Pranav Bhasin

A picture is worth a thousand words and this one says it all

Chetan Bhagat was a valedictory speaker at the NASSCOM BPO Summit and we had the opportunity to have a few words with him after he finished his insightful and inspirational talk.

And in case you did not notice, what he is holding in his hand is the live photo gift that we created for him during the summit. We hope he likes it and it finds a permanent spot on his table, among all his other trophies.

[ Click on the image below to see a bigger version ]

This week, I was invited by VC Circle to be a part of the panel discussion on “Bengaluru’s Ver 2.0 Technology Story” in the VC Circle BengaluruInvestment Forum.

The discussion was themed around how the technology story of companies in Bangalore is in a next generation transition and was ably chaired by Jessie Paul. Other eminent members in the panel were Sanjay Nayak of Tejas Networks, Sean Blagsvedt of Babajob, Manohar Atreya of o3 Capital and Sunil Maheshwari of Mango Technologies.

The discussion started with Jessie doing a recap on the formation of software services industry in India as a result of globalization and posing a few questions to the panelists.

Sanjay, who has raised 5 rounds of private financing till now added that companies in the west are more focussed on marketing and adoption of products whereas companies in India are more focussed on building great technology. He emphasized that technology does not build great companies, great marketing does. He also stressed the need of participation by the government to help take the sector to the next level and push India into the reckoning as the hub for software products.

Sean emphasized on the fact that while the services industry was timely and was responsible for creation of a lot of jobs in the market, it has not done anything for the masses. Until we setup an infrastructure where it is easier for entrepreneurs to come in and create companies out of India, we cannot move to the next level. He also stressed that the current venture funding setup seems to work in the west but may not be suitable for India where a lot of companies can benefit from a small amount of capital vs a few companies benefiting from a large amount of capital.

Sunil added that companies that do not wait for the next game changing opportunity to become obvious and drive change will be the ones that will be successful. He cited the example of iPhone which was conceptualized by Apple with zero experience in mobile device area – the product has been extensively copied by competitors but no one has been able to dislodge Apple from the slot it has occupied.

Manohar gave his perspective on the venture business where he said that venture funds are in the game to make money and hence they remain extremely choosy about their investments. He also pointed to the fact that venture industry in US started in early 70s whereas the one in India started in 90s – as a result, the industry is still in its learning phase and will take some time to mature. He advised entrepreneurs to be patient, persistent and remain passionate about the idea and be prepared to slog it out for a year and a half to receive capital for their venture.

For my part, I added that to build a successful business, you need to have a combination of Market + Idea + Capital. With the mobile phone market exploding in the past few years, this creates a lot of users and plenty of opportunity for new business to use it as a channel to enable their services. In 2000, a similar proliferation of web services led to the dot com bubble, but the market seems to have learnt from it and the investment in mobile companies, though growing at an encouraging pace is not yet showing the signs of a bubble.

The salient points from the discussion were summarized by Jessie and followed up with questions from the audience. Overall, it was great connecting with the fellow panelists and I had a good time in the panel and overall at the VC Circle conference.

The title is a copy of a recent post by Fred Wilson, but the post is not . The part that caught my attention in the post was the statement “it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph”.

My personal view is that first of all, it is somewhat unfair to compare search with social since they solve vastly different problems. To me “Search equals Intent” whereas “Social equals Discovery“. When you really want to find something, the first thing you do is google for it. Yes, you may ask a few friends about it, but in most cases the expert on your question may not be in your network at all. You may post your question on twitter or facebook, but you certainly won’t wait on these channels for an answer.

The two things that social brings into the picture is “serendipity and trust“. If you are a part of a social network, you hear all kinds of things whether you want to hear them or not and in some cases, you do stumble upon some really neat stuff. Thats serendipity and since you heard about it from someone in your network, you know how much to trust the information based on the trust you have on the source of the information. To a large extent, this is a completely different way of getting information than what search has to offer, but certainly not good enough to kill search by itself.

That is why, at lifeblob, we are building a new channel for discovery of photos through your social graph, not trying to compete with google image search.

Whats your take on search vs social?

When google announced a preview of google image swirl I was compelled to check it out. After all lifeblob is also in the business of photo discovery and it is always good to know what other companies are doing in this area.

The preview is neatly built in flash and presents a very interesting visualization. This reminds me of a similiar visualization they did earlier for a “wonder wheel” view of navigating through search results. The part that I did not like though was that exploration ends very abruptly – perhaps this is because they are running on a limited data set and will not be a problem in the final version.

That brings me to the question – what is google trying to achieve through this? Is it just a ploy to counter the advances of microsoft in visual search or is there a bigger agenda behind this?

My verdict: There is a bigger agenda here. Read On.

1) Searching through images is not an easy task and given that google’s key focus is search, they would want to establish a big lead in the image search market as well. So far, google image search attempts to identify duplicate images so that they do not present duplicate results to the user. With this kind of a visualization however, google lets you explore variants of the same image so that you have more freedom to choose the one that fits your bill.

2) This is an excellent way to provide more visual detail around a searched topic. Imagine a wonder wheel kind of icon next to your regular search results, clicking on which opens up the image swirl widget and lets you see photos related to a search result.

3) Search is intent driven – you type in a few keywords and then choose a result that matches your intent. Google has used this information very effectively for its regular search to verify that the results being shown match the user intent and also to improve its data mining algos to continuously improve the results.

Images suffer from a terrible handicap that they don’t have any metadata to organize them and google typically relies on information around the images, tools like image labeler and some level of image analysis to understand what they are about. By presenting the results in a visualization like this and watching user interaction patterns, google will get excellent information about images and to improve their image search.

4) Navigating through images this way is very enjoyable and gets people to spend more time on google properties. Now, that may not necessarily align with their standard way of measuring search effectiveness ( its counterintuitive, but google wants you to spend as little time as possible on its search pages, which is their metric for measuring how good their results are ) but hey,  the more time they spend here, the more time they are off Microsoft’s visual search and thats a good thing . Plus, the metrics that apply for text based search may not apply for visual media search anyway.

What do you think about this?

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?

Yesterday, I was discussing a simple feature with Vishwas when the discussion veered towards the very subjective domain of usability. After spending almost an hour in the discussion, I thought to myself if there is a way to think about usability when implementing a feature.

Let me put things in perspective here. The feature being discussed was “The ability to allow a user to select a facebook photo or upload a photo in our facebook lifeblob application ?” Vishwas already had a gallery like view for the facebook photos and needed to figure out how the upload gets integrated in the view.

Vishwas: Lets add a file chooser element and an upload button above the gallery. That way, we get both the options on the same page.
Me: Sure. What happens when the upload button is clicked?
Vishwas: The photo gets uploaded and gets added to the collage.
Me: Hey, wait a min. Isn’t that confusing? I just thought that the photo would get uploaded and show up in the gallery.
Vishwas: Why do you want the user to go through an extra click? If the user did not select a photo in the gallery, he/she obviously wants the uploaded photo to get added to the collage.
Me: Well, yes – but that’s not what the text on the button tells me. It just says “Upload”. Plus there is a gallery below which intuitively makes me feel that the photo will get shown there.
Vishwas: But thats an unnecessary extra click for the user. The user will drop off if we make him/her do that.
… and this discussion goes on and on.

Two quick observations from this discussion:
a) As developers, we tend to optimize everything. Vishwas is not trying to find out the most intuitive way for upload – he is trying to find the path that goes through the least clicks.
b) There is a fear that getting the user to do that extra click will make them drop off.

The user perspective:
A user thinks very differently. Based on initial screen, a user has an expectation set before he/she performs an action. If your implementation deviates from that expectation, you are asking for serious trouble. In simple words, if you call the button “Upload”, you should only upload the photo and show the user a message indicating whether it was successful or not. Or call the button “Upload and add to collage” in the first place and don’t set the wrong expectation by showing a gallery below it.

As for reducing clicks, everyone seems to be obsessed with it these days, but in my opinion it is not such a big deal ( of course, I assume that you are not adding extra steps that are not necessary ). As long as users understand the value of an action and have belief that your app will do what the action says, they will be happy to do not just one, but a few extra clicks. When you skip steps, you shatter this belief and in most cases, this is what causes the user to drop off.

Conclusion:
Usability is plain common sense when you look at your application dispassionately from a user perspective. When in dilemma, err on the side of giving user more information than less.

Reuters ran an article last week talking about how traditional photo sharing services are having a run for their money because users of social networking services are happy sharing photos over there.

Very true! Infact, this is a repeat of the classic dilemma of reinvent or perish. The basic question to answer is – “Why do people share photos”? Two answers come to mind:

1) To show it to friends and family
2) For archiving, just in case you lose your hard drive full of photos

As all your friends move to social network and you get more connected online, naturally sharing photos on a social service starts making a lot of sense. Why would you want to upload your photos on another site and send links around when you can just upload your photos and the social site takes care of letting your friends know about it.

As a result photo services are left with no other option but to turn more social. However, the good news is that photos are still relatively dumb creatures and there hasn’t been much done to unleash the full power of a network of photos. So there is plenty of room for innovation and a lot of value addition that can be done to turn photo sharing into an activity, more entertaining than it has ever been.

That is what we are trying to do with photo sharing at lifeblob – building a more intelligent tool that understands how photos are connected and helps you navigate through them.

Today, I came across this post by Prof Ramesh Jain and I couldn’t agree more.

A quick peek at the most popular photo management solutions today will tell you that it is still all about uploading your photos, organizing into albums and creating a slideshow. Flickr, to some extent lets you discover related stuff through tags, but thats pretty much it.

To me, a photo management solution is about discovery, photos connecting with each other and navigating through the mesh of related photos. Add to this the time context around a photo and it has all the ingredients of a heady cocktail that could have you hooked for hours.

Imagine taking a shot of  “The Statue of Liberty” and instantly finding other people who also shot it around the same time. Or imagine going on a trek with your friends and getting a view of what your friends did while you were at the trek. Imagine attending a pink floyd concert and discovering shots taken by fans at several other previous concerts of pink floyd.

The possibilities are endless and there is a huge problem to be solved here. We are trying to crack some of these problems at http://www.lifeblob.com by making it really easy for you to add and organize your photos in a time based manner. We have also built a system that tracks connections of each photo and highlights connections that are more important to you than others.

We are in the process of turning on some discovery options like the examples that I gave above and hopefully you will be able to take a test ride of this before the end of this month.

If you also think that photo management is an unsolved problem, I would love to hear from you!

I just came across a week old article by Stephen Waddington about how lifestreaming is dumbass and blogging is kickass. Well, I think he missed the point.

I’m no big fan of twitter or friendfeed and have been a significantly late adopter of these services, but what I do see there is a really strong value add in real-time information discovery. The way twitter has been on top of breaking news lately, I don’t see how someone can ignore this channel anymore.

Now coming to thought leadership, twitter not only forces you to speak your mind concisely, it also gets you instant reactions from people listening to you thereby engaging in a discussion – isn’t a discussion the best way to show your thought leadership?

Is twitter or friendfeed the beginning and end of lifestreaming? Certainly not. My personal belief is that lifestreaming is evolving and eventually there will be solutions that satisfy different people in different ways.

Stephen, you think your photo stream is boring as hell – try putting it in a lifeblob timeline and see how engaging it can be with relations around it.  There is a lot of innovation that needs to happen and while all the lifestreaming solutions may not hold relevance for Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel, they would certainly gain prominence as all these services get better at organizing and visualizing this vast resource of information.