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-Breaking into Tour Management

Management

One of the most diverse and multifaceted jobs in the music industry is that of the tour manager. As the person responsible for making sure everything on tour runs smoothly, this position may seem daunting, and it is not for the timid. But, for the right candidate, this can be a very rewarding, unforgettable job. The tasks performed by a tour manager are extremely diverse, and vary from band to band. One tour manager I spoke to described her duties as: “Basically, my job was to manage the band on the road. Anything from babysitting them, making sure they got to their press on time, dealing with managers of clubs, collecting money, handling promotion, driving, finding hotels, and making sure the rooms were ready for us; you do a bit of everything. Also, with smaller bands, I would set up the merchandise, so doing inventory before and after – just taking care of selling their stuff.”

Before we get too far into what the job entails, we should actually discuss getting the gig in the first place. Again, this varies from person to person, but everyone agrees that amazing networking skills are the single greatest asset an aspiring tour manager can have. Speaking from experience: “It all started just with local bands. I went to a show, in my hometown, for a local band that I was friends with. They ended up doing a show with My Chemical Romance, before they were signed, and I had kept in contact with them, so they hooked me up when they were going on tour. Networking is key, though; if you don’t know people in the industry, you can’t be a tour manager.”

Once you’ve landed the job, get ready for the real fun and excitement to begin. Travel is going to be your new middle name, for the next few months. While seeing new cities, meeting new people, and watching amazing shows every night are definitely some of the perks of the job, don’t forget you’re there to work. The band may go out partying after a show, but keep in mind you’re the one who has to be responsible and get them all up and moving, come morning. I asked one tour manager what the most challenging aspect of the job is: “Being on the road for that long of a time, especially, with smaller bands. Being in a cramped van with no privacy, and being away for long periods of time. It’s survivalism, bare necessities, you shower when you can. But on the flip side, that’s my favorite part: seeing different cities and being able to go see good live music every night.”

As far as the economy goes, tour managers need not worry. As long as bands keep on making and performing music, and people keep on listening, then this is one industry that won’t suffer. As one tour manager puts it: “A friend of mine just got into tour managing, and she picked something up pretty fast. Bands are still touring so there’s still a need for it, the same if not more.”

What’s the best advice for all the up and coming tour managers out there?

“Have a passion for it, you can’t do this job without complete passion and hard work. You can always learn along the way. Start as an assistant or merchandise person. With small bands, you’re learning with them, so it’s a nice learning curve you have together. So networking skills are key. Get to know your local bands, go to shows and start talking to people.”

Are You Planning To Take Up Hotel Management Course in India

Management

When it comes to judging the infrastructural development of a country, hotels mainly take into consideration. As this industry is closely connected to the tourism development of any country, the tourism departments of every nation generally wish to make their restaurants the best in such a way that the best service can be offered to the foreign tourists visiting their nation. The revolutionary growth of this sector is further enhanced by the recent liberalization. Furthermore, entrepreneurs belonging to this industry also take steps to make sure that they appoint the best staff for ensuring the good service to their customers. They wish to recruit the talented staff for their management department in such a way that smooth functioning can be assured.

Due to the great demand for hotel management personnel, students belonging to Kolkata and even from other parts of the nation are looking for the best hotel management college in Kolkata. The best college offers courses like Bachelors in Hospitality management, Hotel management and Catering Technology, Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and Hotel Administration and several other certificate courses as well. For admission of students to these courses, an entrance examination is conducted by some of the colleges. Here, the students are offered with both practical and theoretical knowledge in restaurant management, which will be of great help to them to shine in this booming industry.

The UG degree courses in this branch of student is for students, who have completed higher secondary level education. As mentioned earlier, people who are interested in kick starting their career in this booming field can take up certificate courses in housekeeping, front office, food production, food & beverage service and restaurant operation. The best thing about the best hotel management college in Kolkata is that campus placement opportunities are offered to students for ensuring that they can get jobs in the best restaurants even before they complete their course from the college.

Students completing either certificate or degree courses from these colleges can find employment opportunities in different departments of the hotel like operations, front office, housekeeping, sales, engineering/maintenance, etc.- This is because hotels generally look for candidates with training in effective hotel management for each of their departments. So, candidates with a degree in this branch of study can get good job opportunities in the future. As they gain more and more experience, their salary will also increase since this industry pays well for its employees.

Guru Nanak Institute of Hotel Management is the Best hotel management school in kolkata under the JIS Group Educational Initiatives. GNIHM has one of the best and biggest infrastructures and is affiliated to National Council for Hotel Management and Catering Technology, Ministry of Tourism, Govt of India, New Delhi. It is also affiliated to West Bengal University of Technology (WBUT) and approved by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The objective of the college is to create future leaders in the Hospitality industry. For more info on Hotel management colleges in kolkata, visit us.

Saas Pricing Model

Business Strategy

In many industries the pricing models are as old as the industries itself, and the rules of the game were set a long time go and are well known by everyone. This is not the case of SaaS. Being a young software delivery model, the key factors of a good pricing strategy are not that clear.

