app store.....music store ......why not "charity store"?????

We are living in an age of exponential times.....things change very fast and it is easy to channelize energy in the required directions.

We have open source ....to have free software ....break monopoly or whatever reasons you can thin of.....then we have "causes" on facebook , people can recruit facebookers for their cause etc.

you can also see .......websites which have donation indicators to attract donations from its fans....like wikipedia........and yes ....these instruments work........

whenever I am roaming around in campus and get a glimpse of people who are having some T-Shirt/bag etc which support some cause.....it makes me go thinking......why do not I buy everything i need...trouser,shirt,shoes....supporting my causes......there might be a way to buy a cap from Mozilla store.....Tshirt from Ubuntu site........but why do not we have a web store which is a charity aggregator.....so that when I am about to buy something .......i can check on this web store charity aggregator and find if my purchase decision could support some charity .........

So....once you have a cause which needs money .....and you have some accessory which people might want to buy to support the cause.......you can submit that apparel/accessory on this web store and people can buy it.......

Once this web store becomes popular we can have the physical manifestation of the same.........you can walk into your favourite shopping mall and enter into this charity store and buy stuff for the cause you support....

However, this webstore does not need to be an independent portal but could have presence on existing social media portals like Facebook etc or it could be just extension of the existing players in business....like amazon charity ....... :)

In the quest of ultra cheap marketing trick

I have a small business interest in Bangalore, India ..... and I am always looking for some ultra cheap and effective marketing tricks........

Some basic philosophies which were subconsciously in my mind

Rewarding people who help you spread the word, get the right ideas, or help you identify the problem....

• rewarding them can be through a monetary prize, some food coupon or any other privilege
  
• rewarding by recoginition.

Then today I was watching this MIT world series video, which is about using prize as an instrument to do breakthorugh innovation.

The video summarizes essentially two points which prizes/competition can help you solve:

• Generating ideas
• Solving some identified problem
  

It also mentions that organizing a competition lowers the cost and people who participate end up doing more then the economic gain they can make. ( humans somewhat become irrational while entering a competition)

So........I am now much more strong believer in this instrument of organizing a competition .....whenever I need to get some ideas or a problem which I know I cannot solve .... :)

Future for India

Few days back at dinner we had quite long discussion about sectors in which India must invest. I had vague thoughts about the subject from my previous readings and understanding of the subject.

However, in my ToDo list I had a video to watch...which comes from a book author .....the video is from MIT world series and publicly available.

This video has some interesting comparisions and lessons for India, because we have lot of similarities with China (Huge rural population is one........)

3 email strategy

I was thinking about the email account strategy for quite some time now. I would like to share my solution which uses email accounts in a special way. They are not solving all the problems but atleast the ones I had and no doubt there might be better solutions......hence this post.

So, first my problems.............

1. I feel concerned about checking my mail on others/public computers/devices.
2. I do not want to tell everybody my email....I want a cover.

Solution:

Let's take my primary account is b@xyz.com and I have two other accounts which I have created to solve these two problems. Let's name these accounts a@xyz.com and c@xyz.com. We live in a world where email account is free so we can always waste some.


Now my solution

First part :

I try to give c@xyz.com for all public subscriptions, newsletters etc. And forward all my mail from c@xyz.com to b@xyz.com. So, now something which I don't want to see coming from could be filtered at c easily. (it is possible to do filtering even at b but I like it that way ...more neat and clean and I get email masking)

Second Part:

I forward all my emails from b@xyz.com (except few) to a@xyz.com. Also, publicly my friends do not know that I use c for mailing them. So, there is no reputation loss when somebody mails from a on my behalf.

Now whenever I am at friends place can easily check my email through a@xyz.com . I try to delete all of them when I read them . so I always have only latest ones. So, even if somebody can get my account a@xyz.com I can change the password later (as it is tied up with the primary account for recovery) and the loss is minimal. (because this account has no reputation so mailing from it will not bring me any losses for reputation)

So if I try to make a flow:

(email publicly known @ Public forums ) c@xyz.com -----> b@xyz.com (check mail @ home also has strong password) -----> a@xyz.com (to check mail at public places)

Would like to know feedback and have comments......

