Rama_Blogs

Well done India- You will always remain a Tiger on paper

2010-07-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

Being an Indian it really saddens to read daily reports about how much corruption is happening in the Commonwealth Games which is supposed to be a show piece to the world. Shame on India and it's politicians.

Wake up my dear prime minister, not enough if you just talk about how much GDP growth happened when the morals of the entire nation is going to the dogs. Get these bad guys and set an example.

Let's try some real change for a change

Free Phone Service

2009-07-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

I presume lot of people have heard of Google Voice which is actually a service from Google which enables you to have a phone number and also use that for receiving/placing calls all for free.

Actually Google bought over a company called Grand Central which had that service.

You need an invite to sign-up for Google Voice. I happen to be a lucky person who got invited to the service and I am really impressed with the functionality. Let's look at the features available with just Google Voice and then we will look at small tweaks which can be made to make the service absolutely free.

1) You register based on the Invite and you get to choose a phone number, you can choose numbers in your dialing area if needed. Currently there is no provision of changing your existing land line number for this.
2) Once you have selected a phone number, you will then set-up a forwarding rule, where you can make that phone ring any of your other phones like your cell phone etc.
3) You can also use that number as a catch all message number with no forwarding where it will directly go to your voice message which can be configured like any other phone.
4) The voice mails and call log can also be accessed online through your Google account, the best part is the voice mail are transcribed to text which you just read instead of listening to an audio file.
6) Google voice advt free calling, but that is actually not true if you are having just your cell phone,the way the call piece works is that on the Google voice site you enter the number you want to call, then Google will place a call to your associated phone first which will be your mobile and once you pick up, it will connect the calling number. But in this process if your associated phone is a cell phone, you will anyway pay for the minutes.

Now the free part

To overcome the problem mentioned above, the workaround can be as follows. There is another service called gizmo5 which actually loads an applet on your PC and the interface is just like Skype. When you sign up ( it is free) and download the applet you will also be given a number by Gizmo5 which is not really important here. What you need to do is to put that number as the associated number in Google Voice.

So let's see what happens.

When you go to Google voice and dial a number, google voice will first call the associated number which will be the Gizmo5 number which will ring on your computer, assuming you have headphones and microphone, you pick up that call and then Google voice will dial your number which you want and then you are connected with the perosn.

It might sound a little complicated, but trust me once set-up it is a no-brainer.

Finally i am going to have free calls and I am going to cut my VOIP soon.

Thanks Google.

Long live free enterprise.

All about Solar

2009-06-24T20:16:00.001-07:00

Hi,

I have started a new blog on one of a my other hobbies which is Solar Energy. Hope you will find it interesting. The same can be accessed at http://www.solarpoweruniverse.blogspot.com

Thanks

Tax on Bonus- A perfect disaster in the wings

2009-03-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

The frantic passage of the Populist Tax "The Bonus Act" was a new low in the US government's response to this crisis. It just amazes me and confirms to me how clueless are the politicians, and whenever we throw politicians at a problem, this is what you get. Take any country for that matter.It shows just how likely we are to doom ourselves to a decade or more of misery--by choking our markets, closing our borders, turning our banks into tools of social policy, and wrecking what's left of our economy.

Yes I am outraged by AIG people giving bonus to employees, but never in my wild dream would I have thought that congress would act in such a childish way. In the first place they don't do a good job of policing it properly and then to gain some brownie points with the voters ( please remember elections are due next year) they pass this ridiculous bill.

If the "TARP bonus" bill the House passed yesterday becomes law, any of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, and nine other major US corporations will have to fork over 90 cents of every bonus dollar that puts their household income over $250,000.

That's household income, not individual income. If you're married and filing singly, you'll have to surrender anything over $125,000. Indefinitely.

Is $250,000 per household a lot of money? Sure. But it's not a lot of money for two moderately successful corporate executives. Or a corporate secretary married to a lawyer. (If you're a $40,000 a year telemarketer at a TARP company married to a $210,000 doctor, any bonus will be taxed). So this tax will be felt by a lot more than the handful of execs at AIG and Merrill who ran off with several million dollars apiece.

Believe it or not, hidden inside these companies are thousands of decent, competent people whose households bring in more than $250,000 a year. Many of these folks had NOTHING to do with the gambling addiction that bankrupted their firms. Many of them still have a choice where to work. And now that they've learned that their family's pay will be capped at $250,000 indefinitely, many of them will quickly decide that now is a good time to pursue their careers
elsewhere.

To begin with we gave TARP money to these companies so we can bolster their balance sheet and stabilize the market and then we do this. I am sure Banks will stand in a line to return the TARP money because we are not leaving them any option, how do they run a business when good people will not work for a company where the pay is restricted.Remember the saying 'Throw Peanuts and you will only get Monkeys".

