Shadow that is cast on technology
It has been quite a journey for all of us in the startup so far. And figure what, we seem to have reached a milestone. Although Axis Bank has been trying desperately to demonstrate themselves as a bank that is very much capable of taking on the likes of ICICI when it comes to technology and customer service, in reality, it is very difficult for a large bank as Axis especially with long tradition, to break out of regular habits. Since ICICI started out as a bank that would culturally embrace technology and use that as a key differentiator to capture the market, they made extremely good progress. It is an altogether different story as to why ICICI is disliked by borrowers today. People should just think about those days when they had to wait for god knows how long in the banks to meet with those so called executives who would process their home loans. It was ICICI that transformed the picture totally by way of redefining customer service. Customers can be the King, but after all they have to pay for one thing or another. Even today, a typical home loan processing would take excruciatingly long time with the so called transparent(?) public sector bank.
Coming back to the topic of Axis Bank, they are one such bank which is not a public sector bank technically, but one with such an outlook. When it comes to home loans, Axis is one of the banks with such a wider geographical coverage and with so much cash in hand. BankBazaar.com is a financial portal doing wonders in the loan market by providing real time quotes. This apparently could be done by integrating with banks to an extent and automating that part of the operations which decides on the interest rate for a particular profile. Now what does it take to provide more options to the customers? Well, if it is possible to integrate with Bank X, then it should be quite trivial to integrate with Bank Y. Apparently, that is not really easy with banks like Axis. When it comes to breaking traditions, everyone becomes suspicious. And when it is not a trusted player with track record who is insisting on adopting different culture, it is only natural to become defensive and play devil’s advocate. Finally Axis is an option that is available on BankBazaar.com if you are looking for home loans. Now that Axis has broken the tradition, other such banks in the category of Axis would want unshackle themselves as well. And it is hard not to think what the reaction of public sector banks would be like, for such a proposal. On a similar note, IRCTC has been exceptional and redefined train reservations. But it is not difficult to imagine how much hardship Cleartrip.com would have undergone to persuade IRCTC to build APIs. It is quite the same case everywhere. A complete cultural shift is happening right now. Today we are solving the problem of technological adoption by traditional service providers. This silent revolution can only be delayed by those who do not understand the potential of technology. The inevitable truth is that technology redefines customer service and that is going to be crucial for any business to survive.
Google searchmasters conference for indian webmasters
Google.com recently had organized the SearchMasters Conference targeted towards webmasters. As expected, the list of speakers had included some of the well known names in the industry. The group of audience also deserves a mention here. It included top brass in the Indian blogosphere, seo experts from across the country, members from the press and engineers like myself.
The event started off with a brilliant talk from Adam Lasnik. His photography skills deserve a special mention. I really loved the picture of lemur. Adam Lasnik had himself been webmaster helping out some fortune 500 companies in the past. With such a vast experience in the field, he was one of those with answers to any question, ofcourse related to seo 
. This engaging session was pretty much like a warm-up, touching upon the seo best practices. It was rehash of what has already been put up in their recent seo starter guide.
From a brilliant start, the conference then drifted onto other simple aspects of seo. The problem was that the conference then never caught on and remained to be an introductory talk on various google products for webmasters. Just before the lunch was the much awaited “site clinic” session in which a couple of sites were reviewed on the spot by Adam Lasnik and his team. The sites inspected were “redbus.in” and “www.tarladalal.com”. redbus.in is quite well built site with very less to complain about. On the other hand, tarladalal.com was built by kitchen experts. It was primarily a web1.0 site on the migration path, mentioned the owner of this site. This site had lots of problems and on that very day it happened to be a victim of some nasty hacking with links to viagra selling sites.
Post lunch, the conference pretty much became tutorial sessions. Google custom search is conceptually a good product with great APIs built around it. As such, there is not much to say about the product. Rajat Mukherjee of custom search team was a very good presenter. But unfortunately Google custom search is not a product that one can talk about for an hour. Some of the capabilities of google custom search are abilities to choose a subset of web, to override results for certain keywords, to tag results with label. They are quite useful but true excitement lies in innovative usage of their APIs.
