Guerilla Road Crossing

Morning 9 AM, you are on your way to office. Surprisingly you find that roads are a little bit clear and you are about to step on to gas. Suddenly out of nowhere a person jumps in front of your vehicle and run across and reached the other end of the road. Even before you realize what has actually happened, he/she would have crossed the road. This ladies and gentleman I define as “Guerilla Road Crossing”, an art Hyderabad’s mastered over the time.

During this process, your heart would have stopped twice, your vehicle would have come to screeeeching halt and some one from behind would have banged hard into vehicle resulting in damage costs worth 2years of maintenance costs.

Like any other traffic thoughts, this has to be best experienced than explained.

IKEA in India, How it may work?

A lot Western companies have changed a their Business Models and product offerings after/while entering Indian markets. For example McDonalds has to re engineer their Offering and Menu- to target Vegetarian customers, completely remove Ham out of their offerings, change the positioning from a Fastfood to Family service restaurant.

Same goes with Pizza hut as well. 

I guess a similar makeover would be required for IKEA also for it to make a mark in India.

Run up to 2012 :Part 2-My (not so serious) India Tech Predictions

My (not so serious) Tech Predictions for India:

1. Reliance Industries will launch a 4G(LTE/Wimax?) Tablet using their own network.
2. Apple will launch iPhone5 at even more ridiculous price point.
3. Nokia will introduce budget WindowsPhones and also Nokia Windows8 Tablet.
4. India becomes the biggest country on Google+
5. Indian DTH operators will come with even more enticing Mobile/Tablet integrated features , but fail to provide a technology that works during rains.
6. Mobile call rates will increase even more , roaming will be gone and your ISPs continue to FUP you.
7. Over priced Macbook Air clones(Ultrabooks) flock the market.
8. Spice/Micromax/Karbonn/iBall/HCL and many more will launch ICS based cheap Android tabs.
9. Flipkart changes how Digital Content is bought in India.
10. One Big shake(consolidation or joining the deadpool) in deals/e-Commerce sites
11. India sees a Spotify like service for Indian Music (May be Google Music for India) 
12. Debate on Kapil Sibal's Idea of screening content on Social Networking will continue. 

Run up to 2012 : Part 1

12 Wishes for 2012, not resolutions. My wishes from last year here

1. Visit a Eurpoean /US city on Work/Vacation
2. Buy a new vehicle
3. Invest
4. Run a race ( 10k/15k race)
5. Build some Product (Physical/online ) on my own
6. Learn a foreign language
7. Start cycling
8. Teach Math
9. Buy some Good furniture for home
10. Blog atleast 10 posts a month
11. Buy a Smart Phone
12. Better take home salary

Should restaurants add trends to their menus?

Most of the times, you go to a restaurant and not sure what to order. Some times we ask the waiter to help us choose some thing or go directly with their suggestions. Another thing most people do is to look around see what's interesting on someone else's table or see whats some other waiter is carrying around to serve and order those. Now come to tech world , where we have the trends about what people are talking and discussing currently across social networks. Now mix these two, how about hotels showing trends about what's being ordered currently, what's popular over the Week or some thing like that. I think this will do a lot of difference to the guests and help them discover new dishes. Well how should hotels do this? The most expensive way will be to have interactive iPad like tablet menus with trends. Easier way is to have a display board with top 10 items ordered today. Of course there is a scope for hotels to tweak these .But trends are a great way in offline world to discover new things

New year resolutions

We are already close to a new year (2012). That was pretty quick i think. So with a New Year almost close, i think it is time to start thinking of New Year resolutions. 

Over the years ,I have never listed New Year resolution(s), infact i never believed in them. But for the first time last year , i listed a set of Wishes( not resolutions) and 10 months down the line i am impressed with what i have achieved .

What i had learnt is,by having list like this one will  sub-consiously track the list and try to link each effort/task you take up on every day to one or other item in the list and some how achieve it .

I am currently not posting the achievement %, i will once i have a new set of wishes for 2012. 

On Brands, Social Media interactions and customer service

Karthik Srinivasan writes about his experience with Hippo and Mast Kalandar  about brands

that sets expectations afresh, that if things go wrong, the brand is willing to set things right promptly instead of sitting mum and ignoring annoyed customers.

This is my take 

Agree with his reasoning that brands will and keep targeting people with more online influence with these kind of incentives for a better online reputation (and "bonus" posts) 

At the same time there will be 90 others(with little/no online reputation) who still crib about their service/taste in the case of Hippo in online and offline world. 

Leaving aside Hippo experience, w.r.t to Mast Kalandar kind of cases,

I think it has to be brand/product philosophy as to how they want to serve their customers, like a retailer( Nordstrom) with "No questions asked return" policy and all the customers treated the same way.[ Not sure if they still adhere to this] .

May be Domino's 30 Min delivery promise can also one of such policy [ofcourse there are cases where the delivery guys argue about it (in India) ]

PS:

Hippo is yet to send my gift hamper that they promised to send to their first 1000 followers on twitter.

Virtual Assistant with Social Intelligence

Today if you ask Siri, "Siri, I want to eat a Pizza" most probably it would say. "Here are the near by restaurants that serve pizza arranged by their popularity" . 

Now how about an app that says "You friend Iris had a Chese burst pizza at Pizza Hut in 6th block recently and liked it very much and it is just 2 miles away, should we go?"

How did it say that, well it knows my contacts on Facebook,Twitter, Google plus and list of other social networking sites, Parses thru their updates about pizza, understands the sentiments of the update, gets the location w.r.t your present locations and gives you one final definite answer. Isn't this Magical.

Now who can do this? Obviously Google. They already do this in parts, search for some thing on Google, if you are on Google plus and have your profile created and linked it with other social networking sites, chances are that you see some thing similar like this.(I searched for Apple India)

Added to this, understanding the sentiment of the update is critical, already there a lot of social analytics apps doing this. I think it is a matter of time before Google puts all this together. 

At one point of time Bing was positioned as decision engine rather than search engine. That din't help it much any way. So I guess this kind of definitive answers is soon what people will start looking for and after all Google and Apple with thier evil plans knows how to get this done.

Well one can argue this is incremental innovation on Apple's Siri, ofcourse it is. But still requires a lot of effort to put all together.

iOS5 and Me

Apple had lauched their new iOS5 operatating system for iDevices . This realease had brought in a lot of features. While some features offers a significant improvement in user experiences, some almost go un noticed. I upgraded 4 days back and below are my experiences with each of the features .

A few things I want Siri to do (Indian Perspective)

 

1. Understand Indian accent
2. Book IRCTC (Tatkal) tickets
3. Remind Indian Festivals( especially Rakshabandhan & Holi)
4. Count the number of people honking on traffic signal turning green and disable their Horns for ever
5. Traffic signals with Hijras/Beggars that need to be avoided
6. Navigate thru customer care IVRs and hand over the call on getting intouch with a human
7. Remind when to wake up from sleep in a traffic jam
8. Bargain with auto wallas or tell if an Auto walla is cheating
9. Tell who is going to Tihar jail next
10. Tell when is the best time to post and tweet about this blog for hits and re tweets

 

Will keep adding from time to time, comment your ideas