Hello my friends, welcome to Duskers. This is a relatively simple game. I didn't really like the way the graphics turned out in the last gaming video, so I picked something that would be a little bit easier for the thing to record, hopefully. I don't know if that's actually going to work or not, but we'll find out. Anyway, this is a very interesting game. It's definitely the weirdest horror game I think I've ever played. It's like a command line interface thing, but yeah, here we are. Oh, there's a lot more in this starter thing. Let's see what my drone configuration is. I got a lure. Oh, okay. Oh dear.  You can make anything. I think it is. Create, gather, generate. No, nothing that's useful. I mean, everything else we can make is the one upgrade I really want was motion, but I didn't get it instead I had sensor, which is not as good, which means I'm going to have to do a little bit more careful. Making post Stargate. Well, we'll check that out in a little while, salvage, military, let's go here. Oh, that's it. We have no more fuel. Okay, well, we better hope we find something like this could be a very short playthrough. Yep. All right. Press enter to enter the derelict. Yep. Unknown derelict. No communications. There's a lot of stuff going on. See, the thing about this game that I always found weird is that like it seems that galactic civilization ended and I've just come out of hibernation or something. Well, that's a little odd. Well, anyway, so we got lure, which I don't even know how that works. All right. And we can go into each drone individually as well. So that's what we're doing right now, but we're going. I believe turn the volume down a little bit here. Wait, what am I doing? I don't seem to be doing anything. I click in it and I ain't doing nothing. Yeah. Okay. There we are. That's a little bit better. Give it a little bit less volume so you can actually hear me.  And anyway, you can control one drone. This is probably not. This was not a very good setup for me. I'm not used to doing this without the motion upgrade. So we'll just hopefully don't die. There's been an. We'll check out this drone right here, which doesn't really seem to have anything. Let's see what upgrades it has. I don't have teleport. I've never even seen that before. Huh. Well, we'll use it, I guess. In the meantime, is it two or three that has a generator? What's that one? So what we're going to do with this guy is we're going to go over to this generator and we're going to go over to the generator. What's that one? So what we're going to do with this guy is we're going to go over to this generator thing right here. That's not the generator. Yeah, it is. I don't have an interface so I can't actually do any investigations to find out what's going on here. There are monsters in this game. I'm going to have to watch out for it and not worry for it. I also want to talk a little bit. I don't want to make this very long, maybe 15, 20 minutes a week. But I'll see generator. Alright, we'll go back to that. Oh, D-14 was already open. Well, I'll go down there and find out what we got. Nope, get away from me. First thing we're going to do is gather. But yeah, you know, I had a topic in mind for something I could talk about while I'm doing this. Ugh, I could be monsters anywhere and I wouldn't be able to get to them in time. But first thing we're going to do is gather all. And there we are. And the topic I wanted to talk about this week was basically the difference between forum feedback for your SCPs and chat feedback for your SCPs. And I was thinking about not doing this at all because we're just going to get off of that real quick. Yeah, I know. Uh, swap. Let's get this upgrade out of here just in case. Increase the speed of drone. Well, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. How fast does this thing go with that on there? I have no idea. I probably should have put it on my main drone. We'll do that later. Alright. Anyway, and uh, see the thing is when you are seeking feedback does that door, ugh, put this setup, how do I do this? I guess I gotta, I take three. Can we tow this drone? It's completely destroyed. Yep, it's completely destroyed. Farewell, Nathan. So I guess the best thing we could do right now is drop a sensor in this room. Yep. Yep, that's what we're going to do. And leave. And close that door. D14. And open D11. Sure, why not? If there's a monster in there, well, we'll find it. Pop up on the sensor. And while we're waiting to see that, what I was thinking about mostly was the difference between form critique and like chat critique. And when I say chat critique, that is in-person critique. When you're actually talking to a person. It doesn't look like there's anything in there. If it is, it's taken really long time. So, looks like we might be good. Actually, one other thing first. Now, let's get in there. Let's get into the room and double check it up. Yeah. D14. Actually having a teleporter might actually be somewhat useful.  D11. D9. Oh, nope. Let's forget to close that door. D9. And if something comes up, well, we'll see it. Man, I got a bad cough. There it is. Sensor's being attacked. Oh, no. We're going to open that airlock. We're going to close it. And now I'm stuck in here. No, I'm not stuck in here because I can always just change the docking location. So, yeah. So, there was something in this room. The door D9. I'm going to open it real quick so you can see that door opened into another room that I can't see yet. But there was something in there, hostile, and it popped into room 4 to see what was going on when I opened the door. Well, doing that caused the sensor to get tripped and then just opened the airlock and vented whatever it was into space. So, that's always a good solution. When in doubt, vented into space. And there's an A1 and an A3 and an A4, which means there is probably an A2 maybe over here somewhere. I guess we'll find out. Maybe it's closer. Maybe it's further away. There's no real way to know. But, what do we want to do here? I don't know. Anyway, when you are seeking critique and you get it on the forums, the forum critique is good. At least it's as good as it could be. But it's not what's the word I'm looking for. It's not as comprehensive as it could be because you're always going to have questions about what people mean when they say stuff like we're going to open D9 again. We're going to go in there because we're going to take what? Droom 3? Yeah. Because we've got to drop a sensor off anyway. Anything interesting in here? Well, that's a big room. There's an A5. Okay, well, that's that. Let's move over a little bit so we can see that. So, there's an A5. Oh, sure. Let's take 2. Stop it. Could use that teleporter pretty soon. When you get feedback from an individual person on the forums, it is unfortunately... What's a Doctor A5? This becomes like a puzzle after a while. But yeah, you can't actually use or you can't actually ask them questions, you know?  Whereas I feel the door's not powered. Yeah, it doesn't matter all that much. You can close D9. I'm not going to bother editing out these coughs. Last time I almost didn't make this video at all because I knew that the coughs were just going to be impossible to deal with. Anyway, D7. Hopefully it doesn't disable anything when I open that door. But, yeah, there was an A2. Okay. Waiting. Yeah, if you can't ask questions, I keep getting started on saying something and then not actually finishing it. If you can ask questions, that feedback is a lot less useful. I always suggest, especially to new writers, that they don't bother with form critique. Okay, if they're not in there by now, they're not going in there. D7. We're using the other drones to explore with, but we don't actually what are we going to take? Yeah, I know. Nothing. Whole crazy handful of nothing. We're going to take three. Make sure we're looking at the right one here. We're going to drop off a sensor. But, yeah, I always advise new authors to just skip the forums if they possibly can. Alright.  But, yeah, if you've not able to ask questions, and like someone says that you're, say, you need to do a better job of showing not telling and you're like, what do you mean by that? They're not going to be able to answer you, but if you're talking to someone in person, then they will certainly be able to answer you. Oh, man. Actually, quite a bit of pain there. My ribs are killing me from all the coffee I've been doing. That's definitely safe. Alright. Well, it's not definitely safe, but it's apparently safe. Well, okay then. Nothing at all on this side of the ship. Which means we should probably go over to the other room. We're only going to do this one ship, I think. Like I said, I wanted to keep these short A5, A4, over here, and then we'll open D10 and go from there. Well, technically, I think I'm probably going to open D8 or A4. Nope. That's not one that's what I need. That's not all of the type. It's about to happen in this game of yep, okay, did power that one. Alright, good. And we are going to... What are we going to do here? I'll just open up D8 and wait. I'm going to find out if there's anything dangerous in here. Yeah, have you ever gotten feedback and wondered what in the heck somebody meant by it? That's the problem. I could just lock these guys in here. But I like doing this. Oh, it's not powered. Is A3 powered? No. Well, fiddle sticks. That means they're going to be moving back and forth. I wonder if I can power it up A5. I just want to kill him. He's moved to room 4. The one he just did, he moved from room 3 to room 4. There's no other way to get out, so I should be fine. Yep, he's moving back and forth. What are we going to do? I want to make sure and kill this guy. Doc A5. Yeah. I don't know why I keep leaving one over there, but well, not worry about it right now. Since they're untriggers. That's like a very important thing you want to be able to do when somebody gives you feedback is understand exactly what they're trying to communicate to you. Well, it just looks like I can't kill him. I could, but it would be risky and there would be no reason to risk it. Actually, you know what?  This is a terrible start for me. We'll wait until... So yeah, that's what we're going to do. He's got a speed boost too, so... Why not? That's a little dangerous. Doc A1. The door should remain closed. Let's find out. I'm still new to this game. So the door should remain closed, right? We're going to wait for him to come back and then as soon as he leaves. If I lose it, it doesn't matter. It's going to be restarting this game anyway. So the ship's... Oh man, I like this game because it's like a... No, not war. I don't know what these monsters are. I did it. All right. So I locked him in that room. Is A3 open from here? Yep. We're good to go. It worked. Anyway, that's it for this episode, I think. But the lesson that I managed to get across was chat feedback is better than forum feedback because you can get people to answer questions about what they said about your article. That's literally the full extent of what I was able to communicate whilst playing this game. I got to get better at this. Thank you very much for watching. We'll see you next Friday, hopefully.  But I'm not very good at this game yet. So let's do something fun. Yeah, I know what I'm going to do. I think I know what I'm going to do. Yeah. We're going to go out and ablaze a glory. Yeah, that's what we're going to do. Doc A4 I really like this game. It's very simple. I've got it very recently, but it's very simple and somehow still a lot of fun. All right. Well, it wouldn't even call this a blaze of glory. We're actually just killing ourselves. All right. Doc A1 Yep, and A4 ought to be powered. So, farewell drones. That's the end of my game. Thank you very much for watching. I don't think I can close it again. No. And floating statistics and that's the end of that. I killed one brute. Yep, that happened. Anyway, that ends the game too. So, yep, see you in the next video on Friday and hopefully I'll be able to continue to talk about things other than yeah, I played one other game. Looks like Day Service 20. I did pretty good in that one. Well, not pretty good. I did pretty terrible actually. I killed myself in that one too. I was like, let's start over so I can get something started for the YouTubes. Wait, is it Day 3 and Day 4 and Day 5? Maybe I have played other games. Is this ship name unknown though? I don't know. See you in the next episode. Peace.


Our next speaker session, ladies and gentlemen, he's gonna be sharing more about what does it take to make e-commerce profitable. So we have with us Mr. Ashish Hemrajani, who's the CEO and co-founder of Big Tree Entertainment, Private Limited, which operates Book My Show, which is India's largest online entertainment, ticketing platform, offering tickets for movies, plays, concerts, both games and live events. So if I may please invite our next speaker, Ashish Hemrajani to please come on the stage. All right, so can we have a nice, happy round of applause there for our next speaker as well, Ashish Hemrajani. I'm dressed to work like that and usually for conferences I wear jeans, but today was an official reason to do this, but thank you for having me over. Thanks Vik, thanks Sam. What does it take to make e-commerce profitable? Why is it even a question?  I don't have an answer for that. Isn't it the purpose of any enterprise to take value from society, create value for themselves and give something back and make a little profit in between? But I guess those one-on-one lessons are things that most e-commerce companies in India have sort of forgotten. So what I'm gonna try and do, it's a 20 minute session, I will try and make it as anecdotal and talk about the Book My Show journey and some of the lessons that we've learned, some harsh, some pleasant, some not so nice, some brilliant, and maybe you can pick up some sort of things that you can take back home. So I founded Book My Show about 19 years ago, lesson one that businesses aren't built as sprints, but they're built in marathons. We've been around for close to 20 years and most internet entrepreneurs today or e-commerce companies think that they, they start thinking like investors, that they wanna start a company to exit so that they can make money. I don't think you guys built Madison or all these companies to exit. I mean, you exit when you exit or when you retire or make some money, but you build a business to solve a problem. And most internet entrepreneurs today start a business because they're saying, jaldi paisa bane ga, but that's, then you should be in the stock market or not. So Book My Show started in 1999 and I'm an ex-advertising guy. I worked for J. Walter Thompson for two years and Book My Show started because of smoking and drinking. I don't smoke, but most folks around me smoked. It was a carpeted office. ITC was the brand that J. Walter Thompson handled. It was like the madmen days of 97 to 99 and there was a lot of secondary smoke and I wanted to clear my head metaphorically and physically.  So I kept drinking from 11 in the morning to about three in the afternoon and I was so smashed, I'd sent a text message to my boss saying I'm quitting. She had said, okay, by the time I woke up the next morning and here I am running a business for the next 19 years. I got invested by Chase Capital partner, J.P. Morgan in 1999 and in 2001 we were invested by News Corp. So if you, some of you would probably remember that the ecosystem in India didn't exist in 1999. Internet penetration, mobile penetration, there wasn't a single number policy, you didn't have credit card penetration, net banking, debit card. So the beauty of the internet business is that as your cost curve flattens, your revenue curve keeps growing up and that's why the valuations are so high because at some point your cost curve has to sort of flatten.  