Vishal Kumar

Conflict on this world exists because of resources being scarce – so until the point that there is nothing to covet, there will be conflict in some form or the other.

Conflict is also a drain on a countries resources, with the bare minimum of military expenses which takes away from most development programs (though there are some clear benefits from military aimed research & development).

We are at the cusp of a scarcity world entering into post scarcity – though it will be still a few generations before we are truly post scarcity. What do I mean? Anything that is “install once, use many/everwhere”; e.g. renewable energy (discounting degradation over time), software – write once, copy easily and run everywhere (ideally if a problem is solved once, it doesn’t need to be solved again – thanks to open source as well), and now Machine Learning.

Machine Learning is different from software – as software still takes human effort (expensive, limited by head count) to develop, customise. Machine Learning still does take effort to build up, but think of it as renewable energy – a well built ML system would be able to learn, adapt, reducing effort to onboard new things.

Imagine, building an automated system that converted sand/rocks into machines, which then built more of itself while also creating solar panels. Give these machines a few years, and they could potentially terraform a dessert (Paperclip problem?)

Eventually humanity will be able to drive most of the population above poverty line, using renewables/automation to fund Universal Basic Income.

What does humanity do then? what kind of businesses would flourish? Experiences would become the rarity. Rich/Poor divide would continue – until transport is a 0 cost, 0 time system. Accesses will be privileged. Material things would be less valuable, as any commodity can be mass produced.

Jobs would give meaning, uncharted territories would be thrilling – as humanity starts to explore other stars, planets. Happiness and fulfilment will be the most significant things to desire. Religion will likely play an increased role in giving some semblance of direction.

For now, focus on automating as much of your life as possible, encourage others to invest in improving their life by Not wasting time. Seek fulfilment by living a good productive life empowering yourself and others.

We live now at the cusp of staggering rapid innovation at a global level, with almost all economies firing towards multiple Silicon Valleys across the globe. A few thoughts triggered that I wanted to write up for future reference, specifically, of which technologies and innovations we can expect mankind to make.

Ubiquitous Wireless Power:

Researchers have recently invented a way to power up low-power devices using general WiFi alone (Link), which represents a breakthrough well beyond the emerging close contact charging found now in wireless adapters that you can add to your phones (example devices) and in the form of furniture with integrated charging (from IKEA). This got me thinking, what does this mean for us as end customers and as businesses and governments looking to build society.

If we track the rapid growth of internet usage, from wired internet to WIFI and faster growth of 2G/3G/4G services, with noted growth and spread of Internet usage on mobile (Internet Report), all signs point to a pent up demand in mobile usage. The below graph indicates an overwhelming usage of Mobile for accessing Internet, and it will only continue to grow.

As we continue to develop faster processors, bigger screens (hello iPhone 6+) – we need more and more power. The biggest frustration faced by users is the short supply of power that we need to power the mobile devices we have.

We continue to innovate of course, in super fast charging, such as batteries that can charge up in minutes instead of hours (such as these promising techs) By 2017, hopefully, we should be able to charge a smartphone under a minute.

Future State:

The beautiful merger of all the above technologies will be a state of the world where we get the power to charge up all the devices we own, as ubiquitously as we get Mobile connectivity. At first, it would start with Wi-Fi range and then get full coverage as Mobiles. With projects such as Google Loon to get Internet all over the world, along with Solar charging technologies, we should hopefully get Power globally as well.

What does this mean for businesses? Well, this opens up a range of opportunities for the present network and power vendors. The days of stop-gap power banks would come to an end, and would go along with the flood of mobile only internet usage. We would soon be purchasing top up cards similar to mobile recharges that we do now, and then eventually all payments would be integrated to automated deduction to your account. You walk, talk, recharge and it all gets neatly billed against your needs.

Well, this is just me jotting down my projections. Please do comment if you have any ideas, updates, feedback to add. I’m always looking out for interesting concepts.

Stumbled back on my blog again, and this time fixed a a loading bug on one of my most popular posts (a tutorial on using Gmail on PHP), so hopefully that should help people in the future.

For now, though I shall ramble. Hold on time.

Was pleasantly surprised to read what I had written earlier, and now look forward to writing something else of material interest that I shall look enjoy reading from the near future. I realized that these are really just artifacts of our lives – the pieces of things that we have done, which for some reason, hold value to us. We need them, and depend on these artifacts. Entire relationships can be made or destroyed by the presence or absence of something physical.

Alright, even my randomness generator is feeling that its overloading. Point is, I shall need to work on my outputs, and focus on creating things, for both myself and for others. Its the only way that we exist beyond the time frame that our lives run. These artifacts are who we are. Without these creations, we would cease to exist.

Too often we find ourselves trapped in a cycle of doing tasks which have no significance for ourselves, except to get paid for receiving other services that we need to be done for ourselves. The objects we create, our writings, our paintings, our recordings of songs, etc – these are the things that truly define us.

