Bangalore: The Indian government is planning to set up an expert body called as ‘Market Research and Analysis Unit (MRAU)’, which will collate and analyze business data of companies raising capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) in an attempt to detect early the possibility of fund raising with fraudulent intent.

The intent behind the new agency, which will be a part of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, is to make investment in IPOs a safer option for retail investors, a government official told economic times on condition of anonymity.

The new body will get the inputs from all the parties such as banks, deposit holders, investigation agencies that are related to the company raising capital. The agency will, apart from scrutinizing data made available in the offer document, also look at details available with the ministry’s computerized data repository.

According to MCA-21, the government’s e-governance programme MCA-21, details of financial data of companies are maintained in a prescribed format and can be accessed at the click of a button.

Besides, analyzing the credentials of the companies, the body has to monitor the end-use of funds raised by companies. According to the data provided by the ministry of corporate affairs, 238 companies, which raised capital through IPOs between 1992 and 2005, have vanished. However, the ministry has managed to track down 117 out of these 238 companies.

Washington: In the past 20 years, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) factories created the conditions that helped land the global economy in the current mess, writes Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn. He also suggests that the business schools should be shut down.

Business schools legitimized a pseudo-scientific approach, promoted a mechanistic management style and formed a managerial elite more interested in rewards than producing lasting wealth for the economies they operate in.

Richard Fuld, who was CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings at the time of its collapse, has an MBA from New York University. John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, is a graduate of Harvard Business School. Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has an MBA from Harvard University.

In Europe, Andy Hornby, CEO of British bank HBOS, is another Harvard Business School product. HBOS had to be bailed out in a merger with Lloyds Banking Group and then both had to be rescued by the U.K. government. Peter Wuffli, who as CEO, presided over the huge losses that took Zurich-based UBS AG to the brink of disaster, studied management at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen.

If these business leaders were not able to spot the flaws in the businesses they were running, one has to look into the matter of what business and management schools had been teaching them.

The schools promoted a quasi-scientific approach to business, sermonizing that everything could be nailed down in a textbook, and encouraged students to believe that running a company could be mastered by anyone. The entire private-equity industry is founded on that principle. And also, all the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.

But, management in reality is a skill that is acquired through experience, judgment and flair. Billions are about to be wasted relearning a simple fact that should never have been forgotten.

The business schools took some mysterious risk and tried to make it as easy to count as peas in a pod. By doing so, they encouraged a whole generation of young men and women to go into investment banking armed with the belief that they had mastered risk. But the truth turned out to be different.

The author pins the growth of business schools to the situation where the economy contracts and jobless bankers seek to boost their qualifications. The people who steered the global economy onto the rocks in the past year all benefited from the finest management education that money can buy.

However, Lynn admits that it is unfair to assign all blame to business schools. Over the last three decades, taking an MBA has become just another qualification, a hoop to be jumped through on your way to getting a good job on Wall Street, or in London or Zurich’s financial centers.

Kolkata: Claiming that nearly 10 million jobs have been lost in the country due to the global slowdown, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has flayed the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for neglecting the interests of the common man in its response to the economic crisis.

“The centre’s policy is not enough for the common people. By the stimulus packages they are trying to keep the big corporates in good health. But they are not doing anything towards mitigating the sufferings of the laid off common man,” Bhattacharjee said in an interview to a news channel here late Friday.

He said total 10 million jobs have been lost in India - both in the organised and unorganised sectors - till date due to the economic slowdown.

“The centre should concentrate on generating more employment at this time,” he maintained.

He blamed the liberalisation policy of the central government for the economic distress in the country.

“Thankfully we (the Communist party of India-Marxist) didn’t allow foreign tie-ups in banks and insurance. Otherwise they would have faced a similar fate as the other affected sectors,” Bhattacharjee contended.

Microsoft India has announced that it will work with organizations to help leverage technology to drive cost control and efficiencies to weather the challenges of the downturn.

To this end it has launched a web site titled controlcosts.com, an IT knowledge resource for organizations looking to streamline operational costs.

The website provides information and guidance on solutions to solve business dilemmas faced by organizations from containing costs to enhancing efficiency to energy consumption.

The global economic meltdown has forced companies across the globe and in India to look for ways to cut costs and reduce risks as they confront issues like tighter credit, reduced business activity, and slower consumer spending, while maintaining business agility. We believe that technology provides powerful tools that can help companies reduce costs by enabling them to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, automate processes, and to do more with fewer resources. , said Rajan Anandan, MD, Microsoft India.

For instance, using Microsoft CRM solution, Liliput Retail has been able to increase efficiencies of its warehouses by 60 percent and also maintain a healthy turnover rate. Similarly, Lavassa Corporation has reduced response time to customer queries from one day to immediate action and has saved 20% in payroll by streamlining the sales operation with CRM solutions from Microsoft.

According to a McKinsey report of 2008, targeted IT investments can make operations more efficient and increase revenues, delivering returns larger than simple cost cutting measures typically do. As Roger Killick, IT manager, Siemens Standard Devices believes, Hyper-V gives us all the virtualization features we need in a very cost-effective package. It’s an excellent investment, because we’ll also save money on future training and support costs.

