Of incompetence, innovation and cashcow

Nitin Borwankar has an interesting post on how companies 'settle down'
The Peter Principle of Innovation

He also talks about why potentially viral innovative ideas dont take off due to self created containment:
Virus in a Petri Dish and instantly illustrates it with an alive example on the post itself.

Interesting!

Intent Signals With Twitter Enabled Devices

Intent Signals with Twitter.
Twitter the new fad in town 2.0 - dubbed the prom queen of SXSW - all the top geeks are at it. Even if they hate it. I'm trying to figure out what the hell the fuss is all about. I guess a good way of figuring out is think up cool applications for twitter. Here you go: I'm fascinated by the shift in economic paradigm from scarcity based economics to surplus inundation based economy( Just 10 years back I had to wait for a phone connection, now the telcos are queuing up to give me connection along with value added packages like mobile, broadband etc) . In this new market, the customer is the real king. Just grabbing the attention of the potential buyer is not enough. It is not just enough to fulfill the potential buyers requirements. Appealing to his/her ego is a good strting point. To cut a long story short, paradigm is shifting from Attention to Intention. Being tuned to Intention signals of the market becomes the key. My conjecture is, twitter like tools can become Intention signalling mechanisms.

Twittering, in combination with Intent Economy based tools like roots.net could make it a way to signal intents. With tools like yahoo pipes, the intent could be responded by other players - possibly a supplier of a product or a service that will facilitate the intent.

My biggest complaint with Twitter is that I have to actually do it: The lack of automation. If smart devices around me are able to pick up my intent and my activities and post it to twitter, then I can fill in the gaps with more quirky stuff. With so many geeks becoming fans of the Twittering, we can expect a horde of gadgets tuned to twittering soon. And in the mid term, everyday objects becoming twitter enabled.

In a way, Metaverse like SecondLife is striving to do.

Today Twitter looks like a useless waste of time and a fad that will fade. Yet it has lot of potential as a enabler in the conquest of the plenty. Accelerating the era of attention/intention as new currency.

Idea: Secondlife as a business tool
Execution: Secondlife, the online 3d game that is fast evolving as a mini economy is an active breeding ground for innovations. IBM alumni meeting has proved that it can be a wonderful way to convene a meeting. It has good potential as an unconference medium. Recently it is being experimented as a recruitment tool: a place to hold job fairs and such. With the membership base zooming beyond a million, online money spent per day at a million dollars, it will be taken seriously by innovators. The avatar can be more expressive than a chat or an IM making in the process reducing the travel expenses and lost time in travel.
Profit: Richer interaction.

Better Retirement Plan = Better Productivity?

Idea: Better Retirement Planning for Employees using a professional Specialist
Execution:Today I came across a unique service company called Retirment Capital Group. They offer executive compensation seminars in the changing dynamic world of retirment planning. Retirement is a constant nag in every employees back of the mind. If this constant nag can be addressed effectively, it gives peace of mind to the employees and productivity for the employer. Defined contribution, and custom design of plans are hot areas that can differentiate an employer and improve their chances of retaining talent. The Retirment Capital Group's offereing and Knowldege Centre are worth checking out!
Profit: Retirement worry taken out of the employee's mind => better productivity!

Wikicamp.in Video made with SecondLife

Amazon Mturk earnings now in Indian Rupee:: Tap the housewife resource pool

Idea: Tap the housewife resource pool
Execution:There are a lot of household with a PC and internet connection sitting. Just decorating the living room. Where the kid plays the 'educational' game. And the grown ups use it for email and google. Now with mturk earnings available in Indian Rupee, the housewife glued to the TV serials, sob soaps can be given a gainful alternative. Mturk is part of suite of services opened up by Amazon Web Services as part of Jeff Bezeos strategy of increasing the utilization of Amazon installed capacity. To quote the Amazon FAQ on Mturk:

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo-code below illustrates how simple this can be.

read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}

In a nutshell, Mturk is a way to give out tasks to the crowd and get the task done by a human. Typically, the task are too difficult for computer, but effortless for the human. The person accomplishing the task, gets paid. The Amazon's ecommerce system takes care of the trust, reputation, transaction etc.

Thus mturk can be used to give out work to housewifes, and the housewifes can do the task and get get paid, all risk free for both the work giver and the work doer.
Profit: The housewife of India are a talented lot. They give up pulme jobs to become housewife. They may be well qualified educationally. They can be meticulous in their work. Tapping this talent pool in a risk free way could be wonderful way to gain competitive advantage for businesses.

