Feb 07 in pictures

Here are random pictures from my life in Feb 07. Yes, obviously nothing better to post...

And the winner is: Indian Express

After Hindustan Times & DNA launched with huge budgets and much fanfare, I bet my friend that in 2 years HT would be the leading broadsheet from among the two. Well the story now is that none of them are in the lead and both seem to be flagging in content.

The surprising march ahead, atleast in content, has been by the Indian Express. Long written off as a poor second contender to Times of India, and considered by many to be a nice paper focusing on pessimistic news "Journalism of Courage", off late I have been happy to notice that the quality of content has improved to a New York Times level.

Today's (Sunday) edition is miles ahead of TOI, HT and DNA, covering indepth issues nationwide and worldwide, while the other three just seem to repeat the week's news in their "India Shining" narrative style.

IE definitely needs a new coat of paint, its antiquated layout and style hide the magnificent journalism lying underneath. Though its not much of a makeover and one done quite easily.

But is India ready for this quality of journalism? Probably not. India is still masala news country. Bombay & Delhi do not have even 1 cinema house showing Independent films, where, even cities like Columbus Ohio have one. And what about blogging, Indian bloggers are a rare lot, hardly anyone blogs here, or even reads blogs, showing the dismal state of reading & writing in the country.

But the day of Indian Express will come, not now, not in 10 years, but maybe in 50 or 60 years, but it will come. The good news is that we are headed in that direction, while in many parts of the world there is no hope even of that.

Wikipedia continues to remain at the mercy of donations

"Meanwhile, a Wikimedia staff member named Sandy Ordonez has posted a comment on Nick’s post saying “Ms. Devouard’s comment was taken out of context” and that “Wikipedia will not be closing any time soon. Ms. Devouard was simply referring to the ongoing, pressing needs for funds that Wikipedia, like most nonprofit organizations, face."

It really is shocking that a globally important project like Wikipedia will not take support from commercial revenue such as displaying Google text ads on the side. Look at Craig's list, they have taken limited support from commercial revenue and it keeps them out of danger of shutting down.

Bombay's new dakdak service

You read it here 1st, Bombay's has launched a new inner city low cost dakdak (helicopter) service, that can take a 3 people anywhere for a low cost. It runs by meter and gets you across town in minutes.


Well.... that's actually an art installation at the annual Kala Ghoda arts fair.

The dance bar effect

One and a half years ago the Congress & NCP party ruling the state of Maharashtra (of which Bombay is a part), closed 3,500 dance bars, making over 500,000 people jobless. They took the moral high ground that Dance Bars corrupted people and heartlessly destroyed the lives of half a million families. It was a sham, a politically motivated untruth meant to weaken their political opponents, whom they believed received much of their funding from Dance Bars

When this happened, it was the darkest days of my life. I could not believe that such a crime could occur in Independent India. I could not believe that a functioning democracy could do something like this.

But last week, my belief in the Indian democracy has been restored. In the recently concluded Bombay municipal elections, the people, realizing the injustice of this Congress - NCP government gave them a huge thumbs down, vanquishing them and electing their opponents.

The victory for the Shiv Sena BJP came despite the fact that they have performed poorly in providing and maintaining civic infrastructure and they tend to play communal politics. But the people of Bombay realising the huge crime of the Congress NCP went for the lesser devil.

It is this Democracy that makes India the "superpower" that it is. Not an economic or a military superpower, but a superpower of individual right and voice.

Ahmedabad

I wasn't looking forward to Ahmedabad. I expected it to be another crowded, dilapitated and conjested city with chaotic traffic and blaring horns. Just like all the other nice quaint towns that have now grown into big bad ugly cities.

So it came as a plesant surprise to find Ahmedabad with a quaint and rustic air. Reminded me of Delhi in the 70s, large open roads, bearable traffic and a lack of materialism. Ah lack of material, what a relief that provides in today's world...

I was charmed by the camed drawn carts, which I had never seem earlier. And by the colourfully decorated motorcycle 3 wheelers like the one here.

Put Ahmedabad on your list.

Bombay Islands

Here is a picture I stole a shot of at a recent exhibition. It shows Bombay as it was naturally, a group of 7 islands. The islands where initially linked by causeways and then later totally filled in to create the Bombay peninsula

Marketing vs Customer Experience

Marketing is and has been for decades the poster child of enterprise. The subject is full of books, gurus, courses, awards, media coverage and what have you. Every CEO talks of marketing marketing marketing...and in MBA programs the lure of marketing draws millions of aspirants every year.

