Booming online shopping gave wings to many of the entrepreneur and business ideas. Many succeed and failed also. The most important aspect one need to understand the behaviour of online shopping. A below image shows how the trend in details.
MONDAY, April 26 (HealthDay News) — A combination of four unhealthy behaviors — smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet and substantial alcohol consumption — greatly increases the risk of premature death, a new study has found. The study, published in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, included 4,886 people, aged 18 or older, who were interviewed in 1984-1985. “A health behavior score was calculated, allocating one point for each poor behavior: smoking; fruits and vegetables consumed less than three times daily; less than two hours of physical activity per week; and weekly consumption of more than 14 units [one unit equals 8 grams, or about 0.3 ounces] of alcohol (in women) and more than 21 units in men,” wrote Elisabeth Kvaavik, of the University of Oslo, and colleagues. Over an average follow-up period of 20 years, there were 1,080 reported deaths among study participants: 431 due to cardiovascular disease, 318 due to cancer and 331 due to other causes. Compared to those with no bad health habits, those with all four unhealthy behaviors were about three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease or cancer, four times more likely to die from all other causes, and had an overall death risk equivalent to being 12 years older. “Modest but achievable adjustments to lifestyle behaviors are likely to have a considerable impact at both the individual and population level,” the researchers concluded. “Developing more efficacious methods by which to promote healthy diets and lifestyles across the population should be an important priority of public health policy.”
Amazing Sixth Sense in IT. If it gets on roll, I am sure complete dynamics will get change about computing worldwide.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg]
Bhageeratha was the king of Kosala, a kingdom in ancient India. He was a descendent of the great king Sagara of the Suryavamsa, or Sun Dynasty. He was one of the forefathers of Lord Rama, of the Ramayana, the epic in which Bhageeratha’s tale is primarily recounted.
He lost his father when he was just a child, and was raised by his mother. Bhageeratha was very intelligent, virtuous and kind hearted. When he came of age, Bhageeratha ascended to the throne of the kingdom of Kosala, today located in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He was a pious, benevolent ruler who adhered to his duties as a king as prescribed by dharma.
When king Sagara chose to perform the Ashwamedha yagna, his royal agents lost track of the sacrificial horse. Sagara ordered his sixty thousand sons by Sumati to track down the horse. The proud and mercurial princes raged across Bharat, burning down forests and uprooting life and property to find the horse. They finally arrived at a quiet spot where the Sage Kapila was sitting in meditation. Besides him was tied the white horse. The enraged princes condemned Kapila as a thief and attacked him. Using his terrible mystic power, Kapila instantly turned the princes into ashes.
Another version has it that the horse was stolen by a jealous Indra who did not want the yagna to succeed, and hid it in cave where sage Kapila was meditating in order to escape being accused of the stealth.
One version has it that Kapila told the prince Anshuman, Sagara’s grandson(Son of Asamanjan, other son of Sagara who was thrown out of kingdom by him) who had come looking both for the horse and his brothers, that the only way for the souls of the dead princes could rise to heaven would be through the offering of niravapanjali with the water of the sacred Ganga river, which was flowing only in Swarga.
Other version has it that Anshuman was told about the fate of his 60,000 uncles and about relief from Kapila’s curse(by Ganga waters) by Garuda(who is maternal uncle of Asamanjan).
Bringing Ganga back to Earth was a near impossible task and required many years to be spent in tapasya and prayer. The Kosala kings of successive generations could not do this while managing their duties as kings. As a result, the sins of the thousand princes multiplied in their destructive energy, and began resulting in natural disasters. The kingdom began to lose its peace and prosperity, and by the time Bhageeratha ascended the throne, he found it impossible to attempt to govern in this situation, that had only one solution.
Turning over the kingdom to trusted ministers, Bhageeratha set off to the Himalayas to perform an arduous tapasya in the extreme climate. For one thousand years, he performed an excruciatingly harsh penance to please Lord Brahma. At the end of the thousand years, Brahma came to him and told him to ask for anything. Bhageeratha asked Brahma to bring down the river Ganga to earth so that he may perform the ceremony for his ancestors.
Brahma asked Bhageeratha to propitiate Lord Shiva, for only He would be able to break the Ganga’s fall. It was the largest river, and it would be impossible for anyone save Him to contain the destructive impact of this event.
Bhageeratha performed a tapasya for Lord Shiva, living only on air. The compassionate Shiva appeared only after a year’s penance, and told Bhageeratha he should not have to perform tapasya to accomplish a noble goal such as this. He assured Bhageeratha that he would break Ganga’s fall.
After eons of being flattered and praised by the Devas, Ganga had become vain. She scoffed at Brahma when He asked her to flow down to earth, but could not disobey him as he was her father.
