Digital Daaroo

10 Wishes for a Digital 2012

2012-01-01T13:22:00.001+05:30

Q: What's better than kickstarting a new year with a new post?

A: Kickstarting with a list post!

Here are 10 wishes for the digital space in the year 2012:

May we find something better than advertising to monetize content on the Internet. (Flattr?). That, or, may ads become less annoying and unobtrusive.
May everyone and their uncle STOP making mobile apps, because, it's the in-thing, you know. Mobile optimized websites will work as well, thank you.
May we fix the mobile payment ecosystem [1].
May e-Commerce websites stop bleeding cash.
May daily deal sites graduate from hair/tattoo/nail-art/massage spas... and NOT get into the regular e-Commerce category.
May we get a payment aggregator that doesn't suck. Serious, the bar is that low! (Zaakpay?)
May we get a some digital marketing agencies that don't suck. Again, the bar is that low!
May Google stop screwing advertisers and users over. Seriously, how many 'organic search results' do you see these days? [2]
May telecom operators & TRAI figure out a way to stop SMS spam that actually works. Without crippling the SMS system completely.
And finally, may we preserve and extend freedom on the Internet. And not get snooped/monitored in everything we do online. [3]

Amen.

[1] It's very easy to bring up-to-speed with the desktop Internet ecosystem. Hint: Mobile optimized 3D-Secure & Netbanking. At least http://m.hdfcbank.com seems to be moving in the right direction

[2] Tell me where to stop: hiding referrer information for free/organic traffic, but NOT paid traffic. Ad sitelinks & umpteen other 'ad extensions'. Flight meta-search widget. Hotel meta-search widget. Stuffing hotel related searches with place results. Media ads

[3] SOPA. Protect-IP. Internet censorship (or 'pre-screening'). Sec 69 of Indian IT Act 2008.

Android fragmentation? Don't get me started!

2011-12-27T01:00:00.000+05:30

I've been playing around with Android development lately and it's been a fairly "interesting" ride so far. Well, apart from the horror that programming in Java is (I'll leave that rant for a separate post).

One extremely frustrating facet of designing an app for the Android platform is the plethora of devices with varying screen sizes out there. Coming from a web background, where you pick a minimum screen resolution and get going, it's a rude shock. Android's own guide on supporting multiple screens recommends having four (!) versions of bitmap resources (pictures).

I did a quick survey on Flipkart for the screen sizes & resolutions of all Android phones under Rs 18,000, which I'm assuming would be the top sellers in India. Here's the data (the first column is the screen resolution in pixels, the second column is the diagonal length of the screen in inches, and the third column is the number of handsets available in that particular combination):

So, while designing for Android, you have the mental overhead of thinking about more than 12 screen size & resolution combinations. That's right -- more than twelve. Contrast that with iPhone, where it's just two, I think -- one for normal displays and one for retina displays. Contrast that with the web, where, till some time back, you had to basically pick between designing for a minimum of 800x600 or 1024x768.

Based on the screen classification proposed by Android, even if this number can be brought do half, that would leave us with more than 6 possible outcomes! I haven't even started looking at supporting multiple API versions (2.2, 2.3, 3.0, 4.0, etc.) and multiple device capabilities (scroll wheel, D-pad, etc. etc.) I'm afraid I'll give-up even before I reach that point!

Is there any report out there which segments: (a) the amount spent on the Android market & (b) the in-app advertising revenue, by the handset capability / screen size / etc? I'm sure app developers would be willing to pay for it, to save themselves the time spent on handsets generating a few hundred rupees, at best.

Interesting outdoor advertising & signage

2011-07-06T17:25:00.000+05:30

I really love Blackberry Playbook's outdoor campaign. They're all over the airports and communication at each spot has been designed according to the context. I spotted this sign at the Delhi airport departure terminal - as soon as you walk out from the plane, into the terminal. Brilliant message for the context!

The message reads - "That laptop bag. Heavy, isn't it?"

Close on its heels was this outdoor ad by Google. Bang above the luggage conveyor belt. The baggage that Google is referring to is the tech infrastructure required to keep your business running. Lose it & move to hosted Google apps. Brilliant, yet again! Unless you've actually lost your bags - either case, hard to forget this ad :-)

"Some baggage is worth losing" - An ad by Google for its hosted business solutions

This outdoor spot by Gorbatschow Vodka is as bizarre as they come. What was the brand/marketing manager thinking? "Pole dancer by night. Mother by day. Whoever you are, be pure." Seriously?

"Pole dancer by night. Mother by day" - WTF!

This one was spotted at Laxmi Nagar, Delhi. "Good Looks Beauty Parlour. A Female Stoppage" 'Nuff said!

"A Female Stoppage"

And this one take the cake. From the Lucknow airport. I've been to many airports in India, but have never, ever come across this sign anywhere else! "Please don't put your kids on baggage conveyor" Imagine what a shock the baggage handlers on the other side must be getting :) It happens only in UP!

"Papa, papa - jhoola ghumao!"

Meru Cabs Mobile Booking Website - Review

2011-06-10T17:07:00.005+05:30

Meru Cabs and DotAhead, Goa have done it yet again - wowed me with another offering from their stables. This time it's a pretty kickass mobile optimised version of their awesomely kickass online booking website. They've done it the right way and haven't jumped onto the Android/Blackberry/iOS app bandwagon. Seriously, not every brand needs to have an app.

The mobile site is optimised only for basic WAP phones. There is no special treatment for smartphones or touch phones, which can use the same basic phone interface. I think it's a good strategy to test the waters and see where the usage is coming from, before investing more into product development.

