Rahul GaitondeMedianama on the scope of IVR (dial-to-listen) in India:
STAR India had found TV viewers in the state of Uttar Pradesh willing to pay Rs. 6 per minute to listen to audio summaries of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi after the show ended, because of power cuts in the evening.
Steve Jobs in Wired, Feb 1996:
Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?
Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.
We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.
We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.
Gabor Cselle on what bookstores can do to stay relevant – no, thrive – in an e-reader universe:
Get rid of the physical books and CDs. Only sell goods with 90% margins: Lattes and greeting cards. Rent smaller spaces but build them with beautiful architecture and interior design, comfortable couches, display advertising for the latest digital content, and beautiful, high-resolution e-readers that will let users browse any book in the world, and headphones to listen to any song on the planet. Invite local authors for frequent readings that will let them interact with the audience and the audience interact with them. Staff the store with fewer, but more knowledgeable staff who can recommend books and music, and help people use the fancy electronics.
Want to finish reading a book at home? Swipe your card through the reader and it will be instantly available on your Android phone, your iPad, and your computer. The bookstore takes a cut.
This is much like Matt Mullenweg’s proposal for SafeBank. Eliminate what no longer matters to today’s customer; provide exquisite customer service.
It was not long ago that Nokia held over 70% of the Indian market. That market is now larger but the share for Nokia has dropped by half at least. The share was not lost to Samsung but to 63 new entrants. They managed to capture 40% of the market, roughly equal to what Nokia lost. These new vendors will launch Android phones next year or the year after that.
From an IDC article (which the above post links to):
The number of handsets shipped in the country during the year is forecast to be 156 million, including nearly 6 million smartphones.
Android gained acceptance in India as a mobile OS, with 9.4 percent of smartphones shipped in the third quarter based on Android (this is almost 600,000 Android phones in the country).
The number of models with Android OS also increased to 19 in the third quarter, up from just two models in the same quarter last year.
I bought an Amazon Kindle this December. For the first time ever, I have actual reading equipment (apart from bookmarks, which the Kindle obviates, and my glasses, which it does not). It’ll take a while more before my opinions of the device are divorced from its novelty. In any case, there were eleven months spent and several books read without it, and here are the best books among them:
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson. This year’s been one of discovering good fiction (in which taste is entirely subjective and YMMV-ous). Big in size, plot complexity, years spanned, characters introduced, the book combines history, warfare, politics, telecommunications and computer geekery in one hell of a tale. I’d wanted to read a Neal Stephenson since I read In The Beginning Was The Command Line back in college, and I guess it was about time.
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. Unexpected gift from @jeanmarsh. Much has been written about DFW the man himself, and he’d been made out to be some sort of far-outlier literary genius of our times.
Turns out that he was.
In 2009, I’d read Oblivion, a collection of his short stories, and his two of his essays (one, two – both PDFs) for Harper’s Magazine. Infinite Jest, his 1996 magnum opus, was next. A DFW passage is a ride on a seemingly out-of-control roller-coaster, courtesy some supremely gifted but totally maniacal driver, a ride that dizzyingly speeds right up to the thin border between thrill and terrify, and dizzyingly fro, and to again, not the plots –which are as surreal as they are subtle, but the sheer writing itself.
So Infinite Jest is hard to describe. The Wikipedia page for the book ties itself up in knots over the plot. Suffice it to say that it’s a stark commentary on America’s short-cut pursuit of happiness through pleasure. 1000+ pages of a brilliant alternate future that may well not be so alternate after all.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson. In retrospect, it’s a fantastic translation. And if it isn’t, the Swedish original writing must have been just short of magical. The story makes numerous references to events in the preceding two books (requiring not a few trips to Wikipedia), and ends well, tying up threads well. Fitting end to a trilogy. Now, uh, to read the first two.
