Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve never seen anything from Hulu before but the idea for streaming TV seems totally amazing. What’s even better is that there are Hulu Originals, which in my head, I think of a “HBO Original Series”.

I saw an original from a series titled “A Day In The Life”. This one featured Tim Ferriss, the author of several books in the four-hour series. It was about 30 minutes long and it was amazing. I saw ads:

• Before the video started, I saw an ad (30 seconds long, from the title sponsor). This is basically like what you see on YouTube these days. You have a choice to watch one long form commercial or just see them as it happens like a normal TV show.
• Around 6 minutes into it, there were 3 ads. These ad combos are about 1.5 minutes long. So each ad is about 30 seconds long.
• I see that you can swap ads – an “ad swapper” called “Hulu ad swap”. You have 3 ads to choose from. So you basically watch ads.
• You can also tell Hulu if the ad is relevant to you or not. I for example learned more about Bing and found that it was useful as an ad.
• Around 15 minutes into it, I got yet another 3 ads
• Around 25 minutes into it I got an ad about the Hulu original series itself that wasn’t skippable which then led me to another 1 minute 15 second ad break.
• I can pause Hulu TV and come back to it exactly where I left of.

So in 30 minutes, I saw 10 ads paid for by their advertisers. The first ad is by the title sponsor. The remaining 9 are various rolling ads that I can skip. Oh, and I saw another ad about the Hulu series itself, so in total, they were basically 11 ads. Thats about 330 seconds of ads. Some 5.5 minutes of ads in 30 minutes.

I just saw an amazing video from Wired editor Thomas Goetz (@tgoetz). If you have the time, do watch it (embedded below). He also has a longer article over at Wired on How to spot the future. I’ve just added his book to my reading list: The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine.

I took some quick notes from the video:

1. Look for cross-pollinators – e.g. Detroit meets Silicon Valley
2. Surf the exponentials – bank on today’s technology, bet on tomorrow’s technology. CPUs, battery storage, bandwidth
3. Favor the liberators – CDs are control, freeing up blockages is basically MP3 and BitTorrent technology. See AirBnB, Uber that brings liquidity to markets (via Reid Hoffmann)
4. Respect audacity – Set audacious goals, you’ll solve a lot more things along the way. Too many apps, look for Tesla’s and Square’s who want to change the way we drive and make payments respectively
5. Bank on openness – see Linux and the opensource movement in general. Microsoft compared it to a cancer (Steve Ballmer) and now they’re one of the biggest contributors to Linux. Twitter? Hashtags, retweets, etc. came from the users. Exploits your opportunity. Gives your good idea to reach a maximum number of people.
6. Demand deep design – see Apple with their simple user manuals. Good design strips away the barrage of information. Help us understand information. Facebook has a lot of redesigns over the years, and everything they do is cajoling a user to share more; better organised. Same reason why Pinterest is so hot right now. Turns messy lives we live into something that actually looks beautiful. Deep design: turns chaos into curation.
7. Spend time with time wasters – look at people who are spending time creating new tools, new language, new culture. Look at the DIY/maker movement, health 2.0, hackathons (organized time wasting – create even more than they start with).

This weekend was an example of pulling strings while in Malaysia, something that I completely do not like to do, and think should be unnecessary in a service-based economy.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII (S3) just launched in Malaysia. The ads have gone up and people have been queuing since 4am to buy phones. Generally stores sell up to 300 per day, and these are just at the telcos that have them. Samsung themselves do not sell it at their flagship stores. Mostly telcos are encouraged to sell it with a contract, but you can generally buy them outright.

On Saturday, we had to go to MidValley. I was told the best store to get it at would be the Celcom Blue Cube. Maxis had run out of stock for the day. I figured that while Sara sorted out the groceries, I would pay the store a visit. I got a queue number and waited. And waited. And waited. Thankfully I had my BlackBerry with me and was clearing a tonne of email. 45 minutes passed and the queue number did not move! It was not because people were buying the S3 alone, it was because the Celcom store just seemed very inefficient.

Groceries done and no phone in hand, I go home feeling a little dejected. I text my contact at Maxis, who says there will be no problem reserving a unit for me tomorrow (Sunday). Things are starting to look up. I tried it the regular way and failed; now it’s time to be a typical Malaysian and pull strings, right?

My friends and I go to the store at about 7pm on Sunday. We meet one sales guy who says they only have one unit available. At this stage, we want three. Apparently the daily quota had been met, and my friends would have to come back tomorrow. One more call to my contact and lo and behold, there can be three units available. Sales guy says that we have to queue to make such a purchase and it would set us back up to two hours. Two hours to get service?!?

Another call to my contact and we’re out of the store within minutes with three units of Samsung Galaxy S3 phones. In pebble blue as well, which is apparently the color that is a lot harder to get.

Why doesn’t everyone get similar service? Why must strings be pulled to get service? In an economy where one has to win customers, why is it that the focus is on frustrating the customer at every possible instance? Where is the customer centric nature that fuels a service based economy?