Time is Fleeting

The revolution will now be photographed.

The dreary definition of a digital camera is still the same. A camera that used an image sensor instead of film to create images. And that�s just a thimble-full of expectations from a sea of possibilities.

It�s no surprise that the most exciting cameras in the market today are built by the likes of Sony and Panasonic. These are consumer companies that have long understood the idiom of the digital world. At the beginning of their development, watch manufacturers, adept in designing precision mechanics developed cameras because shutter mechanisms and other precision machinery required skilled hands. Optics then took centre-stage. But cameras needed to go through one more turn of the wheel. Let�s face it, the last innovation in the camera industry was the development of the aspherical lens. The current camera innovators are people who understand digital engineering and understand how technology design and marketing differ so much from other fields of endeavour.

Traditional camera giants like Nikon and camera seem to be struggling with the entire concept. Their offerings are still feeble attempts at holding the fort. Although, to be fair, Canon does have a large enough selection and Nikon�s cameras are individually great. However, that is not the end of that story.

Digital technology has its uses and neither of the big boys are getting around to using them. For starters, Both Nikon and Canon are building interchangeable lens SLR cameras that use proprietary lens technologies. Pentax is going the same way. Olympus, on the other hand has embraced the digital path of creating a standard for cameras and lenses with their 4/3 system, developed with Kodak. Several other manufacturers of cameras and lenses have climbed aboard and it will be interesting to watch the future of this system. Like the development of computers in the past two decades, one hopes that prolific development by multiple brands will create better products at cheaper prices. If that happens, the big boys are in for a fight.

The other aspect is the development of interfaces. Canon and Nikon still have tepid interfaces, although the fact that both know their users well, may fare them well. Today, the best interfaces are made by Sony, who obviously spends time and effort on their interface design skills.

Digital cameras are no longer about replacing film, they are a completely new genre of photography. The next path of development will not be about the optics. Lenses have been made before. Perfection has been achieved. Versatility and design excellence are already in place. The next step is digital design.

Digital cameras are already being made that use the white balance feature to extend the camera�s image capability. Adjusting the white balance of a camera can duplicate the effects of colour filters. Some cameras allow you to shade the image in minute progression of any colour, which gives the photographer more options than a bag full of filters.

Imaging the power to split the image into two or moir� levels of sensitivity. So that the bright sky is shot in 100 ISO while the darker landscape is shot in 200 ISO in the same image. Imagine also, the possibility of drawing out the areas that need higher exposure or lower.

Image sensors work through electronic pulses. Mechanical shutters are constrained by physical limitations. There is no reason why a cheaper camera cannot have a shutter speed of 1/5000 of a second or faster. After all, all it needs is a shorter image capture time controlled by an electronic timer.
ISO Boost is another feature gaining ground. Sensors are no longer limited to the sensitivities available on film. 1600 ISO is almost commonplace. We may soon see 3200 ISO sensors available to the mass market soon.

All the world�s image control algorithms are available to the digital camera manufacturer. Image settings and special effects can be dialled in before the shot is taken. Imagine shooting a photograph with an electronic diffuser or colour effect inserted as you shoot.

New features can be downloaded off the web and installed into cameras. This could be the start of a new industry. Olympus, already offers a firmware upgrade for its E-system SLRs. This may become standard on all future digital systems.
For digital cameras of the future, the rules will be re-written by the digital innovators. Like all digital technology products before, the state of the art will be extended every couple of months, instead of the decades that it took in the film era. Perhaps a little more respect for Moore�s Law will do the traditional camera brands a world of good.

The architecture supermarket

Imagine this. You are an architect. You design a house to a set of specifications. It�s unique and up to code. What happens to your plans after the construction is complete? You move on to the next job.

The design and plans are still perfectly good and can be used to build another house with the same specifications. Would it be so bad if the plans were used to build another home in another part of the world?

Architects around the world are taking advantage of the Internet to sell building plans to buyers worldwide, through what one might call architecture supermarkets. The same plans can be sold over and over and generate more revenue for the seller than the original ever did.

For the buyer, it is a free source of inspiration and the opportunity to buy tested proven designs from a reputed seller. Mostly, plans are available at a fraction of the cost it would require to hire an architecture firm.

Most buyers have no idea of exactly what they want and even less aware of the possibilities and options available. Most home buyers are one-time consumers and have a narrow band of experiences in terms of materials, designs and construction techniques. An architecture supermarket allows them to browse and form a set of specifications from which a design can be generated.

For the seller, it is an opportunity to showcase his abilities and sell dead inventory to low-value buyers who constitute a large part of the great unwashed.

If one is still interested in a unique plan, several options exist. Designs may be modified for a price. Or they can be created from scratch based on new specifications. This automatically brings high quality architecture closer to affordable levels, while making good architects tremendously rich.

Just google the words �building plans� and you will find a number of portals that sell houses by the yard. Choose your configuration: single level, split level, 2/3/4 bedrooms. Choose by architectural style, or by materials used. There are specialist sites that give you plans for houses on slopes, against water, beach houses and the like.

And here�s the other part of the story. If you want a house on the beach, or on a rocky slope, how many architects and builders do you know who specialize in that sort of thing?

On the web, all you need to do is search for exactly the kind of house you need. You can browse through a number of ideas in a narrow wish-list and buy the plans that you like.

Architecture is a high-value business with an average unit price higher than most products. The average house costs much more than the average luxury car, and probably a little less than the average business jet. And for all the marketing pundits who predict that a high value product has no place on the Internet, there is always the success of a business like this that restores our faith in the benefits of common sense.

Your private cupboard in public territory.

There�s a surprising trend developing across the wired world. It began with lurid little reports of young college girls putting up webcams in their dormitories for the benefit of adolescent voyeurs. The subject has been made much of, since it showed up on a number of occasions in the popular media. Notably in movies like �American Pie� (one of the many ungainly sequels).
Some psychoanalytic studies have been made that, in a way, confirm my belief that the Internet will play a significant role in sociology over the next few decades.

But this article is not about naked ladies and the promise of excitement thereof. (So you can switch off now, rather than be disappointed.) More and more people are beginning to put their personal lives on the web. This can be as basic as pictures of children�s birthday parties and vacation photographs. A few people have online personal art galleries and diaries of personal thoughts. But the surprise is in finding sites that have the most unusual content.

