In this age of internet where information is available at your fingertips, you would expect making a buying decision like buying a camera or a printer or even a notebook would be easy from a large choice that exist today?

Sadly, it isn’t. At least not for me when I was recently on a similar decision path. There are many instances when I see my friends on social media just asking for a direct help and advice, in case someone has already made a decision and they can just follow the advice. Hours of search and research and reading reviews leads to nothing but a feeling of exasperation. It feels as if you will always miss out on something or miss a great deal (that is round the corner) that you have not think about and as a result feel bad about making a decision.

The more I think, I feel the market has become highly commoditized where differentiation is becoming difficult even by the so called experts and website. Understanding differentiation based on product features ain’t easy – and knowing which product features to base your decision on is very complex and complicated.

The only true differentiation that most people can understand is “Price”. Not surprising to see price being a crucial factor in such a complicated decision making process.

A colleague pointed out about a crowdsourced phone directory app Truecaller that allows you to find name against a given phone number in any country. Some of us gathered near the colleague’s workstation and it was fun to input your and your friends number to see what (interesting) names are returned by the app.

This is how it works. Once you install the app on your phone, it takes your address book and stores it with itself. All users address book is then combined to return you the result.

But soon we all realized how this can seriously intrude your privacy without your knowledge and permission to share your number.

You can actually pay a small fees and request for contact information by name anywhere in the world!

In principle, building a telephone directory is not a bad idea. I also like the way crowding model is used to build information set that can help, for example, to identify calls from unknown numbers. However the app adds your name and number without your but someone else’s permission. Kinda scary.

What do you guys think?

I noticed this update when I launched Chrome today. Sorry to pick on a small typo – but could not stop noticing the irony of better spell check with misspelled “bettar”.

Hello everyone! I have described my thoughts on what Crunchy Friday is all about here.

Most of all, when I was first starting to think about finding time for doing some fun and crazy stuff with my partner in crime, Rupesh, the name “Crunchy Friday” just stuck with me. And as a followup I thought of using this brand to share some of my learning, experiences, connect with people and also learn from them.

So, let me know your thoughts!

Hemant