Smart Card system is Systems Consulting club initiative to replace minor cash transactions on campus through use of single student smart card. These minor transactions include all the transactions made at eating joints on campus and mess bill. Inclusion of photocopying shops is undecided.

A. Demo

A successful Demo of the Smart Card system was provided on Campus on 27th Sep. 2010 in front of the student community

B. Benefits of the proposed system:

1. Benefits of Campus Cards –

• Cashless transactions can be done.
• Reduces Paper work.
• Complete record of students is available on the campus card

2. Benefits to Students –

• They are required to carry only one Smart Card Based Id-cards for multi-purpose e.g. same card can be used as a photo Id card, library card, in the laboratory, hostel, canteen, fees payment, courseware issue, gymnasium, and many more applications.
• Students will not have to carry cash all over the premises
• Accurate accounts settlement
• These cards are handy and can be carried easily from one place to another

3. Benefits to Shop keepers –

• Since all the transactions in the Stores by the students and other card holders are done through Smart Cards it eliminate cash transactions to a large extent thus reducing confusion and time spent in a cash transaction
• It will be possible to keep record of each student transactions.
• Complete records of transactions are available in ready formats

C. The system in brief:

Student pays an upfront nominal amount and uses the respective smart card points from transactions thereon. After the card value reaches a minimum value (say Rs. 0), student needs to again recharge the smart card. Each time a transaction is made, the transaction amount is transferred in terms of smart card points from student to shopkeeper.

D. How YOU can help:

Our aim is to collect enough funds to start implementing the project in earnest and to first garner enough funds for 1st Phase and then move incrementally to next phases. Your contribution as a pledge will go long way in helping campus realize this wonderful new cash system and improve the student life on campus.


For more details please click here

We are a decade into the 21^st century and we now live in a world full of wonders: marvels of technology, breakthroughs in medical science and an undeniably more comfortable standard of living compared to the previous centuries. While the occasional endemic (or even a pandemic) breakout of obscure diseases bares open the fragility of our existence, we have retreated into a cocoon of complacent living with political and financial turmoil dominating dinner table conversations. But, at this juncture an important question arises: Who is “We” in the statements above. To some of us the answer is obvious as the people we come in to contact with most often might share this utopian existence, erroneously considering it tantamount to a generalization of the entire country’s population. And that is the ugly truth of our existence.

World Bank estimates that 80% of India's population lives on less than $2 a day. According to a 2005 World Bank estimate, 41% of India falls below the international poverty line of US$ 1.25 a day (PPP, in nominal terms ` 21.6 a day in urban areas and ` 14.3 in rural areas). According to the criterion used by the Planning Commission of India 27.5% of the population was living below the poverty line in 2004–2005. This is an alarming indication of the cost of India’s enviable growth and its absolutely unsustainable nature. To fulfil India’s dreams of becoming a global economic powerhouse, the need of the hour is an all-out war on poverty.

Know thy enemy - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There is widespread consensus on the factors widening this gap between the have-nots and haves. World Bank’s Development Report (1990) hit the hammer on the nail with a succinct yet profound statement: ‘Countries that have been most successful in attacking poverty have encouraged a pattern of growth that makes efficient use of labour and have invested in the human capital of the poor’. While the former would bring a larger fraction of the population under the bracket of employment, the latter deals with the social evils that plague sustaining this effort in the long run by tackling issues like education, healthcare and other basic social services.

Well, if the factors have been identified as early as 1990, what prevents veritable action on scale that can usher in true ‘inclusive’ growth? A little investigation throws light on two common themes behind the impediments to achieving the aforementioned long term and short term goals: lack of information and knowledge. Every social /economic evil behind poverty (or more specifically lack of opportunities) takes roots in ignorance or lack of adequate skills and capabilities. And this leads to the next piece of the jigsaw: How do you put together an enormously scalable platform(s) that allows free flow of information and promotes development of human resources on which the next wave of growth opportunities can be ridden, with the keyword being ‘scalable’? Clearly, government policies based on traditional methods are meandering along at snail’s pace due to constraints on scale. So, what has been the missing ingredient in the efforts undertaken thus far? Have we found this magical potion and are we ready to really take on poverty?

