An experiment in light expression

Business Week has a timely article in its April 2007 issue on areas of work where different industries in different geographies are facing a severe human resource shortage. The article notes that the supply for several key professionals including engineers, plumbers, electricians, lab technicians, accountants(!), skilled manufacturing workers, equipment operators, and other such hands on professions is very squeezed. The list is topped by - guess what - the Sales Representative :-)

I was reminded of a thought experiment i once did that if there were a Third World War, and we went back to the stone age, what kinds of ‘professional’ skills would I need to be able to survive? I suspect story telling, teaching, cooking, and playing some kind of music that crowds can tolerate might be somewhere on top of that list…
Regarding the labor shortage in India, the article notes that ” The labor squeeze in India gets lots of attention. Oddly, though, Manpower’s survey found that employers in India reported the least problems filling jobs: Just 9% said they had difficulty, vs. 41% in the U.S. and 82% in Mexico. The explanation? Manpower’s staff thinks turnover is so rapid in India that employers figure if they really need to fill a job, they’ll lure someone away from another company. But stealing scarce talent from rivals isn’t a strategy for the long run. That’s why employers are on an all-out campaign to increase training and raise education levels. While India produces 400,000 engineering graduates a year, few have the skills and language abilities to work in an advanced multinational corporation. Some 1.3 million people applied to tech-services giant Infosys Technologies Ltd. (INFY ) last year, for instance, but the company says only 2% of those were employable. For business, it seems, there’s no shortage of work involved in easing worker shortages.”

Jan Chipchase from Nokia Research Center has an interesting research article on the challenges of designing mobile phones and phone services for non-literate users in emerging markets. Using rich field data from India, China, Nepal and other emerging market regions, Jan notes that non-literate users cope with their lack of literacy and numeracy skills in interesting ways to somewhat successfully navigate through phone features requiring these skills - such as asynchronous text based communication and contact management.

The research poses some interesting questions . Is a purely visual icon-based User Interface even a feasible solution - especially for complex tasks such as changing GPRS settings? Is there an unstructured and parallel and largely invisible universe of symbols, cues, and social handshakes that facilitate non literate users’ successful navigation of phones and devices defined primarily for literate users? Is it indeed possible to ignore the environmental context of paper scraps, notebooks, and other scribbling media that are used in conjunction with the primary technology to facilitate navigating, almost hustling  through the implicit literacy and numeracy requirements imposed by the phone? What kinds of redundant support need to be provided through audio or human interventions for non-literate users to confidently and casually use advanced textual features on thier phones?

Jan poses a Simple Non-literacy test at the end of the article which states “If you’re wondering just how hard it is for a non-literate person to use a mobile phone? Change the language setting on your phone to one you don’t understand for a day and see how well you manage.” Recently at Bangalore airport I helped a hapless Sardarji with his Nokia N70, where he had inadvertently (magically?) changed the language settings to Chinese and wasnt able to figure out how to get the phone back to English mode!

Business Standard had an interesting plug on Google’s plans for developing products for rural Indian consumers. The article states….”Google is developing with local vendors a simpler search engine, as well as content tailored to the needs of rural users. The customised content for rural customers would include weather updates, crop patterns and other local data.” The article notes that sectors such as telecom, retail, and certainly FMCGs (fast moving consumer goods) have experimented quite a bit with rural products and services, often quite successfully, atleast in telecom and FMCGs.

So is Google’s press release a sign that the software technology sector might be opening its mind to the possibility (Doh!) that the Indian market for software and web products represents the next logical step from services and product outsourcing? In the past years, the software technology sector has been a no-show with the the rural market. While rural consumption rides high for commodity goods such as washing machines, televisions, radios, mobile phones, DVD players and the like, the consumption of desktop computers or computer software has not really taken off. Despite the chest beating about e-governance, and all other top down ‘e-initiatives’ taken by the government and other agencies, the end user consumption of desktop software and in general software products remains quite low.

One part of the problem is that international software product companies have focuses on the big boys - the institutional/government machinery and its million dollar budgets for IT-fication and automation of existing manual processes. It is still easier/cheaper/simpler to do some look-and-feel, language, and font changes to software and call it ‘Localization’. A second part of the problem is that large Indian software organizations have never considered India as a relevant market for themselves. Why bother when outsourcing can continue to bring in billions of dollars, from clients based in Boston or Bosnia?
The mainstream Indian market forays (and eventual success or failure) of Google, Yahoo and other companies will be an interesting reference for what kinds of content, products, services, and technology infrastuctures would make sense for rural Indian consumers. Will farming, banking and such areas be the natural port of entry into this market? Are there other enterprise or consumer scenarios where software interventions might be relevant?

One of the areas i’ve discussed with random folks in Bangalore is the idea of a search platform that integrates or co-exists with the vastly successful informal knowledge network based search in India. For example, if i need to find a doctor for extracting my wisdom tooth, or find out about the best Hyderabadi biryani in town, or find out where to get a 0.5 mm pick for my guitar, or a second hand Frank Miller graphic novel, i would probably ask a friend of a friend, or call JustDial (23333333 pre-fixed by the city code, available in 26 cities in India - a good service!), or somehow randomly find what i’m looking for on Church street in Bangalore. How would Google manage this?
So, how do you take a farmer with no technology/media in his house other than a pocket radio and a B&W television to start using a web based search service to find out about the next expected rainfall, especially with 6 hours of daily power cuts? I hope Google is able to remember its own Yoda-like dictum “Focus on the user, and all else will follow”. This represents a great opportunity to do some ground breaking ethnographic and user research work, leading to designs that well, get used in the first place!

Bangalore Barcamp is back. THe next one is slated for Mar 31/April 1 at the IIM Bangalore campus.

This Barcamp is around social technology - or as the website states “At this event, we intend to share stories of technology implementations that affected society around us, and social norms that affected the course of technology. At Barcamp Bangalore 3 we have stories of e-governance, electronic record keeping, and what it means for those without access; Indian copyright law and innovation in music; and celluloid, movies and the resultant shaping of society and culture. We’d love to hear more, perhaps on the application of technology to understand the human condition, or perhaps on the growing spread of personal communication technologies and the unexpected but undeniable shift in the landscape of mass media and governance…”

The Barcamp 3 theme reminds me of Doors 8 Delhi, which was a Doors of Perception conference on platforms and infrastructures for social innovation.

I will probably present this time on Innovation - Innovation as a fad, innovation as a buzzword, and what innovative thinking really means in an organizational context. I might also present a spin on the future of the technology User Experience field.

The MIT Technology Review recently had an interesting article on the state of pocket projection devices. Companies like Microvision have developed working prototypes of the Pico Projector, which is an Integrated Photonics Module that is embeddable into a cell phone or similarly-sized device. The Pico Projector enables large sized projections from the mobile phone device onto any logical surface. Other than the usual applications of video and TV streaming (Mobile TV has already debuted in Korea - in mid 2006, they had 550000 Mobile TV users), Pocket Projectors open up several other possibilities for social interations, personal sharing, and group activity. Imagine taking a nice clip of the Grand Canyon or the Pyramids in Egpyt, and projecting them into any ol’ wall in your home for your city slicker cousins. Imagine making Powerpoint presentations at your workplace without the stress and anxiety of clunky and unreliable corporate projectors.
Another alternate idea of mobile phones being able to connect and project anywhere, upto any size is in this blog post which hypothesizes that mobile phones could communicate through common protocols to a variety of projection systems.

Now what would be *really* cool if someone could project from any pocket device into a holographic display instead of using a flat walled surface. I hope the holograms look better than Darth Sidious in Star Wars and Arnold’s various sci-fi hits and misses…