Month: September 2010

In the same week as Nokia World, we read this article on the Guardian about how being acquired by Nokia was the kiss of death for the startup Dopplr. (“Since then, Dopplr has fallen completely out of the web’s view. Its blog has not been updated since two days after the acquisition. While Dopplr was too young to have grown a large user base, the Nokia acquisition could, with some imagination, have given it scale. Instead, comScore shows its monthly unique user numbers falling from 39,000 in September 2009 to 29,000 in July this year.”) The article ends by listing seven startups Nokia bought over the last 3 years that have either disappeared into oblivion or are dragging their weight along – including Symbian itself.

Then, TIME investigates the new urban hazard caused by texting while walking, and the debate about how much this habit is to blame for the recent increase in U.S. pedestrian accidents. In Britain, “East London’s busy Brick Lane, lined with trendy boutiques and curry shops… people have been filmed walking head down, ricocheting off various stationary sidewalk objects. The solution? Wrap Brick Lane’s lampposts with fluffy, white rugby goalpost cushions.”

Finally, a group property-buying startup founded by two alumni from IIM Kozhikode. (“Groffr.com aggregates demand for real estate projects and then approaches the builder for a discount for the group that a single buyer cannot negotiate.”) While they’re known for their property dealings, they plan to offer group discounts “on homes, phones, cars and motorbikes”.

In nontech, a fascinating look at how local authorities are dealing with cities that are shrinking – such as Detroit or Philadelphia. Instead of the conventional objective of managing urban growth, these cities are have had to plan to ‘shrink well’. (“Rather than trying to lure back residents or entice businesses… cities may be better off finding totally new uses for land: large-scale urban farms, or wind turbines or geothermal wells, or letting large patches revert to nature… or they might consider selling off portions to private companies to manage.”) Great coverage of the challenges in providing garbage collection, policing and suchlike in increasingly vacant neighbourhoods.

Then we read about Stephen Hawking’s surprising comments about, among other things, corresponding with potential aliens – or not. (“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”) In summary, aliens that are smart enough to respond to our communication are also likely to be smart enough to destroy us.

Finally, we look the recent spurt of interest in books by young, even veiled Muslim women about their – apparently normal – lives. It appears to be something like chick-lit meets Islam, and it also looks like there’s a market, however fleeting, however driven by contemporary focus on Islam, for it. Of course, pioneers of this genre had problems finding a publisher. (According to one author “’We need an ‘alias’ of a book that is already out there so people understand how it relates to previous books’, they said. It had to be a forced marriage story or one about the escape from Islam”)

In tech, we read another article about the irrelevance of the RSS feed reader. Comically, to bolster its case, it cites another article from 2006 that also pronounced the RSS reader dead. Google Reader was a wonderful idea to begin with, and it became a daily destination when it introduced shared items, followers, likes, comments and the whenever-you’re-bored ‘Explore’ tab for posts you’re likely to be interested in.

Reader really became a community thing with Buzz. Your friends’ shared items now showed up in your Buzz stream and you could like, comment and reply right there, a la Facebook. Twitter just isn’t that social, and you just can’t cover as many sources with Facebook as with Reader. My network is hardly a statistically significant sample, but there are many times as many friends on Reader/Buzz now than that article in 2006.

Also, we read an argument about why the US Government’s current net neutrality proposal is – contrary to most new coverage – actually anti-business. (“… the FCC has crafted a brand new concept of non-discrimination. Non-discrimination under the FCC’s net neutrality proposal means that ISPs cannot offer enhanced services beyond the plain-vanilla access service to content providers at any price”) In other words, under this regulation, ISPs are condemned to become dumb pipes, able to differentiate purely on the basis of local availability and price, in a race-to-the-bottom.

I’ve always opposed net neutrality regulation; that the FCC instead ought to put into place incentives to ensure choice, to grow the pie instead of distributing the pie that exists today (as an aside, I use the same analogy as the definitive difference between capitalism and socialism). There’s no problem in having a particular brand of anti-virus pre-installed on my new computer, or a particular search engine set as default on my browser, or a particular portal being loaded in a browser window every time I connect to my broadband network, or a my broadband provider choosing not to distribute an dialler for OS X. Non-neutrality, or preferential treatment is *everywhere*, and broadly acceptable.

