The Branded and Gilded Life

He's just been declared YouTube's Creator of the year. His videos collectively have over 4 billion views. He doesn't act or sing And he's just 22. How is it that the YouTube universe generates statistics that would make mainstream studios salivate? He's got a bunch of buddies doing his bidding, staging what seems like dumb stuff. On average, each of his videos get over 20 million views. And they'r...

If you don't follow podcasts, this may be mystifying. Why  is the podcast market growing at a compounded rate of over 27% per year, on average? It's close to $11 billion in value now and is likely to be at $60 billion by 2027. That's a lot of podcasts people are listening to. Audio books never took off the same way. So how is this different? For one thing, podcasts are a reinvention of radio progr...

It's long past its expiry date Microsoft stopped all support for it in 2000. Yet, these systems are still in use in several offices - but they aren't connected to the internet They won't survive for long without firewall protection. But we forget that upgrades are not the only option. Replacing the entire system infrastructure is hard to do, if not impossible. Even software patches are applied onl...

You've heard the stories about how Pierre Omidyar built a site to help his girlfriend sell candy dispensers Wikipedia says it was a fabrication by the PR department to create a 'human interest' narrative In other words, people would not bother if they were told that Ebay, called Auction Web to begin with, sold broken laser pointers. So, have you heard of Mjunction ? It's the second largest ecommer...

For some people, wearing masks is an imposition. Fining those who don't is not a solution This idea from a Turkish agency comes at it from a completely different angle It's installed at bus stops across Trabzon in Turkey. Unmasked people see the reflection of a virus projected over their face. And it disappears the moment the mask is worn. The coronavirus image is now familiar across the world.  A...

Join the queue. The road to the tallest mountain in the world is getting crowded. There's competition between local sherpas and the foreign guides who take a few people to the summit every year. And the money generated makes up 10% of the GDP of Nepal. Everest ascent has become a badge to wear pursued with zeal and single-minded commitment. Success means you can spin stories about the exploits and...

The camera moves over dense green foliage from the air. It's the kind of footage that sets the atmosphere for everything from travelogues to war even in films today. In a beautifully narrated documentary, Todd Dominey talks about the problem that drew Kodak into the war. In the early 40s when the US pilots flew over enemy terrain, they faced a strange problem. They were unable to pick out enemy li...

The resemblance is superficial. Both are round rings. As cultural icons, the Indian version is more of a South Indian staple, though that is changing The Indian Medu Vada is culturally as distant from the American doughnut as Indians are from Americans. Eating a doughnut is basically like chomping a re-designed bun. Doughnuts need makeup. They have to be bathed in chocolate, drizzled with sugar, s...

No Millennial coder knows COBOL . They'll laugh when you tell them that the earliest banking systems in the US were built on it, back in the 70s. We know there are mainframes chugging away somewhere in the background, unseen and unheard but they are the roots of fintech. They can't be replaced or made redundant because billions of lines of code generated over the years still run the systems. It co...

You may not have heard of Ward Cunningham. He's the quiet guy who invented the wiki. Which in the Hawaiian language means 'quick' He created a new concept of collaborative editing of ideas through linked documents in 1994. Hypercard was a set of pages , ideas connected to each other before the internet with weblinks and URLs came into being. People could navigate from one page to another. As soon...

Netflix's greatest hit, The Queen's Gambit has exponentially increased chess game app downloads in the store That wasn't part of the script. Though the connection between brand surges and hits has been documented, it's still hard to figure out what will work. Product placement in films has become an integral part of funding productions. When Madhuri Dixit, swayed to 'Didi tera devar deewana' in th...

As the world warms, the market for air-conditioners is increasing exponentially. What we need is a reset in the way the problem is approached. At a point when electricity had not been invented, architects knew that high ceilings and thick walls kept the temperature at a pleasant level. In our high-rises, most ceilings do not go beyond 10-12 feet. Windows are smaller than they used to be.  Pollutio...

