Doaba region: Hub of dental tourism in India

India has recently become a major tourist hub of dental care solutions. You can have your teeth fixed and make your holidays memorable without getting a hole in your pocket.As dentistry gets a new edge with state-of-the-art technology, a large number of NRIs, mostly hailing from the Doaba region of Punjab, better known as the NRI belt, are thronging the city for specialised dental treatments at affordable costs. The NRIs mostly club their travel with treatment.

Doaba region: Hub of dental tourism in India

There is a huge opportunity in Hyderabad.

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An opportunity for Zipcar?

A Plan to Improve Campus Mobility

Lets say we have a few slots reserved for zip car at every building on campus. In college towns, we can have zipcars at dorms, walmart, etc.

Cupid Can Be Stupid

"We don't know why eHarmony has rejected over a million people looking for love," goes the tag line. "At Chemistry.com, come as you are."

Companies like Match, eHarmony, and Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) rely on serial daters to keep their premium services going. If all these lengthy registration forms are bunk, why should folks looking for love bother with the tollbooth-anchored dating sites?

It's free to post an ad on Craigslist to reach others within your town. PlentyOfFish.com is another free website that claims responsibility for 500,000 relationships last year alone. Don't forget the folks who are hooking up on free social networking sites like Facebook, News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace, and United Online's (Nasdaq: UNTD) Classmates.

Why would eHarmony rock a boat that is already taking on plenty of water from free matchmaking sites out there? I just don't see why eHarmony rejects a premium-paying model.

Stupid cupid. It shot itself with its own arrow.

Unbelievable Growth Is Just Beginning

The next boom

The act of paying relatively decent wages for the cost of living has spurred a new phenomenon in many formerly impoverished countries: a middle class. While that may not sound like a big deal to the average American, it is a huge deal for the rest of the world.

Taken as a whole, a solid middle class absolutely dwarfs the spending power of anyone else. While the ultra-rich may have a whole bunch of money, there are only so many of them around. To have a strong local economy, instead of simply an export-driven one, a country needs a solid middle class.

Teacher turnover leaves void in U.S. schools

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone - a higher turnover rate than in the past.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment

According to the most recent Department of Education statistics available, about 269,000 of the nation's 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-04 school year.

Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied.

Buying an Airline Ticket

Coming from Airline Industry and specifically having worked in Revenue Management, I know how much the Airlines spend to squeeze out the last dollar from you. Today I was trying to buy a ticket for my parents trip from Hyderabad to Newark. I didn’t want my folks to travel to Mumbai or some other location in India from Hyderabad as I feel that transit in Indian Airports is not very comfortable. So, all the considerations are for flights which have a direct access outside India from Hyderabad.

Stem Cell: The Body As Clinic

Dr. Balasubramanian outlines some of the emerging focus areas for SCT and research in India: "One is retinal reconstruction, Dr Taraprasad and Dr Geetha at lvpei are working on it; Dr Madhuri Bihari of AIIMS is pushing the case of neuro-muscular difficulties; Dr Shiv Sarin at the G.B.Pant Hospital in Delhi is routing for liver, and a clutch of hospitals with CMC Vellore are looking at heart. We are most likely to make good progress over the years in these areas." But diabetes is not yet a thrust area though there is a high incidence of it in India. Dr Balasubramanian says it is still a big question whether stem cell biology is required at all to tackle it. "But there are two or three centres looking into this area too," he noted.

India PC Market

Dell's Indian market share is at five per cent, trailing behind HP, Lenovo and local giant Hindustan Computers, which have had a presence in India longer and offer lower prices.

Dell's inability to compete with their price tags results at least partly from the company shipping fully-assembled systems into India. Paying more in duties than its rivals' locally manufactured boxes makes Dell boxes a harder sell.

Dell is investing $30m in the facility, which should turn out 400,000 systems per year, kicking off in July.

AMI-Partners estimates that 40 percent of small businesses in India plan to invest in computers for the first time in the next 12 months. This opens a huge opportunity for PC and related hardware, software and solution vendors. Over a million SBs, out of a total of 2.7 million SBs in India, do not own any computers, according to the latest study by Access Markets International (AMI) Partners. About 15 percent of the non-PC owning SBs surveyed said they would opt to buy laptop PCs, instead of a desktop.

Over 40% of SBs said their most preferred laptop or desktop brand is Hewlett-Packard. Most SBs base their buying decision on newspaper ads -- 65% of SBs said they rely on newspapers for gathering information about IT-related products. Next in line was the opinion of friends and family.

Adding another jewel to India’s crown as the fastest growing IT market in Asia Pacific**, HP has recently announced the launch of a new Rs. 100 crore (US$21.9m) manufacturing facility in Pantnagar, Uttaranchal, significantly adding to the country’s substantial IT resources.

In a nod to India’s flourishing domestic IT market, the new facility will be developed to meet the growing demand for HP products across the country.

Inaugurated recently by the Honorable Chief Minister of Uttaranchal, Shri Narayandatt Tiwari, the plant is HP’s second in the country and is estimated to produce a massive 3,000,000 computers each month.

The focus will be on manufacturing HP’s latest range of desktop computers, workstations, notebooks and servers for the rapidly expanding local market.

Importantly for the northern Indian town of Pantnagar, the new facility will provide vital employment (both direct and indirect) to around 1,000 people in the region, once fully operational.

The New Pornographers

Above Acworth’s desk is a framed article from a British tabloid, The Sun, which he picked up by chance while vacationing in Spain in 1997. The headline reads, “Fireman Makes ¼ Million Pounds Pushing Internet Filth.”

“I realized this article was going to change my life,” says Acworth. At that point, he had already earned a mathematics degree from Cambridge, a master’s from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris—one of Europe’s most renowned business schools—and was working toward a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had also worked for a year at Barings Bank in London.

“This guy had simply taken some photos, put them behind a password-protected area and started charging people with credit cards. There was nothing even remotely clever about it. The fact that he could make that amount of money was astonishing. I thought, Do I really want to finish my Ph.D. and end up in a bank?”

Peter Acworth is a bondage enthusiast who started kink.com in 1997 out of his student bedroom while he was a PhD student in New York City. His first models were students at Columbia University, who he paid to be tied up while he tried to conceal his erection! After a huge initial success, he moved to San Francisco and started expanding.

Why the West is outsourcing healthcare

With more than 45 million U.S. citizens lacking health insurance and no end in sight to the rise of health care costs, Americans are increasingly turning to places like MedRetreat to help them outsource their health care to hospitals in India, Thailand, Turkey and Singapore. It's estimated that 150,000 foreigners sought treatment in India alone in 2004, and that number is growing by 15% a year, according to the international independent consulting firm Oxford Analytica.