Category: India

  • Kwippy quips

    Move over microblogging, here comes nano blogging. Have been exploring a new service the last couple of days. Most of you would have heard about it by now, it goes by the name of Kwippy. This gives a great intro to the service. (a Kwiki, if you will)  While it is definitely related to the Twitter / Plurk clan, its distantly related, at least a cousin, and definitely not a clone. And its desi manufactured 🙂

    I got hold of an invite by just asking for one, the response was prompt. And that, from my interactions so far, has been the hallmark of the Kwippy team – timely and efficient response.

    Kwippy can be made to work in sync with your GTalk or Y! Messenger, or like me, if you easily get sick of the GTalk alerts (i have disabled twitter because I couldn’t take the constant blinking) you could use the web interface. And using that, you can Kwip your status messages, share bookmarks and more or less do most of the things that you would do on IM with your friends. Ah, friends, thats another key thing, because unlike say twitter, where we add a lot of people who are not known to us, the IMs usually have friends we really know. While this may become very twitterlike when the crowd pours in, for now its friends and friends of friends, more so because its on ‘invite’ mode.

    So you might ask, THAT’s the differentiator from twitter? No, the difference maker for me, is the threading. Unlike Twitter, but like Friendfeed, you can comment on my Kwip on Kwippy, which means we can keep having conversations on a post, but open up other threads simultaneously, and most importantly, easily keep track of all this.

    So I’ve been reasonably impressed with the service so far, despite a few 500 errors. Dammit, twitter got funded, and still has problems,  and we still grin and bear, so its okay!!

    But my common grouse with all the new services that keep getting launched applies to this one too. Most new services, with perhaps a small and partial exception – Friendfeed, take me out of the carefully created environs of the existing service, be it facebook, twitter, my blog and so on. To recreate the world, I have to wait till all my friends get there. So my immediate but (possibly) very ambitious wishlist from Kwippy or any service/ on the lines of ‘conversation enabling’ would be, for starters

    • making it easy to import friends from other ecosystems (kwippy from twitter? 😉 )
    • evolving a mechanism to have a Disqus kind of widget (thanks to wordpress’ anti javascript stance, disqus won’t work here), that would allow me to connect my blog with a kwippy site (I agree that its a nano blogging platform, but in essence, comments are nanoblogging too) That would allow me to link my blog crowd (don’t snigger, my other blog gets decent comments) with the Kwippy crowd.
    • a browser (ff) add on, to some its more convenient than IM

    Meanwhile I’m awaiting an invite from LiL, it seems to be on a ‘sharing moments’ path. In case you need Kwippy invites, all you have to do is ask. 🙂

    until next time, try kwipping

    PS Speaking of Indian startups, this is an awesome compilation. Hats off!!

  • Social Ambassadors

    Yes, it is the age of conversation, but in India it is also the age of brand ambassadors. And not just the average Joe Ambassador, but ones who blog. I, for one, subscribe to Big B’s blog, because, from his posts, i think he is a natural. And even if this is true, he’s doing justice to the job.

    Anyway, after blogging for a while, it was quite understandable that with his hectic schedule, Big Adda should make his life easier by giving him a mo blog. And now he’s having a blast with microblogging @160 characters. Updating multiple times a day and speaking his mind.

    The entire activity set me thinking. So, what happens when the transparency of social media meets brand ambassadors?  How would, for example, the Big B (as brand ambassador) react, if God forbid, a pesticide (Pepsi) or a worm (Cadburys) issue erupted again? What role would he play? Blogger or Brand Ambassador or a boring diplomat? Assuming that he uses the products he endorses (okay, stop laughing!!) would he sometimes play the dissatisfied customer?

    I got a glimpse of perhaps what lies in store, thanks to this entry of his. A tale that most bloggers would be familiar with. Sit and write an entire blog post and the server conks out without saving!! In this case, he was blogging on Big Adda. Bad publicity, I would think. Thankfully, someone there was smart enough, and pretty soon we had another entry, this time thanking a Big Adda official. Wonder if they’d do that for mere mortals though 😉

    But back to the point, in an era of instant communication and celebrity bloggers, would brand ambassadors  now have revised contractual obligations that draw a clear line on transparency? One that would bring brands back to the familiar comfortable opaque territory that they have been operating in? Or will the celebrity be true to the spirit of blogging? (read the poetry – header on Big B’s blog) 🙂

    until next time, brand bloggers 🙂

  • The Middle Path

    Lamenting about the state of the internet in india is second and sometimes even first nature for this blog. This was the last major rant. It usually surprises me that even with India’s growth story and the obvious uses of the internet, our internet penetration is languishing in single digits. Yes, we have infrastructural issues, and relatively high broadband costs, but is that the only reason? I had started this thread in the post linked above, and I have a little more now to say on it.

    There are a large set of users who are still happy with the basic uses of the net (mail, a bit of chat, news etc), a subset who use it for jobs and other classifieds. There’s another bunch who are constantly experimenting with blogging, microblogging, and keeping up with a Flock or FF3 browser. There’s a third set that is above the first, but their interests end with orkut and Facebook. I think there is a huge divide between sets 1 and 2. Does that mean that the number of people who are working on the next set of useful products/services for India might be a minority, or worse still, not exist at all? Dangerous!

