ಎಲ್ಲಾದರೂ ಇರು, ಎಂತಾದರು ಇರು..(wherever u r, however u r..)

Dear friend,
Its been more than a month since Kannada Rajyotsava (formation day of my state: Karnataka that's celebrated on Nov 1st), but in keeping with true traditions of K R Puram (which had been my home since birth), I am wishing a warm belated Rajyotsava wishes now. Just remembered that last year we had Rajyotsava celebrations in early December. Even our Sasken Rajyotsava celebrations were in late November.

Now that I am in Toronto & so involved in studies, I barely get time to do these things. But here's a beautiful pearl of a song I unearthed from Youtube. I've missed the count of number of times I've seen it since & I'm sure even you'd love it..



This song has probably the two best Kannadigas ever. Hats off to our Rashtrakavi Kuvempu & one & only Annavru Dr. Raj..

ಕನ್ನಡವೇ ಸತ್ಯ, ಕನ್ನಡವೇ ನಿತ್ಯ..

Where The Mind is Without Fear..

170 odd people dead..entire city & the nation traumatized..
who's responsible for it: ISI? Deccan Mujahideen? or our "nothing can be done" government??
Will our representatives stop expressing shock & giving condolences remarks & take some decisive action atleast now?
I don't understand why this is a continuing issue. Successive governments be it Congress or BJP, forget that they have head on their shoulders when this issue comes up. Is it the complacency of the leaders or that of the RAW/police babus?

I hope its the defining moment for India. We have only 2 choices: continue to kneel down in front of those irritants or stand up brave & do something about this.

Hope our leaders haven't forgotten the aspirations of our forefathers, beautifully elaborated in this following poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

As winter sets in..

Things are changing so fast & so much out of your control, not just the weather...even your own life.


Yesterday when I came out of school I was delighted to see a white blanket of snow all over. I was witness to withering of leaves from the past one month, but today's sudden transformation of green to white was unexpected. Seeing snow for the first time was an experience in itself. I had to consciously restrain myself from not touching the snow so that I my health doesn't get screwed at this crucial time.


This weather change is in sense a mirror to the way my life is getting transformed here. These three months have done so much polishing to me that I never expected before I came here.
At school, each day we are bombarded with so many bewildering choices and challenges. You can schedule each minute of your time to atleast two tasks. You could either work on you project or the weekend's case competition or you can study for tomorrow's Statistics quiz or do Business Finance assignment. What do you choose? All are are of equal priority.

Here are some of the cool things I've learnt in past few weeks. This is just to show you how much intersting learning in a B-School is. Mind you these are just few of the plethora of things that are currently on top of my head:
1) New technology doesn't always mean big money. Ex1. InVitro Maturation Artificial Reproductive Technology (IVM-ART) - Medi-cult, a pharma company had a real bad time selling it. Ex2: Very Light Jet (VLJ)- Linear Air, an air-taxi service started by an HBS grad is facing a tough challenge making profits out of this cutting edge technology due to the already overcrowded airline industry.
2) Lets say there are two stocks with risks r1 and r2 such that share2 is riskier than share1. If you create a portfolio having these two stocks, the effective risk r(1,2) of the portfolio can adjusted to be lesser than r1. In other words, your portfolio risk is lesser than the lowest risk of individual shares in the portfolio.
3) There are quite a number of ways for a company to borrow money from a bank but not show it on its balance sheet !! This one is really intersting isn't it? :)


I had almost forgotten what a festival celebration is till I got a lucky chance to watch a Santa Claus parade on Bloor street this Sunday. There were tiny tots with their parents waving their hands and singing "jingle bells". I could actually feel the joy in those small kids by remembering the jovial mood I used to be in during "pallakki" festival in my home town.



This picture is from the parade passing near the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) near my school.

We've got two more weeks for Q2 exams to commence and before that submissions of various assignments and projects are due. I've joined as a PM for an UofT student project, I'll discuss more about it in a later blog. It's been a very good experience with lot of learning till now.

So these are some of my updates from past few weeks..

Mobile advertising on the go

Mobile advertising is one of those fields that has high expectations but hasn't quite delivered to the expectations till now. This week I had the opportunity to interact with two leaders working on cutting-edge stuff in mobile/Internet space: Mr. Sumeet Khanna VP of Microsoft, Canada & Mr. Shane Green, VP of Navteq (recently acquired by Nokia). This article is based on my learning from these meetings & some research.

The two key aspects why mobile advertising has lured advertisers are:
1) Targeting - Mobile ads are highly effective in targeting customers.
Television, called the primary media is a very general form of media. Every member of the family watches TV, hence it's difficult for the advertiser to focus on the target audience. PC advertising has more focus, thanks to content based advertising pioneered by Google, but the effectiveness of the Ad is reduced because of far too many Ads on the screen. Mobile phone, with its personal use & far little display space can be most effective in advertising.

2) Location based ads - mobiles can be carried around everywhere & its easy to track the customer location. Because of these reasons advertisers can run location based ads. For instance assume you are in a shopping mall now. A clothes store that's running a discounts sale can send you an SMS about its sale. This might trigger you to go to that store even though you had no intent of shopping for clothes.


Let's now focus on the mechanisms that advertisers use to sell their product.
SMS, due to its ease of use & basic system requirements, continues to be the primary form of advertising. It leaves way behind other forms of advertising.
An average SMS takes much lesser space than the 160 character limit. Some of the service providers are experimenting with appending an advertisement to each incoming message.

