About five years back, I spent a brief period of time working for a management consulting company. Back then, we had been told that “retail” was “big” – if not in anything else, because it was potentially going to bring a great deal of consulting business to my firm. There was a partner or two [...]
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that travel agents perform a very similar role to investment bankers. In the olden days, not everyone had access to financial markets. In order to buy or sell stocks, one had to go through a brokerage company, who would be paid a hefty commission for [...]
When we talk about the global financial crisis, one question that pops up in lots of people’s heads is about where the money went. Since every trade involves two parties, it is argued that every loser has a corresponding winner, and that most commentary about the global financial crisis (of 2008) doesn’t talk about these [...]
Every time we clean up our house, which is quite frequent I must say, there is a bunch of stuff that we want to throw or give away. Being rational beings, each time we look to maximize the returns we get out of whatever we don’t need, and hence go around looking for people who [...]
A long time back I’d cribbed that in places like Bangalore where not too many people are willing to experiment with food, non-standard cuisines end up being insanely expensive. This was perhaps during my first trip to New York last year, when I’d been amazed to find extremely high quality food at nondescript places for [...]
This time it’s an i-phone/android app. The motivation for this is the heavy advertising in the last few days for Mapmyindia GPS, on hoardings all over Bangalore. Again, I don’t know if this has been implemented before. So this will be built on top of Mapmyindia or any other similar GPS. When you hunt for [...]
Ok here’s a startup idea. Basically a combination of Agoda and Tripadvisor (basically a front-end combining those two backends). I’m looking to book a hotel for a forthcoming holiday. So what I’ve been doing is to search through agoda for hotels available for those days and within my price range, and one by one searching [...]
I’m trying to figure why that is turning out to be a big deal. Given that we have over 5 years of history of “organized retail” in India, and that it hasn’t performed particularly well on a lot of factors, I don’t know how permitting FDI in multi-brand retail is going to make a difference. [...]
Every few months or so a bunch of (mostly) Bangalore-based liberals go up in massive outrage all over the interwebs. On each occasion, the trigger for this would have been a bunch of cops raiding some bar, and imposing a new set of rules. The last time this happened, it was about cops randomly checking [...]
International flights are regulated by a strange agreement, in which at least one end of the flight should be in the country that is the “home” of the airline. For example, Jet Airways runs flights along the Mumbai-Brussels-New York route, but is forbidden from carrying passengers solely from Brussels to New York (that market is [...]
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