    So it was refreshing to come across two websites yesterday – the first through a mail inviting me to the premiere of Meri Dhun.  The second one, from here, to a site called Yo Macha. Completely unrelated, because Meri Dhun allows you to personalise songs by changing the lyrics. Their studio will then compose, record it and send it to you in a ringtone/MP3 format. And Yo Macha which claims to be, rather pretentiously, India’s top destination, allows users to rate photos, blogs, and an assortment of things from colleges to social networking sites and anything and everything in between. As an aside, while their revenue model is now restricted to SMS revenue sharing, banner ads and generating traffic for CPC?CPM ads, maybe, when they get enough registered users, they could provide corporate services like dipsticks for brand communication within the desired TG?

    I digress!! While they are completely unrelated, but for one small connection – they are not based out of the uber cool Tier 1 cities. The first is from Indore, the second from Jaipur, and both are based on little everyday things that people do in India. I am not even getting into evaluating business models, scope etc, but a thought crossed my mind. Perhaps there is no big killer application that’ll kickstart the net revolution in India, perhaps there are only these smaller drops which will make a bigger drop and perhaps something even bigger in the large indian media ocean. Maybe thats the way the Internet is going to take off here.

    The in between space in india, bridging the gap between the web 1.0 users and the people who are moving beyond web2.0, by building stuff that interests and/or provides value to the great Indian internet middle class.

    until next time, net gains, thats all that matters

  • Mo Brand Ambassadors

    I just realised that I totally forgot about Abhi B (or Shaky B, depending on your levels of dislike. Oh ok, I’ll stop. Can’t even be a bit nasty on my own blog 😐 ) in this post, where i talked about brand ambassadors for mobile handsets, among other things. But we’re not going to continue on the same lines of discussion here.

    I happened to see the new TVC for MotoRokr E8. The ad is a continuation of the earlier Moto ad (watch the complete one here, I have only seen the edit, this is super cool) Any ad that starts off with a spoof of ‘Rendezvous with Simi’ has to be an attention grabber, and going forward this one doesn’t disappoint. The sudden blaring of ‘Appidi podu’ from the Tamil movie ‘Gilli’ was shocking, the first time, and funny, every time I watched. The film briefing with the ‘heroin’ and ‘desh ka jhanda’, followed by the regular awards ceremony, all are a spoof of life. The icing on the cake is ‘Come on Ab, shake a lil’, followed by the abso Tamil dance steps.

    The other I have been seeing is the Aamir Khan ad for Monaco – Life Namkeen Banaiye, the one where he plays a prank on the serious team coach, by putting a sticker with scratches on a brand new vehicle. The humour wasn’t really good, in the same vein as this one earlier, but more importantly something else was lacking, and that brings us to the point of the post.

    Usage of brand ambassadors. The first one worked for me primarily because the humour was good. More importantly, a lot of it was Abhishek laughing at his own expense, as well as the fraternity he is part of. And because its Abhishek, (and I’m a huge non fan), you end up having a good laugh, because while he’s always trying to be goofy, this time he succeeds. Great usage of a brand ambassador.

    On the other hand, Aamir Khan. There was a time when this ad would have worked, exactly saat saal pehle, when ‘Dil Chahta Hain’ released. Aamir’s character was a riot, complete with exactly the Monaco kind of pranks, actually better. Maybe even later, after the release of RDB. But post the SRK-dog fiasco, and the constant baiting of co-stars including Salman, and the yet to be launched Harman Baweja, let’s just say the Aamir brand of humour (in case it exists) isn’t exactly popular.

    I doubt if stars are taken only for the visibility. Usually there is also a dna fit with the brand or at least a characteristic of the star that the brand would like to exploit. If that is indeed true, then Monaco’s choice is a bit too salty.

    Incidentally, what did you think of the new Reynolds ad, the one where they use Sachin’s one day and test avtaar colors to show the different pen characteristics? A bit labored, but a smart idea nevertheless, i thought.

    until next time, mo rockr, mo na ko

  • Ad-vanced Processing

    No, don’t go away, this is not a tech post.  And stop sniggering, one day I will write a tech post.  Hell, if Laloo can blog…There’s been a spate of celebrity blogs recently – started perhaps with Aamir Khan, then Big B, Salman Khan and a couple of days back, Karan Johar. The fad, I think will soon run out of steam.

    But there’s a very interesting twist I saw to the celebrity-in-the-internet space today, and felt it was very well weaved into a brand’s strategy. The brand is a processor – AMD, and it has chosen Viswananthan Anand as its brand ambassador. On a broad level, the processor-chess-intelligence connection is itself a good one. The TVC idea is a neat analogy, showing Anand try his hand at cricket, failing, and then saying that in a cricket crazy nation, he chose to pursue chess because he was good at it. From an analogy point, cricket is Intel, and the message is that one should choose a processor according to one’s requirements, and not because everyone else follows a trend.

    Coming back, a site has been launched – askvishy.com. As the name suggests, the site gets Anand to clear perceptions about computers, and also offers help in choosing computers according to requirements.There’s also some kind of contest there, but didn’t participate because they asked for the address in stage 1 itself.

    In essence, a well thought out campaign, that uses the brand ambassador well, but only a first step towards what should be a prolonged strike at the far-and-ahead market leader. Intel can’t afford to stay inside anymore.

    until next time, AMD is no more wishy washy