Gauravonomics Blog

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I was quoted today in a story on smart phones in The Hoyas, the Georgetown University newspaper.

The story also had a quote from Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer of T-Mobile USA.

By the way, Nokia should consider all the free publicity I have given to the E71 (see 1, 2 and 3) and hire me for a testimonial TVC.

Here is the full text of the story –

New Phones Make Students Smarter
By Gregg Re | Oct 07 2008

While technology will never render pen and paper extinct, smartphones are becoming more prevalent on campus and Georgetown and its students take advantage of all that the latest technology has to offer.

The devices are so versatile that some are using them as laptop replacements for academic work.
“For almost six weeks, when I was between laptops, my Nokia E71 was my main computing device,” said Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-2009 Yahoo! Fellow in Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

Smartphones such as the E71 and the G1 feature physical keyboards that can be used for note-taking in addition to text messaging.  Read More

Many of you may know that I record and upload my vidcasts exclusively from my Nokia E71 smartphone. I also use my E71 almost exclusively for reading my e-mail and 150 feeds, and accessing the only four social networks I am really active on — YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. If you add to that my compulsive calendering and my total reliance on GPS even to navigate two blocks, you can imagine how big a role my E71 is playing in my life right now. In fact, I would say that the E71 has been my main computer for the last two weeks. For the most part, it has been great and I totally love it.

However, a phone is as good as the app ecosystem around it and there is no app ecosystem around the Nokia E71. It comes with half a dozen pre-installed apps and apart from the mainstream web services like GMail/ GoogleReader/ GoogleMaps/ YouTube/ Yahoo/ Flickr/ Twitter/ Facebook, pretty much nothing else works on it. As much as I love the E71, I can’t see it getting traction against the iPhone unless Nokia gets developers to write apps for it.  Read More

As many of you know, I am in month six of my year long off consumption experiment. The experiment involves buying only the bare necessities, and nothing but the necessities, for an entire year, with the intent of immersing myself into the subculture of people who have chosen to define their identities by means other than buying or owning things.

As many of you know, I have been recording my experiences during the year in a blog called ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’, because, well, I am the marketer who went off consumption.

I have decided now that it’s time to say goodbye to the marketer who went off consumption and focus on other stories, on other people who have stepped off the work-watch-spend treadmill, or asked themselves difficult questions about identity, or chosen to define themselves by means other than buying or owning things.

So, I’ll continue to write the blog, and I’ll continue to tell my own stories, but the blog won’t be about me anymore. The focus of the blog will shift away from reality TV mode to immersive journalism or ethnography mode.  Read More

Seth Godin recently described the dead zone of slick –

I have no patience for the stuff in the dead zone, the items that are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel.

Seth Godin’s advice is that if you can’t make it really slick, you should make it really simple.

My advice is that even if you can make it really slick, you should make it really simple.

First, let me say that I agree with Seth Godin — it only works if it’s really slick or really simple; all the in-between stuff is mostly mediocre. So, yes, if you can’t make it really slick, you should make it really simple.

However, it takes more time and effort to make things really slick than to make them really simple, and if both really simple and really slick have the same effectiveness, why not go with really simple?

I am a big believer in this thinking and you will notice that both my website template and my daily vidcast are so simple that they are perhaps too simple.  Read More

People often ask me why I am so passionate about social media.

I became interested in social media because of my need to reconcile the two halves I was split into —

As an individual, I was tired of being targeted by commercial messages from the brands-media-retail triumvirate. As a marketer, I loved the art and science of marketing, adored brands, and was hardwired into the idea of capitalist free markets driven by consumerism.

My endeavor to reconcile these two parts… led to my interest in social media, because, at its best, social media allows brands and consumers to connect as equals, even as people (and brands are people too).

– but that’s not the full story.

At its best, social media enables us to transform ourselves as individuals, transform marketplaces and transform society.

Social media gives us the tools to create meaning (via both content and relationships) in ways that was not possible before, allows us to realize our full potential both as creative individuals and social beings.

Social media also enables brands and consumers to engage as equals, even connect as people (because, as I have said before, brands are people too).  Read More

Saurabh Garg sent me an e-mail today to share his experience with the Nokia blogger review program.

Saurabh has some interesting thoughts on the why and how of blogger review programs, including why Nokia might want to ship out Euro 500 phones to little read bloggers halfway across the world.

I wrote a how-to guide to blogger review programs sometime back and included Nokia as one of the case studies (see Nokia N Series blogger review program). Although Nokia seems to have changed their PR agency since then (why?), the new Nokia blogger review program is essentially the same as the N Series blogger review program.

While Nokia’s blogger review program is great, it would become even better if the website becomes the hub for all social media conversation about Nokia. For instance, I own a Nokia E71, have written a (positive) review on it, and even started a daily vidcast using it. A little link love from Nokia might encourage me to continue to blog about my Nokia E71.

What do you think? Should blogger review programs be ‘push only’ programs or use a mix of both ‘pull and push’ tactics?

In a year when everything seems possible, why not do a daily vidcast too?

Welcome to the Gauravonomics TV, my daily vidcast on marketing, technology and social media.

Here is the first episode –

The interesting twist is that I’ll record, edit and upload my vidcasts exclusively from my Nokia E71 smartphone. So, the vidcast is also an experiment in what is possible and what is not possible with mobile technology. Stay tuned.

Quick Summary: Not only do I love my new Nokia E71 smartphone, I am also writing this post on it.

I’ll not have access to a PC for almost a fortnight, starting August 1, and I was really worried – no blogging for a fortnight! – until I tried blogging from my new Nokia E71 smartphone.

I’m writing this post on my E71 on a Vodaphone GPRS connection.

It’s not the same as writing on a laptop, of course. The Wordpress administrative interface took a couple of minutes to load, the qwerty keyboard is a little cramped, I can’t cut and copy text and doing fancy formatting is somewhat cumbersome.

However, the page download speed is only a little slower than the speed on the Tata Huawei data card attached to my laptop. My typing speed is already quite nifty after a day of playing around with the E71 and I have made almost no typos in the entire post. The qwerty keyboard, in spite of its tiny size, is easy to get used to. The screen resolution is wide enough, without being a wow! factor, and the navigation is never confusing, even if it is sometimes cumbersome. If I really want to, I can even do some really fancy formatting, with a little effort.  Read More