Anthony Tongbram’s Blog

Happy Holi Everyone!

Holi, for the uninitiated is the festival of colors. On these rowdy kids throw water missiles, and balloons filled with water, sometime dirty water, and throw these to un suspecting strangers. Friends and relatives also smear each other with colors that stains harder than tattoos. Drunk youths roam the streets of India on motorcycles, celebrities have huge parties during the day, and the next days’ page three will be filled with Holi Parties.

But it is a fun filled day, no less than the Carnivals.

I got an Email about a Job Interview. I got a very well written Email telling me that I will get a letter and an Airline Ticket for the interview, once I have deposited 10500 into their account. This amount is refundable.

This was an Obvious Scam Artist, but the fact that they are sending the mail out means that they do get some idiots into their Scam. Any Idiot, stupid enough to fall into this trap, just like all those idiots who get scammed by Nigerians and Russian Love letters, deserves to be scammed just on general Principle. But I hate the scammers more than I despise the idiots..

So, spread the word that this kind of Bogus Job Offers are doing the rounds:
See the email that I got:

Dear Applicant,

Ref: “VIDEOCON” Direct Recruitments offer.

It is our good pleasure to inform you that, your Resume has been
selected for our new plant. The Company selected 62 candidates list for
IT, Administration and Departments, as well as Company offered you to
join as an Executive/Manager post in respective department. You were
selected according to your resume in Which Project you have worked on,
according to that you have been selected in Company. The Company is
dealing in Electronics manufacturing business in India.

The Company is recruiting the candidates for new plants in Delhi,
Bangalore and Pune. The interview will be held at Company Corporate
office on –25th November 2010 at 11.30. You will be pleased to know that,
the Company has advised you in the selection panel that, your Application
can be progress to final stage. Your offer letter with Air Ticket will be
sent to you through courier service before the date of interview. The
Company will be offering you your salary with benefits for this post 30,
000/- to 2, 00, 000/- P.M. + (HRA + D.A + Conveyance and other Company
benefits).

The designation and Job Location will be fixed by Company HRD at time of
final process. You have to come with photo-copies of all required
documents.
REQUIRED DOCUMENTS BY THE COMPANY HRD.
1) Photo-copies of Qualification Documents.
2) Photo-copies of Experience Certificates (If any)
3) Photo-copies of Address Proof
4) Two Passport Size Photograph

You have to deposit the (Cash) as an initial amount in favor of Company
HRD Department for Rs. 10,500/- through any [STATE BANK OF INDIA] Branch
from your Home City to Company Senior HRD

BANK NAME:
STATE BANK OF INDIA ACCOUNT NAME:
ACCOUNT NUMBER:

This is refundable interview security fee. Your offer letter with Air
tickets will be sent to your Home Address by courier service after
receiving the confirmation of interview security deposited in STATE
BANK OF INDIA. Company will pay all the expenditure to you at the time
of face-to-face meeting with you in the Company. The Job profile,
salary offer, and date -time of interview will be mentioned in your
offer letter. Your offer letter will be dispatched very shortly after
receiving your confirmation of cash deposited in STATE BANK OF INDIA.
We wish you the best of luck for the subsequent and remaining stage.

The last date of security deposited in bank – 25/11/2010, You have to
give the information after depositing the security fee in bank to
Company ,Your Letter with supporting documents will be dispatch same
time by courier service to your postal address after receiving your
security deposited confirmation in bank. The interview process and
arrangement expenditure will be paid by Company. Lodging, traveling and
local conveyance actual will be paid by Company as per bills. The
candidate has to deposit the initial refundable security as mentioned by
HRD.

If the candidate wants to come with his parents or friends, the Company
will arrange all facilities only for female candidate.

Thanks

Mr Raj Sharma
Announcer
Videocon Electronics Ltd.
videocon_recruitementoffice@rediffmail.com

If you own a Local business, sign up for Google Places.
Most people search for local services and businesses via GOOGLE only.

The other day, it was spammers who took over the Digg front page. Today is the Reddit that took over Digg.

Apparently today’s rediggtion was orchestrated by angry Digg users who aren’t too pleased with the new Changes.

That reddit is all over the front page of Digg is on Reddit as well, obviously. And also on Digg.

Fun times..
But Reddit and Digg have both outlived their usefulness.
And the users have all grown up.
Everybody now “Likes” or “tweets” anyway..

A New Digg was launched.
And while they are ironing out the kinks, they decided to get some “more” linkbait, and introduced a nice Fail Ox. Move over fail whale.

