| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

Wondering why Influx did not do a social media post this year on 08 March? Here’s why…

Per Influx tradition, the ladies took themselves off for a company-sponsored lunch on Women’s Day. While we were out, our CEO decided to pen us a letter. Having stuffed ourselves silly, we returned to office to this treat:

Dear Ladies @ Influx,

I hope you all had a lovely lunch without us noisy boys around. :)

The world decided that on 08 March, we will celebrate International Women’s Day to express our gratitude to the women of the world. And so, today, we celebrate you—celebrating the social, economic, cultural, political and, of course, personal achievements of women.

You know how they always say—there are angels around us protecting us from harm every single day. I look around at my life and background and all I can say is that’s what in many...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

This is a re-post of Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi’s blog, Musings of a Biker. The post appeared on 02 March 2019 as a response to the recent capture and release of Wg Cdr Abhinandan Varthaman in Pakistan.

Dear Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman,

Thank you for your service
and Welcome Home!

There is a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes as I pen this.

What has happened with the Indian military services and the Pakistani military services is something that I will not comment on. Purely as facts are often not as clear as they seem.

Social media, and our actual media, is adrift with various theories and accusations and what not. Therefore, I am not qualified to make comments. Most importantly, I was not there to know how and what happened and, importantly, will never be able to understand the stress and emotions that you and your family...

| Sujith Subbiah |

A few days after I joined Influx Worldwide, I was working on resolving a bug when I was drawn into a conversation. The discussion was about providing server-costings for a client’s ticketing website — they were looking to migrate to one of the popular cloud platforms. After looking through several sheets, reading through numerous blogs and meeting with some high-profile people, we presented the client with the numbers.

These numbers were for a classic web server architecture (a few high-spec computers somewhere inside the data centre of a cloud platform) and I believed they were ideal, considering the number of screens involved and volume of transactions handled per month.

The story continues

A few weeks passed and I gained a little more understanding about the cinema domain. I felt there was a lot of disconnect between how the ticketing backend system were...

| Gopinath Premnath | - @thambi_balo

Virat Kohli’s average impact against the seamers is 2.16m away from his stumps in the current series against Australia, which is the most by any visiting batsman ever in an Australian Test series.

Rafael Nadal has saved 70.46% of the breakpoints when serving and converted 45.57% of the breakpoints while receiving serve in the 2018 tennis season.

Lionel Messi has 14 goals and 10 assists this season which is the highest in all leagues in Europe despite him missing more than a month of football.

These are just a few intriguing statistics — amongst a whole lot of other statistics — that I have read this past week.

Stats Stats Stats

Statistics has been a key element of modern-day sports for over the past twenty years. It has not only become an integral part of strategy but has also enhanced the viewer- and engagement-experience of sports fans...

| Harish Anand Thilakan | - @TheSharck

After the success of our campaign, Making Cinemas Great Again, aimed at the US market, we took the opportunity to attend the Emerging Cinema Markets Conference in Istanbul last week to announce a unique programme to bring the latest in digital design and technology to cinemas in Africa.

We titled it It’s Showtime For Africa and announced that any cinema that originated from, and operates in, any of the African countries would be eligible to work with Influx and gain access to our full suite of products, including ticketing websites, mobile applications, kiosks, food and beverage ordering systems and more — at no cost at all. Click here to get in touch with us for more information.

The proposition

We will work with the qualifying cinemas to help set attainable business targets and dedicate a full year to achieving those targets. In the event of...

| Vaidehi Bhashyam Mehta | — @mehta_vaidehi

In the course of your career, you will have written, read and replied scores of emails. So, it is essential that we understand the fundamentals of business email writing.

We write business emails to:

• ask for information
• share information
• exchange views and opinions
• fix meetings

Every email is different from the next in many ways, but here are some common points to bear in mind when you are writing one:

1. Start with a good subject line

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, if you want your email or message to be read, your subject line should draw the reader’s attention.

Pitch Meeting - (name of client) - 10 a.m., (date) makes better sense than Meeting or Pitch.

2. Keep it simple

You want the recipient of your email to understand your message, and understand it fast. You don’t want to confuse the reader, so keep your writing simple...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

The past couple of weeks have been a somewhat stressful with incredible deals having to be delivered at work. Of course, there have been stress-related outbursts. Every outburst turned out to be related to some other factor and the reason for the outburst was just a culmination of, perhaps, many small things which added to my stress.

Stress, if not managed correctly, can lead to unwanted pressures. And such pressures, like slowly growing pimples, will get bigger and bigger till they explode.

I am not talking about “chronic” stress that could lead to depressions, but rather what is termed as “acute” stress – stress related to pressures of the recent past or near future and — importantly — the present. A review that perhaps didn’t go as well as you would have liked, a big event coming up in your life, or even being late to work due to...

| Vaidehi Bhashyam Mehta | @mehta_vaidehi

With the internet allowing for instant communication, letter-writing is becoming rarer by the day. Text messaging seems to be the preferred way of communicating. And with it has evolved a whole new language — txt msg english.

We write and read emails every day. While your personal emails to friends and family are casual and intimate, business or work-related emails are formal, or at best semi-formal. Despite being tech-savvy, most managers today still struggle to use the email efficiently as a means of communication, whilst others are blissfully unaware of where they are going wrong.

But, there’s no denying that email-writing is important and has become an essential means of daily communication and a record of dealings and transactions.

Here are the essential elements of an email and once you follow this structure, writing a good email...

Jose Joseph

It is pretty hard for teams and individuals to change an approach or the way they do things are being done. With change, invariably, comes resistance. For example, if I am used to doing things in a certain way and someone wants me to do them differently, I may find it very difficult to change or even accept that change is possible or necessary.

In the same way, when we move our existing delivery process to a new one, we are bound to face our own challenges in coming to terms with the new process.

Here are a few pointers that I believe we can follow as a team to deliver the projects in the Agile way.

It’s all in the attitude

Agile begins with attitude. If the team emphasises “doing agile” rather than “being agile”, you’re on the wrong foot right from the start. Agile is a paradigm, a mental shift in how you approach development. The specific techniques and ceremonies...

| Amit Mehta | - @AmitKO84

“PVR buys Sathyam Cinemas!”

Multiple Whatsapp groups are buzzing with messages about the big acquisition. Only people associated with Chennai (like me) will understand that these messages are not from sharing news from a business standpoint but due to an emotional quotient.

“What will happen to Sathyam Popcorn?!” — a question asked by everyone from my mother to a close friend. This message clearly echoes the sentiment created by Chennai’s most beloved cinema chain.

Where else will you find these sentiments?

Let’s break the topic down and see why it all adds up.

Setting the scene

PVR Cinemas, India’s largest multiplex chain (with 638 screens) will be acquiring close to 72% of SPI Cinemas, south India’s largest cinema chain (with 76 screens) in a deal valued at INR 850 cr (over USD 122 m). SPI Cinemas owns the iconic Sathyam Cinemas in Chennai.