Random Thoughts

Book - Midnight Library

2021-05-08T13:14:00.002+05:30

Just completed reading Midnight Library. The central theme of the book is that while we may regret in life for not having made a different choice that could have led to a different life, we all have a unique purpose and reason to be whatever we are in life and whatever we do. Sometimes, things that look most ordinary might end up being the things that lead one to victory. There is no way of life that can immunize against sadness and that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.

5/5 recommended

Blockchain simplified

2020-05-24T18:48:00.001+05:30

In this article, I will attempt to give a high-level overview of Blockchain, some current and potential use-cases, and challenges with Blockchain in simple words.

What is Blockchain?

A blockchain is simply a ledger (one which records transactions), which is decentralized (that is, instead of one centralized server, exact copy stored on multiple nodes) and immutable (that is, one which cannot be altered). Blockchain makes this possible by using strong cryptographic encryption, linking/chaining of blocks, consensus protocol, and others. (In the interest of keeping this simple and high level, will skip details of all those things for now). The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically.

So, what makes Blockchain useful?

Decentralization and immutability are the biggest technical benefits which translate into two big benefits from a business perspective -

Trust with no dependence on a central authority
Transparency with publicly verified transactions

Trust allows individuals, organizations, machines, and algorithms to freely transact and interact with one another with little friction. Transparency allows us to avoid intermediaries like lawyers, brokers, and bankers.

In the next section, we will look at some of the use cases to understand these benefits in more detail.

Blockchain use cases

Financial currency - Bitcoin is probably the most known use case of Blockchain, one that makes people believe that Bitcoin and Blockchain are interchangeable terms. Bitcoin is a digital currency that people can use to buy and pay others in the network without the need for intermediaries and central authority (like the central bank of each country). The Bitcoin transactions are stored in blocks and publicly verifiable (the entity sending/receiving coins is anonymous). Anyone can create a block (the technical term is 'mining' a block) and earns by keeping a part of Bitcoin with itself for putting the transactions on the block.
Social Media- Steem is a blockchain-powered social media platform (think of something like Facebook) where users are rewarded (in Steem currency) for writing content and/or liking/commenting. It promises control of your own content, no sale of user data, and free speech. The content (posts, comments, likes) is stored on the blocks and the company earns from people/companies wanting to share promoted content on the platform.
Cloud storage- Sia is the decentralized cloud storage platform that leverages blockchain technology to create a data storage marketplace where people can buy and pay rent for available spare hard disks on networked machines. The blocks here store transactions between the host and the renter and the company earns a small commission on every rent amount. The rented disk space offered by the platform claims to be cheaper than public cloud storage companies and lower risk because of decentralization.
Supply Chain- Provenance offers a platform to combat counterfeiting by providing stakeholders with a transparent, secure, and highly accurate audit trail of any item in the entire supply chain. Here, physical goods are fitted with tamper-proof RFID tags, holograms, and QR codes that get scanned through each stage of the supply chain, all of the information is recorded on a blockchain. The company charges a fixed monthly fee for on-boarding and maintaining the blockchain infrastructure.
Academic research - A blockchain-based system for research data could prevent data manipulation by providing a complete, transparent audit trail of all data that is collected, processed, and accessed by researchers. Any modifications made to research data would require at least 51% consensus from stakeholders and would be visible to everyone- ensuring high data quality and preventing individuals from acting dishonestly.
Internet of Things (IoT)- Blockchain can be used to record the sensor data information shared by various IoT devices which power smart-homes, autonomous vehicles, supply chain, automotive industry, etc. Blockchain solves the need around interoperability amongst devices of various organizations, provides a scalable solution against a centralized database, and provides additional security and audit of the data exchange between multiple devices.

As can be seen, Blockchain solves a wide variety of use cases. However, Blockchain is not for all. Next section, we briefly explore when Blockchain is not for you.

When would Blockchain not be for your use case?

If your system doesn't need transparency
It needs to be pretty fast
It's not a transaction-based system

Finally, we look at what the future holds for Blockchain.

Future of Blockchain

I found this inference from HBR on Blockchain pretty apt and therefore copying it as it is - "True blockchain-led transformation of business and government, we believe, is still many years away. That’s because blockchain is not a disruptive technology, which can attack a traditional business model with a lower-cost solution and overtake incumbent firms quickly. Blockchain is a foundational technology: It has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems. But while the impact will be enormous, it will take decades for blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure."

Kafka for Business Professionals

2020-04-26T17:40:00.000+05:30

If you are in the IT industry, I am sure you would have already heard about Kafka. There are a lot of articles around how Kafka works from a technical standpoint but very few on exactly what is the need and what use cases it serves. This article is my humble attempt at later.

