• Leaps of faith

    The new Samsung TVC, starring Aamir Khan has been airing for sometime now, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it means. I’m okay with a brand aiming for the best, and looking out for cutting edge technology, but what’s with the tagline – ‘Next is what?’ Is that a question to me? Are you trying to keep me guessing?

    When I see AK jump in the last scene of the TVC, it is, to me, a leap of faith, something which I might be willing to take when its Nokia we’re talking about. But, at this point in time, Samsung has yet to prove to me, its technical superiority, its aesthetic sense or any of the other parameters like value for money that I consider when I make a mobile purchase decision. What Samsung has successfully communicated to me, with this TVC, is that they themselves are not sure what’s going to happen next, and maybe I should wait sometime before I pick up a Samsung handset.

    When a brand reaches the zenith in whatever category it is in, it is sometimes smart to ignore the #2 totally, and start positioning itself to be beyond all the mundane new feature/market share/pricing strategy/tactic that it might have resorted to in the past. But, how smart is it when you’re a distant #3 in the market? It  makes me wonder if brands also should follow a tweaked version of Maslow’s hierarchy, find out where they figure (in the consumer’s mind) and design communication accordingly. Yes, i agree that brand and people occupy multiple levels at the same time, but at least there would be some method in the communication madness.

    When I saw a ‘Next is the spirit of the Olympics’ ad, I couldn’t help but remember this wonderful article. I quote from it “Modern branding has evolved. From its roots creating detailed guidelines for enforcing corporate logos it has become a sophisticated effort to define the compelling and differentiated value that an organization or product offers its customers. And it aspires to create experiences of that value across all interactions. It goes beyond design, messaging, websites and advertising. It touches product development, recruiting, customer service, sales, and it drives and emanates from the very core of every business: culture. That’s where these campaigns miss the mark. They tell me who they are, but not why I should care. They provide an introduction, but can’t sustain the conversation. And I don’t have much attention for brands without substance.”

    I’d have been less acerbic, if I’d seen at least a semblance of involving users in this entire positioning exercise. A developer’s community which takes feedback from users on what they want to see in the next samsung mobile model, updating consumers on what they are working on, building some interest around it, and so on. To be fair, they have done something, though the community link took me here. 😐

    Tell you what, here’s a free idea, go ahead and sponsor the second season of Bigg Boss. The last season, I always used to wonder, ‘next is what?’ !!!

    Which takes me to another premise, I thought a slightly more interesting one. If brands were really gutsy, they would do some product placement in Bigg Boss. From paste, soaps and shampoo, washing soaps to Real Good chicken, tea and coffee brands, apparel brands, exercise equipment, Veneta Cucine kitchens,  every damn thing that we use in daily life could find its way there (of course keeping in mind the rules of the show, so no TV, mobile etc) Yes. MDH Masala too!! In fact, the contestants shouldn’t be told in advance what the brands are, so no rigging. Have competing brands also. Yummy!! What you get is a real chance of ‘celebrity’ endorsement. Imagine Rakhi Sawant saying ‘Tide makes washing so easy that I wish I’d more clothes’. Ok, cheesy, but you get the idea 🙂

    But that requires absolute faith in the product, and having the maturity to accept criticism and ensure you never make the mistake again. We still have a long way to go before brands can handle reality television, or reality.

    Meanwhile, next is WAT too, who’ve got an absolutely cool new design. Go check it out.

    until next time, WordPress has a ‘next’ button too 😉

  • 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