As I sit here in my hotel room in San Franciso, on a warm autumn evening, I can’t help feeling excited about the approaching Tata Jagriti Yatra. When the concept was dreamt up in the living room of one of the organisers two years ago, who would have thought that we’d have reached this point where it is all about to happen in a matter of weeks? For myself, and many of the early organisers who have been with us since the first day, it has been almost a religious affair to meet every Saturday morning at 11am to plan and discuss this years Yatra. Some of us have never missed a single one of those meetings in the two years that have passed. They started off in the living rooms of organisers in London, then swiftly moved to local pubs and bars. Later we had the fortunate use of meeting rooms at a London office and eventually when the India team got established on the ground in Mumbai, we moved our meetings to teleconferences. In the early days we had people from London, California, Dubai and India all participating in our meetings and then, slowly but surely, the gravity of momentum started to shift towards India more and more. Today, the whole operation is being run out of Mumbai, with support and guidance from the original founders, and our team is evolving at an ever increasing pace.
Tata Jagriti Yatra is about enterprise lead innvotion. Some may badge that as entrepreneurship, others may call that innovation, and yet more may look upon it as creativity. Whatever your notion is and however you perceive the goals of the yatra, one core aspect permiates through the whole concept of the Tata Jagriti Yatra venture. That concept is of ignting the spirit of enterprise through exposure to amazing role models.
Since I was a teenager, a huge role model for me has been Richard Branson, the flamboyant and crazy British businessman who loves to pull stunts and break world records. In many ways, Branson inspired me to start up my own music magazine at the tender age of 16 in a similar vain to his very own “Student” magazine of the 1970’s. The zeel to continue in the publishing business transferred to a floppy disk based computer magazine called Digital Illusions. I started that magazine in the mid 1990s with a bunch of like minded friends out of the back of a bedroom. This was when the internet and the web had not yet reached the mainstream. We developed our own “Web” browser of sorts. It was more of a magazine content reader which display images, words and played audio and presented the magazine in ways in which most people had not yet experienced - all through a compact and neat little pieceo of software that friends and I developed ourselves with no real prior experience of how to go about doing something like that. the venture was an over night success and within a year we had over thousands of subscribers. The operation expanded to include numerous paid writers, and businesses actually parted with good money to place ads in my magazine when they saw what an avid and growing following we had. We could run rings around the traditional paper based magazines and have the most up to date news and reviews because we were not limited by the traditional print run because after all, our magazine was digital and played off three 3.5 inch floppy disks. Each month we’d include free “public domain” (open source) software on the third disk which would keep people coming back for me and every year at the annual computer fair being held in London, the spotty faced teenagers who run Digital Illusions disk magazine would walk out of those fairs with bags bursting with free software to reviews and free hardware kit to write about. I look back on those days and still think how crazy it was that businesses actually trusted a bunch of scruffy looking teenagers to take away their wares for next to nothing and write about it all in a professional manner. However, trust us they did, because ultimately we lead by example and took the leap of faith to immerse ourselves in something we were good at (computers and software), and enjoyed doing which event from the first issue of the disk based magazine. From our innovation in publishing media and presentation software to our ground breaking way of inticing people to come back each month for more through giving away open source software, the business spoke for itself and quite rapidly avid readers and advertsisers latched on to a good idea.
The reason I’m telling you about those heady days of yesteryears is because I would have never attempted what I did, had it not been for the role models I was exposed to. Branson’s almost reckless madness and risk taking in business, but also his flaboyant audacity to take on the establishment and ruffle their features was exciting to me as a teenager and it brough a starkle to my eyes. It is this sparkle we hope to capture during Tata Jagriti Yatra and we hope it inspirs the young minds of India to think out of the box, learn how to innovate and then drive the energy and innovation in to responsible and sustainable enterprises.
For all those Yatri’s who have applied to be on the train and have been accepted, I urge you to read Richard Branson’s latest book - “Business Stripped Bare. Adventures of a global entrepreneur”. I picked this book up on my business trip out to the US and I couldn’t put it down till the plane had landed. The book is a personal story of why Branson is in business. It tells the reader about what drives Branson to innovate and continually transform himself and his businesses around the world. For all those who are looking for some inspiration in their start-up business and for some excellent food for thought before you board the Tata Jagriti Yatra train on 24th December 2008, this book comes highly recommended.
If asked to recount 5 top events of my life, I will perhaps always include my participation in the Azad Bharat Rail Yatra (Free India Train Journey) in 1997-98. A chartered train with over 200 students cris-crossed India in an exciting journey that celebrated India’s 50 years of independence. The second edition of this journey, called Jagriti Yatra (Renaissance Journey), takes place this winter, 24Dec08-11Jan09.
Jagriti Yatra (JY) succeeds the Azad Bharat Rail Yatra (ABRY) after 11 years. These 11 years have not been a blink in time for the world, and certainly not for India. We have seen a great deal of change in these years. As JY unfolds, we need to perhaps assess our ABRY direction and evaluate where we need an inflection and where an about turn is necessary.
