DCE News(Kindly post no reply on this thread)

[dce_news]

<font size="+1"><b>Gupta promoted to COO at SwiberFiled from Singapore</b> </font>
10/23/2007 4:34:48 AM GMT





SINGAPORE: Swiber Holdings Ltd. promoted Nitish Gupta to a newly created role of chief operating officer, with immediate effect.



Gupta, who joined the Singapore-based offshore marine engineering company in May of last year, was most recently leading the company's offshore construction operations as its executive vice president. He will continue to oversee the management of offshore construction operations along with working on strategic initiatives, business operations and development functions.



Gupta is a graduate from the Delhi College of Engineering and has more than 15 years experience in the offshore construction business in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Prior to joining Swiber, he worked with established offshore oil and gas engineering companies, including Global Industries, Horizon Offshore Contractors, J. Ray McDermott and Offshore Pipelines International Inc.

[dce_news]

<b><font size="+1">V K Gulhati is SAIL's new Director (Technical) </b></font>
2007-10-01 17:12:55
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Mr. Vijay Kumar Gulhati has assumed office as Director (Technical) of Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL). Prior to this, he was Executive Director Incharge (Projects & Special Steels), SAIL.



Mr. Gulhati (57) joined SAIL's Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP) in 1972 after completing his graduation in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering.

[dce_news]

Times OOH announces the appointment of Mr. Sunder Hemrajani as its Managing Director. Sunder, in a career spanning over 25 years in sales, marketing & general management, has worked with companies like Pepsi, Whirlpool & Hindustan Lever. During his 14 year stint with HLL he handled senior assignments in the HPC (Home & Personal Care) and Foods Businesses and was part of the leadership team that conceptualized & implemented ‘Operation Harvest’, Lever’s foray into the hinterland. In Whirlpool, Sunder led the integration of the refrigerator & washer businesses and helped launch the brand in the country. In Pepsi, he led the company owned bottling operations in North & East and subsequently was Executive Director – Sales for South Asia BU.



Prior to joining Times Innovative Media Ltd, Sunder was President – Distribution at Reliance Capital.



<b>Sunder is a Mechanical Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and an MBA from FMS, Delhi.</b>
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[dce_news]

<b><font>Systems buys NRI firm for $450 mn</b></font>
NEW DELHI: A major US military support provider company set up by an Ohio-based Indian American and his wife in 1984 has been acquired by leading British defence firm BAE Systems for some $450 million.

Rajesh K Soin, who founded Modern Technologies Corp (MTC) with wife Indu Soin in Dayton, Ohio, in 1984, confirmed the deal with BAE Systems - the sixth largest supplier to the US defence department.

"Yes, we have signed a merger agreement with BAE Systems, which will acquire MTC," Rajesh Soin told media here. The deal was clinched last week.

The Dayton-based NRI was here in connection with dedicating a 55-bed specialty hospital in the name of his father Sukhdev Raj Soin in Banchari village in Haryana's Faridabad district, 80 km from here on the Delhi-Mathura highway.

"We are pleased to join forces with such a formidable organisation. We also take great pride in what MTC has accomplished over the last 23 years. I am confident the combination of our organisations will foster even greater employee development and expanded market opportunities," Soin said.

The acquisition of Nasdaq-listed MTC by BAE Systems is being termed as strategic for the British firm, which is hot on the trail of major military contracts from the US government.

MTC provides technical, professional and logistics services to the US defence department and intelligence agencies. The company is rated among the fastest growing US defence technology companies.

Soin is currently the chairman and CEO of MTC. He is probably the only NRI who has a management college - the Raj Soin College of Business - at the Wright State University in Ohio.

"I and my wife Indu set up MTC in Dayton in 1984 as a private company that specialised in high-end engineering and defence products. These included avionics and control system mechanisms for the C-130 (Hercules transport aircraft), attack helicopters and also providing intelligence planning," Soin said.

Among other things, MTC even provides solutions for modern day soldiers, especially about what they wear in the war zone.

"We have been involved in the $350 million Program Executive Officer (POE) soldier project. One soldier carries about 60-65 pounds of weight on him, including the gun, electronic equipment and other accessories."

"We keep trying to minimise the load on the soldier by making things more miniature. We reduced the weight by nearly 20 pounds. But the requirements of the present day have brought it back to 60 pounds," Soin pointed out while describing the work being undertaken by MTC.

