Netflix slashes its forecast for subscriber gains

In this Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012, photo, a woman holds up a Netflix envelope to be photographed in front of a Netflix application on a television in East Derry, N.H. Netflix slashed its prediction of how many U.S. video streaming subscribers it would add this year after subpar third-quarter results, causing a sharp sell-off in its stock in after-hours trading. The Los Gatos, California-based video streaming company said Tuesday it added 1.2 million net subscribers in the U.S. in the three months through September, which was on the low end of its previous forecast of gains between 1 million to 1.8 million. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

In this Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012, photo, a woman holds up a Netflix envelope to be photographed in front of a Netflix application on a television in East Derry, N.H. Netflix slashed its prediction of how many U.S. video streaming subscribers it would add this year after subpar third-quarter results, causing a sharp sell-off in its stock in after-hours trading. The Los Gatos, California-based video streaming company said Tuesday it added 1.2 million net subscribers in the U.S. in the three months through September, which was on the low end of its previous forecast of gains between 1 million to 1.8 million. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Netflix slashed its prediction for how many U.S. video-streaming subscribers it would add this year after subpar third-quarter results, causing a sharp sell-off in its stock in after-hours trading.

The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company said it added 1.2 million net streaming subscribers in the U.S. in the three months through September, which was on the low end of its forecast for gains between 1 million to 1.8 million.

The disappointing figure caused Netflix to cut its estimate for full-year U.S. streaming subscriber additions to between 4.7 million and 5.4 million. Previously, Netflix predicted it would gain as many as 7 million domestic streaming subscribers by year's end.

Growing streaming subscribers in the U.S. is crucial to Netflix because the number of DVD-by-mail subscribers continues to fall and its losses internationally are mounting. Last week, it added streaming service in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

Netflix also needs more subscribers because it is sticking to its price of $8-a-month for unlimited video streaming. The company faced a huge backlash last year when it raised prices as much as 60 percent for people who subscribed for both DVD service and streaming. The company says its reputation has yet to recover.

CEO Reed Hastings brushed off the subscriber miss, even as Netflix shares were hammered, falling $11.13, or 16.3 percent, to $57.09 in after-hours trading.

"In perfect hindsight, it was not the best choice to put out that high a goal," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We want high goals, we're seeking to grow very quickly and have the member satisfaction be extremely high. But five million is great progress. And we look forward to building on that."

Netflix's chief financial officer, David Wells, said the heavily watched London Olympics cut into new subscriber signups in August and they didn't bounce back very strongly in September. The company also said that it was forced to turn off service to customers more often because it couldn't collect a valid credit or debit card ? a result of it expanding into more lower-income homes.

Hastings said he still believes the company has the potential to sign up 60 million to 90 million homes in the U.S. in the long run, about two to three times the number that now subscribe to pay TV channel HBO.

"We feel that Netflix offers such a good value at $7.99 unlimited that even low-income households will choose to subscribe to Netflix in large numbers," he said.

The company ended the quarter with 25.1 million U.S. streaming customers and 4.3 million in other countries, which included an overseas gain of about 690,000 during the quarter. DVD-by-mail subscribers in the U.S. fell to 8.6 million from 9.2 million in June. About two-thirds of its DVD customers are also streamers.

Analysts said the company's inability to forecast subscriber growth correctly hurt the stock.

Andy Hargreaves, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said the company's long-term target is "very, very optimistic."

"Nobody knows what's going to happen 10 years from now," he said. "They don't know what's going to happen next quarter."

Analyst Arvind Bhatia with Sterne Agee said Netflix's stock volatility is largely due to inconsistent forecasts.

"Poor visibility leads to poor stock performance," he said.

Despite the subscriber miss, the company said it earned $7.7 million, or 13 cents per share, in the latest quarter, beating the 5 cents per share expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

Revenue rose 10 percent to $905.1 million, in line with forecasts.

Netflix has said it would take the profits it makes from its declining DVD business and growing U.S. streaming operations to fund an ambitious overseas expansion. But slowing growth at home looks to put a damper on that enthusiasm.

