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Friday, August 29, 2014

Eating cheetahs

Sailfish. Faster than cheetahs, predators just like cheetahs. Apex predators both. Yet cheetah killing is obnoxious, but sailfish are casually slaughtered and eaten (euphemism: they are 'fished'). No guilt. When will we stop treating ocean dwellers like food, and instead start protecting them? When will a tuna burger be frowned upon the way we frown upon a lion meat burger?


Here is a compelling way of looking at it (Sea Shepherd Conservation Society):

A boat full of dead pandas is alarming right, but we turn a blind eye to a boat full of dead tuna.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Hello Moto

Just read that Motorola has jumped ahead of Nokia in the Indian handset market. Link here. That is just mind blowing at so many levels.

1) Motorola has achieved #4 in the massive Indian market (by volume), just on the basis of 3 models...2 if you count out the expensive Moto X
2) Motorola did this within a year of re-entering the market. Holy cow! How did they manage the sales & distribution? I know a lot of sales would have come through Flipkart and other e-commerce partners, but worth figuring out how they nailed the physical distribution bit (if they had any offline sales at all)
3) So online channels for handsets have become so significant? Wow
4) Typical price points for large-volume handsets have moved north of Rs. 10,000? (~$200). That's a 100% jump from just a couple of years back
5) How low has Nokia fallen. I mean, they were struggling with smartphones, but couldn't they have at least nailed the low-end of emerging markets with Asha and other models? Just goes on to show how terrible their strategy was to not launch in Android
6) Indian customers were so quickly willing to let go of all their baggage with regards to the Motorola brand. I remember a time when Motorola was seen as a dog brand...didn't matter if they came up with a few good models, their negative brand value hurt them so bad (like Fiat or Chevrolet in the Indian car market right now). Boy has Motorola moved on from those times!

Quite something.