My latest “power song” is the flagship song of the Colourblind band. Who are these guys? I have no idea. From what I read on their website, they were/are a couple of rockers who got their album recorded with Sony Music India in 1999. Not sure how many copies they actually sold. They had got great reviews by newspapers but apparently still didn’t get support from their recording company:

We sold 10,000 copies in 2 weeks. Regardless of that Sony didn’t put out more copies in the market and published only 500 CDs.

Nine years later, we have the ubiquitous www giving opportunities for everyone to spread their music. For example Kal-Jug by Azad Zeeshan to some awesome fusion flute by Bapu Padmanabha on Muziboo and many more bands featured in the RadioVerve channels.

Unfortunately, you get to hear these songs only online inside a browser. Why is this a problem? Because I listen to most of my music on my iPod during commute, runs or walks.

This is why I really wish Muziboo/RadioVerve/etc. would consider producing an Indian “amateur” music album. A while back, Niara and myself were discussing that the potential is really big considering the online virality (do a couple of youtube videos or at least put some of the mp3s online) all the way to marketing at the national level in cahoots with a big production house. Imagine how many college bands would want to be featured.

Oh heck, you could even do a reality show on TV to select the bands whose songs get to be in the album! (well, okay, maybe this one is a stretch)

On the other hand, I sorely wish there was an indie iTunes store in India where I could purchase these songs. Or perhaps even a Sell-a-Band for an Indian audience.

For now, I’m waiting for MusicYogi.com to deliver my copy of The Raghu Dixit Project’s new album. Can’t wait to listen to ‘Mysore Se Aayi Re’ on my iPod.

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.

Like a broken record, I keep coming back to What are the killer web applications for India? So, I decided to make a list.

A list of websites that are useful for most people in India. But what kind of websites am I looking at? The website should be something useful enough to compel a person without internet access to go to a cybercafe just to access this website.

Here’s what I have so far:

• RedBus.in for bus tickets
  • Also KSRTC.in for govt bus tickets in Karnataka
• IRCTC.co.in for train tickets
• Inasra.com to book hotel rooms
• HungryZone.com (especially HungryBangalore.com) for restaurant reservations and home delivery
• YellowPages.Sulekha.com for finding local businesses and services
• BookMyShow.com for movie tickets
• MapMyIndia for maps and driving directions (even in Bangalore)
• Handiman for handyman services

Note: The definition of usefulness here is in terms of the concept. However, these websites are not verified in any sense. There’s no guarantee that they are good or even trustworthy, but I would encourage you to check out their services if they are useful. That’s the whole point.

I’ll keep updating this list as and when I find more such websites.

Update: Added BookMyShow, KRSTC.in, MapMyIndia.

Update on 2008 May 15 : Added Handiman

Yesterday, I attended Day 2 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference.

The irony to note is that the conference website is so NOT Web 2.0. For example, where are the slides that people can download? These guys can learn a thing or two from the foss.in website and conference. Again, for a web innovation conference, why is there no wifi? How are you supposed to access the websites?

On the other hand, this conference has been surprising to me in the sense that it actually turned out to be interesting. I think the quality of people who have come to speak here is high and that’s probably because these people are high up in the decision-making chain and they have come to talk about what they do best – websites and business.

Of course, the other half of the speakers are doing just boring sales pitches but that didn’t deter the audience from asking tough questions and seeking their value from it. They even directly questioned how their company lives up to what was described in the presentation.

Continuing Day 1′s trend, here are the transcribed notes:

• Jayabalan (CTO, Netmagic) on “Building scalable and resilient infrastructure for web applications”

  • Users, Connectivity, IT infrastructure, Application infrastructure
  • Challenges – Growth (number of concurrent users), Hardware failure, Software bugs, Security threats
  • Management and maintenance, Connectivity/routing issues, Secure connectivity, Cost
  • Failures can’t be avoided
  • Features and functionality alone not sufficient, Performance also required
  • Difficult to get people with end-to-end knowledge
  • Recommended setup – Storage, SANSw, Web + App + DB, Switching, Accelerator, Firewall
  • Develop for future – scalability in all layers
  • Performance optimizing techniques – Compression, TCP multiplexing, TCP optimization, TCP buffering, Caching, CDN, Load balancing, URL/content/cookie switching, Content modification, SSL offloading, Surge protection
  • Please outsource parts of these infrastructure to experts who have good infrastructure and service
  • Netmagic caters to all of the above (can it get more blatant than this?)
  • jb at netmagicsolutions.com
  • Replies to audience that Yes, Providers in India do have such infrastructure now. Power and Connectivity are major issues that you can’t scale in-house, so outsource it.

