Archive for December 2011

Movement of rupee as compared to Dollar in 14 years

Take a look at the movement of Rupee as compared to Dollar in
the span of fourteen years.




Date               Rupee Vs Dollar
27/12/2011            52.89
31/12/2010            44.81
31/12/2009            46.68
31/12/2008            48.45
31/12/2007            39.41
29/12/2006            44.23
30/12/2005            45.07
31/12/2004            43.58
31/12/2003            45.61
31/12/2002            48.02
31/12/2001            48.18
29/12/2000            46.75
30/12/1999            43.52

How to get funds for a startup? - An interview with Startup Specialist Nate Casey



Nate Casey and his business partners had a winning idea: a website that lets users correspond with celebrities and professional leaders they admire. They had a name for their venture--Blazetrak.com--and they had entertainment icons and moguls who were interested in participating. The only thing they lacked was money to build the site.
Failing to secure investors, Casey and partner Corey Stanford instead opened a web consulting firm, Clariwebs, with the idea that they would use the profits from that venture to fund their true passion. After more than a year of bootstrapping, they dissolved Clariwebs and launched Blazetrak (along with a third partner, Ronald Harrison), bringing in revenue from day one. Two years later, the site boasts approximately 50,000 registered users from 202 countries and features commentary from 400 celebrities and experts. We asked Casey about making the transition from Clariwebs to Blazetrak.


How much of Clariwebs' revenue did you put into Blazetrak?
It wasn't a lot of money. Because we created this culture of bootstrapping, it only ended up being $10,000 or $15,000. We were using our own internal team to do a lot of the development work on Blazetrak. There was a lot of sweat that went into it.


How much time did you spend on each business?
We were probably 70 percent on the projects for Clariwebs. In the background, we were constantly building modules for Blazetrak. As we got closer to launching and it got more exciting, the amount of time we were spending on Blazetrak increased. By the final run, we were probably at 70 or 80 percent with Blazetrak.


Did you tell clients about the new business?
We did--particularly the ones we had established strong relationships with and who had become dependent on us for making decisions about their online businesses. It's hard, because you're trying to sustain and take care of customers for one business while in the back of your mind you're thinking about raising money for something else that you feel passionate about.


Any tips on starting a business to finance a product launch?
If you're starting a company or you're doing consulting specifically to raise money for a bigger idea, you have to be 100 percent vested in and committed to why you're doing it. The company that you're creating or the consulting work that you're doing to raise funds could be a big temptation once it starts making a lot of money. You can get really complacent. When we switched over fully to Blazetrak, that's when we started getting all these calls about potential jobs that would have been great if we were still doing Clariwebs. We were making $2,000 our first month on Blazetrak and thinking, "Wow--we could have taken a $30,000 or $40,000 Clariwebs project this month."



What's the biggest downside of funding a startup this way?
It's painful to use your own money, especially when you'd rather spend it on groceries. But that's what makes it a good thing. You get really smart with how you spend it. You say, "We really need to buy this software solution." And then you say, "Is this the right one? Can we find a cheaper version? Can we build it ourselves?"



You start to do a lot of research so you can spend less money or can learn a skill that will save you money over the long term. I figured out how to do our financials for Clariwebs by reading a book on QuickBooks. I use those skills even today.
We got so much out of Clariwebs that helped us with Blazetrak. A lot of the operational stuff, the staff and the work we did morphed over to Blazetrak. The value wasn't just monetary--we gained experience and relationships, too.

Courstesy: Entrepreneur

A Hitech Approach to learning - Startup concept



After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in political science, Josh Silverman spent time in Korea and Spain teaching English and IT. The newly minted teacher quickly noticed a problem with students' retention rates: Not only were his own students forgetting material they'd learned just days earlier, but he was struggling to hold on to knowledge he'd worked so hard to retain during his undergraduate studies.