Overview: Kafka as Message Queue

Let's first understand that Kafka is a message queue. What this means is that Message-Producer publishes a message onto Kafka queue from which a Message-Consumer consumes that message. Now, why is a message queue needed in the first place? The answer is that it acts as an intermediate communication layer that helps various modules aka service decouples from each other. This is the basis of a microservices-based architecture.

Kafka's Advantages

Next, let us understand how Kafka founders viewed data which is fundamental to why such a platform was created in the first place. They believed that instead of focusing on piles of data in relational databases, cache, key-value pairs, all of which are static, focus on data in real-time, as and when its captured. Let's understand this by figuring out what all data is generated for one user session on Netflix. Data is generated by one or more events corresponding to various user activities viz. when a user logs in, browsing different genre options, watching a preview, selecting and playing a movie, and then pausing it and then resuming it after a while. Now across all these generated events, appropriate actions like recommendations, resuming it on another device, have to be generated and fed back to the user in real-time. The 'real-time' in this example is where Kafka fits in. Kafka allows for events to be published and consumed by various services with high throughput (million records per second) and low latency (less than 20 milliseconds) and thus cater to high data being generated in today's systems.

Kafka wasn’t the first one in the market with this idea. We had JMS, RabbitMQ, and AMQP but what worked in favor of Kafka was higher throughput, reliability, and replication characteristics suited for today's real-time logging and analytics requirements. RabbitMQ can also process a million messages per second but requires a big cluster (30+ nodes) for in-memory operations and thus is not suitable from a hardware perspective.

Another advantage of Kafka is that it allows for on-the-fly horizontal scaling and is fault tolerance. As compared to traditional systems that are limited on scalability because of hardware limits and downtime to add new hardware, on Kafka, adding a new machine does not require downtime nor are there any limits to the number of machines you can have in your cluster. For fault tolerance, in a lot of non-distributed systems, there is a single point of failure. In Kafka, on the other hand, in a 3 node cluster, you can continue to work even if two nodes go down.

Usage

Coming onto usage in the market, according to HG insights[1], approx. 20,000 companies use Kafka including LinkedIn, Spotify, Uber, JP Morgan Chase, New York Times, Shopify, Cisco, CloudFlare, and Netflix. Let's look at some of the use cases -

Uber uses Apache Kafka as a message bus for connecting different parts of the ecosystem. They collect system and application logs as well as event data from the rider and driver apps viz. location coordinates of the ride and driver and use this for computing nearest vehicle, exact route taken by vehicle, computing the price, etc. They handle trillion+ (info from 2017) messages per day over tens of thousands of topics.
Netflix which we covered above has ~500 billion events and ~1.3 PB per day generated from video viewing activities, UI activities, Error logs, Performance events, Troubleshooting & diagnostic events
New York Times uses Kafka to connect multiple Content Management Systems, third-party data and wire stories on one side and a range of services and applications like search engines, personalization services, feed generators, as well as all the different front-end applications, like the website and the native apps that need access to this published content on the other side. Whenever an asset is published, it is made available to all these systems with very low latency — this is news, after all — and without data loss.
LinkedIn handles 7 trillion messages per day, divided into 100,000 topics, 7M partitions, stored over 4000 brokers. Kafka is used extensively throughout its software stack, powering use cases like activity tracking, message exchanges, metric gathering.

You can view [1] and [2] for more use cases.

I hope this basic info was useful!

[1] https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/apache-kafka
[2] https://blog.softwaremill.com/who-and-why-uses-apache-kafka-10fd8c781f4d
[3] https://kafka.apache.org/powered-by

Uber and Airbnb - Both sharing economy, yet so different

2020-04-25T17:15:00.002+05:30

Both Uber and Airbnb started in 2007 and defined what is now known as "Sharing Economy". The U.S. Commerce Department in a report [1] in June 2016 attempted to define and map out the contours of this emerging business sector as following :

They use information technology (IT systems), typically available via web-based platforms, such as mobile “apps” on Internet-enabled devices, to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions.
They rely on user-based rating systems for quality control, ensuring a level of trust between consumers and service providers who have not previously met.
They offer the workers who provide services via digital matching platforms flexibility in deciding their typical working hours.
To the extent that tools and assets are necessary to provide a service, digital matching firms rely on the workers using their own.

Both Uber and Airbnb tend to meet the above criteria. Despite this, they are different in two main respects -

The first relates to geographical scalability of marketplace [2] -

Uber’s model relies on hyperlocal network effects, i.e. the addition of a unit of supply (a driver) makes the product more valuable for the demand side (riders) within a small geographic radius. However, when Uber expands to other cities, they have to re-invest in driver acquisition without the benefit of any latent demand. Airbnb’s model, on the other hand, is built on cross-border network effects, i.e. the addition of a unit of supply (a host) makes the product more valuable for the demand side (guests) across geographic boundaries. While Uber faced local competitors like Didi in China, Ola in India, Grab in SE Asia who had replicated the same model in their own market, Airbnb, on the other hand, faced very little competition from other regional startups who had limited supply in cross-geo regions.

