A hack into India's top internet scams In an effort to educate people on the most notorious scams, Telenor Group released the results of an Internet Scams study showing the top three scams in India. The multi-market survey assessed the impact of scams on 400 internet users aged 18 – 65+ in India Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia and was conducted to provide better understanding of the common methods in which people are “scammed” online. |
Sree Vijaykumar | From the Editor's Desk
They are boring. They are useless. Everyone hates them, so why can't we stop having meetings? This New York Times article explores this issue. You can make a whole career of planning, holding and attending meetings and never dare contemplate the possibility of your being exempt. They can't be avoided, but maybe they can be made bearable. Perhaps Paul Graham's prescription for the only kind of "allowable meeting" is a starting point. "There are no more than four or five participants, and they know and trust one another. They go rapidly through a list of open questions while doing something else, like eating lunch. There are no presentations. No one is trying to impress anyone. They are all eager to leave and get back to work." - Comment | |
Sree Vijaykumar | From the Editor's Desk
This has been a good week. Parliament has passed 7 bills, including the Real Estate bill and the Aadhaar bill. Bills indicate intent, the action still has to happen on the ground. Action of the kind taken by Temsutula Imsong, who is cleaning up Varanasi, one ghat at a time. Temsutula is co-founder of Sakaar Sewa Samiti, a non-profit involved in rural development. It's people like her and her army of volunteers who are turning words into action, rather than the local government, which dumps the garbage across the river whenever a VIP arrives. The citizens of India are waking up to the consistent calls to action from the top, it's time the government machinery woke up too - Comment | |
Sree Vijaykumar | From the Editor's Desk
Godmen like Baba Ramdev use corporate smarts to combine knowledge of something real like Yoga or Meditation (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar), with the fears and insecurities of the masses to create multi-million dollar organizations. Their popularity can get chief ministers (or even the prime minister) to endorse them. They sell everything from noodles to a medicinal herb that promotes fertility (its ancient name, which means "son's life seed", hints unethically at particular effectiveness in spawning male offspring). They are seeking corporate-style synergies between religious messaging, personal celebrity, commercial success and political influence. Welcome to 21st-century spiritual entrepreneurship! More in this Economist article - Comment | |
Sree Vijaykumar | From the Editor's Desk
One can evaluate the Kingfisher mess through two lenses - a business lens and a human lens. In the case of Vijay Mallya, it is extremely difficult to separate the two, because his personality and the Kingfisher brand have been intertwined for so long. He used the media attention to his business's advantage when times were good. Unfortunately, for him now, this means a trial by media, when things are down. The business issue is one of loan default and companies ranging from SBI to GMR are now filing cases against Kingfisher. The law should take its own course here. The fact that there are bigger defaulters who have not been brought to justice does not hold ground as an excuse to go easy on Kingfisher. Through a human (and moral) lens, throwing a birthday bash with 600 guests, when your employees have not been paid a salary for more than a year is something that is very tough to reconcile. The Indian business fraternity seems divided on their reaction to this situation. - Comment | |
Sree Vijaykumar | From the Editor's Desk
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, economist and professor at Columbia University, suggests that American inequality didn't just happen; it was created (and is getting worse). In this excerpt from his book, he says that those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of - that is their true innovation. Many of the individuals at the top of the wealth distribution are, in one way or another, geniuses at business (rather than science or technology, which are what truly drive human progress). Steve Jobs was number 110 on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest billionaires before his death, and Mark Zuckerberg was 52. But many of these "geniuses" built their business empires on the shoulders of giants, such as Tim Berners- Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who has never appeared on the Forbes list. Berners-Lee could have become a billionaire but chose not to - he made his idea available freely, which greatly speeded up the development of the Internet. Indian inequality is even worse and has additional dimensions such as crony capitalism and caste/class based discrimination, where the powerful reinforce the inequality to stay wealthy at the expense of the poor - Comment | |
Online harassment must be met head-on: Tech summit panel Online harassment and sexism is demeaning women and can no longer be brushed aside as an ugly side of social media and the gaming industry if they are to thrive, panelists said at the South By Southwest tech meeting in Austin. |
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