Internet – Page 17 – DECISION STATS

Yahoo Finance for Analysis-Indian ITES

A great graphical tool is Yahoo finance- As a test case I took the Indian Outsourcing and IT industry and compared their stock performance for the whole of 2008.

Note I am using the website http://www.tiny.cc/ which has a great 10 sec method of shortening urls, just like www.tinyurl.com

You can view the graph here http://tiny.cc/ITES and add in last year’s value including SIFY (Satyam’s arm here http://tiny.cc/INDIA

Business case- As you can see, the Indian IT sector lost tremendous value in 2008 , perhaps too much so you can see the sharp pullbacks in the last one week ( WNS pulled almost 18 % up). One view I belive this industry will do well to adopt is stop being an Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) and start moving towards Information Technology Enabled Products ( ITEP)

Updated- I didnt factor in Satyam’s acounting scandal in the analysis.If you click the link above now – you would note the impact such events have on domains ( and curiously happen again and again.It also leads to better data mining solutions than simplistic history repeats itself models).

Yahoo finance is extremely user friendly and the design of the interface is sweet,short and simple. But the biggest weakness is ( and it seems like a Yahoo weakness) – there are almost no ads compared to Google Finance which focuses on the ad placement and relevancy over anything else. I hope this site endures ..as it is a great boon for analysts and even stock market researchers.

All the Inventors and Pirates

A terrific site for filing patents is http://www.patentstorm.us/

It has great features and a great database as the US Patent office, and it makes sense for an average Joe without needing a patent attorney.

A terrific site for copyright infringement is http://thepiratebay.org/

Apparently it is legal as per Swedish law, and thus makes it easier for people to download songs ,videos and movies and softwares for free. One NY student even scanned his whole chemistry book and offered it for download as a protest against high prices, which seems a bit extreme in any case.

Swedes have been trying to shut down the site for 5 years now!

Their blog is quite interesting here http://thepiratebay.org/blog

And they say piracy is a problem in Asia

Smart Data Collective

Here is a great online community for decision scientists especially the ones reading these posts. It is called Smart Data Collective and it is hosted at www.smartdatacollective.com

It works like a blog aggregator for specific topics and the quality of posts is quite nice. Just like your blogroll does for you and it can also help your blog, if you write to get some added views. Basically it works as a newpaper for data topics from featured posts by data bloggers. I joined it just over the year end , and was able to both write and read on nice topics.

And also, if you didnt notice , we had a revamped website at www.decisionstats.com

Improvements include a better SEO url structure, new WordPress theme (disliked by many due to ~~blue~~ grey color) ,enhanced blogroll with labels, RSS feeds from NYT and DM Review besides my own poetry blog, and revamping the old pages. Let me know what you think about the change.

Virtual Softwares :Telecommuting 2

Here is a list of resources I got from a blog site called www.remotedesktop.com

with a wiki here http://wiki.remotedesktop.com/

It is quite a nice simple site, with a great domain name, and is dedicated to virtualization softwares, especially for dummy terminal use and my favourite topic- telecommuting.(which I wrote earlier in the month)

Some of the sites highlighted are –I am adding two remote meeting softwares ( SharedView from MS and GotoMeeting besides the Google Docs site)

SharedView-

http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94

and Go To Meeting from

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/?Portal=www.gotomeeting.com

Besides the inevitable Google Docs

from www.docs.google.com which are quite good for collobrative work but can be used for remote working as well.

Apple Remote Desktop

Unlimited Managed Systems edition: $499/administrator (MB423Z/A)

10 Managed Systems edition: $299/administrator (MB422Z/A)

Also includes an automator –

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dtp.amazon.com BETA

Here is a nice beta thing for all authors.

Amazon’s self publishing paltform

https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/dashboard

It is great for ease of use, functional design and convenience.

Caveat – Its limited to United States .You need United States Tax information to register.

But still a very good DTP platform and aimed at the Amazon Kindle ( E –Book ) Segment initially.

Online Banking in India

What made you enter the online market space ? What prompted you to take up this present assignment?

There is tremendous opportunity in the Indian online market space. For instance buying flight tickets and shopping online was not popular a few years ago. Today people realize that transacting online can be safe, cheap, and can be done within a few seconds. Bankbazaar.com makes getting a great loan bargain as easy as buying an air ticket. Customers using our site will appreciate how much thought we have put into every little detail, which will make the process of applying and getting a loan a hassle free experience. It can help them save precious time and money. We expect a large percentage of consumers from channels such as bank branches and agents to migrate to BankBazaar.com .

Today there are a number of websites that claim to give customers instant loan rate quotes, when they actually just collect customer information and sell them to multiple banks and Direct Sales Agents. In such a scenario, we see a need for BankBazaar.com. Our innovative talent pool drawn from the world’s best colleges and companies are constantly seeking the best possible ways to offer an easier and faster online experience for customers.

I took up this assignment because my team is driving pure innovation in India. We are exploring options that no other financial marketplace in the world has ever attempted before and our goal is to build the world’s premier financial services marketplace (made in India).

What is different about BankBazaar for the customer ? What is different for a prospective employee ?

On BankBazaar.com the customer can instantly get customized competing offers from India’s leading Banks and NBFCs on our secure interface. We are the first neutral provider in the world to have innovated in partnership with leading financial institutions to provide this real-time offer capability. This information is

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India and the Internet:SimplyMarry.com

What prompted you to enter the internet media space, and what qualities do you think made you succeed in it.

I just loved the internet since I started using it, somehow I always felt this is the medium for me. I created a portal long time back and then joined an internet firm. The best thing about the medium is that the product, marketing, content and sales are close-knit than in any other medium. Another great part of it being it’s flexibility, you can create lot of designs of experiments at almost zero cost, and implied risk.

Whatever little success I have had is because of my passion for the field, which has given me a sound understanding of behaviour of web consumption. I think consumer behaviour is the key here, which has to driven by great data interpretation skills, which is basically the level of understanding of the medium.

What’s your most challenging project ever (anonmous details)

My most challenging project has been the C2C engine success challenge. This is a case of concurrent profiles, threshold traffic, registered traffic, returning traffic and overall site engagement metrics. Now this is tough t build and tough to break as well, still very tough to build. The returning traffic is a component of current traffic, which makes it a chicken and egg story in C2C domain. This is the toughest part, the “engagement metrics” forecasting is the key, and you can never be precise on this, the engine needs to be fueled on scientific data analysis, industry trends, consumer research and believe it or not, lot of heuristics. And if you go wrong, you can waste millions of dollars for

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