A mechanical engineering graduate from <b>Delhi College of Engineering</b>, Soin migrated to the US in 1969 and started his business career with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.

Besides MTC, the Soin couple have founded several other successful business ventures in the US and sold them off.

They own some privately held businesses with interests in software development (Corbus), capital investment (Soin Capital), engineering products (Composite Technologies), yarn (India-based Garuda Cotex), real estate (JMD Development) and profiling private investments.

BAE Systems will purchase all outstanding shares of MTC at $24 per share and also take over its debt liabilities of over $80 million.

BAE Systems' sales in 2006 exceeded $27 billion.

Incidentally, the Indian Air Force (IAF) last month started receiving the first of the 66 BAE Systems Hawk advanced jet trainer (AJT) it has purchased in a deal valued at Rs.80 billion ($2 billion). Twenty-four Hawks will be supplied in flyaway condition and the remaining 42 built under license by state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

[dce_news]

<b><font>Zicom Electronic Security appoint Sameer Nagpal,Vinit Durve</b></font>
Zicom Electronic Security Systems Ltd., the market leader in electronic security industry has appointed senior members as part of its aggressive expansion plans. Mr. Sameer Nagpal as Vice President & Business Unit Head - Zicom’s Building Solution Group and Mr. Vinit Durve as a Vice President - Corporate Human Resources



Mr. Sameer Nagpal has a Bachelor Degree in Mechanical Engineering from <b>Delhi College of Engineering</b> and has done Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management from IIM, Calcutta. He comes with vast experience in sales, projects, product management and business development. He has over 16 years of work experience. Prior to joining Zicom, he had a long stint with Carrier Air-conditioning and was last working as Director - Building Systems & Services since 2004.



At Zicom, he will be an in-charge of the overall operations of the Building Solutions Business and help expand this division.



Mr. Vinit M. Durve is Commerce Graduate and with a postgraduate Masters degree specialization in Personal Management and Labour Studies. He has over two decades of HR experience and has worked with organizations cross industry. Prior to Zicom he has worked with Crompton Greaves, Union Carbide; Kodak and Invensys Process Systems. He has acquired skill in the area of HSE; Operations management; Learning and Development and has expertise in Employee engagement programs.



At Zicom, he leads the Business HR team in its pursuit to support the aggressive growth plans and to benchmark people culture to integrate HR plans with Business Strategy of the organization


http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/news/ ... /43/318632

[dce_news]

<b><font>Cash-strapped, he wants to blog his way to LSE</b></font>
New Delhi, December 16 Till May 2006, Ankur Shanker had little to complain about. A <b>Delhi College of Engineering</b> pass-out, the Noida based 24-year-old had everything he wanted: a job in which he could pursue his passion for analysing data, a degree from a prestigious college, and a burning desire to go to the London School of Economics (LSE). He had applied to LSE in March 2006, a little too late for scholarships, but he hoped that the finances would be taken care of later. Yet when the letter of acceptance finally arrived in May, Shanker was shaken.
“I had got admission, but because I didn’t have an economics degree, the college wanted me to attend summer school as well,” says Shanker. Put together, the fee for the summer school and the MSc course in economics worked out to be much more than he could manage to raise.

In desperation, Shanker wrote to almost every financial institution in London, promising to work with them for a period of five years if only they would pay for his studies. “Eight to nine per cent of the companies replied. All of them said their policy did not allow for such financing,” says Shanker. “Just after that, they would write, ‘All the best for your studies.’ The letters frustrated me no end.”

Student loans were also not an option, as the fee was too high — £55,000, including the fee for summer school, the two-year course, and living costs. Shanker did not want to surrender his parent’s only house as collateral for a loan. With no options left, he deferred his admission by one year. Yet time for arranging finances was fast passing by. “At that point I asked a business associate for help. He just looked at me and said, ‘You have nine months to get creative’,” recalls Shankar. That’s when an idea hit him. Shanker decided to start a blog to help him pay for his studies. “I decided to start writing a short story every day for the next 180 days on my blog. The revenue I would generate, from advertisements and page views, would pay for my studies,” he said.

The idea seems to be working. Though the blog was started on December 1 this year, in 15 days, ‘Wake up and smell the million dollar story’ (http://milliondollarstory.blogspot.com) has already collected $140 for Shanker.

