A seemingly ultra-modern city has come up on the outskirts of new delhi, called gurgaon.
It is full of skyscrapers ( the attached picture was taken on the evening of 27th July 2009) and parts of it look like downtown manhatten.
It has a population of a quarter million people, and many more come from New Delhi to work here.
Though the city shows the zeal of private Industries in India, it is a good example of the result of lack of regulation and government support.
A city this large and seemingly modern does not yet have municipal water or drainage/sewerage. Everybody in the town is using ground water for consumption (along with Reverse Osmosis machines for cleaning it) and septic tanks are used for sewerage.
There have been cases of polluting factories putting used water back into the ground.
Though medicines are exhaustively tested for all side effects, before these are allowed by government authorities (like FDA), I do not think they are tested thoroughly for side effects when taken in combination with other medicines.
Further, how much and how many medicines should be given together should be based on the health and medical condition of a patient.
In the absence of either the ‘experience’ or readily accessible data, patients are many times given too many medicines at the same time.
Commodity products like bottled water have fierce competition. Besides taste, quality and nutrients, packaging plays an important role in the brand positioning of such products.
The 1 liter plastic bottle for water has been there for many years, along with bigger and smaller versions.
However, these bottle designs miss a few things:
For the 1 liter version, either you have to drink the full bottle during a short time or the water becomes stale/warm after opening it, so you do not feel like drinking it later, specially the next day onwards.
You can buy the smaller versions of this bottle and carry them in your car easily. However, if you are traveling by public transportation, you have to manage carrying many of these, which feels cumbersome and is not sleak.
If you have a 1 or a 2 liter bottle while you are traveling with friends/family, it is difficult to share the water unless you have glasses.
One more issue is that you are forced to gulp the water from the bottle, instead of sipping it , which you could do if the bottle had a built in straw.
An alternate design for this bottle could be a small (half pint sized or smaller) bottle, with a modified base which allows another similar sized bottle to be connected to it. This could be achieved by putting grooves/threading on top of the plastic cap to screw/connect the bottle to the bottom of this modified bottle base. Connecting 3 to 4 of these together would make it easy and sleak to carry. It would keep each unit separate from the remaining ones, water could be shared with friends easily, and would keep the water fresh(since all bottles do not have to be opened).
Another degree of improvement can be achieved by changing the design so that the water can be kept cool for a long time. Will leave that for another day..
I have been throwing away my old movie DVDs recently. Not because I do not like these old movies, but because these old DVDs collect dust and marks and start affecting the lens of the DVD player.
However hard one tries, the DVDs would go bad at the slightest level of mishandling or would start impacting the DVD player.
The video cassettes /tapes for VCRs had a nice plastic cover where the tape would be hidden from all pollution and would be uncovered only after the tape is inserted in the VCR.
However, the DVDs are open and ready to attract dust and scratches at the first opportunity.
I wish some company recognizes this and starts creating DVDs with plastic covers, along with DVD players, so that the DVD gets exposed only after being inserted in the player.
Ideally, if one can buy a DVD of today and insert it in the jacket to be used with this new DVD player, this could become popular.
Ditto would work for the camcorders with DVDs.
Alternately, once the price of read-only Pen-drives go down, these could be used for selling media.
In today's scenario, a machine with hundreds of usb-drive slots where customers insert thier pen-drive and download media for a charge could be of some use.
A recent news in India where a leading IT company announced its plans of acquiring a money-losing real estate company owned by the promoter's family created waves of questions about corporate governance in India.
It is known that promoters/managers have been taking the rest of the shareholders for a ride during board decisions, most of the times by using the 'independent' board members.
Numerous times, the managers have been either not disclosing the full agenda before the board meeting, or manipulating the minutes of the board meeting as per their own requirements.
An electronic solution where all shareholders can access and vote for a board agenda before the board meeting in a secure way could be helpful to organizations.
A weighted average of shareholders' opinion once accessible to the board would put an onus on the board members to take more responsible decisions.
A family friend works for the special cell of Police in India, involved in fighting with terrorists and underworld.
I talked to him about the Taj Hotel incident and asked him if they could have used some gas to make all people inside the hotel unconscious, thus making it much faster to catch the terrorists and rescue the hostages.
He conveyed that the police does not use any such gases; though there are chemical gases like Chloroform, Carbon monoxide, Methane which can make people unconscious, these gases can kill people with their overdose.
A gas which would instantly knock-down people by making them drowsy/unconscious, in a medically safe manner could be useful in such operations.
Despite constant efforts for the last one year, the FED is now forced to offer a $ 700 B plan to purchase the 'toxic-debt', a term for under-performing loans mostly mortgages in different forms. Also, the size of the prime mortgages defaulting now is higher than the sub-prime mortgages.
Analyzing the problem with a bottom-up approach, the underlying cause of the problem is what I call borrower’s 'free put option'. A homebuyer in America gets a ‘free put option’ when he takes a mortgage. He can walk away from the property leaving it to the bank, as the collateral is the property itself and nothing else. Most states will not allow the banks to go after the home buyer's other assets or future income.
Further, banks now are offering short-sale opportunities where even the credit-histories of home owners are not affected.
In the last decline of real estate market, in the early 90s, borrowers displayed patience thru the downturn and did not use these options, probably because their down-payment was higher at that time.
If the decline in home prices continues, more homeowners – even those who can afford to make payments - would like to use the option, thereby increasing the size of the 'toxic-debt', creating a vicious cycle.
