Year: 2008

  • Joy

    The compartment echoed with the child’s cries despite its mother’s and others’ efforts, as the vendor slowly made his way around hawking his toys. He stopped near the child, trying to cheer it. And slowly the cries turned to gurgles, and laughing. The vendor smiled, the smile of a blind man who could create happiness.until next time, and we turn a blind eye

  • Indijoe

    Indijoe opened an outlet on Church street a few weeks back, and we’ve been guilty of ignoring it for sometime now. That has been assuaged, as we reserved in advance and landed up there yesterday. It was fairly crowded by around 8pm, so it’d would be good to book in advance. This is housed in the place where Bombay House used to be, coming from Brigade Road, just before the Museum Road junction.

    While the regular strategy in Indijoe is a starter, followed by a single sizzler, and then dessert, because it just fills the tummy, and we get to eat dessert, hunger overrode logic on this occasion, and we decided to go for a soup/starter (starter if we didn’t like the soup of the day) , and two sizzlers. Dessert was a decision left for later, if space permitted. The mind is always willing. 😀

    The menu seems to be a trimmed down version of the one at Airport Road, but larger than the one on Old Madras Road. But we didn’t miss anything much, except for a couple of desserts, and this menu offers enough selection. So, we ordered the Non veg soup of the day, which turned out to be Cream of Chicken and Mushroom, the favourite. The starter plan plan failed before it got started. 😀 The soup was just about as good as that pun, which means it could definitely have been better. While it was thick, and creamy, the flavors just weren’t strong enough, and I was forced to try a salt + pepper+ sauces combo.

    For the main course, we ordered a Stacked Chicken Valdostana, which is “sliced chicken layered with cheese and stacked, served with white wine and emmenthal sauce and accompanied with sphagetti, vegetables and spiced with green tabasco sauce” and a Jack Daniels double barrel chicken and stake (sic) combo, which is ‘grilled chicken and cheese placed between two slices of steak with smoky Jack daniels sauce served with tangy cheddar cheese, mashed potatoes and mexican salad’. The tabasco sauce and the mexican salad were served separate, respectively. The sauce is necessary because the dish is slightly bland, but I thought the worcestershire sauce was a much better add on. Though I was apprehensive on the spaghetti, because I’m not a big fan, the dish was actually done very well, and I enjoyed it. It also has a lot of french fries, not mentioned in the description, not that I had a problem with it.  We were asked how we wanted the steak, and asked for ‘well done’, and it was 🙂 , though I’m not very sure of the Mexican Salad. Now you might say, I don’t recognise Mexican when i see it, but then, I do recognise Indian. Oh well, maybe they are similar 😀

    The snag with ordering two sizzlers is that you might require external help to take you to your vehicle, it leaves you stuffed, with absolutely no room for dessert 🙁 . All of the above cost us Rs.800. It must be mentioned that the service was excellent. They took care to give extra inputs on the dish, so you know exactly what you can expect. I’ve always maintained that among all of the BJN Group properties, Indijoe is the most ‘user friendly’, and this one just reinforces the belief. Great, and will be definitely visited again.

    Indijoe, Kalpak arcade, Church Street Ph: 41113311

    Menu and Photos at Zomato

  • Linkin Parks

    I’ve been a fan of del.icio.us for a long time, and was extremely happy with the plug-in they’d made for FF3.  Although this offers a perspective of people who don’t bookmark, I’ve found the idea of a taggable, online database that can be shared, extremely valuable, which is why the question of what Del.icio.us 2.0 would offer was an intriguing one. But I was quite disappointed with the url change, to delicious.com . There was something cool about the earlier url, but they have their reasons, as has been well documented by another fan here.

    So what did they say the improvements were? You can hear it right from the horse’s mouth here. To summarise, they have promised speed, a faster and more social search and a new design. Hmm, good, but I think they could have done better, because to me, this is a maintenance job, albeit a good one. As a die-hard fan, I wanted something radical, like Facebook (another favourite) taking the pedal off social networking and putting it on conversation sparking off comparisons to Twitter and Friendfeed. Yes, it has its detractors, and they’d say not many conversations seem to be happening there, but hey, only a small % of my fb friends are on twitter, its early days, and I, for one, am getting responses to my status messages, video uploads etc.

