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The recent blackout in India highlights problems in the electricity sector, including ineffective distribution networks, loss-making providers and low capacity utilization of utilities. Despite improvements in recent years, as supply generation capacity has risen relative to demand, distribution losses have fallen, and the supply shortfall has shrunk, the Indian government’s production targets for the coming five years appear overly ambitious. The electricity shortfall is likely to remain due to coal shortages and lack of incentives for loss-making providers. Read More..

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Latest indicators point to flat U.S. economy

Photobucket Revamps To Rival Social Sharing Photo And Video Sites

Photobucket has just revealed a vastly made-over user experience for its online photo service, which has usually functioned as a photo depository of sorts. The company says it's reacting to a recent survey it conducted which quizzed people about their digital habits--two thirds said they were disorganized in managing their digital pics and 83% said they'd like a solution. Thus the Photobucket revamp is intended to make it much easier to back up, share, and organize digitally stored photos and videos.

The company also revealed that it'll be launching a new Photobucket Stories feature in September, designed to be a way to curate the videos and photos you store in the service into a more narrative format. The idea is to combine text and imagery into a sort of 21st century photo album, so that you can share, for example, media from your recent vacation with friends in a more structured way than via a simple online album or via updates on Facebook.

Photobucket, which has previously been used for personal photo storage and for tricks like storing avatars for use on other online services, is reacting to the rise of services like Instagram and Viddy, which are, along with Facebook, changing how we share digital media online and which create de facto social networks as part of their sharing abilities. One key differentiator of Photobucket is that it's offering the ability to edit your media, but to preserve the original content in the database. This is similar to the way photo editing suites like Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture work, and reinforces that Photobucket also works as a digital "locker" to securely store your images.

Photobucket has been in the news recently for a more controversial reason, where hackers used a relatively simple trick to access sexually charged images stored in some user's online lockers and then share them online. The company noted a very small number of users were affected and has reacted by protecting all new uploads with a scrambled URL to prevent snooping.

Gift Cards To Google Play Are On Their Way

Google is creating a plastic, pocketable links to the digital wares it sells in its Google Play store. Android Central has photo evidence of prototypes of Google's newest creations--cling-wrapped gift cards worth $10 and $25--which can be traded in for books, apps, movies and music.

With its Play gift cards, Google is following a path first cleared in a big way by Apple when it started selling iTunes gift cards for music and movies, and eventually, apps. This year, Apple replaced its traditional back-to-school iPod giveaway with iTunes gift card this season. If you are heading to school or college and bought a Mac, you got $100 in credit to spend at the iTunes store. This last quarter, the iTunes store generated $1.9 billion in revenue for Apple according to Bloomberg, and Apple is steadily growing access to iTunes and its media sharing features to countries outside the U.S.

The Play gift cards would give people a bit of nudge to spend at the Google Play store, sure. But the gift cards could make the Play store more visible, if the cards were made as readily available as those iconic neon iTunes cards, and seen at every grocery store and Best Buy. But that's not it for Google. Word is, a "Wish List" feature, as seen on Amazon, is on the way as well.

Instagram Homes In On Mapping With Version 3.0

Instagram is releasing version 3.0 of its photo app today, and it improves on the browsing experience in several significant ways.

The boldest new feature is called "Photo Maps." All the photos you geotagged before posting them on Instagram? Photo Map collects those and pins them on an interactive world map. This is by no means a revolutionary interface--apps from Foursquare to Yelp offer something similar, and even iPhoto lets you sort images by location. But by automatically creating location-specific photo albums that can be seen by friends, Instagram has put a new twist on the feature. The maps are turned off by default, making it a privacy-friendly opt-in program. When you activate it, you can choose individual photos that do and don't appear on the map, and even edit your preferences later. Photo maps are accessed through a user's profile page, making it easy for friends to see one another's favorite stomping grounds.

You can see our trigger-happy social media editor Anjali Mullany's photographs from all over Manhattan in her Photo Map view below.

Compared to that, my Photo Map is sparser, because I tend to geotag only a few of the Instagram photos I take

I'm not alone, it turns out. According to the New York Times, not more than 25 percent of Instagram users geotag their photographs. This update looks like a bid to get Instagrammers to geotag more frequently in the future. A trove of mobile location data could prove quite valuable to the startup that was acquired by Facebook in April.

There are a few other new tricks in Instagram's update today. The photos can now be displayed in a 3-across grid rather than a vertical river for faster browsing. The upload screen has a larger text box, making it easier to write captions. No need to tap the "load more" button, the app now offers infinite scrolling that loads as you go. And to better combat spam and abuse, individual comments can be reported and deleted in one action.

When Fast Company put Instagram founder Kevin Systrom on the Most Creative People In Business list in 2011, he said, "We think about photos like, 'This is your tweet, this is your status update.'" And now it can be your image-based homing beacon too.

