Tag: Work

Updates

Prasad Ajinkya11 Comments

Do not want to rant and rave about what has been keeping me away from the blog, but this is the gist of it

  1. My sister Arati got married ps – Ashish, have mailed you the link. Her saasar is in Dombivali … quite far from where we stay. She is moving into a new house, new locality and building things up from scratch, god bless her soul
  2. Kida 2.0 is on the way :-), in 3 more months I would be a proud father!!
  3. The new job at Illumine is turning out to be quite an interesting assignment (and that is why you have seen more gyaan posts around here). More on this later. ps – Biggie, keep a watch out for this
  4. Most of my free time is spent in Multiplayer Rise of Nations over VPN :-)

Today was an opportunity where I got some free time from everything and am unleashing a slew of posts … Bwa ha ha haha!!

Customer Engagement

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

My job at Illumine is to make a career enablement platform for individuals. A part of this platform management includes (but is certainly not limited to) –

  • To ensure that users once they come on the website wont get overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of the task at hand.
  • To make sure that the users keep on coming back to the site, in order to enable their careers. No, not like a Naukri.com or a Monster.com. They have their place in their own regards, but that place is in matching the job seekers to companies, and that’s it.

This is why it has to be different. The way the user will engage with the site will be different. In order to understand this “Customer Engagement” thing better, I decided to investigate this further.

It is how the user engages with the idea of the portal, and all the ambience surrounding it. Yes we know that, and we also know how to measure it. Often at times great businesses use Customer Engagement either as a marketing tool or as a metric to measure the success of an initiative.

All this gyaan was great, but it did not get me anywhere. I still had a design for the site to be made, and none of the literature around is talking about Customer Engagement as a Design driver , all of them are using it post execution to see the effects of an action/treatment. People talk about user centric design, is this similar to online CE? I am finding out!!

Today after a long discussion with our modelling team, I realized that to use CE as a design driver would mean to completely re-structure the portal that we are developing; and keeping the customer engagement at the center. I am sure that this concept is already there in all design paradigms, but then why do not I see this being practiced in real life?

Great products have this built-in them – iPod, WordPress, TCP/IP, GMail, Books, I could go on. That’s why their fundamental design has not changed much. The way the user engages with the product remains constant, what changes is the technology, the look and the price :-).

What do you think?

Zoozoo!

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

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Buzz behind Zoozoos – Everyone is talking about Zoozoo these days. Even me for that matter!! And you know what this is creating my friends? Its creating a buzz … a buzz unlike any other in the market these days. People love it, people hate it … but people definitely talk about it. Vodafone has a winner here – or so one might think.

Industry situation – With mobile penetration in India going to touch around 90% by 2014 (thats 1 billion mobile phones!!!), the revenues from simply voice based services are going to trickle down. What were considered to be luxury services on mobiles (missed call alerts, caller ring back tunes, et al) are now considered necessary services. Living in a country which has multiple mobile service provider also means that all these service providers have to invest for customer acquisition. Which means even lesser charges from voice based services.

Jumping the gun – The only way voice based revenues could be increased is to increase the Value Added Services (VAS) part. Before we go any further, What do you mean by VAS?? Don’t worry, even I didn’t know about them a few months back, I worked in an IT firm making solutions for Telecom Operators and I had no clue what they meant by VAS!! Thanks to those beautiful ads, now I do!! But why will people buy these services, how can they buy them if they do not even know what they means?!? Hence the need for awareness for these VAS was recognized by Harit Nagpal (Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone India). Ogilvy was given the charge of creating the buzz for Vodafone.

The Buzz Explained – A good buzz can be dissected to have these elements

  • Clarity of message – Each ad ends with the particular VAS feature. The message is clear.
  • Simplicity – Ogilvy’s Rajiv Rao, in charge of this promotion knew that the entire idea had to be simple and yet stupefying to cut across all ages and convey the idea. All the ads depict this minimalistic approach.
  • Stand out – The egg shaped head; it stands out. The cute shape of those zoozoos; it stands out.
  • Variety – A single idea can also cause a buzz, but over a period of time it dies down, simply because people cannot keep on talking about the same thing again and again. e.g – pink chaddi campaign. You need fodder for people to talk during train journeys!!
  • Right time, Right medium – IPL for TV, Youtube for online.  Zoozoo is everywhere. An nice article by Sushrut Bidwai can be found here.

