ரொம்ப நாட்களாகப் பார்க்க நினைத்து, எங்கள் கிளப்பில் (TNCA Club) நேற்று போட்டதினால் பார்த்தப் படம் அபியும் நானும். ”மொழி” படத்தின் இயக்குனர் ”ராதாமோகன்” அவர்களின் படமிது என்பதால் எனக்கும் என் மனைவிக்கும் இந்தப் படத்திற்கு நிறைய எதிர்ப்பாப்பு. ஆங்காங்கே கொஞ்சம் ”சந்தோஷ் சுப்ரமண்யம்”  படத்தையும் ”கண்ணாமூச்சி ஏனடா” படத்தையும் நினைக்க வைத்தாலும் ஒரு பாசாமான அப்பாவைப் பற்றி ஒரு நல்ல படத்தைக் கொடுத்துள்ளார்  ராதாமோகன். இந்த மாதிரி ஒரு கதையம்சமுள்ள படத்தை தைரியமாக தயாரித்த பிரகாஷ்ராஜ் அவர்களை எவ்வளவுப் பாராட்டினாலும் தகும்.

Recently RBI seems to have sent guidelines to all banks in India that are issuing credit cards to add additional security measures for online and telephone transactions. Currently most of the online transactions using credit cards require only the card number, expiry, name, address and CVV (printed on the back of the card) –  other than address all these information are printed in the card itself. So it is easy for any shop keeper (say in a restaurant where you send your card away from your sight) to copy all these details and use it a fraudulent transaction online. Now RBI will be prescribing that from August 2009 all online credit card transactions will require in to provide additional verification data which is not visible in the card.

Certainly a welcome move from RBI. And probably a pioneering move that central banks around the world will be watching carefully to emulate.

In a recent issue of BusinessWeek I came across this article in which Mr.Paco Underhill author of “Why we buy?” talks about Retail store guidelines. He makes few observations which I found to be very interesting:

1. Shoppers use the area just inside a store’s entrance as a decompression zone. They won’t notice signs put there.

2. Americans naturally turn right as they walk further into a store (Which means I guess Indian’s will turn left)

3. Customers respond best when employees greet them about a minute after they enter. (I will welcome this as more often than not I find it intrusive when I see a person greeting right at the door)

4. Some customers can’t deal with choices. Merchants needs to put up signs that says “Our Best Seller” or “Our Best Student computer” or the likes. (Certainly I will appreciate it)

5. Unlike good times, now when shoppers purchase they spend 20% more time in aisles.

6. He says people more often make decisions about what to buy when they’re out shopping, not before. (True with me 50%)

In my Windows 7 x64 machine I thought I will give Google Chrome a try. After I clicked on download, I was surprised to see Google use Microsoft Clickonce technology to download the installer which in turn installed the browser. Clickonce is a cool technology that if used correctly can reduce lot of the pain consumers have today in installing/updating applications in Windows Platform. In my opinion unfortunately it is also a technology that has generated little interest inside Microsoft outside the team that wrote it. Till date I haven’t seen a single Microsoft application including the recent Windows Live Wave “3” products (which can benefit greatly from it) use Clickonce for their installation. I wonder why?

Anyways, coming back to the topic. After I installed Google Chrome in Windows 7 x64, I was unable to browse any pages. Whatever URLs I entered there was no action. After some web searching I realized this is a known issue and you need to append a switch to make it work properly. Most of the sites gave the switch as an image but it turns out the correct one is --in-process-plugins (not the two dashes in the beginning and not one). You need to right-click on the Google Chrome Icon, in the Shortcut tab, in the targer text box add this switch to the right of the chrome.exe text. Something like below:

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --in-process-plugins

(in the above line, replace the [USERNAME] with the appropriate name of your default user folder (or) easiest is to leave whatever it is till chrome.exe and append --in-process-plugins at the end)

After this switch, Google Chrome seems to run fine. I didn’t find any killer feature that will make me switch to Google Chrome from IE 8 and FF 3, but Chrome does seem to load the pages faster than the competition.