But that wasn't happening for us in those early days and the reason was that even though we had a website, 98% of our bookings actually came from the call center. So we were in effect running a call center company and because you didn't have a single number, you had seven cities where we ran a call center. We were the first company in the world which did home delivery of tickets on cash. And the other thing was that we would buy inventory. So on the weekend, we would have an opportunity loss on the weekday, we had an actual loss because nobody wanted to buy tickets. And every time more people would call us, we would have more people to service those guys. And so our revenue curve went up and our cost curve kept going up again and again. The other problem was that we were running seven separate call centers in seven separate cities and therefore our marketing for those seven call centers was separate. And therefore again, the cost went up. It wasn't efficient. And the other challenge was that every time we would sell out our inventory, you would have people still calling you. So let's say for example, there's a big movie like Padmavad, people would call you and instead of having 100 people to service those calls, now you would have a thousand people because you didn't want your NPS to dip, your net promoter score. So every time you'd still wanna pick up the phone and say, I don't have any tickets available. So the cost curve and the revenue curve started going haywire. And then you know the famous infamous.com bus which started in the US in the 2000, it hit India in 2002. Book My Show went from 150 people down to six, including an office boy. We were wiped out. So I had six people that I continued with and I had to look those guys in the eye, all the guys that followed me as an entrepreneur, they left their jobs, I had to take them to Shivaji Park, I didn't have money to take them to a conference room like that and tell them, hey listen, the dream is over. But I negotiated a very hard deal to get them a six month severance, also sat down and parked my life for six months to try and place all of them, 50 or 60 of them got jobs in various entertainment businesses. And as Karma and Luck would have it today, all of them are at vice president positions giving business back to us. Second lesson in life I learned that always be good to people and Karma always pays you back. Then from 2002 to 2007, we actually were in the road building of the pipeline business. All we did was install ticketing software, change the rules of the game, service call centers, service the backend of most cinemas, cricket, sports. And the idea was born out of solving a problem and a lot of e-commerce companies today don't do that. They're not trying to solve a consumer problem. Let me go back to 1999. When I heard a radio commercial trying to sell rugby tickets in South Africa, I said it's so simple because at that time in India, if you recall you went to Stirling, Regal and E-Ross, you had pigeonholes, you had pink tickets and blue tickets and yellow tickets, you had advance counters and you had current counters. Within advance and current, you had dress circle, balcony and stall. Some of you might remember that, today all of that is gone. And so there were timings. So there was an arbitrage of price, there was an arbitrage in pricing. You didn't know if there were seats available, there was no democratization or information and they would say tickets are sold out but the scalper or the black market here opposite at the Panwala Dukan was selling it for four times the price. Those were the rules of the game. If you wanted a cricket ticket, you would go stand in line with a bamboo scaffolding on Marine Drive overnight to reach the box office, get latte charged by the cops as a customer and then to be told no tickets available and the black marketeers would sell it.  I mean, that's how consumers were treated, right? It was just bizarre. So there's a structural role that needed to be filled and it was a problem to be solved. That's why the business was born and that's why it will continue to make money.  It'll never make money because you've got to continue to bribe and throw money to get your customer. First time user, recency frequency, maintaining that customer loyalty. You've got to keep throwing cash at that customer. This is on a very, very weak footing.   I do, but not all the time.  How can you even talk like that? Just look at the last two or three years that have been at least 100, 150 internet companies that have died, some of them with valuations of over $5 billion or $6 billion, today are not even worth $300 million. So just look at history and you will realize, just like the stock market, don't get too excited, good times and bad times will keep ebbing and flowing. Having said that, 2007 is when the market turned again and between 2002 to 2007, what did Book My Show do? We looked at the first principles of business. If I made money, I paid salaries. If I earned money, I switched on my lights and I'm not kidding. If in summer I kept my air conditioners off, because I couldn't afford it. I still recall we couldn't afford the STD monthly charge. It was some 300 bucks at that time. And so I would go in Bandra, which was a 136 square foot office. We used to be in Pravadevi before that. My friends from advertising had helped me get Pravadevi Industrial Estate. And then in Bandra, I would go to these STD booth and make calls to clients in Delhi. And when I made those calls, there was a lot of road noise. So they would say, why is it so noisy? And I'd say, listen, we are really busy. We've got a lot of action. There was nobody, man, we were six of us really looking for business. But those were fun days because it taught us the first principles of business. Even today, those are lessons that we as a company don't forget. It's that boiling frog theory, right? If you let the water boil slowly and put a frog, he doesn't realize and he'll die.  And so it's these little things that creep into your business which will allow you not to make money. This is a 30,000 view that I'm giving you.  And the reason is because there is so much cheap capital available that they just don't do right by the customer. They never think of the user or the customer. They're like, listen, I'm just gonna buy this customer and good for us. Let the Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, now the South Africans, pour money into the country. It's created a new middle class based on all of this capital. But is it gonna sustain a real business? Only time will tell. So 2002 to 2007, as we built this pipe, we ran a really frugal ship. Even today, we fly low cost carriers. We're not our secretaries booking our tickets. We reuse envelopes. We reuse pins.  But if you want bean took up Italian coffee, you pay 20 bucks on an honor system and you can get it, but otherwise you get really cheap coffee. We stay in reasonable hotels. We lead rich lives, maybe not expensive lives. And we are very, very altruistic. And I'll come to the altruism bit in a bit. But as far as the business is concerned, we don't talk about most of it in public domain. So most guys say, listen, are you a unicorn? And I tell them, what is a unicorn?  