The world around Apurba Sen

This is a cute doll

The
cost of making ‘OSO’ is reported to be Rs 350 million while ‘Saawariya’ has been made at a budget of Rs 400 million.In an unprecedented
move,Sony Pictures, the co-producer of ‘Saawariya’, has allocated Rs
200 million for the film’s publicity.Sony had released 750 Saawariya
trailers in India and another 800 globally.

Whereas ‘OSO’,
backed entirely on SRK factor and his Red Chillies Entertainment.The
movie was sold for Rs 750 Million (inclusive of worldwide rights, but
excluding music and satellite rights) to Eros and director Farah Khan
had said SRK had already made profit of Rs  500 million before the release of the film."OSO" music is said to have sold to T-Series for Rs 8-9 core.In addition association with brands like Maybelline, Sia Jewellery ,Shoppers’ Stop & Nokia will pump in some addition revenue into "OSO"’s kitty.

Sony has released 1034 prints worldwide for "Saawariya" out of which 754 are released in India and 280 are abroad.In contrast ‘OSO’ sets a record relase of 2000 prints.

Post release ‘OSO’ registered 90 % occupancy across the country on its Diwali release, whereas ‘Saawariya’ managed 60 % ,ET repots.

"Shah Rukh film has generated a lot of repeat audience interest in
comparison to " Saawariya ".Among our 15 cineplexes across the country,
the bigger ones did a business of at least Rs.500,000 and smaller ones
Rs.150,000 on Friday. ‘ Saawariya ‘ churned out Rs.350,000 at the big
centres, while at the smaller ones it could only manage to collect
Rs.78,000," -Vishal Kapur, COO  Fun Cinemas

Sometime
back Monica pointed it rightly..battle is between "OSO" &
"Saawariya".Kudos to "OSO" team !! Lets see who bags the satellite
rights of "OSO".

Here is how the movies are competing in blogosphere."Jab We Met" will be released  on this Friday Oct 26th & "Saawariya" on next Friday Nov 9th.I must say its neck-to-neck.

Going by  IndiaFm music reviews "Jab We Met" [3.5] has slight edge over Leela Bhansali’s "Saawariya" [3].When I heard "Tum se Hi",I simply loved the track.Although to much of my surprise the song finds no place in Google Music trends.Songs from Saawariya has blocked the top 2 slots.However..its good to see #7 "Mauja Hi Mauja" has gained much of momentum there.

All the best Tanuj !! I would keep my fingers crossed till next friday.

Reebok has recently launched an exclusive campaign ‘I am More‘ targeting the women’s wear
market in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad.

The campaign will include a mix of print and digital media, Internet and mobile.

Source : AgencyFaqs

Reebok
has tied up with women’s magazine Cosmopolitan for the campaign, where
readers will be encouraged to send in their real-life stories to be
featured in the next issue of the magazine.

Is that a good promotion strategy ??.. specially when Indian print media is witnessing a steady decline in readership. All major magazines experienced a dip of 8-24% in readership

The
company has also strengthened its portfolio of products for women
consumers, by introducing special collections of fitness and gym
gear.Reebok has also tied up with VLCC, Tanishq and Café Coffee Day for
free vouchers and vouchers at a concession, as a part of its retail
promotion strategy.

More details from The Brand Reporter available on subscription.

I was very keen on knowing Internet promotion of the same.IAMAI stats suggest

1. 41% of Indian internet users are in metros (~15 M )
2. 10 % are "working women" within age 18-45 (~1 M in metros ..pessimistic though)

No
idea about Reeboks online plan for 1 M urban Indian women.However in
one of my earlier conversation with Monica, I pointed out its primarily
women (63%) searching for "shoe" in internet.And its women (66%) again seeking customization in shoes.

Sounds like a poorly crafted ad campaign specially with respect to online trends.

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Certain thoughts on social networking quizzes me almost every time.

To start with -

Metcalfe’s Law-
The value of a network grows in proportion to the square of the number
of users, which means that, once a network achieves a certain size, it
becomes almost irresistibly attractive.

