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

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

• I don’t like it tho I kinda get where Twitter is coming from! Read @techsoc on why Twitter’s new policy is actually great – QUOTE "I know many people are upset with Twitter’s announcement that it will now be able to block tweets country by country. There has been a lot of excellent writing / reporting on the content explaining that this is not as bad as it looks. (Check out good posts by my friend Jillian York here or Alex Howard here). My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates.

  I often criticize companies on this blog so I want to take a moment to recognize Twitter for a model policy and explain why these should be the kind of practices that I hope other Internet companies follow.

  In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can ….." UNQUOTE

Am quite excited that we’ve finally launched this project!  In short, it is a year long research and immersion program with 12-21 year olds in India.  We’re really looking for 5-6 sponsors  - to help kick it off the ground – personally I believe that one of the key benefits (apart from the actual understanding and immersions with kids and youth) is that Clients from different non-competing industries will go on this journey together and learn from each others rich and varied experiences too.

More details and the brochure available for download here – bit.ly/convokids

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

• Crowd dynamics: The wisdom of crowds | The Economist – Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. An experiment in 2009 tested the walking speeds of Germans and Indians by getting volunteers in each country to walk in single file around an elliptical, makeshift corridor of ropes and chairs. At low densities the speeds of each nationality are similar; but once the numbers increase, Indians walk faster than Germans. This won’t be news to anyone familiar with Munich and Mumbai, but Indians are just less bothered about bumping into other people.

  Another problem with assuming people act like particles is that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually in groups. That matters, as anyone trying to get past shuffling tourists knows. It also leads to some lovely fine-scale choreography when small groups are squeezed. ….

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

• How we’ve changed! User experiences in reverse – mobile to desktop – Apple Pushes the Desktop Toward a Mobile Experience – Apple isn't the only company merging the experience of using the desktop with that of smaller devices. Microsoft is taking things even further. The next generation of their PC operating system, Windows 8, borrows heavily from mobile design and user experience concepts. It features a touch-friendly UI, a new breed of HTML5-driven applications and a relatively seamless user experience between smartphones, tablets and the desktops.
• troubled . India’s economy: Slip-sliding away | The Economist – EXPECTATIONS for India’s economic growth rate have been sliding inexorably. In the early spring there was still heady talk about 9-10% being the new natural rate of expansion, a trajectory which if maintained would make the country an economic superpower in a couple of decades. Now things look very different. The latest GDP growth figure slipped to 6.9% and industrial production numbers just released, on December 12th, showed a decline of 5.1% compared with the previous period, a miserable state of affairs. The slump looks broadly based, from mining to capital goods, and in severity compares with that experienced at the height of the financial crisis, in February 2009, when a drop of 7.2% took place. Bombast is turning to panic.

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

• @sumants i love the "collective art" expression! The CST Flash Mob in Mumbai – but why? | Beast Of Traal.com – Another tweet response – from Sumant Srinivasan was more pragmatic and made sense to me – collective art. Yes, I quite buy the ‘collective art’ argument. It’s just that I’m not exposed to such philanthropic collective art to make people happy in India besides Lok Sabha TV that shows parliamentarians behave like kids.

  So, yes – it is a wonderful precedent that there are people like this in India who spend so much time, effort and money in creating collective art to make other people happy with only YouTube views as return on time/money invested. To be clear, I’m not deriding this effort – it is a damn good effort and the final video to communicate the effort is superbly produced and edited – lot of little nuances like people’s surprised expressions have been captured beautifully!

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

• @sumants i love the "collective art" expression! The CST Flash Mob in Mumbai – but why? | Beast Of Traal.com – Another tweet response – from Sumant Srinivasan was more pragmatic and made sense to me – collective art. Yes, I quite buy the ‘collective art’ argument. It’s just that I’m not exposed to such philanthropic collective art to make people happy in India besides Lok Sabha TV that shows parliamentarians behave like kids.

  So, yes – it is a wonderful precedent that there are people like this in India who spend so much time, effort and money in creating collective art to make other people happy with only YouTube views as return on time/money invested. To be clear, I’m not deriding this effort – it is a damn good effort and the final video to communicate the effort is superbly produced and edited – lot of little nuances like people’s surprised expressions have been captured beautifully!

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

• The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia. A bit harsh, but we found Wikipedia image was a lil ‘cold’ in a study we did – http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mobile_Strategy_Research/India – Interesting perspective. We did research recently on Wikipedia in India and found it was seen as a little "cold" by a segment of users. Here's the report: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mobile_Strategy_Research/India

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

• A Case for Why Words Matter | Ad and Marketing Book [via @ Reviews – Advertising Age – QUOTE: "Mr. Shapiro's shift in nomenclature from the idea of customers — that is, buyers — to users is fundamentally valuable for two reasons. First, user is, frankly, more of a digital term, as opposed to a consumer-packaged-goods term. And CPG language has dominated the marketing vocabulary for decades. People use Google, Twitter and Facebook — they aren't customers of them. Mr. Shapiro's book is another signal of the cultural shift towards the digital in everything. We're no longer applying CPG terms to digital entities in order to understand them. We're applying digital terms to the CPG world, so that it functions better in the new reality.

