Innovation in the Third World

January 21, 2008

This Boston Globe oped (free registration might be required) is astonishing. The author, somebody named Jeremy Kahn, has violated the Sominism-cheat-sheet and Neelakantan’s guide to writing about India left, right, and centre. He appears to have actually understood the nuances of what he’s writing about! And he doesn’t mention caste, growing inequality, pollution, or elephants on the road even once!

OK, that’s the sarcasm out of the way. Seriously, the oped is a very good read. It’s about how Third World conditions are forcing cellphone companies, banks, and Tata Motors to innovate and come up with low-cost technology, and how this means that design and innovation is now splitting up and being driven by two different things: luxury in the First World, and productivity and low costs in the Third World. In the bargain, First World and Third World innovation are both leading to high technology, and the Third World is now actually in a position to export technology to the First World.

 Excerpts:

This might seem like a classic example of the Third World struggling to catch up with the First. After all, people in the United States and Europe have been using ATM cards and the Internet for years to perform the simple banking tasks Das is only now able to do. But look again: The technology used to bring slum-dwellers like Das their first bank accounts is so advanced that it isn’t available to even the most tech-savvy Americans – at least not yet.

This represents a stunning reversal of the traditional flow of innovation. Until recently, consumers in the Third World also had to tolerate third-rate technology. Africa, India, and Latin America were dumping grounds for antiquated products and services. In a market in which some people still rode camels, a 50-year-old car engine was good enough. Innovation remained the exclusive domain of the developed world. Everyone else got hand-me-downs.

And as they do, companies are confronting the unique challenge of making high-tech products cheaply enough to make a profit. In some cases, this means shifting jobs for talented designers and engineers to the developing world – not just to save labor costs, but in order to better understand the markets they are now trying to reach.

“Developing markets offer the best opportunity for global firms to discover what is likely to be ‘next practice,’ as contrasted with today’s best practice,” Prahalad has written. “The low end is a new source of innovation.”

In a globalized world, people in emerging markets want first-class products – but at prices they can afford. Meeting that demand, particularly in countries where basic infrastructure is weak, requires more creativity than designing a product for a more advanced, affluent market.

Read, read. It’s worth the two-minutes it takes to register.


Prophetic I Am

January 9, 2008

Three days after I write about Star Dial Karein, the concept actually makes it into real life:

The Indian subsidiary of Endemol Group, the creator of programmes such as Big Brother and Fear Factor, is introducing Call TV.

Under this, viewers will end up paying for the entire cost of production and airing through paying for participating in quizzes, game shows and prize shows, through phone calls or SMS text messages. Such calls and messages cost significantly more than normal messages and calls, thus generating significant revenues for the producer and broadcaster.

“We plan to launch the Call TV format in India soon,” says Marco Bassetti, chief operating officer, Endemol Group. “Such shows will be of immense interest to broadcasters because they don’t have to pay for the content, yet they generate revenue out of it. Call TV is going to be big area for us in the coming years.”

 Endemol already has several Call TV shows outside India, including Participation TV in Holland, where viewers pay for interacting with the channel and funded nearly 15 hours of programming each day. Endemol claims Participation TV generates around 100,000 call minutes a day.

(link)

Rakhi Sawant, however, has not commented on this yet.


Infy Public School

December 12, 2007

Raiders Lost the Arc, the idiotically titled and idiotically written Outlook cover story on how IT is ruining Bangalore, has been debunked and fisked enough elsewhere on the blogosphere (Churumuri rebuts CNR Rao hereNitin points out what the Outlook story missed here). Sugata Srinivasraju doesn’t ever blame IT junta for ruining infrastructure himself, but he conveniently forgets that infrastructure is the government’s responsibility, not the IT industry’s. When developers try to make infrastructure their own responsibility, as in the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor, the government has gone after them with a hatchet.

However, it’s undeniable that there is an influx of immigrants into Bangalore (me included), and that this is leading to new cultural forms (which still does not translate to a destruction of the old culture and values of the city).  But there’s something interesting about this wave of migration.

Uptil now, whenever there’s been internal migration in India, the migrants have alsways carried their culture along with them and ghettoised themselves. So Gujrati Jains and Marwaris used to set up their own schools and colleges wherever they went. Mumbai has DG Ruparel College and lots of other Gujew colleges (which are mocked regularly in JAM), and even more Gujrati dominated schools. Even Bangalore has a Gujrati medium school near City Market. Other communities don’t migrate as prodigiously as the Gujratis and Marwaris, but they still cluster. So you have Bongs coalescing in Chittaranjan Park in Delhi, Punjews sending their kids to DAV schools all across UP, and Tams setting up Sangam associations in Delhi and Mumbai. And this is before they extend the ghettoization by marrying somebody from the homelands.

But the IT migration to Bangalore (and Pune and other hotspots) is different. The migrants are united by profession, not by community. And while within the overall migrant community they’ll still form sub-clusters based on language and community affiliations, the ghettoisation is not as extreme as it was when Marwari traders flocked to Chikpet and created their own temples and schools there.

