Month: October 2011

One must-see daily site for me is Medianama.com. Nikhil Pahwa and his team go a great job in aggregating and interpreting news from the world of Internet, mobile and media.

I have watched Nikhil since his early days of writing on Contentsutra, and then as he branched out on his own as an entrepreneur with Medianama. He is always bubbling with new ideas on what to do, and has excellent insights from his perch overseeing multiple industries.

I think more of us should contribute our industry insights to Medianama and help grow it even faster. It can become the primary place for new ideas and discussion, and with the clout to also influence policy at multiple levels in government. More power to Nikhil and his team!

Recently, we watched “Shutter Island” at home. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is a psychological thriller. Another movie we had watched a few weeks ago was “No Country for Old Men.” What was common to both movies was the need to go and search the web for explanations on the endings!

The movies were at multiple levels, and one had to constantly think of the characters and what was happening. Things were not always what they seemed to be — unlike, let’s say “Singham” or another typical Bollywood movie. And the ending left one wondering, in search of an explanation as to what really happened.

These are movies which typically require a second viewing with the new inputs, so one can then interpret things differently from what one thought in the first watching. For me, this was a very different type of movie experience.

From my Gov 2.0 series a year ago:

India needs a deep rethink on the role of government in our lives.

I wrote much of this series on an Air-India flight back from New York to Mumbai. What business does the government of India have running an airline? What business does it have taking taxpayers money time and again and putting it into white elephants? Questions like these cut to the heart of the debate around the role of government.

It is time for us Indians to realize that the government has failed us over the last six decades. If the government had done its job competently, India would have been a better country. We would have had 100% literacy two generations ago. We would have growth rates to match China’s – not for 5 years, but for 30 years. We would not have 500 million poor (more than three times the absolute number from 1947). We would not have pathetic urban infrastructure. We would not have 70% of the country’s population still engaged in agriculture. We would not have power cuts.

Some of us may delight in the near 9% growth that we now see. But we have to also understand that this growth is on a very low base.

The US is going through a difficult period right now on the economic front, with very low growth. But before we gloat about our growth rate, let us step back and see what the US has achieved through its relatively short history. For example, can the Indian transportation system compare to the American?  Are we anywhere close to the American education system? Clearly not since most of our best and brightest make their way to the US for higher education – and often stay there after their education. (Not just the best and the brightest, the children of Indian leaders get their education abroad.)

Sitting through the conference and listening to speakers from within and outside government, I could not but help think that once again the US is showing its ability to question, rethink and come up with better solutions. There is a recognition that the government systems they have had need change, and there is a healthy debate on how that needs to be done.

Obama may have failed on some fronts, but his Open Government initiative is helping bring about perhaps the greatest transformation in how government works. Even though these Gov 2.0 changes will not be immediately visible to all and will have some hiccups on the way, they will have far-reaching positive consequences for the US in the coming years. That is in keeping with the US spirit of resilience and reinvention.

This week’s links:

• The University of Wherever: from the New York Times. “..the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.”
• PC Technology: A special report in The Economist. “Mobile digital gadgets are overshadowing the personal computer. Their impact will be far-reaching.”
• Steve Jobs in 4 Easy Steps: from IEEE Spectrum. “In leading Apple past Microsoft on its way to becoming the most valuable technology company on the planet, Jobs repudiated four pillars of business and technology wisdom.”
• On Real-time information: from Gigaom. “Thanks to smartphones and wireless networking and SMS and Twitter, we are all swimming in an ocean of real-time information — an ocean that can often seem overwhelming. Are new technologies going to help, or are they going to increase the problem?”
•  On India’s Planning Commission: by Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “The Planning Commission…has this illusion that it can neatly order India’s economy. It does so, but often as a kind of conjuring trick, where real credible objectives disappear under a set of entrenched assumptions.”

This week’s Thursday Dassera holiday reminded me of my school days. At St. Xavier’s, we used to have Thursday as our holiday. That was a bit of an oddity since most schools even then (1970s) had Saturdays as their holiday.

I quite liked the Thursday holiday coming as it did in the middle of the week. Of course at that time, the concept of a “weekend” was not really there. So, it was a 3-1-2-1-3-1.. system — 3 days of school, 1 holiday, 2 more days of school, 1 holiday, repeated ad infinitum.So, it wasn’t as difficult to get up on a Monday morning and go to school! Two successive holidays was a treat (other than the long vacations).

