technology – Page 3 – Pertinent Observations

Explaining UPI

I just paid my cook his salary for November. Given the cash crunch, I paid him through a bank transfer, using IMPS. Earlier today, my wife had asked him for his account details (last month I’d paid him on his wife’s account).

An hour back he sent me his account details (including account number and IFSC) via WhatsApp. I had to wait till I got home and got access to my laptop (Citibank app doesn’t let you add payees on mobile banking).

I get home, log in to Citibank Online. Add payee, which includes typing his bank account number twice. Get SMS asking me to confirm payee addition. I authorise payee. And after all this I am able to finally do the transfer – and I expect him to have got his money already.

For a long time I was wondering what the big deal with UPI was, given that IMPS is already fast enough. Having finally tried UPI earlier this week (it’s finally coming to iOS, but only available on ICICI now. And the implementation so far sucks, since you need to pull out your debit card for two factor authentication – defeating the point of UPI. I’m told it’s better on Android), I realise how much easier and safer the transaction would’ve been.

Firstly, the cook needn’t have sent me his account number. All I would need was his virtual payment address. I would then open my UPI app (in my case, iMobile) and click on “send money”. And then I’d add his virtual ID there, following which his name would appear. Two or three more clicks, and entering my PIN code, the transfer would be done.

No bank account number. Not even a mobile number or an email ID. Just a random string of characters would allow me to transfer money to him! And later I could give him my UPI ID, and next month onwards he could simply send me a request via UPI for his salary. And two clicks later it would be done!

Mint has reported that there are massive delays in merchants installing point of sale devices in response to the cash ban. Banks should instead seek to acquire merchants to accept money via UPI. It’s simple, it’s quick and it protects privacy.

In fact, if the bank sales staff now have bandwidth, it can be argued that all the planets have aligned for UPI to take off for merchant payments – people have less cash, point of sale devices are not available, and both merchants and shoppers have shown openness to cashless payments, and there is a push from the government.

If only the banks can bite…

Siri Apps

So now that Apple has opened up Siri to third party developers (starting with iOS 10), I hope that app makers make use of this features clearly.

There are some apps, for example, that require inputs from time to time. My wife, for example, recently downloaded an app to track our daughter’s inputs and outputs.

The problem was that each time our daughter either input or output something, my wife had to unlock her iPhone, go to this app, and then use 3/4 more clicks to enter the necessary information. The complexity was so much that within a day she (wife) had stopped using it, and presently uninstalled the app.

This kind of app that needs frequent inputs seems ideally placed to get Siri integration. Imagine saying “Hey Siri. My baby just shat”, and the app gets immediately updated, and stuff. Given how powerful Siri already is, I don’t see any technical challenge in implementing this. The challenge, though, is on the product front, for apps to be able to use this judiciously.

PS: I just updated my laptop to MacOS Sierra, and so now have Siri on my Mac as well. only problem is that Siri on phone is so much more responsive than Siri on Mac. So when I want to call the Mac Siri, the phone Siri responds first, annoying me!

Big data at HDFC Bank?

I had a bit of a creepy moment today – I must admit that, despite being a “data guy” and recommending clients to use data to make superior decisions (including customisations), it does appear creepy when you as a customer figure that your service provider has used data to customise your experience.

I’m in Barcelona, and wanted to withdraw cash from my Citibank account in India. Withdrew once, but when I wanted to withdraw more, the transaction didn’t go through (this happened multiple times, at multiple ATMs).

Frustrated, I figured that this might be due to some limits (on how much I could transact per day), and then decided to get around the limitations by transferring some money to my HDFC Bank account (since I’m carrying that debit card as well).

An hour after I’d transferred the money by IMPS, I put my HDFC Debit Card in my wallet and walk out, when I see an email from the bank informing me that my Debit Card is valid only in India, and with a link through which I could activate international transactions on it.

I’d never received such emails from HDFC Bank before, so this was surely in the “creepy” category. It might have been sent to me by the bank at “random”, but the odds of that are extremely low. So how did the bank anticipate that I might want to use my debit card here, and send me this email?

