Category: Life in Bengaluru

Notion Ink Adam preorder now possible, but is it worth it?

(source androinica.com)

(source www.notionink.com)

The Notion Ink Adam is finally out for preorder. Fine. But the details have been so seriously sketchy that Indians have no idea about what exactly it costs in India, and how one can get hold of the Android tablet. On an average in the USA the notion ink adam costs roughly close to $450 or in Indian money a little over Rs.20000/-. As of now shipping to any country via DHL costs a whopping 50 USD or roughly Rs.2500/-. While this is ok for other countries, a product conceptualized, designed in India is manufactured in China and sold all over the world first.

I think the Indian government should seriously consider policing such product launches. Given the fact the person designing the product has an office in Bangalore, has studied in an enviable place like IIT and has been Indianized all long the way, this becomes unacceptable. Using Indian soil for product launches elsewhere. This applies to Apple in part too. Look at them, they have launched iPAD everywhere other than India. I can understand their sentiments. India perhaps is still not fully ready for a device like iPAD. But lets take Samsung for instance. They came, they saw the opportunity and they conquered.

Yes its a bit high in price no doubts, retailing at a whopping Rs.36,000 for a silly tablet running android. But then my iPhone is also the same price and I guess its justified if I own one over the other. However for people who were looking at affordable computing with a tablets – congrats folks, your dreams have just been shattered by Samsung. The only other way you can own one is to get into the infamous and dubious EMI trap and keep paying for years together.

Coming back to the Adam product, its flawless and most suited for today’s market if launched properly. But the distribution, returns and servicing strategy is not fully enlisted for both local and international users. There are no reviews of it with production quality hardware. The user interface looks great no doubt, but still not shown anywhere on the actual device. This makes the first set of devices questionable on their use. The keyboard looks fantastic and hopefully will allow for faster typing unlike other miserable touch screen devices like the Galaxy tab or iPAD even.

In summary one only hopes that Notion Ink shapes up its distrubution policy to be more transparent, ties up with banks in India and charts out a proper business growth plan for India. And yes please ship us the device for a 500 bucks instead of a 50 USD !

 

 

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KHB Suryanagar discussions – part 2

I have created a new child thread for you to continue discussions on KHB. Please bear with me until a permanent acceptable solution is found for this.

I am working on it already. Thanks for your patience. You may continue discussing here.

I have created a new child thread for you to continue discussions on KHB. Please bear with me until a permanent acceptable solution is found for this.I am working on it already. Thanks for your patience. You may continue discussing here.

For Original post, click here:

NOTE:A new website has been created for these discussions.
CLICK HERE to know more!

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The phenomenon – part one

I always wanted to pen down this story, but time was at premium. It finally finds its way into this blog. This is not a story of a place. Its an article about the phenomenon called Koramangala and my gratitude for a chance to breathe, live and loathe it.

The year was 1983. But we were living in 1682. The mood wasn’t exactly one of jubilation but more of an urgency. An urgency to find a place which we could call our own, in anticipation of a family which would shortly burst at its seams. With many siblings of my father yet to be married, there was never a perfect time for this shift. Our then rented home 1682, in Rajajinagar had a reason to be vacated. With burgeoning rental demands, and for reasons beyond my comprehension when I was just six, and with pressure from everyone around, we had to vacate the place.

Koramangala was neither in the city, nor was a village. At best it wasn’t even lands that belonged to the rich and powerful Reddys those days. It was more of unexplored forest, which BDA decided to tame in the name of site allotments. My father had been allotted a site for five thousand rupees. Five thousand was like a current day fifty lakh figure to him with his rather abysmal salary levels and the last thing he could do was cough up this amount for the property. He had two choices – Koramangala and Indiranagar. While he could somehow locate the former, he was afraid to go to the latter area !! 🙂

After a lot of discussion and math crunching all the brothers decided to pitch in for the house so that my dad could enable the change in life. This in my opinion was the beginning and end of a joint family. The beginning was one of happiness and the seeds for the end were being sown not withstanding my oblivion about it.

