Top 10 brands of India

Here is the list of top brands of the second most populous and one of the largest economy in the world. India has many world renowned brands and has a strong presence in western countries too but this list rates the brands on its novelty, importance and obviously quality and respect among the Indian customers.

1. Amul

Amul is more than just a milk brand to the Indians. Its advertising campaign has always represented the common man's point of view on the serious national issues with a sense of beautiful humour. Amul has been ranked as the best brand from India.

Owned and marketed by Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Amul has beaten all other Indian brands to notch the 89th position in a 'Top 1000 Brands of Asia' survey, conducted by Campaign magazine.

The July issue of Campaign, published from Hong Kong and Singapore, ranked Amul the number one among Indian brands.

The mascot of the brand is a cute little girl often referred to as "amul baby".

2.  Kingfisher Airlines

Owned by the flamboyant Indian billionaire, Vijay Mallya, Kingfisher is the leading Indian Airlines having presence in both low cost and premium services.

Kingfisher started its operation in May 2005 and has been ranked 5 star Airline by the independent consultancy research firm.

3. Big Bazaar

Launched in 2001, Big Bazaar started off with four stores in Calcutta, Indore, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

In a span of ten years, there are 148 Big Bazaar stores in 80 cities and towns across India.

Big Bazaar offers a wide range of merchandise including fashion and apparels, food products, general merchandise, furniture, electronics and books.

Big Bazaar is part of Future Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pantaloon Retail India Limited.

4. ICICI Bank

India's largest private sector bank having total assets of nearly $91 billlion is one of the most respected companies of India.

Even during the economic recession, ICICI bank was among the only few banks in the entire world which got least affected and barely lost their any client.

5. State Bank of India

The State Bank of India is the largest Indian banking and financial services company (by turnover and total assets) with its headquarters in Mumbai.

The bank traces its ancestry to British India, through the Imperial Bank of India, to the founding in 1806 of the Bank of Calcutta, making it the oldest commercial bank in the Indian Subcontinent.

6. Airtel

Bharti Airtel operates in 19 countries across South Asia, Africa and the Channel Islands. It operates a GSM network in all countries, providing 2G or 3G services.

Airtel is the fifth largest telecom operator in the world with over 207.8 million subscribers across 19 countries at the end of 2010.

It is the largest cellular service provider in India, with over 164.61 million subscribers at the end of 2011 April.

Founded in July 1995, Airtel also offers fixed line services and broadband services.

7. Cafe Coffee Day

Cafe Coffee Day, a division of India's largest coffee conglomerate, Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company, grows coffee in its own estates of 10,000 acres.

It is the largest producer of Arabica beans in Asia. ABCTCL is one of India's leading coffee exporters with clients across USA, Europe and Japan.

The first CCD outlet was set up in July 1996 at Bengaluru. Today there are 1000 outlets across India. Their tagline 'A lot can happen over coffee' became popular among youngsters.

8. Titan

Founded in 1987, Titan Industries is the world's fifth largest wrist watch manufacturer. Titan, Fastrack, Sonata, Nebula, Raga, Regalia, Octane and Xylys are the popular brands of Titan watches.

Titan is a joint venture between the Tata Group, and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO).

Its product portfolio includes watches, accessories and jewellery, in both contemporary and traditional designs. It manufactures precious jewellery under the Tanishq brand.

9. Lakme

Lakme started as a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills (Tomco), part of the Tata Group.

Lakme started making cosmetics for Indian women in 1952. In 1996 Tata sold off their stakes in Lakme to Unilever for Rs 200 Crore (Rs 2 billion).

Lakme has also set up Lakme Beauty Salons all over India.

10.  HDFC Bank

Founded in August 1994, HDFC Bank has 1,725 branches and over 5,000 ATMs, in 780 cities in India.

For the fiscal year 2010-11, the bank has reported net profit of Rs 3,926.30 crore (Rs 39.26 billion), up 33.1 per cent from the previous fiscal.

The total annual earnings of the bank increased by 20.37 per cent to  Rs 24,263.4 crore (Rs 242.63 billion) in 2010-11.

Jeddah of Saudi Arabia to have the world's tallest tower

Prototype model of the tower

Skyscrapers are considered symbols of a city's money, power and, to some extent, hubris. The first building widely considered a modern skyscraper was the Wainwright Building in St. Louis. Opened in 1891 and designed by famed architect Louis Sullivan, it is ten stories tall. But with advancing technology and growing creativity, the ceaseless climb of the world's epic skyscrapers has resulted in the race to touch the sky.

