Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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I dont have to make more evident that I am a huge fan of Mr. Omar Abdullah. I posted this on Mutiny.in about five minutes ago. I am reproducing it here. The context is that Omar Abdullah used to write this blog here and he has decided to shut it down.

I dont know how many are even aware of Mr. Abdullah’s blog (Chacko posted about it on Mutiny), but as on yesterday he decided to shut down his blog (via this post). I tried posting comments but they are not being either approved or responded to.

Omar Abdullah says that he is shutting down his blog because

[QUOTE]Last night as I finished my last post I realised that I was filled with dread at the heap of personal abuse I was expecting when I logged on this morning and I was not wrong. We truly are a bunch of intolerant people. We want to be heard but do not have the strength to hear, we want to have an opinion but do not believe anyone else is entitled to one.[UNQUOTE]

Can we @ mutiny do something about it? I know the regular signature campaigns are just another way to show you care and not do anything. What if we as Mutiny Media (a publication starting 15th Aug) talk to him and try to give him more reasons why to blog? What if we show him that there are enough people who care about his blog and respect his opinion? Any media specialists hanging out on Mutiny?

I think a politician blogging is a very good idea because.

• It makes him more human and approachable.
• He gets timely and honest feedback. People can write back without fearing bureaucracy and lashback.
• People get to know what he really thinks (and not just the excerpts from media - media that can be biased).
• He sets a precedent for other politicians and public figures to follow suit and start writing.

Shutting a blog just because it attracts a lot of hate comments is simply not done. Blogging as a medium has its pros and cons and what we see in Omar Abdullah’s case is just one bad example.

Can we come up with ideas? Can mutiny finally make a difference and be counted as the “New Media”? Someone?

I also posted a comment on his blog. It is yet to be approved. If they approve it, I will reproduce it here. If anyone can give any ideas, please leave a comment.

Thank You.

Abhinav Bindra won the first individual gold medal for India in 10 m Air Rifle today. This is the first time an Indian has won a Gold Medal at Olympics. This gold comes after a long wait of 28 years. Last time we won a gold, it was in the Men’s Field Hockey (This time around our team dint even qualify BTW).

If I say I know a lot about him and put things from all over the web, it would be unfair. To be honest I dont know a lot about the man (isn’t this a huge paradox, we know every small detail about all cricketers and dont even know the full names of other sportsmen?). All I know is that this is monumental and hope we win mode medals. Will update this post with more things once I get over the shock and excitement.

If someone has pics and vids from the award ceremony, please share links.

UPDATE

• A friend says “ashamed to be be proud of one medal”. I think he couldn’t have been more correct. More on this later.

Links

• Abhinav Bindra’s Official Blog
• Official Medal’s Tally, India’s medal winners
• Abhinav Bindra on Wikipedia
• AceBindra.com has a good compilation of facts and stats about Abhinav Bindra

In this EconTalk podcast, Hal Varian, Chief Economist with Google speaks about Search amongst other things.

He says that search is about two things. Precision and Recall. He then defines precision as “off the number of documents retrieved by a search result, how many are relevant” and recall as “off all the relevant results, how many were retrieved”.

This is my opinion is very important aspect. Before we take on a problem to solve, we need to have the exact definitions in place.

He also spoke about co-evolution of technology and users. He said that any technology and its adopters evolve rapidly with time. He took examples of cars and extended it to search engines.

He said that users are getting more skilled at entering search queries. This helps both user and the search engine in delivering results that are high on precision and recall. And thus making the experience better for the user.

This probably explains why most of the user-dependent (user generated, network effect etc) businesses remain in beta stages for long times (gmail is still in beta). Till the time both (business and users) evolve and are mature enough to help each other, system has to remain in beta.

Lessons? Help your users evolve. Give them tools of the trade. They would need some hand-holding to learn initially. And then they would need the freedom and independence to play around with the system before they start making effective use of the system. And same goes for the system as well.

Please note that the definitions might not be exact (since I took notes while listening to the podcast), but the essence has been preserved. Link to podcast.

BookExpoCast.com has this podcast where Jeff Bezos talks about Kindle and then Chris Anderson (Wired Mag, The Long Tail) speaks to Jeff about publishing industry, Kindle, Amazon and Blue Origin.

The podcast is very very insightful and here are my raw notes from the podcast. Please note that these are raw notes and I scribbled them while listening to the podcast. I might have mis-understood and/or mis-interpreted the podcast but there are so many gems of wisdom that it would be a crime to not post them here.

I am breaking them into sections.

