The Y-AXIS LIVE!

I have been a great fan of Amul’s topical ads, which create a connect with an event that happened recently and Amul Butter. The brand has followed decade old practice of creatively staying contemporary connected to the common theme in India. Here are two of them that caught my attention.

(To those who do not follow cricket - Sourav Ganguly is a cricketer who retired recently, he was labelled the Prince of Kolkota by the media)

My another recent favourite is on, you guessed it.

More Amul topicals can be seen here. And of course, I remain a happy customer of Amul Butter and the topicals have played a key role in that .  The oldest topical I remember is on 1984 LA Olympics when PT Usha missed the Olympic bronze by whisker and the nation could not sleep for days.Wonder if anyone has a copy.

Meanwhile, keep going, Amul.

Having grown up traveling long distances in trains in India (Since 1989 kms, have stayed more than a thousand kms away from the city my parents lived in). As a student, I used trains extensively for the travel and if you have travelled even half as much as I have done, you would know that ascertaining the location of a train in India can be such a problem.

No more, because someone has started this mashup that gives useful bytes of information. It gives fairly detailed position but not real time information which is still pretty good. I wish someone could give me a solution to an answer that I oh-so-frequently heard from the Railway Enquiry office which was that the train is almost in (In Hindi, the answer used to be ‘Outer par  khadi hai’). The same answer would be repeated for upto an hour sometimes!

The second must see site is this Mashup which mocks up Swiss Rail train movements. This site lets you almost travel with the train and see birds eye view of locations as a train passes along but does not use real data but only simulates the movements and the stoppages based on the time table.

And if you thought not having real time data is a bad idea, wait till you read the below notice available from the Swiss Rail mashup. You have obviously forgotten that Swiss Trains operate on time and hence real time data is inconsequential and so wasteful of money!

The newly launched Nokia 1202 does not have a music player, no camera, no radio, cannot connect to the internet by WiFi or GPRS. It does not have a slider, or touchpad and stylus. Chances are that it would not support your Bluetooth headphone either. Yet, this phone has the potential of being a winner, simply because it has beautifully identified the requirements of an ignored market segment, and translated them into a very promising product. Simply put, this phone is targetted to the demographically rural ( read poor) customer in markets such as India.

Instead of the high end and increasingly perceived must have features, this phone a flashlights- for anywhere applications in a village, the phone has five different phonebooks ( so that papa, mamma, Bunty, Gullu and Soni can all share the same phone).

The phone has been designed to work in dusty surroundings, and has an amazing standby stamina of 26 days so that even the most wretched  powercuts in the village do not debilitate the connection with the mandi (agri mart), or the son working in the nearby city or village. Smart. It will also capture the usage of individual users . What’s more, its price is a jaw dropping ~USD 32 (~ INR 1500) and it is targetted at Dr Prahalad’s BOP.

Incidentally, Nokia sold more than 200 million of a previous model of this series - the Nokia 1100. The ad below captures a typical environment in which the 1100 was targetted.

I was busy flipping channels looking for something different when I suddenly noticed CNNs Wolf Blitzer and Jessica Yellin talking about the win, standing few feet apart inside the studio. Something appeared a little unusual about Jessica that made me wait, and then Wolf said she was a ‘hologram beamed into the studio’ a la Startrek, while she was hundreds of miles away in Chicago.

(If you don’t see a video above, pls click here )

I have read about CISCO’s Hologram technology before and seen regular 2D video conferences hundreds of times but when I saw this in action, I was awestruck. Wondering when this technology would start appearing in workplaces. Like getting a buzz on the desk at say, 4 PM and hearing an announcement, “Mr. So and so from Australia joining via the hologram “. Wow!