Now of course, there are so many more things to do on weekend — not necessarily any more productive though.

Anyways, the Thursday mid-week break came as a good change, and brought back some memories from three decades ago!

The common thread to these four books is that there is a fable, followed by a discussion on the model and core ideas. That is what makes it so engaging. It is possible to relate to the various corporate scenarios described in the fables, and then see the value in the solutions proposed. The books are slim and quick-reads, with recommendations which should be possible to implement both at the personal level and at the company level.

The four books are:

• The Five Temptations of a CEO
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
• Death by Meeting
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I recommend reading all of them.

One of the remnants of my US stay is my love for cereals for breakfast. I alternate between the Kellogg’s variety and Indian ones from maize, etc. One of my favourite cereals is Kellogg’s Raisin Wheats. It used to be called Raisin Squares. I had started finding it in Mumbai a couple years ago, and then a few months later, it disappeared. (I couldn’t find these in most of the US supermarkets that I have been to during my visits in the past year or so.)

So, imagine my surprise, when I saw it again in one of the grocery stores near my house. I hope they keep getting them! There is soemthing about those wheat squares which makes them absolutely irresistible!

On Atanu’s recommendations, I have also been trying out some of the cereals from Trader Joe’s, especially Vanilla Almond Clusters, and a few variants.

Medianama had a write-up on phone.cc yesterday. Here is an excerpt:

Rajesh Jain’s Netcore Solutions is planning to introduce a mobile Internet based solution to address the challenges the industry is facing while sending SMS’ to consumers, following the TRAI SMS Spam guidelines, which limit consumers on the do not call registry to an all-or-nothing regime for categories that they can subscribe to.

Speaking with MediaNama, Netcore COO Girish Nair said that via a partnership with Verisign, the company is introducing Phone.cc, which allows each user with an Indian mobile number (beginning with 91, for India), to create his own message inbox on the web, which allows for the selective blocking of spam messages, and for the consumer to receive messages over the mobile Internet, and also allows enterprises to message consumers those messages which they choose to selectively receive. He said that this is particularly applicable to certain transaction-related messages which have not been included in the defined transaction messages list from the TRAI, and also address the SMS cost increase expected once an interconnect charge of Rs 0.05 is levied.

“The (marketing) source can be blacklisted or whitelisted by you, and unlike the TRAI regulation, which is about categories, you can bar a specific brand or allow a specific brand. In the end, the user will go to the website to see the message, but the consumer will go to publish,” Nair told MediaNama.

But won’t this limit the usage to the Mobile Internet users only? Nair agrees, but says that he expects mobile Internet users to grow. The company plans to launch a mobile application in a couple of months, and this will enable a server based mobile message push to the users mobile phone, mirroring the way SMS works.

From an article in Mint last Wednesday:

Telemarketers are exploring alternative methods to reach customers. Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd is offering a webpage with a Twitter feed-like service. Cellphone users can log in to the page to access commercial messages they would have received on their handsets.

“One has to make good from a bad situation,” said Rajesh Jain, managing director of Netcore. “The service does encourage people to use the mobile Internet that almost every phone is equipped with now.”

While mobile phone users can register or opt in to receive commercial messages on their handsets, Netcore’s service allows them to check these messages when they want to.

The service is phone.cc. Will have more on it soon.

From my Gov 2.0 series of a year ago:

India needs to focus on civic education to create engaged citizens.

As one of the speakers said, quoting Jefferson, “Democracy is not instinctive; it has to be taught.” That is a lesson we in India need to take to heart. During the election campaigning last year, I could not but help feel that Middle India has shut itself off from India’s political process. Or as Swapan Dasgupta put it, there has been a “secession of the successful.” We have lost a couple of generations since Independence because we didn’t teach them about the responsibilities of being a citizen of a democracy. (Of course, we even failed in delivering basic services like primary education and healthcare to all – so this is no surprise.)

But we need to make a start. Instead of making civics in schools as boring as it is now, we could start by inculcating a sense of societal service in students through national institutions. (Think of the Boy Scouts in the US.) If we can start this at an early age, the mindset of social service and civic engagement will stay through the years.