Religious Inc

Marketing deals with playing with consumers' emotions and compelling them to buy the product. If the product is a hit and the demand is greater than supply then the price gouging starts. Now look at this article

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New Delhi: Protests continue in Jammu and Katra for the second day against the decision to charge an entry fee for quick darshans at the Vaishno Devi shrine. The decision to organise paid darshans was taken by the Vaishno Devi Shrine Board on Sunday. Now a traditional mata ki aarti can be organised inside the sanctum sanctorum at Rs 1000. And those who are unwilling to wait in long queue can enter the shrine by paying an entry fee of Rs 500 or Rs 200. This reduces the darshan time by over 50 to 70 per cent.

The critics point out that this would help the affluent class. Facing flak over its decision to introduce paid darshans, the Vaishno Devi Shrine Board stoutly defended its move saying that the new facility was meant for those people who had little time due to their hectic schedules and wanted to complete the pilgrimage at the earliest, a Shrine Board official said.

"The facility is like a tatkal service for devotees who have tight schedules and are keen to offer prayers at the earliest," M K Dwivedi, Additional Chief Executive Officer, told PTI. The facility, introduced on June one, will be limited to 1000 pilgrims per day though 25,000 to 30,000 devotees arrive daily to offer prayers.
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Lately some people have started viewing religion and God as commercial ventures and are playing with emotions and started raking in the moolah. If people refuse to pay and stop going over there, naturally the demand falls down triggering the lowering and abolishment of any fee. Its high time that people who are religious get to know the fact that God is omni present and can be accessible near you :D

Lack of Business Sense

Just like everyone needs common sense to make a sane decision...a business person must make business sense, a lack of this factor leads to revenue below the maximum possible value. The reason is because of this article...

The prestigious Lahari Recording Company with impressive track record in the last three decades in the audio industry has taken a policy decision. The outside singers should be only 20 percent for the Kannada film audio albums which the Company comes forward to take the rights. The 80 percent of local singers should be there says Mr Thulsiram Naidu alias Velu of Lahari Recording Company. He agrees that the non Kannada singers have flawed in the pronunciation. This should not continue further. The music director and producer should take care of it. The demand of more money for audio film songs is only when good tunes are churned out informed Velu.On the piracy eating away the fruits of hard work Velu said the new government that is coming up in the state would be given a month time to introduce the Anti Goonda Act to tackle the piracy. In case the government does not fulfill the demand we are forced to come to streets he says to fight piracy. We are not asking any subsidy but only enforcement of right law added Velu.

First thing is that this guy doesnt have that business sense at all and as always the fate is a villain which puts these type people on the top. He has no clue of increasing his user base and fetching that extra revenue. If at all these players in audio industry is to keep piracy out & increasing user base and revenue is to follow apple's itune format of selling each song at a price with a low margin, this is the only way they can fight piracy. The trick is to keep the cost so low that the prices are dirt cheap which acts as barriers to pirates. One more thing is that not all songs in an audio CD are a hit, so why not price the hit ones at a premium and keep other songs low, so if someone buys the entire bundle then its attractively priced. Its high time that these audio companies vanish leaving the space for someone with "business sense"

open-flash-chart

Ruby is getting more slicker and popular. One such example is flash + Ruby combo. I was stunned to see such rich colors and style graphs....I want to thank John Glazebrook for this great offering. So take a minute and have a look at the demo below

Click here to view the Demo

AMD's move will reduce prices?

