Cruisemaniac.com

I was out yesterday to meet a couple of friends and as is customary, we were clicking photos with our cameras AND not to forget mention, our mobiles.  At this point, my friend Hrish (@dhempe, for all those who would not identify with the name ) raised an interesting point!

Thus spake Dhempe and here I quote:

Many of us have cameras on our phones, and we click photos! But, its a very messy job to put them in a place where others can see it and also to share with friends. The mobile phone is a blackhole for its own content!

And that statement is filled with such profound truth!

Many of us, or if I may, a whole LOT of us have phones that are quite capable of generating content (Images, videos, voice recordings, etc) and we definitely do generate enough content to fill storehouses with our happy / romantic / funny / cheesey/ whatever memories for lifetimes together. Heck, this is what the mobile phone revolution is coming around to do…

For us geeks, connectivity, socializing and sharing is as basic and habitual an act as is having food.  We feel the necessity to share and connect and as a result, find and utilize services to enable this! Photos go on twitpic / flickr, Videos go on Qik / youtube, Shouts / screams go on blogs / facebook / twitter… we have no end to destinations!

But, a lot of content does not make it online / publicly (atleast within friends) available.  Infact, most of this content doesnt even make it outside of the mobile devices!  And, mind you, the memory on the mobile is limited.  And the main use of this memory, again mind you, is Ringtones and MP3 music!  The photos and videos captured thus take a backseat and much of this content is to true sadness, deleted to make way for more MP3 and ringtones! And hence the reference to a black hole in the title of my post!

• In reasoning as to why people don’t share their photos or videos, the first answer that pops up is: “They dont have a computer!” And this is a very valid point across the lengtrh and breadth of this nation.  Access to a computer is not everyone’s daily possibility.  But with cost of mobiles going down, they do have access to multimedia devices!
• Another reason, a lot of people do not have GPRS active on their devices. Reason, it doesnt make sense…  No, GPRS doesnt yet make sense for a guy working as a driver.  A mobile phone with a camera does. Why? 1. He can afford it. 2. He can flaunt it! Simple!
• The third reason I can think of is the software problems that is associated with sharing content.  Getting your Nokia phone (Cited Nokia because its the most common / prevalent brand in INDIA) connected to the PC with PC suite isnt really an easy job.  Sometimes, you need to make use of imaginary numbers like eleventeen and the likes!!!  For the blindfolded usability and seamlessness nokia gives its phones, the software it bundles with it is not quite the works!!!
• The fourth and final reason I can think of: There is only so much of sharing you can do via bluetooth with your friends and there’s only so much of showing it to friends that you can do…. Believe me, give it a try, you’ll know!

So, four reasons why content doesnt get out of the mobile!

What if a user could as and when he / she could and wanted, move and materialize the media he / she created to make place for more memories to be stored? This, my friends, is a very interesting challenge and hence an interesting prospect for a service!

We are over 400 million mobile users in India alone.  I am really in a fix in figuring out a solution to get this content out of their mobiles and shared across with their friends and with the world!

The way out:

• One solution I can think of is the Kiosk model.  A shop / vending machine where people could go and get their photos printed / and mailed for cheap using Bluetooth to transfer their content. Or better, transfer the photo, punch in the address where it needs to be delivered and presto, the photo + address travels via IP to the centre closest to the destination and gets printed and posted from there!
• Another amazing service I can think of with the kiosk model is one where the videos captured using the mobile can be transferred to CD’s. Come to talk of it, a CD costs you 8 Rs.

These are two solutions off the top of my mind…

The whole idea that I’m trying to propagate here is to take the complexity of the software / sharing service bit of the scenario away from the hands of the user.  This effectively reduces complexity for the layman with the multimedia mobile and effectively encourages him to share the content he / she creates on the mobile with friends and hence further encourage him to generate more content and so on and so forth!

I’d really love to hear more from you all on how the black hole scenario can be averted! Sharing services are many and aplenty!

The success of a service is, in our Indian scenario, not just in holding existing users to itself, but in getting those new users from outside the regular spectrum to come in, take a look, get enthusiastic and get enabled!

Would love to have comments and discussions on this topic!

Chao!

• What if Creativity was not our forte?
• What if only speed is?
• What if all we could do was improvise and not create?
• What if the reason behind out failures was waning of the genes over generations?
• What if we as a race did not innovate fast enough?
• What if we are looking at the wrong problem altogether

Would we survive? As individuals? As communities? As a Nation?

These are some questions I have on why we dont get to  see a lot of “creation of technology” in India.  By creating a wave, I dont mean Tata Nano.  No, that is not technical innovation… The world has Been there, done that! What we achieved with the nano was new business sense… I find it personally impressive.  My question really is: what is stopping us from driving innovation at the snap of our fingers? 1.1 billion people and we still can’t find enough people to roll the wheels???

These questions have been burning in my head for quite sometime and I would love to have a discussion on this… Either here on my blog or on twitter. I’m all eyes and ears

Chao…

There’s about a couple of weeks left for the Nano to start hitting showrooms and the streets… There does not seem to be a lot of excitement in the market about the 1 lakh rupee car other than for the reason that well… its a one-lakh-rupee-car!