The second relates to the commoditization of supply [3] -

Uber’s suppliers are interchangeable (or commoditized), i.e. customers just want a ride and are not particularly sensitive to driver identity or vehicle brand. Riders too are indifferent to wait times below a certain threshold. Airbnb, on the other hand, has differentiated supply, i.e. each unit of supply is unique to some degree across a number of attributes: type of property, quality, nightly rate, location, capacity, etc. Thus, as Airbnb scaled offering choices across each variety, it became more and more difficult for its competitors to match the variety while in the case of Uber, it was much easy to build a similar network of vehicle types and drivers.

These two differences account for why valuation to funding ratio is so different for both these companies.

Credits to Sameeer Singh from Breadcrumb.vc for insights into this.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20161121184952/http://esa.gov/reports/digital-matching-firms-new-definition-%E2%80%9Csharing-economy%E2%80%9D-space

[2] https://medium.com/breadcrumbs-guiding-startups/marketplaces-scalability-lessons-from-uber-and-airbnb-d461aded18a2

[3] https://medium.com/breadcrumbs-guiding-startups/defensibility-x-scalability-the-marketplace-matrix-9d8b02a1e6fa

Is Zoom sustainable?

2020-04-25T10:36:00.000+05:30

Given the usage that Zoom has seen in Covid infected world, the question is if Zoom's business model is sustainable. This article[1] from Sameer Singh explains that Zoom's core business model is based on virality of its product and not on the network effect. As compared to other video conferencing tools (Skype, Facetime) that need you to be part of a network to enjoy the features, there is no such limitation on Zoom. Zoom meeting host can share the meeting ID and anyone having the link can join. There is no attempt at forming the network in the first place which could have built a high switching cost for its users. Sameer thus feels that Zoom's business is susceptible to being run over by a similar video conference app with better customer experience or technology.

[1] https://medium.com/breadcrumbs-guiding-startups/zooms-achilles-heel-843d78ffedcc

Technology to aid of Covid spread

2020-03-26T23:04:00.002+05:30

Came across interesting uses of technology around Covid spread, surveillance, violations -

1 Using Location tracking via smartphones for Covid surveillance
This one talks about how Taiwan is ensuring people who have been exposed to the virus stay in their homes. The system monitors phone signals to alert police and local officials if those in-home quarantines move away from their address or turn off their phones. Officials also call twice a day to ensure people don’t avoid tracking by leaving their phones at home.

April 1 news mentioned that the system was tracking more than 55,000 people. The system has been very accurate with only about 1% of alerts being false alarms mostly because of inaccurate location readings.

2. Identifying lockdown violations (post-facto analysis)
The second one here is a report that was published to demonstrate how public data and visual AI can be used to identify lockdown violations. Taking actual images and videos from public Instagram profiles of 552,000 Italians between March 11-20, 2020, and applying image recognition technology, they were able to predict what percentage of people were not following quarantine, which city/region they belong to at an aggregate level and exactly where they were spending time (viz. parks, markets, malls). Obviously, the entire data was anonymized in the interest of privacy.

3. Using cough analysis to determine if one is Covid affected
This link talks about using AI and Deep learning to determine if a person has Covid by analyzing the sound of the cough, the way they breathe or the way they speak. It's based on the fact that the cough of a Covid patient is distinct from a healthy person. I also stumbled upon this site https://www.coughagainstcovid.org/ which is collecting data around cough sounds to crowdsource and create such a technology. This initiative is supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is in collaboration with Stanford University.

4. Using real-time mobile location data to detect violation of social distancing
Unacast is a company that collects and provides cellphone location data. It has aggregated all this to come up with a Social Distancing Scorecard. This scorecard is based on analysis of information such as two devices being at same place at same time (thus violating social distance), visit to non-essential places (other than grocery), and other parameters. Unacast collects data from various apps installed on phone which track location.

5. Mapping movement of coronavirus carriers
The South Korean government is publishing the movements of people before they were diagnosed with the virus — retracing their steps using tools such as GPS phone tracking, credit card records, surveillance video and old-fashioned personal interviews with patients. The idea is to let the public know, via a central website and regional text messages, if they may have crossed paths with carriers, whose names are not made public. Here is the link to site- https://coronamap.site/

Will keep adding more as I discover.

Making it easier to discover datasets

2020-02-05T14:48:00.004+05:30

https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/

Google has made it easier to discover thousands of data repositories on the web, providing access to millions of datasets. Great help to AI, ML, NLP devs!

here is the release note -https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-it-easier-discover-datasets/

How can WhatsApp control fake news?

