Philipp Heintze

Genauso so sah das Essen JEDEN TAG aus. Danke Holger für dieses Dokument aus grauen Vorzeiten. Abgesehen vom Essen wars aber ne wirklich tolle Zeit da. Kühe auf den Strassen, how can that be?

“Its too late baby, now its too late” (C. King)

India’s online auction history:

1999: Baazee started (with BIG money from Murdoch)

2004: Baazee bought by eBay

2005a: eBay India launched

2005b: Rediff starts Auctions

There’s only one question: Why? Maybe to have fun looking at those early days of the Rediff Feedback System, where obviously professional sellers have -1-ratings, dealing with very professional buyers like Sonia… (click to enlarge picture)

by swaroop

Even though booming Bangalore has now approximately 7m residents and a growing traffic from incredible 900 new cars PER DAY, government fails to improve infrastructure quickly, as reported in this THE ECONOMIST article:

THE BANGALORE PARADOX
Apr 21st 2005

The city at the heart of India’s booming information-technology industry is already choking on its own success; but the boom has barely begun

THE arriving businessman, anxious to get to grips with India’s information-technology industry in its very capital, may need a little patience. He might meet his first traffic jam just outside Bangalore’s airport. He can examine the skeleton of the early stages of a planned flyover on the airport road. Construction started in February 2003 and was due to be completed in April 2004. Three-quarters of the work is still to be done, but the building site is idle. A dispute over cost escalation led to a cancellation of the contract (the rusting steel that forms the skeleton was getting more expensive by the day).

To say the least, this is bad public relations for Bangalore, the hub of the great Indian boom in software and remote services, such as call-centres (known as “business process outsourcing”, or BPO). It seems to confirm recent scare stories that the city has ground to a halt, and its government does not care. Late last year, some of the leading lights of Indian information technology (IT), such as Wipro’s founder, Azim Premji, and his counterpart at Infosys, Narayana Murthy, gave warning that Bangalore was in trouble. The INDIAN EXPRESS, a national newspaper, took up the cause with a front-page series on “Bangalore crumbling”.

Elections last May in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, were taken as a rebuff for the urban elite from the poor rural majority. After a series of failed monsoons, farmers were suffering.
Driven into the grip of usurious money-lenders, more than 700 had killed themselves in the year before the elections. So the new administration, under its chief minister, Dharam Singh, a portly grass-roots politician who prides himself on his common touch, forswore the “urban bias” of its predecessor.

The city soon felt the pain of the government’s inattention. “As companies we have scaled up,” says Bob Hoekstra, boss of a big Bangalore software centre for Philips, a Dutch consumer-electronics giant. “But the government has scaled down.” Bangalore’s infrastructure was already creaking after years of breakneck expansion. Yet foreign firms were continuing to pour in at the rate of three a week. Newly prosperous residents have kept buying motorcycles and cars, adding, say officials, 900 vehicles a day to the already overloaded streets…

Want to read the full article? Just tell me…