The nearest  bus stop to Koramangala those days (80’s era) was can-you-believe-it Diary Circle which is a good 3-4 kms away. I would say its good for a heart patient as such, but for the good-for-nothing health freaks that we are, this was way too much. This also is the sole reason why my dad and grandpa are living/lived a healthy life. They walked this distance at least for a couple to three years before the phenomenon started happening. With just six houses for the entire eight blocks of Koramangala, this was nowhere near a phenomenon in the making.

From there what happened until now is the phenomenon.

Palace road widening, GIM investments and the impacts

The road widening hooligans are at it yet again. This time they are aiming to chop off full grown trees alongside the palace road from both cauvery theatre side as well as from TV tower side. Reason is they want to make it a 10-lane road leading to the already glorious (for the wrong reasons) airport. Of course Mr.Srikantadatta being from the royal lineage wants 40 crores per acre or per squarefeet – all this while the government is already mulling whether palace really belongs to him or not in the first place. The palace itself is earning crores of money for all kinds of events and some sundry income from few roadside meters chopped off is a feather in wadiyar’s money cap. Here it seems both the government and wadiyar are equally selfish to their own ends. Whether its road widening or underpass or flyover, in the name of infrastructure the government seems to be siphoning off funds here and there in mass scale. No wonder in the recent GIM, the government has sanctioned power projects alone to the tune of some 2 lac crore if i am not mistaken, and pat came the query from the high court asking for the details of such blanket approvals and what exactly were these projects. While industrialization of karnataka is not bad, mass approval of projects without any consulting agency or committee just by the chief minister is a certain invitation for trouble in the short future.

 

 

 

the Recommendation disease on linkedin

 

Most of you who use linked in would have definitely come across the raging recommendation disease. Note what I said just now. The issue is not with recommendation, but its actually with cross recommendation or the I-recommend-you-and-you-recommend-me-back syndrome. Here is an example from one of the people I have worked with which I did not expect.

Well, I think personally linkedin must ban this kind of cross recommendation even if it is genuine. This dilutes the very notion of a recommendation. I just dont understand what people think when they resort to this technique. Do they think every such cross recommendation would mean getting a job easily? In fact contrary to that notion these kind of cross recommendations actually dilute the perception about the two parties involved in such recommendations.

Any recommendation must be at actuals typically either from a leader, about the people who he worked with, or a genuine recommendation that an individual wants to provide about a person who according to him has leadership qualities that are beyond par for that role.

However this increasing trend of the recommendation disease is beginning to cast a doubt over the quality of linkedin and subsequently the people who are using it as well. With linkedin also tying up with twitter and perhaps facebook in someway, a real dilution of a professional network is only days away.

One can already notice the effects when linked in updates say things like – “… is reading a book on how to conquer the world”, “….is wondering about the next biggest technology and how it impacts his life” and so on.

Its about time linkedin also introduces an at actual feedback system where one can talk about what are the improvement areas that a person being recommended can concentrate upon. Since this would be chronological, people reading this can always judge how many years have elapsed since such a recommendation and whether the recommended person would have had a scope to effect such an actual improvement in his daily routines.

Seasons change, as Bengaluru embraces Summer

 

(image source: from here)

This February has seen some unusual temperature variations. Bengaluru was ultra chilly at 12-13 degrees C. Added to this were few virii in the air, and everyone were down with viral fevers, cough, sore throat and other typical Bengaluru syndrome.

My case was similar and trying out different modes of treatment did not help much. What really then helped was a shift to summer which I was eagerly awaiting. And change did happen. The second fornight of Februrary is bound to see the minimum temperatures hovering around 17-19 degree mark, while the maximum temperatures feel like May really at 32 degrees and above with very little humidity levels.

Whatever happened, has happened for the good, and atleast we have sunny mornings these days! 🙂
Time to welcome the summer and its showers to cool us down once in a while. Enjoy your summer and holidays if any!