After enrolling in a master's program in computer science at Brandeis University, Silverman and classmates Bill DeRusha and Jason Urton sought to turn this frustration into a business plan that would benefit students. In April 2011, the three launched a beta service that was primarily a platform for taking notes. They attracted approximately 1,200 sign-ups in a matter of weeks, but only a small fraction of those who joined became active users.
Intent on finding a better way for students to retain information, the three uncovered research proving that activity-based studying--using such methods as flash cards and fill-in-the-blank questions--was two to three times more effective than typical note reading and dramatically extends recall of content over time.

When the three realized that smartphones were the ideal platform to enable such study skills,StudyEgg was hatched. They modified their model into a platform that takes lecture notes, classroom materials and textbooks and converts them into brief, targeted learning exercises that are hyper-focused on each student's specific needs and optimized to respond to weaknesses of past performance.
"What we do at StudyEgg," Urton says, "is take everything a student needs to know for his classes--from PowerPoint slides, notes or textbooks--and convert that all into short, focused activities for a smartphone."

After creating the interactive exercises, StudyEgg distributes them to users in prioritized, bite-size batches to avoid overload. The application also allows students to share their study guides with classmates. The service, currently available on the iPhone, is focused primarily on the Brandeis student body for the present, but is poised to expand this year.
StudyEgg has received funding through Brandeis' Sprout Grant Program, which provides early stage seed capital ($5,000 to $20,000) and mentorship to developing projects approaching commercialization. Additionally, StudyEgg has office space and further investment and guidance through Betaspring, a Providence, R.I.-based startup accelerator.

"The biggest asset in the incubator program is mentorship," Silverman says. "Just last week we met some incredible and renowned authors of iPhone and Android development books. The relationships we're building with other entrepreneurs and with the community here in Rhode Island and people who have gone through this experience is invaluable."
No doubt the trio's idea of learning with help from one's peers is driving StudyEgg's business. "One of the best pieces of advice we've been given," Silverman says, "is when you're starting a company, find someone who is one or two steps ahead of you and meet with them regularly, because they've just solved the problems that you're about to face."

How to conduct market research in reality?



Marketing research can give a business a picture of what kinds of new products and services may bring a profit. For products and services already available, marketing research can tell companies whether they are meeting their customers' needs and expectations. By researching the answers to specific questions, small-business owners can learn whether they need to change their package design or tweak their delivery methods--and even whether they should consider offering additional services.

"Failure to do market research before you begin a business venture or during its operation is like driving a car from Texas to New York without a map or street signs," says William Bill of Wealth Design Group LLC in Houston. "You have know which direction to travel and how fast to go. A good market research plan indicates where and who your customers are. It will also tell you when they are most likely and willing to purchase your goods or use your services."

When you conduct marketing research, you can use the results either to create a business and marketing plan or to measure the success of your current plan. That's why it's important to ask the right questions, in the right way, of the right people. Research, done poorly, can steer a business in the wrong direction. Here are some market-research basics that can help get you started and some mistakes to avoid. 
Types of Market Research 
Primary Research: The goal of primary research is to gather data from analyzing current sales and the effectiveness of current practices. Primary research also takes competitors' plans into account, giving you information about your competition.



Collecting primary research can include:
  • Interviews (either by telephone or face-to-face)
  • Surveys (online or by mail)
  • Questionnaires (online or by mail)
  • Focus groups gathering a sampling of potential clients or customers and getting their direct feedback

Some important questions might include:
  • What factors do you consider when purchasing this product or service?
  • What do you like or dislike about current products or services currently on the market?
  • What areas would you suggest for improvement?
  • What is the appropriate price for a product or service?
Secondary Research: The goal of secondary research is to analyze data that has already been published. With secondary data, you can identify competitors, establish benchmarks and identify target segments. Your segments are the people who fall into your targeted demographic--people who live a certain lifestyle, exhibit particular behavioral patterns or fall into a predetermined age group.


Collecting Data 
No small business can succeed without understanding its customers, its products and services, and the market in general. Competition is often fierce, and operating without conducting research may give your competitors an advantage over you.



There are two categories of data collection: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative methods employ mathematical analysis and require a large sample size. The results of this data shed light on statistically significant differences. One place to find quantitative results if you have a website is in your web analytics (available in Google's suite of tools). This information can help you determine many things, such as where your leads are coming from, how long visitors are staying on your site and from which page they are exiting.