Techcrunch covered the Fail OX, but did they notice the Bigger Fail that is happening?
The new Digg also just got taken over by Spammer.
There is a free Money and free Grants link on the front page right now.
With 87 Digg. A Big Lulz. A Bigger fail.

I didn’t look at the site well enough to verify the legitimacy of the site, and maybe the site is legitimate with a domain name like free-money-grantsdotcom, but the point is that it would never have made it to the front page without some spamming and well, digg failed to catch it..
Well just saying..

So Spammers, make hay while the Axle is broken. Rush to Digg and be spamming

Jokes apart. What does this mean?
Digg is not using the old and tested algorithm for making diggs popular?
In the initials of Digg, gaming it was very easy and it make them take some serious measures, and they made the algorithm better over time. Looks like they have overhauled that system for a better, spammer friendly digg. After all spammers do have a hand in popularizing most of the Web 2.0 “properties” out there.

With Elevendy millions of searches every day on Google, chances are
that my couple of readers must also have noticed today that they are not on Google Anymore.
They are in Kansas..
Topeka, KS to be precise.

As a Reciprocating gesture to what Topeka a few months back when the mayor of Topeka annunced that Topeka will be called Google for a month ( It was suppose to be for luring Google into chosing Topeka as one of their 1 Gigabit per second hi speed cable network Locations?), Google today decided that they will be called Topeka… For the whole of the April Fool’s day at least.

Here is a more detailed explanation from Google.

Silly Joke, thinks Techcrunch.

An excellent article on why we should buying stocks now, though we hesitate..
As the author says,

When new clients come to me, I ask them a few questions about risk. One is “What would you do if the value of your stocks fell by 50%?”

The vast majority answer that they would buy more stocks. So now that the market has lost about 40% of its value, why are some of these same clients clamoring to sell?

Well it depends. When the markets are such, and you enter at this point, we often end up catching a falling knife. I caught a couple, and am still bleeding. I have convinced myself that I will not sell them for 3-4 years, but it still hursts you see.

Your investment strategy should instead be based on your goals, your time horizon and what you’ve saved so far. Success will come from sticking to your plan.

The article.

16.7% of all new business owners are Immigrants?
I thought it might be more. Hasn’t that always been the case?

First it was the Irish and polish Immigrants, then the chinese immigrants, and now Pakistanis and Indians.

Now, a November 2008 study by Robert W. Fairlie, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, gives the strongest evidence to date that critics of open-immigration policies have misjudged the impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy.

Issued under the auspices of the U.S. Small Business Administration, the peer-reviewed study pulled data from three large, nationally representative government data sets, and found that immigrants are almost 30 percent more likely to launch a business than non-immigrants. According to the study, roughly 16.7 percent of all new business owners in this country are immigrants, yet immigrants make up only 12.2 percent of the workforce in the U.S. It also found that immigrant-owned businesses contributed roughly $67 billion to the country’s business income, out of a total of $577 billion in 2000. Although this total is slightly below a one-to-one ratio of immigrant population to immigrant-owned business, it is still a very significant chunk of economic activity. And keep in mind, these economic activity findings were from eight years ago, so the total economic activity contribution has likely increased since then.

source.

Jai Prakash Associates net profit up 96% in Quater II
ZEE Q2 PAT up 84%
Polaris Software PAT up 89%
NIIT Q2 Net up 41%
Opto Circuits PAT up 100%

PTL ( Punjab Tractors Limited) Sales up 41%

These are from the Economic Times, Today.
Had it been 2007, I would have smiled.
But today, the overall sentiments are so bleak, we still have a bad day today.
Now, the Sensex is down 442 points to 10,241 and the Nifty fell 152 points to 3,082.

I have never had it so bad.
Good quality stocks, that gives dividen yields in the range of 5% to 10% are today trading at less than half the book value. Will the book value erode in the coming quarters? Won’t they be in a position to give dividends in the coming 12-18 months…

I have no Idea..
Are these attractive stocks?
By God they are?
Would it be wise to buy them?

This is a god given given opportunity, and this is the time when one should Ideally enter.
That is what the books say, and history too.

But these are no ordinary times, and the extent of the current crisis is still not known.
But damn… the stocks are so damn attractive.

Good time to enter they say!!!
But the collective sigh is..

YAWN!!!! But Where is the money!!!!!!

We forgot to sell.
We forgot to cut our losses.
And we have no money……….

No cash.. Only some useless portfolio…
What a time…..

One more good news for the SaaS enthusiast..

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management. The company is deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management and will leverage the Force.com Platform and the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to improve client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives.[more]