Longest Solar Eclipse begins its reign, Bengaluru sun feels strange

Today is the longest solar eclipse for this millenium. The next time you can view such a celestial episode is by 3043, and surely you will not be alive by any means by then 🙂 Rameshwaram and Kanniyakumari were two places where the eclipse looked great. Take a look at this video from Times Of India (Video has been removed).

The Bengaluru sky looked very overcast with no sunlight until almost 8am, and beyond that the sun tried peeking out of the clouds slowly and steadily. The atmosphere was one of some kind of devastation. No traffic on the roads, and no one to be seen doing their usual duties. The temples remained closed and by about 11am, the sun started showing up. The flare of the sunlight was brighter than usual, and most obviously even harmful too. Even with so much of sunlight, still the outdoors looked like being viewed with a tinted glass! There was a subtle amount of shade within the sun rays and even through office windows, the sunlight was pretty harsh.

Here are a few snaps I took of my crappy Blackberry 8520! Enjoy.

So when is the next such eclipse ? How about when you are married and have kids? Yes, its in 2020!

ING Vysya Bank (Koramangala) : heralding the next revolution in banking?

We have seen many banks since a decade. With the pioneer Citibank deciding to set shop in India, its been no looking back for many banks since then to start enticing their customers in many different ways to retain them. The public sector banks too realized this down the line and banks like Canara Bank, SBI and Bank of Baroda have now quickly upgraded their service level to be both personal and professional to the extent that it matters.

If you have seen the Samsung advertisements their caption reads “Next is what?” This is the caption they have set as a vision to themselves to continually innovate all the time. So then can there be a banking experience similar to this? Today I had the pleasant experience of opening a savings bank account at ING Vysya Bank which I wanted to share with you for those whom it would matter. Read on.

I was an existing customer of ING who recently happened to close my account. I went to SBI to open a savings account. But the kind of reception I received there, and the kind of forms I had to fill put me back a little. I decided to give ING a try again. One has to understand that you can currently use your ATM card in other bank ATM’s upto 6 times a month free. But with ING’s Orange Savings Account and a minimum balance of Rs.10000, you can use their card at will at all possible ATMs for free unlimited number of times. Reason enough to try out ING again.

Now here comes the surprise. I walk into the branch. I stand next to counter 1 where there was some customer being attended to. Within ten seconds, the official asks me what I need and when I said Savings account, in less than a minute I am offered a seat, and a form to fill up. And if you thought I had to fill up thousands of details, you are wrong. I signed at relevant locations, gave him one photo, put in my nominee’s name and my mother’s name and bingo – its done.

The next thing I know is I am seated with the manager Ms.Shweta, who introduced herself and after some talk, I am given a welcome kit – yes then and there all in a total of less than five minutes. Can you believe what all the kit had? You won’t if I tell you – it had the debit card, the cheque book, the ATM Pin, the internet username and Pin, instructions on all types of account charges, mobile banking Pin, customer ID and account number details, and a visiting card of the manager for further queries! 🙂 I was just DUMBSTRUCK at a loss for words. I could not believe that in ten minutes, I am walking out of the bank as an account holder with nothing more required than the details already provided.

One word – “Awesome!”. In the past ten years, never did I receive this kind of service from Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, SBI, Bank of Baroda, ICICI, Canara Bank – none. Well done ING. Your customer service requires a blog post. I am more than pleased to invite others to meet you.

And as we all know managers make employees, not the other way. Ms.Shweta is proactive, informal, and inculcates a sense of belonging into all the bank employees, who do things in a right way in a very involved fashion. This is what is called zero-effort marketing. ING Vysya Bank, Koramangala is definitely an example of a well managed bank branch.

I will stick with ING as long as I can, just due to this one experience with many more to come. If you want me to describe ING Koramangala in one word – PROFESSIONALISM. Check it out yourself. And with the experience I have had at ING, there is no doubt that they will not realize their mission statement specified at the top of this post! 🙂

You can contact Shweta here: