Simply Living, Hardly Thinking

 http://bkbirla.in/2009/04/29/politics-relegion-sports-and-business-the-ultimate-conspiracy-to-fool-common-man/

 http://indiadigital.blogspot.com/2009/04/seo-101-how-to-fix-fever-without.html

 Folks,

I am moving my blog to http://bkbirla.in/ on wordpress.

See ya there.

It is not just Harry Potter who can make things fly. Journalists are the new age harry potters who are showering shoes all over the place. Bush and CPM ( I mean Chinese Prime Minister here )  are not the only guys who can claim to have benefitted from this scheme, our own dear financial wizard turned house wife ( oops home minister ) P Chidambaram also had some fun. I thought I would just understand the issue from all perspectives and understand this new dimension of freedom of expression. 

• Where the hell is Abhinav Bindra. We just end up missing our aims. We trained so hard during out net practice but how come things did not work during real deal. Somebody doctored my throwing arm.
• Why don’t these shoe companies make shoes which are friendlier for throwing? They waste so many dollars and use so much child labour to build all those fancy features but none to help us. How about a heat seeking shoe which uses fly by shoe lace technology to guide it to the destination and also have Advanced Air Control System to modify trajectory based on movements of the target.
• How about politicians with weak eyesight and lazy movements ( you mean you want Hritik Roshan in Koi Mil Gaya and Atal Behari Bajpayee shaken together )
• Hey not my fault. The box said – Just do it. I just followed the instructions.
• It was a liberty shoe. I have complete liberty to throw it wherever I want to.

The Politician

• Why me ? The guy in opposition deserved it more. ( not applicable to the Chinese. They are not used to living opposition )
• Why do these guys throw only one shoe? If he had thrown two, I could at least use them. After all being opportunist is our basic instinct ( besides the basic instinct itself )

The South Indian

• I always told you, don’t bring the shoes in. Shoes are supposed to be kept outside the house and obviously press conferences.

News Channels

• TRP
• Let us supply free shoes to all journalists. 
• Open a shoe stall at entrances of large hotels which usually host press conferences.
• Bring the TV telecast technology to the press conferences. Hawk eye to project the trajectory of the shoe and high speed cameras to analyze the events in ultra slow motion replays.
• TRP

• This is the type of shoe which was thrown towards PC. Let us see the angle from which it was thrown and what that coveys is that the designs of the guy who threw it smells of an international conspiracy ( obviously against the shoes ). 
• We have exclusive interview of th shoe which was thrown. How do you feel on getting thrown on a politician face? Any other person in your mind with whom you would prefer a face to face ? Can you throw us more light on the type of face cream used by Chidambram and if that is any different from low cost Made in China cream used by chinese Premier.
• We are the first channel to bring you exclusive footage of how a nomal shoe becomes a throwable shoe. After the break.

Shoe Companies

• Why not my brand of shoe?
• Can we hire someone or maybe two? One to throw and one to dodge.
• Why my brand of shoe? ( just says it, does not mean it )

• Joote do paise lo, Joote do paise lo

• Shoe ke liye press conference, Shoo Shoo ke liye Sulabh

Don't tell me you never noticed it. So many people in town are trying either to kill others or getting killed using the greatest invention of mankind - wheels. You walk on a footpath, you have people in two wheelers honking at you. You drive a car around, people jump right in front of you as if there was no tomorrow. Moving around in this town has become tough if you are driving on your own.

So anyway coming back to the main topic, I saw a rather interesting incident last night worth sharing. I usualy catch a bus from my Office in Indiranagar which drops me at Jaydeva Hospital and then walk to my home down Bannerghatta Road. My peaceful walikng was disturbed by a car crashing into a guy who was on a Hero Honda scooter. He had a mighty fall. Just went there and helped the guy to get up along with his scooter and now I was desperately waiting to see the Big Fight. So I had my first surprise, the car guy actualy stopped, put on his emergency lights and came over. But why, I thought that is the whole idea of owning a car. You hit and run. Ask Salman if you don't agree with me.

Anyway I thought now the fun will start with as both of them will start cursing each other. Now came my second surprise. The car guy in his language and actions looked so concerned about the scooter guy. He appologized again and again and told about another vehicle coming in his way due to which he had to take a sudden deviation. And if this was not enough I has my third surprise. The scooter guy, who had some blood on his hand was also applogizing to the car guy that he should have been driving more carefuly.

I was amazed. Hats off to both of you guys. Dunno who you are ( the car guy had a Wipro badge ) but way to go guys. In the time of mindless road rage, there are Few Good Men in town. 

Let us start with disclaimers first..... I claim no expertise ( although I might have some ) in the areas I am trying to put fundas about.

So here is my research topic, people across the word are trying to figure out, what works for their customers who come in different shapes and sizes. What are the aspects of a product which makes them click and what makes them not click. So I thought let us learn from something which appears to be totally related in the first view but I am sure you will realize the inter links soon.

Food, yes all of love having it everyday and we have been doing it for ages as a species. Even before languages developed and society became so complex that you needed to hire a consultancy company to tell you common sense. Human food habits have developed over ages and some of the food items have become more universal then others. What I will try to understand is that what makes a food universal and how we can use that knowledge in other domains.

So let us start with the first universal food. French Fries. Let the french and belgians fight over it's origin but that is the way word knows it. Why has french fries become so popular across the world. In my opinion the reason is simple, health and taste do not go hand in hand. Most of the tasty things are not healthy and combining potatoes with oil is a very unhealthy ( and therefore tasty) combination. This is a dish which appeals to basic instincts of each individual to consume unhealthy and tasty food. Obviously I can not take anything away from MacD for making it popular across the world but ability to appeal to basic instincts of mankind has been one of the primary reason for making this popular across the world.

My next stop is in Italy. Yes I am talking about Pizza. Across the world Pizzas sell like crazy and are loved by kids and adults. So what is there in Pizza which makes it so universal. In my opinion it is due to the flexibility offered by the Pizza to mean so many tastes to so many people. I am sure 90% of the world eats a version of Pizza which most of the italians will not even call it a distant relative of original Pizza. But every one is happy with their own Pizza. My personal favorite is Wooster Street Pizza with jalapenos and pineapple as toppings. What makes pizza great is that it means so many different things to so many people.

Just to summarize my learnings from food for other businesses....

- Build something which solves a fundamental problem. In a complex societies like ours we have a multi tier hierarchy of needs but the closer you get to the bottom of the pyramid, better the probability of scaling it to a larger audience
- Be adaptable and flexible on the product content if your goal is to reach out to a large audience. All your users will not perceive you as the same product but an ability to adapt to their needs and perceptions is an important aspect.

Times have changed or evolved to put it in a different perspective. Mankind has an age old endeavour, how to make life simpler and better ( after making it complicated and worse). In the stone age the primary mode of survival was by hunting and human beings primarily developed tools aimed towards making that process simpler. Life moved on and our species figured out how to do agriculture. That was one major step in making life complicated. Agriculture needed people to settle down as it would take time for plants to grow. This obviously led to lot of lifestyle changes and human beings started creating next set of complications in their life. You would not have thought of checking email or writing a blog if you were busy with chasing wild animals or wild animals chasing you.

The next wave came few thousand years later. When we moved from a system of almost everyone doing everything ( unless you were a king ) to an era of specializations. You could survive just by putting a OK seal on a Nike shoe without ever knowing how leather is made (who the hell wants to know that anyway). This created another interesting opportunity for mankind to make things complicated.you were a computer engineer then you could create buzz words like CORBA, OOPS, XML and scare the hell out of everyone around. If you were a doctor you can have some complicated names of diseases and lack of ability to pronounce these diseases correctly can itself be called another disease. So anyway things moved on. I am sure you are almost wondering by now if there is any co relation between the title of my article and content, so let us get back to the real issue.

Technology is primarily about building these complications and their solutions and building forgiving technology is all about building e technology in such a way that all the complications are hidden from the end user. So let us look at some stone age tools. These tools were simple and they did the work they were meant for. They never published a user manual on how to use them and never gave you a shock if you did not use them in the prescribed way. But now you might argue that this was primarily because these tools accomplished very simple tasks. This is precisely where I beg to differ my fellow earthians ( not sure if that is even a word ). I think that lot of people building the technology are just not able to put themselves in their customer shoes which come in a wide variety of sizes and colors. They always assume a user manual or basic framework of assumptions and fall flat on face when the technology gets used in an out of the box manner. So long live the example of washing machines being used as Lassi maker in Punjab . I am sure the washing machine makers never thought of this usecase while building it.

