Tuesday Sep 07

The Six Degrees of Minting

Written by S. Srikumar, Batch of 2009, IIM Indore Sunday, 10 August 2008 03:47
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 Vikrant had just finished scrapping Disha who was in Texas A&M. He had asked some queries regarding admissions procedures at TAMU for his Masters Program. And back on the home page of his Orkut profile there appeared an advert on TAMU programs and financial assistance. Intrigued, he clicked on it. The Origin of Social Networks Social Networking sites have taken off from the concept of Six Degrees of Separation: Every person is separated with any other by a maximum of six people. Though it also depends on getting the right six people. From Murdoch (MySpace) to Anil Ambani (BigAdda), everyone has bought into the phenomenon. Up from relative obscurity in the late 90’s, Social Networking sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, Orkut and Hi5 feature high on the top 20 most visited websites list on Alexa.com. From Advogato to Zude, the count has topped 200. While the more common uses of the concept are flooded with options, some others are trying to create a niche within the space. Ever since the controversial Will Smith starrer “Six Degrees of Separation” popularized the phenomenon, various takes have sprung up on the internet. A trivia game, The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, is based on the concept that any Hollywood actor can be connected to Kevin Bacon through his or her film roles. Bacon himself started a charitable organization, SixDegrees.com based on the same small world concept. A nerdier format would be the Erdos number, based on the collaborative distance (co-authors of math papers) between the Hungarian mathematician and any other author. Another application was utilized by LinkedIn, to build up a Reputation system for Business contacts. The visible relationships aids in building trust for recruiters and contractors.

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Self Organizing Model for Large Ticket Portfolio Management

Written by Sonal Sareen Wednesday, 27 February 2008 00:00
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The financial institutes, who lend money to commercial clients, either to buy a new venture, or spin off, or MBO or LBO and other requirements institutions require a great deal of financial analysis and constant monitoring the Clients for there credit worthiness and working under compliance. These lending can be in various formats ABL, CDO, CLO, etc. These sophisticated lending procedure and mechanism in itself are very time consuming and detail oriented leaving portfolio managers with very little time for managing and optimizing portfolios. In today’s scenario, a portfolio manager has to do a lot of manual and tedious work which utilizes a lot of his time spreading financials, calculating ratios, calculating risk, etc. and is left with little time to focus on analyzing them in detail. Here I have tried to develop a model that provides an integrated automated workflow for managing the large ticket portfolio management work.

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Mutual Funds for Rural India

Written by Vineet Patawari and Anubhav Jain, IIM Indore (batch of 2008) Wednesday, 20 February 2008 00:00
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The world’s population can be divided into three basic segments based on the economic pyramid. Majority of them would lie at the bottom of the pyramid with annual income less than $1000. This economic inequality must be overcome to ensure the welfare and happiness of people all around. The need of the hour is to develop innovative products or services for these people.

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Failure of Branding

Written by Aniruddh Mairal, IIM Indore Batch of 2008 Sunday, 10 February 2008 00:00
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There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come- the famous statement by Victor Hugo has been quoted to death in literature in the years bygone. This fact however, does not in any way, dilute the sentiment and logic behind it. One might ask, how this quote is relevant when we look at the present topic under discussion, that of successful branding of commodities the world over, and in India in particular.

Branding as a marketing strategy has seen a significant increase in interest in recent years due to a variety of factors. The increase in competition in just about every product category coupled with the ability for most consumers to quickly and easily seek out and compare all competing offerings via the Internet has put a great deal of pressure on brands to strengthen their positions and continually seek ways to deliver greater value to customers.

Marketing to Below the Bottom of the Pyramid

Written by Abhishek Chandra Sunday, 03 February 2008 00:00
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“To get rich, sell to the poor”
                    -Pradeep Kashyap, Rural Strategy Consultant

742 Million people live in rural India. 53% FMCG and 59% durables sales come from rural India (Source: NCAER, 2002). The estimated size of the rural market stands at Rs. 65,000 crores for FMCG, Rs. 5,000 crores for durables, Rs. 45,000 crores for agri-inputs and Rs. 8,000 crores for 2 wheelers (Source: Francis Kanoi, 2002). These four sectors add up to a staggering total of Rs. 1,23,000 crores. Well, the figures speak for themselves.

The global scenario is not so different. At the core of the argument for targeting the world's poor as a potential market is the sheer size of that market — an estimated 4 billion people constituting two-thirds of the world's population. More importantly, the market will grow to an estimated 6 billion people within 40 years because the bulk of the world's population growth is occurring among the poor. Taken together, nine developing nations — China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa and Thailand — have a combined GDP that is larger, in purchasing power parity, than the combined GDPs of Japan, Germany, France, the UK and Italy.

Here we try to explore the Indian scenario, on what has been done, what are the challenges and what can be done.

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