2020-02-01T11:21:00.000+05:30

India is WhatsApp's largest market in terms of net users with 400 million monthly users according to July 2019 company figures. That equates to more than one-quarter (26.7%) of its total reported user base. India is such a big market for WhatsApp which can be assessed by the fact that the second-largest market for the company is Brazil with 120 million users. In terms of user penetration among smartphone users too, India is among the top three markets for WhatsApp with more than 90% of smartphone users in India using WhatsApp.

Fake news is something that has infested WhatsApp with conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination misinformation and panicked rumours about child abductors that have even led to fatal lynching in some parts of India. WhatsApp's previous attempts to contain fake news included steps like limiting the number of times a message can be forwarded to five and a visual indicator to indicate that it has been forwarded. However, limits on the forwards slows the spread of fake news but doesn’t curtail it and if media reports are to be believed there are software tools for as cheap as Rs 1,000 that let you bypass WhatsApp’s forward restrictions.

So what can WhatsApp do? The underlying solution lies in the form of a mix of AI and NLP. NLP or Natural Language Processing can help identify the text that the user has shared in his/her message and AI or Artificial Intelligence can be used to match it to an offline database of fake news to infer if a particular shared message is fake or not. For images, auto text extraction from images and for videos, frame by frame analysis and speech to text will have to be used. As I understand, using 'CheckPoint Tipline' that was initiated by WhatsApp in April 2019 and discontinued later in the year, the company has already crowdsourced (collected) enough data about fake news and probably has the offline database (technically a model in AI) ready.

With an AI model in place, WhatsApp can thus provide automatic checking of all messages before it reaches you and notify a user that received message is fake. User can also be provided an option to report a suspicious message as fake which behind the scene sends a message to WhatsApp for verification and let them add it to their database post verification.

In my suggestion, I emphasize notifying a user instead of auto-removal for two reasons -

Results from a study show that participants who were exposed to a correction of any kind were significantly less likely to believe the false information posted by the first user, relative to those who do not receive a correction.
Users should be given the power to know and understand which messages were fake and at the same time provide them an opportunity to refute the WhatsApp claim.

There are quite a few challenges in this approach, the biggest of which pertains to the fact that messages between the sender and receiver are encrypted and even WhatsApp cannot see the content of the messages. This calls for change in encryption policy and while fake messages can be filtered, it opens up WhatsApp to government agencies who might want to sniff on your messages. Also, any learned AI model would have to be constantly adapted to the new strategies and techniques of disinformation. Further, the model will have to be sufficiently trained over a wide range of languages as messages on WhatsApp are shared across various languages.

Gandhi- the Mahatma - Book review of My Experiment with Truth

2020-01-24T17:14:00.001+05:30

"The Story of My Experiments with Truth" by MK Gandhi is his autobiography or as he puts it, his experiments with truth, starting from his childhood days to his days in England to the starting of Satyagraha in South Africa to the beginning of Independence movement in India around 1920.

Before reading this book, I thought he was called Mahatma because he steered India's freedom struggle but I now realize, it was his endeavor towards the welfare of the people that made him earn this respect from people. Through multiple stories from his life, I understand the aim of his life was to try to discover and embark on the path to Truth and attain Moksha. His ashram first set up in South Africa and then later in Gujarat was aimed to lead by example where everybody voluntarily shared all work irrespective of caste and creed. He would take up cases for people for free, raise social and political causes with authorities, challenge the status quo and try to reform people around him. Few would know that during the Boer war in South Africa, Gandhi went to the battlefield as a volunteer for ambulance corps ferrying the wounded on a stretcher.

He was a big proponent of Brahmacharya but his idea of the same included not only monogamy but also simplicity of clothes and the food one eats. Despite being a Barrister, Gandhi gave up his European dressing, started to live in a simple home, traveled in the 3rd class in train/ship and choose to donate whatever extra money he had apart from covering his basic expenses. He has dealt extensively about his experiments with what we today call as 'vegan diet'.

We all pretty much know about Gandhi’s take on standing for truth. His idea was hate the sin but not the sinner coming from the notion that we are all created from one single Creator and hating a sinner is the same as hating that ultimate Creator. At another place, he says, it is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not the society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and mortal persecution. His idea of non-violence through Satyagraha is I guess the most difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of courage to hold back one’s natural instinct which is to take revenge and instead face opponent gracefully.

All the things that Gandhi tried didn’t come to him overnight. He constantly experimented with ideas, adapted those before embracing those to his life.

Gandhi has painted a very sober portrayal of himself in the book which I guess is the mark of a true learned person. He has highlighted how he was an average student in the class, how he failed at his first practice in Bombay and how he had great difficulty in speaking impromptu including the ones where he was an organizer.