On Amazon

1. Amazon was founded in 94. (I read later that Jeff Bezos created the Amazon business plan post his road trip across the country. I am planning to take one myself end of 2008. May be I will have some ideas too :D)
2. When he was founding Amazon, Bezos had more than 40 meetings with 22 angel investors to raise USD 1 mn for the seed.
3. Bezos also said more likely someone knew about the publishing business, less likely were they to invest in Amazon.
4. One Amazon customer has bought more than 1700 books. WOW.
5. Things like Super Saver on Amazon saves time and money or both Amazon and end customer. This helps them save by exploiting economies of scale and scope. They can ship two orders together faster.

On Kindle

1. It took more than 3 years to develop Kindle.
2. Kindle is a device that allows people to get books that they are looking for. And the ones they aren’t looking for. Serendipity and accidental discovery of interesting books plays an important part of Kindle experience.
3. Kindle uses electronic ink. This is different from text that we see on a computer or LCD screen
4. While designing Kindle, the Amazon team wanted to capture few essential features of the system that they were making redundant. Things like book like form, ability to take notes, underline things etc.
5. Other important things were weight of Kindle, ability to read in sunlight, efficient on power-consumption.
6. The annotations and markings are stored on the Amazon servers. These are later searchable and can be accessed from anywhere.
7. Kindle wanted to make it easy for the customer to browse the books and eventually buy more titles off the store. (The streamlined the book buying experience by integrating the buy button on recommendation engine and then not charging customer for the download separately. The cost of the network/download is bundled with the price of the book)
8. Bezos made sure that the popular titles, including the ones on the bestsellers lists were available on Kindle right from day 1. This is important so that the customer who have spent about USD 399 on buying a device are not disappointed.
9. Someone sent a comment “it is about the message and not about the medium” - when they were comparing reading physical books with Kindle. (This I think is very important. We can make thousands of industries redundant if we focus on the delivery of the message).
10. Interesting statistic. About 6% of total Amazon book sales (by volume) now come from Kindle. Kindle customers buy as many physical book as eBooks. This was a surprising for even Jeff Bezos.
11. The grand vision for Kindle is all books ever published in any language anywhere in the world made available to you in less than 60 seconds. Which in my opinion is as large as a PC on every desktop. Kudos to Jeff Bezos for this grand a vision and ACTUALLY making it come to life.
12. He actually got CEO of Simon and Schuster on stage to talk about Kindle and how it is making it easier for publishers. (This was probably to address concerns of publishers - since the publishers have to first make the books available in electronic format).

On Future of Kindle

1. Amazon sees Kindle as more than just an access device. They are already talking about experiments like never-ending book and collaborative writing using Kindle.
2. Bezos envisions Kindle as a toolset for publishers and readers. He further talks about giving both publishers and customers these toolsets and let them surprise everyone else with their discoveries and inventions (I am reminded again of Jan Chipchase and his research).
3. Its also about finding the right readers for publishers. If you are a student in Iceland looking for books on biological traits of Saharan camels, you can only find them on Amazon. Or Kindle. Kindle thus acts as a platform where a publisher can find his audience and vice versa.
4. When asked if Kindle is already redundant with faster cellphones and other access devices, Bezos compared it with cameras. Every mobile phone has a camera now and people still buy smaller cameras and SLRs and other photography equipment. (I am sort of confused at this one. I think cameras AND Kindle both might get redundant at some point in time.)

On Bezos himself

1. Jeff Bezos is bald. :D (And so am I.)
2. 4 kids. 8.6.3 and 3. :D
3. “You do not choose your passions. Your passions choose you.” Awesome quote by Jeff Bezos, when he was asked about Blue Origin. Bezos says motto for Blue Origin is Step by step ferociously and he says they are in an industry that helps humanity get into space.
4. Bezos says at one point in time that planetary alignments were needed to Amazon what it is today. Is he superstitious? (Am sure paparazzi would be snooping :D)

Other things

1. Jeff Bezos talk about a concept of “me time”. A time that you spend away from everyone including your family, co-workers etc. This time is typically spent bathing, exercising, traveling etc. A Kindle gives people something to do in this “me time”.
2. Awesome insight into way humans understand interactions. Humans are storytelling animals and we like narratives. (Actually wrote about branding as storytelling few months ago but I never developed the concept further.
3. What about used books? Is there money to be made there? Everyone wants to read books and doesn’t really want to pay for the book prices. If there was a website to regulate that? A pre-web2.0 era website is doing that in Delhi. Is their merit in buying that website out?
4. You make money when you help customer make the purchase decision. This was in response to someone asking if negative reviews are bad for the business. All reviews actually help make the purchase decision. Negative , positive doesn’t really play a role
5. On elastic compute cloud, the idea was to convert the huge fixed cost for customers into onDemand variable cost. (I wrote about onDemand economics for my Berlin School application)

The best part about any great conversation is the quality and quantity of ideas that stem out of there. For me, these are the things that I think have the potential to be businesses.

