The Alchemy of Thoughts

Aakash is the limit

2011-11-05T12:44:00.000+05:30

Aakash - the sky in Hindi, is the name of the new andriod power low cost tablet built by DataWind. It is supposed to be cheapest in the world at $35. Aakash has Wifi connectivity, GPRS access point and USB ports. Most importantly the tablet has the blessings of the Government of India. There are talks of the device being made available in schools and colleges across the country. There have been lots of comments and review about the device in the media, people have rubbished the minister who launched the product and have generally relegated the tablet to the thrash bin.

For any technology product to become ubiquitous it needs to have universal acceptance which means that it has to be in the hands of the common man who is NOT digitally savvy. The last time something like this happened was when mobile telephony came into India. It is not uncommon for the lowest denominator on the street to have a prepaid connection and use the cell phone ( assembled in China ) and consume content.

The government has made a good start by earmarking a bulk of the tablets for school kids. My point is that there is hope on two fronts:

The dismal education system in India needs a boost and the tablet can do that by making technology, internet and content available to the kids who have to otherwise wait till they get to the college levels to have access. Self learn modules using the touch screen would let the children explore the topics they want from their syllabus and around them. This would mean that there can be teacher less classrooms and a uniform quality of knowledge that gets imparted.
Eventually the tablet screen can become personal infotainment option leading to the broadcaster directly being able to talk to the audience without the interference of the middle men. It creates a new dynamic two way relationship which only a true consumer friendly organisation would understand.

It is not going to be easy to get the first point going, with mutiple languages and cultural biases, it is a complex situation. But not impossible. There are several experiments in the past like the 'hole in the wall' project by NIIT's Sugata Mitra that have shown that if given a free hand the children from varied backgrounds can evolve into expert users even when they do not have a clue about the tech behind the device. The kids are not scared of experimenting like us adults and learn very quickly. Now think what is possible with self learn modules being provided via a wifi or a USB drive to the government sponsored tablet. In ten years we might actually have a whole generation of free thinkers instead of the 'rote learning' mass produce that the school system churns out every year. The returns of the investment will be its weight in gold. The problem is that there are too few who are focussing on this area. Most investment in education in India is aimed at the moneyed top end of the market while the middle India languishes with indifference. And this creation of solutions cannot be based on the aided models - those are normally shoddy and lack definitive edge that paid models have. Maybe the solution lies in creating something that is funded by media or ad funded. I am not sure at this point what that model is, I lack the imagination of a startup in this space, but logic makes me think it is possible.

An educated market is far ahead of a semi literate or illiterate market. The aspirations of the people who are aware are more aggressive than that of those that live closeted. The market that would get created by the Aakash tablet is likely to drive consumption far beyond what we can imagine. The sectors impacted would most probably be banking, ecommerce and entertainment. Imagine a 5 million market base that has access to this tablet, to education and then imagine what it would be to communicate with them in their language. The only way this can happen is if there is a paradigm shift in ad spends in India. And not for the luxury car segment but for day to day use fast moving, small pack size items - soaps, toothpaste, oils, masalas, banking services. I get a feeling that this new medium would be the equivalent of the wall painted ads that one sees across rural and semi urban India.

If I were the deciding factor on the business side of things at a broadcaster ( I work for a broadcaster!!!), I would try to get out there and embed apps that provide my content to this market that has access to the tablet on an ad funded model. Short format meaningful 3 minute episodes that can be created out of the existing soaps on TV or source content / create content for this category. Trust me when I say this - there are enough people out there who watch videos on their mobile phone using the crappy 2G connections using youtube or aggregators like Vuclip.

There will always be a savvy English speaking, willing to pay top rupee for subscription model in India for quality content. A tablet like Aakash can change the equation drastically. Hopefully there are enough of us to start preparing for the massive tsunami coming our way.

Exploring Chit Funds

2011-11-03T19:08:00.000+05:30

This Diwali, my father in law finally decided to take me seriously. He wanted to discuss a new business he was planning on investing into - a chit fund as a major promoter of the business. I was a bit surprised at the nature of business, because for me chit funds were what women did at kitty parties. It was the investment method of choice for hundreds of Gulf widows in Kerala. They joined 'chitties' with small amounts saved from the money sent to them by their expat husbands from the deserts of Arabia and bought flashy appliances and gold with the money they saved or paid dowry for their daughters.

In her working paper for Institute for Financial Management and Research, Small Enterprise Finance Centre, Preeti Rao classifies Chit funds as the Indian equivalent of the Rotating Savings and Credit Associations
(ROSCA) that are famous throughout the world. ROSCAs are a means to ’save and borrow’ at the same time. It is considered one of the best instruments to cater to the needs of the poor.

According to her paper the concept of chit funds originated more than 1000 years ago.2 Initially it was in the
form of an informal association of traders and households within communities, wherein the members contributed some money in return for an accumulated sum at the end of the tenure. Participation in chit funds were mainly for the purpose of purchasing some property or, in other words, for ’consumption’ purposes.

She explains that a chit scheme generally has a predetermined value and duration. Each scheme admits a particular number of members (generally equal to the duration of the scheme), who contribute a certain sum of money every month (or everyday) to the ’pot’. The ’pot’ is then auctioned out every month. The highest bidder (also known as the prized subscriber) wins the ’pot’ for that month. The bid amount is also called the ’discount’ and the prized subscriber wins the sum of money equal to the chit value less the discount. The discount money is then distributed among the rest of the members (or the non-prized subscribers)
as ’dividend’ and in the subsequent month, the required contribution is brought down by the amount of dividend.

To illustrate the above, let us take the example of a chit scheme with the following characteristics. Chit Value = Rs.500000, Duration = 50 months and Members = 50. The contribution in this case would be initially Rs.10000 per month per member. In the first month, the collection would, therefore, be Rs.10000 multiplied by the number of members i.e. Rs.500000. This amount is called the ’pot’ which is auctioned out at the end of the month. Now let us assume that the highest bid in the first month auction is Rs.100000. This is called the ’discount’. The highest bidder now gets the amount equal to the chit value, Rs.500000, less the discount, Rs.100000, i.e. Rs.400000. The discount amount of Rs.100000 is then divided among the other 49 members equally (the dividend for the 49 members work out to roughly Rs.2040 each). For the subsequent month, therefore, the contribution of these members reduces by the amount of dividend (i.e. the contribution in the second month for the 49 members would be Rs.10000 less Rs.2040 which is equal to Rs.7960). This process gets repeated for all months till the end of the scheme.

My father in law thinks that there is a need for a Chit Fund that caters to the huge very small enterprise sector. MIDC Bhosari is home to almost 100000 plus such fabrication and job work establishments which do not qualify for institutionalised support in the form of loans or line of credit. My maternal uncle is one such fabrication shop owner who over the last 25 years has done well to establish a series of 'factories' all over Pune district. He says when he started, it was difficult to get a loan and the only way to buy equipment was to join a chit fund and bid for the 'pot' right at the begining and repay it over a 12 to 24 month period. To date there are small operators who run unauthorised chit funds. Many are fly by night operators and people get conned into losing small sums that they invest.

The reputation of the chit fund depends on the ability of the person managing the business. While there have been large organisations like Peerless and Sahara in India which have run chit funds and have used the money to spin themselves into multi crore companies, it is the small fly by night operators that have given the business a bad name. The personal integrity of the team and the adherence to systems and timely audits are the key to the success. The new chit fund that is being proposed is supposed to be a private limited company with some big names in Pune as promoters, a good audit firm on board and a desire to follow the rules.

The economics of the business are sound. When they reach 10000 members who participate with an average of Rs 2000 per month they expect to start making money. They plan to expand into other industrial cities which have similar needs.

The second market they plan to target are the women who want to save but do not get good return due to low rates on FDs and do not have the knowledge to explore other options. These women use the chit fund route to fund their immediate needs and sometimes to support small home based businesses to suppliment their home expenses. A market that RangDe has been successful with.

I was expected to look at the business plan and suggest changes and whether something like this can attract an investor. My honest answer was that I am not sure. I see not differentiator to allow the business to scale up. The business is very locality based and cannot reach a large audience without legs on the ground. To scale up the investments are very large. Having said as much, it potential is mind boggling. Back of the envelop calculations say that they can be profitable within a year of operation in Pune itself. If they use technology - internet and mobile to make payments easy, the target market can move from the lower end to bigger ticket customers. The entire middle east is open to a tech savvy option where the tech savvy Indian can log into and invest without having to involve money transfer and impossible to verify operators.

A few friends on Twitter called Chit Funds a form of Ponzi scheme. My take is that any money related scheme can turn into a Ponzi scheme, there are enough respectable businesses that one reads of who inflate valuations for an IPO and then go bust within few months of the gulliable retail customer investing their saving in the scrips. Fiscal discipline and the ability to play a neutral and honest role in the management team is important. But then this applies to any business.

I will update this blogpost as the business matures, not because I have anything to gain from this venture but because I feel that ventures of this kind if run well have the ability to bring about crucial social change by making capital available when one needs it.

Fortune at the bottom of the mobile phone user pyramid

2011-10-20T12:49:00.000+05:30

There is this young man who works for the apartment block I live in as its security guard. Like most security guards in Mumbai, he has a uniform and lives mostly in the small cabin housing the water pump, using the toilet built for the help who work in the 32 flats in the building. It is not as bad as many might think; it is much more than what people like this young man get in Mumbai with its sprawling slums and forgotten poverty. Most late evenings when I return home from work, he is seated on his plastic chair, holding fort, listening to old Hindi songs on All India Radio’s local channel via his mobile. Like many users that comprise the supposed 850 million mobile phone users in India, this man buys talk time at Rs 50, a onetime charge per week – he uses it to call the building manager, the water tank which delivers water to the building when the Municipal water fails and to call back home in Nepal once a week. He gets Rs 30 as reimbursement from the building management. I asked him if he uses value added services (VAS) like music downloads, ringtones, or videos. He explained that at one time he would do it, but now does not because it drains the Rs 50 within 3 days instead of the week that it is supposed to last.

Most of the Indian mobile phone user falls into this category of people who are users of the service but cannot afford more than the basic voice call service. Sure there are students and a large body of population that is on prepaid and can afford VAS, am sure the ratio between this population and the one like my security guard is overwhelmingly in favour of those who do not use VAS because they don’t want to spend precious rupees on entertainment.

These are the people who despite their limitation buy soap, shampoo, oil, and aspire to buy clothes from a proper shop. This is the population that is catered to by the kirana corner shops in all urban and rural India. These are the very same people who are targeted by outreach programs run by global MNCs like Unilever, P&G, Airtel, Reliance and so many more. It is a huge and potentially the fastest growing market in the world.

I wonder why this market is not targeted by the broadcasters in India. It is a very identifiable media that goes beyond the TV screen and extends itself by making the media free to use or in media parlance – ad funded. Am sure the millions mobile phone users would be happy to consume this content, like they do on TV, without needing to pay any money or very little money (market intelligence says that most cable operators charge around Rs 50 – Rs 100 for unlimited channels, this leakage is one of the reasons that broadcasters continuously look at owning distribution, and to my knowledge they – the broadcasters are losing the game.) Am sure that every advertising brand catering to this mass would get wet dreams on the possibilities that exist here. The big question is, why is no one doing this yet?

The answer lies in the non-existent ecosystem: TelCos see no value in ad funded VAS – they cannot make money selling the services at exorbitant revenue shares and prices. The media buyers have no way to measure effectiveness of their ads on this free model and so it remains a largely ignored area while they keep selling really expensive TV and print campaigns. The advertisers do not want to experiment beyond the safe cookie cutter plans which have been recycled for the last 15 years. And finally the old excuse that high end phones are simply not there in enough markets numbers. My counter is that even if 5% of the existing mobile phone users are using phones capable of supporting some form of entertainment, the numbers are larger than the audiences of most TV channels in the country.

Lets tackle the last issue first, lack of phones capable of playing entertainment defined as music and videos: we must be kidding ourselves, any self respecting cell phone owner, however low end his phone is has the ability to play music on this phone, and a sizable (my guesstimate is 70%) have a way to watch video! These phones are not manufactured by the big names but by the numerous brands that have come up in the last few years. If one works closely with all these cell phone handset brands, it would be easy to pre burn apps that are easily accessible, just give them a part of the revenue ( a small part nevertheless) for the platform they provide for the service. The second issue is that of lack of connectivity to the internet which is easily addressable by focusing on voice driven entertainment. The same user will progress naturally to the next level of getting GPRS services active if the Telcos reduce or do away with the access charges by subsiding it with the ad revenue that they would earn. Which brings us to the cost of content – an initiative can be only by a large broadcaster or a content owner who has the depth to wait for a couple of years to get the mass audience required making business sense. What I am proposing cannot be done by a startup that is normally pushed against the wall to prove business models and bring in revenue from month 6 into the business.

My suggestion is that a broadcaster should look at the latent potential of the huge audience, work with the media buying fraternity to build business cases and business models across voice and video on mobile phones, coordinating with TelCos and manufacturers to build a strong ecosystem that’s self sustaining in 18 – 24 months of operations.

The market in India is no doubt maturing at a blistering pace; the new frontiers are Africa and South America which are slowly becoming hotspots for mobile operators and television broadcasters. Over the next 5 years I expect that by allowing consumers to access their entertainment on their mobiles without making them pay for it will earn more money than business models that truncate the consumer base, simply because your consumer who is likely to buy essentials for his day to day life has very little money for entertainment. If you don’t give it to him, he will find a way to get it without paying for it.

Having said all of the above, there is a large market even then for a paid service that is ad free for people like me, who do not mind spending for content that they want and can choose.

Both models are sound. If you still want to hit me with a brick please comment here on the blog or follow me on twitter @spuriousmallu

The Quora Bandwagon.

2011-02-19T10:15:00.000+05:30

I have been using Facebook for a long time to keep upto date with all the cool stuff that we marketers get excited about. Of the 465 (as of last count) people on my friends list, a majority are from the media, advertising and social media space and between them post enough to give me an idea of whats going on around my connected universe. So when a curious ‘Q’ started appearing like a rash on Facebook it perked me up like nothing before. I discovered the great www.Scobelizer.com cat fight (those who follow tech and media will know what that means) and the many versions of what actually Quora does online. I must confess, I have been on the tool for around a week and am no where close to using it to its fullest potential. But here is a list of this that one can do with Quora - These are things that have come from random searches and cannot be attributed to any one article or source. Some of it have been discovered in the last one week.

Quora can be used for marketing or for self promotion. It is rather easy – set up your ‘bio’ for all the topics that you know about – in effect you can choose from hundreds of topics you think you know and then interlink it to websites and so on. You can ask questions anonymously for topics or search for questions related to your areas of interest and follow them. You can also answer some of the questions that you have genuine answers about them or pretend you have an answer. The correct relevant answers are quick to rise to the top and your reputation is based on how many times you have risen to the top of the heap. Quora allows all kinds of questions to be asked – suppose I wanted to know more about the Kizashi from Maruti, I can look for a question relating to the same and then follow the question for as long as I want. Consider that Google made huge moneys on the intentions of people by placing ads when they were looking for information relating to a topic, Quora has a potential to have advertising in some new innovative form placed along side questions and answers. In case that does not happen, very soon we will have brands creating questions and answers and then reach out to people who follow these – logic being that these people are interested in the topic or the product to which the question is linked. It is also possible that you will get all kinds of information about a product or a company from the people who have been linked with the company or brand in the past. Quora can then become a great research tool.

www.Mashable.com recently had a great article suggesting that people use Quora for job related searches. The easiest ways to attract people who are looking at talent in specific areas is to show up as the expert with you answers. You could also follow the people who matter and their topics and once in a while when you know what you are saying can answer a question to a topic and create a following. When that HR guy comes looking for a relevant position you will feature as an expert. What is important about Quora is that it will never be able to solve your problem at any instant but over a period of time it can be used as a sounding board for ideas. It is great in finding the collective intelligence of the masses to any problem and like any solution to a problem it will take time for the answers to give results. Small businesses and startups and eventually anyone in the world should be able to get answers to issues that are relevant to your life. In the last few days itself I have found people getting answers to natural child birth to parenting to marital issues on the site. In time this single system has the potential to give Google a run for its money in the race for being the knowledge repository of the human race.