But they say, If you're not a unicorn, some animal, I'm a mongrel. I'm a dog. I wake up every day. There's a fight out there as an entrepreneur. Somebody pets you, no problem. Somebody gives you food, eat. There's a pack of dogs, run. There will always be another day to pick up fight. And you know, if that's the way you look at it and they're like, this is not a good animal. You have to be another animal. And I tell them, I'm a cockroach. I've survived for 19 years, either in a nuclear holocaust or a microwave oven. These analogies, and now I've heard the latest one. It's not unicorns, but sunicons. Guys who are soon to become unicorns. Why should it even matter what your valuation is? Is your NPS high? Book My Show's NPS went from 31 to 62 in the last three years. Is your customer happy? What is your recency frequency? What is your lifetime value of the customer? What do you spend on your CPC cost per customer contact? What do you spend on CPA acquiring the customer? How big is it? How loyal are they? I think these are some of the metrics that really matter. But some metrics which you may sort of want to listen to. Book My Show today is present in 660 cities and towns. We are 1,600 employees. Too many, I think, but anyways, we're 1,600 employees. Book My Show sells about 14 million tickets a month. We get about 128 million visits. We do 2.5 billion page views. We have about 75 million subs. We do 35 million MEUs. And we have many, many, many everbots. That's the scale of the company today. But we're still under the radar. We still do what we do. We wake up every day, look at the consumer, and say, how do you solve a new problem? And then we looked at the business, and we said, look, is the market growing fast? And everybody talks about this middle class. And India is a 1.2 or 1.3 billion people market. It's not. We're bullshitting ourselves. We are many countries. The language, the food, the state, everything changes. And even the socioeconomic class, we are the same Indians who look away from a slum and want the maid to come seven times a week, like bonded labor and smile in the morning to serve your kids while they leave their kids at home. And we are saying, there is no other India. It's SCCA. It's urban markets. It's bullshit, right? There are so many Indians, even within a microchasm or just around us. And how are you solving that problem or catering to that individual? And so, as far as we are concerned, we said, there is no bottom feeder market as far as we are concerned. Let's look at the top of the market. So we looked at the top of the funnel, and we said, how many Indians can we cater to? There are 10% of this country, unfortunately, it's a very, very spore metric. 10% of this country controls about 40 or 43% of the wealth. The bottom 5% of this country controls, the bottom 40% of this country controls only 5% of the wealth. And then there is this emerging middle class whose definition nobody knows. We are very optimistic people. So everybody has a new definition of this middle class. So how do you actually make money with this middle class? For me, the middle class, what I see is your driver who used to get paid $6,000, $7,000.  I'm extremely happy for this group of people. But this, to my mind, is a big sea change because they're spending better money on healthcare, on putting their kids to better, he doesn't want his kid to be a driver for better education and better food on the table. And I think this is where we've got to cater all our strength and energy and effort into. So the view that we take of the world is the top seven markets is where we get all our business from. We are now focusing on the next 28 and the next 60, even though we're present in 650 cities and towns. That's one view that you take, that can you do something better? Do you get to newer cinemas? Are we present in as many cinemas? Are we making our proposition more valuable for the person without giving cashbacks and discounts? Of course we give cashbacks and discounts for new users, lock them down. See if you can get a new user. Can you do recency and frequency? Can you create a base of superstars which is your loyal customers, which is about 15% of our customers giving you 60, 70% of your revenue? And while retaining that base, can you still get to the new users? And of course, keeping your costs low. We still scrape the bottom of the barrel by having black and white printers in our office. I mean, we're still an invested company which is still growing at about 50, 60% year on year. It slowed down, we used to grow at 200% but we're still growing at 50, 60% at this scale. Having said that, I think the other way to look at it is can you go a little more horizontal? Because in India, it's very difficult to reach that customer base that quickly because there's regional languages, there's a socioeconomic challenge and there is also the problem of connectivity. GO has added 170 million subs in the last one year but up until then, the number of subs that were there in the country itself was not very large. This number will end up at about 450, 500 million over the next maybe two years. And then on top of that, you've got to have an intersection of does this person have a credit card? Do they have a debit card? Do they have net banking? You've seen WhatsApp's new integration on payments. I'm really loving sending 11 rupee to people and getting one bug back. It's just unbelievable, the user experience, the peer-to-peer. So we were the first partners of WhatsApp in India for white listing our services and now they've started payments. We're probably gonna be the first there. So I think as you solve for these problems, the penetration will take time. We're certainly at the cusp over the next five or 10 years and then you will need to just wait it out and just stay the course for a long period of time. The other thing that we've actually done is slightly go slightly horizontal. The metric we looked at and said, look, we have a frictionless transaction and why should we create more friction? I don't know if you guys have realized in 19 years, book my show has never asked you for your email ID, mobile number, asked you to register what's your name, your mother's name, your father's name, what's your gender, how many times you go out to eat. No questions, no F connect. Only at the time when you wanna buy a ticket, we ask you for your email ID and mobile number.  Do you buy kids movies? Do you buy adult content? Do you buy family content? Do you go for concerts, venues? I don't need to know anything else. We drop a cookie, we analyze your data through that. We don't ask you for more data because it creates friction.  It's pretty annoying, isn't it? So as we looked at the business and we said, we are catering to a frictionless transaction which is 2.8 minutes per session. Can we increase this for our consumers without creating friction? And therefore very subtly, within making a hue and cry, we added a piece called ratings. So book my show has a differential weighted average system for people who have actually bought a movie ticket or a concert ticket. And we ask you to rate that film and it's the most authentic rating and you get a very, very different weighted average. And then we have consumers who use their login and then say, I want to watch this movie or I want to go for this concert or I don't want to go for this concert. And then you have the last set of customers who just wants to come and vote. And then you have the critics who we give a very, very low weighted average in the book my show system which gives you the most authentic and valuable rating system that we have built within book my show. It's giving us a lot of recency frequency and it's giving us a lot of time spent on the application. The other thing that we did was when people come, they just want more information about