Author: Biz India

Authors:  Gary Bahadur, Jason Inasi, and Alex de Carvalho Publisher: MCgraw-Hill  – 341  pages Book Review by: Venkat Balasubramaniam In today’s Internet age, there is boundless opportunity to market your products and services through social media and increase your revenues and profits by adding new customers to your database. With hundreds of millions of consumers connected on Facebook, Linked In and other social media, it is easier than ever for companies of all sizes to reach out to and communicate with consumers of all income levels and assets. At the same time, threats galore abound today. On personal and corporate levels, your bank accounts, your credit cards, your data, your digital assets, your financial information, your identity, your images and logos, your rights, and even your very reputation are at risk of being attacked and stolen. Often, it is not possible to recover your stolen money, to immediately cancel your credit cards, foolish to recover data that must have been copied, get back digital assets (that can be modified and re-used) stop others from using your images and logos, regain your rights, or un-mar your spotless reputation. Loss recovery and damage control is expensive and time-consuming. Better to prevent all these undesirable events from recurring or better still, from occurring in the first place. The authors of this book – Lal Bahadur, Jason Inasi and Alex de Carvalho –...

Author: Adam Lashinsky Publisher: Hachette –Business Plus – 223 pages Book Review by:  Nano Khilnani Apple Inc. has one of the highest market values among public firms worldwide. As of the close of trading on February 20, 2012 its price per share was just a little over $502. With 932 million shares outstanding, that works out to a market value of almost $468 billion. At the end of its last fiscal year on September 24, 2011, it had revenues of over $108 billion and net income of almost $26 billion, amounting to a net profit margin of 24 percent. It has a healthy balance sheet with its net worth being over $90 billion. (assets of $139 billion less liabilities of $49 billion). It is one of the world’s fastest-growing companies of its size. A ten-year look shows that in 2002 its revenue was $5.74 billion. That amount multiplied by almost 19 times to grow to $108.25 billion by 2011. What is even more remarkable is that its profit of $65 million in 2002 multiplied almost 400 times to $25.92 billion in ten year by 2011, or an average annual growth of around 40 percent. Apple has been one of the world’s leading technological innovators, having come up with numerous lifestyle-enhancing products that are not just liked but immensely loved by tens of millions of consumers. To thinks that its...

Author: Barbara Janson Cohen Publisher: Wolters Kluwer-Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins – 603 pages Book Review by:  Nano Khilnani This large book of medical terms comes with a CD-ROM that makes referencing easier. At the end of the book are also useful, detachable cards that facilitate learning of medical terminology. How? On one side of each card is a prefix or a suffix and on the other side is its meaning. Examples: The prefix leuko general means white in medicine, as in leukocyte or white blood cells; the prefix erythro means red, as in erythrocyte or red blood cell. The suffix ectomy means removal, as in appendectomy or removal of the appendix. So when the reader first comes across the word leukopenia, he or she would know that it pertains to white blood cells. Leukopenia means a decrease of white blood cells, which protect the body against “invasion” of antibodies like bacteria. And when you come across the word erythropoietin, you would already have a clue that this word pertains to red blood cells. So, this is a hormone that regulates the production of red blood cells. As most of us know, getting a good grasp of the meanings of prefixes and suffixes enables us to learn new terms and words quicker. To give you an example, when you come across the word dermabrasion, you know that the prefix ‘derma’...

Author: Paul Spiegelman Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group – 214 pages Book Review by:  Sonu Chandiram Paul Spiegelman is the co-founder (with his two brothers) and chief executive officer of the 26-year-old Beryl Companies, a healthcare firm headquartered in Bedford, Texas  whose core business is providing outstanding outsourced customer service to some 500 hospitals throughout the United States. He writes that customers are willing to pay premium prices (as evidenced by Beryl’s long-term, double-digit revenue growth) for quality customer service, which has increasingly become a commodity available from call centers located outside the United States. This is an employee-centric company with a culture based on Paul Spiegelman’s philosophy and proven business model that employee loyalty drives customer satisfaction, which in turn drives profit. It has five to six times the profitability of its competitors and an amazing client-retention rate of 96 percent. He owes the success of a people-oriented culture at Beryl on the company’s Circle of Growth philosophy: employee loyalty driving customer satisfaction, which in turns drives profit. Customer satisfaction is achieved by providing ethical, caring, and concerned service – key values that produce smiles on the faces of customers. Here is substantive proof that return on investment is tied directly to the quality and level of customer service provided by a company’s employees: In the 2007 book Firms of Endearment, author David Wolfe writes that a number...

Author: Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp and Tim Inskipp Publisher: Princeton University Press – 528 pages Book Review by:  Sonu Chandiram This book is a field guide to birds not only n India but also found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. All of these countries except Bhutan and Nepal were once part of India. As a matter of fact the authors state in the Introduction that this book is a compact version of Birds of the Indian Subcontinent (1998). A large full-color map of South Asia is provided for easy reference to the user. One of the best features of this book is that along with photos of birds on the right-side pages are found thumbnail maps of the subcontinent on the left, on which are highlighted the areas where these birds are to be found. Of great value to ornithologists, bird lovers, bird watchers and the general public is the extensive coverage of 1,375 species of birds (found and recorded up to 2010) and 226 color plates, with no more than six or seven species shown per plate. And even with its encyclopedic amount of information, this book is small and compact enough to carry on field trips in the subcontinent. A section on plumage terminology includes detailed drawings of a typical bird, along with its head and a wing. A useful glossary of...