The myth of privacy - we are already tracked and tagged everyday, so why bother?

I have been taking a MOOC course called Understanding Media by Understanding Google by Prof. Owen R. Youngman on Coursera for the last 6 weeks and the last assignment was about privacy - a debate on whether our decreasing anonymity online, and the increases in data collection and information sharing that accompany this decrease, either improves or damages 21st-century life. Part of the course work is a peer assessment which we need to complete and I ended up listing how many of the students were ok with the decreasing anonymity online. 

Around 90% of the students ( the sample size is too small at 10 students, hence I cannot say whether this is a trend) whose assignments I graded and a few people I interacted with on Twitter seem to say that they are not very concerned about the lack of privacy due to mega structures like Google and Facebook keeping tabs on them and sharing their information with governments. 

I have to agree with thinker and author of What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis who blogs at BuzzMachine when he says that it is impossible for us to hide ourselves from the eyes of who ever wants to study us. We cannot want the benefits of a cell phone network and then grumble that the operator knows where we are at any given time. The more data gets collected the better is the understanding of society and the world around us. 

In times of disaster the data collected can help governments keep tabs on the affected citizens. Disasters like the recent Phailin cyclone and the London riots have shown that responsible use of the information can be useful. Had there been some form of a ruling that disallowed the government from tracking there whereabouts of these potential victims, the toll would have been higher.

Data emerging out of our conversations on Twitter, Facebook and Google can help a greater goal of providing better healthcare, prevent riots and squash rumours in times of strife. One of the comments in the Jeff Jarvis debate on The Economist [1] asks "Does society benefit from people sharing personal information online? To me, the answer is a highly qualified "yes". Yes it allows like minded people to share information and experience that would not otherwise have been exchanged."

Google already knows enough about me, it has had me by the scruff of my neck since they went live with their search engine. Airtel probably has all my text messages and a copy of all my calls, HDFC Bank and Amex knows exactly how much I earn and what I spend on. I have to swipe to access the various buildings and levels at work and every toll booth I cross already takes a grab of my car number plates and my face. There are cameras recording the 24 kms I drive to and fro to work. There are cameras inside the lobby of my building, the lift and the mall. I get calls from 27 agents the moment I am 30 days away from renewing my car insurance. I do not think anyone can function without being tracked. Then why are we so worried about privacy? 

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret, says Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez  [2] . My opinion is that what is secret, our deepest darkest stories must be protected and if anyone has these in their lives they must ensure that it is not published on the net or on some social media. However the private part of our lives enhanced by the digital crumbs be leave behind can eventually help us in ways that probably have not yet been discovered.

If in the near future the Internet of Things becomes a significant reality then imagine how enriched our lives can be. And at that point would we be getting fidgety about lack of privacy?

In conclusion can just think of a new jargon I came across in one of the assignments - 'Privacy Currency' - the valuable we give away to get services for free. Think about it.

More things to read on privacy.

[1] http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/806

But imagine if we did feel free to share our health data. Think of the correlations and possibly causes and cures we could find. Why don't we?

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/06/nsa-surveillance-welcome-end-secrecy

Think of it this way: privacy is what we keep to ourselves; secrecy is what is kept from us. Privacy is a right claimed by citizens. Secrecy is a privilege claimed by government.

( A truncated version of this blog post was submitted as part of the coursework on Google Media on Coursera)

Once upon a time there was a girl called Tarakshi and a crow called Kaa...

Once upon a time in Mumbai lived a 7 year old girl called Tarakshi. She lived in a small apartment on the third floor of a building close to the beach. Her bedroom window opened to the lush green of a tamarind tree full of crows. One day while she was playing with her friends in the narrow space between the building and the moss covered compound wall she spied upon a small frail baby crow who has fallen off from his nest in the Tamarind tree. The baby crow was hurt badly. Tarakshi took him home and then she made her mother take the crow to a veterinarian. That night she kept him warm and cuddled in a shoe box under her bed and soon he was hopping around the flat behind her. She named him Kaa. He was a smart crow - and liked to sleep on the bed post right above Tarakshi's head every night with his beak tucked into his right wing. In the morning he would wake Tarakshi up with loud kaaa kaaa and flutter around Tarakshi's head all the while till she went off to school in her big yellow bus. He would be there waiting for her perched on the topmost branch of the tamarind tree when she returned from school. He made friends with the people who lived in the tamarind tree - the squirrels names Sniffy and Hoppy, the ant family - Bunty, Mungi and their daughter Chinti, Kooie the koel and Mignon the sparrow who had four daughters - Crystal, ChiChi, Tara and Maana. He also taught Tarakshi the language of these animal people. And what fun they had!