Trust me when I say this – the site will become mainstream sooner than what is predicted. If Google became mainstream in 7 years and facebook in 4, twitter in 2, I would assume that given that everyone is connected more than ever before, Quora will be mainstream in 18 months. It will grow at a pace that will encompass facebook, twitter and Wikipedia.

What I am truly worried about is the pressures the team will face from the people who have backed the venture to create a revenue mode and the propensity of the social media experts to milk everything as a tool for shameless peddling of goods and services.

This article first appeared on trak.in

Television Viewing Audience - Three generations

2011-02-02T10:30:00.000+05:30

The Past

Back in 1982 just after the Asian Games, my dad decided that it was time for us kids to have a TV set. We got for us a Crown Black & White TV, that evening we played host to our entire community of neighbours. It was fun, mom made snacks for everyone, when that got over, people got their own dabbas. Slowly the entire neighbourhood got their own TVs. Over a 3 year period television viewing in my neighbourhood went from being a community experience where people commented, hooted, whistled, laughed, cried, poked to a more private experience – atleast we could eat dinner without the entire neighbourhood being witness to the event.

Television became the centre point of our family lives. The Saturday, Sunday movies and the film songs and the stray English serials were all mish-mashed into one government run channel and served hot. The family that watched TV together, commented, and laughed together it seemed stayed together. It was the time when intimate scenes required the younger lot to get out of the room to get a glass of water or take a loo break ( how can you watch the ‘hot’ scene when your parents were around).
Eventually we moved to a colour tv set and then we had two sets – one for me and my sister and one for the rest of the family. TV watching became selective and personal. Your family did not define what you watched, your sister and you compromised on what each wanted to watch. From being largely driven by what was available on one channel to the VCR to the cable Tv change was inevitable. Advertising funded programming started created aspirations and fuelled a generation of people to move from socialist India to the new bold consumerism.

The present

Over the ten year period from 1982 to 1992 advertising funded television in India with generous dose of government subsidy. The first Gulf War brought a sexy new avatar of television to India via the cable and satellite model and it changed the way people perceived competition. Over 200 TV channels later, a incomplete model of monitoring and measuring exists which does not take into consideration the real audience but relies on approximations and adjustments.
Sir Martin Sorrell – the high priest of media and advertising recently forecast two paces of advertising growth: rapid growth in digital media and slow growth in traditional media. He adds that TV has the opportunity to be part of the digital future, but the industry needs to evolve if it is to compete effectively. The model that has underpinned the ad industry for the past 50 years won’t safeguard it for ever.
Viewing habits are changing already; high-value consumers – people like you and me watch less TV and are even less predictable in what we watch. Channel V and MTV have reported that most of their audience is no longer in front of the TV sets. The youth has their world has fit into their pockets through a plethora of devices which are convenient to use and play with. Their audience is their larger social network. They connect and share and comment much like what my neighbors did in the real world in the 1980s.
The demands for content is much different from what used to be default broadcast standard fare. It is now personalized and each one has a take on what their needs are. The more mature audience is moving to their portable devices, their carry along entertainment streamed live or available when they want in sizes they want.
No one has worked out how TV will be funded in the future. Content delivery via broadband is a reality and more homes will eventually have broadband than satellite. The eventual rollout of 4G services will make bandwidth available on a tap at prices that will make it as low as the cost for cable tv or a DTH service.
With more and more choices, on demand and otherwise. The ability of shifting time and device seamlessly will mean that the audience could be anywhere. The consequence is further fragmentation. Yet the ad industry has not resolved how to attach commercial messages in an unregulated market and make it accountable. While the digital audience is connected and trackable.

The question then is how are we in advertising media measuring the audience? Are we still talking about the television audience or are we factoring in the audience that’s consuming content wherever they are. Are we still talking about a primetime and hence the premium rates for ad inventory or are we talking prime content? And hence prime audience attached to that prime content. Will we be measuring the audience on the basis of the interactions they have done on a piece of content – the number of times they shared, commented etc or on the basis of what a people meter told us.

These are going to be interesting times and for an industry that has not evolved in the last 20 years in India from a cookie cutter model, we might see a lot of shake up happen. The ones that realize and change their game plan will be the ones that will survive and have an audience that brings value.
Thoughts welcome…

( this blog post appeared first on Trak.in http://trak.in/tags/business/2011/02/01/television-viewing-audience/)

Groupon deal – Google 1 : Facebook 0

2010-12-02T16:15:00.000+05:30

This column first appeared in Trak.in on 24 November 2010

The deal has not yet been announced, but like any Google acquisition this one is making waves on the in the media. Before we analyse the implications of this deal lets understand the players in the arena:

Google:

A media company that enables consumers to get content in various forms for free through its products like internet and mobile search, email, maps, videos, and so on in exchange for relevant advertising placed alongside the content. Google makes money only when consumers click on the ads while consuming the content. Increasingly, the company seems to be losing traction to communities on the net where consumers want to hang around.

Groupon:

A marketplace that allows local businesses to offer huge discounted deals to groups of people who buy them online. It makes sense to the local businesses because Groupon sends people their way who otherwise would not have bought anything in the first place.

Facebook:

A social networking platform where people hangout to get connected to their personal, social and work circles. The platform allows people to share comment and in effect influence each other’s decisions on a wide range of subject. In other words Facebook is a media platform that allows advertisers to map their products to the needs of their consumers using the trending of the consumer’s social graph of needs. Facebook launched FB Places and FB Deals a few weeks ago – this has the potential to become a platform where local advertisers can place ads based on the consumer’s physical local presence.
Ok then, these three hugely valuable companies are the players in the media / advertising space. Google’s dominance is being threatened by the stickiness of Facebook and the only way to counter was to start looking at businesses that allow consumers to stick around longer. Groupon is a fantastic fit. It sits on top of the search+maps+adsense+admob+videos reaching a large audience who are increasingly buying on the net. It’s a perpetual motion machine – local businesses can offer deals on Groupon , advertise them locally using any of the Google options. That’s value and a huge scalable business as time goes by.

In the battle for owning the local advertising space now Google has an edge over Facebook. Groupon already has a huge traction with deals in over 150 cities across mostly US. Facebook is just getting started. If this were a punch-up for the Olympic Boxing Goal then I could shout out loud that Google has won this round with a knockout blow to Facebook’s chin. It will be fun to watch what Mark Zuckerberg does now to bait Google.

There are a number of Groupon clones in India and am sure all of them would be rubbing their hands with anticipation of suckering a few VCs to invest. And am sure there will be a rash of new ventures that will try to create some value by having some differentiator.
To be honest in India, I see Rediff as the only company that can truly go local. They have a great story as part of the folklore of Indian Internet and have had experience [incidentally, they completed 15 years today] in creating a local ad platform / product. If Rediff can quickly come up with a Group discount product, then Indian game would have truly started.
While we revel in the 6 billion dollar valuation for Groupon lets also keep an eye on the other erstwhile king of tech – Microsoft. My final take is that in the cat and mouse between Google and Facebook, Microsoft might spring a surprise.
This coming year will be exciting for all of us.

In defense of Mark Zuckerberg!

2010-11-25T17:12:00.000+05:30

This column first appeared in Trak.in on 24 November 2010

It is now almost a month since the seminal movie The Social Network released. It has been dissected and analysed and commented upon by everyone remotely associalted with Facebook, media or venture capital. I read the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich almost an year ago – it is impossible to believe most of the made up fiction that Mr Mezrich passes off for fact. I watched the movie a few days ago in the company of people gushing about the 26 year old billionaire and try as much as I want, I cannot bring myself to think of Mark Zuckerberg as a villain. In the past I have had problems when the media has compared him to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates but as time passes and the enormity of what Facebook is turning into becomes apparent, one cannot but admire the man behind the company.

A few hours ago a good friend and successful entrepreneur spoke about the problems he has faced in the past from people who have been with his venture for a long time and how they have not been able to scale up to the vision needed to be a truly great company. It got me thinking – why are so many people calling Mark Zuckerberg a villain? The general feeling the book and the movie seems to give is that the founder of Facebook is a slimy guy who carries a sharp knife, willing to use it on people in a cold blooded manner.

Fact remains that anyone who starts a venture has to be the way Mark is – ruthless in the singleminded approach towards achievement of greatness. While there can be ideas all over the place, any half decent VC will tell you it is not ideas that get you funding, it is the ability to execute and execute in a manner of a achieving in the shortest possible time traction to grow really big and be a game changer. That’s what got Google to the IPO, Apple its value and thats what will get any new idea reach its true potential. Mark got the idea of what was possible if you gave people something they really wanted when he created a ‘hot or not’ website. The trio of Winklevoss and Divya just fuelled that idea into a full blown project. Let us look at what Facebook became in the 4 years since that inspiration – I cannot begin to imagine what the Harvard Connect website would have been. It needs a manic kind of thought process to be able to see a 70 mm larger than life picture of what your business is about. It will make the person anti social and lacking in social graces. However the final result would be a work of art. I refer to books like Icon and Iwoz to emphasize this point. The greatest pioneers in this world have had a mean streak and it is unfair to single out Mark for special treatment.

One wonders what would have happened if Mark had followed the path taken by Saverin – quite possible that Facebook would have been an also ran website that ran banners advertisements. Saverin had his role to play in putting in the money but beyond the semblance of being aware of what really was going on, he would have been a major pain in the growth of the company. In getting rid of Saverin at that point, Facebook’s founder did more for the company than all the algorithms he wrote or the coolness quotient he brought to the system. In following Sean Parker to where the action was, Mark demonstrated that he could take risks and jump into the unknown. And in forcing Parker to quit from Facebook when implicated for possession of drugs, Mark ensured that the venture grew.

If you are someone who is starting up please take lessons from these incidents. Your venture will need you to be a hachet man, You will need to cut dead wood or you will be forever saddled with trying to explain your vision to a bunch of people who were good to start with but cannot see beyond their limited vision. You will need to anti social and seek people who can beee with you for part of the journey. As the venture grows it will attract people who can see beyond what you think and that’s when the game changes.

In defence of Mark Zuckerberg I can say that if I had to do all of what he did to build a great company I could do it without regret and in the same manner that he did. I know I have in the past.

Peer powered cash

2010-10-27T15:30:00.001+05:30

This piece first appeared in the business blog Trak.in on 26 October 2010

Remember the good old college days? When time flew, and money was scarce. How many of you borrowed from your friends to fuel endless chai, smokes and dates? You gave back the money when you could and you earned favors when you did the same for your pals. It was a mutually beneficial scheme where trust and faith were currencies on which small sums of money were exchanged.

Fast forward to now. What do you do when you need a small sum of money? Like this morning when I needed 150 bucks to pay for a flat and did not have the desire to go to the ATM on the other side of the road? Would it not have been nice to have a bunch of friends on my mobile phone who could chip in 150 bucks that I could return later in the day when I topped up my wallet? Social Lending? Peer powered cash?

What if there were virtual currency that one loaded onto the phone that one could send out to trusted friends when they needed small sums of money? Not actual cash but redeemable tokens which can be cashed in at cafe chains, restaurants, movie halls, book stores, petrol pumps, or any place that you can think of.

The service could do deals with the outlets and buy the products / service at a considerable discount - for example a cup of coffee at CCD for Rs 45 could be bought at a margin by the service provider and be made available to the consumer at the retail price. If worked upon there can be many models here and it creates a parallel economy of sorts that functions like a virtual wallet. Maybe eventually this can get extended by integrating banking services.

Which brings us to an important application which was the basis on which this piece was being written. There are millions of people without a proper bank account in India who manage to get a cell phone. The very basic cell phone without GPRS, camera and so on. To understand this you need to get that nose out of the metro India and into the interiors - places like Nira in Pune district, which falls off the radar ever so often. Imagine being able to load Rs 100 onto your phone like you deposit money in a bank, earn a small interest on it like you do with a bank and be able to pay, transfer and all that using just your sms enabled device. One might argue that there is too much effort involved in teaching the guy to use sms. My counter to that - trust the common man on the street to evolve faster than you and me. His needs are far greater than ours and he knows he needs to learn fast to survive.

For this idea to work, the telecom companies, RBI and postal service will have to synergise. Every large village has a post office - a perfect place where money cards can be bought and loaded onto the cell phones - like a prepaid card which is used for the calls and smses. I do not have a perfect model on how the relation between telecom ( I keep typing in telecon - a purely Freudian slip :)), postal service and consumer. But I am sure that this is something that will work. Imagine how big this economy can be. Imagine how valuable it will be for the FMCG guys who are trying to expand the rural market.

I am excited with the progress made by the telecom, banking and services sector in the last decade, but the real explosion is yet to come. The rural consumer, the consumer who does not have a banking service is the last HUGE mountain that will need to crossed and the sooner someone cracks it the earlier his IPO!!

This in my mind is more valuable than the hazaar apps and app stores that we spend good time and money building and trying to sell. But hell I am known to be wrong.

Help! I am a dial tone now and I do not mind it

2010-10-22T15:12:00.000+05:30

Techcrunch reports that Pincus the man behind Zynga says that in 5 years time we will all be dial tones. Not just that, we will have a dial tone for our friends, for music, for games and so on. Reading through the piece and the comment I read this one comment by TahoeBlue who also happens to be the moderator of the forum. It says and I quote him here : "When I first read the remarks ("we'll all be connected to each other", and "we'll all be dial tones"), my first reaction was that Pincus was suggesting that individuals and entities on the web would be talking peer-to-peer, and not through a "social portal", in 5 years.

Given the pace of change in both the resources and capabilities of networking, the prospects of each person maintaining their own 'network' of friends, colleagues, and services on computing infrastructure domiciled on servers dedicated to, and controlled by, individuals and not monolithic portals like Facebook would seem to be both attainable and desirable."

The first thought that came to my mind is Diaspora (joindiaspora.com seems to be down at the moment, it could be a localised problem with my internet connection too. You can read about diaspora here) and a few lines below his original comment TahoeBlue also agrees with the thought.

People owning their own social networks is a powerful thought and in time it might become a default standard like owning a telephone or a cell phone connection. One might want to snigger at the mavens at KP and their large $250 million fund, but the truth is that the connected mass of people will become more and more social and it will not just be about poking someone or liking a story or even recommending the a new cafe. Social networks make it easy for people to keep in touch without the costs of keeping in touch. It is similar to the way email changed communication. Only this time the people will also want to share their thoughts and ideas and issues with people they know. Eventually there will be two kinds of social networks - an individuals private space meant for family and close friends, another for their co workers and finally one for their outer circle. Social networks mimic the real world and the quicker we realise this the easier it will be for us to adapt and adopt.

In time this dial tone world will learn to pick out the lines it wants to connect to and ignore the rest. If Google and search gave the connected world the sum total of intentions of humanity. The next generation of social networking platform will give it its voice. We can already see it being reflected in the status messages and the tweets around us, but imagine a global connected thought, of grief and joy and rising. It feels complex and at the same time feels liberating.

Mark Pincus thinks in 5 years the world will change again and these dial tones will be the signal flags of the global connected human mass. It sounds profound, and to imagine when Google started, search and then social networking seemed like geek toys!

