A brief interview with Biligiri Ranga from Primetime PRISM magazine.
What are the things at your place of work that impresses you here? Could u pinpoint the differences between working conditions here and the place you come from?
The working conditions in Hyderabad are very different and yet the same as those of most US offices. If you’re working in a multi-national company, the offices run at an international level of quality standards. On the other hand, you do sometimes deal with Internet outages and other problems with the infrastructure that typically are not experienced in US offices. Separate from the infrastructure though is the quality of the people and the sense of community in most offices there. I had the feeling that people work together more closely and collaboratively to ensure the team is successful, whereas in the west, commonly people work more independently.
What is about Hyderabad that impresses you? How do u see the city compared to other Indian metros like Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chandigarh, Chennai, Pune, etc?
What stood out most to me was the vision of Chandrababu Naidu. The High Tech City design was well thought through. Pushing the business parks outside of the city helped to not overwhelm the city such as what has happened in Bangalore. Additionally, I noticed a different sense of pride in how the city is maintained. For example, there is more energy put in to finishing sidewalks and landscaping for the main roads. These small things make a difference on how a city is perceived by an outsider. Culturally though, I believe Hyderabad is quite different than the other major metros. It’s a more conservative culture than that of Mumbai and Delhi, which I think has benefits and negatives. The benefits are it will slow the pace of change and probably keep the culture from widely detracting from the local history. However, it can also make it more challenging to inspire the young talent of today to live there. Many of these folks want to be in the places that allow them to think and behave more freely.
What’s your take about lifestyle conditions here? Is it reasonable? And how do u find the people here?
The first thing I head about that was immediately validated was “Hyderbady Hospitality”. In Hyderabad there is a sense of community that is much stronger than the other metros. I think people there are genuinely more interested in their neighbor succeeding. This helps the business community continue to grow and succeed. As for lifestyle conditions, I think it depends on what you compare it to. Obviously, the conditions in Hyderabad are not of the same standards of those of Singapore. But, I think things are more comfortable than the other major metros of India. For example, the air pollution is much less in Hyderabad than Bangalore. Then again, it can get quite hot in Hyderabad!
How do u find the social and entertainment scene in the city? Any changes u suggest to make it more lively?
I think Hyderabad is doing quite well in this category. On my most recent visit last fall I was really excited about how many new exciting restaurants there are. People in Hyderabad are huge foodies and the energy of that inspires great Chefs to setup shop in very creative and diverse ways. I would like to see the pub closing times extended though as most of us in the business community work too much and can’t make it out until later for dinner and drinks. Overall though, I had an incredible time when living there. Most of my time was spent in 10D’s, Touch and Cinnabar Red, but others like Liquids and Bottles and Chimney’s kept me well entertained. There was always a great energy within the small community that took full advantage of the “night life” of Hyderabad. People are much friendlier in the pubs of Hyderabad than Mumbai or Delhi, which makes it fun to grab a pint.
How do you see India of today compared to past? Also, do u feel it has the potential to catch up with the West?
I think India has the potential to surpass the West. The trick will be for it to keep its artistic energy, sense of community and passion for life. If it falls into the grind of US and Japanese business culture too much, it will stagnate. I think the other keys are continuing to open up the market to foreign investment and ownership to allow more competition and opportunity. In 1991, as Finance Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh championed many reforms that led to the latest boom in India. India was finally free of its chains to show the world what it is capable of. However, there are still many legacy laws that constrain the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Continuing where he left off would allow India to not only keep pace with China, but potentially surpass it. There is still an incredible amount of talent in India that is not being tapped due to infrastructure issues and legal constraints. Solving some of these will be the catalyst for India to run pace with everyone else on the international front. That said, I think there are some great projects underway such as those being implemented by the National Highways Authority of India. Connecting the countries main metros will allow better exchange of goods and services that will increase commerce and allow more people to be rewarded better for the fruits of their labor. With this in mind, I think the next major focus should be on land titles and ownership such as to create a better system to release the capital locked in the real estate.
Any suggestions u have to make the city a better place?