Then there is Customer Experience...what is that you ask? Customer Experience is the experience you have after you have fallen for the marketing and decided the buy the product. For example, after you have seen the Incredible India ads you decide to visit India; or after you received the free Yahoo T-Shirt you went and checked out the website. You'll be hard pressed to find a single book, course, expert or media coverage on this subject. It not considered important or glam.

Because Customer Experience has been neglected as a subject, it sucks in 9 out of 10 cases. You see the Incredible India ads and then you land in India where they screen all your bags upon arrival while making you wait in a 1 hr line. Or its the lousy experience you get after signing up for MSN Hotmail...

When Customer Experience is good, there have been amazing successes. Tourism into Dubai or Thailand, both which provide excellent Customer Experience has boomed. Receently Skype, Google & YouTube hit the jackpot because customers gave them 2 thumbs up and told all near and dear. The stories of good Customer Experience are many and we all know them.

Infact, I could go so far as saying, that every product with good customer experience has done well with or without help from marketing. More so in recent times where word of mouth through email, messenger, cell phone etc happens faster than ever.

So why is Customer Experience such a neglected subject? I have no idea. If it was upto me, I would do everything I could to further and better Customer Experience. I would design courses that teach the values of Customer Experience and in business reconfigure resource allocation 8:2 in favour of Customer Experience.

Till that happens, here is to more trash Marketing and even trashier Customer Experience.

India Internet Growth

Here is a study by IMRB on the Internet growth. To most of us heading Internet businesses this seems an accurate picture. Unfortunately the story shows that growth is linear and not exponential like we would have hoped. But I am not sure that it will be linear, I think some compuding is bound to kick in....

Juice van

Here is an enterprising guy in Bombay outside Liberty Cinema. He has parked his van in the driveway of a building and serves juice out of the back

Phones going upmarket in India

India has been a notoriously low end market for cell phones, but all that seems to be changing now. More & more guys in my office are roaming around with high end phones (head of tech ofcourse has a Blackberry). Now I see ads all over the place for high end phones. Here are the 1st three pages of this week's business India.



So is the market changing? Yep. Not only can people now afford more pricey phones, but phone themselves are packing in more at a lower cost (I saw a Rs. 2800 camera phone).

What about Internert on the phone? Never say never. So far its mainly email, but I am sure both phone maufacturers and website owners will soon figure out how to get sites working through the slow speeds and the small screen of the phone...I for one would love to see yo4ya and flora2000 on the phone...need to investigate a bit more...

Help my house has been invaded

My house is no longer my house, it's been taken over bymonster....




My house is no longer my house, it's been taken over by 1ft. monster....

Why Microsoft has lost the plot....

Any mail sent from Yo4Ya goes to junk in Hotmail. It's fine in Yahoo, Gmail, etc. But no matter what we do it goes to junk in Hotmail. We have complained to Hotmail customer service, who bounced us to Symantech. Symantech responded after 3 weeks and said all is fine... it still goes to junk. So I spoke to y friend who is a big shot in MSN India..."can't do anything for you, but wait 8 months and we are going to kick Google's ass".......!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This personifies everything wrong with MS...they don't know the ABC of what they are doing on the web and they talk big...they are unable to fix day to day issues and they talk big....

A second opinion

There is a strange conference going on in Iran. Its a conference whose aim is to give the world second opinion on the Holucast. What is strange that this conference is going on in Iran whose govt is obsessed with supressing information and speech.

The other strange thing is that it is being attened by a whole lot of Jewish Rabbis who live in Israel as Palestenians and do not pay Israrel taxes !

Read more here:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3338873,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1970042,00.html

Gmail - Site of the week 50 '07

SPAM the new muti headed hydra that refuses to die....can be fought most effectively through Gmail !!!!!!!!!

Ok so you knew that Gmail was cool with its 3GB storage, speed and all that. But did you know that Gmail is super effective in fighting spam. Almost no spam gets through its spam filter and it all lets all the legitimate messages through...

For the purpose of fighting spam alone Gmail is worth it. That is why it is my site of the week this week.

