments on Epinions:

RE: Tutorvista works

I found it works very well. It took my kids a couple of sessions to get used to the accent, because all the tutors are Indians, I guess. There was also a little hassle the first session or two with technology--just taking the time for it to load the first time and everything was new to us. But the tutor is really great--knows her stuff--and my kid (14 years old) really likes the sessions now. She seems to be doing better on her tests and homework, which is what we were looking for. She doesn't have any problem with the accent now, but it took a couple or three sessions before she was comfortable with it. Now, she uses it two or three hours each week. She has worked with the same woman tutor for about three months now.

They've got a lot of good stuff online, like animations and worksheets and things, and while my daughter doesn't have much time to do extra assignments, I think she finds the animations pretty helpful in understanding the concepts. Anyway, we think it is DEFINITELY worth $100 a month, and I'd say we'll keep the service going through next year when she starts highschool.

"I lost my job so I started the desi-store"

The logic was amazingly in its simplicity. Ann Arbor, Michigan has its 3rd desi store - Shakti Bazar - it's close to my office and I will shop there for my frozen-parathas! A few weeks ago a potential entrepreneur called me asking me to estimate to what extent market research needs to be done in order to start their business. I said, how can one tell - it's impossible to know what you know and what you don't know? Ok, if I do tell you that the opportunity does exist and you can scale, what difference does it really make if it is $5B or $10B? The Shakti Bazar businessman had an easier formula to start his venture - Lost job. Started business. Don't care about competition. Don't care about market size. Will make money.

Now for the hard part - Economist India survey

“NOT once in a decade. Not once in a millennium,” says Manish Sabharwal, boss of TeamLease, India's biggest temporary-employment agency, of the opportunity India enjoys in 2006. “It's once in the lifetime of a country.” The euphoria is widely shared. Nearly six decades after independence, India at last seems ready to take the place in the world that its huge population should command....read on