The Branded and Gilded Life

Imagine you could.

Your smartphone would instantly become a glass brick, assuming it could travel through time. So, unless you had some way to stay connected to the present, there would be no coming back. 

Even if you went back 20 years, you would not have the smartphone or social media. Now that's an idea worth thinking about, given that we know how polarised the world has become.

Go back over 100 years and you can mostly forget about cars .

No telephones either - not even land lines and rotary dials.

Go back another couple of hundred years and homes would have no heating or lights. Conveniences we consider basic.

All those fast food cravings would have to remain as cravings. Unless you took a whole lot of ingredients and the recipes back to the past.

Question is, how would you take back plastic packs and even books to a time when they didn't exist?

Think about it. A thousand years ago, books had not been invented. So they would disappear when you traveled.

Even the clothes you wear today - they weren't invented, so how can they stay on you?

Going back in time means reversing all the advancements, good and bad. Its not about transplanting the present into the past.

Now, would you actually know that you were back in time? In your mind, maybe but it would be hard to explain how much the world changed to the people around you.

If you could speak the language, that is. Apart from explaining that you aren't an alien from another planet.

There's this mental picture we have of travelling to the past and moving back to the present, as if it were simply a physical journey.

You can't go back in time as a tourist. With a real risk that you can cease to exist!

Slumming it

India has the dubious distinction of having the largest slum in Asia. Or is it the world? Dharavi.

It's where people live on the edge, every single day.

The facilities and the space available are among the tightest in an already expensive metropolis.

And yet, it produces stories of entrepreneurship and triumph against the odds.

Including something as strange as 'Slum Tourism' where the affluent gawk at the unfortunate.

There is really no parallel.

Rashmi Bansal wrote 'Poor Little Rich Slum' documenting the lives of hardy entrepreneurs from Dharavi.

They aren't asking for handouts but contributing to the economics that drive the city.

And that's a clear sign that people braving the biggest odds need support from the government to improve their lives.

Rather than redevelop the slum and build something for the affluent, Brazil is trying a different approach.

They are mapping out the byzantine lanes and the cramped access that people living in the slum navigate every day and seeing how the slum can access public services.

Resilience is built into slums as the recent experience of managing Covid in such tightly packed areas demonstrated.

People who were informed and educated on the dangers did a great job of managing the community and stopping the spread - even though they were living at a tremendous disadvantage.

There's no doubt that the people who live in the slum have little room for maneuver - and that's precisely why health and some of the welfare services could play a great role in easing lives.

They shouldn't be forced to slum it.

Thank your stars you have to worry about your future!

There's an interesting discussion going on in a forum.

A young guy got an unexpected windfall of $7.5 million - setting him up for life essentially.

It meant he would not have to work another day - which is what most of us would see as a stroke of amazing luck.

And yet, that's not what happened.

As he describes it : And I also have no idea what to do with my life now. I have not talked to anyone about it but I start to feel fatigued, even though I am not doing much. My motivation for my study is gone, I stopped working out, stopped reading books and am basically becoming insanely depressed in the process. The covid situation is not helping much either.

Hardly what you'd expect.

He literally has lost the incentive to do anything because he does not have to 'worry' about the future.

Practically all the advice given to him by the others is not to tell anyone - because the pressure on him will only increase.

He will find long-lost 'friends'  and relatives eager to help him spend the money and keep some for themselves.

Now that his choice is unlimited, he has no clue on what he would like to do - distorted by having no incentive to put in the effort.

We have been brought up to believe that motivation is internal - and nothing saps it like having enough money to laze around for the rest of your life.

Though I'm sure all of you are hoping that you'll be in exactly the same state he's in.

Think money will solve all your problems? Be careful what you wish for!

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First, you get keyless entry.

Then, if you lose the fob, you pay a huge amount to reprogram it, even though the work involved is minimal.

However, Toyota has demonstrated that car companies can figure out new sources of revenue on a car you've already paid for.

There are a range of 'Connected Services' you opt for and it's only after a couple of years that you realise that it costs you money to enter your own car!

The 'subscription' is $8 a month, or $80 per year.

Imagine paying this, not for a convenience or an upgrade but simply to get into the car and start driving.

There are already howls of protests from customers - all legitimate because it is seen as a rip-off.

Some of these 'services' continue to be available for free only on the luxury models.

The airline pay model of starting at a base price and then paying extra for everything from seating to food is invading other industries as well.

There's software loaded on cars to control several aspects of the driving experience and creating new tiers of customers is an experiment.

