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Business is not about business!

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Business is not just a means to make a living, it is about happiness, helping others and bridging the gap. Taking the discussion on 'Future Beckons' further ahead, the second session at TEDIndia Mysore hosted Srivatsa Krishna (civil servant), R.A. Mashelkar (scientist) Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO), Scott Cook (founder, Intuit) and Harsha Bhogle (Cricket commentator). They talked about how businesses should look at themselves and the way they work.

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Talking about sustained development, Srivatsa Krishna mentioned about growth in other countries, urbanization in cities along with the infrastructure development. He talked about Dubai's sky walk above the Grand Canyon, and how we could reach out and plan vacations in outer space soon. All it requires is a small change that would soon become a part of a bigger change in the world.

Dr. R.A. Mashelkar highlighted the significance of innovation by getting more from lesser and for more. Advocating the theory of Gandhian Engineering, he talked about Tata Nano car and said that things need not get low cost, but super low cost.

If 20th century was gifted by Gandhi, then 21st century should get the gist of Gandhian Engineering. Mashelkar demonstrated the example of changing life through new low-cost prosthetics and psoriasis treatments or by 'Jaipur foot', an artificial foot at a very affordable rate.

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Next Session by Tony Hsieh talked about happiness as a business model. He said that when interviewing or selecting the employees, he looks at the happiness quotient and the will to chase the dream.

He said, “Great businesses combine pleasure, passion and purpose. Basically there are three kinds of happiness – the 'rock star' who chases a point and is happy for a moment, then the 'Flow' who chases a passion and be happy for a longer period and lastly 'Meaning', who follows the dream and is happier for an even longer while.

Talking about more than businesses or rather the business of larger help, Scott Cook presented an Intuit idea for the farmers.

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“We discovered that farmers, when they reached the mandi (market) with their harvests, they did not know about the market price. They didn't know where the best prices would be offered and didn't have a basis to negotiate from. Therefore, what could be used was a document or an SMS. This brings farmers together as a force and changes the game,” he pointed out.

In the third session, Pranav Mistry, a graduate from MIT, presented an interesting demonstration of the sixth sense. The presentation began with an understanding of how a mouse of a computer works by just hand movements.

Pranav has built technologies where, a normal brick and mortar wall can turn into a PC screen, with just a camera capturing a data and a sensor reading the movements. It is all a wild imagination and the notes scribbled on a post-it could be send as an SMS, recorded and stored on the web. Computing interface can be made more intuitive, and this is future of technology, he said.

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