Here is a neat trick: forward your corporate email account to Gmail. Gmail will clean out the spam. Then use Gmail POP3 to downloand your emails. You will be free of a lot of the usual spammy stuff. Use your corporate SMTP to send emails.

Losing the SPAM war

Is it just me, or has the quantum of spam in the last 15 days gone up. I always received a lot of spam, but after taking reasonable care I was able to contain spam to manageable limits. Suddenly I now find myself drowning in spam. I received 296 spam messages in the last 18 hrs and only 6 genuibe emails.

I checked with a few friends and they say that spam seems to have gone crazy this last month.

Off late I have been missing emails and I also find that emails I am sending out aren't getting replied to...my business associates are saying "oh shit your mail went into my spam box"...

So what is to be done? I have absolutely no idea. I am using Spam Assasin, Outlook Junk filtering and Bit Defender Anti-Spam, all at the same time and the spam is getting through all of those.

Today Google announced that they are allowing Pop3 access via GMAIL. Great, good news, lets hope that I can switch from Outlook to Gmail and Gmail will contain my spam.

"Vijay's" calendar

Saturday night the buzz was all about going for "Vijay's brunch" for his annual Kingfisher calendar, aboard his 350ft yatch. Through a random bit of luck an invite landed on my desk and my inviter was insistent that I go (yep in Bombay people other than the host can do the inviting)...

...the yatch looked awesome...too bad I couldn't get on board as it takes only 120 people and 800 were invited...anyway, here are the pics

You know Bollywood has arrived....

...when news of Indian movie star Sanjay Dutt convicted of arms possession makes it to the no. 1 spot on Google News ahead of The Pope, Bush, Iraq, Thanksgiving Sales, Pamela Kid break up...

The strange Indian entreupreuner

A groan escaped my lips yesterday as I read about this guy called Kishore Biyani and how he was adding a chain of hotels to his portfolio of an existing 100+ businesses. This guy is into everything; he has retail shops in every format (I love this meaningless MBA word), trouser stores, kids wear, Indian ethnic wear, grocery stores, discount stores, music stores, stores selling financial products, duty free shops blah blah; then he has random businesses like movie production, real estate development, health care, insurance, contract farming, beauty, gymnasiums, etc etc etc etc hahahahaha...all under the name of Future Group, a stock exchange listed company

When you goto the stores of this company, you get bland, boring and less than optimum quality products. I bought some trousers once and they were awful, though the shirts I bought weren't as bad. But when I returned another time to buy shirts, they were not carrying the same brands anymore. An epitome of Indian chaos.

One of their marketing managers interviewed with me. I asked "What is the brand positioning of your no. 1 brand Pantaloons? Why do you have a campaign that says 'Fresh Fashion' and shows sexy girls when you just mentioned it was a family store?", he answered "We are basically emulating the Zara model of getting clothes from the factory to the store fast, so we say 'Fresh Fashion'" hahahahaha. For those of you who do not know, Zara is a very successful Spanish clothes chain gone international and their brand is to bring runway fashions to the youth at budget prices, a brand position that has nothing to do with the speed of the supply chain; though Zara is renowned for its fast and optimized supply chain, but the customer dosen't care about that.

But Future Group is not alone. Every other group is similar. Tata, the famous & largest Indian business group, is again into everything, from hotels to steel to soaps and software. Bharti group, India's no. 1 cell phone provider also recently started farming (!) and retail stores !!!!!

And there is this guy I know...into everything, Internet websites, mobile downloads, franchisee shops, movies, software development, bookshops and now into compute hardware. He recently raised some cash from VCs...the merchant banker who worked on his project described him as the "finest entrepreneur he ever met"

Ok all this fine. Or appears fine.

But tell me something, please tell me, where is the talent in all this? Is entrepreneurship only about recruiting people, managing capital, undertaking strategic tie-ups and working the legislative environment? I thought entrepreneurship was about innovation, passion, product...

In these Indian entrepreneurs I see size, but I see no innovation...I see nothing of the entrepreneur in the product...in Microsoft I see Bill Gates, in Sony I see Akio Morita, in Skype I see Janus & Niklas, in Oberoi Hotels I see M.S. Oberoi...when I say I see, I mean I see the difference they made to the product, the service, the execution, the company culture...

