Monday, January 23, 2012

Who said that the government's not listening to people?

Cartoon by Alok Nirantar. Read more about him here. If you like his cartoons, drop a line at breathing.cartoons@gmail.com

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Five lessons from Kodak's Bankruptcy

(Kodak advertisement, Image courtesy: Duke Universityhttp://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/, link Via Chandu Gopalakrishnan)

Hope you have finished mourning the demise of Eastman Kodak Co, the 131 year old photography pioneering corporation that filed for bankruptcy Thursday. Kodak's bankruptcy offers a few lessons to businesses, The Economist explains in an article. The lessons?

1.  Kodak's culture did not help. Despite its strengths—hefty investment in research, a rigorous approach to manufacturing and good relations with its local community—Kodak had become a complacent monopolist.

2. If you see things coming, do something about it: Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, who has advised the firm.

3. Diversify, make it quick: Even when Kodak decided to diversify, it took years to make its first acquisition.

4. Nurture re-usable IP.

5. Don't cling to old business just because its higher margins.

Read the full article here.

That moment, Ifthikar Ali featuring Rayshad Rauf & Rizwan Abdulla






My friend Tony Joseph of Tune4.com shared this with me. Chennai based Tune4 Entertainments is into music production, event management, advertising and online radio.

Check out the site here.

Modi's Sad-bhavana

Cartoon by Alok Nirantar. Read more about him here.
If you like his cartoons, drop a line at breathing.cartoons@gmail.com

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Prirate bay's argument on SOPA, PIPA

Dear readers,
 
What do you think of SOPA? PIPA?

I found this interesting. 
 
Enjoy:

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take
over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It's all based on the fact that we're competition.
We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the
USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.
They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers. 
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with
trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that
you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the
hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to
mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.
To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're
creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls
become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching
movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones
is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had
no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy
in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more
honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information
when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Roti kapada aur makan ya Prianka ki muskan?

Cartoon by Alok Nirantar. Read more about him here.
If you like his cartoons, drop a line at breathing.cartoons@gmail.com

Monday, January 02, 2012

Happy new year. Or maybe not

Good morning readers.


Happy new year. Or maybe not. While all of us are hopeful that a good year lies ahead of us, looks like its not going to be as good. For starters, a hike of about Rs 2.10-2.13 per litre in petrol price is likely as oil companies will meet today to revise rates of petrol in wake of weakening rupee. But any hike will need nod from the government given that assembly elections in five states are around the corner. Grim start to a new year eh? But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a laugh. Here's another cartoon by Alok Nirantar. Hope you like it.

Cartoon by Alok Nirantar.  If you like his cartoons, drop a line at breathing.cartoons@gmail.com
Cheers
JPK

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Lokpalwa Phokpalwa?

It only gets better and better.
Cartoon by Alok Nirantar. Read more about him here.
If you like his cartoons, drop a line at breathing.cartoons@gmail.com