To that end, the JY team has rightly positioned this journey as a forward-looking, future-oriented event focused on India’s need of the hour: Entrepreneurship. As an ABRY participant, I am also in position to point out certain themes & messages of the last Yatra that need to be revised for the consumption of the new generation that will come aboard.
As many participants will recall, we had a 5-point agenda on the train (Population Control, Environment & Sustainable Development, Values, India & the Globe, Agro-Industries & Entrepreneurship) and additionally, a focus group on an Ideal Village and Ideal City (which we named Azad Gaon & Azad Shahar). While certain messages have remained topical and have acquired an even bigger importance, a few themes need repackaging:
a) Population Control: ABRY’s consensus was that population growth is a problem and we need to control our numbers. This position was heavily conditioned by the state propaganda and our biases. Indians (and people from other developing countries) are sometimes diagnosed as possessing a ’scarcity mindset’ as opposed to an ‘abundance mindset’ of Westerners. Growing up, one would look around and easily associate the scarcity of resources with number of people claiming them. This thinking expressed itself during events like ‘load-shedding’ (this concept is unknown in the West) or queuing up at the railway station to purchase tickets or over rising prices and while dividing waters. Research (not necessarily recent) has revealed no causation between population and poverty. Thinly-populated countries can be miserable (think sub-Saharan Africa) and heavily-populated regions can be rich (think Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, New York etc). True, larger numbers require more resources but they also accelerate innovation. Innovation fuels prosperity which eventually shrinks the birth rate and populations reach stable levels. To focus on population control as a means of reducing poverty is like rowing against the tide to escape the storm. India needs to focus on creating opportunities for the people, accelerate development and reap what many economists are beginning to term as ‘demographic dividend’. In the process, population will take care of itself.
b) Ideal Village: There was a bit of Gandhian thought that hung upon us like still air throughout the journey, especially after the visit to the Sabarmati Ashram. While Gandhi was clearly a great individual and leader, no serious economist would term his notions of development well-considered. His focus on self-sufficiency may have been good as a tool of civil disobedience, but in post-independence India, it was a recipe for disaster. From that wellspring arose the idea of developing villages (because that’s where India lives, they say). Our well-meaning leaders relied unquestioningly on Gandhian insights and still do. However, this kind of thinking that treats assumptions as axioms is very harmful. Yes, majority of people live in villages but should they continue to live there? A cursory analysis of concentration of world’s wealth (and common sense) reveals that cities are where wealth is. In developed nations, very few people live in rural places or earn their living through agriculture. We can improve the lot of rural India by focusing on creation of cities, not on improving villages. There is a thin line between the two but this difference in paradigm has a powerful impact on how we allocate resources.
c) Agro-Industries: Similar to the Ideal Village discussion, the emphasis on agribusiness was not forward-thinking. In India, we often take agriculture as non-negotiable and then, proceed to think about how we can create more value out of it. It is a sound idea in the interim but our end-goal should be to wean our workforce away from agriculture, as much as possible. Today’s India is reflection of this trend where we have moved away from an agriculture-dominated economy to a services-dominated one. During 2005-06, agriculture accounted for 20 % of India’s GDP while Services accounted for 54%.
d) Values: I was a part of the Values group and remember that we created a poster of a Tree of Values which showed how there are some basic values (the trunk) and how they provide the bulwark for other values (branches) which ultimately help us in achieving success and joy (fruit/leaves). For us, the trunk was ‘Honesty’ and ‘Integrity’, and none of it is obsolete 11 years from then. This is a discussion that requires an inflection since a better understanding of values has assumed a much greater role in assimilating a global world. The more we are joining up, the more we need to learn to understand and respect differences. The predictions of homogeneity (’global village’) have fallen short and as different regions of the world develop at varying rates, the melting pot runs the risk of occasionally turning into a seething cauldron. Samuel Huntington’s 1993 thesis ‘Clash of Civilizations‘ appears full of prescience as he predicted that Post-Cold War conflict will stem from cultural, rather than ideological differences. At that time, this appeared counter-intuitive to many since ideology was supposedly a more powerful force than culture in modern times. Not many people doubt Huntington’s thesis anymore. 9/11 can be considered a watershed in this development and as an event, it stands between ABRY and JY. The next wave could be based on any other identity, beyond cultural or ideological. Therefore, it is important to widen the scope of the Values discussion and include not just culture/ideology but also gender, sexuality and race as possible fulcrums of the emerging world order.
e) Environment & Sustainable Development: We debated endlessly about how forests needed to be saved and rivers needed to be cleansed. The awareness regarding environment has peaked in the last few years with global warming taking centrestage with war on terrorism, so this presents another inflection point. While ABRY understood the importance of Sustainable Development and also endorsed several local and national solutions, I think JY needs to take this dialogue further and include the nuanced nature of the issues that now beset us on a global level. Some of the recent analyses have shown powerful connections environment has with peace (think Water) and terrorism (think Ivory), going beyond the traditional foil of industrial development. The debate has also taken on a moral shade due to clamor by the developed world that China & India need to rein in their emissions and energy hunger. While the West easily neglected any fallout on environment during its coming-out, developing countries are expected to show restraint when they need it least. This calls into question the fairness & politics of development. JY must explore these issues and present India’s case.
