Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. I talk about India, Entrepreneurship and the New New Thing. Thanks.

I will skip this week’s Friday Update as I have limited access to internet. This entire week I haven’t logged on to gtalk, Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin, Google Reader or replied to any emails or comments on my blogs. My online activity has been limited to checking my primary email account and trading in stocks.

The coming week looks real tough with all these mammoth tasks pending.

P.S.: Looking forward to it.

India has finally launched Chandrayaan amidst a lot of fan fare. Its India’s first mission to moon - though unmanned, it still is a giant leap for India. We can now boast of indigenous technology at par with at least some of the other developed nations. Thank you team at ISRO. You have made all of us proud.

Business

• Rupee hit 50 to a dollar for the first time ever. ET reports. Implications are going to be huge for Indian companies. Only advantage that we brought to the table was cost (I refuse to believe that we bring intellectual capital to the table - especially in IT and ITES space). With dwindling economies in Europe and US and falling rupee, I am not sure how will we sustain businesses in India.
• Sensex dipped below 9000 after a long long time. Everyone is scared and its an awesome feeling to be amongst all this.  Lots of lessons to be taken back home. Probably will write another blog post on this.

Advertising

• Recession hits advertising business. There have been unconfirmed news that major advertising networks have frozen recruitments. Campaign India published this story and made it official. Bad news for all the aspiring advertising rockstars. I guess the really good ones are left with a couple of options only. Either start on your own (remember David Ogilvy started one when he dint have an option?) or help us make our clients and their brands famous. Creativeland is still hiring. Do let us know if you think you can lend a hand.
• Sony Bravia: After Balls, Bunnies and Colors, Bravia is back with Domino City. Not as good as balls or bunnies, it still is a much watch. A question (and a tough one at that)… do these ads make you want to own a Bravia?
• Mac vs PC: Unlike most of the people on Internet, I liked the Microsoft ads. And yes, I respect both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Apple came up with this spot to take on the $300 mn ad-spend that Microsoft is embarking upon.

Other things

• Bill Gates and his new company. TechFlash says that Bill Gates has created a new company called bgC3 and is most likely to be a think-tank and would try to coordinate Bill Gates’ personal, philanthrpic and professional efforts.
• Jeff Bezos at TED. In 2003, Jeff spoke at TED about the next web innovation (Thanks Gaurav for the link). In this talk, he draws parallels between the Gold Rush and Internet and then Electricity Industry and Internet and concludes that we have just invented electricity and applicances are yet to made. In simpler language, we have just laid the framework and created environment for innovation. Transformational uses of the same are yet to be seen. For the record, I admire Jeff Bezos and hope to pick his brains some day. This is an old post where Jeff is talking about future of publishing business.

Interesting tidbits

• GrassRoutes.in. Simply put, you travel to the grassroots, see the problem for yourself and be the change. Please visit the website and participate. Honestly, nothing is better than travel and getting to know things first hand. Grassroutes is an YOFA initiative and the honestly I am humbled by the kind of ideas and more importantly execution of the ideas.
• Over a last few days, for n00b.in, I have been checking design stores that cater to Indian customers. Some brilliant stores that I have found are People Tree, playclan, play-asia, thinkgeek. And yes, n00b.in would actually have a store.
• I am on tumblr. A very very good service for sharing things. Its like Blogs > Twitter > Tumblr. Easy, fast, interesting, fun. Am loving it. Please follow me here.

Overall a very very interesting and exciting week. Oh yea, I am in Delhi. If anyone wants to meet, please drop a line.

Nokia as a company continues to impress me with their initiatives with Social Media and Interaction with customers. From WOMWORLD blogger outreach (of which I was a small and insignificant part) to Nokia Conversations to enabling people like Jan Chipchase, Nokia does phenomenal work.

The latest in series is an initiative for Nokia N96. Yet again, the idea is fairly simple. They took one N96 and decided to send it on a world tour. Unlike a typical world tour where one person has the ownership, they decided to crowdsource it. They would send the phone to an individual. Each person uses it for a week. And passes it on. Along the way people can upload and share videos on OVI channel, Twitter and obviously write about it on their personal blogs.

Fantastic idea. Apart from touching lives of all these people and people around them, the media and content created with this phone over the tour period would not be less than a treasure trove. I really look forward to the output.

The very fact that I as a mere silent spectator am blogging about it, justifies that the experiment is bound to create some hype.

Costs for Nokia? One N96 handset, shipping across the world from point to point, a webserver. Negligible.

Although Social Networking phenomenon is very old and probably past its peak, I am still intrigued by this very basic question. What do people do on social networking sites?

More than relying on research reports and data gathered by biggies of social networking over the last few years, I would rather introspect and document what I do at these sites. And what my friends do there. For me top three things would be

1. Share and Discover lives - Upload and read update, photos, notes videos etc.
2. Kill time - Games, Movies, Celeb Gossip, Event Planning etc.
3. Discovery of Interestingness - Interesting people, interesting links etc.

What do you see yourself (and people around you) doing on SNS?  What are the top three things? Please share.

Facebook now has over 10 billion photos (via mashable). The numbers for other photo sharing sites are unknown but assuming that Flickr had 2 billion in Nov 07 (and they were growing by 5 million per day, Flickr should have about 5 billion photos), Facebook becomes the largest photo-sharing website.

Can someone give numbers on Orkut, MySpace, Flickr and Picasa … ?

Brings me to a radical idea. If Facebook stated charging for photo uploads, would the reveune stream be sustainable? Would people continue to upload pictures?

Thinking out loud about Flickr, it has evolved into a place where all the aspiring photographers publish their pictures hoping to catch attention of the world. What if there are places like that for all niches? A place where all aspiring actors upload their videos to be seen by directors and producers? A place where all aspiring sportsmen uploaded their videos and profiles to be spotted by talent scouts? Hmmm .. could be interesting. Any thoughts anyone?

Brings me to another point. What do people really do on social networking sites. More than relying on research reports, what do you see yourself and people around you doing on SNS? For me top three things would be

1. Share and Discover lives - Upload and read photos, videos, notes, blogs etc.
2. Kill time - Games, Movies, Celeb Gossip etc.
3. Discovery of Interestingness - Interesting people, interesting links etc.

What are your top three things that people do on networking sites?