The real lesson here, unfortunately, is that it's a disaster for the government to run private companies.

Now just imagine health Insurance also run by the government.

Let's not pretend to be a socialist economy.. we are bad at that.

Your thoughts...

US is still a power to reckon with

2009-03-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

As the world is currently debating what needs to happen to the economy in the G20 summit in Britain, lot of people have been questioning whether US is still a leader in the world economy. the distinction between emerging markets and developed markets have evaporated, in fact the risk premiums are coming closer, the questions people are asking is if a developed economy with so much transparency can have these problems, what can be said about economies like China,India etc which are still very opaque.

The five biggest investment banks in the world i.e Lehman, Bear Sterns have vanished, the 2 biggest mortgage companies namely Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are under government support. The biggest bank Citibank, is depending on the government largess to survive. The biggest auto companies GM, Chrysler,Ford are at the mercy of the govt to survive.

How did these happen in a developed economy?

But before we pass any judgement, I feel that even though there are problems with US Capitalism, it still is the best we have.

The most vocal critics of US capitalism are sinking too and fast, For example look at Venezuela,Bolivia,Ecuador,Russia,Iran. For all their socialist rhetoric, they are all practically bankrupt states. One IMF estimates talks about Venezuela and Iran needing oil prices to be in the $90-95/barrel to balance the budgets.

The Russian economy soared along with oil prices, is also now in shatters. In the Russian model, the president and friends own all the natural resources and were printing money sometime back. The Russian stock market has fallen more than any other . Russia has spent one-third of it's for ex reserves to defend the ruble, which is down anyway.

It is no accident that so many critics of western capitalism are petro-states. A market economy succeeds by providing incentives for raising productivity and incomes. A state-controlled system is lousy at providing the right incentives, and so is bad for productivity. But a petro-state thrives simply on the geographical accident of mineral wealth, not great enterprise or efficiency.

Socialists bemoan the capitalist emphasis on profit and growth, and focus on distributing wealth instead. This would be fine if money dropped from up there , and the only task of governments was to distribute it. But if you have to produce the wealth in the first place, markets do it much better.

In this context the biggest critics of the US model are in fact pathetically dependent on it. When capitalist economies decline, so do the supposedly rival models. Clearly, they are not rival models at all but dependants of the capitalist model.

The true strength of a system is revealed in times of adversity. Today, despite US economic travails, the world views the dollar as a safe haven. The US system has a thousand flaws, but others are no better, and sometimes worse. Certainly the world economic system urgently needs major reform, and the G-20 meeting in Britain needs to kick-start the process. But the reforms must aim at a safer, gentler capitalism, not hardheaded socialism.

Your thoughts

Protectionism and America do not go together

2009-03-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

Recently there has lot of news on policy makers talking about keeping foreigners out and provide job to local citizens. How unfortunate that politicians make such narrow statements without really understanding what made USA the country it is today. I wanted to discuss this topic in depth as I am also considered so called Foreigner who came to this country on an H1 Visa worked hard in a foreign country and then became a Permanent Resident. In fact after 10 years I can say I feel more American than the local citizen.

I feel terribly pained when people talk about these issues without really understanding that this actually aids the country in many way, let's look at some of things I can think of, I am sure there are many more reasons.

1) The first and most important is US retaining and attracting global talent, I am sure everyone agrees that the next century is going to be decided by brain power rather than muscle power, If US does not attract the best people from all over the world, someone else will do it and that is definitely a loss for US. For example recently UK has started a program for making it easy for professional to work, same is the case with Canada.

2) One survey I was reading was mentioning that almost 50% of the students in various top colleges are from outside the country, and I know for sure many of these people get the scholarship from the schools, well then what is happening is that US is training it's competitors, how will it sound if we say that Ford gets people, train then on the best technology and then these guys go and work for Toyota. Well that is exactly what is happening and we call it reverse brain drain.

3) People who come here to work on visa actually contribute to all the social network which is there in US like the Tax system, Social Security, Medicare. You name it and they contribute to everything out here, but many people go back after the stipulated time say 6 years and they do not take any benefits out of the system, so in a way they are contributing to our country.

4) Out of the top 5 companies getting people on H1b, 4 are Indian companies. SO this means that the restriction on the cap will affect only foreign companies anyway so these companies will stop sending people out, anyway these H1s never really displaced American workers.

Supporters say this law will help US born workers and stimulate the economy, but this is just plain wrong. The economy is not of fixed size in which more foreign-born workers necessarily mean fewer US workers. Productive foreign born workers can help create more jobs here. Keeping them out damages us.

