TVC: Kindle Paperwhite–Joy of reading
By Malay Desai From: Orchard, Bangalore The reading device Kindle’s first mainstream commercial for the Indian market opens with a man paying his respects to his dead mother’s picture before leaving his city home for a remote beach village. On the way, he buys a book on his device and keeps reading throughout his multi-legged journey. Soon after reaching the village, the man is shown narrating the story animatedly to an enthused group of children, as parts of the book appear on the screen. The session goes on for long, but continues despite rains and eventually evokes tears among his young listeners. ‘Celebrating the joy of reading’, goes the only voiceover of the film. Do we Like? ’Tis the season of film and literary festivals, and I’ve already received a dose of long, artful film sequences and book readings by kurta-clad authors on lawns. Fitting in somewhere between films and modern literature is this effort, the first commercial by Kindle, American retailer Amazon’s revolutionary e-reading device that was launched in India in June 2013. The biggest challenge for the e-book reader, besides seducing those who buy tablets, is to convince the tech-savvy metro slicker that the joy of reading a soft copyof a book, is the same, if not more than holding one in your hands. Kindle, already a hit with the suave, eco-friendly reader/traveller, wants to sell its classic variant to more than those, and resorts to Ram Madhvani of Equinox. It’s a top investment, for Madhvani is the man who’s aced the ‘travel wide to make crafty films’ genre, watch the warm SatyamevJayatetitle sequence for proof. But more than his knack of presenting landscapes well, he digs in to his skills that hit our hearts in the ‘mute girl’ and later the ‘money transfer’ films for Airtel. Here, he takes a Sri Lankan holiday with the protagonist of the film, to return with a winding, piano-laced plug about the joy of reading. The film tugs on the ‘mother-and-child’ way, one of the oldest and most dependable routes taken by our ad walas since much prior to ‘Sehwag ki maa’ days. But the treatment is different, storytelling if you may – this is about a man who relives his mother’s tales/ways of livening up a bunch of kids. He’s revisiting a place, meeting young people he already knows and those who’ve been awaiting him. He then immerses them, makes them laugh and sob, just the way he did while reading. And of course, through the film,he uses several functions of the electronic device in multiple environments. Well played Amazon, we hope thisKindle also resists falling tears. (To watch this film, look up Youtube.com/KindleIndia Social Newsfeed Your regular dose on the shifts in the social media universe Whatsapp’s ‘blue tick’ sparks endgame fears The endgamesin tech-savvy relationships may spike over the next few months and years, at least that’s what many Whatsapp-ers fear. The Facebook-owned green dot on our smartphones just made things clearer for some and scarier for some others by introducing a new feature last week: The grey check marks, previously thought of as signs of the recipient having read the message, stand only for the message being delivered. They will turn blue after the recipient has read your message. If you need to see the exact time he/she read the message, you can hold down and get time-stamps. This announcement was promptly met with a barrage of jokes, mostly from those who felt it would be the end of cheaters and liars, i.e. those who’d say ‘I didn't read your message.’ But jokes apart, I have one take –it gives legal proceedings a whole new twist. Your girlfriend likes this Softbank buys 36 per cent in ScoopWhoop Remember the time when I lamented the oncoming of half a dozen Buzzfeed-like sites on the Indian internet that would feed us inane lists pretending to be articles? One of the very first ones has just hit a jackpot. ScoopWhoop, based in Delhi has just been invested into by Bharti Softbank (BSB), a JV between Mittal’s Bharti and Softbank Corp, Tokyo’s internet and telecom giant that has total equity of only 1.9 trillion Yen. While the deal is the latest in a series of cash bets by the Jap biggie (it runs the Hike messaging platform and invested 210 million USD in Ola Cabs just last fortnight among other things), this is a massive development for a start-up. ScoopWhoop, which sometimes has funnier content than most of its me-too competitors, is barely a year old, and is founded by a guy who quit the agency WebChutney after five years. Click-Baiters.Inc like this Saw Mallya Junior’s YouTube show? And to close this column with a social media development which will have no bearing on your life but you will still be entertained given the prominence value in it, let me tell you of Siddharth Mallya’s new YouTube channel and show. It’s called ‘Sid Sessions’, and it features the 27-year-old scion of the troubled co-founder of the Kingfisher Group. Now being him, he had unsurprisingly been at the receiving end of a lot of jealous jibes (he dated Deepika Padukone after all), which he gives due credit to, by responding on the show. The LA-based ‘aspiring actor’ sits on a red couch and reads personal jibes that some Tweeters shoot at him, and respond in a manner he thinks is witty. ‘So what if I’m a rich brat, I’m cool yo’ is the underlying message he wants to give, but what he has ended up giving, in the episode we saw, is ‘I am the Paris Hilton of India.’ Virat Kohli likes this
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