As long as our cars were purely mechanical, we owned everything. But the business model of software companies that make recurring payments a tidy stream of growing revenue is spreading to automobiles as well.

An aside - the 2017 models of Toyota where the subscription never kicks in could command a higher premium in the used car market!

The complex wrap on a simple idea

On a large billboard in Piccadilly in London, a small boy walks across and points to the sky.

In the background where he's pointing, a plane passes. And the details of the flight along with where it is headed appears. This happens with every flight out of Heathrow.

It looks absurdly simple and gets attention because the details change, even while the action doesn't.

A nice touch is the boy strolling back after the plane has passed by.

So how was it executed?

An antenna mounted on the roof of a nearby building reads live flight data from every aircraft transponder within 200 kms.

The GPS coordinates, speed, latitude and longitude are read, cloud cover in the area is determined to check visibility and that goes into instructions sent to the billboard.

Only when all these cross-coordination points match does the flight detail and the animation appear on the billboard.

It got over 350 million views and won the Cannes Golden Lion in 2014.

What's admirable is the simplicity and the accuracy of the information displayed timed to perfection.

The costs, paperwork and permissions would have taken an enormous amount of background work, in addition to the setup.

And since it is placed at a high traffic point in the middle of London, the branding opportunity was justified.

For a simple idea like this one, imagine the number of bureaucratic, technological and logistical hurdles that had to be overcome.

In the end, however, the charm works.

Meditation as extreme sport

The ski resorts were closed.

But the slopes were open.

There were no crowds owing to Covid.

And one expert skier programmed a drone to follow his breathtaking slide through virgin slopes as he teetered over giant crevasses and edges.

It's makes you wonder why people do it.

Mountaineers and skiers demonstrating their skill and control long before the proliferation of social media.

It's 4 minutes of sheer adrenalin as he weaves his way down treacherous slopes and the drone swoops in on him from angles that no human could have managed.

At times, he's just a black fleck in an ocean of white.

At others, you can hear him slice through the snow cutting through it with two knife edges, leaving scars in his wake that the next snowfall would fill. 

There are moments where he's skiing through pine forests of white trees.

And quiet contemplative ones as he treks up to the mountaintop before he straps on his skis and shoots himself off the edge.

There are times when the cliff face is almost vertical and it makes you dizzy just thinking of what it would have been like when he leans over and lets go.

The point of no return.

When all those years of practice and reflexes kick in without seeming effort.

Almost towards the end of the film is a sheer mountainside of white snow.

And he flies off it at an angle, making his way downwards.

Maybe at that speed, you get meditative and move into a zone where stillness is the speed.

And he wants to be there as often as he can.

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That's how all fairy tales’ end. 

And the real world begins. We assume that the attainment of success or money is some point from which we can leap into a higher level of existence.

Question is, we still have to find it.

Life seems pretty much the same for billionaires as it does for us regular folk.

Just yesterday, someone sent a WhatsApp on Jeff Bezos where he said, in a mundane detail, that he washes the dishes at home after breakfast.

Is that the state of Happily Ever After?

You build the largest company in the world but dishes don't wash themselves.

So, is everything spic and span with the picture?

I remember a conversation with a successful lawyer who said he wanted nothing more than to own a Harley Davidson when he was young.

He told himself that he would go for long drives along picturesque landscapes and life would be terrific, all the time.

At some time in his 30s, he made the money.

And the Harley landed up in his garage. He was happy, having achieved what seemed impossible as a child. For a while.

He took a few trips over the next few days and the riding experience was great but not the one he had in his mind as a child - the traffic, the heat and the routine of filling petrol, checking air pressure intruded. He kept wondering if anyone would scratch the beautiful paint job and that worry ate into him.

It's still in his garage gathering dust because he hardly ever drives it. 

Another dream realised and stored in the attic of memories. 

In fairy tales, the thought is reassuring. But real life has another agenda.

Photo by R.D. Smith on Unsplash

Curing plastic addiction

It's an almost perfect solution.

Seaweed mixed with some plant extracts solving a major problem - plastics in packaging.

There's no doubt we've got heavily reliant on plastic right across the supply chain. It is so versatile, there are hardly any aspects of the chain that can function without it.

Water bottles. Food packaging. Oil packaging. Single use cups. And none of this can be replaced overnight.

It's the result of decades of work that has gone into colours, textures, surfaces to be printed on. And plastic has delivered.

Now, we need to go into rehab. And getting around without the convenience is a hard thing to sell. How many true environmentalists exist in the world?

