It’s Ravana.

Watch the trailer if you don’t believe me.

Ashok Banker is on a roll:

… But their (Rohit Vaid and Abhimanyu Singh, of Contiloe Pictures) enthusiasm, love, and passion for the project hooked me. I signed on, despite myself. Surprising myself, my family, friends. And so Mahayoddha Rama was born, an animated film for viewers of all ages (it’s not just for kids, trust me) that aspired to match the quality of any international animated film, while aiming for a photo-realistic 3D animation style that hasn’t even been attempted yet here let alone achieved, and overall storytelling and production qualities that would make all of us proud–would make every Indian proud, in fact.

The script was gruelling. Yes, the film was based on the Ramayana of Valmiki. (Not on my Ramayana books–those are being adapted separately to live-action films by a Hollywood studio.)

… What we were trying was to reinvent the Ramayana for Indian filmgoing audiences, through the grammar of all-ages animation. Now that may seem simple at first, but it’s not. For one thing, there’s never been an Indian animation film that truly uses the grammar of animation. Sure, there have been the Hanumans and Bal Ganeshs, and the like, and they may even have done reasonably well, but they’ve essentially been compromises between low budgets and a dearth of creative courage.

Our attempt was much bolder: It was to create a film experience that wouldn’t simply retell Ramayana, but would reinvent it for a new generation.

Ashok Banker is a perfect example of how pure passion for a subject can show in amazing (literary) accomplishments and suddenly the world is a better place. At least, I am grateful to him for making Ramayana approachable, captivating and delightful to novel-readers like me. And now they’re bringing the Ramayana to audiences of this generation in a movie format. That is terrific news.

I hope I can stop being envious about Lord of The Rings. I hope we can claim that we too have our own amazing depictions of our traditional stories. And yes, the movie is in Hindi and is meant for an Indian audience.

After watching the trailer, I think it’s true that Indian animators can rock.

The movie is scheduled to be released nationwide in October-November 2008. Looking forward to it!

P.S. How can one resist such a movie if Gulshan Grover is the voice of Ravana and Sameera Reddy is the voice of Sita?

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs:

“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”

Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something to the ’system’.

There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work in different areas. For example, at Kluster, the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting is the story behind Kluster:

Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.

And from the June 2006 Wired magazine article:

Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive. The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.

“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t Colgate thought of it? “They’re probably test tube guys without any training in physics.” Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount – if they even solved it at all.

More examples are:

• Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next – this is how Dell’s recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
• Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”
• Intel asking the crowd on what is the next Google
• MicroPledge and co fund os where people pledge their money for software ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someone takes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes it successfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the software they want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
• Sell-a-Band where people pledge their money on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets to record an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, the band and the SellaBand website share the profit.
• Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
• Wesabe for personal finance.
• CrowdSpirit for electronics.
• Threadless for T-shirts.
• Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
• Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcing a book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
• We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
• And many many more.

Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ (which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).

The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites in the world.

The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British crown succession (via IndiaUncut) - this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!

But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people contribute to Wikipedia?

The best research on this topic that I found was the article What Motivates Wikipedians? in the CACM monthly magazine:

I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping into some of these motivations.

The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole article, it’s a good piece of research.

Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia which traces how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become a member of the community, and how the social structure and technological aspects enable this.

I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same question:

Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it’s a very very important part of what holds our project together.

I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We’re doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.

…

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same applies to the other examples above. For example, consider Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?

Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.

Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like Amazon/eBay, etc.

Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced anything in an India-specific way?

Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.

Remember the Lex tool that we used in college days?

Ever wondered who wrote it? It was Eric Schmidt, along with Mike Lesk.

That’s right, the CEO of Google.

I can imagine the CTO of a company to have such a background, but I never would have expected the CEO.

But then again, it’s Google. They can do anything.

I hear you brother. I hear you.

