The State of Sourcing

There has been quite a brouhaha over the impact of tablets and e-book readers in our lives over the past couple of years. With the iPad series being the clear front-runners, the other game-changers are Amazon’s Kindle series and the Nook by Barnes & Noble. All the potential talk over how these will have a massive influence on media, marketing and publishing is explained by the fact that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have each decided to put another 4-5 million tablets each into the market in 2012.

This holiday season, consumers are looking at buying and gifting another transformational format for the media and entertainment industry – the e-book. With the foundation being built slowly over the past two years, the e-book industry is now unleashing its full marketing potential to convince tablet owners to make the “digital switch” from traditional hard covers and paperbacks to its electronic form. Amazon and B&N have already established their proprietary e-book formats and dozens of other publishers are getting on-board to digitize their output.

Continue reading ‘Holiday season cheer for publishing outsourcing with meteoric rise in demand for e-book services’ »

The comparisons between Apple iPad and this $35 ‘still unnamed’ mobile device are so unfair. The online buzz about this new product is almost deafening. Ever since the Indian government announced the launch of the ‘$35 m -device’ (lets call it that, since it does not have a name yet, and this anyway seems to be the most exciting ‘fact’ about it), discussions abound on its viability, price, wasted funds, its not-so-successful predecessors, apps that it can offer and its future. While debate on all of these is justified, some more thoughts:

Why is cost such a big issue?

Continue reading ‘Education at $35… Dreaming big?’ »

The Union Human Resource Minister, Kapil Sibal has taken it upon himself to completely overhaul the Indian education system… a good and long-awaited move. The Right to Education Act (RTE) was indeed a major development in the scheme of things. This is another move towards making education universal, as primary education, something that many of us take for granted is actually out of bounds for millions others.

Recently the Minister talked about the need to recruit 2 million teachers to achieve the goals set out by the Act. The other requirement would be more schools… schools where students are actually taught, and not just decrepit buildings. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has also expressed a desire to build 6500 ‘model’ schools. This is where the private players come in. That the Government will need help from the private sector to successfully implement RTE, hardly needs an intelligent analysis. What is debatable is – Will the PPP work? How will it work? And how long do we have to wait before it makes an impact? The problem, we cannot afford to lose any more time.

Continue reading ‘How long before PPP bridges the education demand supply gap?’ »

• Schools in West Asia and Gulf will be offering certification from the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), with the formal launch of CBSE-I, the international brand of the board.
• The Foreign Education Providers (Regulatory) Bill that will allow foreign universities to open branches in India was recently approved by the cabinet. When this bill becomes a law after approval in the parliament, foreign universities will be able to enter the education market.

The developments in the education space have evinced a lot of interest. The pace at which changes take effect may not alter much with respect to the earlier years. Though if any of these are effective and achieve what they are meant to, India will arrive on the global education scene. The two instances mentioned above tackle two different segments within the education market – K-12 and Higher Education.

Continue reading ‘Indian education: Giant leap to globalization’ »