Social Objects: How about Trees as a Social Object?

Hugh MacLeod on Social Objects: “From Now on, If your marketing does not have Social Objects, It is Junk…“
I’m experimenting with the idea of Tree as a social object. Me teaming up with Stottpot is part of the plan!

Isha Business: A potent, bold way to Fund/Scale Social Ventures

I was surfing about Project Green Hand’s recent 25 Million tree sapling plantation kickoff. The project aims to enhance the green cover of Tamil Nadu by 10%.The PGH volunteers created a Guiness World Record last year by planting 852, 587 tree sapling on a single day. While I was wondering why there not much coverage for the initiative in the Blogosphere, and scant coverage in the mainstream media, I came across the new revamped IshaFoundation website. The site design is pleasing and RSS enabled where appropriate. But one page caught my attention more than anything else. The Isha Business page:

Over the years, Isha Foundation has developed a gamut of social interventions which have been funded primarily by the concern of caring individuals. While the results have been impressive by any standard, this level of support can help relieve only a fraction of the existing need. For these projects to reach their maximum potential, where their impact can be experienced on a much larger scale, a steady stream of funding is critical.

And the page further states that:

Run by professionals and volunteers from various walks of life with diverse work experience and backgrounds, IBL seeks to address the need to combine commerce with social conscience. As such, the entire proceeds of IBL will fund Isha Foundation’s various Health, Environment and Educational initiatives: Action for Rural Rejuvenation, Project Green Hands, and Isha Vidhya.

The lines between the for-profit, non-profits are blurring.

Scale is the buzz word in biz. Be it YouTube, Google, Microsoft or Amazon, they created human impact through scale. Donation/Grant based social interventions inherently face stiff barriers to scale. Thus, Isha Business model is something interesting to watch and learn. Typically, a for-profit spin-off by a non-profit kills both. But given the background of the man in the helm of Isha Foundation – Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev, Isha Business will be a proof by exception and possibly game changer too. Prior to his intense Yogic Experience at the wilderness of Chammundi Hills, Mysore, Jaggi Vasudev was a successful entrepreneur. And there is no dearth of talent, expertise or access for Isha Foundation to take Isha Business to success. Non-profits wakeup! Disruptive market place ahead!

Disclosure: I’m a practitioner of Isha Yoga taught by Isha Foundation.

Bonus Links:
Stottpot has an interesting coverage of the Launch
Ashoka.Org – Intervention through Entrepreneurship.
.
Jaggi Vasude’v World Economic Forum Address:

Inclusive Economics beyond Fringe Spirituality. Just like there is engineering to do external climate control, there is a whole technology to manage inner climate and wellbeing. That everyone can make use of.

SAP Global Survey: Push vs Pull Machinima

I’ve been consulting for Universal Print System for almost a decade now. Seeing a lot of similarity in pre-press backend activity and social media activities, I asked them to get into social media. I signed them up for the social media related unconfernces and they have got into the groove pretty well as evident from the SAP Global survey machinima we made.

Prasad of UPSL has taken up Wiki, Machinima and Mashups to the heart:

We are also keen on making our business mashable. The rationale for making our business mashable is same as rationale of a Bank installing ATMs. Just like ATMs, Mashables make common transactions frictionless. By making our business mashable,

* We are increasing our capacity utilization. ( We continue to be inspired by Amazon Web Services. Amazon as always a good place to watch trends translated to practice)
* We are pro-actively acknowledging the rapid commoditization.
* We cut down our cost (and our customer’s too) of negotiation and discussion over a commodity offering – the time/effort can be better spent on adding value to the same customer.
* We will be able to cost effectively acquire customers and also widen our customer base.

We( Prasad and I) were just wondering why mashups were not mentioned previously in the SAP Global Survey. We quickly overcome our doubts if we are bit confused about Mashups and social media. Speaking of confused, JP Rangaswamy blogs eloquently about Liquefaction aspect of social media/information. And I strongly believe that mashups/API exposure is a promising strategy for better capacity utilization(liquefaction ?). Amazon Web Services is a star example of capacity liquefaction through mashup readyness. I hope SAP Global Survey will help SAP to make this( capacity liquefaction) possible for Small Businesses too.