Focus less on subsidization and more on finding more creative ways for everyone to be successful. Hyderabad will need to continue to keep focused on inspiring and attracting the talent. In order to do that, it will need to continue to provide the support needed to grow business. This includes investing in education and infrastructure.
Do u think India should team up more with the Western World in these days of terrorism, and global warming?
Yes, I think India has a responsibility to help combat the issues facing our world. However, the biggest way it can support these efforts are helping its people have more opportunity. Again, investments in education, reforms in the legal system and more legal support for land ownership will help people get out of poverty and not feel lost. When people are struggling and lost in life, they can be caught up in some of these negative activities, but when they can stand on their own, they find their own way.
Do u think India will reach its true potential by allying with the Western world?
India will reach its true potential by letting itself follow its own dreams.
All posts by Darin Archer
MySpace and StreetHive Pair Up
While there is a lot of interest and discussion around the concept of “Web 2.0”, I think the real big leap is being missed in this discussion. The Internet has had a profound impact on how we communicate, transact commercially, and record our history, but I think the biggest impact is what will happen when this is all available to us at anytime, anywhere.
An example of this is social networking. Right now MySpace has been fun to connect people that are both friends or meeting each other online. It allows people to communicate, share pictures, illustrate and share their life. But, for the most part, you are tethered to your computer to really participate in these activities. While I know that Helio, AT&T, and others have made some good strides to make these transactions accessible from a mobile phone, it’s far from taking advantage of some of the opportunities available today with the mobile cellular infrastructure available in most countries.
The big leap is when you start combining the location based services with existing online social networking models. Take for example Street Hive. This new service allows you to see where your friends are and what they’ve been doing through notes they’ve left on the system through their phone. These can include pictures and text. Integrate this with “myspace” and you see a more live illustration of your friends lives that they’re sharing with you.
This is just the beginning though. The real value comes in sharing your expertise with your friends, family and colleagues. A good example of this is Yelp. Yelp is a site that allows individual users to rate and review various services such as restaurants to the local plumber. But, again, you’re tethered to your computer or a static mobile site.
The leap is when you are able to walk down the street, indicate to your phone you’re looking for a restaurant and you’re not only connected with what’s around you, but where your friends have gone, what places are their favorite and which one you’d like the best based on your preferences such as where you flag a particular friend as being good at recommending the best restaurants. Then, when you pick a place, you take pictures of who you’re with, the dish you loved and give it a rating yourself in real time, not after you get home to your computer.
If you’re only thinking about AJAX and fancy new user interfaces for your old web site, you’re missing the really big leap that is coming. I for one, can’t wait!
Bulk Attachment Removal in Microsoft Outlook
This is just a short entry, but I keep meaning to write it. As I write this, I’m in the middle of removing attachments from emails in my sent folder in Microsoft Outlook. This is a huge pain. I have to open each one, right click on each attachment, and then select remove, close it, save it…
It should be as simple as me highlighting a number of emails all at once, then clicking something to remove all attachments. Done. Then I could manage my mailbox size better.
In Store Buyer Identification and Personalization via Mobile Phone Location
Openwave today announced their Contextual Merchandising Solution to Help Operators Monetize Off-Net Traffic. This system “enables the delivery of personalized content and advertising that is recommended to subscribers based on their user context and profile… [by] promot[ing] …complementary content and services based on a current usage patterns.” Every where around me I find companies getting better at helping me identify products that I would be most interested in. It began most obviously with Amazon, but has quickly evolved and many other online retailers take advantage of this capability such as Netflix (one of my personal favorites). However, I think the real opportunity is in taking the technology beyond the basic CRM data insights garnered from usage patterns and connecting it with insights from ones personal network and their “window shopping” patterns.