Think of how it will change the consumer, consumption, media planning, buying, selling advertising. Each will need new models and new initiative, either the incumbents evolve fast or a new breed of people will start knocking the doors of the VCs for funds to power themselves.

What fun!

can there be another yahoo? or for that matter Rediff

2010-10-20T11:03:00.000+05:30

This post was first published on Trak.in on 20 October 2010

The answer is - no. There can never be another Yahoo or AOL or Rediff. Its just not conceivable for anyone to start from scratch and build traffic that these portals have acquired over the years. A good friend recently estimated upwards of 200 crores to be the amount needed to achieve the scale that Rediff.com has today if one were to start as a standalone venture. And most of it will have to spent on product finesse - forget the ad spends that would be required to create awareness. Even in.com has not been able to reach the depth in the minds of the internet audience despite the 360 degree influence of Network18's television channels.

Sure there will be Facebooks and Twitter and Foursquares that will dominate mindspace of the attention deficient blackberry boys and iPhone junkies. And the connected world might end up being in your back pocket via an app. The value of the portals who have been around for the last ten odd years will never diminish. All other access points on the devices and the social media will just become the vehicles for the content on these portals to be consumed or discovered. The problem here is then what happens to the carefully built up traffic of so many years. A survey done by AC Neilsen exactly a year ago ( report here ) says that while people still use portals and search engines for information, social media is increasingly becoming dominant.

It is clear then that anyone starting afresh will not just have to scale the traffic mountain and then create enough value for the consumer to adopt the content as their own. The 'my space is more valuable than your space' phenomenon will come to play and increasingly more and more users would prefer to have a sort of a facebook style page where things of interest come to them instead of going to twenty different places. Remember that when you click on a link shared by your friend on facebook or twitter, you are sent to that page. In apps where content gets pulled from the repostories the same I assume would apply (please correct me if I am wrong). The focus will have to move away from the homepage to specific interest areas that are likely to be adopted by consumers. This makes Rediff.com's home page style have greater sense because I assume the grand man of Indian internet realises that direct to homepage traffic will reduce over period in time and hence internal sub home pages are more likely to have greater value and hence be more valuable to advertisers.

If am sure sometime in the near future, we might have a facebook OS powering a netbook which boots direct to FB using the interface as an window to what people who influence me are telling me. The only drawback is that I might miss out on the stuff that is not so popular, not top of mind. Then what do I do? Go back to the portal?

It is similar to going to the first 15% of a book shop, you will find all the stuff that everyone reads. But if your interest lies in Sufi poetry or screenplays, you will have to spend quality time trawling across the book store or even go to the gallis in fort seeking nirvana. To echo an old coffee ad for filter coffee - real pleasure cannot come in an instant.

The next 3 years will be the time for consolidation. No new yahoos will be born but the old ones will evolve, merge, be mashed up and exist as destinations and also as little niches in our back pockets.

Microfinance is good if we accept that everyone needs to make money

2010-10-18T12:44:00.001+05:30

This blogpost first appeared in Trak.in on 18 October 2010

Some twenty years ago in the dusty suburb of Pune called Pimpri Camp there used to live a Sindhi businesssman. His fame in the industrial mess in that godforsaken place was due to his business model. Say if you were the owner of a handcart and wanted Rs 100 to buy bananas from the wholesale market, the Sindhi gent would give the money to you if you promised to return the money along with a small fee of Rs 15 at the end of the day. Yes you heard me right - take Rs 100 at seven in the morning and return Rs 115 at seven in the evening.

Every morning atleast a few hundred men and women would queue up along the bylane where he had setup shop. My father used to talk about him with the reverence given to true social workers. He used to say that he knew atleast twenty families that supplemented their income by using this Rs 100 loan everyday. The women in these families bought wheat flour, oil and kerosene and made chappatis everyday and sold them at 1 rupee each to the TELCO factory. The economics was sane - you could make around 200 chappatis at an average with that money - an income of Rs 85 per day.

The security deposit that you gave the 'moneylender' was just a reference of someone who used the service for atleast 3 months. That's it. If you did not pay back for three days your reference would not get the money and would be blacklisted. The system worked it seems till the gent passed away. But he extended his line of business to renting handcarts and then rickshaws.

In recent times if you travel down to Borivali - the northern most outpost of Mumbai using the Malad Link Road post midnight, you are likely to see rows and rows of rickshaws along the road. These form an organised 'rent by the day' method of working. You provide a copy of your license and a reference and hire a rickshaw for 12 hours for x amount, you can keep the money that you earn minus the daily rent and the cost of fuel. Efficient and enterprising politicians of all hues and colour own atleast 200 plus rickshaws and rumours are that they make around Rupees 100 - 150 per day - thats Rs 20000 per day on the lower side or Rs 600000 per month, tax free I assume.

The point I am making is that microfinance is nothing new. It has existed for a long long time. The workings have been exposed and outrage has piled up on the corporate ones only now when moneyed, educated, sophisticates have entered the fray with truck loads of money - from other banks and the public and have stopped pretending that they are here for doing good. Once we accept that microfinance like any other form of business has the aim of making money for its stakeholders, including the borrower, the bitterness goes away.

If anyone needs to take the blame for the lack of options for the women who need Rs 3000 a month to buy wheat flour, or Rs 2500 for buying a sewing machine, it is the existing banking infrastructure. When the treat people like you and me like a piece of thrash, I can imagine what they would do to the people at the lower strata. It makes me wonder when Mr O P Bhatt, Chairman of State Bank of India - one of the largest banking networks in India says in the Times of India he is surprised by the numbers of the microfinance companies. I am surprised that the postal network, the branch network and the reach of the cooperative movement has not been used to lead the way. Atleast you would not express surprise!

What we need is not mega venture funded companies - they serve their purpose too but are not easy to digest :), we need a thousand people who are like the Sindhi businessman from Pimpri Camp or even the politicians of Mumbai who provide a source of income to the a few hundred migrants. Their aims must be dubious but they do serve a purpose. And how different are they from the microfinance guys anyways?

I recently invested a modest amount of Rs 500 through RangDe.org. Of the amount Rs 400 went to Rama Dipak of Maharashtra who wants to setup a diary business and Rs 100 to Ujjwala Santosh who wants to buy a sewing machine. Between the two they needed to raise Rs 7500 and thirteen people contributed towards the amount. None of us are expecting to make any money on this investment, though the promised rate is of 3.5% per annum. If this experiment works I am willing to invest a small sum every month and hopefully a few people will raise themselves and live with dignity. I think its a great thought, only problem is that if RangDe succeed twenty similar ventures will be setup and the same story would get repeated.

I can bet that the social - collective - investing is a fantastic idea and the ones who want to get involved can start small. Locality based startups that work closely with the people who want to volunteer with money and time. We used to call this Social Service under the NSS in college. I wonder if it exists!

revive, renew ?

2010-10-15T16:31:00.002+05:30

Ok, so here I am! after having cleaned up this blog of its cobwebs. Should have done it long ago, no excuses here - am tardy to a fault.

I want to revive this blog. I want to write again on areas that matter to me and to the space around me.

Hope this time I don't stop when something really big comes along.

_____________________________________________________________________

In the last 7 years so many things changed, facebook to twitter to the entire debate on the death of the www. Yahoo! is no longer yahooing and it is possible for anyone to be a celebrity blogger by virtue of self promotion :)

Let us begin.

online shopping. then. and now.

2007-02-05T12:11:00.000+05:30

circa 2000.

the dot-com boom was a gleam in everyone's eyes.

of eye-balls, ideas and sky-high valuations.

no one but no one ever imagined that the dream would go bust. my erstwhile employers at jaldi e-commerce limited spent money like water to try and get to a level where they could conumers to their portal and in turn attract funding that would take their pure-play shopping venture to stratospheric heights.

classic case of a chicken and egg situation.

may be we were before our time.

PC penetration levels were negligible.
broadband was unheard of.
surfers could not complete a single online purchase without mishap.
merchandise quality online was limited and suspect. even if good brands were pushed, they had to be heavily discounted in order to drive purchase traffic to the portal.
selling heavily discounted products online angered the manufacturers who felt that the balance of their channel and business was being upset by us upstarts.
the investments were just not worth the returns.

and we forgot. that the indian consumer views his shopping the way he views entertainment. he wants to spend time. experience it. feel it. touch, feel it.

we ignored basic customer psyche at our own peril. and there was no other revenue stream.
jaldi.com was consigned to dust.

7 odd years later, things are different. futurebazaar.com has made a quiet debut.
offering a selction of carefully chosen merchandise. that requires limited touch-feel. and is pretty much benchmarked stuff.
despite the site navigation problems, lack of product information and the plebian interface, the prices are attractive.
a nokia N72 handset is available for just over rs. 13,000. it does not however specify if this is with a bill / warranty.
the new 1 GB ipod shuffle is for sale for rs. 4,300 which is a good deal.

now to wait and watch mode.
let's see if this works......

and now back to the chaos at work.

movies - the great leveller

2007-01-28T18:38:00.000+05:30

at spice PVR noida, close to the ghastly scene at nithari, life rocks and rolls.

the crowds at this 9 auditorium multiplex have to be seen to be believed.

including the chief minister of new delhi, sheila dixit who comes by for a show with us plebians with a solitary plainclothes escort in tow.

so is the multplex experience becoming the new leveller ?

it's me again...

2007-01-19T13:57:00.000+05:30

and i have to tell you guys about the way brands pop up wherever they can grab a consumer for a few minutes ( and thats a lot, believe you me )...

after upscale pub washrooms were used by marie-claire and multiplex washrooms by dettol liquid hand-wash, the washrooms in an upscale gurgaon mall feature posters of brand kotex.
it's not just a fancy advertising message, but health, hygiene and usage tips relevant to brand usage. smart one that.
i think all that's left are the WC's for harpic liquid toilet cleaners and perhaps for flush-kleen !!

_________________________________________________________________

at the food court at gurgaon's cyber-greens, home to the likes of sapient, nokia, dupont, abn-amro..the longest queues were at the indian food counter.
perhaps it confirms my belief that for regular food, we prefer to fall back on the tried and tested desi stuff.
even the expats preferred indian food..
i, for one, cannot handle sandwiches, pizza and fries more than once a week. and ask me how i struggled to find food in tokyo and singapore...i ended up losing a couple of kilos...

_________________________________________________________________

updates on the folks here on this blog and perhaps why a few of us are silent

gurpreet is fretting about getting her daughter admitted in to a "good school"

sanjeev is flushed with the success of his venture www.indianshutter.com and is exploring other business opportunities with a vengeance

ajit has been busy relocating back to bangalore from delhi via a long drive that took him thru rajasthan, maharashtra and exotic destinations

sunil is THE man who has been in the thick of all the action at nautanki.tv
this is the calm before the storm

watch this space....

*growls

i'll be back....

the power of content..

2007-01-03T23:02:00.000+05:30

...as seen in the spread of the cell-phone-cam video ( see it here - http://newsigo.blogspot.com/2006/12/uncensored-mobile-clip-of-saddams.html
if you can handle it ) of saddam hussain's execution underlines a simple and obvious truth.

content is king. the more unusual and authentic the better it is.

eDemocracy or power to the lowest denominator

2006-11-22T11:05:00.000+05:30

What does Youtube, MoBlogging, MySpace and nautanki.Tv have in common? They are all examples of participatory democracy on the Internet. It is the power of the small user who defines the mind boggling numbers that make an Youtube. It is the ability to cater to the smallest possible denominator that makes Nautanki.Tv unique. However as the following extract explains, it is still early days.

The explosion of direct participatory democracy that we all hoped for is highly unlikely to eventuate merely as a result of the Internet's existence. The Internet provides opportunities for limited revitalisation of the public sphere. These are for the most part restricted to relatively privileged groups.

At least it is an increase in the activities of the public sphere, however modest.

As Internet use expands more profoundly into middle-income groups, lower-income groups and non-English speakers, it may yet present a real opportunity for greater participation, democratic communication and a true revitalisation of the public sphere.

However, this may only occur if current power structures such as governments and large corporations are willing to incorporate this process into their standard practices.

Given the history of such things, this seems fairly unlikely, however exciting the possibility might seem.

The most promising aspects of the Internet as a site for a revitalised public sphere are:

*
the ability of small interest groups to find and communicate with each other
* the ability for individuals and smaller groups with fewer resources to present their points of view to a large number of people
* the easy availability of a much greater range of points of view
* the longevity of materials on the Internet, from journalistic, academic and private sources, that would otherwise have a short life in print publication or other media. They provide a valuable information resource, since access to these offline would require considerable effort and skill
* the interactivity that is possible between web sites and their audiences, enabling more two-way communication than has been possible previously, and
* the formation of online communities.

These do not hold out the promise of a revolutionary change to participatory democracy or a new Athenian age, but they do present an opportunity for more voices to be heard in the public sphere in a new way.

The Internet, combined with easy access to mobile telephones, has fundamentally changed the nature of communication in affluent societies. It has made it possible for people to:

* communicate from almost anywhere to anywhere, at any time - changing the information available, the speed with which it is made available, and the number of sources it is possible to obtain them from. This applies to both email and mobile phones.

One example was on September 11 2001, when passengers on the hijacked United Flight 93 were given information by loved ones on the ground via mobile. This allowed them to make informed decisions about what actions they should take, ultimately leading to the plane crashing into a Pennsylvannian field instead of into the White House or US Capitol building.

Without mobiles, this information would not have been available and those on board would not have known the scale of the events they were involved in

* access information that was previously very difficult to obtain, including exchanging controversial, politically sensitive and minority-based information within countries and across international borders

* conduct international commerce with reduced need for human intervention, 24 hours a day.

This ranges from local companies dealing with international orders and suppliers they would not have had access to before, to individuals selling their expertise online (from financial advice through to tarot readings)

* facilitate the flow of money and goods between national borders in an unprecedented way, allowing not just money market brokers and international traders and bankers access to this, but also individuals.

As a result, over the coming decades we are likely to see a significant shift in international relations, in information, journalism, trade and politics.

Because these changes are in their infancy, it is difficult to say how much impact they will have. It may simply represent a more dynamic movement of money, goods and information; or it may produce a fundamental shift in dynamics as profound as the Industrial Revolution.

Either way, I believe that these changes are profound, and combined with the trend towards globalisation that has been going on for many years, they are a powerful force for change.

-----------

Please do respond. Intelligent conversations makes ideas grow and funds flow.

Sunil R Nair

MS Ipod Parody

2006-10-26T21:02:00.000+05:30


What happens if Microsoft had designed the Ipod?

wake up and smell the Kaapi!!!

2006-09-11T13:00:00.000+05:30

Over the past month Alchemy has gone to sleep. I guess it was obvious - Sanjeev was busy launching IndianShutter, Juno was busy being Juno, I was trying to do too many things (inclusive of learning how to burp a lil baby girl, feed her on time and generally be a responsible father - phew) and the others too I suppose had their reasons.

In the time that went by a few things happened - MaalDhamaal - an idea that was born on Alchemy has formally taken shape of a company and the launch will be happen soon. And we are closer to getting Alchemy of Thoughts to be a incubator of ideas and businesses.

In the weeks ahead I hope that there will be some awesome breaking news and also more concepts discussed as before.

IndianShutter.com is a week old today

2006-09-02T10:41:00.000+05:30

We are today, a week after launch, celebrating the following :

35227 Hits
45 Registrations
3 paid up premium members
30+ photos approved and uploaded
Referrals from Alchemy of Thoughts : 15 unique visits.

Some experienced photographers on our site include Nigel Pinto from the UAE and Omkar Singh Plaha from India.

We have also recd requests from certain stock photo agencies in India to upload their entire database of images onto IndianShutter.com ... As soon as we reach an agreement with these agencies, we should be at least 15000 photos strong.