The world's current tallest building is Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It measures 2,717 feet (828 meters), or 160 stories. This record will be shattered when Kingdom Tower, a giant skyscraper planned for the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, is completed by 2016.

Designed by Chicago architectural firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, the proposed Kingdom Tower will measure 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) and will feature a Four Seasons hotel, serviced apartments, luxury condominiums, offices and the world's highest observatory.

Saudi construction giant Saudi Binladen Group, owned by the family of slain al-Qaeda terror group leader Osama bin Laden, has been awarded the contract to build the Kingdom Tower. The construction of the tower is estimated to cost about $1.2 billion, while the cost of the entire Kingdom City project is pegged at $20 billion.

The current status of tallest towers in the world is below

But soon the above order of the tallest buildings in the world would be changed to the below predicted status.

As the limits of imagination continue to be pushed, the record of the tallest buildings in the world has been changing hands frequently over the past decade and a half.

Burj Khalifa was opened last January, just after Dubai's real estate crash. Constructed at a cost of $1.5 billion for the building, and a total cost of $20 billion, Burj Khalifa is a part of downtown Dubai, one of the major developmental programs undertaken in the Middle Eastern city famed for flamboyant projects.

87% of Brands Plan to Run Twitter Ads : Survey

Eighty-seven percent of brand managers surveyed by the Pivot Conference plan to run a Twitter campaign in the next 12 months. The result appears to reflect the growing popularity of Twitter's Promoted Accounts, which are PPC ads designed to lift a brand's number of followers. Twitter's other major platform, Promoted Trends, costs $120,000 per day for an exclusive global reach.

Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Foursquare also received positive news from the report, which reflects the social media spending plans of 230 brand managers in attendance at the May 2011 event.
A staggering 98 percent of respondents said they'd run Facebook ads in the coming year; 81 percent plan to advertise on YouTube; and 65 percent will buy ads on LinkedIn.

Though only 16 percent said they had already executed a Foursquare campaign, 26 percent revealed they would begin testing the geo-social app during the next 12 months. However only 22 percent said they believe Foursquare's ad offerings are either "good" or "excellent."
Meanwhile, the study bore out other potentially meaningful data-points for the social media advertising niche. It found:

• 75 percent of brands call social advertising an ongoing program.
• 70 percent stated that their social advertising is integrated into a larger campaign.
• 70 percent use traditional media to drive engagement in social advertising.
• 84 percent encourage user involvement with social advertising campaigns.

Internet in 2015

What started with a small network called "ARPANET",made exclusive for the defense purpose for the U.S government has been transformed into the giant cluster of millions of electronic devices,all over the world, connected to each other through a strong network called "internet".

Have you ever wondered what would be the status of internet in the next five years ??
What does the internet traffic look like then ??
What would be the size and memory utilization of internet in the 2015 ??

If not then here is the pictorial description of all the questions mentioned above. Cisco Visual Networking Index explains the status of internet in the year 2015.

NASCAR : Brand of the week

NASCAR, the biggest auto racing sports event of United States, is often referred to as "US Formula one" as it holds the same importance to US, which Formula one has to the rest of the world especially Europe in "Automobile racing" field. Here is few facts and figures of this exciting sports event.

The race teams of the "Sprint Cup Series" are as follows-

The major NASCAR tracks are as follows.

Rupert Murdoch's Empire (pictorial)

The recent UK phone tapping "News of the world" scandal may have brought "Rupert Murdoch", a 80 year old, Australian-American and lively Business tycoon in the limelight of the world media but the irony is that he himself is the owner of second biggest media conglomerate in the world, known as "News Corporation". News Corporation owns a controlling stake in around 100 companies.