Let me start by explaining my thinking on personal network recommendations. In this context the system would be able to not only understand the individual’s buyer patterns, but also those of their friends. Through input from the user, the system would gain intelligence on which friend the individual user most aligns with on a given product category. The power of the personal network for purchase decisions is one that we should be able to bring to the mobile experience. An example would be someone shopping for a new digital camera and making note of their favorite one when out shopping, maybe even communicating they bought it. Then, when another friend is out shopping for a digital camera (or online) the system could let them know what ones their friends liked and purchased. Another example is picking out a hotel in a city you haven’t ever visited before. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if one of your friends stayed somewhere in that city and loved it?!
The second key input I think that would add valuable feedback to the user, would be to leverage their “window shopping” buying patterns. Imagine the insights that could be extracted from the foot path of a customer. How long do they pause in one area, where do they start, where do they abandon the store, what did they miss? To leverage this information you would use location based services to identify their foot path and then overlay it with a store map. You could also figure out where they went next (might be your competitor). With this information you could then redesign the layout of your store. Or, even more valuable to you and the customer, you could communicate directly to them when they’ve missed something you know they’d like as they walk out the door. Now, there are all kinds of considerations around privacy and the “creepiness” factor in this, but remember this, when American Express first launched computer telephony integration (CTI) with their interactive voice response (IVR) system to be able to answer the phone and say, “Hello Mr. Archer, how can we help you today?” people freaked! Today, caller ID is commonplace and expected (so frustrating when you enter your account info and the customer service rep asks for it again).
High end retailers (think “Nordstrom’s experience”) and big-box stores could dramatically increase in store sales if they leveraged such a capability. It could be a key differentiator…until everyone does it.
SMS Survey
After completing a SurveyMonkey survey today for work, it dawned on me that you could take that basic tool, leverage a SMS gateway application and have a very cool marketing tool. Here are a few general areas I believe SMS surveys could be used:
Use Cases:
1.) Product/Service Development – Identify key customers that are put on a team that participates in providing feedback on alpha or beta releases of your product or service.
2.) Trend (Pulse) Analysis (consumer markets, employee morale) – Find out up to the minute insight on how a message is being received in a demographic of people or bounce ideas off of a target group to see what their response is (e.g., “Should we provide a subscription service to iTunes for music?”, “Do you want to know where your friends are on a map from your mobile phone?”
3.) Customer Feedback (amusement parks, restaurants,) – On your exit sign, receipt or other take-away collateral, provide a short message code to have your customers participate in an exit survey. You could find out: how the service was, were the bathrooms clean, will they come back, did they have fun, and what else would they want. You could even follow this up with an electronic coupon.
After thinking this through, I figured there must be some vendors out there that provide this platform. And of course, after some short google searching, I found the following:
Existing Vendors:
– Raosoft
– CodeSegment
– ABBIT
– Apollo Mobile
– mFUSION
However, my searches seemed challenging and the messaging of these companies seemed to target technology people or application developers rather than marketers. I think the one that understands better how their product could be used and who their likely customers could be will find huge success in the coming years. The other trick will be to provide an easily accessible hosted solution for small to medium size companies that want to leverage this type of mobile marketing service.
iPhone Future Product Enhancements
Overall, I am impressed with the new design of the iPhone and am excited to see Apple venture into this consumer electronic category. There are plenty of reviews out there of the iPhone, and I do not intend to provide one here. I would like to share some of my ideas though on features I think should have been included in the iPhone 1.0 along with future product enhancements.
Widescreen iPod
About a month ago my music collection went over the 10GB mark. I was bummed. Suddenly my iPod no longer has the capacity to support my entire music library and has since lost sync with iTunes. But, being the avid monitor of all things Apple I was confident there were two things on the horizon that would be worth waiting for before I plunked down some cash for a new iPod. One, being the rumored Video iPod (not to be confused with the iPod “with video”) and two, the insanely rumored (more popular than “it”) iPhone. With the MacWorld conference coming up in a month, I figured I could.
Unfortunately, the Video iPod was not announced. We did get to find out about a beautiful new widescreen iPod, but this didn’t solve my personal problem as it’s coming inside the iPhone, which will leverage a 4GB or 8GB flash drive, neither of which will hold my entire music collection.