If I were to be offered a monthly plan that would offer faster and cheaper access to Google’s bouquet of services (search, mail, reader, news, chat, maps, photos) and none at all to Yahoo’s andor Microsoft’s sites, I’d gladly take it. (I’d need to migrate all my photos from Flickr to Picasa and import my old del.icio.us bookmarks into Google Bookmarks). Under the current proposal, it appears that ISPs would be forbidden from even offering a plan like this. Instead, the FCC ought to ensure that for the same geography, customers have alternate plans and at least one alternative that – at whatever price – offers a completely neutral plan. If that requires the Government to setup its own ISP, so be it. (This last point is the same as the “public option” for health care that the Obama administration had proposed).

Finally, a musing about why more ‘social’ startups don’t start from your most important social network – your mobile address book. (“Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book?”) I’ve wondered about this several times, and tried to imagine a startup whose pitch could be “let us mine your address book, your message history, call logs, mobile email and let you know whom you interact with when for what, and you can choose whom to leave out (boss, or people you may not want other people to know of). Then we can layer location, social network data and the like on top and actually suggest future interactions, activities, places and purchases for each of them.”

In non-tech, the Economic Times profiled a startup – founded by two of my immediate seniors at IIM Kozhikode – that’s quite a success, at a turnover of INR 2 crore. His first email to the IIMK alumni group about this ventures this March began “I am from the Class of 2007 @ IIM K. I, along with a batch mate of mine(Venkata Raghulan), started an educational services venture called FACE – Focus Academy for Career Enhancement… we sign-up MoUs with educational institutions and offer Career Grooming services…” From what I could gather from the report, it’s come a long way since.

Finally, we re-read this article from the Study Hacks blog that argues that to lead a truly remarkable life, (do something meaningful and enjoyable on a flexible work schedule that gives you enough compensation), you MUST be able to offer something rare and valuable.

We begin today by a rant on how, thanks to carriers (mobile operators), Android is often more closed – and more anti-customer – than even iPhone. (“What happens when Verizon won’t update your phone to the latest greatest Android software — not because they can’t, but because they want you to upgrade to a new piece of hardware and sign the new two-year agreement that comes along with it? The game remains the same.”). This is exactly what I’d written in last week’s blog post.

Moving on, this post on HBR.org blog posits that the era of creating the ‘social graph’ – your immediate network and the network around it – is pretty much over, with Facebook and Twitter and Google and  their smaller ilk. Innovators in the next era will use this social graph to create ‘games’ of sorts with our real-life events (“The appointment dynamic is powerful enough to alter the behavior of an entire generation — “happy hours” are appointment dynamics, as is the pervasive game “Farmville” by Zynga. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Imagine… leveraging this dynamic to improve the adherence rate to often less-than-pleasant medicinal regimens, or the government creating a large scale game (with financial incentives as rewards) to alter traffic patterns to decrease highway congestion in the mornings.”) (via @jeanmarsh)

Finally, Businessweek laments that Nokia’s new CEO is just “another suit, and not the dreamer that Nokia needs to beat Apple and Google.” Of course Nokia needs a flagship series of products in the same league as Android and iPhone. But it’s also competing with every single other mobile phone manufacturer at every price point in every geography. Most American commentators miss the much larger pyramid of all cellphone users for the tiny pyramid of smartphone users at its top. It seems to me as though being a phone factory is indeed Nokia’s DNA, and it’s doing a pretty good job with that.

In non-tech, we read this piece in the Indian Express about breathless media coverage of the raging Yamuna river that was supposed to flood Delhi but ended up not raging, and consequently, not flooding. (“he had succumbed to the invitation of a young reporter who, speaking in Punjabi, had urged him to roll up his trousers and get into the water. He had done so, but the river had only lapped his ankles. She had egged him to go farther.”)

