Author: Rahul

Rajesh Jain, in the same interview, makes a most profound statement about Venture Capital in India. The second paragraph is true of “New Tech” around the world, especially the United States.

I believe we need a new approach to venture capital in India. There is a very limited legacy, so it’s not going to evolve the way the U.S. did or even perhaps the way China did. In India there are lots of gaps across multiple value chains. Sometimes a service fails to take off because some parts along the value chain are not appropriately digitized. What ought to happen is a large amount of investment across building out an ecosystem of companies. Instead of waiting for an entrepreneur to come up with a business plan, venture capitalists need to be much more proactive. They should say, “The capital is available, now let’s find a CEO for this business and back that person with funding. Let’s start multiple companies based on what we have seen in other countries, and what we think the opportunities are in India.”

This is a very different, inside-out approach, where you end up flipping the model around. That requires much more work. It will not work if the core venture capital team lives abroad and just comes to India once in a while. We need people on the ground who understand the realities of India today, who understand how the technology is evolving, and who can make bets on what the future is going to be.

[This part via Rajesh Jain]

The Economist :

“…although China and India are often lumped together as tomorrow’s technology titans, there are marked contrasts in their technological development. They have roughly the same population, but China spends 2.5 times as much on technology as India does. It is already the world’s largest mobile-phone market, and the second-largest market for PCs. Moreover, at the end of 2005, China had around 110m internet users, compared with 51m in India; and today China has 430m mobile-phone users, versus 120m in India. The two countries are adopting technology at different paces and in different ways.”

The next paragraph, though, has a few interesting points. Some of them are wrongly justified:

“Centralised economies can pour resources into projects and direct the development of entire industries, something that is much harder in India’s sprawling, bureaucratic democracy.”

The classic problem with centralized economies is that they are extremely slow to react to change! And I’m surprised the writer didn’t choose to examine how sustainiable this sort of planning is, especially given that the technology industry is constantly in a state of flux. The “direction of development” of the technology industry is, today, being decided in all sorts of places – the USA, Finland, India, Japan, Brazil, China, Korea – and there is simply no way that you can lead this industry by committee directives.

For mobile phones, China established a second state-owned operator to challenge the incumbent, while India’s operators remained tangled up for years in legal fights over a botched regulatory framework.

Ah. Very smart. Imagine another BSNL – wouldn’t that be cool! I wonder, though, if this won’t result in a cartel, which then isn’t too different from having a monopoly. India’s myriad private telecom service providers all driving prices and margine relentlessly down, seem a better bet than China’s state owned behemoths.

China has also tried to develop its own technical standards so that it can avoid paying royalties to foreign firms for using intellectual property.

In a world built on open standards, this is not very smart. Open standards, proprietary implementations are going to be the norm for a while.

Mobilementalism has a feature on what Nokia sees as the future of the mobile phone. Apparently the company has forbidden its employees from calling their products “phones”, instead using the term “multimedia computer”. The strategy is for the mobile phone to perform all the tasks that an MP3 player, a mobile phone and a PDA do separately today. The N-series is the coming-together of the first two. The target is now devices like the Treo. Eventually the company sees the computer as we know it today to fade into obsolescence. Consider what the article has to say about Nokia’s N80 device:

…images and video stored on the Nokia N80 or a compatible PC can be viewed wirelessly on the living room TV, while listening to music stored on the device through the living room audio system. It also lets you print wirelessly to any compatible UPnP-enabled home printer or printing kiosk. It’s only a small step from the Nokia N80 to a device that renders the PC obsolete.

Nokia is banking on the fact that we are increasingly moving our data online, having them stored on remote servers. Today we interface our smartphones with our home computers, for storing and sourcing multimedia captured on these phones. With the advent and ubiquity of high-speed networks in the future, we can interface in the exact same manner with such remote storage. The PC will no longer be needed as a local store for data.

Here’s the company’s ultimate goal, though:

If you hook up a monitor and wireless keyboard to a suitably-equipped mobile phone, you have no need for a PC:

• all your files are stored remotely;
• your web browser resides on your mobile phone, but is displayed on your monitor;
• and all the applications you currently use reside on a web server, again accessible through the web browser from your mobile phone.