Maybe the group system worked in non consumer categories like steel, petrochemicals; or it worked in protected and closed India. But will it work today & tomorrow? Are there any Indian electronic brands left? The Indian electronics industry was opened up 7 years back. What happened to BPL, Godrej, Onida, Videocon? Two are bankrupt & extinct and the other two have become discount brands...

So will Indian entrepreneurs survive? What will happen once the Indian economy opens and the real enterprises with domain specialty come in? What happens to Kishore Biyani when Zara comes? What happens to my friend when seed money becomes available in India and real Indian Internet entrepreneurs arrive?

Can companies and new products be built by management students? By smart capital allocation? By non specialty?

Can there be enterprise without entrepreneurs?

Maybe they can in India. When VCs can't spot the difference between innovation talent and capital allocation talent, is when they back the guys who give this diversified vision...so my diversified entrepreneurs, make hay while the sun shines...

Shoutcast - cool site 47 '06

Think of a song, any song, then goto www.Shoutcast.com and search for it, in minutes you will find an Internet radio station that is playing that song...just click Tune In and instantly you will be able to hear the song through your computer !!!!

Or, having a party, want the latest music from Ibiza, the very latest DJ sets, want to hear them live and ad free? Its all on Shoutcast... unbelievable but true, Shoutcast is one of the lesser known jewels of the Internet.

To make it all work, you'll 1st have to download the music player from www.winamp.com ... the best music player for Windows...get a great soundcard and hook up your music system...leave your friends wondering how you have the coolest music in town :)

Prithvi Festival

Those of you from Bombay know all about Prithvi; for others; Prithivi is a famous and innovative theatre in Juhu thats best know for its great plays and even better coffee (yep everything in India is judged on food & drink).

Every year Prithivi organises a 7 - 10 day festival featuring some cool acts. This year they've done one better and organised all around the city. I went for a Hindi-Marathi play at Horniman Circle on the life of mill workers post the mill shut down...outstanding...

Fabmall - Cool Site 46 '06

Fabmall.com is this week's cool site. Its a kind of a mall which in typical Indian style tries to sell everything. And in typical Indian style, has a really badly designed GUI.

Great for books & CDs

I use Fabmall to buy books, music & DVDs. You get them at Indian prices which is a fraction of the price elsewhere. What I usually do is locate and research the book/CD/DVD on Amazon and then buy it on Fabmall. They ship it within a day or two and it arrives in good condition by overnight courier.

Be careful, the books/CDs/DVDs which show greater than 3 day shipping are NOT made in India and are imported from overseas. You are better ordering those from Amazon as you'll get them faster and cheaper.

Yo4Ya on its way

Yes folks, not only has it launched, but it's in Orbit :) Here's what my home page looks like

Cool site of the week: 45 '06

Here's my stab at being a serious and regular blogger. I am going to introduce a cool site every week...hopefully :)

For those of you who don't get it, a year has 52 weeks and this is week 45 of 2006. AAAHHHH.

The cool site of the week will be random. It may also be connected to an occasion or it may be a software. Please feel free to suggest cool sites.

PrecisionReservations.com

This is the coolest hotel reservation site on the Internet. I have used many hotel reservation sites and this is by far the best:

1. Easy cancellations. Cancel 24hrs in advance and get all your money back
2. The BEST rates. I'm not kidding...after you add the hidden charges on the others, this is by far the best.
3. The best selection. They have 5 stars, 3 stars, budget hotel, luxury hotels, serviced apartment...
4. Excellent in Asia, Middle East & Europe. So far have used them for India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Germany and Switzerland. Amazing.
5. 5% kickback. Get points worth 5% on each booking
6. No problems so far. The room was always there when I got to the hotel !

Visit www.PrecisionReservations.com

Firefox 2.0 rocks for bloggers

Dunno how many of you write a blog; if you do, then you must do so ONLY with the new Firefox.

Why?

Because Firefox has a built in spell checker and it automatically identifies your spelling goofs....if you're a blogger, you'll know what I mean.

Indian Airlines: Good & Bad

The best thing about flying Indian Airlines to overseas destinations is that all passengers are Indians, and being Indians they stand up to exit the aircraft a soon as it has touched down on the runway. World's fastest deplane each time.

