One Two Three Movie Review – Laughter Riot – You will roll and fall, laughing in your chair!

One two three – Movie Review

After working 60 hours a week, all I expect from a movie is something which can make me laugh and make me enjoy my 3 hours in a movie hall. One two three has been a brilliant Riot of Laughter and I got what I wanted from this movie, 3 HOURS OF ENTERTAINMENT AND FUN. I don’t carry my brain to the movie hall, I use it in my office place where it works well for me and if you are looking for a serious plot and a well construed sequence of events, better watch a thriller. This movie is a hilarious riot of laughter and keeps you busy till the fag end.

I watched this movie, this Sunday evening in Vision Cinemas, Bangalore. PVR was running full house and I didn’t get the tickets for the same. I got the tickets in the morning for the evening show in Vision cinemas. The movie was running house full here too and to top it with, I saw 2 extra chairs being laid down in the hall.

It’s a slapstick comedy by the debutante director Ashwini Dhir. He is an award winning writer of the “office office” fame on TV. This entry into the Big Screen is a well thought of “safe formula” of masala and comedy (of errors) for the entry into the big screen entertainment. Thinking from the perspective of director you would want to break-even in your first movie, you need to ensure the movie has some entertainment value, which this movie does.

The story revolves around 3 people who have the same name: Lakshmi Narayan
1) An amateur wannabe DON (Tusshar Kapoor) supported by her mom, who begs in front DON to give Tusshar a chance to murder someone.
2) An over inquisitive employee in a company (Suniel Shetty) who keeps asking questions (even when the DON is about to kill him).
3) A veteran sales man selling Lingerie (Paresh Rawal) who sells it in his car and can see and tell the size of the UGs that a man or women wears.

The movie runs around these 3 main characters and the comedy of errors starts when these three go to Pondy for respective work and land up in the same hotel and their identities get exchanged as all of them are supposed to get information on reaching the hotel. So ONE wannbe DON on a mission to kill, gets the pic of lingerie designer[Esha Deol]. TWO gets the pic of actual DON, Mukesh Tiwari, (to be murdered) and THREE gets the pic of car dealer [Sameera Reddy].

I am not going to reveal the story or the plot. Better you watch it in the movie hall.
Though here are some pointers:

-Witty one liners (makes you rock n roll in your chairs) coupled with comedy of errors in name.
-Individual notable performances by Suniel Shetty (funny), Paresh Rawal (good as usual) and Tusshar Kapoor (Ok, nothing great).
-Also notable performances by Neetu Chandra (impressive), Vrajesh Hirjee(cool), Sanjay Mishra(rocking as always) and Mukesh Tiwari (Papa – was a good concept), Manoj Pahwa (a lil nonsense one liners but they were funny).
-Unable to impress: Esha Deol, Sameera Reddy, Tanisha, Upen Patel (oh BTW tanisha and upen patel had a full dialogue in the movie, that too in hindi )
-Music – Title track was good and catchy, though rest of the songs were very OK, I would say the esha deol song was not even required. So nothing great on the music front.
-Interesting was the background music usage, with 1-2-3 running throughout the movie and Bhen Da Takaas theme.(this was funny, watch it to know it)

The screenplay was average and the direction was fair for the 1st time director. A better and tighter control is needed the next time!

The best part was Suniel Shetty’s non stop questioning sequence all around the movie and that is something which keeps your funny bone tickled! And Paresh Rawal’s ingenious acting with his straight face talk about “kachha-baniyan”.

As I said earlier, if you wish to enjoy and laugh for a change, it’s a must watch! Though if you are of those serious kinds who look for a very serious plot and thrill, this is not for you!

One two three or 1 2 3 is the stepping stone for Ashwini Dhir in the cinema and it’s a welcome step is all what I can say!