“There are two parallel story series that I have been working on, both are inspired from experiences my friends and I have been through,” explains Shanker. The first series, features Vichitra, a boy in love with Chanchal, who couldn’t care less about him. The second series is about the misadventures of Willie Cash and Rick Shaw, two comical characters who magically get transported to different planets.

Readers seem to be lapping it up. “Till now over 7,000 people have come to my blog. Fourteen bloggers from across the world have supported me by putting my blog’s address on their pages, diverting their readers to come and read my stories,” says Shanker. But one question still haunts Shanker: Will it be enough? “I sure hope so. One day when I am finally in college, I will publish the entire series for people who are supporting me now.”



How Ankur gets the money
To make money, Shanker uses revenue generated by advertisements from online agencies. For example, there’s Google Adsense, in which a producer gives money to Google to place ads on websites and blogs. A blogger registers with Google and lets them place the ads on his website for a share. Ads placed on a blog are determined by Google through word searches. A blog on workouts, for example, will get ads related to exercise equipment and the like.

http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news ... SE/251041/

[dce_news]

<b><font>True entrepreneurial philanthropist</b></font>
Rajesh K Soin's is a true Indian American success story. His business acumen, passion for excellence and plain hard work led him to become one of the leading businessman in the United States of America. Soin graduated from Delhi University in India in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering.

He received a master's degree in industrial engineering from Bradley University in 1971. In 1978, Soin and his wife became American citizens. Raj and Indu Soin started their first business venture in the early 1980s and since then they have been instrumental in building and creating a number of successful and thriving enterprises.

Although a number of these have been spun out and sold, they currently own several privately held business units under the holding company "Soin International." These companies, with offices across the globe, include different type of services, manufacturing, retail goods, private equity investments, and real estate development.

The attachment has a list of companies owned by Soin International. Raj and Indu established the Soin Foundation in USA to support their philanthropist activities in the areas of education, health care, arts and culture.

In 2000, Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio changed the name of the College of Business to "The Raj Soin College of Business" in recognition of his financial and other contributions to the community at large. This college consistently ranks as one of the top business training centers in USA and attracts students from all over the world.

Historically speaking, this marked the first time any major college in USA was named after a person of Indian Origin. In 2005, The Soin Foundation was one of the major benefactors in creating a trading and training center at Wright State University.

Equipped with dozens of computers, flat screen monitors, and ability to study all worldwide markets in real time, students are able to simulate trading on any major stock exchange or equity market.

This center received worldwide recognition when it was featured as one of the best trading centers in USA in the magazine, "Business News". The Soin Foundation is the major benefactor for a number of annual events in Ohio including the innovation award, business of the year award, Soin Scholar Program which provides full scholarship to graduates of Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) for pursuing MBA in Wright State University.

Raj has a strong belief in giving back to the community. In 2002, Raj and Indu Soin established the Soin Foundation in India with a similar mission as their foundation in the USA. To take the foundation ahead and work towards development in India, Soin recently established a hospital in village Banchari, in Hodal in Haryana.

He named it after his father as the 'Sukhdev Raj Soin Hospital. The hospital is a 55 bed 'non-profit' organization, which offers a wide range of round the clock worldclass medical facilities in various medical and surgical disciplines to the community at the most affordable cost.

Hospital's infrastructure and services are aesthetically designed and equipped with state-of-the-art technologies to cater to the health care needs of both the rural and urban segments of Haryana. Sukhdev Raj Soin Hospital also runs a Mobile Health Clinic, which tours the neighboring community and is of immense importance to all the villagers providing necessary medical amenities.

"Keeping up with the commitment of serving the community, we bring together the most talented medical professionals and a dedicated team of clinicians to provide the highest standards of patient care", says Raj Soin.

He adds, "We plan to expand the hospital to more than 200 bed facility and establish a special training institute for nurses, and a medical college in coming years". Soin believes in giving the best to business as well as to the society. His motto of life is- "Serving to grow and growing to serve".

http://indiapost.com/article/perspective/1759/

[dce_news]

<b>EBay India appoints Ambareesh Murty as Country Manager</b>
Mumbai: Global internet auction giant eBay on Tuesday named Ambareesh Murty as its new Country Manager for India, replacing Rajan Mehra who is moving out to pursue an entrepreneurial role in venture capital space.
Murty, who has been with eBay for over two years, will assume his new role with effect from today and would lead the entire eBay Portfolio in India, the company said in a statement here.
The top management change at India operations comes within less than two months of a global top-order rejig at eBay Inc. Earlier this year, Meg Whitman resigned as its CEO and was replaced by John Donahoe, when the world’s largest Internet auction firm also brought in India-origin former finance head Rajiv Dutta to the board.
On 23 January, the company announced that Whitman would step down as its president and CEO on 31 March. Besides, the company also named Rajiv Dutta, president of its PayPal unit, as executive vice president of eBay Inc and president of auction business unit - eBay Marketplaces, which accounts for over 70% of the group’s total revenue.
Dutta, an Economics graduate from St Stephen’s College in Delhi and MBA from Drucker School of Management in California, is a 10-year eBay veteran and has previously served as the company’s chief financial officer and president of Skype, eBay’s communications business.
Mehra, the current country manager of eBay India, would be transitioning the role to Ambareesh Murty over the next few months and will subsequently be pursuing his entrepreneurial interests in the venture capital industry, the statement said.
Murty has been with the company since December 2005 and has held a number of senior executive roles, the most recent being eBay India’s Marketing and Operations Director.
Previously, he has worked for over 5 years in packaged goods marketing department of Cadbury Schweppes and has also spent a couple of years with Prudential ICICI. <b>He is a civil engineering graduate from Delhi College of Engineering </b>and a MBA from the IIM-Calcutta.
Mehra had been eBay India’s Country Manager since September 2005. He was responsible for starting and building its successful B2B Motors business, eBay India Motors Marketplace.

http://www.livemint.com/2008/03/1115284 ... reesh.html

[amitkumar.ranjan]

<b>When Speed Was King: Vinod Dham and the Birth of the Pentium</b>
Published: March 20, 2008 in India Knowledge@Wharton

It seems like only yesterday that people were tapping away on computers powered by chips called 286, 386, and so on -- the so-called "X86" series of microprocessors. Most users didn't quite understand what the chips were or did, or who actually made them -- they just had the vague understanding that the higher the number, the faster their machine would run. All of a sudden, in 1993, Intel changed the game with its launch of the first named chip -- the Pentium. Consumers had been told just a few years before to look for "Intel Inside"; now they had a name to go with it.

In an interview with India Knowledge@Wharton, Vinod Dham, widely regarded as the "Father of the Pentium" for his work as vice president and general manager of the Microprocessor Products group at Intel, shares his thoughts on those heady days of ever-faster microprocessor creation, the future of the desktop computer, and what it was really like to work with former Intel CEO Andy Grove. An edited version of the conversation appears below. Dham, who is now cofounder and managing director of the venture funds New Path Venture and NEA-IndoUS Ventures, will speak at the Wharton India Economic Forum on March 22 in Philadelphia.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Tell us about your background before you came to the United States.

Dham: I got a <b>bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering.</b> Then I started working in the only semiconductor startup that existed in India back then. There was some activity happening in a government-sponsored division in Bangalore, where they were doing some work in semiconductors with Bharat Electronics, but in private industry there was only one company, called Continental Devices India, which was collaborating with Teledyne Semiconductor in California. I joined them and helped them put together a facility in Delhi -- I worked there for four years. My love for semiconductors started then. It continued on through my coming to the U.S., getting a [master's] degree in solid state sciences to learn more about semiconductors, and leading up to [joining] NCR, where I worked on some very advanced technologies. For several years, I worked on the technology that resulted in the invention of what we call "Flash" technology today. I brought that [experience] with me to Intel, where I spent 16 years. I moved on to other roles inside Intel, including leading microprocessor development for 386 microprocessors, 486 microprocessors, and finally the Pentium.

India Knowledge@Wharton: You are of course well known for the work that you did on the Pentium processor. What challenges did you encounter during its development?

Dham: With any microprocessor, it's very challenging to put together the design team and create an architecture that gives you a significant performance boost while at the same time meeting the schedule and getting it out on time in a cost-effective way. You have to make sure your design doesn't become so large that the product does not meet the cost target. So those challenges are there for any advanced microprocessor design, even today. But what was uniquely challenging for the Pentium program was the fact that back then, the microprocessor industry was going through a major shakeup. There were multiple architectures. There was the Intel architecture, characterized as X86. There was the SPARC architecture -- which still exists -- from Sun Microsystems, that they were primarily using for high-end workstations and servers, as opposed to the desktop or laptop products we were dominant in. Then there was an architecture that IBM had come up with. They called it PowerPC, and they were supplying this product to Apple Computer. All of the Macintosh products were based on this particular architecture.

And then right in the middle of it, around that time, there was this whole phenomenon called RISC, which stood for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, as opposed to CISC, which stood for Complex Instruction Set Computing, which is what we were using at Intel. Now, the reason we had CISC architecture was that it's how we had started our 4004 microprocessors, in the 1970s, and that had led to 8008, 8080, 286, 386 and 486. Part of the architecture was maintained in order to maintain backward compatibility, to ensure that software developed for previous-generation platforms could also run on the new microprocessors.

The RISC computing really took off in a big way with the advent of MIPS, which was the other company that came on the scene. MIPS stood for Millions of Instructions Per Second, and that was the name of the company itself -- it's still around. They said that they could build a RISC-based processor that would be much more cost effective and much higher performance than Intel's technology could build. Therefore a whole host of companies, ranging from Microsoft to Compaq, joined with MIPS to create a new platform that was to threaten the very existence of Intel, by threatening whether the Pentium would ever come to life and ever be accepted in the marketplace. So with that in the background, the development of the Pentium really was a much more challenging task than normally would be the case.

India Knowledge@Wharton: The major issue with the Pentium, which was publicized quite a bit, was the floating-point flaw. Do you recall when you first heard about the problem? What was your first reaction?

Dham: In any microprocessor or large operating system, it's not unusual to find minor bugs or issues. They come with a whole long list of errata. What was different about the Pentium was that it was the first time in the history of a semiconductor component that the product had a name, as opposed to a number. Most people don't know what a semiconductor is or what a chip is -- they've never seen one. They don't know what's inside their desktop or laptop or cellphone or iPod. Through our branding, "Pentium" had become a household word. Therefore, there was an expectation that Intel was a consumer company, not a chip company. If the consumer wasn't happy about something, the company had to act in a certain way to take care of it. Now we heard of this problem and a few months later we actually began to offer to customers that if they were not happy with the fact that under certain conditions, this component could miscalculate, we were willing to have them send that component back. We'd replace it with a good component, because by then we had started producing the correct component and we were in a position to replace it.

India Knowledge@Wharton: What did you personally and Intel as a company learn from this experience? If you found yourself in a similar situation today, would you handle it differently?

Dham: What Intel learned is that when you create a brand, you have to stand up and be accountable for it when people are not happy with the product you're offering. You have to correct the situation immediately and unconditionally, without asking any questions. You can't go around and make suggestions about "what if this is fixed this way," or "this may not harm you." All of that is moot. When you're dealing with consumers, you have to satisfy them and delight them. One way is just to give them the option upfront to return the component, and do what is necessary to keep them happy. Intel also recognized that it was no longer a semiconductor manufacturer but also a company that had now arrived on the world stage. And the world expected it to deliver a consumer product, even though Intel didn't build the PCs or the desktops or laptops but rather the component that goes inside them. Since Intel said, "Intel Inside," Intel had the obligation to take care of it -- not just Compaq or IBM or any of the companies that sold the computer. A very dramatic change had occurred -- the idea that not just the supplier, but the supplier who supplied to the supplier, also had responsibility for it.

India Knowledge@Wharton: The "Intel Inside" campaign allowed the company to evolve from a behind-the-scenes manufacturer of OEM components to a well-known consumer brand. Are there any lessons for companies in that?

Dham: When you find out there is a problem, you should immediately go out and be the first one to disclose it. Don't take your time to fix the problem, no matter what it is. Yes, the problem was rare, and errors would happen under very rare circumstances, but all that doesn't matter. You have to go out and tell the world -- "There is a problem, we are fixing it, it will take a certain amount of time, and meanwhile, if you want to continue using the machine, you are most welcome to because it's not likely to cause you to burn or crash. And, if you don't feel comfortable, feel free to send it back to us; when we are ready with our corrected part, we will send you a replacement." That would have been the most appropriate and correct response, in my mind. And that's what I would recommend others do. That's what I would do the next time, if I were in such a position again.

India Knowledge@Wharton: You worked closely with Andy Grove at Intel. What was it like to work with him?