Let's not forget that 50% of the plastic in the world is put out there by just 20 companies.

That's why Notpla comes as a breath of sanity.

The name is a mish mash of 'Not Plastic' and it is obvious why they had to brand themselves this way.

It looks exactly like the plastics it replaces but it is nothing like it.

Water bubbles you can simply pop into your mouth and bite in. Swallow or wait for it to dissolve.

Edible packaging may not sound very appetizing and companies who spend millions on advertising would not want their products to look exactly like their competitors.

But it's a big step forward. And hopefully we'll return to our senses.

Even if it looks like a journey that will take years, if not decades.

Migrating the internet!

Tim Berners-Lee invented the basic protocols of the internet - html and http

And brought about one of the biggest changes in the world - the start of the world wide web.

However, he was unhappy with the way the web evolved into creating massive tech companies that locked user data in and made huge sums of money out of it.

Now, he's attempting a reset.

Putting people back in control of their data and handing it out to companies only for defined purposes and needs.

Will it succeed?

It's hard to say. But he's creating an option where the early movers will create their own PODs of data with controlled access.

Right now, it's confusing because it's not ready for prime time.

Even people who create their own PODs need applications built on the new standard.

The problem, invariably, is that smart entrepreneurs see potential and the future much before the rest of the market does.

Then, they provide services and make it easy for people to transact.

Now, most of the world already on social media and logged into current web services will not see a benefit right away.

They've heard of privacy issues but it does not seem to concern them. And that's the way existing giants would like it to remain.

The power is in the control of the data and how money can be made from it.

If it goes back to people, how will money be made? 

Inrupt, the new company founded by Tim Berners-Lee is hoping to find a way to balance commerce and individual privacy.

This is the real Web 2.0. Not the Metaverse view that is being flogged right now.

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If you've downloaded the VLC media player on your desktop, you know how well it works.

The CEO started off the project in 2003 when he was a student at Ecole Central in Paris.

It ran on the university servers for a few years before it became wildly popular and outgrew the initial infrastructure.

Since 2005, it has been downloaded more than 3 billion times.

And it still available for free.

Jean-Baptist Kempf has steered the project right from its initial development into a non-profit without a break.

When the project became to big and expensive for the university to handle, he decided to cut it loose and find other sources of revenue.

Making it a non-profit was crucial. Now, the core team is made up of around 10 people, but every year 100 - 150 people contribute to the code base.

Much like Linux was overseen by Linus Torvalds, VLC remains a passion project true to its origins.

It could have been abandoned anytime and left to slowly decay but it hasn't. The core team has made sure of that while pursuing other careers.

Felix Paul Kühne started work on VLC in 2003 when he was a 16-year-old student but he remains a lead developer devoting his spare time interacting with other contributors and holding the project together. And in the meanwhile, he qualified and works as a Doctor of Emergency Medicine.

It's hard for people who look at free projects to understand how much work goes into getting it done. Or the money that has to be found.

And yet, it does. That's the miracle.

Image Credit: pngkey.com

Are limitations Ingredient X?

Singapore is a small country.

It does not have the luxury of space and yet, it has to manage growing needs.

It's completely flat and lies just 5 meters above sea level.

50% of its water needs are met by purchase from Malaysia and that agreement ends in 2061.

Climate change is another problem the country is faced with. And yet, it has done remarkably well so far.

One part of the solution came from recycling sewage and transforming it into usable water. Today, it already supplies 40% of the daily demand. Desalinated water will supply another 30% of the demand by 2060.

This means executing consistently with little room for error. It's not just a necessity but the entire country depends on the projects to deliver.

Singapore may have only 6 million people but it is a model of how constraints can shape an economy and drive it.

They made individual cars expensive but public transport is so good, no one misses it.

They have to manage population growth, ethnic diversity, trade issues and the biggest problem of all, a lack of space to grow.

And yet, with precise steps they have built a country that is a model for others to follow.

The question is, what happens when the constraints disappear? That's when governments take their eye off the ball.

Take a look at the countries which have shown remarkable resilience against the odds. And that seems as essential as those blessed with fertile soil and a great climate.

Limitations are ingredient X!

The mosquito's 'spit glands'

That's one of the projects that Johns Hopkins hospital researchers have been working on since 2019.

They've found that it holds the key to curbing malaria - it may be a long shot at this point but we've seen how previous research done decades earlier helped accelerate vaccine development during the pandemic.

We know how the tiny mosquito is able to play havoc with all the repellants, the nets and gadgets and devices that proliferate every year without any lasting relief.

