This is my last post on VW till I return from my US trip in July . We are approaching tax season in India. For a number of years in the US I have used the Quicken family of products including Turbo Tax. There are other interesting personal finance sites like Bank Rate, Lending Tree, […]

I am going to spend a few weeks in the US in June and decided to see if I could rent a cell phone in India which would work in the US. Matrix provides such a service. The rental is $30 for the handset. This includes 400 minutes of talk time ( 150 Peak) and […]

The genesis of this post is the forecasts on online media spend. I tend to agree that this may be slow to grow in India but I would want to know when it took off in USA and/or China and what triggered takeoff. I remain optimistic on advertising by persons and SME to get business. […]

Motley fool did a write up on Rediff. The interesting items to me were Users – 53.6 million Revenues: $30MM annually ARPU annual : 0.56 cents. 10 advertisers accounted for 55% of revenues. Maybe all revenues were not advertising related. If say Rediff has 10% ( wild guess) of all online ad media spend then […]

This post builds on the Dhando Investor post which with 20 comments was getting a bit cumbersome. Deepak Nadiger made an interesting comment and I wanted to respond and decided to do it with a fresh post. The hurdle rate discussion is an opportunity to be innovative and delight customers. In the businesses I have […]

I just finished reading “The Dhandho Investor” by Mohnish Pabrai ( the man behind Dakshana). I enjoyed it and it stimulated some new thinking. I also looked at my investing in India over the last two years. On a portfolio with 85% exposure to equities I managed a 45% CAGR(cumulative annual growth rate). I guess […]

I was impressed with what I saw at an Amity school in Noida. In the Maths area there were some excellent and fun brain teasers and puzzles put together by the teachers and kids quite a few of which stumped a “late 40 to early fifties ” bunch of IIT folks ( I was one […]

This is a pet theory of mine and I happily acknowledge it could be wrong. A difference I noticed in how I was raised and how I think kids in USA are raised was that for me it was always ” If you do not do xyz then pqr will happen” Xyz was like drinking […]

The site is up. Still a work in progress. It is nice that atleast for some people if they have the merit means will not be a problem. The idea of having a lifelong relationship with scholars is also interesting and may induce some of them to give back. anyone with ideas/suggestions please contact the […]

Kota has established itself as a center of excellence for IIT coaching. Students after class X spend two years in Kota which costs them around 2.5 lacs. I met a value investor from the US , yesterday who has done very well and has set up a foundation in India so that students who do […]

In the US the point of inflexion with the internet was probably 1998/1999 and a lot of the big money was made in the 1998 – 2002 period. Prior to 1998 there were many attempts that were slow to take off. China the inflexion point was probably later. Do not know too much about when […]

In all the businesses that I have been involved in building delighting customers has been a key priority. In India I have observed based on my experiences as a customer that with a few exceptions ( jet airways, spice jet, PVR,some 5 star hotels) customer delight does not seem important. I have a large LCD […]