Open up your mind and say, ahh...

India is already known as one of the world’s IT powerhouses. Angela Saini, author of the new book, Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World, believes the country is also becoming one of the world’s hubs for innovation and scientific ingenuity.

Over the past few years, BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) has become a buzzy acronym for technology- and finance-watchers. India is already known for call centers, IT development, and expatriate coders. The country is also home to one of the world’s fastest-growing middle classes. Angela Saini, the British author of the new Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over The World, believes that India is also becoming an innovation center to be reckoned with, and a world leader in tech.

Fast Company recently spoke with Saini about India’s tech industry, the growth of Indian startups, and what the future holds for Indian innovators. Geek Nation is being released in the U.S. on May 1.

FAST COMPANY: Why do you consider India to be a “Geek Nation”?

ANGELA SAINI: I grew up in London, and it’s difficult to grow up in this city and not notice that every school has at least one geeky Indian kid. I was the geeky Indian kid in my class. My dad is a geek, many of my cousins are geeks, and more generally, India is famous for producing doctors, university professors, and engineers who work all over the world. India itself is not a world leader in science and technology yet but it does have a culture that strongly favors these things, above anything else. So Geek Nation was my journey to figure out why, and also where that ambition is taking it.

I have to admit, as a science journalist, I started out with a big measure of skepticism–I mean, India has a weak scientific publication record compared to the U.S. and Europe–but the trajectory it’s on is just incredible. I think the rest of the world underestimates just what hundreds of thousands of committed young scientists and engineers can achieve. Then again, President Obama gets it. If you look at his speeches on science and education, he often mentions the growth of India as one reason that the U.S. needs to stay competitive.

The subtitle of my book is a bit bombastic, but the contents are more balanced. I look at scientific research and technologies that are having a big effect on ordinary people’s lives–the good as well as the bad–and the ambitious projects that the government hopes will help secure India’s future superpower status. At the end of the day, I’m just a journalist. I’m not trying to argue a point, but rather to take an honest picture of a country through my geeky lens.

What was the most surprising thing you uncovered while researching your book?

There wasn’t a day in my research that I wasn’t surprised by something. I traveled the length of India, north to south, and met such fascinating characters. What impressed me most is that so many Indian researchers have such a social aspect to their work. They want to help India’s poor and vulnerable, as well as to do good science.

One interviewee, Sujatha Narayanan, was a tuberculosis researcher I met in Chennai. A few years ago, when she didn’t have enough healthy volunteers for her work, she started running tests on herself. One day she found some TB bacteria in a tube that had been in her throat, which meant she may have accidentally infected herself. She had to undertake a grueling drug treatment for months, which she believes triggered her diabetes. She put her life on the line for her work, but it has not diminished her passion or her commitment to science.

What role are ethnic Indian immigrants/returnees from the West playing in India’s tech industry? Are they a major factor?

The success of India’s tech industry has encouraged a lot of young engineers and scientists who left the country, in the big brain drain, to return. And they’re playing a big part in shaping the future of the industry. Not only are they bringing their expertise and experience, but they are also bringing the culture of places like Silicon Valley. In Bangalore these days there are meetups and cool conferences for young techies and designers, just like you get in San Francisco. There’s this buzz about the big cities, which is making them an exciting environment to be in. But it’s not just in IT–I met scientists in all kinds of fields who had chosen to come back to India because they felt the opportunities were improving and that they could make a difference to the country.

Can you explain why you compared India’s current situation to Japan in the early 1970s?

When you read academic studies about the attitudes that people had toward Japan’s technology industry in its early days, it’s very similar to what people have been saying about India recently–that scientists and engineers are hardworking and educated, but not particularly creative or original. In Japan’s case of course that all changed, giving rise to a truly powerful scientific nation. I think similar stirrings are happening in India now. There are shoots of creativity all over the country, particularly in areas like biotechnology, life sciences, and computing. I don’t want to forecast what might happen, because I don’t think anyone can know for sure, but India does at least have the ambition and willpower to want to be the next scientific superpower.

You wrote about jugaad–the power of improvising to solve problems–in a recent article. How do you think that has influenced India’s tech industry?

I didn’t write about jugaad in my book. But yeah, I wrote an article about it recently, because it is such a fascinating phenomenon. Jugaad is a very broad-brush word, meaning something like getting things done by hook or by crook. So for example, in rural areas, people will throw together tractor engines and bits of wood to make trucks, and in the urban slums, people will recycle old newspapers and rework appliances to make new ones. It’s really driven by poverty, but it has inspired some Indian companies to look at frugal, mass innovation for India’s domestic market–for example, the TATA Nano car. But I don’t think it’s had a big impact on India’s mainstream technology industry, which is focused on creating high-quality products and services that can sell overseas.

