As the battle for the smartphone and tablet market rages on, video advertising is one of the most effective ways to grab consumers&rsquo; attention. Samsung, Google, and Microsoft each saw massive growth in 2012 both on a brand and campaign basis. Samsung tops the list of most popular tech ads of 2012 prepared by video tracker Visible Measures, with Galaxy S III, which has got 71 million views, 17 million views more than the runner up.

The head turners

Business Standard

To launch cash transfers on January 1, the government&rsquo;s target is 80 per cent Aadhaar coverage for each of the shortlisted 51 districts. In the second of a four-part series, Business Standard captures the state on the ground in the south.

Ready for rollout? 

To launch cash transfers on January 1, the government&rsquo;s target is 80 per cent Aadhaar coverage for each of the shortlisted 51 districts. In the last of a four-part series, Business Standard captures the state on the ground in the west.

Ready for rollout?

Last week, Goldman Sachs upgraded Indian stocks. On Wednesday, the foreign brokerage said that growth in the Indian economy would increase to 6.5 per cent next financial year, and to 7.2 per cent in 2014-15, from 5.4 per cent this financial year. The stock markets have rallied, betting on a recovery, but economic indicators on the ground give mixed signals.

Goldman Sachs & the Indian Economy

The listing gives you information on the performance of mutual fund schemes based on investment category they belong to and with a corpus (QAAUM: quarterly assets under management) of over Rs 600 crore. For the full list of schemes, visit www.business-standard.com/download/ fm2012.xls. Returns (adjusted for payouts where applicable) and net asset values (NAV) are for the period ended September 28, 2012. Data has been sourced from www.mutualfundsindia.com.

Understanding fund directory

Apropos G David Milton&rsquo;s letter to the editor &ldquo;Ayodhya&rsquo;s legacy&rdquo; (December 6), the demolition of the disputed Babri structure was undeniably condemnable, but holding L K Advani&rsquo;s rath yatra solely responsible is unfair. Three &ldquo;secular&rdquo; politicians holding vital power positions between August 7, 1990 and November 2, 1990 played important roles here. On August 7, 1990, the then Prime Minister V P Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission report &mdash; which had been kept pending for over two decades. His aim was to rob his rival Devi Lal of his OBC (other backward classes) vote bank, and to divide the Ram Janambhoomi Aandolan and the Hindu votes on caste lines. This forced the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to pick up the &ldquo;Mandir&rdquo; issue and Advani, the then BJP president and a minister in the V P Singh government, decided to undertake the rath yatra.

Letters: The 'secular' triumvirate

Gold demand in the third quarter of 2012 was 10% up over the previous quarter, but 11% lower year-on-year. In value terms, demand was worth $57.6 bn, 14% below Q3 2011. Investment demand was 16% below the exceptional levels witnessed in the third quarter of 2011, led by a steep drop in the bar and coin segment.

Gold demand and supply

The conventional wisdom is that job security is something only 50-somethings care about; for younger workers, it is way down the priority list. In that sense, the findings of the Towers Watson Global Workforce Study, released earlier this week, are a surprise. According to the survey, which covers those below 30, job security ranks first as a driver of attraction. The larger trend that emerges is that employees now evaluate just how good the security blanket employers set up is. Even the reputation of the organisation is now being perceived as a surrogate of trust, rather than the badge of value it represented earlier. Stress and anxiety about the future are common, as over half the respondents agreed retirement security is more important today than just a few years ago. That&rsquo;s a completely new idiom for India Inc which, till recently, was grappling with a high rate of attrition and wasn&rsquo;t quite sure whether an employee leaving work today would come back tomorrow.

Job security centrestage  

Stung by B S Yeddyurappa&rsquo;s decision to form his own party &ndash; Karnataka Janata Party (KJP) &ndash; six months before the Assembly election in the state, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders are punishing the former Karnataka chief minister&rsquo;s supporters. The first to face the ire of the BJP top leaders was G S Basavaraj, member of Parliament (MP) from Karnataka, who has been suspended from the BJP on charges of making anti-party statements. Another close aide of Yeddyurappa, Cooperative Minister B J Puttaswamy, was removed from the top post on similar charges. Yeddyurappa claims that he has the support of more than 40 BJP MLAs who are willing to join the KJP.

Battle lines 

The foreign retail biggies should try a new model of retail in India &mdash; one which will be a true win-win for all the parties concerned. They should designate the existing small retail shops as their franchises, instead of trying to set up huge shopfronts like elsewhere in the world. It will be a one-shot solution to objections raised against retail FDI. Besides, consumers will benefit from access to quality goods at reasonable prices closer to their homes, instead of driving long distances to a typical large format store &mdash; the space for which is unlikely to be available in the city proper.

