A Unique Phenomenon!

I was looking at some pictures from Santorini island in Greece, and one thing that struck me immediately was the very unique way of construction.

I don’t mean construction in terms of architecture or in terms of materials used. What we will notice is the unity in the people to preserve their heritage. Look at the picture here, and you will observe that the colors used by most of the people are white and blue.

For a very long time, the Greek isles have been synonymous with usage of Whites and Blues, and whether it is apartments, villas, or hotels, they all try and use these colors as much as possible. The effect that it gives is simply stunning! When one sees the white spires and blue domes rising over the deep blue of the Mediterranean, you simply can’t turn your eyes away! Search Google for more pics of these isles and you will notice that even from the pictures.

Now, coming to our part of the world, it is variety that rules! If my neighbor has painted his house Brown, I have to ensure that I paint it Green!! No two houses are in similar colors. With new colors including fluorescent ones popping up with alarming regularity in our streets, it is fair enough to say that we are at the other side of the world from Greece!! Everything – arches, materials used, colors, designs and even landscaping will be different from home to home in our region!

But in the picture, you will also notice that there is one single house (at the top right hand corner - in brown) that has begged to differ. It must have been built by an Indian!

The Accor City Super Sale - Is it the recession or what?

Hotels have been one of my primary interests ever since I got into Hotel Management several years ago. 

So whenever there is a banner ad or an article talking about something to do with hotels, my interest automatically gets piqued.

And this time, it is for an offer that can quite simply be termed as 'unbelievable'. Accor Hotels has been a world leader in business and luxury hotels for quite a while now, and the only thing that puts ordinary people off is the prices. We went for a dinner to Hyderabad Novotel a couple of years ago, and paid about 700/- per head for a simple dinner!!

Anyway, I got whiff of this new offer that Accor hotels was putting out, and after checking it out, I seriously am thrilled! So much that I had to blog about it.

This new 'City Super Sale' offer brings the prices down to between 1200/- (for an Accor hotel in Bangkok) to 6118/- to one in Vietnam. All Indian Accor hotels - Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Pune are priced at 2400/-. Chinese Accor hotels - in Beijing and Shanghai are even more affordable!

Is this the impact of the recession or is Accor trying to woo the low budget business traveler (which most of the people are nowadays)? Whatever the reason is, the offer is absolutely block-buster. Never a better time to travel in the Asia-Pacific region. Airline prices are at an all-time low, superb hotels are taking reservations for unbelievable prices, and the monsoon is just setting in! What are we waiting for??

Accor hotels include the Novotel, Sofitel, All seasons, and a few other brands.

Here's more information about the offer from the Accor website - City Super Sale.

Pragmatic fan-club!

One of the most awesome comments that I have seen in the recent times was on Rediff. In response to an article analyzing why India performed so dismally in the T-20 world cup, an avid fan finally burst out - ‘Now, let’s get back to work’!

In a Cricket crazy country like ours, it is absolutely safe to say that the average productivity per citizen has come down significantly over the last 2 months. IPL matches started at 3 pm and most of the people in my friends circle (including me) mentally shifted to the cricket pitch. Till the second match ended after midnight, there was no more changing of channels, and half the next day went discussing about the earlier days heroics (or otherwise).

I am a die-hard cricket fan too, and I firmly believe that I played a major role in Deccan Chargers lifting the IPL trophy. However, after the IPL ended and things got back to normal, the T-20 world cup began; and when India played Pakistan in the practice match, there was no emotion left to express! Though the stadium was full and the atmosphere on TV was charged, all of us at home slept off half way through, and when Pakistan won, it didn’t really matter! After the tournament began, the only match I really watched was India taking on West Indies (that too with red eyes and continuous worry about going to the office early next morning!).

After England ousted India out of the tournament, though there was a bit of sadness, there was also an element of relief. Since I did not actually watch the complete match, I was looking at Rediff the next morning and reading articles of Dhoni apologizing to the Indian fans, and Kirsten blaming the IPL for this sub-standard performance; the comment that actually encapsulated it all was of a regular reader finally exclaiming – Now, let’s back to work!

Seriously, let’s get back to work, and thank god that there’s no Cricket to be played in the next few weeks after this one. Meanwhile, I’m sure that our Mitochondria will get recharged and we’ll get back in passion for the next series against West Indies starting this month end.

But wait! There’s also the women’s T-20 world cup happening simultaneously in England and India is thru to the semis there. Wonder which channel that is being telecast on???

The Management Hype!

I was reading a book called ‘Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish’ written by an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus; which chronicles 25 success stories of people from the institute. One thing that is common to all of them is that they worked someplace before they became entrepreneurs.

Why I thought about this is because there is a strange thing going on in today’s world, and I’m pretty disturbed by that. Look at the sheer number of management colleges coming through every year, and you will know the reason of my distress. Not that I have anything against these new (and several old) management colleges, but I seriously feel that the purpose is defeated.

In Andhra Pradesh (and many more states in our country), the same precedent has already been set by Engineering colleges. Today, most of the engineers graduating from our region (85165 seats in Engineering colleges according to 2008 count – source – indiastudychannel.com) are counted just as graduates; and the same phenomenon is happening with MBA and MCA colleges now. Afterall, how many MBAs can a region support?

