Amazon(ian) Experience!

My train was more than two hours late but I reached the station in time. For a change I was ahead of time! I had nothing better to do at New Delhi Railway Station so I started looking through the books and magazines at a bookshop. I had just picked up a couple of books to check, that the salesman at the shop starting throwing books at me from across the counter, literally!

No, he was not attacking me or shooing me away. He was helping me decide which book to buy. And he was good at it. All the books he 'threw' at me, were books of the authors I had read at some point in time. He threw all Malcolm Gladwell books at me. I decided to buy 'blink'. Then as I checked the cover of his last book 'Outlier' I was not impressed and left the book on counter. It was in a plastic cover packing so I could not glance through the pages of book.

The smart salesman immediately brought copy without the plastic cover for me to feel the book.

I was thoroughly impressed. This guy was no more than 18-20 year old. I guess he would not have studied beyond school. Still just by looking at the first couple of books I picked up, he could guess what kinds of book I may like. I agree that I do not have an out of the world exotic taste of books. It was easy to figure out that I was not interested in fiction, or self help kind of books, the ones which sell most. Still I was impressed. He did not talk to me, he did not ask me a question. He just observed couple of books I picked up and he was right on money in his guess.

Then came the Aha moment.
He handed me the book called Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to me. And I could not help smiling. I had read about Taleb's Black Swan theory, but had not seen the book till a day before. I had bought the book just yesterday, it was still in my bag. I was actually reading the book he suggested me!

I felt bad that I did not buy Black Swan from him. But I left the shop with a lot of satisfaction.

It was for no reason a lot of early success of Amazon is attributed to its feature of suggesting books to its users.

Kambakht Internet

Is Internet economy imploding in India? It seems after years of promise, hype and investment, even die hard internet optimists are giving up.

Just sample following:

Tutorvista, which started as an online education provider for India is dabbling in hard core brick and mortar education business in India. It runs schools, trains teachers, and also sells ICT solutions to school in India. TutorVista founder Ganesh says online-only education model will not work in India because of poor internet penetration.

Kyazoonga is an online ticket booking site for movies, sports and other events. Kyazoonga shot to limelight when it offered tickets for IPL matches in the first edition of IPL. In a recent article in Economic Times, one of the co-founders of kyazoonga says, "We realised that selling online only would not work as plastic penetration in India is low."

Most of us would know Rajesh Jain. One of few men in India to have made his money from internet, Rs 499 Crore, all in cash. Having turned an internet evangelist (whatever that means) since then he has been promoting the cause of internet in India. Unfortunately he seems to be fizzling out too. In a series of posts on his , he has outlined the state of internet in India.

He makes some quite familiar points as to why internet economy is in a pathetic state in India, and what needs to be done to make it feel better. State of affairs can be gauged from a statistic quoted in one of his plots - this is known to most on internet industry insiders, but may be a shocker for others. Internet ad revenues are pegged at Rs 500- 600 Cr, of which more than 75% is cornered by three players - Google, Rediff and Yahoo. That leaves less than 150 Crore for all other players put together!

Sate of e-commerce does not look any pretty either. India's total eCommerce transactions are estimated to be Rs 9000 Cr. Of this 38% comes from IRCTC website alone! If you take out contribution of other travel sites, online share trading and b2b commerce one wonders how many people are buying online in India.

Net-net, if you are an internet only business in India, life is going to be tough. Many pieces of jigsaw need to fall in place before you can reap benefits of your efforts.

A lot of us are heavy users of internet in India, and can't imagine a life without it. But it seems internet is going to take many more years in India to realise its potential. Those who stay put may aspire to reap benefits like Rajesh Jain did. Alas, there will be many more who will have to shut the shop before that.

Bing - needs more zing

Ever since bing's high voltage launch, there have been several claims that bing is not a cosmetic change to 'live.com' but a serious challenge to google's monopoly in search engine market. Having turned from a google fan to google critic off late, I got excited. And I moved on to bing as my default search engine.

The first impressions were good. I like the homepage's background images. I really like the feature of providing summary of results on the results page. It really improves the searching experience. But the fun did not last long. In a few days I started noticing that many a times bing did not deliver what I was looking for. And I had to go to google to find things I have been looking for.

Few of the search results on bing that confounded me more than others are listed below:

Search query: ie8 download

Microsoft's site exploremyway.com appears on both, bing and google, as a sponsored listing. None of the organic search results on bing are from Microsoft site or lead to download of IE8. In contrast, first link on google's organic search results is the IE8 download page on microsoft.com.

