Harpreet Singh is a B.Com graduate who wanted to make it big in sales. He wants to become a salesman so badly and joins AYS Computers. Things start to screw up when the honest Harpreet Singh refuses to give up his ethics to close a deal.

And finally he finds out that his company has been selling computers at really high margins and sucked in after sales support. He then starts out on his own parallel company by using company resources and convinces his colleagues to join him and so goes the movie.

The Blog Post

I do not really go to much movies, but Rocket Singh was one movie I had been wanting to go since I saw its trailer. Why? Because it is about sales! Sales, Marketing, Entrepreneurship movies always grab my attention. And yesterday when I finally went to the movie, it was an amazing experience. But when walking out of the movie hall, our Sujith was like “I don’t really like the movie, I cannot digest some parts of it….”.

So, this post hopes to do justice to those Sujiths out there who missed some keypoints of the movie and what I noticed personally from Rocket Singh – Salesman of the Year movie.

• Bootstrap your business: When Harpreet Singh Bedi started off with his Rocket Sales Corporation, he did not go out and build a flashy office for his company. He instead kept his day job and used his companies resources (telephone, furniture, computers, electricity and all that) to build his company. Though trying this can get you sued for breach of contract, embezzlement, fraud, dishonesty and everything else, it is always a wise idea to minimize expenses with your startup. So, keep those bigass oak tables and revolving chair off your mind and focus on your startup.
• Startups can change things big time: Being a startup, agility is your best friend. You do not have to wait for clearances, you can take decisions instantly, you can rebuild and reorganize overnight and rectify mistakes within days unlike bigger companies who work under six sigma pressures. So, never be bowed by big competitors in your industry. You can do things better, faster and more creatively than them!
• Picking up the right people: Harpreet Singh Bedi just closed a big order due delivery tomorrow. He did not have the people to complete it by due time, what did he do? He picked up his office chai wallah (peon) as a partner to finish it. It is important to know who to entrust what and make sure they enjoy doing it. Otherwise, you are wasting everyone time. Really. Period. So build the right team.
• Sales is not the end of the cycle. It is the start. When Rocket Sales Corporation went live, their philosophy was free service any night and any holiday for the whole year. If you run a service or sell a product, the after sales support you provide your clients can either get you more business or screw it up royally. You choose.
• Volumes, margins and pricing: One of the most important things I personally tell anyone looking at entrepreneurship is cash flow. For me, it is like the one single thing that will make or break a startup. If you think you can make money off volumes, price your products lower and make sure your margin and sustain your operations. Ensure cash flow to keep your company afloat while you look for that big break.
• Exit Strategy. Initially I could not bear the thought of an exit with something I might spend years building with every bit of passion, strength and time I have, but it is important to know when to exit gracefully. You might know many firms where the bosses hang around hogging the management seat while the market needs fresh, innovative and bold thinking. A time will come when you will be obsolete, so prepare for that day.
• Branding is not just a logo. So in the movie, our Rocket Sales Corporation reaches great heights with its good pricing and unique service offerings and the AYS computers now take over the company and make it AYS Rocket Sales Corporation puting the AYS badge on the logo. But AYS being a bigger and bloated company fails to deliver on customer expectations of the Rocket Sales Corporation and sales figures start to come down. When  take over another firm and its brand, it is important to inherit its philosophy and culture and see how you can make the most out of it.

Bonus Tip: This is not new to those watching Indian films, but it seems somehow in a weird way that it helps your company grow way faster when you have a background score. Anyone noticed this trend yet?

Jokes apart, I look forward to your thoughts on the movie and what you think about it.

What I learnt from Rocket Singh: Review
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Hearing the word ‘barcamp’ for the first time?

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event

Venue

BarCamp Kerala 7 will be held at Kristu Jyoti College of Management and Technology, Chetipuzha, Changanassery, Kottayam. More details are available at the venue page

Registeration

You can register for the event in the BarCamp Kerala Site. Till now we have 47 attendees.

Sessions

As of yet we have 10 sessions. If you want to handle a sessions at BarCamp, you can add yourself in the sessions page.

BarCamp Kerala So Far…

If you are still uncertain about coming to BCK, checkout these reports about the previous ones…

• Barcamp Kerala 5
• BarCamp Kerala 5 @ Technopark on May 3rd
• Barcamp Kerala LiveBlog
• First ever BarCamp in Kerala on November 24th, 2007
• BarCamp Kerala 2007

This post was created by lazy me using BarCamp Kerala Post Generator

BarCamp Kerala 7 on 20th of December
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds:  Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

In this video, Ze Frank delivers a humours and smooth talk on the web.

For more Videos of TED, Visit TED.com

Ze Frank: What’s so funny about the Web?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Friend: Hey dude , I see the red sign which means you are busy, but can you help?
Friend: BUZZ!!
You: Yea mate, tell me. (frustrated with the sudden interruption)
Friend: Check up this site hxxp://abc.com , does it load for you?
You: Yea, it loads….
Friend: Thanks a ton man!
You: yea sure ….. (painfully figuring out where you were with your work…..)

