“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.” — Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)

HP along with Buzzcorps launched a campaign for the launch of the HP HDX Dragon Notebook PC. Very simple campaign, where one had to take part in a simple contest, answer a few questions and win one of these swanky powerful machines for free.

The brilliance of the campaign is not in the concept. Nothing new in that. The secret here is not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of the launch. It’s in the focused needle-pointed choice of the ‘where’.

Blogging, tech opinions and gadget acceptance is driven by opinion leaders (lead users, as we know them). These are the people who try new software, new plugins, new platforms, and are the beta-testers and alpha-testers who are always one step ahead and in the know.

Knowing this only too well, the campaign (called 31 days of the Dragon, www.31daysofthedragon.com) was launched in all the key influencing sites (31 of the best read blogs / online tech guides / product review guerillas) and the sites have different interesting tasks (from answering simple questions to posting a video of the existing PC on Youtube). Makes sure that the big guns write about the new PC, makes the visitors participate in hordes, and makes them talk about this to hell lot more people.

In short, pin-point, textbook, buzz marketing. Well executed and well noticed.

p.s: Buzzcorps was started by ex-AMD PR guy Chris Aaron who specializes in blog buzz marketing and influencer marketing. Nice niche to live in, at the moment :)

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Let me put things in perspective. A week of ok-ish food, and a very early and miniscule dinner on Friday evening left me with a craving for a good meal, desi-style on Saturday morning. (North-Indian, South-Indian, whatever-Indian. Doesn’t matter). And when two of my friends made a plan to go restaurant-hopping in Little India in search for a good meal, I was already smacking my lips and heading right to nearest taxi stand.

After a mistaken try at a shabby restaurant named Gokul (not worth going into details, let me jump to the more important parts here), we sauntered into this quiet south Indian place named Madras Woodlands. Not too much of a groundbreaking name, I’d say, but the food was oh-my-gawd awesome! All of us hungry souls straightaway went for the unlimited meals, and we were in session.

A tangy start with a vettha-kozhambu (spicy and hot sambar variety), with veggies, appalams (popadams) and steaming rice to boot, followed by the mullangi (radish) sambar cooked to the right tenderness; then came the fragrant rasam and more mounds of rice. The grand finale was when after a nice bowl of payasam I was just digging into my curd rice, and the waiter came and dropped mor-moloagais (chilli peppers soaked in buttermilk, dried and then fried). By god, that was a stroke of genius! and I’m totally sold on the restaurant.

After the humongous lunch, we all had to go back and rest for the afternoon. The food had gotten the better of us, and we all woke up and decided to meet for, wait for it, here it comes, a dinner meal :D

This time it was Gult food at Sankranti. The restaurant had opened only two weeks before, and since the four of us were in mood for experimentation, we repeated the sauntering and ordering of four unlimited meals. And this time, it was full steam, hot and spicy Andhra fare, no holds barred. Each one of us topped about seven courses: Masala rice, followed by Gongura, Allam, Podi (Gunpowder plus ghee), Pappu (dal), Charu (Andhra rasam), Perugannam (curd rice). After stacking empty plates and cups, we polished the meal off with a mango and left the poor waiter and manager in wide eyed bewilderment. (I’m lovin it!)

Even though none of us had the energy nor the inclination to even move after that meal, the experience was worth every morsel of rice that we demolished. To those who planned to have pizza / noodles / chinese indian / naan sabji on that day, can please go sit on their respective thumbs and watch us dig into another mound of rice. Or join in.

Next weekend, destination Mumbai Makaan and its steaming vadapavs. Yum!

p.s: Also caught a gult movie after the double meal ordeal (just for the heck of it), which was called Vivaha Bhojanam (Marriage Food) and hence the title of this post. Quite a befitting end to the day, I say!

[image source: www.sailusfood.com]

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The storyline, the cast, the history are all wiki-able. But the experience was beyond any live performance I’ve seen in perfection, fidelity, energy and the heavenly music. I am a huge fan of Queen, and this was a dynamite package that left me begging for more.

Brilliant performances by the live band, with almost all of Queen’s hits, and I couldn’t care less about the slightly below par story-line. The grand finale with ‘We will rock you’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody‘ performed as an encore played a fitting end to a tribute to one of the best rock bands ever.

