Is Bollywood ready for Snoop Dogg?

These days Bollywood music is heavily influenced by American Hip Hop music and every other song seems to have Hip Hop tunes. However there is nothing new in that, I still remember the music from 80s when Bhappi Lahari's songs were so much influenced by Western Disco music and the 70s when music of RD Burman and other composers was influenced by Elvis Presley and others. In those days it never used to be official and those composers never accepted that they got influenced by Western artists.

However now there is a stamp of authenticity to it as American Hip Hop singers are themselves frequently lending their voices to Bollywood songs and even Snoop Dog is singing the title track of movie Singh is King.

As per this interesting article in New York Times, Snoop Dogs has big plans about his bollywood partnership. He wants to capture the mainstream Indian audience for his future albums and wants to do stage shows there.

Statue of Liberty and Immigrants

Here is a nice observation about statue of Liberty and immigrants, I found somewhere on internet.
The Statue of Liberty which was donated to the US by France, in 1886, still serves as a symbol for immigration in the United States. Some pages of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service web site still contain her picture, as does many immigration related web sites and materials. But the statue is engraved with a poem by Emma Lazarus, which is no longer valid, (I don’t think it ever was valid).

Instead of saying:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

It should say:
Give us your money and wait forever
Before you can breathe free
Do the wretched jobs that we won’t do
And we will debate about whether to let you in
Whether to let you live our dream

Bears everywhere on stock Market

In the few one month we have been seeing Stock Markets around the world loosing enormous wealth. Sensex is at 2 year low now and so is Dow Jones. Chinese mainland stocks have fallen almost 50% from their peeks this year and are at almost on par now with their Hong Kong counterparts.
After the unprecedented bull run that we have been witnessing in the emerging markets everybody was expecting a correction. But I am sure no one could have imagine a correction of this magnitude and that Markets will slip into Bear territories altogether.
Clearly Indian stock market is over-sold right now and their will be some kind of relief rally that will happen. But one should not put big hopes on that because we are still in a Bear market and each rally will be followed by a bigger correction.
Having said that, I think most of the down side damage has already been done, particularly with crude prices retreating now and I don’t see Sensex going down below 12,200 now. But a move to upward levels is also not possible as long Inflation is in double digits. Don’t expect any major Bull market rally uptill the end of this year, what we are going to see till the year end is relief rallies and Corrections.

Tribute to Sam Manekshaw

Here is a Link to an interesting obituary published in New york Times for Sam Manekshaw India’s first field marshal.

Check out glassdoor.com

The other day I came across this cool site glassdoor.com. Here you can see the Review of companies by their own employees and also the salaries that they are paying to these employees at various positions. Its just like Eopinions for companies. But to see these you need to give your own salary and review of your company which they promise to keep as anonymous. A very simple but powerful concept.
So now I could see what my company’s competitors are paying to their employees.

Social networking is the future of internet

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, 11.2 percent of online adults in the U.S. publish content on a blog at least once a month, 24.8 percent read blog content and 13.7 percent comment on it. And the younger the demographic, the higher the number. The days of mainstream media monopolizing information is long gone, with certain blogs attracting millions of visitors each month as people seek out a more personal spin on information.

Here are few things that are happening currently that I think will change the internet that we know of.

Monetization of Social Networks
Rather than relying on traditional forms of marketing, Samsung has created brand and product pages on the leading social networking platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo and has launched a campaign that places the role of marketing the product squarely in the hands of their current (and potential) customers. The company is asking them to record songs and upload them to a community that Samsung has created where others vote for the ones they like best; the four winning songs will be featured in a national radio and online ad campaign.
We are going to see more and more companies advertising in creative ways on these social networking sites.

Social Networking in enterprise is a new fad now
The other day one guy from BEA was in my office to give training on BEA Products. He showed his own Webpgae on BEA internal site. It was really cool the way they have used Social Networking concept for enterprise use. You can update your status on the stuff you are working on and thing that you have worked on in past and provides tags and links to that. If someone is searching on information on some Topic on intranet and you have worked on that that topic then your Web page will come as a search result and that person can contact you. Just one of the way enterprises are going to use social networking

Google’s Open Social and Friend Connect Frameworks
The other day I was listening to this podcast about google’s Open Social and Friend Connect initiatives. As per Google, Social networking is the future of internet. They have created these Open Social and Friend Connect framework to integrate different Social networking sites. So that Instead of going to these social networking sites you can bring these Social networks with you wherever you go on internet. You can display all your myspace, facebook or Orkut buddies on your webpage or blog site. You go to ebay and see which of the Sellers is reviewed by and which product is bought by any of your Friends from any Social networking site. Same thing when you are watching a Video or reading a news google will bring all your friends from social networks there to share it with them.

An Indian Tycoon

NewYork Times ran an interesting article on Mukesh Ambani this weekend. I really liked the article.
Here is an interesting quote from Nandan Nilkani about Mukesh Ambani which I liked most “When we talk about Rockefeller and Carnegie and all these guys, they really each changed one industry,” said Mr. Nilekani, the Infosys co-chairman. “But if you look at what he’s doing, he’s really changing three or four industries.”

Here is the link to this article.