It was a crazy 4 day trip. Crazy because it was 8 related families going together, that’s a total of 23 people. 23. It should be easy to imagine the cacophony that followed…

The highlights of the trip was something like this: sultry mumbai atmosphere, hare krishna mandir, watching dabbawallas, mouth watering vada pav, fantastic four part 2, running on the beach and wide mumbai roads at 4.30 am, mumbai darshan, planetarium, aquarium, museum, marine drive, catching two buses and a local train and a boat to reach essel world, water rides in the rain in water kingdom, rain dance to bollywood songs, finding ice skating easy, jostling for life in local trains, lonavala, famous lonavala chikki, disappointed by khandala, air deccan flights, two days of sleep after coming back home.

I read the iCon book recently and have been wondering what makes people (like me) so fascinated about Steve Jobs?

• He didn’t create any great technology or product, it was people who worked with him who did all that, for example, Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter.
• He was a leader, a manager, that was his role. He’s an inspiring leader, is that why he’s admired?
• Or is it because he’s ruthless in executing his visions and ideas?
• Or is it because he gives such enrapturing keynote speeches that they are now called “Stevenotes”?

I guess it just goes to show that he’s a man of many contradictions.

The best example that I’ve come across of how he can inspire people is his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (the official video is available for download using iTunes). This speech was so powerful that I know of one friend who quit his job after hearing that speech and decided to go chase his dreams. That was a huge risk but guess what, he’s doing much better than before now.

The book has some interesting accounts of how Steve came to India in search of “truth”, wore a lungi, went travelling in cities and deserts, and even meeting a baba in the Himalayas (which itself is quite a story). Another story was how he hung out with his New Age buddies at an apple farm in Oregon, which is eventually how the company was named Apple. Then there are the accounts of how Steve demanded absolute loyalty from his friends to accounts of his taste in the kind of ads that Apple made and so on. It was a good read.

The bottom line is that he led Apple and Pixar and collectively changed three major industries for the better – the computer industry, the animated movies industry and the music industry. And he has battled cancer and survived. All this in a single lifetime. And he’s only fifty. That’s why I admire him so much.

Shreyas, Gaurav and the gang have relaunched RadioVeRVe and it now rocks even more than before!

Things they haven’t changed:

• They play music by independent bands from India. That’s right, these are all Indian bands.

Things I liked:

• The new look feels good and is intuitive. How’d he do that? Hats off to Ganesh Rao.
• Amazing list of channels – from Rock, Metal, Easy to Classical (carnatic!) and Konkani
• We can now play the radio from within the browser.
• Each song is accompanied with info about the band on the right side, the importance of this cannot be understated. We get to know more about the band like who’s on the vocals, the drums, the bass, as well as the history of the band.

Things that I would like to see or improve:

• Some of the RadioVeRVe audio ads are not very comfortable to listen to… sorry guys, but the harsh voices in the metal-style ads are a little jarring in the midst of listening to songs.
• A ‘Buy this song’ option so that I can purchase and download the song and play it on my iPod eventually – for example, I want to listen to “Shadow of the Sun” by Leminsk8 again, but can’t .

So, go ahead and listen to the best of Indi Indie music.

“When a friend moves away, they leave behind silence.”

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

The past couple of weeks has been a rollercoaster ride for us and for ion.

Sales has been very good so far, but our observation is that people in India are still hesitant to buy online from reasons such as credit card security concerns (understandably so) to recently Paypal changing their UI making it more difficult for the average person to understand what to do. So, we started accepting offline payments and that has worked out well.

What’s the response to ion? Simply amazing. I mean if you think about it, it’s just a charger (<marketing-pitch>and works really really well</marketing-pitch>), and yet people are so appreciative and supportive of what we are trying to do. The clincher is that it solves a real problem. I’ve often heard the phrase “I just needed something like this.”

As we say in our about page:

Moral of the story : “See a need, fill a need” — ‘Robots’ movie.

The three biggest points about “ion” (both the company and the product) that people like are:

1. We took the idea to execution. This alone amazes people. I still remember what Jace once said: “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”

2. The statement we make : “Made in India. Available only in India.” and “We are just Indians who want to make products for India.” Nothing much to be said here, except that we mean it and it’s not something we say lightly or say it for the sake of it. And no, we’re not going to rephrase it as “I’m just an Indian who wants to develop products in India for everyone in the World” as someone suggested.

3. We have a very good finishing – the ion itself and the packaging looks very good and has a professional presentation. At the right price point.

