I’ve had an interesting back and forth debate with Sanjay Mehta (@sm63) on twitter on what lessons we ought to learn from the recent Nestle social media debacle. For those who don’t know the story behind the Nestle debacle, here is a brief snapshot of what I have understood from various online accounts:

Greenpeace bought out a video that showed the effect that palm oil cultivation (a key ingredient in the chocolates that Nestle makes) has on the ecology and how it’s leading to a shrinking habitat for the orangutan. The video, which was up on YouTube, showed the KitKat logo (a Nestle product), with words “Killer” instead of KitKat. Nestle, citing trademark violations, had the video pulled down from YouTube. Greenpeace then turned to its army of twitter followers to help in hosting the video elsewhere on the Internet and the video went viral. All this also attracted attention to Nestle’s Facebook Fan Page, where Greenpeace activists turned “fans” were already launching an assault on the brand. A number of people started posting comments using the morphed logo with the words “Killer” as their avatar. This led to Nestle putting out a request to people to stop “violating” their trademark. A couple of high handed comments from the Nestle people managing the fan page ensured that this snowballed into an all out assault. People joined up as “fans” just to put in their 10 cents on how much they hated Nestle and how Nestle shouldn’t have asserted their right to their trademark. In the end it seems that Nestle has one big great PR screw-up in the hands. Continue reading ‘What we can learn from Nestle (or not)’ »

I’ve been pondering over this issue for some time now – Is Re-Tweeting someone’s tweets essentially a copyright violation at some level? As far as my understanding goes, as a content creator you essentially own the right to your content as soon as you have put pen to paper, or in this case published a tweet. Of course, by tweets I mean those random quirky thoughts that get posted and not the rampant link sharing that twitter is fast devolving into.

So, if by tweeting your thoughts, you automatically own the copyright to the tweets, doesn’t re-tweeting in some way violate that? Of course, the argument against that could very well be that we tweet so that others can re-tweet. In essence, the giving away of some copyrights could even be argued to be implicit to the very act of tweeting. Continue reading ‘Is Re-Tweeting a copyright violation?’ »

The current rivalry between Apple and Amazon, and the price war that‘s brewing is just plain bizarre. Amazon claims to currently sell most e-books for $9.99 (though prices vary widely above and below this price point), which in the opinion of most consumers is a somewhat fair price for a digital commodity. What Amazon does is buy the books at wholesale prices from publishers and sell it at $9.99, which is often at a loss. The advantage for Amazon is that this helps develop a market for its Kindle and helps popularize e-books. The publishers on the other hand are paid the wholesale price, which is quite often much higher than $9.99. And lastly the consumers gain by getting e-books at a cheap and wallet friendly price. Looks like everyone’s a winner right? Well not exactly. Continue reading ‘The weird price wars’ »

The Annual Kala Ghoda Art Festival is something that I eagerly wait for each year (along with the Annual Bird Race), and this year was no different. As usual, the festival didn’t disappoint for the sheer diversity of artwork on display. The artwork varied from the bizarre to the beautiful. A common thread across most of the installations seemed to be threats to our environment – be it garbage, water scarcity or global warming.

As soon as you entered the festival area, you were greeted by a huge statue of a black horse on a pedestal. Around the black horse were life-size (I think) replicas of a menagerie of animals ranging from lions, tigers, cheetahs, elephants to zebras and even a giraffe. The same parking lot area had installations educating children on saving water, and an Eiffel tower that seemed decorated by LED lights. The night time saw the Eiffel tower come alive with lights accompanied by a dazzling display of lights in the vicinity. The rest of the exhibitions were along Rampart row and included a wonderful chalk painting of a horse breaking out of the road, a huge wishing bell and other miscellaneous exhibits. There were also a large number of photographs by various photographers from the city on display.

I went there on both Saturday and Sunday and the first thing that hit me was the crowds. The place was crowded even before the Festival was formally inaugurated. There were people milling around everywhere, crowding around the exhibits, posing for photographs with the exhibits etc. I have been a regular at previous editions of the festival since 2005, and this is the first time I have seen crowds of this magnitude at the festival.