Visit www.merucabs.com from your mobile browser or to automatically get served the mobile version of the site. The auto-detection worked for native Nokia browser as well as Opera Mini. (You can also visit www.merucabs.com/m from your desktop browser to view the mobile version). Here's what the first page looks like:

I had already registered on the desktop site [1], so, I logged in with my regular username & password. And it just worked! Here's what I got next:

After specifying the pickup date & time, you need to select the pickup location from the following screen. They give you an option to choose from five pickup locations you've used most frequently OR the option to specify a new one.

I tried specifying 'Phoenix mills' as a pickup location and was surprised they didn't have it! I then tried 'Lower Parel' and got this screen:

The funny thing is that the screen had two areas, Parel & Lower Parel, with both having only one sub-area each (the sub-areas were also called Parel & Lower Parel). Why ask the user to choose a sub-area in that case?

Also, notice, that if you didn't find your area you're expected click on "Go back and try again" to specify another area. Why not repeat the previous screen's text field to make recovering from an error easier?

Next, you specify the drop address. Again same problem, why force the user to go back and select a different pickup address if he didn't find it in the first try? Why not provide a small text-box on this screen itself to make retrying easier?

After a final booking review screen, you get to the confirmation screen:

Overall a pretty decent execution for a transaction focused mobile site. Good attention to detail with the form-field label aligment (should be vertical, not horizontal, for small screen devices).

Conclusion

Good

Works across all phones. Easy to use.
Automatic browser detection implemented properly
Authetication & user profile integrated with desktop site
Best of all -- works as expected!

Can be made better

Although not specific to the mobile site, the area database needs to be improved. On the desktop site you can correct yourself easily based on the auto-complete options. However, you don't have that luxury on a mobile site & you end up making an unexpected error. Also, I noticed that while the mobile site can recognize 'Bhakti Park' as a drop address and provide sensible options to select from, the desktop site only has 'Wadala' in the auto-complete drop down. Are the two interfaces using different area databases in the backend?
Recovering from an error should be made easier for the user. Going back & forth between screens is not easy on a mobile site. So, "Go back and try again" should be replaced with a text box there itself.
IMO, an attempt can be made to reduce the number of screens/steps a user has to navigate through to make a booking. For example, the following screens can all be combined into one: (a) enter pickup date & time, (b) enter pickup location, and (c) enter drop location. When the user submits the "integrated form", the subsequent screen should probably show only those sections where additional user input is required. For example, if the drop area cannot be identified uniquely based on the user's input the subsequent screen should show a form to confirm ONLY that. As long as all user input points to unique locations (pickup & drop), the user should have to press 'submit' only once to complete the booking. The number of fields aren't large enough to warrant a multi-step process.

If you've read this far, you might also want to read my review of Meru Cabs' desktop site.

[1] I'm pretty certain the maximum usage for the mobile site would be coming from people already registered on the desktop site. It would be interesting to see the stats though.

Google +1 vs Google Reader "Like" - Competing features?

2011-06-08T22:32:00.000+05:30

Google Reader had the "like" feature since July, 2009. Why didn't they release a widget for blogs to showcase the like count on each post? This widget would've also given a way to users not on Google Reader to showcase their appreciation for a blog post.
When Google finally released +1 they didn't integrate it with the Google Reader like count. So, now there are multiple ways for users on the Google ecosystem to like/recommend a piece of content. Why?

Am I missing something obvious here? What do you think?

Huawei IDEOS - Review by a first time Android user

2011-05-30T00:14:00.001+05:30

One fine day I received this email from the good fellows at Avian Media asking me if I'd like to review the recently launched Huawei IDEOS. As you can guess, I agreed. They sent me an IDEOS handset, I played with it for a good 2-3 weeks, and here's the review. But, first, a couple of quick clarifications:

I think it's very hard reviewing an Android phone. You don't really know whether you're reviewing the phone or the Android platform. As a first time user of an Android phone, I don't really know which parts of the Android OS/UI are it's inherent traits and which parts are controlled by the phone manufacturer. Given the fact that Android is open and assuming that the manufacturer would have control over all aspects of the OS/UI, I'll state my opinions as a whole towards the phone, and not split between the hardware & the OS/UI.
I did NOT use this handset as my primary phone. I had taken it along with me on my Thailand trip where, although it had a Thai SIM, calls were infrequent. It was used frequently for surfing the net over WiFi, checking emails, Google Maps + GPS, & tons of Angry Birds :-)

The Box

Huawei IDEOS came in a pretty standard box. It had the phone, a USB charger, a micro SD card, and a flyer/leaflet with some info on how to get started. Even though I was told it's a Huawei IDEOS phone, neither the box, nor the phone had any Huawei logo - nothing wrong with it, I just found the lack of any manufacturer branding surprising.

The Bootup

I managed to switch it on using the small button at the top edge of the phone after goofing around with the red-colored button used to disconnect calls. (In most Nokia phones the red button doubles-up as the power button as well). I was surprised to see an Aircel logo during the boot-up process - wasn't expecting it because none of the communication mentioned it being an Aircel phone. The bootup process takes about 90 seconds - fairly long by any standards!

Network, sound, & data

Upon seeing the Aircel logo, I thought this phone would be tied to the Aircel network and this entire review was a ploy to get me to buy an Aircel SIM - talk about being paranoid :-) Thankfully, popping in my Vodafone SIM seemed to work without any hassles. I tried making a couple of test calls and found the in-call sound quality to be pretty good. Much better than my Nokia E63, which is notorious for it's pathetic in-call sound volume.

I tried checking my mail using Vodafone Live, but it didn't work. I thought changing the handset messed-up the on-SIM network settings and called customer support to have it fixed. They confirmed that Vodafone Live would NOT work on any Android device. I'd have to use Vodafone Mobile Connect (an overpriced mobile internet service) instead. I let it be because I didn't want to use this as my primary phone because I wasn't planning to copy my contact list over from my Nokia E63 (Btw, does anyone know an easy way to copy the entire contact list from a Nokia to an Android?)