One key feedback that has come in so far, is about us offering free members only 20% of revenues per photo sold. Maybe, the people here could guide us as to whether this needs to be addressed. I personally, from experience, feel that 20% is a good figure, 'cuz most sites do that. I am however, open to raising it to 30% ... Maybe, I could look at offering 30% as an incentive to people who upload a certain number of photos, or to people who do referrals to get in 10 members, each of who upload 5 photos or something to that effect.

Thank you all for an extremely satisfying response.

Warm Regards
Sanjeev Sarma
Team IndianShutter.com

indianshutter.com due to launch on Ganesh Utsav

2006-08-21T10:33:00.000+05:30

As India enters its 60th year of Independence, we proudly present to you, www.indianshutter.com the world's first portal for buying and selling exclusively Indian images.

Indian images so far were all about slums, poverty, and grim things. There was no site or portal in the world that depicted the true India. There was no representation of India's progress, its technological and other capabilities, its natural heritage, its history, its monuments, its people and its festivals in pictures. There was no site for photos related to Indian cuisine, costumes, jewelry, customs, traditions, marriages, festivals and culture.

Now there is. It’s called www.indianshutter.com. And its launching on 27th August 2006.

All you need to be a part of Indianshutter.com is an eye to bring out and present the best of India in images to the world.

You and only you can make it happen. Be a part of history in the making. Connect now to http://www.indianshutter.com/ and get ready to upload your photos. Photos that you can share with the world and sell.

Spread the word to anyone who you know has photos of India, to upload, share and sell. Be Proud. Be Indian. Be on Indianshutter.com

Warm Regards

Sanjeev Sarma

Team IndianShutter

alchemy can work ...

2006-07-28T18:33:00.000+05:30

billionaire mark cuban recently threw open a challenge on his blog.

how to convince the masses to go out and watch his movie without spending the earth.

in short he was looking for ideas in order to market movies, but with a difference.
the bait ? the guy who's suggestion clicked, would have the job of his dreams, courtesy the maverick businessman.

at the time of typing this, the blog entry had 828 comments from hopefuls.

gigaom's solution to the problem on their blog set my mind ticking.

confident that i am about the collective intelligence and talent and experience of the members of this blog, what do you say that we offer it as a package deal to any entrepreneur / professional looking for a solution to his business problem ?

we are looking to instituionalise alchemy any way.

it would be great if we could get paid for it. even if we don't ( in the beginning perhaps ) compensation could be a function of performance generated from our recommendations. with the rider that we get credit for our work. and that we can create case studies out of it.

in the meantime we can provide solutions on this blog to mark's situation.

what say, sunil ?

any one else ??

ajit narayan speaks..

2006-07-28T10:16:00.000+05:30

...on how and why direct response cannot and should not be relegated to the also-ran category in media choice.

read about it here .

The Community Gym - A concept

2006-07-27T10:43:00.000+05:30

Near where I stay is a Gymnasium. It is equipped with the usual lot of instruments, people trying to get fit, as well as people trying to stay fit.

Near where I stay is also a beachfront, littered every morning with debris comprising mainly stuff thrown around, or discarded or left over from evening jaunts.

And it struck me, that a workout can be coupled with much, much more than firm, healthy flesh and blood tingling through your veins.

Imagine a scene, where a community gym is formed, with the main objective of keeping this beach-front clean.

A trained fitness instructor evangelizes and creates equipment and tasks designed to ensure that a team performs various tasks, scientifically and in a structured manner, that ensures that the beach remains clean, morning after morning. It could involve squatting, stretching, walking, weight lifting, and all other exercises that one pays so hugely to a gym for.

I am sure that such a scene could be easily mapped to a community, and a tenth of the monies that are normally paid to a gym, collected towards purchasing scientifically designed equipment and hiring services of a trained fitness instructor.

What I would like to do is as follows :

1) Evangelize and produce such equipment that could be used for such cleanliness and maintenance exercises, equipment that would be designed to provide for an optimum of exercise.

2) Build up a team of trainers who could work out regimes, and instruct a community on how to do the work, through manuals, videos, etc.

3) Sell the above package to communities that would benefit through exercise and a clean environment as a result.

What I anticipate as a market? Over 400,000 such units of "community gym" in Mumbai alone. This target can be achieved in under 6 months, with proper tieups with action groups, CSR involvement, and correct evangelization.

We would soon have clean drains, no garbage lying around, and at the end of things, a committed citizen, who is proud that his body has been toned up and at the same time, and happy that he has provided a good environment to people around him.

Very soon ... Bye, Bye, Gyms.

Any takers?

Sanjeev Sarma

You blog? Or is it Me Blog?

2006-07-22T10:12:00.000+05:30

Recently went through the findings of a survey that captures patterns in blogging, and tries answer the why, what and who blog.

Contrary to popular opinions, what I've been saying all along, emerges factually correct. That predominantly blogging is more like ones own diary! A medium of self expression, its young, is done by heavy internet users... Here are the top ten findings of the study. And this is basis Americana ... Guess what and where could be in India?

Here are the top ten findings:

1. Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world.

2. Telephone surveys capture the most accurate snapshot possible of a small and moving target.

3. Contrary to the impression created by the press attention on political blogging, just 11% of bloggers say they focus mainly
on government or politics.

4. The blogging population is young, evenly split between women and men, and racially diverse.

5. Relatively small groups of bloggers view blogging as a public endeavor.

6. The main reasons for keeping a blog are creative expression and sharing personal experiences.

7. Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.

8. Bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general.

9. Bloggers are major consumers of political news and about half prefer sources without a particular political viewpoint.

10. Bloggers often utilize community and readership-enhancing features available on their blogs.

Source: Lenhart, Amanda and Susannah Fox. Bloggers. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 19, 2006.Bloggers - v - Pew Internet & American Life Project

beat the ban

2006-07-20T10:18:00.000+05:30

guys..ever since our moronic government and its lackeys blocked blogspot..no one has been saying or posting anything here. despite knowing fully well how to circumvent the ban and log on and post and view as well.

well..shake a leg. and fast. wake up and smell the coffee. is this all that it takes to put you all in to a stupor ????

sunil
ajit
sanjeev
gurpreet

where ARE you all ???

fyi we are now being tracked by google analytics and are on technorati as well...

test post

2006-07-18T11:57:00.000+05:30

am i here or am i not ???

the brave new google world ...

2006-07-17T16:33:00.000+05:30

as seen through the eyes of a die-hard googler with a bit of imagination..

cannot however disagree with the concept of EPIC. i see the beginning of that happening already as phone-cams and blogs and citizen journalists are the new lexicon.

one can debate nitty-gritties. or even the time frames. cannot however the fundamental truth which is out there.

tip of the hat to ajit narayan for this link.

fun ways with google !!!

2006-07-15T13:09:00.000+05:30

courtesy dhoomketu's and lessig's blogs, i found 55 ways to have fun with google.

its downloadable as pdf here.

have a look and share your experiences.

cheers !!!

community expressions

2006-07-15T12:00:00.000+05:30

push-button publishing.
make that click and post.

and then i heard about haftamag

published online every monday by a community of people-like-us who want to move beyond lunchtime journalism. a community of bloggers who blog on different subjects under the brand of haftamag. ranging from food to people to satire and politics..
this is what we have talked about and seen. communities driving and creating cutomised content..

then there is nandita's blog on food and cooking. mouthwateringly well executed with her passionate band of followers. such a pleasure to read and be part of.

and there is enough buzz about the guys who keep a watch on the TV news channels and their backroom shenanigans here

and i have been on my buddy naren kusnur's case to start his music blog..passionate rocker that he is and works for virgin records and writes on music in mumbai's mid-day.

then some upcoming stylist or designer can also start a style blog.imagine what would it do to build his / her brand ?

then will someone do a humour based blog ? that would be SUPREMELY difficult am sure. making people laugh is not easy at all. or may be they exist in regional languages ?

i mentioned this guy who uploads funny videos on his blog . do check him out..

in the long run they could turn in to profit making ventures. or insitutions. as we are in the process of doing.

let me know which other subject based blogs and communities come to your minds...

Institutionalising Alchemy of Thoughts

2006-07-14T09:52:00.000+05:30

The first time I said the title aloud it did sound like I was talking about sending the blog to an asylum. On second thoughts, I let the title remain - it is so apt. Institutionalising - creating of an institution which has aims and definitions and everything else.

One of the ideas that floated around on the Blog has gone into production. There are models being evolved, plans being written and by the looks of it come what may the idea will see action soon. And all of this because Juno wrote a small piece some one month ago and others jumped in.

Here is what I propose - for every idea that is born on this blog and reaches some kind of business structure, let the custodian of the idea give a small percent of the company / business to Alchemy of Thoughts. It is not compulsary, it is based on an honour system which believes in the inherent goodness of some men and women.

The figure I had in mind was about 3% stake in the company / business. The figure is debatable. This stake goes towards formation of a corpus of fund that can then seed more ideas, a community of real technocrats, maybe some sort of a publication, events etc. It can also then attract industry leaders to be advisors on board to help startups find their feet. Alchemy can then become the virtual version of JATC in Bandra or the dozen odd coffee shops in the silicon valley that spawned everything from Apple to Skype and Google. And Alchemy can then be a platform for investors / funders / people with money to meet people with ideas (they are the ones who generally do not have any money)

What this means is that Alchemy of Thoughts has to become some kind of an entity. I suggest (comes from experience) that Alchemy of Thoughts be registered as a private company with a core group of people. The people who will be in the core group can be open to debate. I can fund this bit and let the idea get started.

I had thought of a business plan and all that jazz, but I think this one is simple enough to write on the back of an used envelop.

Will the people on this blog please respond to this thought and write back.

Sunil R Nair

The collective

2006-07-13T16:47:00.000+05:30

Remember the dialogue - "we are the Borg, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated" (Star Terk - TNG). I think we are headed the way the Borg went - collective consciousness, decisions made via the collective thoughts of a group. Blogs, forums, cell phones are all headed that way. You join a blog, subscribe to a group and are influenced by the thoughts of the people there. Not all will subscribe to the thoughts but a small but significant amount of people will think alike and act accordingly. The collective mind set.

I took this off wikipedia

It defines what a collective would be, makes interesting reading:

While group and artificial intelligence have something to offer, collective intelligence is at its roots a human enterprise in which mind-sets, a willingness to share, and an openness to the value of distributed intelligence for the common good are paramount. Individuals who respect collective intelligence are confident of their own abilities and recognize that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of any individual parts.

Maximizing collective intelligence relies on the ability of an organization to accept and develop "The Golden Suggestion", which is any potentially useful input from any member. Groupthink often hampers collective intelligence by limiting input to a select few individuals or filtering potential Golden Suggestions without fully developing them to implementation.

Knowledge focusing through various voting methods has the potential for many unique perspectives to converge through the assumption that uninformed voting is to some degree random and can be filtered from the decision process leaving only a residue of informed consensus. Critics point out that often bad ideas, misunderstandings, and misconceptions are widely held, and that structuring of the decision process must favor experts who are presumably less prone to random or misinformed voting in a given context.

The best-known collective intelligence projects are political parties—which mobilize large numbers of people to form policy, select candidates, and to finance and run election campaigns. Military units, trade unions, and corporations are focused on more narrow concerns but would satisfy some definitions of a genuine "C.I."—the most rigorous would require a capacity to respond to very arbitrary conditions without orders or guidance from "law" or "customers" who constrain actions tightly. One interesting proponent of the rigorous view is Al Gore, the United States Democratic Party candidate for President in 2000, who noted that "the US Constitution is a program that lets us all do together what we could not do separately."

Now apply this to the communities on the internet and eventually to the mobile / hand held devices. The blogging phenomenon can drive / make or break a product or a service. Suppose we were to take together the collective clicks of people on a banner, we can get a fair idea of their needs.

Or the downloads of a particular kind.

Imagine the potential of creation of a monetizable collective.

True, you will be assimilated!!!

sign of the eating times...

2006-07-13T14:04:00.000+05:30

had heard of this a number of times..saw it for the first..just outside manali...this picture features a colleague who wanted his two cents of fame...

What a way to make a million dollars …

2006-07-13T11:42:00.000+05:30

The name: Alex Tew. Occupation: a student. Seeking: funding to go to grad school. Selling: Pixels. Rate: $1 per pixel. Quantity: 1,000,000 pixels. Current status: Sold out!

Starting last September this kid with a huge idea ran up the million dollars in almost a flash.

Why go to the grad school at all? Don't even drop out. Check out the site here.

The story does not end here.

Netherlands-based Sandberg Institute, is imitating the very same concept. But this one is selling space on its building facade!

The building displays ads and logos from brands such as Nike, BMW, Google and IKEA ... art imitating life, virtual or otherwise.

The Sandberg Institute site quotes "a new work that sets itself on the borders between commercial art and critical art, commerce and information, private business and public space."

These Europeans are crazy!

RFM anyone?

2006-07-12T17:55:00.000+05:30

While one talks about databases and targeting, mining, beyond demographics and such terms today in marketing I am yet to find a refined use of the basics of database marketing in practice. Is it because of lack of energy to do it (remember there are tons who seem to be talking about it) or lack of the abilty of how to do it? Wonder which angle...

R = Recency, F=Frequency, M= Monetary Value... three behavioural aspects of customers. Fundemental to any marketer, especially when the category is repeat purchase led. (like say retail.)

Even following basics like studying latency would streamline any marketers offerings and deliver high end ROI on every Rupee spent! Latency would mean studying the time intervals before one interaction (choice of the interaction would be the marketers.) For example, one could be studying latency for web site visits, or actual purchases, or complaints, or calls to customer care etc...

And worse when you do tell people the how to do, they still don't buy it! The answer to it is "my CRM system is coming that will help do much more". WOW!

Any category that has a repeat interactive behaviour would benefit by using tracking and using the knowledge of the behaviour. RFM or latency anyone?

This is a huge subject that I am trying to simplify. Some of the basics covered here.

Multitasking with Balls!

2006-07-12T16:11:00.000+05:30

Its may seem a bit preposterous to talk of soccer at the moment and I seek forgiveness for not being able to hold on to this rather innovating thought. This morning a wise guy asked me to spot the similarities between Indian Cricket and Indian Soccer. At the very broad level, mind you and not the pub hopping fashionably interested in soccer frenzy of the kind that I witnessed with much amusement this year. I could find no similarities - not money, sponsorship, audience or government interest, fan following...except may be the running (they all run all the time) or the ball (size matters!) or the ball stopper. And that could be the genesis of the Indian soccer team!

The wise man added that instead of only dreaming of watching an Indian team playing international soccer (we are 117th in the FIFA rankings ), it may be time for innovative thinking. Why cant the wicket keeper be the goal keeper? Isnt it the exact role that he is tuned to? Stopping the ball? Some practice to align for the size of the ball but that’s easier than the alternatives. The reflexes of a wicket keeper are geared to keenly watch, follow and catch a ball traveling at the speed of 80-100 miles per hour. And that’s a good starting point for our soccer team.

Mumbai Help is back

2006-07-12T10:43:00.000+05:30

A few days ago I had mentioned in my posts that Mumbai Help Blog was dead. Here I acknowledge it's revival. Thank You Peter Griffin.

For information on Mumbai Blasts and How you can help.

