The Real Steve Jobs - iStuff

This is a pretty popular (over 2 mill views), a bit old (2k6) but a pretty motivational clip - the kinda stuff that fuels inspiration - iStuff.



Be inspired!

Mobile and the non/semi literate

One of the roles that I take on at Eko is that of a an observer of the mobile-and-user relationship. While yesteryear's India might have been defined by a turban-clad snake charmer, a man on the street clutching a mobile handset very much describes an average Indian today.

A mobile based service (like eko) which aims at reaching out to a billion such 'mobile' Indians today has to contend with another truth - illiteracy. If this Times of India article is right, our illiterate population equals the entire population of the USA!

At Tinfo Mobile, this fact had driven me to design an application series titled TeachMe Akshara which would run on even the basic mobile handsets supporting Java (which were then being given out by Reliance Communications for prices as low as 500 bucks). The purpose of this app was to teach its users the basic alphabets of Indian languages. This news article on Digit magazine talked about that app. Unfortunately, that app never got formally deployed and I've moved on.

What was amazing about Eko was that the great folks here had put in a great deal of research and thought into this problem and had come out with a mobile interface that could be used by even the most basic mobile user, because the solution involved nothing more than dialing!

Resonating with the Eko team's findings, is this research paper published a few years ago by the Nokia Research Center authored by Jan Chipchase - a pioneer in mobile usage research. Here is a link to the research paper titled: Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication

The following excerpt is particularly interesting:

...
The simple answer is that non-literate mobile phone users can call, but cannot message or use the address book. The subtleties are more interesting than this.

Two basic tasks were easy for almost all our participants to complete: turning on the phone and answering an incoming call. Beyond this, there were various degrees of success. Dialing a local phone number is relatively easy, but problems can occur when there are variations such as dialing a national or international number, or using IP telephone prefixes. ...

iPhone iNdia - dUd dEal

iPhone+ India - I can only imagine what these two put (well) together could have resulted in (lets for a moment even forget the fact that it is a an awfully buggy device - the new 3G version, that is)! Unfortunately, that was not to be.

For the price INR 31K (thats $700! @44), iPhone will have to be satisfied with a couple of thousand units in sale - if they are lucky. Wish some telco really had the guts to come out with a $200, roughly (INR 8800) iPhone. Imagine what a crowd that would have resulted in. I'm sure the headlines would have been something like - 'Total Traffic Chaos. Delhi roads blocked on the new iPhone launch'. I'm sure those who have seen the real India would agree - we are a billion strong magnets (suckers) for mobile phones priced right. I'm sure a million units could have been sold in the first few weeks then - imagine the ARPU these could have generated (iPhone is a proven data services guzzler).

Well, nothings lost, iPhone's loss will be Samsungs', Nokias' and Sony Ericssons' gain! It only means that I will have to contend with my taxi driver holding on to his Nokia N 70!

Eko Presentation at Proto.in

Eko was one of the companies that presented at the July edition of Proto.in. The following is a video recording of the same, gives one a good view on how it works.

'Encyclopaedia Britannica' as a measurement unit

You might have come across descriptions such as this-
"such and such thing....can store the equivalent of 10000 Encyclopedia Britannicas in one square millimeter ..."
Amazing :) - I regularly come across such expressions in almost every memory related electronic/ software description. In this google-wikipedia-(and knol - is already called a unit of knowledge) age, the good ol' encyclopedia has been reduced to a measurement unit ;). I'd propose- the International Standards Organization come up with an official unit named 'EB' which could either be a unit of Mass (those books are pretty bulky) or Memory (enough of KiloBytes!) :)

Randy Pausch

Here's a post dedicated in memory of Randy Pausch who passed away on 25th July 2008. Like millions of others, I came to know about this personality through a YouTube video and have been struck by his words at the 'Last Lecture' titled 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams':


True, we never think of dying - that inevitably, one day we will simply 'fly away'. Randy was keenly aware of that fact and made sure he left behind a legacy of hope.

Related links:
1. His page
2. CMU page dedicated to his lecture

On-screen Telepresence

The Hologram, "...invented in 1947 by Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor (Hungarian name: Gábor Dénes) (1900–1979),[1] work for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971" - as the wiki says, has come a long way and in many incarnations.

Here's another link which gives an excellent idea on how a hologram works.

Having two eyes (and two ears) separated by a distance between them gives us humans what we call the 'stereo' capability; which when roughly explained means the ability to estimate the location of the 'subject' object / sound in a three dimensional space. However, we've been generally quite satisfied by two dimensional capture and reproduction of photographs (I keep a collection at picasaweb :) ). Thanks to broadband internet, good web-cameras, processors and displays, web-conferencing has become a reality. Add to this the growing cost of travel, fuel, time and our new-found concerns for our fragile ecosystem- now we have a good business case for people to arrange 'meetings' over the web.

Still, even an HDTVish quality web-conference for most business is not as 'good enough' as a face-to-face. I don't know how exactly, but I'd trust my sales friends when they say that it just doesn't cut it!

Anyways, despair not! If the folks at Cisco and a UK based company Musion have their way, you'll soon be able to literally transmit the whole of yourself in all its three dimensional glory to anywhere you'd want to be present - over the net, of course.

Check this demo video out that my colleague Abhinav at Eko shared with me a few days back:
This is an actual demonstration by Cisco at Bangalore!


Going through the Musion site, I was surprised to find this video where they say the Tatas used this at the Nano unveiling at a car-expo at Delhi!


I'd still believe that this will be history soon and B2BC (Brain to Brain Communication) as I had mentioned in a previous post will prevail. Ah, flights of fantasy!

Mobile blogging through Opera Mini

Of all software made for the mobile, Opera Mini java version is what I'd call an essential download. While the earlier versions had some issues with my Blackberry Curve (it was unable to somehow use the socket connections), version 4.1 fixed this for good. Though it now uses HTTP to connect to Opera servers, it is STILL much better than anything else out there.

Its way faster than the built in browser on my Blackberry, much slicker and easier to use, supports a full screen layout, renders as close as possible to a browser on a PC. For phones with screen heights greater than width view the page in landscape mode! A pleasure to browse and blog with :)

The way it works is:
- You type in a URL on the opera mini mobile app
- The app connects to the opera server (almost a proxy)
- Sends the url request
- Opera server in turn fetches and analyzes the site
- It seems to make good use of cacheing
- Translates the page into a format for easy (but real) view on the mobile
- Compresses and streams back the data to the mobile app
- The app renders the page in all its glory :)

If you are a mobile user (there is a mobile client for almost every mobile worth its name), just visit the operamini site:



PS: I started this blog post on my mobile but ended it on the PC.

I'm attending proto.in

Hope to see you too!

A sunrise industry coming up in West Delhi’s Uttam Nagar - LiveMint on Eko

New Delhi: Shyama Kumari has a new-found sense of confidence. The 20-year-old college goer taught part-time at a local school for two years and saved Rs8,000, which she has put in a bank account. Her banker? The local drug store.

Kumari isn’t the only one who banks in a shop and shops in a bank. Around 1,400 people in her neighbourhood, Uttam Nagar—a lower middle class colony in West Delhi—have, through shops that include grocers and chemists, opened accounts that now have between Rs20 and Rs 14,000...

Here's the link to the complete article on liveMint.