Serendipity and Learning

Namma Yatri - is a cab hailing app in Bangalore that ensures that 100% of the money goes to the driver. Based on the ONDC platform, it is quite remarkable - that it took time for this idea to be created. It does look like the app has reached critical mass.  But what is a cab hailing app? It is a system. A system of trust.  The same system can be implemented in any city - but the only city where it fully works in India is in Mumbai.  Metered prices. Drivers can choose to go or not. No surge pricing (or sometimes it exists). All the money goes to driver. Trust that the driver will not cheat - and it works for the most part. Nearly 99%. In other cities since this 'honour' system does not exist or someone always tries to break the system, an app is needed and like the proverbial monkey with the two cats, the apps take a chunk as commission. And that led to multiple levels of mistrust - between the app and the driver, sometimes between the passenger and the driver (since drive...

This is a very inspiring video - the story of Indias first autonomous boat - Matangi.  It is inspiring for many reasons. For reasons as diverse as seeing Indian taking leaps in technology that we never thought possible. For seeing an enterpreneurs commitment for 11 years to work on a "never done before" project. For seeing the passion - bringing our sailors home. And being able to see great Indian hi-tech products.  Read this in conjunction with the previous post. This meeting would have started as a dream in someones mind - so much of it vague, unknown issues, unforeseen circumstances, unproven technology, unknown enetities and like any project it would have hit so many hurdles that the team would have struggled to overcome. And all of this would have been one (or a few) persons dream.  What a joy it is to see such initiatives succeed!   

 Yes, digitization has made our life easier (refer to the previous post), but we are facing a few issue. Filling digital application forms.  1. For one, it is not intuitive. It takes a lot of user effort to get it right. Mostly they are digital replicas of physical artefacts, so it is painful. 2. Scanning every document and uploading (there is no standard size, dimension, format) - so it is a circus getting it right for every form. In the physical world, it was simple, photocopy, staple and boom.  3. The servers aren't always available, so you have keep on trying.  Thoughts as we fill out form after form for college application! How to make the user journey easy? The forms aren't made on any user journey - they are made purely from a bureaucractic lens and user is an afterthought. 

 I happened to pass by a railway booking counter - the likes of which were abundant some years ago. Indian railway ticket booking is a good example of how technology changes how work gets done.  In the olden days (before 90s) one would have to go overnight, 90 days before journey, be perfect with the train number, fill out a form and present it at the counter. My father would go sleep in front the counter the previous night (like many others), rush when the gates opened at 7, only to find the first 4-5 places on each counter occupied every single time (touts/agents), some how get a ticket and ensure our travel tickets are "booked". And there were limited counters.  Post 90s, this became a little better as more and more counters opened - at one point erstwhile VT station had 100 counters for booking tickets. The forms were the same, but the process was faster. Agents still got tickets faster than ordinary people. But the overnight waiting was eliminated. And counters were ...

Why has IVR technology still not gone obsolete? And why is it so painful? Some of the newer companies have invested in chatbots and auto resolution - but these IVRs remain as irritating as ever.  Ok, IVR cannot be changed, can it be made better? At the point when your customer is (most likely), upset do you really want to spam them ads? And irritating music? And make them wait for ever with a mourning tone of "Your call is important to us, yet, all our customer services executives are busy" or something like that? But more importantly, why is this technology still around? Resistance to change? Who cares? Low on priority? 

 Like Cinema, Sports and possibly Restaurants,  the Learning industry thrived in getting people together under one roof. I say, was with intent.  A few years ago, 2 day and 3 day training were the norm. Over the years, it had shortened to a day or half a day. Or a somewhere in between - 6 hours. This was pre-Covid. What will learning look like in a post Covid world?  For one, all of us, virtual workshop naysayers have moved to virtual.  ( Read here ) 1. The duration of training is a maximum of 4 hours. Though I did attend a fantastic 4 day workshop ( details here ). But of late, much of the work I have done is for under 4 hours, often 2 hours. So, 8 hour workshops are dead forever.  2. More importantly, while we have started using tools like Mentimeter - the interface of these tools is still clunky - so expecting that to improve.  3. I also feel simulation led learning will be a game changer in these times. Because simulations accelerate the learning p...