The latest push into Scandinavia will boost its international losses to a "peak" in the final quarter of the year, according to a letter by Hastings and Wells. It already operates in Canada, the U.K., Ireland and several Latin American countries.

"We intend this to be our peak quarter of international losses, and expect international losses will decline quarter by quarter next year," they said. "Once we've substantially reduced international losses, and with Netflix then being solidly profitable on a global basis, we will launch our next round of international expansion."

Netflix predicted that its fourth-quarter earnings would range between a loss of $13 million, or 23 cents per share, and a gain of $2 million, or 4 cents per share. Analysts were expecting a loss of 5 cents per share.

The worst-case loss predicted by the company would push it into the red for the year, which would give the company its first annual loss in a decade.

___

Business Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-10-23-Earns-Netflix/id-fe3f5107ddd54693a68e94374090f1b4

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Debt Wish: Every UAE household owes Dh350,000 to banks

Call it the UAE resident?s debt wish. How else can you explain that, on average, everyone living here in the UAE ? man, woman, child ? owes more than Dh55,000 to the banks in personal debt?

Official statistics published on Monday by the UAE Central Bank show that, as of June 2012, UAE residents owe Dh422 billion on their mortgages and personal loans, more than triple since 2006.

With an estimated population of 7.6 million and an average household size of 6.3, that works out to Dh350,000 of debt that each one of the UAE?s households is saddled with.

This record debt, which includes personal loans for business purposes, is up by more than 205 per cent in less than six years, from Dh138.2bn recorded in December 2006.

Bank credit to UAE residents, in fact, crossed the Dh1 trillion-threshold for the first time ever in February this year, and stands at an all-time high of Dh1.02 trillion as of June 2012.

Real estate loans, or mortgages, have seen the most increase in the five-and-a-half-year period, rising by more than 475 per cent, or almost six times, from Dh28.28bn in December 2006 to Dh161.53bn in June 2012.

In fact, after the property price bust in 2009, mortgages have slowed down remarkably and, after declining by about 1 per cent in 2011, property loans have only recently started rising once again, with latest data showing an annualised increase of 1.4 per cent in 2012, which should take the total amount of debt in mortgages by the end of 2012 back to 2010 levels.

On the other hand, personal loans for consumption purposes have jumped more than two-and-a-half times (an increase of 171 per cent), from Dh28.82bn in December 2006 to 78.25bn in June 2012. In fact, personal loans for consumption have seen the fastest rise in the last six months among personal debt categories, rising by 13.17 per cent ? or an annualised rate of 26.34 per cent ? from Dh69.14bn at the end of 2011.

At Dh180.96bn in June 2012, personal loans for business purposes is in fact 1 per cent lower than what it was in December 2011 (Dh182.95bn), but has more than doubled from Dh81.13bn in December 2006.

But does higher household debt necessarily amplify downturns and weaken economic recovery? A recent report by the International Monetary Fund, based on an analysis of advanced economies over the past three decades, found that housing busts and recessions preceded by larger run-ups in household debt tend to be more severe and protracted.

?Household debt soared in the years leading up to the Great Recession.

In advanced economies, during the five years preceding 2007, the ratio of household debt to income rose by an average of 39 percentage points, to 138 per cent,? the IMF?s World Economic Outlook (April 2012) said in the chapter titled ?Dealing With Household Debt?.

?Based on case studies, we find that government policies can help prevent prolonged contractions in economic activity by addressing the problem of excessive household debt,? it noted.

However, the IMF report acknowledged that there are no conclusive reports on whether or not a higher level of household debt negatively impacts a country?s economic performance. ?Overall, there is no accepted wisdom about whether and how gross debt may restrain economic activity,? it said.

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Source: http://www.emirates247.com/business/debt-wish-every-uae-household-owes-dh350-000-to-banks-2012-10-23-1.480004

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Eugenics in education: Healthy boy banned from ... - Natural News

(NaturalNews) An 11-year-old California schoolboy named Colman Chadam has been banished from his school and forced to transfer to another school because he carries the genetic mutation for cystic fibrosis. The boy shows no symptoms of the disease and appears to be in perfect health. He is being banished from his own school solely due to the genetic code he carries.