The second great thing about Indian Airlines is that because its such a C grade carrier, you always get a seat on any sector anytime. Wanna stay extra in Dubai or Bangkok, no problem, Indian Airlines always has seats free.

The third great benefit on Indian Airlines, is that it has some very pretty Air Hostesses. I think largely because it recruits from far flung places in India, not just Delhi & Bombay, so you get to see some interesting faces.

Now to get these three amazing benefits, you needs to sacrifice a few hours each time you fly. On Emirates or Cathay, a flight from Bombay to Dubai takes around 3 hrs, Indian Airlines t takes about 5-6 hrs. Whats a few hours delay each time you fly, after all in a life of 70 - 80 years there are plenty of hours.

The next thing you have to sacrifice is sleep. Indian Airlines' CEO is 5 ft tall and he made sure that all seats are for 5ft people only, so your neck is left hanging in the air.

Just heard Indian Airlines has bought some new planes...good for them, now I don't ever have to worry about gettin seats on any destinations.

Rocking You 007

Rocking You is one of the most famous posts on this blog...keeping with the times here's Rocking You 2...

Alternative reaction to Saddam's death sentance

The breaking new of the day is Saddam's death sentance pronounced by an Iraqi quote. Media is mostly carrying shots of US & Iraqi government officials who are applauding the verdict as a "victory for Iraq, humanity, freedom" and that kind of thing.

Interestingly I stumbled upon Amensty International's opinion on the matter. Amenesty International is one the few respectable organisations out there, and one who is focused on the very important issue of personal freedom in a world where increasingly might is right.

MALCOLM SMART, DIRECTOR OF AMNESTY INTERATIONAL'S MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA PROGRAMME

"Obviously we deplore the verdict of the death penalty against Saddam and one of his co-accused.

We don't consider it was a fair process. The court was not impartial. There were not adequate steps taken to protect the security of defence lawyers and witnesses...

Every individual has a right to a fair trial, even people accused of the crimes of the magnitude that Saddam Hussein faced, and this has not been a fair trial."

I think the important line there is "Every individual has a right to a fair trial", which really sums up the importance of upholding freedom and personal liberty.

YO YO Yo4Ya !

Yesterday was a big day at the office, Yo4ya, our chillware product was opened to selected users. I was really looking for something like this, a place to go relax and do stupid nothings with friends. I can tell you I'm loving it...already spent a few hrs playing around with themes, uploading photos, updating my profile, browsing people, sending stupid messages to friends...

Seems others like it too...
...its up 2,259,601 places on day 1 to reach 26,873 --- winning no 1. in Alexa of fastest rising site of the day/week :)

Server Side Story

It's finally happening. The promised arrival of server side software is slowly emerging. Downloading software is surely going to become a thing of the past:

Email: Gmail and Zimbra

Spreadsheets: Google Spreadsheets...this is the coolest thing, I've switched as I can share my spreadsheets and work in groups

Wiki: My office has set-up a knowledge management and info sharing system using Mediawiki. It's the best tool we've ever used. No more (or atlest no more important ones) documents lying on people's computers all over the office.This 1st thing we're puttin on are our business process manuals.

Storage: Say hello to online storage guys like XDrive, GoDaddy, where you can store all your files instead of on your PC

Photos: Picasa, Ofoto and the others aren't just photo sharing sites, they are photo storage sites :)

Word Documents: Writely is great, works with each using your Google account. And ofcourse it's got the easy share feature.

Games: Ok, hardcore action games have a huge way to go, but all the other games are already online. Infact there are now games you can only play online.

Music: You can get almost all the music you want via Shoutcast. If you haven't checked this one out do it now.

Chat: This has some way to go, but I think in a year or two most messengers will be online. For customer support we are already using a put online web messenger.

Whats left: besides the browser, odds and ends, like visio, skype, photo editing software, some windows utilities...

Google in the thick of it all

These guys really have their eye firmly on server side. They have smartly intergrated docs and spreadsheets into gmail. And they have really worked hard on making sure the server side stuff works lightining fast.

Another important but low key piece of software by Google is the Firefox browser sync which keeps your FF updated with cookies, passwords, history etc, all the time by storing these at Google, allowing you to use FF anywhere and get the same feel as home. Now I bet Google is planning on extending their deal with FF to include this extension as default with FF...

Movie & Music lovers - goto Bangkok free!