Thank God I walked into the ticket counter at Orchard and bought the ticket on a last minute impulse. It’s been 2 days and my pod is still looping Queen songs :D

(And in case you are wondering, Galileo Figaro and Scaramoush are words from Bohemian Rhapsody and the names of lead characters in WWRY).

Tranquility

Made with a piano base and a flute overlay, this song plays on the soft moods of a tranquil seashore and more piano layers before moving into a bit of classical flute towards the end.

Listen

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Vaishnava Janato

Something I recorded a long time ago, when I was at L. Tanpura and Pad recorded on FL, voice arranged and noise-filtered on Adobe Audition. A simple rendition (not a great one, I admit) of the lovely Vaishnava Janato.

Listen

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We are trying to systematically kill intuition. All of us.

How did I come to this ridiculous conclusion, you ask? Here’s a sample list: mass education, objective question papers, market research, decision analysis tools, DSS, statistical predictions, stock analysis, financial management, artificial intelligence and expert systems, simulation models, MIS, ERP systems, JIT, exit polls, stock betas, budget estimates… I can go on and on.

Each of the intuition-killers works on the basic premise of human psychology. We are, as a species, very uncomfortable with uncertainty. We want to understand each and every occurrence and phenomenon, past, present and future. Call it reducing risk, call it extrapolation, call it simulation. Every decision assisting tool is just a different level of replacing intuition with bare facts. And this philosophy is all-pervasive. Physics requires experiments and statistics requires data. Market research requires respondents, and JIT requires inventory levels.

Futurists estimate that intuition will actually become more important as time passes. The information overload will be so mind-boggling that the ability to see a panoramic perspective will be a priced talent. I’m no futurist, but for now, I know that we have an overwhelming tendency to doubt anything intuitive or subjective.

What seems the basic problem here? The problem is of verification, of validation. But then again, the most groundbreaking of discoveries had intuition as the main reason that differentiated the scientist from the maniac. And those discoveries had the next generation worrying about validation and then going hallelujah! over the success of logic and the power of the mind. How important intuition is going to be in the future is for time to tell, but I can at least see developments which give an optimistic tinge, dispelling my initial hypothesis. What development, you ask? Why do you think consultants are paid so highly, I ask?

:)

So as the number of us bloggers typing away to glory scales new levels every day, methinks, what is it in this medium that the others lack, and why is the proliferation faster than a man rushing towards the loo on the verge of bladder-burst? (ah… a genuinely bad analogy… pat.. pat.. )

First of all, methinks it is the web. When I say web, it is not just the technology. It is the ease of use, ease of publishing and ease of feedback that makes the loop complete. Blogger for word; the carrot that makes even lazy-tashreefs like me to go blogetty once a many while. Halo-scan, shout boards, counters, profile viewers, template enhancers and a whole bevy of such niceties make life much easier and prettier.

But then me also realizes, it is not just the shift of a thought onto a byte and then onto a character and then onto the virtual… it is the need to shout out to be heard (and to shout out even if no one is hearing in particular) is the prime driver.

And then the veritable metamorphosis… Vlogs (video blogs), Mlogs (mobile blogs) and in a few months we will run out of alphabets to precede the ‘logs’. And then it will no longer be a log – or a record or listing of events and interesting happening. It will become a medium of information exchange and real time modification and updation. The precursor, I might conjecture, is already here. We call it Wiki.

An interesting observation: The internet, the web (i.e the hyperlinked spaced sitting above the net architechture), and now blogs are all indicative and have grown out of the single impressive factor of collaborative sharing of experiences. And the next generation of such collaboration is already nested deep in the ideas we don’t even realize are already a part of our lives. Linux, the quintessential case study on open source, is also one of the best examples of collaborative software. And then there is the big daddy of them all, Google. Their search improves as we visit a page more and more, Orkut grows as we add more friends, Blogger expands as you and me write more, and Google Answers is a site run by everyone who answers a question.

This incredible model made possible only due to the omnipresent connectivity and the hyperspace, and it has happened now. And I feel privileged to be a part of this silent revolution. I am not a baby-boomer loathing technology, nor am I a Gen-Z whiz kid who thinks Google is a given and doesn’t understand why the net is so unbelievable. I am mentally baked just right, with the understanding and the sense of awe in perfect balance. Bless the zeros and ones… and bless the future that drives our present making us goal-seek and fulfill our own Pygmalion prophecies.