This is being reported by Fox News, Daily Mail and other news outlets.

What we're seeing here is the beginning of the application of eugenics in public schools. This is how it starts: Banning little boys and girls because of a "bad" gene sequence, even if they have absolutely no symptoms and are living in a state of perfect health. Next it progresses to racial genetic profiling, with declarations that people of certain races are "genetically inferior" and therefore unable to be taught in public schools, we'll be told. And from there, as history has shown, it moves into a eugenics phase where mad scientists backed by government power pursue forced sterilizations of those who don't have the "correct" genetic profile.

From there, it is of course a small step to firing up the gas chambers and just doing away with anyone who doesn't have the right genes. As HBO host Bill Maher recently said, "I'm consistently pro-death. ...My motto is let's kill the right people."

The really startling thing about this decision to banish a young boy from school is that his non-symptomatic health condition is not even contagious! He is being banned on the presupposition that he might someday become symptomatic and harbor bacteria in his lungs which could be passed on to other schoolchildren.

But wait a minute: Since when did we ban schoolchildren for the possibility of harboring bacteria? Have you ever seen a young child in school who wasn't harboring bacteria? If this is the new standard, then every snot-nosed kid would need to be banned from schools, too, because they're harboring all kinds of bacteria. Every kid who coughs in class should be banned, too, because their respiratory tract might be harboring bacteria.

But of course this never happens. Colman Chadam is being banned from school not because it makes any medical sense, but because the school is attempting to set a precedent for eugenics-based denial of education to young children. Colman is easy to target because he's white, but the real goal of these eugenicists is to eliminate blacks and minorities. Once they set the precedent with white kids, they can simply expand the program to go after those they really want to target.

In the case of Colman Chadam, his mother made the silly mistake of disclosing his genetic condition to school officials. She must have been one of those naive government worshippers who thought school authorities would honor her privacy and make decisions based on rational thinking. Instead, her son got discriminated against because of his genetic makeup. This is, by definition, medical racism.

Schools claim they do not judge children by the color of their skin, but they do judge children by other genetic markers, as you're seeing here. That's the very definition of racism, and there's no limit to how far they can take this. The argument will now be that your child is "genetically predisposed" to something like cancer, or tuberculosis, or violent behavior. Any genetic "defect" can be used to deny your child an education.

My advice? Don't tell school officials anything they don't need to know. And for certain don't take your child to a pediatrician, because they will call the police on you and have you arrested if you refuse to injected your child with mercury-laced vaccines.

Watch the film GATTACA to see an exploration of where all this genetic profiling could be headed.

Here's a trailer of the film:

About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health author and award-winning journalist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he has created several downloadable courses on survival and preparedness, including his widely-downloaded course on personal safety and self-defense. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2010, Adams created TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural living video sharing site featuring thousands of user videos on foods, fitness, green living and more. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams also serves as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and pursues hobbies such as martial arts, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. He's also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don't Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds.

Have comments on this article? Post them here:

?people have commented on this article.

Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/037635_schoolchildren_genetic_profiling_medical_racism.html

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Apple's iPad Mini much pricier than rival tablets

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, introduces the iPad Mini in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, introduces the iPad Mini in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

The iPad Mini is shown in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an event to announce new products in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, introduces the iPad Mini in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, introduces the iPad Mini in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) ? Apple Inc.'s pencil-thin, smaller iPad will cost much more than its competitors, signaling the company isn't going to get into a mini-tablet price war.

The company debuted the iPad Mini Tuesday, with a screen two-thirds smaller than the full model, and half the weight. Customers can begin ordering the new model on Friday. In a surprise, Apple also revamped its flagship, full-sized iPad just six months after the launch of the latest model.

Apple's late founder Steve Jobs once ridiculed a small tablet from a competitor as a "tweener" that was too big and too small to compete with either smartphones or tablets. Now Apple's own Mini enters a growing small-tablet market dominated by Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Fire.