If you love music like I do, you must buy a music album almost every week, or around 50 to 60 albums a year.

The cost of these albums on an average works out to US$12 each, give or take a few dollars. So that's $600 to $700 a year.

Now lets say you also buy a few DVDs a year at $15 - $20 a DVD. I buy around 8 to 12 DVDs a year, so that's about $150 on DVDs.

Lets come to to the Bangkok part: In Bangkok you can pick up CDs for $2 and DVDs for $5 on the grey market. I would say that 99/100 of them work 100% (you can even check them when you buy them). So, you would get your 50 CDs for $100 and your 10 DVDs for $50, a total of $150.

You now have a saving of $600 on your total annual collection. A ticket from Bombay to Bangkok is $450; and from Europe it's around $600...

You also get a whole lot of other great things that you can make your travel money back from:

- Clothes. Dirt cheap in BKK
- Electronics. Goto Pantip Plaza in Bangkok, you'll get deals that'll save you atleast 40% off prices in Bombay and 30% of prices in Europe. Buy cell phones, computer monitors, digital cameras, laptops, web cams...
- Dentist treatment. Those of you in Europe & the US can save tons by just doing your dentist treatment in Bangkok
- Cost of living. If you have a place you can rent out in Europe, the rent alone will pay for your 1 year vacation to Thailand.

I think a lot more of us have figured this out than we realise.I can't help but notice the huge swarm of tourists in Bangkok's airport each time I'm there. I think it's one of the reasons behind the booming 8% - 10% tourist growth to Thailand.

Dubai too

Visiting Dubai from Europe allows you to recuperate your ticket costs just by buying electronics and gold, which are at a 20% - 30% advantage to India and Europe.

And, lately, a lot Indians and Europeans are realising that Dubai is a great place to park your money and many of them are picking up freehold apartments in Dubai...

Dubai 1991

Dubai 2005

Bombay Stock Ex at all time high again

The market's at a new peak today, 12,700+, and in my opinion, this time it's not overvalued. That's a huge change, considering that just 6 months back I had predicted that it will go in for a 25% correction, which it did.

Why this changed sentiment? Simply because in 6 months India's changed again. The buzz in the air and excitement on the ground has to be experienced to be believed. Airports are twice as busy as 6 months back; property deals are happening at a rate unheard of (more on this below); mobile & internet connections are soaring; salaries are soaring; there are new shops and malls coming up faster than anyone can track; there is new sense of confidence and "can do" with government officers; new nightclubs have sprung up everywhere full of new faces...

I am helping a friend in Toronto buy a 5000sq ft office in Bombay. I have been checking out offices for him last 4 weeks. He wants an office in an A grade building with a 15 foot ceiling. I shortlisted 5 offices. Can you believe it, all are now sold. I was seeing offices and by the time I got back to him and called the agent back within a day or two, they were sold. Its crazy! Now he's told me that as soon as you see a place, just pay a token and lock it in !

Bollywood movies are a great way to experience the changed profile of the market in India. Previous Bollywood movies were made for a large uneducated type of population. The movies released in 2006, which have scored hits are all targetted at educated urban auidences. And 2006 has already given 6/7 big hits and a few more are expected before the year is out (BTW, Khosla ka Ghosla is a must watch).

Not just movies, but live performances are soaring. I have been to more great live performances this year, many by overseas troupes than in the last 15 years! And tickets are at prices people would laugh at previously...and sold out! Nutcracker whose picture is in my previous post ran to full houses for a week plus and then held a few extra show...

So here is to more good times in Bombay.

Nutcracker Bombay

Pictures from Cochin

Cochin is a true mixed bacg, beautiful countryside with pockets of splendid resorts and historical areas, but some very bad roads. To top it all, someone in all their wisdom has placed the airport miles out of town so it takes ateast 1.5hrs to get to it, which in Cochin traffic is.....

Why do people buy 10 Megapixel Cameras?

Did you know that the latest, most expensive compter monitor can only output 1 Megapixel? So what is the use of buying a 2 Megapixel, 5 Megapixel or 10 Megapixel camera...?????????

How Emirates Airline is changing Asia

Yea so what, this is my airlines week. I was in Cochin last week ( the same time I flew Kingfisher - previous post below), and I met a German couple who said they flew direct from Dusseldorf to Cochin ! Woah! Now I know this is 2006, and I know that there are 100M cellphone users in India, and Germany just hosted the world cup, but this sort of thing dosen't happen...

