One of the rules that the author explains and that caught my attention is that of Serendipity. To begin with, there is something really fairy tale-like, if that’s the right way to describe it, about the way the word sounds [ser-uhn-dip-i-tee]. The fact is that the word has its roots from an actual Persian fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip” whose protagonists always make discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of [Wikipedia]. The vernacular usage of the word today is in the same vein with the dictionary stating the meaning of the word as ‘the aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident’.  The role that Serendipity played in the advancement of science and technology is unfathomable especially in the field of natural and biological sciences.

As kids most of us have learnt the basic understanding of the meanings of the words ‘discovery’ and ‘invention’. We understood that discovery is the learning of anything abstract that was already existent, so it was an act of knowledge building just that you are the first person learning about it while invention is the act of creating anything that was previously non-existent.  Organizations today in the effort to sustain competitive advantage in the market have learnt to encourage their employees to be more creative by fostering an ‘Innovative’ environment. So what is the meaning of Innovation? Well, unfortunately the dictionaries don’t give us a clear picture. They say that the meaning of the word is ‘the act of innovating’ or ‘the introduction of a new method or idea’ etc., I’m neither a linguist nor an authority on the English language but if you asked me to define it purely from the standpoint of understanding the term better, I would say that Innovation is a combination of consequences of the acts of both ‘discovery’ and ‘invention’. More in mathematical terms you could say,

Innovation = f (Discovery+Invention)

The definition I’ve assumed for ‘Discovery’ in the above statement is a bit of a white lie. Here the definition assumed is the learning of a pre-existent fact otherwise not known by ‘you’ alone and not necessarily to anybody else.  So in other words the definition for Discovery being used here is purely personal knowledge building. This is where Serendipity comes into picture. The author of this book says that accidental learning of a previously unknown fact has a potential to spark new connections between the neurons in your brain which lead to the generation of new ideas which could result in great innovations.  Remember, I’m not talking about intentional learning where you sign up for a course at college and have expectations about what you’ll learn, I’m talking about accidental learning where you come to the library to find a book on ‘programming’ but pulled a book on ‘global warming’ from the rack because you liked the title of the book etc.,

So are our modern day protocols well equipped to foster our creative spaces by allowing for this form of accidental learning? Are we positioning ourselves for Serendipity? We got to think about this.

I mean what do we do if we want information on something? We go to our favourite search engine, use a couple of keywords as queries and bingo! 9/10 times we find what we want. And for all you know the miss hit was because you did not use the right keyword in the first place. This protocol completely is counterintuitive to the idea of accidental learning. You intend to learn about something and thanks to the search engines you get what you want.  One can argue that these days there is  a great deal of knowledge sharing that happens on your social networks but even in those cases it is still not accidental learning, you are just exposed to what your friends have found and most often they share the same values or interests with you.

Think about reading a newspaper and enroute to the sports section, while flipping pages, you find an interesting article on global warming and suddenly that reminds you that you had to pay your electricity bill and today was the last day! That is serendipity. I have no argument on the fact that the web is a gold mine of information both in terms of quantity and variety but there hasn’t been any solution or software that could emulate the feeling of serendipity as much as our libraries or news papers are positioned to. As mentioned before, Serendipity has played a significant role in advancing science and technology often by creating spaces for innovation and it will continue into the future. History of course does not have any account of this as it concentrates more on the often fabricated ‘aha’ or ‘eureka’ moments of innovations.

The information includes a picture of the person plus links to the facebook/twitter/linkedin/Google profiles all together in the side bar where the Google ads used to appear (Curious to hear what Google thinks of this). This feature is extremely useful as it allows you to make new connections with relevant people of interest which would not have been as flexible and certainly less probable if not for this feature. What’s more? You can add a   comment about this person right there in your inbox which can aid as a memory assistant for future conversations with this person. This means you got a nice little social CRM tool running right in your email. Check the screenshot.

I’ve been using this plugin for a couple of weeks and it already has proved to be useful in making a couple of fruitful connections that I otherwise would not have discovered for sure.  The company started in early 2010 and is well funded by some top notch investors, one of them being Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail. Rapportive is looking forward to adding new services and expanding soon to other email clients. They also have a pretty busy crowdsourcing/feedback tool which gives us a nice overview of what features are being worked on/planned for the future etc.,

Give it a shot and install it’s definitely a keeper.

Many online & offline magazines make use of Pictograms and 3D plots in order to present data to the public. Pictograms and 3D plots though may look very appealing can usually mislead us while interpreting the data. A couple of examples of such cases are shown below.

The above example is a pictogram that aims to show the distribution of advertising budgets across TIME, Newsweek & US News. What is clear is that TIME attracts the largest amount of advertising spending followed by Newsweek & then US News. What is interesting to note is that having a look at the figures quoted in the picture tells you that the  ratio of TIME’s to Newsweek’s share is around 1.6 and that of TIME/US News is around 2.9. This means that TIME should be only about 1.6 times larger than Newsweek and only 2.9 times larger that US News. But according to the pictogram TIME looks definitely more than the above ratios. What is this visual discrepancy?