Indeed, you won’t even notice you’re not using a PC, as you still use a keyboard and monitor, and all interactivity occurs through a browser, just as most of it does now.

Fascinating! And as the article summarizes at the end, Dell had better watch out!

Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity talks about the issues with using a Wiki as a tool to facilitate debate about a topic .

A wiki is designed to facilitate the sort of debates that engineers have among themselves. When it works right, it can dramatically increase the speed with which a group reaches agreement, and can quickly integrate the ideas of many contributors.

A challenge for wikis is that many (actually, most) people don’t share the engineering culture. Many people are deeply attached to their beliefs and aren’t willing to revisit them no matter how much evidence is presented. In many subjects one person’s idea of objective truth may be very different from another’s, and in some (religion, for example), it’s arguable whether there can be any truly objective truth at all. Energy levels and willingness to participate in an extended discussion also differ dramatically from person to person. Often the most energized people are the fanatics, the people who are least likely to engage in an unbiased debate.

This is probably one reason why, for most science-related articles on Wikipedia, there is widespread agreement (resulting out of the best co-operation), and contrastingly, for topics dealing with history, there is often a great deal of controversy. A case in point is the debate over the Kashmir page on Wikipedia, where Indian and Pakistani zealots are vitiating the atmosphere by continually changing content there to represent their viewpoint, often to ridiculous extents.

At least Jonathan Schwartz is candid. But clearly, Sun is having huge problems getting even the most basic messages out. For instance, consider a recent event where Schwartz interacted with a Fortune 100 potential customer:

To test, I asked, “before today, did you know that Solaris was open source, or ran on Dell, HP and IBM hardware, not just Sun’s?” “Nope.”
And like I said, this was a Fortune 100 opportunity.

Well – if it isn’t general knowledge that Solaris now runs on x86 (and has been since Solaris9), and that anyone can download and use it, then Sun’s got a HUGE problem. I talked before of Sun needing to leverage the Solaris brand. For that, it is imperative that they at least get the message out that Solaris, our next-generation OS, can do all these wonderful things, AND yes, it’ll run on all the hardware that you have now, and anything else you’re planning to buy .

I’m not sure how Sun is going to get this message out – they’ve pretty much tried all that there is, including opensolaris.org, Sun Engineer Blogs, and all of the other “word-of-mouth” channels that Schwartz’s talking about. What I find worrying is that he’s decided that advertising through traditional channels is not the way to go. No more “$500 ad budgets”, he proclaims. Well, I don’t know what kind of ads Sun is running, but nowhere in their advertising have I ever heard them shout from the rooftops – “Solaris runs on Intel!”.

By the way, I’m reasonably sure that Solaris doesn’t have a POWER port yet, so a blanket claim that it runs on IBM hardware is incorrect. So there.

Sambhar Mafia talks about the “missed call”.

A recent study notes that “Missed Call” is slightly unique to India. Apart from serving a purpose, it also helps in saving money. With cheap / free SMS and free incoming calls, I guess the utility of a missed call is much lower what it was earlier.

The Indian mobile user seems to have mastered the art of missed calls – and actually to communicate without answering the calls! While cellphone operators are reluctant to give the exact share of missed calls, according to industry estimates, it is somewhere around 20-25%.

Writes Nick Gray in a Moblog (mobile blog) — in India ‘missed calls’ were very popular, as a way to say, “I’m thinking about you” or “call me back.” I would often hear someone say, “I’ll send you a missed call when we get there – see you soon.”

Here’s an interesting take on the entire “Offshore” development paradigm that every American firm worth its salt has implemented.

Ed Burnette from ZDNet contends that over the course of time, most jobs in IT will deal with maintenance/sustenance of a product/system (since that’s an unending task, until the product itself is end-of-life-ed), as opposed to actual product development. In fact, he already sees this happening today:

“A colleague told me today that 70% of her time is spent maintaining the old version of the software as opposed to working on the next version. By maintainence I mean duplicating customer reported problems, fixing bugs, creating hot fixes and service packs,  tweaking performance to address complaints, and so forth”

And it is these kinds of tasks, he says, that he would much rather see being done in India than here. According to him, right now it is the opposite situation:

You have a long list of innovative ideas and features that you’d love to put in the next version, but you’re unable to find the time. Management promises that you’ll be given time as soon as these maintenance things let up. But they never let up. Management promises to clear your schedule, to restrict maintenance to part of the team and let you have some breathing space. But then the next day a high priority gotta-have-it-now defect comes in. Experienced, highly qualified and highly paid developers become firefighters, running from one emergency to another. Meanwhile the remote teams, with no such baggage, get the new projects and growth opportunities, and produce quicker results because they can do it full time.