Protectionist measures such as the ‘Buy America’ clause and the H-1B legislation suggested by the US government will not have any impact on other countries, but in fact, the measures will hurt the US economy.

Your thoughts

Economy-101

2009-02-26T20:27:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across an article which was talking about how this depression is different from the one in 1929 from a information availability perspective. What will happen if we say stop watching the news, reading newspaper and stop hearing anything about the economy. Let's say we go on a long vacation of say 4 weeks to a deserted island and then come back.

I feel that the media is putting unnecessary fear in the minds of people which in turn makes people very cautious which in turn affects the economy. It is very well know fact that 80% of our GDP is based on consumer spending and that consumer spending was aided by easily available credit, now since the credit markets have almost frozen, it is becoming difficult to spent.

But there are many indicators that in the past couple of weeks, the credit markets have thawed and credit is flowing if not at the old levels, but much better than what we were in Nov-Dec of last year.

It is very tempting at these times, to look towards the govt for help, which in turn will lead to more regulations by the govt in the private sector which will not go away when the times are good. Heavy government role in the economy is never a good thing, long term for a capitalist economy. Government should only be involved in defining the rules of the game and ensuring that the rules are followed not actually play the game. The problems we see today is not because govt was not playing the game, but not doing a good job of defining rules and managing them.

I hear a lot of fuzz about the salaries of CEO on Wall street and how people talk about caps on the same, all that is just political rhetoric, will just go aways in a year or two when the economy is good. Caps never helped anyone, every person has the right to earn what he/she can earn in a honest way. I do agree some of the acts of some people on Wall street was questionable, but that happens everywhere, you are going to have some bad apples in any scenario. To blame and put CAP on everyone is just a short sighted approach. The basic rule of capitalism is that market defines what it can pay or not. This is surest way of making talent go away. Remember the saying 'If you throw peanuts, you will only get monkeys'. We don't any more monkeys

Your comments

India's very Own Madoff

2009-01-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

Today billion Indians woke up to hear Mr Raju the chairman and CEO of Satyam Computers announce that he had defrauded the company to the tune of 7000 crore rupees ( almost a billion dollars).

Well we have to hand it out to him to come open with his confessions, I am sure his conscience was pushing him.
His statement was "It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.” Well he has got off OK, but millions of people and employees you gave their everything to the company have been mauled by the tiger.

What is more shocking is that he claims that only he knew about this and no one else was party to this.

The only question I ask is what where the auditors doing, as in this case it was PWC. I am sure they will suffer the most than Satyam. It is a slap on their face and the work they do.

Whatever little image which India was trying to build over the last couple of years has come crumbling down, reminds us of those days of Harshad Mehta who treated banks and financial institutions as his personal ATM.

I feel the law of the land should deal a very strong blow to Satyam as a company and obviously the CEO, but I would
also like to see the directors who are given the responsibility by the shareholders put behind bars. This type of defraud from one of the biggest IT listed company is a shame to the country and every honest man.

India really need to wake up and smell the coffee. I still feel that this is just tip of the iceberg, I am sure lot of promoter owned companies are doing this maybe at a smaller scale. Professionalism is not to be talked about but practiced. Maybe India is learning the wrong things from the west in trying to project the growth story.

I really pity the employees of Satyam who will definitely be embarrassed beyond doubt on the deeds of their CEO.

Definitely this a very sad moment for India.

The worst part 'Satyam' means 'The Truth' in Indian language.

Is the American Dream Dead?

2008-12-26T10:58:00.000-08:00

How uncertain the world has become. In the last couple of months, all our assumptions about the way things will be and how things operate have all changed and fearfully for the worst.

Recently I came across a book by John Kotter called The new rules. This book was actually first published in 1993 period when the baby boomers were in their prime and booming. This book was actually trying to point to the fact that what lasted in the previous 20 years is not going to continue and the baby boomers need to look at the fast changing landscape if they want to achieve success in their life and career.

Fast forward today and still some of the principles sound very valid for our generation also.

Some of the good pointers from the book

Fact: From 1947 to 1973 Americans were accustomed to an growth rate that would almost double their living standards every 1.6 generations. After 1973 the economy slowed down to a almost a point where it would have taken almost 12 generations to achieve the same.
Contemplating on this how does towards economy look. The last 10 years for us has been good, and now many countries are catching up. Not long ago we could have seen that in countries like India,China etc the standard of living was almost same if not less from grandparents to grandchild. But in the last couple of years these countries have progressed a lot and definitely we are going to see growth in these economies moving forward.

