Yogurt - healthy but not 100% veg

Yogurt is a highly nutritious food that is tasty, easy to obtain and transport. However, this cup of yogurt is not a simple product. Manufacturers adjust the ingredients to make a creamy product and to control the calorie content.

Noticed something really interesting. Gelatin serves a number of useful functions in a yogurt product. It forms a creamier product and keeps the fruit suspended in the yogurt. It also serves as a bulking agent, reducing the calorie content, by replacing the yogurt with water. Non-fat yogurt has 130 calories per 8 oz. without any sweeteners. To get 100-calorie yogurt, less yogurt is used.

But not many people know that gelatin, is by definition an animal product. The gelatin used in current yogurt products is produced from pork or non-kosher slaughtered beef !!

Don't believe me? Next time you have a yogurt check the ingredients or read it here.

Happy Diwali

Sofi's cafe wishes all its readers and friends a very Happy Diwali with happiness, prosperity, wealth and love.

New Tubes for Google in making

What I love about YouTube is that it gave clean checkmate to Google video(No 1 search engine) based on it's video search capabilities!! So what's next?? Couple of good examples I can think of are Netvibes.com & Live-documents.com (It's a long way though) .

What struck me most was the details about the Live-documents.com. This Banglore based puppy is co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia (Guano! The hotmail.com guy)!!!

$100 Million for an Idea

Click here so see which are the top selling ideas

A simple theory

 If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
-George Bernard Shaw  

Maison de L'Amitie

 

While reading "Most expensive homes in the World" on Forbes, I read about this amazing deal of Mr. Trump. Here it is:

No. 3

$125 million
Maison de L'Amitie
Palm Beach, Fla.

In 2004, Donald J. Trump bought former health care executive Abe Gosman's palace, Maison de L'Amitie, at a bankruptcy auction for $41.25 million. With the refurbished version--complete with ballroom, conservatory, 100-foot-long swimming pool and 475 feet of oceanfront--he aims to set a U.S. sales record. It is listed with Dolly Lenz and Geoff Thomas at Prudential Douglas Elliman. 

"The 333 Story"

 

I was doing a weekend seminar at the Deerhurst Lodge, north of Toronto. On Friday night a tornado swept through a town north of us called Barrie, killing several people and doing millions of dollars worth of damage. Sunday night, as I was coming home, I stopped the car when I got to Barrie. I got out on the side of the highway and looked around. It was a mess. Everywhere I looked there were smashed houses and cars turned upside down.
That same night Bob Templeton was driving down the same highway. He stopped to look at the disaster just as I had, only his thoughts were different than my own. Bob was the vice president of Telemedia Communications, which owns a string of radio stations in Ontario and Quebec. He thought there must be something we could do for these people with the radio stations they had.
The following night I was doing another seminar in Toronto. Bob Templeton and Bob Johnson, another vice president from Telemedia, came in and stood in the back of the room. They shared their conviction that there had to be something they could do for the people in Barrie. After the seminar we went back to Bob's office. He was now committed to the idea of helping the people who had been caught in the tornado.
The following Friday he called all the executives at Telemedia into his office. At the top of a flip chart he wrote three 3s. He said to his executives "How would you like to raise 3 million dollars 3 days from now in just 3 hours and give the money to the people in Barrie?" There was nothing but silence in the room.
Finally someone said, "Templeton, you're crazy. There is no way we could do that."
Bob said, "Wait a minute. I didn't ask you if we could or even if we should. I just asked you if you'd like to."
They all said, "Sure, we'd like to." He then drew a large T underneath the 333. On one side he wrote, "Why we can't." On the other side he wrote, "How we can."
"I'm going to put a big X on the 'Why we can't side.' We're not going to spend any time on the ideas of why we can't. That's of no value. On the other side we're going to write down every idea that we can come up with on how we can. We're not going to leave the room until we figure it out." There was silence again.
Finally, someone said, "We could do a radio show across Canada."
Bob said, "That's a great idea," and wrote it down.
Before he had it written, someone said, "You can't do a radio show across Canada. We don't have radio stations across Canada." That was a pretty valid objection. They only had stations in Ontario and Quebec.
Templeton replied, "That's why we can. That stays." But this was a really strong objection because radio stations are very competitive. They usually don't work together and to get them to do so would be virtually impossible according to the standard way of thinking.
All of a sudden someone suggested, "You could get Harvey Kirk and Lloyd Robertson, the biggest names in Canadian broadcasting to anchor the show." (That would be like getting Tom Brokaw and Sam Donaldson to anchor the show. They are anchors on national TV. They are not going to go on radio.) At that point it was absolutely amazing how fast and furious the creative ideas began to flow.
That was on a Friday. The following Tuesday they had a radiothon. They had 50 radio stations all across the country that agreed to broadcast it. It didn't matter who got the credit as long as the people in Barrie got the money. Harvey Kirk and Lloyd Robertson anchored the show and they succeeded in raising 3 million dollars in 3 hours within 3 business days!
You see you can do anything if you put your focus on how to do it rather than on why you can't.