Of course, Hugh is doing eXtreme Mashup(XM?) with bluemonster – inspiring!

Update: Shel Israel links Prasad in Global Neighbourhoods blog. Calls Prasad, “first Indian and first person to extol the virtues of wikis for the survey”

Update2: SAP launches A1S a Saas, Web2.0(?), customization-free/consulting-less ERP for SME. Will A1S make the SME more mashable? Dennis Howlett has more at : Zdnet SAP’s slow hand A1S play

Make Tea Not War

By
Evelyn Rodriguez

Booting AWS Community in Chennai: Wanna mash Tiddly +AWS?

I’ve been experimenting with getting coding work done through Freelance coders in Chennai. Recently I hired Mukundan to mashup of SecondLife Linden Scripting Language(LSL) with Amazon Web Services. Mukundan overcame strange stack heap collisions by tactfully dividing the code and a working( but very slow) code is now ready.

I pinged the idea of an Amazon Web Services hackers community at the OpenCoffeecClub Chennai on Sep 2. There is enough interest to take it to the next level. Me think best way build the community is to facilitate it to do some seed work that attract the fence sitters into the community. Then community vibrancy/momentum takes over from there!

Putting the money where my mouth is, I’m initiating a simple project of mashing up TiddlyWiki with Amazon S3. And indeed there is a small cash reward.

When S3+TiddlyWiki is done, the code will be reused for Mturk+TiddlyWiki. The Mturk+TiddlyWiki combo will be handy for developers and lay users of Mturk alike.

Ace Freelance coders in Chennai, Unite! Come add vibrancy to the Startup ecosystem!

Twitter Not yet Global in Attitude?

I was amused to read Biz Stone – Co-founder of Obvious/Twitter Inc, the people that run twitter. Following Jack Doresy’s tweets it is obvious that there is conscious attempt to increase the footprint in India and China – fastest growing mobile markets.
Here is a snippet from Biz’s newsletter( with emphasis added by me):

What Happened This Morning?

We were performing optimizations to make Twitter faster and more
reliable and it took longer than expected. We scheduled some
downtime for the wee hours of the morning but the work spilled over
into normal human daytime. Hopefully, this didn’t put too much of
a crimp in your Twittering style. The good news is we got the work
done and Twitter is better for it.

If we go by Biz, other time zones are ‘abnormal’?

Last night’s AWS chat(see last post) was attended by Avatars from Australia where the local time was 3:30 in the morning. While space is kind of conquered, time remains a harder nut to crack!
PS: Biz, Don’t take this post too seriously! Enjoy your pasta’s and Lattes in your own space and time!

AWS SecondLife Chat: 06 Sep 2007

With Jeff Barr back with a bang after a month long vacation and Conference going, the AWS developer chat at Secondlife is back with renewed enthusiasm.
Today’s chat was dominated by EC2 discussions with the usual rants about S3 mounting support( or the lack of it), need to have an external ‘orchestration’ servers to manage the AWS/EC2, and need for scaled down and scaled up version of EC2 instances.

There was interesting feature request tighter integration of FPS account and AWS bill payment if and when the the Amazon Flexible Payment Service(FPS) supports non-US accounts. This way, currency conversion overheads and credit card processing overheads could be reduced.

