Entries from June 2008 ↓

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Indian toilet cleaners sashay down the ramp - I think Sulabh guys surely deserve to walk on the ramps, as they have made streets in India more walkable.

Women toilet cleaners from Rajasthan walk down the ramp along with Indian models at a fashion show held in New Delhi on June 23. The show was organised by Sulabh International and the United Nations as part of a series of events marking the UN ‘Year of Sanitation’.

Indian toilet cleaners sashay down the ramp

Popularity: 20% [?]

Town in India Rocks (No Use to Wonder Why, Babe)

NYTimes report on how Shillong celebrates Bob Dylan’s birthday every year.

Every May 24 for the last 35 years Mr. Majaw, 61, and one of India’s original rock ’n’ roll bards, has held a homespun celebration of Mr. Dylan’s birth. This year’s version was held in All Saints Hall, next to the church of the same name. Mr. Majaw pranced around the auditorium singing, “Everybody must get stoned.” Two schoolgirls, who described their repertory as mostly Mariah Carey, sang “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” in two-part harmony, having learned it two days before. A poet, Sonny Khyriem, stood up and read a paean: “The voice bathed with protests/Mingled with human rights/Becomes an inspiration/To the toiling millions.”

Popularity: 21% [?]

List of Celebrity Blogs In India

Do you know of any celebrity bloggers in India. Celebrity as in - any famous Indian personality in Sports, Business, Fashion, Entertainment, Politics and so on. If you know, post it here

Popularity: 19% [?]

Nokia on a buying spree

Though I haven’t used a Nokia phone till now, but still a great fan of it’s phone. (That doesn’t mean I don’t love my Sony W810 and HTC Touch).

In India Nokia is really doing some cool things to stay on top - it’s going musical with Sony BMG, launching Rabbi’s Album and remixing A.R with an Ada.

Now, Ashish on Pluggd.in informs about Nokia upping it’s share in Symbian and acquiring Plazes. It’s means a great mix of Mobile Operating System and an Online Social App with can really integrate well with the device.

Popularity: 20% [?]

A Look Inside Wikipedia’s Infrastructure

50,000 http requests per second

80,000 SQL queries per second

7 million registered users

18 million page objects in the English version

250 million page links

220 million revisions

1.5 terabytes of compressed data

This article tells you how do they manage such a feat and that too through being a non-profit operating through just 300 servers from just one location.

Popularity: 19% [?]

India upbeat: Consumer index second highest in the world despite inflation

Indians have not yet hit the panic button, while consumers from America and New Zealand are wary of spending
Also read the special report in Indian Inflation

Popularity: 18% [?]

SMS service to alert motorists on traffic jams - India

This is really brilliant, if you are stuck in traffic or taking up a particular road you can SMS and get the latest updates for Jammed roads. If I would run this service this would be my message "You don’t have any other choice sucker, and we just ate your 5 Rs for the special SMS"

Popularity: 20% [?]

Patents : India Vs. China, Local vs. MNCs – and spineless Indian IT Companies 

Indian companies are not IT companies they are IT Services companies to be precise. We don’t develop products, we develop products for others. We are still struggling with broadband, PC penetration and the major market is still outside the India. On top of that we are pirates country. It’s currently wise for India companies to build scale and work for others instead of trying to develop products on their own. Why ? because their clients are paying them to do so.

In India the biggest problem is to start a business, gather finance and convince people to pay for the software (or anything). Patents is not just an indicator of IP but also how businesses are being treated in those countries.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Should India switch to presidential system? : A very relevant message board topic on MSN India:

Yes, Why we should have a presidential system in India

• Elections in India are pretty expensive and people make use of money and muscle both to win the elections.
• No one can change the coalition game now, no party has the clear cut majority and hence such elections don’t make any sense any more.
• India is getting highly divided based on caste, parties, languages. And we need one person, one identity and one leader who can tie us all together and to think beyond regional politics.

Yeah, But why we can’t have the presidential system in India

• Many politicians who have crossed the retiring age or rather have reached their death beds are still waiting for this title. They would never give chance to young blood. A president who is also an ICU candidate is definitely not an ideal leader.
• India is actually United States Of India with dozens of states, languages, regional issues and their individual parties and politicians exploiting the miseries. I am not sure if any party would be able to pose their presidential candidates without any internal Mahabharat.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Rajiv cites Zenith Optimedia report predicting growth in online expenditure across various countries and India seems to rank 6th with estimates around 3,000 million dollars by 2010.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Microblogging Services in India

Nice update and round of microblogging tools available for India by Vardaan on IndiaWeb2.

