Cleartrip.com - an online travel portal has started a new section called Small World. The feature showcases select destinations around one's residence or internationally. This a is really novel service - not only users get to 'preview' a holiday location, the approximate travel and lodging expenses are flashed immediately on the screen. Once you click on a chosen destination, you are taken to a detailed view of the destination with a Google Map 'to' the location, a slideshow of photos from the destination, flight and hotel details arranged in 4 boxes on the screen. The flights with their prices are displayed in a calendar format while the hotels can be rearranged by their tariffs and traveler rating using sliders. The Google Map widget also has markers for Sites, Restaurants, shopping destinations and entertainment hot spots. The fun part is that Cleartrip has partnered with Yahoo / Flickr and Lonely Planet - the slideshows showcasing are made using photos from flic...

This blog was started on the same day 6 years ago - much has transcended over the internet and in my life since then. Blogging came, became a rage and slowly stabilized. The less serious bloggers moved to Facebook and Twitter while the serious (aka professional) blogs have morphed into full fledged content portals. For me sitting at neither end of the spectrum- 7 years and 515 posts later - this place continues to live with increased enthusiasm. Nevertheless over the years, this blog has (I hope!) improved in content - less personal updates and more meaningful posts whether on Socio-Political matters, Technology , Entrepreneurship , Education , Management etc or literary experiments such as Stories and Poems or occasional Philosophical Musings . In fact I have skinned the blog in the new template with an intent to make the site easily surfable and better presented in terms of the variety of content it offers. The blog is also reachable now from a new URL www.nikhilkulkarni.in - ...

More than an year ago during an internal Training, my friend (also colleague @ KPMG) Glyn demonstrated a very simple example for 'books of accounts' namely the balance sheet, P/L statement, Daily Cash book etc. I found it the most effective way to teach accounts to someone new. The sheet has remained on my desktop since then. I am putting this sheet on my blog for other's to view. The sheet is publicly shared on Google Docs - many Thanks to Glyn for this sheet ...

The previous two posts [ 1 ] [ 2 ] which detail my analysis of slow and fast money clearly define that services which form the firmware of our society – infrastructure and utilities – those which are used as a public resource are targets for investment of slow money. Also, such investment is secure, usually subject to several controls and needs to be reliable and long term. As a corollary such investments are also conservative in terms of the return, and hence not suitable for profit booking. As a result we often find government or quasi government agencies (such as NGO’s) investing in such services. On the other hand, individual wealth – whether in form of PE / VC funds or in form in direct equity – which is aimed at booking high profits is never invested in such fundamental services. Hence, Banks and Insurance companies - because they form the basic fabric of public financial infrastructure - are also targets of slow money investments. It is for this very reason that Non-Banking Fina...