The 140 Characters Conference (140conf) is a conference in NYC on the June 16-17 2009, about the effects of Twitter on various industries. Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm was invited to speak there. Here is his presentation:

Here is Mahesh’s video from the event:

Mahesh’s pic, courtesy @lauriemeisel

Some stats about this post (because we all like numbers):

• Mahesh was one of two Indians invited to speak at 140Conf.
• This post first went up 15 minutes after his presentation there.
• One tweet from @Pinstorm generated 211 visits in half an hour. The number currently stands at 328.
• This one tweet generated 25 conversations on Twitter.
• The presentation was favourited by SlideShare and showcased on the front page.
• It was viewed 214 times on SlideShare alone.

Going straight to the news, the Pinstorm team of Reshma Nayak and Mahesh Murthy placed second in the Media Quiz 2009, ‘Media Quotient – what’s your MQ?’ after winning the Bombay round against 45 teams.

The finale of this pan-India quiz event was held in Mumbai on May 22. This first of its kind quizzing initiative from exchange4media, covered all aspects of the Media discipline – people, places, stories of origin, research, the business and its connection with Indian and global media.

While the team can’t stop talking of the midnight oil they burnt in preparation, no one on this side is believing the stories, all thanks to:

You can read more about the win here.

April 1, 2009

If you think Social Media like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 are changing the face of India, there’s a far more worrying trend you should warn your kids about.

Pinstorm, the leading digital marketing firm announced today that its online tracking of internet usage and trends has disclosed a worrying direction that indicated anti-social media growing at an even faster rate than social media.

“It’s no longer small now”, said Mahesh Murthy, Founder and CEO of Pinstorm. “There are unmistakable signs that the rate of growth of anti-social media is higher than that of fast-growing social media.”

“The evidence is apparent. Lack of online civility, virtual ragging, webcam censorship and even VOIP bleeping are becoming more prevalent”, Mr. Murthy added. Anti-Social Media is the darker side of the Social Media movement and there are steps to curb the menace with the recent strengthening of the IT act in India.

Antisocial Media refers to emerging disruptive activities that include VOIP bleeping, Facebook friendstalking, Orkut scrapbombing, Forum flatlining and SMS barraging. It can also mean to include Hi5 hijacking and unscrupulous Twitter following.

The Pinstorm – Google search trend report here sheds more light when focused on deeply: specifically on some unnerving regional and causative elements.

Anti-social media growth pipped that of social media in India some time in 2008 but only now has taken a strong lead:

This chart goes deeper into regional trends:

Here it seems that Delhi is the leader in anti-social media behaviour in the country – followed by Maharashtra and thereafter by Gujarat and then Karnataka. West Bengal seems to be, given its recent Tata Nano upheavals, still the leader in social media. Gujarat, especially, given its relatively smaller population compared to other geographies seems to have a disproportionately high abundance of anti-social media. This indicates perhaps the BJP / RSS combine’s recent efforts in online politicking.

Surprisingly, Mangalore seemed to have the disproportionately highest occurrence of anti-social media behaviour in India. This can almost certainly be linked to the activities of the right-wing Sri Ram Sene and their attacks on ladies in pubs. This is followed by Surat (hotbed of anti-minority riots) and then Delhi – the capital of the Indian political system.

Commenting on this, Ansoo Gupta, Head, Global Business, Pinstorm said, “The data brings some facts and figures to support the feelings one has about various cities and places in the country. Anti-Social Media is a disease that must be fought on all fronts immediately. The IAMAI (Internet And Mobile Association of India) must take immediate steps in collaboration with state IT departments to reduce this menace and make Social Media win this battle for the growth of the internet industry in India.”

Last night, November 26 2008, Mumbai was attacked. Mumbai is not just where Pinstorm is headquartered, but it’s a city that all 100 or so of us in this office love truly, deeply, madly.

It has turned out that the attack was a well-funded, well-trained effort. One that killed innocent guests and employees at one of our clients’ hotels – The Taj. In addition to horrors at another hotel, The Trident and at a building called Nariman House. The attack eventually ended up killing at least 100 people, and left at least 3 times as many injured. And the toll rises as I write this.