Reed’s Law- The value of the Internet grows in proportion to 2^n

Above
laws hold true as long as user base “N” grows through network
invitation from existing user base and the interaction amongst members
remain alive. For example consider Jupiter Media & iProspect survey findings. A vast majority goes to social networking sites to connect or network with others- primarily social needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy, fulfilling love and belonging by means of joining social networks and building a big list of “friends”.

As long such networking continues, value of the network grows.

But
how many friends do we actually need in a social network ? How many
active friends do we have in real life?? As countless as stars?
Definitely NOT!!

At LinkedIn over 30 connections puts you in the
top 10% of all LinkedIn users and around 49 connections makes your
network 100% complete. I assume post that Law of diminishing marginal utility
comes into play. With every additional connection, you derive less and
lesser utility, eventually to a complete standstill. I do agree this
“optimal connection” has a direct correlation to :

1.Nature of
the social network -for example a Facebook profile will always have
lesser number of connections than corresponding Orkut profile.

2.Nature of your job -for example HRs tends to have an ever-growing appetite for new connections.

Ironically
social networking site owners attempts to penalize or discourage
extreme networkers. At the same time they attempts to introduce new
feature (Facebook Applications?) to maintain a high activity level
among the existing users or to delay the zero marginal utility state.

So
what if,all or some the members within a social network attend the
state of zero marginal utility and still continues to add friends ??
Increase in value of the network at –ve marginal utility for its
users?? Will that be the end of that Social Networking era??

Looking forward for your thoughts !!

Related Links :
Weapon of Math Destruction
Maslow’s Need Theory

It
seems the difference between "Chatty Cathy" and "Silent Steve" has just
grown thinner.In past plenty of survey findings suggested that Women
talk more than men, in fact Women talk three times as much as men with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.Underlying reason behind that - Men Are Computers Women Are Cell Phones
.Men and women certainly operate on different hardware.Their brains are
different by the time they’re born, and their brains are what drive
their impulses,values.With women,speech is a specific area located
primarily in left hemisphere with another,smaller specific area in the
right hemisphere.In contrast,within men,speech & linguistic
abilities are mostly operated out of left hemisphere with no specific
location.Having speech on both sides of the brain makes women good
conversationalist.

Refuting that belief, a survey finding published in current issue of the journal Science & BBC
,on nearly 400 undergraduate students - 210 women and 186 men, uncovers
that female subjects get through an average of 16,215 words a day,
compared with their male counterparts’ 15,669, a difference of mere
546. A point to note ( may be potential limitation ) - all participants were university students.

In fact The British National Corpus is a body of material that tests the sexual word budget directly.In the study "Social
Differentiation in the use of English vocabulary: Some Analyses of the
conversational component of the British National Corpus" ,published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistic , average daily word counts are somehow lesser.

Note
that this sample consists of 148 speakers,75 female and  73 male,
engaged during a period of 2 days.However some meaningful deduction we
can derive out of this data:

1. Average words per day per speaker : 1/2 X 4,307,895 words / 148 speakers = 14,554 Words
2. Ratio of words per Female to words per Male : (2,593,452/561)/(1,714,443/536) = 1.45   (i.e. Female speaks 45% more words)
3. So male budgets average  5940 words per day (i.e 14,554/2.45) ,whereas female has rest 8614 words (i.e. 14,554-5940 ) in a day.

In
addition the table indicates that the female participants took an
average of 33% more turns (per speaker) than the male participants,a
sharp contradiction to what Leslie Morgan Steiner has pointed out in
her blog as her personal findings:

1. In a free-speak forum, women speak publicly about 25 % of the time, vs. 75 % for men.
2. When
   the forum is caller-led, women are called upon about 1/3 as often as
   men are (even when the caller is a woman). When there is even one man
   present, we women defer to him and expect him to speak first.