Some of the other rules which are still valid for our generation and for the generation coming ahead.
New Facts
Do not rely on conventional career paths, those which were winners for most of this century will no longer be providing much success.
Keep your eyes glued on globalization and it's consequences;everything is changing offering both gigantic new opportunities and equally large hazards.
New Responses
Small is beautiful, move towards small and entrepreneurial and away from big and bureaucratic;speed and flexibility are winning in an increasingly competitive world.
Help big business from the outside as well as on the inside;huge opportunities exist for consultants and other service providers.
Management is out, leadership is in.
Backbone for all the above
Increase your competitive drive;high standards and a desire to win are essential today and in the future.
Never stop trying to grow, lifelong learning is increasingly necessary for success.

Your thoughts.................

My prespectives about the Madoff scandal

2008-12-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

What happened here: in layman terms, this person took many from new customers and gave it in the form of interests to his old customers. This is called the PONZI scheme. It had to run out of gas sometime and what better time then the present crisis in the market where he did not have any new customers coming in.

What really hits me in this, is that we all these agencies with fancy names which are supposed to monitor activities in the market and they did not have a clue something like this was happening behind their back, well as it comes to light they did get some pointers which they never followed. At hindsight it is all 20/20.

Can we blame the agency in it's failure to prevent this scandal.

Look at all the mess which are happening, ENRON,Fannie Mae,AIG,Citibank,Wachovia. All this have a common theme, every time it is a different issue which is not possible to be tracked through a system which is very rigid and bureaucratic in nature.

Every time we learn from a mess, and then put check and balances around that issue and then later another issue crops up, becomes the song of the day and the story continues.

We see similar themes in corporate also, a customer gets into a bind because of bad service from your side, you fall head over feet to resolve that and then again after sometime some other problem creeps in and you are caught off-guard.

The point I am trying to make is we need a fundamental change in the way we address compliance issues. We need a sort of feedback loop with some person constantly looking at the defined parameters and doing course corrections as and when it is deemed fit. Knee jerk reactions will not solve the problem, it will only mask the issue and it will definitely come back to bite us.

Questions an organization can ask itself.

1) Can you first define the parameters which need to be measured which in your opinion will tell you a story,
2) Can you have your system to consistently capture the values for these parameters on a regular basis
3) Define threshold values for these parameters, and if the value exceed that value, escalate the same.
4) Finally ensure that each and every escalated value has a reason attached to the same.

You will need a single minded dedication to do this and it should be supported by the top management. Unless that happens it will just be a ritual.

I see that lot of people have lost money in this Madoff scandal, but the worst affected are the charities which lost their money from endowments.

Hopefully the new administration will put in some good checks and balances in place so at least the world will still believe that the US markets are fair and transparent.

Your comments

Bailing out the Car industry

2008-11-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

What is the basic premise of Capitalist economy. Capital or Money goes towards the more efficient utilization of capital. Obviously capital is not wanting to go the car industry as structurally they are not viable. Foreign manufacturers have taken the baton away from the american car manufacturers long time back. We are just trying to wake up a dead elephant.

GM Motors way back in the 1980 had tried to get in business like the Electronic Data systems and Hughes aircraft which actually they sold off profitability years later. Even at that time the car industry was a bad idea. I feel you should allow the big car car companies to fail rather then provided crutches which might look politically appealing but will do more harm than good for the US economy as a whole.

Structurally companies like GM/Ford have become like large bureaucratic government institutions with all the inefficiencies which is common with a government institution.
Between 1998 to 2007 GM has invested around $310 billion in business. What do they have now, their capitalization is around $1.84billion. That is hard earned and saved money of the US economy going down the drain. Instead GM could have invested in the shares of Toyota/Honda and earned better returns.

If someone has to be helped it is the car buyers not the car makers.

70% of US GDP is through consumer spending, which tells us that the best way you can help anyone is to directly help the consumers, because if the thinking is that you can help by helping these big auto companies, we are forgetting one big issue which is Money Lost in Translation. Just imagine the trickle down which will happen when you invest say $25 billion into GM,because of all their inefficiencies and wastage, the final amount which might really come down to help the common man would be around $1 billion ( in fact I am very aggressive even with number).
In that scenario, why not just give a check to every employee of GM, that might be better and assist them in either retraining and cross training so they can get to more profitable and better industry.
Every economy goes through phases, US economy is now a leader in service industry and also the future belongs in research and innovation where US can act as the beacon light for the whole world. Let's not fight over manufacturing, let it be done by countries which are more efficient and much more tuned to that phase of the economy.
Let's get thinking and not try to do short term fixes which might look political favourable, but will surely lead to the bigger problems done the line.
It is the tax payers money we are talking about and it should be used efficiently. If I as an investor does not want to invest in GM why should the government use my money and invest in GM. There is no social good achieved in this.

Your comments.

