The Crucial Difference

There were two attempts at forming professional sports leagues in India in recent years. Well, two attempts that we'll focus on today.

One tried to stimulate interest in the sport.
One made use of the interest in the sport.

One, the IPL, was a huge success. Is a huge success.

The second, the PHL, flopped. Perhaps not miserably, but it certainly didn't succeed.

Should the PHL have gone about it differently? How about first investing in school leagues in major cities? Do this for five years, complete with providing facilities, entertainment et al at the major matches - build the grassroots, and then the league.

In other words, the final, top billing league is the place to reach - not the place to start.

Asia's Airports the Best!

I must have my geography all mixed up then - India is still in Asia, isn't it?

Seriously though, four out of the top five airports in the world (as decided by those who use the airports) are in Asia.

Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore and Nagoya in Japan are the first four, and Halifax in Nova Scotia make up the top five.

The differentiator? Apparently the people who run these airports look upon them as businesses - rather than as public services. Which, the article that I linked to goes on to say, is why no American airport is in the top five.

A timely indictment of all public services in India, as far as I'm concerned.

What say you?

Another Search Engine

... although I don't know that I'll ever use it instead of Google.

Newssift is aimed squarely at business people, and has some features that it thinks will prove to be of meaningful use to businesspeople. This includes contextual search, source identification and sentiment-tracking. The last bit apparently tells the user whether the search-term in question is "favored" by the business at large.

I don't deny that these features are useful - useful enough to wean me away from Google is another story.

What do you do when the business is so lucrative, and the currently dominant player so... dominant?

Keep trying, I guess. Good luck, you guys.

Fascinating Stuff... Really Fascinating

I like marketing, and I'm doing academic work in economics.

From either angle, I can spend hours dissecting this.

If only they could come up with a solid counter-factual in India.

But I doubt I Will...

Because communicating (apparently incessantly) in single sentences is too... brief.

Are Facebook Status Messages akin to Twitter?

Twitter and all that

I don't know if it is micro-blogging or something else altogether.

It's that I can't wrap my head around it.

I couldn't wrap my head around blogs either - it took me a long time, and once I did, I was hooked.

The reason I didn't blog earlier was because I thought it's not exactly writing. And I didn't appreciate the idea of a diary being maintained for all to read. For that's what I thought blogs were.

But I finally figured for myself that it's just a way to communicate with anybody who wants to see your work. And if you like communicating, well, wow! What more could you ever ask for?

I don't know if I'll ever have a twitter feed - but I'll be very interested to know if my perceptions change in this case as well.

Adding Incremental Value

There's a local cafeteria here, that serves really good food.

The owner is rude, but's that's a plus point - people come there as much for the quirkiness as they do for the food.

He (the owner) keeps a tin full of small pink candy at hand, which he dispenses instead of change when he's out of it.

And it's reached a stage, after many years, where people ask him to round off the bill by means of adding a couple of candies to the order. Every year, he has to up his requirements of the little pink candy.

It's never going to become a lead product, but it's a nice way to up sales just a little bit.

You got any pink candy?