The panacea to all these problems lies, ironically, in a field that has helped propel India into the big boys club of economic powerhouses – Technology. Technology brings to the table a host of unique attributes that can enable us to address the problem of scale in any endeavour to alleviate poverty. With the recent developments in both products (scalable applications like Video Conferencing, Mobile Technology etc.) and infrastructure (platforms like cloud, and connectivity etc.), Technology is poised to deliver long overdue social services economically and pervasively. To understand why, let’s delve deeper into the real issues behind poverty, problems with their alleviation and see how Technology could be our knight in shining armour.

Employment-a short term remedy

The most immediate relief from poverty is obviously through provision of meaningful employment. The great Indian growth story entails that there is unprecedented focus on infrastructure development. Ideally, that should translate into widespread creation of non-agrarian jobs. However, fundamental economics teaches us that for this demand-supply equilibrium to be reached information asymmetry must be overcome, in the absence of which demand remains unfulfilled with all the parties unsatisfied. It is exactly here that technology has an immense role to play leveraging the penetration of mobile phones in even the most remote parts of the country and using it as a medium for dissemination of employment related information. Babajobs.com is a perfect proof of concept of how technology has helped create a more efficient marketplace for exchange of services (blue-collar jobs).

Social Services – Long term measures

To affect long term sustainable results to reduce poverty, the very fabric of our society needs transformation. The success of our efforts will depend on our ability to address fundamental roadblocks like issues of identity, free and fair access to governmental measures, affordable healthcare and a right to rudimentary education and continued skill-development. Projects like UID are already highlighting the significant role technology is playing to tackle these issues. The education model adopted by Educomp and distance learning programs of well-known institutes can be reworked to provide a nation-wide platform to provide quality education and skill development courses leveraging the presence of institutions like ITIs and government schools.

The future of the war on poverty, and by extension the country’s growth, depends squarely on our ability to harness our core technological strengths to orchestrate tightly integrated platforms that will deliver essential services to help those living under the BPL. There must be participation from private players, government institutes and individuals to form an ecosystem that, with a little bit of skill and planning, may even turn out to be profitable for private players. That is the essence of technology: it has the potential to take us from having no solutions to providing a potentially profitable one.

~The above article,from an essay, by Sandip Devarkonda(PGDCM student, Batch of 2012, IIM Calcutta) won the first prize in Hysterisis 2011- the Essay Writing competition held by the Systems Consulting Club with the theme "Technology and Below Poverty Line"

Web 2.0 has gripped the world like never before and even India has slowly but surely welcomed it. It includes social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter etc, blogs, podcasts, wikis like Wikipedia and other such new age media which are making it really easy for people to share, interact and converse online.
India has about 55 million Internet users at this moment. Undoubtedly most of them are in the urban areas. Orkut has about 16 million Indian users, Facebook has some 8 million Indian users, Twitter has about 1.8 million Indians on it, more and more Indians are moving onto YouTube to watch podcasts and also taking to blogging – basically a lot of exciting stuff is happening in the Indian Internet industry. Recently YouTube signed a deal with IPL to show the matches of IPL 3.0 live online. Even though it has received mixed reviews, this initiative is indicative of YouTube’s huge and growing popularity in India. There are also a large number of blogging communities in India including Blogadda, IndiBlogger etc.

Even though this field is developing at a good pace in this country, a lot of people still don’t take this too seriously. Many misconceptions regarding social media and Web 2.0 in general exist in this country. Some people think that its just a pastime, some think that it decreases work hours, some think that it only makes people inactive in all the other work in life while most of the people still don’t think that this media can be used for some useful purposes like by companies and above all, all of them feel that this is another means of decreasing the productivity of people in their work life and their daily chores.

Clearing all the misconceptions, I would like to first state one fact – every new technology or invention has good and bad qualities about itself. The onus is on us to use it for a good enough purpose. Eg : When dynamite was invented, no one thought of the bad effects of it. A lot of Indian organizations like Jet Airways, Spice Jet, Kingfisher, Indigo, Paramount Airways, Tata Docomo, Indian Premier League, Airtel, Pepsi India, Idea etc are using this media to reach out to their customers, prospective customers and also their rival customers. The strategy which they normally follow is to listen to the conversations between people on blogs, social networking sites and other media about their products / services. They then engage the interested customers by contests, promotions, schemes, discounts etc and finally converse with them. Many of these companies have started separate social media divisions to handle the complete online media space. These companies also make videos which are meant to be viral that is they could be spread from one person to two, two to four and so on. Examples of use of social media in our country include the Tata Jaago Re campaign, 26th July 2005 floods in Mumbai, 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, campaigns by different NGOs like GiveIndia etc.

