Thoughts from a middle class Indian mind

First Android

2012-02-22T11:41:00.001+05:30

My first android is here.Having spent close to 21,000 INR on my previous (then smart phone) NOkia E71, this time decided to play conservative as a middle class Indian . So here it is my first (Budget) Android phone LG Optimus Net Dual P698.

Opting for LG was kind of tricky choice, I had already tried all the popular mobile brands/OS - Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Apple(iPad- Though not exactly a mobile phone, but a mobile OS) .

So this time I

1) Wanted to play with Android for some time,
2) Experiment with brand not used earlier
3) Needed a dual SIM phone( to manage personal and official connections)
4) Wanted a Budget phone
5) Wanated to purchase first touch screen phone

LG Optimus Net Dual p698 satisfied all the criteria.

At the time purchase , Samsung Dual Sim Android were not available in the market, given that i already tried Samsung, LG became even more obvious choice.

Optimus range of phones is a decently successful range for LG ,but not in the size like Galaxy for Samsung.

From the looks of it, LG Optimus Net Dual p698 looked decent, but the build felt a little bit cheap (Cannot expect more from a Budget Phone).

There was another reason why i din't pick up Andorid this long,current Nokia was still doing strong and I wanted to complete a three years cycle on that, by the time it was three years on Nokia, Google announced ICS and I had to hold on Android purchase for some more time. However ICS doesn't seem to be coming to India in near future(barring Galaxy Nexus due March- not sure if they stick with it).

Given that Galaxy Nexus was way to over priced and I wasnt sure if it is a right choice to invest that huge amount on a form factor(touch) i have never used.

All these resulted in requirement -Dual Sim Budget Touch Screen Android and LG Optimus Net Dual p698 exactly fits the bill.

My next steps would be to use this phone for a month or so and come up with a review and decide whether it is worth spending on another Expensive Android if thing remain the same with Android like current , especially the battery issue.

Guerilla Road Crossing

2012-01-20T12:21:00.001+05:30

Morning 9 AM, you are on your way to office. Surprisingly you find that roads are a little bit clear and you are about to step on to gas. Suddenly out of nowhere a person jumps in front of your vehicle and run across and reached the other end of the road. Even before you realize what has actually happened, he/she would have crossed the road. This ladies and gentleman I define as “Guerilla Road Crossing”, an art Hyderabad’s mastered over the time.

During this process, your heart would have stopped twice, your vehicle would have come to screeeeching halt and some one from behind would have banged hard into vehicle resulting in damage costs worth 2years of maintenance costs.

Like any other traffic thoughts, this has to be best experienced than explained.

IKEA in India, How it may work?

2011-12-14T11:47:00.001+05:30

A lot Western companies have changed a their Business Models and product offerings after/while entering Indian markets. For example McDonalds has to re engineer their Offering and Menu- to target Vegetarian customers, completely remove Ham out of their offerings, change the positioning from a Fastfood to Family service restaurant.

Same goes with Pizza hut as well.

I guess a similar makeover would be required for IKEA also for it to make a mark in India.

Run up to 2012 :Part 2-My (not so serious) India Tech Predictions

2011-12-13T14:11:00.001+05:30

My (not so serious) Tech Predictions for India:

Reliance Industries will launch a 4G(LTE/Wimax?) Tablet using their own network.
Apple will launch iPhone5 at even more ridiculous price point.
Nokia will introduce budget WindowsPhones and also Nokia Windows8 Tablet.
India becomes the biggest country on Google+
Indian DTH operators will come with even more enticing Mobile/Tablet integrated features , but fail to provide a technology that works during rains.
Mobile call rates will increase even more , roaming will be gone and your ISPs continue to FUP you.
Over priced Macbook Air clones(Ultrabooks) flock the market.
Spice/Micromax/Karbonn/iBall/HCL and many more will launch ICS based cheap Android tabs.
Flipkart changes how Digital Content is bought in India.
One Big shake(consolidation or joining the deadpool) in deals/e-Commerce sites
India sees a Spotify like service for Indian Music (May be Google Music for India)
Debate on Kapil Sibal's Idea of screening content on Social Networking will continue.

