It makes me think that there are so many of them, that’s why they are popular or is it the other way around? They are popular and that’s why there are so many of them. This is a classic chicken and egg trap hole. I am of the latter opinion. This begs the question why are they more popular?

Games beautifully cater to psychologically the need of self esteem and self actualization which have been proven to be more important than basic needs. Other apps like maps and navigation cater more to basic needs.  In this fast paced world where everyone looks for instant gratification and recognition, games quietly and aptly fill this need. As you beat your previous score or defeat a buddy’s, you feel satisfaction and pride even if it is momentary.

Games bring out the competitive nature in you. It can induce behavioral changes unlike other passive apps. News apps simply provide information and sometimes overwhelm you with data you cannot and don’t want to grasp. Once you find a game engaging, you usually come back again and again to improve your score, go to the next higher level or beat your friends. Games like Zynga’s Farmville have shown the viral and addictive aspect where gamers change their everyday activities to meet those required by the game.

Even if you have a little bit of nerd in you, games easily talk to that feeling. The high quality touch screen, powerful processors, accelerometers, sensors and now even augmented reality tools on smart phones and mobile devices enable a cool gaming experience. Features like gesture, motion, and pressure do their part to excite the nerd in you. This ability of gaming apps lends it advantages over say a weather app. How many ways can you show the weather and how interactive can you make a weather app?

Is this craze for game apps sustaining and will it be able to defend its place in the app store?

As data bandwidth gets more expensive and carriers in US and Europe are going for tiered pricing. Apps which are light on the network will continue to grow. Games are light on network usage from the carrier’s point, as they use the data resident on the device such as a locally stored game. Apps which require a user to send data real time over the bandwidth like streaming video apps and other social networking apps will get limited if data gets pricier.

Another critical differential is that the size doesn’t matter, when it comes to game developers. Individual creativity competes at par with that of the larger guys and can enrich the ecosystem. Small developers stand an equal chance like the big players for the success of the app. This is not like other apps like multimedia sharing ones, (Netflix, Hulu, Youtube) which have complex issues like privacy agreements and content rights requiring strong negotiation power and size.

Will this be a similar trend in India? In all likelihood. The factors which make game apps so popular are human behavioral elements and are universal.

[Anubha Jayaswal, the author, is a Wharton MBA and works for a leading technology company. She eagerly follows and comments on the telecommunications world.]

• Rediff- 73
• In.com- 177
• Indiatimes-324

The lesser number of options does reduce the clutter but that is again for the more suave users who will any how find the right way to get to the right place, they need not be shown directions and also they are the ones who wont get you any advertising revenues as they know the difference between a  sponsored link and a usual link. The type of audience that TVC is going to get you are actually very easy to handle, he already trusts you because you were on TV, now you can make them buy just by throwing some choices. He is here to buy, spend money (read, time), so all you need to do is give him choices to do so. You shouldn’t confuse clutter with more options. You can always give more options and keep it ordered and sorted to avoid the clutter. So the design may not exactly be a fail but there is a mismatch between the promotion campaign, target audience and the design. The positioning “Just your stuff” would have better suited if Rediff had implemented some of these suggestions but currently i see “Just no stuff”. pic credit

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

Ashish says that you “enable communities” and I think you “create” them. And since it’s a serious challenge to my understanding of social behavior, let me defend my position.

By the very definition,

a community is a group of individuals who are brought together by force or they come together because they share a common interest.

Classic examples are community of slaves working on erecting pyramids and users flocking pluggd.in because they are interested in start-ups in India.

Keywords in the definition are group, individuals and together. A group that is useful to the individual and together the group and the individual make it worth sticking to.

When I say that you create communities, it implies that you bring all these people together (by force, by coercion, by advertising, by showing them advantages of being a member, by hook, by rewarding participatory behavior or by showing that everyone but you is a member, or any of million other ways). Once there is a group, you share ideas and vision on what could become of this group if everyone participates. And when they start participating and everyone is in sync with the collective vision, the group become a community.

For a community to thrive, there needs to be a connecting thread – a reason for members to believe in. A selling proposition. An answer to “Why this community” question. This reason can again be provided by force (if you don’t work, you will be killed) or by prestige associated by just being a member (I am member of AsmallWorld.net – are you? I have access to GMail – do you have it? Etc.).

Second part is that the community as a whole should be useful for the members. No one would want to just give and not take anything in return. People don’t join communities. People join groups hoping that the group would be useful to them. Moment a group becomes useful for individuals, or that user, the group transforms from a group to a community.

When you are starting a community, you HAVE to bring together people. You will have to hand pick people who are committed to this binding thread with or without the usefulness of the community. These are the people whose actions would make the community useful for subsequent members. In case of pluggdin, for example, Ashish would have started writing about start-ups in India. He would have posted the link at relevant places, would have sent emails to friends and family who are interested in start-ups and slowly and gradually people starting coming in. He thus created a community. One member at a time.

On the other hand when you talk about enabling a community, you assume people already know why they are there. You assume that they

1. know what is common between all of them.
2. know why are they not a directionless herd.
3. know what is purpose of their group.
4. can see a larger picture.
5. know how is group useful.

This all might happen in an ideal world and I refuse to agree that any heterogeneous or even homogeneous group of people can answer all the above-mentioned questions. And if you are just enabling the community without holding their hand, telling them what to do and what actions to take. In my humble opinion, they will be as lost as kids in the topless bar .

And with this your-honor, I rest my case.

Regards,
Saurabh Garg
www.saurabhgarg.com/thoughts

P.S.: And I agree that your group/community should be empowered enough to recommend and make changes. They should be empowered to remove things that they don’t like. They should be empowered to freely add on to the community. They should be allowed to explore. They should be given the tools to be themselves and create new things for the community.

• Total of 69 billion searches occured in October 2007, conducted by 775 million unique searchers.
• US alone was responsible for 21% of the search query, followed by China (9.5% ).
• India doesn’t figure in the top 8 countries.

Details (via TC) :

• In 1996,67% of all people online lived in the U.S. By last October, that had completely flipped, with 77 % of the online population living in the rest of the world and only 23 percent in the U.S. – i.e. epicenter of www is shifting away from US.
• Homegrown Market – Leading websites in big markets such as Russia, Japan, and South Korea tend to be homegrown as well.
  India has no story to share here.
• UU – i.e. unique user story:
  • US stands at 162 million.
  • China ~96 million
  • India at 8th position, @ 25.2 million users.
• Top Email Service is of course, Y! Mail with 262.2 million unique visitors in oct, 2007, closely followed by Hotmail (256.4mn). Gmail secures 3rd position with 87.1 mn unique visitors.

On the face of it, India story (i.e. 8th position worldwide) doesn’t look that bad – but it’s surely bad if you look at the real numbers, given the Internet penetration w.r.t country’s population (China is doing far better than India and the core emerging markets are well placed than India).

Infact, the bottom 6 countries’ Internet penetration summed together is almost equivalent to the figures from top 2 country (i.e. US + China) – Classic case of Digital divide?

What’s your opinion?

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000. (nyt)

As per researchers, the demand for Internet can overshoot the supply by 2010.

The problem is not really the global network, but rather the local network and the capacity of network (i.e. switches, routers/pipes) in the neighbourhood. The real issue is about lack of investment in telecommunication infrastructure and cable networks.

If American investment lags behind..the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.
“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” ..“Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”

As far as India is concerned, the network connectivity is too bad and ISPs are manipulating the Internet capacity to charge a premium price.

Aside, China has overtaken US in terms of number of Internet users (China has 220 million, US has 217mn) and by 2008 end, Chinese surfers will touch 280 mn!

What’s happening in India? When will we cross 50 million user base?

History repeats itself and the subtle proof can be seen in the recent $11 billion erosion of Apple’s market cap.

What’s the story?

Google is (supposedly) building Google phone and if rumors are to be believed, Google will offer that for free. Considering all this, Apple cut the price of iPhone by $200 (read Steve Jobs’ open letter). Resistance came from pioneers who felt penalized about being an early adopter of iPhone. After initial hiccups. Steve jobs finally decided to payback $100 to early adopters. The entire episode left Apple fans in a bad taste.

And the result? Riot. Apart from PR disaster, Apple’s shares hit southwards and trimmed the market cap by 11 billion dollars!

An interesting piece of calculation : There have been somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million iPhones sold. Multiply that by $100 and you get $50M to $100M. How could the stock market penalize Apple $11 Billion dollars? (source)

This of course means that Apple is not selling as many iPhones as expected, and as BusinessWeek calls it – “We now know the market-value of nine weeks of iHipness.’” Or it probably the rise of “GHippiness“?

More about Google Phone:

The only way Google can make a mark in the already crowded handset business, is by giving away Google Phone for free. Imagine paying no money for the handset, no money for the in-built apps – and all you’ve gotta do is allow Google to push contextual ads!

Google did this with Gmail and Google phone will just follow the white rabbit.

Technical spec of Google Phone: [source: EndGadget]

• Google phone will run on linux, JVM OS, and will support Java apps.
• Google phone will use a new browser (probably based on the WebKit core, which iPhone browser uses too) – which will have “pan-and-browse” capability
• The UI will be much simpler (“..prototype had a small QWERTY keyboard, like a Treo or a BlackBerry, rather than relying on a touch-screen, as the iPhone does.” – source)

With the launch of Google Phone, Google will add too many enemies. Though the core of all these gutsy step is driven by it’s dominance in search & advertising business – Google will face stiff competition in the days to come (one example).

Concluding thoughts
Don’t you think that Google is spreading itself thin by entering into all possible businesses? Apart from Google search, none of their products are numero uno (in their respective domain?)- which of course raises questions on their ability to market new products.

Moreover, isn’t it interesting that Google is trying to get into Handset business (and compete against Nokia); and on the other hand, Nokia is trying to get into Internet services business (with the launch of OVI)? – Now that’s what I call convergence of communication medium. What do you think?

tags: google phone, iphone, technical spec google phone

Mobile content player, Mobifusion has launched the mobile version of Bhagwad Gita. The mobile version of Bhagwad Gita contains all the 700 sanskrit slokas transliterated in English . The mobile version of Bhagwad Gita is currently available only to Vodafone-Essar subscribers and will be shortly be rolled out to other operators too.

“The Holy Bhagavad-Gita is a source of knowledge and peace and now that we’ve optimized it for the cell phone, it will be particularly useful to de-stress in today’s modern society,” said Prashant Gupta, Managing Director of Mobifusion’s India center. “We are very glad to be associated with this project and unveil it on such a day of importance.” Says Prof Lal (who did the transliteration) , quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “There is no purifier like knowledge in this world.”

Mobifusion, by releasing this on Vodafone Essar, millions of wireless users now can access the Holy Bhagvad Gita instantly on their cell phones. “With our built-in simple search engine, they can instantly access slokas that are relevant to a particular situation. We are working on a mobile audio version so users can listen to the beauty of the works as well.” [Mobifusion site]

Do give your “wireless” spiritual avatar a try and share your feedback (especially on the readability of the content?)

What are the other literature you would like to read on your mobile? Chandamama? Pinky? Chacha Chaudhary? I’ll go for the desi version of Superman and Batman.

Thanks UnwiredIndia for the tip, Pic source: Flickr

Related: What do people search on their mobile?, Coverage of Indian Telecom Industry

Technorati tags: mobifusion, bhagwat gita, mobile content

The growing netizens in small towns is also being reinforced by JuxtConsult’s India Internet report:

“37% of the current Net users come from the top 10 metros, and more than half of the Indian online population comes from outside the eight largest cities. (i.e. tier II and III cities).”

What’s more interesting is that the online versions of Indian newspapers are read in 62 countries!!

Here is the analysis of online/digital newspaper readership:

The market segment:

• The majority readership is in the age group of 21-40 years, and Maharashtra, Karnataka, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh top the readership list.
• Professionals in the IT, education and media fields constitute almost half (48%) the readership.
• Proportion of female readers is considerably smaller than male readers – only 13%.

So, what sort of news do Indians love to read online?

• 24.3% readers read news stories on book/film/theatre reviews
• 92% are interested in reading news about India
• Business & economy (69%), politics (60%), and science & technology (60%). Sports news is favored only by 37% of the users (now I am not surprised with the cricket world cup results!)
• 46% reads news about social development and 33% for environment
• Columnists are read by 42%
• The combined percentage of readers of Op-Ed articles (i.e. opposite the editorial page) is high at 97.7 %.

What surprised me?

• 47% of readers visit online editions to access archival material! Now, that’s what I call the power of digitizing information. Newspapers have a life cycle of a day, but if you digitize them, they live forever!
• 14 % use online newspaper as a tool to overcome homesickness (i.e. when they are out of the country)
• Matrimonial advertisements in the online editions of newspapers do not seem to attract readers, even though the readership is dominated by youngsters. Only about 2.5 % readers visit the matrimonial section of online newspaper (and they go to paid matrimony sites for the same? – Isn’t that surprising?)

Source: Research conducted by UGC

Why is online readership a great sign for Indian Internet (to be more specific e-commerce industry)?
Because online newspaper readers are classified as power users. These power users spend double time on the Internet (19 hours a week) than the regular users. On an average, 82% of online newspaper readers purchase products online (source).

Compare the Indian online newspaper data with the US market (for Q2 ’07) (source)

• On an average, 59 million i.e 37% of Internet users visited online newspaper sites
• Users spent a combined 7.2 billion minutes browsing newspaper Web sites
• US newspapers will now start quoting their online readership as well. Audience- FAX an initiative started by ABC aims to integrate newspaper readership into it’s circulation reports (link).

The newspaper business amazes me a lot – for the simple reason that the life cycle of a newspaper is just 10 hours (i.e. morning 7 – probably till 5 PM, or lesser than that) and stales out after that. Apart from being a low price commodity (priced at Rs. 1/2), the key in newspaper business is not just the content, but distribution as well.

The online version, apart from providing the latest updates (i.e. breaking news) should also offer personalization of news. Indiatimes just did it and I hope others jump in too.

How do you think online newspapers can improve (better content/less ads)? Do you really see a need for more personalization service?

Which is your favorite online newspaper? I prefer ToI – it has a very real look & feel; and somehow I am used to it. I hate to read HT (very cluttered).
What about you?

tags: indian online newspapers, myindiatimes