A large number of celebrities like movie stars and other public figures like Harsha Bhogle, Shashi Tharoor, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai have joined Twitter. The best part about Twitter is the fact that it is like an Online SMS service with 140 characters. Unlike Facebook or Orkut where one has to become a friend of a person to know what he / she is talking about, on Twitter one can just follow a person and read his tweets (conversations). This encourages more of a general conversation on different issues when compared to FB or Orkut which are more towards what’s happening in our friend’s lives, our lives etc. This tool has helped me network with so many different types of individuals. Even LinkedIn which is a professional business networking site has a high number of users in our country. This site is being increasingly used by companies to search for the right people for the right jobs.

But as with any kind of new technology, a large number of people do misuse this media in different ways like having false accounts on different networking sites, fooling people by acting as a guy / gal, luring people into prostitution, sex etc, presence of pedophiles’, causing security issues, wasting time on such websites while at work, spoiling one’s personal and social life due to addiction and other such kind of problems. It’s up to the person to know where to draw the line in such a scenario.

This sector is still at a nascent stage in India and is expected to be the sunshine sector in the coming years as it will require more content writers, social media strategists, executives, social media marketers, web marketers, online marketers etc. Social Media Marketing and Online Marketing are expected to be the next big marketing concepts in our country! Do keep watching this space!!

For more details on Social media and social media in India check out –
www.amitklien.com
www.vinni.co.in
www.2020social.com
www.webchutney.com
(This list is not exhaustive but just indicative)

PS – With this social media revolution, a number of indigenous social media websites have also come up like Ibibo, BigAdda etc!

Disclaimer: the above article is not original.

it is published from the following link http://blogs.siliconindia.com/AnitaRao/Misconceptions_about_social_media_in_India-bid-JZn04QG370755063.html

The author in Anita Rao.

For many years I've wanted to be able to link any physical object (e.g from the marketplace) to anything digital about that object (e.g. all the information in the marketspace). I call this linking of physical information to the digital information about itFindIt! search, and I think we are finally starting to get there. eBay just announced that it bought Redlaser, a company that allows anyone with the Redlaser application on his or her iPhone to scan a barcode. The program then shows you where you can get the product you scanned, how much it will cost, and even where you can get it for free. Scanbuy just announced a free barcode-scanning-software-development kit for Android developers.
We know from the principles of self-organizing systems that have been described in many places, including John Holland's classic book Emergence, that a tagging architecture allows many new functions and capabilities to emerge. The fact that a page link is a standard tag allowed Google to analyze this standard tag with its page rank algorithm. Without the page-link tag, there would be no Google. Likewise, as Redlaser and Scanbuy both understand clearly, the barcode is an existing and growing tagging architecture that helps us tie the physical world to the digital — or as I like to think about it, the integration of the marketplace and the marketspace.
When you begin to think about the lowly barcode and turn your imagination to its possibilities, the mind reels. Here are some examples of things that are already possible:
Proactive, customized service: Simply attaching a permanent barcode to any product when and where it is purchased allows it to be indexed to all its documentation, service history, ancillary products, parts, etc. The next time you had a problem with your garbage disposal, you could scan its barcode with your cell phone. The make and model would pop up, and you would be able to pick from a menu of "reason codes" and desired call-back times. The service technician would call you back with full knowledge of you, your product, its warranty, etc. As I've written about before, we are coming to expect this type of proactive, informed level of service. Such a move can help "traditional" companies rival their online competitors.
Enhancement of the user experience: L.A. Candy, a book by Lauren Conrad, the star of MTV's show The Hills, has a 2D barcode on it that takes you to videos and other content about the book. The same is true of Superfreakonomics. Any experience can be enhanced in this way. Imagine you are standing in line to see a movie, holding a ticket that has a 2D barcode on it that you scan with your phone and instantly see background information on how the movie was made or a cross-promotion for the book upon which the movie is based. Imagine being in a restaurant and each item on the menu has a 2D barcode linked to nutritional information or other facts about the dish you might choose to eat. Imagine tagging an entire city with the history, pictures, and videos based on barcodes strategically placed around the city. Now every phone can become an access device for information indexed to the place.