If this has not happened to you, you do not have much techie friends on your chat list. The more you have, the more you are familiar with the situation. A website not loading can mean a lot of problems both on the server side and on your client side. Sometimes a ISP issue or a DNS issue can prevent the site not load on your website, but work perfectly on another.

This is where a site like http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/comes into use. As the name suggests it helps you find out if your website is down for everyone or just you. There you go, now stop pestering your friends about it!

Do you use any other site for this purpose? I look forward to see it in my comments section.

How To Tell If a Website Is Down?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Mozilla Prism is an easy and perhaps the easiest way to convert a web application into a desktop appliation. If you are a regular user, you will have a few web appliations open on your browser all the time. I, for instance, I have our custom project management tool, Google Calendar, Google Reader and my email open in tabs pretty much all the time.

Mozilla Prism lets you convert a website into a standalone application easily. By easily, I mean in a single click! See the following video and you will see.

Click here to start using the Prism.

Convert Web Applications into Desktop Applications
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Social Media ia used by many in many different ways. Some use it for promoting their products, others use it to listen to their customers while others give away tips on using their products on the social media platforms.

Here are a few ways I think you can use Social Media.

1. Listen – You can simply be a good listener! I personally use this on myself, our products and even client brands with our inhouse tool. Few ways you can listen to the crowd are by using WhosTalkin or SocialMention and many others including simple tools like Google Alerts.

2. Customer Service – A lot of startups find Social Media a boon for customer service and to get feedback from users in almost real time. Using the listening tools mentioned above, you can help your users in resolving the customer services issues and monitor product feedback.

3. Data Collection – This is perhaps one of the most important factor of Social Media. Many companies have successfully used engaging applications and short term campaigns to collect data of users and build a list and market further.

These are some of the ways you can use social media in your company. So, how do you use social media?

Applications of Social Media
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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I usually have a select of 10-20 themes which I use on most of my niche websites mostly because I have heavily modified them myself or find them to be perfectly coded for Search Engines. This is my list of 10 Search engine friendly wordpress themes.

1. Green Park 2 -

2. PlainTxt -

3. A Dream to Host -

4. Dateless Sniper 1.0

5. Free web 2.0 Theme

5 SEO Friendly WordPress Themes
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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The first flagship product of ayuz – WordZo is now alive and kicking! If you are the type of person who can find bugs, use a alpha application and help contribute to the future of WordZo, do signup for a invite key! This month we plan to send out about 100 invite keys to select users.

What exactly is WordZo? It was conceived by Kenney Jacob which aids in helping users to enhance their vocabulary. WordZo lets you find out meanings of words as you read it and it remembers the words you learnt and has a nifty way of making sure you learnt it well.

At ayruz, this is one of the first products we have done so far and we are looking forward to a public launch by January. If you would like to peep into the system, leave your comment here and I will hook you up with a beta invite key

Enhance your Vocabulary with WordZo
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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I have been a lazy blogger for most part of this year for some reason. While initially it was due to work and getting the basics up at ayruz, these days its more like a loss of purpose in blogging life. The traffic to this blog has been fairly stable at 40,000 pageviews a month and revenue from adsense being a little over 5$ a day making it the dream no-maintenance blog in my network.

But at TheAnand, I do want to blog! Just that I am lost at about what to blog. As the traffic is stable, I cannot guess which type of posts interest you the regular readers of this blog.

So, Quick Question!

What do you want to see on TheAnand? Videos of a monkey sniffing his own butt? SEO tips? Entrepreneurship? Fun stuff? My life? (ente thala, ente full figure? #mallu)

Do help me out guys!

Quick Question: What do you want to see on TheAnand?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Recently I was helping my friends at CSharks, the Indian Game Developers about their sites indexing issues in Bing. Initially I thought it was a flash site based indexing issues which Google had sometime back. Then we found out that BingBot has recently visited the homepage of the site, but failed to see through the redirect they had setup.

Though I knew redirects was tricky, it never occurred it could confuse the BingBot too! To me, it looks like BingBot gets stuck at the page which throws a redirect error and cannot figure out a way to index the new page.

But it seems it is an issue with the redirects. Bing does not know redirects. It seems that a search for Moved Permanently gives out a lot of results. Concerning.

While it is an error which has been on MSN/Live Search for long, it is unlikely to give Bing any discredits as they are not a traditional Search Engine, but a “decision engine”.  But its a bad thing for most website owners as bing is currently the default “search engine” for the Internet Explorer, the most popular browser out there.

Dear Bing,

I know you are trying to do a darn good job, so please fix it asap! Stop the sleepless nights of millions of webmasters!

Bing and 301 Redirects – Moved Permanently Problems
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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