Run up to 2012 : Part 1

2011-12-07T17:15:00.000+05:30

12 Wishes for 2012, not resolutions. My wishes from last year here

Visit a Eurpoean /US city on Work/Vacation
Buy a new vehicle
Invest
Run a race ( 10k/15k race)
Build some Product (Physical/online ) on my own
Learn a foreign language
Start cycling
Teach Math
Buy some Good furniture for home
Blog atleast 10 posts a month
Buy a Smart Phone
Better take home salary

Should restaurants add trends to their menus?

2011-11-23T21:32:00.001+05:30

Most of the times, you go to a restaurant and not sure what to order. Some times we ask the waiter to help us choose some thing or go directly with their suggestions. Another thing most people do is to look around see what's interesting on someone else's table or see whats some other waiter is carrying around to serve and order those. Now come to tech world , where we have the trends about what people are talking and discussing currently across social networks. Now mix these two, how about hotels showing trends about what's being ordered currently, what's popular over the Week or some thing like that. I think this will do a lot of difference to the guests and help them discover new dishes. Well how should hotels do this? The most expensive way will be to have interactive iPad like tablet menus with trends. Easier way is to have a display board with top 10 items ordered today. Of course there is a scope for hotels to tweak these .But trends are a great way in offline world to discover new things

New year resolutions

2011-11-13T10:57:00.001+05:30

We are already close to a new year (2012). That was pretty quick i think. So with a New Year almost close, i think it is time to start thinking of New Year resolutions.

Over the years ,I have never listed New Year resolution(s), infact i never believed in them. But for the first time last year , i listed a set of Wishes( not resolutions) and 10 months down the line i am impressed with what i have achieved .

What i had learnt is,by having list like this one will sub-consiously track the list and try to link each effort/task you take up on every day to one or other item in the list and some how achieve it .

I am currently not posting the achievement %, i will once i have a new set of wishes for 2012.

On Brands, Social Media interactions and customer service

2011-10-20T19:11:00.001+05:30

Karthik Srinivasan writes about his experience with Hippo and Mast Kalandar about brands

that sets expectations afresh, that if things go wrong, the brand is willing to set things right promptly instead of sitting mum and ignoring annoyed customers.

This is my take

Agree with his reasoning that brands will and keep targeting people with more online influence with these kind of incentives for a better online reputation (and "bonus" posts)

At the same time there will be 90 others(with little/no online reputation) who still crib about their service/taste in the case of Hippo in online and offline world.

Leaving aside Hippo experience, w.r.t to Mast Kalandar kind of cases,

I think it has to be brand/product philosophy as to how they want to serve their customers, like a retailer( Nordstrom) with "No questions asked return" policy and all the customers treated the same way.[ Not sure if they still adhere to this] .

May be Domino's 30 Min delivery promise can also one of such policy [ofcourse there are cases where the delivery guys argue about it (in India) ]

PS:

Hippo is yet to send my gift hamper that they promised to send to their first 1000 followers on twitter.

Virtual Assistant with Social Intelligence

2011-10-18T22:50:00.001+05:30

Today if you ask Siri, "Siri, I want to eat a Pizza" most probably it would say. "Here are the near by restaurants that serve pizza arranged by their popularity" .

Now how about an app that says "You friend Iris had a Chese burst pizza at Pizza Hut in 6th block recently and liked it very much and it is just 2 miles away, should we go?"

How did it say that, well it knows my contacts on Facebook,Twitter, Google plus and list of other social networking sites, Parses thru their updates about pizza, understands the sentiments of the update, gets the location w.r.t your present locations and gives you one final definite answer. Isn't this Magical.

