Restaurant POS Products from LPR

Was helping my friend find a POS (Point of Sale) system for his restaurant and found about this range of products marketed by LPR Global, a South Korean technology products company that I had done a project with when I was at Rotman: http://www.lprglobal.com/restaurant-pos.php

Was impressed to see a complete range of POS products catering to different segments of the markets such as retaurants, groceries, etc.

Tiesto=trance; trance=Tiesto

Fall has been a great a music season in Toronto. U2 was here few weeks ago on their world tour and last Saturday Tiesto was here to please his trance fans.
Although Armin Van Buuren and Gabriel & Dresden duo are my all time favs, I'm quite fond of Tiesto also. His Adagio For Strings and Elements of Life are simply out of the world.


So here I was with Pavan & Sky, waiting in a mile long queue on a freezing Saturday evening, all too excited to watch Tiesto perform. The rain Gods had decided to rest for that hour and spared us from getting drenched.
After the security checks and other formalities we rushed into the performance hall and were thrilled to see the setup. The Heineken beer bar decorated in florescent green eluded us..the rest, as they say, was history.. =)

Opening acts started at 9 PM with some local DJs dishing out their work. The 1st guy was pretty good and performed for an hour. The crowd was consistently shouting out the God-of-the-night's name "TII-EE-S-TO". By the mid of the 2nd DJ, who was doing a terrible job, most of the people had lost their patience.

Then slowly the lights started dimming down and a soothing music started in the background. The background graphic screen was showing the back of a man's head. The crowd knew what was gonna happen next. We started shouting at the peak of our voices..and then finally Tiesto appeared on to the stage.

He starated off with a fast beat from his new album Kaleidoscope which got the fans into a frenzy and started their trance moves in a religious fervor. He continued with other songs such as Back In Your Head (feat Vancouver based Tegan and Sara)and Escape Me and other songs from the same album. All these numbers were thumpingly awesome, but my favorite was Century. The music is fast and its lyrics is very catchy. It goes like:
Hello, can you hear me??
Now put you hands in the air..for the century

I'm sure its gonna be a super hit.

The atmosphere was electrifying. It was not just the out-of-the-world trance music, it was also the amazing graphics that was making it more fun. Just when we thought the last molecule of ATP (the energy molecule)had been burnt, our bodies would automatically start dancing again, as if it received an energy boost from the music.
The hot dogs we had before entering was long gone. We had taken regular breaks to drain down a Sprite or Coke (we were dancing back & forth, of course).

The 2nd half was even more fun when he started belting out his older classics such as the Adaigo and Elements of Life. The fans went berserk on these two. He also played his some of his songs we had heard in ASOT (A State of Trance, Armin's weekly trance radio program).
We had lost track of time. But bodies were totally exhausted and were begging for some rest. The party went on till 3 AM. Then the music started slowly mellowing down and Tiesto said few good words, thanked us and bowed out. All of us were shouting in our hoarse voice for him to play for some more time. But it went in vain.

We half-heatedly walked out of the venue, caught a taxi & came back home at 5 AM. But the night was an experience to remember.

Here's a link to an Internet version of Kaleidoscope: http://www.myspace.com/tiesto. Hope you'll enjoy it!

happy Indepence Day !!

Dear friend,
advanced Indian Independence Day wishes to you !!
The reason for wishing you a week in advance is because I just came back from volunteering in the day-long Independence Day celebrations organized by the Consulate General of India (CGI) at the Yonge-Dundas square. The program included a procession along prominent streets in downtown area by various states (provinces in India) such as Karnataka, Goa, Rajasthan, describing their states. The most intriguing one was a procession by Indian Oversees Congress Party. I never knew one such association even existed!! Didn't know how appropriate it was for the CGI to patronize a political party, but being a Congress follower, I didn't mind watching Rahul Gandhi's blow-up taken around Toronto!!

Here are some pics from the event:

my state, Karnataka's procession

me with Karnataka Maathe (mother Karnataka)

Rajasthan's procession was quite colorful (but incomparable to Karnataka's)

This summer I've witnessed so many national/cultural events, almost one every week. Yesterday I had been to a Greek festival and the week before to a Caribbean event. I've been to 4 Indian programs this summer. I'm amazed by the amount of diversity in this country and the welcoming nature of its people.

another anniversary !!

On 5th this month its gonna be a year since I stepped foot on Toronto. Can't believe how fast this one year has rolled by. But after having stayed away from home and been put through a grueling MBA program, this year's been replete with lessons for the rest of my life.
In retrospect, it's been a wonderful year, worth every second that I lived.

I haven't able to update blog for quite some time partly because my time management is gone for a toss (a euphemism for "I'm a freakin, lazy guy") & partly because I have my fingers in too many pies.

I'm interning at Sun Life Financial (SLF) where I'm working as a Project Manager for a $500 million outsourcing contract that SLF recently signed with IBM. Its a high visibility project both inside SLF & IBM & I get to interact with senior managers from both sides.

