The Russian Pencil

For long time, I was under the impression that asking the user to type the text given in the form of a garbled gif while registering for an email account is effective. I was sure that there is no way to automate this till I heard this piece of news.

There was a Porn website that wanted to create a lot of email accounts but was unable to automate it due this garbled text procedure. There were a lot of hackers working to automate this procedure but in vain. The owner was frustrated about this but he did come up with a solution to tackle it. He just asked the viewers to type the text shown in garbled form to get access to the porn content.

This news is from our MD, who was earlier heading the Yahoo India division. It reminds me of America which struggled to find a pen that could write in Space where there is no gravity. Russians just solved the problem by using pencil.

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Why did you make her dumb?

Some techie gals have expressed concerns that I am portraying gals as dumb. But they need not feel so bad about it. Everything has a reason in this Universe. I remember something related that I read long back …

Adam was so mad about Eve. Whenever he visited GOD, the conversation was mostly about Eve.

“My father! Why did you make Eve so beautiful?”

“So that you love her”

“Why did you give her so sweet voice?”

“So that you love her”

“Why did you give her so soft hands?”

“So that you love her”

“But why did you make her so Dumb?”

“So that she loves you”

Search without blogs …

Google has unleashed the blog search … http://blogsearch.google.com/

Though there are already a lot of blog search engines such as Technorati and Blogdigger, Google’s foray does create a wave. Interestingly, Google unveiled the information about its blogsearch through a blog. Cool, uh!

Already web is messed up with every Tom, Dick and Harry creating his own web pages. The problem shifted from information seeking to information digging. The keywords churning out billions of page makes it simply impossible to get to the web page we want clearing out all the messy pages scattered everywhere. Agreed … Google did a good job in getting the most relevant info but still there’s a lot of crap that has degraded the search experience considerably. People have already started going to Library rather than search in the web.

Blogs made things worse. Blogs reduced the barriers to entry so that anyone can write anything … Even Lalu Prasad Yadav can write about Indian Economy and that bullshit might be read by great economists digging for some information… Blogs have increased the mess that we have to clear before getting to the right place.

But on the other side, Blogs also give information that other websites can’t provide. They are the voice of real customers. They are unedited logs of information. They come directly from mind.

Ok without boring much, let me complete this …My 2 cents is that blogs need a separate way of handling in search. They cannot be treated as other web pages. The search should identify whether the requested information needs blogs and act accordingly. Since Google has already identified the blogs, it can also come up with a search engine that searches only non-blog pages. This way Users can decide whether to include blogs or not in their search.

Wooing in the McKinsey Way …

My blogging frequency is taking a hit … Hope every reader is having his/her own blog reading software so that they are not checking my blog daily just to see that there is no new post.

Yesterday I was reading McKinsey Way and thought of sharing some insights with you guys.

Let’s take a simple case. I go to McKinsey and ask them how to woo a girl next door.

They first go around gathering facts. They collect details such as she leaves for work at 8 AM, sits with her colleague Sachin in the company bus, returns at 8 PM, has North Indian food at the restaurant opposite to her flat, likes North Indians than South Indians, never comes out before 8 AM / after 8 PM and goes for movie or shopping with Sachin in the weekends.

Then they structure the data.

How can Sujayath woo the girl?

- Go to her house, get introduced and somehow replace Sachin on weekends

- Get her mobile number somehow, make blank calls and gradually progress to a date

- Get her email Id / messenger Id, chat with her and gradually progress to a date

- Join her company and replace Sachin in the bus and in the weekends

- Meet her in the restaurant, get introduced and make it a habit to eat with her. Then gradually move to a date.

