How our news industry is holding us back, and what we can do

Most of us catch up on news as our daily bread and butter, to get informed about our surroundings. So do I. After all, information is the power of the masses. Once when I opened a popular news channel’s site, I was greeted by a BIG banner saying “ An inside look into the life and loves of ****” (name held, because I don’t support publishing anything about someone’s personal life). I was dismayed. I wanted news about what happened around me, good or bad. Not juicy details about someone’s love life! But someone decided that I HAD to be force-fed this distasteful news content.

Lets look at Anna Hazare's movement as another example. Although I do believe that Anna Hazare's movement is a momentous occasion in our lives, I don't think all the news on TV and Internet should primarily be only about that, depriving you from any other important news happening in your world! If you visited the websites of the major news media houses in the past 2/3 weeks, you'd have seen that their news columns, videos, talk shows and everything else was just flooded with news primarily about this single event in India.

That's the problem. Most of the news available for mass consumption is just that: for mass consumption. So what sells will be published, because people will consume it, and then move on to the next controversy. Holding good news back to publish other lower-quality-but-mass-consumed news is a very myopic approach. The news houses might make a quick buck, but there won’t be any value added to the society, and the intellectual curiosity of the masses overall will stagnate.

P. Sainath in this interview session stressed on the need for citizen journalism. This enables people to know more about their surroundings: far more than, and before what the media houses might be able to provide.  I think of this as democratization of news. And since news is information, it has the power to transform India from a corruption-ridden society to a robust society.

There seem to be the following issues with new coverage in current times:

1.     Sensationalization of news.  (But I think we already knew that)

2.     Publication of news predominantly from the same ‘hot’ topic, over other not so hot topics (to maximize viewership)

3.     Quality of news covered and reported. There is a seemingly misplaced discretion about what is a ‘publishable’ news item

I do want to note that I understand that a news house needs to stay profitable, and that it needs the random (at least to me) news on the site. Also, I acknowledge the argument that the news houses only publish what people ‘like’ to read, and that criticizing news houses for this is like ‘shooting the messenger’.  But that actually brings to light a fundamental conflict of interest: that of profitability versus quality. And given that press has to be ‘free’ and out of government dictate, we land up in a place where there is little quality control and accountability over the news dished out to us.

There has been a long debate on how media affects society (just Google it). But I have a simple point. People don’t have much time to read news. Whatever time they do have, they spend on major news channels and new sites. And what they read is pretty much ‘all’ they will take away about what’s happening around their world.  So, while reading about why Ali Zafar wishes to be Katrina Kaif might be pertinent on a slow news day, this news item making a front page news over, say Stem cell engineering research offering a lifeline to endangered species might not add much more value to a reader’s knowledge base.  I am not trying to force a disconnected or irrelevant topic over a reader.  This article can be substituted by any news item, which adds value to a reader. And since a reader only decides what is valuable to him, the reader must have a choice beyond what the editor of the news house decided to thrust down his throat.

I think this is a problem of an editor trying to maximize viewership (profits) by offering news items, which could attract maximum number of viewers and get them reading (and in the mean time see some ads etc). In other words, it’s a problem of one small team, guided by very different goals (profits), deciding what should they offer to public.

It is for this reason that news in a more peer-to-peer format begins to make more sense. In an ideal world, every happening is a news item, and is relevant to someone. So, every one publishes news and anyone interested can tune in and get informed! To map it to reality, we need platforms where people can share news, removing the (often greedy) middlemen like the news houses.

New age technology has tried to solve the problem to a certain extent. Google news, and Twitter have managed to do customize the news distribution. There are other new tools like twitris, which map the social media with news happening around the world to give you a more comprehensive and personalized news content. So, you won’t be force-fed on information about “Absurd places people like to have sex ”. Although if you are interested in such news, twitris can definitely help you find such information J. In my opinion, twitris can take something like Google News to next Web 3.0 level.

