This morning I was listening to a Monocle podcast (don’t judge me) where they were interviewing Steve Jones, a UCL emeritus professor and author of a new book called ‘The Serpent’s Promise’. I haven’t read the book yet, but it examines the Bible from a scientist’s point of view. A disclaimer up front: I am not particularly religious nor am I Christian, so my comments below are purely from the point of view of a layperson. Here’s a review in the Telegraph.
Jones mentioned how organised religion originally came about when farming became an occupation for human-beings; it gave them something to do as a group. From a purely individualistic and rational, non-moral point of view he said that it made sense for individuals to become criminals to achieve what they want. But from a group’s vantage point, that behaviour is not to the group’s advantage and religion made that choice easier.
He then mentioned chimpanzees and how there is a group threshold (30 or 40) at which even they start killing each other and splitting off into different groups. For humans, that number is obviously much higher – thousands, even millions in many cases – but at some point even we, to put it frankly, start losing it.
When I think of the vast amounts of crime happening today in the name of religions of all kinds in many different parts of the world, that perspective somehow makes sense to me. I guess we can’t conduct ourselves the way we ideally should when we grow as a group beyond a certain number. That is absolutely not to rationalise it or condone it, just an observation. A very simplistic one perhaps, but there it is.
I was really glad to be a part of the International Women’s Day Tech City Showcase on March 8th. It was a great group of very smart women who were showcasing their work across a range of industries: design, games, retail, education, music, media and more. The format was very flexible, it was a really informal atmosphere and so diverse in terms of work showcased that there was bound to be something for everyone. Leila showcased her thermal printer from Happenstance, Haiyan Zhang used MindWave and Leap Motion to build a cat staring game (yes you heard that right!), Codasign showcased a music-making banana with Makey Makey (later figured out they were the ones I did the Arduino ghost-making workshop with last year) – they were just a handful of the brilliant projects there. Very inspiring.
Thanks to Alex, Becky, Ana and Natasha for organising!
Sometimes there seems to be a pattern in the way things come to your notice.
On Creative Review a few days ago, I saw a music video by the artist Sivu that featured his head in an MRI scanner in St. Barts Hospital in London, a project that was completed with the assistance of a couple of doctors. It was quite mesmerizing – apparently it was done in real-time, with him repeatedly singing the song.
And then yesterday on the Wired podcast, I heard about some research at the University of Southern California that involved studying the way a beat-boxer from L.A pronounced the sounds he did by analysing the movements of his mouth in an MRI scanner (again). Rather interestingly, the research found that some of the sounds were akin to sounds made in niche languages like Chechen (Chechnya) and Nuxálk (Canada).
….the researchers were able to annotate all of the sounds made by their beatboxing subject using the International Phonetic Alphabet — the system designed to describe meaning-encoding speech sounds, like intonation. And even though the subject was only a speaker of English and Spanish, he was able to produce many sound effects typical of other languages.
It struck me how an MRI scanner is an object most people wouldn’t even think of in a non-medical context. And here we are with not one but two alterative uses that have nothing to do with medicine. Creativity has no bounds.
This is a bizarrely interesting story about how, in Maryland, USA, liquid detergent Tide is becoming a substitute for drugs. A bottle of Tide has become street currency, ‘with a 150-ounce bottle going for $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine’.
The value of a product is how much the market is willing to pay for it, ALWAYS. As for why, read on:
Despite its popularity, Tide is not a big moneymaker for stores. P&G’s proprietary surfactants and enzymes are relatively expensive to produce, notes Bill Schmitz, a Deutsche Bank analyst, so Tide’s wholesale cost is steep. Only so much of that can be passed on to customers. “It’s so tight,” says Schmitz of the profit margin. In general, a retailer clears just a few percentage points on a Tide purchase. A store that charges $19.99 for a 150-ounce bottle might claim $2 in profit. But if it buys stolen bottles for $5, that jumps to $15.
I’ve never formally admitted it but eating pomegranates has never really interested me because the process of de-seeding them takes too much effort. Turns out there’s an easy way to do it, and it doesn’t involve putting it in water (which, again, I wasn’t aware of till now). Ah well, you live, you learn.
Reminds me of the urban legend about the space pen and the Americans spending millions of dollars trying to invent a pen that worked in space while the Russians just used a pencil (which was again rubbished in a talk by someone recently, I can’t remember whom). Sometimes the marketing industry goes to ridiculous lengths to convince people about things that they’d be much better off just being honest about. It’s really simple these days thanks to the internet.
I’d been to Metaphwoar in 2010 and knew the format: entertain and educate people through metaphors (broadly, that is. As Andy said in his introduction to the evening, nitpickers who pointed out the difference between similes, metaphors and analogies weren’t welcome!), but wasn’t quite sure how my talk would go down with the audience. In the end I think it went off well. Whew!
I decided to compare popular Indian culture to successful startups, in the following ways:
1. They are both all about personality
In India, filmstars are a huge part of modern culture (always have been). Rajnikant is a Tamil film actor who does inexplicable things like stopping bullets mid-air:
….and the audience just laps it up. One of the many websites built for him actually runs without the internet. I tried it and it really doesn’t need a working internet connection to be used!!!
The masses in India also identify themselves with filmstars to the extent that they have fan clubs that wield a lot of power politically. Early in my career, I was working on a development research project that assessed the link between social groups and associations with politics and I had to interview people who ran the most influential social groups in different urban and rural areas in the South. Unsurprisingly a lot of them were filmstar fan clubs. That’s another reason so many filmstars enter politics, they sort of come with a readymade vote bank. Their opinions are so revered that people build temples and worship them in some cases. I’m not kidding. Look at this, this or this.
Similarly, good startups have founders with personality. One of the most well-known examples is the Y-Combinator programme in the US, where founder Paul Graham is widely known to favour startups whose founders’ personalities shine through even if they have ideas that aren’t quite there yet, the logic being that an idea can be changed but you can’t really change someone’s personality that easily. As this article says,
Graham is much more interested in the founders than in the proposed business idea. When he sees a strong team of founders with the qualities that he believes favor success, he will overlook a weak idea.
The philosophy of good startups having strong personalities extends to the whole company as well as the founders. Mailchimp is a service that I think really brings this to life – the monkey’s messages always make me laugh.
2. Both give people their money’s worth
The best example of people admitting they got their money’s worth is after they watch a Bollywood blockbuster. When news crews talk to audiences in India outside theatres after a blockbuster film, more often than not you’ll hear the term ‘paisa vasool’, which essentially means that the audience felt they got their money’s worth. These are typically films with lavish song-and-dance routines that make people feel 100% entertained.
Truly successful startups also give investors and users their money’s worth, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter. Whether it’s Series A or B or further, investors want to see whether a startup is worth investing in: what’s its potential, what kind of audience growth is it looking at, and so on. This is even truer when it comes to users of a startup’s service: you’re not going to get millions of users with an offering that doesn’t add value to their lives. The productivity app Things for the iPhone and iPad costs $9.99 while Things 2 for the Mac costs $50, but people see value in it. Angry Birds was entertaining enough for people to buy enough paid versions of the app to contribute to 70% of Rovio’s revenue by the end of their 2011-2012 financial year, with 648 million downloads. And then there’s Kickstarter, where people only really back projects if they think the resulting product will be worth it.
3. They step in when the system fails
In India, causes like fighting corruption are taking up the imagination of millions of people – ipaidabribe.com is a site where people report encounters with corrupt government officials, which at a very grassroots level affects people day in and day out.
The Ugly Indian similarly, is another campaign run by citizens where they take pictures of dumps in public areas and take it upon themselves to clean it up.
We all know about the pretty involved debates and discussions that happen in the US around healthcare – and over here in the UK about the NHS as well, for that matter. Startups like Sherpaa in the US, which allow people to get access to qualified doctors round-the-clock by phone or email, save them time and effort because they can’t get that access with government services. Similarly, Mint enables Americans to track their expenses online and identify where their biggest spends are. Ideally you’d think all banks should do this for their customers – some, like Lloyd’s Money Manager, actually do this now – but I’d argue that it’s startups like Mint that made them sit up and take notice.
4. They both understand their audience so they can fit into their lives
The Indian campaign I showed resonated with me a lot: as a high school student in Tamilnadu, I actually taught myself Tamil by reading the titles on local film posters. Doorstep is an NGO in India that achieved stupendous results by using a similar insight to solve a huge social problem. It won a Silver Media Lion at Cannes.
Startups have to similarly understand what need they fulfil in their audience’s lives if they are to be successful. If they don’t, then they pivot. With agile and lean startups, continuous user-testing will show this up. Fab.com started out as a community for gay people, it’s now an incredibly successful flash sales site for design-lovers. Color started off as a closed photo-sharing community, it’s now a video-sharing site for Facebook users.
5. They know the difference between growing their audience by adding value, and by pandering to the base
In India, in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, there were a lot of pulp fiction magazines in local languages that were incredibly popular. These tales of vampires and sirens, villains and detectives, could get quite lurid – sex always sells. A couple of years ago, a small publishing house in India took it upon themselves to translate some of those short stories into English so they could reach a new generation of audience – like me. And typically you always lose something in translation but I think they did a great job of keeping the cultural sentiment intact and picking exactly the right stories, as one Amazon reviewer of the book said ‘It’s heartening to see that the remarkably prodigious authors of the stories (some of whom have written thousands of tales and novellas) are often capable of superb and sophisticated imagination, refusing to pander to the base…’
Outbrain is a content marketing startups whose plug-in is used by publishers the world over, from CNN and the Guardian to Forbes and Fast Company. What they do is based on what you read, they throw up other articles you might like, but it could include those from other advertisers as well. I recently met them as part of my work at PHD, and one of the things my colleagues and I were concerned about was how they were going to control spammy text marketers. And lo and behold, recently I heard that they’re sacrificing revenue for quality. Which is a no-brainer really if you want to build a company with any integrity.
All in all, a great event and a really fun evening!
I mentioned kanban here not too long ago, so was rather interested (and amused!) to hear about the concept of personal kanban in this Fast Company article. Personal kanban is about not overburdening employees – by having a ‘ready’, ‘in progress’ and ‘done’ way of looking at things rather than one long list.
I am now 50% through my short course at Central St. Martin’s, so I thought it would be good to reflect on it a bit.
I’m not good at design – or drawing, for that matter. Never have been, really. So I thought quite a few times before I signed up to this course, which, with the name of ’100 Design Projects’ did worry me a bit! Design is very much a part of my life, though – I may not be a designer but the essence and philosophy of good design is something I really appreciate and strive for.
The idea of the course is to get us to think differently about design through a series of small quick-and-dirty projects. I can vouch for the fact that I definitely am doing that. We started with typography: we were given what we thought were random letters and a choice of fonts to choose from for each letter, with the instruction that we could arrange each letter however we liked on the sheet of paper. It was really interesting to see how each of us interpreted it. We also had to design a header for a fictional magazine called Typography Monthly, keeping in mind that typographers are a picky lot. There are a couple of professional designers and engineers in the class as well a few fresh grads, amongst others, and we all interpreted them so differently – the group review process is really insightful. Capitalism was the main theme for the day’s session. Some of our projects included defacing a Bank of England note, creating a placard for a homeless person, designing a new version of the ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ board, designing a piece of jewellery for Fidel Castro (we were handed out notes with work by jewellery designers Jesse Mathes, Nanna Melland, Tiffany Parbs, Susan Lenart Kazmer, Ken Thibado and Laura Potter as inspiration), a new bank note for our country of origin and an award for a person who has lost a lot of money in the banking crisis.
Above are two of my projects: graffiti on a banknote and a license plate for a greedy person as an award.
