Author: Shabbir Chunawalla

To begin with, we conceived books as paper books in print. There was a graduation towards e-books later. And now comes the audio books. Printed books are read, e-books are read from a computer or smartphone or other devices. Audio books are listened to . Thus readers have become listeners. This keeps pace with the changing life style of urban population. As they spend time in the commute to work, they have an opportunity to listen to an audio book.

An audio book formerly was put on casettes. Then it was burnt on CDs. These days it is available in digitally compressed format that hardly occupies 25-30 MB of storage space. It can be downloaded from the publisher’s webside or other e-commerce sites. They are available at popular physical book stores such as Landmark.The smart phones with Android and iOS have an application for this. The book downloaded is with you for life time. It can be shared on five digital devices. The average price of a book ranges from Rs. 200 to Rs. 400. Here the challenge is that if the print book and audio book cost the same, the buyer is likely to opt for the print version. It is, therefore, necessary to bring down the cost by reducing the cost of production.

The publishers issue subsidiary rights of their titles to audio book manufacturers. It enables the latter to convert the print book into audio format. They have to engage narrators, directors, sound artists, engineers and quality control people while making this conversion. They can rope in celebrities to read out the a book. However, that increases the cost. In India, they set up small recording studios at the residences of the narrators on their panel who can do the reading and recording in their free time. That saves the hire charges of a professional studio, and the cost of taking the narrator to such a studio.

The genres amenable to audio version are best selling novels, self help books, spiritual books, religious books, classics, Indian language books, comics, biographies, children books and so on.

In India, Reado.com operates in this field. Audible.com is an Amazon owned audio book retailer. We have Charkha Audiobooks.

Robotics is still at the stage computing was at when we had just mainframe computers. Robots are used commercially now to automate the dirty or hard jobs or to the repetitive jobs such as cargo handling and agriculture. In medicine, robots are making a big impact. They are used in unmanned air vehicles too. There are stories of automated cars. The technology should move in the direction of mini-computers and PCs being made in a robotic sense so that they can be used at home.

The cost has to come down. It is not a computing problem anymore.It is the physical costs of sensors and hardware holding it back. The breakthrough would be a low-cost 3D sensor which will enable a robot to understand its environment economically. It would enable it to do the household jobs such as serving tea.

Robotics, according to Hugh Durrant-Whyte, a former professor of mechatronic engineering, Sydney University, is the intelligent connection of perception to action.An arm in a factory or a surgical robot do not have intelligence at all. They are just mechanical things, though it is clever mechanics. They are just machines. A robot is different from a machine on account of its ability to perceive its environment, understand it and make decisions on what to do. Each time the decision could be different.A robot has to understand a particular plant and all other plants.It has to do generalization of the perceptual understanding. We humans understand a tree, and all other trees. This is taken for granted. Robotics really asks that fundamental question — what makes us intelligent ?

Though robots of future are feared, the real possibility of being scary comes from human clones, rather than electronic robots.Human clones are biological robots. Some countries think of robotizing their armies in the next 20 years. Robotics should make the world safer and should not harm it. The choice is moral, and not technical.

Robots vs Humans

The new jobs that technology  makes possible more than compensate for those jobs which are lost through substitution. This is the proposition put forward by an MIT economist David Autor. Some pessimists feel that machine intelligence may be revolutionary, rather than evolutionary. Two breakthrough techniques are cloud robotics in which robots learn from one another. It leads to a rapid growth in competence. Another technique is deep learning in which robots process vast amounts of data to expand their capabilities, forming associations which can be generalized.

The tasks which can be affected by technology can be categorized. Tasks could be cognitive and manual, and could also be routine and non-routine. Middle management tasks which are cognitive but routine are vulnerable to automation. If the task is cognitive but not routine, it gains from technological change. It enables faster processing and presentation. Machines take over previously manual jobs and non-routine ones. Many jobs still require a bouquet of skills, flexibility and judgment. They are not so amenable to codification or being performed by robots.

Will robots eat our lunch? It depends.

Although the world’s most respected companies from the developed world  draw more and more revenues from the emerging markets of Asia including China and India, it is a fact that these developing economies have not thrown up global brands so far. Though branding has focused on differentiation, there is so much to be said in favour of an emotional connect with the consumers. The overriding image of the country of origin does affect the brands. At times, these are negative associations. Local brands can enter the global arena by eight possible routes, as enunciated by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan Benedict E M. Steenkamp in their recent book Brand Breakout (Macmillan ).

The Asian tortoise Route  A decast product at a low price is introduced e.g. Japanase and Korean cars. They climb the value chain later.

The Business to Consumer ( B 2 C ) Route First they sell the product to business so as to gain entry later to consumer segment, e. g. Huawei, China’s mobile network company entering  the handset market.

The Diaspora Route  Products are sold to migrants from the original country, e.g. Dabur, ICCI Bank.

The Brand Acquisition Route  Foreign brands are acquired to get a foothold in the market, e.g. Lenovo and Jaguar.

The Positive Campaign Route  Negative associations are slowly wiped out, e.g. Hyundai.

The Cultural Resources Route  Here the heritage is leveraged, e.g. Yoga from India or silk from China.

The Natural Resources Route  Champagne is made from the grapes from this region in France. The rest is just sparkling wine.

The National Champion Route  The support of the State is leveraged, e.g. Emirates Airline from Dubai.

A customer calls. The order is flashed on the kitchen screen. The pizza makers looks at it. He gets down to the job at hand. He stretches the dough. Does saucing, cheesing, depending on the nature of the order, he does itemising or topping. It goes into oven. From order to oven, it should not take more than 4 minutes.

• Baking takes 6 minutes, from where it goes to the cut table.
• Cutting, packing and pick up takes another 5 minutes.
• It is put in pizza delivery boxes that SDPs carry to the last mile. Delivery time should never exceed eight minutes.
• It is a process which takes 23 minutes. There is a seven minute buffer to the employees for contingencies like traffic, rains etc.

Thus Domino’s pizzas come with 30-minute guarantee from the time an order is placed. If the time taken to deliver pizza exceeds 30-minutes, it comes free if it costs less then Rs. 300. If it costs more, the company subtracts Rs. 300 from the bill. In case , it is an order of more than 4 pizzas, it is regarded as a bulk order, and the guarantee does not apply.