You can’t stop marvelling at the lack of speed in which the Indian Finance Ministry operates. It has taken 5 Years, change of a finance minister, a global recession for the finance ministry in India to start to “look” into this issue. About 5 years back Mr.P.Chidambaram as then Finance Minister cancelled the exemption given to Exporters from paying “Service Tax” on input services (which amounts at current rate @12.36%) that were rendered towards manufacturing/rendering an item/service that will get exported out of the country. The idea being you can only export a service/item not the tax of the originating country with it and to prevent India from becoming non-competitive compared to its neighbours. Instead of the exemption the Hon’ble minister announced Exporters can claim a refund (which in India means pleasing the bureaucracy & adding infinite delays) for the service tax they will pay, this the minister said was to prevent leakages and misuse of the benefit. In India “Refunds” or for that matter any policy announcements (other than the written law) are mere intentions and are like “Poll” promises – they will always be kept as a promise by then finance minister and his successors. Keeping up this tradition, there has been no clear announcement or notification on the procedure and the forms to be used for this refund claim. For last several years at my company, we have asked every Service Tax & Excise Tax official we have met for the procedure we need to follow to get the refund, every one has said anything but a consistent answer.

Hence, I was surprised Today to see some movement on this with this article in Economic Times Newspaper - “Faster Service Tax refunds on cards”. With today’s budget turning out to be a disappointment (it read more like UPA government poll propaganda) for Indian Inc. and Exporters in particular at least if the FinMin can do this refund notification quickly, it will give us some relief in these testing times.

Can you trade in safety for convenience?. If you are like me driving every day in Ranganathan Street and Panagal park shopping areas in Chennai, you will conclude that pedestrians who come here have clearly opted in for convenience. Whether it is the T.Nagar Bus Terminus area (where for some reason people will start crossing only when the traffic light turns green, fighting in between the slow moving cars and two-wheelers) or Pothy's junction (where just after policemen has asked traffic to resume, few people will manage to run in between the slow moving vehicles) or the Ranganathan Street/Usman Road junction.

In the picture above (taken from my car today at 7PM while I was coming home) in front of Annai Sathya Bazaar (near Ranganathan Street), as you can see the authorities have kept barricades to prevent pedestrians (or to prevent vehicles going to the foot path) from crossing over into the two-way traffic road. If you see closely in the photo you will find two men (who came crossed the traffic from left) pushing the barricade and squeezing in; just after them over half-a-dozen followed the same route. All this inspite of the fact there is a zebra crossing with a policemen to control traffic just 10 feet away.

God save Chennai Pedestrians from harm from both themselves and our poor-planning civic authorities!

With news coming in everyday of all major industries in India slowing down from their historic levels of growth in the last few years, everyone in business (including me) is losing our sleep over the state of our businesses and the economy in general. Real-Estate, Cement, Auto, IT, Retail, Travel - all have slowed down in the recent months. No Amount of Liquidity infused by Government/RBI have been able to make banks lend (or) companies to borrow and expand.

With this background, I thought the record monies (spent by owners and sponsors) spent on last year's IPL will come down to ground-level (what everyone will call sustainable) this year. In fact, I thought the whole sheen associated with IPL (as a matter of fact, I loved the games last year) will be down this year due to the overall slowing economy - people will be worried about their jobs, companies will be worried about liquidity and market rather than to sponsor. All these fears have been put to rest for now (we still don't know how the public will receive IPL this year) with the all time high prices paid by team owners for the players in last week's auction in Goa. See the chart below, US$1.55 Million was paid each by Bangalore and Chennai team owners - wow!

If at all this kicks off overall consumer demand and market confidence, it will be great. [Come on, this is my blog and who say's I can't think wishfully here]

For little more than a year I was using HTC S710, as my usage of emails grew after my company moved to Exchange Server the phone was feeling to be too small & slow - it was time for a new phone for me. After waiting for few months (iPhone got released in India around Aug '08) and deciding between Sony Ericsson X1, Samsung Omnia & HTC Touch Pro, I went with the original and the popular Apple iPhone 3G. After the purchase of iPhone in Dec '08, and playing around with the phone for few minutes wiped away all my doubts about iPhone. It is the best Smartphone out there in market. It is going to take Symbian (OS that powers Nokia) & Windows Mobile (OS that powers HTC, Omnia and X1) few revisions before they can catch up with the ease of use and ergonomics of iPhone.

The purchase itself was different from other phone purchases I have made. I had to go to Vodafone store (no one else seems to be selling it) in T.Nagar (Chennai) and pay Rs.26,400 by credit card (only CC and Cash, no cheques - even though our company has over 30 post-paid connections with Vodafone), I had to read and sign a 7-page license agreement from Apple - promising that you will never download pirated content, you will indemnify Apple for any claims out of usage of iPhone and the likes. I learned that my exiting data plan with Vodafone will not work with iPhone, I had to opt for a different iPhone dataplan at Rs.499/699 per month (which will not work on other phones, so you need to have two plans at the same time if you want to use in different phones).  The phone's packaging was minimal. It seems the small pin (like a office paper clip) that you need to use to remove SIM card from the phone if lost will cost you Rs.500! . The sales guy informed me that the phone comes with warranty against any manufacturing defect, but if I happen to drop the phone and anything other an air-crack happens, it can't be repaired and I better throw the phone in the nearest trash can.

