There’s a article in The Wall Street Journal today about Dr. Devi Shetty and Narayana Hrudayalaya. They call Dr. Shetty the Henry Ford of heart surgery, alluding to the process innovation that has led to a big drop in the cost of surgery without any compromise in quality. Dr. Shetty has always been very popular in India, but it’s great to see Narayana Hrudayalaya get international recognition.

What most people don’t know is that Narayana Hrudayalaya is very similar to Aravind Eye Care, which pioneered the high quality, low cost care through scale model. I wrote the final paper for the “Market based mechanisms for poverty alleviation” course I took this semester on Aravind and was amazed at the scale of their achievement. I was always aware of Narayana Hrudayalaya (I went past the hospital on my way to work for a year!), but not of the model which made them so successful.

There is an opportunity for a Aravind Eye Care or Narayana Hrudayalaya in every area of healthcare – we just need the people with the tenacity of Dr. G. Venkataswamy or Dr. Devi Shetty to make it possible. This is an area of innovation where India has all the right advantages – large patient population, skilled doctors, low cost manpower and access to the best medical technology. There was a time when people in India had to go to developed countries to get the best medical care. I’m happy to see that trend being reversed over time.

A globally successful site built out of India in the last few years we can all be proud of (apart from Zoho) is SlideShare. It does one thing really well. Sharing slide shows. But, it looks like Google has taken a first step in competing with them. Of course, SlideShare does so much more at this point, but with a lot of Google products becoming “social” (like Reader), you never know. I guess it’s time for the SlideShare guys to put their heads down to out-innovate them, because there is no way a 16K people company with all their bureaucracy is going to keep up with a motivated start up. All the best to Amit and team.

I had written about the online DVD rental service Seventymm last year and how I came away rather disappointed. In the year since, they’ve been periodically contacting me about their latest offers. I always told them to call me back when they had a better offer, i.e, without a deposit, registration fee etc. They finally have a new offer now which costs Rs 995 for 6 months and 4 movies a month. I’ve signed up and have been using the service for a couple of months now. Expectedly, there are good and bad aspects to the service.

First the good -

1. The convenience – The USP of Seventymm and similar services is that the movies are delivered and picked up from your home, and they’ve completely lived up to this. I just have to add movies to my queue on their site and call them up whenever I want a pickup/delivery.
2. Customer service - Whenever I request a delivery somebody drops by at the promised time. They’ve been very punctual about this in the 3-4 times I’ve had movies delivered. They once mistakenly delivered a VCD of a movie when I had requested a DVD, and when I pointed out the mistake, offered an extra delivery without any additional charges. On a related note, I recommend that you always call them and not use the SMS or web modes of requesting a pickup/delivery. On the phone, you can specify what you want exactly and that prevents mistakes.
3. They provide multiple ways for you to reach them, and though I haven’t tried it, you can ask them to deliver movies to your home or office.
4. There have been no issues with the quality of the DVDs. I was initially apprehensive about unusable, scratched discs, but that hasn’t been a problem. Perhaps because they’re still a new service?
5. They’ve taken care of some of the no-brainer things I had mentioned in my previous post, like providing RSS feeds of latest movies added, better search and discovery etc.

Now the bad -

1. Reliability - This is a serious problem. Their site just throws up an ugly error page very often. It’s pretty much impossible to browse the site for titles for any decent amount of time without encountering a big “Runtime Error” page. Time to ditch ASP and use some proven technology?
2. Size of collection – Pretty good blockbuster movie coverage, but not many niche movies. I guess this will improve with time.
3. Broken rating system – As you’re browsing the site, every movie has a rating below the cover image denoting what I think is the average rating of the movie by other Seventymm users. The same interface allows you to specify your rating of the movie too which is displayed next to the average rating, and I think they use this information in their recommendation system. The big problem here is that I see many of those little numbers next to the average ratings of movies that I haven’t even watched. Surely some bug. I don’t know how good their recommendation system is, but this bug will surely be messing up all their data.
4. Usability – Never a strength of Indian websites, Seventymm doesn’t do too well here too. A simple example is the movie queue. How do you re-order the list to change your delivery priority? There’s a text box next to each movie with the current position in the queue. If you want to change the order, you have to manually change the number in all the textboxes to make it reflect your choice, which is a big pain if you have many movies in your queue. How difficult is it to provide a simple drag and drop interface when there are multiple Javascript libraries which make adding the feature very simple?