Although, my guess is this was a marketing strategy. Why dilute the announcement with two products when you could make the world go crazy about one. My guess is that the new generation of iPods will be announced and hopefully released in the June/July time frame at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference. I expect the new generation of iPods to all use the new multi-touch display. While I would have much rather had an iPhone that could double as my primary iPod, my guess is that won’t come for a while (~1 year). I’ll be happy to buy both though if Apple makes me a really big (>100GB) new Video iPod.
Revolutionary Phone
When the iPhone was just a rumor, I told a few friends that there were going to be a few (ok, several) things that it must support out of the gate for me to consider it “revolutionary”.
1.) Built in iPod with OTA access to iTunes
2.) Wireless internet connection with the ability to sync with iTunes on my home mac over the cellular or wi-fi networks
3.) An enhanced .mac account experience that synchronized all pictures, video, email, contacts and calendar items on the phone. Yahoo! has had this since last year, so I figured this would be a given. Also, with the rumors of the unlimited Gmail account (could partner with Google), I figured the .mac accounts current size would become infinite.
4.) Third generation (3G) and Wi-Fi duel-mode networking with an advanced mobile web browser that allowed easy access to any web site
5.) GPS enabled for location based services
Breakthrough Internet Device
In order to be a breakthrough internet device, you really need to have the high-speed data access, GPS enabled, and an ability to digest any content out there from youtube videos to MMS exchanges.
Ultimately, the iPhone will get there and likely sooner than most will expect. There is still a chance that the iPhone could be shipped with a 3G radio. I suspect the GPS will follow shortly as well. When it has some of these capabilities, then I think it will breakthrough the pack. Right now I think there are many mobile phones with similar offerings.
High Technology
In the high technology category, I think it’s pretty awesome how they’ve done away with buttons. Probably the most elegant menu system I’ve seen. Being able to flip through album covers and contact lists really brings the device back to what we love…our CD cases and Rolodex. I have used some of these touch displays on the Sony cameras and am excited by how this will work. The one thing that stands out the most though is Apple’s comment that the intelligent keyboard “[is] easier and more efficient to use than the small plastic keyboards on many smartphones.” Given the amount of effort Palm put into the Treo keyboard to try and be more efficient than the Blackberry keyboard, I’m excited to see how this multi-touch display will provide this capability. However, if it turns out to not be as fast as a keyboard, hopefully they’ll come out with a slide away keyboard so that it can be a powerful email device.
Additional Feature Requests Not Mentioned Above
– Exchange Sync for corporate customers
– Security lock-out over the air with automatic data eraser
– iChat with video conferencing and VoIP
– Social networking integration (e.g., myspace, facebook)
– Music ID integration with iTunes so you can capture a song and immediately download it
iPhone Sales Forecast
Now is where we get into the real hype. Given what happened with Apple stock the day of the announcement you can tell there are great expectations for Apple and this new “product line”. My roommate and I, both avid followers of all things gadget, have differing opinions on 2007. It’s been a fun on-going debate to discuss how well the iPhone will sell out of the gate in June. I am of the opinion that Apple could sell 10 million units in 2007 provided the following happens. 1.) The product must ship with no major defects, 2.) they actually manufacture enough of them (traditionally something Apple misses on new products) and 3.) They have it available in all markets as planned. I was in a restaurant last week and overheard three gentleman talking about the iPhone at the bar. None of them were tech geeks nor in the target demographic. Yet, all were excited. My roommate thinks it’s going to be a while before they hit their 10 million unit sales goal due to the large price tag. Given the sales volume of PlayStation 2 over the 2006 holiday season one can infer that customers definitely come out more for the sub-$200 price tag. But, I think the iPhone is going to be so visually interesting that everyone that sees their friend, colleague or family member with one will want to immediately have one themselves even if they’ve never been interested in a high-tech device before. Only time will tell who’s prediction is true, but regardless we both agree that this is a game changer for the mobile device industry and that everyone should be scrambling to figure out how they’re going to stay in the game once Apple starts launching a whole line of iPhones.