There was an interesting discussion on protection mechanisms and bandwidth metering in the context of denial of service attack(especially Dns Denial of Service(DDoS) attack):

[10:33] Jeffronius Batra: Alerque, are you concerned about our ability to handle the DDOS, or our response to it?
[10:34] Alerque Thorne: Actually my first concern was bandwidth costs. Is there any filtering done before the metering?
[10:34] Alerque Thorne: Or would all DDOS traffic be my responsibility to pay for and then filter?
[10:34] Jeffronius Batra: I don’t believe there is. We would meter it at the point where it reaches your EC2 instance.
[10:35] Jeffronius Batra: Is there a better way to do it?
[10:35] Alerque Thorne: I currently have my services on a 45mb OC3. It is not unusual for that to get filled up with traffic durring an attack. This doesn’t sound like a fun thing to have to cope with on EC2 if I use it on the forward side.
[10:36] Jeffronius Batra: That’s a lot of bits, even more than my teenagers use at home
[10:36] Jeffronius Batra: I would have to talk to the EC2 team about this. If you want, you can send me an email (jbarr at amazon dot com) with more details.
[10:36] Alerque Thorne: Yes, it’s a pile. It doen’t happen all the time, but probably monthly.
[10:37] Jeffronius Batra: Are you making the wrong people get mad at you??
[10:37] Alerque Thorne: Simple answer: yes.
[10:37] Jeffronius Batra: Ok….

Answering a question regarding Amazon SQS, Jeff Barr built a display panel with GigaVox architecture diagram.

[10:17] Jeffronius Batra: That’s the Gigavox Media architecture, build with EC2, S3, and SQS.
[10:17] Jeffronius Batra: They upload raw podcasts, store them in S3, transcode them from MP2 to MP3, and then assemble them into finished podcasts with introductions, ads, and so forth.
[10:18] Jeffronius Batra: They do a fresh “build” of the podcasts every day, scaling up EC2 instances as needed.
[10:18] Jeffronius Batra: Like I said, they monitor processing time (beginning to end) and use that to regulate the number of instances in operation.
[10:19] Jeffronius Batra: They told me that they spent less than $100 on services to build this entire architecture.
[10:19] Ciemaar Flintoff: wow, that include ther EC2 costs?
[10:19] Jeffronius Batra: I believe that it did. Doug Kaye was the architect (he’s been in these chats before).
[10:20] Jeffronius Batra: The very cool thing about these EC2-based models is that costs rise directly in line with usage.
[10:20] Jeffronius Batra: You don’t have to buy a big pile of servers just in case you need them.
[10:20] cperciva Perfferle: jeff, the costs rise in line with usage once your usage is high enough to need more than once instance

And the usual request to meet up as many developers 1:1 was there too:

[10:53] Jeffronius Batra: This goes for everyone on my team — Mike, Jinesh, and I always seek out 1:1 meetings as part of our travels. Our schedule is at http://evangelists.wetpaint.com/ and you can simpy edit the appropriate wiki page.
[10:53] Jeffronius Batra: We find that the direct contact with developers, be it through SL, face to face meetings, or forums, is really valuable.
[10:54] Chase Marellan: What do you do in those meetings? Just what we do here? Or is it more targeted?
[10:54] Chase Marellan: Or do you just have dinner.
[10:55] Jeffronius Batra: We generally discuss specific questions and issues, sometimes things that they would rather not share in public.
[10:55] Jeffronius Batra: I like to get a good understanding of how they are using our services — what works and even more importantly what doesn’t work.
[10:55] Chase Marellan: Gotcha, thanks.
[10:55] Jeffronius Batra: We write up what we learn each day and get it into the company ASAP.
[10:56] Chase Marellan: Cool.
[10:56] Jeffronius Batra: Yes, it works wonders to be able to talk about real customers when making the case for new features. No ivory tower for us.
[10:56] Jeffronius Batra: And we do have dinner (or lunch or breakfast) too!
[10:56] Chase Marellan: Obviously it’s working.
[10:57] Jeffronius Batra: Oh yeah, definitely.

Too bad my suggestion for mashing up AWS with tiddlywiki got drowned in the interesting discussion. I’m discussing the mashup with some of the geeks at the OpenCoffeeClub Chennai group. It is simple, definitely has lot of coolness appeal if not money making opportunity.

