Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Every Friday I will now post an update that will talk about the week that went by and what to expect on the coming weekend.

• To begin with, its 08.08.08 and its a date that I will not see for rest of my life (until someone discovers the magic formula that can extend the human life span).
• The date also marks inauguration of Olympics in Beijing, China. India has never done great things in Olympics but this time I think we will come back with at least 5 medals - one from Tennis (Paes n Bhupathi), two from shooters (Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and Manavjeet Singh Sandhu), two from boxers (Jitender Singh, Akhil Kumar) and one from Athletics (Anju Bobby George).
• This week also saw the launch of n00b.in blog. More information about n00b.in is available here.

Hits

• Nokia E 66: Nokia sent me a brand new E66 to review on my blog. The device looks awesome, will post a complete review once I have seen most of it, but the best part is the barcode scanner. It can read QR codes and interpret data. I see this as one of the most powerful things for time to come. At Cannes this year, Korean delegates already spoke about the interesting uses they are putting QR Codes to. The possibilities are endless. Will do another detailed post on QR codes. BTW the image on this post is QR code pointing to mt blog. Try it.
• India.Alltop.Com: I bribed my way into India.Alltop.com. This means I need to be more responsible while blogging. I need to produce better content. And I expect more visitors and subsequently more discussions and since they are coming from Alltop, I expect the quality of discussions to be better.

Misses

• Had decided to participate in the Nokia USID competition. Will miss the deadline and end up disappointing self and a very dear friend who had volunteered to help. Had quite a few ideas but could not put them in perspective.

Random Musings

• Indian brands on Twitter: Fasttrack is often quoted as a brand that has done well on Twitter in India. I asked tons of people on twitter about watches and I clearly showed my intentions of buying a watch but they never reached me. Its a fail. Ideally moment I publish this, they should know that I am talking negatively about their brand and they should somehow fix it. Lets see.
• Social Media: Nokia chose me to review one of their devices. Interesting use of Social Media to get bloggers to write about their devices. Few questions, why and how did they choose me? Is this replicable for other brands as well? Is this cost effective (I can always run away with an expensive phone) etc.
• Personal work style: I realized that I relish working at night more than the day time. I think its in the psychology. I think I like the fact that entire world around me is sleeping and I am sneaking ahead of them. I dont want to be part of any race to the top of mountain but I dont know why do I feel like this.
• Wordpress: I am using wordpress for quite sometime now and I think time is ripe to start reading more about it. I will spend this weekend trying to understand wordpress and in process learn a bit of PHP and wordpres moding. Lets see how it turns out.
• TED: TED talks is one of the most wonderful things to have happened to planet since Internet. I am on this mission to see all the talks on the website by end of this year.
• Quarter-Life Crisis: Avery good friend sent this Wikipedia link and everything on that page can summarize what I think. Except “desire to have children” part.
• If I was to tag this post properly, the number of tags on this post will exceed the post size. ;P But what the heck, it helps people find relevant content here and at other places.

P.S.: Inspired in part from Sampad’s Blog. Will update this as and when I remember more things.

Apart from helping people connect and interact and collaborate on things, Internet has actually democratized information. People can now upload their thoughts in any form (text, audio, video, mashup), tag them appropriately and watch the entire world discover it and take it forward.

You no longer need to be a celebrity or a rockstar or a politician to attract crowds as long as you know the right forums to voice your opinion.

The beauty of the medium is that the response is immediate. You will know in an instant if your idea holds merit and if it excites more people. You will get instant feedback. You will get in touch with people who think the way you think and you can now collaborate.

Any quick and dirty opinions?

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

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.

I am wondering Technorati has this awesome advantage of having all blogs link to it… !

They asked me to put a link to my Technorati Profile if I wanted to get higher ratings. Here I am. Can I have more visitors now please?