Letters: Saving small shops 

The last one year ending September 30, 2012 hasn&rsquo;t been easy for fund managers as well as investors.

Picking the winners

India is a young country and it appears that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is keen to record this fact. Its biometric machines have been reconfigured to scan fingerprints up to 60 per cent coarseness &mdash; a feature that didn&rsquo;t exist in the earlier machines. As a result, many elderly people, who tend to have relatively faint finger marks that get fainter in the cold weather, cannot enroll in the system. Now, this is clearly a chronic problem. Officials manning the scanners told a colleague to send a mail to the UID help desk. Each of these mails would then be used as part of a campaign to get UIDAI to do something about it, the officials said.

Out of print

Undeterred by the Opposition&rsquo;s renewed attack against him, the newly sworn-in Maharashtra deputy chief minister and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar announced his move to take them head-on. Speaking to Sanjay Jog after his re-induction into the Prithviraj Chavan-led Cabinet, Pawar said he would concentrate on giving priority to effectively deal with the problem of water scarcity in various parts of the state. Pawar would retain finance and power departments.

Opposition will keep levelling allegations: Ajit Pawar 

This refers to the editorial &ldquo;Growth crisis deepens&rdquo; (December 3). The case for accelerating growth could not be stronger for a nation where a sizeable population lives below the poverty line; that must create adequate livelihood opportunities for its growing labour force; and where a massive expansion in infrastructure investment is required. We need more private investment to achieve higher growth, which in turn will attract greater investments, and keep the economy growing at higher rates. Sadly, this might be the year that India records the lowest annual growth in a decade. With agriculture not doing well, the economy facing an industrial slowdown and global economic turmoil far from over &ndash; and unlikely to get better before 2014 &ndash; we might have entered a period of low growth that is here to stay. The consequences could be damaging.

Letters: Low growth is here to stay

A few days ago, Jignesh Shah of the Financial Technologies group personally congratulated Ashish Chauhan on his appointment as CEO and managing director of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) when they met at a conference at Trident hotel in Mumbai. The significance of this gesture lies in the unstated tension between BSE and Shah&rsquo;s Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX). In a recent interview to a financial daily, Shah accused an exchange of misrepresenting facts about the securities transaction tax (STT). He was probably hinting at BSE because Chauhan had at a public function in October said the lack of STT on commodity trading was shifting trading volumes to that segment. The large volumes on the MCX platform are through arbitrageurs who benefit from lack of transaction tax. On the other hand, STT has been a key catalyst for driving down equity cash market volumes, which affected BSE the most.

Exchange programme

The suspension of the Indian Olympic Association, or IOA, by the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, on Tuesday followed a long confrontation between the two bodies. The last straw for the IOC, however, was that the IOA refused to postpone the election it had scheduled for Wednesday &mdash; an election that the IOC claimed was fatally weakened by government interference.

Shamateurism reigns 

Policy makers should not overreact to the milk glut in India, since this has largely been caused by poorly advised government policy in the first place. The accumulation of surplus stocks of skimmed milk powder (SMP) is the consequence of the government&rsquo;s two ill-timed decisions two years ago as a panicked reaction to the protein-driven high food inflation &mdash; banning the export of milk products and simultaneously ordering import of SMP. These coincided with a rebound in domestic milk output after a post-2009 drought dip. To confound matters, the lifting of the export ban was delayed, for inexplicable reasons, till global prices had nosedived &mdash; making exports unviable. The dairy industry, too, erred: it mistimed increases in the consumer prices of liquid milk. This prevented a rise in sales in the wake of comfortable availability and resulted in a drop in the price paid to milk producers.

Skimming over milk 

Until Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party promised to back the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance on Friday&rsquo;s crucial vote on foreign direct investment in retail, a desperate ruling government had been scrounging for every vote in the Rajya Sabha &mdash; being low on numbers in the upper House. The government was heavily banking on the presence of the 10 nominated members, prominent among them actress Rekha and cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar. The mischievous opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party camp, would have loved to ensure that Tendulkar did not make to Parliament that day. The ruse proposed, if reports are to be believed, was to use their BCCI contact and heavyweight Arun Jaitley to ensure that a cricket match was slated for that crucial Friday. As luck would have it, the third India-England test match which started on Wednesday was sure to roll on till December 7, the third day of the test, and the day of the Rajya Sabha vote.

Business Standard

Business Standard

Page 805 - Business Standard