Overall, it’s a very inspiring read and there cannot be a better quote than what Einstein said for Gandhi “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth”

Trip to Vizag - Beaches, Caves and Eastern Ghats

2020-01-04T17:54:00.001+05:30

I had a chance to see Vishakapatnam (also known as Vizag) from 29 Dec 2019- 2 Jan 2020.

Our trip started from an early (really early :-) at 5:20 AM) morning flight from Delhi to Vizag. With alarm set for 2:30 AM, the anxiety of missing the alarm didn't allow me to sleep much in the night. Nevertheless, the flight started before time and reached before time as well. There is a good view of Bay of Bengal as plane approaches the airport.

I had pre-booked a ZoomCar for 2 days and from the airport, headed to the Zoomcar location to collect the car. Once done with the usual inspection of the car, it started with a trip to Araku. The distance from Vizag to Araku is about 110 km of which half is plain road and remaining is curved around hills. There aren't many roadside dhabas or restaurants on the way. The road on the hills is 2 lane and we occasionally got stuck behind buses waiting for traffic to clear. Maybe there was more rush due to Sunday but it took us approx 5 hours to cover the journey which should have normally taken 3 hours. We arrived at Haritha Valley Resort and after having the buffet lunch in their restaurant, we were all tired and took a quick nap.

In the evening, we went to see the Tribal Museum and Coffee Museum, both within walking distance from our resort. The tribal museum is pretty good and shows the tribal life. The Coffee Museum is average and its more of a shopping arcade than a museum. I avoided seeing Dumriguda Waterfalls (simple waterfall) and Katiki Falls (1-hour walk to reach here and not possible with a small kid) in Araku.

The next day, we started from Araku Valley to Borra Caves and reached in about 90 minutes. These caves are probably the largest in India and are of limestone structure. We took a guide here who showed us various God, animals, human shapes formed naturally from limestone. The Gosthani River, which originates from these caves and flows between is the cause for the development of the odd shapes of structures. The name "Borra" means hole and popular legend is that a cow, grazing on the top of the caves, dropped through that hole in the roof and was found across the river and saved because of Lord Shiva.

At the exit of Borra Caves, I tried the bamboo chicken. Its regular marinated chicken cooked in Bamboo. Contrary to what I had read, I didn't find that any great with respect to regular barbecued chicken but it was good and reasonably priced.

From Borra to Vizag, we decided to take a detour and see Rushikonda beach before we return the car. The beach was very beautiful and by and large clean. After returning car, we checked in to Dolphin Hotel.

A note about the hotel, very hospitable staff - everyone makes you feel special. Awesome breakfast with multiple options to choose from, well maintained swimming pool and a trainer to assist you in the gym.

Heading back to the trip, next day we went out to see Kailasagiri. We took a cable car to reach the top of the hill. Saw the wonderful Shiva-Parvati statue on the top of the hill. The hill also provides an awesome view of the Vizag beaches -

Next, we saw the INS Kursura Museum. This is one of the must-see things in Vizag and contains the actual submarine used by the Indian Navy from 1969 to 2001 and now preserved as a museum for public access. Having seen the movie "Ghazi Attack", we could relate every part of the submarine and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next day we saw TU-142 Aircraft Museum which like submarine museum is a preserved Tupolev TU-142 aircraft which served Indian Navy for 29 years. This museum was established in 2017 by President Kovind and besides the actual walk-through of the aircraft, provides good information through a free audio guide of various parts of the plane.

Post that, we saw RK beach. Being near to the city, its more crowded. However, if one were to stray slightly away from main beach, one can avoid crowd and enjoy the wonderful sea. Long coastline offers long walks. And I could imagine myself reading a book sitting on the beach away from the general hustle bustle of the city.

Last day, since it was Gurupurab, we went to local gurudwara and with God's grace, had langar. Post that, we did some shopping (actually just from one store, Leepakshi) and then headed to the airport for our flight back to Delhi.

As for people in Vishakapatnam, I found them very friendly. There is some language issue but most people can understand and speak broken Hindi (over English). Some streets were crowded but there was no road rage to be seen or people in unnecessary hurry. Wherever we went and at whatever time of the day, we were off the groping eyes generally seen in North India.

Food is cheap and all walks of people enjoy street food. In a decent restaurant, one will be charged the MRP of cold-drink and not some exorbitant price just for putting that cold drink in a glass.

Finally, beautiful drawings in front of houses and shops are a treat to eyes.

Book review- Discovery of India

2019-12-28T12:41:00.004+05:30

An awesome book that traces all of Indian history from pre-historic times to 1944 when the book was written. As Nehru puts it, the intent of the book is to establish the integrity of the Indian past, history independent of British renditions and make people of India proud of their heritage. Nehru wrote this book while in jail with little access to journals and other books and so this is mostly a work of his learnings from explorations across the country. I am not sure how many of present day politicians possess that understanding of Indian culture and have a vision for future as expressed by Nehru in 600+ pages book.