Another aspect is how word-of-mouth has helped ion and we were banking on that because we do not have a marketing budget other than the posters we are giving to our friends to put up in their company notice boards. Most people came to know about ion through emails, and it’s surprising how effective email forwards are – the chain just keeps going on and on, and many times my friends had come to know even before I sent it to them because someone had already forwarded it!

Processing all the ion emails is both a chore and fun…

The worst mail we’ve got is:

first time in india single click orkut programs launching a product,website,service etc. but dont have enough money to market your product,service,website etc.

there are more than 3 crore registered resident indian on orkut out of 8 crore indian internet user.noboby can question the potentional of orkut.

orkut single click tools can help u to reach 3 crore indians at cheapest price possible.

the features of orkut single click program are as follows:

1)Single click to scrap all your friends. 2)A Single click can directly take u to a user’s scrap book or album 3)A single click directly creates a topic in all the groups u have joined 4)A Single click helps u to join a community. 5)IDEAL for people who frequently use ORKUT,people who want to market their product.

Free stuff included : 1)orkut FAN FLOODing 2)DATABASE of 8 crore email address 3)FREE orkut tweaks

i m gonna give this full package in a cd for 500 rs and shipping 50 Rs extra

plz call 098________(Editor’s Note: Full number not reproduced to protect the guilty)

Some of the best mails we have received are:

I would like to congratulate all three of you for your New product – “ion | power your music”. I wish you three develop more and more usable products for all of us. I would like to buy it even though i don’t have any of the product which needs usb charging.

and

If you are devising a marketing strategy for your company and this product, I will be glad to offer any assistance. I have worked in pre-Sales Europe for quite some time and my experience, given the remarkable nature of your product may prove helpful.

and

I am a B.Tech-III Electronics student. Came to know about you through some forward. I actually have few such ideas (related to electronics), but don’t know how to commercialize them. Can you help me out? Though I can get placed in some MNC easily, I am more interested in implementing my ideas.

I think this last mail was the best we’ve ever got. I’m starting to believe what Vikram says that more and more of this generation are thinking like this, and “want to do things for India”, and he/we mean that in a non-political non-hyper-patriotic manner. It’s just that simple “ness” in us.

And finally, some of the blogs that have written about us are:

• Amit Agarwal
• Aarthi Ramamurthy
• Shashidhar Desai

All in all, there’s more work to be done, but so far so good. There’s more to it behind the scenes, and perhaps I’ll write about it in another post.

My friend Abishek Nair and myself were recently having a conversation over email where I kept prodding him about what he’s going to do next. You see, being a Bangalorean, he’s not a software engineer! He’s a vfx whiz. In normal English, that means he’s one of those guys who creates the visual effects in ads or movies that you might have seen. A couple of days after that email exchange, Abishek calls me and says that he’s got a contract with a Singapore company (with whom he had just finished a project) and was going there to work on even more cooler stuff.

I was happy to hear that because I’ve seen some of his work and I think he really is talented, all he needs is a platform to showcase his skills, and this new gig should be a very good opportunity for him.

We met up a couple of days before he took off, just to catch up. He showed me some of his latest work and I was just blown away. You must have seen the latest Limca ad on TV featuring Riya Sen…

He went on to explain the software that he uses and how “node-based” software has shaked the vfx industry literally, thanks to the popularity of Apple Shake, and so on. I was surprised at how much painstaking effort is required to create these visual effects – we take movies like King Kong for granted but the amount of work behind the scenes is mind-boggling.

Coincidentally, Dad had recently bought a new Sony DCR-DVD 708E handycam and I had brought it over to show it to Abishek… I got a brainwave – why not make an interview? It need not be anything professional, just something that happened. I think Kiruba’s enthusiasm, while encouraging podcasters in a session at BarCampBangalore3, had rubbed off on me.

And here I present to you – the first ever video that I’ve ever shot! The best parts are the demos of Abishek’s works and his description of how it was created.

Note 1: You can also download the video for offline viewing.

Note 2: The audio quality is a little faint in the beginning, but much better after we switched off the fan

If you are interested to know more, you can write to Abishek – his email address is abisheknair (at) gmail.com.