Tech Wars: Mobiles vs. Cams/iPod

Mobile Phones Versus iPods/Canon

It is finally happening. After a long wait, iPod will soon see some serious competition, not from the side of Microsoft, but from the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Actually not iPod but iPod mini (has smaller hard disk capacity). Sony Ericsson has come out full force with what they call as Walk-man Phone - W800. Nokia has recently launched its N series mobile phones which it dubs as iPod killers. These phones have a whopping 4GB of memory built into them. While the Sony Ericsson mobile phones are based on their own OS and are Java enabled, the Nokia's N Series run on Symbian series 60 platform. The strenght of SE W800 is whopping 30hrs battery life, while Nokia fails on this front. Similarly iPods also have a good battery life. Sony Ericssons good MP3 performance was seen in their earlier phone SE K700i (my phone, but lacked in external memory card support - the only drawback). From Nokia stable the best phone in N Series offering is N91. This is probably the only N series phone hving ability to compete with iPod and SE W-800. Also with SE W-800 the benefit is that with phone off one can still listen to MP3s, is this present in Nokia N Series is not known yet. Also, Nokia N Series is priced at a very high end. One big decision one has to take is whether he uses phone as a phone or a walkman. The prices of both phones is higher than iPod mini. The war has just begun. Its a three way war Apple vs. Nokia vs. Sony Ericsson. No one can say for sure, where will the customer head to. This is where we marketing guys have a role to play. If you are actually looking for a walkman phone, look ahead, go in for SE P-910 smart phone. If you wanna spend money - spend it wisely. Its a smart phone, really capable of playing MP-3 and has Symbian OS running it. And as of now its the best smart phone available in the market.

Now Canon versus Nokia versus Sony Ericsson. Well as can be seen on my PhotoBlog Sony Ericsson's mobile Camera (K-700i at mere 0.3MP) clicks good snaps if proper light is there. One thing which should be clear about mobile cams is that they need good light to click good snaps, this is because they lack a flash light (can you imagine a flash light sucking your mobiles battery everytime you click a snap). Now again here pitted are earlier mentioned phones from both the companies - SE W800 and Nokia's N Series (with N91 being best. Both these phones feature 2MP camera and Nokia N91 has 20X Digital zoom (keep in mind DIGITAL ZOOM and NOT OPTICAL ZOOM). Also Nokias phones are almost the double the cost of decent digicams having around 5MP and a good OPTICAL ZOOM and over it Digital Zoom. While Sony Ericsson's offering will be slightly higher than these digicams. Here also, priority needs to be seen. And before setting priority one needs to also check out an offering by Samsung - SCH S-250, its the world's first 5MP camera phone. But till the time camera phones are not integrating Optical Zoom also as a part of the phone, till then for digital photography one should prefer stand alone cameras, else any mobile phone having a lower resolution cam around 0.3MP to 1 MP should be preferred. It will help you save money for a good Digicam. Camera Phones are meant to click photos as and when they happen. This is because there are occasions when you don't have your camera, but mobile is always with you. So the higher pixel range camera is not required in a mobile phone. Even a 1MP camera phone will be useful, since the snaps clicked by these mobiles will be of print quality. Till some more innovationin the field of incorporating Optical Zoom in camera phones does not happen, the clear winner in this battle is stand alone Digital Camera with a low resolution camera phone.

BUT technology is growing at an unimaginable speed, thus this topic will keep on cropping up year after year.

Paris Hilton Advertisement for Burger

Well Well Well......here is the link for the spicy hot car washing advertisement featuring the one and only Paris Hilton. The full version - uneditted one can be seen here: The ADVERT. But important thing is that the advt is not for car wash, but for a Spicy BBQ Burger. But this whole advt will not be featured over the television. The censor board has made the company cut it into a 30 sec advt.

Car washing just cannot get better than this, the only car washing scene which can be compared to this is probably featuring Denise Richards in movie Wild Things.

Lately Liril's advt also had to be cut short, just to please the censor board. Why can't we just do away with censor board and let the creativity flow. If the common crowd doesn't like it it will clearly reflect in the sales of the particular product. Even in Pepsi's "Oye Bubbly" advertisement the starting part featuring the belly buttons as lips calling out for Pepsi has also been cut.

Let the advertisements come on screen as they are made. Pepsi's advt was tooo good to be censored and cut. Liril had come out with some serious creativity - moving away from all the waterfall advertisements which was their backdrop in past, with only models changing.

Let the creativity and the market forces prevail to determine the success or failure of advt and also let the audience only determine how the advt is. Its as simple as "If we can have Mallika Sherawat on screen, these advertisements are anyday much decent than her acting or whatever she does."

My Photoblog Kickstarted

Well, finally my photoblog is up and running.
You can access it at: Snapshots from heaven

Go ahead and have some fun.

Thinking about a Photo Blog.....

Well thinking that this is probably the best time I can go ahead and set my own photoblog where I can post some selected pics taken from mobile cam or from other digicams....

Since am free for next few days, don't wanna waste it. Already planning to get a digital SLR - choice between Canon EOS 350D or Nikon D70s. Most probably Canon is going to win this fight if Nikon does not come out with a good competing camera at 8MP. Also, since more into nature photography have to look for a good wide angle lens which can take panorama pics at a go.

Just waitin' to Lay my hands on one of these two beasts of Digital SLRs.

So will put up the link after creating a photoblog soon.