1. I think the Techcrunch Web Tablet probably stemmed out of the Kindle idea. And even though the commercial production and distribution might be years away, they want to stake a claim on the idea before anyone else.
2. How about doing something on the old books market in India. Especially in all the engineering colleges in India, the content remains same and thus there is a large chunk demand. And then obviously there is the long tail.
3. Search cost plays an important part in getting the buyers and sellers together. I wrote about Search Cost way back in Feb 08 and I think its about time I revisited that.
4. Purchase decision is an interesting thing to think about. My day job involves working on this purchase decision for some of the leading brands in India and there is so much that I learn everyday. Need to post about it. What if there was a tool that everyone trusted and assisted in purchase decisions?
5. The entire idea of making fixed costs redundant has been in existence for a long time. Things like outsourcing and contracts actually do that. But doing it to something as fundamental as network, access and storage is sheer brilliance. Airtel did that with their network in India and do far have reaped awesome rewards off it. What else can converted into variable costs? Brain power? Processing? Coding?

If you are listening to the podcast, please share your thoughts. And apologies for such a long post. I did not realize that I have taken these many notes.

Credits
Image: Gizmodo.com

Ashish says that you “enable communities” and I think you “create” them. And since it’s a serious challenge to my understanding of social behavior, let me defend my position.

By the very definition,

a community is a group of individuals who are brought together by force or they come together because they share a common interest.

Classic examples are community of slaves working on erecting pyramids and users flocking pluggd.in because they are interested in start-ups in India.

Keywords in the definition are group, individuals and together. A group that is useful to the individual and together the group and the individual make it worth sticking to.

When I say that you create communities, it implies that you bring all these people together (by force, by coercion, by advertising, by showing them advantages of being a member, by hook, by rewarding participatory behavior or by showing that everyone but you is a member, or any of million other ways). Once there is a group, you share ideas and vision on what could become of this group if everyone participates. And when they start participating and everyone is in sync with the collective vision, the group become a community.

For a community to thrive, there needs to be a connecting thread – a reason for members to believe in. A selling proposition. An answer to “Why this community” question. This reason can again be provided by force (if you don’t work, you will be killed) or by prestige associated by just being a member (I am member of AsmallWorld.net – are you? I have access to GMail – do you have it? Etc.).

Second part is that the community as a whole should be useful for the members. No one would want to just give and not take anything in return. People don’t join communities. People join groups hoping that the group would be useful to them. Moment a group becomes useful for individuals, or that user, the group transforms from a group to a community.

When you are starting a community, you HAVE to bring together people. You will have to hand pick people who are committed to this binding thread with or without the usefulness of the community. These are the people whose actions would make the community useful for subsequent members. In case of pluggdin, for example, Ashish would have started writing about start-ups in India. He would have posted the link at relevant places, would have sent emails to friends and family who are interested in start-ups and slowly and gradually people starting coming in. He thus created a community. One member at a time.

On the other hand when you talk about enabling a community, you assume people already know why they are there. You assume that they

1. know what is common between all of them.
2. know why are they not a directionless herd.
3. know what is purpose of their group.
4. can see a larger picture.
5. know how is group useful.

This all might happen in an ideal world and I refuse to agree that any heterogeneous or even homogeneous group of people can answer all the above-mentioned questions. And if you are just enabling the community without holding their hand, telling them what to do and what actions to take. In my humble opinion, they will be as lost as kids in the topless bar :D.

And with this your-honor, I rest my case.

Regards,
Saurabh Garg
www.saurabhgarg.com/thoughts

P.S.: And I agree that your group/community should be empowered enough to recommend and make changes. They should be empowered to remove things that they don’t like. They should be empowered to freely add on to the community. They should be allowed to explore. They should be given the tools to be themselves and create new things for the community. :D

Image Credits: Sifah via Flickr.

External Links

1. WSJ: Why Most Online Communities Fail - via elan2

Freedom is something that most of us has taken for granted. Most of us reading this have born in free India and had all the comforts and privileges offered by freedom. And we were thus shielded from an era where even things as personal as thoughts were controlled.

I was talking to few college students in Mumbai and I realized that most of us are disconnected with reality. Most of them think that its ok to accept western culture and leave our heritage behind. And then there are some who had their feet firmly planted in ground and want to first understand the past and want to plant careful steps in future.

I was wondering, is there a way to find out what everyone thinks about India as a country and what is their big idea of freedom and independence? For a lot of people freedom is an oppurtunity to pursue their dreams. For some it is their second nature. They look at it as a way of life. For some it is something insignificant for which all the freedom fighters lost their lives. Some are indifferent and haven’t really thought about freedom at all.