The story above is the template that I have used for the last 5 and 1/2 years to keep my (now 7.5 years) daughter entertained. Every night at bed time she would hear me narrate an adventure. To begin with the stories were simple - about brushing the teeth every morning and night and eating healthy fruits and picking up things after play time and so on. Eventually as she grew up Tarakshi became a role model. Tamara, my daughter would do things only if Tarakshi did the same in a story.  Tarakshi has grown up too. She is now almost 11 and has a cat called Kylie who used to belong to a witch queen and a dog called Tipsy - she and Kaa found him running behind cars on the road near Tarakshi's building.

I have wanted to create a blog for parents of little boys and girls to help them navigate through the years 2 to 10 when the kids we have hopefully listen to us and are fascinated with their fathers and their mothers. Afterall what we give them in those 8 years defines what they will be when they are older.  The 20-30 minutes everyday I spend with my daughter are the best relaxant that anyone can prescribe. The wide eyed wonder in the initial years has given way to questions about morals and rights and wrongs. It has helped make me a better man - taught me patience and discipline to be able to think up imaginative stories. I have had to wake up sometimes to her requests on a Sunday morning of wanting me to tell her that story about Ribbit the frog and how he sailed a paper boat to rescue a dragon fly who did not listen to his friends and went far away into the trees to play with the evil grasshoppers! Its been worth the effort. It has been an investment which I hope will be far more rewarding than letting Barbie stories and Shinchan hours be imposed on kids just to keep them out of the way.

I have often wondered if this series of stories could be turned into an illustrated set of books. I have day dreamed that one day there would be t-shirts and compass boxes with little anecdotes of the two. I even went to the extent of trying to convince myself that someday the creators of Chota Bheem ( ugh!) would hunt me down and buy the rights to the series and make me rich within the next quarter.

Until then...

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Missed out posting last week. Was too busy trying to create a business model using excels and word files. Something interesting is brewing. 

Losing our humanness - the age of distraction and the loss of imagination

I choose to think that if someone instinctively and repeatedly picks up a mobile device to consume media while engaged in another activity, then the person is not engaged or immersed in the first activity completely due to either boredom or due to lack of stimulation. We see this behavior happening all the time - recently I attended the performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at the legendary Prithvi Theater in Mumbai, India. This theater is very strict when it comes to the audience using the mobile phone within the auditorium and the ushers are known to vocally point out people and throw them out. Even at the cost of being caught, there were at least half a dozen grownups who constants checked their phones. One of these was seated next to me and ended up asking what he missed when the audience roared with laughter. So much for the good old bard and his art and nuanced performance of the actors on stage. It is not engagement, it is being distracted.

We are bored because we are used to this constant attention that the phone provides. We get fidgety and jittery when we do not have a notification or a message or an email that beckons us to leave what we do and escape to that red blinking LED. The syndrome is similar to that experienced by people addicted to a drug - the withdrawal symptoms which includes physical and mental stress. Maybe it is because we want acceptance from our peers and want to not lose out on the whirlwind of news and events going on around us. 

A few of us might use the excuse that we are trying to be engaged with the event happening in front of us. I cannot justify what engagement would take place if you are tweeting whats going on on screen or updating a status message, and very quickly thereafter keep checking for responses while the nuance, the flavor and the essence of the event occurring at that moment is lost to us. Instead of deeping the engagement it creates a layer of technology interference. I have often spoken of the second screen being as important as the first, one assumes that the people using the second screen are not using it while the main act is being missed on the main screen. It would be downright stupid.

Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead? asks Sherry Turkle in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-eight-march/alone-together-why-we-expect-more-from-technology/

Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself. We come to see what robots offer as relationship. The simplification of relationship is no longer a source of complaint. It becomes what we want. These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm.