actors, actresses, they want to know a little bit more about directors. And we added an IMDB equivalent called IEDB, again without naming it anything, within book my show and we've got 60,000 profiles again to increase engagement of people coming on the site and coming more often. We used to get people once a month, we made it once a fourth night, we made it once a week and now our metric is three times a week and 6.9 minutes per session. Then we looked at this problem and said, you know there's SEC, we're very good with the SEC, A and B, 32 plus, can be catered to the 24 to 32, can be catered to the 18 to 24 and can we go to B and C? So we said, you know what? Maybe music is the conduit to getting to these people. And therefore book my show launched a jukebox which is within the app and what we've done over there is increased our recency, frequency and time spent and getting to newer audiences who probably don't have a debit card, don't have a credit card, but maybe have a geo connection on 303 bucks, one GB of data a day and they just want to listen to music. And so it's not a playlist, it's just a streaming app. And what it's giving us, we've got a data science team which is sitting there and analyzing this data and saying when you increase the volume of Kaigo, I now know that you like Kaigo or similar genres of music or similar artists. And so now with that I know, can I get that live event into the market? I don't know how many Bob Dylan fans, maybe all of you are Bob Dylan fans looking at the age profile here or CCR or Jefferson airplane, but I want to know how many Kings of Leon fans do you have in Delhi and can I get Kings of Leon to India? And so when we looked at 18 years of data, we said, let's build a live division. So we just finished Ed Sheeran, we did AR Rehman, a four city tour, we're in the middle of an Arjeet Singh Tensei tour. We've signed Saktasolay for five years. Don't tell anyone, Saktasolay for five years in India. We're the producers for Disney, we're doing Aladdin and we're getting Disney on Ice, Peppa Pig and Shota Beam. We're just going after the kids category again, everything which is 18 to 24 and can be catered to the 24 to 32. So this live division, given the data that we have, given the digital reach that we have, given the music reach and everything that we're doing, the superstar program, the recency frequency and first time users is looking to see how much can we stretch the dollar in the top seven, the next 60 and the rest of the market. So businesses are built by solving these real problems about thinking deeply about how you can better yourself and looking inward. It's not about going and seeing if I can eat somebody else's lunch. The easiest way in India to build a digital business without actually going through the fuss is taking a 50 rupee note, getting some investor money, standing outside the gate of ITC and start handing out 50 rupee notes. You'll have 2 million customers by the time this night ends. That's not the way you actually build a loyal customer base. And before I end, I think it's very, very close to our heart is the altruism. In India, we can solve so many problems. It's just not the problem in terms of valuation, profits and revenue that you can solve for yourself. I looked around us and I said, what are we doing? Are we doing right by the people that work for us and the people that we cater to?  We turn around and said, let's give medical care to everybody. No copay funded by the company. And now this comes to the heart of the problem. Even though we scrape the bottom of the barrel, do we make money in e-commerce? Or we don't make money. If there's competition, sometimes our 20 crore budget annually on advertising sometimes jumps to 20 crores a month and we can blow up 100, 120 crores in the blink of an eyelid. But in spite of that, we run a medical program in the company, which is yourself, one spouse if you have to tucked away your problem, two kids and a set of parents. So we pay up and down, not just up or down. We also started a pure term life plan from two years ago. Then three years ago, I asked the guy serving me in the office and I said, look, what do you eat? And he said, I eat 20 rupees worth of food. And I said, what do you mean? So he says, my diet is defined by 20 bucks. It's six bananas or two varapaus or bhajiya. And I said, how is it even right? So I played Robin Hood and we started a food program in the company without impacting the bottom line or the PNL. So we get a meal for 75 bucks, but we get everybody in the company to pay 125 rupees for that meal.  I'm not a religious person. I've never been to a temple except for archeological reasons. I find it bizarre when on Mahashevratri, people are pouring one liter of milk on Shiva's ling when there's a poor child outside. Having said that, we started something in the company where we said, look, I'm not religious, but the Gita actually talks about Krishna's discourse to Arjun on the battlefield. Basically, Krishna was a cheat. He kept the sun up. He told Karuna, Arjun, the weak spot of Karuna. And basically the lesson to be learned over there, the end is important, not the means.  And I could have made an opt-in, but from my advertising days, I realized that there's a key which most advertisers put, which is times New Roman six font or eight font or something. So this whole one rupee, which is an opt-out instead of an opt-in, is times New Roman eight or six. So you don't even miss it. You miss it. 70% of our customers actually miss it. We're collecting one, one, one rupee, and we collect 10 crores a year from you guys and build great karma for a lot of you. We sell the double amputee, we send the double amputee kids to the Pan Am Games, who won the silver medal. We support the Jharkhand girls in soccer, 300 of them annually, which is Yuba, and six of them went to play at the Royal Sociodad, a UEFA one-level coaching, along with Real Madrid, and they went to meet 60,000 fans. We call kids from orphanages and cancer society to a movie. Every time a movie releases, without any PR or fanfare, get an actor at that time, because they're like mushrooms.  And then when you have an ISL game, an IPL, which is now around the corner, we take one day with our teams and get all the janitorial and the security staff and replace them by paying for their salary for that one day and get them to watch a game and give them food for that day and get them to watch the game because otherwise they're just cleaning toilets. And I think if we as business leaders and as media people don't do this and if we don't draw from society, create value for ourselves and give back, it doesn't matter if we're profitable or we're loss making, we're definitely at a loss for life. Thank you very much. Well, I think that deserves another round of applause there, ladies and gentlemen. What a fashion and the kind of entrepreneurial zeal there. Thank you so much indeed for joining us. I'm going to invite Laura Balsara, who's the executive director with Madison World, to please come on stage and present a token of gratitude to Mr. Ashish Hemrajani. What a great presentation indeed, I totally agree. Thank you once again.


I just love work. Office is pretty laid back. Cool tie, cool shirt. Show me tie, cool shirt. Fair part about the job. Snacks at the office. How much my CEO made. He's such a cool guy. Pitbull played at our last office party. When is my son's playoff game? It was all worth it. Because I was at the party and the gifts. Kind of the local troll on the slide. Funny guy. Around the office. Silly hat. The only benefit I need. Cool shirt. Is coming to work, everybody.  I was already there. I haven't had a raise in 12 years. My work is just so fulfilling. There's a dog at my office.


