Month: June 2007

Getting my tastebuds going

I  must have been 15 or so when I first heard Noel Coward speak the lines “In Bengal, to move at all is seldom ever done” in a recitation of Mad Dogs and Englishmen; it was at a quiz, probably at the Dalhousie Institute (then regularly referred to as the DI), probably compered by Neil O’Brien. Those were wonderful times, I have great memories of the vibrant quiz circuit that existed then.

Initially, the Coward lines used to irk me; I thought he meant that nobody did anything in Bengal, and, even if we were known to be somewhat languorous at times, I felt that the statement was a bit over-the-top. It made me realise how Slough residents must have felt about Betjeman, when he said:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, death!

But later on that same day I changed my interpretation of what he said. Took it to mean that the Calcuttan was too sensible to “move at all” during the midday sun, and that Coward was paying him a compliment. Now I don’t particularly care what the right interpretation is any more, I like Coward and I like Calcutta. So there.

I was reminded of all this while reading something I’d been waiting for, a book titled The Calcutta Kitchen. I love the quote at the back of the book:

What you’ve got to remember about us Bengalis is that we’re only really interested in three things: educating our children, reading books, and food.

[Yes I know, I don’t particularly care for the Oxford comma either, but I wanted to quote the line verbatim].

Parkes and Sarkhel have done something that is rare for me: they’ve made me salivate just reading their book, despite my having had a wonderful dinner this evening. I’m looking forward to trying out their Aloo Makallah (heavenly deepfried potatoes), Ghugni (spiced-up chickpeas), Shingara (Pastry pyramids with spiced potato/vegetable filling), Kathi Kabab roll (spiced kebabs rolled up in a flat bread), Ledikenni (semolina and cottage cheese dumplings) and Maacher Jhol (serious Bengali fish curry), to name but a few.  What I particularly like about the book is that it seems to capture the cosmopolitan essence of Calcutta food as well as the roadside to restaurant spectrum. [And you’re right, I have this hang-up about spicy potatoes. And I am so tired of having samosas, which are nothing but bad shingaras that someone went and flattened. Pyramids not triangles…]

More after I try the recipes out. Flower Silliman first introduced me to Aloo Makallah, so they have a very hard act to follow.  She was a wonderful cook, I’m sure she still is one. I have not been able to order Around The World With a Skillet, her new cookery book. Sanjay Kapoor, whose family lived in the same apartment block as the Rangaswamis and the Sillimans, told me about its existence, but I haven’t been able to find a copy. Any suggestions out there?

Musing about parodies and copyright and mashups

One of my favourite parodies is  Ogden Nash’s Song Of the Open Road, a take on Joyce Kilmer’s Trees:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I shall not see a tree at all. 

Amazingly, he wrote this in 1933. Even more amazingly, it is still copyright protected, thirty six years after his death and over 70 years since he wrote it, so I guess I have to kowtow to the gods of fair use. Thankfully, you can see the whole of Kilmer’s poem in the Wikipedia link to his name.

As a child, I remember being amazed at finding out that Lewis Carroll’s Father William was a parody of Robert Southey’s earlier poem The Old Man’s Complaints. And how he gained them. These appear to be marginally out of copyright so you can read them at this link.

I’ve always considered a parody to be something new in copyright terms. I’m sure that people far more learned than I’ll ever be have drafted laws to make this possible. How else could I enjoy something like this, the recent take-off of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie?   Do be careful when you watch it, I would recommend you sit comfortably and avoid eating or drinking anything while it’s playing. As usual I’ve made it available via my VodPod in the sidebar as well.

My thanks to Rachel Whetstone at Google, who reminded me of the existence of the video at a private conference we were both at.

21st century technology adoption curves and Facebook and innovation

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for a company in aerospace, defence, high-end manufacturing or investment banking. Before 28 you didn’t have the seniority, after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour.

All that changed with Generation M. The pyramid sort of inverted overnight, as the mobile multitasking multimedia generation caught hold of life in their inimitable way. Now it’s the 14-25 year old who first gets to play.

I’ve known this for a while, and regularly referred to this inversion. But there were other aspects of this inversion that continued to intrigue me, inspired by reading Michael Schrage’s Serious Play many years ago. The connection between play and work, something that has come to the fore more resonantly with MMOG and Second Life and all that jazz.

When I saw the Netvibes ecosystem grow, I had the opportunity to watch this curve evolve and grow, and something stirred within me. There was something I could really learn from plotting it right, but in the end I moved on in my ADD way and sadly forgot about it. More recently, when I was watching the explosion taking place in Facebook Applications, I thought to myself, wow, what a proxy for the adoption curve. I had a second chance to view the culture in the petri dish.

