For our parents – Drs Roshan and Homi Dastur:

Happy 50th, Dearest Mum and Dad!

Thank you for always opening up possibilities. For giving us wings and teaching us to fly. For letting us find our paths. For keeping us real and grounded. For moulding our minds and our hearts. For looking out for us, even as we grow older.

We love you always,

Your three girls, and our families.

(Will add in more pictures from tonight’s celebrations later)

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• How Companies Tap the Potential of Innovative Users – Four Examples from Germany – "Open innovation has found its way into companies’ innovation processes and is a widely used approach to spur collaborative innovation with consumers. A multitude of methods and tools have come into being, creating confusion about how to make the most out of users’ knowledge and creativity. This article provides innovation managers with insights into four popular open innovation practices at four German blue chips and contrasts the various approaches."

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Personas – Characters from inspirational stories of real people – a perspective from @sonicrim & @uday_dandavate –

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Ideas Man in Quest for Rural Innovations – QUOTE: "For more than two decades, Gupta has scoured rural India for its hidden innovations, motivated by the belief that the most powerful ideas for fighting poverty and hardship won't come from corporate research labs, but from ordinary people struggling to survive.

  Gupta, 59, and his aides have uncovered more than 25,000 inventions, from the bicycle-mounted crop sprayer to the electric paintbrush that never needs to be dipped in a paint can.

  Many of the cheap, simple ideas he spreads for free from one poor village to another with the inventor's blessing. Some he is working to bring to market, ensuring the innovator gets the credit and the profit that will spur others to create as well. Many ideas are simply documented in his database waiting for some investor to spot their potential. He routinely dispenses tiny grants, either from a government fund or his own web of organizations, to help poor innovators finish their projects."

Came across this blog post - Klout, Big Data and Opting Out  by Fred McClimans via @gautamghosh and liked this quote, among other things: “There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.” Rod Serling.  I tweeted it, and @rajeshlalwani responds:

Rajesh’s quote immediately made me think of Shakespeare and his monologue from As You Like It. How true it is centuries later, for Social Media, and in the context of the raging discussions around privacy and big data! All seven acts and seven ages, as described by Shakespeare collide at such a fast pace on multiple stages. We’re visible to invisible audiences. We’re being edited by invisible algorithms.

And we are exposed.

I’ve tweeted it and facebooked it … but this is still my space, my main lifestream and my first love … and although I haven’t been blogging much, I thought I’d  share my talk on the Future of Insights which I made at the India Social Summit 2012.

Here’s the deck on Slideshare – in fully downloadable format, along with the talk script:

And here’s is a video of my rather rushed presentation at the India Social Summit 2012.

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Ethnographers vs. Moderators: Know What You Are Buying | anthrostrategist – Ethnographers vs. Moderators: Know What You Are Buying
  The other day I was speaking with someone about ethnography and was informed by the person in question that she too was a “moderator.” She, of course, practiced ethnography, such as it is, and informed me she had been “moderating ethnographies” for years.  Yes, it made my skin crawl. Not because someone was crossing disciplinary boundaries, but because the choice of words told that ethnography was indeed the last thing she practiced, but had no doubt sold her self-defined ethnographic prowess into many a company. And unfortunately, this is precisely what continues to water down and cheapen the methodology and its use in business settings.

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Social Means Freedom, for Better or for Worse – Nilofer Merchant – HBR @nilofer (via @armano) – From a series of posts on how the Social Era will reward fast, fluid, flexible organizations. QUOTE: "This post is part of a series on the Social Era and answers the question: If you were going to design an organization from scratch today, what would you design for? And the answer is: nimbleness." …….. "What will it look like to lead an organization when only 5% of talent affecting output is directly on payroll, and others come and go? Organizations will not need to be big to have a big impact. But they will need an extremely clear purpose, and shared, decentralized power throughout. ………………. Work is freed. This changes not only how we work at the broadest levels — and how we organize every single part of our organizations — but what we make, how we produce and distribute it, and how we market and sell it. Is that scary? For many, yes. But, for better or worse, social is giving us this freedom. The question now is what we do with it." UNQUOTE

