We are still Closet Socialists June 23, 2009

I often find that I sell myself short. When it comes to doing client work – I’d undercharge, or I’d make the matter of money very trivial – as if it was the last thing on my mind, and be extra eager to please – ‘Haanji, yeh bho ho jayega ji’. Of course I’d realise later what I had signed up for – and have begun to learn the hard way that it is definitely the wrong way to go!

What’s interesting is when I recently worked with a freelance Illustrator for some design work, he seemed to be echoing the same feelings. This was a young guy, fresh out of college with maybe a few months work experience. The work that we were doing increased a bit – but he did not ask me to re-evaluate the quote and I assumed that it was okay with him. Later when it came to the final payment and I asked him why he did not talk about this earlier, he said ‘Mujhe paise ki baat karna achcha naheen lagta’.

And I realised that a lot of us perhaps still attach a certain amount of guilt to the pursuit of money – we guys are still closet socialists. Note that it is not that we think that money is wrong – it’s just that we are reluctant to ask for it. I’m not sure if this was the right phrase to describe this mentality, but here’s what Pavan K Verma in his book Being Indian writes on the chapter on Wealth:

The year 1991 removed the stigma associated with the pursuit of wealth. It buried the need for hypocrisy for the aspiration to be rich … People could now do openly – and with greater effectiveness – what they had tried to do surreptitiously under Nehruvian socialism:find ways to make money for themselves.

Perhaps we (I?) still need to pull myself out of this mentality.

A related post on my design blog: Dihari baandhna mat bhoolo

PBBI: Twitter for Project Teams April 28, 2009

For each project that you are working own, have a twitterish project group where people can post project updates – so you know at a snapshot what’s happening.

According to Kani, these start-ups are serving that need: https://www.yammer.com, https://presentlyapp.com/.

They offer the above and much more.

The most important room in your house March 30, 2009

I am a toilet person.

It’s amusing and mildly embarrassing to read that line I have written above, but it is the truth. I am a toilet person because this is the space where for those 15 minutes of crapping you have the license to be cut off from the world. You don’t have to answer calls, reply to e-mails or feel guilty about reading a book when you should be working. It is this solitary haven that you can escape to whenever nature calls, in a world populated with far too many people.

I have been cautious with admitting this fact. I think I have only subjected two people to this thought so far, both of whom reacted with contorted faces of disgust. But I now have validation!

From Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov (not necessarily a literary genius but endlessly imaginative and bloody entertaining). Excerpt from what seems to be a dinner table conversation between 3 people:

‘In your toilet at home you can go at any time, even if you don’t need too. You can stay for hours, read a book or read cartoons. You can simply rest your chin on the palm of your hand and think. No other room gives you such privacy. This is the most important room, you know. The most important room.’

… ‘Those are private rituals, for your eyes only. Because nobody sees you there. I don’t think even God looks at you.’

And other insanely funny stuff including a diversionary chapter on the Great History of the Toilet and reflections like:

‘When I was a kid, I went to the village movie theatre and wondered why nobody ever went to the toilet. All those Indians, cowboys, entire Roman legions (LOL) and no one took a shit or peed.’ [Stuff in parentheses added by me.]

Lest you be dissuaded from the book, it is about a writer getting a divorce. The above and several other topics are just the protagonist’s thought diversions.

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In my attempt to find a relevant photo for this post, found these two hilarious ones:

And a Flickr group on toilets! http://www.flickr.com/groups/toilets/pool/

Pondi’s Book of Busines Ideas : Amazon Anywhere March 21, 2009

A while back I was at Landmark, shopping for books and I felt really handicapped by the lack of relevant information. There were so many books and I hadn’t done my research about which one I wanted to buy so I was just ‘browsing’ – which is always fun – and I can spend hours in a bookshop – but on this occasion I could not. I wanted to find something nice and then head to whatever I had to attend to afterwords. There were the blurbs, there were the endorsement style reviews – but I so craved for an Amazon rating, or a third party review or the ability to find similar titles based on what I had read, or new titles based on what I might want to explore.

So I thought a great business idea would be to have something like ‘Amazon Anywhere’.