    But meanwhile, more than an FB progression path, this user generated discontent has been sparked off by a couple of entities I happened to come across, each of which could have been the lateral step that Delicious could’ve taken. I’ll start with Social Median. Its an online community where you can share links. So?  Well, if you use twitter, you’d realise the number of link sharing that happens there. Well, you can submit news to SM through Twitter. So, in this age of ‘noise’ you get like minded users to do “collaborative filtering to help people with similar interests identify/discover what to read/view.” And it’s not just people you can follow, its topics too. It is packed with features, perhaps thanks to an extremely user feedback based alpha mode. You can vote on the ranking of the keywords, sources that are used to seed the networks and can rank topics based on how important they are to you. In essence, it allows you to customise how frequently you want to read about ‘x’ topic and from ‘y’ media source. You can share the news you add, find through mail, and even twitter. You can also add a bookmarklet to your toolbar and add news to SN as you browse. A short term problem I see is the noise level, since many people would want to be community makers first. But the system will filter it in due course. They’re also planning to use the Google Social Graph API in some pretty advanced ways. While it seems closer to Digg, or Mixx, as a user, to me its fundamentally a collection of links, and shared interests,  and that’s Delicious’ premise. Meanwhile, there’s another one with the same idea, though not as feature packed.

    The other site I came across is httpfuse (via pluggd.in). The idea here is to allow the community to build a set of ‘fuses’ (bookmarks/links) around a topic of interest. Their differentiation wrt Digg, Delicious etc is clearly explained here. While I agree with the explanation on Digg, I am not quite convinced on the Delicious part. Maybe I need to explore more. But one thing I’ll grant, and I’ll use an example for this. If I search for ‘India’ in Delicious, I’ll get links bookmarked by other people with all the tags they have used. But when I do the same in httpfuse, it shows me the subtopics under India. And that’s definitely better.  I’d like a browser plug-in though, or did I miss it? Again, a focus that Delicious could’ve tried out.

    The last entity, is Browzmi, a browser within a browser. It not only allows real time collaborative browsing and bookmarking, with comments, but also has a chat functionality built in. You can also clip photos from a site you’re visiting, and share only that. All your actions are stored and can be viewed like any lifestreaming service. Unlike say, Yoono, its not an extension, and is actually quite a cute social browser which can be just another tab in your FF/IE browser. This is way lateral, but no harm in imagining. 🙂

    That said, you are still my first bookmarking love, Delicious. But the competition is getting hotter, and  you seem very absorbed in a linear way, so please buck up.  I really wouldn’t want to see you in this list. You could at least have added image bookmarking, you know.

    Meanwhile,a couple of other things you should check out, Feedly, an FF extension, which brings Google Reader closer to home, er homepage 😉 and this one – iglue, which reminded me of Snap (only reminded, its not the same) and left me very impressed, with its potential.

    until next time, spread some link love

  • Transience

    Its comforting to walk about, and intuitively know the way around, without ever having to pause and think..the familiar roads and buildings, and places that are significant thanks to the associations they have with yesteryear life.

    Its soothing to catch up with people who you haven’t spoken to in years, and still be able to have a conversation which you feel had been left off  only the day before, about friends and friends of friends, where they are and what they do..

    And as you walk around, its also a bit unsettling to find out that some old landmarks have been replaced with swanky buildings, the roads don’t look the way it used to, desolate buildings that you stare at and say “I used to know some people here”, new street names and sometimes whole new streets have cropped up.

    And when you look around, you miss a few old faces, that used to smile at you from shopfronts…nameplates that you thought would remain forever, have been replaced, bringing new characters and creating new stories.

    And sometimes, as you talk, you understand that even the old characters have changed, perhaps without even them knowing it.

