Basab Pradhan

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

AAPL, small
On May 16, Engadget, a blog on consumer electronics, posted breaking news that Apple’s iPhone and Leopard OS were going to be delayed. This was based upon an internal Apple email that they had been able to lay their hands on.Within a few minutes, AAPL had lost 3% off its market cap. Techcrunch has a blow by blow account here. Paul Kedrosky has another interesting take on the episode here.

My interest in this episode is in connecting it with other recent developments in text analysis based algorithmic trading to see what this might augur for the future.

The real deal with offshore captives

Recently Forrester Research released a report that says that offshore captives, which have been much in vogue for the last three years, are “imploding”. A blog post here makes for interesting reading, especially the comments.

More insiders being recruited as CEOs

A few months back I had written on Runaway CEO compensation after the Bob Nardelli/Home Depot fiasco. My sole recommendation on the way out of the CEO compensation mess was – better succession planning.

Notes from the CRV conference

Spent a couple of days last week at the Charles River Ventures conference. (CRV is the lead investor in Gridstone). The attraction of the conference to me was to meet other entrepreneurs and to meet a great roster of speakers. As it turned out, the former objective wasn’t quite fulfilled, for good reason. But the speakers made the trip more than worthwhile.

The H1-B visa program needs a revamp

This year the INS received 150,000 H1-B visa applications for the coming year starting in October, on the first day that it started accepting applications – for a total of 65,000 visas! An article in the New York Times takes a look at the issues surrounding this. A table from the same article reproduced below gives you the breakup of the visas requested by company. Indian IT Services companies are the only companies at the top of the list.

The difference between KBC and a lottery

KBC

“Kaun Banega Crorepati” (KBC), India’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” is watched by between 15 and 20 million Indians. In parts it is great entertainment. But a part of it is pretty darned close to a lottery.

The Napsterization of Sell-Side Research

Cross-posted on the Gridstone Blog.

Candace Browning, Head of Research at Merrill Lynch posted an open letter last week that talked about the “Napsterization” of sell-side research, justifying why Merrill Lynch would have to take control of the distribution of their research.

Offshore Backlash Redux

It’s back. With the Democrats in Congress and soon perhaps in the Whitehouse and an economy that most think will turn sour soon, it is almost the perfect storm. Trade in services, fondly called “offshoring” is back on the front pages and it bodes ill for global business.

More IT Services Bashing

Sujai Karampuri in Need Product Companies for India’s Growth makes an unconvincing case for encouraging the high tech industry in India. On the way he quotes data on the IT Services industry to prove his point that

Users in India should have opt-in rights

Rediff, McAfee

Last year I posted on “Indian websites haven’t earned my trust“. What had annoyed me enough to write that piece was moneycontrol.com. Once it got hold of my email, it started sending me an email a day with an inane “Sensex was down 89 points, your networth?” Unsubscribing hasn’t worked so far. Eventually, I relegated it to “spam” in my email client where it finds company with all the Viagra and penny stock spam. I wonder what they’ve done with my email though. Probably sold it half a dozen times already, along with those of a thousand other unsuspecting subscribers.