The New New Thing

BarCamp Mumbai 4 is around the corner. For the uninitiated, barcamps are “unconferences” that are organized by volunteers and attendants talk about anything and everything under the sun. Since these kinds of events attract people who love experimenting and networking, the kind of audience that attends is skewed towards technologists, programmers, coders, media and Internet enthusiasts.

And like all the other unconferences, these are open to all and anyone can take and/or attend any sessions. There are no rules. There are no formalities. If you like a session, you interject. If you dont like, you walk out. If you are looking for a job, take a session on showing off your skills. If you are looking for clients, showcase your product/service. Its like one large Kumbh ka Mela where everyone is trying to sell and buy at the same time.

Sounds great but honestly I dont really like the concept. With a large audience, more often than not, sessions tend to be unfocused (is this actually a word?), covering really diverse themes, by often not so good speakers (trying to put another bullet point on their CV rather than furthering the cause) and fail to add any real value to the attendants. Please note that I am not implying for a single minute that the quality of speakers is bad or the sessions are shallow, just that the ones I have attended weren’t up to the mark.

And after all the rambling, there has to be a way to make them better and excite the right kind of people. If I was one of the organizers, I would have done the following things to help the cause …

1. Tweak the format. Let is remain an unconference. Just add a theme to it. Something like a codecamp or a markcamp. Where it attracts only a certain kind of audience. Thus at a codecamp, lots of coders with all kinds of experience levels could come in and talk about coding and other things.
2. Pseudo-Workshop. I honestly believe that doing things is a far far better way to learn and experiment than just talking and listening. What if the barcamps were actually workshops? For example someone might take a workshop on Social Media and participants might brainstorm and plan and implement a social media campaign for a product. (Loknath Swain is trying to do the same at BarCamp Mumbai 4). Can there be more sessions like this?
3. Speed Dating. People might argue that BarCamps are a good way to network and meet new people. In my opinion, the meetings are real short and shallow. Although I have seen very very interesting results come out of networking at unconferences but they can be made better. What if in a huge room, all participants are made to meet every other participant for exactly 5 minutes? In these five minutes, both the participants can talk about anything under the sun and if they like each other and want to continue talking post the event, they exchange contact details. That simple.

What do you guys think? Do you have more ideas on how to fix these unconferences? If there are enough good ideas, may be at the next unconference, will put some to fruition.

Coming back to upcoming barcamps at Delhii and Mumbai, although I am not sure if I will attend any of the two but some sessions look really promising. Please attend and do share feedback.

Schedules

• BarCampMumbai 4 is happening at IIT Mumbai on 4th and 5th Oct 2008 (yes its a two day event).
• BarCampDelhi5 is at IIT Delhi on 11th Oct 2008 (they are still debating if its going to be a two day event or not).
• My posts on BarCamp Mumbai and BarCamp Mumbai 2.

P.S.: I had used the word un Conference about five times in the post and everywhere I got the spelling incorrect. Thanks to Shefaly for pointing out. So much so for my language skills :D

Interesting tidbits

• Warren Buffet invested $5bn in Goldman Sachs. Very interesting. Warren Buffet talks about the deal here.
• Anil Ambani sues Mukesh Ambani for Rs. 10,000 crores. Wow. Thats probably the largest law suit ever in the history of Indian Penal System. Though, the reports were later denied.
• F1 gets night vision at Singapore Grand Prix. First ever Grand Prix at night. Although I am not a big F1 fan but I would have loved to see it. :|
• Kapil Dev joined Indian Army as honorary lieutenant colonel. It implies that if you get some accolades at the international level in cricket, you can become a movie star (if you haven’t become one already), commentator, talent manager and now army man.
• Had some free time in office and on youtube saw videos of The Crystal Maze, I Dream of Jeannie, Small Wonder, Different Strokes, Duck Tales, Tale Spin. I absolutely love the TV that we had in the good old 90s. Here is a blog post to remind you of the golden era of television.

