Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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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.

Stumbled across this slidedeck on slideshare. Really cool. Friends at n00b.in will be really happy :)

Time for another Friday Update. Its not even funny how soon a Friday came. I was in Delhi for two days visiting markets for a client. The trip was more exhausting than exciting. No new highlights so to speak of. However the Delhi trip gave quite a few ideas on interesting things that can be done in the Indian market. I will list few of them here.

To start with, a business idea.

• Background: While in market, I saw that Coke has a water brand called BonAqua apart from Kinley (that they recently relaunched). Wondering why would Coke have two brands in packaged drinking water category. I also saw that Frito Lays has launched a brand called Desi Beats - in direct competition to ITC’s Bingo.
• Idea: How about a market intelligence company? Not a market research company but a market intelligence company. The difference being that market researchers would try and collect data when demanded by the clients and on the other hand, market intelligence company would gather intelligence and help companies and brands take proactive decisions.
• Business Case: As a brand it is very difficult for me to keep track of things that are happening in the market. I would readily pay for a company that monitors the market on my behalf and gives me weekly or monthly dossiers on what is happening in the market. Further, this is better than market research because I am not paying for data that is mostly fudged and has lots of biases built it. In fact more and more clients I meet as part of my work for Creativeland Asia dont want to believe in traditional market research methodologies.
• How would I do this? If I had volunteers or part-timers whose only job is to go and click pictures at retail shelves across the country, I can have reams of data. And with advent of personal technology, its cheap and convenient to click pictures and send it to a centralized location. I can then have another team analyze this data for information and patterns. For example if suddenly all pics from Delhi show that Red Bull is now visible at even the juice stores, that would mean that Red Bull is trying to revamp their distribution and has ambitious plans.
• Probable roadblocks: Quite a few. Including things like <retailers not allowing you to click pictures>, <motivation and remuneration of volunteers>, <team of analysts>, <no competitive advantage> etc. Need to think lot more on this.
• Future of this idea. I think I will post this on VentureWoods and see if I get some feedback. And once I put things in shape, will try to take it further.

Apart from this, other notable things are

• A tee shirt shop that is very close to my n00b.in tees idea. Have to check these people out.
• Learned more about LeagueOne. Rather than opening new stores, they are just aggregating traditional retail stores and selling non-FMCG products/services like insurance, mobile recharges, OOH screens, movie tickets etc. there. Very interesting concept with lots of potential. More on this later. Probably a new blog post all together.

I am a huge fan of Kevin Kelly and probably he is one of the inspirations behind n00b.in. In this video, Kevin talks about Wired.

In the vid, Kevin says, “starting a magazine is like starting a restaurant. Its a very good recipe for failure“. He also says that “Wired magazine is the magazine that we write for ourselves“. Think Kunal and me should also create a similar video, where we talk about n00b.in and that people can watch when n00b.in becomes big.

If creating a magazine that talks about pop culture sounds interesting to you, please do contact me.

Kunal (my partner @ n00b.in) says

I dont know what I want to do in my life, but I want to die a legend.

I couldn’t agree more. In fact we can use this as a VC pitch (if ever we have one). No wonder Kunal and I are in this together.