Finding Dory.. and more money spinners

Couple of weeks back, I had planned to watch Disney's 'Finding Dory'. I had thoroughly enjoyed 'Finding Nemo' and a sequel though over a decade delayed, really didn't dampen the expectations. I was all the more excited about introducing my son to this franchise. When I told him about planning to watch an animation movie over the weekend, he surprised me by asking if it was for the new 'fish' movie!

Little did I realize that Disney had done a pretty good job of running promos on all their medium - one of them happened to be the Disney kids channel, which my son is usually tuned into. After all, the kids segment is such a lucrative market, and brand extension is the name of the game. Disney has been the master here with their movies minting money as extensions into TV shows - Games - Merchandise - Retail products - Theme parks, apart from others.

Haven't we seen the reverse cycle play out equally successfully with Green Gold Animation's Chota Bheem? What started as a TV show has created an industry of its own, again spanning to cover rest of the categories - Games - Merchandise - Retail products, and... Movies. Of late, there have been many winners taking this path.

Getting back to 'Finding Dory', it was a good watch - giving one more of Nemo's magical oceanic experience. Though not ground breaking or a fresh concept like 'Finding Nemo', it has its special moments. Apart from the movie, I enjoyed the lovely pre-movie clip from Pixar studios - Piper! Check out the Youtube preview here. Won't be long before it spawns its own line of products.

Physical newsprint becomes history, in my world

The unthinkable has happened.

I've stopped buying a newspaper at home. Yes, permanently. 

I've never considered that the digital medium would obviate the need for a physical, printed news copy at home, so soon. And definitely not when the balance in web-vs-print hasn't started shifting as much in India.

Firstly, some context on why this is big for me. Of over 15 years of subscribing to newspapers, I've been on Economic times for the past 10. Newspapers have steadily grown into an obsession for me over time, so much that I usually hoard papers through the week to catch up on unread stuff over the weekend! I had such an obsession for ET Sunday that I've regularly carried around the past several week's editions for well over a month, at times while travelling as well, until I've fully 'finished' them. And there are times when my days started gloomy because the vendor accidentally skipped the daily newspaper at home.

Going from there, not too long ago, to a state of taking a decision to stop the newspaper for good, has been too rapid, even for my own senses to fathom. There's an interplay of several channels that have made the newspaper redundant for me:

• Firstly, there's a steady set of feeds that I've subscribed to online and set them up for consumption on my feedly channel spanning my core interest areas. 
• I've setup a similar lists across interest areas, for some of the notable users that I follow on twitter through Tweetdeck. This has evolved into a great medium for news discovery and aggregation.
• I have experimented with inshorts app (the fast-growing Indian startup) on my mobile, which surfaces top headlines couple of times during the day. This covers the national, local and other breaking global news.
• These channels pretty much cover everything that I'd like to catch up on. Anything missed here or trending viral stuff surfaces on whatsapp, facebook or other medium - all of which I use sparingly.

Over the past month, I had started noticing the newspaper gathering dust at home. Time bandwidth issues apart, I've seen a better customized match of news and articles of my interest online and the availability of apps & aggregator feeds only makes it all the more easier to create your custom digital newspaper. And that explained why the physical newsprint has lost much of its original sheen. 

It remains to be seen if this decision will be persisted, but directionally that's where I'm headed, for now.

Gartner and the interesting space of Technology advisory

Couple of weeks back, I had attended Gartner's Business Intelligence & Analytics conference at Mumbai, their recurring annual event in India. Overall, it was a very well organized conference with good thought leadership being served across the sessions, by their analysts.

All these years of my work experience, I have been bumping into Gartner - their collaterals in the form of whitepapers/webinars and the occasional analyst discussions and conferences. Their business and engagement model continues to amaze me. Quite like some of the successful consulting and research-advisory organizations, they have a rather evolved model of existence. Here, I take a 50,000 feet and possibly simplistic view of my understanding of their business model.

Gartner has a core team of expert analysts, some very good people with diverse & deep industry experience who do research and study trends. However, a bulk of their intelligence and industry reading comes through their consulting and advisory streams of business, wherein they engage IT sellers (technology vendors) and IT buyers (end clients of the vendors) to provide services on a variety of business accepts: 

• how should I position, package & sell technology products/services to my clients?
• how do I buy technology to solve my problems & how should I evaluate vendors?
• who are the top clients I should go after?
• who are the worthy vendors to evaluate?
• ..and so on

As you can see, they are at the centre, talking to both the sellers and buyers and that places them in a great vantage position - both for trend-prediction and match-making! With a market leadership, they are uniquely positioned to practically know whats brewing on the supply and the demand side - this completes their vision of what's happening in the industry. This gold-mine of information coupled with some smart analysts gives them the crystal-ball gazing abilities to call out evolving trends, atleast a couple of years in advance.

