INTERNET SPECIAL....................... Offline and falling behind: Barriers to Internet adoption

Offline and falling behind: 

Barriers to Internet adoption

More than 60 percent of the world’s population remains offline. Without removing crucial deterrents to Internet adoption, little will change—and more than 4 billion people may be left behind.

In a little more than a generation, the Internet has grown from a nascent technology to a tool that is transforming how people, businesses, and governments communicate and engage. The Internet’s economic impact has been massive, making significant contributions to nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) and fueling new, innovative industries. It has also generated societal change by connecting individuals and communities, providing access to information and education, and promoting greater transparency.

However, not all countries have harnessed the Internet’s benefits to the same degree. In a new report, we examine the evolution of Internet adoption around the world, the factors that enable the development of a vibrant Internet ecosystem, and the barriers that are impeding more than 60 percent of the global population from getting online. Several findings emerged.

1. Over the past decade, the global online population grew to just over 2.7 billion people, driven by five trends.

Some 1.8 billion people have come online since 2004,1 with this growth fueled by five trends: the expansion of mobile-network coverage and increasing mobile-Internet adoption, urbanization, shrinking device and data-plan prices, a growing middle class, and the increasing utility of the Internet.

2. At the current trajectory, an additional 500 million to 900 million people are forecast to join the online population by 2017.

However, these gains will still leave up to 4.2 billion people offline. The rate of growth of worldwide Internet users slowed from a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.1 percent from 2005 to 2008 to 10.4 percent from 2009 to 2013.2 Without a significant change in technology, in income growth or in the economics of access, or policies to spur Internet adoption, the rate of growth will continue to slow. The demographic profile and context of the offline population makes it unlikely that these individuals will come online solely as a result of the trends that have driven adoption over the past decade. Estimates from multiple sources suggest that 500 million to 900 million people will join the online ranks by 2017, expanding the online population to 3.2 billion to 3.6 billion users.3 By these projections, between 3.8 billion and 4.2 billion people—more than half of the forecasted global population—will remain offline in 2017.

3. About 75 percent of the offline population is concentrated in 20 countries and is disproportionately rural, low income, elderly, illiterate, and female.

We estimate that approximately 64 percent of these offline individuals live in rural areas, whereas 24 percent of today’s Internet users are considered rural. As much as 50 percent of offline individuals have an income below the average of their respective country’s poverty line and median income.4 Furthermore, we estimate that 18 percent of non-Internet users are seniors (aged 55 or older), while about 7 percent of the online population are in that age bracket. Approximately 28 percent of the offline population is illiterate, while we estimate that close to 100 percent of the online population can read and write. Lastly, we estimate that 52 percent of the offline population is female, while women make up 42 percent of the online population.

4. The offline population faces barriers to Internet adoption spanning four categories:

Incentives. Despite the increasing utility of the Internet in providing access to information, opportunities, and resources to improve quality of life, there remain large segments of the offline population that lack a compelling reason to go online. Barriers in this category include a lack of awareness of the Internet or use cases that create value for the offline user, a lack of relevant (that is, local or localized) content and services, and a lack of cultural or social acceptance. The root causes of these consumer barriers include the high costs that content and service providers face in developing and localizing relevant content and services and their associated business model constraints, low awareness or interest from brands and advertisers in reaching certain audiences, a lack of trusted logistics and payment systems (thereby limiting Internet use cases such as e-commerce and online banking), low ease of doing business in specific regions (thereby impeding development of local or localized content and services), and limited Internet freedom and information security.

Low incomes and affordability. In this area, the predominant barrier is the low income of individuals in the offline population. This barrier is exacerbated by the high costs associated with providing access to the Internet for these populations, which are disproportionately rural. The low incomes reflect the poor economic circumstances of large segments of the offline population, often including unemployment and the need for economic development, employment, and income growth opportunities in their regions. At the same time, there is often a lack of adjacent infrastructure (such as roads and electricity), thereby increasing the costs faced by network operators in extending coverage. Several other factors can contribute to high costs of service for device manufacturers and network operators, including taxes and fees, and, in the case of some countries, an unfavorable market structure.

User capability. This category includes barriers such as a lack of digital literacy (that is, unfamiliarity with or discomfort in using digital technologies to access and use information) and a lack of language literacy (that is, the inability to read and write). The root cause of such literacy barriers is often an underresourced education system.

Infrastructure. Barriers in this area include a lack of mobile Internet coverage or network access in addition to a lack of adjacent infrastructure such as grid electricity. The root causes of these consumer barriers include limited access to international bandwidth; an underdeveloped national core network, backhaul, and access infrastructure; limited spectrum availability; a national information and communications technology (ICT) strategy that doesn’t effectively address the issue of broadband access; and underresourced infrastructure development.

5. These issues cannot be considered in isolation—we found a systematically positive and, in some cases large, correlation between barrier categories and with Internet penetration rates.

