MEGACORP @ Occasio ’07 January 28, 2007
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For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight
– Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Occasio launches MEGACORP – The Business Plan competition, that seeks to reward those who strive, who seek, and never yield. Rewards come to only those who struggle for them, and Occasio invites those who have a dream and the will to achieve it to come forward, and stand up to be counted.
The participants are required to choose a sector of their choice and develop a business plan.
Cash Prizes of INR 25,000 for the best of the best!
For more details log on to http://www.som.iitkgp.ernet.in/occasio/Megacorp.php
KIBITZER @ Occasio ’07 January 28, 2007
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Today, the real estate and infrastructure sectors are booming.
Private savings are covering up fiscal deficits.
Stock markets remain volatile and debt markets still immature.
Infrastructure finance is a hard nut to crack.
SREI Infrastructure Finance Ltd. talks about its organization structure and activities and challenges the participants to come up with ideas that seek to solve the complex problems faced by this sector.
So pour in with your entries and win cash prizes worth INR 30,000!!!
Find more at http://www.som.iitkgp.ernet.in/occasio/kibitzer.php
Kshitij ’07 – On the spot events January 25, 2007
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Kshitij (1st to 4th Feb, ’07) is the annual Techno-Management Festival of IIT Kharagpur. And being a part of IIT KGP, VGSOM has always been a hyper-enthusiastic participant. But it’s not just about participating. It’s also about organising. And quite a few of my batchmates have been working really hard at helping ensure that Kshitij goes off smoothly.
Some of the On the spot events they’re organising are …
BizQuiz
Drive thy business; it will drive thee
– Benjamin Franklin
Business Battles; Legends and Myths; Trivia and Classifieds.
Dig up the archives! Run search engines!! Scratch your brains!!! Press the panic button!!!! In other words, get set for a nerve-wracking ride through the corporate world! Find out who keeps abreast of the ups and downs in the business world, at the BizQuiz, a series of shocks and surprises await you. That’s a promise!!
Last year the quiz was conducted by none other than Mr Giri “Pickbrain” Balasubramanium. This time it’s Barry O’Brien!
Cash Prizes of INR 20,000 on the stake!
India Inc
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!
– Albert Einstein
From the days of Indus Valley civilization to Param 10000, several Indians have left behind golden imprints on the pages of history encompassing innovation in the field of management and technology. From Chanakya to Amartya Sen, from Aryabhatta to Vinod Dham, India has seen it all. This quiz is a celebration of India’s glorious history in the field of technology and business.
Conducting the quiz will be none other than the new face of infotainment in India – Avinash Mudaliar himself; a quizzer’s delight!
Cash Prizes of INR 20,000 to take away!
Atelier
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman. -David Ogilvy.
In today’s world of media, marketing and advertising, only the ones who can be dynamic, enterprising and resourceful will ultimately emerge winners. In this impromptu ad design competition, participants get a chance to prove that they are the best when it concerns producing something creative in the blink of an eye.
Cash Prizes of INR 10,000 for the one who’s able to AD it up!
El Matador
That acutes most of your stock. I knew it had been dumped on the market, so I sold short.
– My man Godfrey (1936)
It takes just one rumor and a few minutes to make the wealthiest the poorest. Welcome to the stock market where patience, nerves and uncertainties go hand in hand and where bulls and bears are involved in an immortal clash of the titans. No one knows what lies ahead. A heady blend of neurons, courage and a lot of luck. So if you want to be a Wall Street whiz kid, declare your presence in the arena. Who says you need to be on the floor of a stock exchange to feel the heat? Welcome to the only stock market in the world that remains open throughout the weekend.
Cash Prizes of INR 16,000 for the bravest of all!
Exemplar
Your attitude determines your altitude
– Shiv Khera
Have you always been the one with an itch for adventure? Have you often felt that you could have done better than the Ambanis or the Tatas if you had had that kind of money?
Well Exemplar gives you that opportunity. Enter the exciting corporate world where you plunge through fierce competition, a vacillating government and a treacherous market. Fortunes can be made or lost within no time. Only the sharpest and the smartest survive.
Virtual Money to play with but real prizes to be won!
Can your conglomerate be an Exemplar?
Cash Prizes of INR 16,000 for the best of the best!