I switched on the WiFi and started browsing using the in-built browser. Absolutely no problems in surfing the net using this phone.

Other hardware stuff

The phone fits well in your hand and feels sturdy (I didn't go around testing the sturdiness by dropping a borrowed phone!). The battery life is adequate and IIRC it lasted about 2 days with WiFi used sparingly, moderate GPS usage, and heavy Angry Bird flinging! The touch screen is fairly responsive and has an adequate screen size + resolution. Not good, just adequate - you'll wish for a better screen resolution when you start noticing the fuzzy fonts on web pages & will always end-up zooming in for better text clarity.

The phone's speaker is brilliantly loud. The sound output to headphones via the 3.5mm jack is also good. The camera, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

The phone has a volume rocker on the left edge, a power button & a 3.5mm audio jack on the top edge, and USB/charger port at the bottom edge. It has hardware buttons for call-receive, call-disconnect, and a 5-way nav-pad. It has four permanent buttons on the touch screen one each for return/previous, menu/options, home, and search. This was one of my main grouses with the phone:

What's the use of a 5-way nav-pad on a touch phone? The whole point of having a touch interface is to get rid of a cursor/pointer. The only time I found myself using the 5-way nav-pad was to accurately position the cursor between two letters during typing a message/email. This sole use-case doesn't validate the need for a a 5-way nav-pad, instead it just points towards the need for a better interface for text input.
What's the point of having permanent soft buttons? If the four soft buttons (return/previous, menu/options, home, & search) were so important that they needed a permanent spot on the touch screen, why not make them hardware buttons instead? There's a distinct advantage in getting tactile feedback upon pressing a button. Getting to the home screen or the applications menu, in my opinion are the most common interactions and these, unfortunately, are the most counter-intuitive buttons. The biggest button on the phone -- the big round button on the 5-way nav-pad -- powers neither interaction as one would expect. Pretty disappointing!
I'm still not convinced that four permanent soft buttons are really required. The least useful is the search-button. In most of the applications/screens it's just a dead button.

Processor: The phone is just below the threshold of acceptable speed/responsiveness. It's not that bad that you'll get frustrated during normal usage, but you do notice a split-second delay between tapping & the phone responding -- especially when a couple of apps are running the background. The lack of processing power is apparent when playing a complicated stage of Angry Birds - it's so slow that it renders the game almost unplayable.

Software/UI stuff

The IDEOS is on the Android 2.2 (Froyo) platform. I tried Settings > About phone > Online update and it said that the phone was up-to-date. I guess it was too much to expect it to install the latest Android over-the-air.

You can't install any apps unless you plug in the micro-SD card. Nothing wrong with that, just saying.

The first app that I installed was the Swype keyboard, which unfortunately was not pre-installed. I wouldn't be able to survive a touch keyboard had it not been for the amazing Swype keyboard. Seriously, if you haven't tried it - do it now. Get the hang of gliding your thumb over keys and typing will be a breeze. Every single person I've demoed it to has been truly amazed at what it can do. I don't understand why it isn't pre-installed on the IDEOS when it's free.

I was pretty happy with the pre-installed Google Maps & the built-in GPS. In fact most of my Thailand road-trip was powered by it - saved me a good 200THB per-day on an add-on GPS with my rented car.

I didn't quite like the SMS interface. The UI is still rough around the edges and can use some work. For example, if you get a new message notification on the status bar and you open the messaging app, it doesn't show you the new message. It shows you the last message thread you were viewing instead. You hit the return/previous soft-button assuming it'll go to the message list and the app closes! Pretty irritating.

I wasn't a fan of the way the browser treats multiple windows either. Switching windows is a pain with no apparent shortcuts. I think they can pick a thing or two from how Opera Mini/Opera Mobile handle multiple windows/tabs.

Not happy with the telephone UI as well. The contact list requires an additional click on the "search" soft-button to start typing out a name. I don't normally scroll through hundreds of contacts to find the required name. I type out the first few letters to quickly reach it. Ideally the on-screen keyboard should be visible by default on the contact list. Second peeve, the call log tries to collapse multiple entries (missed calls, dial outs, etc) from the same phone number into a single entry. You click on the collapsed entry and it expands into the actual list. The display of this entire interaction is extremely non-obvious.

Conclusion

The Huawei IDEOS (official specs / GSMArena specs) is priced at Rs 8,499 in India. Would I buy it? I'd say not until I compare the Huawei IDEOS with Samsung Galaxy S5570. The S5570 matches it feature-for-feature and covers up on some of my pet peeves with the IDEOS: pre-installed Swype, faster processor, & larger screen.

One thing I still don't know is whether all the usability goof-ups are only with the IDEOS or are they common across all Androids. Anyhow, even with all it's faults I wouldn't write-off the IDEOS. It's feature packed and comes at an attractive price point. I'm just not sure whether (a) it's the best Android for the buck, or (b) whether Android/touch phones are as good as they're made out to be. (I still think one can't beat the feel of a QWERTY keyboard)

Phuket / Krabi / Thailand Weather in May, 2011

2011-05-26T21:36:00.000+05:30

My wife & I got back from an 11 day trip to Phuket & Krabi. We were there from 14th May to 25th May, 2011.

We were skeptical of having to stay indoors for most of the trip due to the rainy weather forecast. We were surprised to find mostly hot & sunny days all throughout our trip. If I remember correctly, it was partly cloudy on two days (no or very little rain) and there was only one day with heavy rains. A couple of days it rained in the night, but most of the days it was hot & sunny - perfect weather for beach bumming & island hopping.

Thailand is very beautiful in the rains.Unless you're hell bent on catching some sun and lazing around on the beach, hire a car and go for a long drive if it gets cloudy. The roads and the lush greenery are just brilliant when it's wet!

