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Less Boring

Pushkar Sane — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:57:10 +0000

On Friday I visited a tier 3 town in Guangdong, China. We were doing an immersion exercise with a task to understand media and technology habits. We interacted with a cross-section (age-group) of people. It was very fascinating to see how each and everyone of them insisted that they were time-starved and had no time to watch TV. Here is an example where the TV is ON but no one is watching.

In order to find out their device/media dependency we asked them to choose only one device that they can’t live without. Interestingly almost all of them said Mobile Phone. One youngster answered that he is choosing Mobile because it iss ‘LESS BORING’ than other devices/media.

I guess the era of choosing a product/brand/device because it is ‘more interesting’ is over. For the younger generations novelty factor depreciates right after the launch announcement (not even an actual launch) and then it is all about choosing best of the ‘less boring’ options available in the market.

I can very easily predict that life for marketing & advertising professionals is certainly going to be difficult.

The Joy of Listening

Pushkar Sane — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:53:23 +0000

Last month I was in Delhi for business and as always had several hours to kill before I took the 3am flight back to Hong Kong. I decided to shop for some books and dropped into a nearby Crossword. I saw Shammi Narang – TV news reader from Doordarshan era. I always remembered him for his recital of a legendary poem on Jhansi Ki Rani (written by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan). Shammi was reading from a book and soon I realised he was narrating one of Munshi Premchand’s story – Shatranj Ke Khiladi. It was the launch of a set of three audiobooks by Shammi Narang on Munshi Premchand’s stories.

I sat there for 30 odd mins and really enjoyed the Shammi’s reading. Its been ages since I listened to a story in any of the Indian languages. As a child my life was full of interesting stories – from grandparents, aunts, and of course language teachers. Today our lives are so busy that we’re no longer reading to kids & teenagers – certainly not much in Indian languages. We take the easy of option of placing them in front of TV so that we don’t have to spare time. Sad but true.

Listening to Shammi brought back many memories of listening. It made me feel very nostalgic and I walked out with the audiobooks.

Status Broadcast through Ping.fm

Pushkar Sane — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:29:12 +0000

I seriously started using Ping.fm & I must say I’m finding it very useful. The status updates across my networks are quick – in fact Facebook & Twitter are super quick. There are some bugs – my Linkedin status is still not getting updated but I’m sure that will get sorted out shortly. What I like about Ping is its simplicity & multi-device/platform approach. I don’t necessary have to go to the website to do it. I can simply do the updates through emails, msgers or even my iPhone/Blackberry. I know it can be used for many more applications than just Status Updates but I’m yet to fully explore it.

FYI – .fm is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Federated States of Micronesia, a group of islands located in the Pacific Ocean. Just like .tv belonged to Tuvalu – another Pacific Ocean Island. Two small Pacific Ocean Islands controlling two most important media domains – TV & FM – interesting isn’t it?

Strong recommend to try Ping.fm