Stark is the word – a movie about slum dwellers in India makes waves across the world especially in ceremonies studded with celebrities and the elite. See link.
Just makes me wonder if the intention behind the movie was to showcase slums for the elitist population of this world.

What do people want from a website?

Taken from “Nathan Richardson’s Modest Proposal” –

People want voice, breadth, aggregated search function and blog
content from news sites. Give that to them and you get super sticky
engagement.

An acronym for our qualifying criteria was ASPIC,
which stands for Aggregation, Search, Personalization, Integration and
Community. Nowadays we’re focused on video integration, mobile,
editorial, community and thinking about the “X” factor.

Saw couple of movies recently – Kung Fu Panda, Slumdog Millionaire.
Kung Fu Panda is a kid movie which everyone can enjoy, contrast that with Slumdog millionaire which is for a more mature crowd. – One could argue that these movies are meant for totally different set of audiences, but essentially both are “underdog making it big” stories.

Slumdog is a collage of many hindi movie storylines, and a very familiar game show. I found the acting especially by the grown up version of the characters very amateurish – There are much better bollywood movies which never made it big in the international arena, which means that ultimately international recognition is the outcome of good marketing and networking.

A R Rahman is no doubt a genius, but can you call the sound track of Slumdog his best work till date? Com’on you should be kidding. Our maestro had made Rang De Basanti, Lagaan and Kannathil Muthamittal earlier, but nobody noticed all that till Danny Boyle got him onboard. Summary is that there is no dearth of talent in India, and that we are very much capable of doing world class things. Its just that it pays to do some marketing as well!

I personally liked Kung Fu Panda much more than the Slumdog’s jackpot. The lovable Panda rediscovers itself by kindling a lot of self belief within and doesnt depend on lady luck alone to make it big. Thats the best way to do it, isn’t it?   Its an awesome movie for kids because it gives several valuable lessons -
They’ll be fascinated to learn the secret of the Dragon Scroll as well as the secret ingredient of Po’s father’s noodle soup, both of which will surprise them and possibly teach them a valuable lesson. There is one is for elders as well – “yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift–that’s why it’s called the present” – sweet!

The next world order by Gurcharan Das – published on NY Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02das.html

My Note – Lack of a set vision enables public to do whatever they want. Their energy is set in self maximizing principles without the constraint of the state itself developing, end result would be considerable trickle effects on the state. Freedom and democracy motivates further growth for the self maximizing public, that makes the trickle in India a massive flow making it a rather developing country.

Am testing the new wordpress app which pops up inside my Yahoo! Mail interface, and hence this post.
I havent blogged for quite a while, but this one feature sure drove me to try it out!

check out the yahoo blog post on the new application features that are being introduced in Yahoo! mail.
There are seven applications which are available for the beta users to try out, and i find Xoopit (pulls up photos out of your mails and shows them together) the best of the lot. Greetings and WordPress applications also add to the occasional convenience.

wordletagcloud-kseeker-till-aug-08

Created with Wordle – http://wordle.net/

The concept of Signs of Life is core to any commercial venture in the retail space which is pitted against lots of competition. Imagine the following scenarios

• Case 1 – Its a cold evening – You are hungry and are searching for a place to eat when you see two restaurants – one empty and the second one having a lot of people. You don’t have any information about the quality of food in any of the cases.
• Case 2 – Same situation – You see two restaurants – one with a glass window showing a lot of people inside having piping hot food, another one which is completely closed for view.

In a world of asymmetric information, social influence could be a key signaling factor for people to make their decision. In the above cases when people are searching for a place to eat, there could be an implicit assumption that since many people are already eating in a restaurant it should be better than the other one. People tend to be risk averse in a lot of situations, and believe in taking decisions with some confidence as opposed to ones with none at all.

Similar cases could be drawn for Apparel stores, Fast food joints, Cafe shops, Gaming centers, and even for social networking sites. When websites leverage signs of life well,people gravitate towards them as opposed to the ones which just add to chaos in the world already filled with choice. Even in the case of human beings, a happy, cheerful talkative person shows better signs of life and will have increased interactions with the rest of the world than a reserved person.

To read more on social design and signs of life – http://bokardo.com/

• Stop waiting for that 1 hr workout that you plan to do – 15 min of exercise daily morning makes you more agile and active than you could imagine!
• Put an end to the dust accumulation on the $60 book today! You are never going to get those two free days when you plan to finish it off in some marathon sittings. 5 pages a day over a couple of weeks would get you far ahead than you ever thought of!
• Switch to Macbook today, forget about a potential productivity loss during your learning exercise! You will start loving it more than windows in no time!
• Unread mails would always remain there! Read it and tag-create a  to-do list which you review and update everyday!
• Be happy, think positive and cheer up people around you – this day wont come back again!

Came across a slightly old post on “Who people trust” in the online world

It’s not so surprising that bloggers come in the fag end of the list, and i believe the explanation for that is in statistics. Marketers should definitely read this post and act on it by practicing caution while spending marketing dollars on microsites or doing stealth messages on social networking sites and blogs!

But the key for a blogger is to build credibility. Numbers are sometimes mistaken when they are generalized. You cant possibly depend on a blogger to get advice on all your questions, but a close friend could tailor his insights to suit the context. Newspapers cater to a wide variety of topics and the edited content could give you a feeling of assurance across a wide variety of domains, but blogging probably suits better in niche areas. The study is probably flawed because it portrays the blogger as an unknown head, and doesn’t identify the relationship between a regular blogger and a regular reader.

“A melody is like seeing someone for the first time. The physical attraction. Sex. But then, as you get to know the person, that’s the lyrics. Their story. Who they are underneath. It’s the combination of the 2 that makes it magical”
- Music & Lyrics: Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) rough quote