Lessons from Micro-Finance

2008-10-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

Big financial institutions of all sorts are in dire straits across the globe. But one category remains unaffected - micro-finance.
Even as the global financial system freezes and giants like Lehman Brothers,AIG,Morgan Stanley collapse, micro-finance institutions (MFIs) are expanding unfazed. Famous financiers face defaults big enough to wipe them out, but MFIs report virtually zero default.

This is extraordinary. The Big and mighty financiers lend against collateral, a back-up if their borrower defaults. But micro-finance institutions lend with no collateral at all. Big guys lend to the most creditworthy corporations.

MFIs lend to poor women whom nobody in history considered creditworthy before. Yet, the secured loans to big corporations are bombing, while unsecured loans to poor women are being repaid in full.

Why is that- The basic difference sound counter intuitive. Big institutions lend against collateral and micro-finance does not look at collateral. Looking at collateral blinds the institution from looking at the repaying capacity of the borrowers. US big institutions gave mortgages for 100% of the house value as collateral to people who do not have any capacity to take loans of that amount and you know what has happened because of that.
In the micro-finance area, the repayment capacity plays the most important factor in providing loans. I presume the big banks have learnt something from this.

Leverage can only take you up a certain level, if you try to exploit it, it is going to bite you. Ouch It hurts.

Banks wake up.

Another Bank Goes Down

2008-09-26T03:19:00.000-07:00

Today WAMU went under and it's assets were taken over by JP Morgan Chase. What a month it has been for the US Stock Market. With Chase and Bank of America buying everything are we getting ready for the next storm where these banks will become too big to fail and then we are in the same mess years from now.

I have been a WAMU customer for long and I could say that it was a good bank from a service prespective, not sure how that is going to change with Chase.
Also with duopoly in the banking system, not sure what interest rates we will be getting on our deposits. WAMU was always attractive in it's rates.

Comments

Wall Street Mess

2008-09-23T19:13:00.000-07:00

People in Wall street create a mess, the government will clean it with our ( taxpayers) hard earned money and then Wall street will make more money out of it. A classic theme repeating again and again.

Why is treasury secretary asking for a bailout for these banks, why create an entity which will buy toxic assets from bank, why not just lend money to the banks at a higher interest and make the interest payment top-most priority of the banks which borrow money which means no dividends to shareholders, no bonus to executives.

This outright buying of toxic assets is going to make the failed institution not really feel the heat and try to look for alternatives.
Example look at what happened with AIG, it tried to sell itself to many people, but waited thinking govt will bail it out, well govt did bail it out but it is a very costly deal from AIG perspective , so now what is happening the majority shareholders are trying to finance the same and avoid taking the loan from the govt.

I feel that we need to teach private institution a lesson on corporate management and allow them to fail rather than the govt trying to save the same.

This action of creating a fund to buy the assets if done without careful thinking will just bold en the risk taking actions of Wall street. Even if it is done, the institution should feel the pain and understand that every action has an equal reaction.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

2008-09-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

This is also a title of the latest book from Lee Iacocca.Looking at the financial mess our country is in, I can't agree any less to the above statement. I think we have for a long time disguised effective managers as leaders and in that process brought disgrace to the true leaders to name a few-Mahatma Gandhi.

What is a difference between an effective manager and a leader.

An effective manager knows how to climb the ladder efficiently and effectively and a leader is a person who has to ensure that the ladder is leaning against the right wall. Well you can see from this analogy we really do not have an leader of quality emerging out of this Wall Street mess.

Let's take an example of the AIG mess.

AIG was one of the pioneer's in the insurance industry ( notice my past tense)They really did well in all types of insurance namely property,life,airplanes,industrial, you name it and they were there.What is the underlying premise or business model in an insurance company.Let's take an example of say property insurance ( the one you take for your own house)
The insurance companies charge you a premium and they have say 100 customers who pay premium. The underwriters of the insurance policy figure out Ok what is the probability of all houses getting gutted in fire, well that can't happen physically so they estimate maybe 2-5 houses might get gutted and they might have to pay the home owners from the premium collected from the other 95 customers. A good model for a business at the same time providing a good coverage to individuals.

Now look at the new product AIG got into.
They wanted to start insuring the bonds ( so called toxic bonds) issued by the bond agency, well some dumb person ( let's say greedy) thought , if we are the best people in insurance why can't we do this insurance also and try to make more money, so they got into this but little that they realise that in this type of market when one house catches fires all houses are in trouble. There you go...

SO moral of the story, AIG had all the best effective managers they had, but not one could see this coming. The excuse given is no one in WallStreet understood these products, well I will ask a simple question will any one of those guys in their personal portfolio undertake a risk of this magnitude with a product not understood at all. This is plain greediness.