Qualitative methods help you develop and fine-tune your quantitative research methods. They can help business owners define problems and often use interview methods to learn about customers' opinions, values and beliefs. With qualitative research, the sample size is usually small.

Many new business owners, often strapped for time and money, may take shortcuts that can later backfire. Here are three pitfalls to avoid.



Common Marketing Mistakes

  1. Using only secondary research. Relying on the published work of others doesn't give you the full picture. It can be a great place to start, of course, but the information you get from secondary research can be outdated. You can miss out on other factors relevant to your business.
  2. Using only web resources. When you use common search engines to gather information, you get only data that are available to everyone and it may not be fully accurate. To perform deeper searches while staying within your budget, use the resources at your local library, college campus or small-business center.
  3. Surveying only the people you know. Small-business owners sometimes interview only family members and close colleagues when conducting research, but friends and family are often not the best survey subjects. To get the most useful and accurate information, you need to talk to real customers about their needs, wants and expectations.

How college sports photos became a multi million dollar business?



As an All-American basketball player for Duke University in the late 1980s and early '90s, Sue Harnett knew how to take great shots. Today, as president of a 16-person photo reproduction company in Durham, N.C., she's still a shot doctor of sorts.

Her company, Replay Photos, builds and manages online photo stores for college athletic departments and professional sports teams. Replay also has exclusive licensing rights to the GigaPixel FanCam, which augments traditional online storefronts with social media applications that allow fans to find and tag themselves in high-definition crowd shots.
"Everyone loves capturing the 'big game' or the 'big event' into something they can have forever," Harnett says. "For us, it's all about sharing those moments."
The idea for Replay came into focus in 2002. Harnett was working as a healthcare administrator and volunteering for Duke's athletic department in her spare time. The athletic director asked her to come up with new ways to identify revenue sources. After wandering through the archives, it hit her: all the old sports photos had to be worth something.

With personal savings and help from her two original partners, Harnett spent months compiling images into a database for an online photo store. She hired a programmer (who became the company's lead developer) to build an e-commerce engine that could run the site. And in 2005, she tanked her healthcare job to work on Replay full time.
The company's early goals were modest and only focused on Duke's photos (Harnett paid the school a licensing fee for any she sold). Over the next few years, as she pulled in funding from angel investors, Harnett added staff, enhanced the model and replicated it for other schools.
Now fans can purchase everything from framed prints to giant decals to mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with memorable images from their big day or night out.
Then there's FanCam. In early 2011, Replay inked an exclusive five-year license with South Africa-based FanTech to sell its FanCam images in the U.S. The technology takes 360-degree, 5-billion-pixel images of crowds at sporting events. (Replay also put the FanCam to work last summer for several shows during U2's 360° Tour.) Fans who attend the events can zoom around and in on the image to find themselves in the crowd. Then they can purchase the picture or tag themselves in versions of the image posted on Facebook or Twitter.
Harnett declines to share financials, but describes her company as a "multimillion-dollar business," noting that revenue has climbed 25 to 30 percent year over year.
To support these claims, she cites the firm's client list--at last check, it included all of the franchises in the NFL and NBA, more than 140 colleges and universities and ESPN's traveling College GameDay program, which was expected to use FanCam weekly on location this fall.
The photo sales are found money for Replay customers. "We weren't selling these kinds of things previously, so every dollar we earn through them is a bonus," says Michelle Andres, vice president of digital media for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens. "The more we win, the more we expect those revenues to climb."
In the coming months, Replay's client list will expand to sports such as soccer and running. Harnett says Replay is also experimenting with ways to leverage FanCam images for charity; when fans tag themselves in one of the images, a sponsor could donate a certain amount of money to a nonprofit organization.
Clearly, the shot doc has her eye on the scoreboard--and she plans to lead all the way.

Marketing Strategy

According to Moore and Pareek (2009), marketing is one of the important functions of any business besides other functions such as R&D, Finance, IT, Operation, Production, and Human Resource (HR). Function of marketing in organizations is directly related with attraction and retention of customers in comparison of other functions that focus on managing internal matters of organizations.