Strategic and innovative use of technology can deliver huge Return on investment in the short term and further, create conditions for more rapid growth when the economic climate improves , added Anandan.

With controlcosts.com, Microsoft aims to provide one stop tool for CFOs, CIOs and CXOs to learn how to identify high cost operations and streamline costs by leveraging technology solutions such as virtualization, unified communications, Customer relationship management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence and hosted services.
Readers can also access industry reports and whitepapers on the above mentioned solutions and view case studies of how organizations in India have used the solutions to achieve significant cost reduction and streamlined business processes.

In 2038 we’ll likely be weaving tales for our grandkids about how we used to instant message with paper notes instead of our brainwaves and how, when we were really little, stereos were once considered nice furniture pieces. They may be especially interested because, if Richard Wilcox is right, all the really important computers just dialed back to 1901.

Couldn’t say Wilcox didn’t give us ample warning. This link is supposed lead to a post he made in 2003, describing how our 32-bit world is destined to crash on a level a bit more catastrophic than the trumped up worries of December 1999. Unfortunately, due to an unexpected surge from Reddit users recently discovering the post themselves, Earthlink has pulled the plug for exceeding monthly traffic allotment.

Here’s the cached copy.

Impending crises need at least a 30 year run-up—we knew there’d be an energy crisis for at least that long, right?—and it’s not too early to sound the alarms on this one. It may sound unlikely, we’re already Moore’s Law generations past 32-bit systems; just think what we’ll be running three decades.

I generally preferred words to math and programming, so talk of “signed integers” and “time_t” is lost on me, but I did gather from Wilcox’s post that at eight seconds past 3:14 a.m., on January 19, 2038, most computers in the world will think it’s actually a quarter to 9 p.m. on December 13, 1901.

That’s a big, big problem, and apparently a more complicated one than what we faced in 2000.

“So, if all goes normally,” writes Wilcox, “19-January-2038 will suddenly become 13-December-1901 in every time_t across the globe, and every date calculation based on this figure will go haywire.  And it gets worse.  Most of the support functions that use the time_t data type cannot handle negative time_t values at all.  They simply fail and return an error code.  Now, most ‘good’ C and C++ programmers know that they are supposed to write their programs in such a way that each function call is checked for an error return, so that the program will still behave nicely even when things don’t go as planned.  But all too often, the simple, basic, everyday functions they call will ‘almost never’ return an error code, so an error condition simply isn’t checked for.”

Why won’t we beyond 32 bit by that time? Also included in the original post is an explanation about the expense of building new systems and how computer companies tend to rely on cheap, older technology for building basic new technology. In this case, some technology in use in 2038, might span all the way back to the 1970s. Hey babe, dust off Dad’s old 8-track so we can share some Earth Wind & Fire magic with the grandkids.

Zurich , 15 December 2008, GLOBCOS NetWorks GmbH Switzerland announces the signature of a long-term contract with RTV Jesenjin ( Novi Sad , Serbia ) for satellite capacity at the EUTELSAT W2™ video neighbourhood and associated ground services. The new capacity will be used to broadcast Jesenjin Television.

In addition to capacity at the EUTELSAT W2™ neighbourhood, the contract covers 2Mhz space segment. The service is scheduled to launch as of 15.12.2008. Direct-to-home satellite reception on EUTELSAT W2™ satellite provides fixed wideband coverage, spanning Europe , North Africa and the Middle East , and a steerable coverage.

Bojan Lazic, GLOBCOS NetWorks GmbH Senior Sales Manager

“We are particularly pleased with the confidence placed in us by Jesenjin TV with this contract. The arrival of the Jesenjin channels on our satellite platform confirms the strong pull of the EUTELSAT W2™ platform for the Balkan TV market.”

- RTV Jesenjin

About GLOBCOS NetWorks

GLOBCOS NetWorks GmbH is a media consulting and service company. GLOBCOS has successfully worked in the media sector (Radio and TV) for many years, therefore the real needs of companies working in this sector are well known to us and we are in a position to give our customers professional advice.

GLOBCOS provides its customers with a range of services, starting from program schedule analysis to cost optimization of their satellite platforms. Our target is that our customers are always satisfied with the services provided and that they get the solution which fits their needs and budget.

GLOBCOS – New definition of communication

www.globcos.ch

After the success of India Gaming Summit 2007, Intel and Zapak are all set to take a close look at the Gaming industry this year again with Intel & Zapak India Gaming Summit 2008 on 21st November 2008 at Nehru Centre, Mumbai. 2007 was the year where India witnessed the launch of the Gaming Revolution. With the industry projected to touch US$200 mn by 2011 how does US$20 mn in 2007-08 measure up. (According to the NASSCOM 2007 report).

The period has been decisive as it has laid the foundation for the future. With large investments being made in creating infrastructure in content, distribution & access, the industry is fast gaining momentum. Looking ahead how is the “Gaming Eco System” shaping up; the India Gaming Summit 2008 looks for answers to the opportunities & challenges it presents. IGS 2008 as in its previous edition creates a platform for heads of industry, technocrats, advertisers & the trade to meet & deliberate the path for the future.

IGS 2008 this year would be held against the backdrop of the Intel & Zapak India Gaming Expo 2008 creating a public showcase for the Gaming Industry in India.