-Bob Proctor From Chicken Soup for the Soul

 

Sofi's cafe

  

"Point of View Shift Is Worth 80 IQ Points"

 

Out-of-the-box thinking is quite familiar. However the idea that taking a different point of view can literally be worth as much as adding 80 points to your IQ takes this concept to a much higher level.

An example of reverse:

Blind, deaf and dumb - with rediculously low IQ's - is how the management at Xerox must have seemed to Alan Key. Management was well educated but they failed to the see the vast market potential for the cutting edge technology that the small group of computer engineers at Xerox Parc had developed. This group of 20 smart scientists and engineers had created the technology that resulted in computer workstations(that inspired Mac & Windows),Ethernet, network "client-servers," GUI, the Smalltalk programming lenguage, desktop publishing and laser printing.

Yet, management just didn't get it.

The only way Alan Kay could explain how management failed to recognize that each of these ideas represented a multimillion (and often multibillion) dollar market was with this insight.

Another example:

"Crazy" is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says they will charge $15.00 for what you can get for $0.34.

Yet this is exactly what FedEx did. Fred Smith's point of view shift was to make sure that the mission critical documents could be delivered reliably overnight and tracked as well. The concept behind FedEx seems very obvious today but at the time, people told Fred Smith he was completely nuts.

You can use the "point of view shift" to help level the playing field when competing with very smart people in the market place.

Big Lesson:
"The one thing that you can say about paradigms is that they shift"
-Alain Rossman

 

Boom Time for Bold Indopreneurs

 

I have been surfing the web for many years now and I have seen various web industries growing online. And it is fascinating experience to see many great companies making new normals. Here are few of these successful companies who brought new meanings to cyber space and changed the way we use the internet.

○ Google - Changed the way people search the web
○ Yahoo-First portal attracting millions of users
○ E-Bay - Buy/Sell/Bid, who knew people would like that..
○ Amazon- Started with selling books and now almost everything
○ MSN - Portal/Search, Email, Video
○ Myspace - Online social space, fastest growing industry today

Now let's talk about India for a moment. India, with 350,000 new engineers a year, is outdoing the US, a study suggests. According to another report, there were 39 million Internet users in India in 2005, a 54% year on year increase. The number of Internet users could exceed 100 million by 2007, making India the second-largest Internet market in Asia after China. In addition, there were more than 100,000 Internet cafes in India in 2005. Many experts believe that India will be the most important online market in the world in 10 years, not China. And many of the companies listed above already have a platform ready for India.

Apart from few Indian companies like Rediff.com, Kosmix.com, Shaadi.com, Blogeverywhere.com and Sulekha.com, there is hardly any global name which comes to my mind. I always wonder WHY? Well I strongly believe that India has the brain and the man power to create one. Then may be the policy makers are not making it conducive. May be someone can answer that for me.

But I think Indian market has great potential. The place is full of small businesses and diverse culture. All one needs is a big idea. Google's big mantra is to get users and not the money, the money will follow. And considering Indian population one can attract great number of users. The place is a cultural paradise. She has very distinctive art, the music, the travel, the products, the science, the culture and so much more to offer.

Let's wait and see who is next Badshah(King) of India's online market. The game is on and we need more players like Sabeer Bhatia for Web 2.0...

References -
TECH TALK: India Needs More Entrepreneurs: Start-up!
TECH TALK: India Needs More Entrepreneurs: Why?
TECH TALK: India Needs More Entrepreneurs: How?
TECH TALK: India Needs More Entrepreneurs: A Personal View
TECH TALK: India Needs More Entrepreneurs: My Dreams
Spreading the Indian mantra overseas 
Creating Indian Entrepreneurs by Rajat Gupta

Imerging Giants
For entrepreneurs, now is the time

A great resource for startups in India

Ingredients of Google success

Google is one of the most successful company in the market today. In just one and half year of it's market presense, it has now market cap of 120B !! Apart from their innovative products, it is also innovative in management making their own new rules. Here is an amazing presentation explaining what drives Google to innovation.
Slideshow

Btw Marissa what's up with that laugh...:)

Myspace Generation

Online Social Space booming...
Myspace Generation

Also read a case study on Myspace