Apple is charging $329 and up for the Mini ? a price that fits into the Apple product lineup between the latest iPod Touch ($299) and the iPad 2 ($399). Company watchers had been expecting Apple to price the iPad Mini at $250 to $300 to compete with the Kindle Fire, which starts at $159. Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Nook HD and Google Inc.'s Nexus 7 both start at $199.

"Apple had an opportunity to step on the throat of Amazon and and Google yet decided to rely on its brand and focus on margin," said Bill Kreher, an analyst with brokerage Edward Jones.

Apple has sold more than 100 million iPads since April 2010. Analysts expect Apple to sell 5 million to 10 million iPad minis before the year is out.

Apple shares fell $20.67, or 3.3 percent, to $613.36 when the price was announced. Shares of Barnes & Noble Inc. jumped 88 cents, or 6.1 percent, to $15.32. Shares of Amazon.com Inc. rose 53 cents, or 0.2 percent, to $234.31.

Apple starts taking orders for the new model on Friday, said marketing chief Phil Schiller in San Jose. Wi-Fi-only models will ship on Nov. 2. Later, the company will add models capable of accessing "LTE" wireless data networks.

When pre-orders start on Oct. 26, the iPad Mini will be competing for the attention of gadget shoppers with the release of Windows 8, Microsoft's new operating system.

The screen of the iPad Mini is 7.9 inches on the diagonal, making it larger than the 7-inch screens of the competitors. It also sports two cameras, on the front and on the back, which the competitors don't.

The iPad mini is as thin as a pencil and weighs 0.68 pounds, half as much as the full-size iPad with its 9.7-inch screen, Schiller said.

The screen resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels, the same as the iPad 2 and a quarter of the resolution of the flagship iPad, which starts at $499.

The new model has better apps and is easier to use than competitors like Google's Nexus, said Avi Greengart, a consumer electronics analyst with Current Analysis.

"This really is not in the same category as some of the other 7-inch tablets," he said. "And that's before you consider that it has a premium design ? it's made of metal that's extremely lightweight."

Jobs attacked the whole idea of smaller tablets in his last appearance on a conference call with analysts in October 2010.

"The reason we wouldn't make a 7-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a price point. It's because we don't think you can make a great tablet with a 7-inch screen," Jobs said. "The 7-inch tablets are tweeners, too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad."

Job's chief objection was that a smaller screen would make it hard to hit buttons on the screen with the fingers ? never mind that Apple's iPhone, with an even smaller screen, was already a hit at the time.

Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue started working on changing Jobs' mind. In an email sent to other Apple managers in January 2011, Cue said the CEO had started warming to the idea of a smaller tablet. The email surfaced as part of Apple's patent trial against Samsung Electronics Co. this year. Jobs died last October.

Company watchers have been expecting the iPad Mini for a year and most of the details, except the price, had leaked out.

Apple also said it's upgrading its full-size iPad, doubling the speed of the processor. Previously, the company has updated the iPad once a year.

The fourth-generation iPad will have a better camera and work on more "LTE" wireless data networks around the world. Apple is also replacing the 30-pin dock connector with the new, smaller "Lightning" connector introduced with the iPhone 5 a month ago.

The price of the new full-size model stays the same as the previous version, starting at $499 for a Wi-Fi-only version with 16 gigabytes of memory.

Apple also introduced a 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop with a "Retina" display sporting four times the resolution of the older model.

The new model follows a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a Retina display introduced this summer, and goes on sale Tuesday for $1,699.

The old MacBook Pro will still be sold, starting at $1,199.

The new model dispenses with an optical disc drive and a traditional hard drive. Instead, it uses solid-state "flash" memory. This makes it 20 percent thinner and at 3.75 pounds, nearly a pound lighter than the previous model.

Apple also eliminated the optical drive from its new iMac desktop computer, helping slim the edges down to 5 millimeters, one-fifth the thickness of the old model. That makes the edges thinner than most stand-alone computer monitors. It bulges in middle of the back, however.