Dham: He's a brilliant man -- a man of tremendous intellect. He came [to the U.S.] as an immigrant, and went to [City College] in New York and [then] to Berkeley. Semiconductors were his first love, but he actually went on to become a businessman and a business strategist. He reinvented himself more successfully, I think, than most people I know. He was very intense, very focused, very disciplined, very results-oriented.... Those were some of his characteristics. And he was also a person who cared enough about the company that he would carefully orchestrate every move to ensure that he got the results he wanted.

India Knowledge@Wharton: What were the best and worst things about working with him?

Dham: The best thing was the fact that you learned so much about how to develop business strategy and how to win in the marketplace -- how to be paranoid about everything that can go wrong and therefore to go the extra mile to make sure you have covered all the bases. And discipline -- to focus on what the objectives are, what the goals are, and then execution -- to deliver on those goals, monitoring them on a regular basis in a quantifiable way to ensure that you are making progress. [He had a] no-nonsense, straight-shooting style of management and culture where people were not blamed for saying the wrong thing as long as they were doing the right thing.

One negative about working with Grove was that sometimes he was too intense and overlooked the emotions of the people he was dealing with, and how they felt about whether they were right or wrong. He had a way of conveying his point of view -- sometimes he used a hammer instead of a small tap. I think that scared a lot of people who were working with him closely.

India Knowledge@Wharton: When did you leave Intel, and why?

Dham: When I joined Intel in 1979, at that time basically I was still an engineer. I moved gradually into the management ranks, leading programs and projects and running businesses, being part of upper management as a vice president, and then leading the Pentium project -- which was the greatest success Intel had in any product to date. You know, if you are here in Silicon Valley 10 to 15 years and you have not stepped out and done a startup, there's something wrong with you. I was 45 years old in 1995, and I had this major midlife crisis that I had to resolve. Either I could continue to be a tenured professor inside Intel and spend the rest of my life doing whatever management wanted and just retire at the end in a handsome way or -- I could take this plunge into the unknown dark side, of startups, and discover what it was like. I think there were enough stories of startups and great breakthroughs in those startups -- and I was financially reasonably well off -- that I felt I was ready, and that was the key reason I left.

India Knowledge@Wharton: What have you been doing with startups since you left?

Dham: I played it very safe. Coming from a big corporation, I didn't want to plunge into something totally unknown. I joined a company called NexGen, which was about eight or nine years old. They had been supposedly developing an X86 product, and I thought I could go and bring my experience from Intel and help them.

I went into NexGen as the chief operating officer and soon I discovered the chaotic and scrappy nature of working in such a company and how disillusioning it was -- sometimes you really have to be, not just a maverick, but also a little crazy to be doing startups. With my background I was very quickly able to assess what the future of this company would be, and it looked bleak. The way they were doing the technology -- basically building a very proprietary product across the board -- they would have had to build a proprietary personal computer to sell that product. That would be very hard, because the personal computer industry would frown upon building a special motherboard with special chipsets and technologies just to accommodate their processors.

I quickly had them redirect their effort to put a Pentium bus on the program. That was a breakthrough that ultimately caused the company to get bought by Advanced Micro Devices, Intel's archenemy, because they had been developing a [similar] product internally, except that it had misfired. So they basically acquired NexGen to fill that hole.

India Knowledge@Wharton: You ended up working for AMD, right, and helped develop the K6 processor? What was it like to compete with Intel? What innovations did the K6 introduce?

Dham: For a few months, [AMD's] K6 was the highest performance X86 processor in the world. That got a lot of people excited, both inside and outside Intel. We were able to create what I call a "Pentium killer." It didn't last for too long, because Intel with its might was very quickly able to assemble processors that went beyond the K6. But there was a brief moment of celebration as we created a product that was faster than what Intel was selling.

But the biggest thing was not that we built something faster -- that's not really a sustainable advantage. I think the biggest contribution I made was in creating for the first time a legitimate sub-$1,000 PC industry. Today, of course, people take it for granted. You can go out and buy a desktop for $300 or $400. But back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was at Intel, our plan always was to let the price point of the PC stay around $2,000 and continue to deliver into it a higher-performance microprocessor every year -- that is, to give higher value for the same money to the customer. There was really no intention of selling computers that were cheaper -- just selling computers at a high price point where everybody makes a lot of money, and continuing to deliver higher performance, more value and more applications on that computer.

What I created with the K6 at AMD was a sub-$1,000 machine. It forced Intel to quickly come up with a makeshift solution to counter us because they were caught totally unprepared for that type of onslaught.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Recently, there has been a huge increase in portable and mobile devices. How is that affecting the microprocessor industry?