How someone thought of looking into the spit glands of the mosquito to find a solution is beyond me. But I'm glad they did.

Another project is on proteins that could restore damaged sound-detecting cells in the ear - and given how much the current generation uses earphones, it may be just in time for when they hit their 40s and 50s

One more discovery is that Parkinson's disease may be connected to bacteria in the gut, which is a long way from the brain. The proteins that are responsible travel from the gut through a long nerve.

For blood-related disorders, a bone marrow transplant may prove to be a much better option, including sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia.

And brain implants are helping people to control prosthetic limbs only with 'thoughts'. Its early days but these are truly the kind of breakthroughs that will return people to a quality of life they could only have dreamed of earlier.

Solutions emerge from the unlikeliest places. 

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The profile pic is a signal - whether it is on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

A tiny amount of pixel space where the site allows limited exploration.

A newbie is instantly recognizable - the ones who have the standard issue avatar of the site. It could also signal the rebel who does not wish to play the game. But that's often the exception rather than the rule.

Around profile pics, there's a whole system of small apps which exist to allow you to change and modify the pics in accordance with what the current trend is.

I am definitely old school - I don't experiment with new angles, backgrounds or even the outer colors of the circle.

So it was a pleasant surprise when Titus Snell sent me a message with two profile pic options - and I was touched that he had made the effort to work on the pictures and send it to me.

One of them was a sedate blue, which was calm and collected. And what I switched to. The other was a rust shade of red - which is also quite unusual. Maybe in a few weeks from now.

And then, Prof Alby Kurian told me that a photograph of mine on a slide in the background while I was speaking at a conference definitely created an aura. Far more than any kind of angle or artifice that I could have come up with. So, that went up and by all measures, it does help to set an elevated context.

Though it's small, the profile pic definitely allows you to express your individuality. 

And shimmer in a sea of faces!

Routing for roots!

The well-to-do are migrating from India in large numbers according to the ministry. Over 600,000 people have given up their passports over the past 5 years

There will be various interpretations of this move - right from the political to those who believe that a future in a developed country may be a good hedge against climate change.

Like a whole lot of wealthy people in the US decided to get their own homes in New Zealand as a safe haven when Covid was raging in the US.

Now, some of these are simply assumptions. There is a pattern but within the pattern are complex reasons and it never is as simple as the media like to portray it.

Another pattern. Companies abroad are finding it hard to attract Indian techies. There are a whole lot of reasons behind this.

For one thing H1B spouses who earn money on the side by running their own businesses in the US live from one government policy to the next

The coveted 'Green Card' hopefuls live in limbo in the US. Indians are apparently the biggest set of nationals awaiting the change from Green Card to citizenship.

Gen Z in India finds that there isn't much of a difference working from here. The money is good and like techies in the big cities in India who had moved back to small towns during Covid, they're getting comfortable.

On a global chess board, it's like the pawns now have a mind of their own!

The commercial viability of online followers

Businesses are finding that social media followers aren't exactly the best metric to estimate results.

Book publishers who paid massive advances to top celebrities based on their followers-in-the-millions-profile would lead to big sales were sorely disappointed.

There's a slip between public perception and reality.

Building a following in the real world involves tremendous work and effort.  Influencers can actually get things moving with just a phone call or an appeal.

On social media, however, the commitment is easily made and just as easily forgotten because there is no firm connection or consequence.

The words influencers and followers don't have the same magnetism and aura when they transition to social media.

You can't blame the portals alone for the way this works. They built approximations of the real thing.

Connections, engagements, feedback and even likes online are imitation versions of what real world commitments involve.

If you're connected to a person in the real world, both of you take the time to meet, talk to each other and help out in various situations. You know each other's families, possibly and have several shared experiences as memories.

But online, it's just a click and you're away. You may like what a person posts and look forward to reading more or watching a video but the connection ends there. They may not know you at all beyond the profile picture.

Having millions or even thousands of online followers is not a bad thing. It even gives a completely different vibe - and at times, that's all you're looking for.

But equating them to real world relationships is a stretch - they exist in another orbit altogether.

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Literally.

A new way of drying off after a bath is here.

Unlike wrapping yourself in layers of Turkish bath towels, turn on the air.

A new design appliance for bathrooms is the all-body dryer.

As opposed to the hand dryers that have become reasonably popular in public bathrooms.

The advantages are obvious. Go from wet to dry in a matter of minutes. 

After luxuriating in a hot shower, hot blasts of air blow at you from all directions to dry you off.

So you don't end up creating wet puddles walking all the way from the bathroom to the wardrobe.

