It has been long time I haven’t seen a weird thing like this. For those who are extremely tired after your long working hours or lazy, just sit tight on this Easy Climb chair and it will bring you up to the second floor. This device can hold up to 350 lb and travels up to 20′. It looks pretty cool actually but I’m just afraid when kids play around with it. More pictures after the break.
Posted in Technical There is a myth in marketing today that many people blindly believe about sponsoring events … that you always need exclusivity. The benefits of being an exclusive sponsor are easy to list, but there are some less considered negative aspects that could end up doing more harm to your brand than good. Let’s look at the stories of a worldwide Olympic sponsor for whom the strategy of being an exclusive sponsor may not be such a good idea … Visa.
Just about every Olympic traveller here in Beijing has a story to tell about one really annoying moment when they were trying to pay for something and learned that at all Olympic venues the only card they could use was a Visa and no other type of credit card. The fact is, people already have decided on their credit cards before arriving at the Olympics. Hardly any first time Olympic visitor is going to know that Visa is the only card accepted at the Games, and arriving here to learn this fact can make life very difficult and expensive. In addition, business travellers are often locked into a particular kind of credit card to use for work and finding that they cannot use it is a very big inconvenience that is blamed on Visa. The end result is lots of negative experiences and consumer anger against Visa, including several people I spoke to who even said they would NOT get a new Visa card because of this tactic. The incremental sales and revenue for Visa cards at the Games may be good, but the word of mouth generated for Visa at the world’s largest sporting event is nearly all negative.
Another example of the down side of exclusivity from the Olympics is what I remember from Foster’s sponsorship of the Games in Sydney. If you are among the many people in America who think Fosters is actually an Australian beer, let me burst your bubble. It is an American beer and before the Olympics in Sydney, you could not find it anywhere in Australia. During the Sydney Games, lots of Americans travelled to Sydney, which Fosters knew, so they purchased a large sponsorship where they were one of two kinds of beer served at events. I went to one beach volleyball event and vividly remember one side of the beer stand with the Aussie beer sold out, and the Fosters side with lots of stock untouched. It was an embarassing moment for Fosters. Added to that was all the Australians who talked about how Fosters was not, in fact, Australian.
There are likely many other examples of brands that should think a bit harder about whether an exclusive sponsorship actually makes the most sense for them. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes exclusive sponsorships can work very well, if the strategy aligns with the experience offered and way that the brand is integrated into the event. Adidas’ sponsorship of the Olympics works because they supply all the uniforms and custom made gear. Omega’s sponsorship works because they are the official timepiece at an event were time really matters. Not surprisingly, I think Lenovo’s sponsorship of the Games works for a similar reason. Ultimately, there are some brands who can realize the benefit of exclusivity and some that cannot. The trick is understanding where your brand fits before you drop a big chunk of your marketing budget into an exclusive sponsorship that won’t deliver the way you expect.
Posted in Technical In simple words, web store is a complete replicated store of entire physical retail store which is built by the help of technology. This web store appears online and displays all your products online for online shoppers. Each and every product specifications along with the real time product information is available at on line webstores. The products images are graphically enhanced for charming appearance so as to grab the attention of the online shoppers. Online shoppers can enter web stores and search for the products online. The categorized arrangement of the products makes the online search easy for online shoppers.
Online shoppers can select the products at their wish and reserve the products online and collect at the physical store on payment. Otherwise online shoppers can even buy the products online, make the payments online, and collect the products at home or at given address. For the safeguard of online buyers, web stores are encrypted by SSL encryption which protects the online shoppers from misappropriation of their credit cards, etc.
Web stores have distinct features which can considerably minimize the efforts of customers. One of such features is store locator. Online shoppers can simply find the exact location of the nearest physical store by the help of store locator. The digital road map will guide the online visitors to the store with driving directions.
The prod uct locator helps online shoppers in finding the product availability at the nearest store. The deal locator will let the online shoppers know whether any special deal is available on particular products.
You can add as many products as you want to add to your web store from pro duct databank. The POS integration is of good help for you to update your store information automatically. You need not suffer doing it manually. You can offer digital coupons to your online customers, which can be redeemed at your physical store.
Those who are dreaming to call from their personal computers to mobile phones or fixed land lines, have a reason to smile. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in its major decision on Monday allowed complete opening up of Internet telephone services.
