Top-5 Videos Watched in May-2014

(In no specific ranking order)

1. Admiral Bill McRaven's Commencement Speech at University of Texas at Austin 

U.S. Navy Admiral and University of Texas at Austin alumnus Bill McRaven returned to his alma mater last week to give seniors 10 lessons from basic SEAL training when he spoke at the school's commencement. McRaven - the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command and organized the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

Do not mistake this as just another 'commencement talk'; if India respected our soldiers and had the notion of 'commencement speeches' in our colleges, then am sure we would be hearing some of the best experiences from our borders, but till then, lets resort to the most developed nation doing the honors.




2. Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) at IBM Connect 2014 
On the topic of success, based on his new book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

Cartoonists are the new self-help gurus/motivational speakers with no sugar-coating and full of sense.




3. Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last

Why are leaders so so awsum? And why you should know the difference between 'leadership' and 'leader' and 'authority'.

4. 'What-If' by Randall Munroe (of xkcd)

Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions ("what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?") using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader's question about Google's data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer.

Something that many of us lack : Curiosity, Power of imagination and rational thought-processes.



5. Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World

Profanity that makes so much sense! A must-watch for all 'makers', 'creators', 'innovators', 'designers' etc.



Bonus video:
Alberto Cairo(author of 'The Functional Art') , at Tapestry-2014, hits hard at the present day world of journalism and data-visualization.

On Indian Travel and Tourism Industry

India is one of the top travel destinations with the wide diversity of cultures and geographies that it has to offer. But tourism is also one of the most under-rated and also under-utilized sectors in here. Though we have many state bodies which promote tourism in their own states, we do not have a collective framework which would help both the International and National travelers.

With the increasing spending power of the masses and also the quest to visit uncharted territories, toursim/travel does have significant growth prospects in India. For eg. did you know that the rapids of the Zanskar river are much more challenging that those in river Ganges?

In this short essay, i have tried to ruminate on certain aspects of the travel tourism industry which when implemented would be a great source of revenue for the Government and also would be a great source of information and provide safety and comfort to the travellers.

Hotel Reservation
Imagine if the Government collated all the Hotel information in India, and hosted it in one portal for everyone to have a peek at. Individual hoteliers can have their own login ids and can upload videos/pictures of their facilities. The location and tariffs would be structured and can be easily be searched upon. All the booking happens via this single website and the ratings of a particular hotel would obviously be based upon the traffic that it generates.Already sites like TripAdvisor etc are doing this, but since the Govt anway gives Licenses to hotels to operate, they can as well expose this information so that the credibility of the hotels can be established. This would be the directory service for all hotels in India.

The online reservation system if added to this service be a significant add on. For hotels that do not have Net facility, they can as well SMS or call up a call center to update their reservation status.

With the increasing amount of safety concerns for travellers and tourists, this would be an ideal endeavour. Based on complaints on safety, the Govt can blacklist hotels. Also, Black money can be curbed.

Flight Tickets Bidding System
It would be great if we have a website which lets us bid on flight tickets. So, if a particular flight has vacant seats before the departure and operator is ready to fill those seats at a slight loss to his profit margins(i.e, cut in the margin), then this would be a win-win situation for both the customer(who gets cheaper tickets) and also for the operator(who gets a decent traffic and also doesn't fly many empty seats).

For Handicapped
People who are differently abled and are often away from most of the travel need to be given special attention.This space has some promising scope for growth.

For LGBT
I am not sure how many travel agents cater to this audience. Again, though many regions in India are conservative, but a suitably adapted itinerary for the LGBT audience would be a great service.

Adventures
India with its diverse ecosystems can be a perfect place for adventure tourism.
The dense western ghats, the beautiful north eastern india, the deserts of Rajasthan, the salt plains of Thar desert, the canals of kerala, the rugged terrains of Ladakh, the majestic himalayan ranges and the numerous rivers have to be tapped for a clean and ecofreindly tourism.

