An Overview of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002

About Sarbanes-Oxley Act The Sarbanes—Oxley Act of 2002 was passed on July 30, 2002 and only the public companies are now feeling its impact. This act frequently called the “most significant accounting or auditing legislation since the securities exchange Act of 1934”. After the implementation it has established its demands to the companies for proper management and disclosure of risk. There have been found a number of corporate financial scandals (e.g. Enron Accounting Scandal) that provides various type of weakness in the governance and auditing practice in the organization. It represents the failures in controlling the reliability and integrity to the stock markets. The scandals cost billions of dollars for the investors when the affected companies were collapsed. As a result, these scandals make upset the public confidence in the nation’s security markets. The Sarbanes—Oxley Act was passed in positive response by the American congress on July 30, 2002 in Continue reading

An Introduction to Cryptography and Digital Signatures

Cryptography The Greek words “krypt ´os” standing for “hidden” and the word “l ´ogos” that means “word”, are in essence the base from where the word cryptology was derived. As these words denote, cryptology can be best explained by the meaning “hidden word”. In this context, the original purpose behind cryptology is hiding the meaning of some specific combination of words which in turn would insure secrecy and confidentiality. This is a very limited viewpoint in today’s perspective and a wide range of security applications and issues now come under the term of cryptology (rest of the portion of this section will clarify this point of view). As field of mathematical science, Cryptology includes the study of both cryptanalysis as well as cryptography. On one hand, cryptography is a very broad term and represents any process used for data protection. On the other hand, the study of security related issues Continue reading

Sales Promotion in Industrial Marketing

Sales promotion is an activity used by the industrial marketer to boost  the immediate sales of a product or service. It is used to increase the  sales by impressing the customers, rewarding them and also motivating  the sales force to get more business. There are different techniques  used in a industrial sales promotion activity like a free-sample campaign, offering  free gifts, arranging demonstrations or exhibitions, organizing  competitions with attractive prizes, temporary price reductions, door-to-door  calling, telemarketing, using personal letters, etc. More than any other element of the promotional mix, sales promotion is  about “action”. It is about stimulating customers to buy a product. It is not  designed to be informative — a role which advertising is much better  suited to. Need for Sales Promotion in Industrial Marketing To introduce a new product in the market. To influence the public with the help of new uses of the product. To increase Continue reading

Case Study: Zara’s Supply Chain Success Story

Zara is a Spanish fashion clothing manufacturer and retailer, formed in the 1970’s It is known that only two weeks are required for Zara to complete the development and shipment of a new product to its stores, which outweighs the average of fashion industry of six months, thanks to the collaborative relationship with customers and suppliers. Zara mainly targets on young and urban female customers and acceptable prices are offered. There are always new products in Zara stores. Even though usually Zara stores are spacious but the stock is displayed in limited quantity. This kind of strategy gives customers a sense of originality and exclusivity. Most of the stores display clothes only when they have a full set of major sizes, so customers would not be upset to find out that the needed size is not available. As shoppers enter the stores, reaction between Zara and customers starts with creating Continue reading

Applications and Benefits of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

Voice communication will certainly remain a basic from of interaction for all of us. The public switched telephone network simply cannot be replaced, or even dramatically changed, in the short term (this may not apply to provide voice networks, however). The immediate goal for voice over internet protocol service providers is to reproduce existing telephone capabilities at a significantly lower “total cost of operation “and to offer a technically competitive alternative to the public switched telephone network. It is the combination of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) with point-of-service applications that shows great promise for the longer term. The first measure of success for voice over internet protocol will be cost saving for long distance calls as long as there are no additional constraints imposed on the end user. For example, callers should not be required to use a microphone on a pc. voice over internet protocol provides a competitive Continue reading

Case Study on Ad Campaign for Bharti AirTel: “Express Yourself”

Bharti-Airtel Groups, with a customer base of more than 121million subscriber, form the largest cellular service provider of India. The Bharti group is now the world’s third-largest, single-country mobile operator and sixth-largest integrated telecom operator. The groups cater the mobile service in India under the brand name of Airtel and are headed by Sunil Bharti Mittal, He is termed as the Indian Telecom Mogul because of his largest telecom service provider in India. He is the chairman and the managing director of the Bharti Groups. The company has a turnover of US$ 12 billion. The businesses at Bharti Airtel have always been structured into three individual strategic business units (SBU’s) – Mobile Services, Airtel Telemedia Services & Enterprise Services. The Company has a market share of around 24.6% of the whole chunk of the mobile subscriber in India followed by Reliance Communication with 17.7% and Vodafone by 17.4%. Airtel has Continue reading