Besides the internship, which has been quite hectic till now, I'm working on an Independent Study Project (a graded course that's counted as part of our 2nd year elective) for a consulting firm called LPR Global. Our assignment is to conduct market research & come out with recommendations for market entry for a South Korea based consumer electronics manufacturer. My team's performance has been quite good till now. We've succeeded in selling few of our products to a leading telecom carrier in the US.

I'm the VP of the Rotman Dance Club for this year. We initially had to put in considerable effort to transform our club from Salsa Club to Dance Club, that would support other dance forms such as Bollywood, Ball Room, etc. We had to conduct surveys among the members, convince the Rotman Club Administration to rename our club. Substantial effort was also dedicated to revamp the club website. But all our work till now has been just to create the new club, lot more effort is needed in the course of the year to ensure successful co-ordination of the various activities we've planned for this year.

A good amount of my time is also being spent on meeting Rotman alumni from various industries to understand their jobs & if I'd want to be in that profession a year from now. I've stuck with technology & marketing professions till now, since these are my preferences till now. Rotman has a great program called the Mentorship program where senior alums are assigned to interested students & the mentor helps the student understand various top manager issues and shares his perspectives on several topics. I've been extremely lucky to have the CFO of Rogers, one of the largest telecom/media firms in Canada, Bill Linton, as my mentor. I've discussed several interesting topics such the role he plays in increasing shareholder value, M&A strategies of multi-billion Dollar firms, etc. Bill has also introduced me several senior executives in his network with whom I can further interact and learn from.

Despite all this work, my social life has also been quite active. This weekend was a long one & I made quite good use of the time to visit few places around Toronto. The weekend also had a wonderful ending with an evening of "rusty pelican" ice-cream at De Metre's and bhel puri with Kashmiri chai at Little India on Gerrard Street.

Looking for another fun filled weekend and an interesting week in between !!

Bye for now..

10 things I didn't know about Poland

Dear friend,

Today’s article is going to be the 1st edition of a topic that’s very close to my heart: “10 things I didn’t know about country X” that I had spoken about a few months ago here.

I’ve chosen Poland for today’s article. I caught up with Dariusz, a Polish classmate at Rotman & dear friend of mine, asking him to tell us about Poland. Let me give you a brief introduction to Dariusz. He has his Masters in Banking & Finance from Krakow University of Economics and has 7 years of experience in invoice finance and asset based lending in London & Warsaw. He’s extremely fond of the Latin American dances and can put to shame many Latinos with his sleek Salsa moves!!

So here I was, at a reading room in University of Toronto’s Graduate House, close to midnight on Sunday, urging a 30ish Polish guy to come up with interesting facts about his country for the rest of us to know about. Here’s the list he churned out:

1) In the UK, the Polish form the 2nd largest immigrant population. The 1st place is held by none other than us Indians!!

2) Currently Poland is the only growing economy in the EU, notwithstanding the economic crisis that has hit hard the whole of the EU. The main reason being large FDI from the richer EU neighbors who want to capture a slice of this developing economy. Technology outsourcing is also supposed to quite be hot. So any techies reading this point, keep a keen eye on Poland.

3) Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest painters of the modern era is supposed to have said “The three most astonishing things in the past half-century were the blues (Afro-American music), cubism (20th century art movement), and Polish vodka. “ As for the Polish food, sausages seem to be one of the most popular dishes they have. The last time I was in a Polish restaurant with my classmates, I saw a separate menu for savories based on sausages!!

Here's one such delicacy:

4)
Poland lost 6 million of its citizens in the 2nd world war and became an USSR satellite state, post WW Lech Walesa, who became later a President, spearheaded the Polish revolt against the USSR domination thereby making Poland the 1^st country to liberate from the Communist bloc. The movement he started was called Solidarity and he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1983.

5) Religion is a critical component of the Polish people. 89% Poles follow the Roman Catholic Church. The previous Pope of The Church, John Paul II, was from Poland. His funeral was the largest funeral gathering of world leaders and public. An estimated 4 million mourners gathered in Rome and cost The Vatican 6 million euro for the entire event. John Paul II was the first non-Italian Pope since the 1520s and was widely acclaimed as one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century

6) In 2006-2007 Polish Prime Minister and President were identical twin brothers elected in democratic elections. One of the brothers is still the President as of 2009. They both starred in the 1962 Polish film “The Two Who Stole the Moon”

7) Polish history goes back to 966, however, there was a period of over 120 years when Poland did not formally exist after political and military partitions among Russia, Austria, and Prussia (1795 - 1918). Warsaw is the third capital in the Polish history after Gniezno and Krakow

8) Main Market Square in Krakow is the largest medieval town square in Europe (200 by 200 meter square)

9) Frédéric Chopin, a world-renown pianist and composer, was born in Poland where he lived until he was 20. He was one of the great masters of Romantic music.

10) Finally, for all the football (soccer??) fans out there, here's something trivia for you: Poland and the Ukraine will be hosting the European Soccer Championship in 2012

The discussion gave me a brief insight from a Polish into this emerging economy and its culture. Hope you'd find this article interesting & useful as I did !!

Honey, who captured my value ??

