Google's ITA acquisition: Impact on Indian OTAs?

Google has just announced on it's blog that it's ITA acquisition had been cleared by the US Department of Justice. Given that Google drives significant amount of traffic to the OTAs, this is big news for the market.

Even though it could take a while for Google to integrate & roll-out a travel search product in India, this is significant for the Indian players here as well - Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, and Yatra.

How could this possibly affect the Indian OTAs?

At Goa, priorities are straightforward

Pehle duvva, aur fir daaroo. Nothing in between.

[Spotted at a beach shack at Ozran beach, Goa]

Main ZINDO balm hui...

...darling tere liye!

Move over Zandu balm, the new & improved Zindo balm is here :)

[Spotted at a general store in Goa.]

I'm sure you would've seen your share of candies & chocolates, which look same-same, but different. 'Much' instead of 'Munch'. 'Ecloors' instead of 'Eclairs'. 'Beamer' instead of 'Boomer'.

How does this work? How much extra money would the retailer be making to agree to such scams?

Who says offline advertising can't be contextual?

Spotted at a Delhi Metro station - bang opposite an escalator exit. Brilliant use of tying context with a campaign message.

Does copy with character work in India?

There's something to be said about products which have a certain character to them. The first example that comes to mind is MailChimp though they seem to have distanced their monkey quite a bit these days. Another set of opinionated products are from the  37Signals stable, but they don't try to dress them up in a character, in my opinion.

I was surprised to find FeedBurner, now a Google product still holding on to their quirkiness. I love how their their main navigation reads: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize

The "Troubleshootize" page carries forward the character and gives a fun spin to the standard FAQs.

And the dashboard tries to pull a page out of Flickr's book with random welcome messages.

It's a bit sad that their integration with Blogger is not smooth & completely frictionless, but that's a different story altogether.

Something that I've always wondered is whether such quirky copy (or "copy with character", as I like to call it) works with the general Indian internet audience? Or should one play it safe and produce plain-vanilla "transactional copy." What do you think? Any Indian products with such character that you know about?

Angry Birds Released for a New Platform...

...Real life!

Spotted over a weekend at the Phoenix 'Mela' for a Nokia E-series
marketing event :-)

Will Firebug Be Issued a DMCA Takedown Notice?

So, will NYT start issuing DMCA take-down notices to the umpteen tools that enable you to "circumvent" the NY Times paywall? What about tools like Firebug & Chrome Developer Tools? Even they can enable someone to "circumvent" by hiding the layover DIV.

Work of a seasoned consultant!

And with such a brain-dead paywall implementation (it's just a standard HTML/DIV layover), would one really call it an effective control measure as expected by the DMCA Act:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
[...]
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

Apparently, NYT has spent $40-50 million on implementing this paywall. That's right, Rs 180-225 crore! Seriously WTF!

Flipkart Lite - A Review of Flipkart's Mobile Product

I just love what Flipkart has done in the online retail space. The breadth of their catalogue is great. Their pricing is transparent. Their shipping is free. And their delivery times are phenomenal. I don't remember buying a book from anywhere other than Flipkart in the past year.

They have a mobile optimised site too - one of the very few in the Indian market. Flipkart Lite allows you to search & order all product lines available on the desktop site, i.e. books, mobiles, movies, music, games, cameras, & computers. However, the only payment option available is cash-on-delivery (COD). Given that they're in a business that doesn't need immediate fulfillment, like flight tickets, it's makes sense to avoid the payment challenge on mobile.

The transaction process is fairly straightforward, barring a minor glitch here or there. The experience seems to be optimised for small-screen devices as is clear from how they're treating the search box & search results.

3 Reasons Why You Need Test Driven Development

Having been through the initial phase of a startup, I've been responsible for fairly large projects on impossible timelines. With ever-changing specs and the pressure to ship, we never really got the time to write any automated tests.

It's not something that I'm proud of.

I took the first opportunity to experiment with "Test Driven Development" (TDD) when the support contract with a vendor ran out and I had to fix a bug myself. Based on this experience here's why I think every project needs test driven development:

[Online advertising] Apollo Munich campaign on YouTube

A shout-out to the folks at Apollo Munich Health Insurance (and their agency) for coming up with this brilliant piece of online advertising - a medium otherwise fraught with extremely tactical, stale, and uninspiring creatives.

I recently came across the said ad while watching random videos on YouTube - killing time on a Sunday! Here's the ad placement:

And these are the key frames of the flash banner:

I wasn't planning on buying health insurance. I wasn't searching for health insurance. I was no where near any insurance product. However, the ad content was relevant to what I was doing - watching random videos on YouTube. That's what made me sit-up & take notice. And now I remember the brand which made this ad - Apollo Munich.

I'd love to know if the CTR on this particular creative was higher than the average YouTube sees on that placement. (I know - CTR is not the end-all of online advertising, but still...)

Do you know of any good (and original) examples of display advertising?