You can find more information at http://www.ktj.in
Article courtesy Anuja Gulati, Batch of ’08, VGSOM
“Occasio” launched January 24, 2007
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Schedued to take place on the 10th and 11th of February, VGSOM’s Management Event, Occasio, has been officially launched. More information can be found at http://www.som.iitkgp.ernet.in/occasio
Kudos to the team behind Occasio!
VGSOM & University of Nebraska – Student Exchange January 24, 2007
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The most powerful force in the promotion of international understanding and peace is exposure to different cultures. The world becomes a smaller, friendlier place when we learn more and more about people from different geographies.
Going by the same ideology, VGSOM dons a whole new look come March 2007 when 34 students and 7 faculty members from University of Nebraska (Omaha & Lincoln) pay an educational visit to UNO’s sibling university, IIT Kharagpur and VGSOM, as reciprocation for VGSOM’s visit to UNO last year when VGSOM students got to interact with Warren Buffett himself.
The trip, spanning approximately two weeks, from March 7, 2007 to March 19, 2007 and 3 metros – Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata, provides the students of VGSOM with the opportunity to meet people from other lands and to experience their cultures. This plants the seeds for a lifetime of international understanding.
For the visiting students, the trip includes; apart from VGSOM & IIT-KGP; a visit to India’s path-breaking corporate giants like Infosys and Biocon along with an interactive session with the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs. Last but definitely not least the visiting students get to attend a talk by the world famous ‘Mumbai Dabbawallas’!
Not to forget, the trip also includes visits to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Taj Mahal and the Mysore Palace among others.
An experience like this benefits both sides equally. For the visiting students it’s an eye opener about ‘The Journey called India’ and for the VGSOMites it’s yet another aspect of being tomorrow’s ‘Global Managers’. Should be quite an experience.
Article courtesy Prachi Khandelwal and Anuja Gulati, Batch of ’08, VGSOM
Games People Way – the Road Map to Web 2.0 – MMORGP January 24, 2007
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Kerberos, the Systems Club at VGSOM organized a lecture by Dr. Prithwis Mukherjee, Head, Learning and Knowledge – Global Delivery, IBM, on 6th September, 2006. The talk was on “Games People Way – the Road Map to Web 2.0 – MMORGP”
Residents of one of the Internet’s most populous virtual worlds shop, attend class, and even run businesses. Soon you may do the same – Second Life
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 342,944 people from around the globe. Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Plane shift, Second Life represents a new genre of rich 3D applications that are going to dominate the contours of emerging internet techno scope.
Dr Prithwis Mukherjee, introduced the audience to this new field, a novel experience. He explained how one could exploit this opportunity for learning, for doing virtual business, for evaluating an employee’s team skills and so on. He himself is an active member of the Second Life community, and gave the audience a brief introduction about the history of Second Life and how it evolved from an era of online games to Plane shift to Second Life.
He described Second Life as “A community that is free to be joined by any one, which will earn you a certain Linden dollars (that can be exchanged for real dollars) and where one can be anyone, anywhere and do any task wished by him or her”.
On this community anyone can currently sign in for free at the link given at the end of the article and create his own AVATAR, in short be whom ever he or she wishes to be.
He then logged in at the IBM’s own Island as “Kolkatta Prince“(his avatar) in his funky and colorful outfit as of a teenager. There he showed us his team’s hangout place (the island).He then showed off his virtual gizmo cycle built by him on Second Life, which was his college time dream. He also had a cool car gifted to him by an online friend of his, which otherwise would have cost him certain 1000 Linden dollars!!
On a serious note, he showed us the various business opportunities that are possible in this virtual world. These activities are not merely a business situation simulation but also yield certain Linden dollars in return. And these Linden dollars can be then converted into real money (US $).
Business activities like buying and selling of land on Second Life and earning a daily amount of Linden $ 250,000, selling a projector system for business meetings, selling of high fashion clothes for avatars, giving funky haircuts for them, all are conducted on second life. All these activities are made possible through computer programming using high level languages and customization is done for the respective customers. On the same lines, one of the IBM associates is thinking of opening up a boutique for Indian styled female clothes and is busy these days programming full time for it!!!
He also showed a live business conference that he and other IBM associates had at a virtual board room on Second Life. A live presentation was also given by one of the associates in this meeting. IBM also uses Second Life as a platform to promote creativity, to test leadership skills and team player qualities of their employees.
He ended the session by taking queries from the students.
So Second Life turned out to be not just a virtual zone to have fun in but also a real life business simulator and enhancer.
All in all it was an enriching and a learning experience about a domain we were uninitiated about.
