THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

I am breaking by blogging silence (hiatius, perhaps?) by doing what all sane minded folks should do. Let's begin by saying that the Saturday blasts in Hyderabad and reported discovery of other terror devices out to be condemned in the highest terms. You do not get a good feel when anyone dies or gets hurt, least of all, when you learn that innocent folks who are enjoying an outdoor evening, including kids, failed to return home, because someone blasted a bomb. The bombs would certainly not asked for anyone's religion, ideology, age or profession before hitting them and that is the whole tragedy. While law enforcement is surely going to nail these faceless terrorists in due course, it is only a resolute public opinion that would perhaps deter such attacks. My humble homage to all those who left us on Saturday, and remembrance to all those who have elsewhere died in terror violence in the past, either as innocent victims, or those who died fighting the terrorists, such as the sec

In earlier posts we discussed how communication has become conversational and flat . In yet another post, we discussed how cricket boards across the world such as Pakistan and Australia, have chosen to create their websites, and also those such as BCCI have, chosen not to have their websites . The essential challenge is for organizations, cricket boards included, is to reach out to all key stakeholders via all available means of communication. The current unpopularity of BCCI is partly due to its inability to think of cricket lovers beyond just ticket buyers/ TV viewers. This has meant that cricket has been sold as a commodity, not as a well cultivated brand . I hope folks at ICL will soon realize that a great communication advantage awaits them, if they choose to engage cricket lovers via the web. That essentially means, get an ICL website up very soon. A website that breathes and lives. This is no rocket science wisdom, but merely common sense. The engagement possibilities remain pra

GApps, earlier known as Google Apps for your domain, is a service by which you can primarily create simple webpages as well as run your own email service, using Gmail engine. Fellow blogger Nirmal has a post on '7 Reasons Why you Should be Using Google Apps' . Google has both free and paid versions of this service, targeted towards Organizations, Schools, Families etc. I was pleasantly surprised that even former President Abdul Kalam is a user of GApps (Check out an MX lookup on www.abdulkalam.com). Wow, what an endorsement! As an admin of GApps for my alumni network, I give good marks to email service. I have the following wishlist: Improve the Email List (aka Distribution list ) management. Currently if you have to create a 200 member DL, it is quite a pain. Credentials Distribution : If you upload a CSV, GApps does a good job of creating the users. However, you are left with an CSV sheet where you have to mailmerge and inform the users through email. Very tedious task. Ide

In my post titled Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid - What I liked and what I didn't I wrote about my impressions on Dr CK Prahalad's work titled ' The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid '. Frankly when I read the book, I did not come out fully convinced.It all sounded very nice, but not very pursuasive. My curiousity led me to search a bit more on this debate. I came across a paper by Prof. Aneel Karnani published in California Management Review . The paper titled Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid: A Mirage comes out hard on the BOP concept as enunciated in Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by Dr Prahalad. While Dr Prahalad's work focusses on how corporations can make money selling even to the marginal wage earner, Dr Karnani questions the viability of such a proposition, even talks on issues such as affordability of this segment of consumers. He even questions the suitability of the cases used to substantiate the BOP proposition (such as Annapurna salt).