There are lot of times when I am asked by friends and family members to recommend them a Laptop or a camera or some other electronics items to shop for. They have their own constraints like money, time frame, usage preference, etc.

When you are looking to buy a product, always you have to make the decision only after proper research. But sometimes you may not be able to do all that research and you look out for help. What2Shop.com is filling into that spot.

As a shopper you look for search for your items and send it to your friends asking them for their recommendation. Once they provide the recommendation, you consolidate the results and make your final Shopping decision.

What2Shop.com is not like any other Social Shopping site, it is a Social Shopping Facilitating site.

Go Shopping and share your feedback !

Few days back Ramadorai (CEO of TCS) mentioned that TCS is going to cut the incentives, salary and ofcourse the workforce. Today I saw the official news that TCS is reducing it’s workforce. Every company is trying to curtail cost with the same or reduced revenue so that they can tide over this crisis.

Is this the first downturn for the IT industry? Nope, It is not. We have seen the Dot.com burst followed by the September 11 attacks which brought the industry to a grinding halt. What did we do then that we could not replicate now?

To recollect our knowledge, dot.com crash brought all newly created startups that setup shop for doing two things 1) Y2K solution or 2) Creating flashy Websites. With the dot.com burst and Y2K problem, the industry prepared for the next set of options. Everybody were talking about products instead of doing consulting service. So, how much product companies did we had? We had quiet a few which were great in their market. For example, we had iFlex (now Oracle Financial Services) which had the birst in class Core Banking solutions. Next we had Finacle from Infosys. There were other great products from AdventNet (also Zoho from the same company).

So did we had all companies as Product companies? No. Had all the product companies have become BIG.. No again except for iFlex and Infosys. Ofcourse Infosys became the second largest IT company in India not because of Finacle but with majority of consulting.

So for this downturn where will be the money come from??

Keep watching for more updates.

You might have seen the last 2-3 months that Satyam is beaten from all the quarters of the Market, customers and the employees.

Does this raise the question on the Indian IT industry?

Happy New Year 2009

Wishing a very Happy & Prosperous New Year 2009 for our readers !!!

After launching this Blog we intend to bring more news  and insights on the Knowledge Industry. We will also launch other Blogs from the stable of TechCurry.net covering various domains like Shopping, College Campus, Podcast on the Information Technology Industry and many more.

Give us your feedback and comments. This will definitely encourage us to perform better.

Also tell us what you want us to write about.

Regards,

TechCurry.net Team !!!

According the Glassdoor rating’s on the Best Places and the Least rated Companies to work for, TCS is 16th place from the bottom (Lowest ratings).

And Netflix & Adobe top the Best companies in the IT space.

BFS as it is famously called in the IT Industry, is one of majority contributor for revenues. Banking industry had been the foremost in trying new technologies and making their systems up-to-date.  The major reason for that one is, majority of Banks have their backend in Mainframe systems and either to e-enable those systems or replace them with new ones, they need the help of IT companies. The IT companies derive major chunk of their profit margins from the new Development projects. When the Banks are in cash crisis, the first thing they cut on is non-core development projects.

Ok, now which projects are non-core projects?  New projects that are not critical for survival or compliance of the Banks.

Once the BFS industry got hit from the IT Industry perspective, next hit is the Manufacturing Industries.

Manufacturing with Logistics & SCM (Supply Chain Management) is the next other industry that had affected IT Industry. Major ERP providers cater to the Manufacturing domain and the IT companies rely on these companies for executing the projects.

Next in line is the related domains like Steel, Cement and other Metals.

The Manufacturing and Banking industry going down, the Automobile industry was also brought down. When the other industry got hit, the Automobile had problems sustaining the production. With the consumers not ready to buy, the inventory (cars & trucks) piled up with the dealers not able to sell. With the dealers not able to generate any money by selling the cars, the manufacturers had problems keeping the production UP. Two weeks back we had news about Chrysler & General Motors having problems to sustain and needed bail-out from the Government.

When the Auto Industry got down, lot of IT companies depended on the revenue from executing projects for these big Auto industry.

Other industries that got affected included Telecom & Media.

In the next post we will see which are the industries that survived with regards to the IT industry.

The industry is currently under deep pressure (s**t). In the beginning of last year (2007) we got the news about the Sub-Prime crisis. Ok.. for whom “sub-prime” means another theorem here is the small explanation. In United States every individual has a unique identification number similar to our Income Tax PAN (Permanent Account Number). It is called Social Security Number (SSN). If you have a Bank Account, Credit Card, Your Salary, etc everything is tied to an SSN. With this, we have the Credit Bureaus who constantly get all your credit information (any loan, credit card payments, apartment rents, Mobile Bills) and provide you with a rating. This will tell whether you pay your credit bills promptly or defaulting them.

Sub-prime is a class where people who have less credit ratings (or had defaulted before), but Banks provide them the credit facility (loan) at a higher rate of interest.

When the sub-prime crisis hit, lot of loan defaulters means lot of non performing assets for the Banks. This affected the majority of the Housing / Real estate industry. The Banks which had given loans to people for buying their property  now have people defaulting on the re-payment. You can argue that the Bank can takeover those properties back and auction/sell it in the market. But if the Banks have lot of these properties to sell, there will less buyers in the market. If there are less buyers in the market, the return on the properties will automatically go down. This cyclic effect made the Bank less with money and more with properties. This led to the Credit or liquidity crunch for Bank.

Banks are the backbone of whole world’s ecosystem. When they face the liquidity or hot cash crunch, every other industry are bound to be affected.

Occasionally we will introduce and profile startups providing solutions to the problems of the world with the help of user friendly solutions.

Watch out more on this space soon.