Availability of Quality Talent

Aakar Patel writes a column titled “Reply To All” in the Mint newspaper on alternate Saturdays; these are available online at http://www.livemint.com/Articles/Authors.aspx?author=Aakar%20Patel&type=wa. His writing on 29th October on “Why educated Indians are only half-literate” had a number of interesting points on the available talent pool in India for the IT industry and the English media business; reading this column brought to mind a number of related points that I had wondered about in the past. I will cover some of them in this post and hope to do the rest fairly soon.

The article talks about the poor language skills of a majority of the reporters in the english media. I think that apart from language, there is also an issue of content; I suspect that many of the reporters and anchors are (to misappropriate a phrase from NDTV) incapable of “going beyond the headlines”. In the aftermath of the 26/11 attack on Bombay, a regular feature of the 9 o'clock news on NDTV was to have the anchor talk to someone from Pakistan. The anchor would try to get the guest to agree on some point or the other; if the guest (often a print journalist or a member of the Paksitan establishment) chose to be non-cooperative, the anchor was often at a loss since (s)he was no match for the intellectual and debating skills of the guest. Also I don't know whether it was because I was more impressionable and less cynical at that time, but I do think that the participants in some of the current affairs discussions I've watched on Doordarshan in the eighties and early nineties were more knowledgable than the rent-a-quote types that show up on the private news channels.

I suppose this focus on english language skills could be criticized as being “elitist”. But then, if the person's primary task is to communicate a story in english, is it wrong to expect/demand above-average proficiency in the language?

In any case, I don't think the problem in the media business is because of the lack language skills alone; if that were the case then what explains the state of the Hindi news channels? It is not that the Hindi channels or the channels in other local languages offer more substance than their English counterparts.

Is it that the tabloid approach of all the news channels simply reflects what we the audience want? Is this the obvious outcome of our fascination with sound-bites, executive summaries and information in 140 character tweets?

The article mentions that “in India quality thins out very quickly” in connection with the availability of talent for the media industry. This scarcity of quality holds true in a number of other areas as well; for e.g. in education, there is a significant chasm between the top-tier and the next. I guess the increased participation of the private sector in education has meant that there are more good quality schools and colleges now than say twenty years ago; at the same time the private sector has contributed more than its fair share of mediocre institutions. Also while some of the new private schools are comparable to the “colonial institutions” mentioned in the article, these are often very expensive.

Android Initialization... and the advantages of blogging

I was looking at android system startup and found some useful material on the ENEA Android blog. Look at the various posts starting with http://androidenea.blogspot.com/2009/06/android-boot-process-from-power-on.html.

I think blogs are a useful mechanism for companies to publicize their expertise and start a conversation with interested parties - prospective customers, potential employees etc. Of course it needs to be done right to avoid appearing as a cheap attempt at publicity. I wonder how many companies in India have successfully integrated blogs into their public communication...

Individuals too can use blogs to showcase their expertise. I believe that useful to have externally accepted proofs of achievement, especially when looking to change jobs; things like patents, papers, participation in standards or open source communities are good examples of such proofs. Blogs too can serve a similar purpose if you can build a track record of meaningful posts..

LinkedIn Recommendations

I have been spending some time clearing up some long pending items on my

to do list. I was able to tick off one item over the last few days – respond to the

recommendation requests I've received on LinkedIn over the past two years.

The reason that this has been on the to-do list for a while is not because I have

received lots of requests (the number is in single digits); it was because I was

against this idea for quite some time for a number of reasons. Firstly, a lot of the

recommendations were filled with hyperbole and therefore writing in my usual

(bland, though I would prefer to call it 'under-stated') style would make the person

look quite ordinary; secondly, many of the recommendations seemed to be cases

of “i'll scratch your back if you scratch mine” with two people writing glowing

recommendations for each other; lastly, not writing any recommendations gave me

a convenient excuse to avoid writing recommendations for people I may not be too

keen to recommend (i.e. “as a matter of policy, I don't write LinkedIn

recommendations”).

On thinking some more, I began to feel that maybe the above reasons though

somewhat valid, were also excuses. Maybe the real reasons were my aversion

towards expressing opinions in public and good old-fashioned laziness; also I am

certain that there are good things that can be said about anyone (though it may

require more effort in some cases :-)). On a selfish note, I think that a well-written,

thoughtful recommendation reflects well on the writer. Lastly, it would be quite rich on

my part to publish recommendations that I receive while declining to write them for

others.

Another item on my to-do list is to write a blog post at least once a week. I hope I

am able to do this over the next few weeks; if I can post at least twelve times before

the end of the year, this task too can be considered done.

Our Affection For Things British

Back again after a long break. ..

A few days ago I read an article on the BBC website about a group of British men being arrested in Greece for offensive behaviour because they dressed up in nuns' habits (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8067280.stm). The article reminded me about a conversation I had with a friend some weeks ago comparing the British and Americans – we were in agreement that you would find more “characters” among the British than among Americans. I doubt we would hear about a group of American men doing something similar! Then there is the recent You Tube sensation Susan Boyle – I doubt someone like her could be anything other than British.

I guess this affection (preference?) that a number of us (late thirties and older) have for things British is a product of our experiences when growing up. A number of us went to schools with British influences (e.g. Anglo-Indian schools or schools run by missionaries where many of them were from the United Kingdom or Ireland), read Enid Blytons and the only english comedy serials we saw on television were British: “Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em”, “Fawlty Towers”, “Yes Minister” etc. (there was no Cable TV at that time). I suspect the younger folks (i.e. early thirties and younger) are more American in their tastes or at least not biased towards Britain.