But Ganga was sure, as much as Bhageeratha was afraid that no one could stop her fall, which would devastate the earth for a long time. As she cascaded across and down from Swarga, Bhageeratha and celestial observers were terrified of the roar and volume of water coming down. But Lord Shiva appeared from out of nowhere and captured all of Ganga just as she launched herself onto earth, in His jata.
Ganga struggled to set herself free, but Shiva could not be budged. Bhageeratha worshipped Shiva, who let Ganga free after crushing her vanity. She flowed, and is still believed to flow, from Shiva’s jata down to earth at a gentler pace.
King Bhageeratha led the way for Ganga on his chariot, and she followed him across the north and east of Bharat and finally merging with the ocean. In her course she washed the ashes of Sagara’s sixty thousand sons, who ascended to heaven while praising and blessing Bhageeratha.
For its descent to Earth being owed to Bhageeratha’s efforts, Ganga is also known as Bhageerathi (daughter of Bhageeratha) as proclaimed by Lord Brahma.
Bhageeratha’s own great effort was praised by all the Gods and his ancestors, and is known as a Bhageeratha Prayatna, as proclaimed by Lord Brahma. It is a great inspiration to any man who seeks to do something noble despite facing overwhelming odds.
The above post first occurred at Vibhansu dave post.
Pushkar Gaikwad, founder, 6to10 Media
This is a quick ‘10 Pointer list’ (could have more points easily) based on what I am seeing and have seen on the Indian web space and what problems online businesses face or common mistakes they make.
1. Majority of the people who are starting the web startups in India think they can make money from anything, building anything. This just doesn’t work. The advertising model also doesn’t work (unless you are a 2-3 member team with little expenses). You can look at the 2007-08 posts review of startups of Pluggd.in, AlooTechie and StartupDunia and see how many are still surviving?
2. Too Spread Too Thin is a major problem with the Indian online space, about which nothing can be done unfortunately. The Indian online space is way too spread and is way too thin, making each startup to push extra hard to find, convince, acquire and retain customer meaning the startup has to put more resources hence higher burn ratio something which I am seeing more and more often.
3. Another mistake which founders make (I myself did a couple of times) is to overestimate the market heavily, meaning not able to understand the volume and value of the market. Most of the figures which are projected of various Indian sectors (say media or advertising or marketing) are often fragmented and saying the market is of Rs 350 crore often does not mean that the market has full untapped potential of Rs 350 crore.
4. Entry level barrier is too low and IP (intellectual property) laws are non-existing which mean copycats pop up in matter of weeks in India. The cost of starting a web business has come down so much that anyone can start it in a matter of days without building any business plan or revenue model. Once a site starts getting some traction, 20 similar sites also pop up adding no value and just crowding the market.
5. Ignoring existing players – With online businesses, many times, when you start a business, you fail to see the overlap between already existing players or players which are there but you never see them and later find them.
6. Unlike in USA, all venture capitalists in India like to play safe so the money is only going into big players who know how to pitch themselves or have good connection, of course, we cannot blame VCs for playing safe, it is their money and India is yet to mature.
7. People in India don’t want to use credit cards which often make cost of acquiring customers very high. This hits the cost of acquisition, and retention is the reason why majority of the sites in India which start with big bang either shut down after 2 years or go into maintenance mode due to not turning enough profits.
8. Payment Gateways – The situation of payment gateways hasn‘t improved much. Last month, when I was looking to write a post on them and reviewing most of them, many of them were not even working properly, most of them had ridiculous fees (I call it ridiculous business model) where they are charging heavily on per transaction.
9. Last Mile Connectivity – The lesser said about this, the better it is. India seriously needs a package like Reliance Monsoon Hungama which was offered by Reliance in 2000 for Rs 500 which created a revolution and people went crazy for mobiles, which now has resulted in 640 million mobile connections. Now that the mobile connections are being getting saturated, it is good time to get into the broadband war for these operators and start offering internet for free or for Rs 99. Let people get the ‘taste’ of internet, once they get it, they will automatically start using it. The reason for such long rant is, though TRAI says India has 8 crore active users online (those who use internet once per month), from whatever I have seen, I think India has about 3-4 crore active users, mostly in the range of 16 to 32 years.
10. Short sightedness of founders for long term – Though I really can’t blame founders for this, but many times I have seen founders looking to make huge profits or looking to exit in the second or third year, this is not very unlikely scenario in India. For example, Faisal Farooqui started MouthShut in 2000 and is still running it. He could have sold it for a decent price in 2006, may be in 2008 as well, but he kept it, a good lesson for others too.
I can think of few more points but will cut down the list here only.
Editor: This article first appeared in Pushkar Gaikwad’s blog Gaikwad.in and has been republished here with his permission.
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