Then, a post from a bicycle evangelist in Portland, Oregon about the city’s new 300-mile bicycle network (From a person quoted in the article: “Seriously, y’all. I’m a business person, and this is what I’m hearing: Businesses say they can’t attract workers to come live here if we don’t provide parks, exercise and safe places for their kids to ride. Bottom line: Businesses need fit and healthy employees, not couch potatoes.”) A running theme through the post is bicycle lanes as a shared community resource that fosters connections. Urban India, in spite of a huge, almost omnipresent State, is woefully short of these shared community resources – parks, promenades, benches, lakes, public parking (cars, two-wheelers, bicycles), even sidewalks and toilets. Consequently, Indians are remarkably uncouth, aggressive, callous and ultimately destructive in their use of these resources. They view them not as scarce and therefore valuable pieces of property, but merely items that someone else will grab – and destroy – if they don’t. The State, the looming, all-controlling State sanctions hopelessly inadequate quantities of poor-quality public spaces at zero cost, and urban India treats them as such.

Today we begin with a profile of Sean Parker in Vanity Fair. Parker, of course, hacked into military databases, founded Napster, then Plaxo, and was the president of Facebook – all by the time he was 26. (“Parker, a svelte, wavy-maned clotheshorse, is a uniquely quirky figure in the annals of 21st-century business. At age 30, he is already worth close to a billion dollars, thanks mostly to the cache of Facebook stock he still owns. An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral”)

Also, from Apple’s alumni: although Apple is very much business- and engineering-driven, how Steve Jobs’ presence ensures that design is part of Apple’s culture (“A product’s design success also depends on whether you perceive design as merely a decorative skinning of the product once its developed or as an inherent part of the product development process. I get calls all the time from companies who are launching in 8 weeks, the product is in development, and they need a designer to come in to apply some look and feel to it. This is the antithesis of how Jobs works.”)

Finally, could Somaliland become the world’s first cashless society? It may well have to; one dollar = 34 of the highest-denomination Somaliland shilling notes, and money is literally moved around in wheelbarrows. (“… the (country’s) major mobile carrier has launched a service where cash is completely bypassed. Mobile banking in Africa is nothing new and is far more advanced in the West or Asia, but Somaliland can take this to a further level because the country itself doesn’t officially exist. The state itself runs on a budget of only $40 million dollars so entrepreneurship and innovation is vital to keep the country going”)

In non-tech, we read about a contention that Westerners are probably the world’s ‘weird’ folks, the outliers, not those in non-Western, far-off societies. Edward Said would approve. (“…questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a “truly unusual group of people” — the privileged products of Western industrial societies, who just happen to make up the vast majority of behavioural science test subjects.”)

Then, in the Wall Street Journal, the incongruity of India both doling out and receiving massive amounts of aid. (“… aid budgets are typically fixed in advance and have to be allocated across countries. Therefore, the allocation of aid dollars is a zero-sum game. Every dollar we receive is a dollar not sent to a country that is truly in need such as in sub-Saharan Africa)

Finally, why are ‘green-certified’ buildings wasting so much energy? Turns out that measuring ‘green’ is fraught with loopholes. (“Instead of selecting energy-minded features like efficient mechanical systems, developers often reach for the low-hanging fruit… paints that have low levels of volatile organic compounds… cabinets made from rapidly renewable wood… recycle their construction waste or increase airflow throughout the building… none of them prevents an occupied building from guzzling fuel and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for years to come”)

Today in tech, we’re reading about couples who’re split between physical books and reading on the iPad or Kindle. The larger story, of course, is about how publishers are walking the delicate line between appealing to adopters of digital books and avoiding alienating the larger audiences that reads ‘real books’. (“We used to go to the beach and we’d both take out books, but he had an iPad, and it was almost distracting because it didn’t feel like he was reading with me.” Whoa.)

Then, the Irish web apps company Contrast argues that before you create a ‘community’ site for your niche, start a simple blog or suchlike with great content and no network. Only after you’ve gotten a critical mass of regular readers can you add those ‘community’ features like profiles, galleries and more. (“…you’ll need a large crowd before you get worthwhile content from them. You know what they call a content driven site without any good content? A load of bollox. So you need great content from the start.”)

Finally, the University at Kentucky has gone nuts with Facebook’s new Places feature (where you can ‘check in’ and broadcast your location to your friends). It’s put up giant wooden pointers resembling the ‘Places’ icons on its campus that are supposed to remind students to ‘check in’ on Facebook, that will be broadcast to their friends network, so that “maybe their friends still in high school will see it over and over again”. And come to UKentucky. To check in themselves, I suppose.

