Kicks and Kisses

Bollywood movie “Dev D” was released on February 6, 2009. It has become a prevailing fact that one can download any movie using various P2P download software like bittorrent, bitcommets. Recently one of my friend Jubin tried it. He found the Dev D torrent file on the Internet and next day he completed the download. However the torrent file was not containing Dev D movie. It was a fake torrent of DEV D. It was containing an old Bollywood movie called “Chal Chala Chal”.

Jubin was quite frustrated with the prank someone played. This might be a prank or a well thought strategy from the movie owners who wanted to stop piracy at some extent. The idea of fake torrent might have stop online piracy of this movie significantly.

All the torrent websites has this feature which allows users to leave comments/ opinion about a torrent. There are geeks who spends significant amount of time and energy helping other Netizen to decide whether one should download movie using this torrent or not. These opinions generally suggest the movie print quality, authenticity, number of seeds etc. Probably any digital media owner should employ couple of internet geeks who can upload fake content torrent and authenticate the same via posting positive comments about the same

These are just assumptions but competitors can leverage internet piracy to significantly decrease revenues of any new releases. How about a competitor creating   pirated content torrent along with supporting stuff like subtitles files in various language.    

PS: I watched the movie in theatre   

The number of mobile users in India has topped 310m and increasing at the rate of 1m every week. Increasing competition bringing down the calling rates. In this scenario, Value Added Services (VAS) have become significant revenue source for mobile operator. These value added services are being provided to end users via SMS, MMS, Push Messaging, voice portals, WAP etc.

User is being lured by massive advertising and promotions to use these services. Sometimes operator do not tell the complete details of the service or if they tell the steps are so complicated that an unaware customer can’t understand. Users land-up paying money sometimes for nothing. Example: Reliance Mobile Launched a VAS called “Call me |93 231 33333”. The advertising campaign shows celebrities asking viewers to call them to know about their caller tunes and to subscribe caller tunes services (A caller tunes is some music instead of Tring-Tring which a caller listen while calling other user). When you call on such a number you hear some music (celebrities caller tune) and than a recorded voice “Hi I am Riya, like my tunes you can get one too, just follow the instruction coming up” Instruction: To set this as your ringback tone press 1. To choose many more caller tone dial 1234 and it goes. 

 Bad Design Details:

1. The voice portal design is such that it forces user to use the service. At every steps it asks the user to press certain number to continue. It leaves no options to exit, more info, help, and talk to customer care etc.
2. During subscription and after subscription the service/ service provider does not inform about “How to unsubscribe”. User has to call customer care. Even customer care executive don’t do it for a user. Customer care will ask you to send an SMS “UNSUB” to 1234 to unsubscribe.
3. It auto renews the subscription every month without calling / sending an SMS to user.
4. The usage cost of these services is as high as Rs. 6/- per minute (Like making an ISD Call).It pressurize one to make quick decision, this also increases the rate of errors.

In short it can be said that some of the design decision has being taken in order to maximize revenue. These design decision leads user to forcefully use the service or sometime leads to make mistake which increases the revenue to telecom operator.

I had written how embeds are a window into other peoples pages in this post: “Embeds are Octopussy“. Some of the things which I had predicted are now online. This screenshot from a youtube embed says a hundred words, so I’ll shut up.

I have got myself a new domain, rega.in. I have tried to make it a repository of all my posts in different blogs. From now on, any post I make in kicksandkisses will be mirrored there too.

Just back from the barber. While he was working on my hair, with massages in between, between bouts of sleep this thought came into mind. And this I have been seeing for around 2 years. Whenever they have to use the razor they’ll make you see that they are removing the old blade and throwing it in a container, which would have a pile of these used blades. The idea behind this is that they want the customer to know that he is using a brand new blade for him. So AIDS awareness has been good I think.
But what becomes a side effect is that each blade gets used only once.
Which means:

So the market dynamics for the razor blade companies whose main customers where the barbers would have changed in the last 2-3 years.