While book presents interesting bits for anyone who wants to understand our culture and heritage, here are some of them –

Our origins in form of Indus valley civilization was more advanced (stemming from city planning, houses, trade and law) than similar civilizations elsewhere but probably didn’t get noticed because European researchers who came up studying in 18^th century focused more on the later (the Greek, Roman etc.)
Our civilization has been based on security and stability via joint family etc. and that makes it successful than any other in West. Indian philosophy is “individualistic under a social structure” which means perfect freedom to think and believe what one liked while adhering to the social norms
While there are many theories of how caste came into being but one theory relates to Aryan conquest of India. Instead of terminating or enslaving the entire population, as was the norm those days, they created a caste system assigning lower caste to people here and upper caste for themselves. While the system had its own shortcomings, caste system allowed people from new conquests to be merged into respective castes.
Coming on to Akbar, Nehru says while he was a great ruler, what surprised him was his lack of sea knowledge, no focus on scientific research, no training of people abroad, and no book printing. This legacy carried forward by later Mughal rulers was exploited by Europeans to bring in their rule in India
An interesting take on why we find certain skills confined to certain religions only. The reason for this is that religions conversion those days were group conversion and not individual conversions and hence the entire village (the villages in those times being organized around skills) would convert
Rise of British is attributed to multiple reasons including conquest of Bengal which gave them enough money to proceed to other regions and then keep adding, possible fluke as individually each of the Sikhs, Marathas, Tipu had defeated them but never together, infighting amongst Indian states and finally fall of Mughal Empire and disintegration of country into smaller states
With British rule, for first time, center of gravity fell outside India and with people who felt that they were superior and that the ‘new’ people didn't want to Indianize.
All talk of great infra development and running of government during British raj came at significant cost. For example, the railway was guaranteed by government of India at 5% return on capital invested
1857 revolt was essentially a feudal outburst and it was only in 1900s that the real struggle from masses began to oust British

Book review- Good Strategy Bad Strategy

2019-12-03T19:36:00.001+05:30

A good book to understand good and bad strategy with real life case studies from different companies. One-line summary - good strategy is not about some vision statement but set of coherent actions to tackle one or two identified critical issues. One example that stuck me was case of silver machine that churns silver coins is an advantage but not an competitive advantage. The former is more like a bond. An competitive advantage would accrue when either machine can be engineered to increase output or market be manipulated to increase demand.

Book review- 48 Laws of Power

2019-07-15T11:52:00.002+05:30

Wonderful book - Being powerful is an exaggeration but in this world where we socialize with so many people at office and at work, it does help to deal better with everyone. If I would want to pick a few rules, I would say - Never outshine your master, Never get into argument, when asking for help appeal to self-interest, make your accomplishment seem effortless, think as you like but behave like others, despise free lunch, never reform too much at once, assume formlessness.

I also enjoyed sharing some of the stories with my young son too.

Power User Curve over MAU/DAU for understanding users

2018-09-04T11:12:00.001+05:30

Anyone in product development understand the importance of power users as they are the ones that drive successful companies.

Traditionally, we use DAUs and MAUs to measure engagement. However, they do not measure power users. Introducing Power User Curve, which is histogram of users’ engagement by the total number of days they were active in a month/week depending on your business. You can measure engagement as app logins or for specific features which are relevant to your business.

The advantage with Power User Curve is that it shows the variability among your users: some are slightly engaged. When mapped to cohorts, Power User Curves let you see if your engagement is getting better over time. Data for different features can help us decipher and make more informed decissions.

Read the article in detail here - https://andrewchen.co/power-user-curve/

This is How Google will Collapse

2018-09-02T22:18:00.006+05:30

This is an interesting article on reasons leading to possible collapse of Google empire which has been traditionally been built on ads.

Shift in user trends from search to discovery
Lesser ads being delivered because of blocking ads features on devices esp iPhone
Lack of trust amongst users in banner ads
Over-reliance on screen ads and missing disruptive trend of voice based search

Read details here- https://hackernoon.com/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee

How Duolingo Built a $700 Million Company Without Charging Users

2018-08-21T21:52:00.000+05:30

https://producthabits.com/duolingo-built-700-million-company-without-charging-users/

This is a good article on how Duolingo disrupted the language learning industry and became a $700 Million company in 9 years.

Duolingo provides free app to learn a language. Currently, they have over 25 million monthly active users learning a language each at their own pace.

The company started in 2009 tapping into hundreds of millions of people who wanted to learn a new language but couldn’t afford to shell out a ton of money for expensive software. Duolingo’s early monetization plan was to charge businesses for the content that users translated as a byproduct of studying a language.