Well what can i say, we common investors are getting hit from all sides, on one side we get penalised for holding these stocks ( let's call them toxic stocks) and on the other hand the government bails out the same companies from the tax we pay.

I am always a big fan of capitalism but at the same time I am practical. These events should definitely make us think about how we manage our markets. I am sure we will continue to have issues like this and we will keep coming up with solutions after the fact , let's not forget Enron.

The point is are there any leader worth his/her salt in this situation.

Comments are welcome.

Get Things Done

2008-09-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

I spent the labour day weekend on a book which really impressed me. It is "Ready for Anything" by David Allen. It is basically a book on time management with an emphasis on getting small things out of your way so you can prepare the space for a big take-off. I would like to share some of the take aways from the book.

Some points which caught my attention

The process consists of 5 distinct processes : Collect,Process,Organize,Review and Do (Action).
Clear your head for creativity , get small actionable items out of the way. Mosquitoes can ruin the hunt for a big game.
It is most often the small things done at strategic places that make the most difference.
Your mind does not remember or remind very well, compared to what a good system can manage. What it does well is review options and available information and then put together how-to's. If it's not free to do that if it is trying to remember and remind. Without an airtight system, it must work at a lower level than it should and become a misused resource.
Keeping uncaptured,unclarified and unprocessed things in our minds creates unnecessary stress.
On about creating task list and reviews: "The palest ink is clearer than the fondest memory"
You have got to think about big things while you are doing small things so that all the small things go in the right direction.

The core belief in the book as it came across to me was that everyone needs to have a good system of collecting action items and have a way of processing them in such a way that you do not need to have your mind ( which can treated as a limited resource) remember the same, the mind is better of working at a higher level. Also the other important point which came across was that all activities if stored in the mind are stored with no time reference, what is called the psychic RAM of the brain, so both action items will fight for attention and induce stress.

I am definitely going to read the other book written by the same author which explains this system in more details.

Some insights into Investing for the Long Run

2008-08-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a lot recently especially on topics related to Investing and Economics. It is a pretty interesting field out there. Some pointers which will make you explore them further

Stock Marker Real Rate of Return for the last 204 yrs has been 6.8% ( this is after accounting for inflation)

The average has been the same between two distinct periods namely prior to World War II and after even though inflation was less pre-war, this goes to prove that returns from stock take care of inflation.

The price of a stock is always equal to the net present value of all future dividends and not earnings. Valuing Stock by taking the net present value of earnings grossly over estimates the share price.The assumption is that the earnings when not given out as dividends are reinvested in the company to earn the same rate of return as what the stock is expected to return by an investor.

Real GDP growth is negatively correlated with stock market returns.The underlying reason is that to support a growth in GDP requires a corresponding growth in capital requirements which in turn leads to lower per share earnings. Although the aggregate earnings and dividends increase, the per share values do come down because of the increase in capital.

Do share your comments

A Disillusioned Investor`

2008-07-15T17:55:00.000-07:00

I am investor in Citibank shares. Today it reached a price which was almost what it was when it started in 1998 a price of $14.50 and change. I am ashamed to say that I still hold the share which I purchased at $40.

I am amazed at how companies as big as Citibank can fail big-time. Agreed the share markets are over-reacting but Citibank did made blunders along the way. Not sure what a CEO really contributes in companies like this other then doing a PR job of giving rosy predictions to analyst and looking forward to the next quarter. Same is the case with Wachovia.

I think these companies have reached such a level that even the top management has no clue what is happening at the groud level. Maybe it is time for Citibank to be split into different companies so they can be managed which definitely is not happening.

My trip to Walt Disney Resort-Florida

2008-05-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

This was my first trip to WDR with my family. We basically went for my kid who is sweet 3. before I started the trip, I was little apprehensive about what sort of vacation it would be for grown-ups but let me tell you it does cater to adults. I really enjoyed some rides which I felt were unique like the Aerosmith Roll coaster, The Twilight Horror tower.

But something was missing, it did not have a charm which attracts you again to the place like I got when I visited say Grand canyon, or for that matter Las Vegas.

Things are pretty expensive also at the resorts,myself being a vegetarian, there are no options at all, the pamphlets may say that there but you would be better off having a fruit bowl then having the $10 veg burger which has a patty which tastes like clay.

One particular restaurant I would like to mention is Tangerine which is in Epcot and has the Mediterranean cuisine. I choose the veg option and what do I say, for $ 12 bucks I got a piece of bread some, couscous, some lentil salad and hummus, I was so frustrated that we googled for a Thai restaurant that same moment and went to one outside the resort.

Anyway I feel you can visit Disney World once for the experience, but if you are a Veg like I am, look for options outside.