I am sure JY team is crafting a 5-point agenda for this year’s Yatra but if I may throw in my suggestions on which broad areas to focus on, these will be:
1. Role of Government & Civil Society
2. Sustainable Development & Environment
3. Religion & Values
4. Free Market & Regulation
5. Entrepreneurship & Education
I wonder what others think.
(The above is a reproduction of the latest post from my blog: serialbus.wordpress.com)
Hey everyone. I have some great news for you all. We’ve just launched the Tata Jagriti Yatra Flickr photos account. You can stay up to date with Yatra activities through photos and short videos posted to our Flickr page.
If you’re a budding photographer or an eager short movie maker with a penchant for recording impromptu short videos, on your mobile phone for example, then we have a challenge for you. For all those Yatri’s who have been selected, we ask you to docoument your adventure on Tata Jagriti Yatra and post your pictures and short 90 second videos up to our Yatri Flickr group. Please note, it’s a moderated group so please allow some time for your submissions to appear. We moderate the group in our spare time so things may not always appear immediately.
Hello to all Yatri’s and general visitors to this blog. I’m pleased to tell you that we have our train time table available to view on the web site. It should give you an accurate schedule of when and where the train will flag off from, end up at and when we intend to arrive at and leave from all the places we’ll be visiting. I hope this helps you all co-ordinate your travel plans as the start of the Tata Jagriti Yatra draws near (flagging off at Mumbai Central station on 24th December 2008 at 11pm!). This time table should also be useful to all those who cannot join the yatra at the very start and intend to join the train at a later point or drop off at a later point before the trains final return to Mumbai on the 11th of January 2009.Â
Of the next few days we’ll be updating the time table so that the city names are linked to a page detailing who we’ll be visiting at each stop, so I suggest you all return to this page on a regular basis.Â
Hi everyone. It has been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog so here’s a quick update for you all.
We have just posted a brand new set of frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) for Indian and international participants. Check them out as they answer a lot of questions we get on a regular basis via email.
Some of you may have noticed the Hindi link at the top of the home page. This leads to the hindi version of the web site. Some pages are still in English and over time we intend to translate most of it in to Hindi. Please let us know if you spot any issues, problems or mistakes on the Hindi web site.
We’re on Twitter! You can follow JagritiYatra and keep up with the latest gossip from the team. Follow us and let us know what you think about the Tata Jagriti Yatra project.
Latestly, we just got a really nice article about the yatra posted on the NXg web site.
That’s for now, folks! Hope to hear back from some of you soon.
About 7 years back, on 14Nov01, I wrote the following email to the ABRY yahoo-group. It had been about 4 years since the Yatra. I had just got my arms around the basics of internet and email. I found the group online and decided to write to everyone. Looking back at this mail, I am not sure whether I am nostalgic about the mail or about the Yatra or both. Anyways, reproducing it here in original (except for the everything sic, which I edited!!).
“Dear All,
Long time, no see!
I am really excited to realise that just by hitting the ‘Send’ button, all this that I am writing will be
instantly delivered to some long-lost friends from far and wide (from Manipur to Minnesota, that’s how Shashank put it, right?).
I joined the e-group a month ago but it had to be today. I am on another e-group where i get some two mails everyday so I was dismayed to see that we Yatris aren’t getting our act together - it took a Dilen Gandhi to shook us up - and suddenly we began to hear some really interesting pieces of mundane news from all quarters - like how someone just got over with exams and is aching to get back to Manipur, like how some people thought that someone else was namedropping on a US connection and like someone has just completed a report on minorities in the backdrop of a lovely snowfall (Hazel, it’s winter here too, in the Terai region of Himalayas…and I make it a point to wear my hooded sweatshirt every evening).
Suddenly, it struck me that of the 55 people on this list (who all are they???), some might be wondering whose mail this is: Who was Mohit Joshi? What did he look like? or (God forbid) Was this guy really on the Yatra?
So let me tell you what I was witness to. Small things first.
I was there in the foyer of convocation hall, IIT-B when Juhi and Purva shrieked when they discovered that they were long lost kindergarten friends. And, I had looked on in amazement as Akhtar walked up to the stage unaided to introduce himself in his Brit accent. I was sitting outside at lunchtime when Frank came along chatting with all Yatris one-by-one (Damn, he was looking for a hero for the film he was to shoot for the Yatra. I didn’t deliver my lines properly so Devang got his first big break).