Electric Scooter Available in Chennai!

Idea:Electric Scooter/Bicycle is a reality in Chennai.
Execution: Sometime back I wrote about Electric Bike maker survival guide. When I went to a Motor Show at Chennai recently I came across an interesting company displaying electric scooters for sale. The bikes are called Petra and they are made by EPL Technologies Pvt Ltd( Ph +91-44-6453 3333) The bikes are pricey but it will fall whne there is enough demand( A scooty like version costs Rs 27,000 while a luna like version costs 22k and a electic bike like version costs 18K). If someone can bulk buy them, and make them available on short haul rent/lease, it will make them popular and because of the voluem effect bring down the prices and create a demand spiral.
Profit: Apart from attractive gains in running such an operation, the social goodwill earned will go a long way in boosting up the valuation of the leasing/operating company. With the economy very upbeat, I will not be surprised if someone is already thinking/executing this in stealth!


Photo Courtesy Snazzo

Making Text Link Ads Work With Blogger Beta

Idea:Text Link Ads as Feed for seamless integration with Blogger Beta
Execution: Slap Text Link Ads on your Blogger beta blogs. Earn extra ad revenue. Blogspot blogs were not able to host text link ads mainly due to lack of PHP or other language support needed for Text Link Ads to work. Adding a Javascript wrapper around the PHP code does not cut the ice. Javascript is not indexed by search engines so it is not much of use for TLA advertisers. But the Blogger Beta changes everything. In blogger beta there is a Feed widget that accepts any feed. I have converted my Text Link Ad offering(Inventory) into a RSS feed and plugged the RSS URL on to a Blogger Beta Feed widget, viola! Text Link Ads work in BlogSpot! Here is the Text Link Ads as Feed is simple script hack by me. I'd rate it as early beta. Feel free to get your TLA inventory converted into a feed. And start displaying TLA in your Blogger Beta site. Rake in extra cash through Text Link Monetization.

Profit: For a change, here is an idea that has some tangible benefits! So far all my ideas were featuring abstract profits. Here is something, that will put real cash in your pocket(paypal a/c :)) ) immediately.

PS: The feed widget has a limit that display only 5 results. If there is a good response to using the text link ad as feed service I'll come up with ways to fix it.

Cash in conquering the plenty through likeness search

Idea: Likeness Engine Optimization/Marketing

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing are beaten to death. SEO/SEM is passe! Welcome to Likeness search engine( like like.com , I liiiKkkee it :) ) optimization. It might as well be the cash machine for this Christmas shopping season. The folks at Riya have really figured out a nail for their visual search hammer. It is uber cool and it spells cash, cash and more cash for riya all the way. If riya1.0 lacked stickiness beyond techcrunch, Riya2.0( aka like.com) is full of glue for the target audience( it is all about women!). And multiple revenue streams for Riya of course.

Social networks have brought in a sea change in the search landscape( as in del.icio.us), Riya1.0 with face recognition was inherently social network driven. The social network aspect is aparently missing in like.com, but that is just the present day. When women flock a site, men will too and the social potential will finds its own level.

Execution: The likeness search, with all its might indeed conquers the plenty in an interesting way. Yet the 'plenty' is not fully conquered, and there is a lot of scope for recommendations( read social netowrks) to be incorporated in the search. I was suggesting some form of outline based search will be a good idea. Now I guess it will be much much earsier than that. A set of 'meta product images'( similar to the celebrity selection box features in like.com) that will serve as a good starting points for product seraches will be welcome by searchers.

Profit: Search is moving beyond text. And visual search for products( like the like.com) is the new frontier with demonstrated revenue potential. There is lot of cash to be made in Likeness search engine optimization. Spruce up your photoshop skills. Get to know what is an alpha channel. Plain old ecommerce is becoming very very interesting indeed!

Intent Gratification; Pay attention to your Attention

Idea: Intent as Commodity
Execution: ROOTS Exchange
Profit!: A whole new evolution awaits!

This week something game changing and interesting happened and as expected went unnoticed! I'm talking about Chicago Board of Trade's small investment of $1 million in ROOT exchange a marketplace for 'Internet generated consumer leads'.

What is (Chicago)Commodities Market?