How did you do it? It was on Emirates Airlines with a 2 hr stop over in Dubai! While stopping over they picked up two bottles of Ciroc Vodka from the Duty Free. Nice.

Gone largely unnoticed is the boon to Asia thanks to Emirates' superb connectivity. Connecting virtually all of Europe to cities and small towns in Asia, thus allowing travellers and businessmen to go on quick short trips anywhere. Take a look at some destination covered:

Cochin - India
Hyderabad - India
Bangalore - India
Trivandarum - India
Calcutta - India
Peshawar - Pakistan
Lahore - Pakistan
Damascus - Syria
Dammam - Saudi Arabia
Casablanca - Morocco
Lagos - Nigeria
Nice - France
Moscow - Russia
Manchester - UK
Birmingham - UK
New York - USA

and there are 100s more.


When the Airbus 380, the double decker superjumbo was announced, Emirates' name was synonoumous with it, because not only had Emirates played an key role in it's development, but was it's 1st customer and it's largest customer with 129 planes ordered! So in addition the the fantastic existing connectivity, when the new fleet starts operating next year, there will be even more connectivity.

For Asia this mean massive growth. It means that exporters or interior designers based in Paris can serve customers in virtually any part of Asia, making a 2 day working trip !It means the tourism industry in remote Kerela (Cochin) will boom, it means a 1001 positive growth things.

The Kingfisher Experience

Around a year back India's own flamboyant business tycoon, Vijay Mallya, launched Kingfisher Airlines, promising a new level of luxury and naughtiness in the skies.

For those of you who have not visited India or are tee totalers, Kingfisher is India's no. 1 beer. It's actually a basic beer, so Kingfisher Airlines is a curious brand name. Initially I assumed Kingfisher Airlines to be a budget no frill airline, but the multi-million dollar ad campaign and reports from passengers showed it to be a premium airline...Apparently a whole new experience in cattle class travel.

Getting out of my taxi I am assisted by a well dressed porter in wheeling my luggage to the check-in. I realised in horror that the guy had managed to mangle my suitcase's pull along cord and it was in danger of becoming quite useless...

On board the aircraft was extremely well turned out in Red, proving how exceptional design can create wonderful ambiance. The staff was also decked out in trendy and sexy (if you can call short skirts that) attire, but with a bit too much garish make-up.

Service was excellent. A lot of touches, like a handout kit containing goodies and printed menu, were both smart and labour saving. The inflight personal entertainment system is a great touch on a domestic airline and Vijay Mallya recuperates the costs by running promos of his beer all the way.

I was all set to abandon flying other airlines but the luggage took 45 mins...a lifetime on Monday afternoon. This is where Jet Airways, India's original modern airline never lets you down: on time & efficient everytime. Then on reflection I realised that Kingfisher lacked the quiet cool professionalism of Jet Airways and that makes all kinds of horrible thoughts about engine maintenance go through your mind...

Well maybe I'll give it another try...hope Vijay tracks blogs...

No 1 video on Google with 9M views

HowTo remove Windows Genuine Advantage !

I know many of you naughty people out there are being troubled by Windows with their notification saying "This copy of Windows is Pirated !". Very embarassing especially in meetings...But like a friend of mine once said "Any software that costs more than $25 should be pirated by principle" :)

WikiHow has a step by step procedure on how you can remove the WGA notifications: http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Windows-Genuine-Advantage-Notifications

Whats up in Sri Lanka

Went to Sri Lanka last week, what a place. Colombo is a cross between Goa & Bombay, really! What a shame about the civil war, hope they get over it soon. They need a Montreal style referendum, but alas Asians are too smart for that, they need to shoot it out...

Must dos
- Barefoot - lunch & great fabrics
- Mount Lavina Hotel - great dinner & views
- Odel - shopping mall
- Gallery Cafe & Bar - Expat type dinner place, super ambience
- Beach Wadiya - best crabs ever
- Elephant Orphanage - on the way to Kandy
- Helga's Folly - the coolest place you'll ever stay
- Buying Cuban cigars in the Duty Free


Colombo
(click on pictures to open large)


On the way to Kandy


Kandy



Helga's Folly

Abba in Bombay