Road conditions and Water Ways
Middleclass families and budget travellers prefer the road to flights. And hence the maintainence of roadways is very important to attract more tourists. Roads also are more ;leather; when compared to the other modes.

The last BJP Government under the active leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee saw some really good action on the road front; with some of the best National Highways being constructed and also linking the various villages with the neighbouring cities and towns. Baroda to Ahmedabad ExpressWay is one of the BEST in India that i have been on. It rates better than the Mumbai-Pune expressway. The former has the entire stretch laid on as a bluish-black carpet which is a pleasure ride.

I have not heard of any cruises that operate in any of the mighty rivers in India. Whereas the Nile cruises are a BIG attraction in Egypt. People always prefer the waterways to roadways, because waterways are more 'smooth' and scenic.

Other Sales - Stamps, memorabilia
Though i have mentioned in the last section of the post, i think this section is one of the most important as it generates HUGE amount of revenues for the government and positively contributes to foreign exchange. Every traveller wants to take back some memories from his travel. Though we have numerous shops outside every historic monument selling some sort of miniature replica of the monument or selling some handicraft, we do not have sufficient 'structured sellers' - a small example would be that of stamps. I collect stamps, but till date I have never seen any post-office which advertises the stamps or First day covers that are out. Even when i visit the post office and ask them specifically for anything 'new', i do not get a positive answer. I feel that sale of stamps and first day covers would add a significant chunk in here. Also, most of the state run handicraft emporiums price the items exorbitantly high. Me being an Indian, have never bought even a single item from these emporiums for the price of most of these items are 5-10 times that of the average price. A point to oppose my claim would be that of quality - but 'quality' does not essentially always have to be expensive. A kurta costs 600Rs in a Govt run emporium, whereas a kurta of a better texture and variety costs less than 500Rs in Westside. Khadi and Handloom shops have almost disappeared, and if they have sustained at a few places, then they are either dilapidated or hardly any big sales number.

What other aspects can you think of? Guides at the historic monuments, better recommendation systems and better network of travel agents. What else? Do let me know what else would you do if you were the Tourism Minister of India.

India ZIPScribble Maps

And it so happens that i managed to get a handle on all the zip codes in India and their corresponding longitudes-latitudes. This is what you get when you connect all the zipcodes in India :

And then when you order the long-lat pairs :

The next in this series is going to be :
1) Calculate the total distance travelled when you connect all the zipcodes (from map#1).
2) Do a TSP(Travelling Salesman Problem) on the zipcodes (from #1 above) and plot the route. Calculate the distance.
3) Do #2 for each of the states. (this "can" be used when you are planning your travel)

Scribble Map

I was looking for possible visualizations using maps on the Internet; thinking as to how people would be using lat/long details to present information. One obvious example would be use maps to show the sales/revenue spread across the various LoBs of an organization. Many enterprises capture the spatial information and display along with the 'regular' data(sales/revenue..etc etc). By the way, spatial maps, however simple they might sound are very important to bring a breath of fresh air into an otherwise uninspiring presentation of Enterprise data - you no longer work with tables, but directly on the map-region wherein the action is taking place.

But was there more that can be done with maps? Anything more funny and hackworthy? And then i stumbled on ZIPScribbleMaps - i found this extremely interesting; especially for a country like India which is huge and diverse, some visualization w.r.t Pin codes (or Zip codes) would be neat.

I quickly searched the web for a complete list of India Pin Codes, but it was quiet funny that i was not able to find it anywhere. You have to pay to get this information - especially if you want the zipcodes along with the lat/long information. (I think Govt should opensource this).

The following shows the ZIPScribble map for the state of Andhra Pradesh (I will do this for the rest of the Indian States soon - probably this weekend).I used the Google Maps API v2 and plotted the polylines between the pin codes, and this is what you have :

The first map shows the scribble, when all the pincodes are arranged in ascending order and lines are drawn between two consecutive postal codes.

The Second map shows the scribble, when we remove the duplicate lat-long pair and arrange them in ascending order (So that a PIN is not repeated).