When people need things and they go buy it in the neighbourhood shop. And where did the shop buy it from? A: The shop got it from the distributor who in turn buys form the manufacturers who in turn buys form a series of vendors; Creating a chain of supply and demand in the process. A commodity market injects liquidity( read money; equals gratification) into this chain so that the players in the chain need not wait forever to be gratified. More the scope( geographic, political boundary) of the market, more sophisticated and complicated the market becomes. Chicago Board of Trade is one of the most sophisticated and highly influential commodity market breathing the pulse of the global economy. The world oil prices and prices of key supplies are determined by the sentiments of the Chicago Exchange traders. Thus prices of things in your neighbourhood shop is tightly coupled to action in the Chicago Exchange trading floor. Chicago Board of Trade, founded in 1848 predates the American Civil War and a pioneer in 'Futures' contract(In simple terms it is glorified, regulated, information based speculation bordering scientific gambling.) Such an entity is investing in ROOTS markets( not just money, more importantly CB T's CEO Bernard W. Dan is joining the board of ROOTS, spearheaded by Seth Goldstien. Which brings up the question: What is ROOTS? and Why should I bother?

Intent as Commodity

The most innovative aspect of ROOTS is they are trying to make 'Intent' a commodity. Without going into the merits of it or morality of it, the idea is refreshing and daring. How they are approaching it is interesting and seems very viable.

With our the increased dependence on the Internet, we validate, amplify and gratify our intent online. Several online services facilitate, intermediate our trips through the intent origination to intent gratification process. ROOTS approach is to simply capture the intent gratification 'history' or Karma. Then it is a question of standardization to make it into a commodity. Once characterized as commodity, it can be integrated with the financial(or whatever) markets.

The first Intent commodity is going to be 'online mortgage leads' which is simply brilliant considering the almost zero resistance in the path.

By combining the direct response capabilities of the Internet with the transparency and integrity of a commodities exchange, ROOT Exchange has transformed the lead generation marketplace. Buyers can now create quality filters and receive real-time quotes while Sellers can set ask prices and increase their sales pool instantly.

But why should I care?

Just like currency system facilitated easy exchange of things( that inspired a planet full of awesome man made things) the new Intent currency will create unimaginable ways to interact with each other with our Intents.

It is said that Water is the cohesion that binds this universe. Money, being a reflection of liquid(ity), indeed is a binder that holds 'The Market'. ROOTS intent to increase liquidity of Intent, is more like adding life on to the Water: A whole evolution is hatching!

Parkade Ventures; mashup of Retail, Realestate, Autoclub

Idea: Recently multi-level computerized parking spaces got Infrastructure status. This makes investing in parkades attractive as it is an intersection intersection of organized retail, real estate, and access to automobile owning yuppy populace.

Traditionally Gold and Real-estate were the only investment avenues available for rich to grow their wealth easily. All other avenues required spending some time or effort and needed a lot of smarts and street savvy. Now there is a retail boom in-turn pushing up commercial realestate prices. And the automobile population is increasing exploding day by day. Urban parking facilities is increasingly a concern. Adding an interesting twist to the situation, recently, multi-level parkades became tax shelters due to their status as Infrastructure. Put everything together, then investing in creating a national retail chain of multi-level computurized parkade is an attractive proposition.

Execution: Buy land in by-lanes of congested business and shopping districts of congested urban areas. They will appreciate given the urbanization trend. Constructing multi-level parking facility is simple considering that it hardly needs major interior decoration like a retail space. There is no AC to be installed. And the power requirements are minimal. Thus the 'depreciating asset' capital expenses is attractive.

The running expenses and manpower requirements are even more attractive.

Computerization and customer management is the most interesting aspect of the investment. And the scale lends itself very well to create national retail chain. Here some smarts needs to be applied. This is what will differentiate the boys from the men.

With parking charges by the hour cash flow will be attractive. Smart way to bill the customer: half yearly or annual billing with 'subsidy/underwriting' by retail brands and credit card operators etc.


Profit: Retail space is set for consolidation and M&A action 3-5 years from now on. There is a lot of venture money being pumped in to India. This kind of safe ventures are good ways to create good return on exit. And venture funds investing in such ventures will also support a small innovation( GPS/GIS map, travel integration, etc) ecosystem around it. With so much talk about venture money chasing deals stable investments like these will make venture ecosystem sustainable. This will be the McDonalds of emerging India.

AOL Private Data Release Fiasco: Daffy Duck Did It

Top 10 Reasons why AOL Proudly released search and clickstream data

Overheared near the research.aol.com watercooler:
10) Daffy Duck Did It.

9) This is our cool new way of proving to the world that AOLer are not dumb. They *do* search all kind of intelligent things.