Does India need a $3000 car

2008-01-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

For a long time we have been hearing about how a company in India ( Tata) is trying to come up with a car which will be accesible to a common man and the price will be around 1 lac indian rupees ( $2600) .

While definitely appreciative of the company for trying to get this so called luxury to the common man, I feel it is big disservice to the country as a whole. Where does India have the infrastructure for handling the no. of cars which come on the road. Currently the top metropolitian areas are so crowded that it takes around 2 hrs to reach a place which you can get in US in less than 15 minutes. With this level of efficiency what will happen with this cheap car.

Also this will increase the pollution levels and also make India more depend on Oil which will definitely be an issue soon.

Any comments on this would be appreciated

Happy and Prosperous New Year 2008

2008-01-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

Wish you all a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year. As you can see I have made a new year resolution to update my blog regularly with articles which might help others or atleast make one think.

Please do keep visiting the blog for more insights.

Selecting ERP product for an Organization

2006-10-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

What is ERP, well for the uninformed it is Enterprise Resource Planning, the genesis of this was from MRP (Material Requirements Planning). ERP tries to encompass all the business processes of an organization so that all operations across the various function areas are integrated.

Some products which you could be familiar with SAP, Oracle etc.

Recently Microsoft has entered big time into this space and things have become interesting and I see lot of innovation coming up in this field which was normally a very dry space. I am sure many of you remember the screens of SAP which can put anyone to sleep with its rigidness and complexity

Also nowadays with the exponential growth and acceptance of internet, any ERP software which does not have a web-presence will not have a change to survive in the near future

Consideration 1: The products you evaluate, ensure that they are web-enabled and are designed in such a way that they can be opened up for the outside world if need arises.

I am a great fan of componentization, which basically means that products should be designed as a combination of objects so that the users can pick and choose the components they want and also when an ERP vendor goes through this route normally the product will be designed from some industry standard perspective. Has anyone heard of web-parts?

Consideration 2: If an ERP product has been modeled as components it is great plus.

I am of the strong belief that ERP systems are more internal to an organization than external so it is very important that it is very strong in business process functionality and not just on screen features. Many times when you go through presentations from various ERP vendors, you normally tend to get impressed with the cool features the pre-sales guys show you, but remember to look underneath that. Try to have all the key business process users on the meeting. There is a dual purpose in an ERP product. It is neither meant exclusively to meet business process requirements nor the technological contents. It has to make both ends meet. This key aspect differentiates ERP products from others.

Consideration 3: Don’t select an ERP product like selecting a car, look under the hood.

Every business has something unique, like say it may be the pricing logic for its customers, or their item code creation etc. Before you go through the process of an ERP selection, it is very important that you make a list of the most important processes of your organization which you will need in any product. This helps you to focus on how the product can address these requests. Don’t be alarmed that it is not directly supported, you will never find an ERP product which meets all your requirement, stay away from such claims, and in my experience I have never seen a product which will meet all requirements. The thing you need to look for is how easy it is for the product to be configured to meet your requirement, this will tell more about the flexibility of the product which is very important because with today business scenario where changes are very frequent you might we better off to have a flexible product which can take care of you maybe 2 years down the line. But remember Flexibility of a product is to be looked at from a perspective of supporting changing business requirements in its life cycle and not as something which gives you total freedom to change the software the way you want it. Customization is a necessary evil, but need to be used judiciously. 9 times out of 10 Customization is used in porting a bad business process into the ERP software.

Consideration 4: Be wary when the Sales guys says yes to everything, check out the flexibility of the product

It is said ‘Picture is worth thousand words’. Well the best way you evaluate an ERP product is to look at it working. Do a site visit to a company which has implemented the product in the last 12 months. It is important that you do not visit the company as soon as they have implemented the product, because with any implementation, the first couple of months will be a period of turbulence and soul searching within that company. It takes time for the dust to settle in and to appreciate the benefits of the product. If you meet the users too soon, you will take away some bad user experience which may not be the true scenario.
Also it helps if you also visit a company which is in the process of implementing the product. This will help you in getting a good understanding and feel for the effort involved and also it will give you a head start in your implementation.

Consideration 5: Do your Homework. Take a site visit seriously.

Yahoo Messenger with Voice-Great

2006-08-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

I just tested this for international calls i.e. India and it was great. At 9.9 cents a minute, I guess it is the cheapest around. The quality was suprisingly good given the fact I have Comcast Hi-Speed Internet which really sucks sometimes. I had actually tried Skype also, but that had a sort of echo to the voice which was not there at all with yahoo messenger.

I am sure yahoo messenger with voice will find many converts who are interested in good quality international calls at rock bottom prices.

