Staying relevant in the Radio cabs space - Is Meru holding up?

Nokia's CEO ended his speech while announcing their distress sale to Microsoft saying, “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” Immediately, he and the entire management team publicly wept.

All case studies on Nokia dissecting the reasons for failure point to one thing in common - "inadequate pace of innovation & the seeming reluctance to change even as their world was turning upside down". Interestingly, all market leaders across industries who have been swept away with fundamental changes in their respective industries have this in common - Polaroid, Yahoo or Sun Microsystems.

When I need to book a cab, I usually check the 3 apps on my phone - Uber, Ola and Meru. The occasion decides the app that gets picked. If its an early-morning drop to the airport, the choice invariably is Meru (having burnt hands on a couple of occasions while trying to switch to other operators). For every other case its either Uber (on those rare occasions where surge pricing is not on!) or Ola.

Having used Meru for over 8 years, I'm amazed at their consistency - both, in their 'uber' punctuality with guaranteed before-time arrival AND in they being wedded to technology that is atleast few years behind the industry. 

Their Android app has few frustrating touchpoints. For instance, a basic thing such as the 'favorites' feature doesn't really store your home/office location. Meru, surprisingly doesn't yet have a navigation map for its drivers. The GPS seems to be used only for cab booking. So, the driver doesn't have the advantage of routing technology, and the customer's bill summary doesn't provide a route map, unlike Ola/Uber, which offer this check on whether the driver took an optimal route. Without GPS mapping & proper address storage, you end up explaining your home address & landmark to the drivers, every single time. 

While these contribute to a poor UX overall, their significantly higher fares put off users. Today, a bulk of their daily trips seem to come from airport drops and pick-ups, which is one location where you can still find a very high number of their cabs. Considering that the rival cab aggregators do a pretty good job in the above areas along with providing a seamless app user experience, it remains to be seen when Meru would catch up. However, I've noticed in the past that they took an inordinate amount of time to start offering online payment and wallet facilities, years after their peers, so this may take a good amount of time, as well.

As a side note, strangely I've noticed several of their drivers, across trips handing over their business card containing personal contact details, with Meru branding, possibly encouraged by the company. This is puzzling to say the least on why a cab aggregator would encourage their drivers to push for direct bookings with customers.

Pic Source: Forbes article

Thus, directionally the story of Meru cabs doesn't appear to be too different from the fall of some of these biggest names, in the anecdote at the starting of this post. Meru had a stellar rise to the top in the organised cab players market and at a point had a near monopoly in a couple of major Indian cities. The arrival of cab aggregators marked the reinvention & rejuvenation of this industry - players like Uber, Ola & the erstwhile Taxi4sure had innovated the radio cabs space, unseated Meru cabs from its leadership position and gave it serious competition. 

Thankfully, the story is not yet over for Meru. It continues to try and reverse the downward trend, raise funds and even put in place an expansion plan to fight back. However, the initiatives don't seem to be paying off at the pace that the competition is grabbing business from them. Atleast from a consumer's perspective, things don't seem to look good. 

Can a fitness tracker keep you in good shape?

After over 2 months of using my Fitbit tracker, here is a review of the device:

I’ve been using Fitbit to primarily track the 'steps' and 'floors' metrics. These have been fairly accurate and quite useful. The other two metrics - 'calories' and 'distance' are derived from the above, and hence have a high correlation. However, they are useful additions to have. I’ve hardly used the Heart-rate meter. I did try sleeping with the device strapped on, for a couple of weeks, but the accuracy was low. It showed lesser hours slept, at times under-reporting by over 4 hours. Not finding too much utility for this metric, I stopped wearing it to bed.

I've found that walking for 45 to 60 minutes adds up to about 4000 steps on an average. This combined with general moving around at work and using opportunities to take calls mobile leaves you with an end-of-day count at around 7000 steps. These fitness trackers come with a preset target of 10,000 steps a day, however, somewhere in the range of 7500 would be a good enough target to achieve. I generally take the stairs at every given opportunity so the average floors climbed or 'steps' metric has been healthy at around 12 to 15 per day, while the pre-set target here is just 10.

The Good aspects: 

• Reasonably accurate tracking of steps/floors 
• Nice, sleek design with vibrant colours. Fairly sweat/water resistant - have put this through minor water splashes
• Instant vibrate-alerts indicating achievement of pre-set targets for the day
• Was pleasantly surprised to discover that the display was a touch-screen, something that I found out after 2 weeks of usage - only when my 1.5 year old daughter kept insistently tapping at it! 
• Gamification through achievement badges. However, you end up collecting most of the cumulative badges within the first month (50 km, 100 km, 500 floors etc). Would have been great to have some badges for consistency or month-on-month performance 
• Dashboard provides a good summary and reportedly the best amongst other fitness trackers. Gives a useful set of summary metrics, trending and breakup. 

