As the state of Maharashtra reels under a severe drought, one is seeing a strange occurrence in the district of Thane. The farmers in its villages are resorting to polygamy, so that there are more hands to fill and carry water from wells that are over two hours from their villages.
One such family, where the farmer and his three wives have lived happily for over 30 years now. The family said it was a practical solution to the acute water problem the village had been facing for decades.
For the farmers, more wives meant more hands to carry water, because it takes at least four hours for a single person to carry two pots of water from the only well near the village.
One of the women inside the house said, "One lady takes care of the house and two of us go to fill water. We make two trips a day so getting water takes up all our time."
The farmer (name withheld) himself said, "Water is available only for one month after the monsoon. For the rest of the year we have to walk four-five hours to get water."
They are not alone. Even though having multiple wives is illegal, it is a trend followed by many in their village.
What is worse is that the Bhatsa resevoir that supplies water to Mumbai, is barely 5 km from their village.
The villagers have threatened to damage the pipeline carrying water to Mumbai on May 12, if their demands for a separate pipeline for their village are not met with.
One such family, where the farmer and his three wives have lived happily for over 30 years now. The family said it was a practical solution to the acute water problem the village had been facing for decades.
For the farmers, more wives meant more hands to carry water, because it takes at least four hours for a single person to carry two pots of water from the only well near the village.
One of the women inside the house said, "One lady takes care of the house and two of us go to fill water. We make two trips a day so getting water takes up all our time."
The farmer (name withheld) himself said, "Water is available only for one month after the monsoon. For the rest of the year we have to walk four-five hours to get water."
They are not alone. Even though having multiple wives is illegal, it is a trend followed by many in their village.
What is worse is that the Bhatsa resevoir that supplies water to Mumbai, is barely 5 km from their village.
The villagers have threatened to damage the pipeline carrying water to Mumbai on May 12, if their demands for a separate pipeline for their village are not met with.
Sony Corp fell to the lowest level in Tokyo trading since 1980, when the Walkman was new and before it introduced the first compact-disc player, after forecasting profit that lagged behind analyst estimates.
| Sony Corp |
Sony said it may lose about 80 billion yen selling TVs, a ninth straight year of losses in that business.
The maker of Bravia televisions said yesterday net income may total 30 billion yen ($376 million) in the year started April 1, its first profit in five years. That compared with the 61.4 billion-yen average of 18 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sony said it may lose about 80 billion yen selling televisions, a ninth straight year of losses in that business.
“Though Sony’s forecasting growth in revenue and return to profit, it’s still hard to find something that can trigger the stock to rise,” Shiro Mikoshiba, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Tokyo with a neutral rating on the shares, said in a report today. “There are uncertainties in demand for TVs, smartphones and digital cameras.”
Sony, which introduced the Walkman portable cassette player in 1979 and the first CD player in 1982, said sales may be 7.4 trillion yen in the current fiscal year.
The Tokyo-based electronics maker, which lost 856 billion yen combined in the past four years, predicted an operating profit of 180 billion yen.
Kazuo Hirai, 51, who took over as chief executive officer last month, is eliminating about 10,000 jobs, or 6 percent of the workforce, at Japan’s largest electronics exporter after losing customers to Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) Hirai is turning to mobile devices, games and digital imaging to revive Sony.
Sony predicts selling 17.5 million TVs this year, down from 19.6 million last year, the company said yesterday. Sales of its PlayStation game consoles may drop to 16 million units from 18 million.The world’s No. 3 TV maker has lost about 700 billion yen in the business during the past eight years while losing market share to Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung and Seoul-based LG Electronics Co., both of which make money selling sets. Sony plans to make the business profitable by March 2014.TV ShipmentsGlobal TV shipments last year fell for the first time in six years because of excessive inventory in the U.S. and Europe and the end of Japanese government subsidies for purchases, according to DisplaySearch, part of NPD Group. Shipments fell 0.3 percent to 247.7 million units, the researcher said.“We expect Sony to miss its guidance because projections for the TV unit and the game unit look excessive,” Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Securities Co. in Tokyo, said in his report today. “The hurdle for Sony to attain its targets for selling game players will be significantly high” given sluggish demand in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.Takashi Watanabe, a Tokyo-based analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., lowered his operating profit forecast for Sony to 140 billion yen from 152.4 billion yen, saying in a report today that Sony’s targets for profit growth in digital cameras, games, batteries and smartphones are “optimistic.”Sony is projecting sales volume of smartphones and portable game players to surge this fiscal year. Smartphone sales will probably rise to 33.3 million units from 22.5 million, the company said yesterday. Handheld players including PlayStation Vita may more than double to 16 million units from 6.8 million, Sony said.Sony is increasing its offerings in the game business. The company began selling the PlayStation Vita in December to lure consumers increasingly turning to iPhones and iPads for entertainment. The Vita was the first major overhaul of the handheld since the PlayStation Portable went on sale in 2004.
