Inkfruit : Design Democracy

It's been a week of meeting interesting people. After Aviator Simon on Monday, I met the IITian Navneet today! A designer and the co-founder of inkfruit.com.

Inkfruit is a web-based, T-shirt design co-operative!! Anyone can upload their T-shirt designs on the site. The winning designs get a prize and the designer gets his name printed on the T-shirt when it gets manufactured. You must check out this interesting site/ concept!

Am glad Navneet got in touch with me about a week back and today we met at the Inorbit Mall,Malad. I have been interested in design for close to a decade now. Well design and of late co-creation and community. So, I was happy that Navneet approached me to brain-storm on his project!

Every time I have stepped out of my little planning world, it's been very rewarding. Am sure, engaging with Inkfruit would be a similar experience...

Thanks Navneet for the free T-shirt(captioned Disco Fever '82)...

In the ride back to Bandra I also thought about my idea of starting a virtual creative content company based out of Mumbai, a book on co-creation, doing a design course(sometime soon)...

Earlier in the day wrote an article for Mint on the 'media snacking culture'. Turned out well...And a while back told Ram and Shyam story to Neo(the 20th sequel in as many days. More about it in some post soon:-)

MySpace is Full. What About Yours?

So, finally MySpace sets up shop in India. Read the story at DNA here,!

Methinks, they are a bit too late. Orkut and Facebook have the first mover advantage. Mahesh of Pinstorm had this to say...

- MySpace in India has to establish itself in a territory where Orkut is the king with over 8 million users —that’s about one-third of all Indian youth online — a greater share than even Star Plus has of this demographic on TV.

- Too many of us are on too many networks — and it’s too much incremental trouble to get on to another network for very little incremental benefit.

Agree with you on that one Mahesh!

- No Indian social network has yet gained any significant advertiser confidence. Of the Rs 600 crore spent online in India last year that Pinstorm tracks, barely 1-2% went to social networks.

Well on this one, I feel Indian media mostly doesn't understand social networks.
To understand it, you got to do/be social not just understand/ know social and behave like big media/ big company!! We are still a heavily hierarchical company-media-network.

With my limited exposure, I find that media(print and magazine)in the West are trying hard to integrate the 2-way social aspect into their medium but in India it's largely lip-service or a blind eye.

Generally speaking, the Indian mediascape and clients are sitting at the periphery of social media, lusting at ways and means to monetise social media w/o realising what it is.

Thoughts like conversation, engagement, influence, participation fade in the back-drop of shouts of monetising the eyeballs, ROI and advertising potential and reach of the social media...

Coming back to MySpace - well myspace is full. Am happy with LinkedIn and Facebook!! But as a platform for musical bands, I think MySpace has a great positioning! One more grand threat to music companies!!

Lin-storm : the new digital model!

Among the first signs of a formal analog and digital media company courtship(to my knowledge) is the tie-up between Lintas Media Group and digital agency Pinstorm.

Linstorm will offer a pay-for-performance model for digital platforms like the internet and mobile phones. This will mean that the client will pay for the advertising only if the campaign meets pre-determined targets which could be in terms of the number of clicks, impressions or conversions.

You can read the complete story here.

Mahesh Murthy, founder, Pinstorm, had this to say- “The idea is to bring the share of digital in the total Indian advertising scene to the tipping point of 7% from its current levels of 3-4%.”

The Linstorm model would be interesting to watch for the nascent digital advertising market in India!!