From 2009-12, Duolingo didn’t actually partner with companies to build out the B2B translation service, but they designed their app to increase number of users and engagement. Besides web app, Duolingo created a mobile app which used pictures, video clips, and the phone’s microphone to help users learn words, write, and speak.

In 2013, for the first time, Duolingo announced partnerships with BuzzFeed and CNN. With crowdsourced translations, their effective translation cost was around 4 cents per word, compared to translation industry's average price of around 6 to 10 cents per word.

However, Duolingo realized that expanding their B2B services was going to require a more enterprise sales-driven model—which meant potentially less attention on the product and the users. So, in 2014, Duolingo deprioritized B2B translation service and instead released a testing certification service for a small fee.

In 2015 and 2016, Duolingo launched program for Schools and flashcards both of which helped improve engagement significantly.

In 2017, Duolingo started serving ads to users. It also released a subscription plan that removes ads and lets users download lessons for offline use.

Duolingo has raised $108 Million in funding in over 5 rounds with current valuation at about $700 Million.

Book review - Design Of Everyday Things by Don Norman

2018-08-13T20:48:00.000+05:30

"Design Of Everyday Things" by Don Norman is a book that not only shares principles of good design but also evaluates those from perspective of human psychology.

Book starts from design principles including making things discoverable, understandable and making it more delightful for users.

It then delves into difference between human and machines and who is good in what. Basically, human strength is being creative, flexible and imaginative while machines are good in being precise and acurate.

It then talks about how humans can interpret precise behavior from imprecise knowledge in the head and in world and that's something that even AI cannot do.

Finally, it talks about errors and how can they be classified as slips and mistakes. It further classifies them and talks about how to use design principles to avoid them.

Overall a must read for everyone interested in solving customer needs.

Big tech warns of 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

2018-08-06T15:22:00.005+05:30

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/big-tech-warns-japan-millennium-bug-y2k-emperor-akihito-abdication

The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito’s coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shōwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito’s coronation will itself mark another new era.

It means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era. Also, Japanese computers use one character to represent the entire era name (compressing Heisei into ㍻ rather than 平成, for instance), Unicode needs to set the standard for that new character.

Update 21 Aug - The new name will be encoded at U+32FF. Companies in font space will have to work to ensure the new character is supported and any word processing software will have to ensure that the same is interpreted and displayed properly.

Getting users to their Aha moment

2018-07-23T11:13:00.000+05:30

Aha moment (sometimes called the eureka effect) is the moment when new users first realize value in your product.

Here is a good article on how to find aha moments for your product and how to get users reach their aha moment sooner. - https://www.appcues.com/blog/aha-moment-guide

Some of the ways to get users experience Aha sooner includes

Personalizing your user's journey to create more tailored onboarding experience (like one exp for novice and other for professional)
Getting the users to experience Aha faster-
Let people experience the product without asking them for signups etc. beforehand.
Offering something for free like UserTesting offers 5 mins video of website review for free
Creating a quick personalization guide with help from user- like iimjobs.com asking for role preference from a curated set of options for a job alert
Step by step walkthrough

Online marketplace acts as a source for price data in Indian economy

2018-07-20T13:56:00.000+05:30

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/online-marketplace-acts-as-a-source-for-price-data-in-indian-economy/story-tdJseAftmpPhlv6XvLSlCL.html
Good read about how prices on an e-com site can be used to calculate inflation index like CPI. The advantages of this approach being its cheaper, quicker and more efficient.

Lyft new search bar design

2018-07-18T15:22:00.001+05:30

https://uxdesign.cc/what-every-product-designer-should-take-away-from-lyfts-new-ui-742c9668b067

Unlike other transportation apps, Lyft’s search bar isn’t at the top and it’s not at the way-bottom, it’s in a sweet spot for thumbs. A good example of making sure your most frequently interacted with elements are the most reachable elements of your interface.

Positioning Is the Part of Product Market Fit You are Likely Ignoring

2018-07-17T15:24:00.001+05:30

Positioning Is the Part of “Product Market Fit” You’re Likely Ignoring

Most people when searching for product market fit, focus on the product - let’s release an MVP (product) to see if people are interested; if not, add more features to product and so on. Instead focus on positioning and keep updating that until you find the right mix.

Positioning is about finding answers to following questions -
- Who do customers think your product/service is for? - Wide vs narrow targeting
- What do customers think makes you unique?
- What pain points do they think you solve?
- How credible do they perceive you to be?

UX for Lean Startups

2018-05-02T19:48:00.002+05:30

This is 3rd Lean book that I have read on Lean, the first two being Lean Startup and Lean Analytics. I can vouch this is definitely one of the best books and strongly recommend to anyone who has an idea about solution to a problem and wants to convert that to a product. The book offers practical advice for validating all that you need towards building a product.

