Rags to Riches story

What a moment for India and Indians ..Slumdog Millionaire has won 8 Oscars today ! Of the eight awards,A R Rahman, the magician from madras, the music sensation and one who has changed the music scene in India won 2 awards !!!

Like the film itself, A R Rahman's story itself is a rags to riches story. He is a self made man and a real genius; Lot of inspiration to draw from ..

Born A.S. Dileep Kumar to a Tamil Hindu family, his father R.K. Shekhar, a composer who directed music for Malayalam movies, died when he was just nine. The family was forced to rent out musical equipment. Two years later, the 11-year-old budding maestro joined noted composer Ilayaraja's troupe as a keyboardist and computer programmer to support his mother and three sisters.

After working with several renowned composers like Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy, Zakir Hussain and L. Shankar, he set out on his own to compose jingles and scores for popular Indian television features and has composed more than 300 jingles.

During this period, he also earned a degree in western classical music from the Trinity College of Music, London and went on to set up his own in-house studio called Panchathan record-inn at Chennai, which is said to be Asia's most sophisticated and hi-tech studio.

In 1989, Dileep Kumar converted to Islam along with his family due to personal reasons. He became A.R. Rahman.

JAI Ho !!!! Jai Ho !!!!

Silver Lining in a Weak Economy.

We are continually hearing bad news on the economy front ( both domestic as well as global ). The 'light at the end of the tunnel' seems to be still far away atleast from the data that is being presented everyday.

However, there is some cheering news from a domestic front and this comes from the telecom industry in India. The latest TRAI figures state the following:

India added a staggering 15.41 million new mobile subscribers in January 2009, taking the country’s total number of wireless subscribers to 362.3 million, up from 233.63 million in the same month a year ago. The figure is the biggest monthly growth ever, according to data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)

Reliance Communications, India’s second-largest mobile company by users, registered the highest growth rate in January at 8.1%, followed by Idea at 5.4%, Aircel at 4.3%, Vodafone and Spice Telecom at 4% each and Bharti at 3.2%.

India is adding approximate 10 million subscribers per month, as against China’s addition of 8 million subscribers monthly.

Following are the takeways :

What this means is that the telecom industry is not facing as much of a turbulence as other industries.

The innovation and investments in this sector will probably continue in the coming year.

The markets have probably punished these companies more than what is required and there may be a re-rating soon on the telecom stocks. ( this probably is wishful thinking ! ).

Investments in startups in this sector will continue because there are opportunities to tap.

Middle Class

I was reading some interesting article on the middle class segment growth in the world and the numbers throw up some important elements..


We all have talked about this important segment of the population and most likely all of us probably belong to this segment..In india we talk about further segmentation into upper middle class and lower middle class.


As you see from the above numbers, in the last 25 years the % of middle class has nearly doubled and it currently stands at around 60% of the world population

The below figures indicate that for the first time, middle class population has increased significantly in Asia compared to the West.



The below figure shows how the middle class population is increasing its annual income levels.



So what are the takeaways ?

- Middle class is gaining strength across the world.
- Middle class is also having more money than earlier.
- It can be considered as a very important segment for any business opportunities.

Mobile AppStores

Most of us will be aware of the Mobile appstores ( essentially a central place to sel/buyl all mobile applications related to the OS platform. The trend has become very popular because of Apple whose Apple store has been hugely successful and popular.

Android has announced its own 'Android market'. RIM has its own ' RIM application center' .It is expected that, after the sucess of the apple store, we will have many phone manufacturers following the trend. Samsung and Nokia may soon annouce their own stores.

Some data on the iPhone appstore:

More than 5,000 new applications,
$30 M rev the first 30 days of operation,
200 M downloads in the first 100 days.

The success of the application stores will depend on the following factors:
-Business model of selling the application ( cost to list, developer commision )
-Platform Popularity
-Ease for the end user ( download, installation etc )
- Distribution
- Provisioning of applications