Comcast Cable Box Onscreen Guide Menu
I believe I have gotten spoiled by the database. I use databases so often in my every day life that I just expect to be able to slice and dice data any way I want it. Sort it and filter it however, and most importantly only look at what I want to look at. Imagine for a moment if all Citysearch could do is show you every restaurant in their database all at once and had no idea to minimize the list by cuisine or neighborhood. Imagine if your cell phone only had one menu layer and everything was listed. Your life would be all about scrolling. Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with that…except for on my Comcast cable set-top box guide. Argh!
Here’s a thought. I’d like to see Comcast roll out a new on-screen guide that would allow me to set a preference to only show channels that I am subscribed to. I’m to the point where I feel like I’m chasing a moving target. Every time I sit down to watch something I choose a channel that says, “Subscription required…” I’m pretty sure my setup even changes what channels I have access to on a monthly basis to just keep me guessing. It’s very annoying and I usually give up. (Thank god for Netflix) In addition to this filter, I’d also like to see the ability to customize my menu. For example, does everyone have their local network’s FCC call letters memorized? Can’t they just put NBC on the menu?
Just a thought. Hey Comcast, give me a holler if you want to sit down and draft up some new requirements. 🙂
Mobile Marketing and Location Based Services Adoption
Yesterday I was down in Santa Clara visiting a company to participate in a usability study for a new UI. On my way down, it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen a close friend for a while that lives in the south bay. Since I was going to be down there, I figured I could just work from a hot spot for the afternoon after the study and then meet her for dinner. Upon completing the study in Santa Clara I started heading north up to Sunnyvale where she lives so that I would be in the neighborhood when she got off work. After arriving to the downtown area that was very quiet I decided I wanted to be some place a little more busy to people watch (while I work of course). I then remembered that I had a gift card for Starbucks from Christmas burning a hole in my pocket. The challenge is that I don’t know my way around this part of the bay area and had no idea where the nearest Starbucks is. Doh! Could it be?! Could I really be in that strange moment where suddenly location based services and mobile marketing collide to rescue me from my dispel? Unfortunately, I do not have a GPS enabled handset nor one that even supports location based services at this time. But, I do have a Blackberry with mobile Google Maps installed so I wasn’t completely lost. So, I opened Google Maps and went to “Find a business” and entered “Starbucks”. Of course it found nine within the surrounding area and one that was very close to where I was ironically. Now, here’s where the challenges to location based services became completely apparent to me.
First let’s pause for a moment to think about the various use case for mobile marketing and location based services. When would you actually use this stuff? Well, I think there are three ways you would access such a service. The first is the most traditional use almost every web surfer employees today. This is the scenario where you are at home or in an office sitting in front of a computer with a full keyboard and large display. In this scenario it’s very easy to interact with something like Yahoo! Local, tell it you want to find all the Starbucks around a certain address and then get directions to and from where you are and where that double, non-fat, light whip, extra hot, latte is awaiting. The second use of such services would be when you’re literally mobile and on foot walking around. In this case, hopefully you have a cool mobile phone that has all these capabilities and can show you where that latte is, where you are and how you can get to it. The third, and most likely widely used scenario, is when you’re in your car. This is where today’s mobile phone options fall down fast. As I was cruising out of the parking spot I was in and heading onto one of the main roads, I struggled to key in all these inputs and view the map. I wanted to be able to just speak to my phone and say, “find me a Starbucks close by and tell me how to get there.” Now, I realize that many of the GPS navigators in cars these days have this capability, but this is a separate system and not connected to your mobile phone.
While everyone, including myself, is very excited about location based services becoming a reality, I think we’ve got a ways to go before we have a device that makes the user experience such that they would get really excited about engaging this technology. But, who knows, it could be right around the corner.