Now who can do this? Obviously Google. They already do this in parts, search for some thing on Google, if you are on Google plus and have your profile created and linked it with other social networking sites, chances are that you see some thing similar like this.(I searched for Apple India)

Added to this, understanding the sentiment of the update is critical, already there a lot of social analytics apps doing this. I think it is a matter of time before Google puts all this together.

At one point of time Bing was positioned as decision engine rather than search engine. That din't help it much any way. So I guess this kind of definitive answers is soon what people will start looking for and after all Google and Apple with thier evil plans knows how to get this done.

Well one can argue this is incremental innovation on Apple's Siri, ofcourse it is. But still requires a lot of effort to put all together.

iOS5 and Me

2011-10-17T23:04:00.001+05:30

Apple had lauched their new iOS5 operatating system for iDevices . This realease had brought in a lot of features. While some features offers a significant improvement in user experiences, some almost go un noticed. I upgraded 4 days back and below are my experiences with each of the features .

A few things I want Siri to do (Indian Perspective)

2011-10-17T22:57:00.000+05:30

Understand Indian accent

Book IRCTC (Tatkal) tickets

Remind Indian Festivals( especially Rakshabandhan & Holi)

Count the number of people honking on traffic signal turning green and disable their Horns for ever

Traffic signals with Hijras/Beggars that need to be avoided

Navigate thru customer care IVRs and hand over the call on getting intouch with a human

Remind when to wake up from sleep in a traffic jam

Bargain with auto wallas or tell if an Auto walla is cheating

Tell who is going to Tihar jail next

Tell when is the best time to post and tweet about this blog for hits and re tweets

Will keep adding from time to time, comment your ideas

On Changing Display Pics/Avatars

2011-10-07T20:09:00.001+05:30

Display Pic/Avatar is that small pic of yours that shows up on Social Networks like Twitter.

This week a lot of people I follow on Twitter has changed their Avatar to "Steve Jobs" or this famous tweaked Apple logo (for reasons known to every one) and started talking about his Vision,the genious he is and more. It was fine till then, over the time they moved on to different topics and continued their rants on twitter. But the only problem was they forgot to change the DP back to the regular one.

Well this may not be a problem for every one, but it was definitely one for me. Whenever i glance thru my twitter timeline, i see the DP and read the tweet and doesn't pay much attention to the actual handle as overtime i have got an association between handle and DP and i know who posted that tweet. [Ofcourse people change their DPs regularly]. But i always see the tweet as the one directly coming out of that person in the DP.

So when people changed their DP's to "Steve Jobs" photo and started tweeting all the non-sense, that really hurt( yes) me. It's like Steve saying all the junk like these [ I am not linking to the handles as I am not criticising them, rather #justsaying in Twitter lingo]

looking like a cartoon.. had to lop off the mustache coz i accidentally trimmed it wrong when I shifted to answer the mobile #facepalm

Imagine Steve Saying this

Of course Kapil Sibal knows better than NRN. He's a minister.

or this

Looks like no ladies around took the hint from my last tweet

The Hero

2011-10-06T10:00:00.002+05:30

Social Networking Nirvana

2011-10-03T14:48:00.002+05:30

I want Google Plus users to attain this state. To make this happen , i think this is what Google Plus should do and i think it is the only one who is capable of doing this.

We have seen so many Social Network Fatigue management sites (read as- Write once and post to many like ping.fm, Posterous.com etc). What all of these can do is to offer a place where you can scribble your thoughts and they post the same status update/photos/links to all the social networking sites connected to the main site.

What they don't do today is to post the reactions/comments these updates recieve on multiple sites back on to the master site. So i may post a photo onto facebook book via posterous which recieves 100 likes,200 shares and 1000 comments. How do i know all these happened there, i have to visit the site to figure it out.

How about a service that consolidates all the reactions/comments/feedback to your status update/blogpost into a single site? I am not sure if such a service/app exists. Though i am sure there might be some custom tools done for corporates/individual/celebrities.

Today Google Plus knows your webpresence via the sites you link in your profile, Google crawls through every possible website in the world.

So can Google+ do this, I am sure they can , at the same time i am sure there are thousand other who want to stop them from doing this.

Suppose if i post a status A to google plus and also to all the linked sites to plus. If Google plus can track my linked sites from time to time and get back the likes and reactions to that status into Google plus UI. I think it is the ultimate.

Some thing like this is what i am looking at. Let me know if any such service already exists.

Sorry for the BAD mspaint work

What is the definition of leaving early at your workplace

2011-09-30T13:45:00.002+05:30

Summary of responses as on 4th Oct 2011

Inflation

2011-09-26T21:42:00.001+05:30

Exactly 4 years 8 months back , i bought a chalk pieces box like this from my neighbourhood stationery store. I don't remeber how much i paid for that then, but the MRP on the box said Rs.23. I presume, I definitely would have paid less than that.

Yesterday i bought a similar one paying Rs. 50.

That made me thinking , while the prices of these commodities can become more than double in just 4 year 8 months, why does money in Post offices take 8 years 7 months to double.

What goes into a Pizza Hut Delivery Bill

2011-09-25T21:06:00.003+05:30

If you are spending 210 rupess on Pizza ( 184 actual cost +26 tax) would you mind paying additional 10 bucks as a donation to World Hunger Relief . I would not mind.But I would be even more happier if i was told about that contibution while ordering or bill confirmation.

It seems that Pizza hut has decided to contibute their customers money @ 10/- per bill to World Hunger Relief. I reiterate that again, wouldn't be nice that customers are told about this.

As it is Pizza Hut is notorious for charging 101 taxes in their bills (Google Search) on dine in.

Cars to Clouds

2011-09-22T10:43:00.001+05:30

(Re) Positioning Data services

2011-09-19T16:11:00.001+05:30

Across the globe, Telecom operators are cursed by millions of consumers( with high data usage habits) for

not providing the promised speeds they paid money for,
throttling the data speeds ,
Fair Usage Policies(FUPs) ,
Lack of unlimited data plans,

Even if you see in India, all the Telecom operator offer internet speeds on dongles upto 21mbps. But one will find complaints about the lack of minimum required browsing speeds.

I see this as an opportunity for a telecom operator to reposition their data offering.

1) Commit minimum speeds saying your speed will never fall below x Mbps and stick to that service level instead of offering high data speeds which are never realised.

2) Have a Fair Usage Policy(FUP) that does not count the data usage in the lower browsing speeds.

1 in 6 Americans is poor

2011-09-15T08:07:00.001+05:30

says Times of India.

And the definition of poor American family of four with two kids is one with an income of $22,113 a year.At INR 45 exchange rate that is 995085 , which is just around 5000 short of being a millionaire.

"The overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, or 46.2 million, up from 14.3% in 2009" claims the article.

Again comparing to a number in India, more than 1 Billion people earn far more less than that as on 2010

Blogger app for iOS

2011-09-09T00:10:00.001+05:30

Blogger has just launched iOS app(iPhone) only.

Using it on iPad and it is not that good. After all you know how an iPhone app looks on iPad. Like this

Are discounts on Electronics on E-Commerce sites really true?

2011-09-04T11:50:00.001+05:30

I was looking for a good super zoom camera and narrowed down to Panasonic Lumix FZ series . Having narrowed down the model, I started looking for a good deal on two of the popular e- commerce sites- Flipkart and Letsbuy.

Prices quoted on these site came as a shocker to me compared to MRP given by Panasonic. A quick analysis pointed out that the MRP on these sites for two camera models i was looking for is 15-18% more than the actual MRP and then they are offering 8-11% discount on these marked up MRP.

The above table shows the prices on Flipkart and Letsbuy compared to MRP adviced by Panasonic on its official website. It is seen that the MRP quoated by both the e commerce sites is far more than the actual MRP.

Even after discount price quoted by E commerce sites is more than the actual MRP. I am sure i can get a good deal if I actually get onto street. While there are freebies on E commerce site, I am sure one can negotiate those on street also.

