[With nearly 700 million people eligible to cast their votes in an April and May general election, the ruling Congress party and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are devoting more time to first-time voters and the tech-savvy middle class.]

True but are they even bothered ?

[L.K. Advani, the iPhone-carrying, 81-year-old leader of Hindu nationalist BJP, has posted his own blog

"In my own political life spanning six decades, I have enthusiastically embraced every new communication technology -- from the early simple Casio digital diary to iPod and iPhone," he wrote in a blog that drew more than 100 comments.

BJP teams have made Youtube campaign videos and their election offices in New Delhi are packed with youngsters glued to computer screens to update campaign websites.

"There are emotional and functional reasons for using technology: functionally, it is more cost-effective and more participative than say, a rally or an advertisement," said Kiran Khalap, co-founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll.

"And emotionally, they want to be like the cool urban youth they want to connect with," he said. ]

Do you see shades of Obama imitation?

And of course the other party is not far behind…

[The BJP's main competitor for the youth vote may be Rahul Gandhi, 38, son of Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi and head of the party's youth wing. He is tech-savvy, and has been doing the rounds of colleges, mingling with students and posing for pictures taken on camera phones.

Gandhi has thousands of supporters on Facebook and his portrait dominates many election billboards, even though it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 76, who is the party's candidate for the top job. ]

Looks like Social media is finally catching up in India. But here is the fun part (Read these links to find out) – How people are not happy by the online Google Adsense ads and spam generated by these politicians.

The story is on Reuters too.

But here is the real thing -

[In the past week, we’ve reported about Office Depot sales associates who are so desperate to maintain their sales ratios that they’ll lie to customers who don’t want an extended warranty on a notebook and say it’s out of stock. We’ve also published reports from an Office Depot employee, who told us that associates at stores in his area alter the prices of clearance notebooks to include the cost of a “free” warranty or tech service in the sale.  We knew that both practices were bad business, but after speaking with a senior official from the Federal Trade Commission, we can confirm that they also violate federal law.

“When you’re selling a product, it’s illegal to lie,” said Lois C. Greisman, associate director of the FTC’s Division of Marketing Practices. “It’s illegal to make false claims about a product, such as ‘It’s out of stock’ when it’s not or that a clearance product has a certain markup. You can’t lie when you’re selling a product.”

Greisman pointed us to section 2A on this page from the FTC’s Office of the General Counsel that outlines the FTC’s authority, under the FTC Act, to protect consumers from deceptive practices.]

You can continue reading the article here but this makes you wonder.. do these things happen in India too ? Some may say .. all the time.

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Would you get fooled by this Microsoft scam ?

How does it work ?

Choose to model any number of bridges, located anywhere in the world. Only bridges that have not yet been modeled in 3D for Google Earth will be eligible. Bridges should be modeled in SketchUp using photo-texturing and should have a low polygon count. Start by viewing Getting Started page,  Best Practices Modeling Guide, Tips for modeling page, and some bridge examples. Join Google Competition Group to discuss issues, ideas, and solutions for modeling.

For more info see this announcement – Help model the world – one bridge at a time

[Giving a new dimension to the internet, the Indian research arm of the US-based IT giant IBM has developed a technology that will allow users to talk to the web and create voice sites using mobile phones.

"People will talk to the web and the web will respond. The research technology is analogous to the internet. Unlike personal computers it will work on mobile phones where people can simply create their voice sites," IBM India Research Laboratory Associate Director Manish Gupta said.

For this technology, IBM has developed a new protocol -- Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) -- which is similar to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

"India now has over 360 million cell phone subscribers. Last month we added 15 million," he said pointing out that the research technology targets ordinary mobile phone users, all of whom may not be literate.

The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said.]

I have highlighted the last paragraph. Now what did these pilot tests do ? The reports do not indicate the same…

An article on ReadWriteWeb directs to an earlier research paper on HSTP by the IBM team. The example excerpt is here -

[We explain the concepts of Hyperspeech through the fol-
lowing use case scenario:

Jonathan is a busy salesman who travels frequently. His work typically requires him to stay in a place for a few days. Once he is in a new place, he has to go around looking for grocery stores in his locality for his daily needs. He prefers taking phone numbers of the identified stores and places orders on the phone subsequently. Home delivery services deliver the goods to his home. However, often the home delivery boys don't accept credit cards and even if some do, Jonathan tries paying by cash since he doesn't want to share his credit card information with untrusted home delivery agents. This often causes problems since he often runs out of cash.

During his travel, he visits a city and finds out that there is a yellow pages service in the city that he can call up to receive phone numbers of several businesses. He promptly calls up the service and uses the telephony voice application to browse through the grocery stores in the vicinity of his hotel.