But, at the end of the day Seventymm is a useful service to me. It’s literally impossible to watch a movie in Bangalore on weekends unless you’ve planned it well in advance, and I’m finally catching up on all the movies I’ve missed!

The Hindustan Times has launched a business paper called Mint. They have a website too. They’ve partnered with the Wall Street Journal and in typical fashion, reading a news article requires one to register (But hey, it’s free!). Bugmenot beckons…

That apart, what’s even more surprising is the perennial problem of invalid RSS feeds seems to have hit them from day one. There are zero links in the feeds, and so, they’re obviously invalid. I had posted earlier about NDTV’s works-today-not-tomorrow feeds. Do all the sites use the same sub-standard CMS or something?

I guess nobody there cares because they don’t get too much traffic from feeds. It’s just a cool thing to have. Hopefully, it’ll change once the feeds start driving serious traffic.

Among all the MSM news websites in India, IBNLive and DNA do a very good job in my opinion. They are head and shoulders above everybody else. DNA for their well designed, simple and very functional site and IBNLive for just getting what a good news site should really be. They’re integrated very well with the television counterpart CNN-IBN and their initiatives like providing streaming video and doing simple no-brainer things like putting up transcripts of TV interviews quickly on the site shows that they “get” what a good news site should really be like. And of course, the RSS feeds have always worked . So, to the people working on the DNA and IBNLive websites… nice work!

Update: I had to browse IBNLive in IE recently, and boy do they have a lot of ads! Just started appreciating AdBlock Plus and the Filterset much more.

Update (7th May, 2007): Mint has opened up the site now. Registration is no longer required to read the news articles. It’s good that they have realised the futility of asking people to register just to read the news.

Star Movies has some kind of James Bond marathon going on. Tonight was Octopussy, and I thought I’ll watch it. Now, I don’t know if the 1983 movie led to the whole clichéd view of India in the rest of the world, or the movie was a reflection of it. Whatever, the case they were all over the place…

1. Snake charmers
2. Sadhu on bed of nails
3. Fire breathers
4. Sword eaters
5. Hot bed of coal
6. Auto rickshaws
7. Elephants on the roads
8. Crocodiles
9. Safari in the jungle
10. Wild and dangerous natives
11. The Taj Mahal
12. Palaces

…and then I stopped watching it.. not because of the clichés, but because I didn’t think it was a very good movie.

Noticed a new podcast on Cricinfo today. I’m a sucker for discussions on cricket as long as the people doing the discussing know what they’re talking about. It’s anchored by Sanjay Manjrekar and the first show had Tony Greig and Ian Chappell discussing the ball tampering controversy. Quite interesting.. I was especially impressed with the production quality of the audio. I listened to a couple of the widely advertised Yahoo! podcasts with Sunil Gavaskar and was very disappointed. It came off as an artificial effort and the audio quality was horrendous.  If people want to do any serious podcasting, they need to check out the audio quality on the podcasts from ITConversations. I’ve had the inside view on the effort that is put in and the end result is always awesome.

I’m calling the Cricinfo show a podcast, but there’s no RSS feed!

Note to Sahara One (the TV channel, in case you haven’t heard of it): Stop spamming blogs with your out of context, irrelevant comments about some new show. The following makes you look stupid -

1. Adding the same comment to different posts on the same blog
2. Adding the same comment to a post more than once (I’m not joking!)
3. Assuming that commenting on blogs is a ‘cool’, ‘new’ way of marketing
4. Not realising that blogs have comment moderation
5. Commenting as the characters on the show

Rather, start a blog where the actors and actresses write about the show and their experiences. That would atleast be useful to the people who watch the show.

…that NDTV.com, a leading news site can’t generate a valid RSS feed. It’s not that it’s temporarily broken. It’s been broken for months, maybe longer. I had even written to them pointing out the problems (yes, there’s more than one). Obviously, no reply. It is beyond me how anybody could provide an RSS feed without the link attribute.

