AMAZING FACTS ABOUT WARREN BUFFET: 3rd RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD

OSMEB : Feb 7,2013

AMAZING FACTS ABOUT WARREN BUFFET: 3rd RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD

1) Warren bought his first share at age 11 and he now regrets that he started too late!

2) He bought a small farm at age 14 with savings from delivering newspapers.

3) He still lives in the same small 3 bedroom house in mid-town Omaha, that he bought after he got married 50 years ago. He says that he has everything he needs in that house. His house does not have a wall or a fence.

4) He drives his own car everywhere and does not have a driver or security people around him.

5) He never travels by private jet, although he owns the world's largest private jet company.

6) His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 63 companies. He writes only one letter each year to the CEOs of these companies, giving them goals for the year. He never holds meetings or calls them on a regular basis.

7) Warren Buffet has given his CEO's only two rules.

Rule number 1: Do not lose any of your share holder's money.

Rule number 2: Do not forget rule number 1.

8) He does not socialize with the high society crowd. His past time after he gets home is to make himself some pop corn and watch television.

9) Bill Gates, the world's richest man met him for the first time only 5 years ago. Bill Gates did not think he had anything in common with Warren Buffet. So he had scheduled his meeting only for half hour. But when Gates met him, the meeting lasted for ten hours and Bill Gates became a devotee of Warren Buffet.

10) Warren Buffet does not carry a cell phone, nor has a computer on his desk.

11) His advice to young people: Stay away from credit cards and invest in yourself.

12) He has donated $31 billion (85% of his fortune) to charity.

Spencer’s plans a real big box

 Saturday, Feb 9, 2013, 10:30 IST 
By Nupur Anand | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA

For name sake, ‘supermarkets’ abound in the country, but world class, full-fledged, sprawling hypermarkets, like the ones in advanced countries that offer the universe, are yet to debut in India.RPG group-led Spencer’s Retail is set to change that, at least in a certain sense.

“In select hypermarkets, we will expand our offerings on the service side, bringing them closer to what is actually offered in the West, in terms of the wide range of products and services,” says Mohit Kampani, CEO of Spencer’s Retail.

Apart from food, apparel and other goods, Spencer’s will offer an array of services like florist, pharmacy, in-store cafe, barber shop, laundry and so on.

Kampani plans to make that list of services longer with small bookstores and quick service restaurants to trigger impulsive purchases among consumers.

Spencer’s Kolkata branch will lead the pack, to be followed by similar hypermarkets elsewhere.
While in-store cafe and bakery have by now become integral to some new-age supermarkets, other offerings like electronics, car accessories and jewellery are slowly making the scene exciting.

But in terms of space, they are still small to be called hypermarkets. Typically, a Western hypermarkettakes up between 1 lakh square feet and 2.6 lakh sq feet. But Spencer’s ‘hypermarkets’ will be spread over just 29,000 square feet.

Spencer’s is aware size does matter, but, in a country where huge urban commercial spaces are hard to come by, it plans to focus on chain expansion instead. So, 56 new Spencer’s marts will open in the next three years.

Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal, Delhi NCR, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra are among the states that will host Spencer’s hypermarkets.

Besides state capitals and major cities, Spencer’s will foray into Tier-II and Tier-III towns. Kampani links this move to high double-digit same-store sales growth of some stores in non-metros. (Same-store sales growth refers to sales logged by a retailer’s existing stores during a certain period vis-a-vis the corresponding period a year ago.)

Spencer’s will sharpen focus on private label (or in-house) brands which now account for only 15% of its sales. “The target is 25-30%,” says Kampani.

Private label brands, he says, give hypermarkets control over pricing, which is important in a regime of maximum retail price or MRP. “We are looking at extending our private label brand to frozen foods, bakers and so on.”

India's fastest supercomputer 'Param Yuva II' unveiled

Saturday, Feb 9, 2013, 5:00 IST  By DNA Correspondent | Place: Bangalore | Agency: DNA

Stating that the Union government was committed to ensuring that India was the top destination for research and development globally, secretary of the department of electronics and information technology J Satyanarayana congratulated C-DAC Pune for launching Param Yuva II, the fastest supercomputer in India and 62nd fastest in the world. The supercomputer is expected to be of great help to the scientific community.

Satyanarayana was speaking after unveiling the computer at the C DAC premises in Pune on Friday. Director general of CDAC Rajat Moona and executive director of C-DAC Hemant Darbari was also present on the occasion.

Satyanarayana said "Research and development can be a major thrust area for India going forward. Computational infrastructure like Param Yuva II is necessary to achieve this."

Darbari said that this supercomputer would be of great use to the scientific community. He said "Areas like weather forecasting, seismic data analysis, scientific data processing will all be benefitted due to Param Yuva II. We were doing weather forecasting of over 58,000 villages with param yuva. Now we can double that number at a minimum. Industries like pharmaceuticals, bio informatics, aeronautical engineering will also benefit. Seismic data processing can be done much more efficiently with this new computer."

He said the main users of the supercomputer would be the scientific institutes, research laboratories and universities.

"Through the national knowledge network, the Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology can be linked to this computer. Pharmaceutical companies can use it for drug discovery as can the high performance computing community. The computer has been upgraded at a cost of Rs15 crore.”

This is the first supercomputer that has crossed 500 teraflops in computing power in the country. 

Ratan Tata...