Efficient secure storage: One of the greatest problems in information is creating relevant indices to find information in the future. For example, I'm in the middle of closing a mortgage on a condo. There are a ridiculous number of documents to sign. There are at least two parties who want to keep these documents: the lender and me. What I'd like to have (after we go through the inefficient legal kabuki of this process) is the ability to scan all the data, have it stored in a secure place with the appropriate passcodes provided by someone like IronMountain, and generate a unique barcode that will be a robust index to that data.
These are just three possible implications. One can imagine many, many more. The reason it's so powerful is that any time we create a new tagging architecture that is decentralized and out "at the ends" of the network, we have the ability to unleash the power of self-organization. Given how localized and voluminous information is, any solution for integrating marketplace and marketspace information must be decentralized and self-organizing.
In this blog, I've focused on barcodes as the index. There are many more tagging mechanisms.Layar has shown how you can use pictures to index information with its augmented reality application. GPS information is another important tag. I'm sure DNA and other chemical and biological analyses will provide tagging opportunities as they become more available and cheaper. The good news is even with the simple barcode, we can transform the service and information experience.
What applications can you imagine? How prepared would your organization be to provide FindIt! services?
The above content is not original. It has been published from the following link:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/06/how_barcodes_and_smartphones_w.html
John Sviokla, the author, is vice chairman of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, Inc. He is a former professor at Harvard Business School in marketing, MIS, and decision sciences.

While Apple made headline news all over the United States this month, thanks to the launch of the new iPhone4, Nokia was making news of its own with the launch of its Nokia C3 smartphone. You probably didn't hear much about it if you live in the United States, but in a series of special events in 10 Indonesian cities — which led thousands of customers to form huge queues to get the new handset — Nokia was the big story.

The difference in media coverage highlights another critical difference between the two companies: Nokia has a global strategy, earning 99.3 percent of its revenues outside its home base of Finland. Apple, on the other hand, has a largely U.S.-centric strategy; last year, it garnered almost 60 percent of its net sales in Americas.

This is a big challenge for the folks at One Infinite Loop. Crafting product strategies to target the advanced economies of the West no longer suffices for global leadership. Global scale requires global operations. And global leadership requires dual business models — success in the prosperous West and in the emerging East. The rivalry for global smartphone leadership is only beginning and offers a good look at two companies with very different approaches.

To be sure, Nokia is not without its significant challenges. It recently issued a profit warning that suggests it needs to reinvigorate its innovation and marketing efforts immediately. Its share in the U.S., once dominant, has slipped mightily, thanks mostly to the iPhone. But it is one thing to capture a growth segment in a single country market. It is a very different thing to capture similar segments in all critical-to-win country markets. That's where Nokia is well-positioned and where Apple is challenged.

In 2009, the worldwide market volume of mobile devices amounted to 1.14 billion units. Of the total, Nokia accounted for 432 million units and Apple for 20 million units. Apple's iPhone was growing explosively that year, but its market share was still not even a third of Nokia's 68 million smart phones.

If the current growth of Nokia and Apple continued for the rest of the year 2010 — and it's not clear that it will, given Nokia's recent warning — Apple will sell 35-45 million smartphones in 2010, about half of Nokia's estimated 70-80 million units, or 10 percent of Nokia's total mobile devices worldwide.

In order to surpass Nokia globally, Apple will have to increase production 10-fold to some 400-500 million smartphones on an annual basis. Apple is not well-positioned to expand its production capabilities, particularly when compared to Nokia's established global production systems.

Since the 1990s, Nokia has built its production network worldwide, especially in China. More recently, it has relied increasingly on in-house production and, even with smartphones, only 5 percent of the production is outsourced.

In contrast, Apple has no production of its own; it is entirely dependent on a few suppliers. Moreover, only a few of these outsourcing giants can manage massive volumes, including Flextronics, Hon Hai (Foxconn), and Sanmina-SCI.