Hi. So first of all, I would like to know how many of you are developing apps that are targeted at Indian audience? That's a good number. So how many of you support up to Android, really old version of Android, maybe 2.3? How many languages do you support? Three. So what here I'm going to talk about is how, so there are two things I am going to talk about. One, how you can accept input in the local language. And another is that how can you develop an app which you can support, really old version, and not just three, you can support all official languages in India. So this is an old version of Android. And this is Canada Wikipedia. If you go to Canada Wikipedia, this is how you see. So this is one of the real problems you might face if you try to develop an app. And then you will say that, OK, I can embed font and I can overcome this issue in my app. So if you try to embed, this is how it will look. If you can read Malayalam, you can see that the rendering is not proper. Even if you embed a font, the characters are not rendering properly.  I have a set of languages and they're like in the local character. You can see how many your fonts are supporting. I can show you some samples. So this is Moto G1 and Android 5.1 version. You can see that some of the languages are supported. Gujarati is missing, Oriya is missing, Punjabi is missing, and a few more languages are missing. At the same time, this is Sony. So they're supporting Gujarati, but Gujarati and Punjabi are supporting. But Oriya is missing and Santali is missing. This is Galaxy Note 5. They have almost all except Santali. So you can see more screenshots in this URL. It's a good job. We are trying to collect as much screenshots as we can. And OK, so then you would ask, why do I need to support all the versions of Android? So this is from an app which is targeted in the Indian audience. You can see that Android 4.4 and 4.2 are still the most popular OS which is right now in India. And the screenshots I showed is in Android 5.1. So if Android 5.1 support is bad, then you can expect how worse it is in 4.4 and 4.2. And also, if you try to make a map by supporting newer versions, you will get comments like this. No Malayalam support, no Oriya language is not available, Gujarati is not supporting, or some will be specific to the phone itself or manufacturer itself. Here, this app is getting a lot of reviews on Huawei devices saying that it's not working in them. And also, people are really emotional about this. And so let's go to history of Android and how Indic support came in Android. So Hindi support was there in Android for a long time. But Hindi is not the only language in India. There are 22 official languages. And one of the main problem was a lot of languages are complex, and they are using complex script. And the rendering engine, which was in the Android, was not supporting it. Because of that, even if you embed phone with your app, it won't render properly for every single device that is up there. And the new rendering engine, half-bus-ng, was introduced in 4.2, which fixed a lot of these rendering issues. And Google also came up with a set of fonts called Autostans. If you can read, I don't think you can read. So the screenshot above is from 4.4. The number of fonts supported in fonts that is for Indian and other non-Latin languages were very less. And when you come to 5.0, which is below, you can see that the improvement they did in 5.0. Mostly because of the number of fonts they added in Autostans. And if you develop Android app for Indian languages, these are the main challenges you will face. Lack of fonts, even if the official Android supports it, some manufacturer will choose not to support it. The same version of Android will be having two different ways. And also, input method support. So recently, we started seeing a lot of new input methods coming for non-Hindi languages. And also, as I said, rendering issues. Rendering is the most important issue you will face. And also, application size, a lot of applications that are targeted in India cannot go more than maximum 10 MB. Because the memory which manufacturers are giving for these low end fonts are very low. And you can install only maybe a couple of apps. After that, it will be over. And here, we have a project called Indic Project. We are trying to solve a lot of these issues, not just for Android. This is overall Android and desktop and all other mobile. So we have keyboard for Android. It's called Indic Keyboard. Then, Warnum is another input method. It's for desktop and it's C-based transliteration library. Then there is a keyboard for Firefox OS. Then we have other projects, Journey and iBus, which are helping in accessibility. And we have another project called Grandum, which is for bibliography. And for developers, we have two projects called LibIndic and LibIndic SDK. LibIndic is a Python-based library, which will act as a REST library in web. And you can use that to support Indian languages in your desktop apps. And it's called Indic Keyboard. So Indic Keyboard is a keyboard project, which we started almost two years back. Now we have about 300,000 downloads. It was one of the most popular Indian language input method till a few days back when Google changed their Google Hindi input method to the same name. And now they're ranking first. And so this was something which was not there when I submitted this talk. And now I have to show this. Because of that, I added one more slide, just comparing the difference between Google's Indic Keyboard and our Indic Keyboard. Google's is proprietary, and it supports 11 Indian languages and English 12 languages. And also it has 23 layouts. We have 23 languages and 55 layouts. And these are the languages we support, Assamese Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi. And along with all these, since this app became really popular, we got requests from other parts of the world to add their language. One came from Burma saying that we want Mon and Burmese. And we added that. Then Arabian countries, people say that we want to type in both Indian language and Arabic. So we added Arabic support. Tamil people came. We want Singhalese. So we added Singhalese like that. Not all of them are Indian languages because of this. Like people wanted to type in India. People who are abroad, and they want to type in Indian language and their language. So then, yeah, like the app, we were facing the issue lack of phones and all these rendering issues. The initial reviews which are short is for our input method. People are really emotional about it. And the solution we made was we extended Android's ASP keyboard. And we added 20 plus languages, 50 plus layout, and made it free and open source. Also, a lot of people complained that we can't trust you. So we then removed internet permission just to get there. Then dictionary was another issue. So a lot of these languages didn't have dictionary which we can use it for the keyboard. So we need dictionary to show suggestions when I use a type. These are some of the layouts. If you install the app, you can go to language set, and you can see this. And this is the layouts which we have. We have in four categories, oneness, transliteration. It is pretty straightforward. If you type an English word which sounds to a local language, it will convert into that language. Here, I am typing wiki, and it is converting to wiki, and it is suggesting other words which are related to wiki. And another layout is called compact, which where we try to fit all the characters in one layer so that if you see English keyboard layout, there are two layers, one capital letter layer and small letter layer. In compact layout, in Indian languages, it is difficult to fit everything in one layer. The compact layouts are trying to overcome that issue. What we are trying to do is in long press, we show more characters. If it is ka, then the characters which are related to ka will be in long press. Another is phonetic, which is, phonetic is pretty much straightforward. We place similar sounding character in the place of that English character. For example, in place of a, there will be a character which sounds same in that particular language. And another one is in script. We didn't have it initially because it is not optimized for mobile. This is the, in script is a standard introduced by government of India for desktop layouts. And we had to stop support because a lot of people who are coming from desktop, they wanted to type in the same format they are used to in the desktop. And for transliteration, what we did is there's a popular library called jQuery. I mean, this is for web. We had a Java port, and we then later converted it into Android port, which we integrated into Android ASP keyboard. Then we were able to introduce transliteration. And also for dictionary, we didn't have dictionary. And also for suggestion, what we needed was we needed priority. So if you type a word, the words which are showing are based on priority. So for that, what we did is we wrote a custom script, which will take dump of Wikipedia database in that particular language. For example, Hindi Wikipedia dump is taken. And then this script, which will create priority based on the frequency a particular word is appearing in that language. And this app is available in both Google Play and Android. And so for developers, if you are interested in contributing, you can contribute by adding layouts. You can add more languages. Also, you can help in documenting. And for end users, you can contribute us by helping in testing all these layouts. So one of the problems which we are facing is a lot of these layouts are generated by people who doesn't speak that language. So there might be some issues that came just because of that. So for that, what we did is we used Unicode character details every single character. We had to look at the Unicode database and understand the key. So in that process, we might have missed some characters or some parts. So you can let us know by testing it. And also, if you are a developer, you can go to our GitHub or GitLab website and look at the issues tab. You can see the issues which are there. So right now, there are some layouts which we want to add. And there are some issues that are reported by users. So if you are interested, you can go out there and fix it. We tagged it based on difficulty. So if you are a beginner, you can look at any of the issues which is tagged as beginners. And if you are interested in compiling, I would suggest to clone the repo and then go to Java folder inside that. We use Gradle for compiling. It's a pretty good way if you are using command line. Straightforward, like if you're comfortable with Gradle, you can use the keyboard, compile the keyboard. Second part is that libindic.stga. This is something which is targeted at developers who are facing the problem of supporting all the Indian languages. So also another problem is that there aren't many free and open source libraries available. There are some companies working on a similar project, but it is proprietary and closed source. And the solution we have is we have 15 plus language computing algorithms which are targeted at Indian languages. And some of them are language detection, cross-language search, script rendering. And you can see all the libraries. If you go to this URL, all the libraries are open source. And this is one of the library, which is called script renderer. Here I am opening our demo app which we created. So here I am opening it in the same mobile, which I showed initially, where Canada was not rendering properly. If you look at the table on the right side, it is a default rendering from the OS. And the middle part is the rendering if you use the rendering library in Indiclib. And we have a demo app. And these are the current libraries which we have. And use cases of this is like, if you want to support all the version, you can use the library. Or if you want to input, if you want user to input on your app and doesn't want user to install a custom keyboard, then you can do this. The language input, we have a transliteration library. So if user types in English, it will, in the text box itself, it will convert automatically. Then rendering, if you want to show a content, if you use a particular view from the library, it will auto render, all languages will be supported. And if you want to use this in app, you can add directly add in Gradle. It's like this. So here I am trying to add transliteration library. SDK common and SDK render are the dependency for transliteration. So I can show you demo of, this is a SDK demo app which we created. So if you type, so the transliteration input can be taken in two ways. One is an like normal edit text view where you can take the input and on button press it will convert into whatever language you selected. You can select all these languages. Or you can have something like auto translation. If you look at the bottom text view, whatever I type, it will automatically translate. You don't need to, so this is a phone which doesn't have the Malalam or any Indian language in it. It doesn't have phone, it phone doesn't support proper rendering. And here, this text view, it auto converts whenever you type something. And it's not just, you can also edit a text. So whatever I type, you can press back, press, and edit it. And the library is Fortune where, like Fortune cookie, you will get Fortune messages in local language. Here we have for Tamil and Malayalam. And this is the demo app for Renderer. Here is a rendering. And these are the languages in text box. It is working. I can edit. And also you can, if you have a custom word, you can enter it here and output to whatever size you want. Suppose if you want to use transliteration in your app, you can import it in dependencies of your build out graded file. And then in layout, instead of a normal edit text view, you can add a libindic edit text view and add these two extra keys, transliteration, target language, and text output to. So if you are interested in contributing, because all these SDKs which we created are still in somewhat beta stage, because we are still waiting for developers to adopt it and make use in their app. So you can use it in your app and give us feedback. You can also use it and find bugs and let us know. And also you can contribute additional algorithms, like we have 15 algorithms right now. You can contribute additional algorithms. And if you want to build it on your machine, you can clone the libindic SDK Git repo and do normal gradle. You can do assemble debug over to assemble build. So if you do assemble build in SDK repo, you will get an output in demo app, demo folder. You will get an APK. So these are the things which we did. Now we would like Google to use a few things in Naio's P, so that all the manufacturers will support, the language support in all devices will be same for a particular Android version. So whenever if you want to introduce Google Apps in your device, manufacturers have to do a CTS test. So Google can, it's an easy task. They can add a language test in it. It can be, in that case, all the manufacturers with a particular version will have consistent support, which is not there. Maybe I'm wrong, but I looked at the CTS code. It was not there. And also the support libraries like we created, the render library, we would like to see similar libraries from Google and ASP. Yeah, that's all. If you have any questions, you can ask. Explain a little more about how the script renderer works. So what we did is we cross-compiled half-busNG. And we compiled it along with the SDK. And we wrote the JNIL error so that all the Java code rendering call will go to half-bus. And we generate image and give it back as output. Can we use it for offline? Yeah, yeah. All this is running in offline. And did you even check out how many devices it actually supports? It should support up to 2.0 of Android, 2.2 of Android. But we didn't test it much. And you guys actually can do one thing. Like in ASP, you can provide your lib. And you can submit your code to ASP. I'm sure Google can now take power from there. I know pushing something there is actually a big headache. And I have gone through. I can understand your pain as well. For the libindig SDK, since you're supporting so many languages, is it possible for me to get a fork for only a set of languages, like if I only want to support Hindi and Tamil? Because you'll keep adding languages in that increase, maybe increase the size of the library. One thing is that all these SDKs, for example, if you want to use only renderer, you can use only renderer. You don't need to use all the libraries. So from there, you can do a stripped-down version of it. So you don't need to use everything from Maven Central. You can clone the code and remove whatever you don't want. And when you build, add it as a dependency project, and then you can build. Is there a chance that you will add it in your own Maven repo for these folks? Where? Is there a chance? Are you planning to add these folks in your own Maven repo so that it's not that loud? Yeah. It's a good idea. We'll think about it. I had a question. Thanks for your talk. This is really quite impressive. You mentioned that still edit the Indian text, even if the platform didn't support it. So you had that custom class for edit text. Could you give a bit more detail on how you achieve that, how you can still edit it and do backspaces, even if the platform doesn't support it? Some details would be really valuable. Like deleting it from the middle is still a little bit tricky. But if you can go to the end of the word or starting of the word, but middle of the word, now it is tricky. It's not supported. What else are you asking? Do you render directly into the? So we have our own custom text edit view. That is doing all this thing in the background. I'll go directly onto the rectangles. So is your library completely text-based or is there any voice support? Like voice support for regional dialects, sir? No, no voice support. It's a really different problem. You need a lot of data inputs and all this. It's a complex problem. We have plenty time for more questions. So whatever the factors you have taken care of, since definitely we are going to use as a library or as an AR file. So definitely you have taken some factors or considered so that there is no lagging of performance issue or something like that. So we are not in a stage where we can benchmark and improve performance because we are still waiting for developers to adopt it. We are not seeing many developers using it in their app. So it's not the right time to go and improve the performance. So what is the size like? So this SDK, the demo app is 9MB. It has all the 15 libraries. It is 9MB. We do have time for more questions. OK. So thank you, Dishnu, for the talk. And so you just got feedback farms. We really value what the audience thinks every year about our editions of DroidCon. Please fill out the feedback farms. And there's a lot of questions.


everything from the Baroque to renaissance to mannerism to the Edward Hopper's. I didn't see it at first because I was looking for something completely different in these images. But as people started telling me this, I started seeing it. So I went to the Met and I looked around and not being a student of art history. I don't have the academic knowledge, but I was looking for something different. I was looking for how does the light rake across the canvas and is that my light? So when I started this new series, I used that knowledge of not only critical analysis of my own work by others, but I used my trips to the Met. And one thing I did see immediately with this new work with the workers was that I had to use an oval. And it was a very tough decision to make because it's an extraordinary statement, an oval. It has a lot of connotations. Part of the motivation behind this particular series was I wanted to illustrate and show us the people that build the palaces for the neighbors. So I started looking in neighboring buildings and buildings up and down the street and out of the neighborhood and looking through glass and seeing workers. It came to me that it was a noble profession. How is nobility shown in many, many paintings and through history is through the oval. So I turned the tables in a way that the neighbors who were wealthy inhabitants of New York City were relegated to a very harsh geometric container and the workers were awarded the oval. When I started the neighbors series, I had a large lens and was looking through to the neighbors windows. It wasn't successful. And I kept analyzing why could this not be successful. It's a beautiful vignette. It is beautifully lit. And I realized that there was no indication that I was shooting through a window. And one sunny day the light was raking across the windows and it hit every particle of dust and dirt on the glass thereby diffusing the scene behind it into an almost a painterly scene. If I focused on the dirt that this would be the secret that I was looking for. This would be a way of also flattening the planes. I didn't want dimension. I wanted it to appear as all this action was and maybe projected on a fourth of an inch plane of some sort. So the long lens helped with that because that kind of foreshortens and then focusing on the glass further reduced the depth of the action so that it all again appeared as though it was happening as though it was imbued in the glass. It was to me like photographing staying glass. It was almost that, I shudder to say religious experience, but it was an experience that gave everybody and especially the workers all my subjects again nobility a grandeur because it suddenly became bigger than a photo.


The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to recognize the importance of complex systems in the natural sciences. This editorial provides a summary of the opinions of the editors of the journal JPHYS Complexity on the Achievements, Challenges, and Future Prospects of the Field. Each editor's perspective is distinguished by their own unique thoughts and ideas on the topics discussed. The result is a comprehensive overview of the field of complexity science, providing insight into its current state and potential future directions. This article was authored by Genestra Bianconi, Alex Arenas, Jacob Biament, and others.


Because it's time to go to the front, let's go. Six in the morning, I'm moaning. Who says that? Los Angeles, we're here at YouTube, what's up? Workout day, man. Gotta film a little bit with the one and only Barquan. We're in LA for the weekend. Hopefully gonna vlog out some fitness stuff, vlog out some, we got a concert to go to, which is so exciting for me. I love music, if you guys follow me anywhere. Here a little bit, but we can't share our music love as much because we'll get in trouble by DMCA.  And that's actually, I think a big part of me and Bart's friendship is our taste of music, but our genuine love and vibration of music. We both play a little music, but we absolutely relate on many levels as a musician and artist. So the fit, you know how we do. The old Third Street Gym Exclusive, you could only get this at the gym back in the day, but sold out now, apologize, damn. Just me and these, fuck, these delts are coming.  Reebok ventilators, one of my favorite OG models that not a lot of people know about or not a lot of people wear because they don't retro them a lot. I don't know why. I don't know why they're in the vault, but comfy, kinda old school runner. The good company, Americana. Still one of my favorite logos. I say still, meaning it's only been out a week. It might be gone, if not, it might be up on 3SB, I have no idea.  We're filming at 645 or seven. Catch you in the gym, let's get it. Back home, Barbara Brigade, early morning workouts man. I think we're gonna be in LA a little bit more than what I've been the last two years. Obviously the last two years been weird, starting the gym and everything else going on. Yeah, I think we're gonna be down here more, maybe once a month again. I know a lot of y'all think I live in LA, I don't. I live in Sacramento, that's where my gym is. There's your Barbara. We're off to the city I love, but the family's down here, man. So, even the family multiple places. So, gotta see Bart more, lift a little bit. Haven't overhead pressed in two years, but Bart's overhead pressing for some reason, so I'm trying to keep up. We got this, a quick shower and then we're running, J.K. News, it's probably actually a bad day to vlog, I'll probably throw it all weekend in one, cause J.K. News, we're shooting 20 videos in one day. So, two or three videos here at Barbara Brigade, I got an hour break, grab a snack, shower, and then J.K. News, we've got 20 videos, so I can't even vlog that much, cause I'm doing it on camera the whole time, but I'm gonna try to take a long, you guys with me. It was week then too. What was I actually saying? You're saying I could try to win this for five, as well dude. How are we getting five? Five we could do. Five and then we got one more five. Chris said my quads got small. Let's measure these things, huh? Nah, it's only five inches, it's plenty. What if I do this? To this pot cup, it comes off. Here we go. Every day. Oh really? Yeah, we go prime. Why are you smiling? Cause it's time to go prime. Oh, that's gotta be serious. Let's go.  This is gonna make me do, that's pretty big man. 18 and a half, wait a minute. Workout over sadly, like when trips go so crazy, you don't get to do everything perfectly. I normally do cardio today, probably one at a time. I'll just chug coffee, wash the calories, and keep going. Is Barbara Walters here to interview me? Bart, is that where Walters? Bart's here at Walters? You don't even know who Barbara Walters is on there. That's crazy dude, that's an icon. That's a woman. A singer right? A singer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.