We measured the performance of 25 countries against a basket of metrics relating to each category of barriers to develop the Internet Barriers Index.5 We found that all factors correlate strongly and separately with Internet penetration, and all regressions indicate an elastic effect on Internet penetration—that is, improvements on each individual pillar of the Internet Barriers Index will have a disproportionately positive impact on Internet penetration. In addition, we found a systematically positive and, in some cases, large correlation between barrier categories. This implies that the factors are not totally independent and that countries with low Internet penetration tend to have multidimensional bottlenecks when it comes to increasing their Internet adoption. Further, it means that meaningfully addressing these barriers and boosting Internet penetration will require coordination across Internet ecosystem participants.

6. Approximately 2 billion people—or nearly half the offline population—reside in ten countries that face significant challenges across all four barrier categories. An additional 1.1 billion people live in countries in which a single barrier category dominates.

Based on the combination and severity of the barriers they face (as indicated by the Internet Barriers Index), countries fall into one of five groups. These groupings provide insight into each set’s common challenges, which could stem from similar root causes.

Group one: High barriers across the board. This group consists of five countries in Africa and Asia—Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania—that are home to just over 550 million offline individuals and face entrenched obstacles to expanding Internet adoption. Each of the countries in this group performed poorly across all four barrier categories of the Internet Barriers Index; their scores in individual pillars fall primarily in the lowest quartile. The offline populations in these countries are predominantly young and rural and have low literacy rates. The aggregate Internet penetration rate across the group was 15 percent in 2013.

Group two: Medium to high barriers. Countries in this group include Egypt, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, each of which faces medium to high barriers to Internet adoption. The countries in this group rank in the lowest two quartiles in several categories in the Internet Barriers Index, with their greatest challenges lying in the incentives and infrastructure barrier categories. Home to an offline population of more than 1.4 billion individuals, this group had an aggregate Internet penetration rate of 19 percent in 2013.

Group three: Medium barriers, greatest challenges in incentives. Comprised of China, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, this group is home to approximately 800 million offline individuals. The offline population in each country is largely rural and literate. With the exception of the incentives category, where both China and Vietnam scored in the bottom quartile, the countries in this group rank in the middle (second or third) quartiles across each pillar of the Internet Barriers Index. In aggregate, this group has an Internet penetration rate of 45 percent.

Group four: Medium barriers, greatest challenges in low incomes and affordability.This group consists of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey and accounts for an offline population of just under 260 million individuals. With an aggregate Internet penetration rate of 49 percent, these countries are characterized by offline populations that are predominantly urban, literate, and low income. All of the countries in this group score in the middle (second or third) quartiles in the user capability and infrastructure categories of the Internet Barriers Index, and a couple countries rank in the first quartile in the incentives category. However, in contrast with those bright spots, low incomes and affordability remains a significant challenge; each of the countries in this group faces some combination of low GDP per capita, large proportions of their population with low incomes, and a high poverty rate.

Group five: Low barriers across the board. This group is composed of countries that face relatively low barriers compared with the other four groups, resulting in an aggregate Internet penetration rate of 79 percent. Countries in this group include Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States. Despite the low barriers, these six countries are still home to aggregate offline population of approximately 180 million people. Interestingly, given the high Internet penetration rates in this group, the offline populations are disproportionately low income and female.

7. Current initiatives, forthcoming innovations, and lessons from countries that have made headway are cause for optimism.

Nations around the world have recognized the transformational impact of bringing more of their population online and are moving aggressively on several fronts to do just that. Governments are setting ambitious goals for mobile-Internet coverage and investing to extend fixed-broadband infrastructure and increase public Wi-Fi access. At the same time, network operators and device manufacturers are exploring ways to further reduce the cost of access and provide service to underserved populations. In addition, content and service providers are innovating on services that could improve the economic prospects and quality of life of Internet users.

Going forward, sustained, inclusive Internet user growth will require a multipronged strategy—one that will depend on close collaboration among players across the ecosystem, including governments, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, network operators, device manufacturers, content and service providers, and brands.

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/High_Tech_Telecoms_Internet/Offline_and_falling_behind_Barriers_to_Internet_adoption?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1410

ECO SPECIAL.......................... New eco-friendly battery made of seeds and pine resin

New eco-friendly battery made of seeds and pine resin

LONDON: Researchers have used a clever recycling strategy to develop a new eco-friendly battery using materials from alfalfa (lucerne seed) and pine resin.
"We think our discovery can open several doors to more environment-friendly, energy-efficient solutions for the batteries of the future," said Daniel Brandell, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Chemistry, Uppsala University, and one of the researchers behind the idea.

Present-day lithium batteries entail a number of resource-related and environmental problems. The world's commercially extractable lithium resources are limited and whether they can meet future needs is unclear.
Moreover, it is very difficult to recover lithium from the inorganic materials used to make modern batteries.

Lithium batteries also contain other, even rarer materials that are hard to replace and require large energy inputs and toxic chemicals for the recovery process.
In their latest study, researchers at Uppsala University's Angstrom Laboratory have developed a whole new battery concept.
The battery is based on recovery and renewable biological material with an energy content corresponding to that of current lithium-ion batteries.

Components of the battery are made of renewable organic biomaterials from alfalfa and pine resin, and can be recycled with a low energy input and non-hazardous chemicals, such as ethanol and water.

Although present-day batteries contain non-renewable inorganic materials, this is not the first time batteries composed of renewable materials have been presented. But the recycling and recovery strategy is a wholly new concept, researchers said.

Constructing a new battery from a spent one is also feasible. In other words, a straightforward process enables it to be reused.
The scientists have shown that the lithium extracted from a spent battery can be used for a new battery: all that needs to be added is more biomaterial.

Their battery proved capable of delivering as much as 99 per cent of the energy output from the first. With future modifications, this figure can very probably become even higher, researchers said.

The study will be presented in the scientific journal ChemSusChem.

By PTI | 30 Sep, 2014

TECH SPECIAL....................... It's Time To Look Beyond The Smartwatch

It's Time To Look Beyond The Smartwatch

WEARABLES AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE ANYTIME SOON, BUT THE REVOLUTION WON'T NECESSARILY BE ON OUR WRISTS.

It basically takes two seconds of Googling to discover that a whole lot of people believe wearables are the future of technology. The most optimistic of those believers think wearables have the power to transform society in the same manner as PCs, the Internet, and smartphones. And wearable technology is just getting to the point where it’s possible for products to be equally practical, capable, inventive, and essential.

But we haven’t gotten there yet. Right now, we’re still hung up on things with screens that you canwrap around your wrist--smartwatches and activity trackers. And while these devices have generally done what they promise to do, that promise has been unambitious. They’re practical and capable, but they’re hardly inventive or essential. Fitness bands can tell you how active you’ve been over any given span of time, but for the most part they can’t deliver meaningful insights to what your long-term activity patterns mean. Smartwatches have taken certain aspects of smartphone usage and made them more efficient or convenient, but they have yet to offer anything that you can’t ultimately do with a smartphone.

There will be plenty of people who will benefit from smartwatches, but there won’t be many people who will be worse off for not having one.

Of course, every revolutionary innovation has had its universality and usefulness questioned in its infancy, and it's possible that the smartwatch as it exists now could evolve into the next piece of tech that people can’t function without. Maybe sending personalized vibrations to another person becomes the next communication craze. But for the most part, a smartwatch is just another screen that’s a conduit for information, and we’re starting to reach the outer limits of what can be done with that. To make wearables truly inventive and essential, designers are going to need to look beyond the smartwatch.

So many concepts and ideas related to wearables are focused on ways to interact with smartphones less--controlling your music, displaying the QR code for a boarding pass, or replying to a text message with your voice. Or there’s this idea that wearables have to be a thing we interact with at all.

But what if wearables focused more intently on the things smartphones can't do? Take Google’s planned contact lenses, which will help diabetics monitor their insulin levels, as an example. If you consider their impact in the near future, it’s just technology with a single function that serves a relatively small part of the population. But even then, if successful, it could become an essential product for diabetics, who will no longer have to constantly prick their fingers to get the same information.

Taking the longview is where projects like this get exciting and potentially revolutionary. Maybe it could lead to the platonic ideal of Google Glass where digital information is delivered over your natural field of vision in real-time. It would be the augmented reality experience nerds have dreamed of.

And sure, that's an idea which is wildly ambitious, but it provides a new interaction method that existing gadgets can't provide. That’s when innovation becomes essential.

Which is why, this week, we’re focusing on the future of wearables beyond the smartwatch. We’re looking at people who are not only designing and engineering products, but also considering new ways to use them. We have concepts from some of the best industrial design firms in the world imagining entirely new ways of using wearables. We talked to companies that are working to make current wearables more useful. And we look at businesses that are experimenting with how wearables fit into the workplace.

Hopefully that will make you--the designer, the entrepreneur, the engineer, the consumer--think about what wearables should be in the future, what they can be today, and what will make wearables a necessity in your life.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3036326/wearables-week/its-time-to-look-beyond-the-smartwatch?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-newsletter&position=1&partner=newsletter

INTERNET SPECIAL .......................The Invention of the Internet

 The Invention of the Internet

While the World Wide Web was initially invented by one person the genesis of the internet itself was a group effort by numerous individuals, sometimes working in concert, and other times independently.  Its birth takes us back to the extremely competitive technological contest between the US and the USSR during the Cold War.

The Soviet Union sent the satellite Sputnik 1 into space on October 4, 1957. Partially in response, the American government created in 1958 the Advanced Research Project Agency, known today as DARPA—Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.THE AGENCY'S SPECIFIC MISSION IS TO

"…prevent technological surprises like the launch of Sputnik, which signaled that the Soviets had beaten the U.S. into space. The mission statement has evolved over time. Today, DARPA’s mission is still to prevent technological surprise to the US, but also to create technological surprise for our enemies."

To coordinate such efforts, a rapid way to exchange data between various universities and laboratories was needed. This bring us to JCR LICKLIDER who is largely responsible for the theoretical basis of the Internet, an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” His idea was to create a network where many different computer systems would be interconnected to one another to quickly exchange data, rather than have individual systems setup, each one connecting to some other individual system.

He thought up the idea after having to deal with three separate systems connecting to computers in Santa Monica, the University of California, Berkeley, and a system at MIT:

"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them…. I said, oh man, it’s obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet.”

So, yes, the idea for the internet as we know it partially came about because of the seemingly universal human desire to not have to get up and move to another location.

With the threat of a nuclear war, it was necessary to decentralize such a system, so that even if one node was destroyed, there would still be communication between all the other computers. The American engineer Paul Baran provided the solution to this issue; he designed a decentralized network that also used packet switching as a means for sending and receiving data.

Many others also contributed to the development of an efficient packet switching system, including Leonard Kleinrock and Donald Davies. If you’re not familiar, “packet switching” is basically just a method of breaking down all transmitted data—regardless of content, type, or structure—into suitably sized blocks, called packets. So, for instance, if you wanted to access a large file from another system, when you attempted to download it, rather than the entire file being sent in one stream, which would require a constant connection for the duration of the download, it would get broken down into small packets of data, with each packet being individually sent, perhaps taking different paths through the network.  The system that downloads the file would then re-assemble the packets back into the original full file.

The platform mentioned above by Licklider, ARPANET was based on these ideas and was the principle precursor to the Internet as we think of it today. It was installed and operated for the first time in 1969 with four nodes, which were located at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI at Stanford University, and the University of Utah.

The first use of this network took place on October 29, 1969 at 10:30 pm and was a communication between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. As recounted by the aforementioned Leonard Kleinrock, this momentous communiqué went like this:

"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI… We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

“Do you see the L?”
“Yes, we see the L,” came the response.

We typed the O, and we asked, “Do you see the O.”
“Yes, we see the O.”

Then we typed the G, and the system crashed… Yet a revolution had begun."

By 1972, the number of computers that were connected to ARPANET had reached twenty-three and it was at this time that the term electronic mail (email) was first used, when a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson implemented an email system in ARPANET using the “@” symbol to differentiate the sender’s name and network name in the email address.

Alongside these developments, engineers created more networks, which used different protocols such as X.25 and UUCP. The original protocol for communication used by the ARPANET was the NCP (Network Control Protocol). The need for a protocol that would unite all the many networks was needed.

In 1974, after many failed attempts, a paper published by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, also known as “the fathers of the Internet,” resulted in the protocol TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which by 1978 would become TCP/IP (with the IP standing for Internet Protocol). At a high level, TCP/IP is essentially just a relatively efficient system for making sure the packets of data are sent and ultimately received where they need to go, and in turn assembled in the proper order so that the downloaded data mirrors the original file. So, for instance, if a packet is lost in transmission, TCP is the system that detects this and makes sure the missing packet(s) get re-sent and are successfully received. Developers of applications can then use this system without having to worry about exactly how the underlying network communication works.

On January 1, 1983, “flag day,” TCP/IP would become the exclusive communication protocol for ARPANET.

Also in 1983, Paul Mockapetris proposed a distributed database of internet name and address pairs, now known as the Domain Name System (DNS).  This is essentially a distributed “phone book” linking a domain’s name to its IP address, allowing you to type in something like todayifoundout.com, instead of the IP address of the website. The distributed version of this system allowed for a decentralized approach to this “phone book.” Previous to this, a central HOSTS.TXT file was maintained at Stanford Research Institute that then could be downloaded and used by other systems. Of course, even by 1983, this was becoming a problem to maintain and there was a growing need for a decentralized approach.

This brings us to 1989 whenTIM BENERS-LEE of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) developed a system for distributing information on the Internet and named it the World Wide Web.

What made this system unique from existing systems of the day was the marriage of the hypertext system (linked pages) with the internet; particularly the marriage of one directional links that didn’t require any action by the owner of the destination page to make it work as with bi-directional hypertext systems of the day.  It also provided for relatively simple implementations of web servers and web browsers and was a completely open platform making it so anyone could contribute and develop their own such systems without paying any royalties. In the process of doing all this, Berners-Lee developed the URL format, hypertext markup language (HTML), and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Around this same time, one of the most popular alternatives to the web, the Gopher system, announced it would no longer be free to use, effectively killing it with many switching to the World Wide Web. Today, the web is so popular that many people often think of it AS the internet, even though this isn’t the case at all.

Also around the time the World Wide Web was being created, the restrictions on commercial use of the internet were gradually being removed, which was another key element in the ultimate success of this network.

Next up, in 1993, MARC ANDREESSEN led a team that developed a browser for the World Wide Web, named Mosaic. This was a graphical browser developed via funding through a U.S. government initiative, specifically the “High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991.″

This act was partially what Al Gore was referring to when he said he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.” All political rhetoric aside (and there was much on both sides concerning this statement), as one of the “fathers of the internet,” Vincent Cerf said, “The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President [Al Gore] in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator… As far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship…  His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet. So he really does deserve credit.” (For more on this controversy, see:

As for Mosaic, it was not the first web browser, as you’ll sometimes read, simply one of the most successful until Netscape came around (which was developed by many of those who previously worked on Mosaic).  The first ever web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was created by Berners-Lee.  This browser had a nice graphical user interface; allowed for multiple fonts and font sizes; allowed for downloading and displaying images, sounds, animations, movies, etc.; and had the ability to let users edit the web pages being viewed in order to promote collaboration of information. However, this browser only ran on NeXT Step’s OS, which most people didn’t have because of the extreme high cost of these systems. (This company was owned by Steve Jobs, so you can imagine the cost bloat… ;-))

In order to provide a browser anyone could use, the next browser Berners-Lee developed was much simpler and, thus, versions of it could be quickly developed to be able to run on just about any computer, for the most part regardless of processing power or operating system.  It was a bare-bones inline browser (command line / text only), which didn’t have most of the features of his original browser.

Mosaic essentially reintroduced some of the nicer features found in Berners-Lee’s original browser, giving people a graphic interface to work with. It also included the ability to view web pages with inline images (instead of in separate windows as other browsers at the time).  What really distinguished it from other such graphical browsers, though, was that it was easy for everyday users to install and use.  The creators also offered 24 hour phone support to help people get it setup and working on their respective systems.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I FOUND OUT

ENTREPRENEUR SPECIAL..................... How to get a job if your venture did not work out

 How to get a job if your venture did not work out

So your enterprise failed. Now what? You will go through a plethora of emotions before you can rationally evaluate your options.
Positive choices include moving on to a job that guarantees an assured income, or pursuing another venture. If you decide to take up a job, here is how you can go about it.
THE RIGHT PLACE

Having been your own boss, the twin goals of freedom and money will seem to conflict when identifying the right job. The smart way is to ignore both independence and money, for the time being. Both will be yours, if you deliver as an employee. So, focus on finding the right place to work and then creating your place in that firm. Identify sectors that you would love to work in.
What draws you to a firm—pedigree, people, product or processes? If it is a particular brand, invest time and effort in reaching out to people working at the firm, getting to know them and learning about the work culture. Once you have enough information on all four parameters, and you are convinced that this is the place to be in, think about how you can contribute to the firm. Note down your thoughts and use them in the following step.
THE RIGHT RESUME

You may have forgotten the last time you made a curriculum vitae (CV). But you must have processed several great and terrible CVs while hiring people for your enterprise. Assume that you are the product, the decision-maker at your target company is the customer, and your CV is the advertisement meant to draw the customer into taking a closer look at the product. Your resume is the single piece of paper that can get you shortlisted for an interview. Invest a few days in getting it right. The first step is to go online to download a few resume formats.
The subheads will include work experience in reverse chronology and education. Reflect on your notes from the previous step on how you plan to contribute to the firm. What achievements in your last enterprise signal your ability to get stuff done? What skills do these achievements reflect? How will you apply those skills to benefit the new firm? Use clear milestones to showcase your risk-taking ability or people skills or sales genius in a way that will catch the attention of your employer.

Finally, write a one page cover letter addressed to your customer describing where you plan to add value and how you bring the right attitude to the table. If there is more than one firm you are interested in, you will have to make different resumes. No two customers are the same and your marketing needs to be customised to suit each one of your target firms.
THE RIGHT PEOPLE

After you have readied the marketing content, identify your customer. Who is the decision-maker with the authority to hire you? Do your research on him. Then speak to people who are close to you and find a referral for your customer. Get in touch with potential referees who can pitch your case or introduce you to your target. Meet them and leave them with three clear reasons on how you can add value to your customer's team.

Finally, request them to share your cover letter and resume. Follow up at regular intervals. Repeat the process with other referees till you are short-listed for an interview.

THE RIGHT INTERVIEW

At an interview, you will get to make your sales pitch. Preparation will increase your odds of success. Spend time to write down the obvious and the not-so-obvious in questions that your target firm/customer is likely to ask. As a nontraditional candidate, your decision to quit entrepreneurship will come under scrutiny.

Why have you chosen to work for them? Will you quit at the drop of a hat to pursue unfulfilled entrepreneurial dreams? Can you fit in well with a team and inside a structured organisation? Prepare your answers and rehearse them to project confidence. Dress well for the interview and pay attention to your grooming. Focus on the 'what' and 'how' of the gains you will bring to your firm/customer.
THE RIGHT DEAL

The final step is to close the deal at the end of the sales process. Give yourself a valuable gift at this point. Focus only on maximising the amount of responsibility and resources you will get in the new role. Ask the employer for a written commitment on the same. Choose not to negotiate on the financial terms and thus guarantee yourself a successful entry/re-entry into the workforce.