Mumbai Meri Jaan

2006-07-12T10:19:00.000+05:30

This city pays (according to one rumour) about 58000 crores in taxes. In return we have a train system thats 40 years behind times, roads ( is shehar main har jagah khuda hai) with moonscapes and a set of politicos who were busy trying to protect a muddied statue forgetting the millions who survive. Survive if the key word. This is the city where you can get a rick at 3 am or 'anda bhurji' at 4 in the morning and those who provide there services go back to stay in hovels, while those who afford the rick and the bhurji live in matchbox sized over priced apartments. Driving back to work this morning one can hear above the usual noise in the mind "Amazing Grace" being played over and over again. Amazing grace it is!! The maximum city survives another day. Pushing, slamming, ducking, living one calamity after another. One year in this city and it will change you. NewYork will seem like a walk in the park.

__________________________________________________________________

Who were the people who brought the scenes of the blasts to the people across the world when cell phone services, sms and landlines jammed as usual. IBN Live calls them citizen journalists. The era of grassroots driven journalism is here to stay. Live reports filed via mobile phones, pics taken on aim and shoot cameras, logged in via Reliance Internet cards.

Maybe one of these days we will no longer stay glued to the News Channels with their undertrained journalists and over the top style of story telling. We will just visit Flickr for the pics taken by a dozen odd people. Listen to podcasts for correct information on the ground situation and so on.

Maybe it it time for VCs to invest in communities - local websites that are self propogating, blogs that go beyond self glorification.

innovations here ...!!!!

2006-07-07T15:52:00.000+05:30

amongst the first media innovations i heard of ..was a sunsilk hoarding on a pedder road ( or was it breach candy ? ) high-rise, with a live fashion show happening on it during peak hours..it caused traffic jams galore even in bored, been-there-done- that mumbai...

then the odd one like the axe website struck me..though hardly any one knew of it except its creators..

buying out a masthead or even an entire front page of a newspaper was the option when all other attempts to "innovate" drew a blank.

and then one fine day, while scanning the headlines, i stumbled upon this link which documented innovations in the field of communications.

when the maruti suzuki swift was launched, there was an actual car displayed on an elevated platform near a site at ITO in delhi. what could have been more impactful would have been a swift actually driving around in a single strip of road. or messages painted on roads ( except that they are supposed to cause driver distraction , in this day and age of in-car TV's and mobile phones ).

elevator doors in buildings with BPO offices are painted with messages of the "great kebab factory" a popular eating joint that hopes to cash in on captive consumers.

there are more examples of innovations in the article...and its heartening to see and note that innovation is slowly catching on.

cheers to that !!!

Rained out in Mumbai

2006-07-05T23:12:00.000+05:30

Have a look at these pics:

Would you be interested in buying them as a wallpaper? No? what if someone out there wants them? Would it be worth while to set up a market place where these pics can be downloaded onto mobile phones? A part of revenue being kept for the owner and rest to the marketplace? Kind of an eBay for mobisodes and mobercials (he he thats a new one - commercials on mobiles = mobercials! you heard it here first). The more you get downloaded the more are your rating and the more visible you are.

What say Sanjiv can this be incorporated into your portal?

____________________________________________________________________

Technology never takes a back seat. In the 48 hours that I have to endure at home alone I learnt a few things. Work did not stop - E4M did get through for a deal on one of our projects, NDTV got what they wanted and the leads we get for our sundry clients got logged in as we progressed. Yes the number was far lesser from Mumbai - the rains got to many I assume.

Which brings me to the next topic on this rambling post - Freakonomics.

The premise of the book is that one can understand economics by looking at patterns in whatever happens around you. Combine that with the 'Database on Intentions' of the entire connected / wired world and you have an amazing story to tell. Database of Intentions can loosely be defined as the pattern emerging out of searches on Google, Yahoo!, A9 etc around the world. So if a huge volume of people in Upper Mongolia were searching for "cure for asthamatic Yaks" one can safely assume that a large population of Yaks in Mongolia are asthamatic and some bio tech firm can make a ton by catering to that requirement. Does that mean that I can employ a bunch of people who will scrape search engines and look for patterns and then cater to the shortfall? Is this an emerging science? Fuelled by Google, eBaY and so on?

I can predict what markets requirements are and then I advertise on keywords that are searched in those territories using Adwords and AdSense, get people to click on my Ads and get them to buy my product using Checkout. The landing pages are made using Pages by Google, Pics improved with Picasa, translated to Mongol using Google Translate, written on Blogspot and so on. Bloody Impressive.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Rained out in Mumbai.

Ah well with so many gas bags on about everything about Mumbai being the overflowing gutter it is, one might just dare to remind a few know it alls that almost a year ago an initiative Called Saving Mumbai / Surviving Mumbai got hijacked by a few who did nothing about it for a year and now that the disaster is on us again, i wonder what they have to say about it?

Web 2.0 growth engines: Blogs, Social Networks, Local Info ...

2006-07-04T14:15:00.000+05:30

Just got to see some interesting data on internet usage. Shows a shift
in growth. a.k.a eyballs and usage of sites.

The big daddy's are either stagnating or on slow growth mode. Its the newbies which are exploding... reaching beyond the stars. Only Google seems to able to hold on to own in terms of visitors.

Cut to a decade or so back. When the internet emerged with a promise. That of infinte possibilties of participation and empowering people to communicate and air their opinions.

That promise is only getting more powerful now with spaces like blogs ...

This is from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.

laff a lot

2006-07-04T10:40:00.000+05:30

getting people to cry is easy. relatively speaking.

getting them to laugh is another matter altogether. i can count on the fingers of one hand the movies or people that make me laugh.

and no i do not mean the sidhu's and suman's of the world...

vir das yes.
jaane bhi do yaaron yes.
the odd santa-banta joke may be ?
the odd joke on sms ?
quick gun mururgan ?

umm ... ???

and then when we see ourselves or take-offs on our lives on screen ? sprinkled with mirch-masala ?
check out this blog , which is all about getting us to laugh at ourselves.
with the help of its collection of rib-tickling video clips..especially ones from southie movies...this is a laugh riot. and also a telling comment on our mindsets and (?) creativity !!!

enjoy !!!

The three magic words in marketing ... What's happened to them?

2006-07-03T20:40:00.000+05:30

Just in case you're wondering; the words are You, New and Free ... The three magic words and probably in that order. These have helped sell millions or billions. The art of communication revolved around figuring out relevant usage of these words...

In other words it was about the benefit and not so much anything else.

An antithesis to this came to my notice in the form of this toon! Its a take off on the trust and authenticity waves that seem to be the hype around... Today's mediascape!

The holy trinity of blog currency. Indeed!

blast from the past...

2006-07-02T15:51:00.000+05:30

on a holiday at dalhousie, i visited D.C. Khanna & Sons.

located on court road, this departmental store is over a hundred years old. it was THE leading supplier of groceries and all kinds of food-stuffs to the british and the desi saabs of the time.

the good folk there were kind enough to let me take pictures of the store.

there are signboards for nestle and cadbury's. plus an old-fashioned dispenser for chocolates.

i guess...in its own time, D.C. Khanna & Sons must have been an innovator too...

Woot is it

2006-06-29T11:39:00.000+05:30

Junoesque introduced us to Woot on this list...

It really openend up a whole 360 degrees of business ideas for me ...

I think I now have a gameplan ready for taking a Woot concept to Indian retail markets. I believe I have also (extremely important) identified the technology necessary to reach this concept to audiences, without too much of a bother.

I am however, not sure about the following things :

1. How to ensure that my "woot" (I still have to find a name for it, someone help, please?) reaches every bloke who is connected to net space. Ppl have asked me to touch SEOs (sic!) ... am not too convinced that it is the correct path
2. How to get in large retail spaces to participate, and what to offer them (well, I do have an idea here).
3. How to ensure authenticity of buyers ... (scariest part)

I would like the list to dream with me here... Better still, how about pooling in our individual skill sets, contact bases, networks and so on to make it happen ????

Cheers
Sanjeev Sarma

On why there would be a supari on me soon

2006-06-28T19:28:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I was told by a friend after some friendly 'trying to sell him the moon' session that focussed on what we can do for him on the mobile space, that I should speak to someone who is writing an article on convergence of mobile and internet and 'are Indian businesses using these new media effectively?'. "wow" I thought and went straight for the kill. I have put on record (yes the conversation was recorded) that the digital space in India / Asia will change so much in the next six months that all those who are ignoring will have perished or will be struggling to adapt. My reasoning was simple - if you are a product or service and need interaction with your market, you have to be where he / she is - on their laptops and their cell phone, else you are wasting money. The editor asked me if anyone was responsible and I dug deeper and said yes the media buying agencies are pulling wool over the eyes of the clients. Its like this - some smart @#$$ brand manager somewhere decides that he wants his ad to be seen on TV and the buying agency gives the same solution to him which they sold an hour ago to the boot polish wallah and to the chai wallah. Media buying agencies have the same solution for all problems. half page ads, innovations that make no sense and endless TV spots for no one. ( I sometime wonder who watches the ads that run on Discovery Travel and Living at 10 30 pm in Mumbai). The underlying idea is have inventory paste it on some poor brand manager. After all for every 100 bucks that gets spend these poor sods make so little ( 5% if they are lucky) which always means that they have to get someone to spend more than what is required to justify their inflated perks and salaries.

My argument was that if brand are looking for some response then they have to be on the internet or on the mobile. And no not buying impressions but asking the agencies to deliver results. Tangible, quatifiable results. I an sure within six months people who behave like they are selling onions and wada pav will have to dance to a new tune. The tune of integration.

The moment I said that and realised it is on record I broke into a sweat - these guys are going to get me and my agency.

After all we completed our seventeenth campaign yesterday, we advertised (we bore the media costs, decided where to advertise and where not to - yes sometimes we make mistakes like having a link on Ryze which goes no where) and we delivered results. Client wanted customers, we got them customers, used the mobile phones to reach out, once they said they were interested, our call centres went into action. Our on ground persons gave demos and as a result we got a conversion rate of 25% on all leads.

And yes we made a pile.

Now we are going into stage two. All those who bought the service also need something else. There are some who could not buy due to constraints, we have got together with the client and packaged lite versions of the product available in smaller pack sizes. WONDERFUL NO?

Now imagine what would happen, you guys would read this and say hmm let me send him a message and so on some will even send me an email. or others will just say "Big Shit" and go silent. If what we have done spreads and some big spenders decide to pull out media budgets and decide to go with us, I am sure I am going to be run over by a truck :)

Anyways. Have fun.

Exploding ? Is it ?

2006-06-20T19:36:00.000+05:30

Some maths to chew on.

Big Bazaar has 27 outlets. Food Bazaar has 42 outlets ( An Electronics Bazaar planned in 25 of these outlets ). Vishal Mega Mart has 29 integrated stores. Shoppers Stop has 19 outlets (now also one Hypercity in Mumbai ). And the wait is on for the Lion King Mukesh Ambani to arrive.

Lets turn back to page 1, chapter titled 'Disorganised' Retail. According to a Pricewaterhouse Coopers top honcho the number of traditional stores in India will increase from 6.9 million in 2004 to 7.8 million in 2007 and the growth will continue alongside despite the Malls and other forms of organised retail.

And that organised retail ( not shopping malls alone but all those glitzy stores whose Ads you see in the glossy supplements every weekend ) accounts yet for only 3 % of retail sales In India. The expected growth rate is 1% every year and by 2010 organised retail would be 10 % of all retail in India.

Ernst & Young say that out of the 220 Malls in the pipeline till 2007, 125 are in the top 6 metros.

If you havnt yet felt smug enough then please consider the AT Kearney's 2006 Global Retail Development Index which says that India has retained its no 1 position in the annual study of retail investment attractiveness amongst 30 emerging markets in the world.

So Ladies and Gentlemen ( Sanjeev please note ) the action has just begun. Please hold on to the edge of your seats for more.

calling names...and some more names

2006-06-16T22:49:00.000+05:30

what about www.hornokplease.com ? sabina singh would want this for her eponymous label. but i try to log in and it throws up a grim looking "forbidden" screen.

www.hungrykya.com isn't the pizza place. its got some set of listings posted. no connect to our desi domino's.

www.thanda.com is all about stuff in africa...not our coca-cola.

i loved www.oktatabyebye.com ...its a travel reality website...do check it out and ooh and aah over its funky truck style graphics...

moral of the story ?

don't just register your brand name domains...register associated ones too...

sunil, we need to do something with caferati.net or i shall send you the bill for that !!!

FutureShop - the desktop economy

2006-06-16T17:50:00.000+05:30

Have you considered how eBay is impacting our global economy…your business….your products…..your customer base?

The rules of business are being rewritten as the current generation of digital marketplaces, led by eBay, are maturing and becoming mainstream. As eBay approaches new levels of depth and breadth it is beginning to fuel an unprecedented level of buying and selling activity that will soon send ripple effects throughout the global economy. The aftershocks of this bustling secondary market will cause a dramatic shift in behavior whose repercussions will be stitched into the fabric of our society, culture and business for years to come.

This evolution is beginning to redefine socially accepted norms for consumer buying and selling behavior. Specifically, we are beginning to embrace the notion of temporary ownership. We will soon live in a world where the norm is to sell our designer shoes after wearing them twice, where Verizon will automatically send us the newest, best, most high tech mobile phone every six months, and where we’ll lease our Rolex watches instead of buying them. Did you know that – even today - you can already return used books to certain Barnes and Noble Bookstores, upgrade your golf clubs at your local Callaway dealer and trade in your an old video camera for a new one at Sony?

This new paradigm will change the very meaning of brand value and alter fundamental methods of marketing across most consumer products. It will reinforce the importance of a brand in a virtual mall where reading the label on a digital photograph becomes the closest thing to touching and feeling what you buy. Yet at the same time, it will shake-up the status-quo by re-shuffling brand values according to how well a product actually sells in the secondary market. The “informed consumer” will soon choose the brand of her next handbag based on how much it will likely fetch on eBay next year – which corresponds to how much it will really cost her to own it up until then.

Organizations that understand the new dynamics between the secondary and primary markets will strengthen their products inherently, and in so doing increase customer loyalty. And their consumers that understand how to maximize the value-to-utility lifecycle of their possessions will be rewarded with a more prosperous but less costly lifestyle.

This trend is already here and Ebay is using the age old bollywood to rake up transactions.

Click here to see what I am talking about.

Go on click and register and you will understand what I am talking about.

the rise of the internet..

2006-06-16T12:56:00.000+05:30

sunil shibad's blog informs us that as per Steven Fredericks, TNS Media Intelligence President-CEO, online advertising spend, including search, would reach $20 billion by year-end, or about 12 percent of the projected $161 billion 2006 measured media advertising spend.

losers include B-to-B magazines and newspapers - and to a lesser extent, consumer magazines and Sunday newspaper magazine supplements.

i have got tired of pushing my techie / hardware / durables clients to look at the net as a viable and effective alternative to conventional media.
they have case-studies. they have numbers to prove it. they even have the option of pay-only-for-what-you-get.

and still they hem and haw sit on the fence.

when will they ever learn ??

Retailing anybody ?

2006-06-15T17:29:00.000+05:30

Having stumbled upon Retail as a career many years ago I soon discovered that 'dukandari' was my vocation after all. However its been a bumpy ride till a year ago and I am a bit astounded by how fast Indian Retailing is growing now. Though stupendous projections of large Research companies haven't exactly matched reality but I think we have taken huge strides and by 2010 we should definitely be going places provided the government does some more hand holding. The number one problem that Indian retailers face today is the non availability of retail space at reasonable costs. Would it to be too utopian to imagine the government's IT initiatives finding a parallel in Retail ? Retail Parks in every city with generous parking space ? Subsidies, concessions for the Retail Industry which till now has been steadily limping along without any help from the government? An Industry which is a as much a face lift for modern India as Aishwarya Rai or the impending commonwealth Games.

There is no denying the fact that there are a handful of large corporates that make organized Indian Retail. However if FII is allowed in unlisted retailing companies, there is no stopping this sector to grow into a giant industry.