I have one possible explanation, and if this is indeed the case, I would be very very impressed with HDFC Bank. Apart from my debit card, I also have a credit card from HDFC Bank, which I’ve been using fairly regularly during my time in Europe (that my only other credit card is an AmEx, which is hardly accepted in Europe, makes this inevitable).

My last transaction on this credit card was to pay for lunch today, and so if HDFC Bank is tracking my transactions there, it knows that I’m currently in Europe (given the large number of EUR transactions recently, if not anything else).

Maybe the bank figured out that if I’m abroad, and have transferred money by IMPS (which implies urgency) into my account, then it is for the purpose of using my debit card here? And hence they sent me the email?

The counterargument to this is that this is not the first time I’ve IMPSd to my HDFC Bank account during this trip – the Income Tax and Service Tax websites don’t accept Citibank, so I routinely transfer to HDFC to make my tax payments. So my argument is not watertight.

Yet, if the above explanation as to why HDFC Bank guessed I was going to use my debit card is true, then there are several things that HDFC Bank has got right:

Linkage between my bank account and credit card. While I’ve associated both with the same customer ID, my experience with legacy systems in Indian financial institutions means actually associating them is really impressive
Tracking of my transactions on my credit card to know my whereabouts. If HDFC has done a diligent job of this, they know where exactly I’ve been over the last few months (provided I’ve used my card in these destinations of course).
Understanding why I use my account. While I’ve IMPSd several times in the past (as explained above), it’s all been in either the “service tax season” or “advance/self-assessment income tax season”. Mid-May is neither. So maybe HDFC Bank is guessing that this time it may not be for tax reasons?
Recognising I might want to use my debit card. If I’ve put money into my account and it’s not tax season, maybe they recognised I might want to use my debit card?

Maybe I might be giving them too much credit, and it just happened that the randomly sent out email came at the time when I’d just put the money into the account.

And the link they sent to enable international transactions worked! I had to use my laptop (it didn’t work on either the app or mobile web, so that’s one point deducted for them), but with a few clicks after logging into my bank account, I was able to enable the transactions!

So maybe there is reason to be impressed!

The problem with Slack, and why it’s inferior to DBabble

When two of the organisations I’m associated with introduced me to the chatting app Slack, it reminded me of the chatting app DBabble (known to us in IIMB as BRacket) that was popular back when I was in college.

There were two primary reasons because of which Slack reminded me of DBabble. The first was the presence of forums/groups. There was a “General” that everyone in the organisation was part of, and then were other groups that you could choose to join and be a conversation in. The second was that you could not only converse on the fora, but also send personal messages to each other – something DBabble also enabled.

There are several reasons why Slack is superior to DBabble. Most importantly, you can tag people in your messages on forums and they get notified, so that they can respond – this is a critical feature for using it for work purposes.

Secondly, Slack integrates well with other tools that people use for work – such as email and a lot of development tools, for example (which one of the organisations I’m associated with uses heavily, but I’ve never got into that loop). Slack also has a very nice search feature that allows you to pull up discussions based on keywords, etc.

What Slack sorely lacks, which makes me miss DBabble like crazy, however, is threaded conversations. The conversation structure in each channel in Slack is linear – which means you can effectively have only one thread of conversation at a time.

When you have a large number of people on the channel, however, people might initiate several different threads of conversation. As things are, however, a Darwinian process means that all but one of them get unceremoniously cut out, and we end up having only one conversation.

It is also a function of whether Slack is used for synchronous or asynchronous messaging (former implies everyone replies immediately, latter means conversations can take their own time and there’s no urgency to participate immediately, like email, for example). My understanding is that the way it’s built, it can be used in both ways. My attempts to use it as an asynchronous messenger, however, have failed because some of the conversations I’ve tried to initiate have gotten buried above other conversations others on the channel have tried to start.