On Saturday, I was supposed to meet up with some pals from college and since I reached a bit early, I decided to head out for one of the Heritage walks. The walk took us into the University Campus and included a visit to the convocation hall and the library. The convocation hall was breathtakingly beautiful, with some really fabulous stained glass panels adorning the windows. The buildings were an excellent example of the Bombay gothic architectural style, and were wonderfully adorned with intricate sculptures and artwork. It was a pity that photography wasn’t allowed in there; otherwise it would have been a great place to shoot in.

After the walk I met up with one of pals and we went towards the amphitheatre. Unlike last year, all photographers weren’t allowed in the enclosure, and the crowds made it impossible to shoot from outside (unless you were early enough), so we decided to give the events a miss. After much hunting around, I finally met up with my friends from college (Gargi, Tarvinder and others) and clicked a few pictures before heading back home.

Sunday was pretty much the same, with the crowds making it difficult to shoot the performances, unless you were early enough. So I was reduced to shooting some of the older buildings in the vicinity and also trying my hand at candid street photography. I did however manage to get a few pictures of the author Chetan Bhagat, at his keynote Kala Ghoda lecture. And among other things a cat  decided I was its new best pal. It almost didn’t leave my side

So far Kala Ghoda has definitely shown a lot of promise, however the crowds and the somewhat photographer unfriendly rules have made it a bit difficult to get the kind of pictures that I wanted. I hope to catch the premiere of Sunshine Boys on Thursday at the festival as well as hope to salvage some more pictures on the last two days. If you plan to drop by then, do give me a shout out on twitter.

As promised here is the video of the talk (Must say I look terrible ):

Social Media and Crime from SMC Mumbai on Vimeo.

Apple’s iPad which released a few days ago promises to change the way we read digital books. Armed with a 9.7” touch screen display, it certainly looks capable of doing so. In comparison, the e-ink powered readers, like Kindle, look like black and white silent films in a color talkie era. But will the iPad really deliver on its promise?

Well there is no easy answer to that. I think it falls somewhere between yes and no.

While a number of commentators and analysts have been raving about how the color screen is what e-books have been waiting for, I think they are missing the point that most of the books published are predominantly black and white. So having a color screen isn’t really going make that much of a difference for standard fiction and non-fiction books. It’s true that you are going to get fabulous 3-D page turns, page backgrounds and all that other jazz, but given a choice between charging a device after reading say a book or two (10 hours) to practically charging the device once or twice a month, I think I would prefer e-ink any day, more so if I was going to use the device only as an e-reader. (In spite of the perceived shortcomings of e-ink devices that the press keep raving about) .

What’s going to really matter is readability – meaning how long can you read off the screen before your eyes tell you it’s time to do something else. Having read extensively off LCD monitors in the past, I know how painful it can be to read for long on normal screens. E-ink on the other hand remains a pleasure to read from, and so far I have had very low eye fatigue. So what remains to be seen is if the iPad’s LED display will match up to e-ink in terms of readability. Continue reading ‘Is iPad a game changer for e-books?’ »

I gave a short talk on the prevalence and propagation of 419 scams through social media at the Social Media Club meet yesterday. The talk also covered a few examples of about how the police were leveraging social media. The slides from the presentation are there below:

I know the slides don’t make much sense, so watch this space for the video for the event. I promise I’ll post that soon.

Also those of you that did make it to the event, please do feel free to comment and let me know what you liked or didn’t like about the talk.

Update – 24 February2010

Following a complaint by PhotoSadhu, I have modified the presentation to not include his photographs. I hope this satisfies him.

Apple displayed its “latest creation” at the much talked about “event” yesterday. The device dubbed iPad (wonder which genius came up with that name), is basically a very large iPhone, without the phone of course. The device sports a 9.7” display capable of displaying a resolution of 1024X768-pixels. It’s got most of the iPhone’s features like capacitive multitouch, accelerometer, compass, flash memory storage as well as a speaker and a microphone. It supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G (3G plans from Apple’s beloved AT&T). Under the hood, it runs on a new custom, 1 GHz processor (the A4) that Apple developed and has a rated battery life of 10 hours with a standby time of about a month. And the non 3G version starts at $500. So with that price point it seems like a sweet deal.

