1 - 2 - 3

1 - 2 - 3 are special numbers. For some reason in every sport, the first 3 people are awarded a medal. 

Ofcourse 1 is the best place to be to get maximum attention but 3 is atleast the last place you would want to be. Noone cares about 4, so dont bother, be where you can be 1 or 2 or 3.

Noone remembers the 4th best restaurant or 4th smartest guy in class or 4th smartest employee or the 4th best search result in a search engine. No one remembers the 4th product feature or benefit or the 4th vendor quote, noone remembers the 4th guy who finished the 100% metre race or the 4th country in the olympics medal tally.

Be 1 or 2 or 3, or dont be at all.

How A Search Engines Conflict Of Interest Can Keep You Away From That Perfect Search Engine

We all dream about that perfect search engine. The engine that gives you answer for every question without trying your ability to think of imaginary keywords that might or might not exist. The search engine that will tell you where your kids are and what they are doing, the search engine that tells who you need to marry, the search engine that tells you if are going to become the next president.

But wait, it will never happen. 

There is a conflict of interest that arises in every advertising based business. Every content provider is serving a advertiser. They owe the advertiser a share of your attention. 

If search engines became perfect, you will hardly click the ad. If search engine became perfect, you will not visit a website, the content owner will not have any reason to share his content with the search engine.

Marrissa mayer, gave a seminar in web.20 summit in which she shared how increasing the number of search results on each page from 10 to 30 caused the traffic and revenue to reduce 20%.

When marrisa mayer equates people leaving their search results page early and not clicking ads to bad performance you know there is not much hope.

The chances are a user might might have more search results to view, he focuses less on ads, he finds a good result in 30 results and visits the website.  

Itsclearly understandable, irrespective of what google tells you, they want you on their website. That is where they get their revenues from.

I dont blame them, they are a for profit company. Its the entire business model that has conflict of interest built in.

Someday maybe they will start an ad free search engine and charge a fee for it. There they can give users the best search engine, because you are paying them for it. Simple.

Recession Comes Home To India: Let The Layoffs Begin

Jet Airways a leading airlines company has recently laid off 850 staffers and will layoff another 1100 soon. Air India has offered its employees a unpaid leave for 5 years, whatever that means.

Pepsico. has laid off 3300 employees.

Satyam laid off 400 workers and have given notice to another 4500.


Stock Markets are under 11k down from 21k in January. Beat that.


Most companies have stopped hiring, more layoffs expected. RBI has taken some serious  preemptive action.

ICICI is closing down branches. HDFC and other institutions are seeing a decline in demand.

Malls are less crowded, airports are emptying. But the ones with jobs are still ok. There will be no 50% offs in most shops this festive season. And its money saving time anyways.

But the worst affected will be the new graduates of this year and the next when they come out with no jobs in sight.

Tough times ahead. Didn't someone say Indian economy is decoupled from US economy? 

Updated News: Jet Airways takes back its fired employees. According to the chairman of the company Naresh Goyal, he has listened to his conscience, while the avitiation minister jumped into to take credit by saying he asked Goyal to take back sacked back employees.

It seems the truth is political pressure arising from the coverage of the sacking and the effect it will have on the salaried class and the upcomign elections.

When Capitalism Isn't "That Capitalistic" But Socialism Still Sucks

Wikipedia Mentions Capitalism as:

"Capitalism is the economic system in which the means of production are owned by private persons, and operated for profit^[1] and where investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods andservices are predominantly determined through the operation of a free market^[2], rather than by central economic planning."

While Wikipedia Mentions Socialism as:

Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of anegalitarian society.

So what am i refering to?

I am refering to the recent interventions from governments, especially the US government in the functioning of markets. The US government has recently announced a bailout package of $700 billions and previously bailed out freddie and fannie bank, merill lynch,  AIG.

The point of this post is if companies are bailed out like this by governments that pride themselves as the keepers of capitalism, doesn't this bcome socialism of sorts?

USA has been pressurising, pleading, lobbying to get developing countries like India, China, Brazil and others to cut subsidies on various sectors, including oil, agriculture, banking sector. While these countries hold government control and regulations on ownership and investment in many sectors and themselves manage and run many sectors for example railways in China & India, USA and its representatives have always been unhappy with this stand.

India was about to lift up its foreign investment limit in the banking and insurance sector in 2009. And we should thank god that the current crisis has come to the forefront before that. 

But things are a little different now. US goverment will buyout troubled assets of many banks and mortgage landers freeing them of bad assets and making available some cash. But 700$ Billions isn't that much, is it?

By the way while i was researching to find out how a economic bailout can help boost economy, i came across, keynesian theory.This theory was coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes in early twentieth century somewhere around the economic depression. 

According to him, some people may have a liquidity preference which would see them rather hold money than buy new goods or services, which therefore raised the prospect that the Great Depression would not end without what he termed in the General Theory "a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment."

In other words, a goverment intervention is required to help a economy come out of a depression. 

We don't know if this theory works or not, but we will soon find out. From what ever history i know, US came out of the last depression because of world war 2 when they got the chance to supply allied armies with military hardware.

So i am just hoping this theory will work out for them and we do not have to deal with the second option!. 

Coming back to the topic, the US government is certainly acting like a socialist state. In a freemarket, true to capitalist principles, these troubles companies should be allowed to go bankrupt. Thats how a free market functions, surivive or die. 

So do we all finally agree that its ok to be a little socialistic once in a while? George ?

Billionaire College Dropouts!

Billionaire college drop outs

Went through this list of college dropouts who made it big. I always had a feeling this education is doing something bad to us:-/. But then there is a good news and a bad news we are not dropouts yeah but then the way we cleared engineering is no mean feat probably a better performance than any dropout can match bill gates steve jobs ahh anyone. Long live kts!

Maybe someday they will publish a list of guys who made it big and had an amazing number of kts. Amen!!

As they say I was born intelligent education ruined me, Well almost. Lots of copying from others, bunking like crazy, keeping ears closed in lectures, never bothering to find out what subject lecture is gong on, we took our precautions.We made sure our thinking ability is not completely destroyed ;) by the education.

Move over dropout billionaires,  we are KT billionaires and we are here