AMD is taking a gamble by trying to move up the market in grabbing the major share in the sluggish PC market. AMD's USP is Lower price + Performance against Intel's high priced and brand equity. The PC market is on the saturation curve and its high time some one comes and shake up the curve to get it move up slowly. AMD going in for its own branded PC may be the right way to start penetrating the market and getting noticed. AMD has a great product, has the attractive pricing...its promotion and distribution seems to be the only problem. The only way to shake up the market is to find an alternative operating system and move away from microsoft as each microsoft product adds up a fortune on those systems. But getting a new OS off means fighting against the network externalities enjoyed by microsoft. AMD has solved one part of the problem by squeezing in the price and bringing it a tad down. I had come across one service where the operating system was a stripped down one and all those additional applications were hosted on a remote server and was into some sort of pay per use. I still dont understand why all these damn desktops and laptops come loaded with so many applications which suck up the Ram. The only way to reduce money and make these price elastic consumer turn heads is to make computers similar to TVs and go in for revenue in opening up various e-commerce fronts like movie downloads, internet shopping et al. Thats the only way any price penetrator can take the PC market by storm. It must be similar to mobile phones thing ... give the set at a subsidy and make money on subscriptions in such a way that the subsidy is taken care of and the profit margin is on par with the company's objective. Its high time these computer manufacturers get a way to project computers as a simple but great gadget which is affordable. Atlast if only those people think like me :D

E-ticket

E-tickets are seen as convenience and is seen as a saver from the issuer viewpoint. But i see it as a pain , the airline company or the travel agency sends out a simple email that contains the e-ticket with details and this inexpensive way helps them squeeze on dollars and cents which is very much needed in this existing competitive domain. But look this by getting into the shoes of the consumer. Its a PAIN when you need to run around looking for a computer connected to the printer. Look at the cost involved ... cost of paper + cost of cartridge ink + cost of electricity + cost of time involved in being a computer literate. if you dont have access to a computer .. you may need to head out to kinkos and print it out. Now add the gasoline cost to it :D

But wont it be good if there is some sort of vending machine near the airport where you just go there and enter your PNR number and swipe your credit card and Voilà .....you get a kind of strip generated with the details as in ATM machine. There will be a transaction cost of $2 per e-ticket which solves everything. Now it would be interesting to see if anyone from the airline or travel agency read this and implement this one...may be move one more step and hire me :D

Are Humans Products too?

I have the Marketing exam tomorrow and i was going through the product life cycle and was wondering if humans are treated as objects? Just a primer.... A product life cycle begins in the introductory stage where its just released and various advertisements, ,promotions, smart distribution is performed to push the product onto its growth phase. After a while, the product moves towards its maturity stage and finally on decline where all sorts of support systems are gradually pulled out...eventually letting the product line or product model to die. Now carefully evaluate what happens to humans? I can see that it follow a typical classic theoretical theory behind product life cycle.

When one is born, there is so much planning and excitement and slowly you start to plan and prepare yourself to market to the school and to the society to accept you into its fold. You need to prove that you have a competitive advantage and move on with the life, then learn the tricks of trade and market yourself to find a job, to find a bride, to stay on "successful" path...as you reach the maturity level, panic buttons are pushed around to ensure that you dont get to rot in your decline phase. As the decline occurs you are retired off and left to be on the mercy of pension or at the mercy of your kids or dear ones. Now the kids evaluate you and if they think that you are a liability they dont hesitate to act as management in eliminating the product...eliminating as in packing you off to old age homes or abandoned.

What a shame that humans are visualized as products and commodities...now this puts an interesting question as to whether we are the resulting failures of our own smart strategies? I just dont understand as to why aging people become liabilities? why arent they given any attention, what happens to all their life experiences and their intelligence? is it all about money? For a moment i am scared of seeing my own fate in few years soon :D

My New App

I dont expect my work to be anything path breaking or expect to be a millionaire, its just a small tool to help universities and small business people to save on printer cartridges. Any small save translates to huge savings across the planet and helps reduce the carbon footprint. Anyways here is the summary....

Click on this to view the working

Opportunity/Problem Identification:
When you try to print out a webpage, the main problem is you need to print out those cartridge guzzling banners and images. You can print if you need it but what if you dont need those? Cut pasting the section you need into a word is another crap. Why does anyone want to do that extra stuff? why waste productive time in doing that extra work? This motivated me to look for ways to look for ways to print what one needs.

Features:
A simple toolbar that sits and helps you select what you want in a page and remove all the rest without disturbing the page layout.

Some more stuff to code and also hoping to build something that can help someone spread out the content by positioning them where they want to and then printing it out. Any reaction to this application? :D .... feel free to comment