As an entrepreneur, you'll know how an employer is loath to lose an employee who has proven his worth. Within six months to a year in your new job, re-negotiate your compensation based on outcomes you have delivered. If the employer does not meet your expectations, then you can easily leverage your new achievements to get a suitable compensation correction elsewhere. Have a great journey!
TILL YOU FIND A JOB...
Knowledge as a service: Do you have specialised knowledge as a result of your enterprise or education? Offer your services as a consultant to help other enterprises. For compensation, seek a fixed sum or a percentage of benefits delivered.
Outcome as a service: Can you deliver tangible outcomes—create a legal contract, set up a warehouse or make a website? Most small businesses would be glad to pay for guaranteed results without the hassle of managing a person. Ask for an advance, followed by milestone based payments.
Time as a service: Can you sit next to a telephone for four hours every day to answer or redirect calls intelligently? Or enter data for two hours daily? Offer your time as a service to individuals, professionals and small ventures who wish to outsource non-core tasks to save time. Get paid hourly, daily or weekly.
Writing as a service: Having run an enterprise, can you help another business codify its processes? Start-ups are always caught up with urgent deadlines and need extra hands to create and record processes in administration, HR, operations and sales. Agree upon a structure and compensation for each manual.
Speaking as a service: Are you comfortable with public speaking and are willing to teach? Offer soft or hard skills training for new hires in organisations or coaching at education/ training institutes or tuition to students at home. Get paid for every assignment or on an hourly/monthly basis.

By Devashish Chakravarty
The writer is Director, Executive Search, QuezX.com ET 140930

FOOD SPECIAL ......Nine food myths busted

FOOD SPECIAL Nine food myths busted

Myth: Shellfish cause heart disease.
Reality: The same as eggs – another old wives’ tale. The dietary cholesterol in shellfish (oysters, prawns, scallops etc) does not make a significant contribution to your blood cholesterol levels. Shellfish are actually low in total and saturated fat.

Myth: Blood-type and food-combining diets are the best way to lose weight.
Reality: Well, maybe they are – but there is no convincing scientific evidence to back up either diet’s weight-loss properties.

The blood-group diet was popular after a bestseller made it a rage a decade or so ago. It drew its intuitive appeal from our belief that different people respond in different ways to the same diet. Some lose weight quickly and some don’t.

There is actually a branch of nutrition called nutrigenetics devoted to working out why we react differently from each other. Some dieticians plan diets according to what they think will work best for your genetic makeup. But deciding what your genetic makeup is can be a lot more complicated than just looking at your blood type.

The blood-type diet works on the assumption that characteristics within your blood will affect digestion. For instance, people with blood group O have more stomach acid and can therefore find it easier to digest meat. On the other hand, people with blood group A produce less acid and are therefore better off with vegetarian diets and less meat.

The problem is that there is no convincing scientific evidence for this theory. Even if people with type O blood do produce more acid, this has very little to do with the ability to digest meat. The digestion of meat is done by enzymes produced by the pancreas and not just by stomach acids.

If this theory were valid, then everybody who suffers from acidity should eat lots of meat every day and lose lots of weight! Alas, digestion is not so simple to explain.

Food-combining diets have been around for a long time, but they sprang to fame in 1985 with the publication of the best-selling Fit for Life, which said that you could not combine meat with complex carbohydrates (ie rice, wheat, potatoes etc). In effect, what this meant was that unless you were vegetarian, you should stop enjoying food: no biryani, no meat curry with rice or chapatis, no steak and chips, no ham sandwiches, no keema naans, etc.

But if the Fit for Life theory is valid and people who eat only vegetables along with complex carbohydrates will never put on weight, then all vegetarians should be thin – which as any Indian knows is nonsense.

There is absolutely no scientific evidence for this. And all the stuff about stomach enzymes and food fermentation etc that this diet is based on is pooh-poohed by scientists.

But yes, it will cause you to eat less. And that alone will make you lose weight.

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Myth: There is no natural propensity among some people to put on weight. It is all your own fault.
Reality: This is a load of cobblers. I know, for instance, that I put on weight faster than most people. (I joke that I put on two kilos every time I pass a pastry shop.)

Research has shown that a tendency to put on weight is genetic. Researchers studied identical twins who had been raised separately and found that they had a similar body weight even if they had been raised apart – or given away for adoption at birth.

So, the fault is often in our genes. Some of us are programed to be fat and some to be thin. This does not mean that people with fatty genes should lie back and eat jalebis all day. We should all try and eat healthy. But let’s accept that it isn’t always our fault.