Search query: Bing

This one is actually funny. Only 1 result on google was not related to bing, the search engine by Microsoft. On bing 8 results on the first page were NOT related to bing, the decision engine. So as per bing, 'bing' the search engine is the not the most important bing!

Search query: 160by2

That's our FREE SMS site with more than 50M pageviews in a month. It was a kind of vanity search!Only two of bing results were non 160by2.com pages. All other results were pointing to various sections within 160by2.com website such as the blog, or the mobile website and so on. On contrary google results pointed to independent sources that talked about 160by2, like independent bloggers, or media sites.

Later on I realised this to be an issue with quite a few of searches on bing, that different sections of the same website were being presented as different results. Try searching for microsoft, apple, yahoo, rediff...Not sure if its merely a presentation issue. But I have started doubting on the reach of bing's crawler. It does not seem to match up with google's. Update: Google also does the same thing, displaying different channels from same website as different results, especially for a content rich site like yahoo or rediff. But when I am looking for apple, I may be looking beyond apple.com, something that google recognises, but bing does not.

There is a long way to go for bing. I for one believe that google needs a serious competitor to stop it turning from evil. And if microsoft believes bing is the one, then they need to work hard, very hard. Do share you feedback on bing if you have used it.

PS: While I have not seen any ads on the side bar on bing, but sponsored ads on top of organic search results are coming from overture i.e. Yahoo. Is something cooking there as well?

No more slave

For me there are two types of mobile phones - email phones and 'other phones'. For several years I have been highly addicted to email phones. Even few hours of outage at blackberry would make me sound like a lost man. When my blackberry conked off last week, I could sense withdrwal symptoms. Was not able to concentrate on work at hand. Wifey started complaining that I was paying even less attention to her!

Displaying a sense of urgency alien to me, I figured out where to get it fixed. I went over to Airtel's Blackberry Support centre. The young engineer from Wipro had a quick look at the phone. For some reason he refused to believe that it was my phone!!! In two different ways he asked me if I indeed was the user of the phone.
And then came the dampner. "It will have to be sent to Bangalore. Will cost you 5600 bucks, if they are able to fix it. Else you will get your phone and money back. It will take at least 10 days, and you will lose all your data either ways", said the engineer in one breath.

Everything was against me. It would cost good deal of money. It would take a lot of time. I would lose all data and in the end it may not get fixed! I came back without submitting my phone for repair.

I took out my old 'other phone' - the one without email. It was not getting charged. I took it to Sony Ericsson service center. They were nice enough to fix it within few hours at a nominal price.

So here am I. Struggling to transfer my contacts from my email phone to 'other phone' - manually! But I am getting used to a non instant life. And contrary to my belief nothing has changed for the world. Everything is going on as usual. There are no delays anywhere, nobody is dying coz of lag in my replies to emails.

And to top it all, kids are happier that I am actually listening to them. Wifey is also cool that she has more of my mindspace, at least when we are together. And she has her moments too - "Is everything ok? Nah, I was just thinking since you are not checking the mails, Obama would be wondering what to do with GM?"

I feel good that I am no more slave to my mobile. Hope it remains this way for long.

Optimism down the drain...

With the new government announcing its 100 day agenda, and sounding business-like, there is unprecedented sense of expectation in the country. After, what is being called a positive vote, people are expecting this government to really deliver goods. It is a first in India, people actually expecting the government to deliver on governance, not on issues.

And as optimism started getting on to perennial cynic like me, I came across an article in Mint - A better bureaucracy. And this made me realise that fundamentally things are going to be delivered the same way. Change in intent is not going to make a cosmic change.

The author, himself a former top bureaucrat, is suggesting that poor governance in India is primarily because of extremely slow and ineffective bureaucracy. Corruption is not the only monster, ineffectiveness of our bureaucratic set up is an equally challenging problem. Depending on our current bureaucratic structure is like relying on old age steam engines to compete with new age electric engines.

Despite the best intentions of Prime Minister, UPA 1.0 failed to deliver on the most of infrastructure targets it set for itself. The reason of this failure is essentially the way in which our bureaucracy decides, or rather does not decide. It still takes huge effort and time to move things from one decision point to another.Presence of multiple decision points does not help the situation. With this lethargy and apathy I do not expect UPA 2.0 to perform any better.

A lot of this government's policies are aimed at providing relief to BPL (Below Poverty Line) families. Analysts are debating if it is more efficient to hand out food and education coupons to BPL families or to provide them subsidised food and education. But a bigger concern is around identification of BPL families.