We are beginning to behave like Pavlov's dogs - we need attention and the phone seems to provide it in easily doses, and we say we are bored.

I hear from friends and coworkers that their kids spend a lot of time using the tablets and mobile phones, that these 7/8 year olds are experts in using these devices. My question to them usually is whether their kids read a 20 page book with pictures at a stretch or can they listen to a story narration without getting distracted? I get weird looks. And therein lies the problem, we are so distracted that it is the normal for us and hence it is the normal for our children. Unfortunate that the next generation would not know what it is to lie under a banyan tree and watch the clouds go by and not have the compulsion to let the world know that they saw a dragon and a rabbit being chased by a mouse in the sky.

Further reading:

The crisis of Attention mentioned by Joe Kraus in "Slow Tech" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzpX0TLKS9Q which in the initial minutes illustrates how distracted we really are due to the mobile phones which are constantly buzzing and not letting us complete any one thing in its entirety.


Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead? asks Sherry Turkle in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-eight-march/alone-together-why-we-expect-more-from-technology/

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ - illustrates the loss of ability to absorb nuances and depth in any subject.

(I had to write a shorter version this essay for my assignment for a course that I have taken on Coursera.org - by Professor Owen Youngman, it has been tough to do it when all the phone does is vibrate)

RectifyCredit and OKListen - startups that are different and other ramblings

I started blogging again almost 2 months ago and the first blog post after that long break was about rejection.  A different kind of rejection happened a couple of days later - a bank rejected my application for a home loan (was mad enough to want to invest in one more property, logic was that one needs a property for every year post retirement, and considering I aim to be around for a long long time, I figured one more would do no harm).

I have been rejected before by banks and credit card companies for a lot of reasons - I used to work for a company call nautanki.tv (Citibank rejected me for this reason), had a bad credit history because my EMI cheques would regularly bounce - I had salaries to pay and any insane individual running a startup would understand this. After retiring from the business of startups, I paid back every rupee I ever borrowed and cleaned up my track record and eventually managed to get a car loan, home loan and a couple of credit cards (part of it was due to my employers and that in itself is another story).

The latest rejection was because the bank found that once upon a time I had taken a loan and had missed a few EMIs. I had repaid them with interest but the stain remained. In their view I am no less than a criminal with blood on my hands.  I tweeted about it and got a response from Aparna Ramchandra who runs Rectifycredit.com - the business is simple, her team works with the credit rating firms like CIBIL and the banks and helps people like me or worse in getting their credit history cleaned up so that they do not get rejected by banks. I found the idea simple and am happy to say that the service is efficient and effective.  I was curious to know how they function, their funding and the scale and called Aparna to chat. What I realised after talking to her is what a lot of us who have been in the startup have started to talk about - does it make sense to give away a huge chunk of your company to get money from angels who are not really interested in your business but are looking at a ROI of 16 - 17% on their investment. She says that it puts unrealistic pressure on the business and takes away the core ideas. RectifyCredit wants to expand, wants to go to new cities and wants to put humans in those offices to have a voice to deal with people who are already scared of the banking and financial sector. She wants to put the trust factor into the business and grow steady.

Another service that I have come to love is OKListen.com. If you are someone who is tired of the Bollywood noise masquerading as music then you must try the service out. It provides a platform for independent music to reach their audience. Currently available via the browser, one can buy jazz albums by artists who would never be found otherwise. They have some of the brightest artists on their service today and do a sizable volume of downloads per month.  I met Vijay Basrur, the CEO and Founder of the service over]coffee - he had the exact same thing to say about funding - do not want to give away equity for just some money.

These are two very small but robust ideas in my opinion and can be grown into large businesses if the inputs are correct. Simple things like connections to people who can help. Relationships that can be leveraged to benefit and possibly a small bit of cash to get to the next level.

I wonder why most angels and angel networks in India have gone the way a VC firm would work. Wonder why no one is willing to invest in a startup that needs sub 1 crore in funding and why do the ones that can fund want so much of equity that the founders do not have the incentive to work beyond the first couple of rounds.

Would a platform that interfaces and performs the role of a mentor work? Would it be possible to pool in resources of the startups and businesses that have crossed the threshold of death so that a pipeline of startups take root? I am not talking of accelerators and combinators and such, am talking even more basic - more grounded setup that provides synergy to the startups. I have a whiff of an idea here but I am not sure yet where it would go from here.