There are also Wikipedia like platforms coming about, which allow users to publish news items with strict crowd-sourced quality control. itsnotyellow.com is an initiative on that front. Although in very initial stages of its conception, the idea seems to have hit the pain area of a-few-people-aiming-for-profit-deciding-for-the-masses. Since the news is crowd-sourced, there is a plenty of choice to suit to your taste.

News houses have an added responsibility, (just like doctors I guess) to make an ethical choice in carrying out their business. If they fail to do so, we need to create platforms for free news exchange. It is after all, the food for the mind.

It's not Yellow! And thankfully so...

Imagine this. You are sitting at the dinner table, and its ____ for dinner. You can fill the blank with anything you absolutely hate eating, and you ask your kitchen authorities for something else to eat. Now, instead of serving you something else, your hands are tied and you are force fed against your wishes. Would you like that?

This example applied to news industry is what is called Yellow Journalism. Lets look at Anna Hazare's movement as an example. Now, I do believe that Anna Hazare's movement is a momentous occasion in our lives, but I don't think all the news on TV and internet should primarily be only about that. If you  visited the websites of the major news media houses in the past two weeks, you'd have seen that their news columns, videos, talk shows and everything else was just flooded with news primarily about this single event in India.

That's the problem. Most of the news available for mass consumption is just that. For mass consumption. So what sells, will be published. Because people will consume it, and then move on to the next controversy. For instance, If I asked you, how long have the Kashmir interlocutors been in the Valley, chances are that you might not remember when did that controversy start. P. Sainath in an interview session stressed on the need for citizen journalism, which enables people to know more about their surroundings. Far more than and before what the media houses might be able to provide. I think of this as democratization of news. And since news is information, it has the power to transform India from a corruption-ridden society to a robust society.

itsnotyellow.com is a new initiative which tries to address this issue. It allows common people like us to create news for people, removing the middle-men (the media houses) from the picture. Its "About Us" page says: "“It’s Not Yellow” (INY) is a citizen driven platform that invites people to raise “real” issues in the Indian mainstream media. ".  So you signup with them, and upload news that matters to you, and the cycle continues. There is a strict moderation of the news done by an internet based set of moderators, which follow a pre-decided set of rules to separate Yellow articles from the better ones. Think of it like a tightly knit Wikipedia for news.

The site is in very initial stages of its launch, and is definitely just about ramping up. But what I really like is their attempt at solving the force-feeding of news to us. As more and more people start posting news important to them, everyone will begin to benefit from it.

One of its founders shared this experience with me: His home town had a curfew clamped for 4 days, and being in the US, he couldn't get to know anything about it! No major news house covered it since they were busy covering other news, significance of which might not always be impressive. 

Good luck to them!

mKrishi: A revolutionary technology product for Indian farmers

  Ok, so we are now we are an 840 mn strong mobile phone market. What next? How do we use the fact that there is at least some sort of a communication device with the majority of the population? I think of this as a hub and spoke system. 840+ million people are equipped to receive data from different centralized and decentralized sources. And this must be utilized to fill the gaps.

TCS is already on it. They have come up with a solution known as mKrishi. This service provides farmers (around half of our work force) advice about how to best go about their agriculture cycle, keeping in mind various factors like weather forecasting, other macro-economic factors, location etc. All enabled through a cell phone and web interface. It’s like having the expertise and resources of TCS at your fingertips.

The service, known as Mobile Agro Advisory System, “connects farmers with an ecosystem that empowers them to make sound decisions about agriculture, drive profits and conserve the environment”. I’d say it’s about time. There is a lot of thrust to increase agriculture productivity and enable farmers to get better returns from their produce. There are also a lot of studies being done around the globe on how access to mobile phones impact agriculture in particular.

