Weekly Update No.I

The following are the important events and decisions made during the first week of August’07 which has an impact on our personal finances.

* On 31st July, RBI Governor announced the review of its monetary policy and increased the cash reserve ratio (the deposits that banks keep with RBI) from 6.5% to 7%. RBI also lifted the daily cap of Rs 3000 crore which the RBI had kept on absorption of excess liquidity. The CRR move will lead to absorbing around Rs 15-16000 crore of excess liquidity from the system.

* The RBI has the unenviable task of reducing inflation, keeping the interest rates benign and also keeping the Rupee appreciating beyond Rs 40 a dollar. The three are linked but not exactly friendly with each other. To keep the Rupee from appreciating, RBI is buying Dollars. And that injects extra liquidity in the system which can lead to inflation.

* Facing the wrath of the sub-prime woes in the US markets, the Indian indices plunged sharply on August 1 and this resulted in them ending lower for yet another time on the bourses. The week was witness to one of the biggest intraday declines ever. Coming on the back of a huge sell off across the globe, especially in the US markets, Sensex edged lower by more than 600 points on Wednesday and Nifty too, declined by more than 180 points.

* The markets are nervous and the volatility index, maintained by the Chicago Board Options Exchange, has doubled in recent weeks. Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyer, in his weekly column in TOI asks us to hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Mr Aiyer has visualized three scenarios. One, nothing to worry, things will become normal soon. Two, there is a cyclical down trend waiting to happen. Three, there’s a disaster coming! He remembers the Asian crisis ten years back.

* In Mutual Funds, the total Asset under Management (AUM) reached Rs 4,86,513 crore at the end of July, a jump of 21.5% over Rs 4,00,333 crore at the end of June. That too when the PAN has become compulsory from July 1, 2007 and the MFs were cribbing about it being unfair that the Insurance companies were not subjected to the same regulation.

* UTI Mutual Fund latest offer of Lifestyle Fund takes into accounts the changing demographics. This scheme has an investment objective to provide long term capital appreciation and/or income distribution from a diversified portfolio of equity and equity related instruments of companies that are expected to benefit from changing Indian demographics, Indian lifestyles and rising consumption pattern. There are 242 companies identified for investment and I’m told that the last three year return of these companies is 52% and for the last one year, it’s a whopping 72%!

* ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company will be focussing on health insurance in a major way. The company has announced the launch of “Crisis Cover”, a policy covering 35 critical illnesses, total and permanent disability and also death. Crisis Cover will be sold through the company’s 680 branches. ICICI Prudential is working on revamping its features of Diabetes Care, a plan launched in November last year. The policy encourages a monitoring regime as per the Diabetic Association of India with policyholders required to undergo three mandatory tests

First Update for India's Online Weekly on personal finance

India’s first online weekly on personal finance had it’s first update today.

To begin with we had this week’s roundup. The roundup featured the monetary policy review by RBI Governor on July 31, the sentiments of the stock market, a review of the fund launched by UTI MF, a health insurance product from the ICICI Pru Life Insurance Company, etc.

Ajay Shah was kind enough to allow me to publish a very useful article on Derivatives on Nifty Junior and CNX-100. And we had three articles on Insurance, Stocks and Financial literacy.

And we also linked to an article by IndiaKnowledge @ Wharton titled Currency Conundrum: Is the strong rupee good or bad for India?

Go Take a look. And tell me how it is, please.

Social News Reading Site: Neoows.com

NEooWS is a Social NEWS reading site, where people can read news, make friends and share with them what's happening around the world. NEooWS looks to me a blend of a RSS Reader (I use Google Reader), Digg and Del.icio.us!! Interesting I think this is unique. They have all the major features like, Tagging, Commenting, Recommending, Emailing, Saving, etc. which other similar sites have. They plan to announce some unique features soon. The key point is NEooWS gets better as you use it every day, so why don't you check it out.

I wrote to Rahul Sapkal, the founder CEO and he has given greater details of his venture. Read on...

What is NEooWS?
NEooWS is an online RSS aggregator and reader with all the features of a conventional desktop reader and more. The idea behind NEooWS is to build communities around news. Users can add comments and vote for popularity of stories from various sources, tag stories, and create groups. It also allows to compare news stories from different sources.


Why'd you name it that?
Its NEWS with a pair of eyes in the middle. NEooWS .