You can get more information on the current weather in Phuket at the Phuket Weather Blog.

Back to school from Thailand

2011-05-26T02:29:00.002+05:30

Back from a long-ish (11 day) trip to Thailand. Didn't want to come back only :( Thinking of going to office tomorrow feels like going back to school after 10weeks of summer vacations!

Gotta write some SEO'd posts about my travel tales now...

Brand bidding as a PR tool: Learnings from CCAvenue hack

2011-05-11T12:53:00.000+05:30

Following up on my previous post about the CCAvenue hacking incident & learnings from it, I'm really, really surprised that CCAvenue has not started bidding on it's own brand terms.

There's a lot that has already been said about bidding on one's own brand terms in the regular course of things and I'm not about to go into it here. You can read some opinions about it here & here. This post focuses on why you should be bidding on your brand terms during critical public situations.

As of 11 May, 2011, a Google search on "ccavenue hacked" results in a bunch of links from other blogs & news sites, which talk about their take on the incident.

If CCAvenue were bidding on terms like "ccavenue hacked", etc. they would easily have the opportunity to place the official response right on top of the search results page. With a few rupees per-click they could ensure that users hear of the official response first. The fact that their official response sucks, is a different matter altogether.

BP seems to have done this during the Deepwater Horizon Oilspill incident. They were bidding aggressively on keywords like "oil spill", "deepwater", "gulf of mexico", etc. The ads took users to a section on their website detailing the official response and updates on the damage control process. Read more about the BP Oil Spill Google ads here. However, they seem to have gotten a fair bit of backlash - [1] [2] - for spending time in online reputation management instead of fixing the damn problem. But that's mostly because oil companies don't have a good reputation to begin with. I would presume that that's not the case with CCAvenue.

PS: I'm not sure what the search volume for the CCAvenue-hack related keywords would be. I'm itching to put out an ad and see how many clicks I can get on this. Screw it, let's do it!

Two must-have features in Google Blogger & Reader

2011-05-09T21:03:00.001+05:30

Two features that I wish Google Blogger & Reader had:

Google Reader should show me ONE consolidated news item if it appears multiple times in my news feed. For example if a particular post has been shared by one or more of my friends and/or is also part of my news feed it should show up just once. Bonus feature would be to display each user's note/comment in a usable fashion.
Google Blogger should have the ability to reply to a comment via email. While you can be notified via email with every comment to a particular post, you can't simply hit the reply button and continue the discussion. Pull up your socks Google, it has been ages since Facebook released this feature for all comment threads on its platform.

What do you think?

Aside, if you haven't already read why I think Google Blogger + Reader can beat the shit out of Twitter, do it now. I mean now!

CCAvenue hack: What can developers & businesses learn?

2011-05-08T01:08:00.003+05:30

If you haven't already read about the alleged hacking of CCAvenue, here's the gist:

Hacker, calling himself d3hydr8, posts complete schema of CCAvenue's DB on a mailing list. The post also contains the contents of 'admn_users' table, which include username & passwords in plain text.
Story is covered all over the interwebs - MediaNama coverage, Pluggd coverage
CEO, Vishwas Patel "patently" denies that this happened.

Developers should read this

Here's what developers can learn about how to safely store passwords:

DON'T store passwords in plain text
DON'T store encrypted passwords. Store their hash value instead. There's a big difference.
DON'T use MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512 or your hand-rolled hashing function. Use bcrypt instead. Read why here & here.

Business owners should read this

Here's what business owners can learn about building a tech-enabled business & handling critical public situations:

Hire good developers. Make sure they read the section above.
When faced with critical public situations such as security breaches, realize that people will look for more information and they should hear the official response first. If I were CCAvenue, I would be bidding aggressively on "ccavenue hacked" & related terms and be linking off to the official response.
Ensure that the official response is written like a human, not a lawyer. Secondly, learn to own-up & let your customers know how you're (a) containing the damage, and (b) preventing a repeat incident. The notice on CCAvenue's website does neither.

In my opinion, the official CCAvenue response, reeks of a pathetic attempt to cover-up. They've picked their words like lawyers when they say "no hack has happened at 15:15 hours on 4th May, 2011". The full disclosure made by the hacker does not claim the time of the actual breach. The date+time on the top of the post seems to be the time when the post/email was sent. Also, the Netcraft site-report for CCAvenue clearly shows that their webserver was upgraded on 5th May, a day after the original full disclosure. Pretty fishy, I'd say.

What's your take on this?

Is the iMint loyalty card worth it?

2011-05-02T11:10:00.001+05:30

A couple of years ago I got a free iMint card because of my ICICI Bank debit card. I never bothered with it apart from getting mildly irritated with iMint spam in my inbox every week. Last week I got yet another iMint spam - "Redeem your i-mint points & get 100 BONUS i-mint points" - and I wondered, how desparate could they get!

I decided to dig deeper.

Here's what I could fathom from the relevant sections on their website (earning points & redeeming points):

Broadly, you earn 1 point for every Rs 100¹. An additional 1 point if you pay through our ICICI Bank credit/debit card. So, in the most commonly occuring best-case scenario that's about 2 points for every Rs 100. On the redemption side, 4 points equals Re 1²

This means that for every Rs 100 you spend, you earn 50 paise. Which means the merchant is giving you an effective benefit of 0.5% on your purchase. Putting that number in perspective:

On a flight ticket of Rs 4,000 it's equivalent to getting a Rs 20 discount
It's like spending about Rs 40,000 in a music store to get a Rs 200 movie ticket free
Or, like buying apparel worth Rs 60,000 to get a t-shirt worth Rs 300 free

Shocking, isn't it? Is that the value of customer loyalty? 50 paise for every Rs 100 spent? What is this card solving for the merchants or their customers? Am I missing something here?

[1] There are merchants which give you 5 or 10 points for every Rs 100, but neither are those merchants where your transaction frequency is likely to be high, nor are the points high enough to rake-up a decent total on infrequent purchases.
[2] The point-to-rupee ratio on the redemption side is very clear from the way their shopping voucher redemption is structured. I checked the checkout process on Zoomin and an order worth Rs 292 could be bought for 1167 iMint points. I also looked up the retail price for some of the other stuff that you can redeem on the iMint website and the ratio is pretty much constant.

How to announce an acquisition to customers?

2011-04-26T01:12:00.001+05:30

Learn from Wufoo.

It's very rare that an email notifying you about a merger/acquisition makes you smile. Makes you care. Does a good job of explaining what's going on. And does all of this in plain English, not corporate-speak.

That's quite a lot for an email to achieve. But that's exactly what this email from Wufoo did.

Email Subject: Holy Donkey Kong! SurveyMonkey Acquires Wufoo!

Read through the email given on the left and come back here.

In the very first paragraph it gives it straight to you – Infinity Box Inc. getting acquired by SurveyMonkey. (A little bit of lawyer-speak there with "definitive agreement" & using the legal company name – Infinity Box, but that's just about it).

Second paragraph details what is means "for us" (Wufoo). Third paragraph explains what it means "for you" (the customer). Fourth paragraph links off to a blog post & an awesome FAQ for more details.

Next comes three paragraphs about how data is going to be shared between the two companies and the fact that both have similar privacy policies. The following paragraph explains this again in plain English:

"We want you to know that neither we nor SurveyMonkey is going to start doing anything sketchy with your personal information like selling it to third parties without your permission. However, if you’re a subscriber to the Wufoo newsletter, you may receive email directly from SurveyMonkey in the future about its products and services."

In fact, Wufoo is a great example of what I call a product with a character and they demonstrate that beautifully with the content of this email. A simple & direct tone with tongue-in-cheek humour thrown in. Just in case you didn't get it, the dinosaur represents Wufoo & the monkey represents, well, SurveyMonkey. (Check out Wufoo.com and hover your mouse on the "Login" link on the top-right of the page. Sweet!)

Subject line, body copy, images, and concept. Everything - just brilliantly executed.

PS: Just in-case you missed, scroll-up and read the subject line of the email again. I'd be really interested to know the open-rate they got on this email.

Meru Cabs Online Booking Website - A Review

2011-04-23T13:32:00.004+05:30

I'm a big fan of Meru Cabs. Always on time [1], well maintained fleets of cars, and appropriately priced.

My only grouse had been with waiting (for eternity) to speak with someone in their call center to make a booking. Well, with the recent launch of online bookings on the Meru Cabs website, even that seems to have been solved.

A big shoutout to my friends at DotAhead, Goa for solving this beautifully.

What's good

The home page is where all the action happens - as it ideally should, for a website focusing on transactions. No mugshots of founders & investors welcoming you to the "Meru family". No corporate-speak about our "fleet of cars", "since 2002", yada yada. Get your booking. And get out. Simple. Here's what the home page looks like:

Interestingly, they have used mobile numbers as the primary user identifier instead of a username or email address. A sensible decision given the fact that people would expect cab booking details to be sent on their mobile phone.

Bookings are allowed for up to 24 hours in advance for the four cities that Meru currently operates in - Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, & Mumbai. The form fields to specify the pick-up & drop address are structured & auto-complete driven to help allocate cabs in an automated way. Previously specified addresses are automatically saved in the user's profile. One address can be tagged as "Home" & one address as "Office" for speeding up the booking process for frequently booked routes.

After the booking form on the home page, there's a second screen where you confirm all the booking details and agree to some T&C. And that's it. You're done. Within a few seconds you get an SMS + email, either confirming the booking or notifying you of unavailability.

What can be better

One basic feature that is missing is a persistent login, i.e. "Remember me on this computer". Is it because they don't see too many repeat transactions from the same customer? Hard to believe given the amazing service delivery by Meru cabs and brilliant online booking experience.

The home/office selection tags and the previous location selection drop-down could've been designed better (take a look at the screenshot above). I had made 3-4 bookings before I noticed those tags on the address form. It took even longer for me to realise that "Select a previous location" could be clicked to view a list of all previous locations.

Irrespective of these minor glitches, the Meru Cabs online booking is brilliant. The booking experience is almost friction-less and it actually does live up to it's promise: "Book a cab in less than 60 seconds" I don't remember using their call center to make a booking after I discovered their website.

Update [10-June-2011]: Read my review of Meru Cabs' mobile website.

[1] Some of my friends have had a bad experience where the cab had arrived later than the scheduled pick-up time. However that kind if service delivery failure can happen in any business. Ensuring that it happens less than 5% of the time is what makes a service delivery phenomenal.

8 types of bad creative critics

2011-04-19T00:54:00.000+05:30

I hope I'm none of them. Or better yet - have evolved through each of them already :-)

[Via Indigo Consulting, which is originally via SkydeCartoons.com as indicated on the image]

How can Google beat Twitter at the social game?

2011-04-14T13:18:00.001+05:30

Quick answer - Embrace blogs & RSS feeds.
Long answer follows...

Twitter is a micro-blog

The numero uno use-case on Twitter is that users publish content (opinions, links, etc.) and broadcast it to whoever wants to listen. (The content, for some unknown reason, is limited to 140 chars.)

There is a well established & easy way to publish content online – hosted blogging platforms. There is a well documented & well supported open standard for broadcasting one's content – RSS feeds. No wonder Twitter was called a micro-blogging platform when it started out.

The other two significant use-cases of Twitter are:

The social interaction - A user can come to know when someone else happens to talk about him. In the Twitter world these are called @mentions.
The ego booster - A user can get to know, to some degree of accuracy, who is listening to his broadcasts. In the Twitter world, these are called followers.

There is no easy or obvious way to achieve these right now. But given Google's strengths & some clever extension of the RSS standard [1] even these can be made technically possible & easy of the user.

So, who owns the largest blogging platform?

Google does.

Now, let's put 2 & 2 together

Google should roll Blogger & Reader into one kick-ass product - aimed at the masses, not the geeks. Along with a web-based version, they should integrate this new product into various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) to drive adoption.
Adopt the RSS standard (with some extensions [1]). Give first-class treatment to RSS feeds in Google Chrome & push other browsers to do the same.
Put some sexy marketing into promoting this as an open ecosystem.

Users can install + control their own blogging platforms & RSS readers.
Other competitors can build competing products and use open standards to be part of this open ecosystem - much like all of Internet.

But what's in it for Google?

Two words - Advertising revenue.

More content on blogs hosted at Blogger = More content to monetize via Google AdSense
More content on blogs hosted elsewhere = More content outside the walled garden of Twitter to monetize via Google AdSense (is there any other viable option?)
More people reading RSS feeds via Google Reader = Opportunity to serve ads on the Reader interface based on user's interests
More people publishing RSS feeds via FeedBurner = Opportunity to serve ads on other (non Google-owned) RSS readers

Frankly, Google is late to the party. Their attempts at building a closed ecosystem have failed. Their only option is to embrace the openness of the web & bring content outside the walled gardens of Twitter (and Facebook). Organize & monetize it the way they've been doing till now.

Out in the open. Out in wild wild web. Where Google is king.

[1] RSS Extensions

These are broad approaches for enabling the the more 'social' aspects of Twitter via blogs & RSS feeds. These are obviously not the best ways.

Ability to view list of "followers" - Extend the RSS spec to include subscriber identity in the RSS GET request. A standard URL (say /id) on the subscriber's own website/blog should serve as the subscriber's identity. At regular intervals the publisher's blogging platform can ping all identity URLs seen regularly in RSS GET requests to re-confirm the subscription (and filter spoofing attacks).
Ability to @mention someone - In the new scheme of things @mentions should be nothing more than back-links - either to the person's main website/blog OR to his identity URL. While composing posts, the blogging platform should make it DEAD SIMPLE to create backlinks to someone's identity URL.
Ability to get notified when someone @mentions you - There are two possible ways to do this and it depends on the implementation of the blogging platforms:

Your blogging platform should crawl the web to look for backlinks to you and present them to you in your private timeline (news feed). It should crawl the blogs of your subscribers/followers/friends with higher frequency than the rest of the wild wild web. This is where Google's product with kick the ass of any other product.
The RSS-Identity URL should have the ability to receive pingbacks. As soon as someone @mentions you (creates a backlink to you) his/her blogging platform should ping your identity URL with the URL of the post that he/she just created. Your blogging platform would then fetch the post and present it to you on your private timeline (news feed).

Google's ITA acquisition: Impact on Indian OTAs?

2011-04-10T00:55:00.003+05:30

Google has just announced on it's blog that it's ITA acquisition had been cleared by the US Department of Justice. Given that Google drives significant amount of traffic to the OTAs, this is big news for the market.

Even though it could take a while for Google to integrate & roll-out a travel search product in India, this is significant for the Indian players here as well - Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, and Yatra.

How could this possibly affect the Indian OTAs?

Meta-search or something else?

It's almost certain that Google will end up making a meta-search of sorts. What is debatable is whether the user experience will be the familiar travel search form (Bing Travel, Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, etc.) or the regular Google "OneBox". From what they've been saying in their Google-ITA microsite & the recent blog post it seems that they've almost made up their minds to go down the OneBox route:

How cool would it be if you could type "flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May" into Google and get not just a set of links but also flight times, fares and a link to sites where you can actually buy tickets quickly and easily? Well that's exactly why we announced our intention to buy ITA Software[...]

Keywords, keywords, keywords

The significance Google's meta-search product will lie in the keywords that they will "target". "Targeting" could be of two kinds.

Firstly, for search queries where the user's travel intent is narrow, eg. "mumbai delhi flights" OR "flights to delhi". In this case it's certain that Google will end up showing a typical search results page - with flight times + fares + links-outs to airlines/OTA websites where the user can book that particular fare (Take a look at the video above - they have have a rough scribble of the search results page). There could be secondary fields shown to the user to select his/her travel dates. Google has already started experimenting with such date fields in the US.

Since these kind of queries currently make up less than 5% of Google India's air travel search volume they pose little threat to the OTAs. [1] If Google insists on deep-linking to the booking pages of participating advertisers, at most it could reduce the OTAs to mere booking engines for 5% of their traffic and would put Google in control of the primary search experience. (This is pretty much what TripAdvisor is trying to do with the hotel segment through their "Check Rates" features).

Secondly, for search queries where the user's travel intent is very broad. These searches currently make up 90-95% of Google India's air travel search volume. In this case it's unclear what Google's strategy would be and this is where the real threat for the OTA segment lies. What could be the possible approaches?

Google uses it's AdWords platform for placing in-house ads. For each broad travel query it takes the user to a page/microsite simply educating the user about the new search feature.
It could very well go one step further and offer fields to narrow down broad travel queries, which would then lead into the meta-search results. For example, searching for "flight schedule" could throw up text fields (at the very top of the search results page) asking for origin/destination city or airline name.

Google could choose to crank-up it's marketing engine - employ AdWords, Google Display Network, & offline advertising (which it has in the past). This could result in significant increase in volume of targeted/narrow travel searches happening on Google itself with OTAs/airlines being used purely for transaction fulfillment. (Hell would break loose if they started targeting branded searches for pushing their new travel product. Not sure if they'd do this to their advertisers.)

