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Wow!!!, was the word I kept on saying and hearing from others at the wedding of Ritu and Rick. It was definitely a fairly tale wedding, albeit Rick didn’t ride in on a white horse but instead an elephant. It was 3 days of sheer fun and livin’ large at the Samode Palace and Bagh.

Pics

Indian investors for many months have been grabbing every IPO that has come out but as of late – that ain’t the case. I wouldn’t call myself a doomsday guy, but having been in the thick of the “internet revolution” of 1999-2000, history does repeat itself. There have been a few IPO’s I have been tracking and true to form most are dogs. I like to call these three the past, present and future:

Past – Parsvnath Developers, came out two weeks ago and no where near it’s initial price
Present – Cairn India, hit the street on Tuesday – Jan 9 and of course lagging. In fact, the issue was not oversubscribed as first reported and the 3 banks that were leading the road show had to chip in money
Future – Shoba Developers, waiting for the carnage to begin

My favorite (in a sarcastic tone) is Cairn India, they claim to be a part of the Scottish company Cairn Energy PLC. But after reading through the Red Herring document it seems they just put together some wild assumptions about some oil exploration, threw together a management team and honestly couldn’t even copy their parent company’s logo correctly. As of today it was the largest IPO in India, so they did manage to get a lot of money in the door. But my guess is that a large part was due to the marketing of Cairn. A month prior to the book building process (a way to determine the final price and volume), you couldn’t look at a billboard or a TV show without seeing their advertisement’s. They did a great job of also planting rosy stories in the newspapers like they were on the verge of discovering massive amounts of oil, but of course their Red Herring document spoke the truth – discoveries were still many years off if ANY.

Here we are a day after Macworld San Francisco and everyone is weighing in on the latest and greatest from Apple. After everything was said and done, Steve released 3 products:

- Apple iPhone – at first this product looked like the “holy grail”, but now it just seems like an awesome phone and NOT an awesome phone + iPod. But, I’m quite sure I’ll end up buying one of these bad boys in the next next 9-12 months, once they get to Asia.

- Apple TV – i still don’t see the value of this product, if you have space for this product, why not drop another USD 300 and get a full blown mac mini. Yes, this product has component video output, but if you are gonna pimp out your TV room wouldn’t you be using HDMI anyway?

- Improved AirPort Extreme base station. Has the new 802.11n spec + a/b/g compatible. Has a new case that has the same footprint as the mac mini and Apple TV product.

What was missing? New displays, iLife 07, iWork 07, new iPods and Leopard.

Happy New Year to everyone. 2006 was definitely a big year for me and expecting 2007 to be bigger.

Woke up this morning and saw the logo to the left plastered all over the Times of India. It’s a new marketing campaign launched by the Times Group to get everyone jazzed about India Inc. India got a lot of press coverage in 2006 and with this campaign they want to keep the momentum going, personally if the Sensex rises another 48% this year, they won’t have to have a marketing campaign – money talks.