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Facebook Inc ( NASDAQ: FB ) stock touched a new all time low $19.72 and keep trading sub $20 levels. For those who have invested on the first day or there after, they have keep loosing their investment values. There was a lot of buzz that Facebook Inc stock might see a steep rise like a fall,but the reality is quite different as stock keep making new lows and toda it has touched an all time low and breaks below with a significant volume. We were recommending a Sell rating on Facebook since an announcement of an IPO and our reason behind this was quite reasonable if you see logically. Don't invest in Facebook stock because you have other value picks available.

The selling in Facebook stock is partly due to the end of lock up period for 270 million shares, that could hit the market over the period of nine months. Read More

Ever since Kareena Kapoor featured in her bright pink saree and dark blue blouse in her item song 'Halkat Jawaani' in Madhur Bhandarkar’s upcoming film, her costume became the talk of town. And now buzz is that the same ensemble is being auctioned for a cause.

Our source says, "The money will be donated to a charitable organisation, which Kareena is associated to." There is also news that the Manish Malhotra-designed costume managed to create quite a buzz at the recently concluded Mumbai fashion week.

We all like to think we make buying decisions on a rational level, but neuroscientists tell us otherwise. While marketers have known this instinctively, brain mappers have shown that the smallest part of the brain, the amygdala, lights up like a Christmas tree when confronted with fight-or-flight or in this case buy-or-fly situations.

Recently, I visited with Christophe Morin, a French researcher with SalesBrain, which is based in San Francisco and claims to be the world's first neuromarketing agency. His title is chief pain officer. He believes that if a company wants someone to buy its products or services, it must seduce the reptilian brain — the part that controls fear and other emotions.

"Pain" is in his title because his company's approach is to help marketers look at the frustrations and challenges consumers experience. "Humans are pain-avoiding machines," Mr. Morin said. "Sometimes our pain points are conscious and sometimes unconscious."

Six Rules for Small Business
He offered six simple rules that small businesses can follow:

1. Don't use the word "we" or start off your pitch with a corporate overview that lasts 10 minutes. Focus instead on how to relieve your customers' pain. Our brains are extremely self-centered, and we care most about our own survival.

2. About 10,000 messages are sent to our brains daily, so get to the point. "When you sell to the lower brain structure, you must say, 'This is your life with our product or service, this is your life without,'" Mr. Morin said. He cited a successful campaign that helped a client that was selling home flood remediation services to major insurance companies. The campaign featured a traveling exhibit that showed a flooded home and how the company had mastered the art of drying home interiors. "The reptilian brain gets very stimulated by this kind of disruption. Stay away from, "We are one of the leading providers." It's the marketing equivalent of sugar -- empty calories.

3. Make your points visual. Remember the "See and Say" books from childhood? Don't just tell; show. "We are visual people, and the eyes are directly connected to the reptilian brain," he said.

4. Stay concrete and make it tangible. The primal brain isn't able to understand complex language or metaphors. As much as we love word play, if it's too complicated, it doesn't get processed by the parts of us that make decisions. Creating ads with facial expressions is good. "Facial expressions help us decode what people's intentions are," he said.

5. Gain attention quickly in your advertising or marketing and make sure you have a strong close. The brain pays the most attention at the beginning and end of an event. It's important because the brain needs to recap and store.

6. Use emotion. It creates disruption, a contrast with what we expect — surprise, laughter, fear, disgust, anger, it really doesn't matter. If there is emotion, we are more likely to remember the message. Nothing happens in the brain unless some chemical process has found a code to create memories. To create a memorable brand, therefore, you have to use emotional connectors in your advertising. Don't just give your audience the facts, tell them how it will make their lives better and solve their pain.

All in all, Mr. Morin believes that if your target market has to kick your advertising up to their cortex, its not going to be as effective. At our advertising agency, we always encourage clients to let us create advertising that makes that critical emotional connection. Mr. Morin's comments also made me reflect on infomercials. While often considered the bottom feeders of the marketing food chain, infomercials can be effective because they follow these rules: show contrast, keep it simple and be visual.

In May, the Corporate Executive Board, shared research that suggested that brands that help consumers simplify the decision process have customers who are far more likely to purchase their products and recommend them to others. It is a fascinating study that is featured in the Harvard Business Review and states that many businesses are pushing customers away by bombarding them with messaging that is not relevant to how they make decisions.

There has also been much discussion lately about the rewiring that is happening to our brains because of our constant interaction with computers and smartphones. This interaction is further reducing our attention spans, which is pushing overworked and overcommitted American consumers to make purchasing and other decisions more quickly. The upshot is that people want information but they want it baby style — pureed to its most basic and served simply.

Something to wrap your marketing brain around.