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• India’s elite is blinded by a cultish belief in progress | Siddhartha Deb | Comment is free | The Guardian – QUOTE: The Hazare movement has since petered out, but its central idea, of the unique meritoriousness of the middle and upper classes of India, remains. It is an illusion, and it reminds me of the illusion among the middle and upper classes of another society, and that is the US. I live and teach in New York, where I've seen among my students (mostly white, just as elites in India tend to be mostly upper caste) and in the Occupy Wall Street movement an elite that has suddenly been forced to examine its notions of unique meritoriousness and endless prosperity. The lack of jobs in the US, something that earlier affected only those in manufacturing and the service industry, and therefore had an impact mostly on inner city African Americans, poor immigrants and rural whites, has now worked its way into the lives of the middle and upper classes, towards even people with expensive college degrees." UNQUOTE

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Farmers using Facebook to discuss prices and plan strategy – The Economic Times – QUOTE: "Facebook farmers played a crucial role in stopping the auction and solving the problem," says Raghunath Ramachandra Patil, president, Shetkari Sangathana, a political party with farmer members. The small protest at Sangli may not be a patch on the social media-led 'Arab Spring', but it does point to the growing importance of social networking websites in the Indian countryside. From sharing critical information in real time to eliminating middlemen to opening up marketing opportunities for companies looking to tap rural consumers, social media is becoming a powerful tool of communication across India's 600,000 villages. Technology experts say the community has always been central to rural India and therefore its acceptance of social media tools is not surprising. "Community concept has always been prevalent in villages," says Asheesh Raina, analyst at technology research firm Gartner India." UNQUOTE
• Brilliant argument by @jeffjarvis: The temporary, pop-up corporation « BuzzMachine – QUOTE: "I have been arguing that vertical industries will be replaced by horizontal ecosystems made up of three layers: (1) platforms that enable (2) entrepreneurial ventures to be created at low cost and risk and (3) networks (e.g., ad networks) that, when needed, bring these ventures together to reach the critical mass that firms used to provide. Of course, enterprises today can start with no need to build factories (use someone else’s) or distribution (plenty of that, for now) or technology (use the cloud) or marketing (let your customers do it for you) or design (let your customers help) or retail outlets (they’re dying anyway) or capital (see above). We know that this new architecture of the economy means enterprises can be launched with less investment, risk, and effort." UNQUOTE

Hacking Life – the India Way is a presentation I made at Microsoft SCS 2012 in NYC in January.  Here’s an introduction by Stuart:

In this presentation Dina makes a nice case viewing “hacking” as a generative construct for thinking, and an organizing principle for life … hacking life and living … rather than it being just about hacking infrastructure to do different things. In other words think about how hacking empowers the user and betters their life, rather than the technical approach or the work around. And this presentation is not about the much-touted concept of Jugaad!

And a video recording of the presentation that I did later, as the slides were just a support for my talk:

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Can a 10-year-old sell you a bike? TOI – one reason why we’re doing Convo Kids (bit.ly/convokids) – QUOTE: "Advertising gurus are turning to kids to help them sell products to all you adults. Just how did tiny tots beat cricketing stars to land airtime, asks Purba Dutt" UNQUOTE

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• How "frictionless sharing" is undermining the individual experience – essay by @evgenymorozov. The Death of the Cyberflâneur – The New York Times – QUOTE: "Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely…." UNQUOTE

  QUOTE: "According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously." UNQUOTE

Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Stuck? Now stay connected: Use Facebook on your Mobile Without Internet or a Data Plan | thanks @labnol – It reminds me of the old days when I travelled overseas and had no data connection but could still chat with friends on Yahoo Messenger via an SMS number.

  QUOTE "Do you have an old mobile phone, like the Nokia 1100, that has no browser and can do little more than make phone calls? Or are you stuck in some remote place where there’s no Internet or no other form of data (EGDE/GPRS/3G) connectivity is available? Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:      
  UNQUOTE