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There has been a drastic shift in the business scenario in India in the last two decades. Businesses are forced to tweak their existing strategy in line with the climate change and socio-economic changes.Today's business manager need to understand and appreciate the expectations of all their stakeholder and behave in a socially responsible manner. Concepts like Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Stakeholder Management, Corporate Social Opportunity (CSO) etc, are gaining prominence in the parlance of management practices.Management institutes in India are often criticised for not making much contribution in the field of business sustainability and associated public policy processes. IIM Lucknow, in the year 2011-2012, became the first IIM to establish a dedicated Centre of Excellence for Business Sustainability. Now it has launched a Post Graduate Programme in Sustainable Management: PGP SM. This new programme will be a two year full time residential programme. Admission to the programme will be done based on CAT score, Group Discussion and Personal Interview. A total of 45 seats have been alloteed to the PGP SM. This programme will be conducted at IIM Lucknow's Noida campus in Delhi NCR region. Specifically, the programme will focus on:Cross sector collaborationsChange Management preparationSystemic linkages among environmental, social and economic issuesEnvironmental, Social and Economic Sustainability aspectsCritical perspectives on policy and institutionsPGP SM graduates will be instilled the ability to think in a holistic way about different aspects of sustainability challenges in the business environment using a dynamic systems framework. The programme will provide the students the ability to recognise the interconnectedness of economic performance of businesses coupled with the environment and social systems.
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ASUS on Wednesday (21 January) launched its budget Notebook, the EeeBook X205, in the Indian market. The notebook is priced at Rs 14,999 and comes with a 11.6 inch display. It will be sold exclusively on Flipkart Wednesday onwards. Peter Chang, Regional Head, South Asia & Country Manager, System Business Group, ASUS India said, “We are persistently focusing towards delivering value products with premium feel and functionality and the introduction of EeeBook is testimony of the same fact. Streamlined curves, compact dimensions and a tactile finish; it will complement all your on the go computing requirements. We are elated to bring EeeBook which is lighter than any 11 inch notebook and employs simple yet elegant design.” The ASUS EeeBook X205 is powered by Intel Atom quad core prcoessor and 2 GB of RAM. It runs on Windows 8.1 operating system. The best thing about the notebook is that weighs less than 1 kilogram and is extremely portable. ASUS claims that the EeeBook can last upto 11 hours with a single 100 percent charge. The standby time is a massive 14 days and the EeeBooks backs up the data automatically once the battery drops below 5 percent. The device is designed to give users a smartphone-like computing experience, keeping them socially connected by allowing them to receive emails, updates, notifications,and messages from social media platforms, even with the notebook in standby mode, or with the lid closed.The total storage space on the ASUS EeeBook X205 is 32 GB. ASUS is offering free 500 GB of storage on its own cloud servers for a period of 2 years. Further, 1 TB of storage is available on Microsoft's Onedrive for a period of one year. After the first year, one would need to pay in order to avail the service. Apat from the above menitoned features, the EeeBook X205 boasts of a full-size, one-piece seamless chiclet keyboard with 1.6 mm of key travel for extremely-comfortable typing. Aesthetically, it boasts smooth curves and tactile surfaces and is available in four chic colors: black, white, gold, and red.
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Lenovo on Friday (16 January) introduced its phone for the masses: the Lenovo A6000. The phone is priced at Rs 6,999 and comes with 4G connectivity. Such an aggressive pricing is sure to start an aggressive battle in the Indian mobile market. The Lenovo A6000 supports both LTE bands in India FDD 1800MHz (Band 3) and TDD 2300MHz (Band 40). At the heart of the device is Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor with 64-bit, quad-core CPU each running at 1.2GHz. The phone boasts of a 5 inch HD display and a battery of 2300 mAh. Another premium feature of the phone is the Dolby digital certified dual speakers making it a perfect multimedia companion on the go. The A6000 is running Android KitKat 4.4.4 out of the box. "Lenovo as a leader in smart connected devices is committed to staying ahead of the curve ", said Sudhin Mathur, Director, Smartphones, Lenovo India. "The A6000 is the perfect choice for the youth/millennials who want a trendy phone loaded with future proof features and yet not being heavy on the pocket", he added. "We are happy to partner with Lenovo again for the launch of A6000. The response has been very good to their last 2 phones we partnered on-Vibe Z2 Pro and Vibe X2. With the A6000 we are again providing a leading edge device at a great price", said Amitesh Jha, Vice President, Retail, Flipkart. Like Xiaomi, Lenovo too is aiming to make its mark through the flash sale model. The registrations will start on Flipkart at 6 PM on Thursday (16 January). The total number of units which will be offered to the users has not been disclosed by the company. It is now a three way battle amongst Lenovo, Xiaomi and Micromax Yu. It will be interesting to see how the consumers respond to these new generation handsets.
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Earlier this month Google released a report which stated that 49 per cent of the Android devices run on Android Jelly bean operating system while Android KitKat has made its way to 33.9 per cent of the devices. From the business point of view, both these figures are a good sign for the Mountain View company since these two OS' were released in 2012 and 2013 respectively and the rate of adaptation has been swift. However, the roll out of its latest offering, Android Lollipop 5.0, has been late (mid year roll out was the trend earlier) and on top of that, the early birds have started complaining. Google started rolling out the update in the last week of November and it hit the Indian shores in the first week of December. On receiving the push up notification, there was hardly anyone who didn't install the new OS. But what followed was a complete mayhem. The Android Lollipop update rolled out to the Nexus 4, Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 users is full of bugs. Loss Of Push Notification On Outlook EmailsIn Lollipop, Google has integrated the Outlook Emails with its own Gmail app. This means that the office email can now be accessed through Gmail. In a way this is supposed to be beneficial but the problem is that it is not working as intended. Users are reporting that they are not receiving push notifications. You have to manually go into the app and refresh. Camera App Comes CrashingAnother major issue which the users are facing is the camera app. Once you click multiple images at a single go, the app crashes with the message: sorry, the system had to close the app. Moreover, the image capturing time has increased by 0.5 to 1 second. This means you need to hold the Nexus phone still for more duration of time in order to capture a blur free image. The Battery DrainThe battery uptime has also witnessed a major drop. With a normal usage, the phones lasted well upto 7 - 8 hours earlier but now even 5 hours use is a daunting task! Seems like Google's much hyped Project Volta which replaced Dalvik in order to increase application performance and thus, the battery life has failed miserably. Connectivity IssuesThis issue is build specific and is more critical in Nexus 4 handsets. With the new update, the network reception and the voice quality, both have witnessed a drop. One needs to switch their phone to 2G network if they are in zones where 'Network Handshake' is not smooth. It would be wrong to state that the Android Lollipop 5.0 update has been a complete disaster. Users can now set up guest login and multiple user accounts which mitigates privacy concerns. Secondly, the last used applications are remembered even if you restart your smartphone. This comes in handy when the phone freezes during some activity and a restart is required. The Lollipop 5.1 update is expected in February and rumours are that its primary aim will be to address the above mentioned issues. A two month wait will be frustrating for the users who have already updated their device. If you have n't, wait and watch strategy is the best you can afford!
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Corning on Thursday (11 December) officially introduced its latest offering: Gorilla Glass 4. This glass too has been aimed at what previous generations of Gorilla glass offered: minimising screen breakage from everyday drops. Corning claims that the new glass will provide two times better performance than any existing glass present in the market. Speaking at the launch, Amit Bansal, President, Corning Technologies, India, said, “We see significant potential for Gorilla Glass 4 in India and are frequently speaking to Indian OEMs to understand their requirements. It is one of the fastest growing consumer electronics markets in the world and it therefore makes perfect sense to equip manufactures here with the very best in cover glass technology.” Corning's scientists carried out hundreds of tests by replicating real world scenarios in labs. They dropped devices face down from one meter, such that the cover glass directly contacted a rough surface. After that they examined every case separately in detail. The results, according to Corning, were exemplary. In comparison to other glasses, the Gorilla Glass 4 survived up to 80 per cent of the times. “Corning Gorilla Glass has outperformed competing materials, such as soda-lime glass and other strengthened glass, since it was introduced in 2007, and we’re always innovating to push the limits of what glass can do,” said James Hollis, Director, Sales & Engineering, Gorilla Glass, Specialty Materials. As of now, Samsung Galaxy Alpha is the only phone in India which comes with the Gorilla Glass 4. The thing that should be noted that it is a premium device and not everyone can afford it. It will take the company atleast one more year to make Gorilla Glas 4 available in budget handsets around the world. Another thing worth noting is that even though Gorilla Glass is the latest technology from Corning, it is not 100 per cent shatter-proof. Moreover, you will still need to use a screen-guard on your phone in order to save the display from scratches. Seems like there are miles to go before we get that perfect smartphone which won't make our heart sink whenever we drop it!