The Not-so-good aspects:

• The data dump offered for csv download is disappointing. It just extracts the daily total, whereas an activity-wise summary (distance, speed, incline captured) or by-minute detailing would have been better. 
• The dashboard has scope for improvement. Long-term trending (over 30 days) would have been very useful. Further, the weekly summary doesn’t give you a week-over-previous-week summary, nor is a comparison provided against personal averages/best. I’ve now ended up creating my own summary view in excel, based on the csv data download available.

My Fitbit main Dashboard

Overall, Fitbit Charge HR is a good companion that does the job of making you stay active, by the very act of being visibly conscious and up-close through the day. Its almost like a trainer prodding you to move around. Gamification is a definitive motivator. There are days, I’ve felt bad that my steps count were a paltry sub-2000 and have ended up taking a long walk at night. 

Yes, the difference is partly psychological, but I would definitely recommend this for anyone conscious about their activity-level/weight or aspiring to get into this zone. 

Kabali da...!

Note: This post is not a review of the movie

Its been a week since Kabali fever gripped the country. Just as expectations soared right into the sky prior to the release, there have been mixed reviews the past 2 days, after it hit the theatres. There are people who've showered the movie with praises on the bold departure from the popular Rajni genre. While, there are others who've come out with punishing criticism and have even gone to the extent of talking about an impending end of the ageing actor's career. Yet again. 

For a couple of decades now, release of every Rajnikanth movie is marked with the frenzy and celebrations that merit a festival. There are fans who worship him, critics who write him off, people who are drawn-in with interest, while media keeps playing to the gallery. For every movie, as people outside Tamil Nadu struggle to fathom the build up with disbelief, the analysts yet again try to dissect what routinely sets off such a craze time and again: whether its his style on-screen, or his personality off-screen or whether all of this is some irrational, maniacal following that defies any sane logic. 

Love him or hate him, but you can never ignore Rajnikanth. 

Having blocked tickets for Kabali through several friends, I ended up booking 17 tickets - across 2 theatres and for 3 different timings! There were also colleagues planning to join in for the Tamil version of the movie, just to partake in the Rajni craze, though they didn't understand the language. Our preference was to watch the movie with the Hyderabad hackers, the good folks who had organized a special 'Kabali bus' from IIIT to watch the first-day-first-show of the movie at PVR. Having booked tickets for the event through them as well, I had given away all the other tickets for the FDFS show at Prasads. It didn't take too long to find takers for those tickets, and surprisingly long after the tickets were given away, I kept getting requests for tickets based on my facebook post. 

However, PVR made a last minute change in plan and decided to screen the movie in its Telugu version instead of the planned Tamil one, for an already booked show. With this, I was pushed into a last-minute, mad scramble to get back a few tickets on the night prior to the movie release. With some magnanimous friends agreeing to return a few tickets, we kept our date with the first-day-first-show. We had ample fan-crazy moments in the show and it was pure fun. 

With the Boss!	Pre-movie selfie in front of Prasads

At the end of it all, the story of watching the movie was perhaps, no lesser than a short-movie script! Finally, if you're looking for my take on the movie, I'd just say that I liked the movie and enjoyed its detour from a prescribed, formulaic script. But, I'd have to warn that this is a fan speaking! I'm sure, the debates in the media will continue for a while and more 'final verdicts' will be passed. All said and done, 'Rajnikanth - the phenomenon' will continue to both baffle and entertain people for some more time!

Artificial Intelligence debuts in Screenplay for a short sci-fi movie

These days its not new to hear on the advances in machine learning - how AI could eventually take up anything that humans do, and beyond. But we, naturally have been thinking linearly - starting with using AI for automation of low end manual tasks, then moving on to the mid-level tasks that need more cognition. The highly creative and artistic tasks that require great talent are reserved for the last, or some optimists like to keep them within the realm of mankind, assuming machines will never get there.

With bold and futuristic experiments in machine learning, it appears that machines are hitting it right across showing strong ability to pick up tasks at the top of job pyramid. As enthusiasts plug them into totally unexpected and not-ready-yet disciplines, they produce surprising results. Google's Magenta project recently presented the first-ever AI-composed music.

And now, AI has written its first screenplay! The machine was fed scripts from hundreds of sci-fi movies like Star Wars, Avengers, Avatar, Star Trek, Aliens, Terminator, apart form a host of other non-mainstream movies in the genre. A LSTM Recurrent Neural network was trained on these scripts, which eventually called itself 'Benjamin' and churned out its novel screenplay. Film makers had taken a target of 48 hours to direct whatever script comes out.

Here is the outcome - a short, 10 minutes video titled 'Sun Spring'. The script appears to be a cryptic interplay amongst 3 characters set in some futuristic world. Dialogues are never straight, and the monologues border non-sensical rants, but surprisingly it keeps you curious. If this is AI's first outing in screenplay, then perhaps it holds lot of promise. 

It is also the director and actors who have portrayed the characters strongly and elevated the script. But isn't that also too common in the human realm where experts churn out sub-par screenplays which needs technical expertise to rescue?!