MPEG-2 Import to iMovie when MPEG2 Muxed
Traditionally, when working with a Mac, things just work. You plug things into it, and it talks to these things (see Apple ad video). Having purchased a Mac Mini a year ago, I have been slowly getting back into video editing and making movies. My first experience was digitizing my high school video yearbook to create a DVD. Recently I started a new project of putting together a video for a group of friends that took a trip together. We had used a brand new Sony DCR-SR60 camera and thought it would be very easy to later edit as this camera records the video directly to an internal hard drive. Unfortunately, it records the files as MPEG-2, which are heavily compressed, not importable by iMovie, not playable with sound by QuickTime and just all around difficult to work with.
After 15 hours of searching the web I came to the simple conclusion: Don’t get one of these types of cameras if you care about quality.
My goal in spending this time online trying to solve the riddle of getting my footage into iMovie was to find the best way with the least degradation to video and audio quality. What I found was that there really is not a good way. Here’s how I recommend doing it after my research. Please, if anyone credible has another idea, I’ll repost. 🙂
Solution
Step 1: Go buy the MPEG-2 player ($20 from Apple) so that QuickTime can even play this file. You’ll want it later to work with another application.
Step 2: Install MPEG Streamclip, a fantastic application with functionality that should be included in QuickTime Pro. This application allows you to demux the file, which strips the audio out of the MPEG-2 file and creates two separate files that you can import and convert to another format later.
Step 3: Open the MPEG-2 file (most likely saved as .MPG) in MPEG Streamclip and from the File menu choose “Demux to M2V and AIFF…”. It will then ask you where you want to save the two files. Make sure they go into the same folder as this will be important later when importing into iMovie. Note: My files used AC3 for audio, but unfortunately iMovie doesn’t support this either, so I had to convert the audio to AIFF
Step 4: Create a new project in iMovie with the default setting of having it be a DV based project (other options are MPEG and H.264, but neither of these turned out with high quality when I tested them)
Step 5: Drag or import the newly created MV2 file into iMovie. iMovie will convert the MV2 file to a DV file in the project and include the appropriate sound file. You’ll now have the clip in the project!
The above solution covers the following problems:
- “File could not be imported because QuickTime could not parse it. -2048”
- MPEG2 can’t be imported into iMovie
- Codecs: MPEG2 Muxed
- Type: MPEG program stream
Bit Rate: 9.20 Mbps
Video Tracks: 224 MPEG-2, 720 ◊ 480, 16:9, 29.97 fps, 9.10 Mbps, upper field first
Audio Tracks: 128 AC3 2/0, 48 kHz, 256 kbps
SMS Marketing on Outdoor Advertising Billboards
idea: Create additional service offering for outdoor advertising companies to provide an additional value added service of SMS marketing
Background: Having just returned from India, a more advanced mobile phone market than the US, I experienced first hand great usage of outdoor advertising and SMS marketing. While driving I saw a billboard for a bank that was promoting a specific account with a great interest rate. To get more information, the billboard instructed to text a short code. I had a Hutch mobile phone at the time and thought I would give it a try. After sending the text message to the short code advertised I received a message instantly thanking me for my interest and informing me someone would get in touch with me to discuss further. Only a few minutes later my phone rang from an outbound telesales agent ready to answer any questions I had and promote the product.
Thoughts: Not only is the integration with the call center extremely effective for those travelers stuck in traffic, but provides an instant connection with the customer and drives real sales from the outdoor ad. An alternative approach would be to simply capture the customers info and provide basic info in a reply SMS, additional menu options to get additional info or a reference to a web address where they could visit later. After a brief search for potential platforms in the US to support this marketing strategy, I found a large number of them. Given this, I think the key is to not be the platform, but the service provider that educates the customer on how to build, manage and monitor the campaigns. Goomzee Connect should stay focused on offering services related to specific industries such as real estate, classifieds, and potentially outdoor advertising. Goomzee Connect could partner with the outdoor advertising companies such as ClearChannel, CBS, and Lamar to allow them to provide this capability as a value added service to their portfolio of outdoor billboards.
Potential Customers:
– Outdoor Advertising Association of America
Platform Competitors:
– iLoop
– Soapbox Mobile
– GoLive! Mobile
– Cellit
– flyTXT
– TextSMSMarketing
– Movo
Mobile Interesting Facts and Figures
