Rediff slideshow of Avenues 2009, the annual B-school festival of SJMSOM, IIT Bombay

Now that's what you call innovative marketing:
'A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.'

An article by William Deresiewicz about how universities should exist to make minds, not careers from The American Scholar
Not very different from the way things are shaping up in India

Interesting way to use the unfinished code that's part of Windows 7 to turn a laptop into a wifi hotspot. Wonder whether this will be patched up eventually by microsoft or will they ship their own finished frontend.

I wonder whatever would happen if revenues continue to grow the way they are in the entertainment industry. In fact they seem to be at an all time high. Maybe just kill the internet & wait for things to happen.
Transcript & MP3 available on the site – http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2726710.htm

Kind of like initially mutilating the hand that will feed you in the future:
'Digital Video Recorders, once considered a mortal threat by the entertainment industry, have now become its new best friend.
When the industry meets a new technology, it panics and fights it tooth-and-nail. Eventually, the industry loses this fight, often squashing innovation or arbitrarily singling out a few citizens for punishment along the way. Finally, the same technology ends up benefiting the same short-sighted industry — but rather than learn their lesson, the same corporations are usually busy repeating the same cycle all over again with something else. It happened with the VCR, the audio cassette, and even the turntable.'

Advertisement for copyright services from 1906. Guess some things are timeless.

Read Batul the Great comics online

Summary of the findings of the study conducted by CRIA in 2005-06 regarding music piracy & P2P

An older study from 2005-06 conducted by the CRIA similar to the one conducted in UK recently.
'Three out of four P2P users admitted to purchasing music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of P2P users saying that they have bought tracks they have also downloaded on more than 10 occasions. 25 percent admitted to purchasing previously-downloaded tracks only once or twice, while an additional 27 percent claimed to have done it less than 10 times, but more than twice. The end result is clear: people are buying music after downloading it on P2P, meaning that the industry has failed to recognize the marketing-like effects of P2P. Just as important, this should caution the industry against assessing each and every download to a "loss" to piracy, since the statistics clearly show that those engaging in P2P do buy music in not-insignificant numbers.'

People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

The survey was conducted over the Internet, and this particular question relies on notoriously inaccurate consumer recall, so it's hard to know just how seriously to take the results. It does fit with past research, like that commissioned by the Canadian government which found a strong correlation between downloading songs from P2P networks and buying more CDs. But even that research found no such correlation between downloading and purchasing music online.

It's called a spoiler tactic. You take your competitor's biggest cash cow and offer a free alternative. Everybody from Linux to Google has used the tactic against Microsoft. So who can fault Microsoft when it uses it against Google's advertising cash cow? The guys who benefit from this tactic today are the good folks at OpenX, the open-source alternative to ad servers from Google such as DoubleClick (for big publishers) and AdManager (for small publishers).