Super-cool technology - and a competition!

IS NO ONE INTERESTED IN THIS? :-)

I had published this a couple of days ago but got no comments and no feedback. And I thought we were incubating many entrepreneurs!

*****

I came to know a researcher who has developed some super cool technology and is now looking at a way to productize it. He is Swedish and his name is Alex Oswal. Check out the public domain videos demonstrating his technology, especially this and this one. Aren't the spatially aware handhelds cool?

Now here is a competition - can you suggest innovative uses for this technology? If someone can suggest several innovative (and sensible) uses of this technology, he/she will be given a chance to work on a paid student project around it.

Let your ideas flow! And do give it some time. The ideas that you come up with in 5 minutes are not likely to be good; think about it for a few hours and you may have something truly innovative.

Non-veg is okay, but must we be cruel?

I have nothing against non-vegetarians (I am one myself) but I feel horrible about our cruelty towards the animals who supply our food in one way or another. The factory farming of animals is especially, unnecessarily and unspeakably cruel.

Why should we bother? There are many reasons but just one will suffice for me - that a person who can hurt an animal without reason will not hesitate much to hurt a human being, in a riot for example. I do not know if anyone has studied this scientifically but I believe it strongly.

Yet it's not just factory farming that is to blame. The lone cyclist with live squawking birds strung upside-down by their legs is as much unconcerned with their suffering as the truck driver with cages stuffed full of shitting birds stacked in layers after layers for some twisted efficiency.

Some years ago, I sent Manu a link to a video showing horrendous treatment of factory farmed animals. He gave up eating meat as a result! He now only eats fish, with the reasoning that they probably suffer less as they are not cooped up in confined spaces.

I suggest we create a "CRUELTY FREE" certification for eggs and meat. We must push producers to avoid being cruel just to improve profit margins.

In this connection, I wrote to the CEO of Keggs, a leading company whose eggs I used to buy. A pack of Keggs used to look like this:



I urged the good gentleman to switch to cage free eggs - where the eggs were laid by birds free to roam around. He responded by saying that their eggs were already cage free due to their unique approach to egg farming. Lo and behold, a few days later, I saw that the packaging of the eggs had changed to incorporate a "CAGE FREE" statement (see below).


To the best of my knowledge, this is the very first incidence of "animal friendly" messaging on food packaging in India.

You too can make a difference! Go out and do something! Let the producers know what you think as consumers. Force restaurants to buy meat only from "CRUELTY FREE" producers.

Customer disservice - Redux

Manu's blog yesterday carried several examples of customer disservice. One would have thought that we'd get better service as the economy modernizes. And we typically do. But there are three typical problems.

1. The organization is in either a "hit and run" or "God" mode. This organization does not care about its customers. That's part of the organization's philosophy and flows from either the ownership or top management. A number of India's private educational institutions are unfortunately in the "hit and run" category! And many government services all around the world operate in "God" mode where they feel they are answerable to no one.

2. The organization is well-meaning but incompetent. This too happens from time to time. Currently the cellphone operators fall in this bucket with respect to network quality. Tens of millions of uses are being added every month and though they would like to give good service to customers like myself who have run up six figure bills in the recent past, they just don't have the bandwidth (literally and metaphorically).

Another stunning example of such incompetence happened to me recently with HSBC where I have a Premier account. HSBC acts very serious about security - they even give you a special device that generates a new code every few seconds that you have to enter into their online banking site along with your user ID and password (you cannot use an old code). So imagine my surprise two weeks ago when I logged into my account with all the credentials feeling highly secure only to read: "Dear Mr. Amit Sardana, as per your request, your address has been changed to xyz." What??!! I did a double-take like you see in the movies.

It's been a week and they haven't been able to explain how they changed not just my address but my NAME, although they keep sending offers for "free champagne and cake at the Le Meridien all through September to celebrate the birthday of your spouse". Hmm.

3. The organization is process driven but forgot to add a process for your particular problem. Manu gives an example and we all have our stories. In such cases, NO ONE KNOWS how to fix the thing for you. The option is just not on their computer screens and they just don't know how to do it. They don't have any escalation process for this. Worse, they don't have any continuous improvement or kaizen process to log your special case so that they can address it later! They will simply lose a customer and a lot of goodwill.

In fact, in India we are still at the beginning of service automation and there are still manual workarounds possible in most cases. The people manning these service centers are still fairly educated and somewhat alive intellectually. I have seen the future (in the US) and it is scary in some ways. Everything is process driven, there are no workarounds, and working in a call center is often a very low-end job. If you are served by the process, fine, otherwise you are ejected from the process into deep space with arms flailing where no one can hear you any longer. The only thing that works in such situations is to use the clout of your credit card company - American Express can have your money refunded for you when all else is lost because your service provider has a process for THAT.

Software usability

Over the last couple of days, I was busy hosting a VP of IT of a major airline that works with Nagarro. It was a good trip in all ways - he was impressed with our open culture, the sheer technical ability of our people, and our eagerness to do a good job.

One of the things I found remarkable was how much importance this senior person attached to the matter of software usability. He spoke of how the world's leading departure control software was developed by continuously testing ideas over time with different airlines and different sets of users at the same airline. He said that the elegance and the usability of the system were perhaps a major factor in its market leadership.

I'm not an expert on usability and need to learn some more, but even I can see a few aspects of it.

1. The first layer is "basic hygiene" at the screen level - uncluttered page, good aesthetics (colors and arrangements), easy to find things, minimum need for scrolling and so on. When two of these principles conflict, you have to prioritize intelligently.

2. The second layer, of increased complexity, is workflow across pages - navigation, the number of pages required to be visited to conclude a task, how different users interact to accomplish something, and so on.

3. The third layer, at an even higher level, is context. Just as I always say that you can't make a presentation on a topic without knowing the audience, you cannot make a software without imagining one or two or four types of users. Let's take Blogger for example, on which I am typing this email. They should have (must have?) imagined a few profiles of bloggers. Normally such profiles are even given a name and an imaginary personality. Perhaps there was a profile for "Mr. John Doe, academic, 38 years old, has used computers for 20 years, typically has 20 to 30 windows open on his laptop simultaneously, likes to write the blog in the mornings with a cup of tea, pretty much lives through his BlackBerry." The more you can imagine such a typical user (note the imaginary embellishments like the cup of tea), the more ideas you can generate for usability.

Which is the most usable software that you routinely use? Which is the least usable?