"I know what you did last summer.. and pretty much everyday!" - Check out your life catalogued on Google

Couple of weeks back, I was in Bangalore to conduct a workshop at the National Institute of Design (NID), Bangalore. After reaching the hotel, I googled the NID location on map to check distance and the commute time. As I was about to close the page, I stumbled upon a small link on the left that said 'You last visited 11 months ago'.

I was surprised, since I had indeed been to NID a year back, for an earlier workshop. Intrigued, I clicked on it and saw the below:

Now this got interesting since it showed the actual date of visit in 2015 and not just that, but where I stayed (Ivory Studio One at Indiranagar) and when I travelled that day, how long I was at NID, and when I left. And then I noticed the bars at the top which seemed to have similar catalogued information, for other days as well. To investigate further, I clicked on the next day. Now it started getting beyond interesting:

This showed my itinerary on the next day, after I had got back to Hyderabad. It had a complete chronicle of the day - the time I left home, the bakeries I had visited to book a cake for my kid's first birthday party. The cake pictures I had taken at the bakery on my mobile phone (and which was backed up on Google photos) is neatly catalogued alongside.

The timeline continued to show Karachi bakery, the last one I had visited and where I finalized the cake. Then, it showed my visit to the printers for the birthday cards - and the rest of day at office - time I travelled home - the route I took that day - and Google's guess of whether I drove, cycled, took train or walked, perhaps based on the speed of movement. Now this was just too much of my personal life catalogued, and it was quite eerie! The only apparent comfort being Google's assurance that this information is safe & private, until I choose to make it public.

Finally, to understand what else was up for grabs from my google-created life travelogue, I explored further and discovered a variety of rich information - all my trips by year; every single place I had visited; the favorite joints; average travel per day and so on and on. All this information was available for a historical period of 3 years, which was when I transitioned to an Android smartphone, and incidentally handed over my life to Google!

Now, all along I knew Google has been storing my data - my Google searches, my Android phone location, map searches, photos backed up, my office inbox, my calendar. Being a data afficionado and one who takes out time to track all possible data points in the daily events, this was a conscious choice and something I have been excited about. But what caught me by surprise here was the neat processing and linking up all of these together to create a rich and frightening catalogue, which leaves nothing to imagination.

For now, I will definitely continue giving out my data, but will be a bit more circumspect about the possibilities.

'Ambush marketing' your competitors: Hyderabad billboard wars

Care Hospitals opened one of their biggest branches in Gachibowli, Hyderabad a few months back. In the midst of hundreds of ads and billboards put up by Care Hospitals all over Hyderabad, I was alarmed to see the below billboard put up by a competitor, right next to the new Care Hospitals campus.

Continental Hospitals had taken a brazen approach to rent out a prominent billboard right next to the location and has put in this tongue-in-cheek hoarding. This is unmissable for anyone taking the highway, and is all the more prominent in the night, with use of right brand colors of 'Care Hospitals' just as seen in the neon lights right behind the billboard! A classic case of ambush marketing at its unsavory best!

Hardly a few weeks later, I stumbled upon this billboard by Oakridge International school, again in the Hitech city area in Hyderabad.

I saw variants of this board in other places where ‘Pilani -or- Princeton’ was replaced by ‘Symbiosis -or- Stanford’. Seems to be a case of an 'International' school glorifying Ivy league universities abroad, while belittling their Indian ones with a similar rhyme to the name. I wonder whether they’ve also used a ‘IIT -or- MIT’ comparison somewhere!

Clearly another variant of ambush marketing that could degenerate into an ugly spat. When I googled for these, I couldn’t find any local news or mentions, and I wonder how the affected parties have reacted to these.

But if the intent of these boards was to grab attention and be talked about, they sure achieved their 'intended' purpose.

Hans Rosling - a tribute

In the past week, the discipline of Data Visualization lost Hans Rosling, a stalwart & leading proponent of Visual story telling. He passed away at the age of 68. That he was a master story teller with data is widely known, and one can get a glimpse of some of these brilliant narrations in his TED page.

A key highlight of all his talks was to demystify statistics and make seemingly boring numbers come out alive on the screen. One of the reasons he stands out in the Visualization world is his unusual combination of diverse skillsets - depth in statistics, eye for visual design and riveting presentation with screen presence.

His efforts have been lauded for taking pains to simplify statistics for the common, non-data audience. He has gone to the extent of explaining heavy concepts like population growth and climate change through Lego blocks and other physical props. Experimenting with innovative ways of presenting data, he had also used Augmented Reality to present data in 2010, several years before AR and VR came into mainstream parlance.

Hans Rosling was a big inspiration for us, in the early days of Gramener. We have leaned on his vast repository of work as part of our talks to educate audiences and in introducing concepts to our clients. Gapminder, the non-profit website and visualization tool that he founded were used as benchmarks in our early work. Over the years, I have continued to use some of his brilliant videos in my Visualization workshops, including one just yesterday.

Thanks to his pioneering work, the industry has benefitted immensely and his legacy will be carried forward. If you're looking to get started with Hans Rosling and his body of work, I'd recommend to take a look at the AR talk from 2010 where he covers 200 years of global history, the wealth and health of nations through a 4 minute talk.

Dangal - wrestling to Wrestle

I arrived late to the Dangal party. But thankfully, I caught up with this movie a couple of weeks back, before it moved out of most theatres. The uniform reaction I heard from people who watched the movie was “What perfection - everyone in the movie seems to have learnt & lived wrestling so much so that nothing appears to be an enactment”. I must agree, since I looked up Geeta Phogat’s Gold-medal winning ‘real’ match after the movie, and it didn’t come close to any of the prelims matches shown in the movie!

I’m a big fan of sports movies and particularly those inspired from real life events, for they celebrate triumph of the human spirit against insurmountable odds. They not just inspire people to march-on when massive challenges come in the way of their passion, but they also do the dual job of endearing them to a new sport. Several Bollywood movies have done an outstanding job here, like Chak de India (Hockey), Bhaag Milka Bhaag (Athletics), Mary Kom (Boxing), Lagaan & MS Dhoni (Cricket, though this sport hardly needs any further push). So have movies in Tamil like Irudhi Sutru (Boxing), Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu (Kabadi) apart from other commercial movies with sports as a key track - like Chennai 600028 (Cricket again) or Ethir Neechal (Athletics). They have done a world of good to promote sports and get audience interested in stuff beyond the obvious cricket bat-and-ball, when on the ground. Perhaps its no coincidence that a lot of non-cricket sports leagues have sprung up in India, in the recent years.

What struck me with Dangal was the incredulity that something like this could have happened in real life. The first thing I did after stepping out of the movie hall was to google and check how much of it was real vs reel. Understandably, the director has taken some creative liberty and added elements to make the movie work commercially - such as the antagonist character of Indian national coach and Phogat Sr getting locked up during his daughter’s Commonwealth Gold bout, to name a few.

Nevertheless, there are several aspects from Phogat’s journey that makes his real story on the love for wrestling & the doggedness to get a gold medal, incredible. Without doubt its good to see such stories come out in the open, be taken up commercially (albeit with some ‘reel’ embellishments) and achieve the reach they have, rather than taking a puritan approach by being a stickler for factual accuracy and bury such tales forever.

The Dhaakad video from the movie has been playing on repeat mode in my machine for a few weeks.