Large issues considered, there is an overwhelmingly basic issue that plagues Indian Retail. At a retail summit a couple of years back I got an opportunity to listen to the very dynamic MD of a south Indian retail chain called Subhikhsha who said that as a career "Retail is an alternative to going to jail". Sadly that is very much the reality. Before McDonald's made Retail glamorous, any job was better than working in a shop. Even at the Management level, there were no takers for Retail till a few years ago and it was frankly amusing to see a bunch of IIM graduates being inducted at Barista by serving coffee at the Cafes for a month ! The situation is changing of course and frontline salaries must break the stereotype in order to attract youngsters to opt for Retail as a serious career option.

I am convinced all this and more will happen in the very near future and its going to be as much fun being a Retailer as being the Consumer !!! Ladies look forward to a lot more Queendom.

more consumer touch points...

2006-06-15T16:07:00.000+05:30

multiplex washbasins with dettol liquid handwash are old hat.

nursing homes and hospitals tom-tomming the values of lizol are passe.

washroom mirrors reflecting today's marie claire woman ( aka you ) are tired.

now your out-of-home potty seat too may not be spared a branding.

or the soles of your footwear.

or a song from the group you idolise.

or branded gift wrapping and cellophane used for bunching bouquets.

changing rooms in departmental stores. merchandise hangers and stands for offers and promotions.

next someone will come up with cakes and ice-creams that incorporate brand symbols and names !!!

CSRs as a media tool

2006-06-09T11:18:00.000+05:30

CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility is, in my opinion, the next cutting edge tool for spreading brand awareness.

Corporates, especially MNCs, have understood the power of this wagon, and are using it in manifold ways to announce their presence unobtrusively across TG segments and locations. BG-India is one such entity that I feel is doing pretty good service to various domains, and announcing their presence as a corporate, here to stay in India. The home page of their website carries a link dedicated to their CSR initiatives.

http://www.bg-india.com/corpresp/index.html

Others, like Mahanagar Gas have experimented with CSR in unique and novel ways to bond with their consumers, provide value to the CSR audiences, and derive value too... One of their CSR initiatives, provided employment to retired senior citizens. MGL tied up with Dignity Foundation to provide a "rozgaar" for these people, who in turn were gainfully employed to walk the MGL pipelines (4 kms a day) and report any digging or hazardous activities. Senior citizens were also deployed in their communities to enhance connections, provide information, and coordinate complaints. The results were pretty apparent :

1. Provide livelihood to a neglected section of the society.
2. Build a huge, well networked team to protect and enhance their assets.

Re. the recent campaign run by Anil Ambani for promoting his new corp logo ... I wondered whatavenues he would have chosen to bring the brand closer to the community (in Mumbai), via the CSR route (if). Some things I would have done are:

1. Give every public servant, including traffic cops, beat cops, sweepers, municipality workers, etc, a rain coat/umbrella to face mumbai monsoon, embossed with the logo.
2. Provide a cover for all manholes in Mumbai, and announce presence through a small flag waving atop, or an embossing
3. Give each beggar who soaks in the rain, a set of tshirts and a plastic jacket to cover themselves with

And many, many more along those lines.

The Intel CSR initiative to provide "PCs for Rural India" is simply mindblowing. The specs of this PC are : Not too high on processing, etc.. but sturdy enough to withstand power failures and dust. Why, its so simple that its enchanting. Not only have they enabled a rural India, but have also cleared a huge stock at one go.

There's a lot more initiatives happening along these lines. I will watch each one of them with care :) Probably, I might have just helped people work out a few such initiatives :)

Sanjeev Sarma
www.indianshutter.com
Buy & Sell India specific Image content

Markets and Mindsets ...

2006-06-07T17:39:00.001+05:30

I have always felt that media has not developed in India to the extent it has in the West, for the kiddo market. The kiddo market, btw, has always been a passionate thing for me, a challenge that's a flux, undefined ...

When I started my portal for kids, http://www.kidskhazana.com/indexnew1.html, I wished to re-define the way products hogging the kiddo domain looked at things.

For starters, this portal came out of an event I organized, where I carried over knowledge on another passion I have, cel animation, to kiddos. I held a series of workshops on animation, started with flip book creation, and so on, before i moved onto sketching and animating in flash. Assisting me with the first part, the flipbook and sketch bit, was RamMohan, the evergreen Indian animator ... and Kids did characters and backgrounds and anims for this portal... I just compiled and put it together with a bunch of asp and html guys.

When I started this exercise, I didnt have any money to reach out to kids, travel to them, get a place to be with them, and pass on my skills. I touched base with kellogs, nestle, parle ... you name 'em, i contacted them ... I wanted to pass on my skill to more and more and more children at no cost to them.

One of the things that I thought would interest co's would be an animation by children on their brand ... where the brand gets their adverts from the TG themselves ... getting perceptions, getting ideas, getting to know colors, pack types, shapes and so on ... So I dutifully packed the animation school offering in a flowery presentation where I tried to explain to corporates, that I would hold a product pack ... THEIR product pack, in front of their TG for 40 hours a month, and ask their TG to LOOK at their brand, visualize things about their brand and create stuff for their brand.

I didnt get a single co on board.

They were all committed to airtime on cartoon network or nick (nick had just launched here then), they were all committed to ads in newspapers ... not ONE of them ever seemed to be interested in this branding exercise where THEIR PRODUCT would be not just seen by the TG but IMAGINATED WITH ...

I worked with Hyundai along similar lines. I told them that I would ensure that one of their TG, the pester power audience, would not every confuse a santro with a matiz or any other car !!! they listened, they agreed, and up came the "Golu Junior Mechanic Car Coaching Camp"

With a mechanic from my garage as the master of the event, and me as the chief babbler, and my driver as the technical backup person, I took a Santro to over 40 schools in Mumbai, opened it up, and asked children to touch the blasted carburettor or the piston pump or whatever else they wanted ... I told kids that what they learnt in chemistry or physics or math at schools was what would lead them to understanding a Santro better. This event went to schools at no cost to the schools, at all.

Kids loved it, the parents raved about it, the principals god kudos, I got requests that I could not handle from schools in mumbai. Hyundai, though, for some reason, refused to take this countrywide.

I wish to get back into the kids domain sometime. I think the best when i am in this domain ... for the brand, for my audiences and for myself.

Maybe, one day, Markets will be ready to look beyond spending on just TV into serious value adds like this ... where their audiences get INVOLVED with their brands.

I'll wait ...

Sanjeev Sarma
www.indianshutter.com
Buy & Sell India specific Image content

I me myself, welcome

2006-06-07T16:01:00.000+05:30

Hello people,

I would like to extend a warm welcome to myself here, and totally ignore and deny Dittu's nice gesture of wanting me to join her Blog ...

One reason why I go anywhere, or do anything can be summed up in the following brilliant line ...

"In search of God knows what, I wandered far astray, And that is why I find myself, where I am today. ..."

Cheers

Sanjeev
http://www.indianshutter.com
Buy & Sell India specific Image content

New twist to media buying

2006-06-06T20:13:00.000+05:30

I found this on BBC.co.uk and I am breaking a few rules to reproduce a small bit. (read it in total here)

While the advert is going through the various stages of creation, a decision will be made about when to start buying media space. As some forms of media, especially magazines and television, have considerable lead times it may be necessary to start booking airtime or print space very early on. This becomes even more important when prime slots are required as there will be considerable competition.

There are two key roles in a media team: planning and buying. The planner makes decisions regarding which magazine or which television slots to buy in order to reach the target audience. The buyer negotiates to buy the required space at the best possible price.

The media team will need to be briefed carefully to ensure that they know what the campaign aims to do. A media schedule must be produced outlining how the budget is to be spent - how much on television slots, how much on magazine adverts, the frequency of appearances and so on. The buyers will then start to use their negotiation skills in order to try and purchase the most suitable spaces for the best price. Ideally, the media schedule will leave the buyers enough room to pick and choose, so if a good deal can’t be made with one publication that is of interest to the campaign there is room to move on to another.

Of course, the sales teams that sell space on behalf of the newspapers, magazines etc. have to bring money in to keep the company solvent - they rely at least in part upon advertising revenue and in many cases they are heavily dependent. So there are often opportunities for media buyers to play one off against another.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

So basically what goes on in media buying and selling is finding new ways to spend the clients money. Newspapers and TV and Magazines and hoardings have perishable inventory, and hence the need for space sellers to get rid of inventory at cheap prices that a retail advertiser will never get. Media buyers buy in bulk and are sometimes left holding stock that no one wants. Then these smart asses go and put ads of unsuspecting brand managers and charge them the earth.

COnsidering so many advertising con men and women move to client side businesses and are now responsible for the money the organisation spends, you have them now wearing halos and pretending that they never did anything wrong while on the other side. The easiest ploy is to play two media buying agencies against each other. The one who gets the better deal for the client is the winner.

This situation is good for the clients because now you have every media buyer megotiating harder and harder and driving prices down. Sound logic?

Now come to Search Marketing - Google expects you to bid for those damn keywords for prime positions. So when you have so many people bidding for the same keyword at some point the prices become unviable. One cannot pay for the ads anymore. Now if there is no one bidding one would expect the prices to go down, the truth is that it never happens. Google caps at an average high bid and anyone from that point has to bid upwards. Google makes money. No one else really does.

In this case if you have two media buyers working against each other for the same client, the costs are bound to go up. Better positions mean more and more and more money. The client is the loser because some brand manager somewhere wanted to see who could deliver better. Problem is not in the thought but in the understanding. While it is great to do it in traditional media, it is a death sentence for everyone in the search engine driven ppc world.

In the same breath I have to smirk and add that while one can imagine oubidding a rival advertiser for better positions, One cannot see sense in competing against oneself and driving prices up.

In Search Campaigns better written ads work better, better banners that talk sense is a must. One need not occupy position one forever just to ensure visibility. Sometimes positions 5 and 6 at the bottom of the page too give good results.

All those who read this (and I hope some clients read it too) please do remember that there is an emerging set of people who understand interactive media better. Look hard before you pay for something.

VoIP phones on today's woot !!!

2006-05-30T13:16:00.000+05:30

sunil, the future is here awreddy.

today's woot features a two-pack of Atcom Voice Over IP (VoIP) USB phones.

how does it work ?

you send your partner one, and sign you both up for a VoIP service like Skype.
Calls from one VoIP user to another don’t incur per-minute charges no matter where in the world that other IP is. there’s a monthly fee, but it’s a lot cheaper.

and if the two of you live in the same city you can still use VoIP as a supplement to a your cell line, so you don’t pay for valuable daytime minutes.

all for a princely sum of US $ 17.99 plus $ 5 shipping.

for more comments on this product go here

sighhhhhhhh............

customer engagement

2006-05-26T19:02:00.000+05:30

the longer you keep him with your brand, the better it is.
thats what engagement is.
with brands and brand experiences that are sticky.

and so this is how a few do it. by creating groups of involved, happily hooked conumers.

india's leading karaoke jockey KJ Subz does it by offering his fans the chance to turn rockstar. and so teeming crowds hang around waiting for their turn to belt out their opportunity from behind the mike.

vikas verma's Colour Factory at an upscale DLF mall in gurgaon is therapeutic, as i discovered.
at this DIY ceramic studio, one can pick a choice of pottery and personalise it, paint it, jazz it up. and eat and drink alongside while trained assistants attend to your queries and top up your colours and select paintbrushes for you.

so can't record labels team up with KJ Subz ? to do a karaoke evening of their music exclusively ? or promote the music of a forthcoming film by getting consumers to listen to it and sing along ? throw in a few simple quiz type questions for prizes and you have a winner.

and can't the camlins and the fevicryls of the world tap in to the world of the colour factory ? or even the juice or snack brands of the world may be ?

are we looking at fleeting levels of brand exposure which may or may not impact consumers ? or a guaranteed 2/3 hours of pure passionate involvement from them ?

take your pick brand marketers.

Matrix Revisited

2006-05-25T15:02:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I was rapping as usual with a friend from the CellCos and ended up talking about how little the guys who decide what kind of content will reside on their GPRS portals know. Take some content to them and they will ask you how you would promote the same. (before hitting you on the head with a 50% revenue share they have dreamt up for themselves) The content provider has to bear the cost of developing the content, sharing rights fees with the original owner and media costs to promote the content. Net result - few content guys have the balls to be orginal. They simply cannot be innovative knowing that at the end of all this they will be left holding about 10% of the total value of the content. Dont blame them for treating content likse e onions - buy by the ton and sell by the kilo.

What if I had Satyajit Ray content - Feluda, The movies and everything else, would CellCos be interested? Yes they would be in West Bengal and BanglaDesh. Try talking to a Hutch guy in Mumbai and you will know what I mean. Now what if I were to get a media house as a partner? What if they push the content to ensure stickiness of their readership? Now does that change the game?

What if I use search marketing? Every true Bengali searching for anything to do with the language or the culture would come to the website. I get ad revenue on the webpage that hosts the content, get revenue from operators through whom my visitors download the content.

Now does it become interesting?
The art of working in the digital space is not in looking at components in isolation but in being the zubin mehta of creating a matrix of sounts that work together to give a symphony.

Are there any companies that you know of that is taking interactive and mobile along with brands and content and creating a unified solution? If you send me a list of these I promise to buy you a cuppa in which ever city you are located.

__________________

Interesting read

Blogging for Dollars

more magz...

2006-05-25T11:45:00.000+05:30

hah !

the guys at business today agree with moi.*

my post finds an echo in their story "magazine mania".

the whole world and their moms want a price of the action.

forbes, businessweek, vogue, glamour et.al. could be gracing indian shelves soon.

and then new niches - magazines on pups and dogs. spas.

such fun, no ??

* subscription needed to view the link

Passion Drives...

2006-05-25T10:29:00.001+05:30

Gadget geeks go here
News-hounds and gossip mongers go hereTechnology geeks go here

What’s common to woot which sells one sexy product “deal ” as it dubs itself.
And sells itself out only to re-invent itself every 24 hours.

To warfornews which quietly slips in to the world of today’s TV channel journalism and uncovers their deepest, darkest secrets.

To a barcamp, a concept which has originated in "saddi dilli"..surprise surprise and not in Bangalore. Where lovers and users of technology get together to rap and share ideas and visions of what they want to do with technology.

All of these are unique ideas which give groups of consumers what they are looking for.
It taps in to their passions and deepest desires.

So that apart from the initial effort …to drive traffic, the consumer gets hooked and keeps coming back for more and much much more.

And one more thing. Viral marketing has created the buzz around all these.

What now brown cow you may say ?

A desi woot avatar will work. Assuming the stuff up for sale doesn’t come from Chinese rip-offs or from grey market junk.. Rediff and Baazee are you listening ? Try and figure why that zircon pendant doesn’t sell despite 20 identical listings and a one rupee pricetag plus three hundred bucks delivery charges.
And why that Nokia handset doesn’t get enough bids. That’s because its cheaper at the nukkad store.

Some passionate soul who KNOWS gizmos can turn this in to a money spinner.

Rock music passions can open up another front. I keep telling my dear buddy Naren Kusnur to start his music blog. Given his exposure in the business and his contacts with musicians that’s a slot that he can do full justice to. Rise O Naren. History awaits you…

Then given our passion for gossip and Bollywood who will be the first to blog the darkest secrets of that world ? Film rags are pure childs play didn’t you know ?
This could be the worlds first pay to read blog. Mint millions.

The gaming world where game driven souls can meet, rap, play.