The TRAI decision will permit the Internet service providers (ISPs) to provide unrestricted Internet telephony that means they can terminate Internet telephony calls on PSTN (public switched telecom network) or on land lines and mobiles and vice-versa. At present, a voice call can travel between two computers but not from a mobile or a fixed phone. By allowing Net telephony from personal computers to mobile phone or fixed lines, it is expected to open huge channels of revenues for Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
The decision is also expected to fuel further competition in the domestic long distance segment and lower STD tariffs, said an official in the Telecom Ministry. “It is envisaged that customers will be ultimately benefited from cost effective and innovative Internet telephony service. The grey market tendencies shall be curtailed,” said TRAI in a statement.
The TRAI even allowed the National Long Distance (NLD) operators to connect to ISPs through public Internet (Internet cloud) for unrestricted Internet telephony. But for that to take place, ISPs and NLDs will have to agree for unrestricted Internet telephony, said the statement.
The Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), a technical arm of the Department of Telecom, will work out the number plan for the ISPs to enable them to offer telephone services
“Telephone numbers from identified blocks shall be allocated to ISPs, Unified Access Service Providers, Basic Service Providers and Cellular Mobile Service Providers for internet telephony,” TRAI said.
Posted in BPO Speaking out one’s mind is not a crime. But in the recent scenario of blogging, it does not seem so. Last year, about 35 bloggers are arrested for the content they have written in their blogs, reports TechCrunch.
Most of these arrests were made by the repressive governments like Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran as they consider the content posted on the blogs as threat to their governments. According to the annual World Information Access report, there has been a significant increase in those falling foul of the law in countries such as China, Egypt and Burma.
In India too, controversies related to blogging occurs time and again. Recently, the Mumbai based Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects, which provides construction machineries to medium and large construction companies, has filed a defamation case against Google India for hosting a series of articles on its blogging site, campaigning against its mines in Mozambique. The Bombay High Court has asked the search firm to furnish information about the blogger in an interim order, reported The Economic Times. But Google’s India office refused to reveal the name of the blogger. In 2005, IIPM sued Gaurav Sabnis, a sales specialist in IBM, as he wrote in his blog that the facts that IIPM publish in its ads are not real.
Noticeably, there is an increase of more than three times in the arrests as compared to that in 2006, according to researchers at the University of Washington in the US. “Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big,” says Phil Howard, an assistant professor of communication at the university.
There is also a possibility that the number of arrests might even be higher as a lot of them are not made public. There are many evidences of this kind of arrests. Reza Valizadeh was arrested in Iran in November, 2007 for revealing Iranian president’s overpriced dogs that his security team uses. Charles Leblanc was arrested in Canada in June, 2006 for taking pictures at a conference for his blog. Again, Josh Wolf was arrested in USA in August, 2006 for videotaping a burning police car. However, the number of arrests in 2008 seems lower till now. Five bloggers have been arrested around the world during the first quarter of the year. One of them is Welshman Gavin Brent, who was convicted in April of writing “grossly offensive and menacing messages” on his site. “The real number of arrested bloggers is probably much higher, since many arrests in China, Zimbabwe and Iran go unreported in the international media,” Phil Howard said.
Blogging has become immensely popular in countries with authoritarian regimes to express one’s viewpoint. As a result, governments always keep an eye on the blogs in case it might raise any sensitive issues. A report says that the average sentence for those who were sent to jail was 15 months.
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new…India discovers herself again.”
- Jawaharlal Nehru
(on Indian Independence Day, 1947)
After more than two hundred years of British rule, India finally won backs its freedom on 15th August, 1947. All the patriotic hearts rejoiced at seeing India becoming a sovereign nation and the triumph of hundreds and thousands of martyred souls. It was a birth of a new nation and a new beginning. The only fact that marred the happiness of the fruits by the blood of martyrs was the fact that the country was divided into India and Pakistan and the violent communal riots took away a number of lives. It was on the eve of 15th of August, 1947 that India tricolor flag was unfurled by Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, on the ramparts the Red Fort of Delhi.
The day is celebrated to commemorate the birth of the world’s biggest democracy as a national holiday. Schools and people hoist the national flag through out the country and put them up on the rooftops and the buildings. People only go to offices to attend the flag hoisting ceremony. The Prime Minister addresses the Nation after the flag has been unfurled recounting the country’s achievements of the year, discussing current major issues and future plans for the progress of the country. Recently, kite-flying has become a tradition on this day and people can be seen flying numerous kites of all colors, sizes and shapes symbolizing the freedom.
