I have just finished reading Supermarketwala by Damodar Mall. It is an interesting book on India’s fast-growing modern retail sector by a retail venture CEO, and has a lot of insights for anyone working in India’s retail / service industry. Still what I found most interesting was a chapter on how D’Mart, India’s most profitable grocery / supermarket chain, and its founder Radha Kishan Damani (or RK Damani as …
Sajith Pai
About Sajith Pai
Posts by Sajith Pai:
The Three Frictions of News
Recently on Quora, I posted an answer to the question “What is the revenue model of apps like News In Shorts?”
I am posting my answer for readers of this blog.
I dont think News In Shorts (NiS) has a revenue model in mind. In fact I am not sure they will ever arrive at a B2C rev model. There is possibly a B2B model – they could …
What I found interesting in Higher Ed last week
My blogposts
Apple University is Apple’s internal training centre, visualized in that distinct style that only Apple can. A look at how it works, and what it can teach B-Schools. Here.
What I found interesting in Higher Ed
Bertelsmann, Europe’s biggest media co (rev ~ €16b / $17b) is buying a controlling stake in Alliant International University, to enter the University space. Purchase figures were not available. It is …
Apple University and what it can teach B-Schools
Corporate Universities are not a new phenomenon. By Corporate Universities, I mean company-owned and operated training centres equipped to provide job-related skills and instill company culture, and not general-purpose universities founded by corporates. Some of the more well-known Corporate Universities include McDonald’s Hamburger U, GE’s Crotonville Campus, General Motors Institute etc. Wikipedia mentions that as early as 2001, there were over 2,000 corporate ‘universities’ in the U.S.
One of the …
Hacking Habits
Allow me to point out four interesting trends
- Leading VC firms are hiring top-name designers as Partners and Principals in their firms. John Maeda, ex-Dean of RISD was hired by KPCB as Design Partner, Irene Au by Khosla Ventures, Tom Hulme by Google Ventures and recently Jeffrey Veen by True Ventures.
- Big Business is buying innovative boutique design shops by the bucket. CapitalOne bought Adaptive Path, the legendary valley-based
A Freesheet for New Delhi?
A colleague who has recently joined us, wrote a mail to our Vice Chairman, sharing his thoughts on how a free-sheet daily could take advantage of the millions of people who travel in New Delhi’s Metro.
I detail the same below, along with my response. In my reply, I also refer to an earlier blog post Free newspapers : Why free translates to profits!
I will continue to update this …
What I found interesting in Higher Education last week #12
This is a list of what I found interesting in Higher Education news and happenings.
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Interview with Pramath Sinha, promoter of Ashoka University. Relevant for data points; 1,000 applications, to which they made 250 offers and finally 133 accepted to join the inaugural class. 60% of students are on some kind of scholarship, about 10% have a free ride. Median SATs at 2050, median CBSE 12th scores …
Contrasting Susan Wojcicki and Marissa Mayer, and a look at Yahoo’s Strategy
Last week brought us two well-written articles in the New York Times; the first, a withering look at Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, by Nicholas Carlson and the second, a rather more positive one on Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, by Jonathan Mahler.
I found the two stories fascinating, and I thought it would be interesting for this blog to take a quick look at the two CEOs …
Thoughts on Books, Online Book Discovery, and Bookstores
“The decline of physical bookshops…affects which books have a chance of breaking out : bestsellers flourish, but midlist books that might have been discovered while browsing a bookstore are worse off, because consumers cannot easily stumble upon them while shopping on the internet.” – The Future of the Book, The Economist Oct 11, ’14
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“Amazon is ideal for finding the book you know you want. But it is …
What I found interesting in higher education last week #11
What I found interesting in the world of higher education last week, with some added thoughts and views. I work for the Times of India Group. All views are personal.
News
The Times of India looks at caste discrimination in premier Indian campuses after the recent suicide of a Dalit student at IIT Bombay.
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Mint covers Nalanda University’s launch (or relaunch). And even before Nalanda can come on steam …