And, I had stood up in Matoshree when Shashank made us get up and do some stretch exercises before delivering his cocktail speech (Shashank, we didn’t really need it: your cocktail gave us a good enough kick!). And, I was the one who sang the carols out of tune at the Bombay Central station on the midnight before Christmas (who broke the coconut, i never could gather!).
And, the cold morning of 26Dec97, when the train had reached Tilonia and the welcome party from the village had started beating drums hoping that our motley group will jump out from all possible outlets in the train, our people were busy rushing to the loos while the train stood still.
And, the rather colorful guide at the Amer Fort in Jaipur who spoke in detail about the polygamous habits of the Rajahs. The way we all rushed to the stage at GGIC, Amritsar to do bhangra but then were recalled because we had reacted prematurely….
Marc Tully, Kiran Bedi and R K Pachauri couldn’t get enough of each other at IIT-D. And, the people danced at Railway Station till the train got moving, a few minutes after it became 01-01-98. Mrs and Mr Pasricha joined us there. The five-point agenda spelt out by a lady doctor at KGMC, Lucknow - Does anyone remember what I’m talking about? (Not the real 5-point agenda!)
Gautam Mukherjee’s Toflersque talk at football stadium, Jamshedpur enthralled all of us although Shashank remained skeptical of his ideas till the end. Santaragachi???? Yes, here we had the Azad Bharat Paidal Yatra (ABPY), lest anyone forget!
I guess we kept the Navy guys waiting for long at Vizag Rly Stn and I got bumps at the harbour because it happened to be my b’day that day and never will I forget the card Purva hand-made and got signed by everybody then (It said in block - “Tum jiyo hazaaron saal; saal ke din ho pachaas hazaar”).
Aurangabad was a long halt - the Manifesto group had started working day and night - and the presentations at the Bajajs’. The choreography show by Nath Valley School kids was awesome, wasn’t it? And, Frank made Madhur Bajaj do several retakes for capturing a single scene (Frank’s houseboat on Thames was called ‘Girl Friday’, he said).
And, by that time Clyde had become famous for his bum-charades also. And Komal for her dance on the French number, ‘Melissa’!
The pictures of the tank ride at Ahmednagar have always been the envy of my friends. While filming Anna Hazare near his school, Frank had stationed himself on a rooftop nearby. At a point, he wanted a retake but he didn’t exactly remember Anna Hazare’s name, so he shouted out to Shashank - “Make the great man go down the steps once again!”
The military band playing outside Col Patil’s home in Pune excited junta so much that they formed a platoon and started marching on its beats much to the amusement of the band! I had forgotten my slam-book at the Agha Khan Palace but someone brought it to the train in the night to my relief or I would have lost all those precious entries by all of you!
And, the Pune-Mumbai leg was what they call senti; Chutki broke down and some others too. People began taking rounds of the train - beginning at one end, they would go ahead hugging everyone they came across till everyone had been hugged 199 times.
The last time I was with you was when the cake was being cut at the Bombay Central with a beaming Shashank doing the honors. After that, we unclotted. We walked, ran, raced ahead in all directions. And, haven’t stopped ever since. So, i feel sometimes we should stand still. And, let the forest find us.
Let’s connect - all of us! And, get everyone else into the loop! Let’s keep the family intact because the onus of an Azad Bharat Sea Yatra (ABSY) is on us! We will get Shashank et al as consultants.
Keep writing a la Dilen’s formula - mundane events in lives of friends distant become the most interesting of narrations. I have been rather sloppy so far (3 years, 9 months, 25 days) but my Diwali resolution is to remain in the loop now onwards!
I basically wanted to wish all of you a great Diwali (for the Finnish, the Indian festival of light) through this mail. Those who remember me would be kind enough to hit the ‘Reply’ button and those who do not, well, can assume me to be a new friend altogether and the e-group shall keep us together.
The final draft guidelines for implementing the role out and allocation of spectrum for 3G and WiMax services in India will be finised this week, according to sources in India. This will presents a significant move forward for the Indian mobile telecoms Industry.
3G and variations of it first got rolled out in Japan back in 2001. 3G essentially allows you to shift data faster over the mobile phone network thereby opening up many new services and possibilities (such as video telephony and high speed data services for downloading information and surfing the web). WiMax is similar to home wireless technology. Where-as home wifi only reaches out a few hundred feet, WiMax has a much wider range many across kilimeter. It also offers speeds that are far greather than 3G. To WiMax in to reality, just image that you can be anywhere in the city of Mumbai, lets say, and flip open your laptop and get on to the web instantly regardless of where you stand. Work from the park, the local Cafe Coffe Day, from home or at the airport terminal. WiMax allows this and that too at high speed.
