Param Aggarwal writes here.

The song playing on the radio was ‘chitti aayi re aayi re chitti aayi, watan ki mitti aayi’.

And it brought to my mind the beauty of physicality. The touch of paper, the smell of the ink. The knowledge that the person who sent it had touched the same paper.

I wished that I could send such a letter that would sing this song, when opened.

And it clicked me.

The first episode was the postal service. Physical mail.

The second was email. It digitized post entirely.

The third episode would be something that combines the beauty of both. I don’t know what it might look like. Imagine.

But I do know this:

“Intelligent electronics has the potential to bring back the lost physicality of the digitized IT world.”

Just thought of this today. I believe this will be the defining idea of my entire career.

There is this huge thing going on in the industry. Change.

IBM had quit the PC business 5-7 years back and shifted to enterprise focus. PC business went to Lenovo. Lenovo’s biggest market is China. Apple’s revenue passed Lenovo’s revenue in China.

HP had bought Palm. Now HP is going to discontinue WebOS, Palm’s OS. They will discontinue their phones and tablets. HP is also considering spinning off their PC division. HP is the largest PC maker in the world by volume!

Nokia and RIM consistently missing revenue and profit estimates. They are not the leaders anymore. They were the industry leaders just 5 years back. (Hint: before the iPhone)

Microsoft buys Skype. Why? No one knows.

Google buys Motorola. A software company buys a hardware company. A software company that gives everything for FREE!

Gosh.

There was a promise of better times,
a promise of brighter hours,
a promise of an easier life,
a promise of satisfaction.

The promise was kept,
the dreams reached,
the wants gained,
the desires fulfilled.

And then the stars seemed brighter,
the wind seemed cooler,
the moon seemed whiter,
the heart seemed happier.

But it was just another night.
Again.
And there was another promise.
Again.

Be arrogant about being yourself.
Be selfish about doing great things.
Be envious about unfulfilled dreams.
Be devilish about criticizing yourself.

The new bad is good.

A Question of Purity of Photography

Photography means ‘painting with light’. It is an art form just like painting. A photo sensitive film is taken, exposed to the scene that is to be captured and developed. The film, the camera and the chemicals used are all tools of the trade.

Recently the essence of photography has come under question for the use of post-processing tools like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Why shouldn’t the camera do everything?

In film photography, if the film is under or over exposed during a shot, the only way to correct it is to use chemicals while developing the film. This is a fix. No chemical can bring back the details lost to improper exposure. Chemicals are not a way to make photos, they are a tool to enhance them.

Hence the existence of post processing tools is in no means an excuse to improperly light your subject expecting to be able to fix it in post processing. These tools exist to give you creative freedom. They allow us to give a dramatic effect to photographs. They allow us to turn it from what the eye sees everyday into a work of art.

In art, nothing is impure. What matters is the form and expression of the photograph.

Visiting Windows Phone 7

I see six smartphone platforms currently:
1. Apple iOS
2. Windows Phone 7
3. HP WebOS
4. Google Android
5. Blackberry OS
6. Nokia something-something.

Out of them, 1,4 and 5 have a huge market share and 1, 2 and 3 are really really well designed.

Today I read an article about 2, so lets talk about that.

Windows Phone 7 is the first thing I have seen out of Microsoft that is realy really fresh and original. It is inspired by the design of Zune which was meant to be an iPod competitor.

Let’s first get a feel of what it looks like: Windows Phone Website

Just see the screenshots here, to get an idea: Windows Phone 7 on Wikipedia

Here is an interesting video that talks about the design decisions that went into this Metro UI: The Context @ CTIA: Windows Phone 7 Overview on YouTube

See? It’s pretty different, right? A very very minimal design. No gradients, shadows or borders. Basic colours and no UI or chrome or buttons. Just content. The focus is on the content. And this is a very very good design perspective. I’m impressed. I am happy to see that the competition is actually pretty good for iOS. It’s just that Windows Phone 7 is not perfectly implemented. It’s a good idea but not properly taken through to completion.

Like, lets see their ad: New Windows Phone 7 Official Commercial TV Ad on YouTube

Do you see? They don’t really get it. This is not an ad that makes me want to buy this stuff. The idea or design is never enough in itself. The software is buggy and confusing. Apple is good at that, they are consistent and they simply don’t provide the features that aren’t well implemented yet.

Here is an in depth review I read: ignore the code: Windows Phone 7

It’s a good critique of UI design written by usability expert Lukas Mathis. You should actually try reading completely. User Interface design is going to become more and more important as technology matures and a good user experience becomes more important.

(This is why Apple has finally found success these days. Because they are good at design. “Technology alone is not enough” they say: Steve Jobs: Technology alone is not enough on YouTube and Apple - iPad 2 - TV Ad - We Believe on YouTube)

And now the next version called ‘Mango’ has more interesting stuff coming that is pretty interesting: Joe Belfiore shows off Windows Phone Mango on YouTube

I am really impressed with the work Microsoft’s phone division has done. Specifically the design philosophy and ideas. They are not just copying Apple but doing their own thing. It’s so much fun to see and follow such amazing competition.

