An app to manage greetings over the Internet

We have been hearing about air pollution in New Delhi, with the Diwali crackers being the last straw. Most of us suffer from an online phenomenon that is a comparable nuisance.

Someone starts with a list of about a hundred colleagues and sends them all a common greeting the day before the New Year, Diwali, or something like that. The hundred of us blindly “reply to all” in the list sending our own greetings to everyone on the list. Then every one of us spends the festive occasion deleting the greetings received. Ten thousand minutes wasted. The emails serve one purpose – it tells the recipients that the sender is alive and is fit to use email.

Then comes greetings from your bank, the shop where you bought lettuce, some miscellaneous jeweler, and hundred others sending you greetings on the occasion. Many of them send you birthday greetings! Very touching to get a birthday greeting from your bank! The same bank that, when asked for a form, tells you that your request would be attended to in three working days!

There can be many ways of tackling this near-spam enterprise. The best would be for email software to identify pure greeting messages and put them in a separate folder. The software can make a consolidated list of senders available for inspection. You should be able to click on a sender’s name and send a message prepared by you in advance – one designed to be sent to all those who greet you. An email generated by a click should be going only to a single person, unless you indicate that it should be otherwise.

The solution could also be in the form of a well-designed app which people could use for sending greetings, in place of email. Would users be interested in one more app? Can we make it attractive enough to find a big clientele?

There are many possibilities. The app could possibly be branded in the name of a sponsor like Red Cross, UNICEF or other NGO and be popularized by them sending URLs through email. The apps could be linked to an e-wallet like PayTM by the user who downloads it. Every time the users send greetings, the app could transfer a pre-set sum of money, like say Rs 5 or 10, to the NGO. The app’s development and operations cost could be paid by an e-commerce site like “Favorites of my city”, and the app could offer a feature for the users to send gift packets through the e-commerce site when they send a greeting.

The app could be enhanced in many other ways. For instance, there could be a provision for the user to send a canned short message, such as the following:

“The kids are growing up well. Rama choreographed a dance item for the Diwali event at her school. She also fooled her grandma by making a phone call, in a voice resembling that of an uncle. Vinay is busy building his model planes.”

The app could also allow the user to type in a few lines of a customized message to selected recipients.

Srinivasan Ramani

Putting STOP signs on the Google Map

Can we put up traffic signs on something like Google maps using a suitable app to display them to drivers of vehicles at the appropriate time? You might wish to experiment, starting with 

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/start

The other day my wife and I saw a distressing scene at a street corner; three girls who were sharing a scooter had been in a traffic accident. A car running along an intersecting street had hit them and one girl had a bleeding injury on her face. There was crowd around them offering help. The car involved was there on the side of the street and a young man who seemed to be the one who had driven that car was involved in helping the unhappy girls.

It is often pointed out that traffic is chaotic in India. Part of this is due to the absence of any enforcement of traffic discipline. Part of this due to the absence of essential traffic signs such as a STOP sign to show that traffic on the intersecting street have the right of way. Millions of vehicles rush through intersections free of any discipline. Any aggressive driver gets his way, till the day he crosses the path of an even more aggressive one!

Many drivers have a navigational aid mounted on their dashboard or windshield. The map app will use stored data to identify when your vehicle is reaching an intersection and if you have the right of way there. If not, it would flash a stop sign. You would bring your vehicle to a complete stop for a moment and then cross the intersection carefully. The app could warn of speed breakers, prohibited turns, one way streets, your exceeding the speed limit etc.

Do virtual street signs absolve the local government of their responsibility to display real-world signs? No, all they can do is to increase your chances of being alive as and when they fulfil their responsibilities!

Joking apart, there is a necessity for the government to get involved. They should participate in any project in this area to put relevant information on maps. They should ensure that there is a standard for encoding this information. The basic information should be made available in the public domain. What about the app developer? Why should he spend a lot of effort to build this national infrastructure? Well, we will give him the rights to display "paying" signs in addition to traffic signs - like the following:

What about liabilities of the app developer? That is no problem; they will show you a link named Terms and Conditions. As usual, you would ignore it and click on "I accept". The 5000-word T & C would include a line absolving the app developer of all and any responsibilities! (Warning! It may not be as simple as that! But you can worry about it when you have a prototype to show the lawyer!)

Lastly, what are the limits to this technology? Will one day even traffic signals will be run off cyber space? Data from users of navigation devices gives statistical information to servers as to how many vehicles cross which intersections and in which direction. Can one use such data from these servers to drive real-world traffic signals in a highly adaptive manner? 

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