Vijay Basrur

David vs Goliath?

Rajesh Jain has a interesting problem. His highly successful mobile business MyToday is being arm twisted by Vodafone. MyToday is a highly successful mobile alerts business which is seeing a lot of traction. Vodafone sees this as a potential threat to their VAS solutions (which really beats me).

So what do they go and do? Ban all Vodafone subscribers to sign up for MyToday. Rajesh has more dope on his blog. He is doing a good thing by blogging about the progress.

I’ve been loyal to Orange/Hutch/Vodafone since the past 8 years. It is disappointing to see such a response from Vodafone. I expected much better.

Obama’s Internet Strategy

If over the past few months you didn’t spot Obama on the Internet (nevermind the newspaper or TV) then you probably weren’t surfing at all.

Obama spun a really good web on the web making him probably the first president to have leveraged the Internet successfully in his campaign. I am sure the Internet will become mainstream for all politicians in the year to come. Our own L K Advani has kicked off an online presence but seems to be just buying Google Ads to get the message across.

Some learnings from the Obama Campaign are captured in this slide show

Separation pangs

I have always had the separation pangs. The first day at school, the first day in the school bus, the first day at junior college, the first night at engineering college, the first day at my first job, the first day at b-school, the first night in Delhi, the first day of staying away from my wife. I have felt miserable at the start of the separation but moved ahead quickly.

This time I am not able to. I am staying away from my wife and daughter for the first time. And I am missing both of them terribly. Both of them are amazing stress busters when I get back from work, especially my daughter. Her excitement when she sees me walk into the house is a treat to watch and guaranteed to melt away any form of stress. And my wife’s smile relaxes me to no end.

They are visiting my inlaws for a fortnight. Thankfully the fortnight comes to an end this week and I am dying to have them back. I thought I’d be fine while they were away. I thought I’d immerse myself into my magazines & books and while I’ve devoured the magazines quite a bit, I am unable to get them out of my mind.

Parenting has been a joy ever since it began. Though it brings in a very different dimension into your life, leaving a little less time for yourself and your spouse, I think its an experience which leaves you very content and greedy for more.

I am already counting days for the weekend to arrive

Death Threats due to Blogging

Some guys take blogging way too seriously. Michael Arrington is one of them. But he loves blogging about start ups and suchlike. And he has created a huge ecosystem of startup reporting at TechCrunch. Infact every startup would give an arm and a leg to get covered by TechCrunch because that would be the best form of publicity. TechCrunch boasts of a followership, only a few can match.

But yesterday was the first time Michael came out with the bad side of blogging. He blogs about getting spat on his face because he was too tired to meet an entrepreneur. He also refers to a death threat he received sometime last year. He is planning to take a month of to take a backseat and relook at what he wants to do in life.

Jesus. This is freaky! I had read about Om Malik getting a heart attack sometime late 2007. Ironically TechCrunch has a post about it here. And Om talks about his learnings about the stress of blogging and starting up here.

This does throw a lot of interesting questions on the problems in store for serious bloggers.

I think blogging is great way to publish your thoughts & ideas. The moment you try and exploit this for a commercial purpose, it is bound to stress you out. The level of stress is probably directly proportional to the success you aspire.

Apple and Jobs

There has been quite some talk everywhere about how Steve Jobs is dying and all such. When spurts of these news come through, the Apple stock gets hammered and for no other plausible reason.

I am not buying that logic at all. Infact Fortune did a cover story on the Apple story with a focus on their COO Tim Cook. I think it was a nice article. The role of Jobs has always been of a leader. Here is a nice perspective on Jobs by Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm.

Whatever said and done, I think Jobs did a great job at re-building Apple and Pixar and I am sure the team at both these places will take the firms to greater heights even if Jobs steps back, which I reckon he has already started to. I feel so about these firms as they are solidly entrenched in the foundations of innovation.

Recession. What recession?

We went shopping last evening to Shoppers Stop. With the recession rumours we were hoping we would be faced with an average crowd. We were also hoping to get back home for dinner.

Rumours be damned..The crowds were there in hordes and they continued to pour in. I haven’t seen a queue for parking like that since quite a while now. we had to park away from the mall and then walk to the store. We were greeted by more folks inside the store than I’ve seen before. Took us a while to finish shopping and more time to pay than to pick up stuff. I hate standing in the slow moving queues with those idiotic folks bothering you to sign up for a “some-thing-or-the-other” card.

Next stop was Crosswords and I was thrilled to lay my hands on Chinese Democracy (a GNR album after nearly 17 years)which has a fairly decent review in the Rolling Stone and Amy Mcdonald’s debut album This is The life which was favourably reviewed by Luke Kenny in the Rolling Stone Indian edition. We also picked up a Thousand Splendid Sons by Khaled Hosseini. We are both dying to read it. Not to forget there were enough folks at Crosswords to make the queues long enough to get bored.

Shopping done we realised we would be better off grabbing a bite before heading for home. And lo and behold the restaurant was practically empty. And we were like huh? How be this? Shoppers Stop is bursting at its seam and no one to grab a Thali at Rajdhani?

We were ofcourse more than pleased. So we got a table, had a nice meal and then when the bill arrived it hit us. The Thali on Sundays is priced nearly twice as much as the weekday rates. The value conscious Indian consumer was shying away from these expensive binges. Wonder if its the recession or the price?

I am sure as the year draws to an end and with the Christmas spirit in the air all those recession fearing folks can take a walk to any of the malls and breathe easy. And I hope for longer than they expect.

Rewriting to make it simpler

I have been working on some of our mailers to make the content more simple. Ironically it is much tougher than I thought. We are striving to ensure that the user experience is simple yet helpful.

Like Guy Kawasaki says about his 10/20/30 rule and Rajesh Jain shares his thoughts on Public speaking, it does take a lot of effort in keeping things simple.

Google exemplifies simplicity. In the Indian context I think there are very few folks who keep it simple. Cleartrip does a great job. I worked with the folks at Bookeazy and I think their efforts were pretty good. There are quite a few but much less in number that you would want ideally.

For now it’s back to the simple stuff!