Benign Girl
Category: Copyright Law
My youngest daughter came back from a birthday party yesterday with the requisite goody bag filled with party favors manufactured in China.Among the toys was a little plastic cell phone. The packaging was all in pink (as was the phone itself). Bulleted on the side of the package were the selling points:
*BATTERY!
*OPERATED!
*CREATIVE!
*VARIOUS MUSIC!
The instructions were also on the package: "Beautiful girl, press any button!"
At the top, a (completely unlicensed, utterly pirated) image of Barbie. In the Barbie-esque pink font to the left, were the words "Benign Girl".
There's a role model for ya. Truth in translation.
This morning I had a call with the CEO of B2K, the BPO-outsourcing company covered (in great depth) by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat. They are located in Bangalore. What do they do...well, actually, a more appropriate question is what DON'T they do. They do tech support, customer care, software development, business analysis, and they have a virtual executive assistant team as well.
Shortly after that call ended, one of my clients called me and was discussing some product development for a particular product line that's been suffering from some neglect lately. He told me that he wasn't really happy with the IT infrastructure for this product.
I said, "How do you feel about India?"
He said, "I love India. They work cheap and they speak English."
Asia is a market much too huge to be ignored. It'd be nice if the images weren't pirated and the translations were better - Benign Girl really isn't going to play so well over here in the long run, probably because it's too truthful - and it'd be nice if we had a better understanding of what the market is for our services there. But that's just a matter of time. The genie's out of the bottle. Now it's time to see what it can do.
What I offer:
