I have been using Airtel's 3G services in Pune for a couple of days now. Here are the first impressions.

• availability/coverage is spotty. For example, it will work near Aurora Towers but not work near the GPO. Which is very odd
• coupled with the spotty coverage is the fact that it mostly requires you to be near some window etc to get it working. As an example, if you are sitting near one of the Moledina Road facing windows at the Dorabjees Coffee Shop it will work, try it near the yoghurt section on the first floor and be prepared to be disappointed
• most folks say that 3G causes battery drain, I haven't noticed anything unusual
• however, it does take a longer time for network/data signal to align itself (bars on the phone). It could be that the network infrastructure itself is facing issues, but an example could be parking at the ground floor at Mariplex, losing cell signals, coming up till the KFC/Juice Bar and then waiting for close to half a minute before I get signals. Nothing of significance has changed in the phone in terms of firmwire or, application stack. So, it is a curious experience. You can repeat this if you park at Dorabjees and come up.
• I am noticing more signal drops than before. Again, the network might be congested.
• It takes some time, sometimes connecting and disconnecting twice to get on to the 3G network and actually send/receive data. Else you can see that data is being sent, but nothing is coming down the pipe.

Runa is still on the 2G plan. And, she doesn't seem to have the above issues. So, it makes it even more unusual.

On a side note, call drops on the network seems to have increased.

The Flipkart.com folks sent across a survey form to be filled up. The one pattern I noticed was that the questions asked for comparative analysis ie. "best amongst", "easiest amongst" and so forth. This has an amusing downside - if an user hasn't actually ended up using competitor sites they may be tempted to give it a shot. And, additionally, it somewhat dilutes the brand/unique-ness of Flipkart as a business site.

A random selection from the survey questions are as follows:

• At Flipkart.com it is the easiest to search for products, compared to other online shopping sites
• Flipkart.com offers the widest range of payment options, when compared to other online shopping sites.
• Flipkart.com provides the best delivery AND after sales customer service, among all online shopping sites

with the options for responses ranging from "Disagree Strongly" to "Strongly Agree".

The same survey could perhaps be re-designed to ask the users the following questions with a numerical rating (1 to 5) or, even the existing rating

• You find it easy to use the search engine on the site to receive accurate and relevant product results
• You find it easy to Order and Checkout using the options provided for payment
• You will recommend the site to others based on delivery and after sales customer service performance

Was my hack the most optimal ? Surely not. But it does avoid the comparative behavior while trying to self promote.

Among the various things that get me fuming and fretting is the casual manner in which books are arranged in bookstores and libraries. You know what I'm talking about - those oh-so-innocent mistakes in categorization, the inability to check up inventory and, the general feeling of being ill-at-ease when using these services. Yes, that's the same feeling that returned with a vengeance when looking at BigBooks.

Cut to random anecdote.

During my student days when we were doing lab-work, we had a teacher whose daily drill was "a student is known by how clean he/she keeps her workspace". This, to me, was a small variation of the one my dad has - "the cleanliness habits of a family is known by how clean and organized the kitchen table is".

Cut to present day rant.

Why are the above to ditties relevant ? When you visit a bookstore, all you want to do is search for the books you want and hope that they will be under the appropriate categories. Once you've built up your stash you queue up in front of the cash counter, plonk down the cash and waltz out of the door (err... if you are at the Kolkata Book Fair, you'd either have to lug your sorry behind through a gate that is open just enough for anyone wearing skinny jeans to slip through or, you get pushed by the "maashimaas" into the wide open space in front of the stall). When you go to a library you figure out the way books are organized and then look them up. In both these cases the single most important aspect is the ability to look up what you want and, then obtain it. This is precisely where BigBooks fails completely miserably. Let me put it in some context - I used Flipkart when their search results were unpredictable and, the resultset displayed after the query was abominable. However, it didn't take them long to start fixing large parts of it (they got an important thing right though - they kept the site very sparse and simple in those initial days) . I didn't have to listen to "yeah we know that the search is a bit broken, why don't you send a list of books and we'd add it to your queue".

In my world of consuming online services that's fail. I hope that BigBooks revisits this part. If searching and building up a queue is difficult then using the service is difficult. A service that is difficult to use would have some uphill climb in customer acquisition even if it is backed up by a superb telephone-based networking and support.