Flattery?

Someone once said "Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery". I am sure this was coined by some guy who plagiarized his way to the bank and then when he got caught, he had a well phrased statement coined and ready for use.

During the usual weekend manga sessions, me, my wife and cousins usually discuss about bollywood, movies, music etc. One of the constant topics over the last year or so has been the hits being delivered by the combo of Pritam, Kay Kay and a band of unknown singers. The constant in the equation is always Pritams music. I always had this gut feeling that he was definitely copying stuff from somewhere, but could never really find out from where. Even while watching his latest blockbuster Race, I was getting this nagging feeling... "Man, this guy has gotta be lifting this stuff!". My dad, who could care less about Pritam and his music, actually liked the songs of the movie and therein lies the secret to Pritams success. Every song revolves around 2 or 3 notes and catchy lyrics to go with it and viola you have a hit album. His music is shallow but peppy and that is apparently all that people need.

Unlike his predecessors like Anu Malik, Pritam does an extremely good job of choosing songs that he gets "inspired" by. During some general youtube browsing I came across these 3 videos which makes quite an eye popping revelation of Pritams flattering ways.







Since its unlikey that this info will ever reach the bigger audience, the hit music director, Pritam, will continue to make oodles of money on someone else's hard work. :-)

Spoiler

Had a hearty laugh when I saw this. :-))

Product Idea

I am a reluctant orkut member. I don't necessarily like the idea of orkut, but apparently many near and dear ones of mine do like it and hence I am on it. Another such social networking website which is gathering some momentum in India is facebook. They have smartly tied up with the yuppie youth channel, MTV, whose VJs try to coax you into getting onto facebook. We also have fringe players (in the world scene) like hi5 which are quite popular in India. Similarly it won't be too far in time when other sites like myspace or bebo, which got bought for $850M by AOL try to expand their horizons and get to India in a big way.

With such a plethora of social networking sites, the story is going to be very similar to the Instant messaging world. It started with AOL, then ICQ, then Yahoo, then MSN, then GTalk, then rediffbol etc etc. People will try all and eventually will have settle on one. They will do so not because they don't have friends on the other IMs but because they do not have the patience to manage multiple apps and also the CPU sap that would result out of running all these apps. Similarly, people will want to receive scraps or whatever from all these sites, but their inability to spend the same kind of quality (questionable) time on each of these social networking sites will hurt them socially, so to speak.

I think, in this crammed world of web innovations, here is a niche space for a company to flourish. How about a website that aggregates your data(scraps) and contacts from popular social networking sites and show them on a single page ? Something like a trillian or an orgoo for the social networking world.

Will this fly ? Anybody interested in funding me ? :-)

Beat this!

I remember having a discussion with a NRI a while back on the telecom sector in India versus the one in the US. He was talking of how fantastically cheap billing was in the US and that he had to pay only $60 for a fantastic tariff plan. I of course countered his tariff plan with my Rs.250 (then $6) tariff plan and then factored in all the freebies he got and had my total bill come to less than 50% of his. He then shrugged it off by telling, "Wait for the market to mature, and then lets talk".

Well, its been 2 years since this discussion and even as I agree that its not enough time for the market to "mature", it sure is long enough to know the general direction of the maturity :-), and this is the way its headed. Virgin Mobile has launched its CDMA services in India and apart from having attractive phones on offer they have a very unique feature in their plan. You will get paid for incoming calls (10 paisa/minute)!! US is still trying to get free incoming for prepaid and here we are... paying people for getting incoming calls. Damn, c'mon market, mature! ;-)

On a more interesting note, lets see if we can run a scam here. I am sure we all have changed mobiles in the last year or two. Lets assume we have not sold the old GSM mobile we had. Now, I am relatively confident that if I hunt hard enough, I can get a tariff plan from some service provider which will have all calls to one mobile free or some ridiculously low price of 1 paisa or something. Now start a call from this mobile to the virgin mobile and leave it on the whole day. You will be making approx 9 paise/minute. I am sure someone will catch this and ban the number or something, but by that time we would have made some money off the service providers.! :-)

... And it gets better!

I had already blogged about MTV Roadies 5.0 and how I have really gotten into it. Now, the folks at MTV and of course GiftMate have sweetened it for me and I am sure for many others.

Giftmate in an attempt to get more popular and gain userbase have tied up with MTV and have made the Roadies show not only entertaining to the eyes, but also very pocket friendly. Though Roadies is not a SMS based voting system, they have a number that people can SMS too, to voice their vote on who would go out. Giftmate will give a Rs.200 voucher for anyone who sends an SMS (which costs Rs.3) to MTV Roadies. These vouchers are accepted at almost any e-retail site in India, like indiaplaza, rediff shopping, indiatimes shopping, bookmyshow etc etc.

I have sent the SMS, got the voucher and used it already, so it all works. :-) So, what are y'all waiting for...

Brave or Cornered ?

In what can be considered as one of the bravest decisions by the software giant, Micro$oft has decided to provide online access to their office suite of products. We all know that the cash cow for the company has always been its office suite of products and providing online access to it is proof of 2 things:
1. The other online office competitors like zoho and writely (google) etc etc have gotten to M$
2. M$ realizes that with net becoming so big, exposing itself to this market sooner than later makes sense.

None the less, it does come with a catch, as its meant only for those who already have an office license. Anywayz, if anyone wants to give it a shot, here is where you can do it.

Enzoy maadi!