The Art of Reading Faces

For centuries, people have tried to understand aspects of a person’s character just by looking at their face. The ancient Chinese believed that your face was a reflection of your inner spirit. In Medieval Europe, beauty was considered to be synonymous with virtue, and ugliness was sometimes considered a sign of evil. Even in more recent times, phrenology — the study of the shape of the skull — was used erroneously to identify the guilt of suspected criminals. As recently as the 19th century, this remained a popular school of thought.

While these once fashionable ideas have been disproved by modern studies, there are still aspects of the face that may allow us to make a judgment on somebody else. This was made more popular by the TV show Lie to Me, in which Tim Roth played a man who is an expert at reading faces to discover what is really going on with that person. We don’t claim this to be an exact science, and it may be worth putting it in a similar bracket to things like astrology and palm reading. There are apparently over 100 points on the face that can be analyzed, but we aren’t going to tell you about all of them. However, for anyone who has an interest in what their face may be revealing to others, you may just find a kernel of truth somewhere in here.

Chinese e-commerce giant - Alibaba Group

Alibaba.com is an e-commerce site that connects Chinese suppliers with buyers at home and abroad. Today, Alibaba Group is involved in a variety of Web businesses. Its most important elements are its online retail sites: Taobao Marketplace, a large commerce site; Tmall, an online marketplace for name-brand retailers like Apple; and Juhuasuan, a daily deals site similar to Groupon. The company is also affiliated to mobile payments service called AliPay, and it has investments in online video, mobile messaging and cloud computing, among other businesses. The company that started in 1999 by Jack Ma, a former teacher from his apartment in his hometown of Hangzhou, now employs 24,000 workers at its headquarters in Hangzhou and elsewhere, with 25 separate business units. 

Digital India Initiative

What is it?  

It has long been Modi’s dream to serve India via e- governance. The Digital India initiative aims to connect rural regions and remote villages ensuring that they too have high-speed Internet services. With this ambitious project, villagers will not have to travel long distances to the concerned departments. 

The Digital India programme is a transformed version of the already running National e-Governance Plan. The project aims to provide thrust to nine pillars identified as growth areas. These pillars include - broadband highways, everywhere mobile connectivity, Public Internet Access Programme, e-Governance, e-Kranti (which aims to give electronic delivery of services), information for all, electronics manufacturing, IT for Jobs and early harvest programmes. The project is expected to be completed by 2019. 

Why Marketing Needs More Introverts

Susan Cain’s book “Quiet” has provided wonderful insight to me, because I am an introvert. Cain’s core premise is that western culture overvalues extroverts and under-utilizes introverts. Introverts prefer less stimulation and quiet concentration. We listen more than we talk, think before we speak, and focus on relationships. Introverts focus on the meaning of events around us, while extroverts focus on the events themselves.

If I had to bet, the best marketers of tomorrow will likely be far more introverted than the average marketer is today. I would even argue that marketing needs more introverts—people who will spend more time listening than talking, reflecting deeply on meaning, and building fewer, deeper relationships.

Three fundamental trends will drive this.

European Debt Crisis

What is European debt crisis? It is the failure of Euro, the currency that unites together 17 European countries in an intimate but flawed manner.

Over the past 3 years, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain have all fallen down to the brink of collapse, threatening to bring down the entire continent and the rest of the world. How did it happen?

For most of Europe's history, it's been in a war within itself. Countries at war with each other tend to do less business with each other. Europe was always a continent of trade barriers, tariffs and different currencies. Doing business across borders was difficult. You needed to pay a fee to exchange currencies, and you needed to pay tariff fee to buy and sell to the companies in other countries. That tendered to stifle economic growth.