Rupert Murdoch, whose net worth is $7.6 billion (as per forbes list 2011) can't be written off so easily. He is an ultimate example of success. He turned his father's single publication in Austrlia to the World's most newspaper publishing company. Key characteristic of his personality is self-determination and aggresiveness. Here is the pictorial display of his vast empire. 

source- Al jazeera
             Shortformblog

EA sports Facebook revenue

The average lifetime revenue from customers playing EA Sports games on Facebook is $56 for each paying user, Electronic Arts has said.
That figure is drawn from in-game payments on three Facebook-hosted EA Sports Games; FIFA Superstars, Madden Superstars, and World Series Superstars.
The $56 per customer “surpasses the net revenue we received from players on consoles” Electronic Arts said. It is not clear whether the comparison is lifetime Facebook game revenues versus a single boxed EA game sale, or average lifetime revenues from console customers.
Yet the figure puts into perspective the rapid pace of the digital games sector, which EA is positioning as a priority target for growth.
EA insists the Facebook revenue figure is on an upward path. Company CEO John Riccitiello said the Facebook platform could eventually have as many as 75 per cent of customers with their accounts tied to their bank.

EA Sports chief Peter Moore said Facebook is “not only a scalable, standalone business, but also a gateway for bringing new players to deeper EA Sports experiences on consoles, tablets and smartphones.”
The Superstars series of Facebook games work on a free-to-play basis. Customers can, if they wish, purchase in-game items to enhance their experience.
EA said the number of paying customers, versus non-paying, is in the “low single digits” – likely less than five per cent.

10 most expensive cities in the World

Global consultancy firm Mercer recently came up with a survey to determine the cost of living of cities across the world.The index for the survey is based on cost of living expressed in US dollars.

If the dollar weakens against the local currency of a city, the city becomes more expensive and moves up the index, even if prices expressed in local currency remain the same or even go down.

The survey covered 214 cities across five continents and measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment.

Rank 1: Luanda

Luanda is the capital and the largest city of Angola.
It has an excellent natural harbour; the chief exports are coffee, cotton, sugar, diamonds, iron, and salt.
The city also has a thriving building industry, an effect of the nationwide economic boom experienced since 2002, when political stability returned with the end of the civil war.

Rank 2: Tokyo

Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo.
It is one of the three world finance 'command centres', along with New York City and London.
Tokyo was rated by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the most expensive (highest cost-of-living) city in the world for 14 years in a row ending in 2006.The Tokyo Stock Exchange is Japan's largest stock exchange, and second largest in the world by market capitalisation.

Rank 3: N'Djamena

The largest city in Chad, N'Djamena is a port city on the Chari River, near the confluence with the Logone River.
It is a regional market for livestock, salt, dates, and grains.
Meat, fish and cotton processing are the chief industries, and the city continues to serve as the centre of economic activity in Chad.

Rank 4: Moscow

The city is named after the river Moskva.
Moscow is one of largest city economies in Europe and it comprises approximately 20 per cent of Russian gross domestic product.
In 2006, Mercer Human Resources Consulting named Moscow as the world's most expensive city for expatriate employees, ahead of Tokyo.

The Cherkizovskiy marketplace is the largest marketplace in Europe with daily turnover of about $30 million and about ten thousand sellers from different countries (including China, Turkey, Azerbaijan and India).

Primary industries in Moscow include chemical, metallurgy, food, textile, furniture, energy production, software development and machinery.

Rank 5: Geneva

Geneva's economy is mainly services oriented. The city has a finance sector, which specialises in private banking and financing of international trade. It is also an important centre of commodity trade.
Watchmakers, Baume et Mercier, Charriol, Chopard, Franck Muller, Patek Philippe, Gallet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Rolex, Raymond Weil, Omega, Vacheron Constantin, and international producers of flavours and fragrances, Firmenich and Givaudan, have their headquarters in Geneva.
The Geneva Motor Show is one of the most important international auto-shows. The show is held at Palexpo, a giant convention centre located next to the International Airport.

It is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland.

Rank 6: Osaka

Osaka literally means 'large hill' or 'large slope'.Historically, Osaka was the centre of commerce in Japan.
However, many major companies have now moved their main offices to Tokyo. Panasonic, Sharp, Sanyo, video game maker Capcom are still headquartered in Osaka.

The Osaka Securities Exchange specialises in derivatives such as Nikkei 225 futures.

Rank 7: Zurich

Zurich is not only the largest city in Switzerland is also a leading financial centre.
The most important sector in the economy of Zurich is the service industry, which employs nearly four fifths of workers.
Other important industries include light industry, machine and textile industries and tourism. Most Swiss banks have their headquarters in Zurich.

The Swiss Stock Exchange, established in 1877, is one of the most important stock exchanges in the world.

Rank 8: Singapore

Singapore has a highly developed market-based economy. Along with Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, Singapore is one of the Four Asian Tigers.