While Apple is trying to scale up fast, its timing is difficult. Today, the world's largest electronics contract manufacturers in Guangdong suffer from extraordinary labor turmoil, which has resulted in salary hikes.

Moreover, since early spring, Foxconn, which won Apple's order to make the iPhone, has been in the spotlight in China, due to multiple suicide cases.

Even if such a massive production ramp-up were possible for Apple, the company's pricing strategies remain out of alignment with the global marketplace. This was evidenced most acutely with the unsuccessful iPhone launches in India and China — the most critical marketplaces of the future.

The iPhone first came to India with a bang in 2008, but high prices ($665 for 8GB, $775 for 16GB) buried the product. Most buyers felt many of the key features were already available in mobile devices that cost only a fraction of that amount. For phones that may cost less than $175 to build, both Apple and Airtel stuck to the $700 price for the phone in India (vs. $199 with a two-year AT&T contract in the U.S) — in other words, 68 percent of the annual GDP per capita.

In the U.S., the comparable GDP per capita is $46,381. Would you pay more than $31,500 for an iPhone?

After India, the iPhone flopped in China, where it arrived with a price tag of a stunning $1,000 without a contract. By the end of 2009, some 100,000 iPhones had been sold in China in a marketplace of 724 million mobile users.

In the long-term, the future market for smartphones is in China and India. In 2009, smartphones accounted for 11 percent of mobile shipments in Asia-Pacific. By 2012, this figure will grow to 20 percent.

To stabilize its competitive position, Nokia has to launch hits in the smartphone market in the next 6-18 months and, concurrently, increase its market share in America. Not an easy task for any company, much less in the hyper-competitive smartphone market. Otherwise, it risks deterioration in the U.S. and in other advanced economies and over time even in the emerging world.

Apple challenge, on the other hand, is global. In the global markets, companies can no longer afford to be strongly U.S.-centric, starting product launches in the U.S. alone and only gradually reaching other markets as supply chains catch up.

To grow outside the U.S., Apple needs to adopt a dual business model, one for the advanced economies which enjoy high living standards but relatively slow growth, and another model for emerging economies which have relatively low living standards but enjoy high growth.

Today, Nokia has such a model; Apple does not. In fact, the fluctuations of the Apple stock has correlated with those of the luxury stocks, such as LVMH Moet Hennessy and Christian Dior. That is not a good omen for the future, which requires increasing frugality even in the advanced economies.

In the past, companies could marginalize large emerging markets; today, global leadership requires success in the advanced economies and the emerging world.

Disclaimer: This is an HBR article published from the following link http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/06/apple_iphone4_success_masks_gl.html

Dr Dan Steinbock is Research Director of International Business at India, China and America Institute (USA) and Senior Fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China). His most recent work is Winning Across Global Markets: How Nokia Creates Strategic Advantage in a Fast-Changing World (Jossey-Bass/Wiley).

The moon has been an object of fascination for human beings since time unknown. So near, but yet so far. So beautiful but yet full of craters. So barren, but yet so resourceful. Resourceful? Indeed, the moon has millions of tones of Helium-3 embedded in the soil blown in by lunar winds. Helium-3 is one of the potential raw materials for a nuclear fusion reaction. With natural resources on earth fast dwindling and nuclear energy fast picking up popularity, helium-3 harvesting is one of the best available options available.

The moon has been a part of almost all ancient cultures and has had an important role to play in the calendars, poetry, mythological stories and also deity worshipping. In the past century, after the advent of feature films, outer space has gained great importance and films like 2001: A space odyssey, Solaris and Alien have been hugely popular. The blog is about the 2009 film MOON, a British sci-fi film starring Sam Rockwell. The film has been chosen over scores of other sci-fi films simply because it shows both advantages and moral hazards of modern technology.