8) We want to reassure our users that you can do idiotic things in the Internet and still get by.

7) We want to try out this opensource thingy. Maybe this is the way to do it.

6) We want to be pro-active with DOJ.

5) There is no such thing called free lunch. We are free service from Aug 2 2006. This is our way of saying there is no free lunch.

4) We want to bring it to the notice of the world what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft can do with your data.

3) We just want to quickly show that our API is better than Amazon AWS A9, or GYM's. And we are anyway sinking, and we would love to take Google( 5% Stake holder) along.

2) We are experimenting with he Wisdom of Crowds Thingy that is so popular these days.

1) We wanted to kill Digg. That is not happening, at least let us be on the Digg's top for a while.
PS: Stay tuned for a statement by Bugs Bunny....

Update: Greg Yardley of RootsExchange a pioneer in the area of Intent Economy is going gaga with the data:
You never had privacy anyway

Get your AOL data on
A funny one at:
AOL user says "just kidding" about searching "How to kill wife" 30+ times

TIE-ISB Connect:Venture Market Warming up in India

I came to know about TIE-ISB Connect Seminar through Interpid's Everyday Entrepreneur. It is a serious effort to connect the entreprenurs with VCs and other support services.


Shishir Bhate's interesting article at Rediff Have a biz plan? Here's how to get VC funding

Who can participate?

"Whoever has a bright idea that can make wealth," Sarma puts it succinctly.

To elaborate, basically three categories of enterprises can participate:

* Growth-stage enterprises seeking capital infusion (may be even second round of funding) to ramp up their businesses;
* Early-stage enterprises that have a great idea, put together a good team and are seeking capital to build their businesses; and
* Idea-stage entrepreneurs, who have a great idea and have proof of concept that a viable business can be built around it.

Even if you are not planning to present a business plan it is a good networking opportunity:

Great networking opportunity

TiE-ISB Connect will be a great networking opportunity for entrepreneurs with over 500 delegates expected to participate in the event.

Some of the keynote speakers at the event include serial entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi, Air Deccan chairman Capt G R Gopinath, rediff.com founder and CEO Ajit Balakrishnan, Headstrong Corporation chairman and CEO Arjun Malhotra, Naukri.com CEO Sanjeev Bikhchandani, and Satyam Group chairman Ramalinga Raju.

Among the venture capitalists to be present at the event are Carlyle Group, Sequoia Capital, DFJ, Helion, August Capital, NthOrbit, Comcast, Sherpalo Ventures, TSI Ventures, ICICI Ventures and Actis Partners.

If you are averse to seeking venture money: Convert your 2 cents to $20m with almost zilch

See you at ISB!

Alexa Thumbnails, darn Why I did'nt think it up!

Today I came across the new Amazon Web Services: Alexa Thumbnail Service. For a really small fee, you can get thumbnail image of the site you specify. This will be useful in showing preview of sites say in a search result.
Ad sites like Text Link Ads, show site preview for potential link buyers. A quick preview of the site's look and feel will be useful for making an ad purchase decision. Site thumbnail could be a good way to link sites in blogs.

I see lot of opportunity for creating widget services around this: A S3 based permalink thumbnail that gets updated as the site content changes. This permalink image can be used as a profile image in social networks.

I was kicking myself why I did not think up this service. Looking back, AWS has all the crawl data available. They just have to render the html as a NxM pixel image to generate the thumbnail. It is simple and cool.

As an extension, if sites can be converted into small flash animations it will be cool.

If you want to enhance the search experience with site thumbnails it will burn a hole in the pocket with 20 cents for 1000 thumbnails.

Your Opinion Counts

0.2

Tezaa is a quick way to know opinions on serious and trivial matters. You can instantly creat a poll if opinion you are seeking is not already there.

Jul 15, 2006

by Balaji Sowmyanarayanan
website

Tezaa Opinion Search

★★★★☆
I got to know about Tezaa through my BarCamp friend Amit Rajan's Webyantra. I was curious to know that it is a Chennai based Web2.0 startup.

I gave it a try and found it interesting and potentially addictive. With Tezaa you can search for opinion on topics by keyword. If you are not satisfied with the results you can create a opinion poll of your own. The active community picks up the poll and votes.

There are provisions for running the poll through your blog as a widget.

The business model is not obvious from the site. Yet there are multiple ways to make money out of the play. The generated content increases in value with time and community participation. I will not recommend a ad based revenue model for this play. Carigslist like community growth is needed. At that point a profit sharing model will evolve.