An iMac model with a 21.5-inch screen will start shipping in November for $1,299 and up, Schiller said. A 27-inch version will start at $1,799.

___

Svensson contributed from New York.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2012-10-23-Apple-iPad%20Mini/id-2727b1839a1543c5a7e740a5b4e88296

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How small businesses are using social media marketing - Leaders ...

Just over a month ago, Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing released a study titled ?Pathway to Influence: a Study of SMBs* and Social Media.? ?(embedded below)

What?s important about this study is that it benchmarks social media utilization and implementation on a smaller-scale. ?Too often people tout Ford, Coca-Cola or some other huge entity as benchmarks for social media marketing success, but the scale and budget that those companies enjoy make their tactics somewhat irrelevant to companies with a smaller-scale. ?That said, this study of small and medium businesses STARTED at $5+ million revenue, so this should be a wake-up (at least somewhat) to a very small business or ambitious?entrepreneur?who is spending as much or more on budget than a $5 million company.

What the ?Pathway to Influence? study did was sense small and medium sized businesses on a whole range of topics around their social media presence. ?In aggregate, the insights offer a pretty good ?state of social media? for smaller businesses, and I think Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing (specifically Frank Strong and the phenomenal John Jantsch) did a great job identifying the need for this data and then collecting and presenting it in such a digestible fashion.

*SMB = small and medium-sized businesses

Who is managing social media marketing?

One of the key?takeaways?from the study was that 73% of the businesses in the study made social media marketing an additional function of their marketing department. ?Assuming that a portion of the remaining 27% would use interns or some zero-cost mechanism, this indicates that small businesses aren?t spending more money on headcount to manage their social media presence. ?This may indicate that there is more opportunity for social media marketing trainers than there are for community managers for businesses this size.

Another takeaway was that the average business in this study has a social media marketing budget of $845 per month for social media tools (just over $10K per year). ?Many?respondents also?indicated?that they expect to increase budget in the near-term. ?This may present an opportunity for social media consultants who have a broad understanding of social media management tools to set-up a robust set of tools, save a company money and pay their bills. ?It also seems to indicate that this size of business may be susceptible to software pitches because they have budget and because social media marketing is oftentimes ancillary to the marketing function.

What are people measuring?

One of the more illuminating insights from the study was the data on how these businesses are measuring their social media marketing efforts. ?It appears that many companies are marrying their social media efforts to their website, presumably (hopefully?) as part of an inbound?marketing campaign.

The additional measurements such as follower size, follower demographics, hashtags, et cetera seem to indicate that businesses are focusing a lot on awareness metrics for the majority of their measurements. ?While this seems somewhat incongruent with the theory that their social media marketing is tied into an active inbound marketing effort, it shows that businesses are measuring their efforts and most importantly that businesses are not freewheeling social media.

Scale.

One of the statistics that stuck out for me was that only half of sensed businesses saw scale in their social media efforts as important. ?Assuming all or most of the $5 mil businesses are not local brick and mortar businesses, this indicates some misunderstanding of the power of social media. ?Sales has always been about?numbers,?and social media marketing isn?t a practice that breaks all conventional sales wisdom. ?In fact, because of the low-barrier to entry for most social media, scale may be more important for social than many other top-of-the-funnel tactics.

This indicates to me that there are training opportunities for businesses of this size (the caveat being that they would open to them), and that businesses who aren?t currently utilizing social media don?t have as steep a path to catch-up to their competition as one might think.

What I think this means

This study is a pretty honest assessment of how smaller businesses are utilizing social media marketing, and it provides a more realistic benchmark for smaller businesses than most examples of social media prowess. ?It shows that smaller businesses are investing in social media marketing, that their understanding of the channels are growing, and that they are committed to grow the channels for the future.

What are your takeaways from this study? ?What is the state of social media marketing from your perspective? ?How effective are small and medium sized businesses participating right now? ?How well is social media marketing being measured?