- Change the hair-style and dressing to look like a North Indian

- Remove moustache

- Read Kushwant Singh Joke books so that some jokes could be sprinkled while talking to her

Now this is not a rigid structure. In McKinsey language, this is not MECE (pronounced me-see), which stands for Mutually Exclusive but Collectively Exhaustive. I remember vaguely that I have heard this term during my B school days. Let make the list MECE …

- Get introduced to her by the following ways and gradually progress to date

o Go to her house

o Get her mobile number somehow and make blank calls

o Get her email Id / messenger Id and Chat with her

o Join her company

o Meet her in the restaurant

- After introduced, attract her by changing the hair-style and dressing to look like a North Indian. It is important to remove moustache.

- Read Kushwant Singh Joke books that could be sprinkled while talking to her

If someone is overaggressive and combines the third point with the second point to make it more MECE, they are breaking the McKinsey rule of magic 3. McKinsey claims that 3 is a magical number and whenever you do a MECE, you end up with a list that contains three elements. So see to that your list is with 3 elements.

After that, they formulate initial Hypothesis which is the gut feel of the result (aka the initial impression based on the facts). It’s basically a problem solving map. Our MECE list itself could act as initial hypothesis. Then they test it and see whether the hypothesis is true based on the facts gathered.

Failed cases:

- Go to her house

o She usually greets visitors after 8 AM without make-up and Sujayath is too tender to receive such a shock

- Get her mobile number somehow and make blank calls

o She has the history of complaining blank calls to police

- Get her email Id / messenger Id and Chat with her

o She is still learning to use messenger and till now all she has learned is to login and logout … Still a long way to chat …

- Join her company

o Her manager doesn’t hire anyone whom he thinks could be potentially intelligent than him

- Look like a North Indian

o Whatever Sujayath does, he cannot hide his south Indian origin, which is visible in every part of his body

So finally they come up with the solution – I meet her in the restaurant and talk with some humor (courtesy: Kushwant Singh). I pay their huge fee and wait in the restaurant just to see that she enters the restaurant with Sachin, the data deliberately omitted by the consultants.

Freedom - not a freeware

In Tamilnadu, cell phones are banned in the colleges. They are not allowed to dance for film songs in the cultural festivals. Not sure whether they will be allowed to sing film songs. A lot of ladies colleges have brought rules that the students should not come in jeans or skirt. Already our colleges are backward compared to other parts of the world and now new rules are pulling us backward. Most of the colleges still think that strictness and discipline are the only ways to mould a student. The path of creativity and freedom is looked like a forbidden fruit.

When I was doing my undergrad, I marketed a software idea called e-wife in some technical competition. I felt it was a great idea and thought that I did a good job in marketing that. I bagged the first prize in the previous years for not-so-good products such as magnetic computers. So I was confident of appreciation and prize that year. But it turned out that my entry was black-listed and was thrown out of the competition. I was said that it was a vulgar presentation.

No … No … I didn’t tell anything about how my software would replace real wife in satisfying the sexual desires of husbands. Actually it’s a lady who questioned me during the presentation who is to be blamed. She asked me whether it is necessary that e-wife should be used by only one person. I don’t remember the exact reply I gave but my entry was thrown out of competition.

Leaving that part, e-wife was a well designed product. It was a combination of entertainment software (though most of the married guys disagree, wives do provide some entertainment in addition to the obvious one) and Jini technology, which was hot at that time. So e-wife will wash clothes (talk to chip enabled washing machine), wash dishes (yes, chip-enabled dish washer) and do almost everything a wife can do.

There were also feminists in the class who protested to the name e-wife and asked me to change the product name as e-servant. I explained to them that e-servant is obliged to do work but my e-wife doesn’t. So when you ask for a coffee, you might not get that day just because your e-wife is mood-out. When you switch on your comp in a hot mood, she might disable access to all porn sites as you didn’t get her the favorite antivirus she asked.

My college professors were not willing to let go the little vulgar part which was there for humor and appreciate the concept. I can’t help comparing it to the skit I did at My MBA School - ISB. The skit was criticizing the school for exorbitant fee and making fun of the Dean and Asst. deans for their meaningless rules. Asst. dean was the judge and she gave us the first prize. When Tamilnadu colleges are banning film songs, ISB is thinking of opening a bar inside the campus.