It has become one of the most divisive aspects of our time. How do you figure out what's fake news and what is real? There's a part solution to the problem developed by a team from University College London and UC Berkeley. A machine learning tool identifies new domains created to generate false information. So, instead of stopping fake news stories after they have spread, the objective is to stop...

In 1958, David Ogilvy created the immortal Rolls Royce ad.  "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock" At the time, automobiles were noisy, greasy and could be heard from a long way off Luxury and refinement was defined by how skillful engineers made the car interior quiet for occupants. Another famous one in 1990, showed the Volkswagen driver irri...

You've probably seen this happen several times Gone out with friends or family to a restaurant and everyone spends time looking at the menu. Suggestions fly back and forth on what's the 'best' dish available. Then, most of the people around the table order exactly what they did the previous time! So, why do we go about this elaborate routine of pretending to make decisions? In a sense, we want the...

We've started receiving robocalls in India Insurance companies telling you your premium is due. Or from airlines when the flights are delayed. And at election time from political parties asking for your vote A recording delivers the message, not a real person Spam calls are different. They are call centre personnel trying to make a sale. The robocaller menace is real in the US because it still mak...

Parking tickets are a problem in the US New York alone apparently collects over a billion dollars a year in parking fees, for all kinds of violations. Back in 2015, Josh Browder was issued over 30 parking tickets in the first year he started driving. Like most teenagers, paying off a parking ticket left almost nothing for him to spend on anything else Since each fine was a $100 or more, he went th...

Fame is fickle.  That's because people need new stars to worship. Each generation has its set of politicians, film, and sports stars. At the next level, there are singers and celebrities. The business stars who may drive stock markets up and down but are anonymous outside of TV  The Carnatic music singers who shine during the annual festival  The YouTubers with millions of 'followers' Take the 'gu...

Apart from the camera icon itself, how many apps open to a camera frame? None?  QR code scanners, maybe? For an adult, the first response is that they opened the camera by mistake. There's a sense of being stuck in a space they don't understand Maybe it wasn't intentional. That's exactly what Snapchat has achieved. Over 200 million people use it everyday. And its a sliding scale of users who pract...

Married couples know exactly what the loaded question means. It's code for 'Are you pregnant yet?' In a country where births are now conducted by the time prescribed by astrologers, this is where it all begins. The time of birth can be controlled down to the exact minute, and C-sections are the choice. No ambiguity. We've gone from accepting natural birth cycles to making it part of an elaborate w...

This post will sound like a 'trip' on magic mushrooms but the facts are even more surprising. Vegans have been on the look out for milk substitutes for years. None of the options come close to mimicking the taste and mouthfeel of milk-based food like butter and cheese. Whey and casein are the proteins that make milk what it is. And two obsessive vegans, Ryan Pandya  and Perumal Gandhi decided they...

Can you imagine thrillers where no guns are fired? No action sequences with vehicle crashes? Only conversations. You get to know what happened based on the questioning A set of 4-5 police officers take turns to ask questions. It's psychological warfare Each episode has a different suspect being questioned The setting is always the same. The questioners and the accused in one room The observers in...

The formula for Coca Cola is it's secret sauce. It has never been disclosed. It is the single most important thing that preserves Coke's legacy But this directly conflicts with the results of blind taste tests. Assuming there was a big difference, shouldn't you be able to tell two brands apart? If Coke and Pepsi were poured into identical glasses out of your sight and then served, there's a 50% ch...

Remember the vehicles that were dreamed up for the film? Well, the platform is ready With electric cars, the engine disappears. So does the steering system and a lot more. So, the car can be imagined from the battery flatbed and four wheels, all with independent motors driving them. As Fast Company recently wrote, car design has become a skateboard on top of which you build anything. You literally...

Do you like your bristles soft, medium or hard? That's the most choice kids have these days. We had much more back in the summer holidays spent in Kerala. Wake up in the morning and make our own toothbrushes. A new one every morning. It allowed us to pick and choose We'd walk around the compound to find several mango leaves lying under the tree Some of them would be spotted and orange with strange...