Do you have ideas that can help these two startups that I have mentioned. Write in and I would be happy to share their contacts or just go and look up their websites.

The martyr syndrome

According to Wikipedia, in psychology, a person who has a martyr complex, sometimes associated with the term victim complex, desires the feeling of being a martyr for his/her own sake, seeking out suffering or persecution because it feeds a psychological need. In some cases, this results from the belief that the martyr has been singled out for persecution because of exceptional ability or integrity. Does this sound familiar? If yes then you have been dealing with a startup or an entrepreuneur who runs a startup. Maybe it is because of our Indian mindset where failures and failings are considered to be taboo ( No, do not pay heed to that VC who claims that he is interested in failures, he probably has some reference check agency thats compiling a report about your life).

The problem starts when things begin to go wrong. When promises are not kept or when the business model that you so passionately put together does not make sense to most. The whining starts on a low note and grows and grows and drowns everything good that the startup and its team put together. I have been there and I have whined and am grateful to a lot of people who heard me out and did not throw their purse, shoe or a brick at me.

It took one kind investor who refused to part with his money since he firmly believed that the business plan would not work who called a swamp, a swamp and helped me out of the hell hole I was heading towards. He sat me down, made me buy him a doppio and a cookie and asked without mercy some 5 things that slapped me out of a day dream. First question was - did any of us ask you to start this business? Second question - why must we listen to your crap about how upfair the world is and how everyone is against you? Question number three - do you really think people have the time to plot against you with the sole intention of running you to the ground? Question number four - how do you know that what you have has not been tried before? Question number five - do you think you are incapable of getting a job to ride this tough time out or are you simple too lazy or scared or both?

Five questions that any of us startup veterans must answer. Must dwell upon and must lose sleep over.

Many a times, the demon we are trying to tame is only in our heads. We become martyrs inside our imaginations. We do not know when to stop and give the business we are trying to run / setup a hard look. We do not think beyond ourselves and run the people around us to the ground. We become toxic waste.

For every business that raises millions and goes public, there are a hundred that burns itself to the ground. It is important to see the signs and realign and survive. One of the cornerstones of being Steve Jobs or the latest flavor Elon Musk is to see what is coming and shed weight accordingly, being a martyr and wanting to be named such is not one of the strengths.

I see way too many startups, some with brilliant plans on paper getting bogged down, there is just one solution - cut the strings and start again, take up a job that pays the bills. Spend time with your kids, if you do not have kids, then get around to making them. Babies bring a new prespective to the way startups and people who run startups think.

No one will mourn you if you sink deep and never recover, and that is tragic.

( I was planning to call this post, The Nirupa Roy Syndrome, the bollywood fans will know why)

Zen and the art of washing the car and other such obsessions

Exactly two months ago I discovered that the fuel in the car seemed to have been depleted by half even when the car was parked in its bay under the building and I had spent the Sunday lazing and cooking. Then I started noticing things that I never bothered with - clumps of rotting leaves in the grooves at the back of the car, finger marks on the wind shield and an oily sheen on the car. And most annoyingly, unwashed and grimy car most of the days when I had to leave 30 minutes earlier than the 8 am schedule. I asked the Nepali watchman what the problem was and he refused to accept that he was doing a bad job. I let the matter rest and one night one of the watchmen was caught siphoning petrol from someone else's car. We leave the car keys in the lobby so that the cars can be shuffled if required. The culprit was sacked. The remaining guys were asked to behave. A week later I requested the guy cleaning the car to try to do a better job and his reply was that if you think you can do better then do it yourself. Something snapped inside me. I did not react then and after looking for an alternate solution, not finding any and a week of dirty car later, started cleaning the car myself.

Everyday after seeing off my daughter at the school bus stop, I clean the car. And in the last month or so discovered a great many things about the car and myself. I found scratches that I did not know existed, discovered a way to clean the wheels really quick and fashioned a routine that allowed me to focus on the areas that needed attention once in a way. You do not really need to use water to wash, it rusts the car considering Mumbai has salt laden air. I KNOW the car now, it is no longer a utility that I use to travel, it is an extension of what I am if you know what I mean. I feel good to know that I have a car that shines when it zips across the EEH on way to my office.