It seems, just by taking a look at the pricing models of many SaaS offerings, that traditional licensing model of the on-premise software is not the best idea for OnDemand software.

Also, the traditional services (like consulting) model “I charge for the time you are using my resources (professionals) and their value (junior, senior, etc…)” doesn’t seem to be the best way to approach the SaaS pricing problem (probably fits better when talking about cloud computing). We are not talking about traditional services, we are talking about pricing a subscription business.

In SaaS, the change from offering “products” to “services”, from “acquire” to “subscribe” implies the need of defining the best way for charging for the solution offered.

So, any SaaS provider faces the problem of fixing the right price to its solution / services. There are many alternatives and factors that should be considered when dealing with this.

Most of the proposals out there use some (or all) of this ideas:

* Pay periodically: This means charging the customers on a regular basis (usually monthly).

* Pay for each user: Very widely used, from Salesforce to that new SaaS start-up that two college students just started.

* Pay for the resources: This usually means computing resources: CPU/hour, GB, Bandwith, etc… it is used very often in IaaS or PaaS.

* Pay for the features: So the customers pays just for the features in our solution they really need. Maybe new functionality or maybe simple using ‘more’ of the tool (for example more applications in a PaaS offering).

Each of this ‘ideas’ have its own pros and cons. For example, ‘paying for each user’ has the problem of generating fear in the customer about adopting the solutions widely, or ‘pay for the resources’ has the problem of the customers not knowing what they will pay the next month…

In one word, usually SaaS pricing models are more flexible than in the traditional license-based on-premise software, and mean less risk and a wiser spending. This can, though, lead to a problem of complexity that should be taken care of.

Let’s take a look about something one should always keep in mind, the goals that any pricing strategy for SaaS should pursue in order to sustain a profitable business model.

* Make it interesting for a new customer to start using the product. Having a free version, a trial version, or simply a ‘pay-as-you-go’ strategy starting low, usually solves this.

* Make the costs for the customer predictable. Everyone likes to know what to expect when talking about paying… some SaaS offering have this problem (specially those that have cost based pricing models). One should let the customer know, and decide what they want to spend. Though we should keep in mind the next goal.

* Try to increase the customer share once the customer is using the tool. This can be achieved in many different ways, most of them related to the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model (features, users, resources, etc…). The customer should feel that spending more really means extracting more value from the tool.

* Don’t make the pricing model too complex. This is a problem very often found in SaaS offerings, and that can make the adoption of the tool by the market slower and harder. Let’s keep in mind that many companies are not used to SaaS yet.

* Make sure that the customer does not abuse in the use of the solution. This can happen quite easily in solutions where lots of data are involved, like those that use video, business intelligence tools, etc… the provider should be protected against this.

So, how would this goals and the main ideas explained in the first post be applied when defining a SaaS pricing strategy?

Let’s take a look at a real world example: coghead

Coghead is a very good, and quite veteran PaaS offering that distinguishes itself by giving the chance of developing an application on their platform mostly by visual “drag and drop” operations. They are well funded and should be considered as a strong competitor to companies like Intuit with quickbase or Salesforce’s force platform.

So, let’s analyze their pricing model without talking about money, we are interested in the model:

* They charge basicaly on three different concepts: users, records and file storage.

* They offer a free account with: 1 user, 2000 rows and 100MB of space.

* From there you have two options to scale: the workgroup bundles (with discounts) or the ‘pay-as-you-go’ more flexible depending on your needs.

* There are four different workgroup bundles: plus, pro, premium, business, each one with a fixed price for a certain number of users/records/space. Of course a bundle is cheaper than having the same amount of usage via ‘pay-as-you-go’.

* The ‘pay-as-you-go’ model basically charges you for each user/10000 rows/1 GB you use.

You can take a deeper look at Coghead’s pricing model here.

Let’s talk now about how does this pricing model relates to the “model ideas” and goals we talked about:

* They, obviously have a periodic (monthly) payment. Something that makes perfect sense for a PaaS offering.
* They charge both for the users and for the resources used. This is very often used in PaaS offering, that can be very easily overused. Charging for number of rows or space is a way for Coghead to make sure nobody abuses the platform.
* They have some feature pricing also: Limited users and acces point for applications that wish to be public.
* They have both ‘pay-as-you-go’ and a ‘package’ alternatives.

So, they seem to use all of the ideas we talk about, this, of course brings a problem of complexity but gives the users a lot of flexibility.

And now the final question, does this pricing models achieve the goals we wrote about in this post?

* It is certainly atractive for a new customer/developer to start knowing/using the platform via the free basic account.
* About making the costs for the customer predictable: They offer this through their bundled-workgroup choices. You know what you pay for. This is not true in the ‘pay-as-you-go’ option, which is also more expensive, so their pricing model tends to bring customers to the ‘workgroup’choices.
* Increase the customer share: This true for the ‘pay-as-you-go’ , but not so true for the ‘workgroup’ option, where de customer could hesitate before buying the next and more expensive bundle.
* Don’t make the pricing too complex: We really think Coghead fails at this one, their pricing model is quite complex for the average user. We didn’t even talked here about their partner offerings or the concepts behing the different kind of users. We asume that, for a PaaS offering whose customers are both business and technically skilled, complexity is not such a big problem.
* Avoid customer abuse: This is quite covered there is no easy way that a customer could make a very extensive use of the platform without paying for it. Maybe they could have a problem with bandwidth, something they don’t charge for (they actually have limits at least for public/web users of an app).