The problem with Slack is that it assumes that each forum will have only one active conversation at a time. Instead, if (like DBabble) it allows us to have different conversation threads, things can become a lot more efficient.

One of the nice features of forums on DBabble was that everytime you went to the forum, it would show you all the active threads by showing them in bold. DBabble allowed infinite levels of threading, and only messages that were unread (irrespective of which branch of which thread they were in) would be in bold, meaning you could follow all threads of conversation (this also proved problematic for some as we developed an OCD to “unbold” – read every single message on every forum we were part of).

Imagine how powerful threaded conversations can be at the corporate level especially when you can tag people in them – so you go to a forum, and can see all open discussions and see where your attention has been called, and contribute. Threading also means that you can carry out several different personal (1-to-1) conversations at a time without losing track of any.

It’s interesting that after DBabble (which also died after a later edition gave the option of “chat mode” which did away with threaded conversations) there has been no decent chat app that has come up that allows threaded conversations. Apart from possible bandwidth issues (which can happen when each message is suffixed with the full thread below it), I don’t see any reason this can’t be implemented!

I want my BRacket (DBabble) back. But then, chat has powerful network effects and there’s no use of me wanting a particular technology if sufficient number of other people don’t!

Blockchain and real estate

Based on the title of this blog post, you might assume this might be about Honduras, where there is a proposal to use the blockchain to store land records. The problem with Honduras is that there is no “trusted third party” – nobody even trusts the government, for example, so the best way to store land records is in a decentralised hard to tamper manner.

Over the last few days I’ve been reading up a bit on blockchain and bitcoin and how it works and so on. I haven’t yet got to the math – that it is described as “proof of work” irritates me no end (given that work should be evaluated on output rather than input).

So I see that what makes blockchain secure (apart from the miners having to agree on every transaction, and securing bunches of transactions using cryptographic hashes) is that every block contains within itself a hash of the previous blocks. In other words, the entire sequence of transactions is maintained.

The way “normal currency” (like cash) works is that only possession matters, not history. So the fact that there is a hundred rupee note in my pocket means that I can spend that money, and nobody has a track of how that hundred rupee note reached my pocket. This makes the system insecure since if a pickpocket picks this note, there is no proof (apart from possibly catching him in the act red-handed) that he picked it from my pocket.

With bitcoin, on the other hand, there is a record of how each bit of currency (no pun intended) ended up where it ended up. So even if someone were to magically “steal” my bitcoin, the historical records show that this legitimately belongs to me, and that makes it secure.

This reminds me of the paperwork involved when we bought our apartment in Bangalore last year. Normally you would imagine that a certificate indicating that the title currently rests with the current owner is enough to conduct a real estate transaction. but lawyers and bankers here are not satisfied with that.

The paperwork for the apartment I bought went back sixty odd years, when the land on which the building was built was first “allotted” by the City Improvement Trust Board. If I have to sell this apartment on, along with the certificate that I own this apartment I’ll have to furnish copies of this entire history going 60-70 years back. And the way property deals are done here, I don’t expect the system to change.

So this is what makes real estate such a prime candidate for using blockchain. Not only is a third party (such as the government department that stores land records) not trusted, it is a standard practice to include the entire history of every land or property going back several years. A sale transfers ownership, but in terms of paperwork, a layer gets added, not replaced.

This shows why real estate is such a prime candidate for moving to blockchain for storing transactions. It is ironical that a small and crime-ridden country such as Honduras is showing the way on this. It is time for countries like India to consider similar uses. But first, we will need to digitise existing records and make sure there is exactly one owner for each piece of property, and blockchain can’t help us with that challenge!

The problem with Twitter

Starting from the mid-2000s, the dominant method to consume content was to follow individual blogs through RSS Feed readers such as Bloglines or Google Reader. You followed specific blogs, most of which (unlike this one) had content on specific topics.

So when I wanted to learn up on economics, I started following Marginal Revolution and Econlog. When I wanted to follow the global financial crisis, I added Felix Salmon and a couple of other blogs (which I don’t remember now). All I needed to do to read on specific topics was to follow specific people.