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• Got two awesome ideas. iCollect and Discovery of India. Please help spread word and share your thoughts. On second thoughts, I think ideas that are powerful enough don’t really need any advertising/marketing around. They just spread like wild fire.
• Google, HTC and T-Mobile jointly launched G1. The first phone to use much awaited Android. This device will be in a direct competition with “the” iPhone and since Android is an open-source platform, the application development would be much easier and faster. More on this coming soon.
• Prof. Bakshi released Issue # 2 of his already popular BFBV newsletter. This time he speaks about Richard Feynman. As I write this, I have already ordered a Feynman book.
• Removed a virus from my blog. While monitoring stats on my blog, I realized that there lots of exits to a mixlong.cn website. Somehow it was appended to the bottom of index.php file and I had to manually remove it.

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• I am finding myself short of ideas to write on. Considering that I am trying to write a book, short of meat to write on is not really a good thing. Guess need to take a break and not write for few days. Can anyone else give me hints on how to resurrect my writing style?

Guess that’s about it for the day. Later today I am off to a road trip to some place. Really looking forward to it. Will share pictures and videos. At a souvenir, I shot this video with my phone on Wednesday night.

Although I try to avoid comments on anything related to work, but this has caught my attention. Exchange4Media reports that India Post has unveiled a new campaign to try and resurrect the 154 year old organization. As a part of the campaign, O&M Delhi has come up with a new logo and a tagline – “Giving wings to your dreams”, which in my humble opinions looks like a line created with Dilbert Mission Statement Generator

The agency says that the new logo “depicts yellow flourish on a red rectangle, symbolizing an envelope. Yellow represents a rising sun, while red, signifies the dawn of a new era.” I mean all that is fine but it lacks the class and panache of the simple, classic and yet powerful logo. Who would remember the “dawn of a new era” few years from now? I did not even realize that the yellow pseudo-swoosh on the red background is supposed to resemble folds of an envelope.

What about all the people that India post touches? Think for a minute about people who live in semi-urban and rural India? For a lot of them, postmen and post-offices act as sources of information, news, money, access to reading and writing, gossip etc. Would these people be able to adapt to the new logo easily? Would that trust on the postal system stay concrete? Wouldnt there be a disconnect in their minds when all of a sudden they see changes in the colors and imagery?

Agreed that the 150 year old institution is reeling under the pressure from Telephony and Internet (emails substituting letters and postcards), private courier companies (for freight carriage and bulky deliveries) and so and so forth. Agreed that India Post is seen as yet another sarkaari company with bureaucracy, painfully slow work environment, lack of enthusiasm and motivation amongst employees but just a new logo and communication is not the way to go about it.

Project Arrow was an initiative in the right direction – to make post offices more than just delivery and access points for mails (there were talks of setting up Internet kiosks, selling insurance, data collection etc.). The idea was to modernize the postal system and revitalize it. They hired McKinsey to work on the turnaround strategy and with the work so far, I am not very impressed. So much for consults being top preference for management graduates.

Ideally along with a management consult, India Post should be hiring a HR consultant to put some sense in their employees to start with. And then the marketing and branding consultants to help out with communication part. Its always an incremental process and has to be like one baby step as a time.

I am very disappointed with the new logo. And since we live in a democracy, I can not really do anything to stop Mr. Scindhia Junior to actually not use it. And with due course of time we will get used to it. We saw the same with Godrej, Shoppers Stop, Canara Bank, Axis Bank, Union Bank of India and their new logos. There is a huge hue and cry when the new logos are revealed. And with passage of time, people get busy with their lives and forget. The institution losses. The identity is lost. The classic era fades away. Only entity to win is the agency that has created the new logo and has charged pretty bucks for it.

Please also see my Discovery of India. The timing of the new logo and my discovery is purely coincidental!

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 thrill of exploring the unknown,

The adventure of going down a road that you dont know,

The mystery behind the tun that you are about to take,

The feeling when you meet new people and you try to come across as interesting,

The realization that you get once you know that you are yet another human being,

are simply too rewarding and too tempting to make you seek travel.

If someone was to ask me two things that connects civilizations and make all the development happen in the modern world, I would say they are roads (or rivers in ancient times) and reach of a postman.

Rivers and roads because water being the most essential commodity for sustenance of life, the nomads moved along rivers and other water bodies and created settlements around them. From Harappa to Mohen Jodaro to Babylonian to any other ancient civilization, all of them have been found around water.

