Ravindra Patil – Salman Khan Hit & Run case – The Wretched Witness

Everybody knows that one person was killed and four others were injured when an inebriated Salman Khan rammed his Landcruiser onto the steps of A1 Bakery at the turning near Mehboob Studios in Bandra in the wee hours of September 28, 2002.

But perhaps we don’t remember that the incident claimed one more life later. In the course of the case another strapping young man died a slow but painful death on the cold floors of a government hospital at Sewri in Mumbai. He had nobody from his family around during his final hours.

Such was the misfortune of this man that nobody from his family even came forward to claim the body immediately after his death. They were not even aware that he had died.

The handsome young man was reduced to a bag of bones

Ravindra Patil: The death of a messenger

This Post Was originally Written by Banerjee, Soumyadipta of bollywoodjournalist.com Original Author has removed the same. Here is a Reproduction under FreeSpeech.

In India, the testimony of the prime witness is considered the most important document in a criminal case, which often influences the final verdict.

In the 2002 hit-and-run case of Salman Khan, the man who found himself in the epicenter of the controversy, was the prime witness of the case — constable Ravindra Patil.

Those close to Patil admitted that he was under enormous pressure to change his statement.

There were many who wanted Patil to change his statement. They preferred that Patil maintain that Salman leaned back to listen to him seconds before he lost control of the wheel. This would mean that the accident was caused by a ‘human error’ and not because he was drunk.

Cingular can learn some lessons from the East

Cingular announced that it will introduce Ringtones from MySpace for its customers. Cingular must try to catch up with its European and Asian peers by introducing Caller Tunes, little or unknown in the American market. In India, Hutch and Airtel lets you customize caller tunes so that your friends or business partners waiting to talk to you can listen to the song of their choice. All of these features are available on Cell as well as regular land phones.

Google dumped Open Office ?

Om first broke the story that Google has bought Writely. So was Google just trying to distract Microsoft that they will develop Open Office ? MS executives also made comments such as OO is 10 years behind MS-office. Hmmm! Smart Strategy Googlers. Writely welcome to NEC 😉

Search engine market share – Q4-2005

At the end of 2005, Google had gained significantly over Yahoo & Microsoft. Google had a 48.8%(+5.7%) of search market followed by Yaahoo at 21.4% (-0.3%) and Microsoft’s MSN search had 10.9% (-3.1%). Unfortunately this is not NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” show to be the winner 😉

Tropos routers a FONero ? A Win-Win for all.

I am not quite certain why Google is so aggressively pursuing network infrastructure, so I will believe in what John Battelle is saying,

Yes, but what if you need that distribution(internet) to run those high margin services over? More as the Superbowl buzz wears off.

I was thinking on how FONero movement can succeed. Tropos immediately struck to my mind. Oho! Ya Tropos’ WMR was an original & unique idea I had presented in my Network Appliance Design class 5 years ago. Lets analyze how Tropos can help FON and Google.

Tropos’ mesh network is a wi-max clone(not exactly) and is successfuly deployed in several places. Tropos’ 5210 routers form the private mesh network with only few of them acting as Internet gateways. Consumers use Tropos’ 3210 routers to connect to 5210 private network and thus to the WWW. Now for instance lets imagine all the 5210s and 3210s were to act as Fonero, then someone like me who needs to connect to the WWW can opt for either of those connections, depending on cost/speed. I can also use a VoIP based phone(a Google Talk enabled phone ?) just like a cell phone within the network. FON & its partners should consider talking to Tropos(and similar companies if any) to act as FONeros.

GOOG-Dell and Pack an Insider’s View

The deal is not as straight forward as it is reported in the press. Here are some of my thoughts. I don’t expect it to be the same pack for enterprise customers of Dell. NEC members are likely to offer more through GOOG-Dell channel. GOOG has several partners(currently known) in the PACK – Lavasoft, Symantec and Real which give a trial licenses. Once user converts trial into perpetual license, GOOG gets a cut out of it(Greater than 50% as of the time of release of GOOG pack, not sure what it is now). The story doesn’t end here. A dozen engineers(not dropouts) are working on optimizing Star/Open Office which will go into GOOG PACK this year. If this DELL-GOOG pack succeeds, then expect some more partners to queue in front of GooglePlex.
This deal may hurt GOOG’s immediate bottomline which it might compensate from other sources. What GOOG does is always right 😉 except Larry and Sergey selling their own stock 😦

C.K.Prahalad on $20 entrepreneurs from India

Prahalad is known for his out of the box corporate management and strategy lessons. BusinessWeek covers Prahalad’s radical views on how the East Asian economies will have a far reaching impact in the western corporate boardrooms. As he quotes while taking a cab drive through the streets of Mumbai,

With the world’s cheapest telecom rates, all you need here is a phone and a $20 card to start a business. He notices a busy closet-sized shop charging a few pennies per page to send faxes. “That guy probably started with a single phone and then added a fax and printer. Now he has a self-contained communications center offering extremely low prices.”

Prahlad stops his cab and visits a small shop and asks the owner to let him behind the counter to observe closely on his trade. He notices global brands such as Head & Shoulders, Colgate, Pears Lifebuoy and Lux.

Prahlad further adds,

Low wages alone can’t account for such price gaps with the West, Prahalad contends. The real secret is ingenious cost-cutting practices, such as extreme reliance on outsourcing, novel use of technology, and making the most of capital investment. “These are radical innovations,”

In the context of this statement, I feel Prahlad is so right about his predictions. The first thing that stuck to my mind is this company, website.in which sells Web related products and has resellers and customers worldwide. It probably started in a garage and is the cheapest domain reseller in the world today. Anybody who wants to venture into web hosting related business can start with a mere capital of $90 with no hidden fees and excellent customer service. In 2001 Godaddy.com came into limelight because it was the cheapest domain reseller directly poaching customers from Networksolutions. But today website.in is a bigger threat to Godaddy due to the formers low and efficient cost of working with high quality customer service. After low cost manufacturing, I feel that online businesses will feel the pinch sooner.