Sunday Posts

At a recent event, the oft-mentioned terms - Digital Native and Digital Immigrant - were invoked, with the cast-iron borders set by birth on or before 1985. I come from the wrong country here, but that is only part of my discomfort with the doctrine. This, and other generational divides, handy as they are, represent, for me, both a tendency to generalise and at the same time, to divide, representing two wrong ideas at once. My first problem with this doctrine is even more personal than my age. Are the immigrants not the drivers of change and innovation? At a time when immigrants are being called Feral Human Beings by The Sun, the hateful British newspapers which would give up decency for sensation at the drop of a hat, being hunted down by bullies in South Africa, being demonised in Mexico and Germany, they are still proof of human energy and human enterprise, an essential part of what made the world we live in. Civilisations, as much as they may seem to be, are not monoculture -...

There is massive arrogance in the technology circles, captured best perhaps by Marc Andreessen's WSJ article proclaiming the same. The rise of the 'information economy', though a bit of jargon in itself, has boosted such rhetoric: Today, technologists confidently sermonise others on how to do healthcare, education, construction, everything else, and even money. It did seem that this is the final frontier, a scientific thesis that is really un-falsifiable. Until Bitcoin. Bitcoin possibly shows what's wrong with this position. It is not about the technology or the economics of it, nor the failure of Mt Gox. It is about the underlying proposition that software can save/ change everything. It may appear arrogant, but the recent pronouncements of Jon Matonis that Bitcoin is a currency in beta and you should only invest if you can afford to lose ( see story here ), is really symptomatic that software may be living inside a bubble itself. And, bubble in this context is ...

I am already a fan of Open Utopia , an experiment in social reading. I met this with a pure deja vu feeling: First, an article by Jennifer Howard on the project, and then, coincidentally, an email from a Linkedin contact complaining about how rough Amazon and the various self-publishing organisations treat the authors, set me up for this. If I was feeling despondent about books and more so, about creativity, here is the answer. Indeed, I am talking about the idea rather than the specific project. Open Utopia is an experiment, carefully crafted, though I think Utopia is rather an unfortunate choice. This experiment could have been easily crafted on some other book, one, I may hope, that had a world-changing impact, and by implication, showed a deeper confidence in the way the future will indeed play out. Open Utopia, I would like to believe, is not an utopia, but more a precursor of an excitingly creative future. Printed books have to change. Those of us in love with paper, with...

We consume a torrent of data as we live, and we produce the same too. However, the more we produce details of each little step we take to live, we obscure the little data more and more, such as feelings and pleasures of human exchanges. The Big Data, the faster, bigger and more complex stream of data, does not so much chronicle our life as much as it changes it. While the technologists and marketers of various descriptions celebrate its arrival, it is time to pause and reflect how it changes us, our lives and institutions, and further, what it means to be human in the age of big data. One would wonder why big data is any big deal, as data gets bigger with every passing generation. As our networks grow, we know more; our storage technologies get cheaper and better, and we store more. Having lived in the age of floppy drives and 4kb memories, the big leap into megabytes was as significant as moving from cheap gigabytes to plausible petabytes. While the rhetoric is that the torrent o...

I have come across a number of people who are struggling to keep their professional and personal identities separate on social media. The challenges are common : Have two twitter accounts or one ? Have read so many stories , few with happy endings but a lot more lot less pleasant , of people mixing up their twitter accounts and sending wrong messages to wrong people . On a more involved scale, getting one 's work colleagues on Facebook , and the recent case of one of the jurors contacting one of the defendants , is something fraught with danger . However , another side of the story is that it is incredibly difficult to keep the two separate, and often , an honest effort smacks of dishonesty and manipulative behaviour . The point , indeed , is that this is all about an individual person and it is best to be as open and honest to the world as possible . However , it is equally true ...

MySpace , going by the latest reports, has lost 50 million users over the last 12 months, of which the last two months, January and February this year, have seen a loss of 10 million unique users. It is now down to 60 million users from its peak of 110 million, and it is expected to fetch a valuation of $50 million, down from $330 million that News Corp paid for it only a few years back. Compare this with the stratospheric rise of Facebook and its multi-billion dollar valuation, and the decline looks stark and irreversible. This will possibly happen, as the executives look rather directionless and talk about MySpace being an entertainment site rather than a social network. That seems like the business-speak that is sinking the company: It is the social context of entertainment which broadcast media executives never get it. But it may be the time for social media to grow up. It is no longer enough just to blame old media thinking for new media failures. Remember Friendster, which took ...

I have one thing against the twenty-somethings: I am not one of them. As it is obvious from the tone, I regret the fact. Because the world today moves around twenty-somethings. In this Mark Zuckerberg era, if you are not twenty- ish , you are unloved. VCs think you are history. You are not licensed to dream. I was told that if you have reached forty without messing up your life completely or doing something insanely great, you are not qualified to dream. My rather feeble protestation that there were always great men in history who found their calling in mid-life, like Gandhi or FDR, was pushed aside. We don't live in that era anymore, I am told. Yes, indeed, life's faster and there is more respect for young businesspeople. Young business-people by itself is a new phenomena - it is much easier to get capital and run a business early in your life. I contend that what really changed is this - starting up has become easier - we have more young people pursuing a business career. A...

Web 2.0 versus the Web itself? With Facebook valued at $53 Billion by Goldman Sachs (who invested $450 million in the company now) and taking over the No. 1 spot for most popular website (dethroning Google), the question is getting louder: Is Facebook (and the likes of it) a threat to the Internet? After years of optimistic predictions about Internet changing the world, it has become fashionable to talk about the threats to Internet over the last year. The Economist ran a story about the Internet breaking down into various national networks, each with different rules. Then, Tim Barnes Lee and other founders of the World Wide Web spoke against the various Walled Gardens, such as Facebook (and Google), which are sort of private gardens in the cyberspace, each again with its own rules. In a way, these seem to be the 'old' society gnawing back into the cyberspace, and shackling its free for all flow with the the usual borders and fences that we are used to. How much of this is r...

Indian cities today represent different layers of Indian history: Cities like Varanasi our distant Hindu past, Delhi and Ahmedabad our Muslim heritage, Surat, Mumbai and Calcutta sport the symbols of British times and the new ones, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar and New Delhi, reflect the ambitions of Independent India. I shall argue that time has come to build a new layer altogether. That of small city talent clusters. Many large Indian cities are at a breaking point. Their population is too large, the public services inadequate, the local governance too remote and ineffective, and their development in reverse gear. For all the mystic of Mumbai , anywhere to anywhere takes more than an hour to travel. All the joys of Calcutta gets undone by the remoteness, insensitivity and corruption of its city fathers. The story is same for all the large cities, not to mention the pollution and the social disconnect it invariably creates. We seem to be following the Industrial Revolution model, that...

Totally under snow. It keeps snowing more, completely submerging my car and everything around me. I started with, but gave up by the mid-day, any hope of going to see my Chartered Accountant and Mentor-in-Chief, who is also supposed to sign off my naturalization application vouching that I am who I say I am. Given that this will need to be submitted by Friday the 8 th , this gives me tomorrow and if the weather does not improve, which is unlikely, I am in for a bit of trouble. I can't postpone the appointment as I must stay in Britain for five working days after the application, and I have got my tickets to fly precisely on the fifth day. I don't feel nervous, this is how my life has been most of the time; in fact, if anything, I feel usual. I am slowly getting back to the 100-day plan and how critical this really is. Glass-half-empty is not really my style, but if I really want to draw sympathy, here is how it looks like: At the end of this 100-day period, I shall have no job...