Concept: Pick out your phone, scan the bar code using your phone camera, hook on to GPRS/EDGE/Wi-Fi or perhaps an in-store BluZone (The bluetooth zones which found limited  popularity in malls for sometime – I don’t see them now perhaps because there might’ve been too much spam advertising!) and get some information about the title you are looking at.

Infact, when Android came out with it’s app challenge, I thought that would be a real cool app to make. Some issues were apparently the inability of camera phones to read regular bar codes (I believe they need 2-dimensional bar codes to work).

 

Then today I saw a video which showed me how limited my vision was. Limited because I couldn’t think beyond the available infrastructure and limited because I wasn’t thinking beyond books.

Guys, This is how the ‘relevant information’ will be delivered to you in the future – becoming a ‘sixth sense’ to your existing quintet. Watch Pattie Mae from MIT media Lab describe the sixth sense to you – her research student Pranav Mistry is the genius behind it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

The guy got a standing ovation at TED! Man, that must’ve been something (Matlab, main ek baar TED dekh aaon to apne aapko dhanya samjhoonga). I’m very VERY jealous, and yet very proud..

The Personalisation Myth March 10, 2009

I come across a lot of websites that have recommendation engines based on your history, or your past purchases or what you favourites are and then they pimp similar stuff back to you. I guess the notion is based on the idea that they can find stuff related to what you ‘like’ and thus not just improve the experience for you, but also increase their sales as you are more likely to make a purchase. Amazon is probably the most shining example of this where the very pristine and fresh home page changes to show what you have browsed before and what you might thus like, with every subsequent visit.

The main area on ‘my’ Amazon.com home page lists 8 main sections. These are ‘Frequently Bought Together’ which shows an image of a book I had looked at earlier today along with two other books, ‘More to Explore’ which also shows a book I looked at recently along with related books, ‘Stay Dry with a New Raincoat’ – which is the one section unrelated to my ‘Amazon Past’, ‘Customer With Similar Searches Purchased’ – which another name for #1 & #2 above. ‘Recommended for you’ which seems to be based on purchase history as it shows an Action Figure I bought for a friend and a Shaver I bought 5 months back. ‘New for You’ which is again a recycled #1. And finally ‘Recommended for you based on your browsing history’ and ‘Inspired by your Wish list’.

A whopping 7 out of 8 sections are ‘personalised’ and pay no attention to stuff which I might want to try out or explore.

I think there are two variants of personalisation: a) Explicit  & b) Implicit. The Explicit variant is more common with personalised homepage service such as Netvibes where I specify what news sources I want to get my news from, my widgets and more. E-commerce sites however, cannot use explicit personalisation – they in turn use my explicit choices – such as a my searches and past purchases to make a guess at what else I might like.

I think the biggest problem with this is that it overlooks the exploratory tendencies in people. I like rock music, I like Bollywood – sure I’d like to explore more of the same, but then sometimes I want to try something completely new – recently a friend introduced me to Jazz – which I thought was pretty interesting too – why couldn’t Amazon recommend something like that? I think often people themselves don’t know what they like and would like to sample something new rather than more of the same.

Unfortunately, pretty much all services – from the Pandora’s to the Last.fm of the world empower only incremental exploration by showing related stuff, but haven’t cracked the question of how to encourage people to try out something radically different.

Another issue is the assumption that I want to buy everything I searched for (Personalisation at Amazon appears to based on favourites, past purchases and searches of which the last seems the most unreliable to me). A friend of mine once asked me to buy a Belly Dancing DVD for her, next I know I have 4 other similar titles showing up in ‘You Might Also Like…’ on Amazon! I think search related recommendations are best served on the Search Result pages – which provide related results within that context.

I really wish Amazon would stop deciding my future based on my past, or at least not all of it.

Postscript: Apparently an old report called ‘Beyond the personalisation myth’ published in 2003 (damn they used the same title!) seems to make a similar case based on more extensive research: :  Personalising Web sites ‘wastes money’.