Roads because there is a limit to which a human being can travel on unpaved paths. Even with help of animals carrying humans (and assorted goods), there is a limit on the reach and replenishment. Moment roads (or paths or pagdandis as they call them in India) came in, suddenly trade became possible. People got more creative, found new ways of making money and settled along these roads. Trade, commerce, cultures, information, intellect etc. all moved along these roads. Silk Routes and Hippie trails are more popular examples of how trade and cultures moved along roads and how civilizations were developed.

Postmen because until communication happens, everything from trade to knowledge to entertainment all goes for a toss. When you want to sell, you need some kind of communication medium that enables transactions and exchange of ideas. Since people are always moving from one settlement to another, you need some kind of communication medium to enable everyone to stay in touch. We might argue that now we have ubiquitous telephony and omnipresence of Internet but there is a certain charm to a letter that a phone call or email lacks. The handwriting, the effort that goes in writing the letter, the concept of a permanent address, the planning that it takes to send a letter, the wait for a letter, the stamps and the concept of collecting them, the envelopes, everything is very very mesmerizing. I still write and love to get hand written letters. There is something about letters and concept of postal system that mesmerizes me – I cant pin point what exactly draws me towards postal system but I know I have to do something about it.

And after this longish preface, here is the introduction to my Discovery of India. The Indian postal system is the largest in the world with about 1,55,333 post offices (wikipedia).

Every territory in India has been assigned an unique postal identification number or PINCODE as we know it. Each post office has its own PINCODE and my Discovery of India idea is that we go around shooting each post office, their identifications plates (the one shown above), talk to people around there and write a 500 word note on that region. There are more than 1 lakh post offices and the task is a mammoth and seems very challenging. But it should be awesome fun. While doing it, I would be traveling. Taking pictures. Talking to people. Reading more about a place. Writing. Blogging about it. All the things that I love doing.

The end result might look like a photoblog or a coffee table book or website or something that I mash with the map of India. Its still a fresh idea and I am wondering if anyone would have more ideas on how to go about it?

UPDATE: We now have a FB group for it. Please join and invite more people.

Image credits: Rahul via Flickr

The Google Blog has this post called The future of search by Marissa Mayer (I would love to meet her someday and bug her with my questions on Google). Very interesting I must say. This is my interpretation of the same and things that are possible and yet Marissa hasnt talked about.

Apart from everything that is mentioned on the blog, I would like to see these things in any discussion on future of search.

1. Device. A search device that I can carry along. A device that does not rely on an Internet connection. Hints: Kindle. Why cant I have a hand-held device that lets me use a search engine and emails and feeds? This could become my net access device and with cloud computing and software as service on browser, I can corner a large chunk of a market. TechCrunch’s web tablet could have been an ideal device but for size. Can iPhone become such a device with an always-on, high-speed net access? Can someone think of new devices?
2. Human Search. As the post on Google blog says, that universal search probably is the future, I would love to see it extended a wee bit. Instead of just uploading pictures or sounds, I should be able to capture inputs the way human do – by seeing (point my device at things and with a combination of great web camera technology, image recognition and bit of luck, the search engine should give me results – with QR codes, we are already seeing glimpses of the future), hearing (voice recognition and searching the sound pattern) etc. If we get close to any of these, that for me would truly be human search and evolution of search as a concept.
3. Recommendations and Personalization. When do we want to use search? When we are looking for more information about certain things. Search should be able to give me recommendations that will truly work for me. If Amazon Suggests can be extended to search, it will make my life so much simpler. As Google Blog mentions, its about personalization and the device/algorithm knowing you well enough to predict that you want to search for. Once that happens, I would be harnessing the power of search engines. Users look for answers when they search. With things being done at Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia we are moving towards giving answers to users rather than a list of webpages that has those keywords or are relevant. Will the search engine that gives answers please stand up?

Search is something that I am really passionate about. Although I cant really speak from a technology perspective, I sure have end-user and product ideas. Here are my previous posts on search.

• Search Cost
• Hal Varian on Search

The highlight of the week has to be turmoils in the financial markets. Banks are trying to buy each other, all the while knowing that its a wretched business. Lehman Brothers have decided to file for bankruptcy. Apparently Chinese banks are buying out the biggest and most influential financial players in America. Crude oil is undecided whether it wants to stay above USD 100 or not. Dont really know what impact would this have on India and it is really funny the way news anchors are predicting the doom and god knows what.

