Ideas, Rule

Last weekend I installed Fring on my Ipod Touch.  I use Localphone to make International (India) calls. Honestly, I installed Fring after reading that I can use VOIP calls using Localphone and Fring.

This weekend while sitting in a local cafe in Barcelona, I noticed it has free wi-fi. After checking my mails I suddenly remembered of Fring and Localphone. And then without waiting a minute, I was talking to all my people. All I was paying was the normal Localphone charge.

So all you Localphone users, why don’t you take advantage of Fring, while you are travelling?

I am doing some research for a service around Twitter, and stumbled across Kingfisher Airlines twitter account. What I saw was instead of Kingfisher saying “What they were doing?”, they are solely using Twitter as a CRM tool. Saying thanks for customer who have left them thank you note, or in some cases asking sorry to the angry customer who were not satisfied with some service.

Well, it’s all fair to use such social networking tool — but the downfall is, you are wasting time or may be turning off those customers who want to follow you to understand your promotions, flight announcements, last minute schedule changes, some critical security updates. Personally I feel, using Twitter for Saying Thank you, visit us again will flatter “that one” passenger, however will turn away several potential passengers who want to follow the business/ enterprise and gain more out of their tweets.

It indeed is an art how to distribute your tweets between tackling customer complains, building rapport by saying thank you on their good experience, sending our promos, delighting travelers with useful announcements etc. Well I feel the sooner an enterprise learns this art, the more useful such social tools will be — after all it is all about ROI.

Using Internet and Social Media to help win elections is not a new story. Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook did it for Barrack Obama very neatly.

What makes me write this post is the recent tweet by Sashi Tharoor that Oct 2nd, should be a working day instead of a holidy in India.  He said on Twitter,

Gandhiji said — Work is Workship — and we enjoy holiday on his birthday. He would have wanted us to work harder today.

In political circles this might have created a controversy but the work-is-workship believers indeed cheered up Tharoor’s tweet. What amazes me is the speed at which social media is connecting the politicians and the people. A politician who wants to connect cannot give loose excuses and visit only once in 5 years. And the young India is liking its leaders speaking their mind on such platforms. As long as this constructive effort is underway on Youtube, Twitter, Facobook and other social media giants, the next generation would hopefully find itself close to it’s leaders.

You might have a long list, which you can add in the comments section. But this is what I have.

I feel what Twitter should do (and guess youtube did it very well) is opening up dedicated streams for current events. Youtube captured presidential elections, live symphonies and what not very well claiming it’s leadership in the video space.

I rent out cars a lot. For apparant reason, that I don’t own one. Now as any other customer of these “Rent-A-Car” services (Enterprise.com, Avis.com, Hertz.com) I go to their website and look for the cheapest deal. The place where I live I have to pay $60 per day (without taxes) for the basic version of the car.

What made me think was, to pickup the car at cheaper rate, I (the customer) have to travel for almost 1.5 hours in a public transportation. I go to this location because it is connected by public transportation (which I came to know from a different site – njtrasit.com)

Now all I want these guys to do is when they present me the Search page, can they not have a search criteria which says “Show location accessible by public transport?” There are tons of APIs available which can be used in their website to present the information and filter out the data.

Am I asking for too much, or should I start paying whopping 60$ per day rent for a small size car?

Yesterday I was at Open Everything NYC held at UNICEF Headquarters, United Nations Plaza in New York.

John Britton (the organizer and the host) was right when he said that weather was responsible for people who registered and did not show up. I think we were around 50-60 people, but it seems actually more than 250 of them said they would come. I had some interesting conversations on how Openess and sharing would make a difference in the fields of music, journalism, education, enterprises.

We also had some wonderful speaker like LESLIE HAWTHORN, Schuyler Erle (btw, I just liked the way he presented RapidSMS, very innovation idea.)

I was impressed with the spirit of openness and the urge to spread it in so many different sectors. Being a techie, I always thought does open source makes sense in other areas. Well it totally does or else Youtube Symphony wouldn’t make sense or take place.

We had several sessions on topics posted by the attendees themselves. I had put a topic “How and Why Enterprise can become more Open?”. All the participants chipped in their views and opinions and had a great time networking. (I shall write a different post on this particular topic)

I am still waiting their Wiki to get updated with the photographs and the videos.

I would definitely recommend others to attend this event next time.

In a newsletter from WebGuild, I saw a story about how Google CEO Eric Schmidt asked the ailing newspaper industry to create a new web format for themselves. After reading the summary over WebGuild, I clicked the link to “more” which redirected me to WSJ site.

And BAM, as soon as I land on WSJ, they ask me to register. Duh?

Isn’t think story about newspapers themselves — which means you WSJ?

If you want to know, which you should, whether Eric’s thoughts makes sense or not let this story be public — your readers will post their thoughts (collective intelligence) which you can use to come up with the next 2.0 for Newspapers!

Whenever any great invention happens, the inventor along with the pros of the product might also think about the problems his/her investion might bring upon the society. There are so many such examples. Well, great that nuclear energy got invented, but it gave us Hiroshima & Nagasaki. There are cars, but now we are fighting with the pollution and all the damages is it doing to our planet. The list is so very long. And now we realize and think about how we should put a check on all kinds of pollution from such origins to save the planet.

Similarly, and it might not be right away, we will face similar issues originating from these social networks/ information getting generated from the web. I mean look at the time we spend online — it’s increasing day by day. Sure the idiot box (Television) was considered harmful few years ago, because it made you couch potato, but Internet and it’s friends are just taking it to the next level. All work/ browsing/ socializing/ reading and NO PLAY!

Here are some trends by Online Publishers Association (OPA) 

Look at Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and hundreds of other social networks/ junk data generators. What good are they doing to us? Do we really need this much information in real time? I am not sure!

Well what triggered this blog, is the new service started by Google — Tip Jar . Is Google feeling insecured about people adopting Twitter? I don’t get it. And well, I know they want to organize world’s information, but look at the data coming up there. Here is one .. 

“Take advantage of free entertainment in your community – parks, museums, exhibits, etc. Go to free park concerts and other community activities”

Who doesn’t? Whoever posted this, didn’t he/ she come to the Central Park during free concerts and see the number of people hanging out there? Here’s another one

“Quit smoking. You will save tons of dollars and my favorite: you will save tons of years”

Ya right! You said it and now whoever reads it will quit smoking. 

My point is simple! I think there will be time when so much information will be floating around that we will find it tough to get to what we are actually looking for in the given amount of time. Noise is just spreading all over. Just noise!

And I don’t think building faster machines, better search algorithms or intitive user interfaces will do the trick. Look at the planet and think again, as to what we really need to do.