What do you see as the strong points and weak points of India’s tech industry?

India’s tech industry is great at business innovation. India’s outsourcing model for IT work has been incredibly successful and, on the back of this, it’s managed to build a profitable industry that is globally competitive. But it’s less good at genuine technological innovation. India simply hasn’t yet produced a company of the caliber of IBM or Microsoft. But that isn’t to say it will never do it. It certainly wants to, but I have a feeling it may come from the younger generation, which is more free in its thinking and creative.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and readability.

Geek Nation was released this past March in the United Kingdom and is currently awaiting U.S. release.

Image: Angela Saini

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

Digital services, such as Google Maps and Foursquare, are a fast-growing part of our daily lives. These services can be beneficial and much loved, like Amazon Prime, but poorly designed services can revile, causing customers to terminate brand relationships.

Designing living entities

So what is service design all about? At Fjord, we use service design to shape delightful experiences wherever people meet the products they use. Service design is about creating living entities that evolve and change over time. This is fundamentally different from other forms of design, which generally aim for permanency. Successful service design changes in three ways:

• In response to people’s evolving needs and expectations.
• According to feedback loops from users and related service systems.
• Natural growth and added functionality over time.

It’s not that the design of services is inherently better or more important than other forms of design. But it’s different. It’s more multidimensional, and it requires different skills and a different approach–because digital services are living entities, not static or one-off things.

Designing for love

Instead of getting stuck in industry jargon, we like to compare services to human relationships. After all, people’s relationships with services mirror their relationships with people. Users go through different stages of service engagement, and when service design is great, they have a long-lasting relationship of trust–they might even fall in love. It’s been proven through many studies that users’ relationships to their mobile phones (and the digital services that they use) can be as powerful as their relationships with people. They feel incomplete or cut off without their gadgets and services.

Delightful experiences can make people loyal and valuable advocates.

At Fjord, we aim to design services that people fall in love with. When you design for love, you have to design for the heart, for an emotional connection, rather than merely for the mind. When you appeal to the heart, you can usually create more value. Compare Alessi and Ikea dinnerware–the functional utility is similar, but people pay way more for Alessi objects that are designed with passion and for the heart. Or you can compare Manolo Blahnik shoes to Skechers–arguably Blahniks have worse utility, but people are still willing to foot the cost.

The same logic goes for digital solutions. In a recent post explaining why Facebook bought Instagram for a whopping $1 billion, GigaOm’s Om Malik put it this way: “People like Facebook. People use Facebook. People love Instagram. Facebook lacks soul. Instagram is all soul and emotion.”

When the iPhone first came out in 2007, it wasn’t the most feature-rich phone, and an over-burdened AT&T network made voice calling a real pain. However, the iPhone design and overall package was so good that people were effectively prepared to give up calling in order to have one–and pay very good money for the privilege.

At its best, digital service design helps create a strong bond between a company and its customers. Disjointed and impersonal solutions are a real turnoff, but delightful experiences can make people loyal and valuable advocates. At Fjord, we often talk about “the service as the marketing,” meaning that the most powerful marketing is the “Look at this!” or “Let me show you!” effect that well-designed and considered digital and mobile solutions can have in the real world. Investing in carefully crafted and well-packaged digital service experiences is probably a better investment than sinking money into traditional one-way marketing to create buzz about something that doesn’t buzz on its own.

Three stages to true love

Just like love in real life, falling in love with a service is something that happens gradually. Yes, love at first sight does exist, but it’s an exception, not the norm. Usually there are three stages of engagement with the service:

1. MATCHMAKING

The matchmaking stage is about people discovering and understanding the service in the first place. Services must be designed so that they are easily discovered and understood. They have to feel real and relevant, by way of meeting real human needs. Importantly, there should be a strong “hook” or strong point of differentiation–the thing that people will mention to their friends. If you’ve done a good job designing for this first stage of engagement, you can hope for a user reaction like “aha!” This type of reaction indicates that they understand it, and could see how the service could be useful for them.

If you’ve done a good job, you can hope reactions like ‘aha!’

Fjord has collaborated with Foursquare, and the company offers a good example of how to do matchmaking the right way. It has a focused offering that is both social and approachable, and a playful personality that appeals to a diverse group of users. As a result, Foursquare has become the winner in its domain. With more than 20 million users and over 2 billion check-ins, the three-year-old business has clearly earned more “aha!” reactions than its direct competitors.

