Google Now and its Indian predictions

I've been tracking Google Now for a while. However, Google did not push most of the features in India, though they have been rolling out incremental capabilities in US and few other geographies over the past years. 

In the past few months I was excited to see Google Now cards being gradually pushed onto my android mobile. I've been checking the cards, customizing preferences and feeding inputs based on the suggestions it had been surfacing. For instance, there are cards for weather alert, stock movements and news story suggestions based on browsing history. Few weeks back, I was glad to notice stories suggested from my Feedly account, based on Google Now's integration with the Feedly app. 

Couple of days back, I was amazed to see Google Now push a travel card, alerting me to leave for the office at 9.10 AM. I later figured that this was based on a meeting in my calendar that was setup at my office; this was combined with my home location, and by figuring out the possible routes and travel times, Google noticed a surge in traffic on that day. Per its calculations, the usual 30 minute journey was supposed to take 50 minutes, and hence it prompted me to leave immediately. 

Amazed with this alacrity, I left home a bit earlier and indeed found the traffic to be excessively bad that day. I duly checked back with Google on the best route for the day, and it showed me a off-road route, under the Hafeezpet railway bridge as the shortest one, while my usual route was projected to take 40 minutes longer than usual. Grateful to Google, I took up this route which was something I used to take very occasionally. True to the predictions, I encountered very less traffic on the route, inspite of all other roads being clogged.

With everything going picture perfect right from the start & in a dreamy state, I was woken up with a rude shock when I saw that the underpass road was filled with water upto 3 feet, from the previous day's heavy rains! That was perhaps the reason for less traffic on this particular route. Taking a U-turn, I went back to my usual route, and spent an hour longer commuting to the office. I had the Google assistant turned off for the rest of journey.

The Indian market is indeed unique and a tough one to crack! Hope the Now Cards algorithms learn its peculiarities soon enough to get accustomed to this market.

A 'rocky patch' for Hyderabad's Rock structures

Hyderabad has a defining characteristic. No, I'm not talking Biryani, but the famed rock structures that dot this city. Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills are perhaps as popular as Charminar. One can find a series of undulating terrains and rocky structures not just in these localities, but pretty much throughout the city.

These charming structures would pause anyone in their tracks and make the people wonder as to how they've managed to achieve the unique balance.

Rock structure at Ghar-e-Mubarak, near Golconda Fort

Hyderabad is blessed with so many such structures and clusters of rock formations.

Rocks at BITS, Hyd (Pic: Shailesh Jain)	Balancing boulders (Pic: TribuneIndia)

The sad part of the story is that the city is fast losing these landmarks. As Hyderabad keeps getting more attractive as an investment destination and the land value goes through the roof across the city, the first casualties are these structures.

Before (A patch of land near my office)	... and After

Its a common sight to see an entire rock hillock get levelled to further commercial interests.

Check out this hillock..	..and the work in progress to level it

Khajaguda, an adventure enthusiasts favourite, and a second home to my club, GHAC (Great Hyderabad Adventure Club) is at the verge of getting wiped out. This place has hundreds of acres of fascinating rock structures. Unfortunately, this has not been spared as well, and over half of this place has already been blasted to dust.

GHAC bouldering event at Khajaguda

There are some good souls fighting for the rocks. There is the 'Save Rocks Soceity', a 20 year old organization that has been taking up the cause of rocks, and has also got few of the sites declared as heritage-rock-sites by the government, to bring them under a protective umbrella. They do a lot of awareness campaigns and events like the famed 'Hyderabad Rockathon' in partnership with GHAC.

Unfortunately, this is too little and needs more public support, financial muscle and support from the power corridors to really save Hyderabad's most popular landmarks, which are perhaps more historic than the Charminar. After all, rocks take a few thousand years to form and they are now going through a mass extinction - great structures blasted & levelled in a few seconds.

Facebook's misstep on data privacy with Whatsapp

Facebook received bad press yet again last week, after its internet.org fiasco in India, several months back. You might have got a notification on your Whatsapp that the 'terms and conditions' had changed and you'd need to 'accept' them to continue using the services. One of the key changes in this was the user's implicit permission to let FB use their Whatsapp profile info to sell more targeted ads on your Facebook account. 

Image source: Techcrunch

And, this created considerable outrage, with a lot of messages going viral (within whatsapp!). There were talks of privacy breaches and how Facebook has started invading more spheres of our private lives. The messages also educated users with a simple set of steps on how to turn this setting 'off' in Whatsapp.

If for a moment you take a dispassionate look at the whole thing, it doesn't appear to be so alarming. Here is a parent company (Facebook) trying to cross-leverage its presence and services with a subsidiary (Whatsapp, which it bought for a bomb of $20 Billion), to better monetize the user base. The users were anyway getting both the services for free. And the new terms clearly stated that only the whatsapp user profile details would be used and none of the chats, groups or other interests would be shared.

Then why the outrage? Its not new in the B2C space for companies to cross-leverage or cross-sell services across their spectrum of products or subsidiaries. Take Google for instance, who has systematically achieved deep integration amongst their wide gamut of products, wherein consumer intelligence from one product enriches the others. But, the fundamental difference here is that the features for the user have always come in first and hence have been well received (though not without its share of suspicion); like the smart Google Now that simplifies your life. Facebook has erred by putting the carriage before the horse, and attempted to monetize first without linking the two for user's gain.

This apart, a side issue has been the perceived dishonesty or malicious intent in the way users have seen FB roll this out. The nature of an implicit, hidden agreement that kicks in when a user 'accepts' T&C certainly didn't help. When you try checking-off the box to disagree on usage of your profile info for ads, the prompt checks 'Are you sure you want to do this? You'll never be able to change this ever again'. Why should this sound like a once-in-a-lifetime favor that FB is doing you. After all, its a user preference and one might be okay to go back and enable the link when they see some benefits coming their way.

Finally, another undercurrent for all of this is the extremely accurate and targeted nature of the ads on Facebook, which has put off a lot of people. Actually this is one area FB must be congratulated for the accuracy they've managed with their algorithms! Unfortunately, the market at large doesn't see it that way. The advances in analytics have been exponential in a brief span of time in an unregulated market, that unpeople haven't been able to fathom it yet. 

A personalized recommendation is not seen as a smart salesperson suggesting just-the-right product, but rather like an intruder who has not only got into your house without permission, but has setup a canopy right in your living room to sell stuff by overhearing what you talk to your family!