Three Reasons why not to make lists

I am not sure how it all started but making lists while writing articles seem to be a cute trick to lure the readers. No one at the end of the article remembers the list but people never seem to get enough of it.

Ever noticed that most of the experts when asked to answer a question always have a three-points answer. It is only Mr Narayan Murthy who can come up with an extempore 7 points (or more) response. Jack Welch books have so many lists of things to remember that I wonder if he made them all up for the young management wannabe CEO's! Self-help Guru Dr Stephen Covey got so obsessed with his seven habits that he had to dedicate a new book "The 8th habit" to get out of it.

In my view the origin of list lies in our education system. We were asked to write down important notes in tabular form and index bullet points for memorization. Making lists was learning tool during school days. In work-life Lists are mostly used for time management. Not to mention the list of lifestyle desirable; seven wonders, top 10 movies of the year, top twenties songs, Times 100 celebs, Forbes 500, etc.

I have seen my son grow up and for whatever reason his lists are follow the binary system i.e. zero or one. It is good to see him cheerful and carefree. Cheerful when he has "one" thing to do and carefree when he has "nothing" in his mind. That may not be good enough reason for you to kick the habit. Let us go through my list of three reasons:
1. Don't make lists make objects of the things to remember. Action buttons with colorful designs is taking over as new user interface, you might end up as a creative art director in web2.0 firm.
2. Connect the objects in story or a flow diagram. It will help develop lateral thinking (e.g. VIBGYOR or My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas).
3. Work usually has life cycle or in a flow chart steps. I am not suggesting learning UML state machine design, just follow simple work flow rules. Sphere: Related Content

101 Reasons to visit Rajasthan on your next vacation.

Pictures courtesy Mr Atul Jhala of Rajasthan Tourism. A rare glimpse of Rajasthan's majestic palaces, wild life, people and their craft. Locations in this album are Udaipur, Chittor, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Jaipur, Jhalawar and Ranthambore Wild Life Sanctuary. Enjoy!

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Pictures worth thousand words

I am not a great fan of my Nokia E61i considering all the new and fancy models available, but I do like some of its features -

1. Built-in blackberry client.

2. Good voice quality and great speaker phone

I tried my hand on taking some pictures on the way to work and some travel the results are not bad. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

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The Pied Piper of India

If I get a chance to meet AR Rahman, will ask him if the Indian National Congress Media agency “Mindshare” take permission to use the music "Jai Ho" for "commercial purpose" or for "non-profit"? Also did BJP ask for compensation for doing the take off version of the same song? No I don’t want to know the answer, just asking for sounding intelligent !! 

I have tried to break a few laws myself. I am using pictures of the three public figures without their permission. Perhaps will get away with that. Also have used a cartoon (Credit: Conservative Punk) and repurposed for a different outcome. Anyways my blog is not a very popular place and is not generating any revenue. A few copyright glitches will go unnoticed. If it does not,  I will take shelter under "artistic freedom" to repurpose art. Inspirational art for academic purpose to explain the law using examples following the footsteps of reformists to bring out changes in the society.

I would like to see following changes in the copyright act

1. Reduce the number of years of copyright to maximum 4-5 years. Artist or publisher or media companies are mostly able to monetize their work within this period after which it becomes public property.

2. Make adaptation, translation, and other forms of repurposing of art free from copyrights and allow limited commerical value (Cost Plus Model).

3. Inspirational form of art should have limited commercial value. Cost plus model.

In my view Internet based creative commons and open source effort will change the way art will be viewed in future. Immersive web (web 3.0) will be able to dynamically chain and repurpose huge amount of information. My best example is that of 10,000 people in a stadium with their mobile phones up-linking video to a central server. Theoretically, it is possible to get an accurate, hig-definition, three-dimensional view of the live match. In this case copyright does not belong to any one of the individual and can be broadcasted only if all of them agree on "creative common". Microsoft Photosynth project is also an effort in similar direction.

What are your views on repurposed art and copyright act?

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Wrapped Time in a Flat World

Most of the telecom operators are concerned that 3G and LTE data services will introduce Internet based voice services and their traditional voice business will be lost. What can the operators do?

