I am back after attending the ‘Tata Marketing Minds 2007′ seminar which explored the subject of Innovation quite deeply. The 2 day seminar was held on the outskirts of Bangalore city, at a place called the Angsana Resort and Spa — a scenic and serene piece of land suited for knowledge building.
The event which was organized by Titan Industries, was kicked-off with a wonderful session by R Gopalakrishnan (ED - TataSons) who spoke about innovation and the history of the Tatas, quoting generously from the book ‘The Creation of Wealth’ by R M Lala. Eminent personalities from various industry domains spoke from branding and marketing to consumer goods and cyberspace innovations, and tried to touch upon the art of innovating ideas. Some of the speakers included Santosh Desai (Futurebrands), Richa Arora (Head of Marketing, Britannia), Alok Kejriwal (CEO, Contests2Win.com), R. Balki (Adman and director of the film Cheeni Mum), Vikram Kaushik (MD, TataSky Ltd.), C Venkataraman (COO, Titan Jewellery Division - Tanishq), Sashi Sinha (Lodestar), Bhaskar Bhatt (MD, Titan Industries) and more. For me personally it was scintillating to see Piyush Pandey (Chairman, O&M India) from close quarters; sort of a dream come true for me. I have idolised him since my art school days when his work for Fevicol was quite well-known and had won many awards.
The seminar provided a grand opportunity to network and get ourselves to know the other Tata Group companies and their projects as well. There were delegates from Tata Motors, Tata Steel, Tata Ryerson, Tata Chemicals, Trent, Tata Teleservices, Tata Tinplate, Tata Pigments, VSNL, Tata Advanced Materials, Tata Consulting Engineers, Tata BP Solar, etc. just to name a few. I was of course, representing Tata Consultancy Services (thanks Jayant!). It was fun, educative and most importantly every member of the Tata group was filled with pride to know each other. Here are some pictures from those exciting days (enable JavaScript to have the best view).
India and Pakistan never fail to entertain when they play each other. Be it Hockey or Cricket, their performances are keenly watched and scrutinized on both sides of the border. Yesterday’s match at the World Twenty 20 in Kingsmead, Durban (South Africa) proved to be a nail-biting event unlike all their previous encounters.
First, it looked like India would be bowled out within 15 overs as they were tottering at 36/4 after Mohammed Asif picked up four Indian wickets. However, the Indians managed 141 in their 20 overs thanks to some hard hitting by Robin Uthappa who scored 50. Then defending their modest score, the Indians were gaining some ground early before Agarkar gave away 17 runs in his penultimate over and the match went down to the wire with 1 run required of just 1 ball. Sreesanth then bowled the last over of the match superbly to end the Pakistan innings at 141/7 in their 20 overs and the match was tied — a first for any Twenty20 International. A ‘Bowl out’ method — much similar to the penalty shootouts in Hockey and Soccer — was applied for an outcome despite both teams already qualifying for the Super8s from Group D.
The rules were simple — each team nominates 5 bowlers to bowl at the stumps. The team with the majority hits wins. Sehwag, Bhajji and Uthappa made no mistake to help India win 3-0 and keep its winning record against in world playoffs against Pakistan intact. The young Indian side maintained a characteristically cool head till the last ball which helped them snatch victory from the Pakistanis. The sad reality of going into a big tournament without a regular coach hasn’t come to hassle the Indians and the way they performed yesterday it seems there’s no requirement for one at the moment if they keep winning consistently. Great performance surely and I hope they bring back the world cup and with it the glorious days of Indian cricket.
Writing for an internal global initiative on Innovation, I spoke about imbibing a user-experience design framework (UXD) in the software development life-cycle (SDLC) that can consistently deliver better products. I am publishing the article here.
Designing a UX framework for Internal Applications
User-experience (UX) design deals with harnessing the feelings of a user — How people feel before, during and after they have used a product. It pertains to creating an interaction model that impacts a user’s perception of a system or a product which makes it more desirable for use again. Being a subset of UCD (user-centered design), the first step towards evolving an internal UX methodology is to understand the requirements and user-needs through research.
