………. Two short stories.  Of great highs and great lows.

In Season 5, Sushil Kumar from Bihar won the Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) bumper prize.

Lady Luck shepherded him through phone calls, and then into the Top 10, and finally through 15 questions that won him Rs. 5 crores, ($1 million in 2011)

After that, she thought he would manage.

But he managed to burn through the entire jackpot in less than 4 years. 

Every single money decision he made was terrible.

Now on to the other short story.

Gary Dahl, out drinking with friends in the 70s,  heard them complaining about high-maintenance pets.

On a whim he created a Pet Rock.

Smooth round rocks he bought for 1 cent and sold for $4.

With a background in advertising, he created great packaging and a hilarious user manual.

About a no expenses pet that would make no demands on you.

Lady luck smiled again.

In a few blazing months he sold 1.5 million rocks 

And pocketed $15 million in profits.

However, most of his fortune vaporised in the following years, when his early investors sued and won bigger paybacks.

Lady Luck sighed. 

Making money is completely different from keeping it.

The art of persuasive interrogation

In the movies, the cop and the prisoner are locked in a battle for control.

It set the tone for violence and confrontation.

The higher the pain caused, the easier it is to get major secrets tumbling out.

That is the widely held view.

The capture of Saddam Hussain in Iraq changed the foundations of how interrogation was conducted.

In a country where the army was unfamiliar with the culture and did not know how tribal instincts operate, they found a person who made new inroads.

Sergeant Eric Maddox was never an interrogator. He didn't believe that fear was the way to get the insurgents to talk.

He also believed that the way the military had been operating so far was not the way to go with a success rate of 4%.

There had to be a better way.

Empathy with the enemy. Not in terms of understanding what they were doing but why.

And using the power of listening to people to get through.

Consider the odds.

The Americans were in Iraq trying to capture Saddam Hussain who was holed up in Tikrit.

But tribal bonds are hard to break. Especially when the interrogator is a foreigner.

And they succeeded.

Stripe swipes!

Stripe is a highly valued global company in payments.

But content can be used to target specific sub-segment audiences as well

Blogs can strategically attract the right tech talent by detailing the steps taken to work a global project

Without making things too complex for a general audience

A recent post dived deep into the the problem of displaying transaction data across the globe.

And they converted it into an insightful tour of the challenges in displaying maps 

Most interactive maps are flat and the movements are in 2D

Stripe decided that it would make the map in 3D so that it added depth and dynamism to the depiction of transactions

That adds another significant layer of interaction and heightens the experience.

They open with a nice knowledge nugget

Apparently, cartographers have to choose between displaying the shape of countries or change their size. You can't do both.

Then, filling the surface of the globe with dots to dynamically display at the right location when a transaction took place.

That brought in fresh issues to manage the size and shape of the dots.

It's surprising that more companies don't follow Stripe's content strategy

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