Myth: Eggs increase cholesterol.Reality: The late Russi Modi outlived most of his contemporaries even though he was famous for the number of eggs he consumed. And in general, Parsis who eat eggs with everything (even bhindi!) live a lot longer than the rest of us.

Nobody has found any causal link between eggs and heart disease. In fact, eggs are good for you and a typical 50mm egg contains 5gm of fat of which only 1.5gm is saturated fats.

So don’t necessarily eat loads of eggs – unless you are a Parsi! – but you can forget all that nonsense about egg white omelettes.

Myth: Exercise alone can lead to weight loss
Reality: Exercise is good for you. But it isn’t the best way to lose weight. Run for 30 minutes and you will expend 403 calories. Come back and eat a chocolate bar and you will consume 342 calories.

This explains why the people you see, year after year, walking around Lodhi Garden or Mahalakshmi Race Course are fatties. They eat what they like and imagine they can lose it through exercise.

The best way to lose weight is diet plus exercise. But if you have to pick only one, pick diet over exercise.

Myth: Microwaves can make food toxic.Reality: Relax. Microwaves are safe. You don’t lose nutrients if you cook vegetables in the microwave whereas if you boil them, the nutrients are thrown away with the water.

Microwaves don’t expose you to radiation for significant lengths of time, as the moment the microwave is switched off there is no radiation in the kitchen. Even if the microwave is on and the door is properly closed, no radiation leaks out.

Myth: Red meat takes longer to digest
.Reality: This myth was popularised by Fit for Life. The book also said never to combine meat with fruit (so no duck a la orange, no Thai food, no turkey with cranberry sauce etc.)

There is no scientific basis for this view. All food takes about three hours to leave the stomach. And it is fully digested and excreted within one to three days. Meat is no exception, even if you eat a banana after your seekh kabab.

Myth: Non-stick pans are the best.
Reality: Well, yes and no. The bright side is that you may need less oil while cooking. The bad side is that some non-stick pans should not be used if you are cooking at very high temperatures.

Some non-stick pans use PFOA, a chemical, which, at high temperatures, can release dangerous gases into the air. These gasses can cause flu-like symptoms in humans and can even kill pet birds.

So if you are frying at hot temperatures, cooking Chinese food or making a steak, then use cast-iron. It is safe and adds more flavour to your food.

You will note that professional kitchens rarely use non-stick pans. That should tell you something. On the other hand, many non-stick pans are manufactured these days without dangerous chemicals. So, if you can tell the difference then do, by all means, use non-stick cookware.

Myth: Frozen food is bad for you.
Reality: The opposite is true. We can argue about the flavour of say, frozen fish versus fresh fish and yes fresh is better. But even the frozen kind is not bad for you.

In the case of some vegetables, frozen is better. The vegetables are frozen within hours of being harvested, whereas you have no way of knowing when the vegetables your sabziwalla sells you were picked.

Plus some vegetables (peas are the best example) start to deteriorate as soon as they are harvested. So frozen vegetables may actually be healthier.

Vir Sanghvi, HTBR140914
Primary source  is the Australian dietician, Nicole Senior, author of the book Food Myths.

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RETAIL SPECIAL............................. Eight Things We Learnt about the Indian Shopper From Supermarketwala

Eight Things We Learnt about the Indian Shopper From Supermarketwala

A range of nuggets – everything from why Indians want to be 

crowded to how misri became prasad

I have no interest in large-scale retail and no long-term plans to persuade the kirana store customer to convert to the shiny new mall I’m building. This is the purported purpose of this new book by Damodar Mall (has ever a man had a more occupational joke-appropriate surname?). I am not convinced that this is not something of a ruse – a ‘buy this toothpaste because dentists give it to their kids’ gambit. You think that if the books are meant for the almost-Biyanis and quasi-Ambanis then maybe I should get my hands on it too? Whatever. You’d have to be a highly incurious sort of human being to be not intrigued and entertained by some of the revelations of this breezy, cheerful book.

1. “If you leave a space measuring more than your forearm – from the tip of your finger to your elbow – between you and the person just ahead of you in a queue, in India, such a gap is not feasible to sustain. It shall get bridged or occupied within five minutes.”

This is one of the interesting results from a study done on Mall’s request across India from temples, colleges and train stations to malls, multiplexes and wedding parties. But Mall’s interpretation of these results is even more fun. He says Indians value what he calls the ‘elbow push factor’ in different ways from the Western shopper. Luxury stores, built with plenty of room so no one needs to jostle (based on the understanding of the Western shopper), are looked upon suspiciously by the Indian shopper as forlorn and empty, not as peaceful and serene. “People actually felt reassured by a certain polite level of elbow push, a certain amount of crowding as long as it does not degenerate into disorder and chaos.”

2. The existence of the female customer shaped the Indian fitness business way before Karisma Kapoor started exercising in tights.

