Just saw an HDFC ATM ad on TV. There were so many things wrong with that ad that had to make this blog entry. In the first scene a car is shown parked at the side of a narrow road, presumably illegal parking. Then a tow-truck guy comes out of hiding to tow away that car. He looks like a villian from a old Hindi movie. While they show him struggling to hook the car to the tow truck, the owner of the car is seen already in the driver seat ready to drive away and the tow-truck guy is disappointed and evidently blames the fast ATM. Then the camera pans to the HDFC ATM and the message is clear that withdrawing money from that ATM takes very little time. It is true that most ATMs don't have dedicated parking area and most customers are forced to park somewhere nearby and walk to the ATM. But in this ad it seems like HDFC is encouraging it's customers to do illegal parking right in front of the ATM. It also shows the incompetency of traffic police to enforce the parking law. Doubl...

Another interesting year is coming to an end. A lot has happened in the past year. It's been fun, exciting and hectic. Tomorrow, we are entering the double digit years of this century. 2010 - it has a special ring to it. Somehow I remember it being one of those years used in all those science-fiction stories as a kid where they painted a world with amazing things. (Hey, at least 3-D movie technology has improved!). Anyway, dreams and stories like that are what inspires us. Wishing a very prosperous and happy new year to everyone! Live long and prosper!

When we saw GMail years ago when it came out, people were very excited to get it. And moment they got it they could practically start using it as their primary account and put it to full use. This meant people spent lot of time with the product and came to like it or hate it, mostly like it as it was ads free and pretty fast. With Google Wave, whoever saw the demo was very excited about. But when they finally got their invite, all that excitement didn't translate to wow! or ah! moments when working with wave. Aside from the stability problems, I think the key problem is that unlike e-mail wave isn't a widespread standard protocol - this means you can't use wave with all your friends and family unless they also have wave - which they don't as of today. So in some ways, this invite-based marketing is actually having negative effect in this case. Waiting for the invite builds up people's expectations and when they do get the invite they see these stability issues and c...