Thursday, July 23, 2009

How much credit do you get for a credit card?


I love hanging out at coffe shops, office canteens and now,sports bars....NO!!I'm not drinking yet my beloved friends and readers:). The thing about these places is that friends meet up and talk about a variety of stuff, right from who's their latest crush to what the new leader of the country should do.Last night at a hangout place, I couldn't but overhear the conversation of two adult men.No points for guessing their topic of discussion...what other can one discuss these days than money. One of the men was saying, "The only use the X Bank's debit card, after all I can't sepnd money that I don't really have"..Thanks my man!You are finally realising it.

The whole concept of credit was,I would say,marvelous and extremely smart and impacting...after all without credit one could never think of buying a home or a car or even for that matter go to college(this applies to colleges in the U.S...most of which are damn damn costly!). Hadn't there been no one to give us a mortgage or lend us money, we would just live life plainly...
While (!unemployed)
{
if (month-starts) get payckeck;

pay bills;

if (layoffs or over 60)
umemployed == true
}

In order to encourage credit-taking or borrowing, the US had come up with the concept of one's credit score, basically you borrow or take a loan from a bank or some other source and the time you take to pay it back and your promptness in paying it back, gives you a good creidt score out of 800 points.

But we being humans that err, took this whole credit cycle to such a phase where almost all the money that was was in the air floating as credit in circulation...I don't want to elaborate on how one thing led to another and we landed where we are today.I was shocked to know that the present day avergae credit of an adult in the US is $11,500 dollars and the average # of credit cards a student has it 5!!! While any form of credit could potentially go bad, the chances of credit abuse are more with a credit card than any kind of mortgage or bank loan etc.This is coz, once you have a card that could be swiped at places ranging from cffee shops to the Prada stores...we children of the God eat up all the candy we can afford with the allowance we were never actually handed out.

I'm glad the phenomenon of credit cards has not caught up in a country like India where the economy is stabilising finally.Forget the nationalised banks, no private bank would give a college student any credit card so easily, and it's good in one way. You teach the kids to spend resourcefully and judiciously. No wonder economies like India and Brazil are called more important than that of US (ref. on of the July TIME issues)the saviors of the current economy. As for the U S of A,I hope the current credit scare here stays the way it is , if not in a more paranoid state.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

What should google do against the new bing ads?

The latest from the Google-Microsoft wars are the Bing ads.Check out one here.

For over a decade now , google has been the place to go to when you had an unanswered question, atleast for most people like me :).It became a synonym for 'search'. People started saying , "did you google it" instead of "did you search for it". It is acontemporary case of a brand-name replacing the name of the product itself, like 'Xerox' replacing the word 'photocopying'.

Now microsoft , in its ongoing competition with google, has launched Bing!
I haven't use Bing much, but its latest TVC (TV commercial) promises to not overload search reults onto the consumer , unlike google which gives you all possible things related to your search and lets you decide which of them is appropriate. My first impression on seeing the ad was 'Good point!'. But unfortunatley Bing doesn't stand up to what it promises.It ends up giving me results similar to those on google search.

So what should Google do now, should it continue what it's been doing so far:not advertise its products on the TV or should it comeback with a retort?
In case Google decides to do the latter , what should be its positioning?