In these times of corporate cutbacks, most of the graduates will not be able to find good employment. And a majority of them will look to study further. The bulk of that majority will get into MBA colleges, and what I am worried about (not personally, but still…) is about what most of those people will do once they post-graduate! Already many management passouts are out competing with graduates for the few choice jobs available in the markets (and most of the times it is the under graduates that walk away with the jobs) and that is cause for angst! Think about what will happen 2 years later, when all these MBAs getting enrolled now will come out qualified!!

The other part of the hype (and my concern) is the amounts being charged. All of the new management colleges I know of are charging upwards of a lakh rupees each year, in spite of having no track record to boast of. Few colleges that have started last year have already decided to hike the fee by 50% this year for this years intake; and that, according to me is pretty ambitious. When new management colleges are charging those kind of monies, the older ones naturally will look to charge higher, and any decent college worth its name will already get you to fork out over 5 lakhs for the 2 years. What they will do in the next couple of years is anyone’s guess.

I firmly believe that like in the USA (and some of the best colleges in India), MBA should only be done after a couple of years of working. Afterall, the 25 stories mentioned in the book are all of people who’ve turned entrepreneur after working for a few years with some of the best companies around. Else, MBAs also will just become like a general graduation course; albeit a very costly one!

Is this just my perception?

Trial Post from Live Writer!

This one is brand new, and I never knew something like this existed!

No more logging on to the internet to blog. Live Writer – which is a part of the Office 2007 pack is just the right tool to blog right form your computer. It works with WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and other popular blogging platforms too, and I am tremendously excited :)

Will see if there is an option of even scribbling offline so that when I go online next, it is automatically uploaded!

Office 2007 rocks!

Accidental revenue!

Over the last few weeks, I have become pretty interested in site flipping, domain name trading, and earning passive revenue from websites. I'm not directly involved with it, but am doing research on the topic and writing up the findings for a client.

While I found quite a few very surprising things in the process, one of the strangest things that I found was that the business of 'accidental revenue' is extremely robust.

Have you heard of Sedo? or how about NameMedia and GoDaddy?

All of these online companies do domain registering, forwarding, web hosting, domain auctioning, reselling, and much more. But what we want to talk about is Parking. No, it is not the regular parking that you have heard of - if you park your car, you need to pay a parking fee. If you park your domain with one of these providers, you will earn revenue - most of it accidental.

Let's say you have a domain name which you have registered, but are not making into a website immediately, you can park it for free with Sedo, and they will in turn create a landing page for your domain name. So if someone searches for that particular website (oh yes - it happens quite often), or just stumbles on it through a link, there is nothing there but a series of links and ads to related topics. For instance, www.freefonetones.com and www.10cate.com are just 2 of thousands of thus parked domain names. If you visit them, you will see a huge list of related ads, and you will also find a link if you are interested to buy that domain name. Now, who will exactly go to 10cate.com? You will be surprised to find that there are thousands of people who actually go there! Take a look at the stats there!

Another example is www.yellowmangoes.com. Though it does not have an ad page like the one above, it is parked for free by GoDaddy, and there is a link there that people can use if they are interested in buying the domain name.

These domain names actually count on us to make mistakes so that we stumble onto them. Instead of typing microsoft.com, if you type in www.macrosoft.com, you will be led onto yet another Sedo parked page displaying ads and a 'buy' button!!

If you are thinking how many mistakes can we make? Think again!

According to stats, NameMedia reported a revenue of over $ 60 million generated from people clicking ads on domains parked by them in 2006-07! That is a lot of typos and a lot of foolishness on our part, isn't it? However, the Silver Lining is that we don't need to pay any money for that! The advertising companies pay out that money for our clicks. How many of those are genuine clicks, no one knows! 

But still, there is a lot of accidental revenue going around :) Quite interesting!

Micro Blogging - No longer 'ouch'!

The word 'Micro Blogging' has been doing the rounds for quite some time now, but the impact of it did not strike me till a couple of days ago.

Every other day, I (and I am sure that you too) receive requests from some or the other known or obscure social networking sites, mentioning that some friend added our mail IDs to their account.

Till last week, I used to wonder - do people really have the time to go into all those networking sites, and even if they do, what purpose does it serve?

Now, that question has become obsolete, as I've realized that Micro Blogging has taken over the regular social networking stuff. If you are not yet there, don't worry - you will soon get there.

The micro blogging revolution is led by the ubiqutous 'Twitter', which has become much more than a craze with the online generation. If you have not yet got onto Twitter, you will find it a real revelation when you do - there's just one column for you to enter an answer into - What are you doing now. That one question is to be answered in less than 140 characters (you're right - that is to enable twitter mobile users to see that as one regular size sms)! No wonder that the trend is called micro-blogging!

Wikipedia defines Micro blogging as 'a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia through means of photos and audio clips, and publish them'. Will you be very surprised if I told you that there is a new service which allows users to communicate through short videos that are 10 seconds in length??

In the initial days, I used to think that this is taking a good thing (social networking) too far. However, I realize that I am wrong, and that micro blogging is truly here to stay. And it is not too easy either! Try communicating through a 140 character message! And another thing that I used to wonder about is how much of 'staying in touch do you need'. If this question has popped into your mind too, congratulations - we have just been classified officially as 'old'. For the new gen, apparently there is nothing called 'too much in contact'. In fact, our earlier generation used to look down on us when we scrapped throgh Orkut once or twice a week, remember? 

So, when a friend sends you a request to join FaceBook or some other old-age service, send him a short sms - wr hv u bn?

If you are seriously into micro, do let me know if you think it'll continue or is just a fad.