The advantage of 3G to mobile phone operators is that there are a lot of phone models in the market aleady which already support 3G out-of-the-box. With further investment in installing 3G transmission towers the basic infrastructure for 3G in India can be rapidly rolled out. WiMax, on the other hand, could take a little longer to become widespread. The equipment necessary to receive WiMax signals isn’t readily available in India yet and transmissions in the WiMax spectrum is some-what limited to date. In India, Tata Communications has been experiementing with a WiMax trial and Bangalore and hopes to expand this across Mumbai and Delhi once spectrum has been allocated.
What really interests me is that WiMax has the potential to reach remote rural populations in India where existing mobile coverage is patchy or non-existant. This would open up the possibility of bridging the digital divide and binging the advantages of access to the Internet to whole new communities. History has shown that Internet access in rural areas of India has been mostly a good thing with a great examples being the e-Choupal project, which enables farmes to get price of grain and seed direct from market instead of going through the middle man via internet terminal in their villages and farms. Access to the internet in rural areas also spreads the influence of better and wider education to all of India’s population, helping to unlock the latant tallent of a youthful and eager work force. Ultimately, however, as technologies like WiMax and 3G reach the masses, it will enable India to innovate and invent in ways it hasn’t done so before. Entepreneurs up and down the country as well as would-be entrepreneurs will suddenly have a new medium to release their ideas through. When I look at the divide between the uptake of broadband internet and mobile telephony in India, the choice today is clear. More Indian’s today own and use a mobile phone and the number of mobile subscribers dwarfs the number of broadband intenet subscribers. Everyone from your ricksha-wala to duba-wala, city slicker to gardener, cleaner to call centre worker now owns a mobile phone and the uptake is unstopable.
Although market saturation of mobile phone ownership is some years off in India, like its global counterparts, Indian telco’s will eventually start to feel the pinch and one way to sustain and increase revenue is to expand sevice offerings. 3G and WiMax will enable Indian telco’s to offer their subscriber base a multitude of new services including premium video content, video to video chat between hand-sets (and cross network), selling software to mobile phone business users and innovating in the burgeoning mobile phone games industry. Like it’s console games counterpart, mobile gaming is booming in International makets and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case in India once the networks enable people to download large files to their phones. Culturally, Indian’s differ in many ways to the world at large and one of those differences is the high value placed on education. Nintendo already realises this and its DS games console, coupled with the plethora of recent educational titles that you play on the Nintendo DS is taking off like hot-cakes. This is a natural appeal and fit with the Indian psychi and mind-set. Finally, 3G will allow Indian users to upload photos and videos from their phones to the web and partipicate in the mobile social networking space beyond the confines of SMS and becomes what is coined as citizen journalists. Indian teleco’s will probably offer a selection of data packages to subscibers, although like the west, most teleco’s will no-doubt standardise data tarrifs on flat rate “eat as much as you like” structures to reduce confusion and streamline billing.
There are countless ways the Indian telco’s and consumers will benefit from 3G and WiMax and I cannot wait for this market to blossom in India. With over 71 countries now offering 3G to its consumers, it’s time for India to join the 3G club and perhaps suplant it altogether with WiMax.
Now this may seem a little premature but live mobile phone video streaming from your mobile is here, and available now. Granted, in India there still isn’t a high speed 3G or 3.5G network to easily faciliate live mobile video streaming, but it’s coming and that’s probably when live video streaming from your mobile will start to take its first baby steps in the Indian market space. Both the infrastructure and the software to make it possible are two very important things for the further development and adoption of new technology on the mobile platform and I’ve recently started playing with it here in the UK. Here’s my take and what’s happening and why you early adopters in India should be keeping a keen eye on developments.
Firstly, I really do hope a viable 3G network is established in India by the end of December 2008 but I’m not holding my breath for any major surprises as there’s a lot of red tape to cut through and a lot of spectrum to sell before the transmission masts start going up. My ultimate hope is to be able to live stream from the Jagriti Yatra train so that the world can view out journey as it happens in glorious, all be it slightly grainy video.
So, you’re all wondering by now what the heck I’m talking about. This is how it works. You have a mobile phone which has a camera on it. It’s something most of us have today. Most mobiles can also record video and a lot of you have probably recorded videos on your mobiles already and probably uploaded them on to Orkut, Facebook, Myspace or Youtube. This is the conventional, normal way of doing things. Enter live streaming. This enables you to record a video on your mobile and in real-time transmit it up to the web, either directly to a mass content delivery service like Youtube or to a specialist web site. As this is going on, others anywhere in the world with a fast enough broadband connection can watch your video stream, live. There’s usually a notable amount of delay. Depending on your mobile phones network speed you can get delays of a few seconds, all the way up to a couple of minutes. I’ve experiemented with live streaming from my home wifi network which results in very little network lag.