With the advent of high speeds & smarter phones, advertisers can deploy graphics based & more interactive ads. Since mobiles are relatively slower devices with lesser graphics support compared to PCs, displaying mobile advertisements require a company to maintain a separate site for its mobile customers. 26% of top 100 US sites have a mobile micro-site now. Check m.facebook.com for an example. As I had mentioned in this previous article, iPhone seems to be real trend setter & has driven mobile data rates to new high.




To make effective campaings, its good to understand when a customer uses her mobile to access the Internet. According to Interactive Advertising Beureu, a mobile user accesses the Internet mainly in the following scenarios:
1) When the user is busy in a work & wants to access the Internet to lookup for some references. He doesn't want to switch on his laptop/PC for a small job.
2) He wants to kill some time by playing a mobile game or some similar app.
Understading these usage patterns of the user is essential to build effective mobile ads.


The main roadblock in future increases in mobile Internet access seems to be high prices charged by service providers for these services. Going forward, with increasing ad based revenues, service providers may reduce these rates. Virgin mobile with its "sugar mama" campaign is already experimenting on this front.


The future of mobile advertising seems to be on the slow but steady path now..

References:
http://www.iab.net/media/file/moble_platform_status_report.pdf
http://www.telecommagazine.com/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_4357

A new series in terraintamer.blogspot.com

Q1 exams got over yesterday. Q2 will be starting in full flow from Monday. I Need to read through 2 two topics for Strategy class. And by "reading" I mean I need to be completely through with the topics & also gather few points for class participation. My gut feeling that I may need to slog the entire Q2 like we did in last 2 weeks before Q1 exams.


The past few months in Rotman has been a truly International experience for me. My classmates are from 30 odd countries. For any topic discussion in the class, each student brings out her perspective that's so unique to their culture & different from mine that I instantaneously feel "wow !! what an amazing point that was". This has inspired me to start a new series on my blog. I am planning to interact with some of my classmates & understand what's unique in their country/culture that many of us don't know of. Then I'm gonna compile it on my blog with a title like "10 things I didn't know about countryX".
Hopefully, this exercise will let me learn a little bit more about global cultures & also spread the "gyan" to you guys..

For a starter, did you know that "hola" with stress on "A" is Portuguese & "hola" with stress on "O" is Spanish? Basically, you greet a Brazilian with the 1st option & any other person from Latin America with the 2nd option.


Ciao..

What a hectic week !!

It had never dawned to me how hectic MBA is until last Wednesday. I was talking to my team regarding the various submission we had to make in coming week. This was the list:

group assignments:
Stats project step1 - 10th Oct
FIT presentation - 14th Oct
MPO case analysis - 16th Oct

individual assignments:
FIT - 21st Oct
MPO - 23rd Oct

We had planned our team assignments properly, so there were no problems there. But time required for individual assignments are grossly undervalued & we need to slog over now.

In between all this we needed to make time to prepare for the exams starting from 20th Oct, i.e. from next week.

Time to head back now..
bye..

Indian Railways @ Rotman

We got this article from our Media Relations office this tuesday:


Indian Railways Return to UofT’s Rotman School of Management.

Toronto – For the second year in a row, a program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management will provide a look at the latest trends in management thinking and transportation for 40 senior managers from The Indian Railways, the second largest railway network in the world. Managers, from the finance and human resources functions of The Indian Railways, will be in Toronto from September 22 to October 4.

The two week program will provide participants with focused classes in finance, human resources, strategy and marketing. In addition to the classroom-based activities, the participants will have site visits to transportation and logistics firms.

“The Indian Railways have underwent a grand transformation in recent years becoming one of the most successful transportation companies in the world,” says Prof. Dilip Soman, Corus Chair in Communications Strategy, at the Rotman School, who is the academic director of the program. “Education and training, such as this program, are important for the company to continue its renaissance.”

The Indian Railways is the second largest railway network in the world and the largest civilian organization under a single management. It carries over 13 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of freight every day, runs 12,000 trains daily with nearly 8,000 Railway stations.

The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum based on Integrative Thinking. Located in the world’s most diverse city, the Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables the design of creative business solutions. The School is currently raising $200 million to ensure Canada has the world-class business school it deserves. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.



This explained why we were seeing so many well dressed Indian men & women in the School over the weekend. I has initially thought that Rotman had rented out our CIBC Hall on 3rd floor for some Indian business meeting..


Later, I was able to collect some more info from Prof. Dilip Soman. This program was previously being done at NYU-Stern & Prof. Soman was instrumental in getting this program to Rotman.


Indian Railways has been a life-line of sorts for India, ever before Independence. So much so that there's a separate Railway Budget presented by the Central government.
It has been performing brilliantly well of late, very much inline with the economic boom in India. Contrary to most of the PSUs (Public Sector Undertakings) that have crumbled post liberalization, Indian Railways has been one of the few organizations that was able to capitalize on the booming economy.

Imparting top-class business education to top management is one facet of its willingness to innovate & revamp itself. But I think this is one the most important steps towards nurturing a better organization. Its this top management that's going back to implement new strategies to increase profits & at the same time move to around tonnes of freight & millions of Indians at least possible prices.

This program is going to be a good image building for Rotman as well. Now you know Rotman is behind all those innovations Indian Railways is going to roll out in the coming years. Hope delayed trains will be a thing of the past soon.. :)

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