Telecom bridges three gaps (a) Distance, (b) Information and (c) Time. Telecom Operator's focus is "Distance" and Web-services focus is "Information" with some overlapping intentions. No one is focusing on Time? Let us consider a few examples to understand the issues (Please note I have restricted the discussion to voice calls only) -

(a) Instant Access - reduced waiting time, saved travel time, improved response to customer. This has resulted in setting up call-centers service to reach out to customers. The value add charged by call-center over normal communication service is anywhere between 20-200 times (depending on the country and type of services). If the underlying voice call is FREE the value addition is infinite! The flaw in this model is that call center does not factor in the cost of time of the called party (it is assumed to be zero). Most of the dissatisfaction with call centers is emerging from 2 issues - long waiting for service calls and the unsolicited calls. Obviously the call centers do not care about your time, however call-centers get paid for "on call" time. What you don't want comes unannounced and what you need is on-hold for the next free attendant. This is an unsustainable model which finds it roots in the Toll Free Service. If the service was not “toll free” it could have been better?

(b) Pervasive Access - The personal or private time of individuals has been taken over by telephonic interrupts. People travel long distances to meet someone and find that their face to face meetings are interrupted by telephone calls. Taking appointments, booking calendars, scheduling conference calls, watching movies, why lunch even loo brakes are interrupted with phone calls. If time is money whose is paying for your time? People talk to family during office hours and take work related conference-calls from home.

It is my estimate that productivity of individuals due to unplanned calls has come down by at least 20%. In any given meeting at least 2 people go out of the meeting to take phone calls. Everyone in meeting is interrupted by emails, text messages and everyone is multi-tasking.

Let me kick in my theory here "talk time is free but the time to talk is not". If we were to build a complex talk-time trading system:- One that allows calling party to decide the price they are willing to pay to talk to someone and it also allows the called party's willingness to accept the call at certain price, the transaction would be more rewarding. The operator can decide a floor price for the calling party talk time and the rest of the pricing will be on discovery and market forces. Telecom operator keeps a small percent of revenue. The factors determining talk-time trading is time-of-the-day, presence status and relationship between the calling parties. Now consider a few use-cases of this trading system.

1. Consider that the calling party has signed up for the minimum floor price. If the called party has marked status as available the call goes through. This is plain vanilla stuff.

2. Consider the called party has applied restrictions with check-my-price flag. Now the calling party will need to up the stake depending on the number of suitors and a fee charged by receiver. It better be important. Assuming that calling party has real emergency situation agrees to pay for higher call rate the call matures.

3. Appointment situation. Consider a patient to book an appointment with Doctor. Patient is presented with a fee for available slot much like a flight booking system. Once a reservation is made online during the appointed hour, Incoming calls to doctor will be presented to an online call administrator who can take messages or interrupt the doctor during emergency situation. If the doctor is interrupted network refunds the patient. During the appointment situation the patient also has call restrictions or optional call administrator. The appointment situation can be extended to consultations, education, coaching, etc.

4. Circle of influence. The users can create their inner and peripheral circles. The inner circle belongs to direct work and family relations. Presence information is shared within the circles. Calls are treated differently when being presented outside of the circle. The calling party can present a call with message (e.g. "Your stock broker is calling"). The presence status decides the billing rate. If you are in office and decide to take personal calls or call outside your circle, your office may charge you. If you accept a call in a meeting your phone bill goes up. Likewise if you get office circle calls during personal time, you make extra money.

5. Certain areas like cinema halls, theatres, hospitals, etc will have restrictions and different bleeding oops billing plans!

6. Different subject matter experts can make themselves available on-call for charge. The bidding system decides who is most sought after and the stake goes up.

7. Celebrities can put up themselves available for fan-call for a fee determined by talk-time auction system.

This requires standardizations efforts, inter-operator agreements and massive integration with location, presence and payment platforms.  If the operators are willing to open these systems, independent application developers will be interested. Long distance education using video conferencing is a great example of “value of time” for technology provider, content provider, service provider and end-user. The trading system devised for talk-time price discovery would be the best way to grow the voice revenue.

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Gen-X Rejects Mandalization of Indian Politics

The next generation voters and emerging congress leadership has put brakes to growing Mandalization of Indian Politics. It has taken one generation of Gandhi Family to reverse the trend which was set in force by VP Singh by accepting Mandal Commission Recommendation back in 1989. Rise of local parties based on vote banks emerged in the Hindu Heartland.

The Indian Voters clearly understood the better bargain power and influence of smaller parties in the formation of Government. Consider the impact of electing SP or RJD leader who gets to be not only a Cabinet Minister but also in the "inner circle". No issue is decided in isolation. The vote bank is supreme. If a large party comes to power, the voter has no say in their candidate yielding as much bargain power in deciding the fate of the Government as was possible with multi-party alliances.

What went wrong for the smaller parties in Election 2009? I think there are multiple reasons -

1. Ban on traditional media (posters and banners) has had significant impact on smaller parties. The Smaller Parties are not well prepared for electronics media.