Along with these models there is an another Model FZ-35 , the price of which is not quoted on Panasonic website and for that model both the sites are quoting a discount upto 50% and i know for sure that model is a very old generation gadget.

Update 1: 21 Sep 2011

I started looking out for the camera in the market starting with Panasonic Brand Shops. None of them stock the models with them and can procure them in 2- 3 weeks on request ( note : these are brand stores and they sell only Panasonic) . I fail to understand Panasonic's strategy, if they fail to stock a product that is showcased on website's home page

What happens to your body if you go on hunger strike?

2011-08-25T11:19:00.001+05:30

Today's Economic Times paper featured an infographic on Body Politics explaining the adverse effects of fasting. Along with the infographic it shared the following stats on earlier world record hunger stikes

I am amused to see that stats, i found it surprising that Editorial team has time to research about hunger strike happened in Ireland , but missed the sacrifice of Amarajeevi Potti Sreeramulu

This is what wiki says about him

He became famous for undertaking a fast-unto-death for achieving the Andhra State and losing his life in the process

Potti Sreeramulu fasted in the heart of Madras (Chennai) city for over 82 days for an Andhra state with Madras as the capital

His sacrifice became instrumental in the linguistic re-organisation of states

How can they miss his sacrifice.

Virtual Bank

2011-08-11T18:27:00.001+05:30

Posted this first on my G+ feed . Since i don't have any thing else to post here, I though i will share it here also.

Some body should start a virtual bank, as in bank only with virtual presence and no real life brick and mortar presence for branches, there wont even be a corporate office or may be a small one if the laws mandate, every one works from home, data is in cloud. It will offer all the services online right from opening an account to closing. All transfers will be online. Cheque deposits if required can happen via scan copy of cheque to deposit and original cheque can be collected by bank via courier.Signature and all will be digital only.
Customer care also will also be online via skype, no telephone call.so you ping them and they call you back FIFO model on skype.

All communication will be via e mail and SMS.

What will be the challenges in this model?

African safari

2011-07-24T20:50:00.002+05:30

I got my (first) passport in 2006. Since then, I have used it as an identification and address proof document . That is the maximum use I found from that. As usual like any other middle class Indian my aspirations have been to visit a foreign country(read US, UK,EU, Singapore) and get atleast one stamp on the passport. But work load and money never got me to do that till date. Last week i got a chance to visit a African country for 2days on work .
So my first international travel is to Tanzania.Quick medical check ups,lonely planet look up other prep works done and landed in Tanzania(Dar Es Salaam).
Weather in Dar Es Salaam was just like Bangalore.It is coastal city and reminded of Kochi. Though the title says Safari, never had enough time to plan for one. Most of the time was spent on work itself. A lot of friends and family member scared me of food especially being a first time visit , but there was enough of North Indian vegetarion stuff i managed to get when ever i needed. How ever i always had ready to eat food as plan B.
The other thing to worry was mosquitoes , even the hotel has got a Mosquito net in all the rooms. I backed it up with Odomos.
I reached Dar Es Salaam with no expectations and it impressed me a lot. One think i liked the most is the traffic sense of the people. I am made to understand later that every country is better than India when it comes to traffic. People follow lanes, there were hardly any traffic jams. The only place where the traffic piles was at the signals and that gets cleared with in Minutes.
The other thing that impressed me was the reach of Toyota, I have seen more Toyota models there in 2 days, than i have seen in my entire life till now. The other surprise was this Mercedes, it was the smallest Mercedes car i have seen till date.

People i interacted (in hotel, at some shopping) were extremely courteous , and each discussion there starts with a salution and hand shake.
I managed to do some shopping at Mwenge Cravers' Market and bought some wood stuff for home decoration and gifts.
Given that enogh of people scared me of safety issues there, never ventured out in the nights at all.
Overall it was a good experince for a first international travel. I hope to see more and strike of more items in this list