Frequently a lot of the latter aren’t choices at all. They are so instinctive that you do them without the act of ‘making a choice’. Thus, in everyday life, one has a ‘precomputed set of choices’ – time spent on work, with your better half,  friends,  video games etc. A precomputed choice is a choice that one has made after (typically unconsciously) factoring in all the other choices that existed.

It is both a challenge to change them – that is why changing a habit is hard – because while you did something unconsciously before, you now have to make an active effort to make a different choice – example – giong to the gym instead of sitting at home. The other issue arises when other people don’t see it for what they are, and instead assume that your consciously choose to slight them, and therefore have misplaced choices – for example, choosing to spend more time with one set of people or another.

So, what are withdrawal symptoms? Withdrawal symptoms (normally this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal) is the phrase I am using to describe the initial resistance people show to something new because they are used to the old equivalents (Facebook design changes come to mind, iPad launch comes to mind). Also, how to do you do useful ‘human-centered’ design when you are creating something different from what people are already used to?

You are tweeting about your company latest feature and see a WIRED article in your stream that you can’t wait to read.

But work calls, so they have to wait.

You either leave the TED email unread, letting it consume prime visual real estate in your inbox. Or you download the video on your Desktop where it will lie for the next several days. You open the article in a browser tab and let it be. Or you bookmark it and then forget all about it.

Our computers have become now the primary device for discovering AND consuming information – be it work or leisure. But how do I reduce this information overload and at least consume it when I want and where I want? One answer: new devices and services that can deliver to those devices. Which is why I love my Kindle and my iPod Touch.

These days when I find an interesting article, I Instapaper it. My Instapaper is set to automatically send new articles to my Kindle at the end of the day, and then I can happily read them in the most important room in my house. TED has this awesome functionality where you can ‘Download a video to iTunes’. Whenever I connect my iPod Touch, it syncs them and then I can watch one of these videos right before I sleep (I wish iTunes had Wi-Fi sync).

So what’s the point? I am making a case for devices that do one thing and one thing well, like a Walkman or a TV. But obviously, that’s not going to be the case – because you know, ‘there’s an app for that’. So what we then need is devices which when doing one thing do it really well. This is a case for full screen immersive experiences. A case against the taskbar that shows which applications are open. A case even against tabbed browsing.

You say that already exists. An iPad. You’re right. It’s just that I realised how much of a disruptive innovation that is. Johnny Ive (a man who vocal chords need to be preserved as much as his right brain) may be overstating the case when he says ‘I don’t have to change myself to fit the product. It fits me.’, but it definitely fits the activity you are trying to do.

But more than letting out some iPad love, this is a case for the missing piece in this puzzle besides discovery and consumption which is delivery.

Something like Instapaper. When combined with Amazon’s WhisperNet it takes no more work that clicking on ‘Read Later’ to get an article to my Kindle.

But what about music? Why can’t a song I discovered on Shazam be delivered to my Sansa Clip?

YouTube videos? Why can’t I just ‘Send to TV’.

So the question is: How might we get to a point where a discovered piece of information or media it can be effortlessly delivered to my ideal consumption device?

A few minutes later you feel like making a call. You tread carefully towards the phone. It’s lying dead, or maybe just switched off. You don’t know yet. You pick it up and see it has chipped a little on an edge but no other external damage. You are a bit relieved. You press the power button in anticipation. After what feels like an unending logo animation, the phone is on. You make that call. Maybe the phone is not that bad after all. You give it a little peck and pocket it. Back to things as usual.

But things aren’t usual. Everytime you threw that phone it broke a little bit. On the inside.

One day it stops working. Your doubts are confirmed – this phone was trash. It had to stop working eventually.

They are just never good enough. You head out to go and get a new one.

You toss the dead old phone in the bin on the way out. There’s a rattling sound when it hit the top of the dump already in the bin. But there was another rattling sound. Much quieter. The sound of the broken pieces inside.

Well, I’m sure the Google goons are on it, figuring out a way to tackle this problem. Meanwhile, the search engine whose names comes up more and more frequently in these posts is ‘Blekko’ – much more than the more obvious alternatives like Bing.

What is different with Blekko? To start with they have something called ‘slashtags’ which narrows your search within a category specified by the tag. For example if you use ‘/date’, Blekko will rank your results chronologically, if you use ‘/tech’ it will search within a ‘human curated set of websites related to tech’. See how this professor used it for research.

Here’s Blekko explaining their own search engine.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/14593120?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

So what gives?

1. As soon as you look at the video you realise that slashtags could imply any number of things. It does not have an immediately intelligible usage pattern – in some cases, it’s searches a human selected set of sites (as in /tech or /green), in another it’s algorithmic sorting by date (/date). What about ‘photography /fashion /people’? I read “Find pages for ‘photography’ in websites related to fashion and websites related to people”. It just does not translate into normal english as ‘people related to fashion photography’. Most people would rather search for the latter directly and that too probably in Google. So they either need a name that has more semantic value, or a some structure that can translate to readable english.