Creative Labs PR 2.0 Debacle + Microsoft’s shoddy VISTA OS = Lost Customers

Creative Labs PR 2.0 Debacle + Microsoft’s shoddy VISTA OS = Lost Customers

On 28th March 2008, Creative Labs, makers of X-Fi series of Sound Cards which are known for it’s good quality and Dolby Digital LIVE experience, faced the worst PR ire. I would call it a PR 2.0 debacle.

Good product + BAD OS + Bad Drivers + Bad Support – Customer empathy = Worst PR 2.0.

The public admonition on blogosphere (creative’s forums) worked against the company’s product and services marketing efforts.

All this PR 2.0 debacle started when Phil O’Shaughnessy, VP Corporate Communications, Creative Labs Inc., openly on the forum posted the message below, pointing it out to Daniel_K a regular contributor to the forum, who modified the code of the drivers to make the X-Fi cards work properly on Windows Vista.

Daniel_K:We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.
Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.Phil O’ShaughnessyVP Corporate CommunicationsCreative Labs Inc.

Even though I do not have personally anything against them, and I do understand that there action was primarily to support IP protection of their own company products, however, the communication message and the behaviour adopted was un-customer friendly and obviously the potential and existing customers have punished it openly.

However, the sound cards, which work fine on Windows XP, yet lose some functionality on the new Vista operating system. Forum member Daniel_K made some modifications to the code used to run the sound cards, and released drivers of his own that allowed Creative Labs users to take full advantage of their sound cards on Vista.

Daniel_K was recently able to “fix” many drivers, enabling the “incompatible” features as well as fixing some bugs. He made a few mistakes, however, as in asking for donations. Making a profit off his modded drivers was asking for trouble. Now Daniel_K probably shouldn’t have sought donations for his work – that’s the main thing that most likely attracted attention to his efforts. But otherwise, he was only trying to ensure that other users like himself were able to get their sound cards to work properly on the sometimes-unstable Vista OS.

However, Creative’s announcement, as well as Daniel_k’s indicating he was quitting the modding business drew still more ire – from Creative’s customers.

For example, this one:
I am sure I am not alone when I ask this. Once and for all, we want the truth:After your disrespectful messages to Daniel_K, will you be fixing your own drivers? Or are you going to leave it as it is?

And this one:
I’m happy to announce that by your recent actions AGAINST your customers I have decided NEVER to purchase a Creative product again. I’m also happy to say that within 30 minutes of your horrible news I’ve managed to convince 3 people to NOT purchase planned Creative products.It’s indeed not a lot but at least I’m doing something.
And finally:
Can we (Vista and X-Fi users) request for a refund as Creative has failed to deliver the necessary drivers and materials in order for the Sound Card to work as advertise?
I have to admit, Daniel_k has a good point in his post I linked above, one that Creative should take to heart:
The funny thing is that you are faster “protecting” your technologies and intelectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers.
You purposedly crippled and ruined the Audigy/Live! (Emu10kx) and the Audigy LS/SE/Value/Live!24-bit (P17) drivers for Windows Vista.
This just proves you don’t really care about what your customers and what people think about you.

Immediately following their VP’s blog post, the rants against Creative Labs begin – and as of this writing, continue for 80 pages – almost 700 comments – nearly all of them negative. Most posters are saying that they will either return their Creative Labs product, or that they will never purchase or recommend the purchase of a Creative Labs product again.

What Creative Labs does not seem to get is what they have been hunting themselves, it’s called ROI, return of investment. Something the folks that who have invested over $200 for a high-end Audigy card with a breakout box did not get back when they moved to Vista.

A complete PR 2.0 Debacle. My advice to Creative Labs, firstly fix the drivers and provide it on a priority and reassure the customers, that they will get the ROI on the cards they have bought. And then go public like this, they way they have.

Healthy Mobile Office, of Tomorrow?

This Wednesday night I picked up my parents from the airport who are on an India wide holiday trip and while I was on my way back to home, we were discussing the bad traffic situation on Bangalore roads(it took us 1 hour to reach from bangalore airport to my house~8 kms).

