Now, an engineering degree from India&rsquo;s most coveted engineering institutes would come at a higher price.

IIT council bites the bullet

Business Standard

Michael May, one of a handful of the people in world history to regain some vision from total blindness, had great difficulty making sense of the visual world when he looked around him after four decades of complete darkness. But he survived and went on to write about what it felt to confront the bright, buzzing confusion around him for the first time in many years.

Alokananda Chakraborty: Why the ecosystem matters

French producer Alain Chamas called Amitabh Bachchan a one-man industry in the late seventies, when eight of his films &ndash; released almost simultaneously &ndash; had an unprecedented success at the box office. Over 30 years later, Bollywood has got another claimant to that epithet.

Brand Salman: Looking for class appeal

Extending brands have become increasingly important in the last decade of consumerism as new product launches have gone up substantially. A Nielsen survey across a sample of India Inc has found that marketers have today realised that having fewer but larger brands makes a lot more business sense. This shift is visible as many companies have caught the brand stretching bug, seeing it as a cheaper and less risky way compared to creating new brands.

Innovation powered by brand stretching

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have raised the tuition fee by 80 per cent, from Rs 50,000 to Rs 90,000 per annum, the steepest so far after a four-year hiatus. Yet, this would do little to help the financial condition of these institutes.

IIT fee hike won't fix financial woes

By merely bringing in foreign faculty cannot suffice the need for quality research. Though the faculty appointed from offshore at B-schools may serve as a medium for conducting efficient research process but it cannot be a sole criterion to depend on for improved research.

Student&#8217s corner

To be among the top research-driven institutions in Asia by 2020, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, plans to invest Rs 1,000 crore to increase the batch size across its bachelors and Masters &amp; PhD programmes by 50 per cent and 400 per cent, respectively, over the next seven years across its campuses at Pilani, Goa and Hyderabad.

BITS Pilani has big plans, with large batch sizes

To cater to individuals without any expertise in the financial services sector, Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute on Thursday announced the launch of a certificate programme, Claritas Investment Certificate. Registration will open in May.

CFA Institute launches certificate programme

The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) today declared the Common Admission Test (CAT) results for 2012. Ten candidates scored a 100 percentile. Of these, one is an undergraduate science student at Delhi University and the other nine are from an engineering discipline. Eight with the perfect scores come from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and five among those are in their graduation year.

8 of the top 10 CAT scorers are IITians

GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare (GSKCH) has two winners &ndash; Boost and Horlicks, which has been around for 140 years and became part of Glaxo&rsquo;s portfolio when the drug giant merged with SmithKline in 2000. But the company&rsquo;s ambition to grow beyond its core malted food drinks products in India has seen only a muted response.

Glaxo's brand extensions lack fizz

Mobile commerce is on the cusp of taking off in India and the growth curve would be a hockey stick shaped one, says Shubhradeep Guha, Global Capability Lead and Country Manager, SapientNitro (India), an integrated marketing, commerce and technology services firm, part of the $1.02billion Boston-based Sapient Corporation (2011). In an interaction with Sudipto Dey, he shares his insights on how brands should behave when the mobile and tablet screens become the hub of communication with consumers.

Mobile, not TV, will become the first screen: Shubhradeep Guha

The Bangalore Management Association, a professional body to study and promote professional management, is in the process of building a Management Development Centre (MDC), at Electronic City in Bangalore. Being built now, and estimated to cost about Rs 16 crore,the facility will be spread over 45,000 square feet. The state government had allotted the 22,000 sq ft of land for the centre through Keonics.

Management development centre

The University of Hyderabad (UoH) has recorded good placement offers from top companies including HSBC, TCS, Cavium Networks, One Covergence, Integraph, DST Worldwide Services, Jaro Education for the academic year 2012-13. Students from across disciplines have received offers ranging between Rs 3.50 lakh and Rs 10 lakh per annum. Apart from the professional courses, including MBA and MCA, students from general courses like Economics, Physics, English, Mathematics and health Psychology have also got placed in various organisations. GE Capital, Deloitte, Global Analytics, Asian Paints, Apollo Hospitals and Purple Talk are expected to come for placement by this month-end, according to a press release on Friday.

UoH students get offers from top companies

Barely two months after 9/11, Tony Fernandes, then a vice- president at Warner Music, acquired AirAsia from a Malaysian government entity for a token amount. For the struggling airline, it was virtually a rebirth. Whether it was the mega sale of free tickets, or last monthâ€™s $9.4billion order for 100 Airbus A320s, AirAsia has been making headlines regularly â€” all for the right reasons.

India remains distant for AirAsia

Do yourself a good turn: do others a good turn. Used to be, that was sage advice for souls seeking solace from wise monks who might or might not have sold their Ferraris. Today, itâ€™s good marketing strategy, good business strategy. Everywhere, a new breed of business writers and CEOs is churning out authors espousing the virtues of doing business for good.

Wanted: A global group hug

    Ratan Tata, while announcing the pullout from Singur in 2008..

Answers to last week`s quiz (#287)

The top 10 business bestsellers

Many organisations tend to walk a &lsquo;safe&rsquo; path by plotting their innovation graph as continuous improvement of what they have delivered well. However, this can only lead to slight process or product improvement; it can rarely catapult an organisation to an entirely new league.

Disrupt to innovate

As I write this, I am watching Pakistan whip India in the Kolkata ODI and I am struck by the similar stories of our cricket team and e-commerce in India .

Boom.Bust.Boom

Much as markets evolve, so do consumers. To stay relevant, marketers must keep in constant touch with these changes in the market place as well as their consumers&rsquo; behaviour. Quite often though a part of this learning is unlearning what you thought were the rules until now &mdash; letting go of ideas that may have worked wonderfully in the past but have no relevance in the future. Here are ten marketing rules from 2012 that may not apply this year.

Those marketing lessons? Unlearn 'em

Overcoming a round of resistance in July, a determined government and the broadcast industry finally made sure that the top four metros fell in line with the digitisation mandate before the end of 2012. While the next round of 38 cities present a bigger challenge, the changes in viewership as a result of a whole new world of genres on the TV set are likely to be the focus of much analysis and discussion in the coming year.

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