Sites like Tripod and Geocities were the first to start giving out free space to people so they could do their own thing. These were not exactly user-friendly. You had to know your HTML before you did anything useful here. Of course WYSIWYG HTML editors came into being and made the job much easier. But the idea of a personal site has changed.

Blogger caught on to the assumption that people loved to have their personal thoughts and opinions published for public consumption. It�s surprising how much personal information oozes out of people and finds its way into their personal sites.

Much of the world�s web is made up of people who use it for the anonymity. Your opinions are public even if you are not. Besides, it puts you in touch with people who want your opinions and think like you, rather than people who are physically in your vicinity.

So if you are interested in international politics and can�t find intelligent conversation with the people you know, put your opinions on the web and look for takers. Every marginal thought process has its subscribers on the Internet. This is where the Internet scores over popular media. Popular media is involved with the �popularity� of an opinion rather than the value of the opinion itself. Politically correct, generally accepted, mass opinion is all right with popular media, while the Internet allows all sorts of marginal opinions and controversial issues. This goes directly to the belief that the Internet is the domain of whackos and unworthy radicals. But the written word on the Internet finds its followers where they are without fear or favour.

Blogs are one way to get your message through. Art and photography is another. That�s where sites like Flickr come in. Radical art is as powerful as the spoken word and has always been despised by enthusiasts of the straight and narrow.

People post their views and visions on the Internet because it is free. Free, like �free speech� and not so much as the free of �free software�. Freedom that the Internet offers you automatically disconnects you from thoughts of profit to make an investment worth its while. Opinion leaders stop thinking of popular acceptance before they create and concentrate on saying their piece. That is what allows modern day prophets and impresarios the opportunity to create without fear of being crucified and lets impresarios display their work without pandering to their sponsors.

The Internet is the future of media because it allows revolution of every kind to flourish. A little revolution is a good thing. A lot can be wonderful.

Death of a middleman

The Internet is quickly separating people into two groups. The creators of goods and services, and consumers of these products.

While this seems logical, consider the existing supply chain that binds business today. Manufacturers sell to distributors who sell to dealers, who in turn, sell to retailers. The system requires shipping, warehousing, accounting and marketing personnel all along the chain. It requires government resources to maintain order and stability, and yes, to collect taxes.

The infrastructure that connects the manufacturer to the customer often becomes too large and unwieldy and requires an ecosystem of its own. This is an ecosystem that requires too many people who contribute nothing to the product, but simply add to its cost. This is the reason why every move towards automation has faced revolt from the indolent classes.

Like any human system, supply chains are susceptible to human frailties. Mistakes are made. Tedium, greed, despair and fear all work to undermine the system. At the bottom of the problem lies the fact that the system is repetitive and requires a fixed process to operate.

Obviously, a machine is better suited to do this. A machine connected to the world�s largest and most accessible network is even more so. The Internet has closed the gap between the manufacturer and consumer to such an extent that the entire structure in the middle is redundant. This is a problem for an entire class of people who manufacture nothing. A large part of the service industry worldwide is simply a mechanism by which products can be brought within grabbing distance of those who need it.

Consider the businesses that provide marketing, advertising and promotion. They are designed to inform customers about the existence of a new product. They are also designed to create a new set of customers for their products. A small number of products need these services. For the rest, commodity marketing still works.

Think of all the products that we advertised in magazines. Most of them are available in supermarkets, stores and large showrooms. This goes for everything from toothpaste to minivans. People need to buy toothpaste periodically, so they will look for what they want and a convenient way to get it. There is nothing more convenient than ordering it over the Internet for delivery at home. In fact, once the system knows exactly how often you need toothpaste, it can send you an alert when it knows that your tube is on its last squeeze.

Minivans are a little different. You buy one once in a long time and it�s important that you get the right one. So you search all over the Internet to find the right product with the right features, at the best price. Once you are done, you go to the showroom to take a look at the vehicle of your choice. Satisfied, you place your order on the Internet, unless the dealer at the showroom matches the price.

In the first scenario, you have a product delivered directly from the manufacturer to you without the benefit of a large and cumbersome delivery system. A manufacturer would love to have access to the customer directly, since it lowers costs and makes him more competitive. Also, he doesn�t have to worry about a competitor hijacking his dealers by fear, favour or deceit.

In the second scenario, the Internet helps to bring the consumer to the showroom, cutting away the need to poster every wall with the features of a new minivan. The Internet helps to capture the consumer at the point where he wants the product and brings him to the showroom. The details available on the minivan�s site is already the first step to the showroom. Here�s where the product really gets sold. There should be enough information in this site to keep the customer interested. Advertising can only bring the customer into the shop. The Internet helps to do just that for a frightening fraction of the cost.
For products that are made for niche markets, the Internet is the best possible resource, as it allows the consumer to go find the product he really needs. It also allows manufacturers to find their customers directly, without sending out junk mail to all and sundry.

So the middleman dies. But others will have to take his place. Most importantly, the entire personnel manifest of the supply chain has to find new ways to make themselves useful. More about that, in another report.

The really small cinema

While the world got used to the weight and feel of a camcorder nestled in their palms, young impresarios were making other plans. A generation of young people weaned on cable television, the Internet and Sony Playstation are as comfortable with making movies, as most of us are with driving cars.

Independent cinema had always found the back alleys and smoky bars more comfortable than the mainstream. Now, it has found the Internet: a meeting place for the bored, the disenchanted, the huddled masses yearning to be free of mass-produced mediocrity.

Video cameras have always been around. Affordable digital video and easy access to desktop editing are perhaps the greatest catalysts to the surge in independent filmmaking. You can actually set up a desktop editing suite for less than $2000. Of course, there are people who do it in less than that.

Doing it for less is the rallying cry of the independent filmmaker. And the Internet provides the perfect place to trade resources. It is possible to buy, trade, contribute or borrow any resource required to create a feature or short film. There are sites for almost everything: scripts, screenplays, direction tips, cinematography ideas, animation and downloadable computer applications and such.

Several portals like EiCinema and Filmmaker Magazine have community areas and links to similar sites. While you are there also take a look at College-Film for everything you need to know about everything, from sound recording and Cinematography to finding the funds to make your film.

If you are out of an idea, there are plenty available at Terrence J Brady�s Third Millennium Entertainment website. Also, take a look at College-Film�s scripts page, you can download scripts and review them. Alternately, you can submit scripts for review and find out exactly how good they are. Uploading your script to the site ensures that you have a documented date of registration, in case of an IPR conflict.

