Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Flickr, the image sharing website, allows us to create groups (pools) where people can put their images in certain groups. You could for example create a group where everyone uploads their Counter-Strike scores and everyone else can see and probably hurl profanities at each other. There are lots of pools on Flickr. From as absurd as what is in your bag to as refined as catchy colors. Apart from offering a peek into the lives of people, these are really interesting social experiments and an alternate way to conduct market research.

The other day when I was thinking how can I know what do people save on their desktops and how many desktops are clutter free. I thought Flickr could be a good medium for this personal research. I created Desktop Screenshot on Flickr. Please join and share your desktops.

You might ask “whats in it for me”. I dont really have freebies to giveaway but I jotted down following reasons that might motivate you to join in and contribute your desktop screenshot

1. Simply, aren’t you curious how other people’s desktops look?
2. Opportunity to share your desktops with the world. Although you risk revealing your files and secret plans to take over the world, you can share your personalization style with people. Everyone can know how messy, clean, sorted, organized you are.
3. May be, just may be, a comment on your desktop screenshot might  help boost that ego .. ?
4. And there are 21 other people who are members. May be that is a reason?

Do log in, see the images and if you like please share and spread word.

Just opened my desk drawer and there were hundreds of coins, tens of Diet Coke Pull-Tabs and lots of pencils. I have been collecting these for some time now. And these things are as dear as anything else could be. In fact you can hold these tabs for ransom and I would do anything to get them back.

I am sure people DO collect things - from something as mundane as a stamp to something as interesting as a food bill (or is it the other way round?). Over a period of years, I have collected stamps, coins, matchboxes, postcards, autographs, certificates, marbles, empty boxes, bills, envelopes, tins, sand, songs, books, movies etc. Is it only me who is so engrossed in collecting things or are there more?

Curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know what other people collect. I asked junta on twitter. Within the next two minutes I was told that people collect DVDs, Books, miniature elephants etc.

Logical extension would be a place to aggregate all these things and realized that Flickr and its group is just the right place. Just created this Flickr Group. Please see/share/comment things that people around the world collect. Use the tag “iCollect” in case you decide to upload your pictures.

Don’t you think, its a good way to share what absurd/weird/non-conventional thing do YOU collect?

The leading headline for this Friday has to be India’s show at Olympics. We have ended our Olympic run with three medals (One Gold and Two Bronzes). As on today, we are at 45th place (link here). Wrestler Suresh Kumar came out of nowhere and got us a Bronze. Boxer Vijender Kumar got us another Bronze but this one got way too much attention - thanks to a day’s gap and his boyish looks? I will not get into rant about the game and how we need to look beyond these Olympics and prepare ourselves to take on the world in 2012 at London. I would move on to my Hits, Misses and Random Musings section.

Hits

• Blogging Tip: Make sure that the About page on your blog is done really well. I have always placed importance on these pages but Google Analytics for this blog has helped me understand that it is really important. My About page is the most visited page on my blog. I have updated it since but its still work in progress. If you can recommend some changes there, please do.
• Twitter: I have crossed 700 followers on twitter. This is not important to please my ego but this helps me get in touch with more people and more ideas to lift from. Actually I am trying to get the network effect going on for me. More people I follow, more ideas I get, more conversations happen, better is the quality of ideas/work. I actually saw it work for me when I wrote about Nokia’s use of social media and all the people I wanted to read the post, read it.
• Flickr: I recently discovered flickr as an awesome way to conduct secondary research. With people uplaoding all kinds of images on flickr, if you use the right tools, you can mine amazing data. I will post a simple example. I want to know what things are important to people. What if I looked in their bags to determine what all they carried with them? There are few ways to go about this. I can ask them to fill a questionnaire. Or I can ask them to think what would people carry. Or I can simply go to What’s in your bag Flickr group. The possibilities are endless. Its one of those New New Things that I love chasing.

Misses

• iPhone 3G launch in India: Finally after months of waiting, Apple finally launched iPhone 3G in India. It has been priced at Rs. 31, 000 with no mandatory contracts. For an average Indian 31k is very steep and I already know a lot of people who wanted to buy but aren’t because cost is very prohibitive. Also becuase people were waiting to buy a device like and iPhone and its high price, I can see Nokia N96 etc. getting a larger chunk of market share. IMHO there was simply too much hype around iPhone in India. Lessons for marketers? Hype is good. Very good. But not delivering on the hype can make you most ardent fans into die-hard opponents. If you were to fix the entire thing, how would you do it? Is there a way Apple can salvage the situation? Any ideas?
• n00b.in: I was in Delhi and yet could not meet Kunal and decide on the future of n00b.in. Looks like n00b is yet another project that would die an premature death without ever seeing the day of light. I need to somehow salvage it. Off all the ideas that I have ever come across, I am most excited by the possibilities that a place like n00b holds. From content to brands to entertainment to information to geekdom to thoughts, everything is there.

Random Musings

• Rant on Internet: While talking to a colleague about my Cannes trip, I was telling him about seven things that I think are the current trends in advertising (probably most of them are already things of past but they are still very new for India and there is a long long way to go). I think the themes are large enough to actually create a separate blog post on and make a presentation and upload on slideshare. In no order, these are seven things would be
  1. Empowered customers: Customers now know what exactly they want. And if they dont get it, they would make sure that they pester brand owners as long as brands dont deliver it.
  2. Emergence of Personal Media: Its so easy now to create any kind of media at drop of a hat. From blogs to pics to videos to complex mashups, people are trying their hands at everything.
  3. Collaboration: People talk to other people about their lives and brands. Increasingly over the Internet and often with strangers. Participation has gone to an entirely new level altogether where people contribute not for monetary incentives but social currency. Classic example is MadV. More on this on my post on Youtube.
  4. Mashups: Remixing of things to create new things. More on this follows.
  5. Mass Personalization: With technology advancements, it is possible to mass market a product and yet customize it. Simple example could the way you are greeted by your name when you board a Kingfisher flight in India. Why aren’t more brands adopting it? And with personalization, there is no limit to which you can go.
  6. Brand Ownership: Increasingly, marketers and brand owners are giving away the ownership of brands in the hands of the customers. Started with things like Orkut where you could report malicious behaviour of other users to keep the system clean, it has trickled down into main-stream advertising where marketers are giving tools to customers to take the brand forward. In a lot of cases, brands are actually asking customers what should they do with the brand. Most famous example? My Starbucks Idea.
  7. Branded Entertainment: I have spoken about this earlier here. Would not add more gibberish.

• Mashups: I think mashups are the way of the future. More and more companies will make data and APIs available freely and more and more people would allow access to that data. In fact I think everything in future would be publicly available and with easy to deploy and easy to use tools like Popfly and Pipes, creating mashups would become a child’s play. Only constraint would be the imagination. I have to think more on it. Read more on it.

Come to think of it, this weekend could be really interesting if I get time to think on things. I can speak about the 7 new things that can be used in advertising in India, write on Flickr ecosystem, read about mashups and hopefully create some and understood two very important lessons on blogging. Still about 6 hours to go before the end of the week. Might write more.