And then Google Reader Shared Items happened. Now, you didn’t really need to follow specific blogs, for there was a social network where people would share interesting stuff that they read. Now you could outsource following blogs to friends who became curators. So there was this one friend who would share pretty much every interesting post on Mashable. Another shared every interesting post from this blog called The Frontal Cortex. I didn’t need to follow these blogs. My “curator friends” shared the best pieces with me (and I know people relied on me for Econlog etc.).

Then around the turn of the decade, Twitter replaced Google Reader Shared Items as the primary content discovery platform. A couple of years later, Google would decommission Reader. The thing with Twitter was that the movement from following specific ideas and sites to following “curators” was complete.

While twitter also functions as a “normal” social network, a major function is the sharing of ideas, and so everyone on twitter is essentially a curator, sharing with her followers what she wants them to read. There is also scope for adding comments here, and adding one’s opinion to the content. This adds a sort of richness to the content, and people can filter stuff accordingly, without consuming everything one’s friend has shared.

The downside, however, is that you are forced to consume the opinions and links shared by everyone you follow. There might be someone who I might be following for his curation of technology links, but it might happen that he might also tweet heavily on politics, which I’m hardly interested in. There is an option to turn off retweets (which I’ve used liberally) but even so, there is a lot of “unwanted content” you have to consume from people. And since it is “opinion first” (and link later), you are forced to consume people’s opinion even if you’re just browsing their timeline.

What we need in Twitter is a way to curate people’s opinions on topics. For example, I might be interested in Person A’s opinion on politics but not anything else. Person B might offer good opinions on economics but might be lousy on other things. Person C might be good for technology and sports. And so forth.

Of course, you can’t charge people with classifying their own tweets – that will add too much friction to the process. What you need is an intelligent process or app that can help classify people’s tweets and show you only what you want to know.

I can think of a couple of designs for the app – one could be where you could tell it not to show any more tweets from someone on a particular topic (or block a topic itself). Another is for you to upvote and downvote tweets, so that the app learns your preferences and shows you what you want.

Yet, I’m not confident that such an app will be built. The problem is that twitter has been notorious in terms of cutting off access to its API to apps built on it, or cutting permissions of what apps can see (Facebook is as guilty here). So it’s a massive challenge to get people to actually invest in building twitter apps.

Twitter as it exists currently doesn’t work for me, though. I repeatedly find the problem that there is way too much outrage on my timeline, and despite mercilessly cutting the number of people I follow, I find that it’s a slippery slope and otherwise interesting people continue to tweet about stuff that I don’t want to read about. And so my engagement is dipping.

I don’t need twitter itself to do anything about it. All they should do is to send out credible signals that they’ll not pull the rug under the feet of developers, so that APIs can be developed, which can make the platform a much more pleasant experience for users.

No Chillr, Go Ahead

This is yet another “delayed post” – one that I thought up some two weeks back but am getting down to write only now.

After some posts that I’ve done recently on the payments system, I decided to check out some of the payment apps, and installed Chillr. This was recommended to me by a friend who has a HDFC Bank account, who told me that the app is now widely used in his office to settle bills among people, etc. Since I too have an account with that bank, I was able to install it.

The thing with Chillr is that currently they are tied up with only HDFC Bank. You can still sign on if you have an account of another bank, but in that case you can only receive (and not send) money through the system. So your incentive for installing is limited.

Installation is not very straightforward since you have to enter some details from your netbanking which are not “usual” things. One is a password that allows you to receive money using the app, and the other is a password that allows you to send money. Both are generated by the bank and sent to your phone as an SMS which the app automatically reads. I understand this is part of the system itself and this part won’t go away irrespective of the app you use.

Once you have installed it, you will then be able to use the app to transfer money to your contacts who are also on the app without requiring to know their account number. The payment process is extremely smooth with an easy to use second factor of authentication (a PIN that you have set for the app, so it is instant), so if more people use it, it can ease a large number of payments, including small payments.