Here’s my take on the device – Appearances aren’t everything!! Continue reading ‘My take on the iPad’ »

This fortnight’s Time Out Mumbai highlighted a documentary titled “Supermen of Malegoan” which aired on NDTV 24X7 over the last weekend. It seemed interesting so I decided to give it a watch. And it sure turned out to be a gem of a documentary.

The documentary is set in Malegaon which is a small town about 175 miles from Mumbai. The town is based around the power loom industry and the town cinema hall provides a much needed escape from the drudgery of everyday life to the people residing there. Nasir, a videographer who helps run the cinema decides to shoot his own movie in Malegaon. Having previously shot such masterpieces like “Malegaon ke Sholay”, he wants to go all Hollywood this time. He decides to remake Superman into “Malegaon Ka Superman”. From here on the film follows the mad cap antics of the film crew as they go about bringing their dreams on to the silver screen.

He ropes in Shafique, who works in one of the local looms to play his “Superman”. Nasir explains that his “Superman” will be different, and will suffer from a variety of disease like asthma from flying in the polluted skies.  So he chooses Shafique, who looks like anything but Superman. And he chooses Akram to play the bald villain with a penchant for filth. (Excellent dialogue delivery by the way) As the movie progresses, you begin to see the joy that the simple act of making a film brings into their lives. They shoot with makeshift gear, green screens, a handy cam, a bicycle for a dolly and have many accidents on the way to completing the movie. And the local newspaper keeps referring to their production as “Spider-man”.  At the end of it you are convinced that even that scrawny set of bones playing “Superman” can fly! Such is the magic of cinema!!

The film crew is uniformly funny, from their attempts at green screen magic (quite successful actually), to the leading man playing Superman to the mishaps on set. The movie is darkly comic at times, and brings about the aspirations of simple people beautifully to the screen. It also highlights some of the problems that small town India faces like lack of power, clean water and other facilities. But most of all, the movie’s sheer brilliance lies in the manner it brings the joy of movie making to the audience.  Highly recommended stuff.

PS: The film has one kick-ass theme song  :)

I was reading this fascinating article on Visa, which showed how incentives along with competition can actually raise prices instead of lowering them. I was wondering about how incentives may work in everyday life, when I realized that I see one such example in action every day.

Of late, I have had to change the route that I take to get home from work in the evenings, because of heavy traffic and work on the Mumbai Metro. So I usually walk a short distance to a point where I can catch a Bus or Auto-Rickshaw to Jogeshwari station.

Now, there are two primary routes to the station. Route A is about 2 km long and the fare usually comes to Rs.16-20 on this route. Route B is about 1.8 Km long and the fare usually comes to about Rs12-15. See the Google Map below for an idea of how the routes run to Jogeshwari station (Route A in Red and Route B in Green).

Routes to Jogeshwari

Now you have two options to get to Jogeshwari station, besides the bus – hire an auto-rickshaw or share one. There are two perspectives in the transaction of hiring an auto-rickshaw. From your perspective you would like to get to your destination in the least possible time and running up the least possible fare. From the driver’s perspective, he’s in the business of maximizing his revenues, so he’d like to extract the largest possible fare from you for the distance. So, you will find that more often than not, the driver has a tendency to take you along Route A. In fact there are several instances where I’ve had to correct the driver and insist that he go along Route B.

On the other hand, when you share an auto-rickshaw, incentives and behavior change for both parties. Usually an auto-rickshaw seats three people, and generally you pay Rs.5 per head when sharing the auto-rickshaw. Now, as your costs are fixed, you are indifferent to which Route the driver takes as long as he gets you there quickly.

The driver however is in a bit of a fix. His revenue from the trip is Rs.15. If he takes Route A, then he doesn’t even break even on the trip (as compared to the usual fare). So his only hope of earning something is to take Route B. Hence, I’ve found that when you are sharing an auto-rickshaw, almost no driver will attempt to take route A and everyone takes Route B. In order to maximize his revenue, the driver will also try and fit in an extra two people into the vehicle taking his total revenue to about Rs.25 for the trip. But he will still prefer taking the shorter distance.

I think this small example goes a long way to show how behavior can change when incentives change. After all, people respond to incentives.