If it works as promised, hotels will line up for it because they can simply do away with having to wash, dry and replace the towels everyday. That's a significant cost saving, apart from removing a source of the mess in the rooms.

The only question is whether they will be power hogs. In which case, the savings from buying and maintaining towels evaporates.

All said and done, the idea is worth trying. On rainy days and in winters, the damp smell of towels lingers long in the air.

And there's nothing as dispiriting as having to wipe off with a damp towel.

The first versions of these ideas usually leave a lot to be desired. And some crucial questions are still not answered.

How long do you have to stand in front of the airstream, for example. And when you see the design, it's air being blown at three levels. What happens in the middle, and most importantly, how do you dry off the hair on your head?

Well. it may not be wise to drop that bath towel, yet. For a few years at least!

A single woman ed tech business

Did you ever think that TikTok and Instagram could be used a teaching platforms?

Miss Excel has been doing just that.

She creates Excel training courses on these platforms, and they have been a runaway success.

They range in price from $297 all the way down to $5.

What exactly is going on here?

It isn't as if there aren't enough tutorials on the Microsoft website.

Or even on YouTube.

Excel courses are quite easy to find and a Google search will net quite a few options.

It's probably got to do with the way Miss Excel engages her audience.

She dances, pirouettes and sets her promotions on Tik Tok and Instagram to music.

Corny when you think about it. For example, videos show ' Conditional formatting' and a headline like 'Does your spreadsheet match your outfit?'

There's no reason whatsoever for the colours on the spreadsheet to go with your clothes but she does things like this - get the excel sheet background made from the pattern of her clothes.

You aren't going to be able to read any numbers on those sheets, but like they say, it's 'fun'

Makes you wonder about all the teachers slaving away in classrooms and earnestly rustling up courses that go deep into the subject.

And here's a young lady tripping on Excel to say pretty much what you can find on several sites if you do a little digging.

It helps, of course that once things go viral on TikTok , it propels the course to the top making it highly visible.

So GenZers looking to learn Excel must be instantly hooked. Someone speaks their tongue.

There are days when she earns as much as $100,000 dollars .who says life is fair!

What the $100 billion in UPI transactions mean for banks

The change was swift.

The pandemic drove more people and businesses to digital payments.

Traditional banks are the foundation for the entire system.

And that became the problem which could balloon into a threat in the years ahead.

While banks are the ones approving and managing transactions, they have become invisible to users.

As long as net banking was an option, a user had to log in on a fairly regular basis to manage payments.

With apps like Phone Pe and Google Pay, that is no longer necessary.

If banks get relegated to the background and become the invisible middlemen, their long-term prospects are squeezed.

They have to rely on aggregators for their most profitable businesses like loans for vehicles or personal loans and slowly, get cut out of the reckoning.

A small announcement the other day passed almost unnoticed. That SBI would be adding a Rs.99 charge to EMIs on every purchase. This was over and above the interest payment - a flat charge.

This leads to customer resentment because a customer sees no value in making the payment.

It is a sign that SBI wants a part of the action on payments and they are willing to risk the wrath of customers because they don't have an option.

The writing is on the wall - banks thought that payments were merely transactions and loans were their main product. But if people don't need you for payments, they could look elsewhere for loans as well. 

The payment facilitators are building the wall between consumers and banks - how this will play out remains to be seen.

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The QR code was invented back in 1994.

The original use was to scan components at high speeds in auto manufacturing companies.

The biggest advantage of QR codes is that they hold 300 times more data than barcodes

But they became a largely fruitless link between offline and online environments.

Brands used it for years to tempt users to go online by scanning a squiggly square in magazine ads after the invention of smartphones.

It was supposed to be the bridge to landing pages and allow users to go straight to designated pages and get people to interact.

It went nowhere.

People thought that typing in a URL was equally easy.

Until Covid made contact in any form scary.

Even credit cards being swiped implied danger. People wanted to order and pay without making any physical contact with menus, catalogs or any surface.

And that's when the QR code became the preferred option. It had become popular in Japan and China as a mode for payment but with Covid, the floodgates opened.

Today, the no-contact plaques showing a QR code have become the norm in supermarkets and even online payments.

QR codes are generated on the fly on desktops and paid for with scans by the mobile app.

They top up mobile or satellite TV recharges, bill payments, and we interact with them almost without thinking now.

A system that was made for no contact living had to wait for the world to discover it 26 years after it had been invented.