 As an added incentive I realized that I could reduce my routine of walking up and down 13 floors from 4 laps to 2 and still manage to get a sweat worked up.

The experience is similar to running a startup, unless you do the things needed for the startup yourself, you will always find someone willing to cheat you or do a shoddy job. Once you start doing things yourself, you discover ways and means to optimize and can apply it to other parts of the chore. I recently sent the car for its scheduled servicing and I for the first time knew what had to be done. Which part of the body had scuff marks and which mat needed to be cleaned on both sides, if the water level in the windshield spray was low. It is liberating. I feel enlightened. And I save around 1000 rupees a month.

Now I am obsessed and am thinking of car shampoos and waxes and such!!

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Another obsession that has gained in strength is finding coffee blends that go beyond the crap that is served in the CCDs in the campus. I discovered BlueTokai. They do a fantastic job of roasting, grinding and shipping coffee from some of the best single origin estates. I recommend their Kalledeverapura Estate Coffee. If you like it black and strong and with a nice fruit after taste buy the samplers and get addicted.

I brew the coffee in my office. And the coffee fragrance wafts across the entire wing. Discovered that politics can be interesting if one adds coffee to the mix.

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The last obsession is something that I recommend that everyone who has had problems with money should do. I write down every rupee I spend every day into a notebook (yeah, laugh!). It has not made me spend less, but ever since I started doing it from December 2010 onwards ( I joined Star TV that month, and got a regular salary :) ) I know where every rupee goes, I have an excel that has all the major expenses marked in and the expected funds every week. For every 1000 bucks I record I reward myself 100 bucks which I can use for anything. The fun part is that this reward is limited and has to come out of the savings and I have an upper limit.

Anyone interested in creating an app for this using Gamification is welcome for  a chat, will thrown in a cup of the above mentioned cup of coffee as an incentive.

Google = Skynet? and who is the new Neo?

With reference to Siva Vaidyanathan's work on Google  (I discovered this during my Coursera Session on Understanding Media by Understanding Google by Prof. Owen R. Youngman) where he says the following as part of his seminal work called Googlization of everything:

"Most of us are not Google's customers. We are its content. It sells our attention and our user data to its customers and they are all the businesses that advertise with Google. Google is not necessarily more secretive than Coca-Cola, but the difference is Google knows everything about us."

Read it from the point of view of today and please remember that Siva wrote this book in 2007. Six years later a lot of what was addressed seems to work brilliantly and becomes more scary than anything else.

Which bring me to the title of this post: Is Google and Skynet similar? Or Is google the machine controlled Matrix?

I have been teasing friends who work for Google about the firm being similar to Skynet - the fictional all controlling machine from the movie series - Terminator. And over the last few years as more and more of the Google products start to dominate our lives, work and as we feed it with minute details of our lives, I get a feeling that the Google guys know more about us than we know. We are the actors who live out our lives, whereas they can analyse and dissect everything we do and give us what they think is 'right'. 

When do you think this Google intelligence become self aware? and then what happens? Are we doomed to becoming like the humans in the movie Wall-E - fat lumps who are fed a constant barrage of information? or like the human battery cells of Matrix - living in the belief that what ever is shown is real. 

At what point will the rebellion happen? and who will be the Neo emerging out from the Matrix created one search result at a time?

My post might be out of context to the subject of the course here but am curious to find if anyone has done any study on the pop fiction of movies like Matrix, Terminator, Oblivion, and so on and overlapped the same with the progress made by Google, Amazon and Facebook?

Cheers


Sunil 

Rejoice - the long tail is dead (atleast for now)

Between 2006 and 2010 there was this surge of excitement about the long tail because of which google became what it is today. In an earlier avataar (role - for the uninitiated) I built a company using the principles of harnessing the long tail by allowing people to take content from TV channels and indies to their own blogs and websites. The idea was that people knew what their audiences/readers wanted.  And  hence would take the appropriate video content and embed the widgets that streamed the videos on their blogs, which in turn would be relevant to the audience who would watch this content - paid for by the preroll video ads that would get dynamically inserted. 