Whatever it is 20,000 Vs 7000 or 16,215 Vs 15,669 or my estimates 8614 vs 5940 ,female is the conversationalist.In addition 46 words women might say, men probably wouldn’t: 

• Book club:
  A female dominated affair, perhaps because women read more fiction, or
  perhaps because men aren’t very good at talking about it.
• Accessorise: If men were ever to use this word it would only be in the context of cars.
• Body image
• Empowering: Men never use this word, perhaps because for the 200,000 years humans have been on the planet, men have had all the power.
• Burlesque: Something involving strip-tease that can apparently involve the above .
• Size zero
• Home birth
• Pilates: Men in the UK, particularly, seem to have no interest in building up their core strength .
• Pomegranate: Men seem ill-equipped to understand the significance and full range of superfoods
• Cellulite
• Absolutely beautiful: The words women often use to describe friends who are not.
• Conventionally attractive: Preceded by "well I suppose she is…", a phrase women often use to describe those who actually are.
• Jesse Metcalfe: A walking Athena poster, see above
• Footless tights: Strange idea, strangely popular
• Breastfeeding
• Emotional intelligence: Something that men usually do not possess, instead preferring the kind of intelligence that involves dates of battles .
• Kitten heels: Or indeed heels of any other kind .
• What are you thinking?: The classic female condition check .
• Feminism: If even veteran feminists can’t agree on what this means then it’s probably best avoided by men .
• Afghanistan: A place where the debate is rather starker .
• Agony aunt: When men seek answers to life-changing problems in magazines, it tends to be under the headline "plasma or LCD?".
• Airbrushing: The process by which magazine picture editors oppress women in an underhand way .
• Flexible working
• Handbagging: As in new Commons leader Harriet Harman’s request to Theresa May not to savage her every Thursday .
• Beefeater: The first female one made her debut this year .
• Babies
• Superwoman
• Ms:Extraordinarily, the battle continues for women to be allowed to avoid definition by their marital status .
• Middleton: As in Kate. Style icon or harassed paparazzo target?
• Concealer
• Why: As in "why do you never call?"

Enough of serious thought ..now some air of humour

A
husband looking through the paper came upon a study that said women use
more words than men.Excited to prove to his wife that he had been right
all along when he accused her of talking too much, he showed her the
study results.

It read "Men use about 15,000 words per day, but women use 30,000".

The wife thought for a while, then finally she said to her husband "It’s because we have to repeat everything we say."

The husband said "What?"

Related Resource:
NPR :Men and Women Equally Talkative, Study Finds

There was a mosquito and a dog who loved each other a lot………..

One day the mosquito got excited and gave a love bite to the dog……..

The dog became emotional and bit the mosquito…….

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The next day………………….

Mosquito died of rabies and dog died of malaria……………….. 

What a touching story………………………..!!!!!!:-)

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Thank you Monica for sharing this and helping me to improve my sense of humour.

Last night my friend Pallavi ,a consumer behavior
expert, was grouching over her irresistible junk diet "potato chips".
To my knowledge she is highly health conscious or at least this is what I
perceive about her. Well are potato chips simply irresistible??

Google
Trends says so. Through out the year the demand of ‘potato
chips‘ seems incessant.

Potato chips as usual almost a straight line.
‘diets’ grows in the start of year, "swimwear" grows somewhere around
March then both falls during the last few months of the year.

So what happens to our physique consciousness??
The trend
of ‘Potato chips’ ,’Swimwear’ & ‘diets’ shows something interesting. kind of
trend worm I love to see.

Hitwise
analyst LeeAnn
Prescott has an
answer to this seasonality

 

Not surprisingly, it turns out there is
  a seasonal correlation between ’swimwear’ and ‘diets.’ The search term chart  below shows that the lowest volume of searches for the two terms is in
    October, November and December. Of course, searches for ‘diets’ surge in
    January when people make their New Year’s Resolutions, but ’swimwear’
    doesn’t pick up again until March, when spring break approaches. It is odd
    though, given how much time it takes to loose any significant amount of  weight, that the correlation between ’swimwear’ searches and ‘diet’
    searches is timed so close.

Ohh Great !! Thats an interesting correlation.

Related Resource:
Wiki Resource

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Dedicated to :Pallavai Aiyer