Thought Beans Blog

Both Areva & Airbus secured good orders from the Chinese during the visit of French president to China. While Airbus has secured an order for 160 planes, Areva has secured orders for 2 nuclear reactors. A320’s & A330’s will be part of the deal. The agreeements were signed between the 2 premiers during the recent visit. Sarkozy who is embracing the US style of leadership & has been steering France towards US style of working is forging new relationships with the world leaders. His latest salvo on P2P downloading in France shows the steps being taken to protect the industry. Airbus which has been hit badly by the delay in the A380 delivary has at last some good news. The order for 160 planes will help Airbus in its recovery.

Finally Indians can get hands on the Hybrid Car In India, which we have been hearing for a long time. Honda will make available the first Hybrid Car in India, Honda Civic Hybrid, in 2008. This will be the first Envirnomental friendly Car in India. Honda will make the 2008 Version in India. Honda will import the car as Completely built unit. This will start a completely new Car segment In India. Since it runs on both Combustion engine & electric powered motor, milege will be higher. It’s Civic model is already a big selling model in India. We will have to wait & see how the Indians will receive the car. If this is successful, it will have a hit on the sales of other cars in this segment. This may Make other makers like Toyota to bring similar cars to India.

Scores of people have been injured & Killed in the Serial bomb blasts at  Civil courts of Lucknow, Faizadbad and Varanasi. These blasts have taken at a gap of 5 minutes of each other.  There is a report of a death of lawyer & according to initial reports Bomb was kept in a cycle. Rescue work is going on in full swing & this time the militants have made the legal system of the country a target. They hav hurt where it hurts most. This is another Major attack in the country after the Hyderabad attack. This is the first major attack in the NOrth Indian CIty. Though the attacks on Indian Soli is continuing unabetedly, Govt is not taking any steps.

With Globalization, Real Estate Prices in India is increasing at a rapid rate. Now, Mumbai has the distinction of being the 2nd highest office rental in the world with London’s West End being the Highest.  Mumbai has a price of around $189/sq.ft. None of the cities from US, the economic powerhouse of the world, find a place in the top 10. Only NY’s Manhattan finds a place at 12. London City & Moscow occupy the next places respectively. This high office rent definetly affects the MNC’s planning to shift operations to India or setting up their Indias ops. Infrastructure in Mumbai needs to be improved a lot. The other Financial Nerve centers of the world have a better infrastructure comapred to Mumbai. Whatever happened to plans of Turning Mumbai into Shangai of India?

Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame has launched a new product called Live Docs. This, according to Bhatia, has all the features of Microsoft office 2007 & is free online. Live documents has been developed by his bangalore based company instacoll. This has wiki capabilities as well & can be accessed in a Browser. This has good security features as well. The docs can be shared & edited on the web & browser as well. This can be used on Linux or Macs as well with More features compared to Microsoft Live. More info can be had at http://www.live-documents.com/

with changing customer preferences & tastes, Premium beer market is growing very rapidly. SABmiller, 2nd largest premium beer maker is acquiring the Dutch based Grolsch for $1.2 billion euros. There is much consolidation going on in the beer industry. This will result in increased competition & better margins for the players. Carlsberg & Heineken are also in the race to acquire the companies.

Adding to the Spectrum allocation tussle between GSM vs CDMA, is the number portabality issue govt is planning to introduce. The Number portability will give big advantage for the users to move easily across the operators. It was Reliance, a CDMA operator which stirred the nest about the Spectrum allocation. Now GSM operators alleage that this would give big advantage to CDMA operators. Reliance is in plans for rolling out GSM services. GSM operators led by COAI says number portability should be introduced for both fixed & mobile operators. There is a shadow war being played out by both the service providers.

With the booming Indian Stock Market, the Bombay Stock Exchange has become the latest sucess story of the Globalized India. Now, the US Futures Exchange has licensed the Bombay Stock Exchange’s Becnchmark Sensex for US Dollar Denominated Futures Trading. This will allow the US investors to invest directly in the Indian equity market without ADR requirement. The Dollar denominated sensex futures will trade 23 hours daily. This would help the institutional investors in the US to participate directly in the Hot & emerging Indian Equity Market.

No Indian Univ has made it to the list of top 200 World Univ list. The  Surprising fact is our Neighbour, China, has made it to the list with 6 Universities. There is no mention of IIT’s or IIM’s in the list. The top 10 spots are held by the US & UK universities. Harvard Univ of US tops the list followed by the Cambridge & Oxfard univ. The Sad part is  IIT’s which we are so proud of doesn’t find a mention in the list of 200. If such top educational institutions dont find a place, then what about the rest of the Indian universities. There needs to be a good policy framework to improve the competitiveness of the education system in the country. The Amount of research going on in the Indian Univ is very less compared to the foreign univ.

The Fake CEO blogs have become a big buzz in the blogosphere. Amongst the fake blogs, the Fakesteve blog is most popular. It is written by Daniel Lyons, a senior Editor at Forbes Magazine. It took almost 14 months to find out the author of this Fakesteve Blog. Daniel writes the Technology articles for Forbes. There are other fake CEO blogs

http://fakerichardbranson.blogspot.com/
http://fakelarryellison.blogspot.com/
http://fakebill.wordpress.com/
http://fakeschwartz.blogspot.com/
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/