Month: February 2009

  • The man.. the machine

    A while ago, I’d written about my fascination for lifestreaming, and the role it could play in storing our memories and giving it context. In fact memories and the possibility of losing them have always been food for thought for me.  One memory from a long time back, when I was an avid reader of Doctor Who books,  is of one of the Doctor’s villain sets – Cybermen – a fictional race of cyborgs. From Wikipedia

    Cybermen were originally a wholly organic species of humanoids originating on Earth’s twin planet Mondas that began to implant more and more artificial parts into their bodies as a means of self-preservation. This led to the race becoming coldly logical and calculating, with emotions usually only shown when naked aggression was called for.

    The connection. I saw an article recently on what has been called Homo Evolutis (original video here). Human beings have been the dominant species on the planet for a short while now, and as the author explains, there’s no guarantee that the current situation is a stable one. And in this context is seen the beginnings of speciation, in broad terms the evolution of our own species.

    The author talks about three different tracks of speciation -prosthetics (from limbs to hearing aids and beyond), stem cell and tissue engineering (where we are reaching a stage when a single cell can be rebooted back to its original factory settings and can rebuild any part of our body,  and lastly, a track to improve the brain. The author says that the last track will be the slowest to evolve, but the one with the maximum impact.

    And these tracks would create a new race or races- in fact a prosthetic body part, a plastic surgery etc are all the common manifestations of this process. As technology becomes more advanced, it will become affordable to a lot more people. From a physical perspective, who wouldn’t like body parts whose wear and tear can be controlled, an end to pain and suffering. And it doesn’t stop there, because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…

    We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality?  How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?

    until next time, a man made man….

  • Product Life Cycle and Consumer Life Cycles

    One of the social web’s by products er, products, are “shiny new objects”. (new services that launch and send us enthusiasts into a tizzy. All the web 2.0 greats were shiny new objects at some point in time)  There were a couple of wonderful posts I read in this context. The first is Rex Hammock’s excellent post on how we obsess over these for sometime, and then move on. Yes, I know you know that, but its the next part that’s interesting.

    Then one day about three years later, you notice people who aren’t obsessed with shiny new objects are talking about something four-or-five shiny new objects ago and you wonder: Why is everyone obsessed with this?

    This happens to me occasionally, the latest example being a few guys tweeting about the Baba Ramdev- Chrome ad that was circulated around quite a few months back.

    The second post was great, right from the title – The Loneliness of the Early Adopter, and when i shared it on Friendfeed, at least a couple of guys liked it. I confess I’m more at the borderline of early majority and early adopter, (refer this ) but I could empathise with a lot of that post.

    Now, a long way back, Jeremiah had an awesome post on Applying a social computing strategy to the entire product lifecycle. As the title suggests, its about listening to consumers, collaborating on product development, filtering out the right consumers, learning from them and supporting them and in essence, utilising the social web in all parts of the PLC. Here’s another great post in Social Media Explorer on the same theme.

    Twitter and more so Friendfeed (as this Mashable article explains) and Facebook (commenting on status and other elements of the newsfeed, the ‘Like’ feature) are great examples of how the product/service is evolving with the consumer and his preferences. Increasingly consumers are ‘creating’ a use or finding a way to fulfill a need gap from a basic service.

    The question is, who is the consumer? I’m trying to juxtapose the Product life cycle with a consumer life cycle. Are the tastes and preferences of the early adopters markedly different from that of the late majority? As the adoption of various social media services rapidly increases, who would a service target, and will it be at the cost of another segment? Different consumers, located at different points on the Roger’s bell curve will use the service at the same time. How can these possibly different sets of expectations be met? Will there be variations of the same service for different categories of users? I don’t see the issue being addressed a lot now, that possibly explains why a lot of people leave say, Twitter after a few tweets/days since they can’t figure out what’s happening? Would a ‘nOOb version’ have helped? Social media is about customisation too, and this might be something that needs to be answered soon, as these services become mass.

    until next time, handling a cycle on a curve 🙂

  • Class Act

    “I’ll be gentle, it won’t hurt”, he promised. She was apprehensive, she hardly knew him. Noticing this, he added, “I know it takes time to trust someone new, so let’s start slowly and talk as we go along.” As her muscles expanded and contracted, she still wasn’t sure whether to trust the new yoga instructor.

    until next time, breathe out 😉

  • Paper Money

    There was a wonderful post in the Edelman Digital blog titled ‘The Last Newspaper‘. An insightful, well balanced and objective take on stories and content which perhaps captures the newspaper and web relationship best. From the post

    Stories are personal and transformational. Stories have definition and character. Stories are history personified.

    But content is cold, distant. Content is a commodity – a finite consumable of fleeting value. Content is artificial intelligence.

    Quite a paradox for brands that handle stories, when we consider that brands that tell the most interesting stories are loved by consumers. Taking it to a not-so-appealing premise was this question that was asked on Friendfeed recently, by Adam Lasnik.

    “I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the growing sensationalism in online “journalism.” Will the pursuit of pageviews ultimately trump integrity and thoughtfulness? I’m seriously worried.”

    When news becomes a commodity, publishers have to find a way to make theirs look more appealing than someone else’s. This is an unfortunate but inevitable by product.