The free access to scripts opens the doors to fresh new ways to do one�s business. American Zoetrope (Coppola�s company) accepts scripts online from budding scriptwriters. A number of institutions and film production companies are looking for scripts of a particular kind. For gay and lesbian activists, women�s rights and other advocacy groups, everybody is looking for a movie. What better way to promote your cause than to make a popular movie about it? The Burry Man Writer�s Center has a list of sites that either accept scripts for money or run contests for writers.

In the continuing story of free stuff on the Internet, the Dependent Films website offers a large number of free files and standard formats for everything from call sheets to standard artists� contracts.

The bad news is that this makes everybody a director (and more people, critics). It�s pretty much the natural fallout of any medium that goes public. Independent publishing made writers of us all. The Kodak brownie made photographers of us all. Digital video and the Internet are making filmmakers of us all. Hopefully it will grow into something that challenges the existing movie establishment.

The outsourcing circus comes to town

In 1998, I found out that wearing GAP trousers was the cheapest thing on earth. This is the opinion of a man in India, where designer pants cost $20.

Way before outsourcing meant chucking out our loyal employees for cheaper tech graduates in India, there were a multitude of products and processes being outsourced from India.

Lancome, YSL, Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin and Oscar de la Renta bottled their perfume in India. Shiploads of perfume came to India, where bottles were manufactured, perfume was packed, bottles were labelled and packed into cardboard cartons (printed in India) and shipped worldwide.

Indians know the difference between the product sold to Europe, America and the Middle East. Strong for America, mild for Europe, and fruity or flowery for the Middle East: packed by the same brown hands that are eating into the US job economy.

Indian writers are the chosen few who write ads and news reports over the wire for large American and European media houses. Of course Indians being the slaves they are tend to write in English alone and have no truck with other languages. But then, the English media is the largest selling and most influential worldwide. Even the Khalij Times and the Al Jazeera network acknowledge this.

But back to my pants. In Bangalore, there are small technological marvels in the guise of tailors who farm out DKNY clothes. Few people know that the same people manufacture GAP, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and other major brands that sell across America. To give the devil his due, the US knows how to exploit people who think that they are the ones doing the exploiting. Talk to the denizens of the Nike Vietnamese sweat camps and they will tell you that this is the best job they ever had. Consider the options: cultivating rice in land-mine ridden fields or selling dope on the Cambodian border to low-paying tourists.

There is a small number of urban Indians oblivious to the trade, who blissfully buy their �imported� clothes from the smuggler across the street, little knowing that the thing may have been manufactured right next door. In an amazingly crazy coincidence, this fact came extremely close. My cousin spent the better part of his life on board a Merchant Navy ship and brought home a number of things that he considered interesting shopping conquests.

One of the things that he picked up was an exquisite blanket of regal proportions. One fine day, his wife read the fine print on the tag that said that the product had been made at the Raymond factory just miles away from their house.

Today, �outsourcing� is a bad word. People who call in from the US try to couch it in euphemistic language. They try to tell me that it�s not something that they would prefer to talk about, but the Indian companies that are in this business are writing dedications to the business like their lives depended on it, and they do.
Look at the ranks of ICICI OneSource and the others of their ilk. They need this business to justify their salaries. The special place they have in their hearts for this business is less than amusing.

IT is now the poster boy of an industry that has thrived for decades in this country. I have worked on a client who creates herbal solutions for European retail chains for years. Never mind what George W Bush says about the economy of his country, even if the US gives up the ghost on ITES services, there will still be the spirulina and perfume bottlers of the Indian economy milking the Western Economy.

This is the time for the world to re-structure its priorities and rationalise its interests. This is the time to focus on the merits of the individual. Come to us for help, my friends, India has always been the ones to respond to the needs of the individual all over the world.

Individuality will not be tolerated

The Pink Cadillac won�t start up any more. America�s post World War II preoccupation with individuality seems to come back to bite it in the booty.

Thousands of American jobs are being sent overseas to countries where people are happy to do a skilled meticulous job with mechanical precision and efficiency.

Popular American culture has created heroes out of the lone cowboy, the rebel without a cause, the rock and roller and Sarah Jessica Parker. The maverick cop in Hollywood imagery always gets ahead of his stodgy, by-the-book seniors. The misfit always makes the cut above the straight-laced company man. The football hero always goes home with the girl.

After half a century of creating Jerry Maguires, the American media desperately tried to redress its wilted morals by creating virtue out of the legal community by portraying lawyers as the ultimate mature individual. What it managed to do was make a virtue out of making more money for materialistic gain. American society lapped it up and begged for more.

School and college graduates grow up to believe that intelligence and education is irrelevant and attitude is all. Every spring break movie popularises this enigma that the American public buys without trying to solve.

Eventually, they begin to look for work and realise that their careers are being outsourced to India and to the Chinese, people who for years have valued education (despite the occasional Mao Tse-Tung and Murli Manohar Joshi.

China was the first, and possibly the only civilisation that proposed the idea that government must be led by an administration of �philosophers�. Ironically, it was Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, the man demonised in Western myth as a monster, who began the concept of written exams for the civil services. He believed that high birth and upbringing were no criterion for responsibility and political power. Public libraries were built to promote education, which was made available to the public at large, providing an opportunity to the lowest classes to gain knowledge, given freely to all. Many centuries later, the western world is still trying to grapple with the idea of a George W Bush in charge of the free world.

India�s culture of education comes down from a plutocratic convention. The guru has always been in a social stratum higher than all others. Combined with the traditional respect for elders, it created a rigorous environment of learning and the perpetuation of a culture through verbal communication and ritual. To most Western anthropologists, ours is a culture that never had any books or permanent written manuscripts. They failed to acknowledge that none were necessary and libraries would be superfluous.

The Indian education system, long reviled for its fallacies, has come to the aid of the stonewalled American economy. If irony is to be blamed, world economy now rests in the hands of the few geeks and nerds that the world has left behind. The doctors, engineers and other professionals that India has generated over the years are working the shifts around the world with their unique blend of talent, sincerity and a commitment to the task at hand.

India today is the technical back office for every industry from space research, medicine, architecture and demographic research. Of course, the poster boy for outsourcing will always be the little black boy from Coimbatore who picks up the phone and says, �Guten tag, Lufthansa.�

American jobs are being outsourced by the thousands to Indian workers who are willing to get their hands dirty without hoping for glory or unreasonable personal gain. Much as Americans and Europeans may curse, outsourcing is here to stay and may be the next step in creating American media history.