On Jonathan's prompt, the call gets transferred to a grocery store and goes to the voice application of the store. Jonathan easily specifies the items he needs to buy from the cataloger. The order is placed and a delivery guarantee is made within half an hour

To his surprise, the grocery store's voice application also accepts credit cards securely over phone. Jonathan selects the option and his call gets transferred to yet another voice application of a secure payment gateway. The secure payment gateway already knows about the amount of money the grocery store wants to charge to Jonathan, and securely authorizes the payment by taking in Jonathan's credit card details and transacting with the credit card company's authorization system.

The delivery boy comes within half-hour and delivers the goods to Jonathan.

We observe a few salient features that Hyperspeech enables in the above scenario: (1) Telephony voice applications across enterprises are seamlessly integrated with one another(2) For transactional operations, voice applications transfer context (e.g. amount to be billed on a credit card) to other voice applications; (3) Users can employ purely spoken language interactions to complete a transaction.]

Now, tell me how will people in India use this application? And how were the pilot tests conducted? Any answers? Will it ever see the light of the day in commercial applications?

[The long running boom in the construction of new apartments and houses across urban China ended abruptly last year and is now unwinding. Deflation is evident in Beijing and Shanghai in particular, where real estate developers and brokers report prices will likely be down 15% to 20% this year. Prices in the once booming city of Shenzhen are down more than 18% from year ago levels. Nationwide, according to a recent forecast by economists at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, housing prices in China may decline 10% to 15% this year, as the overall economy struggles amidst the global financial crisis. "Housing prices far surpassed the actual incomes of the general public" over the last five years says CASS economist Chen Xigang. "They are now correcting."]

Is the same thing which happened in US of A going to happen in China ?

No, says the article -

[That's a chilling echo of what happened in the United States over the last decade. But there are important differences in the two markets. For one thing, Chinese by law must have "skin in the game." The absolute minimum down payment on a new house or apartment is 20% of the purchase price, and for most buyers it's usually closer to 30%. And a large percentage of Chinese — upwards of 40% according to some estimates — pay cash for new apartments, because in a high savings economy, housing is widely seen as a safe investment. That means, in China, you don't have the real estate equivalent of "dine and dash": people don't abandon houses the minute they think the price level is lower than what they paid, leaving it to the mortgage company or the banks to sort out. There's no sub-prime, zero-percent-down U.S.-style debacle here.]

I guess China is similar to India atleast as regards to “skin in the game” part.

But as reports point out, the worst is not over for the Indian Real Estate market -

[It’s a double whammy for property developers. On one hand existing units are not getting sold and on the other hand interest costs are increasing due to funds already invested in these half complete projects. Rental incomes have also come down. As a result developers are left with little cash in hand to finish residential or commercial projects under construction. Real estate industry has always been a working capital heavy industry, and things have gone from bad to worse in the recent times.]

Hope for the best.. and prepare for the worst..

[I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.]

Read More at The importance of stupidity in scientific research

The above pdf is useful for anyone but I have made some suitable modifications so that it applies to the Indian job market – Non IT as well as IT…

Have a look. There are plenty of other resources too – mainly the LinkedIn Learning Center. After you join, you may check out their blog.

Note : PDF is prepared using data from Guy Kawasaki’s – How to Change the World

[Madoff himself had several luxury homes, a motor yacht and private airplane, but this was to be expected for a big beast on Wall Street -- anything less might have been suspicious.

And the list of investors was Madoff's best advertisement: if so many VIPs were on there, what could there be to fear?

Behind this shiny surface, prosecutors say there was little more than a shell game, a Ponzi scheme where new clients' capital was stolen to pay off existing clients and create the illusion of returns.

Prosecutors have detailed how even the Manhattan offices were phony, with unqualified workers churning out fake statements and other paperwork.

"Madoff created and caused to be created a broad infrastructure at (his company) BLMIS to generate the impression and support the appearance that BLMIS was operating a legitimate investment advisory business," prosecutors said.

Just two weeks before Madoff's arrest, his company claimed to be managing 64.8 billion dollars, when in reality, the prosecution said, there was only "a small fraction of that." ]

The above excerpt is from ET’s article – How Bernard Madoff cheated investors. I have highlighted certain portions as regards to the similarities.

Now Bernoff has pleaded guilty and is facing a 150 year prison sentence. But what about people behind the Satyam scam ?

Image : Boston Globe

Though every advice in the Forbes article is not going to be followed by me, this seems like an attempt.

You can read about me more on the about page.