    And that’s when you realise that there’s something both sweet, and sour about having a town you can call home. A home where your life and memories were shaped, and which is now being reshaped by others’ dreams, and lives.

    And as places fade away and landscapes change, you are reminded of sand slipping through your fingers, even as you try to hold on. What remains are those tiny flecks, to give you memories, and to remind you of the fleeting nature of it all…..

    until next time, mortality

  • Copy Paste

    There was an interesting piece I read about the way Cuil, the new search engine I’d written about earlier. In that post, the author compared Cuil to toilet paper, no offence meant because it has nothing to do with the engine’s features. It has more to do with how Google as a search engine is so ingrained in your head that there is no thought process involved when you have to choose a search service, much like the toilet paper decision. So the lesson was that if you’re challenging the market leader, you need to have some really strong firepower.

    And while that insight involved an online entity, which provided a free service, it also got me thinking on purchase decisions regarding low cost ‘real’ items, like say, matchboxes or sometimes, even toothpaste. To justify the latter, I don’t make a decision before I go shopping, we check out the stuff available at the retail outlet, but within a set of brands we normally use.

    And coincidentally, I saw the latest online effort from Colgate, via their Facebook app. The Facebook app is based on a game they have on the site – Kayak. You can read a review of the effort here. I will not get into  checkbox marketing, I’ve been doing that for over a year now, the earliest rant being this. The site is connected via a contest with the TVC that’s being aired currently (which also advertises the site) and stars Bruna Abdullah. As for the contest, if you win, you have a chance to get fresh with Bruna. Woo!! (okay, i made that up because i couldn’t resist the maxfresh name connection, but yes, you do get a date with Bruna) 😉

    Someone’s got the right intentions, because this is not Colgate’s only attempt to rally the internet. I chanced to see this sometime back. (via Medianama). I liked the dental expert touch, and am happy for the efforts, though I have a different perspective. For example, though MaxFresh is a youth brand, the primary benefit is dental care and a cool Facebook App could very well be built on that parameter. But yes, while the net is definitely useful, very few brands have learnt to use it to their advantage.

    So, what’s the way forward for ‘commodity’ brands? One is to pretend that the internet doesn’t exist and continue trying to shout the loudest and get the customer’s attention. Two is to include digital in the marketing effort, but as an adaptation of the Print creative. Three is to devise a digital strategy, that’s in line with the overall brand strategy but not an adaptation. I would love to see brands that take the last route, because I see a great sync with the way social media is working.

    What if brands go back to Step 1 and start looking at the product? Isn’t that where the differentiation can be brought in, rather than from a communication that will stay in the consumer mind only till a louder one from the competitor or anyone else looking for the same consumer’s mindshare, comes along? Use the internet to gather insights from people who are interested in your brand, create stories around the brand, utilise those insights to make the product better, to make variations and satisfy the niches that lie hidden in the long tail, to make your communication more appealing. That’s what the internet allows you to do. Obviously, each brand would have its own criteria of critical mass that even a niche should have for it to operate in that space, but the good news is that we operate in India, and sometimes 1% of this market would be the population of a country. And while on India and retail, would love some info on what exactly these guys are doing – Blinkmagic. Everyone who i chatted with, among those who attended the recent edition of Proto only had good things to say about them.

    Meanwhile, what happens when the ‘commodity’ brand’s variations start hitting the market? Obviously, existing retail space cannot handle all of this. And if the tail wags the dog, it could have really bad results as Al Ries has observed here. But where I disagree with the article is that the rampant flavour proliferation is a bad thing, or is a reason to junk the ‘long tail’ way of thinking. I see it as a challenge that retail and brands need to address. I’m sure someone will find a way to tweak the traditional distributor-dealer network to address the needs of the tail. After all, technology is definitely making its way into retail, in a big way, in India. 🙂

    I wonder how internet brands will handle ‘commoditisation’ when it happens to them, I can already see it happening in a few areas. Will they need another media to help them out?

    We started with a search engine, so we’ll end with one. Check out a new search engine I came across – Viewzi

    until next time, be refreshingly original