And it looks as if we won't be going back to physical payment modes even after the pandemic passes.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Nature has expert engineers who work for free

We think of nature as beautiful. verdant and a poet's inspiration.

Turns out that the engineering skills are truly magnificent to behold as well.

A dry creek in California was proving to be a wildlife risk.

It had grown that way after years of agricultural use.

The estimate for 'greening' the land was around $1 million and the time it would take - 12 years.

So the ecologists took an unusual route.

They prepared the land for beavers to operate freely and it cost about $60,000.

In just 3 years, the beavers have completely transformed the landscape.

They didn't need a blueprint. There was no committee constituted to oversee progress.

And best of all, they didn't need to be supervised or told what to do.

Trees, willows, plants that thrive in wetlands and meandering streams appeared across a wild landscape encompassing about 60 acres.

This is a project initiated by the US Fish and Wildlife service.

Hardly seems like the kind of thing a government would do but there are several projects now in the pipeline.

Seeing the success, nonprofits and universities are now on board.

So, an army of beavers is now going to be put to work to reclaim the land. Nature's engineers who have been doing it for eons will be called upon to repeat the magic of breathing life into land that has been denuded and destroyed.

Like the elves and the shoemaker saga - we don't have to tell nature what to do.

Just prepare the ground, get out of the way and come back for a pleasant surprise a few years later!

Can a calendar make money?

It depends, really on what it is being used for. 

Practically every email program has a calendar. So what was missing?

The old way to fix a meeting was to email,  figure out a convenient date and time.

When you're trying to organise it halfway around the world, it gets a lot trickier. Especially when there are several meetings involved.

Trying to figure out when working schedules intersect and whether the person is free at the time is a problem.

Whether you're trying to line up a demo, get an introduction going or interviewing a candidate.

Calendly was founded by Tope Awotana who faced the problem himself. 

He tried every other product in the market and knew what was missing.

Getting the technology to work was another major problem altogether.

We underestimate the level of knowledge that is commonly available - if we are familiar with something, we assume the rest of the world knows. Which is far from the truth.

So the problem statement can be pared down to this. How can you set up multiple meetings a day across time zones and know when time slots with the people you want to meet with are available?

That's the problem Calendly solves. 

It let's you synch up slots that people indicate on their schedule without having to exchange emails.

Word of mouth was the single biggest way in which people got to know of it. And last year the company made over $70 million.

So yes, calendars do make money - but not just by printing the months of the year!

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James Dyson built over 5000 prototypes of the 'Cyclone' vacuum cleaner to get it right.

He made one change at a time, so he knew exactly what was going wrong or in the right direction. Not 2 or 3 changes. One.

He was told by every manufacturer that vacuum cleaners could not get any more efficient.

The 'cyclone' technology had to be developed to suck up dust particles smaller than 1 micron. A Physics professor told him anything less than 20 microns was impossible.

He had to buy out a partner who didn't believe it was possible either.

He tried to license the technology to manufacture it but no one was interested.

He finally had to do it himself.

The vacuum had a transparent pipe showing the dust being collected. All previous research had shown that consumers didn't want to see dust being swept up. The engineers liked seeing it, so they kept it.

It was priced at 4 times the cost of the established competitors. No one gave it a chance.

The few retailers who agreed to stock the product paid for it in advance. Those were the terms of the sale.

The people who bought it were not the rich. Their houses were vacuumed by maids and they couldn't care less.

It was bought by the middle class who wanted to keep their houses sparkling clean and found a product that worked as promised.

It took nearly 4 years to develop the first working prototype. And another 4-6 years to get it out to market.

James Dyson put up his home as collateral to raise the money from a bank.

In the entire set of events narrated so far, where do you see the inspiration?

Now, you know!

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash

Frydom

Sounds a bit like freedom, right.

A guy has created an interesting interactive site on the best shapes to fry.

Not too many surprises, actually.

The ridged shape 'fries' the best because of the surface area exposed to the oil.

What's a little surprising is that only potato fries were explored.

If it was India, you'll get all kinds of shapes and sizes to work with, apart from the incredible variety of things we happily drop into oil.

'Bajjis' the evergreen favorite of the commuters come in round coin shapes, stuffed with potatoes.

The long misshapen ones often hide a fiery chilli. 

Entire batches are fried at a time and people patiently await their turn to dig into them.

But we also have this ability to combine the crisp outside with flaky and soft insides in the fries. Which calls for some specialisation and skillful techniques.

The 'fafda,' something that looks like the Gujarati version of the regular 'papad' seems to have evolved into one stage of automation.