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The current decade would most probably be remembered as the age of mobile technology. The world is going digital and the scale of involvement is massive. No company wants to miss out out on the revenue pie. Thus, a new day, a new smartphone app has pretty much become the norm these days. It is like a fashion trend: they come and go; few stay but a product from a big player never goes unnoticed. Facebook Rooms is one such app. Rewind your brains a bit, go back to the days when we only had a dial-up connection and chatting meant the world for us. Yes, the great Yahoo Chat is what I am talking about. Back in those days it was the only way one could connect to unknown people across the world without revealing any identity. But then things changed. Services like Hi5 and Orkut marked the beggining of a virtual social world where you need to have an identity. Until recently, this idea was the sole focus of all messaging and social media companies but Facebook decided to go retro! There got to be some business logic behind this, right? "When you are a company that's more than ten years old and you have been number one for so long, you are in a prime position to make attacks and create headlines. You need to introduce things in order to keep your user base fresh. Facebook's original audience lies in the '20s and '30s age group but the company needs to maintain its relevance for 16-year-olds as well. They got their in-house innovation team for the first time three months ago, so expect more news from Facebook," says Jason Mander, Head Of Trends, GlobalWebIndex. Allo, a free chat application, won rave reviews from US and UK users for being completely ad free and offering secure annonymous networking. This further pushed Facebook to take a reactive approach and launch its own Rooms app on similar lines. With IT driving the Indian growth story, the country has a growing consumer base of text applications with a solid chunk of young population to back the growth where competitors can co-exist profitably. "There is a clear transformation to multi-networking. Apps are going to compete with each other but from the user's perpective, they are not hard wired to one single application," says Jason. Facebook already has a massive user base through two of its premiere offerings: Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Of all the internet users in India who actively use chat applications, Whatsapp is the favourite with 52 per cent users. This is followed by Skype with a market share of 42 per cent. Facebook will definitely use its established platforms to market Rooms and draw young and diverse user base towards it. So what are competitors doing? "In a short span of time since entering the Indian market, we have achieved 30 million registered users milestone.The peer-to-peer messaging is growing at an astounding rate of 23 per cent in India and the numbers are likely to spike further," says Damandeep Soni, Head, India Business, LINE. We have an application called LINE Hidden Chat which promises to delete each message from LINE’s servers after a certain period of time to indicate how privacy and security is one of our foremost concerns. LINE prioritizes user privacy protection and stable service support as top priority, and we continue to offer the most dynamic services that can be trusted anywhere around the world." WeChat, with a market share of 26 per cent Indian internet users, has been using star power and has been running regular campaigns since a long time. This has enabled it to scale up its user base with a massive increase of 2364 per cent from Q3 2013 to Q3, 2014. They already have chat rooms and intend to add more features and functionality to it. It is clear that Facebook Rooms is an experiment from the social media giant. The app, in its present form, has limited functionality. Users have reported that it is difficult to locate a room (one can name a room of his/her choice). An anonymous chat application always comes with security concerns and the app has already found an audience with evil minds. The established players are combat ready and it won't be easy for this new kid to carve a place for itself. On the brighter side, Rooms might still be able to recreate that old charm of anonymous chat rooms. After all, seldom does any one return empty handed from the land called India!
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The global spelling competition, WCF Cast-a-Spell, was conducted on 25 November this year across various locations around the globe. Children were given word banks to memorize and WCF volunteers were mentoring them to memorize words through innovative ways. A total of 36 schools comprising of 26,470 students participated, making it a first-of-its-kind competition conducted by any CSR. “Cast-a-Spell is a first-of-its-kind global spelling competition conducted by the WNS Cares Foundation using a digital platform, among schools teaching lesser-privileged children. WCF’s mission is to ‘Educate, Empower and Enrich’ lesser-privileged children and youth through various innovative learning programs. Cast-a-Spell engaged more than 26,000 children across six countries and contributed to each child learning more than 200 words for the contest. It was the first global platform for the children that built tremendous confidence in each one of them. Watching kids from so many countries on a video wall at the grand finale was a delightful experience,” said Keshav R. Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS. Tejaswini Reddy, St. George School Bengaluru, India, was the winner in the age group of 6-9 years. Nikhil Patil, Dr Shalinitai Borse School, Nashik, India, won in the age group of 10-12 years while Sisipho Tukushe, Yomelela School, Cape Town, South Africa, secured first position in the age group of 13-15 years. Every winner was given 100 USD and their school was given an encyclopedia.