It’s a great campaign, and I would not be surprised if this turns out to be a case study in a few years. As I finish this post, a question still remains in my head – what will happen if the Zoozoo’s buzz transcends Vodafone VAS and moves on to something totally different (e.g I saw a political ad with the zoozoo theme)?

What does he do for a living?

Prasad Ajinkya14 Comments

Since the day I got into an engineering college, my mother has been proudly saying “Majha mulga computer engineer ahe!” . I used to get amused by her pride, and it still makes me smile that she is happy for me (love you Aai :-) ). As days went by and I graduated to become a software developer, the “Computer engineer ahe” line was still there. Even when I got admission into one of the better known b-schools in the country, Aai would still tag me with Computer engineer.

The point is that sometimes you feel stereo-typed with the tag. People still ask me to troubleshoot their Windows. I dont mind doing that, but to expect me to visit their place at Borivali just because something is wrong with their Internet Explorer?? Sometimes I think I need a tag which defines my work and competency space better than “Computer Engineer”.

When I started working in a start-up, explaining to my family what I do became slightly more difficult. I was in charge of handling and building the technology on an entire organization. A lot of work which required a considerable bandwidth of know-how across the tech domain – a CTO in a nutshell. Whenever someone would ask, prompt would come the reply “Majha mulga computer engineer ahe!” . I kind of prefer IIM grad, but I dont think many people know about them – with people I mean the old aunty types, who ask your mother (in a nasal twang) “Kaay karto tumcha mulga?” The ones that sometimes do know about then quip “Oohh! Ahemadabad hoy?”, mother then simply says “To computer engineer ahe!!”” . Then I would butt in to say – “I sell shirts” rather than the oft repeated computer engineer tag.

These days I am working in a knowledge lab. We work on designing knowledge interventions and designing models which can change communities to become more productive and human oriented. I hope I got it right in this one line. My specific job entails a mini-CTO who is in charge of taking care of all technology details. Now what?!? I think “Majha mulga computer engineer ahe!”  is there to stay :-)

Co-ordinate Geometry and Perspective

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

This is going to be a philosophical post, don’t say that I did not warn you at the beginning. But, I have came across an a-ha! for myself at work. This just does not apply simply to Good v/s Evil, but it can be applied to life itself.

Good and Evil are two sides of the same coin, that means, if I were to have an axis (similar to say X-axis), then Evil will be on the left hand side of the Y-axis and Good will be on the right hand side. Thus, Good and Evil are opposites. Now, my friend, what do you do to eliminate Evil? Think. Don’t move ahead and read the answer, please think. Think Co-ordinate Geometry.

You delete the origin (0,0), you take out the Y-axis. You take out the definition point at which Good starts being Evil. You take out that Evil-defining-perspective (Y-axis). I am defining each axes as a perspective on life, and thus, a way of defining (aka constraining) your perspective. Take out the Y-axis and now you have only a degree of Goodness left.

Now, ask yourself – what happens when you take away the X-axis? That translates into a change in your perspective. A shift which fundamentally changes the way you look at things, look at the world. How much more of the co-ordinate geometry concepts can I apply on this? Does this make sense to you? Would appreciate some feedback on this.

Dropbox

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

imageIf you already know about this, don’t bother to read any further, but if you don’t then hey, have I got a nifty utility for you!!

Do you remember GDrive? It had come up some time back, where users could use their GMail accounts like a virtual storage drive. I am not sure as to why it disappeared, possibly due to Google Docs and copyright issues, but it was great to have a online storage for your crucial documents. If I am going home and I want to take some files with me, why bother carrying them in a pen-drive when you can always have it online and access them anytime you want as long as you have internet.

Well, Dropbox does exactly that! You get a 2GB free account, from which you can version and collaborate documents. A good collaborative tool as any. There are a lot of such tools, but I really like the ease with which a newbie can start using this tool. Will try it as a tool within the office and post on this further.

Addendum

This is my application of the Dropbox idea. I have backed up my entire workspace (documents, mail, setups I need, etc) in one dropbox. And wherever I go I have my workspace online! No need for machines, laptops, pen drives whatever. Give me a new machine and all I have to do is install this nifty little application and voila! All my workspace documents will be synced with me in no time.