And then discussion turned out that it’s not just Bangalore but every city in India or outside which is having these traffic qualms.

So it gave a birth to another discussion. I mentioned that it used to take me 40 minutes to travel from BTM Layout in Bangalore to my Wipro office on Hosur road which was exactly 4.5 kms away. The situation is even worse in Mumbai and many such cities.

So what’s the solution? Well I put forward an idea that let’s not go to our office, so we will not have to face the traffic. And the traffic will automatically decrease. Obviously I do not mean that stop working. But what I mean is work from home.

In today’s world, what’s needed to do your job, mostly a PC, Internet connection and a phone? So, you can have most of it at your home and you can start working from home. Is this, what is going to happen in the future? Are offices of tomorrow going to be your homes?

I mean it makes perfect sense, you can work from home and for any collaborative activity you can go the office if needed.

And BTW I was reading another interesting post and say a very interesting video of a Truly Mobile Office. So now you can give 3 cheers for good health and a healthy business!

CLAIM – Collaborative Learning and Involvement Marketing

CLAIM – Collaborative Learning and Involvement Marketing to claim more and more customers with confidence and pride.

Today I am introducing this concept in marketing, called, CLAIM and I will try to explain, how, you can acquire more customers and convert more prospects into customers by using this CLAIM concept.

Collaborative learning

What do you see people doing around you? From a CEO to a desk manager, from a machine shop owner to a software engineer, from a marketing professional to sales guy, every one is involved in a day to day task of there own. To accomplish that task they are communicating and applying knowledge or their skills. Either they are using their previously acquired knowledge/network or they are learning new skills/building new network. They are talking to each other, talking to customers and prospects, keeping in touch professionally or socially, they are searching information, they are reading or writing they are leveraging everything possible to collaborate and accomplish their tasks, everyday.

How different are the things from earlier days and now? Well in 1970s if you were to acquire accomplish any task, you would be talking to someone senior, spending time with them and learn from their experience. However, with fast paced life in today’s world, it’s getting difficult to do that. So what do people do today? People leverage the knowledge networks and their professional networks. They learn from the knowledge already available to them. There are multiple sources of knowledge today from learning from the case studies, whitepapers, research reports, survey analysis, personal network, professional network, open question and answers online and vast knowledge available in terms of best practices on Internet.

People are collaborating with each other to help each other learn and grow much faster than they could have otherwise.

As Graham Jones pointed out in his post “online advertisers are failing to understand people”, it is partially evident, that ads are disruptive. This means: you can catch the attention once; however, does that have a positive effect? No.

So what does the marketer DO?

Re-focus on customers!

It’s becoming simpler to answer this complex situation, Collaborate with the customers/prospects and keep the Learning process ON always. Open up your ears and eyes and whatever possible to learn from the customers. And be genuinely interested in making the customer successful.

Make it a 3 way learning process.

New Customer/Prospect Marketer Existing Customer

Learn from your existing customers, learn from your new customer or prospect and then share the knowledge from an existing customer to another customer and repeat this cycle.

Come up with solutions to present issues that a customer is facing. Make your present customer successful and make the successful customers your sales people.

Involve the customers and prospects in your marketing by interacting with them and making them do the Word of Mouth.

Getting your intentions correct – Though it’s a long term strategy and many organizations are ignoring it in the pretext of short term sales and revenue, the genuine intention of making your customers successful is dying. While your customer is struggling with an issue in their work, you as a marketer is showing benefits to the customers and not projecting the genuine intent for a solution. Collaborate with them to showcase the best solutions out there from your research and learning from other customers.

Reach out as a support in communities and professional networks. Provide research and best practices at no charge and make people successful in their jobs. Does this need time and money from your side? Yes it does, however, it is important now to collaborate and involve people in your marketing effort.

With Collaboration and Continous Involvement of your customers and prospects in the marketing process, you CLAIM more and more customers with pride!