Ifra Newsplex, Wiki at IfraExpo India 2007

I happen to visit IfraExpo India 2007 as part of checking out how my client, Universal Print System(Showcasing SCREEN CTP) is doing out there. My main motivation for visiting Ifra expo is to check out how Newspaper as an industry is coping up with the onslaught of the New Media and Social Tools. As a card carrying member of Social Media fan club with active interest in Wiki and SecondLife I was looking forward to the Ifra Newsplex showcase at the Expo. Ifra Newsplex is grounded in the philosophy of convergence of multiple media platforms and strives to

• Getting the theory of convergence into practice so that your newsroom is able to generate ready-to-go content for your audience
• Keeping the audience close to the brand by supporting newspapers that generate content the audience seek
• Enriching the art of journalism by using multimedia approaches
• Building up a long-lasting relationship with the audience that is based on communication and interaction.

In short Newsplex is how a typical Newsroom will be in the future. Add an element of ‘Future is Now’ – you get the idea. But, I was kind of disappointed see a small stall with a few laptops( supposedly loaded with podcasting and vodcasting tools) showcased as Newsplex. Of course, the disappointment was more than made up by Dr. Dietmar Schantin, Director of Newsplex’s enlightening presentation and subsequent offline conversation.

He shared his experience in transforming the news team of The Telegraph into Convergnet Media team in one go! The magnitude of the task can be better appreciated if you note that seizable number of team were to be won over to see the online trend as opportunity rather than a threat. And brought up to the speed of podcasting and vlogging as part of their daily routine. It was insightful to learn that it is not Technology but it is all about People.

Throughout the history of Computing and Communication Technology, News organizations were early embracers. With that in mind, I was expecting edgy social media tools like SecondLife put to good use in futuristic Newsroom like Newsplex. From the conversation with Dr Dietmar Schantin it is clear that even Wikis are not widely used. With my recent Citizen Journalism submission experience in fresh in memory I was ranting about how The Hindu could have easily routed the ‘Longtail’ submissions( Read submissions not fitting constraints set for print/online publications) like mine to a Wiki.

A wiki approach will immensely benefit shaping up of a News story as multiple people are collaborating to evolve it, validate it and render it in multiple forms. I can swear by it given our wonderful Wiki2Booklet experience.
I am kind of very surprised that despite having the biggest asset( the Community) Newspaper et al are slow adopter of social tools either for its own reinvention or consumer engagement.

Bonus Links:
Web 2.0 – a threat or opportunity for newspapers
A social media tutorial at Ifra Summer University.

BlogDay2007: Chorus Repertory Theater

A Wholesome Multidimensional Experience
Nine Hills One Valley by Chorus Repertory Theater performed at the MetroPlus Theatre Fest was indeed a Multidimensional experience. Here are the highlights of three of interwoven threads that many would be able to easily relate. The play was an intense mix of wholesome entertainment, a crash course on management, and a deeply subtle yogic spiritual process.
Wholesome Entertainment

The performance blended several samples from the traditional and contemporary Manipuri culture to create an immersion into a culture at crossroads. The viewers were settled down during the buildup that showcased spread of the evil. The wailing and the treadmill effects – so familiar in everyday experience – was employed to draw the viewer into the play. The scene depicting the cutting of wrists of Raas Leela performers enabled total immersion. The magical composition of cast, color and cloths reinforced with myriad theatrical elements made the immersion total.
The encounter of the men of wisdom with men of the modern times brought out the satirical and the comic streak within Rathan Thiyam who indeed directed the play. United States invasion of Iraq and the consequent ‘pissing off’ of the locals/Arabs was deftly portrayed within couple of seconds in the most funny manner. A muted mumbling English accent was effectively used to take a dig at the vagueness and chaos of modern times. Inundation by newsprints, with an obsession to report the death and destruction, served as a fitting ambiance to enhance the satire.
Soothing chants and music inter spread with graceful dance and movements amplified by color and costume made the performance a wholesome entertainment.