Well what actually happened is that the picture in the pictogram was magnified and used for the three data points. While magnifying the picture both the height and width have been increased proportionally to avoid distortion. This means that the actual increase in size between the TIME’s figure and Newsweek’s figure is actually 2.56 (1.6*1.6, accounting for both height & width). Similarly the increase in size between Time’s figure and US News figure is 8.4 instead of 2.9.

So, our eyes, which capture the area of the pens rather than only the height, are misled to think that TIME’s share of budgets is way ahead of its competitors while it actually is not

The following is another example of an unnecessary use of 3D plot to present the data.

The aim of this graph is to showcase the drastic increase in the number of Starbucks outlets around the world. If you look at the graph carefully between 1999 & 2003 there is an increase from about 2000 stores to a little more than 6000. This is effectively an increase of about 200%. But the from the graph below it appears that the increase is much bigger than what the actual numbers suggest.

Using a 3D graphs brings in with it another problem, the third dimension. So when a 3D picture is magnified the height, width & breadth are all simultaneously increase to avoid distortion. This is the reason the picture looks much bigger than the 200% increase suggested by the numbers.

So essentially make use of the traditional 2D plots for the best and most accurate representation of your data.

I’m completely convinced that Fast food joints are the best places for the young folk that most throng these joints to take a few lessons on Team Work. This is not a random observation. This is a hypothesis that I proved to be true after years of collecting data of statistical significance . No, seriously jokes apart I’ve been visiting this fast food joint since a loong time and I’ve visited at random times, a good combination of early mornings, late mornings, evenings and on both on weekdays and weekends. I can say that even at peak times never was  my order  held for more than 15 minutes, averaging at around 7 minutes in general. Believe me when I say peak time I’m speaking about at least around 10 orders being placed per minute and sometimes each order in bulk, Ex: 10 plates idli, 5 plates Dosa etc., Another observation made was that its always the same 4 people who takes the oders at the counter and then another couple of people inside the kitchen actually executing the order. What is another constant is there is continual chaos at these food joints irrespective of the time of the day. With all these unfavourable parameters one would would think how these folks have been managing to sustain its customers for all these years. The answer is simple ! They work as a team. They have all the qualities that an efficient team should have. I’ve read a few online resources that talk about the traits of a great team and when I tried to align these traits along with the few observations that I made at these fast food joint folks I actually got a good overlap of these traits.

These are some of the often found traits of members of a ‘great’ team:

1. Sharing of responsibilities & rotating roles as needed.

2. Showing of support, respect and trust.

3. Great  understanding, immaculate communication and collaboration

4. Having a unified goal oriented approach in their actions/work.

Another very inspiring story is that of the mumbai ‘Dabbawallahs’ whose business model was studied by big business schools around the world. You can find more information on them here:

http://www.mydabbawala.com/

They also seem to have set up a twitter account here: http://twitter.com/smxindia

I’ll try to update this space regularly regarding this event.

Time to get excited?

biztrivia.wordpress.com/

to this new place.
http://www.biztrivia.org/blog/

I will be more regular in updating this space and hopefully will meet and make many good friends

So are we giving way too much attention to this topic than it requires? Maybe or maynot. But what is true is that India’s Economy has never been better and the good news is that the party has just begun. The Indian stock market has been performing extremely well and has shown signs of standing pretty tall in difficult times which is always good in the long term. What is more encouraging are the projections that some of the top financial analysts have furnished. Even the most cautious ones are quite confident that the sensex can easily soar over 40,000 mark in comfortable time. Morgan Stanley said that the sensex will cross the 50000 barrier in about 10 years from now, which sounds unbeliavable , atleast this point in time. Earning a global footprint through foreign acquisitions and domestic mergers which would eventually unlock greater value through its operations are other strong reasons for us to be optimistic. Finally other businesses that are huge and have not been listed ,like the Retail sector, when listed will only help in realising the $ 100 billlion dream faster. What is defnitely true and maybe more important than anything else for the members of India Inc., to focus on is the fact that there will be tough competition and the the only way to reach the top spot is to sustain this competition. After all its the Survival of the Fittest !

I would’nt be surprised if your answer is Amazon. But you are worng. The correct answer is Zappos.com. The emergence of Zappos from a tiny shoe retail store to one of America’s largest online business has been one of the most startling sucess stories for online businesses. The site, which was founded in 1999 had just $1.6 million in gross sales in 2000. This has risen to $600 million in revenue in 2006.

Zappos is derived from the word Zapatos which means shoes in spanish. Apart from shoes Zappos very recently started off with selling ladies and gents handbags. A part of its revenue model also includes in running ad campaingns in the form of banners on different sites and an affiliate program where webmasters get paid for refering customers to zappos. With about 4 milllion customers the company had about 1% of the Total american population buy something from them.

Being a Web retailer only means that IT plays a huge role. Part of the reason for their business success has been because they have managed to use power of IT in a smart and efficient manner. They follow a policy which states that IT should prove useful to the business and not to the developers.

Zappos doesnt manufacture shoes but does develop its own software.The compnay has a small team of developers and has built the majority of the tools using open source software like PERL, MySQL, Linux and Apache. This includes the website , Warehouse management system , Customer service tools etc. Zappos proves to be another example of how business can succeed by employing the open source movement.

It will be interesting to keep a watch on the strategies that Zappos will employ in the coming years to reach greater heights. All the Best !