What Siri can do, But she is not ..!!

1. Voice Differentiation - Primarily this mean, Only I can open my Voice mails by commanding to Siri. Siri will determine there is no one but his master is commanding to open the Voice mails. We dreamt of an future where password will be replaced by your voice and specific commands. Pitch recognition will add lot many things, which Siri is not doing right now.

This can give an edge to remember securely sensitive information to Siri.

2. Siri, please answer my Phone calls - as Siri is my personal assistant , She can take up the calls. On my behalf, and instead of the boring Voice mail , Siri can provide some useful info to the caller, or I can tel l Siri to give different messages to different group like Friends, Family and Office.

A tale of Airtel's logo: branding, re-branding, un-branding?

A brand’s successfulness is not largely dependent on logo but on its people and products, but brand’s acceptance and popularity is dependent on its logo, tagline.

The responses on Airtel new logo is such we can barely say ‘mixed response’. Fonearena’s poll of 1300 people, where only 35% liked it and whooping 51% disliked new logo.

Large number of people on Twitter found the logo non appealing, missed the old connect feeling with brand. On Twitter you find some very strong discontent and very funny rant on the logo.

Airtel explained this new logo as part of launching a global campaign that would re-brand its operations across the world. Airtel said logo represents dynamism and the warm and friendly appeal of Airtel.

So here are few questions which likely to pop in every one’s mind?

1. Why this logo and re-brand exercise?

2. How this logo represents the global re-branding of Airtel?

Before getting in much detail on these questions, let’s have quick facts on Airtel.

· India’s No.1 cellular service provider company

· Reached 200 million customers across globe

· Acquired Zain Telecom and pacing in Africa Operations,

higher priority for Africa Operations as the market

So lets find difference between two Airtel logos.

This logo has ‘Airtel’ written in specifically designed type face. And how you identify this logo without ‘Airtel’ text is its color code “Red, White and Black”.

New Logo:

This logo has a symbol of something which all are trying to decipher. (I have contacted Robert Langdon to give more details on the same J)

Here also there is specifically designed type face for ‘Airtel’ text. But n this logo if I remove the text, I still identify the logo from its ‘symbol’.

Quick summary:

Can we say new logo will helpful to re-brand Airtel?

I think, YES. Countries in which Airtel is expanding its operations, the old logo with ‘Airtel’ in English typeface can be a barrier for the brand recognition.

And a new logo, which is based on symbol, will certainly be more recognizable globally.

It is always preferable to create brand logos Language independent, and independent of intellectual. [ In my CAPTCHA research if the puzzles have shapes instead of English Characters, humans are comfortable to solve it and don't feel annoyed on CAPTCHA puzzles]

In a nutshell, a brand logo should be something ‘Ishaan Awasthi’ can understand, ‘John Dalton’ can identify at any time.

Concluding with few questions:

Which technology company’s logo is by far most favorite of all? [My personal favorite brand ..! ]

And which popular logo brings naughty smile to your face? [I see lot of gray market t-shirts with this logo.]

Both companies don’t use any type face in their logo, and that is a powerful brand logo, language independent, intellectual level independent and universal.

Old Airtel logo and tune has strong branding and bonding with people. New logo and tune is facing bad critics.! Will this re-branding ultimately be un-branding for Indian customers ? Share your thoughts.

Finally,

Popular brands make logos popular not vice versa!!

Expressed views are not intended to favor any of the brand or organization mentioned in the post. You can reach me at @desaiguddu.

A part of this post appeared on Pixelonomics, in an excellent article Airtel has a new Logo. Heart it? Thanks to @sparklinGuy, a discussion which gave inspiration to me to write this article .!

Twitter and Spiders

I kinda find some unusal thing on Twitter from past few days.

And to be more precisely a pattern of spam messages on twitter.

Sending the Direct Messages as a spam is any how not working for spammers. But they have come up with some fresh and new ideas Kudos.

Last night I was searching for Commonwealth Games and other trending topic Laxman, to my surprise with the normal tweets I continually see the same viagra tweets coming. Its interesting as the spammers find a good way to place there spam ads where they surely get noticed.

But bigger concern is should Twitter put some mechanism to stop this, as these are the bots who were posting the tweets but they won't be recognized as the bots are sending the spams with different Trending topics and different messages alltogather.

So here are the interesting questions.!

How can this annoying spammers be recognized , as what they are posting is completely fine in terms of twitter posting but certainly its a spam.

Twitter at any point of time is not introducing the CAPTCHA in its ecosystem.

How exactly this appears on the search screen of twitter :

http://awesomescreenshot.com/07e22ylca

Although still very small amount of bots are posting spams with trending topics.But happy that people are designing good bots and spiders to take maximum benefit of any thing ? Hopefully they can sell more products with the help of trending topics.