Long and thin strips are laid reverentially across boiling oil and then packed off in 1 kg boxes for family consumption.

There are no stopping Indian families who like to fry everything from bitter gourd to capsicum.

There's even a complex recipe where ladyfingers are sliced, stuffed with masala, tied up with string and then shallow fried.

The resulting concoction can convert even the most die-hard ladyfinger skeptic.

May be an Indian website designer could explore the multiple sizes, shapes and textures of Indian fries to show the world that potatoes are not the ultimate gastronomic experience.

People who live in smart homes may be rendered dumb

It's mostly hype.

Reality is another matter altogether.

Lights coming on just as you enter home. The temperature adjusted to the precise degree that you have defined as comfortable.

Music begins to play from your favorite playlist, depending on what your mood is - determined by your latest tweet or smartphone conversation.

The coffee machine begins to bubble and froth based on the recipe you've fed in.

Now, let me pierce the bubble.

This is an account from a person who actually lives in one, so she should know.

The problem as usual, is that competitors are jousting with each other.

Google Speakers can work at odds with Alexa's instructions.

Some of the IoT players have a mind and systems of their own - and that leads to frustrating consequences.

Alexa gets a little too chatty for comfort, making various recommendations over the course of the day without being asked.

Lights come on at night when you're fast asleep - and not being able to put them off adds to a sense of powerlessness. It requires another update. Until it breaks again.

Weather bulletins are read out aloud even when they haven't been summoned.

Some of these are niggling problems but it shows us how far out on a limb we already are.

If our fridges are going to place orders without our knowing, calls made to ecommerce companies to deliver things that have run out, where will it stop?

And what happens when 4 people with different habits start living together in a smart home?

Whose instructions do the systems follow?

It's a recipe for chaos and we're just starting to see where the madness could lead.

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There's something cinematic about platforms - no, not the software version.

It's where family issues get resolved or break up forever - at least in the movies.

The place where strangers arrive in a town and have a profound impact - where their life changes or the town changes.

Scriptwriters need a staging point for life's inflection points - and railway platforms are more accessible than airports. Airports are distant and there can't be last minute resolutions - at least the way they can be staged on platforms.

Bus stands are ordinary. There isn't much potential for drama in drab surroundings.

But railway stations have parallel lines that converge or diverge - and act as final chapters.

The train leaving the station, the guard waving the green flag and blowing the whistle and the closing doors have a finality that can be mined for dramatic staging.

The heroine having escaped the clutches of her dominant family runs in slow motion towards the outstretched hands of the hero.

Will he disappear into the horizon? Or will they unite at the last possible minute? We've all seen movies where both happened.

In fact, it has become a cliché - the movie station ending and trying to come up with variations is now almost impossible. 

But that doesn't matter ultimately.

The point is that every story needs a resolution. And platforms offer that neutral ground where conflicts can be either resolved or end in bitterness.

Platforms are cinema's punctuation point. Life has to come to a full stop or go on.

Photo by grayom on Unsplash

Insurers are cutting ransomware cover

it's getting chaotic out there.

Even with strong cyber security systems in place, insurance companies have had to pay out hefty sums to affected companies.

Ransomware, apparently, is the new money making favorite of the underworld.

There's nothing to be transported, and every single successful strike brings in large rewards, directly in cryptocurrency. Making it harder to trace and thwart.

No wonder insurers are having to cut their losses and put up safeguards from payouts instead of protection.

They are paying only half the cover they used to and some insurance companies are actively discouraging cyber expansion.

That is bad news for IT companies which looked at software eating the world. But ransomware is taking a seat at the table and biting off a lot more than any company can cough up.

No one predicted a networking future that would have to contend with such disasters. Effectively, an affected company's data needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and there is no guarantee that they will not face a reckoning again.

The ease with which data is locked up and systems rendered useless is prompting a rethink.

Solutions will be found but since the operation is highly profitable, new attack methods will be tried out as well.

How will insurance companies respond to the new dynamics of cyber crime?

 The risks are rising at a fast clip now.

Companies will have to bear the brunt of the attacks. A solution provider who can prevent breaches could be a guaranteed billion dollar opportunity - as long as they can deliver. 

Quantum computing may have to be fast tracked.

Explore things you don't understand

We create our own barriers and walls.

I've heard people proudly say " I know nothing about..." as if that was an achievement. It takes so little to find out more.

Maybe you won't be able to understand things in depth right away but it does not mean you don't make the effort.

Babies start out with no understanding of how to move, talk or communicate. But they are observing and making the effort all the time.