So what I’m eagerly waiting to see is what happens when the IT professionals’ kids go to school – and where they go to school. If migrants’ kids and ‘old-Bangaloreans” kids grow up together, the clash of cultures is probably not going to be as acute.

This could of course go all pear shaped if:

  1. New schools don’t come up fast enough to cater to the Bengalooru baby boomlet – this worries me the most.
  2. New schools which do come up price themselves out of reach of the old middle class. Even so, if they do, they’ll price themselves out of reach of a substantial number of IT workers as well, so cultural intermingling would still happen, just in old, cheap schools instead of new, expensive ones. I somewhat doubt this will happen. This is India. People will find the money to educate their kids.
  3. Cultural factors mean schools end up as IT/ non-IT kids ghettos also. I greatly doubt this will happen. Schools compete for students, just as students compete for schools. If the kid is smart, the school isn’t going to care about the parents (at least at the post Class-10 level). And if the school is really good, the parents aren’t going to care much about who the other parents are.

How this plays out is going to be interesting.


Hacking the Media

November 2, 2007

CNN-IBN wants to interview me today for tips on cracking the CAT. If they do a live telecast instead of a pre-recorded one, the temptation to scream ‘Prakash Karat is a traitorous bastard!’ will be overwhelming.

Update: It was prerecorded. So I generally told CAT aspirants that there was no point mugging anything new two days before the test, and that they should go out for coffee or icecream. If only they had been running a story on what CAT prep over a year should be like, I could have furthered the free market fundamentalist agenda by telling everyone that the best way to prepare for the reading comprehension section is to regularly read Ajay Shah, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, and the Indian Economy Blog.


The Times of India’s Firewall Policy

July 6, 2007

Homo (of Homo Fighter, Fighter Homo fame) is currently working as a wage slave for the Slimes of India. Which, considering the stuff it splashes all over its webpage (and print pages), has a rather bizarre firewall policy. As shown by the GTalk excerpt below:

Homo: so what have you done so far to help out a person in dire need?
11:40 AM me: Nothing. I am a heartless bastard who kicks kittens
11:41 AM Homo: very well, but remember that god will one day punish you for your sins, disbelieving blasphemist
11:43 AM and, oh, i realised last week that three weeks is all it’ll take for me to lose my nickname.
11:44 AM me: And why is that?
11:45 AM Homo: courtesy pastor ted haggart.
11:46 AM me: ??
Homo: who sleeps with gay hookers for three years, doped on meth, and then goes in for three weeks of rehab and therapy before proclaiming to the world, “I’m heterosexual now!”
oh you haven’t heard of him? fun story
me: Whatta guy
11:47 AM But your nickname is eternal and independent of sexual orientation
Homo: i’d google it, but my office bans any mention of “sex” in the link, so my search on google news for “ted haggart” +heterosexual will be blocked.
me: Let me get this straight
11:48 AM The Times Of India office bans any searches on sex?
Bwahahhahahahahahahhahahahah!
Homo: yes.
ultimate irony, innit?
me: I am so blogging this
Homo: i’d blog about it, but, ah well, i work for them.
sure!

(In case your firewall isn’t as restrictive, and you do go Googling, it’s Ted Haggard and not Haggart. Here’s the wiki article)


India Today Gets It Backwards

June 20, 2007

India Today has become so pathetic that I don’t even have to read what’s inside the magazine. The cover’s enough to make me puke.

From manicures to hair styling, laser surgery and even breast implants, today


RJ Maalveekaa

June 20, 2007

(That’s what her name sounds like on the Radio Indigo promos for The Big Couch. I have no idea how it’s actually spelt.)

I realised today that her enthusiasm for happy happy songs and Justin Timberlake and Ronan Keating is quite alarming. She projects a sort of bubbly and gurgling enthusiasm that is fine when received over radio, but would probably be horrifying up close.


Published Writer Are There!

April 21, 2007

My travel writing piece has appeared in Mint.

Hopefully, more will follow.


Mandira Bedi is in Maxim this month

April 10, 2007

Many people will be overjoyed if she stays there.


Finally Cricket is Entertaining

March 19, 2007

At the peremptory request and desire of Spunky that I take more photographs of desserts, I went to IndiJoe this evening to eat and photograph a Chocolate Avalanche. IndiJoe had big screens up on every wall playing the India-Bermuda match, so I saw a cricket match after what must have been four or five years. And I have only one comment: why the faak hasn’t Bermuda been playing international cricket until now?

Let’s face it. All sports are boring, but cricket is especially so. It’s five entire days (one if you’re lucky) of people hitting a ball and chasing it. You have to ask yourself what the point of it all is. Why not just give the ball a rest? You’ll probably get more exercise with forty minutes of cardio at the gym, and the gym will have more cute women also.

But along comes Bermuda and suddenly cricket is entertaining. When the people running after the ball and fat roly-poly black men, cricket is no longer a Harold Pinter play with deathly boring pauses and silences but slapstick in the best traditions of Hong Kong kung fu movies. What this sport has always needed is blacker and fatter men and finally it has got it. Clearly the next thing on the agenda is to throw out all the white people and institute carb-heavy diets for everyone left.