Talwalkars (est. 1932) is convinced that their huge success – 175 branches in 65 cities – is entirely because way back in 1943, Vishnupant Talwalkar was the first Indian gym owner to welcome women, instantly positioning it as a ‘family’ space and not a rippling, bronzed, grunting male one, which is what the akhaaras were. In one of the book’s funniest ‘unself-conscious tycoon’ quotes, Prashant Talwalkar (current head of the empire and grandson of Vishnupant) says, “There’s nothing wrong with lady personal trainers in gyms wearing hot pants. Our male patrons may like it, too. But it does not pass the test of having a congenial, comfortable atmosphere for women patrons. So Talwalkar’s will not do it.”

3. The Indian customer is no longer impressed by readymade clothes in the way s/he once was.

Her traditional access to highly customized clothes (via tailoring) is something she still values. She is repulsed by the sight of the same clothes in a few dozen sizes in the way it is offered by modern retailers. So who gets it right? According to Mall, it’s the traditional retailers, including old-fashioned jewellers, whose shop assistants feed customer preferences back into production. These stores create endless minor variations so every customer feels like they’ve got something no one else has. These Indian stores and… Zara (surprise! Start at minute 1:04 of the video Shit Delhi Girls Say!). Zara with its fruit fly length design cycles works just fine for the Indian shopper frantic for something non-standard that will allow her to put off the search for That Magic Tailor.

4. Indians have been apparently buying millions of fridges and, this is important, have been buying bigger fridges.

But what we are doing with these fridges does not quite follow the Western trajectory. We are still terrified by leftovers. Leftovers are only okay if you can bung them into the transmogrification machine. To quote Mall, “Google search ‘recipes, leftover rice’. While half the world eats rice and therefore has ‘leftover rice’, the recipes to rework it and make it refreshingly new and hot are overwhelmingly Indian.

5. Also on the Indian fridge front, we are wildly suspicious of actual ready-to-eat foods.

Indian households are instead filling their fridge with what Mall calls work-in-progress foods – batters, pastes, mixes, packets of vegetables cut for Chinese stir-fry or sambhar. According to Mall’s research, the Indian middle-class household would rather get a cook (full-time or part-time) or even outsource special festival cooking to what he calls a “neighbourhood aunty” – informal catering operations run by women. As long as the illusion of making something from scratch and the illusion of customization exists, the Indian grocery shopper is willing to try anything from pesarattu batter to maple syrup

6. Young Indian women like to shop for groceries in malls and supermarkets because of the anonymity. 

Mall points to an annoying and hilariously recognizable phenomenon. You love your neighbourhood store because it stocks the brands your household likes and remembers it. But what if you are a young woman who doesn’t want to know what the kirana store guy thinks of you for buying expensive fabric conditioner or a private stash of Lay’s chips. Mall calls it the Shopkeeper-in-law situation. “A significant clue lies in the manner in which the young bahu addresses the grocer. It is with the same respect that she would use with a senior member of the family. ‘Panditji, Guptaji, Anna, Gauru, or Bhaisaheb’ are the norm. Most of the time, the fan is directed on him and the customer has to sweat it out at the counter. She might be giving him her custom but he is the one patronizing her.” How glorious the long, empty, anonymous aisles of supermarkets and malls must seem in contrast where you can buy denim-coloured condoms. In bulk

7. Indians are obsessed with long, black hair on women.

You colour your hair to cover the greys or for the very occasional, very youthful lark. Really you just want a trim and say no in an embarrassed manner when the funky stylist suggests taking a few inches off. Mall says, “Paradoxically, the biggest offering in salons in India has to do with hair, even though that’s what Indians need the least… Even though the ratio of spend on skin versus hair is 60:40, with only 10 per cent of the revenue coming from styling. In salon imagery, of course, the opposite is true. All of us have seen gigantic posters of exquisitely styled hair in salons, most of these sponsored by L’Oreal, the industry leader by far.” Mall goes on to write about YLG, a young and extremely successful Bangalore-based chain of salons – 34 salons in 5 years. YLG says they did it by ignoring the MNC dogma and switching their focus to a very big, juicy range of skincare services

8. One of Mall’s most intriguing nuggets is about prasad. How did particular foods become inseparable from particular pujas?

“Every celebration is accompanied by food that was once upon a time considered exotic. In the days of cooking at home from scratch with local raw ingredients, fasting items like sabudana, rajgira (amaranth) atta, bhagar (wild rice), sweet potato and festival foods made with besan, maida, dates, sevaiyan, sherbet and exotic fruits, were actually processed in distant factories or imported from far-away places. Weren’t they the equivalent of what olives and tofu mean to the young women today, for our great grandmothers way back in that day or age?” asks Mall.

Enough already. You’ve blown our minds with the thought that the misri of maakhan misri was once a cool, new thing that came from Egypt (aka Misr in Hindi).

https://in.news.yahoo.com/eight-things-we-learnt-about-the-indian-shopper-from-supermarketwala-052122048.html