Click, with caring

Emotion is critical to the success of all companies, including those selling technology-based products, aver Peter Boatwright and Jonathan Cagan in Built to Love: Creating products that captivate customers (www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

They foresee, for instance, that healthcare would be one area where nanotechnology may profoundly impact human well-being and emotion. An implantable nanofactory — in the place of drugs manufactured in chemical factories — could potentially create an artificial system at a nanometre-size scale that is able to convert pre-existing, deleterious molecules already in the body into beneficial compounds, the authors describe. Additionally, they note that the above approach may enable chemical reactions in the body that a person might otherwise be unable to make happen due to their inherent medical conditions.

“Such a capability could elicit a range of emotions from excitement and the feeling of adventure to the fear of the unknown, because it is occurring inside a person's body. It is therefore essential to both deliver technical capability that improves healthcare and also to create supported emotions of confidence and security due to the technology's effectiveness.”

The book quotes Robert Schwartz, General Manager of Global Design for GE Healthcare, for the view that healthcare companies are engaged in a ‘technology arms race,' what with most medical device companies attempting to create faster, quieter, more powerful, more accurate devices and procedures at a lower cost.

Underlining that the medical procedures we go through are among the most emotional events that we humans may encounter, Schwartz rues that, in practice, there is little emotional support built into diagnostic and treatment experiences or the products that support and enable them. “Complex equipment protocols, heavy patient loads at institutions providing diagnostics or treatments, cost pressures and an emphasis on high-technology as the solution often eclipse needed attention to what can become a journey of anxiety.”

Among the positive examples mentioned in the book are the use of music, video, ventilation, and lighting to create calming or distracting illusions or effects, and also imaging procedures that reduce the sense of confinement or discomfort that may be experienced by some patients. “Companies are also seeking to leverage advances in high-speed wireless communication to enable physician monitoring of the patient outside of traditional medical environments, for example, the patient's home.” The authors inform us of Schwartz's vision of medical products that could ‘even act as an object of beauty and curiosity in the home,' much like the iMac brought computers out of the remote study and into the living room.

A chapter on ‘the emotion of form and touchpoints to create it' introduces us to ‘shape grammars,' a concept of George Stiny, a mathematician architect originally at UCLA and then at MIT. In shape grammars, Stiny created a production (or rule-based) system that works not with words as in the common expert systems, but with shapes. “Each rule allows a transformation of an emerging design toward a final completed design. It has been shown that you can break a visual identity into discrete chunks and a sequence of rules that will generate the design of a product.”

Unlike their distant expert systems cousins, shape grammars can be more like fractals, logical in the details but sometimes seemingly illogical and creative in developing an overall product design, the authors observe. They add that, with today's computer technology, formal shape grammars can be implemented by computers to allow efficient and automated exploration of many different variations of a design. “By merging market research methods, statistical data mining, and artificial intelligence, shape grammars have been implemented and used to test different product design attributes with the customer, providing an alternative to traditional focus groups.”

Recommended addition to the reading list of techies looking for a productive role in building tomorrow's products and services.

Opportunity at the bottom of the search heap

A chapter on ‘information marketing' in Cash in a Flash: Fast money in slow times by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen (www.landmarkonthenet.com) cites Jay Abraham, a marketing guru, to explain how low-hanging fruit is hanging all around you.

You do not need your own product, there are millions of products out there already in some warehouse just waiting for you to come along and offer to help sell them, Jay advises. “Every business needs help selling. Some need it even worse than others. Some businesses are terrible at selling. They love to create products but they're lousy at marketing them. You can come to their rescue.”

How? Use Google, is the simple answer. Reminding that all businesses fight to have their products show up in the top 100 in a Google search, the counsel in the book is to do just the opposite. That is, instead of going to the top of Google, do the opposite; go to the bottom of the Google search, or deeper than the top two or three hundred results. As the book instructs, the bottom of the heap tells you about the companies that do not know how to sell their products, and the companies that need your help.

The next part of the exercise is to connect with the companies whose products you would love to sell, and ask them if they would like to sell you a bunch of their products at a very wholesale price. “Maybe they've got a warehouse full of older models that they'd love to get rid of. You're looking for products you can acquire for a super bargain – that you can almost steal. In economic times like these, there are thousands of companies with products they're dying to unload.”

Further lessons in the book take you through how you can sell these products without even having to warehouse them yourself, by using opt-in customer information databases for a small fee, and reaping big gains as a result.

Educative takeaways worth trying out.

A twitter-ed away future

In the epilogue of Mattering to India: The Shashi Tharoor campaign by T. P. Sreenivasan (www.pearsoned.co.in) there is this advice, attributed to a story in The Washington Post: ‘If you have a political future, do not twitter it away.'

Sreenivasan reminisces that he emailed the story to Tharoor with the counsel that, as a minister, Twitter had the potential to harm him. “I invited his attention to a tweet about the allocation of work for the two Ministers of State as a case in point. Tharoor defended himself by saying that the allocation of work was not confidential. It was not confidential, but its publication led to unnecessary speculation that no important work had been assigned to him.”

The author recounts that Tharoor was never repentant about his Twitter adventures even after he fell into one controversy after another on account of Twitter. “Whether it was the row over the ‘holy cows' statement (the reference to ‘cattle class' was made by the questioner, and it was the ‘holy cows' coinage, which was close to the bone as far as the Congress Party was concerned, that caused the upset), or the visa issue, or the many less harmful but inconvenient revelations, he felt that he had done nothing wrong.”

Interprets Sreenivasan that Tharoor was reaching out to an audience far beyond the voters of Thiruvananthapuram. However, as the number of his followers swelled, Tharoor became intoxicated by his imaginary Twitter empire, frets Sreenivasan. “He did not realise that many of his Twitter followers were egging him rather than seeking his wisdom and insights. He believed that he had lakhs of real followers. He had not heard the wise statement that ‘followers' on Twitter and ‘friends' on Facebook were nothing but a bastardisation of two good English words. Ironically, it was the tweets by him and some others that led to Tharoor's misfortune…”

A book that can make entrenched ministers chuckle gleefully.

Tailpiece

“Are you sure that the Lokpal Bill will not cover…”

“The corruption dadas?”

“No, data corruption!”

>dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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