A dream that is three and half years old…

January, 2003:It was my engineering final year, campus was abuzz and everybody was hopeful and anxious since its placement time. CSE people have more opportunities naturally and we kept hearing about the companies that might visit the campus this year.
Finally the first company was announced. India’s largest software services company it is. We were running [...]

A bachelors guide to renting a house in Chennai

All you hopeless and wifeless bachelors, get up and start looking. With PHD releasing “the unofficial bachelors guide to renting a house in Chennai” today, you will never again get a “no, we dont rent to criminals, politicians, drummers, dogs, carpenters and bachelors” reply from your prospective landlords.
Where to look:

Never call a housing broker. They [...]

Learnings of the week that was

Not that you would be interested to know them, but anyways,
>>> It does rain in Chennai for more than 12.3 seconds at a time. It happened once yesterday.
>>> Using combo-boxes in excel is not that difficult, it is so much more fun and intuitive. Try learning them here if you are a excel freak like [...]

Understanding Customer - Insights from street

Part 1 of many more to come
Location: DTDC Main office, Hyderabad
Customer: Sir, can you courier this to Nellore (its a town in AP)Service Personnel: What is in it?
C: a SIM cardSP: We dont deliver SIM cards
C: Why?SP: Because, we donot take responsibility to them. (apparently either they are not covered under insurance or Govt. has [...]

How not to do advertising online?

The above seen is a snapshot of the interactive ad for Indage Chateau Wine sellers. It took me to this page when I clicked on it.

What went wrong with this ad?

In above page you can see that there is no way in hell I can find out where all this Indage Chateau is located; not [...]

9 sureshot ways to kill your audience using powerpoint

Lately I have been attending campus pre-placement talks by various leading companies in India. It would suffice to say that I have attended over half-a-hundred presentations of companies “trying to sell themselves” to us. Some of them were really good, and then some of them are so pathetic that it made me feel sorry about [...]

Absolut Shift

Looks like companies are bitten by the rebranding bug. First there was Intel changing its logo. Then there is Kodak following the suit. Now we hear one of the most famous campaigns of ad world, Absolut vodka - bottle campaign is being shelved.
The absolut ads have always been one of my most [...]