When your profile pic looks away

Three weeks without a smartphone

I thought I'd give it a shot. In the ghostspace between the wait for a new smartphone and the sale of my old one, I experimented with going back to the early 2000's - I used a phone that could only make calls and send messages. And double up as a flashlight. Here's what came of my attempt to live the old days in the new.

Sold my old smartphone. Waiting for a new one. #FirstWorldProblems

The hardest thing was being on the crapper. I just sat there, carrying out nature's business. Gone were the millions of possible apps I could download from app markets. Forgotten was the evil joy of killing all apps lurking in memory even at the cost of general system instability. No more being in touch with the news of the world and labored tweets of attempted humor. Instead I had a grand total of three choices: staring at my thighs, staring at the door or trying to telekinetically move my shoelaces. The only smartphone action that survived was the swipe. After the job was done.

It goes unnoticed how quiet interaction with our personal rectangles of light has become. This became apparent to me when I tried to use my dumbphone in a long meeting to reply to an sms or play the ultimate game of intelligence, skill and conviction - sudoku. Those situations turned into unfortunate Mr Bean episodes. I played the guy who made loud noises, oblivious to the knitted eyebrows and pursed lips of displeasure around me. On occasion, I've even had to go back to attending meetings again.

The lack of social apps also left me feeling a wee bit unsocial. I once traveled in a bus trying my best to focus at the gap between four faces. I've had to wear a fake smile on my not pretty face through 10-11 floors of slow elevator ascent. Strangers aside, people like my brother always accuse me of not responding to their one-word (usually a childhood twist on an expletive) instant messages.

It's not been an easy three weeks, but it ends tomorrow. And brings with it one realization - I'm too dumb to go without a smartphone again.

What do you think - can you live without your smartphone? Leave a comment below.

Ads for 'Innovative' products from the future

In an attempt to be innovative, companies are constantly adding more of the same stuff in their products. New 'technology' and 'features' are designed to make our lives easier. While this might be true in many cases, have these two products from the future gone too far?

Product from 2016: Gillette Super7

Tagline:

Gillette: How blade are we?

Slogan: 

When your stubble is too stubborn for six slicers.

Copy:
The number seven is the number of balance. Not as many as eight, but far superior to six, Super7 has just the right number of blades for a super comfortable shave, should you still have any skin left on that face. This time (as usual) we promise a super close shave and you have no choice but to believe us as our brand ambassador, recently rehabbed pop star, Justin Bieber shows his clean-shaven mug.
[Note: Actual results may differ depending on whether or not you have real hair growing on your face]

Product from 2012: Facebook version 1 million

Tagline + Slogan:

Art: Facebook version 1 million 

Copy: 

Want to show the friends you don't have in real life how many friends you really have? Have you ever pondered existential questions like when you will die, how good you are in bed or which Bollywood star you are? Do you want all your communication with family and friends to be reduced to a 'Like' or 'hai hru doing'? Then Facebook is the thing for you! Secretly pry on your partner's hot friend's photographs and go a step further with the super poke 3D, which lets you poke people - in 3D! But that's not all. You can like stuff you could never imagine, as our brand ambassadors' status message proves. So what are you waiting for? It's time you got a life, it's time you got Facebook.

Closed Jobs and open Gates

Apple recently lost a bid to make iPhone jailbreaking a criminal offence. So, on that happy note, here's a mini-comic:

Comic template taken from the prolific @krishashok whose done a bunch of mini-comics like this on Twitpic - comics that aren't even blogworthy for him. Go figure.

The touch of India

An ancient Indian saying goes: What thou shalt not take to heart, thou shalt take in your hand. And it's true. We have never shied away from the sense of touch. Around the world, millions of westerners are only now waking up to our ways.

The recent revolution, of course, is due to a fellow whose surname is Jobs. This man is making billions off a simple human need - the need to touch. It's what we Indians have always done. When we eat our food, we touch it. When Zakir Hussain plays his tabla, he touches it. When we want to show respect to our elders, we touch their feet. Even when we wash ourselves after our morning jobs (no pun intended), we clean by touch. The average Indian has no problems touching food, assorted body parts or percussion instruments.

However, the poor, deprived western world envies our ability to touch. After their capitalist companies forced them to buy toilet paper, spoons, forks, drum sticks and plectrums, their innate urge to touch now manifests itself in the latest technological breakthroughs.Jobs can't get enough touching
(Image credit: via @dhempe on Twitter)

They envy us in general, I think. When we were winning at hockey, they made the pitches turf. Now that our guys are killing at the spelling bees, they want to simplify spelling. The iPods, iPads, iTouches and iMats threaten to steal from us our touchy feely culture. (Aside, iNamitha is now on Twitter RT'ing intense stuff about people giving up drinking because of beggars. Now if that isn't touching, I don't know what is.)

But we are not to be outdone easily. Our march on touching shall not be stopped by a few phones and pads. Where they fail, we will make up. Our young men will continue to touch women as (in)appropriate. We will now regulate our touchiness to the extent that one of our major states is going to have a 'culture policy' that will define what is too touchy to be touched. Heck we'll even be a little contrarian in our greeting. If they shake hands, we will touching and say 'namaste'.