Non-GDS/LCC Content?

One dampener in Google's plans for Indian travel would be access to LCC content (non-GDS content, to be specific). I'm not sure what percentage of air travel in US is through LCCs, but in India it's more than 50% of the market. If they don't have SpiceJet, Indigo, GoAir, JetLite, etc. they'll be irrelevant.

Conclusion

Google will require LCC/non-GDS content to be relevant in the Indian market. With the ITA acquisition this has not yet happened. However, it would be very easy for them to get access to LCC content directly through airlines.
If Google sticks to making the "search experience better" for narrow/targeted travel searches, it may not impact the OTA segment much (since such search queries contribute to less than 5% of the search volume)
However, if Google starts going after broad travel searches, it could impact the OTAs in the long run, especially if Google puts it's marketing dollars behind it.
Lastly, if Google starts targeting the core OTA territory - branded keywords - it could end up hurting the entire eco-system (and invite quite a few lawsuits in the process).

One thing is certain - in the long run this will definitely kill the travel affiliate market which thrives off the narrow/targeted travel searches & contributes a lot to search-engine spam.

[1] A broad/inexact but directionally correct break-up of air travel searches is given below:

Branded searches: ~80% This includes keywords like: Cleartrip, Yatra, MakeMyTrip, Indigo airlines, Air India, Cleartrip flights, Thai airways, etc.
Generic air travel/flight related searches: ~10% This includes keywords like: cheap flights, cheap air tickets, flight booking, flight schedules, etc.
Route searches: <5% This includes search phrases like: Mumbai Delhi flights, flights to Delhi, Mumbai Bangkok flights, flights to Bangkok, etc.
Others: 5%

At Goa, priorities are straightforward

2011-04-09T19:34:00.002+05:30

Pehle duvva, aur fir daaroo. Nothing in between.

[Spotted at a beach shack at Ozran beach, Goa]

Main ZINDO balm hui...

2011-04-09T14:53:00.003+05:30

...darling tere liye!

Move over Zandu balm, the new & improved Zindo balm is here :)

[Spotted at a general store in Goa.]

I'm sure you would've seen your share of candies & chocolates, which look same-same, but different. 'Much' instead of 'Munch'. 'Ecloors' instead of 'Eclairs'. 'Beamer' instead of 'Boomer'.

How does this work? How much extra money would the retailer be making to agree to such scams?

Who says offline advertising can't be contextual?

2011-04-08T20:13:00.002+05:30

Spotted at a Delhi Metro station - bang opposite an escalator exit. Brilliant use of tying context with a campaign message.

Does copy with character work in India?

2011-04-08T15:57:00.000+05:30

There's something to be said about products which have a certain character to them. The first example that comes to mind is MailChimp though they seem to have distanced their monkey quite a bit these days. Another set of opinionated products are from the 37Signals stable, but they don't try to dress them up in a character, in my opinion.

I was surprised to find FeedBurner, now a Google product still holding on to their quirkiness. I love how their their main navigation reads: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize

The "Troubleshootize" page carries forward the character and gives a fun spin to the standard FAQs.

And the dashboard tries to pull a page out of Flickr's book with random welcome messages.

It's a bit sad that their integration with Blogger is not smooth & completely frictionless, but that's a different story altogether.

Something that I've always wondered is whether such quirky copy (or "copy with character", as I like to call it) works with the general Indian internet audience? Or should one play it safe and produce plain-vanilla "transactional copy." What do you think? Any Indian products with such character that you know about?

Angry Birds Released for a New Platform...

2011-04-05T05:04:00.002+05:30

...Real life!

Spotted over a weekend at the Phoenix 'Mela' for a Nokia E-series
marketing event :-)

Will Firebug Be Issued a DMCA Takedown Notice?

2011-03-30T23:33:00.002+05:30

So, will NYT start issuing DMCA take-down notices to the umpteen tools that enable you to "circumvent" the NY Times paywall? What about tools like Firebug & Chrome Developer Tools? Even they can enable someone to "circumvent" by hiding the layover DIV.

Work of a seasoned consultant!

And with such a brain-dead paywall implementation (it's just a standard HTML/DIV layover), would one really call it an effective control measure as expected by the DMCA Act:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
[...]
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

Apparently, NYT has spent $40-50 million on implementing this paywall. That's right, Rs 180-225 crore! Seriously WTF!

Flipkart Lite - A Review of Flipkart's Mobile Product

2011-03-29T01:27:00.003+05:30

I just love what Flipkart has done in the online retail space. The breadth of their catalogue is great. Their pricing is transparent. Their shipping is free. And their delivery times are phenomenal. I don't remember buying a book from anywhere other than Flipkart in the past year.

They have a mobile optimised site too - one of the very few in the Indian market. Flipkart Lite allows you to search & order all product lines available on the desktop site, i.e. books, mobiles, movies, music, games, cameras, & computers. However, the only payment option available is cash-on-delivery (COD). Given that they're in a business that doesn't need immediate fulfillment, like flight tickets, it's makes sense to avoid the payment challenge on mobile.

The transaction process is fairly straightforward, barring a minor glitch here or there. The experience seems to be optimised for small-screen devices as is clear from how they're treating the search box & search results.

Getting to Flipkart Lite

Visiting www.flipkart.com from my mobile browser (native browser on Nokia E63) I'm automatically redirected to the mobile site. However, I have to explicitly type m.flipkart.com on Opera Mini to get to the mobile site. It's a small bug that needs to be fixed, unless they've explicitly decided that Opera Minis are capable enough for the desktop version of the site.