HSBC Bank – Marketing promotion reaches New “Greener” Heights – Shameful Marketing promotion

HSBC Bank – Marketing Strategy reaches New “Greener” Heights – Shameful Marketing promotion.

Yesterday night while on my evening walk I noticed the “New Green Ways” of marketing adopted by some Employees of HSBC bank. As if the annoying calls for personal loans were not enough, the Sales Executive at HSBC bank decided to NAIL posters on the trunks of trees to sell Personal Loans.

As John Muir said, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from draught, diseases, avalanches, a thousand of tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.”

I wonder what they are thinking when they came up with this brilliant Marketing Plan. Will posting a personal loan ad on a tree trunk get people to call you? It is ridiculous. Isnt there a law againt this somewhere in the country?

I was just wondering, if you post something on a billboard, you pay the billboard owner rent. Considering HSBC posters are on trees which are public property should’nt HSBC be paying the public. Will HSBC give out company shares to every bangalorean? Will they atleast pay-back society in some way instead if ruining the environment. Is there anything at all the Bank is doing for the society in which it operates?

Enough of complaining. On one hand while there are no-brainer promotion tactics like this, there are some people who really care for the city and planet’s green face. They have started planting trees for free across the city. They have left a name www.treesforfree.org humbly and they have a blog which is full of action and it speaks for them.

What I am doing here is to take their action to masses and spread their to the people:

“We plant trees for free to heal the earth. As of now, we do this in Bangalore only. So if you know any place where a tree can take root and flourish, let us know. We’ll do the rest. You’re welcome to join us, I as a volunteer or a “tree planting member”(one who gives 100 rupees to plant a tree, every month). We also plant trees as a living tribute to your birthday, anniversary, or any other day that you want us to. If you like what we do, and then feel free to spread the good word about our work. Speak to your friends, family, and your company’s CSR department. Do whatever it takes to spread some greenery and heal the earth.”

I have contacted the people behind this to put my personal efforts to help promote and contribute in this initiative.

For once, let’s stop complaining and DO this. And for the people at the private banks, please put some thought into your Marketing exercises.

Holi – Indian festival of colors brings freshness in Subways from Mumbai to New York!

Do you stink? Please take a bath this Holi …

We casually joke in India, pointing at the lazy bums, “You take a bath from Holi-to-Holi?” Not sure how true that joke is, but with people stinking in sub ways and public transports, it sometimes looks like it is true.

Holi – for once in a year everybody takes a public bath, quite literally . Holi is an Indian festival which is played with colors and water with a lot of enthusiasm. It has a rich cultural history, read more about it here. On the first day it’s celebrated by a bon-fire signifying burning the demoness Holika and on the second day (dulhendi) with colors and water. Even though it is a little dirty festival (as many people might say) it at least cleanses the dirt off your body and at the end you smell good. I would say it’s more of a mass cleaning operation .

Why don’t people play holi every month in Mumbai and New York? I think it’s more important for people to adopt this festival considering the increased stink in the subway trains. Just a few days ago while I was talking to my friend in New York and he pointed that people stink in sub ways and it seems as if they haven’t had a bath in ages. It made me reminisce my days of travel in local DTC and Blue line buses in Delhi, and the journeys in local trains in Mumbai, even some of my early job days in Chennai, the stink on these public transport systems was so bad that I sometimes almost killed myself pressing my nose hard to escape the smell.

Our politicians don’t stink: They all love holi. In India, right from politicians to small kids, people of all ages, castes, creeds play holi. UP and Bihar have a unique style of playing holi called “Kurta Faad” holi. Our favorite railway minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav, is known for this style. Recently The Hindu reported that Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and AB Vajpayee all enjoyed holi.

More facts on Holi: Holifestival.org gave tips on how to make natural colors (I hope these colors take the stink off the subways). Also I saw a holi calendar till 2021 which tells you when holi is (you can visit here). I was wondering if I can rewrite the calendar and celebrate Holi every month. More facts about holi can be found here.