The economy depends heavily on exports and refining imported goods, especially in manufacturing.
Manufacturing constituted 26 per cent of Singapore's GDP in 2005.The manufacturing sector boasts of electronics, petroleum refining, chemicals, mechanical engineering and biomedical industries.

Singapore has one of the busiest ports in the world and is the world's fourth largest foreign exchange trading centre after London, New York City and Tokyo.

Rank 9: Hong Kong

Hong Kong was once described as the world's greatest experiment in laissez faire.
It still maintains a highly developed capitalist economy, ranked the freest in the world by the Index of Economic Freedom for 15 consecutive years.
Hong Kong's currency is the Hong Kong dollar, which has been pegged to the US dollar since 1983.
It imports most of its food and raw materials.
Much of its exports consist of re-exports, which are products made outside of the territory, especially in mainland China, and distributed via Hong Kong.

Rank 10: Sao Paolo

Sao Paulo, in Brazil, is transforming from a strong industrialised base into a service and technology-oriented offshoring location.
The city has a mix of global multinational executives who have their BPOs and contact centers providing IT services and R&D.
Brazilian exports are currently scaling new heights, its major export products being aircraft, coffee, automobiles, soybean, iron ore, orange juice, steel, ethanol, textiles, footwear, corned beef and electrical equipment.

George Soros : the end of an era

George Soros, the billionaire best known for breaking the Bank of England, is returning money to outside investors in his $25.5-billion firm, ending a career ashedge fund manager that spanned more than four decades.

Soros, who turns 81 next month, will hand back the money, less than $1 billion, by the end of the year, according to two people briefed on the matter. His firm will focus on managing assets solely for Soros and his family, according to a letter to investors. Keith Anderson, 51, chief investment officer since February 2008, is leaving, said the letter, signed by Soros's sons Jonathan and Robert, who are co-deputy chairmen.

"We wish to express our gratitude to those who chose to invest their capital withSoros Fund Management LLC over the last nearly 40 years," they said in the letter. "We trust that you have felt well rewarded for your decision over time."

The move completes Soros's transformation from a speculator, who in 1992 made $1 billion betting that the Bank of England would be forced to devalue the pound, to philanthropist statesman, a role he first imagined for himself as a Hungarian emigre studying at the London School of Economics after World War II, according to Soros's writings. In the last 30 years, he's given away more than $8 billion to promote democracy, foster free speech, improve education and fight poverty around the world, he said in a recent essay.

Soros's sons said they took the decision because new financial regulations would have made it necessary for the firm to register with theSecurities and Exchange Commission by March 2012 if it continued to manage money for outsiders. Because the firm has overseen mostly family assets since 2000, when outside money accounted for about $4 billion, they decided it made more sense to run it as a family office, according to the letter.

The rule calls for hedge funds with more than $150 million in assets to report information about their investors and employees, the assets they manage, potential conflicts of interest and their activities outside of fund advising. Registered funds will also be subject to periodic inspections by the SEC.

"We have relied until now on other exemptions from registration which allowed outside shareholders whose interests aligned with those of the family investors to remain invested in Quantum," the executives said in the letter, referring to its flagship Quantum Endowment Fund. "As those other exemptions are no longer available under the new regulations, Soros Fund Management will now complete the transition to a family office that it began eleven years ago."

Twitter's new Revenue model

Twitter could potentially generate revenue from commerce in addition to advertising, its current money-maker, the chief executive of the company said Tuesday.

Dick Costolo, speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in this Colorado ski resort, also dismissed reports of management turmoil at the San Francisco-based company and said it is still seeing explosive growth.

"Along any axis you measure us we're growing faster than we've ever grown before," Costolo said.

Twitter users are sending one billion tweets every five days and the service now has more than 200 million registered users, he said.

Costolo declined to reveal whether Twitter, which was founded in 2006, is profitable, but he said the number of advertisers on the platform is up 600 percent this year over last year, when it numbered in the hundreds.

"The beauty of the Twitter advertising platform is the ads are just tweets," he said. "The ad system is organic to the platform."

Costolo said Twitter gives advertisers the ability "to edit and manage a campaign in real time and distribute it globally."

"We've already seen that from (movie) studios," he said. "The week before a film comes out they're promoting trailers on Twitter."

Twitter users are engaging with advertisements on the service much more than they do with Internet search, he said.