I wish that good email providers could provide all this functionality in one account......if there are any good points in it .........

SPAM and analogy from dinner

We were having dinner (indian food) with friends. The rice had some spices (Bay Leaf) in it. See the picture below:



You can see the bay leaves seperated from the rice. Now the question was would you do it before you start eating your food. So, that you have a comfortable ride then on ....or .....remove them as you eat.....maybe depends on how hungry you are.....


Now the parallel analogy is ..... you get emails but there is SPAM in it ....do you delete them first or delete them on the run as you read.


So I had this thought while eating dinner with my Indian friends and I mentioned it to everybody. One guy who was yet to eat...... I told him about this hypothesis that ....since he has removed all the bay leaves before start eating his food .... would he also like to delete SPAM before reading emails ........surprise surprise ! he says yes!

I am not saying there is any correlation, but maybe there is ??? ... the readers of this post might want to check for themselves.

My hypothesis is that is not only about food eating but this behavior might be part of the personality, you prefer to clean your study table before you start studying etc. This behavior might also spillover into your mail/spam deleting habits.

Links for the FREE audio book

I was eagerly waiting for Chris Anderson's next book FREE. It is now there and available for free (with some limitations, only audio and ePrint on Scribd, Google books).

Links for the Audio book:

1. Audio Book Unabridged: Link
2. Audio Abridged (It is not free, but from this link can be obtained by entering the email id) : Link
3. eCopy from scribd (maybe this opens only within USA)

Wired post covering the story on book.

U.S.A: A society of experiment!

I was recently watching the "The century of self", a B.B.C documentary. The documentary shows the various cultural transformation which were pushed and influenced by some major psychologists/psychoanlaysts.

Some highlights of the documentary:

Phase A:

• Invention of public relations. Invention of Advertisement, appealing to the irrational self of a consumer (Sigmund Freud: human behavior is guided by unconscious sexual and aggressive drives). However, this approach failed after recession. (due to over production)
• Paradox of making people choose (the elite want people to have a rational choice which is better for all) and still making it look like democracy. (so ultimately manipulating the choice of consumers)

Phase B:

• Free society by liberating the consumer, over feeding the desire.
• Lifestyle marketing.
• Self actualization. (Focus groups vs psychological market research)

So , the open question is "if people are irrational", building a feedback mechanism as in ideal democracy will make irrational decisions. Do we need a leadership which takes the vision of people beyond their own selfish needs or they must just cater to their short term demands.

Innovation for telecom operators (service store)

I was discussing with a friend about possibilities for mobile operators. (apart from being bit pipes do they really have a case for doing something else in future)

There were main points which we thought a mobile operator is different.

1. For users to experience a service through a mobile, operator can get a lot of first hand data and a better sense to customize and improve the service.

2. Paying for a flat Internet connection like 15 Euros per month in Finland and similar amount elsewhere. Is there still some latent demand which might be satisfied if the price to be paid was less.

As the discussion progressed I came to the conclusion that a new type of business model is possible for mobile operators. which is somewhere in middle of Flat rate and Pre-Paid (or pay as you use)

The proposal is to charge user per service. Say, you are an avid facebook user, the mobile operator will provide you a widget or some other access point in your mobile by which you can access facebook unlimited! (The price is definitely lower then flat rate and pre-paid)

So, as a user if you are not an explorer on Internet and consumer of 2-3 standard Internet services. You might go with this kind of an offer, where an operator can charge you something like: 2 Euros per month for facebook and 3 Euros per month for Youtube (maybe higher because of video content). So, if you are only doing facebook and youtube. You end up paying just 7 euros per month.