Yes, why do people scooters on the flyover? We have all seen it. Rental scooters are left on the flyovers. Actually they are left on many random places - on the footpath, in alleys, fallen on the side and I have often wondered, as have you, that, why are people so irresponsible? Few days back my kids asked me; when people leave the scooter in the middle of a flyover, where do they go after that? We made a few wild guesses, we laughed and then we forgot about it. Today evening, I had the pleasure of talking to Keerthi, a cab driver who drove us from the airport to home. And as the conversation progressed, we noticed a bunch of scooters parked in odd places like this and then he asked, "Sir, why do people leave scooters on the flyover?" "And I see a few scooters even in the middle of the airport flyovers. The others I can understand - it is a 200 hundred metres walk, but what about the airport flyover? Something must be there. Is there an incentive to leave it on th...

Kids learn by themselves. Especially when there is youtube. Earlier, we used to learn a board games instructions by reading through the instruction manual, playing and by trial and error. It was a little difficult and took us quite a few tries. Nowadays, the kids teach us the rules. They watch youtube where a gamer duly takes us through the rules and often addresses "between the lines" doubts. And what is surprising is that this is a way faster process. Welcome to the age of the autodidact... Recent skills learnt - Coding in python, decoupage, Arduino, Making slime etc etc. Earlier posts on Autodidacts: Here , here and here . 

The Indian Microsoft wont be a Microsoft (that we think of - like an MSOffice) in all likelihood. Slowly but surely we are realising that all our data/tech/capability, private, personal, corporate is all based in a foreign land or in a foreign corporate. China has got this, we still havent. Therefore, the Indian tech giant wont be a giant the way we know it. It will be something else. It better be something else...

What is the purpose of tech in HR.. Very often those who oppose tech think the purpose of tech is to dehumanise, but in reality it is otherwise. That means instead of seeing tech as a threat to our job and existence think how can it make life easier for our stakeholders? For instance... Ensuring candidates get replies on time, enabling the right people to apply, building a metric for team capability and by ensuring small interactions are done well, build greater empathy in the system How does tech increase empathy? Instead of sending an email to someone and that someone doesnt respond for whatever reason, having a bot, simply makes the job more painless. Think of a bank. Back in the day, we had to go to the bank for every trivial thing. Now, by having a portal/app - you dont have to go and all your work is getting done. Isnt that better? The question to ask therefore is what problem of the user are we solving for? Sometimes, we put that on us and try to solve our problem - w...

Some days ago, the fellow stumbled upon Morse code. And from then on it has been a flurry of investigation on Morse code and finally he found a Morse code keyboard on the phone. Whoever? Whyever? But it is fascinating how the internet can set you off on such serendipitious paths - some interesting, some positively not (like a few weeks back when he wanted to memorise the first 100 digits of pi and insisted on reciting it to unsuspecting listeners). The Morse code is an interesting path. The Lego puzzle box another interesting one - that led to multiple smaller inventions in the fray - some of which saw light of day some that did not. 

Over the last few weeks, I have got rid of Facebook, Instagram from my phone and leaving only Twitter and LinkedIn as Social media. And of course, Whatsapp because it has become a default communication medium. What I realised that much time was being spent in meaningless scrolling and the best part is that I am not missing it. And that there are better things one can do with the internet in your pocket! What are those better things? Well, one is serendipity (post coming soon). The other is to use the time saved for better things and ideas. And of course, save your eyes.

Recently, I read Paul Allens - Idea Man. And set me thinking about how in a team when there is one 'Big' founder, the story from the other side is often more unvarnished and presents a different perspective than the dominant narrative. And thus, I started re-reading iWoz to see if there were some parallel perspectives there. For one, both Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak were the 'idea' guys. Both were avid tinkerers (and I am coming to believe that tinkering is an essential part of the learning process.), got interested in something early and pursued it with a lot of freedom. In the not so prominent founders book, you get to see a more human side of the prominent founder with all their flaws. You get glimpses of the early culture of the company at the time it was founded and so on. The founders seem to have something in common (passion for technology, hands on in technology) and a complementing skillset (one tech, one business). One of them is more 'communicat...