Beginner's Guide to Blogshares!

Blogshares is a fantasy sharemarket for blogs. It is an addictive game.
Here is a guide for getting started to the game/Monitoring your/other blog's popularity.
Beginner's Guide to Blogshares!

Text Link Ads

XOXO for Riya Filter Templates?

Idea:
Riya Filters, way to search pictures. Munjal of Riya.com is involving the community to revamp the home page design. It is in the larger context of making Riya to be a visual search company rather than just face recognition joint. I have outlined an idea for one way of doing it. Here are some more implementation details to add to it.


Execution:
Use standardized formats to create Riya Filters. This will go a long way in internally generating the templates and also generation of templates by the ever active Riya user community. Without giving much thought, I'm mulling XOXO as a possible candidate. These templates will be named well and will be searchable/discoverable easily. The quality of the search output will be a direct function of the content in the filter. Which is the incentive for the community to create it and possibly self promote themselves. Which will lead to new revenue models too.


Profit:
We are shifting gear from text, form submission so characteristic of Web1.0 to structured content submission. This will create some chaos in the beginning, but eventually lead to new innovation opportunities. Widespread adoption of microformats, more microformats will be a side effect. (PS: Am I missing the whole MicroFormat concept all together here? )

Followup: I have submitted a more general version of this idea to to Cambrian House: Content Membrane: Mashable Content Search Filters Cambrain uses Wisdom of Crowd and the power of Lisp/ Lisp like language to deliver software projects rapidly. A very interesting site, business model, technical platform etc. Worth watching.

Robots that trade game score and game artifacts

Idea: There is an interesting contest run by Microsoft called MSN® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger Invasion of Robots The cool prizes worth $40,000 are to be won. Here is a small idea for contest entry robot:
There are many multi player game sites all over the net. Many of them like BlogShares allow players to gift/transfer game artifacts to other players. The idea is to establish an exchange/trading floor for such game scores/artifacts to be bartered. And make a MSN messenger BOT do automatic trading for the busy user based on user specified criteria!
Execution: ??? There is a lot of prior art in terms of Real Money Trading, but what we are doing here is Barter
Profit: This trading site will attract immense traffic from all kinds of users - an obvious profit is to generate ad revenue. Giving users more time and mobility across many games enhances fun! In due course this will overtake the Chicago commodity exchange!

MirrorZen, an Innovative question generation search

Idea: Tired of the endless irrelevant search result of Google, Yahoo and MSN? What if a search engine generates relevant questions that matches what you have in mind? MirrorZen is a planned search engine on these lines. Going by the popularity of Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ) MirrorZen might be welcome evolution in the search scene.

Execution: From the website of MirrorZen:

With MirrorZen, when a User puts in Boolean Queries similar to what they would have done with regular search engines, the engine then generates questions perfectly related to the keywords. The Engine generates highly specific questions related to the boolean keywords. The obvious benefit the user has with MirrorZen is that there are questions staring at the user instead of links to over 100,000 pages. The user could derive a meaning out of the Question and if he feels that the question is what he was looking for, he goes ahead and clicks on the question to come across the ANSWER and links to pages describing them.

MirrorZen does perfectly well with Natural Language Questions and provides composite answers to the questions as a normal human being would.

As an aside, in the famous Tamil Movie ThiruVillaiAadal, Nagesh says: I will ask questions, that is what I know best; I don't know the answers!
Here the page ranking is going to be based on not just the link analysis, but on the content also. With questions acting as a pivot/magnet to the right content.
I was wondering what kind of features will be good for a white hat comment based blog traffic enhancement plugin. A question generator that will scan a blog post and create a relevant question that will stimulate a conversation will be a killer plugin. Especially for the longtail Z-listers. Saves people time, and increase the return on effort for bloggers.

Such an algo taken to industrial grade server farms generating multiple questions for the whole web content is what MirrorZen is aiming.
Good luck MirrorZen, I wish you good talent, funding, good initial customer base and lot of fun all the way!

Profit: Democracy is about markets. Or markets are about democracy. Democratically voting out the Google, Yahoo, Microsoft stornghold using them as the base is vibrancy of markets/democracy. It is not about money or jobs or fame, it is about advancement of the human civilization. Amen!





Update: I got a chance to take the Mirror Zen search for a spin. I am convienced that this is a very promising technology. It is a good sugar coating for the plain old text search. And there is lot of scope for adding colour and flavour to the candy. With adoption all that will evolve: In to a fairytale. At this stage they are worth giving all the backing and support.