  The second reason this is fundamentally valuable is it identifies a deeper kind of transaction: the word customer defines the relationship purely in the transactional terms of buying and selling. But buying does not solve the buyer's problem. They have to become a customer, so that they can then become a user."

• Facebook Study: It’s a Small(er) World After All | Epicenter | Wired.com – The concept of a tightly knit, interconnected world — one where an individual’s connection with another is within six degrees of separation — has been around for nearly half a century. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram published his findings in 1967, and has been a standby of sociology and pop culture alike ever since.

  It comes as little surprise, then, that the rise of social networks over the past decade has brought us even closer together. Facebook released two studies of its social graph on Tuesday, which conclude that we Facebookers are closer to one another than we thought.

  In collaboration with academic researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Facebook’s study found that instead of the average of six degrees of separation between each of us, Facebook users are separated by an average of four degrees.

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

• Ethnography Matters – Discovered a good new blog on Ethnographers and Ethnography. From the about page:

  "We came together to start this blog because we believe that ethnographic research — with its focus on human experiences in context — is critical for countering the trend towards users as numbers, as digits, as data and as markets. In the push to scale technologies globally, technological talk often focuses on the production and consumption of technological goods — There are Users, Makers, and Artifacts — and very little in between. We believe in the in between. This blog will be a place for conversation between academic and applied ethnography, for listening to and thinking about people’s stories, and for analysis and theory focused on the social patterns and contexts of technological (re)use, rejection and  (re)construction.

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

• 7 billion people and you: What’s your number? [via @stuarthenshall] – "When you were born, you were the:
  3,431,212,262nd
  person alive on Earth
  77,405,160,776th
  person to have lived since history began"

3 random gems from my wise maid this morning.:

Gem 1: We were discussing an imminent death in one of the TV soaps. She says:  “People die only when they get a better role & more money. Wish that happened in real life”!  Karma redefined?

Gem 2: [[Warning: this is a graphic one engaging all your senses!]]. She burps really loudly.  Full throated. I say: Try keeping your mouth closed?  She says: “You don’t understand – if you burp with your mouth open and let it out with a large sound, it lightens your stomach and is worth it.  Otherwise why burp?”

Aside: As a child, I remember my Hindi tuition teacher who would burp right after drinking tea my mum served him.  Burping loudly each time.  I once asked him why he did that and he said it is to say “thank you”. Indian culture!

Gem 3: She is making me a nice spicy paste for fish.  We’re chattering away.  She asks me when my “gori” friend (“white” friend) is coming to stay again.  Comments that my “gori” friend would find the masalas too spicy. And then comes up with this gem:  “You know didi, they are so white because they eat so much butter and cheese and not enough spice”

My maid….she keeps me real. And is my number one in-home, real-time, living ethnography project!

Some of her earlier Gems:

On the Walk n Talk Idea Cellular ad: “should be banned!” tells me she has seen people fall off local train while talking on cellphone

Another time, she  asks “are newsreaders on TV more intelligent & better educated than you, didi?” Her logic; they must be because they’re on TV and I am not

Then this one: “pple r saying obama is going to buy India. he’s rich & owns america. what will happen to congress/shiv sena?” 

And this, I will never forget.

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

• Ten predictions for the mobile health market | mobihealthnews – 10 predictions for the mobile health market in the US. How would that work for India/emerging markets? #mobilehealth …. “Over the past three years, research firms including InMedica, Juniper, Chilmark, ABI, In-Stat, IDC, and Manhattan have been predicting the future size of and eventual revenues generated by mobile health services. This week MobiHealthNews has compiled its list of ten predictions for the next five years of mobile health — including prognostications for both consumer and enterprise — beginning with one that has already come to pass.”
• Design Perspectives Lecture Series – Swinburne Faculty of Design – This is great – thank you!  A series of lectures on Design Perspectives published.  you can now access these lectures via the Swinburne Design web site: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/design-perspectives/
  Design Perspectives Lecture Series
  Pi’ikea Clark – Expanding Design Education through Indigenous Design
  Jacob Buur – User Centred Design
  Kalevi Ekman – The story behind Aalto University’s Design Factory
  Judith Gregory – Activity Theory as a “Trading Zone” for Design Research and Practice
  Keith Russell – Chocolate Bread, Sacred Rice: Continental Ways of Looking at Things
  Wendy Wong – Chinese Graphic Design History in Greater China SInce 1979
  Nigel Cross – Understanding Design Thinking (Lecture 2)
  Nigel Cross – Creative Thinking in Design (Lecture 1)

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

• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error