What however spurred me on to write this post on the Tata Nano is my analysis on the thought process put in behind the vehicle.  The nano is not just about a car that costs one lakh rupees… Its about a huuuuuuge time-bomb thats gonna go off the moment Ratan Tata says Go!  A time-bomb thats going to start ticking in every CEO / MD’s office when they realise that the market is no longer theirs… The rules to the game they started just got re-written… The processes and manufacturing setups they had just got a royal trip down the drain…

Here is my statement of reason:

The Target Market:

The nano is being targeted at a market that is extremely price sensitive.  When you bundle this with international grade quality, you get a direct WIN!!!  The nano is also targeting a segment that is already booming, the small car segment, but here, they’re changing the rules of the game.  Same quality merchandise, slightly smaller quantity, but perfectly priced to just touch the lower segment.

The same technique a vegetable vendor uses to compete against retail stores.  Same quality, more or less same source for the commodity, easier availability, lower price.  I’d go with the vegetable vendor for tomatoes and paalak as opposed to walking into an air-conditioned Spar supermarket.

The Volume Game:

From what I understand of selling commodities in a market, there are two distinct ways I’ve noticed people do it with:

1. Sell it at high prices because of quality and brand value and make the cut based on profit per commodity sold a.k.a Mercedes, Honda, Apple <AND>
2. Sell it at low prices at lower profit margins and make the cut based on volumes moved a.k.a. Bajaj, Nokia, Saravana Stores, et. al.

Tata, as we can see, is playing the game using strategy no. 2.  “One Lakh Rupees” is an amazing price point!!! They have been able to achieve this in a way no one else could imagine.  They have reduced cost of production by bringing all component vendors under one roof (a.k.a. one production area / SEZ) thus reducing transportation costs.  They have also convinced component vendors to operate on a volume based margin and make smaller but numerous profits rather than making one big million dollar sale and taking a 15-20% profit margin out of it.

The Pricing Model:

The pricing of the “One Lakh Rupee” car is directly attributed to the afore mentioned to points.  But hey, This for me is absolute ingenuity.  The teams inside Tata have hit the nail bang on the head with the pricing and in addition to it, they have also looked into making the one-lakh car easily affordable for people that would want to own one.  Their tie-ups with numerous banks offering loans is a gimmick they picked up from Bajaj ( the guys who started with Zero % Auto-finance) and pushed it across to make sure that the work put in does not go to dust.

The concerns:

This is a very important point.  Yes, the Nano is hitting the roads in a couple of weeks from now.  Hyundai and Maruti must be peeing in their pants right away!  How they would handle the uproar is something i cannot fathom citing lack of business sense!!!

But what I’m more concerned AND interested in looking at, is, how Two-wheeler manufacturers are going to respond to it.  Bajaj, TVS, Honda, and the likes are now going to get kicked in the nuts.  This is how Tata is positioning itself in the market:

Hey, you’re buying a bike, you are taking a loan of 65k+ and getting two wheels.  Here’s the thing: Take a loan from us, We’ll give you a nano, it has 4 wheels instead of 2, you can pay us back at the same rate that you’d pay back for your 2 wheels, and guess what, 4 people can travel at the same time and you wont get wet too!!!

Bajaj is already in the news for planning to make 4-wheelers but there is a lot that needs to happen before they can compete with such a sound business plan!

The forgotten JLR:

The nano has created so much of news for Tata (good, bad and otherwise) that the 2.3 billion dollar Jaguar – Land Rover has slipped to the sidelines…  What Tata would do to get Jaguar into the market is something we would have to wait and see…

Closing Note: Will I buy a Nano?

The answer currently is NO.  My reasons:  Well, they are personal.  I have never been comfortable with a small car.  I am used to the larger ones and that would be what I would pick up.

DISCLAIMER: Nope, I am NOT a market analyst.  Nor am I a business guy.  I’m just another lame Software Engineer who put in a bit of logic to the equation of the Nano to come up with the post   This blog post came out as a result of the conversation Saurabh Minni a.k.a. the100rabh and I had this morning.

Chao…

Delayed post, nevertheless an important one!!!  Its been close to 3 weeks since I touched down in India after completing my first stint abroad in Italy!

Italia was lovely… India just leaves me speechless…  I’m not going to do the Italy has this… India doesnt have that kind of a comparison post…

But I’m definitely compelled to answer a few people that I met and keep meeting time and again with a “perspective” about MY country…

The answer is straightforward… The math is simple… When you dont have population, you dont have scale, and you can micromanage more effectively.  Europe as a continent has just about the population India has as a country!

India is never about micromanagement… Heck, India is not even about management.  India is just about scale… The scale of a billion and more heads… and counting… And still running strong…

And on a post that comes on the Independence day weekend… I can always still go back on the sentence I wrote a couple of lines above and say thus:  Europe may have a truckload of things indians always dream of… But come august 15, no Italian ever has the pleasure of listening to A. R. Rahman’s rendition of the country’s national song!!!

Vande Mataram!

&
Jai Hind!!!