This was followed by a subdued session of tutorial on building mobile applications. The talker was a graduate from IIT Delhi and perhaps the guy leading the team that build Orkut’s mobile version. But he needs to learn a great deal of things on how to be a good speaker. It was an extremely boring session with most of the audience compensating for the loss of sleep due to early flight that morning. The essence of the talk is that building a mobile application needs a lot of care and knowledge as it is drastically different from building a web application. At a time, when mobile penetration is extremely good in a huge country like India, innovative mobile applications would be an easy winner for entrepreneurs.
The last session was about google analytics and google site optimizer, presented by Deepak Kumar. This again turned to be a showcase of google analytics. No great wisdom or knowledge about analytics was offered to the audience. Instead the presenter displayed us all screenshots of various simple reports. When the time was to move on to Advanced Segments, Custom reporting and other Enterprise Features like Motion Charts, the presenter was quite convinced that most of the audience had no clues about them. Surprisingly for me, that turned out to be true. Of course, google has the data on how many users create custom reports or motion charts. Now I know why there are so many SEO firms out there in the market. Basically, no one has the idea or knowledge to find those reports that reveal the true performance of their sites. My self-opinionated thoughts apart, let me just reiterate one point. Motion charts allow you to visualize your data in five dimensions which really means a lot and helps in decision making much easier and faster. For a good hang of site optimizer, there are merely two options. The first option is to learn statistics and combinatorics to do things all by yourself. The second option is to use google website optimizer effectively and let all the nasty work be done by google for you. Of course, a true genius can verify google’s results.
Most of the QA were very site specific and that was quite irritating. Even the google team members were quite uncomfortable as they had to walk a thin rope in that, they don’t accidentally slip off some of their key parameters that would help rank sites.
For the fun part, here is my suggestion for all those seeking wisdom on seo. Google has an army of guys in search quality team. Date them and get them drunk. Then you can possibly get some useful information from them. And do remember, if their boss finds it out, you will have had it. He was formerly a fighter pilot 
so keep in mind that the punishment will be extremely severe. Of course, I am sure you wont mix up business with personal affairs.
So here it is, the event was marketing and showcasing of google products. Happier advertisers means happier google. That was why I got the invitation in the first place. Keeping in mind all the best practices, focus mainly on the customers. If you game the system today, you will potentially jeopardise your tomorrow. And to hell with all those seo firms, use them only if you find them cheaper and better than your in house experts.
Lara’s theme
Good soothing music is a fantastic chill pill. It is not daily that one comes across a soul stealing melody. One such fabulous piece of composition is Lara’s theme from the movie Doctor Zhivago. It was composed by Maurice Jarre. The director must have been blessed with good ears for music. He sprinkled this musical cue all over the movie so much that some would even call it superfluous. Nonetheless, this marvellous composition got what it really deserved. It became an instant hit and was acclaimed throughout the world. Watch the youtube video featuring this.
Grails – sending email using ant for google hosted apps
The following entry pretty much covers the basic case for sending email using gmail smtp server. If you needed to send with an attachment you can use the attachments closure as mentioned below.
new AntBuilder().mail(
mailHost : CH.config.mail.host,
mailPort : CH.config.mail.port,
ssl : CH.config.mail.ssl,
user : CH.config.mail.user,
password : CH.config.mail.password,
subject : "Daily report"
) {
from(address:"${fromName} ")
to(address:to)
message(mimetype : "text/html", "Daily report")
attachments() {
fileset(dir:'.'){
include(name:'hello.csv')
}
}
}
Customer focus
Check out Amazon.com’s performance. Now, thats where you end up if you have strong customer focus. Amazon’s Q4 numbers were stunning compared to those of its counterparts. So much has been said and read about the economic problems in the US. And in the midst of such a mess, it is indeed a tremendous feat of achievement for Amazon. Rationality is the only weapon to fight the inherent greedy nature of human being.
Disclaimer: Of course, I do own a little bit of Amazon’s stock!
Startups and daily operations
Life is mostly unjust in that when faced with obstacles normal human beings often tend to make wrong decisions unless the individual has the right experience to make the right decision. Very recently, we had discussions on the operations process in our startup. The opinions shared below hold true only for web startups. Also, pardon me for the reference to Amazon.com (thats where I used to work for).