"Capturing value" is as familiar a term to MBA's as "raising a bug" is to software engineers. It simply means if and how much is your business is making money out of the service or good it produces and sells to consumers.
For ex., lets say your firm manufactures cars. You create value to your consumer by providing her a means of transport that's going to save her time, make a style statement, etc. You capture the value you generate by getting the consumer pay for the car.
Now lets try to understand what value a car dealer captures. This is important to understand since my today's article is based on a similar concept. The car dealer adds value to the consumer by having a large collection of cars and providing a buyer an aesthetic environment for his customer to make her choice. The dealer captures his value add by charging a premium over the factory cost of the car.

But capturing value in some industries is not as simple as in the above example. This concept is such a menace that it has disrupted entire industries.

One such example is the telecom industry of the late 1990's. Carriers such as AT&T, MCI of that era had built up so much overcapacity (and therefore huge fixed cost) that in order to break-even they had to provide n/w access to smaller resellers at shoestring prices. These resellers consisted of calling-card companies, paid 900 services providers such as phone-in-astrology, etc. The services provided by such firms were so attractive that similar firms mushroomed at an exponential rate all over the US. You might think that this was good news for the bigger carriers. But in reality, it was disaster in the making. It turned out that the modus-operandi of the smaller firms was that they bought large bandwidth from the carriers, provide their services to their clients & go underground before paying usage charges to the carriers. Basically these firms were usurping the value provided the carriers thereby depriving the revenues that the larger carriers had to make. This shook up the entire industry.

MCI, the 2nd largest US carrier was supposed to have had many such customers but the problem was supposed to be so much out of control that the management had slyly buried such bad accounts receivables in the hopes of being acquired by another carrier, thereby having a chance to cash-in on their ESOPs. Ultimately, in '97, after WorldCom formed a $37 billion merger with MCI, the company wrote down $685 million worth bad assets (non-paying customers). Finally the company had to declare bankruptcy.

Now let me explain a 2nd version of this value capture problem, that's closer to my heart, prevalent in today's tech industry. It is none other than the Social Networking industry, comprising all the Orkuts, Facebooks & Myspaces. These sites boast of millions of users like you & me and are backed by some of the best venture capitalists. But these companies are struggling to break-even, even after more than a decade of operations. Wonder why? The simple answer is that these companies have failed to capture the value they generate. What value do these firms generate? Breaking down commucation barriers, providing another mode for people to express themselves and many more..

Certainly, these are pretty valuable that anyone might be willing to pay for. But the social n/w firms dug a grave for themselves by training the user to demand these services for free. Since then, the firms have tried various things such as advertising to claim the value, but haven't found critical success in any of them. As my team & I try to realize a strong business model for a social networking startup called VividCampus, this question continues to come back and bite us.

Oracle buys Sun

This is got to be the biggest tech news of the year, so big a news that its woken me up from a long blogging hiatus to write something about it.

The process has costed Oracle $7.4 billion and Oracle expects to achieve operating profit of $1.5 billion in the first year through this acquistion.

Let me try to apply few basics of Mergers & Acquistions I learnt in our finance courses to check if this acquisition was worth the trouble.

The sole purpose of a firm is deliver profits & increase shareholder (SH) value. Any activity conducted by a firm has to adhere to this principle. This rule is applicable to the case of acquistion too: if an acquistion doesn't increase shareholder value, then don't do it.

Now, how to decide if the acquisition is increasing SH value?
Let's say a company called Acme wants to acquire a company called Beta. The acquistion is SH value increasing if Acme's share value post acquistion is greater than value of Acme '+' value of Beta. If this condition wasn't true, the SH is better off holding an Acme share & buying a Beta share from the share market.

This means that Acme must see some level of synergy in acquiring Beta. Generally, there's high level of synergy if the two companies are in the same business so that the acquiring company can achieve greater economies of scale or scope, gain access to new markets or reduce costs by retiring redundant resources. This was the case when Alcatel-Lucent acquired the UMTS business of Nortel or when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft.

But in case the two firms are in different businesses, its difficult achieve scale economies, but the acquistion can be justified by applying better management expertise to the acquired firm.

Lets apply this principle to Sun's acquisition by Oracle. Oracle is into DBMS, while Sun has a large porfolio of products ranging from microprocessors to to high-level prgramming languages. Java, a programming laguage owned by Sun is widely used in user-interface development and by far its most popular product, even though its Solaris operating system & UltraSparc microprocessor are quite well established in the enterprise market.

Sun has an open-source DBMS product called MySQL that has quite a strong following in the FOSS (Free & Open Source s/w) world. MySQL seems to be a good enough reason for this acquistion. Are there any economies of scope (like providing end-to-end "back-end to front-end" solutions) that can be achieved through owning Java and Solaris (other main products from Sun)? The answer to this will be "it depends". If Oracle can achieve higher level of optimization in Java or Solaris systems running on Oracle DBMS, then its definitely a great value-add to the customers. Happy customers generally leads to happy shareholders.. :)

Overall, this seems to be quite a clever acquistion for Oracle and it seems to have to have got the timing right too: in the middle of an economic downturn !!