Where did the idea come from? What is the research you have done on the business model?
The idea actually evolved from our experiments with RSS. We found RSS as a very powerful concept to build a feature-rich consolidation website. Before we knew it, we were consolidating news and stories from various popular sites in one place, making a very powerful platform to read news and share insights. NEooWS evolved organically
from an experiment to a social networking website around news.


How did you actually build NEooWS(how much did it cost, where do you host, what CMS, coding, finding people, etc)?
NEooWS was built by two friends over six months of effort. The user interface went through different looks before we arrived at the current look. Rahul Sapkal is the primary architect with backend and logistics support from a friend in California.

We have a long term relationship with our hosting provider Lunarpages (http://www.lunarpages.com). We host NEooWS from Lunarpages's San Diego datacenter.

We are very much in public beta right now, and we are seeing some aggressive growth in the number of people visiting the website daily. We have quite a few repeat visitors with over 1000 registered members. Typically, guests visiting the website have grown manifold since we launched, and the average time being spent on the site by users has been steadily increasing. We are monitoring these statistics on a daily basis and are working on translating the large number of guest users into daily visitors.


What are your goals with NEooWS ? I mean the number of page views daily and the revenue targets.
Our goal with NEooWS is to make it the single best choice to read news on the Internet. We have a solid plan which we plan to implement over the next 6-8 months, which will allow users to read news online,offline and while they are mobile. Our customization features are on target to be the best offered by any news site, and are aimed at providing unparalleled flexibility to users of NEooWS on how they wish to consume the content.

We wish to start monetizing NEooWS with targeted advertisements and value added features (coming soon) when we have our NEooWS story near completion (see above). The target is to gain momentum in converting users and kick-start revenues by the end of year 2007.


How do you market NEooWS?
Currently, we rely on reviews and interviews related to NEooWS to market the site. Our main marketing tool is word of mouth. This works well during a beta stage since we are getting our feet wet with a large number of users, and interviews such as this help in driving more users to the site. We are mostly testing most of the features to make sure they are absolutely solid for use by our valued audience at this time, and the limited marketing keeps traffic to a manageable level for us to work with and improve.

Once we reach our target feature set, we will be more direct in marketing NEooWS with inviting blog reviewers directly, targeted advertising using google, yahoo etc. to drive users to the site.


Is there a USP for NEooWS that you are working on?
Absolutely. I won’t elaborate, but suffice it to say that we are working on features that will target every consumer of news stories (online or offline) with value added features that will target everybody.


What would you say to a person who wants to do something entrepreneurial?
We say, keep at it. If you find an idea interesting because it solves a problem you are facing, chances are, there is an audience for you. How big the idea is depends on how many such target users you will eventually have. Niche ideas generally do much better in garnering an audience if the right marketing is put in the mix.

If you are engineers like us, get professional help to market your site.

Q. What importance do you give to finding the funds vis a vis the idea?
It actually depends on the idea. Some ideas can be implemented on a shoestring (such as NEooWS). Others need funding. In case of the latter, we believe it is mandatory to go through the step of finding funding since that puts you through a trial of fire. If you capture funding from VCs, your idea probably has merit and it is a matter of
good execution to succeed.

In case of NEooWS, it is privately funded (mainly time and hosting
costs), which enables us to control the agenda and features we would
like to provide. However we would like to hear from people interested in NEooWS or have a proposal to work with us, write to us at business@neoows.com.

Foreword for India's first online weekly on personal finance

You readers have helped me and my small & young blog (not even one year old) to dream of constructing India's first online weekly on personal finance. When you check it out, you'll see a forum, an advisor's directory, a blog and sections on Mutual Funds, Stocks, ETF, Insurance, etc.

And a section for Foreword too. I want you to contribute to that. I'll be the happiest person to post your thoughts in that section.

I want you to give your personal finances a thought and check whether you are on the right track. Or are there things you would try to improve? What is the importance of money to you? Is it evil or a necessity? What is your expectation from the site?

These thoughts can form part of your foreword.

India's first online weekly on personal finance

I'm excited about this website which is India's first online weekly on personal finance. The design and contents of the site has been on my mind since a year and I'm proud that despite knowing nothing of coding, I have been able to come up with this site with a cost next to nothing.

Along the way I have been helped by many helpful coders, developers and encouraging words and I can't thank them enough.

Take a test drive, please and let me know what you feel.