In some feeds where the link is present, it’s completely broken. It’s seems to be some time bound thingy after which the link becomes invalid. It goes without saying that it doesn’t validate (as of today).
IBNLive recently changed their link format to make it more search engine friendly. After that change the links in the feeds were broken because of a small error. I wrote to inform them of the problem and it was fixed immediately. No reply in this case too, but atleast they fixed it. IBNLive seems to be paying more attention to their website at the moment and it’s showing…they’re kicking NDTV’s butt on the web.

Also very surprising that Yahoo! India News does not provide RSS feeds.

It’s almost impossible to watch a movie on a weekend in Bangalore unless one has booked the ticket well in advance. Renting movies from the neighbourhood rental shop is almost useless. It’s obvious that they haven’t grasped the concept of a DVD (Just like VCD, but with four movies on one disc!). So, I was happy to read that a new online rental service, Seventymm has started operating in Bangalore. I’ve read a lot about Netflix and was hoping someone would start such a service here. The entire idea is very appealing and sounds convenient. But, once I actually signed up for an account on their site, I’ve decided not to pay for Seventymm’s service and complete the transaction. Here’s why…

• Our “no late fees, no due dates” online movie rental model eliminates the hassles involved in choosing, renting and returning movies… says their site. All the messages on the site indicate that you can keep the movie for as long as you wish, but the real deal is hidden in the Terms of Service. Provided you continue to be a paying subscriber of our service, you may keep the DVD/VCDs delivered to you as long as you like but up to a maximum of two weeks. You will not be charged any late fees as long as you return it within two weeks. As long as you like, but not more than two weeks. What does that mean? Why try to hide stuff unnecessarily from your customers? They’ve now lost my trust, but there’s more…
• The prices are advertised all over the site as Rs. 199 and Rs. 549 for the two plans that they offer. The Rs. 199 plan offers four movies a month and I figured that would be enough. But, after filling the forms and giving them all my personal information, when it’s time to pay, I’m told that I now have to pay Rs. 199 as the subscription fee, Rs. 499 as a registration fee and Rs. 2000 as a refundable security deposit. Are you kidding me? Why wasn’t I told this earlier…before I went to the trouble of registering?

Though I won’t be subscribing to their service, here are a few suggestions to improve it. They are very new and may be working on some of them, but still…

• There is absolutely no way to help the user choose a movie apart from the genre information. It’s a chore on the user’s part to find something that he may like. Syndicate content from sites like MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes to let the users know which movies are actually good.
• Add a feedback mechanism where users can rate and comment on the movies they’ve watched.
• Allow users to suggest movies to friends.
• Get a better search engine. It sucks right now.
• Provide a list of the newest movies added to your collection.

There are many such features that can be added to make the user experience much better. I’ve never used Netflix, but it surely provides all of the above features, and considering that a co-founder of Netflix is an advisor, they should find their into Seventymm soon. Maybe the offer will then be more attractive.

Update (March 14th): It looks like they’ve got some feedback about the issues I raised. Now the Terms of Service says Provided you continue to be a paying subscriber of our service, you may keep the DVD/VCDs delivered to you as long as you like. The two week clause has been removed.
Also, the pricing details page clearly mentions the registration fee and refundable deposit. It’s good that they are listening to feedback.

Rashmi Bansal, the editor JAM magazine recently wrote an article for Businessworld on the Association for Democratic Reform (ADR). Following that, I had written to her about the need to give such efforts more exposure, and had mentioned that I was a volunteer for the ADR during the 2004 general elections. She asked me to write about my experiences so that it could be published in JAM. I’m posting below what I sent her. The slightly edited version which was published in the magazine can be found online here.

The Great Indian Tamasha

The first time I exercised my democratic right to vote was during the 2004 general elections. Like anybody who has just become eligible to vote, I was looking forward to the experience. As the elections were fast approaching, I enthusiastically followed all the political news. After all, I had to vote and it was a great responsibility you see.

My new found interest in politics brought me across an article about the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) started by a group of IIM-A professors. They wanted to do something about the criminalization of politics in our country, and were successful in getting the Supreme Court of India to uphold a PIL which made it mandatory for everyone seeking public office to disclose their criminal, financial and educational history. It was a way to ensure that the voters knew the important details about their “esteamed” leaders, and steamed they were indeed. In a move that is usually reserved for pay hikes, all the political parties were united in opposition of this requirement. But thankfully, even their unity wasn’t enough to prevent the Supreme Court order.

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