Niches could tap in to karaoke, hacking, net usage, business games, brand developments, trend spotting… the list is endless

Enough people are passionate about many things

Cash in.

the secondary network of wonderful things

2006-05-23T17:20:00.000+05:30

Cold media buying types occassionally gather together and speak in hushed tones about circulation numbers etc. They also chew on the bing bang that mainline newspapers can provide to brands that fall prey to their games. A couple of weeks ago I had a good friend try to explain to me the strategy behind the launch of a new service by a courier company. His solution was simple - full page ads in Times of India all editions, Economic times, BusinessWorld and TVCs across news channels. Money burnt - about 80 lakhs in one bloody day. I looked at him and blinked twice and gave him a look over. Was this guy for real? I wanted to check his pulse and poke him in his ribs to ensure that he was indeed alive.
It was then that my friend spoke in hushed tones about a secondary network of media that exists. This media network lives in the shadow of the biggies, it speaks local languages and is generally looked down upon by the Anghrezhi speaking types. But when you want to reach the grassroots, target the mass markets then you have to go to them. They are not expensive and they dont have flash value. No one will ever talk about them in glorious terms. But they do the job.
Think again - why the ^%$##$ did Hutch introduce vernacular Ads for Chota Recharge? And why do brand want to go local? The answer is that we city folks have reached media saturation, we dont look at ads

SO! can I be the first to lay claim to the future of Online advertising? Can I say that I intend to create a huge network of websites and blogs and forums and all that which cater to chota communities who are consumers? Can I tieup every small newspaper in the country and run their websites and drive visitors and thereby create value for advertisers? Can I therefore break the stranglehold of the bigg guys?

Can I do the same with the mobile phone?

Can I offer a potent combination to advertisers ? Mobile and online platform to reach the right consumer? Can I mine the data to know what patterns are emerging ? Can I link SBI Debit cards usage to predict when a family in Ludiana or in Vellambalam buys its next colour TV? Or tell Paramount Airways when Mr Parthasarthy from Chennai will take his next trip to coimbatore or When Mr Waghmare will fly to Kolhapur?

It is exciting times and by god the best to make history and not remain a footnote.

where all will you touch...

2006-05-16T13:03:00.000+05:30

...your consumer ?

a quick visit to the washroom at delhi's turquoise cottage last night in the midst of rocking karaoke do left me stunned.

on the left hand side of the mirror. there was a nicely printed sticker. classy graphics too. saying that i was looking at a marie claire woman. and on the right of the mirror was pasted another sticker with a visual of the international marie-claire magazine.

i dont know if it was there by chance or deliberately put there. but pause now. think.

then there was this promo done by dettol handwash liquid soap in the washrooms of PVR cinemas where users had free bottles of the product for their use.

is this ten seconds worth of brand exposure in a washroom albeit in an "upmarket" what we are coming to ? imagine WC's with stickers saying they use harpic and nothing else !

there was this guy on e bay who was auctioning his forehead for a brand tattoo.
imagine if he was a co-worker or a family member.

sheesh !

move over SMS. MMS. inflight promos. pop-ups. in-film placements.

but the scrabble seems to be for newer and more innovative ways of brand exposure. in a myriad of ways. newer and innovative touch points.

the beauty is that now brands have people looking for that connect.

via podcasts. or message boards or discussion groups. or an online virtual walk through. or contests like this one which ask viewers to guess the ending of the movie "fanaa'. via gaming.
and yes even thru blogs !

so are there any more ways of touching consumers? capturing them while they remain willing slaves to a brands experience ?

possible areas could be around

movie seats
IM / chat browsers
search engine home page ( google allows you to brand the home page )
wiki
spa
at your shrink's office !
on your inflight movie screen
on your GPRS display screen
on your ice-cream cone

any one for any more ??

WiFi Zindabad

2006-05-11T10:17:00.000+05:30

Over the last couple of weeks I have been travelling extensively between Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore. Since most of the traveling is on short notice I end up with Air Deccan tickets, which almost everytime means that I am stuck at the city airports with two to three hours to kill. Till a few months ago this delay would mean that I would buy a few mags and read them, now with a wifi enabled wireless laptop I can get on to the net at Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi (Mumbai is still in the backwaters).

I suppose very soon we will have sify, vsnl, bsnl wifi networks which cover every major building and maybe even cities. That brings us to some wonderful ideas:

1. If I am a VSNL wifi customer can I access a sify wifi network? Not yet, but imagine if such a thing was possible - it is possible if we build the system ( stupid!!) and extend it to roaming like we have in the cell phone domain. It would be wonderful to be online always via a laptop and be able to access information on a 15 inch monitor instead of a measly 4 inch Treo. I wish this happens asap and then it will open possibilities galore.
2. If there is a wifi network covering the entire city then why do i need a cell phone? can I have a handset which connects to the net via wifi? Have a skype equivalent on the handset ( some techies say that it is possible to build such a software) and lo and behold you can dial and speak to anyone using VOIP.

Is this the reason Google is investing in wireless networks in some cities? Can you begin to imagine what is going to happen?

sunil nair is famous !

2006-05-09T22:47:00.000+05:30

read all about him here

pop the bubbly and make merry !!

magazines wanted

2006-05-06T21:07:00.000+05:30

mala bhargava's take on how difficult it is to figure if a new mobile handset is for you, set me thinking.
plus my geeky buddy sanjeev sarma who lives with technology and tries to take us simple folk closer to it, had this idea.

a magazine on mobile phones.

i know IT and digital content publications do it partly. but there is now enough meat and enough consumers to make a go of this niche.

and then one more.
gaming.
and may parents, teachers all slaughter me. the truth is out there.
alongwith online gaming on PC's and at reliance web worlds , downloadable games for mobile phones and game CD's and cartridges for computers and Xbox and the PS series...

the websites which carry cheat codes for games ( shortcuts ) must be getting huge hits from lazy bones who want to get to the next level on their game without making the effort. so a real or a virtual gaming hangout would be BIG methinks.

does anything exist for the booming biotechnology and retail and entertainment sectors ?

then i am taken back to my salad days where a cult called Junior Statesman aka JS existed. once it closed down, no one has been ever able to re-create that magic.
perhaps today's youth may not even relate to a JS. but us youngat heart diehards surely would.

so it magazine time...wake up and smell the paper guys!!

wanna do this in india?

2006-04-26T12:31:00.000+05:30

Tribeca online film festival ka desi avtaar? wanna try?

Writer's Marketplace

2006-04-26T12:18:00.000+05:30

Many moons ago I was involved in something that evolved into Caferati . The idea back then was to provide writers with a forum where they could interact and explore and eventually find their own space and confidence to go and write that Booker winner. Caferati has been bumbling along doing nothing much other than sporadic readmeets (must remember to copyright ideas). I had visions of getting sponsors for every read meet, sponsors for books that would be published and so on. Did Not Work!

Time now for version two of the idea:

Create a forum for writers
Communities based on interests and genres
Drive registration : Free with limited access and features and a paid membership
Price it at Rs 249 for six months
Allow paid members to submit their work
Give away premium content that the members can read.
Rate content on basis of number of downloads, the best ones rise to the top based on reviews and number of downloads
Share revenues with the writers
Distribute content to offline media
Distribute content to Mobile
PUBLISH!

I have a feeling this will work. But this one needs some bit of seed capital. Coffee anyone?

Write to me if you want to explore this idea further

food 24/7/365

2006-04-25T12:08:00.000+05:30

picture this.

a bustling food court. serving anything and everything.

soups. mocktails. slushes. chuski. ice-cream. desi. southie. pasta. biryani. snacks. street food. pastries. chinese. pizzas. continental. desserts. salads.

packed with families with kids. just married types still shy of each other. cuddling couples. all male hang-out types. BPO types who stick out a mile.

here's the surprise part.

its 2 am on a saturday morning in new delhi.

and the location is "comesum", the eatery outside the hazrat nizamuddin railway station.

run by the irctc, and located in select cities .

comesum is not just a food court at railway stations. there are smaller comesum restaurants and takeaway kiosks at railway stations.

and the best is this one. call up their phone numbers. place your order and have your food delivered at your seat on your train.

whew. non-shatabdi types can finally take heart.

given the proliferation of eating out options today plus the choice of ready to cook/ ready to eat foods, home-delivery options from waiters-on-wheels to dominos to humble dhaaba / dabba fare.... i wonder.

may be there will come a day when we too turn in to a nation that almost always eats out ? much as in the west where domesticity is a pain.

i dont really think so. as long as servants are here to wait on us it seems a remote thing.
even two or three generations after todays mcfood types.

the frequency with which i take my son out to eat is once a week. minimum. the order-ins and takeaways are separate.
the ready to eat foods and chips and assorted junk is separate and not accounted for in this discussion.
but pretty much what i want to say should be clear.

we are eating out like never before.

and anything new and innovative - sushi, veda, juice bars, office lunches flaunt salads, vodka filled gol-gapppas, flambe-ed gulab jamuns, branded vada-pav...

convenience foods, ready to cook, ready to eat tom tom virtues of being natural with no preservatives to anxious homemakers. the working types simply put their guilt and doubts on the back burner and snap them up.

restaurants turn in to brands and market their speciality dishes in cans or pouches in ready to eat avtaars.
cook books routinely sell out. foodblogs have appeared

food rocks. business wise. even other wise.

so when will some one do a concept store that does any thing and everything around and with food ? a foodie version of the planet m / music world. tough. but not impossible. enough footfalls, trials and repeat visitors are guaranteed.
will messers biyani or pillai oblige ?

when will the roads of chandni chowk be turned in to an endless food street the way it is in lahore ?

microwave marketers have long since used the recipe / food route to familiarise buyers with their product and ensure that a new style of cooking is taught to desi women. post the initial flush and enthu how many have bothered to stay connected with their database of users and ensure interest and involvement levels are maintained? after all its easier to retain a customer and upsell rather than acquire a new one. scope for community building here. especially amongst home makers. samsung, LG et. al. wake up.

and then there is this. the ultimate tribute that one can pay to a brand. more so when promoting it is not allowed in any media except at point of sale. brand heritage and other sundry facts aside, this is something that constitutes the holy grail for any marketer. meakins and co must take a bow for inspiring this effort.
also a fit case for brand sustenance in the blogosphere.

stuff that case-studies would be about.

sometime in the distant future.

and now am HUNGRY...

p.s. no thanks to blogspot who swallowed this post twice before. hungry kya ?????

of knock-offs and pavements....

2006-04-20T11:06:00.000+05:30

take a look at the teeming, milling crowds on the streets.

all doing just one thing.

shopping.

and the maximum crowds i see are at the pavement stalls and the "khokaas" selling shoes and clothes at rock bottom rates. almost always to women.

nice, kitschy stuff with assorted glittery thingummies. all at prices that don't burn a hole in the pocket. quality of course is pretty suspect. but as long as it lasts a couple of months, no sweat.
and a bit of bargaining proves irresistible. even though deep down we all know that even after supposedly bullying the shopkeeper down by a few bucks he is STILL making his pound of flesh from us..who cares ? we have got what WE wanted, right ??

makes me wonder in the midst of our so-called retail revolution and hypermarkets et.al., when will anyone come up with a chain of pavement stalls ? a brand of pavement stalls around the country. offering the same kind of products at the same prices and the same experience, everywhere ?

a chain of pavement stalls selling designer knock-offs at knock off prices - would be a smash hit, methinks.

we guys are great at fake stuff. so merhcandise shouldn't be a problem. stalls selling fakes abound, but lack credibility. and quality is always suspect.

so may be a chain of pavement shops selling QUALITY designer knock-offs and tom-tomming that fact would give that credibility stamp perhaps ? i think the crowds would attack in droves.

the west has made a virtue of designer fakes ...perfumes, clothes, sunglasses, shoes.
no reason that it can't happen here ?

well ??

p.s. - delhi has this cute-in-pink "chota" shop chain called "impulse". where you pick up baubles, beads, bags and shoes. and get nail art done. almost always crowded.

then a long while ago, a foodie friend who had his own chain of fast-food reastaurants serving kebaabs, had decided to innovate and take his kebaabs to the masses at office complexes. branded "kongo" (short for kebaab-on-the-go), the idea was to have a uniformed seller with his own tray of kongos ( kebaabs in roomalis with chutney and onion rings, foilwrapped and packed in cartons a la mcdonald's ), much like the food-sellers you see walking about in the west, during soccer and cricket matches.
replenishments could come from a nearby storage source or a central kitchen.

willing to bet this would work like a dream....

warning to plagiarists !!!

2006-04-18T21:23:00.000+05:30

all the ideas and content on this blog are original and the property of the blog-owners and may not be copied / reproduced in any form whatsoever in any manner and in any media whatsoever.

for those who want to try and do this, be warned that this blog is protected by

" COPYSCAPE " , a plagiarism prevention software. not only will it prevent you from doing so but it will also track your id and IP address !!

so there !!!

the game of games...

2006-04-18T14:17:00.000+05:30

they are laughing all the way to the bank.

or they soon will be.

game creators and content providers are finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. courtesy the fans of PSP and Xbox.
online and mobile options add to the fun and games. pretty literally.

service providers, and the porn industry lick their chops in anticiaption of all that moolah they can lat their hands on.

then sundry brands see this as THE way to get through to their difficult-to-reach hard-to-please consumers one on one. seasons, characters, events also have a role in game creation.

and the kids are left way behind the grown-ups (!) who want a piece of the action .. 33 % versus 11 % as reported in one of the mainline dailies.

so the new timepass is this perhaps.

assuming we get games on our i-pods ?

school lessons woven in to games so that kids can at least get to learn their lessons that way ?? ( pretty please, someone go in to this new paradigm of learning and make trillions )

and we can create our ideal partner in a game ?

play pranks on others through games ?

next we will have game olympics ( shudder !! )and spawn a new monster !!!

Defining moments ...www style !!!

2006-04-17T11:30:00.000+05:30

The World Wide Web’s defining moments as researched by CNN make interesting reading.

Would be interesting to see if our lists of defining moments coincide with the majority speak or not.

Imho, e-mail and the mobile phone are the two things that have simply revolutionised the way we do business now.
May be voice and video too. However they have been more along the lines of value-adds to an existing base of technology based work enablers.

My next defining moment with regard to how technology will redefine our work and living styles –

Office / Wallet / Entertainment all in one.
On a mobile phone or mobile communicator. Right now it takes the shape of a handheld external device.
What if it is an implant under the skin? Or adhered to an external garment ?

Who is the mad genius who will get us there ? Which is the corporation which will invest ?

Futurists have predicted the possibility of creating an invisible force-field around humans that will enable all communication possibly by thought and telepathy….

Welcome to our Brave New World.. circa 2084 perhaps ??

What do the kids of today want ?

2006-04-17T10:38:00.000+05:30

As mother to a pre-teen, metropolitan, elitist, semi-spoilt brat it’s pretty clear.

The latest game CD’s ( both for PC and PSP aka Play-station Portable ), Nike soccer jerseys, Mall shopping sprees, Gatorade, safari holidays in Africa ( Disneyworld ? What’s that ? ) , a personal mobile phone, notebook PC's, birthday bashes at farmhouses with girls coming in for an “evening dance party”……

A lot of these are a function of the super-informative age and the one-upmanship scenario that we live in. Where the world has shrunk in to reside on our idiot boxes or PC’s. And kids selectively pick out this kind of information and take it in like super-absorbent sponges. Retain it all, too.

Given the nature and level of information flows, research in the West has shown , that the average sleeping times of babies have gone down considerably due to the level and quality of stimuli that they are exposed to.

That doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, we all know how tough it is to get and hold the attention of these guys for more than a brief length of time.

So. How does one harness the power of information to kids about a brand and make moolah out of it ? Time and time again ?

This example comes to mind.

