Month: March 2016

Request for app: Arnab Goswami debate talk time distribution tracker

I bumped across The Newshour on Times Now today after a really long time. It is still _really_ hard to watch. Amazed at the longevity of this format (I presume it is doing very well)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard of Arnab Goswami and his antics. Basically if you like to watch people shouting at each other, and see one self-aggrandising man trying to pass himself off as a force for righteousness, then this is the show you need to watch. Arnab Goswami has spawned many memes, and he is famously known as the man who knows what India wants to know.

Anyway, a brilliant app idea struck me while watching. Would be really glad if someone builds it. I think it might be pretty useful <I’m being serious>. So here goes..

What if you could get real time metrics on a debate. Suppose you are watching the newshour, and you could pull out your phone, launch the app and see something like this –

debate time tracker v1

Or maybe even this –

debate time tracker v2

The red indicates time spent shouting or multiple people talking in illegible debate etc. We could also measure decibel levels. I’ve noticed how they keep controlling the volume on the newshour depending on whose voice they want the loudest.

Of course this could be done for other news programs as well. But since the idea came from watching newshour, I want to call it the Arnab Goswami debate talk time distribution tracker. If Arnab funds it, hell I’ll build it myself.

What do you think? Does India want to know debate metrics? What are the other metrics we could track, apart from talk time?

A swing and a miss

This is a follow up to the post – For fun and exploration. I made the following graph in that post –

impact_vs_fun

So there’s good news and bad news. Bad news first –

Assume that Fliptrazon was the golf ball in the above gif. This is exactly what happened when I took a swing at it. So, it seems that Fliptrazon has been forever ordained to the mildly fun and pointless category. No real startup coming out of it.

The good news is I didn’t waste too much time and money on it. I was able to make an MVP, test my hypothesis, try it out on a few known and a few unknown customers and get a reasonable idea of whether or not to make this a full time business (The business part of Fliptrazon was a b2b product). If anyone is interested, I could write a separate post on what I was trying to do with the b2b product and why I thought it did not work out etc.

Anyway, I plan to keep it up and running, now that we’ve built it. It does not cost much to keep it up. And a number of users have started using it fairly regularly as the coupon search engine part of Fliptrazon has some strong user retention. We also made an app which we’ll put up on the play store shortly, which will make it a lot more easier to try out coupons if you’re on Android.

On that note, I’ll go back to trying to figure out what to do next! Cheers.