Personal blog of Prasad Ajinkya
It’s that part of the year again, the time when Mumbai rocks as one, and the sleeping Marathi Manus comes out of the house to celebrate with everyone.
In case you are in Mumbai, then do consider this as a personal invitation to grace my abode for Ganesh Chaturthi for darshan (and ice-cream ;-)).
Address – 306, Akruti Nova-A, Akruti Niharika Complex, Off N. S. Phadke Marg, Saiwadi, Andheri (E)
Dates – 1st September and 2nd September
With too many blogs, media shows and news announcements on the Lok Pal Bill, I thought I would add my $0.02 on the subject.
I confess that I am no expert on this, but neither do I want to be. I do not want to add to the voice of social passivism.
It’s sad to think that the country would require one support system to keep other support systems in check which were meant to do their job. That’s it in a nut shell.
What guarantee do we have that the Lok Pal committee will not do their jobs?
Here’s my favorite quote which is so apt in this context – Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
When I was a programmer, I really took a taste to coffee. Nothing beats a good techie discussion with a cuppa. In fact I was so addicted to it during my first job that I used to consume 6-7 cups in a day on a regular basis.
Even today, coffee is part of the morning ritual where I focus my thoughts on work, on the top things to be done … over a problem. This time around, at Neev I have found fellow coffee lovers and aficionados. People who consume coffee in the same copious amounts (if not more) as me … and who can tell different flavors apart. In fact, I think one of the major cost centers at Neev would be coffee :-)
From the simple Nescafe powder, to the gold flakes of Nescafe to the variety of exotic flavors such as Brazilian, Vanilla beans, the rich aroma wafting through the office makes work such a welcome place. Each flavor having its unique aroma, taste, mix … it’s small things like these which makes life (and work) a better place.
Viewing this post after almost 6 years, and so many things have changed at that organization. Looking back, I’d say it was never the coffee, but the people which made that experience special.
Happy to say that I am now a father of two kids. A smart angel of a daughter, and now blessed with a son. Hope he takes on his elder sisters footsteps!!
I have been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for over a year now, and I am thoroughly enjoying the break it provides over the weekends. It’s a great product and has been running for the past six years or so. Blizzard has done a real good job there, especially in capturing the player versus player interactions (PVP). One such place is the auction house (AH), wherein players can buy and sell items offered by other players in the virtual marketplace. In fact, the concept of auction within its games have been so popular that Blizzard has decided to include real currency in it’s beta version of Diablo III.
But, other than the in-game auctions, a surge of enterprises have sprung up around the game, right from WoW based clothes, to power leveling services (which I think are pretty pointless! If you want to play only the end-game content, then you are missing out on a lot of good content and not to mention the lore!!). That brings us to this post’s topic, ever since 2006, people have realized that players will be willing to pay up good money to buy virtual currency. That’s where a horde of enterprising gamers realized that they can make their game-plat profitable, and even into a scalable business enterprise. This is called Gold-farming.
Whenever you complete a quest in WoW, or sell any item to a Non-Playing Character (NPC), or sell an item on the AH you get paid in the virtual currency which is Gold pieces. The higher your level, the more gold you get. A dedicated player who plays the game for 8-10 hours can easily collect 3000 gold pieces a day (there are players who make higher as well, as high as 3000 per hour!!). You put 3 different people to do the same thing and keep farming and you have a gold generating machine. Currently (in the year 2012), a 1000 gold pieces are selling for USD 2.7 (roughly 120 INR).
I know it’s not much, but consider the fact that you have to pay USD 15 per month per account. Now you make around USD 27 per day per account. That’s approximately INR 35k per month. A gamer who is farming, will get paid around 6k-8k per month, leaving a profit of 10k per account.
Obviously, one major assumption I have taken over here is the gamer remuneration. This salary will only work in places where the cost of labour is low … namely third world countries. In fact in China, one prison was making the prisoners farm gold all day!!
Now, all was hunky dory at the start, but there is a teensy-weensy problem here. Laws of Economics.
Consider this graph, those are the demand and supply curves. As the quantity available for the same demand increases, the price that people are willing to pay for that good goes down, and vice-versa that as the quantity available for the same demand decreases, the price that people are willing to pay for that good goes up (since its going to be rare!!).
Now apply this to the gold farming business in WoW. Over the years, the number of people playing the game has seen upswings and downswings (in fact with the recent release of Rift, it has reduced quite a bit). Hence, the demand has actually gone down.
Also, the amount available/supplied is ever increasing … what I mean is that since its virtual currency, there is no limit to it. In the real world, the total volume of gold is 300673 cubic feet, but in WoW the virtual gold is infinite. You can farm as much as you like, its not going to be depleted. EVER.
What that means, is that over a period of time, the price of the virtual currency is going to drop. I did some searching, and this is true. The price for 5000 gold pieces in WoW in 2007 … was a maidenhead. Now, its just 600 INR :-).
Not a sustainable business, this gold farming thing no? I wonder what that girl must be feeling now that those very epic mounts are being sold within WoW for 80 Gold a piece.
Well, there’s always the dragon mounts.
I was checking on my list of target keywords on Google for both SEO and SEM, when I chanced upon “CFA Hyderabad” where we are doing good on both the paid rankings as well as the organic rankings. When I was checking the ad, I noticed that one of the ads was by olx (in case you do not know about this site, do not bother to find out!).
They have recently started advertising in a heavy way (even on TV as well).
Buying advertisements so you could sell your advertising platform? Really? Is that how effective your platform is, that you have to pay to get traffic?
Or are you just trying to siphon off traffic from one of the market leaders?
In fact not quite sure whether they are directly in the advertising space, somewhere between Craigslist and e-Bay. I still wonder, why will anyone pay good money to put advertisements on this site?
If you are in India and watch Television, then you surely must have watched this ad –
The ad is targeted towards working women who take charge of their lives and planning their future on their terms. The ad which is timed brilliantly is launched in sync with the India International Jewelry Week, talks to the right sentiments, however the product itself is questionable.
Tanishq Gold Harvest Offer is a scheme where one has to make 11 monthly payments and at the end of the year, you get the same value in jewelry. At a first glance, I thought that the financial returns amount to roughly 8% of the investment. Turns out that I had valuated it in the wrong way from the start itself, the formula to be used should have been XIRR, and it gives a 15% return.
Jyothi, our resident content creator then pointed out that it’s a loss making investment. Consider the inflation of gold (or the Indian Rupee for that matter) over the period of one year, and you end up with a loss-making product. Average Indian Consumer, beware of this product!