We were extraordinarily fortunate to find out that none of our people and their immediate families was affected. Many others, we know, are not so lucky. Our heart goes out to them.

We followed the news closely. While the news TV had sketchy or downright wrong information, we noticed that some of the more reliable updates on the #Mumbai Twitter stream came from two of our own people- Netra and Asfaq.( I added a bit.)

Both worked tirelessly through the night updating the planet on what was going on. Netra in fact was interviewed by several international news organisations.

We figured out this morning- the 27th, that our co-citizens in Bombay perhaps could do with a simple, reliable source of important information. While the TV channels did their canned-panic-overkill-designed-for-rating, we felt there was a need for basic, useful information: how to contact the hotels, the hospitals, the authorities, or the right people at the blood banks and the embassies.

So we decided to put it together. In another superhuman effort, Netra and Asfaq, along with Vikas, Naman and Sanjeev put together a page rather quickly to serve this need: http://helpmumbai.pinstorm.com .

I write this while many of us have not slept in 36 hours.

To the Pinstorm team and to everyone else in Mumbai, you’re the real heroes. We’ve been through crap like this before – and we’ve fought it together. We’ll fight this one with everything at our disposal, and we’ll get through this too.

And all I’ll say is this – let’s keep calm, let’s not descend into terror. For if we do that, then the terrorists will have won.

- Mahesh

Hanisha Vaswani, an Ex-Pinstormer was recently awarded her Masters in Information Technology from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy. While working on her final thesis, she used the Pinstorm presentation style to create her presentation – with great results. Here is what she has to say about her thought process and the Pinstorm presentation style…

I was last in line to present my final thesis, and the audience (my professors) would likely be dead by then. After a dozen cluttered presentations, they’d only want to quickly get over with the whole business, and I needed them to hear me out, pay attention, laugh at the right places, and grade me well :). I’m hardly alone. You’ve been there too, and for you, the stakes are higher than getting better grades on a mark sheet.

When we speak, we want to be heard and understood, even remembered. (If not, why speak at all?). But we also know our audience today is busy, and have tiny attention spans as a result. So how do we get across to them?

Focus: Pick one thing you want your audience to remember at the end. Build the presentation around it.

Simplicity: PowerPoint is a tool. Your idea is the star. Remove the fancy crass that doesn’t help present your idea better.

Pith: Justify each word’s presence on your slides. We at Pinstorm can do this in our sleep, right? :)

Wit: Get them interested. And when they want to hear more, make your spiel. ( albeit, briefly.)

Smarts: Be Different. Do you need PowerPoint at all? Will a demo do better?

In short — use the Pinstorm style!

Does it work? I’ll give you two examples and let you judge:

My first example is my pseudo-famous thesis, part of which spoke of a part-of-speech tagger, I built. Its differentiation is that it is actually composed of two completely different taggers. The presentation said ‘A Tale of Two Taggers’. Sad, perhaps! But it worked. Everyone still remembers my tagger’s USP.  My professors heard me out, asked questions, made suggestions, and actually had an impromptu discussion about my approach. There come the marks :)

My other example is a presentation I heard at an IT jobs seminar in late 2001 –not a happy time for IT job seekers. While most speakers were reading off sad-yet-fake-hopeful presentations, this one speaker was scribbling on a paper onstage. And when he spoke, sans his PowerPoint presentation, it was to spout Seven ‘Laws’ for building a career (note: career, not job); each wittily named. Some examples include Law of Aamir and Sunny, Law of Zig and Zag, Law of Schumacher and Schumacher. Any doubts whose presentation I still remember seven years later?

Simply put: Don’t say much, so there isn’t much to forget. And say it so well that it is absolutely impossible to forget.

Make your point, there’s a reason that the tool is called PowerPoint after all :)

Here is wishing Hanisha a very hearty congratulations from all of us here at Pinstorm.