"Our engagement rates are through the roof, ads with clickthrough rates of 30, 40, 50 percent," he said, adding that 80 percent of advertisers have been renewing their campaigns.

Advertising will be "one of the major revenue components for Twitter going forward," the Twitter CEO said, but "there is a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of."

"We already see a tremendous amount of commerce taking part on the platform," he said. "We are thinking about the kinds of things that we will offer to the market and designing different things and experimenting with different things."

Costolo cited the case of a professional American football team which used Twitter to advertise to fans that it had 1,000 tickets left for the next day's game and sold them within an hour.

"How can we remove friction from the process?" he asked. "Now you have to go to a third site, enter a promotion code... Classic economics -- good money to be made when you remove friction from transactions."

Costolo said the recent departures from Twitter of two of its co-founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, did not mean there were management problems at the firm.

"While people like to focus on the comings and goings of the founders... what's been really going on inside the company is we've been building out the senior management of the company," he said.

Costolo, who replaced Williams as chief executive in October, said the process was mostly complete but Twitter planned to hire a senior marketing executive soon.

"It's one of the most powerful brands in he world already in its short life -- the bird is recognized around the world -- but we don't really have anybody internally curating that brand," he said.

Costolo was also asked about aUS Federal Trade Commission probe into Twitter's dealings with third-party firms that build applications for the service.

Twitter was cooperating with the US regulators and will "provide them with all the information they want," he said.

Twitter has recently begun designing its own tools for using the service, triggering some concern among developers whose products may be seen as rivals.

Costolo said Twitter intends to provide a "Twitter-owned and operated experience on all major platforms" but there will be a place for outside companies that can provide "value-added services for our core products."

Sibling from NJ sold their enterprise for $100 million

What were your priorities at 21 ?? Maybe enjoying your final year at college or peparing for the further "post graduation" studies. Perhaps for this sibling-duo from New Jersey, "studies" and "job oppurtunity" is holding the last proritization in their current life. Afterall not everybody make $100 million dollars at the young age of 21.

In 2005, Catherine Cook and her brother David had an idea for a startup. The high schoolers flipped through a yearbook and wanted to make a digital version.
The 15-and-16-year-olds got to work and created MyYearbook. In the 6-year span, the duo raised $17 million in financing, grew the site to 20 million users*, and generated 1.2 billion monthly pageviews.
Today, a publicly-traded Latino social network, Quepasa, announced its $100 million acquisition of MyYearbook. The majority of the deal, $82 million, is Quepasa common stock. The other $18 million is cash.

Geoff Cook, MyYearbook's CEO and sibling of Catherine and David, wrote a letter to his 100+ employees:
"I don’t consider this an exit or the end. I consider it the end of the beginning, and I believe we have a lot more innovative products to create," he says.
Welcome to retirement Catherine, Geoff and David! Although we're sure this won't be the last company they create.

Nokia lost its throne to Apple

Mobile phone maker Nokia Corp on Thursday posted a loss of 368 million ($523 million) in the second quarter and for the first time was overtaken by Apple's iPhone in smartphone shipments.

Nokia, which posted a profit of 227 million in the same period in 2010, said revenue fell 7% to 9.3 billion from 10 billion last year.

It shipped 88.5 million mobile devices in April through June, down from 111 million a year ago and 108.5 million in the previous quarter.

Its smartphone volumes fell to 16.7 million units, which means Nokia is no longer No. 1 in the smartphone sector. Apple Inc sold more than 20 million iPhones in the same quarter, lifting its net income to a stronger-than-expected $7.31 billion.

"The challenges we are facing during our strategic transformation manifested in a greater than expected way" during the quarter, CEO Stephen Elop said. "However, even within the quarter, I believe our actions to mitigate the impact of these challenges have started to have a positive impact on the underlying health of our business."

Nokia's share was up 3% at 4.21 on the Helsinki Stock Exchange immediately after the report.

Nokia said it was accelerating its cost-cutting plan to exceed the previously targeted savings of 1 billion in 2013. The reductions would be achieved through cuts in staff and outsourced professionals, facility costs "and various improvements in efficiencies", the company said.

While that could improve the company's finances, Nokia needs to take quick action to develop new products or it will continue to lose ground to its rivals, said Neil Mawston of London-based Strategy Analytics . He expects Samsung to also surpass Nokia in smartphones when it releases its second-quarter earnings next week.

Nokia's global market share dropped below 30% earlier this year for the first time in over a decade.