To develop the marketing function effectively, firms choose appropriate marketing strategies. Role of marketing strategies is important for organizations. According to Silk (2006), marketing strategies can be divided into two parts such as selection of an appropriate segmentation, targeting, positioning, and selection of a suitable marketing mix (product, price, place and promotion). In both marketing and marketing strategies, role of advertisement is very critical as advertisement is one of the important tools among other tools such as sales promotion, marketing research, distribution and pricing of marketing.

According to Slater, Hult and Oslan (2010), marketing strategies are the combination of marketing mix, positioning, targeting and segmentation that helps the organization to create competitive advantages from the international market. With the help of effective marketing strategy, organization can attract the customers for the products and services.

In the research study, researchers also argued that marketing strategies plays an effective role in the organization to face various resources and utilize different opportunities. At the same time Rosier, Morgan and Cadogan (2010) has supported the argument of Slater, Hult and Oslan (2010) that marketing strategy starts with a detailed and creative assessment of organization’s capabilities in order to achieve organizational goals. In the research, researchers argued that marketing strategies helps the organization to increase in strengths in order to increase in competition in international market.

How to learn a language quickly and easily?



  • Use the immersion technique. Visit the country where the target language is spoken, and immerse yourself into the culture. This is by far the fastest way to learn a language, but it isn't always possible. If you are unable to visit a foreign country, hang out in a local area where people speak your target language. Befriend native speakers of the language and learn from spending time with them.

  • Watch television and movies made in the target language. Try to watch for at least 1 to 2 hours each day to pick out familiar phrases. Listen carefully to what you hear, and attempt to mimic the natural tone, pace and accent of the native speakers.



  • Listen to language tapes and CDs constantly. Listen to tapes when you drive, lift weights, walk or just hang out around the house. Listen to them around the clock, if possible. The more you expose yourself to the target language, the quicker you'll learn it.

  • Build your vocabulary of the target language. Every language has about 50 to 100 words that should be learned immediately. This essential vocabulary includes prepositions, interrogative words, adjectives and a few nouns. Learning these words helps you understand many others through context.

  • Study vocabulary and phrase books. Memorize lists of vocabulary words, and review them regularly. Study new words and phrases out loud rather than silently. Review the vocabulary lists daily for 2 weeks, then review the vocabulary 3 weeks later. Carry a phrase book wherever you go, and read it as much as possible.

    Other tips n tricks:

  • 1) Spend the time!
    By far the most important factor is how much time you are immersed in the language. The more time you spend with the language, the faster you will learn. This means listening, reading, writing, speaking, and studying words and phrases. This does not mean sitting in class looking out the window, nor listening to other students who do not speak well, nor getting explanations in your own language about how the language works. This means spending time enjoyably connected to the language you are learning.


    2) Listen and read every day!
    Listen wherever you are on your MP3 player. Read what you are listening to. Listen to and read things that you like, things that you can mostly understand, or even partly understand. If you keep listening and reading you will get used to the language. One hour of listening or reading is more effective than many hours of class time.
    3) Focus on words and phrases!
    Build up your vocabulary, you’ll need lots. Start to notice words and how they come together as phrases. Learn these words and phrases through your listening and reading. Read online, using online dictionaries, and make your own vocabulary lists for review. Soon you will run into your new words and phrases elsewhere. Gradually you will be able to use them. Do not worry about how accurately you speak until you have accumulated a plenty of words through listening and reading.


    4) Take responsibility for your own learning!
    If you do not want to learn the language, you won’t. If you do want to learn the language, take control. Choose content of interest, that you want to listen to and read. Seek out the words and phrases that you need to understand your listening and reading. Do not wait for someone else to show you the language, nor to tell you what to do. Discover the language by yourself, like a child growing up. Talk when you feel like it. Write when you feel like it. A teacher cannot teach you to become fluent, but you can learn to become fluent if you want to.
    5) Relax and enjoy yourself!
    Do not worry about what you cannot remember, or cannot yet understand, or cannot yet say. It does not matter. You are learning and improving. The language will gradually become clearer in your brain, but this will happen on a schedule that you cannot control. So sit back and enjoy. Just make sure you spend enough time with the language. That is the greatest guarantee of success.