There are no other highlights to really speak of. However there were few interesting things that I can talk about.

Interesting bits this week

• Yahoo’s customer service got “tricked” to reset Sarah Palin’s email address. If you don’t know who she is, you must be living in a cave. Please come out. And no one is at a blame here but it certainly highlights the perils of being a public figure. You reveal so much about yourself on the Internet that it becomes really easy for random strangers to find out things about you and invade your beloved privacy.
• Finally filed my tax returns. Hope I am not fined too much for delaying it by 4 months ;) The good thing is that you can file it online.
• Although I dont talk about work on this blog but two awesome things happened. I have to talk about em. Raj’s commercial for Pantene finally went on air (see it here – it already has more than 7000 hits). And second, we revealed Appy Fizz’s new look. He looks totally cool in his new avatar. The commercial is finally on air (here).
• I am completely hooked on to a Facebook game called Whos Has The Biggest Brain. I play it like 20 times a day without fail and my highest score there is about 2300. What is yours .. ?

Look forward to next week. Hope it brings more excitement and action. If I look back at my recent weeks, apart from sporadic instances of excitement, things have really been quite. I guess I need a spark. Where would it come from? Any clues? Hints?

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

Of all the questions that I try to find an answer to, the most perplexing so far has been the ones that invite a discussion on the future. And especially the ones that are around youth. Today I would like to explore the trends that marketers and brands can look forward to in next five years in India. I would want to answer questions like

• What would the country look like in next five years?
• What would youth be thinking and doing in next five years?
• How can marketers reach them best?

Before I launch into playing an old magician with the crystal ball, let me make a few assumptions. By 2013, following things would be available to a large chunk of Indian youth.

• Access to (and presence on) Internet: When I say access and presence of Internet, I just dont mean that we would have Internet enabled mobile devices but I mean that every young person (in cities, towns or even villages) would have an Internet Presence. This could be in form of a profile on social network (which network, I cant guess), a blog, a website or at least an email address. This Internet presence would make the young population identifiable and reachable.
• Information Availability and Democratization: A close knit groups of friends and a large group of loosely connected contacts over the Internet would make information easy to gather. More than data and analysis, information would be fact based, in public domain and reliable enough to allow people to take actions on. Currently, information is expensive and belongs to certain privileged few and because of this access to information, these people enjoy a lot of competitive advantages over the others one. These boundaries would blur with time.
• Availability of Credit: Money and credit would no longer be a pain. Most of the youth would have access to cheap credit. A lot of services (like transport and communication) would start following freenium model and hence the basic cost of living would come down. However even though UGC would over take experts and professionals, entertainment would get more expensive. New meanings of entertainment would emerge.
• Geographically Mobile and Global Influences: Even today a large chunk of young population is geographically mobile (we goto different states, cities for education and work), almost everyone would be in a state of flux in times to come. Not only because education and work demands so, people would want to experiment and explore. People would take on more ad-hoc jobs that stable careers and would want to live for the minute rather than planning 5 years, 10 years in advance. Youth will start appreciating global differences and would be more open to newer ideas.
• Education: More and more youths would become more aware about the world around them. Their focus and agenda in lives will move beyond grooming and pursuit of opposite sex to larger causes and making their lives better. In fact education will play a really important role in the way individuals will live.
• onDemand Economy: This is what I wrote for my Berlin School application. I will re-iterate. In next 5 years we will see businesses that would produce products (physical, electronic) on demand basis. A vague analogy would be just in time production methods use by automobile industry. A simple example could be satellite television where you can watch your favorite show anytime. Think of it as youtube for made available everywhere. Currently we use Internet for onDemand services, a time shall come when all services would be onDemand.
• Redefinition of friendship: Currently you make friends with people who study with you, live close to your residence and probably friends of friends. With Internet and more avenues to meet people, the way people choose friends will change. From incidental the friend discovery would change to interest based. There would be more compact (friend) groups and these groups would be really passionate about their interests. And finally the groups would be addressable as one entity rather than individuals. In fact this is one of the founding principles of n00b.in.

Assuming all these are correct, What do you think would be a typical 18 year old’s thought process in 2013? Knowing that he is 13 right now, in schools, amidst the explosion of media and information to satisfy their natural curiosities, how would he cope up with all this?

Once I have few answers, I shall compile them and update this post.