Crash Course on Enterprise Management

Nine Hills One Valley was not just a entertaining performance but also a demonstrative crash course on business management. For starters, it was 5S in action all the way throughout the play. The play brought out the essence of management buzzwords without uttering them explicitly. Here is a subset of elements covered in the crash course:
Organizational structure. In a typical business organization, the structures created for easy management invariably creates conflicts and inefficiency. In the play, the flexible partitioning effected through light demonstrated the harmony between the parts and the whole. The technique can be directly applied to harmonize the core teams and the support teams and manage the interplay between the visible and the latent.
Leadership In a scene one of the seven men of wisdom wore the blanket in contrast to the rest of the wise men highlighting his leadership. In many real life situations, the contrast between the leader and the rest of the team players is even more trivial. Yet, the contrast is a constant source of conflict and heartburns. The scene could help teams to put leadership in perspective.
Virtualization The pageant of modern men interestingly marked by out of tune zombie walk is a case of effecting more with less.
People and process The execution of the play itself is a celebration of people tuned to process. There were elements of people and process in the content of the play too. Like the traditional practice of use of dhanda ( serpent headed staff in the play) to externalize knowledge and wisdom. And using the staff to rewrite the wisdom in a form suitable for contemporary society.
Passion and Return on Investment. The play demonstrates the link between passion and high degree of attention to details. And the interlink between passion and exponential returns. The transformational touch of the play is the exponential return effected with sparse resources with good measure of passion thrown in.
Homework, Homework, Homework. Elaboration unnecessary. Enough Said.
On the whole, Nine Hills One Valley as a crash course in management is a compelling value proposition in terms of both value for money and value for time spent. It will beat buzzword peddling consultant mentors hands down any day! A key takeaway question from the course: When something as permanent as culture and tradition needs conscious renewal, how can businesses afford stagnation?

An Exposition of Spiritual Progress

Nine Hills One Valley is a Manipuri play. Yet, the language barrier proved to be an advantage to experience the exposition of spiritual progression expressed through yogic symbolisms shared across Indian cultures. The play is a vivid portrayal of the ill effects of disconnecting from the wisdom ingrained in culture and tradition. The portrayal explored the natural cycle of cultural reconnection and rejuvenation. The seven men of wisdom( symbolized by serpent headed staff) undertake a sadhana that wakes them from slumber and makes them transcend the ocean of life. The sadhana – inter spread with penance, chanting, fighting off the evils, invocation and reflection – not only leave them transformed, but also makes available the gift of wisdom and hope to the contemporary younger generation.
The play underscores the need for making traditional cultural wisdom relevant to contemporary society. The two way process in which the tradition and the modern meet half way across the bridge was outlined through juxtaposition of modern day angst with elements of grace and harmony quintessential of traditional wisdom.
The yogic symbolism of the palm – the instrument of mudhra that controls the flow of transformational subtle energy( prana) – was employed to illustrate the disconnect from wisdom. The cutting of wrists scene highlights the ill effects of disconnect from wisdom and the plight of traditional culture reduced to soulless ritual.
The performance climaxed with the modern mothers weeping and singing lullabies to their children expressing their modern day fear uncertainty and doubt. They invoked the men of wisdom who showed up in subtle form of light and hope in the valley thereby bringing the sadhana to closure.
For me, the climax was not during the performance but in the post-performance thanks giving ritual. The very graceful thanks giving was a revelation of and moment of connection with the Adi Guru – the energy that dispels darkness and origin of all art forms.

Note: The above review was sent to The Hindu in response to their call for citizen journalism contribution. Other than automated ack, I have not heard anything from them. Makes me wonder if they really ‘Get’ Longtail. A simple wiki would have made all the difference! As part of my client engagement, I’m checking out IfraExpo 2007 – curious to know how the dead tree media copes with the social media onslaught.

ninehilsonevalleyreview.pdf

Update: Looks like the the Newspaper industry is not fast adopter of Social Tools. Ironic given that their biggest asset is Community!