I’m currently aware of two items of software that’ll allow you to live stream from your mobile. Firstly, there’s QIK . They’re still in alpha test phase so you’ll have to queue up to get an account. For those who don’t know, alpha test phase means that the author of the software has released a very early version of the software and it getting limited number of people to trial it and report back bugs and other problems with the software so that the author can improve things in the software and add new features. To use QIK, you have to go to their web site and sign up. An SMS gets sent to your mobile to verify your mobile phone number and then you wait, usually about 24 to 48 hours to get a link to download the software over the air dirctly to your mobile. I’m using a Nokie N82 and N95 which both un the S60 operating system on which QIK appears to run smoothly. It may also work on Sony Ericcson phones as well as others, but I’ve not tested this out yet.
Here’s an example of a movie I recorded directly on my Nokia N95 this morning on my way to work:
My first impressions of QIK were good, especially when streaming from the wifi hot spot at home and in my office. Outside in the street when I was on a 3G connection the lag was about two to three minutes. If you’re moving on a bus or in a car the lag dramatically increases. I’ve network seen lag (the time it takes the video to go from your mobile to internet) of up to ten minutes on a few occasions. When I’m within 3.5G coverage the lag is around 20-30 seconds which is quite acceptable, given the nascent stage of this technology. As you live-stream, the video goes up to the QIK web site. Anyone on the QIK home page will see a thumbnail of your video with a “Live” strip across it. If you click on it you’ll start to view whoever it is that’s streaming live at that moment in time. Once you stop recording video it gets archived in your online QIK account where you can tag it and describe it so that others can find your video. The other nice feature is a “private” option which means you can stream up the QIK web site but no one else will be able to watch. This might be useful if you’re just recording something to for others to watch later on. One of the biggest annoyances of QIK is that there’s no way to search for anything on their web site which actually makes it hard to find your own video on the web site unless log in in to your account first. That’s quite annoying when you’re trying to send somebody, who’s not signed up to QIK, a link to your live stream. I’ve still not worked out an easy way to do this. Come on QIK! Sort it out!
The other option to live stream video from your mobile is Flixwagon which is also in early alpha test phase. I’ve yet to get my account confirmed on Flixwagon but one cool feature I’ve noticed on their web site is the ability to live stream directly up to Youtube and also search for video stored in their database. These two features are both missing from QIK. I’m still waiting for my Flixwagon account to be set up so I’ve not got any comments yet about the quality of the service in general. I’ll let you all know how I get on with Flixwagon at a later date.
One thing to keep in mind about both these services and any other like it is that they’re VERY data intensive. Unless you’re on an unlimited data plan, you’re going to rack up a HUGE phone bill. This is luckily something that’s already very sorted in India. You’ve already got a good selection of flat fee, “eat as much as you like” data tariffs. Don’t let this totally put you at ease as most network carries will impose a fair usage policy on your account and give you a number of warnings when you exceed your limits before they’ll get nasty and probably cut you off. Basically, go easy and don’t over do the streaming. In future, the networks will probably increase the data limits but it’ll be a long while befoe you see totally unlimted data capacity.
Live streaming opens up a whole raft of “interesting” questions and concerns. I’m sure you can all think of the REALLY bad things one could do with live mobile streaming but I’m a technologist and I’m not here to preach caution or put the fear of god in to you about the all the BAD things this technology could entail. There are a lot of positive things about live mobile streaming. One one swoop it shrinks the work right down in size and makes us all citizen video journalists. Capture amazing moments in history such as a sports event, show the world around your city, record family occassions such as weddings so that others who couldn’t make it can be part of the special day and use it in many business applications. The list of positive things one could do with live video streaming from your mobile is endless. As I mentioned at the top of this blog entry, I’m really hoping that the Indian 3G network is up and running by the end of this year. If that happens, expect a lot of live video streaming from the Jagriti Yatra train and from the various places we’ll be visiting at each stop. This is totally cool technology.
Everyone is socializing these days. If it’s not social networking on the Internet then it’s social networking in real life. More recently the social networking bug has started to catch on in the mobile world. A crop of new and not-so-knew services have entered the market and most have been slowly circulating by word of mouth. I guess since this technology is so new - many of the entrants on the mobile social networking scene are still in "beta" test mode and treading causiously with a limited audience to test the waters, so to speak.
I wanted to write about the onset of mobile social networking as I believe it will have a huge impact on the Indian mobile user base. It’s a well known fact that in India there are now more mobile subscribers then land line subscribers and the uptake of mobile phones is sky rocketing on a monthly basis. The pervasive nature of the mobile is far greater than the Internet which still has not reached the large majority of the India population. Even within the middle classes in India, the Internet is a luxury and for those who do have "broadband" services in India, the speed and reliability is not a patch on international services in Europe, USA and parts of south east Asia you’ll find faster, more reliable braodband services and less confusing tariff structures and options. However, where India does have a very robust user base, with good service support is in the mobile phone market. Nokia is by far the dominant hand set manufacturer in the Indian. GSM rules the roost, so most people are still on what’s known as 2G (80% of userbase). There is a growing number of subscribers signing up to the CDMA packages which are on offer as they provide a faster experience on the mobile,. This technology is commonly referred to as 2.5G but this is primarily being used by business users right now in India - especially by those with laptop data cards from the likes of Reliance, Vodafone and Tata Indicomm. The advent of third generation (3G) networks in India has yet to arrive although there has been recent consensus in the Indian parliament on how to carve up the 3G spectrum (as recently as March 2008) although there is hot debate on right now about whether or foreign mobile networks should be allowed to buy up 3G spectrum licenses in the Indian market place. The next few months will prove very interesting for all those who are watching the developments with 3G in India.