In non-tech, we’re reading how the author (well, we’ll forgive him for Theodore Boone) John Grisham stumbled upon his calling – after failure after failure. (“I applied for a job at a Sears store in a mall. The only opening was in men’s underwear. It was humiliating. I tried to quit, but I was given a raise. Evidently, the position was difficult to fill. I asked to be transferred to toys, then to appliances.”)

Then, a college professor find out that letting students pick their own due date for coursework actually resulted – contrary to rational behaviour – in earlier deadlines, and higher grades. (“When resolving to reach a goal—whether it is tackling a big project at work or saving for a vacation, it might help to first commit to a hard and clear deadline, and then inform our colleagues, friends, or spouse about it with the hope that this clear and public commitment will help keep us on track and ultimately fulfill our resolutions.”)

Finally, a short post about how our ambitions keep shifting downwards, as the years pass. (the blogger quotes a book where the author went from wanting to be Einstein to “the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France.”) Your conversations with kids will be all about what they want to be when they grow up. And you won’t hear developer, mid-level manager, or –horrors – HR executive.

Today, we’re reading commentary on our age’s inability to disconnect from work while on vacation, our self-expectation of all-time-availability. Just very good, very true and quite sad. (“Five years ago, in Barbados, none of us consulted a computer. Three years ago, in Costa Rica, a few family members walked to an Internet cafe and checked our e-mail one afternoon just for the novelty of being online in a faraway place. This year I stood in a long line in the lobby of this resort in the Dominican Republic, to wait my turn to sign up for 25 hours of Internet service for $25.”)

Also, ReadWriteWeb posted a selection from its call for comments about the workplace of the future. (“The long-term impact of this trend (an increase in the share of part-time contractors v/s full-time employees) may yield a more knowledgeable workforce constantly aggregating and fine tuning skills as a function of the need to truly multitask efficiently.”) The commuter scene in Indian cities – and I’ve commuted in Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Bombay – is insane. We could each save a couple of daily hours of time, massive amounts of stress and liters of fuel by working mostly from home. I’m a big fan of this. To the fear that “I just don’t trust the productivity levels for when people work from home, and I know our CEO agrees with that.”, we’re just going to have to build teams of people who can function well as a geographically dispersed team. Think Automattic (“We’re very much a virtual company where everyone primarily works from home (or their coffee shop of choice). The half dozen of us in the Bay Area will go in on Thursdays to have a little company, but six days out of the week the space is usually empty.”)

Finally, this lovely live visualisation from Book Depository of books being sold at this moment around the world.

In non-tech, a website that became a favourite destination of ultra-conservative Christians in America, linked to from other popular websites, mentions on a radio show – but is actually a prank. (“… they were posting collaborative humor pieces on the Web. Mr. Butvidas bought the ChristWire.org domain name, and the partners began to conceive the Web site that exists today, something like what The Onion would be if the writers cared mainly about God, gay people and how both influence the weather”). Hilarious. For such gems as “Is My Husband Gay?”

Also, what’s behind the Times of India’s sustained, extremely negative coverage of the Commonwealth Games (CWG). Apparently, a failed attempt to get the “official newspaper” tag (“For 2-page reports on five key milestone days (carrying a half-page ad of CWG at DAVP (department of audio visual publicity) rates and a half-page ad at commercial days); for six one-page reports (where in 65% of the page will have edit and 35% will be paid-for); and 12 full pages of advertorial at DAVP rates, Times proposes a Rs 12.19 crore package.”)

Finally, while we’re on the CWG, my friend Karthik Gadiyar on the Commonwealth Games theme song that (this week) has gotten as many newspaper inches as the Games themselves. (“I don’t know about the Indian spirit, but there is a lack of a high point in the song. The wait for that one memorable point continues through the song, but the one high point (using Rahman’s own previous compositions, a “Jai Ho” chorus or the Sufi qawwali part in “Kehna hi kya”) never comes. As a result, there is no one line or one lyric that you can immediately recall from this song.”)