    Publishers. On one side, we have Kindle 2, and its competitors (via @chupchap) work on an alternate platform for news delivery, and on the other, we have The Printed Blog rolling out a printed newspaper. Meanwhile, we  have Japanese newspapers collaborating for an iphone app. We also have an entity like NYT, which carries an op-ed article stating that perhaps non-profit, endowment based system is the way forward for newspapers, but is still the world’s best newspaper website,  taking radical steps to figure out ways to evolve, basis the understanding that newspapers are perhaps not the preferred means of delivery anymore – an API which offers developers access to 2.8 million articles from NYT, and another that gives developers data on the sharing and reading habits of Times People’s registered users. In essence, from a newspaper or even a news website, it transforms itself into a platform on which users and developers can use this mound of information for various purposes, and the possibility of linking it all together semantically. In context, an article from over 2 years back, still relevant.

    Closer to home, the top Indian newspapers are still grappling with the issue of how to handle themselves on the web. That’s not to say that some publications aren’t trying. HT, for example, has started blogs recently. Now you could turn around and say that’s basic, but that’s the state of Indian print media for you. Future revenue models are not even being thought of in most places. From their three main sources of revenue – subscription, stand sales and advertising, the first two are at best on plateaus and the last is suffering, largely due to recession. Recently, there was even a delegation of publication owners that approached the government for help!! Maybe they should be doing this instead – collaborative link journalism by Publish2. Vernacular papers are in better shape. But for English newspapers, i really don’t know what’s a better time to start thinking about future revenue.

    In that context, this post correctly states that micropayments for news (here’s a rebuttal too)  is not an option. Some revenue could be possible by making some parts of the content paid for, as the NYT is planning, but that still cannot be the main source of revenue. I am wondering how well a subscription model based on a different platform (mobile) could work. The news alerts on SMS are only the tip. While GPRS penetration is not exactly astounding, it is bound to grow especially in the segment that the English newspapers operate in, so perhaps it is a path to be explored. Locality based, contextual advertising could be fun.

    Newspapers, especially in India, would do well to heed a great piece of advice that I got from this post on brands, and the need for evolution. (via Gabriel Rossi)

    “Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” William Pollard

    Its not merely a change in delivery platform or an API that makes the move by NYT so radical. Its the mindset change, and until Indian newspapers realise that, no efforts will make long term sense. For now, they are smug in treating only other newspapers as competition, not even considering the possibility of an entire army of vertical-specialised content providers who now have digital media which gives them advantages like never before, to generate and distribute content.

    until next time, paper tigers…

    PS. This – Google buying a paper mill and converting it into a data centre, I thought, was very symbolic.

  • The Egg Factory

    The name’s an attention grabber. And so it was that we decided to drop in on a lazy Sunday. You can find it off St.Marks Road – the part that goes towards Residency Road. Soon after you take a left from Museum Road, you can see it on the right, packed inside a tiny lane. (after the petrol pump, and a ramshackle plot).

    The ambience has a wooden-metallic grunge look that goes well with the factory name.  The  “Damp Wall. Please do not lean” is a good touch. “The logo is inspired by the Maori symbol “Koru”, which represents renewed energy and new beginnings. The name and the logo is a symbolic adaptation of the meaning, and that of the humble egg.”  The menu is a great piece of work, and shows that that they take the egg part of their name (and positioning) very seriously. Its a spoof on the foldable user manuals that come with consumer durables (including the multiple languages). It is an absolute pun fest with eggxpectations, egghilarative snacks, eggxotica, eggsamplers. eggciting combos all making appearances. So you can see why I didn’t need any egging on to take an instant liking to the place. 😉

    We started with an Egg Pasta Frittata and an Eggs Florentine. The frittata is a “hearty meal of penne in frittata and baked with cream and parmesan”, and is served with garlic bread. I’d read reviews that it was awesome, but it was just about okay. The Florentine, which is “soft boiled eggs on a bed of spinach and a creamy sauce and topped with parmesan” was a much better dish. Both are served with garlic bread (which they didn’t have, so we were given  bread toast, and they used sweet bread, hmm)  If you’re not really hungry, the portions are quite sufficient, and make a good snack, but if you’re out to gorge, then you’d want a second course, like us 😀

    I wanted an Arroz Con Huevos, a mexican dish, which looked spicy (from the menu) but it wasn’t available. So we went for an Egg Cannelloni Alforno, a “tube pasta stuffed with eggs, mushroom and red pepper” and a Polish omelette. The Alforno is excellent and had a distinct tangy flavor that was a welcome relief. They seem to have a slight geography problem since we got an Irish omellete – has potatoes flavoured with chives and lemon juice. The latter is served with toast, butter and jam. We ended with a bread custard, that was one of the desserts of the day, and was quite okay. (the ones who came in earlier finished the caramel custard).

    They seem to have discontinued several of the menu items – paratha curry, rice curry and chinese combos, wraps, subs and crostinis, wonder why. There is a ‘Manipal connection’ part of the menu which reminded me of college life. 🙂 Meanwhile, for the health conscious, you can have all the stuff, with only the egg white, for an extra Rs.10 per item. All of the above cost us Rs.450, an absolute value for money outing, and one that we thoroughly enjoyed.

    The Egg factory, Ground Floor, White House, St.Marks Road. Ph:42110041

    Menu and Photos at Zomato