Food Entreprenueurs: TastyKhana

By guest author Erika Valdez Known for being a country in which home-cooked meals are highly valued, India prides itself on being a society in which food traditions stand strong. Yet fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s and Jumbo King have not only made an entry into the market but have prospered. There is also

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Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 9): Applications

By guest author Nalini Kumar Mappala Part of the success of the iPhone can be attributed to the App store. To its credit, Apple  had the foresight to see the smartphone as what it is – a computing device and not merely a piece of communication equipment – and devise a strategy to sell software

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Outsourcing: West Corporation Interview (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott Culture Gaps and Management Challenges Tony: Do you find a cultural gap between the agents who are working for West who are based in the Philippines or who worked for you previously in India compared to your U.S. agents? Has that impacted your ability to move into higher value services

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Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 8): Operating Systems, Part 2

By guest author Nalini Kumar Mappala The year 2009 has been the coming-out party for Android. There has been a lot of innovation as well as regular updates with exciting features. The scene at Microsoft, on the other hand, has been lackluster. Updates to Windows Mobile were incremental and more service updates than feature upgrades.

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Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 7): Operating Systems, Part 1

By guest author Nalini Kumar Muppala Opinions differ on what capabilities a device needs to have in order to be classified as a smartphone. In every case, such features are well beyond what can be found in a feature phone. An embedded operating system (OS) empowers a smartphone to perform tasks that were previously known

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Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 6): Cheaper Smartphones

By guest author Nalini Kumar Muppala There has been a lot of talk about cheaper smartphones coming our way. A slew of recent product announcements and promises from chip vendors seem to support this claim. It must be noted that the price in question is the real price of the device, not a carrier-subsidized (and

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Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 5): Devices, Part 3

By guest author Nalini Kumar Muppala As seen in the table below, each major component is dominated by a different set of companies. There is no dearth of competition, and we can thus be assured of continued innovation.

Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 4): Devices, Part 2

By guest author Nalini Kumar Muppala Smartphones and an increasing number of feature phones have a variety of connectivity options. Bluetooth, WLAN, GPS, and FM all were discrete parts not so long ago. Advances in radio integration have lead to a variety of combinations of the connectivity radios. In some cases they are combined with

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