That said, I shall try to put words on paper, color on a painting and record my singing so that I can Ctrl+S myself. I would highly recommend you do the same. I shall be eager to follow you.

V

As usual, its been a very long time since my last post. A thousand pardons.

I write now from Sydney, Australia, (Rhodes, if you really want), working as a client relationship manager at the same organization I used to since post-graduating. Different role, but definitely lots of learning.

I’ve also realized the human potential to learn is still pretty vast. I am more cognizant of things that can be done, how it can benefit others, and how value can be extracted. But wow, so little time for it all.

Anyway, before I save this as a draft and promise to update it and then never do, I thought I’d jot down one theory I’m working on.

The fundamental idea is that there is an optimal population density that is directly correlated to overall economic development. If the density is too low, then it would be hard to collect enough resources to develop anything. And if it is too high, then you have the problem of dealing with large scale under-utilization, unemployment, and the issue of subsidies or dependencies that hamper growth. Therefore, an optimal level of population density would allow the region to have enough employment for everyone, and to progress as a society.

Ok, like I said, it is a theory, so I haven’t substantiated it, and possibly never will (time, oh dear, time), but these are the kind of thoughts that occur to me now as I walk 5 minutes from a high rise apartment to a shopping mall and look at the relatively low density of people living in (perceived) prosperity. Contrast to developing nations (including my own), where the focus of budgets are on improving the lives at the base of the (very large) pyramid.

Now, I haven’t thought out the action items yet, but job and education schemes (why are they called schemes anyway) would be the crux of it. Back to thinking.

Life is long enough to do something. Let me see.

We often wonder why, we are forced to do things that are ‘apparently’ good for us, but we feel that we don’t need them at all. For instance, after paying thousands and lakhs of rupees for education, most of it ends up in one ear and out the other. When we see some effort done by others to improve something, we dismiss it for their hopelessness. Allow me to introduce to you, the Zero State Principle, a way of looking at something to understand its full worth.

The Zero State Principle is something I thought up (hence the rather simple name), as a way of applying thought process to understand the Reason behind doing something. The logic of ZSP is simple: Whenever you see something being done, eliminate it completely, and then imagine the state of the environment (business, personal, political, etc). Then start building up to the current state, the process through which you will understand the full benefit or need of doing it.

For instance, Micromax, the Indian mobile phone brand, has been extremely aggressive in their advertising. They make low to high end mobile phones, which sell at almost half of what the current leaders, Samsung sells comparable products at. Meanwhile, Micromax is pushing ads on Radio, Television, sponsoring major events like the colossal Indian Premier League cricket event.

All this made me wonder ‘Why’? Surely, it would have enough to have TV ads and Radio. Why events so large? Aren’t they just over-doing it? I take this example, though there are countless others (spate of recent E-commerce TV advertisements should be an indication).

So I had to imagine what Micromax would look like in a Zero State of marketing. So let’s say Micromax has a perfect back end supply chain – excellent manufacturing, high quality processes, quick transports, and a well balance and distributed retail channel. So in this side, Micromax makes excellent phones, and you can buy one pretty much everywhere.

But with Zero Marketing. So now, who is going to try the first phone? Surely, someone who does not know the brand, and is looking at the cost/features alone. On a purely technical or objective note, Micromax might still be quite competitive (though facing stiff competition from clones). A few people might try it out, find it to be a decent find, and share amongst a few friends. Growth would probably happen, but a rather slow trajectory. Basically, Micromax would struggle to sell enough in volume to regain its investments in manufacturing, quality control and distribution. It needs to sell more. Zero State of Marketing isn’t enough. At all.

Now, from Zero State, let’s start adding elements.

So let’s start looking at mediums which India uses: TV, Radio and Print. Newspapers are still very well penetrated in India, and TV gives visual feedback and allows users to get a sense of the product in its ‘natural’ habitat (in some lovely looking damsel’s hands, or in the palm of smart executive with a suit).

Phase 1: Micromax rolls out TV advertisements (after hiring an Ad Agency of course. In this case, Lowe Lintas made those TV ads). Not bad, decent coverage – people are curious

Phase 2: Billboards, Print Ads, promotions and discounts, some Radio ads. People should be picking up phones with proper incentives, and finding that the phones are of good quality, recommend to friends. But some of those friends still haven’t heard of Micromax (“Microsoft?”) and  are not completely convinced.

Phase 3: The big guns – Sponsor IPL. This would be worth a lot of money, but wow, the visibility of it cannot be denied. As India’s favorite sport, it had a Cumulative Reach of 90-110 Million people, almost 10% of all of India? Now, as Tarantino’s character from D’Jango Unchained said “You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention”. If you haven’t experienced a Micromax yet – go out there and do it!

