This is a topic that interests me a lot.  And even though I’m no psychologist or a researcher who studies the brain and evaluates why illusions work, I decided to experiment a bit and give a presentation on my thoughts on optical illusions.

It was a fun presentation to give.  I had quite a handful of people who asked me for slides after the presentation was over.  But slides without the talk would not mean a lot.  So I decided to post slides with the talk points online.

Click to go through the presentation: Why optical illusions work

Steven Spielberg’s Secret to Riches

1.

“Anyone who believes he is too small to make a difference has never been in bed with a mosquito.” – Anita Roddick

• If you love http://news.ycombinator.com/ – you should come.
• If you have started your own startup you should come.
• If you have a cool side project and want to scale it up, you should come.

(This is a Dutch event. Not free. Everyone shares the bill.)

Date:
Monday 6th December 2010

Time:
7pm
(Please don’t come fashionably late. This is a small get together. Not an event.)

Venue:
Sheesha
Roof Top, Shopper’s Stop,
Linking Road, Bandra (W)
Mumbai, India
Phone: 022-66770555

RSVP
Please let us know on facebook if you are coming so that we have an accurate head count and can do reservations accordingly.

A friend sent me the above video as a joke.  But to tell you the truth, this is exactly how it feels like being in a startup. You’ve got to plough and plough and plough your way through.

But recently I decided to get out of my comfort zone.  And have started testing the waters.

Recently, Vivek Khandelwal of VoiceTap.in invited Aditya Rao and yours truly to do a podcast on social media marketing and affiliate marketing for websites.  Aditya Rao spoke on social media marketing while I gave tips on affiliate marketing.

If you’re brave enough to listen to it and get past my voice to gain value from the content – then here is the link:

Voicetap Podcast on Social Media Marketing and Affiliate Marketing – with Aditya Rao and Ankesh Kothari
(Note: audio starts automatically.)

(Downloadable link for folks who want to download and listen to it on your ipods at your own leisure.)

I may do these a lot more often because a couple of reviews have not been too bad.  We’ll see.  Thanks.

So TEDxMumbai happened on 3rd April at Blue Frog – and it was a smashing hit!

We had 180+ attendants who were raving about the event. A lot of the speakers actually got standing ovations (a very rare thing in India)! And we had 17,759 views of the live online streaming video of the event!

Now that the event has been so successful, let me take this space to answer to 2 objections that kept on popping up during the days we were putting the event together.

Why go with the TED brand? Why not just create a new event and give it a new name?

Quite a few people have asked this. Most of them didn’t know what TED.com was. Its a legit question because a TEDxMumbai license does come with some restrictions. But the restrictions are nothing compared to the benefits the TED brand brings.

Apple took 18 months to sell 1 million units of their iPod. But just 1 week to sell 1 million units of their iPhones. By the time iPhones were launched, Apple had already built the traction they required to make big things happen quickly.

This is the big benefit we received from going with a TEDx license. TED has already done a lot of the hard work in creating traction that we could leverage.

• Because we went with TEDxMumbai, getting an awesome sponsor (Cleartrip) became easy for us.
• Getting kickass speakers became easy. We had to do very little convincing.
• And I doubt that we would have received 17,759 views of the live streaming video if it weren’t for the TEDx brand name!

People weren’t impressed with the speakers before the event

Except Anupam Kher, none of the other speakers were very famous.  People didn’t recognize their names. And because they didn’t recognize the names, they weren’t impressed with the list of speakers.  We had quite a few folks complaining about the speaker list on twitter and facebook.  And we know of at least a few people who didn’t apply for TEDxMumbai because they thought the speaker lineup wasn’t upto the mark.

We couldn’t say much about it before the event except tell people that very few of the TED speakers were popular before they got on the TED platform too.  And that we were focusing on awesome people with awesome ideas.  Not famous people with mediocre ideas.

And so I’m glad that the speakers out performed everyones expectations. Quite a few of them got standing ovations.  Well earned standing ovations.  There was not a single person who said that the speaker lineup wasn’t good — after the event! The speakers rocked the stage. And hopefully soon they will rock the interwebs too – once their videos are put up on youtube.

There are thousands of techies in India. But if you compare the ratio of techies-to-startups between USA or Israel and India – you’ll see that India lags far behind. Not a lot of innovative ideas come out of India. Why is this so?

2.

History gives us a clue. Many people have pondered over why the Industrial Revolution originated in Britain – and not in China or Spain or someplace.

Trade, especially woolen trade depended entirely upon London’s port. And as trade grew over the years, so did London’s population. London’s population exploded from 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600 and half a million in 1700.

And because of the explosion in trade, the standard of living of people in London increased too. The population just didn’t grow in numbers. They had money to spend too!

But London’s energy requirements didn’t grow as quickly as its population. The world relied on wood fuel because it was clean and cheap. The price of wood fuel and coal was the same. But coal was much easier to get than wood fuel. And so as London’s population grew, wood became more expensive because of supply problems, and so they started relying more on coal – even though it led to pollution. Where as, the rest of the world still stuck to wood.

In the 18th century, the French government actually tried to promote British technologies in France. But they failed because their economies of scale weren’t the same as that of Britain. In London, labour was expensive than energy. The opposite was true in the rest of the world. Energy was more expensive than labour.

Expensive labour + comparatively cheap energy = new innovations.

3.

And that is why, even though there are more IT people in India than in USA, more innovations pop out from USA than from India.

Because in India, labour is cheap and energy expensive. While the opposite is true in USA.

And so Indian IT folks take the easy part of providing services. While US IT folks take more risks and innovate more.

4.

How do we change that?

Some thoughts:

i. Increase the minimum wages in India.

ii. Invest in infrastructure.

iii. The IT parks in India could be converted into kick ass charter cities.

I’ve bagged a book deal along with the awesome Mike Keesee!

The book will be called Magic Bullets and will be out in March 2010. Here is the sell sheet for the book:

Magic Bullet – by Mike Keesee and Ankesh Kothari – Sell Sheet

To pre-launch the book, Mike and I will be blogging on TheStrategyDaddy.com blog.