India is the centre of the Western ire today. And for no fault of its own. While the American education system tried to build components for the American dream, India built thinking machines. A culture of respect for society, environment and the laws of the rational world become more and more important in a world seduced by the lure of instant glory and the prospect of making it without the slightest scrap of talent.

Perhaps we are a society of underdogs that believes in harvesting more purchase out of our individual abilities and hard work, instead of putting too much in store by the ghost of instant glory and the regurgitation of values invented by a populist media.

America is learning the hard way that the maverick doesn�t always drive off with the prom queen on one arm and a million dollars of undeserved riches in the other. Instead of whining about the injustice of losing their careers to hard-working people, they should learn the virtues of rigor, discipline and constancy.

The unbearable cruelty of numbers

Imagine yourself buying advertising for a large multinational company. An agency media planner will give you a set of statistics that go like this.

�This magazine has a readership of 500,000. This magazine primarily caters to housewives in the �A+� to �B� class Socio-Economic category in the top 20 cities countrywide. If we repeat the insertions once every week for the next three months, your target audience will have the opportunity to see it at 3.4 times.�

Let�s translate this into actual marketing reality. The only number that we can be sure of with any degree of confidence is the circulation of the magazine. This is a real number, audited by regulating bodies. Within a small margin of error, this number would be correct.

Now take the next statistic: Readership. This is calculated on the assumption that a magazine is read by more than one person, when bought. This is true, however, the exact multiplication factor is a combination of assumption, generalisation, aspiration and vain hope.

Just as vague, is the demographic break-up of readership. This is based on dipstick surveys, usually volunteered by readers. And we know exactly how accurate they can be. You don�t have to be a sociology genius to figure out that women are always younger and men always make more money in these surveys.

At any rate, extrapolating data from dipstick surveys is a giant approximation. The only reason people do dipstick studies is to save money on doing an actual quantitative research. Real research across the country takes money and effort. Dipsticks are carried out inside urban areas close to the physical location of the research company. This excludes any regional understanding of reader behaviour. It�s unreasonable to believe that reader behaviour in New Delhi is the same as reader behaviour in Bangalore. Extrapolating data from a male dominated society in the North to define a Brahminical South Indian society is akin to exchanging chalk for cheese and is a recipe for demographic disaster. However, this seems fine as long as a mindless American formula based on an anchorless amorphous society is satisfied. Imagine assuming that a demographic survey conducted in Italy should mirror results in Germany.

The next assumption is that the magazine is read in the areas where it is sold. It�s a well-known fact that the magazine offices have absolutely no control over the publication once it has made its way to the distributor. The magazine can be anywhere and geographical precision is well nigh impossible. Any leakage of the readership outside the target cities is just a load of waste.

Now let�s consider the assumption that the magazine is not read by readers of any other magazine. Here again, we run up against the assumption that we can actually pinpoint how many people have already seen the advertisement in another publication.

Finally, consider this. What if the advertisement is in all the right places, but the reader just doesn�t feel drawn to it. The records show (and we can debate this for years) that the reader has the �opportunity to see� the advertisement. However, there is no way to tell if the message was either read, understood or if it registered with the target consumers who actually read it.

If you were as pessimistic as you should be, you would realise that the actual chances of the target consumer reading your advertising message is this. An indistinct fraction of the assumed readership of a magazine is the target audience of your product. This indeterminate number may or may not have read the message in your advertisement and some of them, too indistinct to name would be willing to buy your product.

Somehow, this logic is far from alarming to most marketing people. No wonder marketing is feeling the pinch of non-performance. Marketers continue to subsidise waste rather than look for cost effective methods.

Direct mail has been a long-suffering industry due to exactly this reason. Direct mail is an exact science that is much more effective in small doses. However, it has always been relegated to the back alleys of marketing, being patronised by the junior staff of any marketing organisation. And the reason is staring straight in our faces. Direct Mail has never had sensational numbers on its side.

To realise the truth about mass media advertising, one need only to look at retail clients who are much closer to the ground when it comes to judging advertising efficacy. If a retailer puts an ad in a newspaper or magazine that purportedly reaches 500,000 people, he is happy to gain 50 additional footfalls in his store during the subsequent week. This is far lower than the average 4% response that he can expect from a Direct Mail exercise.

Of course, Direct Mail will never be able to match the unreasonable reach that mass media presumes to deliver. In terms of sheer numbers, Direct Mail has the same disadvantages that reason and reality have always had.

Online Marketing has an extended version of this problem. The Web is too truthful. It logically categorises every hit that a website receives, right down to the length of the visit and the number of pages each visitor sees. On the Web, there is no such thing as a target audience. The audience targets the marketer instead of the other way around. The only people who visit websites are people who are interested in the product or the brand and have volunteered to come to the site of their own accord. These visitors are not an assumed statistic. They are logged as genuine visitors, with a record of their stay and surfing behaviour.

Few marketers can ignore real slurs upon their abilities. It is understandably difficult to accept that their assumptions based on other people�s mathematical ability may be wrong. Any expert will tell you that the study of statistics is based on probability. On the Web, there are no assumptions or probability gaps.

The Web log is a tool that few marketers can stomach. It actually tells you what products are more exciting than the others. It tells you what people would rather look at, see, hear and what they would rather buy. It gives the marketer enough ammunition to build a successful offline campaign. Most importantly, it teaches the marketer to be subservient to the needs of his target audience, before defining the target that he should address in the first place.

Sex and the small town

It�s 3:30 PM on a Monday afternoon and nobody expects anybody to be on the Web if they don�t need to be. Desk jockeys in offices around the world are finally getting in to the scheme of things. Students are looking for bootleg term papers. But the significant population on the Web at this time are middle class women from small town India, looking for a quickie.

As much as we may ignore the existence of sexuality in the young Indian woman, it exists, and surfaces like an icky oil spill in a calm sea. The anonymity afforded by the Web seems to be a significant factor in squeezing out these basic instincts. On the Web, the ordinary Indian woman is as randy as her male counterpart and surprisingly open to suggestions.

I work with a bunch of twenty-something men who are programmers, animators and Web designers. Each one has a Hotmail or Yahoo email account and an accompanying Instant Messenger (IM) account. Every one of them seems to have, at some point, been propositioned by a woman on the Web. The dating game seems to be taking a bizarre turn.