 This research study mentions, “Mobiles impact information asymmetry in the agriculture setup. It also helps in bridging the gap between the availability and delivery of agricultural inputs and agriculture infrastructure”. In other words, farmers are much better informed (about prices and resource availability) and their produce can now reach far beyond what it used to, earning them more and reducing wastage too.

Another research study done on Niger (Africa) concludes “the introduction of mobile phones is associated with a 10 to 16 percent reduction in price dispersion across markets, with a larger impact for those market pairs with higher transport costs”

But mKrishi doesn’t stop there. Its offerings include a sensor based “Automatic Weather Station”, Geographical Information system, and a lot of other features (see here). It effectively is a one stop, mobile enabled shop for farmers to get very useful information to enhance their yield.

With a possible 10-16 percent reduction in price dispersion and reduced information gaps, I think we can help a lot of farmers get a more standardized price, and hence get a better deal for their crops, tremendously helping their financial situation. If things go well, this may also help reduce farmer suicides.

There are some challenges too though. Educating farmers to use the system well is a one, ensuring their participation by sharing their personal data is another (Read TCS CTO K. Ananth Krishnan’s interview here). But as with any technology S-Curve, I am hopeful mKrishi will catch-up soon to empower farmers and propel India forward towards a more inclusive growth.

Empowering Subsistence marketplaces: Enabling inclusive and sustainable growth

We all have access to products and services, which make our lives easier. These include healthcare, education, hygiene care, taxes, movies and what not. Each of these products and services make our lives better and easier, and we have the money to pay for them. But how do people with money enough only for daily subsistence make their life easier?

Enter the friendly neighborhood entrepreneur. This entrepreneur is NOT the typical suave person fluent in English, with a techie degree. Instead he is the local vegetable seller, or the kirana shop owner who successfully setup his own venture for sustenance. These smallest of small enterprises usually face many challenges everyday, which limit the growth prospects of the entrepreneur. There are so many such entrepreneurs with only ambition as their resource, that it can create an explosion of revenue generation in the country, resulting in much better living standards for many more people.

This is where Marketplace literacy comes in. If we could somehow provide resources to these entrepreneurs to ‘manage’ their organizations better, they will in-turn end up providing great solutions to the local market, and generate value both for themselves and the society.

Research is going on in this field to find out methods to provide resources to subsistence marketplaces. These resources include better understanding of market dynamics, management techniques and best practices to help them extract more out of the resources at their hand.

One such initiative by Microsoft is to “understand the ways in which rural and urban low-income households access and use financial services from formal and informal providers, including microfinance institutions”. This project is trying to create a technology tool to ease the process of record management, which will reduce many issues with the existing micro-finance and other lending services used by the subsistence marketplaces.

Another approach to helping subsistence marketplaces is through the NGOs. An organization called Udyogini is helping women be an integral part of the business cycle of their communities. This project approaches two major aspects of the subsistence marketplace: Gender inclusivity and marketplace literacy.  If you read Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, you’d notice that he supports lending to (empowering) women for greater financial and social impact on the society.

A third approach is to use technology to disseminate information out into subsistence marketplaces. This project is creating “an online journal and international community for sharing refereed educational materials that are targeted toward low-literate learners in impoverished settings to enable sustainable development”. This is revolutionary because it uses best minds from top universities to connect with people in subsistence marketplaces through a common mobile phone, and disseminate best practices and approaches among them. Watch this for more details.

All these efforts and many more are trying to create a sustainable system where people outside the middle class net get access to more products and services. This not only gives them a shot at a better life, but improves the living standard of the country as a whole.

Mobile phones based business models: An entrepreneurship revolution.

Around 2006, when I was working for naukri.com, naukri came out with a revolutionary recruitment product called “Insta hire”. This product extended online recruiting with cell phones and was an instant hit. I loved this product because it used what I considered was a tremendously potent power to access people who didn’t usually use a PC. Now people outside the tiny population section of PC owners were also available through a simple SMS. And that drastically improved the candidate set for a hiring company and for the candidate. A win-win situation.