The way information is consumed has changed. When we were young, we sat in front of the TV and absorbed all it blared. Or read books. Since I was more of the latter, I had a storehouse of information - which I labelled - Department of Useless Information. This information was not useless - it did enable me to win quizzes and suchlike till I met bigger hoarders of information who I could not defeat. Today, the way information is consumed is over the internet and the Department of useless information gatherers have never had it so good. Except for the arrival of non-googleable quizzes. That means that the internet is a great place to build curiosity - almost like the library of yore - provided of course one uses it for the right things. So, the kid potters around on youtube - mostly on science sites like ASAP science and Ted-ed and suchlike. Soon comes with a question after a round of retail therapy by the parent. Are you happy with the purchase? Well, ya, kind of. Ok. It ...

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies  by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson is a very thought provoking book.  Written a few years ago with an acclaimed sequel out - it was a bit dated, but not for me. Much of what they said was thought provoking I felt.  In this age of technology and AI - there is something we perhaps dont realise.  In the book he mentions a concept called the second half the chessboard ( referring to this story ) which in turns relates the human understanding of the exponential function (and then I read about Al Bartlett and his lecture) The second part which clicked was the fact that in general, technology does cause job losses - and it has happened from the chariot drivers times and will happen when self driving cars arrive. It has happened from the bulls in the time of tractors and will happen again in the age of mechanical agriculture.  Yes, some people will be ab...

If you have ever had an online chat - that starts off with an initial intro and then refers you to someone or makes you hold - you have interacted with a bot . If you have pinged for train details (for examples) and got a response online - highly likely that it is a chatbot. And this world is growing - there are bots that run on Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp and Kik (which actually has a bot shop and is fairly ahead in this game. Check this out .). There are bots that can mimic talking to your idol. There is a bot that you can chat with your bank - for instance.   Ordering food - for instance can be easily botified. But since then the world has gotten fairly more complicated - there are bots in more places than you can think. The earlier example of ANZ is just the tip of the iceberg. Banks are trying to move their transactions to bots. Indeed all of Indian Railways tickets currently manned by humans is an ideal candidate to be 'botted' up. We can think of this as suffi...

Meanwhile we are getting bigger and smaller on Clash Royale. There are good days when we win a ton of trophies. There are bad days when we get thrashed. We spend time discussing various battle strategies (and this is where I love how games make children think). There is a cheapo strategy - that seemed to work well, until we lost a few times. And then tweaked it. Then there is a attack from both sides strategy. Then there is a 'Prince' strategy. Then there is a 'Defense' strategy - worked beautifully once and then never thereafter. Then there is an 'All out offense' strategy - ditto. Then just for kicks, we tried out an aerial route only strategy - this one was an out and out disaster. Now the best part of it is that - there is very little that is useless in the battle deck. And that makes us all think (adult brain, child brain alike) about how we are going to do it. There is discussions on options, choices, priorities, limited gold or gems (both alw...

Some days ago I attended a technology presentation. On Learning and Development. The vendors (like many others) have a grand (working) platform of technology enabled learning. And with the season being one of analytics and data – they offer a bouquet of data and analytics as well – more than what you know you can do with it. As technology becomes more and more prevalent, traditional trainings are taking a back seat. There are e-learnings, e-assessments, MOOCs and e-everything. Traditional trainers have a reason to run scared. And this is true across the spectrum – any type of training. But very often, the first state is one of denial. "This wont affect us". But the fact is that it will. Whenever a technology reduces cost, improves scalability and provides consistency to anything – any industry – the industry will face a shake up. When mass manufacturing came by, this happened and the hand crafted industry went through a dip. Automatic watches wi...

As summarised by the ten year old while trawling through youtube lego and carnatic music videos. First there were no ads, Then there were ads on some videos, but you could skip them, Now there are ads which you cannot even skip  Google, please do not be evil - even the ten year old can see it.  

A few weeks ago, I walked into a cup cake shop and since the little one was with me, we decided to take a look at the kitchen. And I was a little surprised. There was hardly anything hi-tech in there. I mean, the equipment was what one would find in a standard urban kitchen of today. And the shop boy assured me all the baking was done there itself. Perhaps I am missing something. But while on the one hand, there is a lot of discussion on how the internet has democratized information - to some extent microwave ovens have done the same in India. Baking is one of those home-industries that has taken off after the introduction of microwave ovens and the easy availability of recipes and ingredients on the internet. Today one can find baking stuff like silicone moulds and other assorted items at almost any shop. There are practically no entry barriers. And by the way, cake making is now so easy that every neighbourhood has a cake shop that bakes its cakes right there - it has still not got...