It�s difficult to pinpoint the source of these adventurous forays, but by all accounts, it comes from the small towns all over India, particularly in the North and East. Online promiscuity seems to be all the rage in places as diverse as Lucknow, Jallandhar and Guwahati. Calcutta is probably the only large Indian city that contributes to this community.

Two factors stand out. One: Most of these women are married. Second: Almost all these women are over thirty. Many have children and would rather stay in their marriages. But the urge to experiment is strong and unabashed.

Demographic experts maintain that people in cities who have more exposure to international media and have better social and financial independence are more likely to stray. Perhaps this is true. But the small town woman is just as ready to look outside her marriage for a degree of murky excitement. What does not come out in the wash tends to show up behind veils of anonymity on the Web.

A young designer friend confessed to being hounded online by a woman from Lucknow. He has changed his mail id thrice, since he first met her online. Knowing a little about anonymous cybersex, I asked him, �How do you know it�s a woman?� He said, �Well, I asked her about her kids, and she seemed to know a lot about children. She told me about their favourite foods, how the younger one keeps imitating the older one, how one is more sensitive to weather than the other. Most men wouldn�t know that. It has to be a woman.�

But not all such stories are this scary. A few of my friends have even met women in person, after chatting with them on the Web. Some confided in me that they had even done the horizontal tango with women they met online. Most of these relationships do not amount to much more than a one night stand. One Lothario actually claims to have two women friends who drop in to town intermittently for a weekend of frolic. Years ago, I would have taken a story like this with a pinch of salt, but today, I�m inclined to believe them.

And here is the other side of the story. If the Web is all about anonymity, why would these women expose themselves to their intended lovers in person? I don�t have a clear understanding of this yet, but see if you can figure it out. Most of the women who have hit on me on IM seem to have bad communication skills. Three minutes into a conversation, and they want to see my photograph, which I decline. The next thing I know, I�m being indecently propositioned, which is neither here nor there for a single man. But it�s surprising how quickly these women get down to what they are actually looking for. If a man acted like that on a date, he would be roundly slapped and labelled a �jerk�.

Anonymity on the web has its commercial uses. Many online retailers have used customer insecurity to sell vanity products. Intimate lingerie, hair restoration remedies, Viagra, porn, sex toys and haemorrhoids treatments immediately come to mind. Many vanity products have profited from anonymity as well. People prefer to shop for cosmetic surgery and remedies for embarrassing ailments from the relative secrecy of their homes. Compulsive gamblers, closet homosexuals and members of hate groups have their own individual clandestine surfing habits.

The outpouring of furtive sexuality is just another example of the way people use the Web as an alternative to �normal� societal behaviour. A regular consumer of Internet porn once told me that until he saw porn on the Web, he had no idea that there were so many different categories of porn, all of which clearly had large audiences. In a perverse way, the Web makes a porn addict feel more accepted. Similarly, promiscuity on the Web may soon become widely accepted.

The Web has immense power to transform our social structure and values. The power of the media in the past few centuries has rapidly erased many social taboos. Interracial relationships and homosexuality used to be forbidden once. Throwing them open to discussion in the media has improved our understanding of ourselves and promoted much more tolerance.

Indian society has received very few benefits from its media. Most of Indian media tends to waffle between idealism, government-sponsored rhetoric and �self-censorship�. We have too many political judges of our social character, and very few analysts. As a result, we have too many pre-conceived notions about ourselves, and the people around us.

Perhaps my surprise is predicated on these pre-conceived notions that we have cobbled together from morality groups and various religious philosophies. I make no judgements here; only observations. It�s time we studied our society and threw it open to discussion.

The cult of free advice

Here�s a set of blah-blah to think about. �We create customised solutions�. �We integrate your core offerings with market intelligence to deliver unique solutions that enable your business.� �We understand your requirements and generate solutions that work.� And quiet flows the unidentified river.

This could be the product brochure of a financial company, a logistics company or an IT solutions company. It could be a pitch for an ad agency or a marketing consultancy. It could also be the generic drivel that an HR consultant might dish out. How do you find a unique way to present a product that is based purely on the product of a human mind?

It�s easy for a manufacturing company to display its wares on the Internet. You need a catalogue, with ways to describe the features, the shape and dimensions of the product, and possibly the best way to use it in a practical manner. You may even include a set of examples in which your product has been used best.
That�s an industrial age thought process that worked best in the industrial age. How do you explain a service that is not based almost completely on human labour?

Let�s take a page from the old idiom. To sell a knowledge service, you need to display your wares in some way. The only possible options are the age old catalogue method. This doesn�t work quite as well with products that have no shape, cannot be demonstrated graphically and cannot be described in dimensions or value. How do you demonstrate a new architecture to evaluate credit ratings of non-commercial ventures, to take a case in point?

Once you have gone beyond the point where the boring details of the company have been articulated in facts and figures, you need to get on to softer, tacit rationalities of intelligence. You need to explain to people what intelligence you have within your system and find a way to demonstrate it. You have to put your company�s intelligence on display.

This explains why many intelligence-based consultancies open their websites with a surfeit of white papers. It displays the intelligence that the organization holds within itself. It also provokes an intelligent response in the visitor, thereby preparing the ground for a cultivation of wits.

Some organizations use case studies to achieve the same effect. Case studies combine this display of intelligence within the employee body with the older concept of a catalogue of produced work. Overall, not a bad way to push your core product: intelligence. But it does limit you to the processes and methodologies that have found their way into a client�s cheque book. Often, this represents the lowest common intelligence denominator in the client�s boardroom, but be that as it may.

The Web provides a medium where intelligence can be published freely. Every consulting company will have enough reports and presentations inside its walls on consumer insights, professional advice and key findings that can be displayed as free advice available to potential customers, investors and employees. A media-buying company can publish results of its findings on the way people absorb entertainment and information off the media. An IT company can publish its ideas on futuristic applications for its products. A knowledge lab can demonstrate the difference between human intelligence systems and heuristic software systems.

Companies who balk at giving away free advice do so from an industrial age mindset where giving the product away was always seen as a bad business proposition. However, consider this. The day a piece of intelligence, professional advice or market insight becomes common knowledge, it becomes difficult to sell it. But then, it becomes difficult for your competitor to sell it as well. Displaying free knowledge automatically trivializes the information, lowers the value of your competitor�s product and presents you in the halo of a leader and benefactor who has so much that he can give freely of his bounty.