How to make users do stuff. To get them to check pending emails, comments, notifications?
My gmail has 150 unread mails. Now most of these are random mails which I don’t want to read. But still there is this momentary thought of marking them as read just to clean up my inbox. But the task of going through all the pages searching is a task I am not very fond of. So the task remains.
Similarly in facebook whenever a friend invites me for an app, a notification comes up. And the number of notifications which I haven’t checked has increased to quite a number. I noted today that facebook is taking a few number of tasks from the whole and showing them apart. These pictures will give a better idea.

And I realized how this is better than showing just “40 new notifications”, as I actually clicked on the smaller task. The comedy in this is both these links go to the same page even. Still people will click it. I think this is a lesson in human psychology.

Do you think big corporate websites should have a sense of humour? whatever you think some of them do. If you type “chuck norris find” and press “I’m feeling lucky” you would see what I mean.

Earlier I had written about Flickr’s use of pop culture lingo here.

via mayank

updated on 5th may ‘08 —-

on swamy’s comment i checked again and found this text at the bottom of the page

This page has no affiliation with Google
Created by Arran Schlosberg

and the “Support this site” leads to a page which says this

The goal of this site is to have the top Google ranking with the keywords “Chuck Norris” so that when these are searched for using the “I’m feeling lucky” function this page will appear.

So swamy you were right :).

What is kwippy? - a micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network

Why another microblogging app when there are already plenty out there? - There is twitter, pownce, jaiku, and 10 other similar ones. Though all of these promote small posts, each has a different kind of social network.

On twitter you mostly meet strangers. By strangers I mean people you don’t know in the real world. It’s like barcamp, or a conference where you go partly to network. You meet fellow bloggers, marketeers, and people from your field. Yes friendships may grow among them, but mostly there are subtle motives behind the tweets. From promoting your blog, selling your product, showing your expertise, etc.

Pownce is geared more towards file sharing, sharing media (youtube, mp3s) etc. And it has an AIR instant messenger kind of software which makes it a little closer to an Instant Messeger.

In kwippy, the whole focus is on the Instant Messenger. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks. It gives the people in the list immediate access to your attention. People share their joys (i got a raise), sorrows (i flunked my english papers), their favorite links, and thousand other things through their status messages. And all these people also have a list of their closest friends on their list. And like in the real world when a real friend introduces you to another person, the chances that you hit it off are greater. There’s this trust thing which is automatic.

So there - kwippy has a social network which gets real friends, friends you could meet. And it stores all your status messages, which become your emotional timeline.

We have been working on it since some time, and now it is in testing. If you would like to check it out, and give your invaluable suggestions for improvement, either go to kwippy.com, or comment here.

LinkedIn has become a marketing tool for working professionals. At the same time it has also become a great tool for potential recruiters to find out/cross check the candidature. More and more consultants are trying to add you in their network. You approve it and you get a call next minute for a Job opportunity in xyz company.

I just thought about the “Trust” keyword regarding LinkedIn profiles. How accurate are people in writing about their title, work experience, skills, breaks etc. These types of discrepancies are always there. People write wrong information in their CV’s too. But one can discover the same while interviewing a potential candidate.

I came across one such profile. I knew the person and his profile in his current company. He is a senior software engineer but he wrote his role as Manager in LinkedIn profile. Later some people in his organization complained against him to management and he changed his profile on LinkedIn.

Recommendation is one of the great tools. But some how I feel it’s not that efficient. I have lots of endorsement requests pending in my inbox. I will endorse all of them one day, may be when I need such endorsements. I endorsed you so please endorse me. But if somebody writes about you it works like magic

Simpler tools can be design to give credential to one candidate. Credential can bring trust factor in particular profile. This credential can be given by people in your network, people outside of your network, old manager, new manager, technical person who interviewed you once, a consultant who talked to you once. There could be number of ways to do it. Statistical equations can serve as back bone for such tool and make great results.

At the same time there could be social implications of such tools. Even there is a possibility of frauds in any such tool. But an Intelligent credential tool can really help potential recruiter to quickly identify a right candidate.

Flickr greeted me in LOLcat :).

Pop cuture goes mainstream?