Resources:
http://Secondlife.com for more information.
Article courtesy Kanishka Bhambhani, Batch of ’08, VGSOM
Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services January 23, 2007
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This talk was delivered on October 14th 2006 by Mr. Gopal Bhageria of IBM Global Business Services.
The students of VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur attended a very informative and thought-provoking guest-lecture on ‘Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services’ on 14th October 2006. The lecture was a part of a series of lectures being organized under the auspices of IBM and Kerberos, the Systems Club at VGSOM.
The lecture dealt with business modeling and the increasing need for service oriented architecture of business and software in today’s world. In computing, SOA defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
Mr. Bhageria also talked about SOA realization, SOA governance and web-services. He also made a suggestion that VGSOM could introduce a course in Enterprise Architecture as there was a great demand for good enterprise architects.
Mr. Gopal Bhageria is leading SOA initiative and Model Driven Business Transformation (an IBM Research initiative http://w3.webahead.ibm.com/w3ki/display/MDBT/Home ) based projects in GBS India. He is also a GBS India SOA and Web Services community leader and a member of TEC-IN an affiliate of IBM Academy of Technology. VGSOM takes pride in the fact that Mr. Bhageria, who has successfully lead teams in developing and implementing business solutions for IBM’s clients, is an alumnus of VGSOM.
SOA Resources
A great place to start is the wikipedia entry on SOA. Excerpts …
SOA is a design for linking computational resources (principally, applications and data) on demand to achieve the desired results for service consumers (which can be end users or other services). OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) defines SOA as the following:
A paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations.
…
Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (service) level rather than micro levels (eg. objects). It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
Article courtesy Kanishka Bhambhani (Member, Kerberos), Batch of ’08, VGSOM.
SpringFest ’07 January 23, 2007
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From the 25th to the 28th of January, IIT Kharagpur sheds its intellectual skin and lets its hair down for a party like no other. With the entire IIT participating (not to mention the thousands of participants coming down from all over Asia), event management can be quite daunting. And what do you get when you combine Management, Tough Task and Party? You get an overwhelming response from VGSOM.
It has become a tradition for VGSOM to actively participate in the management of certain events that come under the umbrella that is Spring Fest, and this year is no different. VGSOM will be organising seven events.
- Ad Spoof – Sell your products… Big Deal that’s what we ARE gonna do after VGSoM. Yes, of course, but the products here can be AS WEIRD AS???
- Dumb Charades – Nothing screams as loud as Silence does. Be dumb and explicit simultaneously to enact to your team members whatever you have in mind.
- Extempore – So you have always been told that you have the gift of the gab. You thought you could put Caesar to shame when it came to oratory. Battle it out on no lesser terms and shut ‘em all up.
- Just A Minute (JAM) – Hocus-Pocus, Squiggly-Wiggly, Honky-Ponky Slush. Can u be that loquacious? Chatting for long hours won’t help here coz this is Just A Minute.
- Turncoats – A debate with a twist… where u have to contradict yourself. Begin with for the motion or against the motion and then change your stance.
- Vateez – Are you the nosy one who’s always asking questions and earning yourself plenty of those if-only looks-could-kill types?? This is just the place for you… But mind you, no more than 16. Not a single one more…Think you are up to it?
- What’s the Good Word – You have been hooked onto words ever since you could spell. Those endless nights on the net challenging people over Scrabble, Literati and Text Twist. If you thought playing Hangaroo was fun, you haven’t seen it all yet. So what’s the Good Word?
Should be a blast!
Article written by Rajesh Sharma, Batch of ’08, VGSOM. Editing by Anuja Gulati, Batch of ’08, VGSOM
Asset Management: Cost and Risk Modelling January 23, 2007
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Dr Gopinath Chattopadhyay of the School of Engineering Systems, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia delivered a talk on Asset Management: Cost and Risk Modelling at the Department of Industrial Engineering, IIT Kharagpur on the 17th of January, 2007.
Dr Chattopadhyay spoke about systems developed by his team to evaluate risk and aid in the management of rail assets for a few Scandanavian countries. The talk was attended by quite a few students from VGSOM (myself included) and was very well received by the audience, especially by the management students since risk modelling and management is coming into its own as a profession for MBAs.
Dr Chattopadhyay was kind enough to get us in touch with a colleague of his who specialises in financial risk modelling and management. We hope to learn much from both of them.
Events @ VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur 