Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cell phone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel’s parent) are breathing easy you can’t be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple’s Iphone and Google’s Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The “Mahabharat” (the great Indian epic battle) is about “what is tomorrow’s personal digital device”? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – “who is my competitor?”

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says “What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?” The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won’t compete on pure audio? “Elementary Watson”. So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as “digital.”

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question “who is my competitor for tomorrow?” The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared “internet is a fad!” and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today’s competitor. Today’s competitor is obvious. Tomorrow’s is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton’s law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC’s price dropped  from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film’s competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour “tamasha” (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a  typewriter? The answer for all the above is “I don’t remember!” For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is “alarm clock.” The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called “alarms.” What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said “Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast”! That sums it up rather neatly.*

- Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M. Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore*

To Read the Complete post, click here..

http://designhook.blogspot.com/2010/01/super-ram-and-durga-woman-contemporary.html

It has long been my contention that Bollywood has defined Indian notions of masculinity in more ways than one. Now it looks like there are parallels in Indian comics as well. In 1978, Ram on the iconic ACK Valmiki’s Ramayana cover by artist Pratap Mullick is a muscular thickset man with features that are unmistakably from Uttar Pradesh: much like Dharmendra, the superstar action hero of that era. Abhishek Singh’s Ram for Ramayan 3392 AD is more like today’s Bollywood heartthrob Hrithik Roshan, with sharp exotic features and an impossibly V-shaped torso. But add messy dreadlocks (Pirates of the Caribbean?), fabulous sword (He Man? Lord of the Rings?), and mysterious eyes under a brooding forehead (Batman?), and you have a truly 2008 Indian Superhero.

This exhibition also pays due diligence to the development of the Super Heroine, by tracing the journey of the Durga Icon. First, there is the Devi Mahatmya painting from the Guler tradition (c.1750), showing a nubile Durga in Mughal armour. Then there is Souren Roy’s brilliant imagination of Durga for ACK (1978), which is essentially a Bengali Durga with muscles, achieving curious shades of masculine aggression in a very motherly goddess. Saumin Patel’s Devi (2006) is all Comic Book Woman, complete with oversized breasts and tight leotards. Catwoman is an obvious influence, and he certainly likes Halle Berry. But when you are confronted with the illustration Devi Vanquishes Bala, you realize that the history of the Durga icon is too strong to shake off. As she plunges her spear into the chest of the demon, she is so unmistakably Mahishasuramardini! The weight of a 1500-year-old art heritage lends a pulsing, melodramatic quality to this image, and indeed to most of the illustrations on display.

In this session she showcases her previous projects like architectural typography, various album covers, books and the citibank logo..

Go Green !!

Agency – Saatchi & Saatchi

Actual Commercial

The making of the commercial

Manav

But still there are a lot of great bullet points which will shed a lot of light on his new strategy of How to market himself as a photographer in this new economy of Web 2.0 and using Social Media tools to create a tribe which follows him on FB, twitter, etc..

Enjoy Reading.

Here a video from Irenard.

Here is the first SprintCam v3 showreel and Fujinon Xa76 lens in Stade de France (Paris) and in Belgium, made for NAB 2009 exhibition. Mostly 1000FPS shots.

The browser-based program features stunning user-submitted photography from the natural world to create a massive As Seen on Earth photo mosaic that you can navigate by clicking on color patterns to create an infinite number of photograph mosaics.

by Jeffrey Zeldman

My father was a Sunday painter, and his art books played a formative role in my childhood. Like many kids, I was fascinated by sheer representation. I lost myself gazing at painstakingly rendered engravings of battling gladiators, picturesque villages, and Roman ruins at sunrise. I understood art to be synonymous with drawing well. The more painstaking the detail, the more lines in the etching or leaves on the tree, the better the artist in my childish, unformed estimation. Later, I discovered comic books. Still later, museums. Maxfield Parrish made me want to take drugs, and also made me realize I could never be a painter. Paul Klee seemed like a bad artist who couldn’t draw. Andy Warhol was a cheater because he used assistants.

I do not pretend to understand art today, but I do know that my earliest impressions had little to do with the nature of art, and everything to do with pure visual sensation. Like Disneyland and the circus, art was spectacle. But you can only ride the Matterhorn so many times, and you can only chomp so much cotton candy, before nausea sets in. From sensation, I graduated to style. Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man. Pop art. Rock, and then soul, and then punk album covers. I was a Style addict. I could not tell good from bad, but I knew what was cool.

“Many young web designers view their craft the way I used to view pop culture. It’s cool or it’s crap.”

Many young web designers view their craft the way I used to view pop culture. It’s cool or it’s crap. They mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style can communicate brand attributes.

It can also convey the designer’s contempt for the subject matter. “This is boring, so here are some stripes and here’s a drop-down menu, so you’ll know I’m better than this stupid assignment.” On this level, style is an underground language, from one peer to another, having nothing to do with the site’s visitors or purpose. Indeed, this stylistic appliqué can interfere with the site’s purpose. Then the usability gurus step in, blaming Design for the failings of stylistic fetishism.

Designers driven by Style can succeed if they are lucky enough to pick and choose projects that benefit from their stylistic obsessions. Most web designers do not have that luxury. But that doesn’t stop them from applying the stylistic vocabulary of leading designers to the projects they do have to work on. And so we end up with e-commerce sites that resemble rave flyers, and informational sites embellished with occasionally dazzling but more frequently misguided and inappropriate intros.

The web used to look like a phone book. Now much of it looks like a design portfolio. In fact, it looks like the design portfolio of 20 well-known designers, whose style gets copied again and again by young designers who consider themselves disciples. Distinctions between graphic design and communication design are lost on these designers. As is the distinction between true style, which evolves from the nature of the project, and derivative pastiche, which is grafted onto many projects like a third arm.

When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name — at least, in some circles.

Trouble is, we live in a society obsessed with surfaces (and afraid to peer beneath them). In a consumer culture where we buy $200 sneakers because they look cool and Beck’s song was used in the commercial, flash and dazzle are the highest-prized commodities of all.

For some clients and too many young designers, multimedia Flash projects have become synonymous with web design. If it doesn’t sing and dance, it must not be good — and it certainly isn’t cool. Great work is being created in Flash (SWF), and it’s receiving overdue recognition in award shows — particularly in traditional, high-profile award shows, where “the digital stuff” precedes the multimillion-dollar TV commercials. Judges expect TV commercials to have a brilliant concept and higher production values than most commercial films. Naturally, they expect web sites to blow them away, too.

Boundary-busting, stylistically baroque experiments built with the latest technology will continue to win awards as long as judges continue to view them in the latest browsers on wide-screen G5s and Pentiums with T1 connections. And, it goes without saying, they will win these awards only if they are prize-worthy in their graphic design and programming. We’re not talking about bad design, here. We’re talking about design at the highest levels — but design of a certain type only.

Most of my colleagues design sites like this. My jaw drops when I witness their achievements, and I cheer when they take home their well-deserved prizes. But I also worry.

“Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and usability where most of the web must be built.”

I worry because this type of design, which is appropriate in certain settings and inappropriate in many others, is the only type of web design achieving recognition. Thus it is the type of design young designers are emulating, not only in their personal projects (which is great), but also on commercial projects where it may cause harm.

I worry because young designers who confuse style with design are learning to copy their heroes’ technical tricks and stylistic flourishes, but not necessarily learning to communicate in this medium. “Bullet Time” is great for “The Matrix,” but not for documentaries. And since much of web design is informational — or is supposed to be — the wholesale grafting of other people’s stylistic achievements onto informational sites does not advance the medium; it just makes it confusing.

I worry because there are designers who will never evolve their own, individual styles, let alone learn to evolve brand-appropriate styles for particular projects. Because recruiters lack critical vocabularies, and will place people whose portfolios demonstrate a knowledge of “what’s cool” in jobs where they will be miserable. (“With your talent, you’ll turn that place around.”) Because eventually traditional designers who do understand branding and communication design, and who do know the difference between Style and Design, will enter this market and displace some young designers who have never had the chance to understand the craft they practice.

I worry about the medium, because not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and hardcore usability where most of the web must be built. And there are fewer and fewer incentives for web designers to toil in these fields, since this type of work pleases web users but wins absolutely no recognition from the industry, aside from a paycheck. (“My God, it loaded so quickly and worked so well, even in IE3 on my Dad’s old Dell machine.” You know how awards show judges are always saying things like that? Neither do I.)

Most of all, I worry about web users. Because, after ten-plus years of commercial web development, they still have a tough time finding what they’re looking for, and they still wonder why it’s so damned unpleasant to read text on the web — which is what most of them do when they’re online.

As long as our society values Style over Design, surface over substance, this situation is not going to improve. Of course, I think the same every four years, when I have to vote.

About this talk

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.

About Pattie Maes

At the MIT Media Lab’s new Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another.

About Pranav Mistry

Pranav Mistry is the genius behind Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.