We consider that the usual behaviour of a customer would be to:

1. Try the free account.
2. Go for the first bundle.
3. Then the second, third, and finally the ‘business’ option.
4. If the customer has further needs they wouldn’t have any option but going for the quite unpredictable ‘pay-as-you-go’ model.

So, in the end, increasing the complexity of their pricing model by using most of the usuall ideas in SaaS pricing, (they made some changes recently) Coghead has been able to cover most of the goals. We think they have an strong pricing model (complexity is not such a big trouble for this kind of PaaS tool) that supporting their excelent flex-based tool, should help them in becoming a big player in the PaaS area.

Tulisa Constantavlos’ Hair Style Journey Through the Years

Hair Style

Tulisa Constantavlos has recently been voted as the -Sexiest female in the UK’ – despite the controversy this caused, whether you agree with the title or not, one thing that no one can deny is that Tulisa always looks great. She has her own unique style and is always following the trends with her own twist on things, and one thing that can always be said is that her hair is always on point. Tulisa first came onto the scene as one third of N-Dubz, a young singer with a fresh face and, to be frank, not so fresh hair. Sporting what can only be considered as quite ghastly striped blonde highlights at the time, this look was gone almost instantly with her full fringe and dodgy extensions – on to better! Soon after the initial blonde mishap, the star was seen with a full head of toned down blonde and a more styled fringe. Adding layers and some layer with the help of hair extensions complimented the square shape of Tulisa’s face and made her look feminine and elegant. Over time, Tulisa Constantavlos gradually added more low lights to her long locks, until she was sporting a pretty much full head of brown hair. This started off as a -mousey’ brown tone, which progressively got darker until she found her perfect colour match with a deep, rich brown. The ex N-Dubz songstress has always been fond of her hair extensions, and is a true inspiration for anyone who wants to add some extra length and volume to their hair. Whether she wears her hair straight, curly, or tied up, Tulisa always makes sure her extensions are undetectable by keeping the rest of her hair looking healthy and layered. Appearing on the X Factor, Tulisa often was seen with up-do’s to add some sophistication to her look. One of her most memorable hair styles from the show was a quiff and bun combination. This allowed the judge to show the thickness and strength of her hair, with it completely off her face. Tulisa had the front section backcombed and pinned back, and the rest tied around each other in a neat bun. If you would like some advice on how to style your hair to suit your face shape, or some assistance with hair pieces, or you are going through any for of hair thinning, shedding or loss, contact Bloomsbury of London today.

Daniella Clowd Bloomsbury of London

An Overview Of The Paper Industry In India

Industry

The paper industry is one of the leading and prominent industries in India. The industry is among the highest contributor of revenue to the country. It also provides employment to more than 1.5 million people and is considered to be a developing industry. Paper products have been in constant demand during the past several decades which has led to the further growth of the industry in many ways.

Various types of paper products are used in many ways including bags, cups, plates, books, envelopes and so forth. The availability of raw materials is one of the most important factors that concern the paper industry. With the growing destruction of forests, authentic raw materials are becoming scarce which has led to the increased import of raw materials from neighbouring countries.

The Growth of Paper Industry in India

Due to the wide spread demand for paper products, non conventional methods are utilised for producing different types of raw materials required for the production of paper. The paper industry is now further identified as three types mainly the agro based, forest based and other varieties such as waste materials, market pulp and fibre.

Today the paper industry has around 515 units which manufacture various types of paper products. The Indian industry is the fifteenth largest industry in the world. The high costs of production, concentration of industries in one place are the various bottlenecks of this industry.

The paper industry has also witnessed a considerable demand for products with the shift in consumer behavioural patterns. The use of plastics has declined considerably due to many health and environmental issues. This has in turn increased the consumption of different types of paper products such as stationery items, photo frames, kites, magazines, bank notes, catalogs, playing cards, tissue paper, albums and directories.

Different types of products can also be made with the use of recycled raw materials. Today the process of using recycled raw materials for the manufacture of various paper products are encouraged to reduce the ill-effects of deforestation. Waste materials such as rags, jute, cotton and straw is used for manufacturing various types of products.

The paper industry also utilises hand made paper which is quite popular in the country. Known to provide employment to more than thousands in the rural areas, the industry is a major source of employment. The hand made paper is durable and lasts longer. It can be used to manufacture various types of handmade materials.

Today the government has introduced several policies to support the paper industry. Better manufacturing technologies, reduction in the import duties and production cost, availability of better raw materials are some of the measures taken by the government to improve the production of paper products.

In spite of facing several challenges, the industry has attained considerable growth in different parts of the country. Paper importers have known to import raw materials only for specific types of paper. Today there are a number of industries that manufacture paper and are known to be the leading industries of the country.

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