The problem, though, is that it is currently in a “walled garden” in that only customers of HDFC Bank can send money, and hence the uptake of the app is limited. The app allows you to see who on your contact list is there on the app (since that is the universe to which you can send money using the app). The last time I checked, there were four people on the list. One was the guy who recommended me the app, the second was another friend who works in the same organisation as this guy, the third a guy who works closely with banks and the fourth a Venture Capitalist. And my phonebook runs into the high hundreds at least.

In terms of technology, the app is based on the IMPS platform which means that in terms of technology there is nothing that prevents the app from transferring money across banks using its current level of authentication. This is very good news, since it means that once banks are signed on, it is a seamless integration and there are no technological barriers to payment.

The problem, however, is that the sector suffers from the “2ab problem” (read my argument in favour of net neutrality using the 2ab framework). Different tech companies are signing on different banks (Chillr to HDFC; Ping Pay to Axis; etc.) and such banks will be loathe to sign on multiple tech companies (possibly due to integration issues; possibly due to no compete clauses).

Currently, if HDFC Bank has $a$ users and Axis Bank has $b$ users, and they use Chillr and Ping Pay respectively, the total value added to the system by both Chillr and Ping Pay is proportional to $a^2 + b^2$ (network effects, Metcalfe’s law and all that). But if these companies merge, or one of them gets the account of the other’s bank, then you have a single system with $a+b$ users, and the value added to the system by the combined payments entity is $(a+b)^2$ which is $a^2 + b^2 + 2 ab$ . Currently the sector is missing the $2ab$ . The good news, however, is that there are no tech barriers to inter-bank payments.

Postscript: The title is a direct translation of a popular and perhaps derogatory Kannada phrase.

Maybe not a fanboy any more

Over the last one year or so I’ve been on course to becoming an Apple fanboy. I had already quite liked the interface of the iPod touch and the iPad, though I hadn’t taken very well to the wife’s iPhone4. And then around this time last year, she bought herself a Macbook Air.

That was a gamechanger as both in terms of physical specifications and ease of use, it seemed a world away from the Windows laptops that I had at that time. A couple of months later (my laptop needed replacement anyway), I bit the bullet and invested in a Macbook Pro. And I became a bigger fanboy. I even decided last month that my next phone will be an iPhone (I’ve never had one so far).

After the events of the last two weeks, however, I’m not so sure. I was upgrading the iPad (it’s technically my wife’s since I had gifted it on her birthday two years back, but I’ve used it more than her) to iOS 8.4 when the update failed midway. It was inexplicable. I tried it a few more times, upgraded iTunes on my computers, downloaded the OS again, did a zillion things but the update continued to fail.

Considering that the iPad isn’t as integral to my life as the phone or computer, it was two weeks before I took it to hospital. Yesterday I went to iCare, an authorised Apple service centre, and showed them the iPad. They took it in and asked me to come back after an hour. An hour later, they said it wasn’t updating and that there was a hardware issue and the iPad was effectively dead.

It was then that I started losing it (I thought the lack of updation was a routine bug that happens with OS upgrades). And it was clear that these guys had done nothing more than what I had done at home. Connected iPad to iTunes, hit on the process to update, see error code, become clueless and give up. And then say “hardware issue”.

I mean, I’m an engineer, and I know that there is clearly no hardware problem with the iPad. And I couldn’t have possibly burned something in it when updating the OS. Who are they bullshitting when they say that it’s a “hardware issue”?

And so off I went to another (this time unauthorised) service centre which had come recommended. They made me wait, and tried all sorts of things. I had to wait longer here since they had to download iOS 8.4. Again it is not clear if they did anything beyond what I had already done at home. And I repeatedly told them not to repeat that but to find out what the problem is. And they seemed clueless.

So the iPad is a brick now. And since it’s been two weeks, I’ve really started missing it. I’m fairly pissed off with Apple right now, for making something that cannot be repaired. And for staffing their service centres with incompetents who do little more than what can be done at home.