From the operator vision, they can create a service store from where people can buy such service pakage for 1-3 Euro each (price depends on the market, this is say as per scandinavia). Like the developer community on other platforms (iPhone, Facebook) , here we have the third parties (Google, Yahoo or a freelancer etc) who can provide there customized widgets on mobile operators service store. There can be a revenue sharing between third party and mobile operator.

Also, Operator can build a colloborative filtering support in the platform and provide standard API's to the service developers and provide users of the service a unique experience customized as per their local network.

This business model would be an equivalent of micro payments in other platforms. Where you (as a user) can buy less demanding services for unlimited use at a much cheaper price. (say even 10 cents, which might be just a weather update from Internet )

It is also combining the bandwidth cost and application cost in one package. (Like amazon kindle where you don't pay for the bandwidth , most customers don't even realize that)

New Google Chrome OS

It was just few months back , when I was complaining to my friends in Otaniemi. That why don't we have a device which just boots in a web browser.

I don't remember when was it last time I felt I need any other software on my laptop. (Mostly Mozilla, also some ocassional use of VLC and Open Office)


Now we have today the announcement of Google ChromeOS coming from Google. I don't know will google OS boots up directly into browser on a netbook or any other gadget. But, atleast there might be a chance!

Future of social media and how it effects India

Out of many value propositions which I could/(or could not) think for social media, one which has just struck me is "Reputation and Trust management".

In the ideal world of high Internet penetration, where every body is on some sort of social networking site. We will have every body connected to somebody (with some exceptions). The creation and identification of trust from reputation would be much easy, especially in the places where it is not that easy now!

Like we already can see role of recommendations on LinkedIn for getting a job. Recommendations do exist in real world but hard or costly to have. In online networks they exist in black and white, easy to access and persists for ever!

Some of the things we (Govt.) ought to do in physical world, where people intend to do some fraud for greedy reasons, like what is mentioned here in an article of Times of India. These problems could be solved effectively with use of online social networks and crowdsourcing.

I am taking some basic assumptions about India here:

1. Coming from India, I know that we have a society where most of the people know about people around them, which is very different from west! So, it is very easy for people to vouch for others (their near and dear ones).

2. Too many people, lot of contribution possible. Success rate for crowdsourcing the effort!

Now one of the problem posed in the article is that govt. want to issue id cards and then they are issued to people who do not even exist and execution fails.

So, what I propose is a wikipedia kind of solution where people can create people database. Let's call it peoplepedia.

Allowed functions for peoplepedia.

1. Creating a node, which is essentially a living person (say in India ) which can be later dead and the status change can happen accordingly.

• Node will contains the name.
  
• The gender.
  
• System will issue a unique id to every node.
  
• Anybody can create/ delete a node.
  
• The system will have a CAPTCHA like solution to prevent non-computers to make fake nodes.
  

2. Linking to another node, if one thinks they know each other.

• People can also indicate the relationship when linking. Like relative, friend, NGO, third party etc.
  

3. Bootstraping this database from existing social networks like Facebook and Orkut. (as chances of having real living users on those networks are high)

4. To users people have a graphical interface to search people based on their unique id, name or social graph neighbors.

5. Optional could be users adding more details to a node which could be private data like passport number etc but then which might need a login/password protection. Although this is not the real value of this database.

6. Since it is a people driven project and people identify the people they know in real life , which gives the trust in the numbers. Also, more people linking to a person will add to the reputation of a person and database can have an indicator based on who links to the node and how many links to the node. Let's call this indicator lively index, which would mean, the chances that person is real and exists/existed in this world ! However, the loss of privacy will happen in form of identifying somebodies social network but since we do not have any other details about that person (apart from name and sex) the privacy loss is minimum.

The cost of the project must not be high but the value it can provide with a small percentage of population actively involved would be high.

It would be a dynamic snapshot of number of real people in the country and also giving the break up (like men and women)

This platform can then be used for vouching for people, for distributing cards / other goods. Although it would not be highly reliable but could boost the confidence of identifying the real person.

I welcome readers of this post to improve the concept as it is in very initial stage and I have the feeling that it can be improved a lot!