Now throw in a slew of products and solutions that are actually by-products of the above mentioned core engine - whitepapers, magic quadrants, hype cycles, analyst calls, webinars, global conferences, media products and what not. They brilliantly package and monetize this knowledge as suitably positioned information offerings, and have an army of people across rolls in their big org-structure who complete the picture (those that most industry watchers wouldn't even be aware of).

One might argue that there is a potential conflict of interest in this (seemingly self-feeding) cycle - IT sellers, in order to get positioned in the mainstream of the Gartner market picture would need to first get into this universe. This is invariably by signing up as a Gartner client, participating in their events and thereby gaining a mind-share with the all-important analysts. Though a successful emerging player could surely get noticed from the outside, there are doubts whether they can get featured in the mainstream collaterals (say, like the Magic Quadrant) if they choose to stay outside the ecosystem.

A potential counter-argument to the above could be the credibility and growing mind-share that Gartner enjoys in the Technology eocsystem, with IT buyers, sellers and all others on the sideline watching it. Perhaps, Gartner walks the fine line by balancing needs/commitments to their clients with an unbiased market picture portrayal to all others. Perhaps, they manage all this too well. 

Nevertheless they are in an interesting position and doing some exciting stuff in the technology industry. Definitely, a space to continue watching.

Data journalism through Visual analytics to cover India's electoral battles

19th of May was a momentous day, not just for the parties that swept to an absolute majority in the 4 State Assembly elections in India, but also for Gramener, which made a splash on national Television by covering the elections through visual analytics. With Gramener's partnership with Times Now having been forged hardly 6 weeks prior to the counting day, it was a daunting task to deliver insightful & engaging data visualizations, for the real-time streaming results of the votes tally. The most critical ask was to have this data journalism initiative designed and packaged in a way that it reaches the non-tech savvy, TV audience - millions of them, considering the clear leadership that Times Now has in the English News Channels segment.

The last similar outing for Gramener, at a comparable scale was during India's landmark 2014 Lok Sabha elections, which witnessed BJP's landslide victory. Then, we had tied up with CNN IBN TV channel, through a partnership with Microsoft. This was a big success as well, but very different in terms of the type of engagement and reach. The CNN IBN initiative was two-pronged: TV and Digital. The visual content was created as an interactive application and used for live reporting by anchors on a touchscreen TV. Then, there was the end-user-targeted Election analytics app, which was launched on the web through multiple channels - Microsoft Bing, Windows 8 app on the appstore and the CNN IBN website.

The content on TV was used more as an add-on reporting by anchors, while the main action and live debates happened in the primary studio, led by Rajdeep Sardesai, through their traditional means. There was good response to the visual reporting on TV , however the major reach was through the Digital channel, where we received over 10 million hits just within the 16 hours on the counting day.

For the recent initiative with Times Now, TV reporting was the only medium leveraged and as if to compensate for this, the visual analytics was integrated mainstream into all of the channel's programming. All reporting through the day, prime-time coverage and live debates were tightly strung together with our product's visuals. 

And hence, the stakes were really high and our team had put in extra efforts to make this work on national television, with just a single opportunity to get it right in front of millions of live TV audience.

Reflecting on how things progressed on May 19th, what a day it was! The Gramener product's visual analytics was synced with the Times Now programming and everything worked out to clock-work precision. The visuals got a major boost with a pre-launch premiere on the 18th, a day prior to going live. There was very good visibility for the Visuals and ample co-branding for Gramener. Thankfully the 5 Visuals helped identify early trends, while the analytics helped give a clear picture of the evolving scene in each state, which in turn spurred a lot of meaningful debates. 

As a bonus, couple of us got to participate in the show and contribute to the data stories on prime time. An equally enriching experience was in the On-Air backroom, to get a first hand experience of TV production. It was something to view from close quarters the zillion moving parts - video feeds from all over the country, editorial team live-feeding & curating the content, graphics team sending their animations & graphic designs, in-studio cameras shooting people at all angles, apart from several other technical teams editing and mixing all the content. It was amazing to see the technical mastery on how the show director and producer work through all this chaos, manage things on-the-fly and create a supposedly seamless and perfectly unified experience for viewers, on the screen!

There has been extremely positive reviews and feedback flowing in from various quarters. It was a delight to get additional reinforcement of the effectiveness from the all-important TV ratings, which is a gold standard to judge the popularity of shows.

Perhaps, there will be separate posts on the making-of-the-show: the preparations, technology architecture and on the production aspects. For now, do check out the below post by a colleague, which gives a good summary of the entire engagement.

The Nation wants to know what GRAMENER was doing at TIMES NOW – By Yash Raina