Sony predicts selling 17.5 million TVs this year, down from 19.6 million last year, the company said yesterday. Sales of its PlayStation game consoles may drop to 16 million units from 18 million.The world’s No. 3 TV maker has lost about 700 billion yen in the business during the past eight years while losing market share to Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung and Seoul-based LG Electronics Co., both of which make money selling sets. Sony plans to make the business profitable by March 2014.TV ShipmentsGlobal TV shipments last year fell for the first time in six years because of excessive inventory in the U.S. and Europe and the end of Japanese government subsidies for purchases, according to DisplaySearch, part of NPD Group. Shipments fell 0.3 percent to 247.7 million units, the researcher said.“We expect Sony to miss its guidance because projections for the TV unit and the game unit look excessive,” Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Securities Co. in Tokyo, said in his report today. “The hurdle for Sony to attain its targets for selling game players will be significantly high” given sluggish demand in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.Takashi Watanabe, a Tokyo-based analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., lowered his operating profit forecast for Sony to 140 billion yen from 152.4 billion yen, saying in a report today that Sony’s targets for profit growth in digital cameras, games, batteries and smartphones are “optimistic.”Sony is projecting sales volume of smartphones and portable game players to surge this fiscal year. Smartphone sales will probably rise to 33.3 million units from 22.5 million, the company said yesterday. Handheld players including PlayStation Vita may more than double to 16 million units from 6.8 million, Sony said.Sony is increasing its offerings in the game business. The company began selling the PlayStation Vita in December to lure consumers increasingly turning to iPhones and iPads for entertainment. The Vita was the first major overhaul of the handheld since the PlayStation Portable went on sale in 2004.
Facebook Inc. (FB)’s initial public offering has so far generated lower-than-expected demand from institutional investors who are concerned about the company’s growth prospects, people with knowledge of the matter said.
| Facebook Inc |
Facebook executives have another week to market the IPO, scheduled to price on May 17, and underwriters are stepping up efforts to drum up interest from large shareholders, one person said. Underscoring concerns that growth may taper for the world’s biggest social network, 79 percent of respondents in the Bloomberg Global Poll of 1,253 investors, analysts and traders who are Bloomberg subscribers said Facebook doesn’t deserve a valuation at $96 billion, the high end of its projected range.
“Expectations on Facebook are way too high,” said Mitsuo Shimizu, a market analyst at Tokyo-based Iwai Cosmo Securities Co. “Given its fundamentals, the company doesn’t look anywhere cheap in valuation.”
Lackluster interest from institutional investors at this stage could compel the company to rely more on buying from retail investors, from whom demand remains robust, people said. The company could still elicit enough demand to sell shares at or above the high end of a projected range, people said.
Slackening Growth
Institutional investors tend to hold shares longer than retail investors, lessening a stock’s volatility.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company.
The Menlo Park, California-based company is seeking a market value of as much as $96 billion, and is offering 337.4 million shares at $28 to $35 each. The shares will be listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol FB. Morgan Stanley (MS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) are leading the sale.
Facebook is offering 180 million shares, while existing owners such as Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies are offering 157.4 million shares. Zuckerberg is offering 30.2 million of his 533.8 million shares, and may control 57.3 percent of the voting power of Facebook’s capital stock outstanding after the offering, regulatory filings show.
Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Facebook, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Facebook, co-founded by Zuckerberg in 2004 in a Harvard University dorm room, seeks a valuation at 24 times revenue, compared with 5 times for Google Inc., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Already the company’s growth has shown signs of slackening. Sales climbed 88 percent to $3.71 billion last year. According to researcher EMarketer Inc., revenue may increase 64 percent to $6.1 billion this year. That would be the third straight year of slowing growth.
Read Why one should sell Facebook instead of buying it?
Read Why one should sell Facebook instead of buying it?
In parts of war-torn Ethiopia, bullet casings are easy to find. Raven and Lily help Ethiopian artisans turn the raw material from those deadly artifacts toward more pleasant uses.
In Ethiopia, being female and HIV-positive can be a double whammy: Many women are ostracized from their communities as well as getting sick. Raven and Lily is trying to help HIV-positive women by giving them jobs making jewelry from bullet casings and coins.
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This is how it works: The company works with three different village communities in Ethiopia. Farmers gather artillery shells from former war conflicts as they plow their fields. They then sell the bullet casings to the villagers skilled in the traditional techniques of bead making. These farmers and villagers live in very remote parts of Ethiopia, so the beads are always brought to the main cities to be sold.
Raven and Lily bypasses the city markets and works directly with the bead makers to ensure they are the ones getting the most money for their craftsmanship. “I love the imperfect beauty of each hand-made bead,” says co-founder Kirsten Dickerson. “It’s really amazing to me that what was once meant for harm now brings hope and life to the HIV-positive women in our partnership.”
The company also works in India and is launching a new product line in Cambodia. Dickerson says that the process of partnering takes some time. “When we decide to partner with a group of women who have learned a design skill, one of the first things we do is assess what types of locally made materials the women can utilize,” she says. “We really try as much as possible to ensure that not only the women in our direct trade partnership are receiving fair wages, but also the communities that product the base materials.”
Dickerson says that the company goes beyond fair wages and works with the communities to ensure that the women and their families have access to health care, education, savings accounts, and a community that doesn’t shun them. “We are able to witness firsthand the transformation that is happening in the lives of these women and their families,” she says.
Today Bing is announcing a revamp of its front end, to make its search results more useful for users. But what's much more interesting is what's happening on the back end, underneath the hood, as Microsoft re-architects how the data used for search results is collected, stored, and repurposed.
Is that all?
Bing, however, believes the approach of indexing and ranking pages is no longer sufficient. Helping people find answers shouldn't just be about pointing you to documents elsewhere and making you do the work of clicking over and figuring out if they have the information you need.
Instead, Bing thinks search should be more about helping you get things done right in the search results themselves. In cases where they can reasonably predict what you're trying to accomplish, search should provide widgets in the results that let you get the job done. For example, if you enter the keywords "The Avengers Chicago,” it's reasonable to assume you're looking for movie show times. Why not post a list of show times right in the results, instead of making you click over to a page of moving listings?
But to provide that level of service, a simple list of pages on the Internet isn't enough. You need a whole different kind of database on the back end. And that's what Bing is working on creating.
"Our goal is to model every object on the planet,” Weitz says. So far the company has compiled a database of 300 million objects, from computer mice to buildings. As Bing's bots crawl the web, they identify pages that have information about those objects. And then they use that information to develop an understanding of what kinds of things people might want to do with that object.The goal is to use the understandings they're gathering, and the data they're collecting, to identify and build the kinds of apps for search results that will help you accomplish tasks without making you click over to a second page.
"We're literally no longer indexing text,” Weitz says. "We're trying to associate data that exists on the web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the first place.”
"It's so important for us to understand the object layer of the web because that tells us what actions people can perform on it,” Weitz says. "So suddenly, you go from asking a question like, ‘Where do I buy a mouse?'… to knowing that there are different applications that can fulfill that request.”
Google, of course, is also working on this problem. Back in March, a Google executive told the Wall Street Journal the company had compiled a similar, massive encyclopedia of "entities,” or people, places, and things.
And they're not the only ones. Facebook reportedly is also compiling a database of things that people talk about and share on the social network. And Apple's Siri is also working on the problem, so it can understand the questions users ask it.
All of which is to say that a massive game change is waiting in the wings in the search business. And it won't just affect the search competitors as they race to develop the most powerful models. It will also affect the SEO industry that has spent the past decade trying to master page rank. The more the search engines create apps to help people accomplish tasks right in the results, the fewer referrals they'll be making to outside pages.
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Update: Yesterday's open positions on short side were covered at Nifty 4910.
Yesterday, Nifty had tried to rally but couldn't sustain at 5050 levels and give up some gains. We recommended to short Nifty at 5050 levels and book partial profit at 4960 levels. See here.
In asia, China was weighing on sentiment, as Consumer Inflation is higher than expected. Asia trading in red too.
Yesterday, Nifty had tried to rally but couldn't sustain at 5050 levels and give up some gains. We recommended to short Nifty at 5050 levels and book partial profit at 4960 levels. See here.
US markets closed mixed as Cisco's earnings weigh down on Nasdaq to close in a negative territory. Economic data from US was encouraging and Banking Sector to push stocks higher. Dow Jones and S&P closed in a positive territory. Meanwhile European headlines were calming investor's nerves as Greece might work out a coalition government formation and avoid Euro exit by assuring the bail out terms. Europe closed positive. The headlines from Europe will dominate friday's trading session too.
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| Nifty Trading Tips |
Tips & Outlook Today for Nifty
Our View is to short sell Nifty around 5000 levels. Yesterday's open short position were covered if Nifty drift lower. Nifty will see sub 4900 levels in a coming week. No long positions created and Short Nifty on every rally for now.
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If your friends and family joke that you're addicted to Facebook, they may be right. Researchers in Norway have identified six signs that you may be addicted. They've used those signs to develop a test to help you figure out of your suffer from a social media addiction.
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| Facebook Addiction |
• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
• You use Facebook to forget about personal problems.
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.
If you are, indeed, addicted, you're not alone, the researchers say.
"The use of Facebook has increased rapidly. We are dealing with a subdivision of Internet addiction connected to social media," said Cecilie Schou Andreassen, who conducted the study.
Andreassen heads the research project "Facebook Addiction" at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway. The results of her research have just been published in the journal Psychological Reports.
Andreassen said she sees some clear patterns in Facebook addiction.
"It occurs more regularly among younger than older users. We have also found that people who are anxious and socially insecure use Facebook more than those with lower scores on those traits, probably because those who are anxious find it easier to communicate via social media than face-to-face," she said.
People who are organized and more ambitious tend to be less at risk from Facebook addiction. They will often use social media as an integral part of work and networking.
"Women are more at risk of developing Facebook addiction, probably due to the social nature of Facebook," Andreassen said.
Andreassen said the research also shows that Facebook addiction was related to extroversion. People with high scores on the new scale further tend to have a somewhat delayed sleep-wake rhythm.
The study was based on 423 students — 227 women and 196 men.
Despite Andreassen's findings, others are not as convinced about Internet-based addictions.
"There are often underlying or co-occurring psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression or a disturbance in interpersonal relationships, all of which may explain the person's Internet problems,” Ronald W. Pies, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Tufts University told BusinessNewsDaily sister site LiveScience for a 2009 article. "The question is, do we need another 'disorder' in the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), if the manifestations of Internet addiction can already be accounted for by well-described and better-validated conditions?"
That, however, doesn’t mean that Pies is writing off the possibility of Internet-based addictions. Rather, he believes that better research is needed to quantify these behaviors.
"We may eventually come around to the view that Internet addiction is a discrete mental disorder, but that will require carefully designed research aimed at linking Internet addiction with family and genetic factors, biological concomitants and responses to specific treatments," Pies said.
Maintaining his high standards and living up to his own expectations still gives Sachin Tendulkar sleepless nights, and it is this restlessness that has brought the best out of him, revealed the Indian maestro in an interview published in the Timemagazine. Tendulkar is on the cover for the editions in the Indian subcontinent, Singapore and Australia and New Zealand.
| Sachin Tendulkar to appear on TIME magazine cover page |
StarTek, Inc today announced its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2012. The Company reported first quarter 2012 revenue of $50.9 million and adjusted EBITDA of $1.2 million. As of March 31, 2012, the Company had approximately $10.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and no debt.
Tip :Stock jumped more than 40% intraday and may see more upside.
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| Startek Inc |