BTW: For social service I do play holi and here is the proof!

Tradition Marketer? Online media can help your ROI tracking.

My online media evangelism is making me more generous towards the traditional media marketers or you can call it’s a sympathy gesture to myself (for the time I spent in traditional media). Here is a piece of advice for the traditional media marketers to track the ROIs from the offline media campaigns (which is a hard nut to crack otherwise).

Let’s say you are running TV, Radio, Print ads for certain campaign and you wish to track your ROI. Neither this is a fool proof method nor will it give you an accurate tracking, however, it can act as an add-on to your regular media tracking tricks. Assumption made here is that you would be using some call to action in your campaign and tracking it back to your results.

Try to use a “keyword” or a “buzzword” in your campaign as a call to action. Now, much before launching your offline campaign, you can look at the search engine volumes for the specific keyword which you are going to use in your offline campaign.

Identify some popular search engines in your region and start running a fixed time SEM campaign. Buy out certain keywords that you are going to use in your offline campaign and you expect that those keywords will be searched by people in search engines.

Now bid for those keywords and keep a close track on the search engine traffic coming to your website through those keywords before launching the offline campaign. This is the base setup which will work as the platform for you.

Once you start your offline campaign monitor the post campaign increase in search volumes of your keywords and the increased traffic to your website. Determine whether your offline media has a positive ROI impact by evaluating whether this incremental search traffic got you additional searches, enquiries, sales, etc.

Was it worth investment on your offline media initiatives? In case your business is not at all online, and you know, for example, that majority of your business is done by phone or in stores; you could look at increased search volumes when calculating ROI.

This is how Online Media and search engines can help you measure your ROI and track the results a little better than what you might be doing now!

New Marketing Mantra for India INC – Incentevise | Nurture | Capitalize

Online media evangelism – How online media can augment sales when traditional media gets the beating.

INC Philosophy: Incentivise Nurture Capitalize

I was reading an article this morning on how the surrogate advertising might just get blocked completely in India, thanks to our minister Anbumani Ramadoss. I met him during an ICT in healthcare event in Baramati. He is a learned man and gets very passionate about certain issues, especially with younger generation.

This is a roadblock as well as an opportunity for the marketers. Obviously one channel (TV) for promotion of such brands as well as brand extensions might get blocked. However, the channel which opens for India Inc. is the online channel. Fortunately the Indian minister does not have control over the online channel (Yet). So obviously this channel can be leveraged effectively for the promotion.

Incentivise: Give more reasons for people to move online and see the benefits like Cost or better and quicker service etc.

Nurture: Provide more benefits, create a conversation and nurture the audience by collaborative community based discussions.

Capitalize: Capitalize by spending the least amount of advertising dollars and still convert them to revenue.

INC is the new marketing mantra in a age where the traditional media fails.

TV 2.0 eating into Traditional TV time?

Is TV 2.0 or the web based video channels cannibalizing the traditional TV watching time? Would Internet replace the traditional box?

I was recently reading the survey report on media consumption and noticed that 37% of the audiences between the ages of 12-28 on an average are hooked online for up to 5 hours a day. The usage varies from news, office work, matrimonials, jobs, social networking, online videos, online and music download, blogging, commenting, reading, file sharing, mobile messaging and mobile media usage and more…It is evident that there is a cannibalization of TV time with Internet/Mobile time. Another interesting piece by Times of India, 17th March 08 on Video Blogs and how there is a general behavioral shift towards internet.

However in another media and entertainment household survey fact sheet by IBM showcased DVR as one of the key reasons to have increased the TV usage. The key thing to look at is that video recording or playback is driving this behaviour of media consumption. This means people want to choose the time and want to have the convenience of watching TV or digital media as per their own will. Can we call it ON-Demand digital media?

