Month: January 2011

From TIME magazine’s Person of the Year profile of Mark Zuckerberg:

“We’re trying to map out what exists in the world,” he says. “In the world, there’s trust. I think as humans we fundamentally parse the world through the people and relationships we have around us.

And you begin to understand why Facebook remains controversial in spite of its everywhereness. Mark Zuckerberg views Facebook as a digital analogue of our real-world relationships, and a way to make the Internet a better place because of those relationships.

But that is a huge responsibility to place on people. Your friend list on Facebook is likely nothing like ‘what exists in the world’ for you. Very few among you have enough self-awareness to know who you really have a relationship with. Fewer still have the strength of character to decline friend requests from your extended family, current and former colleagues, former batchmates, acquaintances from the city you used to live in, your old boyfriend or girlfriend – all people who you had some relationship with, perhaps a very close one, but no longer. And even fewer will un-friend people in your list who no longer matter (with equanimity, I mean. youdumpedmeyoupigunfriendthere doesn’t count).

Hence the different ways people use Facebook: a professional marketing tool for yourself or your company, or a way to peek into the life of your former crush, or while away boredom at work through gameaftergameaftergame, or to share random blurry photos from your phone camera, or channel every semi-conscious thought into a status update directed to no one in particular but one you always expect comments on. Ways of using Facebook which betray everything about you – desires, insecurities, biases, sparks of geniuses, likes – but rarely reflect your your real-world relationships.

It emerges in the article that Zuckerberg does possess such confidence, such self-awareness, such integrity. This is rare, and it is probably only such who can use Facebook as Zuckerberg intended it, with no conflicts – of privacy, time, expectation or obligation.

As the writer of the TIME profile points out, “Facebook is still a painfully blunt instrument for doing the delicate work of transmitting human relationships”. Indeed, we inhabit so many imperfectly formed, constantly changing personas (some of them semi-conscious) that any such Facebook alternative would have to be so complex as to be completely unusable. So like any sufficiently complex issue, we make Facebook a binary decision – log in or not.

Rajesh Jain (the founder of Netcore and the mobile VAS startup MyToday) reflects on the decade since his Rs. 500 crore sale of Indiaworld, and speaks of his plan for the future:

A politically right-of-centre site that will use Facebook and Twitter across a variety of devices, feature strong opinion-laced stories (like the Drudge Report or Huffington Post), float ideas and get people from middle-class India to create a politically aware community, passionate about education, technology and change. He believes it can ride what he sees as the Net’s biggest opportunity, a “direct-to-consumer mobile value-added service”. Indeed, many entrepreneurs see India’s 700 million mobile connections and forthcoming 3G and 4G telecom services as the great, new hope.

Rajesh, like several others who’ve seen India’s tech industry this last decade, are disappointed with the lack of Internet penetration and (consequently?) the lack of large-scale Internet-based companies of the kind that grew in the US in the 1990s and in China in the 2000s. There’s a near-universal hope that such firms eventually will be founded this coming decade, built around Mobile. What they will be like is anyone’s guess.

Onward Mobility, a mobile app development firm from Bombay, does not sell apps online:

“We’re better off selling apps offline,” he [founder Arun Menon] says, “because Application Stores are too cluttered and our apps don’t get sufficient visibility. Especially in India, not many people buy apps through Credit Cards. People don’t need credit cards or GPRS with our existing model.”…. Given that the retail sector is still unorganized in India, the company intends to rope in individual distributors who in turn deal with individual retailers rather than targeting major retail chains.

According to another article, the apps are “transferred via USB or Bluetooth at [the] retail outlet”.

Medianama 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.

(Via Gabor Cselle’s blog)

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.