Categories
startup technology

Product Description in BigBasket

Disclaimer: This is not a paid post. I do have purchased from BigBasket a couple of times. The information contained in the post is my opinion on the way online marketing/retailing is changing.

I got an email in the morning from bigbasket.com. The email subject was to tout their latest android app. True to the subject, the first section of the email was a banner which described the arrival of their android app.

bbandroid

Nothing special about this. Then it went on to describe the latest deals. Nice bright pictures with their original price and the new deal price.

prices

Again. Nothing special about this. I get atleast a couple of such emails these days.Then comes the kicker.

rice

This seemingly innocuous note about Sona Masoori has more than what meets the eye. Firstly, it invitingly says, “A note by Subramanyam J,National Head, Staples Merchandising”. Intriguing. So I clicked on, and it took me here.

This page gives some very nice information on what is Sona Masoori rice. Where it is grown. Where the original rice comes from. What processing is done on it. And then, it also says, where BigBasket sources this rice from. It then goes on to give the quality metrics that it observes. And the yield. Yes, get that, the yeild. How much cooked rice does a cup of uncooked rice yield?

rice2

Wow. You dont get that information from ‘any’ grocer that you visit. Just not possible. This is where online retailing is headed to. And I like it.

Categories
bangalore design misc

Beautiful Branding – Puma

IMG-20130424-00401

Came across this beautiful bill board. You should note a few things – the shoe takes center stage. The story takes center stage. The Nature of Performance takes center stage. You get to see the name of the shoe only in a few tactfully hidden places – “Available at the PUMA Store”. And the ubiquitous puma jumping symbol. Beautiful. That is branding.

Not sure if Puma has always been like this, or they have been learning about Nike. Nike is even more manic about this. You would see a sportsman or sportswoman wearing the shoe and excelling. And the Nike swoosh symbol in the footnote. Some ads would not even have the word Nike. It would just have the Nike swoosh symbol.

nike

For more Nike ads, you should look here -> http://pinterest.com/pin/169870217167015064/

 

Categories
software startup technology

Instagram Outrage

Today’s xkcd strip mirrors my feelings exactly about the recent Instagram outrage. Well, to be honest with you, I had some initial outrage too initially (though I do not really use the product), but just a little bit of thought changed my mind.

For people who do not know about Instagram and the recent outrage (first, please come out of the rock that you are hiding under – the world did not end!), let me summarize the issue and my two cents.

Instagram is a free iOS app/service which lets you take photographs using your iOS devices, apply some cool filters, and then stores these pictures for you. Filters are image processing effects – such as sephia, b/w, and more fancy ones — that you apply on your otherwise dull monotonous pictures of your flowers and feet, to make them pretty),It also, as is mandatory for any app these days, lets you share these pictures using twitter, facebook, and other social networking sites.

More recently they got acquired by facebook. These guys have not been making money for a while now. I guess Zuck was probably miffed and asked the Instagram team to ‘start thinking about $$’. Last week, these guys changed their terms and conditions, that starts to make them thinking about $$. They had some ambiguous terms which people misinterpreted as ‘Instagram will use your pictures in advertising, without having to tell you’. I am not quite sure about the legalese, but this caused quite a bit of bad PR. Instagram responded very quickly that they would change their T&C etc.

Ok, now my opinions/reactions.

My first disappointment was that, “how could a company in the social networking space – which is super focussed on consumers – do such a faux paus as to have an ambiguous T&C in the first place?”. The new era of apps and social networking is so much consumer faced that, consumer is not just God, but probably more than that. They have made and broken companies.

On later hindsight, I am realizing two things:

In this era of social networking and ecommerce companies, the companies that do survive are the companies who fail fast, and recover fast. The fact that Instagram responded shows promise. They HAD to take some risks to do some internal stuff to start making money. And to survive they had better make money. Having been a part of an ecommerce company for about a year, I can vouch for the fail fast-recover fast method. It is the only thing that works.

Secondly, why are consumers suddenly so worried about T&Cs. Had anyone ever read the T&C when they signed up for Instagram? GMail? Or for that matter, any online service?

Next->Next->Continue->PageDown->PageDown->Finish->Congrats, you are done.

All my sign-ins have been like the above. The whole bad PR is because of another new phenomenon – Large Herds. The Herd mentality has been studied for quite a while now, and it is typical human behavior. But with the advent of large scale social networking, the herd sizes are magnified, several fold. So if TechCrunch says something, or John Gruber says something, or if @AtulChitnis retweets something, it becomes h.u.g.e.

So in conclusion, what happened to Instagram is not something alarming at all. This is what is going to be the future of QA. This is how product testing is going to happen. What used to happen within a enterprise software company when a Priority-Zero (P0) customer bug came in, just happened in a social networking company. Do not get alarmed, and get back to your work. If you have faith in that company (as in, you have an account with them), they will fix the bug. If not, this will ensure a new start-up founds itself with that limitation removed and an easy move-your-data-easily-to-me process.

Categories
misc photography technology

McD advertisements and ‘food stylists’

I did not know so much went behind creating the picture for a burger advertisements. Watch the food stylist “inject” some ketchup with a syringe. And also watch the photoshopper adjust the cheese slice. Wow.

Categories
humour technology

Awesome LG Ad

 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYX5fFxcXWU&w=560&h=315]

Shot beautifully. 🙂

(via TechCrunch)