My fave photo shoots have always been snow capped peaks (should have had an SLR cam before going to Sikkim in March). I aim to shoot a great sunrise someday (for that getting up around 5am is absolutely necessary). Though have got good sunsets at Andaman and a couple at Railway station. For clicking a great pic, one needs some real patience.

Next my fave shots I like taking are in a move train, standing or sitting on the door of the coach and clicking some country shots....trust me.....train is the best thing Britishers gave to India ever. India is extremely beautiful, and it can only be experienced during a train journey.

Also, now maybe in future I will be moving around a bit, but following lines will always always hold true: (The lines were given to this world by GnR - Paradise City)

Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green
And the girls are pretty
Take me home (Oh, won't you please take me home)

[Home here is Delhi New Delhi, having the prettiest girls in the country and one of the very few metropolitans blessed with loads of greenery - truly a PARADISE CITY]

Lets see what the future has in store for me now...........

MBA - Ponder over it.........

Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, Canada, advocates "You don't get trained in the capacity for managing in an MBA programme. You think you do, but . . . a lot of people end up grabbing for techniques. Where it goes wrong is in the case-study method: give me 20 pages and an evening to think about it and I'll give you the decision tomorrow morning. It trains people to provide the most superficial response to problems... getting the data in a nice, neat, packaged form and then making decisions on that basis. It encourages managers to be disconnected from the people they are managing".

Well, Mintzberg is 150% right. What we are taught are just mere techniques. Most of the students in any B School have no work experience. Most of us take MBA as a natural extension to our bachelors degree and in top B Schools the percentage of engineers is clearly above distinction (75% of the batch).

Well as a person who has been there done that, I would like to admit that though case studies is a method followed by all the B Schools as a primary teaching aid, but then as Mintzberg says what students do is just put the whole case neatly down on slides and in recommendations are made by just "thinking out of the box". With pressure of too many projects or assignments to be submitted, the case studies are the once which suffer the most as everyone feels they can do it anytime after finishing of the projects. Also, another place where we - in India - lack is - we do not have a huge collection of local (India Specific) case studies. We are always referring to Harvard BS case studies. In only some top B Schools do some professors convert their Industry experience into case studies, and these are the best case studies which they can use since they were personally involved in them.

But what I feel should be the future trend for B School education is having more of professionals coming to teach for a semester. Also as projects the Industry projects will provide the maximum learning to the students.

If B Schools and corporates want to have a continuous supply of good managers in future then they should work together to change the teaching methodologies in B Schools.

Also reading of "What they don't teach at Harvard Business School" should be made compulsory at all B Schools. One excellent book on people interaction - another area where B Schools lack.

THE INDIAN "IDLE"

Well we have seen competitions like "Indian Idol", "American Idol", "Channel V's - Get Gorgeous" and all such competitions......
BUT WHERE IS INNOVATION.....
Imagine competitions like:
- The Indian IDLE
- The Sleeping IDOL
- Channel [T]ea's Get Bored

If anyone has any practical ideas on these lines....can help in making this list for future television serials longer.....and these are the concepts which will provide the best possible laughing material.....

You can see how bored I have been lately......my blogging rate is on a sharp rise.....

MICROSOFT TROUBLED BY GOOGLE

Well the following link "Microsoft versus Google" makes for one hell of an interesting reading, especially for those who are open source software lovers.

The story goes like.........
Once upon a time Sergey Brin and Larry Page started of a company which claimed to provide the fastest and the best search possible. That was just a start. Companies like Microsoft and Yahoo did not consider them a challenge and outsourced their search tool to other companies, instead of having a search machine of their own. No one would have at that time guessed what Google's plan could have been. The magic which Google's search machine did was create a brand Google. Well the brand was such that instead of saying a sentence like "Search for xyz" people started using "Google for xyz". The word "search" was replaced by word "Google". Their were competitions like "Who is the best Googler?". Even in our campus we used to have student conducted Quizzes over LAN where the use of Google or any search machine was allowed.......but it was just to find the best Googler.

Also another thing which Google achieved was - cracking the mystery of how to make profits from online advertisements.

The Google of the search fame was ignored by the Microsoft as being just a simple online search tool. It was then, when Google had decided to go for its IPO, that they also decided to launch of their e-mail service - and what a marketing strategy to follow - "Membership by invitation".........this is a do or die strategy. But then to make it work they had a 1GB capacity for their mailboxes (which is now increasing towards 2GB). This was like a major earthquake for other big email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft and Rediff. While Yahoo and rediff reacted pretty fast MS was slow and it provided higher 250MB storage only on new accounts not on existing......what a miser Bill Gates is. For Google, this venture into email was a big success and from here the company has not looked back.

They are enjoying a real good run at Wall Street, and they have entered into many areas either through their own softwares or through acquisition - major being Orkut (social networking), Picasa (Photo management and editting software), Hello, and a real big one being Desktop Search (developed in-house).

It is the desktop search which is now giving sleepless nights to Microsoft - what will Google come up with next.

Also there are many cases as can be seen in the link given where Microsoft employees have left MS for Google.

Lets see where this war goes.......and there is no way Microsoft can buy Google.........just because of one simple reason........it was developed on Linux and MS buying a company which has its roots in Linux doesn't sound a good publicity for its current products.

Imagine the following scenario - Google releasing their own version of Linux with real easy to use desktop, an office software based on Open Office and also a browser!!!!!!! This all together can be a real Microsoft Killer.......

Till the results of this war are out.....Google away to glory.........