2. I am very intrigued by it’s other features. An ‘seo’ link against each result! This should be interesting!

So I’m going start testing it out by replacing it in Chrome as my default search i.e. the default in the Chrome address bar. How do you do it? Well, Go to Chrome Options, Click on ‘Manage’ next to Default search. Click ‘Add…’ and then enter the following:

Here’s the URL to copy paste with ease: http://blekko.com/ws/+%s

Next, select this ebgine from the list and click ‘Make Default’. You are good to go.

If you still want Google as a fallback, here’s what I did. I added another engine to the list with the following parameters:

You can use whatever keyword you like. The URL : http://www.google.co.in/#q=%s

Now, if I want to search Google, I type the keyword gg in the address bar , press Tab and get to search Google!

I found it particularly interesting because I run a company myself, and it was interesting to observe Rocket Singh’s (and his boss Mr. Puri’s) approach to running a company.

1. USP, Branding and Finding a Niche

My first observation was how Rocket Sales go about building their USP and brand. Their USP was the day and night service they provided – and that was so unusual that it got their customers really interested. I wonder how the conversation between the co-founders ‘might’ have gone (but didn’t).

Potey: You know what, other companies don’t provide after sales service – let’s focus on that.

Rocket: You’re right. In fact let’s go one step further and provide day and night service.

Potey: Tu pagal ho gaya hai. Kaun karega, apun do log hain, soyenge kab – aur aage jaake sustainable kaise hoga. Service se shuru karte hain, and then we will see how it goes.  

And if had happened that way – they might have settled for a half-measure and though they might have done well – they might have grown a lot slowly. Another example comes to mind when 95FM launched, they launched with no ads! They only used social media and Orkut to reach out – but within a short while everyone was talking about the ad free radio company. I think the take away is this : “To create a brand and a USP, you might have to do something drastic, even if that might come at severe inconvenience to yourself”. Far too often we end up doing the easy stuff, because we do not want things to be inconvenient for us. Either that, or the solution is not obvious. For example, for us, one of the biggest issues would be shipping, which is out of our control – and even if we make a state-of-the-art product, if the customer receives it too late – his experience is sub-par. Another interesting example is McDonald’s franchising model – to have the same bloody burger served everywhere in the world must have come with some serious effort.

Another observation – Don’t be scared by the big guy, but don’t dare to do all that they do – find a niche – dominate that niche and then go forward from there.

2. Short Term Profit vs. Long Term Clients

This is always a tough call. Do you maximise profits? Or do you sell your product for a song so that you can capture the market. Rocket Sales did this by shaving off their margins and providing a better proposition on both service and price. But is that strategy sustainable? Jury’s out on that one.

2.1 Related to #2: Do the Razor and Blades model.

Remember the razor and blades model – sell the Razor cheap and then make money on the blades (Or sell the game console at a loss and make money off the royalties on video game sales). In this case, sell the computer cheap, but have a compelling after-sales service for continued revenue from the clients.

3. Team Issues

This was one area which I think Rocket Singh made it look really easy – but is the biggest challenge. Operationally, being in a team has one great benefit – sharing of work, and one big drawback – the tendency to settle for the consensus, and consensus is often mediocre (example, the half-measure of #1). Rocket Singh chooses to be inflexible – which I think is good, because then what they do, can only end in extremes – either do well or fail miserably – giving you the chance to try several others as against well rounded consensus ideas – which will give average returns (Idea churn is high and higher potential returns) .

Another thing I found interesting was his approach to equity – where he gave equal stake to every member – irrespective of the skill set involved – and interesting the earlier founders willingly diluted their stake. Good strategy/bad strategy? Jury out on that one too.

4. Ethics

This one’s again a bit tricky. While in the movie – a righteous ethical businessman is something that will appeal to the audience – in real life this is much harder. Perhaps if everyone in the chain is a well educated professional – this might be possible – e.g. perhaps in the IT industry, but in several other businesses you have to deal with middlemen, especially when they are in the government or bureaucracy where they can bring your work to a standstill for want of a electricity load approval, liquor license etc. etc. Many an idealistic businessmen had to rejig their view of the world when faced with this (I personally know some of them).

5. Startup = Fun? 

Besides Rocket Singh, another character whom I found very interesting was his boss Mr. Puri. Kudos to Jaideep Rajput for making a character who isn’t evil per se (except for the arrogance – which was his hubris) – but someone who only was trying to run his business the way he knows best. He says this fantastic dialogue in the end “Jab khoon paseena ek saath kagaz pe chapta hai na, table bed ban jaati hai aur office ghar, bhookh pyaas bhul jati hai, baal bachche rul jaate hain, tab jaake saali company banti hai.” And man, isn’t he right – a start up, while being fun, often takes over your life. So if you ever do one, don’t do it for the wrong reasons.

So all in all, an interesting movie for all these reasons.

PS: Given my love for logos, I must add that I also liked Rocket Sales logo. When you are a start up – don’t get your friend/bhai/bhanja to design a crummy logo for you for free (even though the Rocket Sales people did). It’s going to be your identity for several years – invest in it.

Articles on the web on the same topic: http://bit.ly/5Rcarx, http://bit.ly/7Ewv1C, http://bit.ly/4TSaC5, http://bit.ly/71nnWi

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

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

They offer the above and much more.

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.

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/

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..