Thought Garage

Yesterday was quite an eventful day as I came to know Lufthansa Pilots were going on strike for 4 days and 800 flights a day have been cancelled that included my flight towards Frankfurt. After a little scrambling, I got my tickets rebooked for the next day on 26th Feb, 2010. But, news stories that Pilots may extend their strike if their demands are not met are still in back of my mind and were little troubling. It is all a Happy news finally. Pilots suspended their strike, and Lufthansa will resume its flights and get back to normal by 26th Feb, 2010. I will stick with my once altered schedule of 26th itself. The New York Times : Striking Lufthansa Pilots Agree to Suspend Walkout

By nature, most of us hate to fail and prefer a path of least resistance. So, we plan every thing. We plan to the deepest detail possible in order to avoid any uncertainty and surprises. And will try our best to stick to that plan. There is nothing wrong having a plan. But too much of planning will kill your creativity, because planning is quite limiting in essence. Instead, have a high level plan, like a roadmap. And leave rest of the details to the moment to reveal your creativity. Most cases, our ‘plans’ are created based on experiences of those who didn’t have one.  There is nothing wrong in learning from others.  But don’t dwell onto too many details upfront. Remember that ‘surprises’ are what makes a life worth living for. More over, your feelings and emotions will be genuine when you don’t have a plan. On a related note, If you want to really know a person, sail with him/her to unchartered waters. Not only each of you get to know the other person, but you will fin...

Just when I thought, everything is going on as planned and was browsing happily, one headline caught me by surprise: Germany braces for Lufthansa Strike by The New York Times. I was literally shocked to read that Pilots of Lufthansa are going on strike for four days starting from 22nd Feb to 25th Feb (4 days) and about 800 flights a day will be cancelled. What was more shocking than the news itself,  I have received absolutely no communication from either my Travel agent or Lufthansa about this cancellation. Here is the screenshot of that news Article that I accessed through Google News on Sunday 21st February 2010 around 8AM in the morning. The New York Times: Germany braces for Lufthansa Strike So, I browsed more stories on the web, went to Lufthansa website. They left a note on their website and included a list of flights they will be operating in these 4 days. I checked the listing, and my flight wasn’t included. So its now official that my flight got cancelled too....

Microsoft’s Augmented Reality in Bing Maps (Windows Live Maps). Going beyond the street view. Crowd sourced Photographs, photographs through the timeline and augmenting real time video, awesome. And if you just look up in the sky, you can all constellations in that space at that time. Wonderful.

Indiatimes (that includes famous Times of india) reaches 8 times more visitors (810,042) and grew at 20% in 2009 compared to NDTV.com that reaches only 106,530 and has lost 33% in 2009. Times of India and India Times are also the top two keywords searched in 2009, mostly because nobody remember the exact URLs. Source: Compete

BanyanTree is a group of friends that hang around once a month to discuss a variety of topics of interest. I would like to share some notes and ideas from those meetings. The following is a Questionnaire from such a discussion on Value Investing moderated by Harish . I understand in concept what is value investing all about, but haven’t got a chance to read any literature yet to fully grasp strategies based on Value. For those like me that don’t know much about ‘Value Investing’, here is a quick excerpt from Wikipedia : Value investing is an investment paradigm that derives from the ideas on investment and speculation that Ben Graham & David Dodd began teaching at Columbia Business School in 1928 and subsequently developed in their 1934 text Security Analysis . Although value investing has taken many forms since its inception, it generally involves buying securities whose shares appear underpriced by some form(s) of fundamental analysis . -- Source: Value Investing...

I stumbled upon eggSunday on LinkedIn and I fell in love with the concept of eggSunday.  And the way they brought the concept to life is equally admirable and scrumptious. On the web : eggs unday .com Egg sunday or eggs unday was born out of a vision shared by two entrepreneurs who just loved eggs. Eggsunday is a food court brand that serves simply mouth watering varieties of egg dishes competitively priced and with new recipes added every month. The first outlet is located at a Food court on Mumbai - Pune highway. (images from ideaspice.com )

Wondering why it took more than a year for Obama’s administration to come up with a plan for Small Businesses, when they constitute 99% of all employers. “There are approximately 25.8 million businesses in the United States and over 99 percent of all employers are small businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.” – Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Plan for small business (PDF)

Its a wonderful talk.  Most of our current problems can be solved just by changing our behavior instead of waiting for that great new technology.  Its not that people don’t know what is good for them, but they are not compelled to take any action. Marketing can sure help.

Every now and then I get curious about what Indians are searching for on the internet and go to Google to have a look. This time, I am totally surprised to see that Manipur tops in number of searches beating all other IT curious states. Top Search Keywords in 2009 The following screenshot lists out top 10 keywords originated from India in 2009. Note that these key words are not exactly what is being searched for, but these key words are part of searches. News, Jobs, Electronics and Travel For instance, ‘India’ is part of the following searches that tops the list. News Papers top the list, compared to 'movie stars’ last time I looked at this kind of data. Next most searched for was “Songs” This doesn’t surprise me at all, the next most searched for is a place to access, play and download songs. Manipur tops the list This is totally surprising to me, that Manipur tops the list beating those IT curious states in keywords related to India. Andhra Pradesh is no...

106,456,367,669 (Source : How Many People Ever Lived On Earth ) This number was estimated in 2002 since then we must have added another 720M people to the earth. Current living population : 6,800,300,000 ( Wikipedia ) And when it comes to density of population, India is one of the most densely populated. About 400 people per a square Kilometer. Compare it with USA’s rate of just 34 and China’s 141 to put that number in context. (Image Source : Wikipedia )

That's right. American Prime time TV will have two shows with and about Indians and Indian Americans. The two comedies -- "Nirvana" at Fox and "Outsourced" at NBC -- have something else in common: They both are ensemble shows about Indians and Indian-Americans. Source : Reuters You might have already spotted Anil Kapoor in the new “24” season.

I wondered last night why NDTV.com is so desperate ? Desperate enough to put Advertisements right on top of content and those ads won’t let you read content unless you click on them. This morning, out of curiosity I checked how NDTV.com is doing by looking at traffic on the site at Compete. And this graph may explain the desperation. Unique visitors to NDTV.com dropped by 40% in 2009. Source: NDTV.com Profile on Compete.com However, the site was able to maintain number of page views more or less the same. So, it sounds little obvious that as they are loosing on unique visitors, they may want to monetize those still visiting and make up for the difference. May be! Or that Ads on top of content may be just a bug. Hopefully.