Which category do you fall under?

The Idea
This brings me to the idea. The Freedom Blog. What if Indians all over the world submitted one piece of work that they think symbolizes freedom? This could be an original thought, a blog post that you have written, an original composition, a link to a website, a photograph, a picture, a video, a music piece, an incident, a mashup or any other way that you think expresses your idea of freedom.

Post this submissions stage, all these submissions would be put on the Freedom Blog in context and publish them on a website or a blog on 15th August 2008 for everyone to scrutinize.

The result will give us a fairly good indication of what people really think of Freedom. How they perceive it and what it actually means to them.

Interested?

Few ground rules

• Deadline for submission: 5th August 2008
• How to submit: Email your ideas to saurabh.garg@gmail.com.
• Ownership: You retain the ownership of your work. I will just re-publish them on the Freedom Blog with due credits.
• Terms and Conditions: None.

How can you help?

• Obviously you can help by submitting your work.
• You can also help by spreading word about the Freedom Blog. You can post on your blogs, in your twitter streams, email to friends, share on social networks, call up people etc.
• And finally if people do submit their work, you can help in filtering and putting things in context.

How did I stumble on this?
I happen to be a huge fan of collaborative experiments on the Internet. I have participated in quite a few myself and its about time I did something of my own. I was working on some other idea when I stumbled on this. Obviously serendipity plays a huge role in my life and it so happened that Independence Day is around the corner. And I thought If I started acceptance of media from 5th of July, people will have a month to ideate and create their work, I will have time to collect it and then I will be left with some time (9 days) to actually collate and make some sense out of it and finally release it on 15th August 2008.

What do I get out of this?

• Satisfaction of actually being able to unite Indians into thinking like a group.
• Understanding of the way people think.
• Answer to the question “if people actually cherish freedom and independence”. Every submission would mean that entrant has indeed thought about freedom at some point in time and is aware of the comfort (and challenges) that freedom brings. Every person who spreads the world is an Indian at heart and is also seeking answers to these questions. Every person who reads is concerned and wants to enrich his/her understanding of Indians.
• UPDATE: Someone has already asked if this is a commercial project. NO this is not commercial. This is not sponsored by anyone. There is no media coverage happening.

Obviously none of this is possible without help from you guys. Please let me know if this makes sense. Thanks for your time.

William Henry Gates 3, better known as Bill Gates is retiring from active duty at Microsoft today. This marks an end of an era. An era where a seemingly new line of business was created by Bill Gates and Microsoft. An era that symbolized new generation entrepreneurs taking over the world of business. An era that gave hope to millions of small time businessesmen, dreamers that its actually right to dream and chase them. An era when two young men can produce something that can rule the world some day. An era that envisioned a computer on every desktop. An era that changed the way we work and think. An era that made sure the world is on a rapid path to development.

For me, a computer is probably the most important invention after light bulb and telephone. It made tedious tasks lot easier, faster and fun. This is where Bill Gates played an important role. Gates made sure that a computer is accessible by even an ordinary man. He was the first person to have created an operating system that makes a computer easy to use as a personal tool. And rest as they say, is history.

From a humble beginning, Microsoft went on to become a huge giant in software space. They have an entire suite of productivity and office products. Its fantastic that a company commands a valuation of more than USD 250 bn and most of their revenues come from something that is non-tangible. Compare this with other businesses where at major chunk of valuation comes from tangible and fixed assets. For me, Microsoft is truly the first company that created an empire just on the pillars of information and productivity.

Obviously Bill Gates couldn’t have worked forever at Microsoft and he had to go at some point in time. What’s good about them is that he is leaving at a time when businesses are doing fairly well, obviously there are lots of challenges. Then they have been planning a succession for almost 2 years.

Now that Bill Gates is gone, what happens to Microsoft? I think they already see the company in uints like software, services, gaming and Internet. If at all I was at Microsoft, I would look it as a company that enables people to be more productive (Windows, Office), enables people to connect (FB, Internet, MSN), enables people to entertain themselves (xBox and gaming division) and enables companies to work better (developer applications, programming languages etc.). Moment you start thinking on these lines, there is so much more than your company can be rather than just another software company. You suddenly are playing on a different level altogether.

For a lot of people Bill Gates stands for control, closed-systems, authority and monopoly. Everyone is free to have opinions and if I could defend Mr. Gates, I will use only one line. That Bill Gates is trying to run a business. Everything that he has done was to make sure that his business grows. For me, Bill Gates stands for Entrepreneurship, Business Acumen, Vision, Execution and a Great Mind. Would love to pick his brain some day.

Bill, you will be missed.

Image Credits: Flickr