e Magus

The past few weeks I’ve been reading the book –The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The book has been an eye opener for me in many ways. The idea of how little things can make big impact has been around for a while. The famous one I can think about is the “butterfly effect” – how by the flapping of the wings a butterfly in the Amazon jungle can cause rains in Europe. However, the things that caught my interest were the mavens, the connectors, and the salesman all playing important roles in creating viral effect The past few weeks I’ve also been reading a lot of new items on Khap Justices and Honour killings. Almost every main stream newspaper and TV Channels has been carrying news about one or another incident happening on a day to day basis. While most of the incidents of Khap justice and honour killings news had centred around rural Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, it has now reached the peripherals of the Metros (Delhi) It seems that these uncivilized actions have become some so...

For past few weeks, I’ve been reading in the Times of India news items on Examination results and College entrance. The keywords like – Top scores, Cut off marks, First list, preferred courses, college preference, etc all reminds me of that time in my life I wish I could forget :) I’ve done most of my schooling and college in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. As Bryan Adams crooned “Those were the best days of my life…” but it had some days that is best forgotten One thing I must mention is that during my studying years most of my thickest friends from my class have been the brightest students. As any bright students, they were the source of admiration of other students. And I thought, me in their company would get a share of the admiration (or that is what my developing mental faculty at that time used to think). But during the examination period and the results thereof they became my source of depression and dejection. The 10th Board Exams: In the great Indian Education Challenge, the 1...

This can be part – 2 of my earlier blog on how technology affects human behaviour. Couple of things that has come to my notice in the past few days made me think… is the popular technology more of a communication enabler or disabler? A colleague of mine has recently been to Singapore for holidays. An interesting observation, he mentioned, was that how people seem to be in their own world – the ear phones plugged, listening to their ipods, mobile phones, etc… or they were busy fidgeting with their mobile phones, either playing games or watching some video on the phone/ipod. They seem to be in their own world as if they have created an invisible wall around them. Another is a report that was mentioning about the increase of mobile VAS. Currently the mobile VAS contributes to 12% (in India) of the revenue. While text (SMS) seems to be the major revenue generator in VAS services, contribution from other VAS sources like – Music downloads, Ringtones, Caller Ring Back Tone (CRBT), screensav...

Experts have been talking about how technology is innovated based on human behaviour, and the cultural behaviour of the people…. But this is no one way street. The use of technology is changing the human behaviour too. Remember the days of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Systems)…where in you had to actually rotate and dial a number…(I can still remember the kit-kit.kit…tone you get to hear when you release the wheel).. I’m sure like everyone else you would have been using the index finger to dial the number. In case you don’t belong to the POTS generation, ask your parents about the big black telephone covered with the white cloth placed in the corner of a living room…with the bulky telephone directory under it. It was an era when the index finger ruled. Then came the push-button dial pad telephones….It was usually gifted to you by your rich uncle or cousin coming from ‘Gulf’ on their annual holidays. The late 80’s saw the govt. owned company Bharat Electronics producing the same for mass m...

A few weeks back, I was working on a proposal for marketing of an e-commerce portal. One look at the stats showed that the e-tailing in India never took off. While categories like travel (led by IRCTC, and the OTAs) and Hotel bookings has taken of in a big way…it has been a dismal performance, when it comes to e-tailing. e-tailing can be defined as a business to consumer transaction through direct sale of limited quantity of goods or services.. The industry experts have been talking about the rise of e-commerce in India, but what is being missed out is that most of these e-com transactions are done on the B2B space. The data shows that the B2C industry size of ecommerce in India is around INR 11,000 crores*. About 80%* of the B2C e-com transaction is from the Online Travel Industry, followed by online classifieds The e-tailing pie is only about 9%*. While the numbers and growth might be encouraging, it is nothing great to make a big noise about (* Guesstimates by classical extrapolati...

An interesting news article that came out a few weeks back has got me thinking…. Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share. See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/8XVAKZ What got me thinking was how could Facebook in such a short span of time overtake Google -the default destination for millions of internet users globally? The data shows dramatic rise of Facebook- this can be attributed to the fact that people are spending more time on the net socializing, and an average user visits more pages on Facebook (not sure though if the Facebook Chat window refreshes are counted as part of the Hitwise data as the chart shows a phenomenal increase since April 2009). On a different note, a person usually visits ...

I saw this new stuff that Google Labs is working on… FollowFinder it made me curious to know what exactly does this feature do, and how will it help the users and also how will it help Google as a company. Followfinder is basically a search engine that will help you find people (nay, tweeps) and expand your twitter network. While I’m not sure why would people go to a Google feature to search for Tweeps, while I have this function on Twitter page… in terms of finding people. In fact looking at the growth of twitter access through mobile apps (I guess in the last count it was close to 45%) Google is looking at only half the twitter user universe through this feature… Another reason and I find this most stupid is the fact that if I am following say 2 publication tweets…what inference makes Google believe that I might be interested in other publication tweets too.. I mean, I do not subscribe to all the newspapers or magazines.. I stick to 1 or 2… and I’m sure most people also would be hap...