One where a brand has a unique offering, at least in the Indian context. Obviously the quality and presentation has more than exceeded consumer expectations.
A presence in strategic locations in a few malls is enough. Word has spread like wild-fire.
( Oh yes, pundits call it “buzz”, “WOM”, “viral marketing” and suchlike ) amongst son’s peer group.

On two successive weekends my son dragged me to different malls in an effort to find the store. There was no advertising whatsoever to go by. No one had the exact location, only vague directions to go to so-and-so mall and such-and-such floor and it was next to a particular store.

Once we located it, it was bliss. For the child at least. He was lost in his Paradise. A whole range of assorted candies were neatly arranged in rows of crystal clear containers. Stuff which we had read about in Enid Blyton books or seen in Archie comics as kids.

Dolly mixture, liquorice sticks, chocolate coated footballs, fudge, marshmallows, bulls eyes, humbugs and god knows what all else. In flavours from cola and mint to peach and grape. In shapes ranging from dentures to cola bottles to creepy crawlies.
We could mix and match an assortment of candies as we pleased with the large spatula there. Designed to pick up large helpings every time.
All priced at a flat rate of Rs. 60 per 100 grams. Works out equivalent or more than the most expensive “pista burfi” or dry fruits that one could pick up elsewhere.

You could pick up as much or as little as you wanted.
They were weighed, billed and packed in a food grade zip lock bag with colourful candy coloured streaks on it.
Mind you, the candies were still visible through it. Anyone carrying this sort of a bag would be instantly tagged as being a customer of “Candy Treats”. And in “that” stratospheric league of people who would go to such places.

And we keep going back there. Again and again. And I half-heartedly, semi-willingly shell out the moolah for over-priced candies that I know will cause tooth decay in the long run with dentists bills as a side benefit.

But this guy at Candy Treats has got his act down pat. He has created a tribe of regular, loyal ambassadors at no extra cost.

Google did it with g mail. Once upon a time a g mail invite was the most wannabe thing on Earth. They’ve been smart enough to keep it still by invitation only.

Smart. Very smart. Or did Mr. Candy Treat just get lucky, being the first in his business ? Was he in the right place at the right time ?

Makes me think. Where does he go from here ? Even the biggest cult brands (think i-pod, for instance ) need to innovate and move on in order to maintain and grow loyal consumers.

May be the answers could lie in low-cal or sugar free candy to attract health conscious adults ? Or even “naughty” candy ? These could be placed at pubs and restaurants. Customised candy in desired shapes ? Play-and-eat dough candy for babies ?

Or better still. Ask the kids what they want.

A confectionery company called Candico had a few years ago run a contest, where they had asked kids to write in with their suggestions as to what kind of candies they should manufacture. The best suggestions would be rewarded with the opportunity to become Brand Advisors and Tasters for the company. Imagine the hoard of information they would have managed to gather.
Strangely, though, I don’t seem to recall anything happening with that company and its products.

But for now, my drooling continues…...

p.s. - thank you sunil :))

Random thoughts on a pale Saturday

2006-04-15T11:32:00.000+05:30

1. When advetisers want people to know about the existence of their brand they use print, Tv and outdoor. But when they want people to respond they will use other means. Those means include interactive and mobile. When Voltas has a cherubic kid saying "India ka AC, Korea ka nahi" (India's AC, not from some Korean company) they want to establish their coolness in an overheated market. If a potential buy goes to the consumer durable market to select an AC he or she would most certainly be seduced by the glib talk of the sales guy and will 90% of the time come back with the AC that was not even in their consideration. The last mile battle is won by those companies who promise better margins and deals to their outlets / dealers etc. In this scenario if Voltas wants interested consumers to contact them direct so that they can send their representative to ensure a sale they need to have some sort of contact mechanism in place in their Ads on TV. The best is to put in a call centre number, but then how many people will remember to call - after all expecting people to call in the middle of some Saas Bahu conspiracy or Dhoni's sixes is asking for too much. The next is to get people to SMS so that a call centre voice can call back. Both are call to actions that are mucked up by uncertainities. Now if Voltas just wanted to get people to know that they are around then their objectives are served by having non response advertising.

Suppose we were to have a solution in place where the user gets to call when he is online and browsing for information about how to make payasam on an obscure portal? Can we offer multiple options to contact Voltas? Can we send him an SMS after he has opted in to remind him about buying the AC when he is in the confines of a multiplex?

2. Response advertising will move to the Internet and mobile in the next one year. It will assume and then consume major budgets. The next big players in this space are going to be nimble operators who can take convergence to the next level.

3. Is anyone reading this blog at all?

Take your Google personalized page with you

2006-04-15T07:14:00.000+05:30

I am sure this has been discussed about 100 Googol times before. But hey I just rediscovered this fact and I am thrilled to bits about it's possibility.

Click here

And you will know what I am talking about. After taking over the net, Google makes things thrilling by promising to take over the mobile screens. They have a few things you can do from your mobile phone right now. But that will change soon. What happens when a uniform shortcode for Google comes into effect. Imagine what you can do with ringtones and screensavers and images which can be accessed from Google on your mobile. Will it mean that the mobile content providers will be out of business? Or will this mean that there would be an easier way of distributing content. It would be fun to see Ashish Kashyap - Google India Head trying to compete with Mobile2Win for business. And Indiagames selling games using Google.

Imagine enterprise solutions on your mobile phone. Delivery schedules coming to your Supply Chain Management system visible on your handset. Order confirmation when you are on the move.

Imagine being able to get all that you now take for granted on the net getting ported into your mobile.

Imagine text ads on Google Mobile, Imagine being able to call direct the number you see on the ad and ask for a quote. Oooh, this is exciting times.

Wonder how many of us marketing jerks are already onto the bandwagon? I can imagine a few smirks.

Democracy on the net?

2006-04-11T10:39:00.000+05:30

Blogging comes of age:

A syndication service that delivers commentary from 600 bloggers for use by newspaper publishers is set to launch on Tuesday, further blurring the lines that divide blogs and mainstream media. Read more

I must have jumped the gun when I spoke about democratisation of mobile content. Looks like it is happening on the internet space too. Imakimagine a newspaper full of articles and stories written by citizens of the world. Their opinions and their views which could be unbiased, and not delivered by people who have been embedded into war zones.

Interesting thought eh?

The truth is out there on Google

2006-04-07T11:21:00.000+05:30

Last month

6800000 people searched for export related information on Google
300000 people searched for air tickets
1500000 people wanted share market related information

From India alone.

Over 100000 searches for plastic fastners from US, 70000 searches for asbestos insulating devices from Eastern Europe, 30000 odd searches for silk fabric from US.

How do I know this? There is not secret sauce involved or any patents or any copyright on the information, it is available on http://www.adwords.com
to anyone who can use a computer and use a calculater.

I or anyone using this information can now source anything under the sun from people who manufacture it and then sell it to people who want it. All one needs to know is the item in demand, so if someone wants plastic fastners use google to find someone who has a surplus and then advertise that you have it in the country where the requirement orginates and voila you have a profitable business.

Did someone say ebay? Oh yes, Ebay it is. Only this is far simpler to use and it does not need rocket fuel to run.

___________________________________________________________________

If you need more information on how you can use the internet to do more business please do write in, I would be only too happy.

democratisation of mobile content

2006-04-05T18:20:00.000+05:30

One man's thrash can be someone else's treasure - that is the way eBay went about making money. By giving the common internet user the ability of put things he did not want and then be able to sell it to someone who wanted that very thing for a price in Timbaktu democratised the internet. Now look at the mobile space. In India everything you want for your mobile phone is available for ten bucks - wall papers of Aishwarya, screen savers of Udita panting away and games where you can kill ten guys with one bullet. The success of the mobile content industry is that it has found a way of monetising what the user wants. The ticket size is small enough to not hurt anyone and the phone bill is the payment gateway (safe and easy).

Suppose there was a way for me to take my content - a small clip of a paper bag flying up into the air (Yes yes American Beauty style) or a pic I took of a mongrel or anything that interests me - and put it up for sale on a portal. You SMS the content code and get it downloaded to your phone. I get a portion of the sale, the operator gets some and the portal makes some money. The best content goes up the scale and so on and so forth. Will that change the dynamics of the game? Will it mean that I can keep sending small things to the portal and get micro payments accumulated over a period of time and get ten dollars every week in my mail box.

Can brands get onto this portal? Can Nokia be interested? Immensely huge potential!! Ok stop drooling - gimme the money to do this!

Another Idea - What if every content piece has a small ticker which says interested in this product? send SMS to 1234 and we will call you. Like I said before I am just getting started.

I guess a few people do read this blog, can you help more people come to this blog and contribute ideas, if you want to contribute send me an email at theaxe(dot)sunil(attherate)gmail(dot)com and I will send you and invite to participate.

innovate or die!

I am lost! which city am I in?

2006-04-04T10:06:00.000+05:30

Four cities in five weeks! Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai. All metros, all sufficiently progressive. Delhi leading the Internet revenues, Pune - the IT services hub, Bangalore - already a legend in the western world and Chennai - the emerging financial services BPO hub. To add to that I live in Mumbai - the financial capital of India.

This is not about the cities that I want to talk about, but about the loss of identity of each of the cities. Whether I go to the Forum Mall in Bangalore or MG Road in Pune or any malls in Chennai or in Gurgaon the sameness of the places bore me to death. It is the same Barista, Cafe Coffee Day, MacDs, Shopper's Stop and so on that flourish. The same brands in uniformity across every horizon. Once upon a time it was comforting to see familiarity, now it is scary.

If I want authentic Maharashtrain food in Mumbai I have to hunt hard. To find Coorg coffee or chicken I need to go to some small eatery in Bangalore. Maybe I am wrong and it does make sense to have uniformity where people go and spend money to buy things that look the same, taste the same and so on. Maybe in five years we will have Mall rats and Mall wives and mall guys. I guess we are heading the US way.

But think about it. What if you got local cuisine, local arts, local ideas, local culture all in one sealed unit inside a large mall. Say if someone repeated it over and over in every city. Will it work? Suppose merchandisers went and sourced paithanis from aurangabad, Kaanchiverams from Chennai and Coir mats from Kerala and all this was available in a 4 lakhs square feel mall in Mumbai. Call it a festival of India.

Come to think of it, these kind of malls have been around. You can see them at the MMRDA ground in Bandra Mumbai. Maybe all it needs is some good packaging.

Who wants to invest?.

my world resides on my mobile

2006-03-31T10:28:00.000+05:30

Long ago, 24 months to be precise, we were pitching for the BSNL Mobile's (India's largest telecom network) advertising account. Our thoughts centered around just one idea - "my identity is my mobile phone". The thought was consigned to dust back then. SMS was just about starting up, camera phones were things rich kids played with. Ringtones were begining to get fancy and colour was a luxury. Two years on the bloody handset is like a identity tag. The first thing you notice is the handset model. The brick sized monsters mean that you are either a wannabe or have lots of money to buy the latest.

And suddenly my world resides on my mobile phone. I use it to message, email, talk, keep myself busy, update information, entertain, buy stuff. In a city like Mumbai where I live it takes about two hours to get from point 'a' to point 'b', it does not matter that the point b is three kilometers from the start point. This city measures distances in time and not meters. What do I do to keep myself from losing precious hair? I surf the net, download themes and get on to Google. I use the phone very little to talk. I assume the same happens in Delhi or Kolkatta.

Very recently I got on to Google via the mobile phone and typed in "shares" - the results gave me a bunch of results that were bang on target, now if I were to get ads in there using the Google Adwords and have a contact number right there on the results page it would be great. If I were the kind who wanted to invest in shares and found a number which was relevant at that moment, I would call.

The normal method is to click on the ads that Google throws up and fill in a dataform and wait for the company to call back. If the contact number were available on the mobile phone itself it would bridge the gap between the net and the phone.

Imagine being able to fill in a profile on your phone using a small application and then getting offers that interest you as you drive along. I imagine a time when while crossing Granth - a good bookstore on way to work, my cell phone getting a small list of books that might interest me and then being able to buy the ones that I want after reading a small extract by sending in an SMS. The payment added to my phone bill to be paid at the end of the month.

Imagine being able to download a small animated girlfriend - a tart who wants everything from diamonds to Rayban - or she gets angry and sulks away - the only way to satisfy her is to visit the diamond brand that sponsors the section or to the rayban section. You get points for interacting with the brand, the animated girlfriend is happy and you can redeem the points you collected for movie tickets or mechandise.

So if my world is on my mobile does someone have the appetite to exploit the arena. Can someone invest and reap the benefits. Believe me there is huge money here.

Threshold of migration

2006-03-30T09:45:00.000+05:30

When management guru CK Prahlad talks, everyone listens. Showing a pyramid where the elite
constitute the top few, the middle-class the middle and the poor the huge base holding up the top, he pointed out that the “invisible poor” were very much there. While a majority of businesses were focused on the top 1bn people in the world, there were several billions waiting to be serviced, and this, he said, was as good a business opportunity as any. The idea was to look at next practices. India could do it in several sectors, he feels — healthcare, automotive, FMCG, financial services and others.

Let me take retail as a case study, and InOrbit Mall in suburban Mumbai as the place where all the action would be. The mall is about two years old and caters to the upper end of the market, the high income group. My theory is that eventually these high income folks will move to better and more exotic locations because they can afford to do so. What happens at that point in time is that the vaccuum created is replaced by the next level of buyers. These are the SEC C in India, people who aspire to buy what they see the high income groups consuming. If you visit InOrbit mall today you will see a scatter of the SEC C families window shopping, be sure that within the next few months the ones who come to the mall to dream will collect enough to be able to buy the products on display. At that point the mall will have to consider whether they want to cater to the high end fickle minded customer or do they want to cater to the non english speaking consuming "save and spend" customer.

Eventually CK Prahlad's inverse pyramid theory works and the earlier innovations cater to the larger base of the population come into use the money money would be made.

The same applies to Mobile content, can we have at some point Hindi content available? Or Malayalam?

IS there someone out there who has a killer solution? If there is then the Threshold of migration of consumers will change drastically.

Another blog, another day

2006-03-29T11:45:00.000+05:30

For a very very long time - some six months to be precise I have toyed around with the idea of writing a blog that has a few of my ideas. The thought was that some of these ideas and concepts seemed to have merit and when i talked about them in public they did get reactions. Now since I am one of those regular sort of guys with less money (three EMIs a month and bank balance is kaput), I never will get to implement any of these ideas. And many a times someone else seems to get the credit for what i thought up orginally. So let us say that this is a way to protect myself.

Do I hear a sniff that says that I sound pompous? Ok then let me prove a few points -

Point 1

In 1996 I and a rag tag team of software writers wrote a device driver which went on to get approvals from Bajaj Auto and Tata Motors - India's largest automibile manufacturers. this piece of code printed barcodes - those straight lines that you see on products in super marts which are used to total your tab - We went on to install these at over 900 locations. We also went on to do work for Benz and Bayer using the same code. The idea could have gone far but we never could get funding and it was sold off for a pittance.

Point 2

Heard of eMarket-places? No? Ok heard of eBay? Amazon? Hmm fine - was back in 1998 when ebay was just getting its biz plan in place when I talked about emarket-places as a concept would bring together everyone in the supply chain onto the same platform and bring value. Guess what? It did not happen. It died due to lack of funding ( actually everyone including John Broughton said good idea, but held on to their money) You can read this interview which appeared in Hindu BusinessLine if you search real hard on Google.

Point 3

Caferati and Caferati Blog

An idea that has been acknowledged as the very first attempt at collaborative publishing. (I did get fed up with ponderous people who took ownership of this and walked off)

So what am I trying to get at? Simple - this is to be an attempt at trying to get ideas into action, to see if there are ideas that can grow into viable a business and most of all to find funding for these projects.

So here goes... Hope we see a billion ideas bloom and flourish