Dham: What's happening is very interesting. Companies like Intel and AMD and others truly do have a big challenge in front of them. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, which I call the Golden Era, there was a huge demand for these machines, and the software just wouldn't keep up with the hardware. Every time we came up with a higher-performance processor, people had to rewrite software to take advantage of many more functions and to make things run faster. But now we've reached the point where most people don't even know how fast the chip inside their computer is. Most computers run fast enough that it's no longer the speed at which the chip runs but all the other functionality -- accessing the Internet, connectivity and things of that nature -- that is significantly more important.

In some ways, the industry has become very mature. IBM no longer builds the computers -- they sold the PC division to Lenovo; Compaq got bought by Hewlett-Packard. The industry is now consolidated into three or four players who build these machines. Comdex, which was the flagship show I went to for 10 years, where we used to launch all the computers and chips -- has died. There used to be tens of thousands of people gathering in Las Vegas every year celebrating, and there is no longer a need to do that. New computers come and go and people don't notice. It's becoming more of a replacement cycle for mature economies like the U.S. and Europe. People have multiple machines in their homes, and they only buy the next one if there's a compelling need -- and there's not much of a compelling need. People are sitting on one machine for four, five or six years, unlike in the 1980s or 1990s, where they had to change their computer every one to two years because the previous one just didn't run fast enough. That's one place where this industry is facing a challenge in terms of growing the overall market. Yes, more desktops are moving to laptops, so maybe you can make money by doing that, but the overall market in the advanced part of the world is not growing.

Something more interesting is happening in the developing nations now. China clearly has a leg up on India in terms of its broadband capability and connectivity, and therefore it has more computer penetration than India, but nowhere near what we have in the U.S. However, in India there is no broadband penetration. So even if you have a computer there is no way to hook it up on the Internet fast enough to allow you to share videos and share music and do all the things we normally do here [in the U.S.] with our laptops and desktops.

Most consumers in India are not using computers due to lack of broadband and are actually in love with their cell phones. Cell phones are becoming significantly smarter -- as you can see with what the iPhone has done -- and they're becoming like mini-computers. India already demonstrated successfully that it can go from not having phones at all directly to cell phones -- for example there are only 44 million landline phones in India, and there are 239 million cell phones. They've leapfrogged the landline business completely. People don't buy landline phones in India because they need not do so. Now there's a fear that Indian consumers will do the same thing to the desktop-laptop industry -- they will leapfrog it completely and instead buy smart phones. I think companies like Intel have a big challenge in front of them.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/indi ... cleid=4270

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<b>From the back cover </b>
LinkedIn, an international networking website, has made the world of business a much smaller place. The contacts you seek are no longer separated from you by six degrees; the number is down to one, two or three in most cases if you are on LinkedIn, by far the most successful and vibrant of all professional networking sites.

And it has leveled the playing field in ways one could not have imagined. The community of LinkedIn users can now be used by anyone for accessing faraway markets, landing dream jobs, raising capital, attracting the best of talent, building corporate brands and more. What you can achieve is limited only by your imagination and effort. The ingredients are all there to whip up something profitable for yourself.

And it is not rocket science.

This book is full of ideas, real cases and suggestions on how to get LinkedIn to work for you. Because, as you will see, LinkedIn works for you even as you sleep.

According to Guy Kawasaki, successful entrepreneur, global investor, best-selling author and columnist, USA, “LinkedIn is great for business development. I think I can get to almost any company via one or two connections. After all, people would much rather work with people who their friends know and trust.”

This book has been written to help readers understand the possibilities offered by LinkedIn. And how to get the best out of it.

About the author

Ajay Jain is a New Delhi based independent journalist, professional blogger and now author with his first book, Let’s Connect: Using LinkedIn to get ahead at work.

He has worked in the Information Technology and Sports Management industries before taking up a career in writing.

Currently, he is focused more on covering technology and travel. He is also working on a travelogue, expected to be out early 2008. Besides writing, his other passions are photography and travelling.

He has worked as a business journalist and has written columns and features for national publications in India. He has also edited a youth newspaper, The Campus Paper.

<b>He holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering (Delhi College of Engineering, 1992),</b> Business Administration (Fore School of Management, 1994) and Journalism (Cardiff University, UK, 2002).

http://www.ndtv.com/ent/booksreview.asp ... 2s+Connect