It is a usual practice in Amazon.com to have engineers as oncall (on rotation basis) who would be the first person to respond to any issues that arise in the running systems. Typically, there are two persons labelled as primary and secondary who are responsible for resolving these issues. Also, Amazon.com measures the severity of issues depending on the impact on revenues (which is derived from customer impact).
Now, coming to the reality, ‘operations’ is something that literally kills engineers. It would be the last thing that any engineer would want to do, resolving tickets. It is okay for a big company like Amazon.com to have engineers dedicated for operations since they have large pool to resources to utilize from.
In the context of startups, where the business is always resource crunched, it is extremely important to ensure that the system is built with much greater quality right upfront. With a rough estimate of 4 engineers in a typical startup, it doesn’t make sense to dedicate two resources to fix operational issues. And typically fixes for the operational issues would be patches or quick fixes, which is not really the smartest way to have avoided that issue in the first place. And if there are too many issues in the system that you need pagers and trouble ticket systems to manage issues, then perhaps we are talking about an established big company or a bunch of morons trying their hands on programming.
And moreover, startups typically would have systems that do not demand a lot of resources leading to halts. The prime differentiator for any web startup is coming up with strikingly innovative features that benefits the end user. For companies like Amazon.com or Google.com, a defaced page is a very serious issue that pertains to their reputation. Whereas, a defaced page for a startup is completely fine and the seriousness is merely a parameter of the standards set by the developers of that startup. As long as the business is unaffected, minor hitches should never be considered serious enough to buy a trouble ticket system.
In summary, when revenues and reputation are not at stake, it is better to focus on improving those rather than wasting time in daily operations with trouble ticket systems.
Saying with proud “I am a software engineer”
The mood created by Saarang (the cultural festival of IIT-Madras) is so enthralling that people forget what IIT stands for. Wandering about the campus, I chanced upon an opportunity to meet a couple of guys who are supposedly musicians. It was time for introductions and our common friend helped us with introductions. And when the time came for us throw some light on our respective occupations, I felt a little uncomfortable mentioning that I am a software engineer. I felt very bad for becoming self-aware of the fact that the profession as such has been diluted by a sudden surge in the employment opportunities created by the IT sector in India. A course in a popular computer center and you walk-in with a job from some software company. Of course, those days are gone. But the impression created would last a longer time. Also, software engineers are not very popular among the general public (save the situation when they search for brides or bridegrooms) the reason being the dwellings of a typical software engineer turn out to be hateful because of that extra disposable cash he earns(supposedly). It has been a common practice to blame these unfortunates for inflation and what not. And above all, for a layman, there is just no difference between an IIT graduate and course completer at a local computer institute both working as a software engineer.
Considering all these, I was pushed to introduce my profession in a rather cryptic way which they never understood it. For clarity sake (heaven’s sake), I finally told them I am a software engineer. And I got the prompt reply, “90 in 100 tell us the same thing”. Ah what a coincidence. The last thing I wanted was to be stamped by the general public as a stereotypical one. But then, pondering deeply, one would also find it interesting to note that, this same society envies the so called software engineers. That disposable income gives us an extra edge and we the software engineers can walk our heads held high. Atleast higher than those belonging to the non-software group. All those glitzy parties, shining technology parks, pickup and dropdown service and above all those beautiful babes dressed in unimaginably fashionable clothes, you have just walked into a software company.
If you cut the crap, the life of a software engineer is above par. And the life of a brilliant software engineer is much better. Well if you think otherwise, you have no idea!
And for heaven’s sake, atleast when you are inside IIT campus, show the courtesy to respect engineers.
Revenge of the nerds
Web 2.0 – the so called technological achievement of the early part of this century brought up a significantly noticeable perceptual improvements to the world wide web. It is not without drawbacks and of course, I put the word perceptual there intentionally. With this technology under the belt, wordpress did an amazing job of migrating(upgrading!? perhaps it was downgrading) their admin console to web 2.0. And incidentally, that new admin page had tonnes of Javascript references. In a country like India where broadband is still narrowband and also super expensive, the console took about 2 minutes to come up. I gave up blogging for sometime.