2. DATING

The dating stage is the first trial of the service, and it’s really important to reduce all barriers to usage in order to make it as easy as possible to get going. It’s also very important to appeal to the heart and make people really engage with the service. Gaming dynamics, social service components, and beauty can be very powerful at this stage. Great content, humor, and a winning personality are key. A successful design for the dating stage often results in the famous “wow!” reaction from the user.

When we worked with Citibank to design its iPad app, there was a clear focus on rethinking how to represent financial information on the tablet. The service makes it easy for Citi customers to visualize and understand their finances–a first for many users just getting started with online banking. It’s a true post-PC user experience, and the app succeeds in making Citi customers feel that their money is more tangible. Results show that during the first six weeks after the Citi iPad app’s release, the number of downloads was more than five times that of the number of Citi iPhone app downloads. And more than 5,000 Citi customers who had never created online or mobile user IDs signed up for the iPad app, suggesting that the tablet application had managed to woo users trying online banking for the first time. Citi has clearly done a good job in getting that “wow!” reaction that is fundamental to success during the dating stage.

3. TRUE LOVE

The third and most powerful stage is true love. If you’ve designed a service that adds value and is meaningful over a long period, users will stay loyal and let the service become a life companion. Consistency and trust will be essential during this stage. Just like with a human companion, you want to be able to always rely on the service. As you trust the service with more of your content and more of your secrets over time, you should never have doubts about privacy or the true intentions of the service provider. An ability to fluidly use the service across platforms and locations will be important. But with multiple touchpoints and interactions, complexity is a real issue–both for people using the services, as well for companies that provide them. In digital, there’s a tendency for complexity to take root and grow like weeds in a garden. For service designers, the trick is to make complex systems simple and elegant. When users fall in love with a service, a typical reaction is “of course!”–an indication that the interaction feels intuitive and natural.

Consistency and trust will be essential during this stage.

Fjord partnered with Qualcomm and the Prevention Plan to design Macaw, an app that turns your smartphone into a personal wellness monitor. The service takes a proactive approach to helping people understand and improve their health. Macaw turns a topic that could feel heavy and dry into the opposite–fun, engaging, social, and immediately understandable–through the use of clear visual information. The app effectively uses gaming dynamics and empowers people to take their health literally into their own hands. While some users may start with Macaw as a simple experiment via their mobile device, the app’s ability to make managing your health simple and accessible gives it the power to become a long-term and cherished service companion.

Just like any great romance, getting to that “of course!” reaction is never easy. But as anyone who has ever fallen in love can attest to, when it happens, it’s magic. The companies that design seductive digital services will ultimately be the ones that create the most successful and long-lasting bonds with their customers.

Images: IngridHS, Lori Sparkia, Antonio Abrignani, Everett Collection, and Battrick via Shutterstock

As Top Gear‘s secret American prepares his own British invasion, he shares with us the 10 autos that do the colonies proud

By Dennis Tang/GQ.com

If you haven’t seen the BBC’s Top Gear, chances are you’ve heard of it. The show is estimated to have more than 350 million viewers every week in over 170 countries, yet most people in the U.S. are unfortunately unaware. And that’s a shame, because once you’ve seen the over-the-top, comically destructive “car” show, featuring reviews, challenges, and epic, globe-trekking road trips, it’s not hard to decipher its popularity.

It might have to do with how the British show infamously ridicules Americans and their cars – especially head honcho Jeremy Clarkson, who, between calling the Mustang V8 “rubbish” and claiming that “Americans have the aesthetic ability of giraffes” – isn’t doing Anglo-American relations any favors.

But of the program’s trio of presenters, it’s Richard Hammond – aka “Hamster,” or “the little one,” as he was once termed by London mayor Boris Johnson – who has a soft spot for us Yankees and our big daft cars. So soft, in fact, that he just filmed his first series for the U.S., Richard Hammond’s Crash Course, in which he takes an array of America’s (and thus the world’s) largest and most powerful vehicles for a whirl. We managed to snag him while he was still basking in the California sun, for a more optimistic outlook on American motoring.

···

GQ: For those who don’t know, you have a serious “hardest-working man in show business” reputation going. Latest on your docket is this new show, Crash Course.

Richard Hammond: It’s a new thing for me entirely. It’s the first show I’ve done for the States, in the States, with an American crew, made for BBC America by BBC America. Which has been a real revelation, I’ve loved it.

