Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Trust me, you don’t want your URL on the front page of the Times. Not, given the number of people who think you are an exotic creature they want to be buddies with.

I’m having a busy, interesting and not very pleasant time for reasons other than that article. latelyontime and I have barely slept the last two days, staying up nights fiddling with suitware.

I need a vacation. It’s about time.

Water free urinals? How do you clean them then?

“Oh, BTW, there’s a very famous monument right behind this.”

Three men in a cycle rickshaw. It’s been a decade since I rode one of these. Wish I had the cyclist’s strength.

And now, a book on how to pass the metro exam.

These trains are neat. It’s like a single compartment all the way to the other end of the train. Wonder what radius of curvature they can handle.

The Delhi Metro security mascot is a girl scout. Is this how they hope to appear less threatening to passengers?

Gas station. Real gas, not gasoline. All public buses and autorickshaws in Delhi are required by law to run on CNG. Whether it has helped reduce the pollution or not is debatable.

Outside a hotel. What a reassuring thing to show to guests!

Walking around a new city is a bit like entering a new map in Quake. There’s no sense of familiarity or orientation. What would be part of the background for a local becomes anchoring landmark for me, as I figure out where I am relative to everything else.

I walked into a restaurant and sat down at a free table. This other fellow walked up and for a moment looked like he was trying to decide if he wanted to share the table with me. Then it turned out he was the waiter. Because the typical Delhiite is fairer than down South, unintentional mental associations of appearance to occupation stand out starkly here.

Stating it matter-of-factly.

First impressions, Delhi: the weather is bloody hot and the roads are bloody good. This taxi driver is somewhat fond of saying behnchod pagal to others on the road.

Kingfisher Airlines. Once again, there’s no row number 13. 12 is followed by 14, both emergency exit rows. So it seems like even Airbus is not beyond superstition. The airhostesses have the same white and red dress code as SpiceJet, but the tops aren’t form fitting, so at least it doesn’t hurt to look at them.

When I marvelled at the iTunes Music Store about two years ago, tsk1979 said he preferred AllOfMP3. I finally got down to checking out the service today, and I'm suitably impressed.

iTMS charges $0.99 (Rs 43) per track. In contrast, AllOfMP3 charges $0.02 (90p) per megabyte. Given 4 megabytes for the average MP3 track, that's less than a tenth of what iTMS charges.

The way it works is, you select the tracks you want, then you select what format you want them in and at what quality. AllOfMP3 then does a live conversion from it's source data, charges on the basis of the resulting file size, and puts the file in your download queue, from where you can pick it up using a standard browser or download accelerator. It remains available for the next two weeks. I did have some trouble with their servers being overloaded, but a few refreshes later it was downloading comfortably.

Bonus: Because of “limitations” in Russian copyright law, AllOfMP3 is able to sell you music legally no matter where in the world you are, and DRM-free too, unlike iTMS which only works in parts of North America and Europe.

So this company across the street is running an open wireless network “AVBLR2”. I have unrestricted access to all the machines on their network and the Internet. Ironically enough, their tagline is “mobile empowerment”.

We’re sending an office boy across to tell them to fix their wireless.

Last time we tracked down a person downstairs because her phone was harassing our phones with copies of CommWarrior. We fixed it for her. This time it’s an open wireless network that my laptop asks me each morning whether I want to join it or not.

We’re now unofficially in the business of fixing our neighbours’ security, just so we can work in peace.

Updated satellite projection of my tracks in Bangalore, covering South Bangalore, the eastern half of the Outer Ring Road, and the road to Yelahanka. Here’s the earlier revision. This revision available in three versions courtesy the GPS Visualizer:

Medium JPG, 632x1080, 163k (labels badly mangled)
Large JPG, 1184x2080, 507k (labels somewhat readable)
Large SVG, 1184x2080, 787k (best)

My house is at the very bottom, on Bannerghatta Road. I’m thinking of doing a bike trip around the Ring Road this afternoon to get a better visualisation of Bangalore’s dimensions.

The Bangalore Free Map project is progressing nicely. Srishti in Yelahanka is now the coordination centre and even Google is interested. We’re now looking for reliable base data to start working on—running around with GPS units simply doesn’t cut it.

It’s easier to mail a document to the fellow sitting next to you, sending it halfway across the world and back, than it is to paste it into his shared folder over the local network.

What does this suggest to you?

Bwahahaha! Five points to Barista for a suitably clever line. Unfortunately, I saw it before seeing the food pictures I was expected to drool at.

This dude is selling electric shavers by the roadside. To prove that they work, he’ll shave your face–without asking you first. Sadly I missed that moment.

So I’ve been issued this wireless handset for the office phone. There’s this blinking envelope icon on it, presumably indicating an unread message, but I can’t figure out how to retrieve it. I’ve pressed all the buttons. This phone’s UI makes even Motorola look good.

Apparently they’ve been celebrating with fireworks since last night.

Here’s Skoda showing off an ad campaign they can run in almost any country with very little changed. This is what happens when executives fall in love with their brands: they start to see it as representing everything.

Nice t-shirt, wrong continent. I’d like to see someone pull off this stunt with, say, Nehru.

Following up from the earlier post, to make a high value sale, you need three steps:

1. Positive spin. Make the prospect aware of the brand and all its wondrous abilities. Make the prospect imagine their improved lifestyle when associated with your brand. Traditional marketing does this. The scenarios you see depicted in a typical advertisement represent the lifestyles of only about 10% of prospects (think car advertising: Ford Ikon’s Josh campaign, or Tata Safari outdoor). The rest are expected to desire such a lifestyle, and to associate your brand with fulfilment of that desire. Spare no effort at infiltrating the prospect’s mind.

2. Critical review. Unleash opinionated customers to disparage the brand as well as they can. Let their frustrations (and small delights) show. Review sites like Epinions and MouthShut gleefully facilitate this. Traditional marketing wishes they would go away, but traditional marketing no longer has a hold over them, like they did (and do) with advertising campaigns in print and television.

3. Bring the brand down to reality. Let the prospect offset hype with criticism to decide whether the brand brings value to them. This happens in the prospect’s head, and a wise marketeer would do well to not tamper here. The foolish will attempt to make soothing sounds about how the brand is so great despite the obvious imperfections, thereby annoying a prospect who wants to make an independent decision. The wise will instead continue with the barrage in Step 1, using an impersonal, broadcasted push to turn opinion in the brand’s favour.

The key here is that a prospect who discovers negatives after closing the sale is likely to be very upset and influential of other prospects, than if the prospect decided to close the sale despite being aware of said negatives. This is particularly relevant when prospects have a voice (ie, the web). Smart marketeers will understand the importance of Step 2, and learn to use it to their advantage instead of wishing it away.

Comments? This isn't quite there yet, but getting clearer.

Allow me a moment to gloat here. My first blog, Lunateks.com, went live in September 1999. Epinions had been around for a few months, and MouthShut wouldn’t come to exist until the following year. Since the term ‘blog’ was unheard of in those days, we simply passed for a Slashdot-clone site. We were a technology user forum, and one of the recurring themes was users bitching about being cheated by vendors over product specifications. I thought it was interesting, but was far too naive to realise the significance. Sadly, the company didn’t either, for they chose to ignore the site in favour of an international media alliance (aka dotbomb), and Lunateks died of negligence halfway through 2000.

There seems to be a major epidemic of Commwarrior in the city. It used to be that going into any public place with Bluetooth discoverable was invitation to be sent the worm. Now it’s worse—I got hit thrice today merely walking down the road.

Please, people, disinfect your phones. Go to the F-Secure download area, install the removal tool, run it, reboot your phone, and then go to App Manager and remove the Commwarrior package. It’s as simple as that.