This is my first blog post from a desktop blogging software called “Drivel” (had to hunt around to find one running on linux). I don’t think this post will turn out pretty bad. If its just possible to get the message without all those glitzy formatting gimmicks, why bother to fiddle with Rich text editor that takes forever to load.
Should ISRO pay more than NASA?
Hello,
The below posted blog is actually a slightly edited version of comment posted by me for the post in the blog coffeewithsundar.com for the post http://coffeewithsundar.com/interesting-comment-from-senthil-kumar/
My comments
It is quite an interesting perspective from Mr. Senthil. The answer to such confusion lies in the theory behind the very concept of Capitalism and Communism. In my view, Socialism is a middle-ground to these. Its a very fine balance between greed and irrational emotion towards one country(read “extreme patriotism”).
But in my humble opinion, none of the great things are built with the sole aim of altruism. Atleast, not most. I may be wrong. You could definitely come up with a number of living and non-living great minds to refute my understanding. But you see, thats not my point. Chandrayaan was not built primarily to increase the prestige of our country. It is justified such a monstrous budget (considering the indian scenario) based on the acceptance of potential long term benefits which could possibly never turn to fruition. And its a feather in the cap to showcase Indian talent for the multi billion dollar satellite launch industry of which India is pretty much a pioneer now.
So my friend, one should always care about money. It is the reason the entire world is functioning. It is the reason you are guaranteed your next day’s bread. One must be aware that if greed takes over ethics, then there is a good chance we would come to a standstill. Even then, it is not the money that led you to this. It is the greed of few men. An example for such a thing is the present scenario of the US.
In summary, need should always keep greed in check. ISRO would pay more than NASA if they need good talent. And such good talent must be justified on all grounds. What is the use of great minds, if all that they have to grapple with are red-tapism and bureaucracy?
There are much more complicated issues than money although I completely agree that money is also part of the issues. Every man lives to be happy. Either happiness is felt with a good bank balance or a passionate achievement in work, the hiring company must keep their employees happy for their own sake.
So more than patriotism, if I were the one to set preferences for the aspirants applying for ISRO, interest in science and academic achievements would be given more weightage even irrespective of nationality. All I am saying is that ISRO should be willing to pay more, just for the reason NASA pays their employees handsomely.
There are much more ways to demonstrate patriotism. Refusing to pay bribe, reporting corrupt officials to vigilance, protesting against bad roads, solving the traffic issues, ways to improve literacy, ways to improve employment, paying taxes properly are some of the ways I could think from the top of my head to show true patriotism. If you think none of them are your concerns, perhaps voicing against greed but great talents is the least of a nation’s concern.
So the question is this, if NASA thinks those minds are worth so much and are able to justify the same, then why does ISRO think that they are worth peanuts (if they are really paying peanuts)? There must be something fundamentally missing here. Either the scope of ISRO is much less, if they are paying their employees less or if they deliberately want to pay low, perhaps they dont deserve such people. I donot think either of them are reasons. An entire revamp of attitude is required and government should increase research spending by multiple folds.
My few cents.
Whatever happened to NBFCs
NBFCs are an integral part of economy that provides easier access to credit and hence help in attaining aggressive growth. But that also makes them vulnerable as any slowdown in the economy hits them hard first. Let us try to analyse the business sense of these NBFCs and arrive at the scenario of Indian NBFCs.
In this post, I have tried to make an analysis of Indian NBFCs yesterday, today and tomorrow.
NBFC – a brief introduction
NBFC stands for Non Banking Financial Company. These are money lending institutions that are much more agile than traditional banks. They are agile in the sense that the credit line extended is much deeper and aggressive than normal banks. Other advantages of NBFCs are that they are extremely quick at processing and accomodate riskier profiles in their portfolio. And since they take more risks, they get their cushion in the form of higher interest rates. Yes, they charge higher interest rates than what normally banks charge. This also has to be viewed in the context that the acquisition cost of funds for NBFCs come at a higher cost than banks, the details of which we will explore further below.