The Home Page

On the home page it isn't completely obvious what to put in the search box. For quite some time I kept thinking one could search only for books. The only text hinting at the availability of multiple product categories is "below the scroll" and seems more like marketing gobbledygook, best ignored.

The Search Experience

Ambiguous search terms, which return results from multiple product categories are handled pretty well. The search results page for such terms defaults to the product category which is most popular. It would be interesting to know how Flipkart determines popularity on a keyword basis. Searches for "Udaan" & "Dev D" returned the music listings first, whereas searches for "Kaminey" & "Dabangg" return the movie listings.

I feel the search results page, while functional, can use a better visual treatment.

The Product Details Page

Clicking on the product title leads you to the product details page. Apart from reviews and other product recommendations, it lists all the details that the desktop site carries. Again, the visual treatment could use some serious work. Especially the specs section of phone product pages. (View screenshot »)

The Transaction Process

Clicking "Buy this now" takes you to a form which asks for your PIN code, phone number & email ID.

Hitting the "Verify" button takes you to a form which asks your name & address. Surprisingly, the name & address are NOT pre-filled from the user's profile info. Typing out a complete address on the phone is pretty painful - especially if you're not on a QWERTY devidce. This is a major usability glitch adding to some friction in the transaction process. There could've been some privacy concerns around misuse of this feature (get anyone's home/office address if you know their phone number & email), but nothing that a cleverly worded & placed OPTIONAL password field could not solve.

An order review screen, followed by an order confirmation screen upon hitting the "Place order" button.

The Good

All product categories available
Almost all product information that is available on desktop site is also available on mobile site
Easy to use cash-on-delivery payment option
Fairly well optimized for small-screen/mobile devices

The Bad

Friction in the checkout flow caused by not pre-filling the user's shipping address.
While site is pretty usable on mobile devices, the layouts could use a better visual treatment
Minor-bug in detecting the browser type (mobile or desktop)

Go ahead - give it a spin. Visit m.flipkart.com now and let me know your feedback in the comments section below. Overall it's a very well executed mobile product. Any other mobile optimized websites in the Indian market that you know about?

3 Reasons Why You Need Test Driven Development

2011-03-25T09:07:00.003+05:30

Having been through the initial phase of a startup, I've been responsible for fairly large projects on impossible timelines. With ever-changing specs and the pressure to ship, we never really got the time to write any automated tests.

It's not something that I'm proud of.

I took the first opportunity to experiment with "Test Driven Development" (TDD) when the support contract with a vendor ran out and I had to fix a bug myself. Based on this experience here's why I think every project needs test driven development:

#1 TDD will be your saviour when you're editing someone else's code

The project that the vendor had built for me wasn't very big, nor very complex. But I was in for a shock when I got my hands dirty to fix a bug. There weren't problems in the code, the code itself was the problem! It was, like, 10 WTFs per minute.

While I had to fix the bug fast, the last thing I wanted was to end up with messy and broken code. So, before fixing anything I wrote tests against the classes & methods that I planned on changing.

Thanks to these tests I was confident that my first patch to production didn't break any existing behaviour of the app.

Moral: Test suites will be your saviour when you're treading the "unknown code" territory without knowing what you may accidently break.

#2 TDD will be your guiding light when you're refactoring or rewriting code

The database structure was a mess. The ActiveRecord associations were a mess. The entire code base was a sad, sad mess. (DRY & basic structured programming, it seems, were concepts alien to the developer.)

I caught the developer's itch. I just had to fix this. I went on a refactoring spree.

The application was a 'rule engine' of sorts. It had 'marketing campaigns' comprising set of rules/filters to be applied on e-commerce transaction records. All transactions matching the rules/filters were to be assigned coupon codes.

The classes with the filtering logic were the application core. I wrote comprehensive tests against the expected behaviour. Then I rewrote the entire 'filtering' code to pass those tests.

Changing the DB structure next, was a breeze. With tests guaranteeing the sanctity of the core logic, I could rewrite & refactor like a madman.

Moral: When re-writing code, tests are the machine readable Bible of Specifications. Write them first. You'll thank yourself.

#3 You'll make love to your tests when you're deploying to production

After experimenting with InfiniDB & Infobright, my laptop refused to start plain-vanilla MySQL. So, I was forced to use an Sqlite3 DB for testing. Given ActiveRecord & it's DB abstractions, I wasn't expecting any issues deploying to MySQL in production (how naive?!)

Along came Murphy.

The very first comamand 'rake db:load' barfed. Did you know that MySQL does not allow TEXT columns to have DEFAULT values? I didn't. I quickly changed all TEXT fields to sufficiently large STRING fields and re-ran the test-suite. All clear.

Next, a perfectly innocent test failed against the production MySQL server. From the debugging output it was clear that an ActiveRecord association was unexpectedly becoming 'nil'. Digging deeper I realised that it was because of a special object that was required to have ID=0 in the DB. Did you know that MySQL will accept any value in an AUTO_INCREMENT INT field apart from 0? I didn't! I quickly changed the fixture, application code, & test code to look for ID=1 instead of ID=0 for this special object. Test. Clear.

From never having run the app against MySQL, to fixing stuff at last minute & still being confident of the app behaviour. I completed the entire deployment in 45 minutes flat! All thanks to those tests.

Moral: Most deployments don't go as planned. Many incorrect assumptions for the production environment are discovered at the last moment, resulting in dirty hacks & monkey patches. In such times, your test suite will be like your faithful lover, giving you confidence and standing by you through thick & thin.

Thanks to the "perfect-entry-for-The-Daily-WTF-code" written by the vendor I got the chance to experiment with TDD. I'm sold! Comprehensive test suites will be the baseline reqiuirement for all my future projects.

Update: Is it serendipity that the day I publish this blog post I get this Dilbert strip in my Google Reader? Hilarious!