Guess who won an IPOD Nano!

Highlight of the week or perhaps the whole goddamn year is that I 'won' an IPOD Nano! Isn't that cool? I submitted a business idea a few weeks ago to one of our forums at work and looks like they like the idea :) I must also mention that Reeba bought me an IPOD Nano (black) for my birthday a few months ago so it not so much the IPod that I am excited about but its more the fact that I actually won something! My parents will be here on June 2nd and Reeba lands on June 4th, so we are going have lots of family time, really looking forward to that. Our furniture from India has not arrived yet, so guess who is going to be sleeping on parquette flooring pretty soon? Not my parents :) We are having an INSEAD stamtisch this week in Munich, looking forward to seeing some familiar faces again. It's hard to believe that we are going to be in the middle of the largest football frenzy ever and not have tickets to any of the madness. In order to make amends to our disappointment, we have decided to buy a TV :) Priya's German is getting pretty good, we went out this wine bar near our place yesterday and everytime the waitress asked me something in German I would look at Priya and she would sputter something in Deutsche. You should have seen the glee on her face and the embarassment on mine. We have seen it many times already in the newspapers around the world, European Markets are dead! Many people don't seem to think so, here is what the CEO of my company has to say about it - "Europe has actually been a tremendous success story on many levels. Think of what's happened: the Iron Curtain has fallen and the Cold War has ended. German has been reunified. Europe now has open borders and in many countries a single currency. Nations that were once dictatorships are now democratic. Many countries once in the poorhouse are today economic success stories. In the Baltic states, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, GDP is growing 3-8 % per year - rates many countries would envy. While other countries are growing slower - including Germany - there are positive signs of change, there too. This includes wage moderation in labor negotiations, macroeconomic reforms on the part of many governments, and a growing recognition that innovation is the key driver to creating jobs with a future. Further, Europe remains on the global cutting edge in many key industries including automotive, aerospace, healthcare, GSM technologies, etc. (incidentally, these are many industries in which Siemens is already active)." I read an article today which said that Germany exports over 1,000 Billion euros worth of goods every year making it the largest exporter in the world - this with 9 million people unemployed and a 35 hour work week! The question but beckons, how do they do it? Obviously productivity is a big key, any other ideas? My theory is that the true secret lies in their beer :)