THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

A friend of mine forwarded this link to a hilarious, but very professionally made video on what would happen to some elements of branding if iPods were to be made by Microsoft instead of Apple. Worth every second of your time. If you a marketing professional and appreciate subtle humour, cannot afford not to view the entire clip. See what others are saying on iPod

Like most of us who get unsolicited and unwanted telemarketing calls selling everything from a personal loan to credit card to a new telephone connection, I too get such calls everyday, whether I am in meeting, travelling, or working on document etc. Many such calls come from India's leading banks.The interesting part is that, I have already registered for DNC on their website. While some of these companies give you a request number, others merely say thanks, and you get nothing, no email confirmation, no request number. These companies also helpfully add that it might take them 3 months to remove the number from their list. The calls do not stop though. Consider this. At eleven AM I get a call from some telecaller, who wants to sell credit cards to me. First of all, they ask me if I hold a credit card from another bank. It really cheeses me off. Why should be I talking about my financial arrangements to any TDH who calls me without invitation.That's when I ask them if they hea...

The newspapers, television and radio are screaming- Indian Space Programme goes commercial and likes . Indeed, after decades of research, our scientists are all set to do a commercial launch- a 309 kg Italian satellite would be lobbed into a polar orbit this afternoon on board a PSLV rocket. This is a low orbit satellite would find its position somewhere 300 kms above the ground and orbit earth every 90 minutes or so. Communication satellites of any real worth - running communication channels and costing megabucks - operate in geo stationary orbit at about 36000 kms, and they must be transported to 8000 kms by rockets.These satellites weigh 3-4 tonnes.This is where the real money is. The US space programme and Arianne rockets compete heavily in this commercial space. China and Japan have their own programmes and at least China does not outsource the launches though not sure about Japan. India's own GSLV is far from ready, even after burning time and money and couple of Russian eng...

Greedy about the possibility of carrying an R K Laxman cartoon in my pocket, I signed up for a designer credit card offered by State Bank of India. Yes, the silliest reason I can think for signing up for a card but let me be honest. It turned out that the card was a co-branded Indian Railways credit card and came with a free membership to Frequent Flyer Traveller programme, which I never cared about since my travel with the railways can hardly be called Frequent . So I was at New Delhi station ready to board a long journey to Chennai and could not find my name in the reservation chart despite having a printout of my e-ticket. Still I went on sat of the berth showing on my ticket, took out the ticket one more time and pored over it for any date errors. Could not find any. There was a newly wed couple sitting there who were in certain need of more private space, and I was feeling very very awkward. The conductor came soon enough and I gave him my ticket with very eerie feeling. Then...

Kiran Karnik, the venerable President of Nasscom is all set to leave, Economic Times, reports . Nasscom is the premier coalition of Indian IT and BPO companies and apart from lobbying and awareness building about IT and BPO, Nasscom has been playing an active role in envisioning future business opportunites in IT & BPO space. This news comes the same day when Infosys(INFY) announced Q4 results and several others are all set to come out with their Q4 numbers in the next few days. Nasscom's previous president was Dewang Mehta, who established Nasscom's name to what it currently is. Kiran's tenure was marked by days in which IT companies have come across stringent non-tariff barriers such as visa quotas, and outsourcing becoming a negetive term in the west, and other countries having earned the 'emerging destination' label.Whoever joins next, will have quite a challenge on his hands.

With temperature in Chennai and rest of India soaring, Chennai's Elliot's Beach(also called Besant Nagar beach) presented a soothing relief. This picture was taken few days back around 6:30 AM when fishermen were heading out to sea.

Blogstreet is an India based feed aggregation cum rating tool. But unlike other sites such as Technorati , it suffers some major drawbacks. Registration is a painful process, and it might take days or weeks depending on Blogstreet to 'accept' your blog.Go visit the temple. It is pretty whimsical about which blogs to update, example, it has not pulled feed from this blog for ages (neither has it been merciful to my Hindi blog). The last post it picked up from this blog was , well, it has no posts right now, though for some reason it still assigns 'rating' to my site, which goes up and goes down, well, logic unknown. There is no one to connect to, if you have any issues. If you go to Contact and leave a message pointing out the issues, well, quite likely, you would not receive a response. Probably not even in months. There is no ping like feature on Blogstreet to let Blogstreet know that you have made a new post. Blogstreet has its own logic to visit your blog, well, yo...