Category: India

Social networking

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One of the biggest problems due to the proliferation of social networking  is the spam invites  you receive from perfect strangers to the various social networking websites.   I am extremely careful online,  but I still face this deluge of  unwanted mails. The worst culprits are:

Facebook  – “Check out my photos” –  who wants to waste time looking at photos of  perfect strangers ?

SiliconIndia  –  Invites from an assortment of  girls with faces pancaked with make up.  They use email ids which I do not publish anywhere online, I wonder how they get the email ids.

Orkut

Zorpia

Unyk

Apnacircle

Shtyle.fm

Jhoos –  XXX  wants to be your friend

Netlog

Boxbe

Yaari

When you are in college or have just started working, you have plenty of time and nothing much to do , you can afford to waste time on social networking and making “friends” with perfect strangers.  As you grow older,  you have seen enough of human nature to make  an effort to make friends. You  value your time and  there is so much you want to do, why waste  time socializing, especially  with people with whom you have nothing in common.

Airtel 290603 debit

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Like a movie sequel , my Airtel  prepaid balance is  again being debited for  Rs 3  for Thought for the day service to which I have never subscribed.

In June I was facing this Airtel prepaid problem and after repeated follow up, I managed to get a refund.  Now in the space of  30 minutes my account has been debited for Rs 12 for a VAS service to which I never subscribed.  It seems that millions of Airtel subscribers are facing this problem,  if no immediate action is taken, it is better to go to the consumer court. They refunded the Rs 12  initially and  I switched off the mobile.

But now my account has been debited for Rs 45 since then and I continue to receive the unsolicited SMS messages from 290603. It seems all Airtel subscribers are facing this problem.  I have been trying to find out if there is a mobile phone virus which could be causing this problem,  but it appears unlikely since I only have a basic mobile phone model.  I have written to customer support and will publish the correspondence here soon.

Sending an email to the nodal officer is also not of much use. Now I am getting an error message

Your message

Subject: Mobile no **** – Incorrect billing

was not delivered to:

Nodalofficer.Mumbai@airtel.in

because:

Error delivering to Nodalofficer Mumbai/SERVICE EXCELLENCE/Mum/Airtel/BTVL; Router: Database disk quota exceeded

One would have thought that India’s  largest mobile service provider could afford more hard disk space on their servers.  Before buying foreign companies like MTN,  why don’t they put their  VAS  and billing systems in order? I have wasted so much time trying to get a refund and there are so many customers who are facing a similar problem.

Update : After repeated follow up  and sending emails to 121@airtelindia.com , I got 3 refunds of  Rs 12, Rs 45 and Rs 3 each .  I hope Airtel is able to fix this problem permanently.

Lack of diversity

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Though India is a very diverse country, one of the things I have noticed is the complete lack of diversity in the employee profile of most software / internet companies in India. Everyone comes from similar socio-economic backgrounds, age and have similar interests. Even bloggers/ websites are very similar in nature and their opinions. One company even stated that they only hire people who stay close to their office!

While this may help when you have to work as a team (for software development), it could also be the reason why there is so little innovation. India has a culture of sycophancy, so whatever the boss says is always right. No one is always right, but if no one points out the flaws or drawbacks at an early stage, you are likely to lose more.

There is very little tolerance for people who do not “belong” to their group. “Outsiders” are often treated very unfairly. The media may give a lot of coverage to discrimination against Indian students in Australia, but how often do they cover the discrimination people face daily in India because of gender,age or family background.

The other casualty of lack of diversity is that since they do not know people from different backgrounds, is that you tend to stereotype. So if your girlfriend / wive / sister / mother is only interested in cooking / fashion/ housekeeping / partying, it is impossible for them to believe that any other lady can be technically competent.

Fed on a steady diet of actresses, models and other dumb celebrities extensively covered by the mainstream media in India today, most young people think that the way a person looks or talks is the best criteria for evaluating an individual. They have closed minds and do not realise how important trust is in the long term.

Corporate espionage

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As this article indicates, corporate espionage is widespread in India today , and some Indian companies are very careless about their internal security systems.  With the lifestyle people lead, “integrity is the cheapest commodity that can be purchased in India today” and I will write more about it later.

In the internet sector, you will never experience it if you are:

  • An internet company catering exclusively to the Indian market , with little interest / expertise in expanding world wide.
  • Providing outsourced services like programming, content writing
  • A start up whose main aim is to get (or already have got) funding  from Venture Capitalists (they are your “minders”)
  • In your twenties , incapable of independent thinking, with little exposure to real business , foreign policy, has been brainwashed into thinking that  Google can do no evil and what ever is written on websites like Techcrunch and other similar websites is the only thing that matters.

American and European companies spend billions of dollars every year on corporate espionage. In the past 2 years , I have personally experienced corporate espionage.    At first I did not realize what was happening,  but in the last few months I have got proof of their activities.

The corporate espionage groups can be classified into 3 categories :

  • Group based in Bridgeport, CT, USA  – this group has been tracking my activities for a long time.  They sign up on forums I own, make payments from stolen accounts and generally trouble me.
  • UK based – check out all the content of the websites I own, want me to sell to them cheap, pretend to be false buyers.
  • Located in India – most of them do it for money,  their activities are sponsored by  G* (Giant Internet Company), and  I have a lot of information on them including their phone numbers and address.  They intercept and sometimes alter the content of  my email. ( I have proof of this) . Many work/ have friends in local internet companies.  Unfortunately, they are kites , paid to do the dirty work, tracking the company (or companies) who pays them will take time.

These companies also sponsor organized stalkers/gang stalkers to harass individuals and spread rumors, you can find more information about Organized / gang stalking online, it seems to be a world wide phenomenon, if  you are an outspoken individual.

The companies do this because they are confident they will never get caught or exposed, and I am writing this post to indicate all their activities and correspondence will be content for this and other websites in future.  Stealing secrets only works if your competitor has a similar organization and cost structure to yours.

Cybercrime networks

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These articles on  Cybercrime networks in Mumbai and the e-crooks confirms what something that has troubled me for the last two years.  From the article

The latter two cases indicate social engineering, where the victim has been spied on and cultivated. The Pune man had to have had a reason to believe he had African property and the Worli businessman’s cheaters knew he had recently bought a BMW. In other words, they were not entirely random attacks.

These networks are very well entrenched and have their informants in all major internet companies here. At first I was surprised that this was happening, now after two years I am just trying to gather the evidence so that I have a solid case. The general level of internet literacy is low, so these cybercriminals  think that they can get away with it (and they usually do). In Europe, USA, Canada, cyber criminals have served jail terms, so it is safer with businesses there.

All this has badly hampered the growth of internet in India. If you are sure that your emails are being intercepted, will you send any important information over email?  The signature of these cybercriminals is blank calls from non existent phone numbers.  Some Indian internet companies turn a blind eye to these criminal activities of their employees, but they do not realize that in the long run, they lose both money and goodwill.  If  your customers are getting hurt financially by these  criminals,  they will spend less money with you and move their business to other vendors.

After a time, it is easy to detect these activities, the  criminals are humans and they start leaving evidence. Some of these criminal networks seem to be hired by big global companies.  Unfortunately,  some  Indian internet companies are not very cooperative and do not take any action to prevent this problem, which also damages the companies in the long term.

Social conditioning

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Nice article on what happens to female school and college toppers in India , more than 50%  end up wasting their talent and skills.   Most of the women who are showcased by the media  belong to a rich/ famous family – they are some one’s wife / daughter / daughter-in-law / girlfriend and owe their position to their relationship, not their own competence.   It is very difficult to start a business from scratch without any backing of any sort , not  only do you miss out on the networking,  many vendors will try to cheat you by charging a higher price / selling substandard material.

Digital media

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India Today, India’s largest magazine publisher is not going to spend any more money on digital media,  they are not getting the returns they want.  You can make money from  content, but you have to keep your overheads really low.  Most big Indian media companies have plush offices and highly paid employees( very important for “status” in India), with those expenses, it is very difficult to be profitable online with content websites.

The other thing the publisher has correctly pointed out (which you will rarely see mentioned in India’s digital media)  is that Google has a monopoly and often uses the information available to destroy /damage any potential competitor.  I have personally experienced it and at least two of the ad networks I work with have specifically confirmed it.  When the demand for advertising space exceeds supply, Google is happy to have content publishers,  but now when the supply exceeds demand, Google shows PSAs on content websites who use Adsense so that the advertisers spend their entire budget on advertising directly on Google’s own properties.

Smaller Indian content websites can make money online, but few have the imagination, motivation or exposure to really grow big, compete with companies worldwide and beat them.  They are too worried about others stealing their ideas.  Compared to a decade ago, people in their twenties have a lot of distractions and often do not focus or  reinvest enough into their business.

From my personal experience, when you are very small, the damage  the big companies can do is more.  Once you learn to out maneuver them and are more careful,  at least some of them will stop wasting their money and leave you alone.  Others will continue their attempts to damage your business, but just treat it like a game of chess, a form of entertainment.  Lets see who has the last laugh.

IT Companies

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Infosys has fired 2100 employees and  a confirmation from ex-Infosys employees about layoffs.  The problem is that when you provide services to only a few major customers, your fortunes are tied to how well their business does.  Compared to developing a product, providing a service is not very risky , but is very labour intensive.  Since there are only 24 hours in a day, at some stage you are forced to hire people to scale and then manage them.

If you develop a technology or even understand it better than others, the entry barriers are very high and it is difficult to replicate it easily.  Indian IT companies have a lot of cash reserves, so could afford to take risks. Unfortunately they did not.

More on the Infosys employee firing technique – in India the employees are forced to “resign” , this is how layoffs are implemented by HR departments.   Feel sorry for the ex-employees, actually rating systems in most companies are not fair,  many employees who are good at office politics often get good ratings, though they do little work.

Mainstream media

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So salaries are being reduced in the mainstream media companies, earlier there was talk of layoffs too.  Unlike the developed countries where major newspapers are closing their print editions, the mainstream media has flourished in India in the last few years.

However, at least for the English language papers, it is going to be a struggle soon, since they cater to the same English speaking internet using population.  The only advantage is that most people spend a lot of time commuting in major metros, so newspapers are still very convenient for reading when you are stuck in a traffic jam.

Ragging

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This recent ragging death has got a lot of media coverage.  The students who suffer the most are those who stay in hostels, usually 17 or 18 years , living far away from their parents for the first time.  Its been a long time, but from what I remember from my hostel days, those who take greatest pleasure in ragging their juniors are those who have the attributes for success in the corporate world – arrogant, brash and inconsiderate, ragging is their idea of “fun”.

It is worth noting that the to be “doctors” who committed the murder were drunk, why is drinking and pub culture considered  being “forward” and modern?