Big Idea : Nano Ganesh

Had read about Nano Ganesh a couple of days back in ET. The relevance and the desire to share the story got amplified post a telecom client mtg!

It's a story about the leap-frogging India. The other India(read rural)that is also growing exponentially in technology adoption and aspiration but often doesn't feature prominently on the radar of big media!

It's a story of innovation amongst farmers in Anand’s Sojitra, a village cluster, about 30 km east of Ahmedabad. On a sleepy summer afternoon in Sojitra one Bhavesh Patel makes a game changing call from his Nokia E-75, but says nothing and hangs up. “Will it come?” asks one of the villagers. They were all eagerly waiting for water to flow into their fields from a reservoir 10 km away. Patel had just activated the pump set at the site by making the call.

The inventor of this mobile-phone enabled gadget however named it Ganesh first and them prefixed it with ‘Nano’ after Tata Motors decided to relocate its Nano factory to Sanand, near Ahmedabad.

Santosh Ostwal, the Pune-based founder of Ossian Agro Automation has developed the gadget that’s revolutionising irrigation in farms across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Around 7,000 farmers are already using Nano Ganesh. Ostwal hopes his impending north India launch will take the number to one lakh in two years.

Ostwal is taking advantage of low mobile tariffs and handset prices. Among many of the USPs of the device are its price tag at $15 - 55 apiece, and ease of use.

The idea has its roots in Ostwal’s childhood when he spent time with his grandfather, a farmer who grew oranges. His village didn’t have a television set; even electricity was a luxury. The senior Ostwal had to walk deep into his orchard late at night, with a stick and a flickering oil lamp to water the trees. “He developed infections on his feet and had to lose one of his legs.

That set Ostwal thinking whether he could do something for farmers so that they wouldn’t have to walk into the fields to water the saplings or plants!

A good education helped him become an engineer and got him a job at Telco. He quit in the mid-eighties, and started working on his idea. 10 years later he had developed the 'Nano Ganesh'.

Ostwal’s simple application is already winning him accolades the world over. Nokia recognised his work at the All Innovators contest in Barcelona last year with a cash prize of $25,000 and promised to distribute his mobile application to consumers worldwide!!

Blabnote : The World's 1st Vocal Social Network

Conversations, social media, ferments within my company and social experiments have taken/ are taking quite a lot of my time. But am enjoying this social school.

Pawar - the Mican trainee who is doing a project on digital media sent a link for blab-note - the voice-only social network a while back! Check it out here...

Blabnote, a British start up that is currently in private beta, has created what may be the world’s first “vocal social network.”

The product is far from perfect but it's the first step towards a voice-enabled-interaction future...The keyboard must now have a clear expiry date:-)

Just Tag It!!

Was having coffee with my Slovenian friend, Alen on mobile, digital and other stuff! When he showed me the Tagit barcode. I have known about this company(Ranjan apparently has some stake in it:-) for some time now...But have never seen anybody use it...

Check out the demo video on the tagit site here...

-Tagit offers marketers a way to establish interactive relationships with their consumers. Adlabs is a client!

-Simple, low-cost solutions to businesses for inventory or asset tracking, identity verification and data management.

-Useful applications for government services, such as security access control, personal or vehicle identification and information dissemination

-When a display screen was added to the first mobile phone, a new media was created. The additions of a camera and Internet access have created a whole new way of interaction with the physical world.

Mobiquity(Mobile + Ubiquity) is here...We must know how to Tagit to our brands and communication in innovative ways!! Need another coffee with Alen session.

Mobile Talk 1 : Rajesh Jain

Read a decent interview of Rajesh Jain, the man who almost single handedly brought on the dotcom boom to India after selling off his Internet venture, IndiaWorld.com, to Satyam for Rs 499 crore in 1999, on agencyfaqs.com!

Nuggets from the same...

1. Other than email, classifieds, trading and ticketing, not much has happened there. What I think of as the N3 web – Now, New, Near Web – hasn’t really happened. Part of the problem is that access is mainly from cyber cafes, so the Internet has not become a part of people’s lives.

2. There are two aspects to the Internet – the PC and the mobile. PC-based access is very much around the 'reference web'.

The mobile has the opportunity to be the primary mode of access and interaction for the 'incremental web'.

So, I can use the mobile to find directions and similar day to day activities. There are life's 'empty moments' and life's ‘know now’ moments. When you are waiting for someone, for example, you are in an empty moment and you can use your mobile to check stock quotes or text someone. In the ‘know now’ moments, you want to know something immediately instead of going and searching on the web. Now, if you can overlay mobile services with permission, you can give consumers only the information they want.

3. I think in the next few years, when you mention the Internet, it will primarily mean the mobile Internet.

4. Just like on the Internet, the search box has become the starting point for user interaction and monetisation of the web, my belief is that on the mobile phone, it’s going to be the SMS subscription with a brand of your choice.

So, if there’s a special promotion at the mall in the neighbourhood, you want to know. It's called 'invertising' – advertising that consumers invite into their lives. This is a marketer’s dream (come true). For example, if you buy a new Nokia phone, you can get free updates from them about the features of the phone and about upgrading to a new model

5. Why not enough innovations in the mobile industry? Because something has worked very well in the industry... because ringtones, wallpapers, Bollywood, cricket, etc., have become a Rs 4,000 crore industry, where users are spending on consuming this content, we are not looking beyond.

6. SMS subscription is the best way to provide bite-sized content.

7. As we think of roads, airports and power, we need to start thinking of the digital environment as core infrastructure for this country. I think there is no reason why we cannot have state of the art innovation in services here in India. That's going to spur entrepreneurship and will create the next set of large companies in India. Once we make that happen, it’s better for advertisers, marketers and businesses.

Change Story - Letterman

G. P. Sawant, 61, estimates that he has written more than 10,000 letters for people who were unable to do so.

The frenetic pace of change in India has been captured and replayed to us to death by planner power-points:-) and research dockets.

But Change I feel is best captured in stories...

So here's a nice story of a man who made a living by writing letters(what are they??:-) for the unlettered before the communication/mobile revolution took India by storm.

The story was forwarded by Meraj. It appeared in NYT.