How can we, as a social entrepreneurship venture, utilise the mobile social network given that it penetrates the Indian population to such a great (and growing) degree? More specifically, I am really interested to know how we, as an organisaiton, can exploit the mobile services in India to build a mobile community that will glu together our ever growing network of supporters and build a truly awsome mobile social network. Allow me to highlight a number of interesting technologies which almost anyone in India with a modern mobile phone can take advantage of right now.
If you are in India, in possession of a mobile phone and reading this blog entry, then there is one pre-requisite you must know about. Everything I’m about to write about requires that you have a data plan for your mobile. Most Indian mobile networks offer this at a flat fee rate. If you don’t have a data plan then contact your mobile providers customer services and ask them what your options are. You should tell them that you want to access the internet from your mobile. It also helps if you have a modern mobile phone. If you have a Nokia, Sony Ericson, LG, Moto or Blackberry that’s less than 2 years old (as of March 2008) then you’ll probably be able to utlise everything I’m about to tell you about.
First up is Twitter. If any of you have been using Facebook you’ll know what I mean when I say that Twitter is simply the status field of Facebook. You can Twitters away from your computer or even your mobile phone. If you have a Blackberry you can get a great bit of software (free) called Twitterberry which allows you to tweet on the move. Twitter, put another way, allows you to post short 140 character messages to an open or closed group (or groups) of friends and acquaintances. Should you wish to keep your messages within a closed group of friends you can do so, or alternaively you might feel that your dialy life is so immense that the whole twitter community needs to know about it. The option is yours and your privacy is in your own hands. Lets say you get to go to an amazing conference, fully paid up by your employer, but your colleagues and your friend outside your company are so lucky and don’t get to go. Well get them all on your Twitter list and you can send them all regular, brief updates from your conference and make them feel a part of the event. It might sound frivolous but once you get on to Twitter it can become highly addictive!
Next up is Trutap. This is a very young company. They’ve been in business for under a year (as of March 2008) and recently secured some more funding to expand their business. They have a user base in over 100 terriories world wide and have a strong and growing user base in India already. The idea behind Trutap is to unite a number of existing technologies in to one application. Many of you reading this may already have your own blog, a lot of you will have camera phones on which you takes photos and vidoes and post them up to your blogs. Others may like to chat on Instant Messenger platforms such as Yahoo Chat, MSN Live Chat, AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk. Trutap unifies all their seperated plaforms in one Java application which you can download for free to your mobile. On your mobile just go to http://m.trutap.com to get an over the air download of the application. Once you’re signed up you can form groups of friends and message them en-mass without incurring the cost of SMS’ing them all individually. You can chat to them all on their own respective favourite IM that they’re logged in to because in Trutap you’re logged in to all of them all at once. Your IMs will go from your mobile to their laptop screens and back to your mobile. You can even use Trutap to write your blog, take photos and post them all up to your blog. Trutap is in the process of upgrading their current software and when the new version is out you’ll be able to do a whole lot more. You can already download a Facebook application that suppors Trutap and show your IMs and messages from Trutap in your Facebook page. Keep an eye on them as they’re a hot start up with a lot of growth ahead of them.
Finally, there’s a combination which packs a punch. A lot of you may have heard of the photo sharing community called Flickr. It’s popular with the prosumer and professional photography crowd and is arguably one of the best photo sharing web sites in existance today, although there are many alternatives which offer a similar experience. Those of you who own Nokia N-Series mobiles may not know that your phone has the ability to directly upload photos you take on it to Flickr. So if you have a Flickr account check out the Flcikr upload option on your handset. The built in uploader is rather basic so you what you might want to consider is using a free download Java application called Shozu. It is a nifty piece of software which makes the process of taking and loading photos to Flickr (and other places on the web) a hole lot easier and more fun. Using Shozu you can post your pictures up, view the comments people have left on your photos, reply to those comments, tag, title and describe your photos and even manipulate your images. The other great feature of Shozu is that you can subscribe to feeds which allows your phone to download photos and video in the background and automatically with no user intervention. I ususually have my phone do this over night so that in the morning I have a collection of short news bulletin videos and tech news updates ready to watch or listen to on the train in to work. It’s a really great sevrice and I do encourage you to check it out.