BPO employees, who were on a holiday on July 4, will have to work on August 15. While these employees are forced to work on their own Independence Day , their employers don’t mind giving them a day off on the American national holiday.
“There is a holiday for the management staff on August 15, but BPO employees have to work. This is because we are working for companies in the US on that day,” said Nandita Gujjar, HR head, Infosys.
Some BPO employees are planning to ask the government to make our Independence Day a compulsory holiday, for them too.
Identity crisis
“BPO employees are facing an identity crisis in their country. Their emotions neither remain with America nor are they with India. The government has to put an end to this, and we are urging it to force BPOs to observe a closed holiday on our Independence Day,” said an office-bearer of Unites, a BPO employees union.
“Though the majority of employees are looking for a solution to this problem, they were not comfortable to openly oppose authority for the fear of losing their jobs,” he said.
However, some of them are not bothered as they are happy with their salaries.
“While the BPOs declare compulsory holidays when USA and European countries go for polling, they don’t allow their employees to vote in the assembly elections,” said Girish Mattennavar, president, state BJP Yuvamorcha.
“We will take up the matter with the chief minister seeking his intervention,” he added.
Modern slavery?
Reacting to the issue, veteran freedom fighter H S Doreswamy said, “Unless we have patriotism in our blood these things are bound to happen. If the youth don’t dare to express their sense of freedom, what is the use of their earnings? These trends show that we are now into a modern form of slavery.”
Interestingly, the state labour minister is unaware of the system in BPOs.
“I don’t know about this and I have to ask for the details. I’ll speak to my officers,” said labour minister B N Bachche Gowda.
Circumventing rules
A source in the labour commissioner’s office said according to Karnataka Industrial Establishments (National Festivals and Festival Holidays) Act, BPOs must declare a holiday on occasions like Independence Day, Republic Day and Gandhi Jayanthi.
“If the employees are into essential services, they must be given a double wage for their day’s work or a compensatory holiday,” he said.
Taking advantage of this provision, BPOs were making their employees work on national holidays by providing them with compensatory payments which don’t carry any legitimacy, as their services are not essential ones like health, law and order or water supply.
A HR professional with Transworks, a BPO company, said, “This is a global phenomenon, and one must understand this before they make any emotional statements.”
There is no obstructive repulse between modernity and spirituality, as they can both be balancing factors. The modernitry should go with the Spirituality. To deal with the hazards modernity may pose, one may need to go back to spiritual roots.
While modernity brought rising disposable incomes, a widening basket of goods and services, falling prices, access to information and a potential for high quality of life, it also made individuals into robotised consuming machines, brought in an advertising onslaught and information overload, besides neglect of health, intellect, aesthetics and spirituality. Modernity largely rejects tradition. One could say that one of the characteristics of modernity is rejection of tradition; conversely, rejection of tradition is a symptom of modernity.
Scholars’ theories of modernity differ in important ways, they agree on two fundamental ideas. First, there is a crisis of meaning in modern society; the social differentiation and specialization that characterizes modernity has drained meaning away from daily life. Second, modernity does not have to be this way; people can bring meaning back into daily life by coming together to create new shared meanings through talk.
An optimal priority order for a healthy model of life would involve spiritual evolution followed by aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual depth, psychological maturity, physical fitness and material prosperity.
The deepest spiritual insight is that we are all inter-dependent and connected. That’s the fundamental spiritual insight of every tradition. And because we are interconnected, and because we are interdependent, we have to treat each other in a certain way. For the first time in human history we actually have a technology that matches that spiritual insight. That’s what it means to have a global community. That’s what it means to be able to have a global web. People really are interconnected. And so that technology, which in a sense concertizes and realizes the deepest spiritual insights, now it realizes it in the material world what this spiritual insight is. It was more than just the material world, but it’s an emotional, and intellectual, and spiritual, and ethical world of meaning that has to match up to that technology.
New Delhi: The government has given its approval to agents working at call centers and other service providers to work from home. They can work from home, which will result in low operating costs and bringing more people including women and the physically challenged into the work force.
The department of telecom (DoT) has introduced the concept of work-from-home agents for the companies registered under the Other Service Providers (OSPs) category who would have to pay Rs 5 crore bank guarantee for this purpose.
Services like call centers, network operation centers, tele-marketing, tele-education, tele-medicine and tele-trading come under OSPs.
Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, Genpact said, “It will help fight attrition and traffic blues, lower costs, and allow many more people to join the workforce. It’s a great move, but I need to look into details.” Genpact was experimenting with work-from-home initiatives for employees in functional domains like finance, legal and HR.
Raman Roy, Managing Director, Quatrro BPO Solutions said, “This could be the game-changer for India and the industry. It could make attrition problems history. However, the devil is in the details and we need to see the terms and conditions,”. Nasscom former President Kiran Karnik added, “The industry has been asking for this for long. It would allow those who are home-bound like differently-able people and women to work in the BPO industry and earn, too.”
Some BPO firms will not be able make full use of the concept due to security concerns. “Clients have a whole host of security concerns and access to information to employees is allowed in a tightly controlled environment. Security concerns reduce the lure of work-from-home and it’s no longer a viable option for us,” said Firstsource Solutions chief technology officer Sanjiv Dalal.
Some BPO companies took the line that there was no clarity on interconnection between local and international telecom networks. Indian laws prohibit such interconnection. But in its absence, agents working from home won’t be able to call an international customer using their domestic telecom network.
The Increase of earth temperature as well as the ocean, aids for Global Warming. The earth temperature is continuously increasing as the earth finds new reasons to develop. The scientist associations are still to bloom with the new resources to prevent the heat effect. This has been said that it is due to the greenhouse effect or the solar variation. But scientists are still not been with this. They are constantly working on the climate change and according to them, even if the Greenhouse effect is controlled, the temperature would rise constantly for next thousand years.
The increasing temperature would cause sea level to rise, change in the intensity of climate and changes in atmospheric water phenomena. In the period of 1860–1900, the temprature has rised by by 0.75 °C (1.35 °F). The tempretaure of land is increasing more than the temperature of the ocean as the water on the ocean is evapourates quickly than land. the norther earth has more heat as it has vast land and the lower part of the earth has less heat as it has less land. The year 1998 was considered as the most warmest year and the year 2005 is in the second position. The Southern Oscillation had took place in 1998 and hence the tempreature was to the highest in this year.
The earth had been gone through many climate variations from last thousand years. A rapid growth of greenhouse gases has made the heat level to go up. As this weather locks the carbon levels, the temperature will be dropped back to normal over next 150,000 years.
Mobile telephony has grown rapidly in India, especially during the last three years, with India becoming the second-largest wireless market in the world, says a World Bank study.
The number of wireless subscribers in the country has reached 250 million, making India the second-largest wireless market in the world, says the study, The Role of Mobile Phones in Sustainable Rural Poverty Reduction.
Authored by Asheeta Bhavnani, Rowena Won-Wai Chiu, Subramaniam Janakiram and Peter Silarszky, the study says India is now second only to China, with tele-density already surpassing the 25 percent mark.
Currently, China is adding about six to seven million new subscribers per month, India about eight to nine million and the U.S. about two to three million, it notes.
“The private sector is also active in India and there are a number of telecommunication companies providing mobile telephone services who have to compete for market share and meet consumer expectations,” according to the study released recently.
It argues that mobile telephony has a positive impact on economic welfare by generating GDP; job generation (both in the mobile industry and the wider economy); productivity increases; and taxation revenue with mobile operators usually being a sizeable contributor
Telecom, IT services and software researcher firm Ovum, based in North America, had already pointed out the economic benefit of mobile services in India, in another study in January 2006.
Ovum had also reported that the mobile telephony sector contributed Rs.145 billion ($3.6 billion) per year in import duties, licence fees, spectrum fees, and taxation revenues in India.
The World Bank study said mobile phones also cause an impact at the micro level in reducing poverty. “For example, reducing market inefficiencies in Bangladesh or information asymmetries in India.”
Other studies have shown that fishermen in Kerala use mobile phones to arbitrage over price information from potential buyers and coordinate sales, helping them to increase incomes and reduce wastage.
Since the use of mobile phones in 1997 there, the technology has had an impact in ensuring “price stability for the consumer and a nearly perfect spatial arbitrage replaced a collection of autarkic fishing markets”, notes the study.
The Internet is rivalling and even eclipsing traditional media, particularly television, with users spending less time watching TV, listening to the radio and reading newspapers than non-users, according to a new study here.
Users are also more likely to turn to the net as their primary source of information for important news stories. These findings are based on a survey of 1,000 Australians by Centre for Creative Industries (CCI).
The study also found that 20 percent of the people interviewed had never used the net, resulting in a digital divide in the country.
Lead investigator Julian Thomas of the CCI said: “There is a digital divide in Australia – and it reflects patterns of uptake that are repeated elsewhere in the prosperous West. If you’re male, employed or studying, if you have a university degree and a higher than average income, you are more likely to be online.”
The study also found that broadband technology – as opposed to dial-up connection – changes what people do in fundamental ways.
These findings become even more significant with the realisation that the net is changing politics, as seen in the federal election last year. Just under half of users polled agreed the Internet has become important for the political campaign process.
Like the Human Genome Project, this large-scale study of the net “is an ambitious, collaborative, worldwide attempt to map something that was until very recently unthinkable,”
Thomas claimed. He believed it has the potential “to tell us a great deal about who we now are – or more precisely, who Australians are becoming in the new era of networks”.
Source: siliconindia
This is a new-age irony. The `gold-collar employees’ ,as the IT/BPO employees are referred to, earn fancy salaries and lead a high-flying lifestyle. Still, their status quotient has taken a beating, of late.
This is most discernible in the marriage market. It is not uncommon these days to see matrimonial ads with the tagline: `software engineers excuse’. Given a choice, fewer parents would now like to marry off their daughters to the `Americanised youths’ and leave them to the vagaries of an unhealthy, irregular lifestyle. Consequently, conventional jobs and traditional courses of study are back in demand.
Here is a wake up call for IT/BPO companies. An impression is gaining ground that there is no life beyond 30-35 for the IT/BPO staff who work in the `US/UK shifts’. I know of at least one Chinese IT company in Bangalore that intends to retire people at 30. Perhaps, the Company assumes that there would be little sign of life left in them by the time they cross that age.
The rise of BPO sector has brought in its wake enhanced standard of living, high purchasing power, flamboyant lifestyle, etc. which were hitherto out of reach of the average Indian youth. On the flip side, the long and odd working hours, work pressure, tough deadline, eating disorders, sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical exercise are taking an early toll on the health of BPO employees.
Physical ailments such as backache, constipation, BP and diabetes and emotional problems like stress, panic attacks and depression are the occupational hazards of a BPO job. Their unearthly working hours hardly leave any time for interaction with family or friends.
The culture of BPOs has shifted the focus of youngsters from education to making quick money. Earning huge salary at a very young age encourages them to develop unwise spending habits. There are cases where the individual’s whole personality has changed within a few months of taking up a BPO job.
In many cases, the individual is either not aware of the problem or is too scared to report it, fearing loss of job or denial of promotion. Many switch jobs thinking it will help, but that too seldom makes a difference. Finally, they land up in innumerable health clinics and fitness centres that have sprung up in IT hubs like Bangalore to cash in on the medical needs of the young workforce.
In Bangalore, many leading Kerala and Tamil Nadu-based ayurvedic pharmacies have opened their branches in centres like Koramangala that have high concentration of techies, offering special packages for lifestyle diseases.
Increasing sickness among employees and the high rate of attrition has opened the eyes of IT/BPO companies to the need to take better care of the physical and mental health of their employees and promote their work-life balance. Many IT companies are now setting up self-contained campuses that enable employees to manage office and home easily. Night-time work has come down from 100pc to about 60pc in the BPO industry. Women employees are given options like working from home, maternity leave extending up to one year, `paternity leave’ for male staff to take care of their wives in the pre and post-delivery days, etc. This has instilled in them more confidence and a positive attitude towards life, resulting in greater productivity at work.
But such employee-friendly measures are adopted only by a few resourceful companies like Infosys and Wipro. Vast segment of the IT/ITES workforce still toils under conditions highly injurious to their health. Now that the IT industry is projected to have many more years of steady growth, it has to take better care of its human capital. If the employees maintain a healthy balance between work and their private lives, both they and the company benefit in the long run.
Source: India Syndicate
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