You would have seen how cell phones have meteorically grown in India since then. As also seen right here on Trak.in, telecom industry has grown rapidly to add around 800 million users. But what usually goes unnoticed is the multifarious, albeit quieter, revolution that this is bringing with it. You can of course advertise, chat, or even find out cricket scores on cell phones these days, but what is more profound is the change it is bringing to the poorer sections of Indian society. Entrepreneurs are using this opportunity to create value for people who aren't yet in the bracket of the great Indian middle class.

EKO financial services is one such innovative company. It uses a simple mobile phone based operating model to provide banking services to people who don't have banking facilities. This is revolutionary. It allows people with inadequate financial resources to send money back home electronically. I don't know the details about its profitability, but the sheer volume and spread of its impact makes it a revolution of its own. The Tata Nano of the mobile world, EKO financial services has already been recognized worldwide and also in India, as shown by the list of 50 emerging companies by NASSCOM.

Another very interesting development was reported by BBC recently. An organization called United Villages has developed a way to 'empower rural people by providing and delivering products, services, and information'. In simple words, they use cell phones to enable remote sales people to log orders from small and remote shopkeepers in a central database. The centralized warehouse then mails the products to the shopkeeper. The per capita value of this service too might not run into lakhs of Rupees, but the number of people potentially benefiting from this service is huge. A much bigger market will now have access to better products which they didn't have so far, improving their lives in a little, yet significant manner.

I think such offerings have the potential to have an impact similar to what Internet had on us. These offerings enable a lot of users out of the traditional net to have access to almost similar products that are usually available at a premium they can't afford. Also, a lot of people also agree that majority of India might not even end up having a PC at home. They might just skip the PC and invest in smart phones, which could serve the same purpose. Such jumping of a generation of technology was already seen with the landlines versus the cell phones.

With companies already working on improving the cell phone capabilities and reducing the cost of a cell phone, it looks inevitable that more people will continue to gain access to more resources. Add to this the revolution happening with Cloud Computing, which gives easy and cheap access to computing resources, and you have a killer combination in hand.

Here is to a rapidly increasing per capita GDP growth! (Which I think is much more important than simple GDP growth percentage)

 

Why we need supercomputers to be a great nation

Working for one of the leading Supercomputing centers of the world has its own perks. It is a front row view of how the U.S. propels itself to greatness.

The vision of greatness wasn't far away from India either. Pandit Nehru, in his book 'The Discovery of India', talked about how the ancient Indians of Vedas and Upanishads strived for truth. Their quest for understanding what they saw, what they couldn't yet comprehend and which lay beyond the obvious was so inspiring that it led India to its place as a great ancient civilization. This fearless search for answers was captured in these lines of Riga Veda. Fundamentally, it is this fearless, unbridled quest for answers which leads societies to greatness.

In the current context, many such questions lie at the forefront of science. Some of the most complex problems facing us today are such that they are mammoth in their size. From predicting weather to 
Genome sequencing, Looking deep into the universe to better understand it, predicting next disease outbreak, mapping water resources of the country etc. All of these problems involve thousands of parameters effecting each other, and almost always manifest on a massive scale.

Such research not only enables mankind to better address the problems of tomorrow, but it also has an almost direct impact on the economic success of the nation pursuing it. Research done in any field leads to creation of intellectual property in form of research papers, patents and consequently new medicinal/technology products, improved services and many other forms of solutions which in turn make great revenue generators. In today's world, the country with the latest and best computing technology calls the biggest shots in research.

Let me give you the example of my own project. The purpose of Dark Energy Survey is to try to answer the question 'Is there Dark Energy in the universe'. Without going much into details, the universe is said to be composed around 70% of Dark Energy, which is pushing the galaxies away from each other at a pace which is not accounted for by gravitational force. This Dark Energy, if/when discovered, has the potential to change our outlook towards the universe we live in.