Photo Credit

I see social media as a huge differentiator for small businesses and try to tailor my insights to support that view. I am the 12th most influential social media blogger according to Kred, and the single most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff according to Klout. Neither of those is probably true. Representing Cincinnati, Ohio and my hometown of Seattle, Washington.

Source: http://leaderswest.com/2012/10/21/small-business-social-media-marketing/

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Interview with Neeraj Gupta from Meru Cabs | Nagpur Entrepreneurs

Conveyance is a major issue for people residing in Tier I cities. However, by introducing India?s first metered radio cabs under the name Meru Cabs, Neeraj Gupta offered a solution that made every traveler?s journey fast, safe and pleasurable.

In this entrepreneur interview, Neeraj Gupta traces his journey from starting a garage to becoming the MD of the 3rd largest ?Radio Taxi? company in the world. No wonder, Meru Cabs is the only company in India to have won the ?Best IT User Awards? by NASSCOM CNBC TV-18 in 2008, 2009 & 2010.

Q: Can you tell us how you got started from an old garage in Oshiwara, Mumbai.

Till the time I got married at the age of 24 I was trying my hands at odd jobs and not doing anything substantial or material. After marriage, I realized it was high time I settle down with some business that is concrete and gives me full time occupation. With a loan of Rs.50000/- from my wife, I ventured into an automobile garage with a partner who had the technical expertise of running a garage.

With the limited capital in hand, opening a road side garage seemed to be the best option at that time. I managed the sales & marketing side of the business and very soon we had a long list of corporate and retail clients for our business

Q: When and how did Meru Cabs happen?

In the year 2000, I had ventured into staff transportation business with a single mini bus contract and later expanded on pan India basis with a fleet of 1300 vehicles by the year 2006. By this time, the clients were demanding newer vehicles fitted with technology and competition was also brewing from un-organized players.

During that year Govt. of Maharashtra had come out with a tender to offer license to operate radio taxis in Mumbai. This was a unique opportunity for us as we could enter the retail segment under this scheme and had the fall back arrangement of corporate business to keep us afloat till the retail business starts kicking in for us.

Q: What were the key challenges you faced while starting Meru Cabs?

There were quite a few challenge in this business model and hence not many looked at this opportunity.

1. The license was for 10000 taxis that means it required a huge capital investment and ability to manage such a large fleet.

2. The main condition was to obtain the existing black& yellow taxi permits on lease which was a completely unchartered territory with no clue as to how that will be managed.

3. The segment was highly un-organized with a challenge to train and develop drivers from the black & yellow segment, own and maintain such a large fleet which was never done in India before.

4. Since the market was dominated by the black & yellow taxis, there was a fear of back lash and resistance from the taxi drivers and unions.

We faced all the above issues but managed to overcome them over a period of time

Q: What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are planning to start a capital intensive business?

Access to capital ? first through own resources then debt and lastly through equity is the pre-requisite. To enter a capital intensive business one must evaluate his strengths and challenges in the business he wishes to enter. Understanding of the market and its potential to get a share of the market is very important.

Ability to sustain is the key to success. Complete commitment to the venture by the entrepreneur and a stable management team to operate a large business is a must for a capital intensive business.

Concluding part of this interview will be published next week. Stay tuned!

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About Meru Cabs: Meru Cabs was one of the first companies to launch metered ?Radio cabs? in India under its brand ?Meru.? In the last 3 years, they have shown consistent growth in terms of the fleet, people revenues and popularity. If you want to book a cab in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi or Hyderabad, try them out at www.merucabs.com

Source: http://www.nagpurentrepreneurs.com/entrepreneur-interviews/interview-with-neeraj-gupta-from-meru-cabs-1

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Video Conferencing Startup Blue Jeans Network Adds LinkedIn Integration

By integrating with LinkedIn, Blue Jeans will allow users to use their social network credentials to sign in. Once they've connected, other users they are video conferencing with will be able to see their headshot, bio, and other information stored on LinkedIn, as it will be automatically uploaded to their Blue Jeans profile.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/WZ2bSS5H5Eg/

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