Greek Complexity

Yes, we need more messiness!

Creativity and serendipity depend on it.

What am I talking about? An architect called Aaron Betsky zeroes in on the downsides of Singapore's planning obsession. Yes, it all works but

everything was being planned with such efficiency and with such an eye to latest theories of what makes good urban environment that there was no opportunity for chance, ad hoc activities, or the joy of contrasts.

My office is in the Marina Bay Sands area so I know that Betsky is bang-on with his assessment. Sadly and frustratingly, this is a thread that runs through all of Singapore, not just in urban planning but also, to pick just a few areas, education, the arts, the promotion of entrepreneurship and sports.

This terrific short post tells you more: Singapore's URA: Too much planning? Especially watch for the very funny dig at our bureaucrats' reading habits!

Business opportunity for mobile game developers

Mobile gaming companies in Bangalore or other parts of India who have content that they would like to expose to a large, established base of paying subscribers in emerging markets, please ping me.

Lenskart spam

As regular readers of this blog would recall, I talked about Lenskart.com a few days ago and wondered whether people would buy eyewear online. They must be reading my blog closely because, to convince me that my misgivings are unfounded, they've put me on their spam, ah, mailing list. Ok, I'm joking, of course.

I mean, I'm joking about their trying to convince me. I'm not joking about the email itself. I did get an unsolicited email from them touting their wares. Not just glasses but also watches, wallets and ladies' handbags. The email was sent not to my murli.net email address, which might be sort of understandable if this was a robot crawling the web for mentions of Lenskart, but to my work email address. How did they get this? (I do know the identity of one organisation that has sold my work email address to third parties in the past, but that's a story for another day.)

I wonder if their investors IDG Ventures know that their newest investee buys email addresses in bulk for spam purposes. I also wonder if one of the metrics presented by management to their board is "unique users" or "prospects contacted" or "email list size" or some such, whether people like me are (inappropriately) counted as part of this and whether -- listen closely now -- this metric determined to some extent the valuation that IDG assigned to the company.

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Update: The funny thing is, the email ends with the following:

"Call: +91 8860004379/97 It's almost as amazing as our customer service."

Yes, I've no idea what that means.