Unfortunately the business had to slowly move away from the indie - long tail video content and start working with the mainstream video content coming from broadcasters and movie studios. 

Looking back from a vantage position today, I realize that the business I setup would have failed anyways because it was addressing a mass audience which was used to consuming whatever was popular. Hence the question - is long tail of content relevant? I think that the very notion of people consuming long tail of content is flawed and archaic with larger organisations, broadcasters and twitter and facebook and google and pretty much everyone else pushing the content that sells to the top of the display. It is a incestuous cycle which feeds on itself and does not allow the non standard to  surface at all.

So unless you have a business that harnesses and keeps the audience locked in, do not even try to get them to consume the content that you have by spraying across the net. However if you do have the audience locked into your service then be nice to them and personalise what you offer or suffer in the long run.


Please do let me know if anyone else has any suggestions that shows that there is indeed a business that can be built using the long tail model.

Cheers


Sunil Nair

First published on the Coursera discussion forums on Understanding Media by Understanding Google by Prof. Owen R. Youngman

Unsolicited advice to VOD platforms part 2: get over the Youtube fixation

Thank you everyone for the amazing response to last week's post about VOD platforms. Continuing on the same topic....

Youtube is for the masses, your VOD platform is for the ones with the money. It is quite simple, over time the rabid class of mass audience takes over the viewership on the Internet. One has to just read the comments to understand what I mean. Youtube adds an additional layer to the confusing mass by having everything under the sun under one roof. The closest analogy is that of a fish market. On the other hand a VOD platform that is curated and has hand picked content is more like a fine dining experience. There is no jostling crowds and insane elements trying to derail your experience. My take always has been that if you want to advertise to the audience that is mass and your product includes soaps and shampoos, then please go ahead and use Youtube. Your VOD platform has the opportunity to address the other side of the audience - the non mass guy who has willingly plonked money to experience a good service.

While advertising can never sustain revenue and ad funded VOD services will forever bleed, you can augment by allowing sponsorship and branded programming that is not obtrusive or offensive. I have been called naive for suggesting this in the past, but my argument is that I am the kind of audience you are addressing and if I am ok with seeing / interacting with ads before my content, then there would be more like me. Yes, it is a  task to get the media buyers to see beyond CPMs and cost per transaction, but they see reason when you go back with data - with solid understanding of your audience. I am never saying that there will be a pile of money on this type of advertising in month 3 of the service. By taking the pressure off ad funded revenue streams, you would be able to start small and grow.

Invent ad options - allow the advertiser to choose between the kind of content he wants to associate with on the 3/4 screens. The content and its derivatives can be delivered with different ad options / sponsorship options. I have seen Hulu do this effectively but am yet to see and Indian VOD platform go beyond the usual. Be bold, sell inventory to the advertisers who are looking at experimenting.

Use your VOD platform to go beyond the main content that you are so obsessed with. Go and ask the studios and channels for content that is discarded and create interactivity with live TV. Instead of competing with the large screens everywhere, try to be the supplementary screen that the audience goes to when they want to go beyond the first screen, integrate with the advertising on TV for the shows, with the in film advertising and extend the reach.

Finally, listen! Listen to the buzz, listen to the gut of the content acquisition guys, and the content that's bubbling under the surface on the social media scene. And then use that intelligence to manage the needs of the audience.

Running a VOD platform is akin to running several TV channels at the same time. Talk to the guys who run TV channels often. They may be of another generation but I learnt a lot from what they know and am sure the VOD platforms can gain from them too.

Hope this helps....

Unsolicited advice to VOD platform: get your heads out of the sand.

Here is my list of tips that I think any VOD platform needs to survive:

Do you know who your audience is?

I know this is a very cliched questions but I must ask this one again and again. I believe that the common man on the street is quite some years away from becoming the audience for VOD services. There is no point in trying to be a single screen cinema when the audience you really want wants a multiplex. Your audience is much ahead of you and there is no point in trying to put large numbers in business cases and say that maybe you will get 5% of that number in the first year. Your first million customers are likely to be the ones who already are aware and understand what VOD is and are using it in some form. 

What is your real audience watching?