You may also like to read these blogs for more updates on Microblogging in India

• The State of Citizen Journalism in India Part 3 – Microblogging and Mobile Blogging by Parmit Singh

• Blogging by SMS, new rage in cool India via Gaurav

And No Microblogging is NOT Social Media it’s Social News Agent or a Social Cafe.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Demazi - Generate your own software code

Started by two ex-IIT KGP guys and are mentored under IIMA’s iAccelrator programme.Demazi means Development made easy and now you can really create your own codes online. It won’t replace the programmers or various other softwares, but surely it does gives a power in hands of the small business to create some utility on the fly and ease out costing, time and efforts.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Amul in Second Life 

Not sure what this advergaming strategy would yield. But this surely generates a itch in me to know what’s the Indian user base in second life and have Indian brands have already reached the level of distribution and service that they can take up digital avataars. At least whenever I call up ANY call center- their systems seems to be out of sync.

But in Amul’s case hope their digital strategy turns out to be utterly butterly delicious…

Popularity: 19% [?]

Cerius Shah writes about JuxtConsult’s report on India Internet Usage Trends.I was trying to know what it would mean from a product manager’s point of view. My observations are not limited to this report but how one should interpret such report and how to make sense for you own products. These reports are highly useful for any Internet company if you draw the right conclusions. In past 10 years I have understood that Reports & Survyes are like modern art paintings, for some it doesn’t make any sense for others it surely does.

Also, I am not critical of this report as others are. Why ? I have carried two/three surveys myself and I know it would take some super solid psychiatrist & mathematician to give you even the accuracy of 80%. But people who actually work on products know the 80-20 percent rule and would know what to understand from this. Also this report is based on what users claim and not what JuxtConsult claims.

Growth Indicator

If India Internet Urban Usage grew by 19% percent treat it as a figure like - GDP ; this doesn’t mean that your product’s growth rate has to be the same. It just means in a vast pool, some few more buckets were added. This data is more relevant for the established products categories like search engines & horizontal portals and they would see the year-on-year impact of this trend. A product in a growth stage has nothing to do with this. It’s just an indicator that market is performing well.

Daily Users

This is the bread and butter of any web site. This number you should never reveal to the outside world but keep it close to your heart and self-introspection. This is true both for open sites and for sites with authentication, and if you are not seeing growth in this you are in serious trouble. You would be surprised to know that majority of the Indian Net Users fall into once in a month & once in one/two weeks. So understand the classification of various types of users and how you can boost their usage and force them to come to your site.

Yeah! Social Media

81% of the users use social media platform. Now nobody seems to agree with my definition of social media so there you suffer. Please read this data as UGC data and I am sure even that would be wrong, why ? I would never treat chatting as social media, just remove those users from this and you would see a grand dip in this 81%. But that’s not the problem with JuxtConsult, it’s the problem with Internet Industry - we have removed the intelligence and representation from the word ’social’ & ‘media’. Anything and everything is social these days and anything and everything shouts to be media these days.

Top 5 activities

India is still at the very nascent stage of the growth (considering our overall population). If this is 10th year of your Internet usage, for majority of new Internet population they just figured out how to click compose and send. The Internet in India will be still be dominated by people who provide search & email and are better in doing that. I would not doubt the Top 5 activities cited in this report: Emailing (91%), Job Search (72%), Messaging (70%), Reading News (63%) and Sports (57%). But I may want to replace sports with Movies. But users tend to bring more of their serious or active side on the net.

Preferred Location

What does this mean for you as a product manager. This shapes your peak traffic during the day and gives you highs/low over the weekend. But again this is required to super fine tune the performance of your site and only meant for people with deep understanding of the product and their users. Most of the others should not feel too happy or sad to know what it means.

Net Access Points

Do not think at all from net access point of view when you are working on a product. Just ask yourself, is your service worth and/or really usable on mobile. There is no need to grab the share of the mobile usage if that share is going to be absolutely pathetic. Focus on maintaining the growth story of your core offering be it web or mobile. 0% web & 100% mobile or 100% web & 0% mobile both product scenarios are possible.

Top of the mind recall

Try to list down the reasons why these companies are there and now try to see if something is applicable to your products and market. Don’t take this too seriously though, some brands can feature here because they just had a big advertising campaign and therefore the recall might be high. And also, when you ask somebody a question he would dare not show his/her ignorance and would always come up with something from TV/Newpaper if nothing was available from his/her actual keyboard.

Popularity: 32% [?]