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    When Karachi's Clifton Underpass was Submerged with Rain Water

    How to create a personal connection with a customer?



    It isn't always enough to create and promote an outstanding product or service. Often, your sales approach matters just as much as what you're selling. The most successful entrepreneurs create a connection with the customer by bringing their own personal touch to the sales process.

    "People buy from people that they like and can relate to," says Adrian Miller, a sales trainer based in Port Washington, N.Y. "When business owners overlook the importance of that personal connection, they run the risk of losing the prospect to someone else--usually someone who took the time to create a relationship and help the prospect buy something rather than trying to simply sell to them."
    Here are seven tips on salesmanship that can help you develop that special rapport with potential customers
    1. Model your business on the corner store. If you long for the days of shopping at a local business where the owner knew your name and your family, try to emulate that experience. For instance, remember one or two details about your customer and bring them up in conversation. "If you know a customer has a daughter finishing up grad school, ask for an update," says Laurie Brown, who owns a sales training company in Detroit and is the author of The Greet Your Customer Manual (The Difference, 2011).

     "Everyone likes to feel they're important enough that someone remembers the little things in their life. It's one important way we go past viewing customers as a dollar sign to a human who is appreciated."
    2. Ask questions first. Before you launch into a hard sell, take time to probe your prospect. Ask questions that will help your customer explain what he's looking for. "Once you know that information, it's much simpler to show how your product or service can satisfy his wants or needs," Miller says.

     "Probing is fundamental to relationship building, and the more skilled you are at utilizing open and closed ended questions, the stronger the relationship you will be able to create."
    3. Court your clients. Selling is a lot like dating in that you have to woo customers and hope they return the attention. "Figure that for every 10 people you want to reach out to, three will want to set up appointments to hear more about your product," says Mark Faust, an adjunct professor at Ohio University and the author of Growth or Bust! Proven Turnaround Strategies to Grow Your Business (Career Press, 2011). 

    "To get a potential customer to call you back, you have to hook them somehow. Consider emailing them an article you found interesting that's related to their business and then give them time to respond. Whatever you do, be respectful of their busy schedule."
    4. Talk about yourself. Another way to make it personal: Reveal something about yourself. Just be sure it's something your customer can relate to and isn't too personal, suggests Lourdes Martin-Rosa, an American Express OPEN Advisor who helps small businesses win government contracts. 

    "It's pivotal to connect in a real way. In fact, according to a study [in] the Journal of Consumer Research, if a salesperson shares a birthday or a birthplace with you, you're more likely to make a purchase from that salesperson and feel good about it."
    5. Really listen to the prospect. There's nothing more insulting than feeling that you're being ignored in a conversation, says Matt Eventoff, owner of Princeton Public Speaking, an executive training company in Princeton, N.J.

     "Asking someone a question and truly listening to the response, rather than beginning to formulate a response while the other person is speaking, is so important." In fact, small business owners may have a distinct advantage in connecting with customers because they are in touch with them so often. "The smaller the size of your business, the more encounters you'll have and the more opportunities you'll have to listen to your customers," Eventoff says.
    6. Step away from your computer and smartphone. While it's often much quicker and less stressful to email a potential customer, face-to-face meetings and networking are far more effective in creating meaningful connections. 

    "These meetings are still among the best ways businesses can establish relationships with decision makers," says Martin-Rosa. "For instance, if you want to pursue the federal government as a customer, make the time to regularly visit the D.C. beltway. Communications should not be limited to email and phone--though both are important follow-up methods." 
    7. Be patient. Like many important things in life, it takes patience to develop lasting customer relationships. Fight the urge to rush the process.

     "Take the time to explain how your product or service will benefit the prospect," Miller says. "Be patient as you go about cultivating this new contact. You never want to make a prospect feel rushed or hustled."