Happy New Year 2010!!!

Wishing all my blog readers, family and friends a very Happy New Year 2010. May this coming year surmounts the crisis world has seen over the last few months and brings in new hopes, aspirations, luck, prosperity and success to one and all.

Richest Arab

Saudi Arabia's prince Alwaleed bin Tala is the richest Arab. CitiGroup's largest individual investor, Alwaleed who added $1 billion to his personal wealth, was ranked the richest Arab businessman by Arabian Business magazine.

Alwaleed’s assets were valued at $18 billion, the Dubai-based magazine told in its 2009 Arab Rich List, adding that the figure was confirmed by the Saudi Arabian prince’s office in Riyadh. It compares with Alwaleed’s wealth of $17.1 billion that was reported last year. Alwaleed, 54, has seen his wealth recover as the global financial crisis shows signs of easing and share valuations recover from lows earlier in the year. In August, his assets were valued at $16.3 billion, the magazine reported, citing the accounts of Kingdom Holding Co, the prince’s Riyadh-based investment company.

The prince built his fortune by investing in brand-name companies he considered undervalued, including Apple, News Corp and Time Warner. Forbes magazine estimated he was worth $13.3 billion in March, ranking him 22nd among the world’s billionaires.

Source: ET

Famous Sayings!!!

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind - Albert Einstein

The energy of the mind is the essence of life - Aristotle

Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough - Oprah Winfrey

Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several, he will fail to achieve distinction in any - Plato

Hasty climbers have sudden falls - Robert Greene

It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted - Aeschylus

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens - Carl Jung

Look out for more quotes at, http://www.indianchild.com/Quotes/famous-sayings.htm

Google knows what you searched!!!

Google knows exactly what everyone searched for. Starting from Katrina Kaif, Rahul Gandhi, Satyam shares, Nokia 5800 and everything under the sun roof. Google released its year-end Zeitgeist, a compilation of fastest rising and most popular words Indians keyed into the search engine this year. The guys at Google made their lists after going through billions of queries, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools.

Globally, Michael Jackson emerged as the fastest rising on Google search, most likely because of his untimely death. Social networking site, Facebook was No 2. In India, the fastest rising search words were budget 2009, Kambakth Ishq, IRCTC – the Indian Railways online ticket reservation website, Satyam share price.

The most popular searches, however, were for Gmail, Youtube (watching your favourite movie while at work?!), Yahoomail, Orkut and, yes, the Indian Railways. Looks like we Indians really love our trains. India’s five most popular celebs according to Google: Katrina Kaif, Michael Jackson, Salman Khan, Aishwarya Rai and Shahid Kapoor. Shah Rukh only made it to No 7. Everyone was also looking for these politicians: Rahul Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Sachin Pilot, Sarah Palin, P Chidambaram and Mayawati came in at No 6.

Source: TOI

Nice One!!!

E Payments made Easy

Life has become much more easier with the advent of electronic money payments. Now it seems to be flexible even further. RBI, in order to make such electronic commerce more faster and reliable has made it mandatory that all such transactions should be credited directly to merchants, instead of getting cleared by intermediaries such as CC Avenue and Paypal.

Currently, until a payment is authorized and processed by intermediaries, a transaction is not completed. For instance, online retailers such as eBay do not ship goods purchased online unless funds are credited to their account, before being routed through an intermediary. CC Avenue, BillDesk, Direc-Pay, ICICI PaySeal and Paypal are among major payment gateways in India.

“The new measure will ensure that the epayments made by customers are remitted to the accounts of the merchants who have supplied the goods and services without undue delay,” G Padmanabhan, chief general manager at RBI said. Under the new system, all payments to merchants shall be effected within a maximum of three days from the date of transaction. The Internet and Mobile Association of India has also welcomed the move.

Source: ET

Lesson for Counterterrorism.

Life is so very unpredictable. Sometimes pain and sometimes pleasure. But whatever days it might be, time just passes by. It was almost a year back that Mumbai was engulfed with the terrible hands of terrorism. 26/11 was a major eye opener for the Indian Inc and its fragile security systems. This has made large MNCs and business enterprises to take their necessary security measures and steps to counter attack terrorism. When large Indian corporations such as the Mahindras and the Essar group have formed independent teams to tackle security related issues, multinationals are forging alliances to quickly react for adverse conditions.

Multinationals such as Citi, JP Morgan, Disney, HSBC and StanChart, among others, have joined hands to rope in the law, and enforce agencies to provide nimble-footed response to an event like 26/11. Indian business houses such as the Tatas are also doing risk analysis based on information given by law-enforcement agencies. “We do periodic risk analysis to bolster security,” said R Gopalakrishnan, director, Tata Sons.

Retail companies, which are at a higher risk with thousands of people entering it every day, have been aggressive in bringing better security practices. Shoppers Stop, a Mumbai-based retail chain, has installed bomb checking machines, similar to the ones used for airport security, at most of their outlets.

Source: ET