I’m not sure I’m a “fanboy” any more. It seems like there is too much “tail risk” in apple’s products. To their credit, they possibly recognise that and exhort you to buy extended warranty (which I now plan to do for my Macbook). But it’s surely a problem that their repair centres (I’m not talking about the “unofficial” place) don’t do much more than what can be done at home.

I’m not so sure that I’m going to buy that iPhone now. If you’re investing so much (relative to “competition”) into a single product that carries so much tail risk, I don’t know if it’s all that worth it. But lack of worthy androids might just push me in that direction.

Meanwhile, I need to figure out how to salvage my iPad. Does anyone know of any competent apple service centres that I can take it to, where they’ll do more than just a cursory sniff? And are the so-called “geniuses” at Apple stores in the US actually good?

On apps tracking you and turning you into “lab rats”

Tech2, a division of FirstPost, reports that “Facebook could be tracking all rainbow profile pictures“. In what I think is a nonsensical first paragraph, the report says:

Facebook’s News Feed experiment received a huge blow from its social media networkers. With the new rainbow coloured profile picture that celebrates equality of marriage turned us into ‘lab rats’ again? Facebook is probably tracking all those who are using its new tool to change the profile picture, believes The Atlantic.

I’m surprised things like this still makes news. It is a feature (not a bug) of any good organisation that it learns from its user interactions and user behaviour, and hence tracking how users respond to certain kinds of news or updates is a fundamental part of how Facebook should behave.

And Facebook is a company that constantly improves and updates the algorithm it uses in order to decide what updates to show whom. And to do that, it needs to maintain data on who liked what, commented on what, and turned off what kind of updates. Collecting and maintaining and analysing such data is a fundamental, and critical, part of Facebook’s operations, and expecting them not to do so is downright silly (and it would be a downright silly act on part of the management if they stop experimenting or collecting data).

Whenever you sign on to an app or a service, you need to take it as a given that the app is collecting data and information from you. And that if you are not comfortable with this kind of data capture, you are better off not using the app. Of course, network effects mean that it is not that easy to live like you did in “the world until yesterday”.

This seems like yet another case of Radically Networked Outrage by outragers not having enough things to outrage about.

Intellectual discussions

So this afternoon a friend came home and we had a nice long discussion on a lot of things. And then it was time for him to leave. But by then, I was in the frame of mind where I was craving intellectual discussions, but there were no avenues for me to execute!

I remember this time five years or so ago, when each day when I would come back home from work, I would open Google Talk and initiate five or six conversations with friends who were online. Some would be stillborn, as the counterparty wouldn’t reply, but my carpet bombing would work and there would be 2-3 conversations that would fructify, and I would have a nice time talking!

Unfortunately, with the decline of Google Talk, there are no avenues for such discussions now. In fact, what killed it was the move to mobile – the original point of Google Talk was that you could signal that you were available by logging on. And so when you signalled thus, someone would ping you, and you would have a conversation.

By moving Google Talk to the mobile phone, where you were online by default, it meant that you were shown online even when you weren’t in a mood to chat. People would occasionally ping you, but then give up. It was like the case of the shepherd boy crying “wolf”. So a green button next to someone’s name on Google Talk means nothing now, in terms of their availability to chat!

Other chatting mechanisms, such as WhatsApp are no better, being “mobile first” and thus “always logged in”. You don’t know who is available when, and who you can possibly ping to have a good conversation.

And then five years back, I stopped logging on to Google Talk and initiating five different conversations. I started logging on to Twitter, instead, and making conversation with people on my timeline . Unfortunately, twitter has been ruined, too. It is so full of outrage, and some of such outrage conducted by otherwise smart people, that I’ve radically cut down on the number of people I follow.

As the world solves some problems, it un-solves others, and creates yet others. And there was a time when I would blog, and visit other blogs, to have intellectual discussions. And now people have stopped commenting on blogs, also!