Phase 4(?): Now, in marketing, you toy with two basic parameters – reach and frequency. While all of the above media indicate different ways to get reach, the only way to get frequency is to keep pumping money (I shall not bore you with facts of how much each costs, but lest to say, its quite expensive to get footage in India, unless you really don’t want footage). Depending on how much money you have, you can theoretically keep paying up, well, forever – though one would argue that it wouldn’t make sense.

But let’s rewind back to the point. Micromax is spending a lot. If we ask ourselves why, go to Zero State – the Why Not? and see what would it do. Then build up back to the current state. Now appreciate what they’ve done. (On a note though, this a theoretical exercise. Micromax has been around since 1991, and is a major national and international player)

Switching examples to something more closer to us, consider education. We often give little regard to some of the classes we attend, fooling ourselves with the pride that ‘We know all of this already’. When working, there are training workshops which we half-heartedly attend for the sake of checking off the requirements.

But imagine it at Zero State. Most of us have completed a bachelors degree, and then many of us are on a masters as well. If you really knew everything that was already taught, then start skipping classes. Surely one class wouldn’t matter. We can skip this class on a whim, right?

Why not. Let’s go. Eliminate trainings at office. Scale back on each of the classes that you are forced to attend at masters/bachelors. Once you start eliminating each class individually, pretty soon you can imagine that you need not attend any class. Since you’re not attending any class, why do any exercise (on a slight note, its usually these forced exercises/submissions that require you to learn). But for arguments sake, eliminate higher education. Then secondary education. Then primary education. Ta-da you’re just reversed generations of fighting for right to education.

Now imagine yourself in a state where, by assuming yourself to be the beneficiary of a short term decision (like well, missing a class), extended the argument to Zero State – no education. For argument’s sake, let’s say you were given hollow degrees, so on paper you didn’t miss anything. Isn’t it likely, that in Zero State, you gain none of the wild skills that someone else gained by going through the grind?

Going to Gym, another example – you miss out on one day, fine, another day, also ok – but go to Zero State, and you’re stuck with a shape that isn’t shapely (Round is a shape isn’t an argument folks).

I think you get my point.

Zero State Principle. When in doubt of why you are doing something or asked to do something which value seems too minor in a small step, or when something seems too much and unnecessary, imagine a scenario where it doesn’t exist at all. Then keep adding elements to the state you are in, or where you want to be. Appreciate.

I was recently talking to a friend of a friend (now, of course, a friend, directly), who was in Bangalore, potentially looking for a job change. We had a few really good intellectual discussions which I wanted to record here, for safeguarding it from the merciless villain that is, forgetfulness.

Over a Costa Coffee, my friend, who was a working a global management consulting firm, looking for a switch to a financial company, described how he perceived the work that he was getting, to which I added some thoughts.
Basically, when you first join a job, you are pretty much told what you need to do. The work is usually cut out, based on a clear set of requirements from your manager, or a directive from your boss to do something that you have previously done in the past. I drew parallels to both these instances from working at my present role, and found both of them to be quite straightforward and easy to do.

With the passage of time, of course, this would become repetitive, and you begin to explore what more can be done. And here we must pause, because the juncture at which you as an individual realize that you can actually do more than you were tasked to, or that you begin to take on the right to question what is given, that is where you start contributing real, irreplaceable value.
Now, even with my limited employment experience, I begin to question what I am doing, and how I can make it better, faster, easier to comprehend, etc (usually through the powerful use of technology). I would begin asking, how can I use technology to make this better. My friend suggested, take it a step forward “”Why technology””. I had a pretty good answer (keywords: “”multiplicative effect””, “”do-once-run-forever””).

At this point, I realized that fundamentally, everything must be questioned to the absolute core. Why technology? To improve something? Why improve something? To make it better? Why? To serve customers better? Why? …. this process should go on, until the only answer you have is a test of how strong your company’s or your personal Vision and Mission holds against what you are doing.

And of course, where do the vision and mission come from? Well, someone has to sit and write them. A rather famous quote went something along the lines of “”If you aren’t working for your own dream, you are helping someone else’s dream come true””.

I thought I should end this short note with a few points from my discussion, lest I forget them.
1. Initially, absorb what it is that you are doing, and what you need to do it (from your peers, managers, parents)
2. Start questioning what you are doing, why, and how
3. Question all the way till you can define yourself and your organization.
4. Turn Questions into possible ways of improvement, focusing on the sticky points of your line of questioning, or abandon the current process for a better one (e.g. Why are we rewriting code in different languages => Switch to WebApps, etc)
5. Add value to whatever you are doing, making an impact that is attributable to you, a legacy to leave behind.

No process is perfect, and there is always scope to improve. The key lies in your ability to question things, and improve on them. Absorb, then question.