2. The smaller parties lacked unity. There wasn't sufficient time to regroup.

3. As a result, smaller parties kept poker face. The seasoned voters couldn't care less but it was perhaps the first time voter, clearly deciding in favour of black-and-white, they were confused by the shades of grey displayed by their leaders.

4. The parties which did not play constructive role during the coalition were punished.

It will be interesting to see if we move to 3 party system in the coming elections. Sitting in opposition for five years teaches several lessons. For now it is "Jai Ho" to the Indian Voter for deciding against indecision.

What is your take?

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Blogging is a lonely word

I created my blog some time back and have since tried every trick in the trade to make it popular. I finally decided to take some professional help and discussed this matter with our corporate communications head to get some useful tips. I have bad news for bloggers. I was told that there are millions of bloggers who are creating content everyday. As per study done by digital publisher large majority of the blogs are being read-or-visited by the authors alone. This is very depressing. It is almost like writing a private diary. I can assure you that more people will read my blog if I circulated the printed version of it on my way to work. So much for the "ubiquity" of the web, promise of the “collaboration” tools and the power of rating engines (bookmarking/share etc.) The depression gets deeper when one learns that there are more bloggers joining the party and slice of advertisement revenue is getting thinner.

There are three important steps towards publishing. The digital media has fixed only step one of the process.

(A) Content Creation: The creation of content, the editing tools, collaborative tools make it easy for bloggers to use their creative genious and make it readily available for online consumption. Why is it then people are not consuming the online content. It cannot be true that millions of bloggers are boring, self-gratifying, egotists, writing to satisfy the creative urge and not for the publicity. At least 5% of them deserve a better response. If digital publishing and open platforms are to make any dent to closed media baron controlled industry there is a clear need for rags to riches story for a weblogger.

(B) Moderator: An author in the paper world has to get past the editors. The editors decide what the people should be reading. Web with its democratic efficiency was a savior to millions of would be writers. Electronic marketing is simple, post your blog on your social networking site, signature of email or put it on your visiting card if you like. I wish it was that simple, not everyone is lucky enough to get the attention of the discerning readers.

In my view there is no electronic equivalent of an editor. "Most Viewed", "Most Rated" and "Most Discussed" are not editors, these analytical tools. If you do not get past "viewed" statistics it is a sad end of your blogging career. We are looking for semantic tools "Most Proficient", "Most Prolific", "Most Elegant", "Most Humorous", "Most Relevant" etc... Machine cannot replace the human touch of an editor. Does the online version of print media have an edge over millions of free-lance bloggers?

What we need is a publishing tool, let it be paid tool? Let there be paid editors who will rate blogs based on different criterions. The rating when fed into a recommendation engine will generate “publish worthy” content. Will web 3.0 have this capability?

(C) Publisher: The role of the publisher can never be undermined. Publisher is someone who understands the economics of the art. Publisher creates the cultural orientation, the prophesized value system and on-boarding of trusted advertisement partners. There is no equivalent of Vogue Magazine besides its online version. Can an online publisher create a Vision, a Mission and a Business Logic system where input come from “freelance bloggers” and output will be a finished online magazine? Can semantic web take care of this?

The solution lies in creating freelance editors. We need the snooty readers to judge our literary skills, we want them to pay visit to our sites, we need humans not machines crawl the blogoshere. I will give up my digital-post spot to a worthy author in return for an editorial position. Think about it there is an unexploted business potential.

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Ideas are transcendental, implementation is Karma

The date is important 12th March 2007, Shantanu and I are heading to Gurgaon in pre-paid taxi taken from Delhi Airport. The driver makes an innocuous request of stopping at gas station for CNG. We nod our heads and before we know it we are standing at the fag end of a long queue of taxi's waiting for our turn. We did protest but failed to convince our man to fill in the gas on his return trip. I made a profound suggestion to Shantanu that one day people will drive Electrical Vehicles where they will rent batteries at "battery charging" stations. Every roadside pawn shop will be a battery charging station. A great energy trading model. This will reduce the cost of ownership of car and the mode of energy distribution will be cheaper than selling "gas". Shantanu perhaps was in no mood to discuss debate this, he agreed and both of us went quite.

In April 2007, Shai Aggasi quit SAP to pursue interests in alternative energy and climate change. In October 2007 he founded a company named Project Better Place, focusing on a green transportation infrastructure based on electric cars as an alternative to the current fossil fuel technology. (source Wikipedia).

Moral of the story is that ideas are transcendental. Given a problem statement multiple people can arrive at the same conclusion. Not everyone has conviction or courage to put ideas to implementation stage. I still believe that this will be a great idea for 2 wheelers where a number of companies have entered with products aimed at cities. Any VC listening?
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