Karan Rajpal | Thoughts on Marketing, Cinema, Food and Books

Sequels generally disappoint people by the time they are announced. As a regular film goer, you go through them like your pack of pop-corn. When they are of the summer blockbuster variety, you typically, leave your mind at home and just see them. When they occur for movies which were sleeper hits, you tend to sit up and take notice. Why would an idea which had little juice in the first place, get another shot at celluloid (pun intended)? Horrible Bosses 2 gets some things right-  Jason Bateman continues his deadpan and matter-of-fact acting, continuing in the same vein as Arrested Development; Jennifer Aniston playing the sex-addict doctor; and Chris Pine as the handsome devil. Apart from this, certain gags do get you- the scene where a runaway car waits past a train crossing because they don't want to leave the police behind, is, in the true sense of the word, hilarious. Apart from that, the only thing keeping one hooked is the presence of high and might actors in guest rol

Mobile apps. You use them over 100 times a day, mostly the same ones over and over again. And if, like me, you are a marketer, you've spent time and a bazillion dollars to make sure your app provides the best user experience ever. Reiterating daily, you make more changes and spends on newer ways of delivering content and helping consumers buy your products.  And I'm predicting in three years time, the number of apps you use today will fall down by 70%.  It could be that your phone becomes a giant browser and instead of a drawer full of apps, only apps which make use of specific hardware functions remian on your phone- a VR application which requires heavy network resources; a maps application which uses GPS and other triangulation mechanisms to deliver location awareness (to you), and a few other uses.  There are a number of reasons for this to occur:

How you do you reconcile this: The world's biggest online company launches a new wave of devices- devices which overcome buggy stick-on interfaces by partners such as Samsung, provide a great experience for first timers, and launch with big-bang promotions in one of the world's largest mobile markets, with some of the biggest local phone brands as partners And yet fails? Google's Android One project, launched in India over the past three months, has been a middling affair, and when seen in context of the booming mobility market, an abject failure. Google made a critical error at launch. As always, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but this error is so fundamental, it left me in the 'what were they thinking' mind frame- something that shouldn't happen when some of the smartest minds in the business were behind this campaign. Now, in order to understand the issue, some background is important. Google came up with the Android One Project for some sim