What all this mobile social network enables us as an organisation and you as participants to do is form social networks online and on your mobiles. It allows for the exchange of ideas, photos, videos, opinions and a host of other things. It is what’s known as user generated content. Just image if you’re one of the selected Yatri’s or a registered participant and you’re on the Jagriti Yatra train with all this mobile technology at your fingers tips. You can Twitter about what you’re currently doing and let every one know that you’ve just shaken hands with the CEO of a huge company. You could snap photos on your mobile during the Yatra at every stop, of all the people you are meeting and immediately post it up to Flickr so that everyone can see what you’re going through during the Yatra. How about doing a short video interview on your mobile phone with your travelling buddies and talking about the excitment and discoveries you’ve made and then posting them up immediately to your blog so that TV, radio and newspaper journalists can get an almost real time picture of what’s going on? How about Trutapping with all your buddies whilst you’re on the train? You don’t need a laptop anymore to send instant messages to your friends on Google talk, Yahoo or MSN. The mobile opens all these doors to you and much more.
We’d like to hear from you about your experiences with the above mentioned mobile social networking services. Download them and play around. Check out the features and report back your findings here on this blog. Perhaps you’ve already been using a lot of this stuff and you know of other exciting services you want to share with us? Go ahead and post your suggestion here. I look forward to reading your comment.
Before I met the inspiring Jagriti Yatra team, I was your average “bindaas” girl who was caught up in a busy schedule that revolved around work and friends. My friend introduced me to the concept of Jagriti Yatra after attending the Yatra launch on the eve of India’s Independence Day. After hearing about the concept and meeting the team, I was tremendously inspired by their vision of empowering the youth of India by awakening their spirit of entrepreneurship and urging them to define their own destiny and the future of India through their entrepreneurial efforts.
I am inspired by this effort to make a difference to the society we live in. It has changed my entire perspective and lead me to staunchly believe that I as an individual can make a difference. The positivism of the team as well as their belief that each individual has the capacity to bring about change instigated me to think positively and find ways that I can contribute to this great effort. Imagine the potential of being on a 16 day train journey with 400 likeminded individuals who are fired by the same zeal and enthusiasm- I see limitless potential ahead of us. Together, we can define the future of our nation.
Frankly speaking, I would never have gathered courage on my own to even dream of such an ambitious journey for youth to bring about positive change through a train yatra across India to meet real heroes and learn from bottom-up innovators and entrepreneurs who are changing, challenging and redefining India today. Today, I am inspired to dream big and have the wings to dream and aspire towards contributing to India’s future.
Before getting involved in Jagriti yatra, my thinking was limited much like that of the common man battling the everyday urdles of life. Like the majority of youth, I admired the Tata’s and Ambani’s from afar for their long hard journey to success. Films of a patriotic nature such as Rang De Basanti and Lagaan had a fleeting impression on me rather than inspire me to think about how I could contribute towards the building of my nation. We are so caught up in our daily schedules that we ignore the greater mission of our life – to achieve something that touches the lives of others and make a lasting impact long after we are gone rather than remain caught up in a net of day to day personal issues. Life is too short, if seen in limited focus of living from day to day.
As the population grows, an economy has to provide more jobs, more goods and services for the growing population. Copying others won’t help. People these days are so afraid of taking risks, of taking an innovative approach to beating competition because we are unwilling to give it a shot for fear of failure. One forgets the dictum that “if there is a will that is a way”. We need to acknowledge risk and yet dare to dream big. We can find answers to the challenges of today if we have self-confidence and are willing to think of innovative and creative solutions. I believe that if have confidence in our ability to innovate, no power can stop us from achieving our dreams.
Jagriti Yatra boosts the confidence of budding young yatris to innovate, to think out of the box and dare to take calculated risks. Innovation is fundamental to being a successful entrepreneur. I think Jagriti Yatra will cultivate entrepreneurs amongst the participants by empowering them with a vision, self belief and the freedom to dream. India needs entrepreneurs to create wealth and sustain the current level of growth. Entrepreneurs have the power to drive the future development of this country at a pace that has not been seen before.
Learning a subject in a classroom setting has little impact. Jagriti Yatra gives us the opportunity to meet and learn in a practical manner from entrepreneurs in their “karma bhoomi”- those who have made a difference. Each Yatri will explore their own ideas, and develop their latent potential for innovation by meeting real entrepreneurs face-to-face and learning from the experience of the real heroes when they started out in their incarnation as an entrepreneur. The main aim of the journey is to get Yatri’s to think in a systematic way pertaining to all the aspects of innovation and in turn entrepreneurship.
Through this yatra I feel each participant will get to discover the entrepreneur in themselves by learning to explore their passion, dream big, innovate upon their ideas for change, explore opportunities within risks, the role of leadership and team work and the ability to think outside the box. This is a key life skill and I recommend it highly to each one of you. Come, be a part of a new generation of change makers.
Entries (RSS)