So next time you are building any piece of technology, just imagine that there is no user manual. Just get NUM ( No User Manual ) principle embedded in your psyche. If you are software developer writing code to add two numbers do not forget the case where both the inputs might be perfectly right but the sum might still have an integer overflow. If you are a restaurant owner it is a better idea to label what is salt and what is pepper after all how many people can guess it based on the number of holes. So the idea is very simple that understand your user very well, the smartest one and the dumbest one also ( both might correspond to the same human being in some cases ). And always ensure that you forgive them for all their mistakes after all you as a technology builder is existence because you have users. Your life is not worth a meaning without that user set.

Happy Forgiving Technology Building……

PS: This blog entry is also posted at http://fourint.com/blog/?p=48.

I am sure the third word would have passed as a Japanese city till our dear Bhajji uttered the magic word to Andrew Symonds ( or did he ? ). I am sure if Aussies promise that they will continue to make a mountain out of a mole, there will be lot of reuse of this word which can greatly benefit lot of people in this world. Here are few people who I am sure can use this strategy

Rakhi Sawant
No point in having all that tiger paint all over your body and still not getting much attention from PETA folks as they were more interested in what was behind the paint.

Ram Jethmalani
He has the distinction of fighting almost all controversial cases and he can't miss this one. No points for guessing that he will be figting from the australian side.

Sania Mirza
She is trying so hard to avoid controversies but her efforts to avoid controversies have become bigger controversies in themselves that Bangalore Open organizers had to fill up the gap using the Williams sisters.

Jodha Akbar
I am sure they have already got such a big endorsement from the historically hyperactive political parties from all over India but some help from down under will not hurt.

Border
This is not the Allan type of border but borders between countries (JP Dutta types ). Despite the airtel ad almost all the countries have a controversy on this issue. I can certainly understand the Aussie frustration in this regard as they do not share thier borders with anybody else.

News Channels
How can I forget them. I am sure Prabhu Chawlas and co will love such contraversies which enable them to churn out hours of programming ( rather advertising ) which keeps talking about such things again and again. Infact I have learn from reliable sources that some of these channels are researching on making a voice gun ( called Pheke - 47 ) using which they can sit miles away and fire a word at someone and the person who gets shot will involuntarily speak out that word. Just imagine this technology can also be used for making Sonia Gandhi talk hindi....

More suggestions on the issue welcome....

So here goes live my other venture - www.asklaila.com - local search engine. The Laila journey has been just amazing. We started the journey approx 9 months back and at last reached the D day ( D as in delivery ) on 3rd Aug, 2007. It  is such a great feeling to write some code  where you can see the usage happening in front of your eyes. I have spent 12 years of my professional career writing code for so many alien societies that doing something desi was so much of relief.

The biggest challenge was to build everything from scratch and still keep a focus on the quality of things and timelines. Finding good quality of people has been one of the biggest challenge. When I see so many young kids driven by pure monetary benefits instead of bigger challenges, I just feel bad for them. Tough to find people who love challenges and enjoy the sheer joy of solving something which no one has solved before.

Being part of startup is always about finding the right solution smart way within limited time and resources. This is what drives much more innovation. I wish how large companies could let go their desire to keep a tight control and instead spawn many more smaller companies. I am sure they will end up creating much more business that way. I guess someday large corporates will evolve a distributed model of operation and will reduce inter unit dependencies to maximize organizational efficiencies and reduce  avoidable red tape.

Coming back to the launch,  lot of people ask why another one when there are so many in the market. This always reminds me of how some generic search engines are not good for specific verticals because they are trying to be good in too many verticals. As in life sometimes when you try to be good to too many people you end up being good to none or end up compromising principles. Life is about believing in principles and not bothering about rubbing few folks on the wrong side in defending them.

I  hope to get lots of feedback from all and work towards improving the quality and user experience. That is what will keep driving me for next few months......