Those untranslatable words February 13, 2009

I’m back! After several days – I’ve finally managed to unlock my mind again – to toss out those pointless nuggets of wisdom to the world and causing much embarrassment to myself. What had happened? I don’t know – guess I had gotten stuck into the work routine rather intensely – refusing to give myself that time to reflect and contemplate. I had become too cautious of what I put out there giving up the opportunity to make a fool of myself. So what changed? After several months I finally downloaded a couple of podcasts from the Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner and listened to Jeff Housenbold – the CEO of Shutterfly and Tom Kelley from IDEO. Tom’s talk was fantastic and woke me up. Guess I need to do this podcast and random reading thing as often as I used to. As Tom says – treat life like an experiment.

So what’s this one about? It about Schadenfreude. The happiness that humans experience upon others’ misfortunes. You’ve always felt it – but did you know there was a word for it?

A very common feeling, which unless you’ve actually heard the word – making it an identifable part of the human condition – is otherwise followed by feelings of guilt and remorse.

I think it’s fascinating that words exist in other languages which actually capture something so succintly, and in another language you need a full sentence to explain it. It’s just make the very experience immediately relatable because when you know there’s a word for it – you know that you’re not the only one experiencing it.

Of course we all know Deja Vu. I remember reading this fantastic book by Milan Kundera called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (which I now intend to carry with me to Goa and reread) – which has a short story called ‘Litost’. Litost is an untransalatable Czech word that ‘represents a state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s misery’ – Kundera says that he finds it difficult to imagine how one can understand the human soul without it. More on it once I’ve reread it.

Any Hindi words?

2009 January 2, 2009

My year.

Businessweek’s List of Best Books on Innovation in 2008 December 16, 2008

 

Businessweek has published a list of what they feel were the best books on innovation this year.

 

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/12/1215_best_design_books/index.htm

 

My wish-to-reads: A book which talks about doodling as a management tool, Clay Shirky’s book & Groundswell on Social Media, and Numerati – data from your web browsing being used to create highly customised products. Also a book on Pixar which gets an honorary mention.

Damn, I haven’t kept up with the media coverage November 25, 2008

When you have a small company, you should celebrate every little victory with aplomb. I just realised that we haven’t spent enough time compiling mentions of iTasveer in mainstream media. While digital media is a Google search away – conventional media is more difficult to collate after a point in time – and to be honest – still holds more charm than being covered by a blog – there, I said it. An attempt to collect some stuff that I remember.

 

NDTV [Sometime in 2007]

An amusing interview done at IIT Delhi which required at least 3 retakes of us looking at a flying plane (a cheesy shot supposed to indicate ambition).

 

PC World [May 2007]

The Best Website for Photo Printing ! :D

 

IBN Live [August 2007]

http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/47739/sites-for-printing-pics-online–hottest-search-engine-goes-desi.html

itasveer.com – ‘The Champion’!

There was another story, which I had found on a competitor’s blog – also to be tracked down.

 

HT Business [Around June 2008]

Have to track down the article.

 

Indian Express [October 2008]

‘Photo shop’

 

Post to be updated – as and when I locate a story.

A Bollywood Stock Exchange November 18, 2008

Sometime back I read a fascinating book called the Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The book talks about how and under what conditions crowds can be wiser than the individual. It makes for an engaging read and is packed with interesting anecdotes (though some arguments are not entirely well supported – the author relies a lot on stating thoughts which may intuitively appeal to the reader rather than defending them with evidence or logic – can’t help it – Freakonomics spoilt me).

Anyway, a very interesting concept in the book is that of decision markets. You can learn more about them here on Wikipedia.

Apparently the likes of HP, Microsoft, Google use it internally, and there are several other projects which rely on the same.

One such example mentioned by Surowiecki was the Hollywood Stock Exchange – who actually sell their data to Movie Studios.

Which got me thinking – how about a Bollywood Stock Exchange – in our stocks-crazy movie-crazy nation wouldn’t this do exceedingly well? As usual, that called for a logo:

 

Turns out some guys have already come up with a similar service for India – and they are not just covering bollywood, but sports and current affairs. Haven’t gotten a chance to slice-and-dice their business model – but at any rate a promising site. All the best guys!

  

For a counterpoint, read the ever eclectic Taleb who says decision markets are for suckers!