You don’t profit in a monopoly, you work harder : A lesson from Apple

Total Profit = Profit per Device x Number of Devices Sold

Every high school pass out knows this equation. To maximize profit, you can either maximize the profit per device sold or you can maximize the number of devices sold. Profit has the tendency to stay constant. If you reduce the profit per device, the number of devices sold will increase.

Hence you either decide to price your product high, so that you can make more per device sold and call yourself a premium company or you can sell a large number of devices and call yourself a mass market company. In the end, the profit is the goal.

Now in a monopoly, it is pretty obvious that you would want to price your product at a high rate because there is simply no one else in the market. While, to enter an existing market you would want to reduce the prices on your product and try gaining some market share.

But Apple beats conventional wisdom, again.

The phone industry was as competitive as it could be at the launch of the iPhone. There was no monopoly, just cut throat competition. Apple should have kept the price of the iPhone low to be able to slowly leach in and gain market share. After all Apple itself said that in the next year, it would like to gain at least a percent of the market share. And that was an ambitious goal.

But Apple decided to sell the iPhone at a high margin of upto 40%! The iPhone is a pricey phone to say the least. And still, today four years hence, the iPhone has captured 5% of the mobile phone market. That is staggering.

In 2010, Apple launched the iPad. There was nothing like it in the market. It was an instant success. A monopoly in the true sense of the word.

Apple should have priced it at a thousand dollars. After all there is no competition! But again, beating conventions the iPad was priced at half of that, with just a 25% margin.

And therein lies the brilliance of Apple. Because it worked. Apple is making a ton of money. Both the product lines have been incredibly successful.

In the phone market, they knew that if you provide the customer with a good well thought out experience they would be ready to pay for it. So people who can afford a smart phone would most likely get the best phone available. And they made sure that this best phone was the iPhone. After all, reducing the price by 10% would not have increased sales by 10%.

In the tablet market, it was necessary to use the monopoly to establish total market dominance. And we see how it has worked. All the other competitors were quick to come out with their clones, but they failed to compete on the price.

If Apple had learnt nothing from the PC era, and had priced the iPad at an exorbitant rate, the competitors would have competed successfully on price and Apple would have again been left to a tiny market share. Thankfully, Apple did not err again.

A low price made it very lucrative to prospective buyers who didn’t have much idea how they were going to use this entirely new class of device. It was safe to try out this device solely on its ‘cool’ factor.

It is very interesting to see these traditional economics failing to apply as we enter this amazing new post PC era, and as Apple shapes the future of the tablet era, or more appropriately the iPad era.

How Megapixels and Zoom Fool You

“Hey, got a new camera?”
“Ya!”
“How much megapixels?”
“Umm.. 16.2MP.”
“Wow! That’s great! Cameras are improving so much these days. Just a month ago I got a 14.3MP one. Time to get a new one I guess.”

You, yes you, are under the hold of a marketing gimmick of the camera companies. Want more megapixels? Pay us more. Why should you want more megapixels? Because we advertised it to be better and fooled you.

Companies get people to talk about these buzz words to compete on something that is easy to increase but not really affecting the actual photo quality. Just like the megahertz, megabytes and gigabytes of the PC era.

Megapixels is just the number of dots your picture is capturing. At 16 megapixels, you get around 5000x3500 dots. And that is just plain useless, it is never ever going to be of use. When I take pictures, I’ll either see them on my computer: which has only around 1500x1000 dots on the screen or put them on Facebook which resizes photos to 1000x700. So it really doesn’t matter what the resolution is if it is above 5MP, really. And all camera’s today have 5MP, even a phone camera. But companies increase the price of camera’s by 2000 bucks for every 2MP increase. Because the sensor is costlier, to package more dots in the same size. This is just plain stupid to increase the cost for something that doesn’t improve the image quality. (This is even useless for taking postcard size prints. There are just too many dots.)

For zoom, anything above 3x and you are cropping the image so much that there are a few things that hurt the image: focusing and blur. The camera has to focus on an object so that it appears sharp. As the distance to the object increases it becomes more difficult. So if the object is far and you focus into it, the image is not sharp always for zooms above 7x or something. And because you are zooming in so much, slight vibrations in the camera as you are holding it produce a massive amount of blur in the photos. Effectively a large zoom number does not take good photos. And all camera’s have 3-4x zooms which is good for casual use.

You know what is the real deal? Image quality. And that is qualitative and not quantitative. So companies don’t advertise it! Next time you are out to buy a camera, do this. Just take a photo of the shop, and then one by one zoom into the image on the camera itself as much as possible and see tiny things like a table. If the camera is able to capture the details and textures then you have a good camera. This is actually affected by the size of the image sensor, but all compact camera use the same damn thing.

So buy a good camera next time!

Together

Hope, together we dream of a better future.
Freedom, together we dream freely.
Creativity, together we make new stuff.
Intelligence, together we solve problems.
Heart, together we help the world.
Peace, together we shall live simply.
Courage, together we shall fight evil.
Truth, together we shed light.
Love, together we shall care.