Now in this case people are paying for the media and a small number is also ready to pay a little extra for ad free viewing. However, considering that there is a large focus group which is online and would like to get access to digital TV 2.0 or WEB TV 2.0 at their will, that to free of charge all supported by the ads, they wouldn’t mind watching that, would they?

Here enters Vuze an open platform for digital music and video on demand! Vuze is the world’s most popular entertainment platform for high-res digital content: video, music, and games. With an installed base of 18 million unique client downloads in its first year, 500,000 new downloads per week and 150 content partners to date, Vuze is experiencing unprecedented organic growth. I have seen small webseries like roommating is getting popular already and there are many similar series which are presently running on Vuze.

It won’t be an exaggeration if I call Vuze the next standard of Web TV or the TV 2.0. It’s a P2P based video and music sharing platform. You can simply download the video by opening the torrent file. Also you can publish your own content by creating torrents. Vuze attracts and features high quality content from a growing roster of global television networks, premier production studios and thousands of maverick content creators, on the most advanced, most open entertainment platform ever created. Another finding in the survey sheet was that 23% responders liked user generated content which gets fulfilled in an open platform like this.

The new commercial-grade platform is supported by powerful peer-sharing technology, enabling its vast global community the ability to browse, share, search and discover unique multimedia entertainment in a high-resolution format. And Vuze is supported by text and video advertisements.

Then you have websites like youtube.com, yahoo video, google video, MSN Video, AOL Video, Veoh.com which offer a variety of online video series to watch online.

So the battle just boils down to Bandwidth. Do we have strong enough networks which can support these heavy video streaming sites? Can we actually stream LIVE Video as smooth as our traditional TV? Obviously looking at the benefits that I get where I can choose what to watch, when to watch and for how long I want to watch, I can pretty much control my buying behavior for entertainment products. And if offered well, I can even buy into a service provider for eg: there can be a bundling of packages with news, entertainment etc for online Video viewers. Presently Tata Sky is one of the leading organized cable operators on on-demand TV which is a digital, DTH via satellite TV, in India. This can become a threat to Tata Sky if they do not look at their online strategy of on-demand TV.

Would TV 2.0 become a threat to traditional Cable and TV operators or the traditional way of watching TV and replace the Traditional Idiot Box?

Google – “A Prediction Shop”?

Google is almost “Human”.

Internet psychologist Graham Jones in his post on his website on 13^th March’08 says psychologists prove Google is almost “Human”. He supported his conclusion on the research done by researchers at University of California, Berkley.

An excerpt of the research report said:

“Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a component of the Google search engine. In this task, people were shown a letter of the alphabet and asked to name the first word beginning with that letter that came to mind. We show that PageRank, computed on a semantic network constructed from word-association data, outperformed word frequency and the number of words for which a word is named as an associate as a predictor of the words that people produced in this task. We identify two simple process models that could support this apparent correspondence between human memory and Internet search, and relate our results to previous rational models of memory.”

So now my question is: Is this good or bad for me, as a search user?

Good Side: If I am thinking of some specific term in my mind and I google that term, in most probability google shows me the most relevant response. Wow it is good! Well it’s based on there algorithms, their experiments, their learning from data of masses and billions of queries and web history and many more reasons. So in a way I am happy that I got what I wanted. So google is not evil and truly giving me very precise search results.

Bad Side or Not? If google can give me the relevant search results of the stuff that I am searching for, does that also mean that they knew at one point of time in future I am going to search that? Something like a predictive search? And if yes, if they know what I am going to search for that means, they are going to serve me that even without me searching for it eg: If they know that I won a online marketing contest and previously I have been searching for a vacation in Thailand, so are they not going to serve me ads on Vacation Planning and special tours in Thailand?

Now this is debatable. Should I be happy about Google knowing that I am planning for a holiday in Thailand and they offering me relevant tour operators who can help me find a good package or should I be left alone to decide on my own through my research to find the best for me?

Last but not the least…So will a Machine algorithm take over Human Mind, and will google become a prediction shop?