Surely not the Salman Khan blockbusters that you want to display out loud on the home screen of your app!!! People who have the time are getting their fix of entertainment via torrents already. The connected and aware audience is consuming entertainment even before the mavens of TV acquire them for Indian C&S audience. So if you segment the audience into slivers - the top thin layer would be the audience that you absolutely want. They are your evangelists - the first 1 million people who will sing praises if you just listen to them. The others usually follow in hordes when this first lot is happy. This slice is not watching Chennai Express, they are not watching the TV serials and are definitely not looking forward to Grand Masti.

This audience wants NH7 streamed live, they want content that is usually deemed too niche for the TRP fuel. I am part of that sliver and I do not watch TV, Hindi films do not excite me enough to go into the crowded multiplexes, but I do wish someone got me Ship of Theseus or The Supermen of Malegaon on my tablet. I wish I had easy access to the entire Godfather series. I spend a lot of time watching content between my work and while I am waiting for things to happen. If I watch a movie or an interesting series, I want to know more. I want an IMDB equivalent that I can go to when I want while I watch VOD on my connected TV. I want the same content in different forms on the 3 screens I am in front of most of my waking hours. 


Have you heard of Original Content?

Am assuming you do read the blogs and are aware that everyone from Hulu to Netflix is investing huge money into Original content. Do not get me wrong, am not even suggesting that you go to your VC with this plan – he will most likely throw a tantrum and ask for excels in triplicate.  The most common excuse that VOD platforms have is that original content is expensive - I say you have not tried hard enough. Not thought through the content ecosystem. There is content for the asking in all formats available if you look hard. The stuff that goes on TV is merely 5% of what is created. The rest is not available for audiences because of the existing structure. The day you stop calling yourself a VOD and start thinking as an alternate broadcaster who does not have the restriction of 24 hours time slots, you have got the secret sauce.

The art of enabling people

My crib with youtube is that there is way too much crap out there which they want me to sift through to find what I want, and when I find it is usually not available in my country.  If you want your audience to keep using your service then you need to enable and empower him to discover the things that he wants in 3 clicks. Ok 4!! Invest in a good discovery engine, a good recommendation algorithm, go find a bunch of IIT kids who can build it for you.  Find a system that enables you to allow people to tinker around with the app without requiring a PhD. Most VOD services assume that just featuring thumbnails on the home screen would solve the problem, please apply intelligence – get a human to map events, happenings and change that homescreen content every couple of hours.

Become an MVNO

This is a moon shot idea but the one who gets this correct will win the battle of survival. The biggest problem against the VOD services in India is the willingness of the audience to pay for the bandwidth. If a VOD goes out there and buys spare bandwidth and figures out a way to reconcile, they could do an Amazon Whispernet for VOD.

Stop paying MGs

There is no way anyone can sustain a business by paying MGs upfront for TV content – There are several examples of VOD services that are dead or dying because of the lure of the big TV channels on the service so that your investor is happy and valuation increases. Instead focus on working with the TV channels to expand their content beyond the 24 minutes that they currently work with. TV folks are not bad people, they just are greedy, don’t give in to them. Please get your heads out of the sand.

More tips coming soon …..

The coming age of Twitter

Every few years we have gurus and shamans predicting that the next big thing in ecommerce, human communication, innovation etc surprisingly close to the IPOs of these 'next big things'. Last frenzy and orgasmic rapture was around 6 months before the Facebook IPO. At that time we (yes me included) were talking about the Facebook social graph and the impact on advertising and ecommerce. What followed was amusing, debatable to death and like my younger colleagues say "Meh". So then why am I writing this piece about the coming of age of Twitter? Maybe it is because I believe this time we have some story that is heading towards that 'googlian' moment when there is a cataclysmic shift in the balance of power. I might have cake on my face in 2 years time, but I want to take my chances.

My good friend and entrepreneur +ashish bhansali has always claimed that Twitter never had a business model when they went around asking for money. It is his excuse for never wanting to write a bplan for anything he wants to do. Not having a business plan ( assuming Mr Bhansali is correct about Twitter) might have been a good thing for Twitter. All this while they were just a microblogging site where one ranted, after the Arab Spring they have earned their stars as a tool for revolution (We Indians are making a mess of how we use it for political gains, that apart).