Dark Energy Survey will install a huge telescope, which will collect data deep from the universe and send it to scientists. Scientists will then work on the data to find out the deep mysteries of what we call 'Dark Energy'. The data sent by the telescope will contain information about galaxies, supernovae, stars and other heavenly bodies, and would run into Terabytes. This data will then be processed by data intensive processing pipelines which would run 'science' on it. None of this would be possible without a supercomputer, since this needs tremendous computing power.

Consider the case of water management. In India, even in the 21st century we have 60% of our agricultural land dependent on rains for irrigation. And on the other side, not only do we have floods in other parts of the country, but even the fertile Gangetic plains are said to be eroding with soil erosion through flood waters, river water. Then of course, there is the case of severe water shortage. In the U.S, supercomputers are being used to "create a national capability to better predict and manage the behavior of water—and its nutrients, contaminants, and sediments—everywhere in the U.S.". The value provided by this project, both in economic and social terms is tremendous. If such a project could be implemented in India, it can potentially reduce the loss of revenue, soil fertility etc by a huge extent.

For any of these issues and many more, India stands to gain by having a lot more supercomputers in action. Currently, India has only 4 out of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. If India wants to actually become a great nation for its people, it must lead the quest to solve the next big problem.

Oh and as for side perks, the worlds first browser was also invented at NCSA. And since you can read this article, I am sure you agree what revolution a browser has brought to the world :)

Gmail Contextual Gadgets: Your inbox on steroids!

How do you differentiate a commodity product? Say if you are selling a soap, or a broom, or an email service?

2 decades down the road, with almost every web- hosting service, cable connection, ISP etc providing free email accounts, when more and more machines are joining the internet than ever before, revolutionary things like email end up becoming commodity offering. And this cut throat market for email services necessitates the need to offer differentiated product. I remember a time when India Today group started an email service(mailmetoday.com) where they offered rewards (prizes etc) for using their service! Well, that fizzled out, and so did many other email services when they couldn't offer what people were looking for. Then came a time when we were lured by mammoth Gigabyte sized large email accounts by Google, Yahoo etc, which according to me, was the closest we could have come to price wars, in an already free email service realm

But things began to turn yet again with the advent of web 2.0, social networking and application platforms. The latest and greatest offering now began to offer innovative applications on the email service platforms offered. Yahoo has a lot of apps it offers which add on to the existing email services like Calendars, photo embedding, online storage etc 

The way Gmail has approached this is really innovative. It has begun to offer Gmail Contextual Gadgets. Basically these gadgets are small software pieces which work around the 'context' of your email, and enhance the value of the information present in the email itself. These software pieces can be created by third party software makers and can be easily integrated into your Gmail account.This transforms your Gmail inbox into a hub of different software which help you not only read your email, but do the 'next thing' which you would have done, right from your inbox.

lets say you use Yelp to share a possible restaurant to go out for lunch with your friends. You paste restaurant's yelp link in the email and send it to your friends. what your friends receive is not only the link, but also its ratings directly embedded into the email from Yelp's website. No need to click the link to go to Yelp's website!

Lets say you use Twitter a lot. Now you can use it from within gmail by simply adding the gadget to your gmail account! for more such applications click here.

It also helps enterprises by offering many business software services around your enterprise google email! watch this to know more about how Gmail is revolutionizing business software for enterprises.

What this platform offers is a tremendous value around the context of your email. That Google can read your email was no secret, but that it can be used to your advantage is surely a pleasant surprise! In coming months, I see this transforming the common Gmail accounts into a communication hub. Where one will be able to take actions on an email, right from the inbox! Now you can call (with embedded google voice), preview pictures, watch videos, accept invitations, schedule appointments, even perform business activities (as the video link above shows) right from your inbox!

I won't need to go anywhere else from my Gmail inbox, and with the right participation from the third party developers there will be enough apps for everyone to stick to Gmail.

How's that for a differentiated value prop!