Lending and Credit
Before delving deep into the subject of NBFCs, it is important to understand how credit extension and growth of a country are interlinked. Most of the business operations are financed by lending institutions. Banks form a major chunk of providing funds to these companies. This is evident from the fact that more than 50% of credit portfolio of State Bank of India is through corporate lending. These funds are required to meet varied requirements like day-to-day operations, capital expansion, business consolidation, etc. For most of the small and medium sized businesses, access to aggressive credit from banks is unthinkable. These businesses usually turn to such non-banking finance companies for gaining access to credit. More credits to businesses means more growth when things go fine. Thus along with growth numbers of these companies, the GDP index also climbs up. But if the going gets tough, then defaults go on the rise. This is when the risks taken by these NBFCs start showing its naked face. As the defaults rise, to stay on the NBFCs naturally would tighten the valves and rework their risk model to flush out riskier profiles. Access to credits become tougher and businesses shutdown leading to job cuts. Hence the production comes down and consequently the GDP numbers take a hit. It is not as straight-forward as explained here but I have tried to provide a simple explanation of what happens in large scale.
List of popular NBFCs in India
- Shriram City Union Finance
- Sundaram Finance
- AIG Consumer Finance
- Reliance Consumer Finance
- Citi Financial
- DBS Cholamandalam Consumer Finance
- Indiabulls Financial Services
- and others
NBFCs Yesterday
For the past five years, the indian economy was promising on all aspects and with money from foreign investors pouring in, large pool of investments were created through mutual funds. These mutual funds have been the primary source of funds for NBFCs. As there was excessive inflow of money, borrowing from mutual funds was cheaper then. A bunch of above mentioned NBFCs mushroomed during this period to ride on such a promising opportunity. With indian banks remaining as conservative as ever (partly due to government regulations), and natural greed of mutual funds, NBFCs were nothing less than celebrating. Many other small NBFCs have also been started within a short span of five years. An Increasing number of microfinance institutions (MFIs) were also seeking non-banking finance company (NBFC) status from RBI to get wide access to funding, including bank finance. As the weather was fine and the government was poised to attain aggressive GDP growth, nothing could have stopped these NBFCs from posting tremendous growth. NBFCs have been accounting for as much as 30% of the retail lending sector where the only other aggressive lender among banks is ICICI Bank. Well, the world was about to receive one of the greatest shocks of this century that would threaten the world economy to bring it to a grinding halt.
NBFCs today
As of the time I am writing this article, most of the NBFCs that have mushroomed during the last five years have either shutdown their shops or have stopped providing credit for the time being. Yes, they have come to a stand-still. Why did this happen all of a sudden? The reason is very simple. All these NBFCs have been relying on Mutual Funds to provide them with access to capital. But as the global economy was facing turmoil, mutual funds were profusely bleeding under redemption pressure. With capital drying up and banks refusing to lend any money at all to these institutions, NBFCs could no longer stay afloat. Atleast, these institutions no longer provide any unsecured loans like personal loans and they dont have the money to provide home loans.
NBFCs tomorrow
As it is, the indian situation is not so bad. Tough regulations and inherent conservativeness have come as a blessing in disguise. Except for the exposure of ICICI Bank, all the other banks were pretty much safe from the global turmoil. Although the stock markets bled and the government reduced the GDP growth forecast, India is in a comfortable zone. RBIs recent moves aimed towards increased liquidity in the economy ahs more than made up for the void created by withdrawing FIIs. This is an extremely valuable learning for the Indian economy as to what should be the dependence on FII money. RBI has not just provided liquidity in the system by releasing funds of banks, it also has opened up gates for NBFCs. RBI has allocated nearly 40000 crores that can be borrowed by NBFCs. This is only a fraction of what NBFCs were accounting for the sector, that is nearly 30%. In just plain numbers, NBFCs non-deposit taking is Rs 3,80,000 crores. Thus its not a long term solution provided by RBI, but a short term measure that is just enough to keep the NBFCs afloat.
In the long term, as said by CRISIL, these institutions would have to change their business model with strong focus on product innovation and a move towards the originate-and-sell model.
Other interesting articles that covers the state of affairs of NBFCs in India
