Ashampoo, is a shampoo, is a shampoo. Right? Wrong! Any woman who steps out from her salon after a hair treatment complete with a wash and blow-dry wishes for nothing more than her hair to stay that way &mdash; lustrous, smooth, soft to the touch. Or at least be able to afford salon treatments more often. Unfortunately, the latter is a luxury few can afford even though the former stays a life-long aspiration.

Segment and rule

Business Standard

Eeryone has a type, but only Wall Street will take anything with a pulse. My industry spends countless hours and millions of dollars teaching people how to read people. Understanding individuals&rsquo; motivations, what makes them happy or sad and fearful or trusting, will allow the practitioner to sell them things.

How Wall Street sees you

    The Aston Hill races near Birmingham provided the inspiration for the first half of a very popular brand&rsquo;s name.

The Strategist Quiz (#248)

After the success of Swift, small car giant Maruti Suzuki now hopes to create ripples in the multi-utility vehicle (MUV) space with the launch of the Ertiga on Thursday.

Ertiga creates a new category

Research In Motion (RIM), makers of BlackBerry phones, has taken one more step in its bid to relate to teenagers and young professionals, even if that means having fun at the expense of the original &lsquo;BlackBerry boys&rsquo; (grown men in black suits) in its brand new campaign.

BlackBerry makes a virtue out of necessity

In his new avatar as Mr Yatra in a new commercial, superstar Salman Khan says, &ldquo;J3o bhi deal chahiye mein dilaunga. Yeh meri commitment hai&rdquo; (which ever deal you want, I will get it for you. That is my commitment).

No one-time endorsement fee, stars have more at stake now

Raheja-owned retailer Shoppers Stop has gone off the beaten track. At a time, when bigger players such as Pantaloon and Aditya Birla Retail are either shutting stores or looking at halting expansion to preserve cash and check losses, Shoppers Stop is moving ahead with its expansion plans.

Shoppers just won't Stop

When was the last time you thought of your favourite driving road and imagined yourself in an automatic car? If you&rsquo;re a driving enthusiast like me, I&rsquo;m guessing never. I&rsquo;d rather work my feet and hands to set up the car for the next corner and revel in perfectly matching the revs on a downshift, than let the car do the driving for me. But sadly, we don&rsquo;t get to drive those roads everyday, and the commute to and from work is never a smooth affair.

Boxing match 

The arching driveway of Birla House is lined with jackfruit, gulmohar and mango trees. There&rsquo;s a full garage at the bend, but it is dark in there and you can&rsquo;t make out the badges on the grilles and bonnets. Visitors must take off their shoes at the portico.

Six-pack Birla

I currently own a Ford Figo 1.4 TDCi and a Mahindra Renault Logan 1.4 petrol and I plan on adding one more car to the garage. I presently face a problem wherein my cars&rsquo; underbody scrapes against speedbreakers because I usually travel with a full load.

Clean and clear

Known internationally for creating drama on the ramp, designer Manish Arora feels that his journey has just begun.

Ladies' Tailor

Ecommerce leader, 100,000 sq ft warehouse (sorry, &ldquo;fulfilment centre&rdquo;), 6,000-25,000 items shipped every day, 500-plus employees at this site &mdash; big numbers, but where&rsquo;s the buzz? Could be a power cut, one thinks, walking into Yebhi.com&rsquo;s warehouse just off the national highway on the outskirts of Gurgaon.

Enter the back end

Had you been a woman travelling in second class on the Titanic a century ago, your chances of survival were quite favourable &mdash; 86 per cent were saved. For the men in second class, one of whom was my grandfather, Lawrence Beesley, the odds were the reverse; only 14 per cent survived, and the rest drowned in the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

The man who survived

The best way to know when a country has grown up is when its revolution takes place in its classrooms. And with the Supreme Court upholding the Right to Education (RTE) Act this week, paving the way for schools across the country to admit students from economically and socially backward homes, India is about to witness one of its most important social experiments &mdash; nothing short of storming the bastions.

Classroom revolution

There is nothing passive about the act of reading. It may seem mysterious that one writer exerts a powerful undertow on your life, while another leaves not even a watermark impress, but there is nothing accidental about the choice a writer makes in his literary friendships.

The heart of the matter

The breezes through the Georgia pines on yet another beautiful day could not presage the drama that was to unfold in the latter stages of the 2012 Masters. The early starters tried to improve their position, although it could not affect the final outcome in any way. Tiger Woods continued to flounder, dropping a couple of shots to par, in a lacklustre performance. He is a great player but being virtually lonely and funless when you are playing a game, no matter at what level, is not easily consistent with winning any more.

Elementary, My dear Watson

Did you know that wine grapes produced in India are different from any other wine grapes in the world? Not better or worse, just different.

Grape harvest notes 

Companies often spend a small fortune to bring out glossy brochures. But we, readers in a hurry, dunk it in the dustbin in no time, often unopened. Then I recently came across a &ldquo;souvenir&rdquo; brought out by Delhi Cloth Mills (now DCM) in 1939 to commemorate its golden jubilee. The hard purple cover has withstood the test of time. The outline of the Qutub Minar is embossed on the front and back jackets, perhaps to emphasis that the company was the first modern large-scale industrial enterprise of Delhi. The pages have come off the jacket but are intact.

Those 50 years of DCM

Since Chess offers a technically finite, if mind-bogglingly large, number of possibilities, it presents rich scope for the development of better computational search functions. Endgames with few pieces have been solved. The tablebases now have complete solutions for all positions with upto six pieces and some seven piece situations.

Chess (#996)

Pench Tiger Reserve is home to the big cat. But even though the majestic animal has a fair share of prey, the going is tough.

In tiger territory

The original prints of Aamir Khan&rsquo;s 2001 release, Lagaan, now lie in safe vaults in Los Angeles. Not about to take any chance with the film he produced and which was nominated for the Oscars, Khan has done what is said to be the ultimate in film preservation. &ldquo;He has split the colours of the picture into three (YCM, or yellow, cyan, magenta) and stored the film that way,&rdquo; says Nina Lath Gupta, the managing director of National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).

Rescuing a film

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