Earlier this year they launched Twitter Music, Yesterday they say they have acquired Trendrr - a company that harnesses the power of  real time data for media and advertising. In addition they have launched the 'conversations' view which allows for people to read their tweets as a threaded view. Most importantly they announced that they have a new man on board for ecommerce - a new that seems to be well planned considering the movements Twitter has made in the last 6 months or so.

Ecommerce on Twitter would be absolutely great considering we users have a natural tendency to buy impulsively things like movie tickets and digital goods based on recommendations and conversations around us. Twitter for the last one year has been my sole destination when I want to read about reviews of movies - when Dark Knight Rising was released, I spent a few hours just reading what people were saying. OKListen can use Twitter to track the next concert of their indie artists and advertise and sell track right on Twitter. Today most of this means that there are 2-4 steps in between interest, intent and actual sale. With Twitter removing that middle layer, it can mean better conversions.

My prediction is that there would be a new way of selling that would come to Twitter through its program for retailers who would be able to target users who have tweeted in the past about goods or services. A sort of a Flash Sale exclusively available on Twitter that can be completed right on Twitter itself using payment platforms like Gumroad. So potentially since I tweeted about buying a phone earlier this month, Twitter could track the tweet and crunch that data to throw up a good deal when I am shopping next and tweet saying that I am in a mall, or I check in. Since we are already slaves to broadcasting our every move, it would be self serving to use it to the advantage of a product that wants to claim my wallet at the time when I am agreeable to spending. I guess the next stage would be to integrate with the offline retail stores and complete the fullfilment cycle. You can opt to buy the phone after paying via Twitter or by getting a discount at the local store. The potential is huge. 

My predictions for Twitter are as follows:

• Flash Sales becomes the new buzz
• Twitter will end up buying Gumroad ( +Mohak Gambhir - hat tip for pointing this out)
• A square like POS solution in the next 2 years
• A messenger service that leverages the conversations feature
• Buy a social listening company to help brands track the chatter better

Twitter has already shaken up the news business, with ecommerce and entertainment being next, the age of twitter has arrived. I hope they do not muck it up.

Maybe now Amazon must be thinking of entering the social micro chat space :)

Image courtesy: presta-ecommerce.com 

Rejection slips

It has been exactly 2 years and 4 months since I last posted on PushBottonThinking. I was gainfully employed with Star TV when the last post about whole wheat bread was done. In the time since then I quit Star TV (disputed as usual) and joined Reliance Jio. Been quite some ride(No I will not write about my work). I bought a new car, cleared two loans, invested in some more, finished 4 courses on Coursera, been a decent father to my 7 year old girl, cooked every Sunday, drove 20000 kms. in 8 months, took two holidays in as many years, struggled to find my feet and give back as good as I got.

Somewhere along I got lulled into a rhythm - salary comes in every month like clock work, loans get repaid on time, jokes can be made about the 'two punch, one lunch' dejavu every day 6 days a week. The challenges of work are nice, finding my way around issues, people, politics and situations keeps me going back but that hunger goes away. Took up a challenge 14 months ago of beating the living daylights of my diabetes - I won by simply remembering to walk up 13 floors twice everyday and do 25 minutes of assorted stretching. Gamified the monthly spends and now I know exactly how much is required in any week and can plan things accordingly. In short there are no great insurmountable tasks that remain (barring bringing up a daughter).

And as is my habit I cribbed about this to a couple of friends and one of them (you know who you are, lady) reminded me about this blog and a novel that I have been threatening to write for the last 10 odd years. So over the next 3 weeks I will try to write 1500 words everyday. If I am able to put together 30000 words in these 3 weeks I will go on and finish the novel. And send it out to experience rejection. Its been sometime since I pitched anything to anyone. The last time I got rejected was because the person wanting to fund me found an excuse that my reputation was not clean. That cleared my senses and made me look for a job, that was almost 4 years ago. I am grateful for that rejection slip in the form of an email. It made me see reason. It made me understand that rejection slips are needed, the are divine love notes that slap you out of your hubris.

Coming back to the novel - if I am able to write and get someone to publish it, I would be making peace with myself. I will start believing again that big things happen in small ways. And maybe I will be tempted someday to start something new. ....maybe even write 2 posts every week here.

S