The film revolves around a single character Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) who is stationed at moon whose main responsibility is to send helium-3 canisters to earth in a space module. His 3 year contract at moon is nearing its end. The process of helium harvesting is almost fully automated and Sam has a robotic assistant GERTY to help him with his day to day activities. He is in constant touch with his wife and (now almost 3-year old) daughter. One day while going for his regular round of Helium harvesting, he meets with an accident and while he is recovering, he is not allowed to venture outside by GERTY. But realizing that there was something fishy, Sam tricks GERTY and somehow goes out of the Lunar base and finds a look alike of him injured in an accident. The audience is made to realize at this moment that the Sam recovering right now is someone else and the one injured in the accident has never been rescued. The new Sam seems to realize gradually that all of them could be clones. But it becomes quite difficult for the original Sam to come to terms with the truth. The rest of the film is about how the two Sams take control of the situation and how they fight back.

The film is a technological marvel. Though the film does not reveal much about when the story is taking place, it can be reasonably assumed that it is set somewhere in 2050s. Let us start with the idea of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. The robot GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) is highly intelligent and can converse with Sam on any topic under the sun. Not only that, it can also show emotions. Though it has a monotonous voice, it has a graphical display to show smileys by which it is able to communicate a number of feelings with Sam. The film also shows that GERTY has been programmed to take good care of Sam; it is not reluctant to take Sam’s life whenever required. Thus in a way GERTY almost symbolizes the present day human beings who develop relationships and can emote with fellow human beings but are smart enough to sacrifice these emotions when required.

The idea of parallel computing and co-operative robots has been captured well by the film. GERTY, physically is not a single robot but many different robots, the nearest physical unit to Sam communicating with him as and when required. At the same time, GERTY is sharing the same memory resources and probably a single core – processor. The film also has shown a very realistic picture of robotics. Instead of showing high flying robots like in films like Star wars, it has shown a simple 6-axis or 7-axis robot which is quite adept at simple mechanical tasks.

Space technology has really evolved and the film paints a very true picture of things to happen. A Lunar base has been set up on the moon, where an earth like environment is being maintained for Sam. The space modules which frequently transfer the Helium-3 between earth and moon also seem a highly realistic proposition.

And finally, let’s get into the main subject of the movie- CLONING. Man is being used by Lunar industries as a commodity and with the help of his so called wife and daughter, it has become very easy to play with his emotions and keep him under control. In fact, the ultimate aim of ‘getting back to earth’ is shown as the main incentive to Sam because of which he is bearing the pain of solitude. The cloning technology has not evolved to the extent that the same clone can be used for years together. Every three years, the clone requires a replacement as his body becomes weak and succumbs to the regular wear and tear of the highly demanding job performed in adverse conditions. Also, the inhuman way in which the clone is treated in the end also shows how inhuman man can get for earning a few dollars. Every clone is asked to sit in a module (supposed to take him to earth) and there he is incinerated.

The film thus is one of its kind capturing various human emotions and technological evolution at the same time. The film also shows the ultimate victory of human mind over technology, ironically, though the latter is a result of human mind itself. The film was a limited release but nevertheless picked up two BAFTAs. It features in the 39^th position in the top 50 sci-fi flicks on imdb.

Hopefully, my article was able to TAKE YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK. Thanks for reading. See you soon.

For a long time the academia has been going gaga over the enormous education potential of the Internet. The Utopian dream of having quality education available for all has seduced many. Efforts have been made to put as much information as possible onto the net. Institutions like MIT have begun to make their lectures available to all. But there is a fundamental problem. The content and level of the material should match with the student. There was need and demand for content which doesn’t require and engineering degree to understand and is broken into bite sized pieces.

Enter “Salman Khan”, not the celebrity we are familiar with, but an alumnus of Harvard and MIT. His aim was to provide quality education for everyone. Armed with just a camera and the wonderful platform of Youtube he went on the change the world. Till date he has made over 1100 videos that explain topics from high school algebra to financial crisis in simple to understand terms. Providing a quick and easy way to brush up concepts, his videos are currently viewed by over 70,000 students a month.

He was awarded the 2009 Tech Award in Education (ref: http://www.techawards.org/laureates). The Tech Awards is an international awards program that honours innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity. Khanacademy, the not-for-profit organization founded by him has the comprehensive collection of links to his videos. Currently efforts are underway to make translated versions of his lectures available.

The URL is http://www.khanacademy.org/. Useful but forgotten concepts from mathematic s to economics can be refreshed. This would undoubtedly help in preparation for interviews and also to satisfy your curiosity.

Pratik Sule

(IIM Calcutta ’09-‘11)