Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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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.

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

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.

I am sure everyone is aware of the recent controversies surrouding the boycott of the Olympic Games in light of problems between China and Tibet. Our country seems to have a knack of getting itself involved in every issue important to the world.

I am talking about torch relay through India on April 17. It was supposed to happen in India and was supposed to pass along a message of global harmony and peace that the games represent. It was also supposed to educate Indians about the games and spirit it embodies. Some people were also considering it as the precursor to Commonwealth Games in 2010.

However, officials have decided that the torch relay would be inaccessible to the common man. If I may ask Y. If India may ask Y. Isn’t common man makes a person a very important person? Isn’t a VIP a public figure? Doesn’t the common man own the VIPs?

I know that there is a “clear and present danger” to the torch, the torch bearers, the olympic committee officials, policemen guarding the torch, VIPs trying to look fit and carry the torch, semi-nude cheerleaders cheering the torch-bearers, school children in their fancy dresses, lost doggies of policemen and a lot of other important people. I know that whatever China is doing or not doing in Tibet is uncalled for. I know that I am getting bald fast. I know Veerapan is long dead.

But why so much politics around an olympic torch? They are calling for snipers and equivalent to FBI and CIA to guard the torch. China is promising tactical support for the torch. Thankfully US, Iraq and Afganistan are not interesting in restoring global peace with this torch.

Then I dont want to talk about the expense account of the entire security operation. I am not trying to say that the entire IOC (Indian Olympic Committee) flew to Melbourne for the closing ceremony and superstars were paid crores to just say goodbye to the games. Am not asking for an audit on the accounts and private businesses of the officials. All I am saying is that make it accessible to the junta.

People like Sachin Tendulkar, Anju Bobby George, Milkha Singh have been invited to participate. Certain people like Bhaichung Bhutia and Amir Khan have decided not to run. I have never seen a bunch of grown-ups and intellects fighting over a sporting event (except the battle between ICL and IPL).

Its about time India really asked Y.