The gibberish that comes out of their mouths transforms into words and then sentences. The 'rolling over' in bed is among the earliest things that kids do, not sitting up or even attempting to walk.

They ask an unending series of questions, irritating adults who find that they have to explain the same thing over and over again.

That's the learning process. And somewhere in school, we get used to rote learning. And studying to get the highest marks in class.

As if that is the objective and not the thrill of understanding.

We get used to others setting the limits of what we should and should not know. Like invisible barriers, we never go beyond them.

Take cryptocurrency. There's a series of lectures from Princeton University available online. It's 13 hours of a deep dive into what Bitcoin and blockchain are all about.

But don't limit yourself to what is fashionable right now. We live in a time when there are no limits to learning.

We have to go back to the time when we learned more in those first few years because of one simple behavior. Curiosity.

The rest will take care of itself.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Formula 1 is all about speed with a core group of worshippers.

But it was a closed world. What people saw was cars driven at incredible speeds around convoluted tracks.

The big names like Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen were well-known.

But a sport is never about the lead players alone.

It's about the thousands of smaller stories that never get a moment in the spotlight.

So anyone placed below the Top 5 got scant attention from the sports media.

The other thing that attracted attention were the slow motion crashes and the way cars careened around the track into massive pileups.

But the human stories were missing.

Once the live telecast was done and the interviews followed, people waited for the next race to watch and cheer on their heroes.

The idea to make a scripted documentary of the Formula 1 world was greenlit by Sean Bratches, a former Managing Director of commercial operations for F1.

Box to Box films produced the first season for Netflix and they were given unprecedented access to all the teams.

And suddenly, the human stories came through loud and clear. It was about crushing defeat and disappointments as much as the victories.

The nail-biting finishes were shaped by teams working in close coordination with the superstar drivers, but every wrinkle and setback was seen as well.

The net result? Viewership of the F1 races jumped by nearly 50% and the managers seen in the Netflix series were mobbed as much as the stars were.

Fi became the sports brand that grew the most on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram

Brand building is fueled by storytelling. Not so much the machines as the machinations!

"A developed country is not where the poor drive cars”

It's where the rich use public transportation"

This is a quote attributed to Enrique Penalosa, a Mayor of Bogota.

And what does Elon Musk think?

From an article in Wired “I think public transport is painful. It sucks..."

Two completely contrasting philosophies.

The first built Tokyo, the largest and most densely populated metropolis in the world.

It's a city without one single centre but many of them and overseen by relaxed zoning principles. So, one area does not get to thrive at the expense of another.

And then you have the US. A country that lives by the principle of individual independence and strict zoning.

Where public transportation is perceived as the option for the poor and not something cities should invest in.

In Tokyo, like in Singapore, trains are the best way to get around a city that sprawls.  Riding the train does not say anything about your economic status. So you don't have to invest in a massive car and show it off.

Tokyo ranks 99th in the world for the average expensive price of a single-bedroom apartment.

Mixed zoning allows density and people living in close proximity to each other. As a result, it increases safety because people are out in the streets all through the day. Children walk to school with no problems at all.

The principle of individuality is enticing. But it also separates you from the rest of the people you share the city with.

If you don't want to travel in public transport and interact with only a certain social circle, what does it say about you as a person?

Tokyo should be the model of the world's metropolises. But the one that is packaged and sold is New York.

Do we appreciate risk?

As far as insurance policies go, maybe.

But until the 12 century, the concept was largely unknown. As with most things, it was business that paved the way.

The earliest known usage was with respect to merchant ships and voyages. The captain of a ship would enter into a contract with an investor for a 'resicum' - the Latin word for risk before setting sail.

On return, the captain kept 25% of the profits and the investor got 75%

Now, we're able to calculate probability, eventuality and returns on data that goes back decades.

And it has crept into daily usage that spans an entire spectrum.

The risks of falling in love. Of keeping all eggs in one basket. Of spreading risk like it was a slab of butter. Or  de-risking as some kind of sponge that absorbs hard knocks.

And so, the word has moved far away from it's origins to involve behavior - of people who take needless risks and those who don't.

Entrepreneurs have been defined as those who have a high risk appetite.

There are physical risks and mental risks. Each with its own set of payoffs and pitfalls.

There are risks we can control and those we don't even know of. Until Covid, not a single insurance company would have considered a world-wide shutdown and the impact it would have on businesses.

For everything from stock market crashes to F1 results, the risks multiply.

And as  global connections increase, all we know is that new risks are just around the corner just when we get comfortable with what we are able to predict.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.