If you think I'm going a touch overboard, sample one of ToI's best headlines in recent times: Fans touch Big B, star touched by fans. You can't expect any better from an ordinary blogger like me.

As the ancient Indian saying goes, 'Dil pe mat le, haath pe le'. Stay in touch.

The productivity lifecycle for a software tool (or some such)

All right, it's been a day when I've used one too many tools that have become too resource hungry and tried to do too much. But you get the picture!

Facebook disguises 'friend finder' as 'friend request' a.k.a Facebook #FAIL

Dear diary (by Sania Mirza)

It had to happen. The engagement is off.

Sohrab insisted it would be called an i-Tablet. I said: something more feminine, like the iPill. Then he said that we were incompatible and never agreed on anything. I was always wrong. I wagered our engagement on the fact it would be a more feminine product. (I'm very playful like that. Except on court.)

He heard 'iPad', it was game, set and match for me. At least this one.There will be no re-Kindling of all this, though. That's for sure.

I must think now - better late than never. What kind of person should I look for? Someone who lets me play tennis? People ask me about tennis after marriage all the time.  In fact, sometimes they don't even ask me, but have a public quiz about it.

But why should it matter? Tennis ain't so grand. After all, I'm bigger than tennis. I just need to choose someone who gives me more space. Hey, that's right aren't we doing something about space in 2016? That's it. I'll choose the guy who goes in to space. I'll call him Spaceman! Ah, he will come and sweep off my feet and we will escape gravity together. Maybe the Times of India will call us Space-San and have more quizzes about us. Slideshows, even! The joy!

Anyway, I'm off now. Tomorrow I'll tell you more about those six games I won in the Australian Open. Not matches, silly. Games. See you later, I'm Scootying.

Love in the time of Facebook

I just happened to see a wonderful ad on Facebook. Sure to drive the maidens wild with delight while taking care of some very practical issues like legality and speed. Much props to those who came up with this idea.
Romance is in the air, I tell you.

GMail faces reality - drops 'beta'

I know, I know, I'm a little late on this one. But the shedding of the 'beta' tag for GMail co-incides suspiciously with the announcement of the Chrome OS, don't you think?

Also, it's not just GMail, but a whole host of products that are being stripped of this rather pointless little tag. This was required if the big bosses at Google were serious about selling Gmail/Apps to corporates. No one spending hard-earned / stolen money would want to buy 'beta' products for their organizations.

Trying to integrate these things into one saleable package, maybe, Google people? Buy Chrome + Apps + Chrome browser + Calendar for next to nothing? It's possible, I suppose - most of these are free, supported by Google Ads right now anyway.

Our times are about to get interesting.

Snooping on someone - the DishTV way

A simple list of tasks to get someone's complete postal address:

1. Wish they have DishTV.
2. Use your OWN login to get into the DishTV portal. You can also create one from here: http://www.dishtv.in/subaccess/default.aspx
3. Enter victim's cell phone number / VC number.
4. Ta-da! The next page displays their complete postal address!

Easy, no? How's THAT for privacy?

Believing in advertising

Wired writes:

Apple doesn't want you to believe what it says, even though the company claims it's not lying.

I know false advertising and all that, but isn't this going a little overboard? I mean, do you really believe an ad that says, "Twice as fast", and go measure the speed of the product to check if it really is exactly two times faster than whatever? Where do you draw the line, then? Just think what would happen in the following cases:

1. Unilever would be sued because Axe didn't cause hot girls to cling to unattractive, young men.
2. Coke would be sued for every warm bottle.
3. Perfetti would be sued for not lighting a bulb in your head.
4. Airtel would be sued for not breaking barriers.
5. Adidas would be sued because impossible really was something.
6. Dish TV would be sued because wishing didn't lead to dishing.

You get the picture...

The 'Nano' of IT

I may not be Narendra Modi's biggest fan, but he certainly knows what he's talking about when it comes to business. Take this quote from a recent article, for example:

Why cannot we develop MS Windows in India, or a Google or a Yahoo? If an Indian can develop Hotmail and given that 30 per cent of Windows developers may well be Indians in any case, the task does not look all that difficult. What is required is a leap of faith, a paradigm shift.

Spot on, Mr Modi.

A caveat though: what he's talking about is product-related innovation only. While I totally agree with him that we are not up there in terms of technology products (with or without a social angle), we did revolutionalize the way IT is done around the world, and business model-related innovation is as commendable as product-related innovation.

What say, lurkers? Time to comment!

Chris Anderson - FREE

No, I don't have the free e-book, you dummy! But, I'm so looking forward to reading it when it does release. Especially, after this little preview. And most readers aren't really getting the concept of economic marginal cost. Here's a good place to start.

What he's essentially saying is that the market forces and technological advances that very-nearly ended some industries (like CD sales), are now forcing industries to use these very advances to come up with new models of business. Apart from that, there's also a nice little history lesson about Gillette and some beautiful examples of Calypso and cocaine thrown it. Read it, it's worth one look.

Anyway, I'm off to Pondicherry for the weekend. Cheers!