The User is King
Numerous internal applications are required to be accessed by users on a daily basis. Surprisingly, while the process intended for the greater organizational good is in place, a framework that can monitor the outcome in delivering the right experience to the end-user is missing. Consequentially users get turned-off while conducting simple tasks–either the session gets expired without warning or users are not allowed to recover from their errors. A reason for this is the narrow focus of our design efforts on the end-user’s vision of goals – incapability of internal teams in understanding the user’s mental model including time spent in completing tasks and the prioritization of the goals minimizes the efficiency of the interface and relevant technology. Shaping a central mechanism that comprises of UX design specialists to analyze the user activity (recording success and failure rates), gathering feedback from the end-users (understanding tasks and priority) and working continuously to re-model the user-interface (ensuring it matches user-goals) should be encouraged. Other factors like allowing users to choose the relevant content for their needs – a variant of the Web 2.0 theory – would help in improving the overall credibility of the system.
The Benefits
The better the UX of a system – less mental efforts, less mistakes — the more enthusiastically users are likely to visit it often. Key organizational activities will get deeper visibility due to the rise in visitor loyalty. In turn, an UCDian approach will bring clarity to the project — fewer U turns, management support and less time wasted, which would bring down costs and timescales. A good user-experience is a sign of a good product.
With talent contests running on every channel and youngsters slugging it out to get their share of limelight, one gets excited to see a ‘rising star’, an unknown face on TV everyday. MTV India started airing a music video called ‘Scent of Desire’ sung by an unknown voice called Silky Kumar (I bet you haven’t heard of him much) and I thought — what a name to have for an upcoming star singer? Well it turns out that he’s actually a conceptualized character for a popular deodorant brand [read more]. Whatever has been said about the video, I love the melodious retro-styled music and choreography which takes you back to the 80s era (think Bappida and the disco). Most notably the video has been creatively executed without resorting to unnecessary skin show.
BTW, I recognized one of the girls in the dancers behind (in green outfit) who was also seen in the ‘It’s Rocking’ video, with Kareena Kapoor but I wish I could get further details on the director of the video, the actor, choreographer and so on. Go, watch the video and rate it yourself.
Ever since the rumour mills were working over time, I had been waiting eagerly for the news about Apple’s new, much hyped iPod. There was a market speculation on the introduction of a touch-screen iPod which added to the frenzy. Yesterday THAT speculation turned into reality when Apple announced the iPod Touch alongwith upgraded versions of the other family members. My reactions are mixed for now.
The iPod Touch will have the same features touch-screen as the iPhone — infact it looks the same as well. Additionally it carries WiFi capabilities, so users can connect to the net with Apple’s own Safari browser. Apple has signed up with Starbucks to offer the iTunes WiFi store on your WiFi enabled device. With the revolutionizing iPod Touch, Apple has ushered into a new segment of innovation — MP3 players being ported with wireless capabilities to connect to the internet. In my opinion, this version of the iPod will go down well with individuals who haven’t had a first-hand experience of the iPhone since the similarities cannot be ignored. But the Touch is available in only 8 and 16GB models which is sad news for those expecting something ‘big’ from Apple. In my opinion, the offer of owning a touch-screen iPod with more storage space, would have looked more appealing.
The iPod Nano has also undergone changes including a bigger screen display and it can play videos too. Frankly it no longer sports that slim ‘pencil’ appeal anymore, rather it looks like a squished version of its big brother — who just got bigger! the iPod is now called ‘Classic’ and has been upgraded to 160 GB (yay!). The design looks much sleeker now, with accentuated curves all along. The decision of going for a path-breaking touchscreen iPod with less storage or a 160 gigs iPod Classic, would be a tough one to make.
India and Pakistan never fail to entertain when they play each other. Be it Hockey or Cricket, their performances are keenly watched and scrutinized on both sides of the border. Yesterday’s match at the 
Ever since the rumour mills were working over time, I had been waiting eagerly for the news about 