By the way I also changed my home phone to VOIP. It is great, the provider is Vonage. It's web-site allows to manage your account from anywhere. I definitely feel that VOIP is the way to go with phone systems. I am sure more people will move to this in the coming days.

Problems with Sharepoint Portal Server SP2

2006-07-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

We had some issues after we applied the Sharepoint Portal server SP2 as part of the regular updates of microsoft. After this was applied, when we browsed to our sharepoint portal we got the following error

HTTP 500 - Internal server error

The problem seems to be that the SP does not get update properly and some fields in the configuration database of sharepoint do not get updated.

To fix the problem I ran the forceupgrade utlity using the stsadm utlity on the sharepoint server and that fixed the problem. Refer the following article for more details

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;841216&FR=1

Moving Sharepoint portal server to a new physical machine

2006-07-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

This worked for me, so no guarantee that it will be work for everyone, use this at your own risk.

Following is the scenario

Present Portal Server : http://oldserver
Various sites under it : http://oldserver/sites/library

New Portal Server : Newserver

New Portal Server : http://newserver
Various sites under it : http://newserver/sites/library

1) On the new server, install Windows 2003 with SP1 and install SQL 2000 with SP4.
2) On the new server install IIS 6.0 with asp.net.
3) On the new server install Sharepoint portal server along with Knowledgelake components namely Mozingo Storage and Mozingo Imaging.For the installation process refer the documentation from Knowledge lake install procedure. Do not configure anything on the new server.
4) Note that you might encounter a problem with establishing the Microsoft Single-sign on feature. This is the error you might get, the resolution is shown below.
“Failed to connect to the database server. Verify connectivity and rights for the configuration account and try again.".
As it turns out ... this problem is due to Windows Installer 3.1 that happens to be installed when you apply Windows Server 2003 SP1 !The problem is fairly easily resolved however ... by manually tweeking a registry entry.
Find the ImagePath registry entry at the following location:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\ssosrv Remove the quotation strings from around the the ImagePath value ... and away you go.
The result of all this is that there is currently a KB being written that will outline the problem and the steps to fix it. Do it at your own risk.
5) On the old server run the Sharepoint Backup and Restore Utlity, it should be available under Programs
6) Take a backup of all available sites shown there, you will need to pick the parent one also. The backup will create one xml file which is supposed to be a manifest file.
7) Move the back-up files to the new server.
8) Now run the restore process from the new server, where you will ensure that the parameters are referring to the new server, if we do not do that we might actually restore it back on the old server which might be dangerous.
9) Once all the parameters are entered properly, restore all.
10) Once restore is done, you will notice that you might not be able to directly go the home site of the new server, for that you will need to remove the ‘Allow Anonymous access’ from IIS for that defualt site.
11) Once the above is done, this will copy all the created sites from the old server to the new server.
12) In case of Knowledge lake product, we will need to move the doclibary.config file from the old server to the new server, this will under C: /program files/…. This is the file which bascially allows the stripping of the datafiles from SQl and put’s it into a different folder. Please note that the server name will need to be changed in the config file.
13) Once the above is done, restart the Mozingo extension and the print spooler on the sharepoint server.
14) Then move the document folders physically from the old server to the new server, try to create the same share name, so that we will need not change much in the SQL server in the next step.
15) After the files have been moved there is a table in each of the library database called the ‘userdata’ where there is the reference to the folder location kept, we need to change that by a mass update, because there is no other way out for that.
16) Once the above is done, the library will be ready.
17) Once all the above is done, the next thing to do is to change the settings for the library on the scanning machine, i.e. where the spooler is installed. In the configure doc class, we need to change the library name to point to the right place.

Also we did the following, which I do not think is normally the case, but anyway we had to do because we were having some issues with the externalization of the storage.

We reinstalled the Mozingo components after we migrated namely the Web-services, web-part, the search definition and also the Mozingo Storage.

How to change the mailbox for SQL mail

2005-09-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

Scenario: You have Mailbox X attached to all xp_sendmail. You will like to use a different mailbox say Mailbox Y. How to do it?

On the SQL server open up the Profiles set-up for mail. This can be found in the Control Panel in Windows 2003 operation systems. Edit the current profile to change the mailbox name. Save the changes. But remember one thing, you will need to run a xp_stopmail command in SQL and then Xp_startmail. Only then will the reference of the old mailbox be removed from the SQL server and it will get associated with the new mail box.

The last point is the kicker.

Rama's Blogs

2005-06-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blogging site.

All things mentioned in this Blog are my personal opinion and experiences. These are NOT supposed to be authority on the subjects. If you find any suggestion worth using, it will be at your OWN risk. Please use Discretion is using the various suggestions and opinions.