The Iranians, Sandra Mackey. Written in 1996, Mackey’s book traces a detailed history of the Iranian people, from before Zoroastrianism to the Islamic Republic. I was particularly interested in the three revolutions this century – the popular one in 1906, the 1953 coup and the 1979 Islamic revolution, and Mackey describes in vivid detail. Disappointingly, the period after the revolution – the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war and the 90s – is rather dull and unnecessarily drawn out. It seems like Mackey ran out of steam and dumped her notes into two or three long final chapters.
A History of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr. Begins with Labour’s unexpected big win in the 1945 election, through its coming to terms with its much-diminshed global stature, to burrowing into socialism, to clawing its way out to a well-balanced capitalist system. My only gripe is that while it takes occasional detours into the lives of ordinary Britons, the book follows the same tired theme of looking at distinct eras in British society only through the lens of changing governments.
Among the believers, V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul’s account of his travels in the early 80s through nations not originally Islamic – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. According to Naipaul, a people’s rigid conformity with a foreign faith combined with an unconscious clinging to artefacts from their original one confirms the shallowness of their entire belief system. Therefore, it is no surprise that people both are unsatisfied with their world and, tragically, seek meaning by only digging deeper into that shallow system.
The other books read this year:
Nonfiction:
A-list
B-list
C-list (disappointments)
Fiction:
The Wall Street Journal on the proliferation of smartphone apps that send information about their users to advertisers without permission:
Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone’s unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone’s zip code, along with the user’s age and gender, to two of them.
Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.
In an increasing number of areas of our lives, we’re offered a stark choice – go along with the state of affairs or be left out altogether. There is no middle ground. The new work-life balance (or its extinction). Personal Finance. Insurance. Social Networking. Smartphone apps. In most cases, the trade-off isn’t bad enough for most of us so we go along (take Facebook and privacy, for instance). At some point, it will get bad enough for us to pause. And then we’ll have to evaluate what’s truly important to us and consciously weigh that trade-off.
From the New York Times review of the new Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader:
The “Lend Me” feature from the first Nook is still here, but it’s still laughably restrictive. You can lend a book only once, to one person, for two weeks, during which time you can’t read it. (You can’t read it while your loan offer is pending, either — another week.) You can lend only books whose publishers have agreed to it, and precious few have. Of this week’s 15 New York Times fiction best sellers, only two are lendable.
The best phrase I’ve encountered so far to describe contemporary TV, print and mainstream online media.
(from a Susan Sontag essay “The Novelist and Moral Reasoning” via “I, Reader”)
I’d always read the news as a part of my writing ritual: wake up, go to the newsstand, buy the Times, the Post, the Daily News, get coffee and a bagel, sit down with the papers, read until an un-definable click occurred and I started writing. But a newspaper in your hand is a quiet thing, even when it’s a tabloid. When I gradually switched over to getting my news on the web, it was like walking into Internet Fight Club, with articles headlined to incite arguments from anonymous commenters who left thousands of angry, misspelled, and misinformed comments for others, also leaving the same, and each side returning to leave more, driving traffic. Reading the Times/Post/Daily News no longer elicited the click. Now, reading it online, it was the readerly equivalent of listening to cats on meth.
Bingo.
Read the full essay. It’s worth the ten of fifteen minutes it’ll take (unless something on-screen distracts you, of course).
I’d always read the news as a part of my writing ritual: wake up, go to the newsstand, buy the Times, the Post, the Daily News, get coffee and a bagel, sit down with the papers, read until an un-definable click occurred and I started writing. But a newspaper in your hand is a quiet thing, even when it’s a tabloid. When I gradually switched over to getting my news on the web, it was like walking into Internet Fight Club, with articles headlined to incite arguments from anonymous commenters who left thousands of angry, misspelled, and misinformed comments for others, also leaving the same, and each side returning to leave more, driving traffic. Reading the Times/Post/Daily News no longer elicited the click. Now, reading it online, it was the readerly equivalent of listening to cats on meth.
Bingo.
Read the full essay. It’s worth the ten of fifteen minutes it’ll take (unless something on-screen distracts you, of course).