This is another glaring display of our inefficient, indifferent and insipid bureaucracy - Planning commission says there are no more than 60 million BPL families in India. All state governments put together have already issued more than 107million BPL cards. AP has almost entire population (incl those with Sania Mirza's pic on BPL card!) listed as BPL while some of the poorest states have a very low count of BPL families!

Its issues like this which derail the agenda of government. Its not a policy issue. Its a governance issue. And we face this issue because of a failed bureaucracy. We desperately need an intelligent, efficient and honest bureaucracy. It seems too much to ask...

Its the sheer ineffectiveness of a large elephantine apathetic bureaucracy that is pegging back India. Unless we carry out structural reforms in our bureaucratic set up it is impossible to deliver the kind of changes that we want and more importantly that we need in our country. We all have experienced this, we all know it, then why are we not doing it?

Kettle, pot, black, who?

Attacks on Indians in Australia - my two paise
Indians are outraged over attacks on Indian students in Australia. No doubt we need to condemn those attacks and pressurise Australian government to crack down on those responsible for such attacks, whether or not they are racist in nature.

In the entire episode I found two things to be quite funny as well as thought provoking. One was an article in Mint today - beyond the racist attacks by Ramesh Ramanathan
The author of this article argues that Indian students go to Australia for higher education because of appalling standard of higher education in India. Is he serious? Yes, if you leave out few reputed institutions, standard of higher education in India is really appalling (primary and secondary education do not fair any better too!). Still I do not think India's contribution to Australia's universities is primarily because of those students not finding good enough educational opportunities in India.

A large majority of students who go to Australia do so because its cool to study in Australia, and its easier to get admission in Australia, and coz its cheaper to study in Australia than in places like UK, US etc. I really doubt how many of those 97000 Indian students studying in Australia are there to acquire skills, as assumed by Ramesh Ramanathan.

I am in complete sync with Ramesh Ramanathan's views regarding the need to spruce up India's education infrastructure. And Kapil Sibal definitely has a chance to do so. But I find it funny that one needs the pretext of attacks on Indian students in Australia to do so! :)

The second thing I found funny in this entire episode is the eagerness and authority with which everyone in India is calling Australians racists. At times I really wonder if there is someone more racist than us, Indians. For us racism is part of our lives, our social set up. We do not just discriminate on the basis of race, we discriminate on the basis of caste, sex, religion, region, language and what not.

How easy is it for a Tamil guy to settle in say, UP as against Australia? Odds are that a Punjabi villager will find it easier to visit UK, Canada or Australia than Madurai. Its next to impossible for you to rent a house in Mumbai if you are a muslim, unless of course if you live in a muslim(!) building. All black guys in India are supposed to be drug dealers from Nigeria. Or just check the comments on any political article on rediff. That will tell you the level of bigotry prevalent in even the so-called educated sections of our society.

When you yourself have such a convoluted way of thought, when you yourself do not respect a human being just for being another human being, do you really have the right to call someone else racist?

Youth Brigade or 'Papa Power'?

Indian media is providing wide coverage to youngest member of Manmohan's cabinet-Agatha Sangma. While media is quick to point out her age, nowhere can you find an analysis of her strengths, capabilities achievements etc. The only thing known about her is her lineage - she is daughter of veteran NCP leader P A Sangma.

I am genuinely confused about call to nation's youth for joining politics - be the change that you want to see in the nation. I believe that its a movement that is gaining strength. Many youth I know (if I can consider myself young!) are getting serious about politics. In general there seems to be realisation in today's youth that apathy is not going to work any more. We need to participate in the politics to get rid of our corrupt political class. I expect 'youth movement' to really change the face of Indian politics in next 10 years. A lot of credit for bringing youth factor in focus must be awarded to Rahul Gandhi.

While I admire Rahul for his perseverance in call to the youth of nation, I am also frustrated by 'dynastic' nature of participation of youth in Indian politics. Think of any young politician that you know. Nine out of ten times, you will find the young brigade to have strong political lineage. All torch bearers of youth politics in India are people like Sachin Pilot, Agatha Sangma, Kanimozhi, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasad, Akhilesh Singh etc.
These are not the youth leaders who have come through ranks in Indian politics. They owe their existence in politics to their families. All of them are alumni of Ivy League schools, and many of them tried their hands at professions like investment banking before turning to family trade of politics.

This is what I am confused about. Its good to see the young of nation leading the polity of nation. But do these young leaders actually represent their constituents? Do they really understand the social, economic, political intricacies of India? Or are they just good looking ineffective politicians interested in furthering the cause of their friends and families?

I would love to know the answer to this. Do YOU have any clue?