The Pizzazzy

Now that we know how Nano looks, everyone is waiting for the later part of the year when Tata Nano will hit the Indian roads. Infact people are so impressed by the pricing that they even took the booking cheques to the Car Expo earlier this month. And when the veil was lifted off the revolution brought in by Tata, everyone was further taken in by the stylish looks.

Much has been written to criticise the car and a lot more about what a change it will bring in. As a target consumer, afterall it has been claimed by many that it will be more of a ladies car used mainly for dropping the kids to school or going to the corner supermarket, I am worried. Worried because right now I am finding it really difficult to drive on the roads with all potholes, the indiscipline and the bottlenecks due to bad infra-structure. And imagine when you would see nanos everywhere on the road trying to overtake the bigger cars and cutting lanes. I would any day prefer a better organised and maintained public transport like Singapore rather than driving myself.

I further hear that the rickshaw-walas are also planning to upgrade to Nanos. Are we all ready for this revolution and the concept of every home owning a second car. Many of my friends are planning to keep their bigger cars for weekend and buy a nano for weekdays. I am not against change, but before all this we need to pay attention to the infrastructure. I honestly liked the looks and the price.

The Indian infrastructure is not as bad as has been lately portrayed in all the international newspapers - brickbats and applause is coming in the same breath directly targetting the poor infrastructure. Nations who are also amazed at the world’s cheapest car and that India is the country and Tata is the company to be able to achieve this. The country of so called snake charmers where the car drivers share the roads with elephants and other animals has taken such big leaps. I never really liked that my country was referred in such a way but I am liking the context in which it is used, definitely a giant leap. Snake Charmers driving Nanos.. chuckle

Although I am one of the target customers but I am not waiting for nano. No sir, being in software there is one golden rule or you can call it fact that the first versions always has scope for improvement. Meanwhile I will keep happy with my Silky Silver Alto LXi which will be delivered in a few days. I’ll be happy getting some road sense and traffic discipline into me. And also wishing that some day in a few years India is actually in the league of developed countries with best of roads, traffic discipline and good public transport system. With this wish list let’s wait and watch for the Nanos of the future.

Everyone knows google is equal to search and google is also equal to online advertising. Adsense and adwords have created huge tsunamis in the world of online advertising. Now google is making a foray into tracking TV advertising. Many of the web masters with their hands and eyes on online advertising will vouch by google adwords: the click to click real time reporting that google provides is unmatched in any other media.

It would be really a boon to the advertisers to get a similar quantitative data to derive the statistics of their reach, target audience, impact and place ads in more appropriate channels and programs. Many of the TV advertisers buy airtime, then the ads are run and thats the end of it.

The scene is about to change as Google is planning to tie up with major cable operators and then study the data collected from set top boxes. To precisely know which ads were watched and which were skipped by which segment of people.

For ages advertisers have associated the ads viewership with the program viewership which everyone knows is not accurate. Appearance of some commercials really push you to flicking channels. Sometimes viewers can view multiple programs in a span of a 30 minutes by expertly avoiding the ads. Google is about to announce a partnership with Nielsen Company. Its planning to give advertisers a more accurate snapshot of how many people are viewing the commercials on a second-to- second basis and what is the segment of the viewers. This will help in specifically targetting segments that directly impact the ad ranking.

But just like we have internet users with eyes trained to avoid ads when visiting a web page the human brain is already trained to avoid all commercials while watching TV. It is highly possible that for some segment of users google can never get accurate data of what ads to target at them.

All said and done imagine a day when you sit down in front of your TV to watch a program and the ads during the commercial breaks are all relevant to you. Interesting and Innovative right!

When one thinks recycle and reuse the first thing that occurs to you is Water. But reusing goes much further than water. When we were renting the condo we are staying in, we saw that there were quite a few pieces of tiny furnitures. Our landlord told us that you can keep whatever you want and simply leave the others near the security. There’s a guy who takes whatever is useful and disposes off the rest.

I took a look at the furnitures and kept all, basically because they were cute pieces namely two peg tables of very simple design and a green colored small computer table enough to hold my laptop. Now one of the peg table is used for my prayer corner and has our family goddess’ picture on it.

The other peg table is used as simply a peg table in the living room. The green table holds our piggy bank, the cordless and basically acts as a corner to dump bills etc. What I gathered from pur landlord was that this was left by Cathy the previous tenant.

The topic I am driving at is how one person’s trash can be useful for others. The Salvation Army head quartered in London is all about reusability. Donation in kind from individuals and companies are resold in affordable prices and the income is used for supporting Salvation Army’s social and community programmes.

You can find volunteers gathering around specific locations on holidays and collecting the donations. You can donate anything out of your closet or personal book collection or old furnitures. So before thinking disposing or dumping think Salvation Army. With a tagline of Heart to God Hand to Man this is just the concept that we need. Reuse and Recycle.

I believe that if you do not give away the old ones you cannot make room for new ones.

Okay before I sign off there is this interesting news item about how a lady found an abstract canvas painting disposed by someone as trash. This turned out to be lost masterpiece now worth $1 million. The article titled One Person’s trash is Another person’s lost Masterpiece makes really an interesting read.