Buying Realestate Property at Nanganallur, Chennai

Nanganallur at the suburb is emerging as a middle class to upper middle class locality. The real estate prices are increasing steadily. The infrastructure is also keeping up with the growth to some extent. Is Nanganallur, Thilliganga nagar, Madipakkam, Ullugaram, Vanuvampet, Moovarasanpet, Palavanthangal, or Purithivakkam a good destination to setup your new home?

The decison depends on few important factors viz.,

• Schools
• Water
• Transportation
• Resident mix
• Access Cultural and other activities
• Locality Profile Improvement over next few years.

Let us attack them one by one:
Schools: There are a lot of good schools at Nangnallur. Modern Senior Sceondary School is a good School with good record. Other schools with different mix and match are available. There are vans to far off schools like the Ashram at Vellachery.
While at the topic of schools, most engineering colleges operate bus route via Nanganallur so access to such colleges is also not a problem. The middle class aspirations are centered around schools and colleges Nanganallur populace fits this profile and the type of people flock Nanganallur.

Water: Till recently, ground water level and ground water quality were the pride of Nanganallur. Yet with the increase in the number of flats, and appartment complexes, the wate level is going down at an alarming rate. In the summer season, the sigt of water tanker is a very commonn sight. There is metro water supply through 'pipe and pump' system. It is fairly regular yet inadquate. Buying water has become a norm.

Transportation: With its proximity to the suburban train line near Pallavanthangal, train is a popular mode of transport. You ride up to the station, park your 2-wheeler at the bike stand at the station and take a train to the city, etc. Busses are very infrequent. Yet it is imporving day by day. Most popular transport is private transport. Recently, the road infrastructure has undergone a improvement for good. The traffic situation is slowly getting busier.

Resident Mix: Middle class with aspiration is the mix of people at Nanganallur. Particularly, salaried class with their wards at schools and colleges with big hopes of making it big through education, employment is the majority. Now the things are changing, there is a good level of north indian population Thanks to the BPO and IT employment boom. And the cheap rental rates at the well connected areas of Nanganallur. A lot of Brahmin Non Resident Indian family population is also here. This is evidant from the ICICI bank customer profile. Much of the business to the bank is due to the Sons and Daughters and Son-in-law and Daughter-in-law who choose to spread their wings from Big time Sydeny Australia to Small time Ceder Rapids Iowa. A good mix of Conservative middile class values with the willingness to experiment with the trendy consumerism characterizes the Nanganallur resident mix.



Access to Cultural and Other activities: There is a plenty of activity choices especially if you are religious type. There are a plenty of temples which are very unique. For example the 32-feet Anjeneya Swamy Temple is centre of many cultural activities. So is the Sri Lakshmi Narashima Temple, or the Sri Hayagriva Temple. These are the Vishnava temples. Vishnava is a dominant sect in Nanganallur. The Shiva temples include Ganesh Mandali, The Ardhanariswarar Temple, Dharmalineshwarer, Sri Iyyapa Temple and innumerable other locality temples. Apart from temples there are cultural shabas like the Ranjani. If you are yoga, meditation type, you will see that Isha Yoga, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar classes are thriving at Nanganallur area. Churches, Mosque and other religious activies are also available at Nanganallur.

Locality Profile Improvement in the Future: You can see that most software companies like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, Patni etc operate buses to Nanganallur. This fits well with the aspirations of Nanganallur populace to land in a plum job that has a chance to go abraod. The BPO employees profile is evident from the number of SUVs that ply in the night. These people are going to spend money/invest in Nanganallur. These people will raise their kids here at Nanganallur. They will need for services and care for their elderly at Nanganallur. Apart from the high disposable income categories, the traditional jobs like Ashok Leyland, The Hindu, Banks, Central and State Govt employees form a majority chunk of the Nanganallur mix. Indeed it is ofsprings of theres traditional job holders who are getting into hi-tech high disposable income IT/BPO jobs. Many ways the profile is set to imporve in the futere. There is rampant construction all over the main roads and the side roads. Branded shops are set to paly a vital role in increasing this profile. The Medavakkam main road becoming a 4-lane road is also going to boost the profile in a major way. The proposed extension of MRTS from Vallechery to St Thomas Mount will increase the transport infrastructure. There is a lot of scope for developing the parks and public places at Nanganallur. If you aspire to buy realestate property at Nanganallur, invest in interior places which are supposedly remote now, yet will be well connected in the near future due to the above connectivity!