Regarding the features of the phone, enough has been talked by reporters around the world. I would like to highlight few of my experiences.

Highlights - Apart from the positives above, few other points impressed me the most and they are:

1. My company uses RADIUS certificates based authentication implemented at the Windows Server 2003 level for Wi-Fi security. Even on a Windows Mobile (better integration between Microsoft Products) you can't connect that easily to these Wi-Fi access points. With iPhone it was seamless. It automatically detected that I had this authentication method, prompted for my Domain Credentials, downloaded & installed the certificate. Everything worked flawlessly. More over with half-a-dozen Wi-Fi AP's that I have configured across my office, house, relative's houses where I frequent - the overall Wi-Fi experience has been outstanding. Even with-in my office just as I get out of Wi-Fi zone, it seamlessly moves to EDGE (Cellular network) and back.

2. The design idea of having a Toggle switch in the side for Silent mode - brilliant. Other than this and Volume Control (two buttons on side) everything else in iPhone is touch. It is not practical to access your phone through Touch when it is in your pocket and you want to turn it to Silent when you are in a meeting. And having it as a Toggle switch, you can easily feel / see whether your phone is in Silent or not. And you can configure when in Silent mode whether the phone should vibrate or not.

3. The Exchange Server integration through ActiveSync is outstanding. Next to having Outlook 2007 client this is the best client software for Exchange server - period!. It is so good that nowadays I hardly bring home my laptop to work on emails.

4. The firmware upgrade process through iTunes software is extremely easy. I have my reservations in general about iTunes software, but the updates to the phone through this has been implemented very well. Other OEM's should learn to mimic this.

5. The MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Adobe PDF viewers that are built-in are much usable. I could open the most complex Excel Sheets and Word documents that I received in the last few weeks at it and it opened all of them without any fuss. What is better is that the viewer supports the latest MS Office formats (Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007). 

Blank screen bug

I was wanting to do this post for over a month now, but it didn't make it. Today my phone had its first serious problem - suddenly the display and touch were not working entirely. I guess it was to do with a video I was downloading from YouTube with the built-in app. When it gets a call though it was ringing, I was not able to pickup the call. Any number of Power button presses, Home button presses didn't help. I started to feel worried that it had developed a hardware  problem and I had to give it to Vodafone/Apple for servicing. That's when I searched and found this page which had a solution to the same problem. The solution is to keep pressing both the Home and the Power ON button for 10 seconds and the device will do a reset.

Last year during one of my business trips to USA, I purchased this (then) latest DVD "Bob the Builder Onsite - Roads and Bridges" for my son. This is not the regular Bob the Builder Cartoon show that is shown in Cartoon Network/Pogo, it is an education video. Bob explains and explores real life on constructions sites - on how roads & bridges are build; how many people and machines work tirelessly in these projects and more. At the time I bought this DVD my son didn't like, after few minutes he switched it off. Today when he saw this DVD again, he asked for it to be played - and he enjoyed it thoroughly. He ended up learning how these are done and recalling the processes to me. Nice DVD for your young kids - comes highly recommended by me if your kid is over 5 years for them to understand and enjoy this.

Recently I was checking out one of Nokia's entry level phone (Rs.2000) - Nokia 2626. The phone had "Hindi" letters printed on the keyboard, so I was doubtful whether it will have Tamil fonts. I launched the built-in browser and went to INFITT website (HTML page in Unicode), it said loading and processing for over 2 minutes; but I was delighted finally to see the page display properly in Tamil (you can see the image in right).

This means that this entry level device has 1. Unicode support, 2. Tamil Unicode font, 3. Rendering support for Indic languages in particular to Tamil.  This proves the present Unicode system for Indic languages does work even on the most basic/low-end devices and processors. So the reason Tamil Unicode is not yet supported widely on all phones especially high-end Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry & Nokia Smartphones is not because of any technical limitations, but a lack of interest from the manufacturers to ship Tamil (Indic) support. It is mostly got to do with the wrong assessment by them, that all Smartphone buyers in India can read and care only about "English" and not their mother tongue.

References: Hindi support in mobile devices in India.