I personally prefer understated comedy to the over-the-top variety; it is easy to think of Hugh Grant as being representative of the former and Jim Carrey as epitomizing the latter and to then generalize this to label all American comedy as being loud but that would be unfair. I've enjoyed watching American sitcoms such as “Caroline in the City” and “Frasier” and like Steve Martin and Bill Murray. However the cult status Sienfeld acquired puzzles me, even though I liked quite a few episodes. There would be a small clip of him doing a stand-up routine at the end of each episode. I think he was trying hard to do some understated humour (if that is actually possible..) but actually came across as being rather smug (especially that slight smile accompanied by the nod of the head).

For an enjoyable description of Britain and British idiosyncracies read Bill Bryson's book “Notes from a Small Island”. Its been a while since I read it but I still remember its gem of a start where he describes how the British (wrongly) believe that Britain is a big place.

Peter Drucker's "Five Deadly Business Sins"

I found an old classic when browsing the web this morning – “The Five Deadly Business Sins” by Peter Drucker (http://www.bmacewen.com/blog/pdf/WSJ.2005.11.29.DruckerFiveDeadlySins.pdf). These sins (in order of prevalance) are:

• Worship of high profit margins and premium pricing (e.g. Xerox's focus on feature-rich copiers and American car companies' focus on big cars provided opportunities for their Japanese competitiors to capture the rest of the market)

• Mispricing new products by charging what the market will bear (e.g. American firms' pricing of fax machines)

• Cost-driven pricing (rather than price-led costing)

• Slaughtering tomorrow's opportunity at the altar of yesterday (e.g. IBM forbade its PC division from approaching its Mainframe customers)

• Feeding problems and starving opportunities (i.e. assigning stars to fix problems)

Sins 1 and 4 are very similar to the issue Clayton Christensen addresses in his famous book “The Innovator's Dilemma”. 

Web Widgets on TVs

A common failing is to become enamoured with your present (e.g. our current city of residence, our current area of work) to the extent that we dismiss all other options as being inferior or less advanced. Such comparisons are often unfair as our views on these other options do not take into account all the changes that have happened since we last looked at them.

I have been working in the area of internet applications and services on mobile devices for the past few years and had not been tracking the impact of the internet on home entertainment, especially televisions. I read an article today on how the Yahoo Widget Engine has been integrated onto Samsung TVs (http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090324/yahoo-widgets-lend-brains-to-boob-tube/); Sony and LG Electronics are also planning to release similar products.

It will be interesting to observe how the evolution of web widgets on televisions (or in the cable industry) compares with the evolution of widgets on mobile devices (or in the mobile industry). Yahoo and Opera offer widget solutions for TVs and mobiles and if we were to extrapolate based on the the shape Yahoo solutions are in, widgets on mobiles (http://mobile.yahoo.com/gallery) seems to be further ahead as compared to solutions for TVs (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/).

Apart from Yahoo and Opera, other players in the mobile industry are also active in enabling widgets; device manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola have their own widget frameworks and mobile operators are attempting to standardize security mechanisms and APIs to enable widgets to access device services (the OMTP BONDI initiative). I tried googling for standardization efforts in the cable/television industry but was unable to find anything similar.

There is also the larger question on how the relationships between the different players in the mobile industry (i.e. application developers, operators, software platform providers, device manufacturers) compare with the relationships in the TV ecosystem (TV manufacturers, set-top box manufacturers, cable operators, channels, content providers). I hope to improve my understanding of this area in the coming weeks.

Monetization may be easier for Mobile Social Networks

Bill Gurley's has an interesting post on his blog - “How to Monetize Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent” (http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/03/09/how-to-monetize-a-social-network-myspace-and-facebook-should-follow-tencent/ ). He writes that social networks have a monetization problem because users are heavily immersed in the task of interacting with other users and so are less inclined to be interested in advertising; conversely nline advertising is more successful on sites where the user's intent to purchase is already formed (e.g. travel sites or on search result pages where the search query was triggered by an intent to purchase).

The post states that social sites can enhance monetization from other sources and gives the example of TenCent which generates revenues from digital items and casual games. Examples of digital items on TenCent include virtual clothes and accessories that users can buy to dress up their online avatars. Only 12% of TenCent's revenues come from advertising (as compared to over 90% for Facebook and MySpace). Gurley also explains why he thinks that people who dismiss the viability of such revenues as being an “Asian fad” are wrong.

Given the increasing popularity of social networking on mobiles and the fact that a number of mobile users are looking to personalize their handsets, I think that mobile operators can increase sales of digital items by enabling users to use the same content within the social networking application and to customize their handset. For e.g. users could purchase digital item packages that include personalization elements for their social networking avatars, wallpapers for their handset, downloadable ringtones and subscription to ring-back tone(s). As mobile users are already used to paying for digital items, it is likely that a social networking site oriented towards mobile users will be more successful in selling such items as compared to a site that is accessed primarily by desktop users. Common digital items would also mean closer integration between the handset and the social networking service (i.e. beyond the creation of specific applications such as the Facebook app for Blackberry, MySpace app for iPhone).

It will be interesting to explore how social networking on mobiles has evolved in different markets. Bill Gurley's post mentions two popular services in Japan that are accessed more often from mobiles than from desktops: Mobage-Town from DeNA (http://www.dena.jp/en/services/mobileportal.html) and GREE (they only seem to have a Japanese site; a write-up on the service is available at http://www.tokyotronic.com/2008/01/review-japans-no-2-social-network-gree.html). The creation of such “mobile-friendly” solutions in Japan seems to be mirroring the different approach taken by NTT DoCoMo as compared to operators in US during the early days of the mobile web; while the former created I-Mode (a new set of web-based services designed for mobile users), the latter viewed the mobile web as providing the desktop Internet on the handset.