In the context of the current housing slump and lackluster GDPgrowth, it is interesting to read the following excerpt from Wikipedia.

“A recession is traditionally defined in macroeconomics as a decline in a country’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more successive quarters of a year (equivalently, two consecutive quarters of negative real economic growth). However this definition is not universally accepted. The National Bureau of Economic Researchdefines a recession more ambiguously as “a significant decline ineconomic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a fewmonths.”

You can almost hear the buzz predicting an oncoming recession (though I continue to hear to the contrary). People are asking — is it a sign for something bigger and more devastating? Eighty two year old Lee writes in his book ‘Where Have All The Leaders Gone?‘:

“Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who’sfed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.” Stay he course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damnedTitanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.

I’ve had enough. How about you? I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have. My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to, as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention…” (more here).

Where Lee’s opinions are objective, or whether its just a sensationalistic approach to writing, is a matter of viewpoint. However, even I have felt that somewhere down the line, the promise of US got lost. The Great American Dream, got corrupted. And, there is no real sign of improvement, or change in strategy.

But that’s beside the point. The question that we ask here is — if the US market does go into a recession, how badly is the rest of the world going to be affected? Really. How many of the large organizations in India (specially in the IT sector) can actually survive with a crumbling US economy? I wonder…

A year ago, I was the first from India to join a team of two entrepreneurs (Adarbad Master and Freeman Murray) who had come down from the valley with funding (from Com Ventures) to India to start a Web 2.0 venture. From a three people team, we have now become a full fledged 25 people team (in both India and US combined), and recently launched our product Mixercast. And with our CEO Jennifer Cooper pushing the throttle, things are looking damn good!

In the last one year, we gave gone through ups and downs thats typical of a startup, but the true beauty of the idea has been the ability to feel the market direction and rapidly adapt with an incredibly low burn. The cost advantage and talent pool that India offers turned out to be our biggest advantage over others who were aiming for the same market. It also gave us the ability to come up with a super-extensible platform that can now be integrated into a variety of different verticals.

In that way, the model is very clear — Have an idea? Come to India and startup in 1/10th the cost! Hell, you could even test waters in the Asian market before going global!

Today, I was delighted to read the following post in GigaOm, as a true formalization of the model we hit.

“HitForge is an entrepreneur cooperative composed of independent small teams, where people can apply with their ideas, join the team, and see their idea go from idea to product in a few weeks, largely with help of an offshore engineering team.

If it works, then the product is turned into a company. If itdoesn’t work, the product is killed, and the team moves onto something new. HitForge is out of a few thousand dollars. The team whose product got killed still gets to share in the hits that come out of the cooperative, Ravikant says.

Ravikant argues that the start-up creation model – have an idea, start a venture, raise capital and then release a product – might have worked in the past, but now it doesn’t, at least when it comes to consumer web start-ups. In the world of consumer Internet start-ups, only the hits win. Today while it takes less capital to start and launch a company, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to be a hit. As Ravikant says, “Web businesses are unpredictable despite the best of intentions and execution.”

“What these are, are products that needed to be tested out in the market before becoming a company,” says Ravikant. Only the hits should become companies, since hits are the only ones that get consumer adoption, and have some sort of an exit event. Hedge funds use this “momentum investing” philosophy, and so does Sequoia Capital, that has done well by betting on growth.”

More on Mixercast very soon, but I think its high time that all VC firms and entrepreneurs realize the potential, and decided to do all their startups here.

I know that Tarantino/Rodriguez double bill release has done complete justice to the genre in terms of the marketing it has done in the theatres. But has anyone seen the classy website for the film?

The word “exploitation” itself is an old show business term for publicizing shows and motion pictures. “Exploitation films” are those whose success relied not on the quality of their content, but on the ability of audiences to be drawn in by the advertising of the film (for example, a common device used by the more notorious exploitation films is to advertise the banning of a film in a certain country).

Ephraim Katz, author of The Film Encyclopedia, has defined exploitation as:

Films made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product

Given the above definition, I wonder if I could classify the entire of Bollywood 80s as Indian version of the “Exploitation” film genre. Check out the posters, for instance (yeah, you can even buy em!).

Found this outstanding photograph of Dali that appeared in the cover of Life.

Link forwarded by a friend.

“The play by Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, was submitted last year as part of a short story writing class. Entitled “Richard McBeef,” Cho’s bizarre play features a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia and murdering his father. A copy of the killer’s play can be found below. The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child’s mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with “a deadly blow.”

Needless to say, the writing is worth reading only as a peek into the mind of a troubled man. Mostly, its a cathartic outburst of the writer against something.

From Wikipedia

“While it may be simplistic to assume a straightforward “profile”, the study did find certain similarities among the perpetrators. “The researchers found that killers do not ’snap’. They plan. They acquire weapons. They tell others what they are planning. These children take a long, considered, public path toward violence.”^[6] Princeton’s Katherine Newman points out that, far from being “loners”, the perpetrators are “joiners” whose attempts at social integration fail, that they let their thinking and even their plans be known, sometimes frequently over long periods of times. The shootings seem as though an attempt to adjust their social standing and image, from “loser” to “master of violence.”

Million dollar question is, are we going to see any change in US gun laws? I doubt it. Its like what my friend says — first they dig a hole, and then they try to fill it, and then they dig it again, and so on…!

Insane.

“