What am I talking about? Have I finally completely lost it? Patience, patience. I’m going to try and cut and paste the list of current applications in Facebook Platforms:

I think there’s  a big lesson for us all in the data presented above. Just For Fun leads, then comes Utility some way behind, then comes Gaming. Music, Photo, Video and Messaging bunch up a little later, and Business is around half the size of any one of those.

I’m sure someone can write an app that plots the movement of numbers in each of these classifications over time, or make it possible for someone else to do it. Any views, Dave? Enjoying your travels?

Now this is the supply side. What would be even more interesting is the demand side and how that behaves across these classifications? How many people are using applications in each classification? I accept there is risk of misclassification or fuzzy overlaps, but I am not looking for exact sciences here, I think the trend information is good enough.

Any comments or views? Have I finally lost it? Let me know what you think.

An aside about airports

Paul Farnsworth, who works with me, told me about the existence of something like this video, where someone has modelled US air traffic. Fascinating. There’s something about traffic flows I really love, something that helps me understand more about what’s happening in a given space. Inflows and outflows, frequency and pattern, time and space dimensions. I’ve added it to my VodPod to make things easier for you. [I think Paul meant me to visit a different site that hosted something similar. I will link to that as and when I get the information from him.]

Musing on organisations and platforms

Some time ago I wrote a few posts about organisations and platforms, and considered the possibility of each firm becoming an open multisided platform. You can find the posts here, here and here.

Over the last month or so, I’ve landed up spending far too much time at airports, partially as a result of a complex travel schedule, primarily as a result of flight delays for a plethora of reasons. And it got me thinking.

Maybe open multisided software platforms are like airports. Maybe soon many organisations will look like airports as well. I know, I know, you think I should keep taking the tablets, but please bear with me. Just for a little while.

An airport is a marketplace, open and multisided. Anyone can go to an airport, embarking and disembarking passengers make up a small percentage of overall traffic. Some people pass through there. Some people work there. Some people, apparently, stay there.

There’s a primary purpose to the community: getting on or off planes that take you places.

And there’s a whole pile of activities that relate to the primary purpose:  Ticketing, Check-in, Security, Departure Lounges, Arrivals Lounges, Baggage Halls.

There’s also a set of activities that deal with special cases of the primary purpose: Immigration, Emigration, Tax Clearance. Health checks for would-be immigrants, sometimes even holding cells for illegal immigrants.

And there’s the usual feedback loop. Complaints counters. Lost Luggage counters.  Whatever.

Since there’s a lot of through traffic, there are a bunch of other things that happen, overlaps with other marketplaces. Airports are shopping malls. They have churches and other places of worship. They have restaurants and food halls, bookshops and nail salons, shoe-shine seats and children’s amusements, ice-cream parlours and pizza palaces. Airports sometimes have luxury shopping arcades with all those brands, the ones that would make great plays at Scrabble. [How come Paul Smith is the only designer I can think of with a “normal” name?].

People come to get and spend and lay waste their powers. So they need banks and cambios and wechsels and whatever, they need toilets and loos and restrooms and whatever. They need places to sit and stand and walk around and amble aimlessly, even to sleep. Sometimes, when flights get delayed, the borders between these places gets a bit fuzzy.

And to make all this happen, people actually work in airports as well. They too need places to call their own, places where they can change out of civvies and into clothes that say to everyone else “I work here”.

Everywhere there is motion. Of a sort. Queues form for no apparent reason, then disappear for similarly invisible ones.

In the old days, airports were fairly basic, there was no concept of customer or service or time or quality. In the old days, airports were about the primary purpose and nothing else. In fact you couldn’t even go there unless you were a departing or arriving passenger.  In the old days, airports tended to be locked-in components of an airline’s attempts at vertical integration, a classic monopoly play. In the old days, information about the status of flights and passengers and baggage was sparse and unreliable.

Now the monopolies are beginning to break, and customers are coming to the fore again. Conversing with each other. Occasionally transacting business as well. Fluid and active. Global and open and realtime.

Over time, a bunch of standards evolved to make this simpler and easier. I guess I’m an idealist: I think that airport gates are likely to be similar in dimensions, even if they get manufactured by a host of companies. That escalators and lifts are similar to some extent, even if they compete via a complex array of prices and bundles.  That passport sizes have converged over time. That Starbucks looks the same everywhere, as does Hermes or Harrods. That a loo is a loo is a loo.

Some airports are niche, serving a specific and narrow market. Some are satellites. Some are regional. Some are global. Some are domestic. Some are international. Some are everything and nothing.

You can go from airport to airport via coach or train or car, not just plane. You can do this privately or using public services. Airports collaborate and compete with each other.

Some things you can do online and in advance, some things you must do online, some things you can only do physically.

There’s a lot we can learn from airports, things we can apply to software and to organisation.

Open. Multisided.