5 May, 2008

The Paradox of choice

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (0) Comments

I just saw a profound video (a TED Talk) by Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice. Barry is an author of a book by the same name. The video is short and covers basic logical reasoning on how more choice can actually be detrimental to our welfare. His arguments are mostly compelling (with a few areas I may not necessarily agree with). The macro fundamentals however are something I can relate to.

As a part of running Directi, I have learnt this paradox the hard way. While there exist several anecdotes, one that comes to mind is ResellerClub’s (one of our many businesses) our strategy of selling hosting packages. I remember not too long ago, when Rclub used to offer a complicated configurator for purchasing hosting packages. While other companies had a set of fixed packages, we offered our customers the ability to choose each parameter on their own. One could select the exact amount of disk space, email accounts, bandwidth, number of databases, database space and so on. If memory serves me right each parameter had between 2 to 15 combinations totalling up to possibly well over half a million combinations.

RClub has since sacrificed that system in favor of a simpler set of 4 packages, but not until we went through some of the thought process expounded by Barry in his talk.In summary, excessive choice can -

• Overwhelm a consumer
• Confuse a consumer - especially in a scenario where the customer does not know all the variables
• cause Paralysis - inability to decide which way to go
• result in Procrastination - where one chooses to postponing the choice due to their inability to make one
• manifest Regret - should I have picked the other one?

5 Jan, 2008

Directi wins the Times Ascent Pinkslip award

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Directi won the ‘PinkSlip Choice’ Award for the “most innovative recruitment advertisement”. The ad was our third recruitment ad for Times Ascent.

Spearheaded and executed by our in-house marketing and design team, the ad reflects one of our fundamental principles - which is - “We like to stand out in everything we do”. At Directi creativity is expected in every task. Directi is the only company so far (I think) that has won this award without outsourcing the ad to an Advertising agency.

26 Nov, 2007

Lucky 13: Our rank in the Deloitte and Touche Fast 50 list

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (6) Comments

Directi was ranked in the Deloitte and Touche Technology Fast 50 list for the 3rd consecutive year (2006-2007). This time we improved upon last year, garnering 13th position (as compared to 17th last year) with a compounded annual growth rate of 547%. The title is somewhat of a misnomer given that luck had nothing to do with this. Credit goes to the relentless effort of our amazing team.

Directi was the only company in the Top 15 to have won this award 3 years in a row, a commendable feat, considering that each year becomes the baseline for the next year.

(Divyank collecting the award - Looking smart as ever )

As I always say … this is just the beginning, and there are many more to come

13 Oct, 2007

Speaking at the BarCamp

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (3) Comments

On Sunday, Oct 13th, 2007 - I will be speaking at the BarCampMumbai. I have already prepared a detailed presentation on Storage / SANs / DAS / Building large storage arrays. I have been meaning to conduct a training session on the same internally since several months now. While I have been researching storage for the last 6 months now, it is only when I began penning it down in PPT form that I actually realized the colossal amount of information that this training session would encompass. By the time I reached slide 43 I realized I need to break this session into multiple parts. So I will attempt to complete part I at IIT Mumbai later today.

I plan on recording the session and uploading the slides / notes / video here, but that may take a while since I am flying off to New York today evening for 2 days. So those of you who attend the BarCamp and manage to find their way here for downloading a copy of the presentation - hit the subscribe to RSS feed link and wait for an update