Monday, 3rd August ’20
Good morning, today we celebrate the auspicious festival of Rakshabandhan. The history of Rakshabandhan dates back to Hindu mythology. As per Hindu mythology, in Mahabharata, the great Indian epic, Draupadi, wife of the Pandavas had torn the corner of her sari to prevent Lord Krishna’s wrist from bleeding (he had inadvertently hurt himself). Thus, a bond, that of brother and sister developed between them, and he promised to protect her.
To kick start your day, here are some words of wisdom from Steve Jobs,
Your time is limited. Don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
MARKETS
- Markets: Nifty lost its winning streak, falling over 1% last week. Rising Coronavirus cases continue to be a concern as macroeconomic indicators continue to deteriorate. Investor sentiments are not strong with US-China tensions escalating. According to a Bloomberg report, retail investors are rallying to buy beaten-down stocks and highly leveraged companies with an increased appetite for risk-taking.
TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
- 22 firms including Apple manufacturers Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron have applied for funds from India’s $6.65 billion scheme to boost smartphone manufacturing. The production-linked incentive PLI plan offers companies cash incentives on additional sales of devices made locally over five years, and add 12 million jobs.
- After their proposal to maintain a minority stake in the US business of TikTok, which the White House had rejected ByteDance have hinted at exiting completely as Microsoft Corp takes over. Microsoft will be in charge of protecting all US user data as they take over TikTok along with another US company.
- UPI clocked the highest monthly volume with 1.5 Billion transaction with Rs 2.9 lakh crores in July. This is a sign of the pandemic-induced behaviour change among consumers as the government pushed for contactless payments. Toll payments increased 8 fold pointing to more intercity commute.
WHAT ELSE IS COOKING
- IPL Governing Council decides to retain Chinese sponsors: The Indian Premier League’s Governing Council on Sunday decided to retain all its sponsors, including Chinese mobile company VIVO and approved COVID-19 replacements in the event to be held in UAE this year. The tournament will be played from 19 September to 10 November in UAE; evening matches will start at 7:30 pm, half an hour earlier than usual. It is expected that the squad strength in terms of playing members will be 24 the eight franchises.
- India eases quarantine rules for international travelers: International passengers arriving in India will be able to seek exemption from mandatory institutional quarantine on arrival. This is part of the new guidelines announced on August 2 which will come into effect from August 8. The guidelines of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare have also halved the duration of quarantine from 14 days each of institutional quarantine and home quarantine to 7 days.
- Taking on Space-X, Amazon to invest &10 billion in satellite broadband plan: Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it will invest more than US$10 billion to build a network of 3,236 satellites that will provide high-speed broadband internet services to people around the world who lack such access. The announcement follows the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of the plan, called “Project Kuiper”, for the constellation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that will compete with the Starlink network being built out by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS
US & EU question India’s use of WTO Peace Clause!
Why is it in the news?
The US, EU, Canada, Brazil, Japan and Paraguay have questioned India for invoking the World Trade Organization (WTO) peace clause for exceeding the ceiling on support it can offer its farmers for rice.
What is the Peace Clause?
The peace clause protects a developing country’s food procurement programmes against action from WTO members in case subsidy ceilings are breached. High subsidies are seen to be distorting global trade.
What are the key highlights?
In a first for any country, India invoked the peace clause for breaching the subsidy limit for rice for marketing year 2018-19. It informed the WTO in April that the value of its rice production was $43.67 billion in 2018-19 and that it gave subsidies worth $5 billion. The limit is pegged at 10% of the value of food production (called de minimis) in the case of India and other developing countries.
MANAGERS’ CORNER – Marketing Bucket
Based Content Strategy (Digital Marketing)
Since people heavily rely on Google to provide accurate and relevant answers for most of their questions today, Google needs to understand the intent and context behind every single search.
To do this, Google has evolved to recognize topical connections across users’ queries, look back at similar queries that users have searched for in the past, and surface the content that best answers them. As a result, Google will deliver content that they deem the most authoritative on the topic. To help Google recognize your content as a trusted authority on marketing, sales, and customer service topics, consider implementing the pillar-cluster model on your blog.
Essentially, the pillar-cluster model is a topic-based content strategy. This means that you generate and organize ideas for your blog by topic. By creating a single pillar page that provides a high-level overview of a topic and hyperlinks to cluster pages (subtopic blog posts) that delve into the topic’s subtopics, you can signal to Google that your pillar page is an authority on the topic.
Hyperlinking all of the cluster pages to the pillar page also spreads domain authority across the cluster, so your cluster pages get an organic boost if your pillar page ranks higher, and your cluster pages can even help your pillar page rank higher if they start ranking for the specific keywords they’re targeting!
THE MILLIONAIRE MINDSET
Product of the Day: Matter App
In an increasingly critical and competitive world, wouldn’t it be great if you can feel confident at work, grow your skills, and increase productivity? This is where Matter app comes in. Matter app helps you become the best version of yourself with personal feedback. It helps you
- Gather feedback all year round.
- Clarify feedback and work on the right things
- Give feedback to others to genuinely help them improve.
With a 360-degree peer feedback approach, matter helps you improve 30+ recommended technical and soft skills.
Matter is being adopted by a number of top brands like Slack, Dropbox, Intuit, and Adobe. We recommend you check out Matter in your workplace and teams to gift feedbacks and enable overall improvement.
Written by Kumar Sourav Mohanty, Akansh Bhatt, and Shashank Dobhal
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