Of course, it also keeps the wheat miles above the chaff, by obliterating the interlopers who profess to intelligence and have none. Which, over all, is pretty good for all concerned.

Corollary to the king

I belong to a small bunch of people who are tired of platitudes and quotes out of context. Apparently, this sort of behaviour is still pretty popular in the web development business. The next person who tells me that �Content is king� without actually caring for original content will get a powerful bottom-paddling.

Every web-developer I�ve met works on the assumption that a Content Management System is the ultimate panacea: a foolproof method of creating a popular website. This, I know, is untrue. Nobody wants another website with content siphoned off other websites. Web surfers react well to original content, without which, the site has no reason to live.

Sites have been created with content begged, borrowed and stolen from other sites. This doesn�t improve a site�s surf-back potential at all. Technology folk need to understand what people read and absorb from a site. Very few people will come to a site and say, �Ooh, look at that spiffy integration. This is a site I could really use." Viewers react to content and its presentation and very little else.

This is probably the reason for the growth of the blogs and sites created by individuals who have a personal stake in the growth of their sites. Corporate sites, all too often fall into the trap of trying to tell people what the company wants to tell them, and not what they want to know.

A manufacturer of olive oil will do better to put recipes and restaurant reviews on it, instead of droning on about the quality and purity of its product. A sneaker manufacturer would do well to talk about fitness and methods of training, instead of putting up documentaries about his products.

The Web surfer is more likely to come back to a site that gives him something he can use. Branded content is only welcome as long as it is content that he needs. The Web surfer is too intensely fixated on the �What�s in it for me?� factor than the conventional media consumer.

The average marketer who is bent upon telling his story, his way, often ends up wondering why nobody listens on the Web. And that�s why I need to illustrate the problem with a characteristically inappropriate analogy from my advertising days.

Conventional advertising works like men in a singles bar. This is how you do it. Scan the room. Look for a girl that you like. Walk up to her and deliver your little come-on speech and then ask her to dance. You need to impress her with the sincerity of your pitch before she chooses to dance with you. If she refuses, walk over to the next girl and try again. Hey, if you ask enough women, the law of averages will eventually catch up, and you will get a modicum of rumpy-pumpy.

Web marketing is the girl in a bar. She dresses up just right, looks pretty and sits in the corner waiting for someone to walk up to her and ask her to dance. Web marketing doesn�t have the liberty to walk up to the viewer. The viewer has to choose to visit your site.

Marketers seem to have a problem dealing with this sex change. It will probably take a generation of young people who understand the idiom to push the old order aside, before we see any change in contemporary marketing techniques.
The only people return to a site is because they know there will be something new to see when they get there. This requires smart editorial content. Web surfers need to be cajoled, seduced and entertained before they choose to stay with you.

Many marketers on the web tried to swim against the tide by forcing a real world idiom to the Web. That caused the unfortunate rise of the horizontal portals in the late nineties. Few survived. Many viewers tired of the incessant badgering that banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitial ads and other irritants on portals. Finally, banner advertising click-thru rates plunged to abysmal levels and will probably soon be relegated to history.

Website content has to be usable and current. It needs to keep its audience enthralled and committed. Sites that don�t have repeat visitors are dead from the word �go�. That is the corollary that marketers have to learn and live with.

When the bells have stopped pealing

In 1999, a friend asked me if he should buy a VCD player. This was a time when they were becoming slowly affordable and software, mostly pirated, was available in large quantities. It was difficult to make a case for what I had to tell him: that VCDs were just an interim technology between VHS tape and DVD.

Interim technology has always been the undoing of the whiz-bang set. It�s so easy to mistake bells and whistles for technology. At the time VCD technology started becoming popular, DVD was already available in a stable, interchangeable format. The caucus of consumer electronics companies decided to keep DVD out of the market through planned obsolescence.

This is how we see it. We see VCDs all over the marketplace. Every brand tries to sell us its basic model for �only $199�. Then the next round of �new, improved, menu-driven� VCD players come into the market with a few real features. At this point, the basic models are available at under $100 and the new, improved models are at the same price point. After a while, the basic player will be made available free with mixer-juicers or farm equipment.

The Average Joe continues to be a �consumer� (a thoroughly degrading concept invented by marketing people). The consumer believes that companies are building new technologies constantly and are therefore able to give him a better product. In truth, the companies that were making VCD players already had DVD technology in their hands and preferred not to do anything about it. They were having so much fun selling DVD players at $500, that �making things better� didn�t seem like such a great idea.

If you don�t believe this, try developing an optical drive technology that increases data density by a factor of 20. Trust me, you can�t do it in 5 short years. That is the time it took to go from $100 VCD players to $100 DVD players.

The phenomenon of interim technology is most pronounced in the areas of consumer and workplace electronics. This is because there�s a lot of money to be made here. Since marketing is the business of fooling all of the people all of the time, it succeeds most in these two fields.

Look at the detritus of interim technologies that have accumulated worldwide over the years. Historically, we know of various printing and imaging technologies like lithography that have fallen by the wayside, or have been re-purposed. In consumer electronics of an earlier era, the 8-track player did see a short run, but failed to find worldwide acceptance.

In personal computers, the churn has been the strongest. Think of the BBC Micros, Sinclaires and Commodores that burst on to the scene for a few years but couldn�t hold ground. If we learn anything from history, it is to wait for a new technology to settle down. Today, new technologies and formats keep coming out of the woodwork every few years. It�s easier to wait till the technologies settle down and the trench warfare subsides. Usually, it�s easy to tell which one is left standing.

Sometimes technology takes years to settle down for various reasons outside its own abilities. For example, WAP never really took off due to limitations in carrier protocols. GSM didn�t have the stability or the bandwidth to make it work. CDMA 2x wasn�t available, and still isn�t, in parts of the world that matter. MMS never did take off. Perhaps a version of it will come along at some point. GPRS is possibly an option, but the carrier is still a problem. Unless GPRS can break through the bandwidth bottleneck, I don�t see it getting anywhere.

Some companies have tried to barrel through the standards barrier, hoping to make their own technologies the basis of a standard. HP succeeded with laser printing and Postscript. So did Canon with ink-jet printing. Cisco did it with networking and practically owns the field.

Others were not so lucky. Apple rushed into a number of technologies before standardisation set in, resulting in the mess they are in. That road can only end in hurt, not unlike Harley Davidson Motorcycles. Once a market leader and innovator, now patronised only by a small group of die-hard loyalists.

Smart marketing has also created standards out of turkeys. Microsoft is a case in point. I don�t subscribe to sensationalist theories about Microsoft�s monopolistic hegemony. They are in the business of selling their products just like everybody else. However, I do feel miffed at the number of good products dying, and being replaced by Microsoft. But Microsoft hasn�t been the only reason for this.

Excellent technologies like Philips� DAT and Sony�s Minidisc never stood a chance. OS2 lost the war against Windows. Adobe may eventually lose the e-book war against Microsoft.

The next best thing in the market may not be a real technology at all. It may just be a set of bells and flashing lights bunched together without anything under it. The bells don�t peal for very long, and you are left with something that was designed to be a bad investment.

The GQ school of technology

Everybody I know sports a Nokia 6600 phone. I need to find new friends.

As a gizmo-enthusiast, I am often appalled by the technology choices made by my friends. The overriding factor governing their decisions appears to be peer pressure. Styling, bells, whistles and flashing lights are the next big factor. Features and performance are almost negligible as criteria.

The Average Joe who uses notebook computers, cell phones and PDAs has no idea about technology. (Which keeps chaps like me in business, of course.) Not a lot of the average population reads technology magazines. The general media, too has no credible technology editors. Fashion magazine articles on technology usually meander around novelties and unusual shapes and colours.

The other day, a friend asked me, in exactly these words, �Which laptop should I buy? The Apple G4 or the Sony Vaio?� This question would fuddle most technology experts. Besides their obvious good looks and smart marketing, I could see no similarity in either efficiency or features. Not to mention that the two machines use completely different standards and technologies. So how exactly do you answer that question?

So I went to the next step. I asked him what he needed to do with the machine. This threw up the usual business and Internet applications. There seemed nothing in his requirements that justified the cost of an Apple, or the aggravation of trying to figure out Apple�s �user-friendly� interface.

Also, the Sony is not a remarkable machine for its price, as far as specifications go. However, the styling and the refinements try their best to emulate actual value. So I advised him accordingly and he ignored me utterly. He is happy as can be with his shiny laptop, while his friends titter and thrill about him.

Good branding is its own reward. Everybody around this man will follow his example wile choosing laptops. After a point, it will become impossible to buy another brand without eyebrows being raised. I recently met a chap who asked me if it was possible to create graphics on a Windows PC. Any reply is futile. There�s no point in citing cases or statistics, especially with Apple Macintosh aficionados who become needlessly emotional when faced with a technology debate.

The corporate set uses Compaqs, HPs and IBMs. Technologists use Toshibas, Dells and such. Very few people care to deviate from the centre. There are very few imaginative people out there willing to go shopping for better performance at lower prices.

I recently came across Asus, a Taiwanese company that makes fairly comparable laptops at affordable prices that look really good. But I don�t suppose they sell many. I have seen their marketing efforts and they don�t raise too many hopes. The silliest thing a technology company can do is have a bad website. Asus makes about 19 different laptops with several options in each, but the website doesn�t let you compare specifications. It took me a very long time to figure out the difference between six machines that have the same technical specifications.

Mobile phones are the other phenomena. While Nokia continues to lose market share worldwide, Bombay holds a death grip on its Nokia phones. While ease of use is a great selling point, it doesn�t tell me that this is a better phone. Frankly, I have used everything from Siemens to Motorola, to my current Sony Ericsson, and I don�t think the Nokias are any easier to use. Although, Nokia�s use of interface graphics has been the best till the Koreans got into the game. The reasons why Koreans lead the world in animation come screaming to the fore.

Nokia now has stiff competition from Sony Ericsson, a company that actually knows how to build a great product, and market it well. Their handsets are also quite easy on the eyes, which helps. The whiz-bang set may just leap at Sony Ericsson mobile phones like lemmings. If they do, in five years, it will be difficult to yank Sony Ericsson phones from their cold dead fingers.

Let�s see which way the herd will turn.

Why broadband won�t sell

Well, it�s arrived a day late and a dollar short, but broadband is finally making a small headway into Indian cities.

I remember the fanfare with which ISDN was launched in India. Eight years later, the ongoing joke still states that ISDN stands for, It Still Does Nothing. I have seen broadband being launched in Chennai and Bangalore in 1999 and slowly gain currency. Five years later, Bombay is probably the last of the important Indian cities to slowly lay its big pipes.

Let us first understand what constitutes broadband. Technically, it�s the capacity to carry multiple voice, video and data channels on the same wire between digital terminals. But a broader definition is necessary here. I believe that the purpose of broadband is to give the user a vital link to information, entertainment or business, whichever application he chooses to access. It should be available, accessible and consistent.

Availability is crucial. No mode of communication is useful unless it is available to all. If I have a telephone that I can only use in parts of the city and had a limited number of people who I could call, it would be a very bad investment. Naturally, very few people would ever buy one, and they would still be horribly expensive. Broadband will only become useful as a credible channel of communication and business if it is available all over the country.

Accessibility is another issue. You pick up a telephone and use it immediately. The same goes for turning on the TV or the radio. Connecting to the Internet still requires a couple of minutes before the modem connects (if it does). Any broadband connection that follows the same principle is not much use as a resource.

The telephone would never be a vital part of modern business if it weren�t dependable. Cable TV wouldn�t be vital to your entertainment if you turned the TV on and weren�t sure there would be a picture.
So we come round to defining broadband, as it should be. Start up your PC and you are instantly connected to the Internet. The only broadband that works is one that is always on. Broadband that is sold by the hour is just labouring the dial-up idiom on a different wire.

Understand why dial-up works the way it does. Telephone lines were never meant to carry data. The modem was invented as a quick fix solution, at best, for consumer networking needs. Modems are a creative use of a patchwork of technologies. None of which are suited for the purpose of data interchange. Sure, you can use your motorcycle to transport furniture if you rig it right, but it still wouldn�t be a great solution.

Telephone lines work for communicating via voice. The telephone is essentially always on for that purpose. While is sits there seemingly inactive, it is still available to receive calls. Imagine how we would telephones if we had to pay for every hour that it was just sitting there waiting to receive a call. People would disconnect the phone when they weren�t making a call and the entire purpose of the phone would be lost.

Accessing the Internet through a dial-up connection suffers from the same usability disorder. If you have to pay for connection by the hour, you tend to turn the connection off. The connection is no longer available and the viability of the medium is stunted. Yet, this is the idiom used by broadband services that charge by the hour.

The other billing method is the one used by slightly smarter services. They bill you by the amount you download. While this is a much better use of a broadband pipe, I find the pricing ridiculous.

Imagine actually accessing broadband content like video or music at these prices. Broadband in Bombay costs between Rs 3 and Rs 5 per MB downloaded. A piece of music in CD quality MP3 is about 1 MB per minute. So listening to 20 minutes of Internet radio would cost me between Rs 60 and Rs 100. DVD quality video in PAL format would cost me Rs 500 for the same 20 minutes. Why would I use this service to actually access broadband content? Who were the geniuses who thought up this pricing, and can I get a batch of whatever it is they were smoking?

Still, for low-band web-based business applications, the �billing by downloads� a much better solution, since it puts no constraint on the amount of time your system can be online.

The Web can suddenly be used as a very large and ridiculously cheap Wide Area Network (WAN) available to small and medium-scale businesses. Extranets, supply-chain management systems, ERP and collaborative workspace tools suddenly become available to every business, however tiny. The greatest impediment to the use of these enterprise-class applications has been the cost of networking. Now all you need is a broadband �always on� connection and a web server.

Broadband as a product is still not viable in India, and I blame the ISPs for it. I don�t understand it. Internationally, there are enough precedents to follow, especially since intelligence is a rare commodity in our marketing circles.
Most Broadband ISPs offer broadband at a flat monthly fee. That is the last stage of the evolution of broadband billing. It�s the right revenue model and at the right price, it can spur enormous growth.

None of these sainted ISPs have a plan for small businesses yet. And that surprises me. Business use of the Internet is growing steadily. In the UK, 92% of medium sized enterprises use the Internet for business applications. In Asia, although the numbers are low, growth is rapid.

India still needs a credible broadband policy, which I might say, based on past experience, doesn�t look promising. Perhaps in the next decade or so, we�ll catch up with the rest of the world in a field where we should be the rightful leaders.

Free the universities

The latest move to determine the way our universities function is a continuing story of government meddling in things that don�t concern them at all. Instead of clubbing the education system in the foot, the establishment needs to solve the real problems.

Despite the last government�s strident denials, India�s economic indicators hover between those of Swaziland and Malawi. Education hasn�t improved any. Every year, we have fewer seats in college than the number of students applying to them. In the case of premier technical courses, the ratio of supply to demand is nearing 1:100. Lowering the fee structure won�t solve that problem.

Our premier institutions have spent the last five decades contributing to the development of the West by exporting the best of talent to these countries. When the �ubiquitous� IIT graduate becomes a topic of conversation and the butt of anti Republican jokes on network talk shows, it is fair to say that the Indian engineer cannot be ignored.

Why not make the IITs pay for themselves? Instead of dredging up Nehruvian socialism all over again, I suggest that the IITs increase their fees to a point where they can actually educate a student without having to beg the government for sustenance.

Around the time I did my time in an engineering college, the average cost of educating an engineer over four years was in the neighbourhood of Rs 140,000. At that point, the IITs charged a fee of under Rs 10,000 a year. So over four years, the government actually had to shell out about Rs 100,000 for every student who went to IIT. The same situation continues today. There is no reason why the government should subsidise a student who eventually moves out of the country and contributes to another country�s development.

Looking at the problem from another angle, I understand the predicament of most IIT graduates. In the past fifty years, the country has had no academic structure, no university or campus culture and certainly, no R&D infrastructure. The little that exists is laughable. Few organisations like CDAC and the Pune University have actually created a unique marketable product out of the generations of academics that have passed through (CDAC did invent the PARAM II supercomputer which is marketed worldwide).

The quality of education available to a student at IIT is undeniable. Why not market that to the West, where students can actually pay for the education. In fact, even if a foreign student pays full price for his education, he is still paying much less than he would in the West. Universities will have to rely less on handouts from the UGC and concentrate on improving academic quality.

As the premier universities lead the way, other universities will be forced to compete and improve their academic services. Making the education process lucrative will encourage growth and make technical education a buyers� market.

Today, an Indian student goes to a university to buy a degree. Hopefully, in the future, we will see more committed students who go to college for an education. Universities in India follow an archaic process of evaluation that merely prepares the student for life as an interchangeable machine part in an industrial engine. Considering the number of students who graduate from technical courses in India, the number of post-graduate and doctorate students is pitifully low.

Graduation courses that compel the student to think independently and create new technologies and applications instil the spirit of entrepreneurship that is sorely lacking in Indian CEOs.

A large academic body across the country supported by collaborative tools would help to build a broader academic atmosphere that is conducive to research and development. Inter-mingling of academic disciplines would help to deliver a well-rounded education to the student body. For example, the management faculty of a university could easily create programs for consumer testing and marketing projects that the engineering department builds. We don�t need Scott Adams to tell us that engineers and managers don�t play well together. It stems from a lack of understanding of each other�s disciplines. Perhaps this needs to be addressed at the universities.

This brings me to the next, and very important argument. Why should the students bear the cost of the education solely upon themselves? Universities need to understand the needs of the industries where their students will work. The industry itself should be allowed to invest in the education of their intended recruits as well. Universities the world over, offer their services to technology companies. The University of California at Berkeley invented every new Unix flavour for the past few decades. Sun Microsystems was practically born there. (Little wonder therefore, that the Unix, Linux and BSD worlds are so, so hippy.)
Similarly, every new technology in the post-war era, from space research to nuclear physics to nano-technology has come from an American University. The premier universities of the US are littered with Nobel laureates. And this is a country that discredits its academic community as geeks and nerds.

I know for a fact that companies in India go out to Russian and Australian universities for their technical research requirements. It�s pathetic to note that a country as large as India, with an education system to match has to depend on academic help from outside. I lay the blame directly at the door of our universities, who have, by and large, never created a credible long-term R&D infrastructure, nor marketed their academic skills to our own industry.

India is now the centre of the world�s Information Technology research. It is also increasingly growing into a centre for the development of healthcare and nano-technology research. It is time the universities were freed to offer scientific research facilities for a price. Lowering fees may win votes in the short-term, but that albatross will hang long and fetid from our necks in the future.