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Global Web Index (GWI), on of the world’s largest multi-market research company specialising in online consumer behaviour, recently conducted a massive study relating to the mobile messaging and use of social media across the globe. The study, covering 32 markets and representing 90 per cent of the global internet audience, unveiled that conversations are now moving from traditional social networks towards mobile networking. The mobile messaging app audience continues to show a steady growth, with 46 per cent in the APAC region using these services. On the other hand, interaction on social networking sites is on a decline. “Mobile messaging tools have experienced substantial growth during this recent period, particularly amongst the younger generation. Social networks are now being treated more passively, meaning the number of people messaging friends on social networks is now declining. People see mobile messaging apps as an efficient way to communicate. We are expecting the number of mobile messaging users to continue to grow in the coming quarters,” stated Jason Mander, Head of Trends, GlobalWebIndex. According to GWI, the top reasons for this surge in usage is the free access, low data rates and the instant delivery of the messages via messaging/text apps. The Indian ScenarioIn India there has been a 113 per cent increase in the number of people utilizing mobile messaging tools since 2013. According to GWI’s study, smartphones are vital to the internet users in India, where 79 per cent of the online population own a smartphone. Furthermore, users of mobile messengers are young, affluent and highly active online. In Q3 2014, 83 per cent of online Indians accessed the internet via a mobile, resulting in the increased popularity of mobile messaging apps. Top mobile messaging apps in India include WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger. Among these, WeChat has experienced significant growth with an active user base increase of 2364 per cent in India, and 156 per cent globally, between Q1 2013 to Q3 2014. Even though WhatsApp currently remains the top messaging app in India, WeChat has quickly become a dominant messaging app globally, used by nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of the world’s Internet users, along with an impressive 39 per cent users within the APAC region actively using the app.
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The question of regulation of colleges has always been a bone of contention between private universities and the regulatory authorities. Most regulators are seen as villains by the institutes, but students see them as heroes. The issue of regulation was thoroughly discussed at the Businessworld | BW India's Best B-Schools event. R.C. Natarajan, director of T.A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), spoke against any kind of regulation in B-Schools. According to him, the worst and most regulated sector today in India is education. He cited the example of an institute set up by some American B-Schools. They simply refused to comply with any conditions and come under the scrutiny of Indian laws. This prompted the Indian government to blacklist the institution. Still, that institute's one-year diploma is considered equivalent to a two-year course by many recruiters. "The more you comply, the more are you regulated," Natarajan said. "In education world, different set of regulations are present for the self-supported institutions and the government funded. When it comes to giving grants in the areas of development, maintenance and research, the private institutes should be supported by the government. I am okay with the idea of regulation without bias," said Harivansh Chaturvedi, director of Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH). "There is no point in threatening the private institutes under the UGC act. In certain cases, private institutes have a better faculty than the IIMs and pay them better in order to retain them. Thus, the fee regulation should be left to the market," he added. "Certain set of policies and certain set of people who are dealing with AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) have somehow abused the process due to which there is a bit of angst about the whole thing. One of the big issues we need to deal with is how much of regulation is aiding the student to take that leap towards employability and skill building and how much of regulation is impeding the institutions in providing the right kind of education that is needed to succeed in the modern world," said Peri Maheshwer, chairman of Pathfinder Publishing India Pvt. Ltd.
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Microsoft Devices on Wednesday (01 October) launched the recently unveiled Lumia 830 and Lumia 730 running the latest Windows Phone 8.1 operating system. The audience was in for a surprise as the company also announced the Lumia 930 at the event. "We recognised the potential of the affordable smartphone segment and brought some extremely successful products to the market including the Lumia 520, 525 and the more recent Lumia 630 and Lumia 530. Building on our momentum in this space, today we introduce three new devices, Lumia 930, 830 and Lumia 730, which we believe will help us consolidate our position in the mid priced smartphone market in India," said Ajey Mehta, Managing Director, Nokia India Sales Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of Microsoft Mobiles Oy. Let's take a quick look at the specs now. Lumia 730It is a dual SIM device with a 4.7 HD display. The phone comes with 8 GB internal memory and 1 GB of RAM. Lumia 730 boasts of a 6.7 MP Carl Zeiss camera on the back and a front facing 5 MP camera for those exquisite selfies! Microsoft has put in a 2200 mAh battery under the hood of the phone and it will cost you Rs 15,299. Lumia 830This is a 5 inch offering which sports a 5 inch HD display. The amount of RAM is same as the Lumia 730 but the internal memory on-board is 16 GB. The camera has been pumped up too: the primary is a 10 MP Carl Zeiss affiar and the secondary a 0.9 MP one which can record HD videos. Microsoft has priced this phone at Rs 28,799. Lumia 930This is a beautifully crafted device and the best thing about this smartphone is the camers. Lumia 930 has a 20MP PureView camera and advanced Rich Recording, ensuring a flawless video and imaging experience with Living Images and optical image stabilization. Apart from the camera, the phone features a FULL HD 5 inch display and a solid 2 GB of RAM. Lumia 930 will be available in India starting October 15, 2014, at Rs 38,649. Quite a hefty price for the specs on offer! Microsoft Got More To OfferAt the event, Microsoft also announced the Denim update for its Lumia series. It features live folders, SMS merge, forwarding and mobile web site improvements in IE. Lumia Denim will be available on both Lumia 830 and Lumia 730 at sales start while it will roll out as an over-the-air update to all the other Lumia smartphones in Q4, 2014.
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