• Rohit Varma (Founder and CEO, Techtribe) on “Delivering Value through Social Networks”

  • (Unfortunately, missed this session in the business track because the session in the other tech track was long)
  • Get into the press, only way, do not depend on viral marketing

Yesterday, I attended Day 1 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference.

The first half of the day was quite useful, but the latter half turned out to be pure marketing pitches by the sponsors.

First and foremost, I think the title of the conference is a misnomer. Although it says “Web Innovation 2007: The Nextgen Web Technology Revolution: 2.0 & Beyond”, it should have been “Web 2.0 : How can India catch up” – the discussions were really about the ‘current’ situation of things rather than ‘innovation’ or ‘future’. By ‘current’ I mean, the internet products and services market in the western world and how India can catch up.

The No.1 and possibly only gripe that most speakers mentioned which is a barrier for internet and Web 2.0 to become omnipresent is that broadband connectivity is pitiful in India.

I agree to this as far as locality reach, reliability, and pricing is concerned. However, let’s compare it to mobile phones which is the second-most discussed topic, on how it is booming and all that. Why did mobile phones take off and not broadband? I think it’s because mobile phones had a killer application – communication. That too, communication any time, anywhere.

Similarly, let’s take the case of computers in many shops and distributors – accounting solutions whether it is by the local software shop or well-known ones like Tally, they bought computers just so that they can use these software. Just like Lotus 1-2-3 for Apple Mac I in the history of computers.

Unless we have killer applications that people in India want to use, why would anyone want to buy a computer or a broadband connection? And if there are killer applications, won’t there be demand for broadband connections, and won’t supply follow? Just like the mobile telephony market today?

Maybe I’m completely off on this one, but I still don’t yet see killer applications on the web today for the common man in India, let alone Web 2.0-style applications. Forget common man, how about the educational aspects of things, if there are products and services that can be beneficial to school and college students, that alone is a big deal. As B V Naidu (one of the advisors in the Karnataka IT committee) said, 54% of the Indian population is below 20 years!

Naidu also mentioned that there are 7 million new phones being bought every month, you won’t find such a high number anywhere else in the world. Yet, there are a meagre 1.6 million mobile internet users. Again, what are the killer applications for them? At least, I never felt the need for internet on my mobile phone. (As an aside, getting it working for the first time is a pain which is another major factor).

That reminds me, it’s been a while since I read The Daily WTF.

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.

Microblogging seems to be the rage these days, so I was looking at Indian alternatives to Twitter, and I found Webaroo Gupshup (later I realized that I had already received an invite but hadn’t paid attention to it).

Gupshup seems to hit the sweet spot in the Indian context because its all about sms and mobile phones and combines it with the web. For example, you can start your own group and update your microblog via sms, and it’ll be automatically forwarded (as sms) to all those who subscribe to your channel. The posts are also available on a webpage. The added viral/social features are the ability to conduct your own polls or quizzes and even ratings.

I signed up for Gupshup and created my own microblog located at http://sms.webaroo.com/channels/Swaroop.

This got me thinking how people actually promote their microblog, and it turns out that one of the important things is a widget on their blog that points to the microblog, especially the Twitter badge.

So, I was looking for a widget for Gupshup as well but couldn’t find one. Why not write one myself?

It seemed pretty easy to create it using Flex because Gupshup now has RSS feeds. And just a hour and half of tinkering got me to create this:

When Opera announced BitTorrent support within the browser (two years ago!), it never made sense to me. After attending Dr. Satish Menon’s “Video Goes Viral” talk yesterday, I am convinced that is the way to go.

The funny thing is that there are no benefits to the user, if anything, it is a downside for the user because the user’s upload bandwidth is going to be used most of the time (because of the p2p connectivity). However, it is a balancer for the network as a whole as the traffic is distributed, and it would’ve prevented the cricket website’s servers from melting when the World cup starts next week. If that sounded like gobbledygook, Kazaa’s help page on p2p is a good start.

One of the interesting things that Dr. Satish mentioned was that there is a prediction that in 2010, 80-90% of the traffic on the internet will be video. I am highly skeptical about that since the internet as we know it is useful mostly for information and communication, and information is mostly text. Unless everyone starts video chatting or, like Dr. Satish described, everyone is watching videos on the TV and the video is streamed via the internet. That is way into the future.

And that is the clincher why Yahoo! and Google are interested in video technologies – so that they can put ads in the 80-90% on videos. After all, internet is accessible by only 6% of people (I don’t know if this is US-only numbers or worldwide that he mentioned) and TV is accessible by more than 90% of the people… that’s a lot of money.

I am starting to see the value of Apple TV now. I wonder how people can predict such things (and consequently work on such products) – does it require some amazing insight or does it just require experience in the industry or keeping your ears to the ground or is it something else?