The book starts by offering advice on how to conduct qualitative research on the idea to check if customers really need that and then moving on to landing pages to confirm the hypothesis and then to A/B testing to get statistically significant data on whether proposed changes increases certain metrics or not.

Between the various ideas, the books talks about how to speed up things aka faster user research, faster design etc. emphasizing the "lean" concept of doing just enough and thus avoiding wastage.

Other key takeaways for me were designing the test first, when to use qualitative vs quantitative tests, tips on creating various types of MVP including landing page, Wizard of Oz, Fake door test etc.

Creating habit forming products

2018-04-17T22:10:00.001+05:30

We all (ok, most of us) are hooked to Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and other similar apps. Such is our hook that some of us are actually addicted to these apps. What is the secret of these habit forming apps? Nir Eyal in his book Hooked tries to provide an answer.

He explains that any habit forming app has 4 parts as depicted in following image-

Lets see this with an example of Facebook –

1. Trigger

First time trigger for downloading FB app could be –

You heard it from one of your friends via word of mouth
Saw some online ad for FB
An automated email from one of your friends who has been using FB for some time.
Some product ad that has a FB page and has a campaign etc running that you would like to be part of

Once you have downloaded FB and have started using it, the external trigger would be the app notifications for one among many of the following

Friend requests,
Video recommendations,
Friend suggestions,
Likes on your picture, posts etc.

The internal trigger could be that you are feeling bore and therefore would like to see Facebook. Notice that in this case Facebook has successfully mapped an emotion in your mind with their app.

2. Action

Comes in form of user opening the app and viewing updates from others, sharing his own.
Nir talks about making action task as frictionless as possible and that’s what Facebook has been good at - App is available on mobile and desktop, provides infinite scroll and for people in countries with limited data speed, it even provides for a Facebook Lite app.

3. Variable reward

Reward in Facebook comes in form of

“Reward of Tribe” which is a rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included in our community.
“Reward of Hunt” which is to do with reward that makes us feel that we have acquired new knowledge, maybe about our friends, new skills (through some video, group pages etc. )

4. Investment

Comes in form of user storing his personal photos, his check-in details, his posts with Facebook.
Also comes in form of user inviting more of his friends
Eventually, user forms a network of friends who like or provide comments to his stuff and thus giving him a trigger to come back later to check what his friends have written and who all of them liked his stuff.

Similar to Facebook, Hook model can be applied to other products too.

However, there are few cases where Hook Model doesn’t seem to have an answer. In my opinion, these are products which are not "social" in nature. As an example, if we were to apply Hook model to a successful product of last decade, say Acrobat Reader, this is what I get -

External trigger- I receive a PDF from a friend/office etc. or I download a pdf from some site
Internal trigger- The pain is related to ability to read content of pdf document.
Action- Motivation is to read the doc and ability is ease of opening at no cost to buy a software (via free Acrobat Reader) to open pdf
Reward- I can read content and that's possibly a reward but it doesn't fit into tribe, Hunt or Self category and there doesn't seem to be variability.
Investment- I don't seem to store anything with Acrobat. I am probably inclined to use any other software which can let me open pdf. For that matter, I am ok to use any product A which lets me open a document of type B.

As can be seen, reward and investment is not very obvious but still Acrobat has been a very successful product.

Understanding Indian society through advertising

2017-12-22T22:17:00.004+05:30

Nawabs, Noodles and Nudes by Ambi Parameswaran provides interesting insights around how Indian society has evolved over the past 50 years (and more so after Indian economy opened for liberalization in 90s). Advertising has used both social trends as well as attempted to change behavior when selling products and services.

Few examples of such changes include -
- Changing men- In 70s, the depiction was of macho man (refer Lifeboy ad) to a man who is using Fair Lovey to remain ‘fair’.
- Dynamics of husband-wife relationship from a suffering women to empowered women (refer Airtel ad where wife is the boss)
- Changing role of women from being a housewife to aspirational (refer, Santoor ad in 1986 showing woman at wedding while one in 1994 shows woman doing aerobics.)
- Ads depicting older people not showing the pain/suffering but of celebration and second innings (refer SBI Life ads) due to improved longevity

Its interesting also to see how some ads in India have brought in major changes like –
- Commodity mindset to brand mindset in wheat. Refer Captain Cook ads
- Making eggs food habit for Indians. Refer NECC ad

The book is organized into 4 broad sections, namely, people, product, services and ad narratives, each of which looks at changes in society from a different lens. The author also predicts the trends in next few years at end of each section and sub-section. The book is very interesting read for somebody who wants to understand what goes in an advertiser’s mind when creating an ad. For me, born before liberalization and seen a ‘controlled’ version of television and ads, this book provides interesting memorabilia of old ads as well.