GQ: And you’re currently in California, shooting yet another show for the BBC.

Hammond: Yeah, for the BBC in the U.K., but it’s brought me out here. Laughs A lot of work at the moment seems to be bringing me to the States, which doesn’t bother me, because Americans are great to make TV with. They just get it. One day we needed to use an optometrist’s place. So we just rang, there we are, and one welcomed us in, made us coffee. Sure, use it!

It was the same when I was making Crash Course. These were guys welcoming me into their workplace, doing their job every day, and here’s this stupid irritating little Brit, wandering in and saying, “Hi, my name is Richard, will you teach me how to drive this tank?” and they were just totally welcoming, talked to me about what they do, and let me loose on their terrifying machines. Which wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world, really.

GQ: Americans do love being on TV.

Hammond: Yes, but I think Americans are also just natural-born communicators. They do it all the time. If you put Americans together, they just want to talk, and that doesn’t happen in many other places. And that’s great for someone like me, whose job is talking. So asking guys to talk me through their jobs – they were just so happy to do that, and as a result they’re so good at communicating, and it makes it easy to make TV with them.

GQ: So on Top Gear, you are known as the show’s “secret American”…

Hammond: Laughs I’m glad you picked up on that! It’s something Jeremy and James May came up with, it just makes me laugh!

GQ: The show spends a good deal of time making fun of Americans and their cars. What are your personal feelings on us?

Hammond: I think it’s fashionable in the U.K. to knock on America. It’s a sort of caricature inversion. But I think people get it wrong. America as a whole is huge, there’s an awful lot of it. But look at Americans, work and talk with them. But if you take away the size of the place, and think of it as just a country – we think they’re the kookiest, funniest, sometimes conservative with a small C, sometimes craziest, most communicative, chatty, talkative, creative, occasionally mad and stupid nation on earth! We absolutely love and treasure them. But because of the size of the place, we naturally become overawed, we’re made nervous by the size of that.

Now for a small guy, a small Brit, I’m used to that. I’m not easily bullied as a result. Big guys, particularly James and Jeremy, who are both well over six foot, they’re used to being the big guys in the playground, they get intimidated by it and they lash out. Everybody’s bigger than me, so I’m not scared.

Next: Richard Hammond’s 10 Best American Cars

I’ve been asked by subscribers of my personal newsletter how I decide what goes on my blog and what goes into my newsletter. I think the answer differs depending on your strategy, but I’m more than happy to tell you how I view it. I put information that sells on my blog, and information that nurtures in my newsletter.

Information that Sells

My job, because people seem confused these days as to what exactly it is I do or am selling, is to help mid-sized to larger companies build business (revenue and growth) by improving their use of the human digital channel (social media, email marketing, mobile marketing, content marketing, and other business applications). When I write something here on chrisbrogan.com, the goal is to help YOU, and then also to entice potential clients who are seeking ideas on how to build up business.

Thus, what goes onto my blog is information that I hope gets indexed by Google, that I hope gets shared by you, and that I hope is found to be useful to the kinds of clients I like to work with (primarily B2C, but I get some B2B as well). Lots of times, however, I write for my community and not my marketplace. This article is for you. It’s not really as useful for a bigger company, unless that company is just as uncertain where to put which kind of content. See the difference?

Information that Nurtures

On my newsletter, I write personally to you. I write with ideas that I think will help you grow yourself, and sometimes your business. Last week, I wrote about how to start an email marketing program to grow your community. This week, I’m going to write about how one starts charging for services, and/or the whole money thing in general. (If you want that information for free, subscribe here.)

My idea is that my newsletter content is built to nurture my community.

That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t sell to your community. Don’t forget: if you’re doing it right, your community is very willing to hear what you’re offering for sale, because they know that you’re only offering products and services that are of value to their own needs. So you can sell. You just have to spend more time nurturing than selling, lest you lose the privilege of having a strong email newsletter community.

What About the Outposts?

As your primary site is your Home Base, social networks are Outposts. What should you create for those places? On Google+, for instance, I might write a piece that isn’t a blog post. What I do there, quite often, is just write the “liner notes” to this site. I write information that I find interesting, or that might tell you more about me, but that isn’t exactly the bread-and-butter of chrisbrogan.com. For instance, when I write about music, I tend to write about it there. Same thing with Twitter and LinkedIn. If I still belonged on Facebook, I would write posts that were specific to my community and try to help nurture it even more.

How About You?

Does this line up with what you’re doing? Does this make sense? How have you found this kind of approach helpful, or how has the opposite treated you?