And then Ed calls for a reversal of roles. Actually, I’d say that has happened already.

Most Indian companies today deal with “Level 2 and Level 3 support”, and handle customer issues and product defects. The teams in the US, instead, focus on the next release, feature-adds, and longer-term strategic issues. It’s a lesser form of outsourcing (the o-word has come to imply really low-end jobs; call-centres), but it’s all about focussing on your core competencies, letting your top workers do what they do best, leveraging your talent pool to maximize value to the customer/client. From the point of view of a firm in the Unites State, you don’t want your top developers fixing bugs, handling customer issues, since that requires less creativity, less talent and more drudgery than true product/system development.

What about this situation from the point of view of India? Next: Part Two: Commoditization of Science, and Art as the Differentiator.

Here’s an article on Rediff.com about the possibility of newspapers becoming extinct. The premise is that the Internet as a distribution channel, with online newspapers, blogs, wikis and message boards as the content, supported by online (in place of print) advertising, is threatening the very existence of newspapers. According to the article, newspaper circulation is declining, and there’s a vicious circle being formed, with newspapers wanting to shore up revenues by charging advertisers more, who won’t pay until circulation goes up.

In the context of India, though, the threat to the print medium has little to do with the Internet. The penetration of this medium is so poor in India it doesn’t even matter. So from a newspaper’s point of view, blogs, wikis and other online sources of news can take a hike, they don’t even register on the threat radar in this country.

The real threat to newspapers is from Television. From the 24×7 news channels in most major regional languages, and English and Hindi, of course. From the fierce competition among them to provide up-to-the-second updates on everything from cricket scores to the stock market to politics.

The usage model I’m increasingly seeing is: most folks catch up on news throughout the day via TV – or at least in the morning and then during prime time. (which is why the 9PM news bulletin is such a big deal). The next morning they don’t want to see the same news again, this time in print – they’ve already seen that.

What they want is analyses and opinion pieces with regard to that piece of news. They want special reports on a range of topics. Something to complement what they’ve already seen on TV the previous day. That’s the challenge before newspapers today. Content matters more now. I realise that I’ll probably be raising a few hackles here – given readers’ loyalty to newspapers – but the Indian Express seems to be gaining in popularity and readership over the past year. It’s got to do both with the steady improvement in the op-ed section of IE, and the gradual but unmistakable tabloidization of the Times of India. The newspaper is taking the place of the “weeklies” that used to dominate this kind of print content in the 80s and 90s – they’re becoming “dailies” in a different sense.

Now this is really exciting – “MTNL, BSNL to kick-off IPTV from Mumbai, Chennai“. Television via telephone lines! [ via]

It remains to be seen if anyone can offer these services, over MTNL and BSNL’s lines, or if the two state-owned telcos will attempt to “lock-in” users into their content. The problem, of course, is MTNL and BSNL have not yet decided what business they are in. If they are telecom companies, then they ought to stick to maintaining the telecom infrastructure around India. But they imagine that they are ISPs, too – so they’ve “locked in” consumers into using only MTNL’s Triband and BSNL’s DataOne Internet services over their copper-wire infrastructure. Now they also imagine that they’re content providers. Going by past experience, there’ll be a messy “licencing” and “bidding” process for channels/content providers to provide television over, for instance, MTNL’s Triband service.

It would be interesting to see how MTNL would react if there were a service that offered, let’s say, an ad-supported, web-based TV-channel that operated via the RealPlayer or Windows Media Player plugin inside a browser.

I’ve set out to read up on as much as I can on the immense penetration (and hence usage) of broadband internet in South Korea, which Wired Magazine had dubbed “The Bandwidth Capital of the World” a couple of years ago. Even though I can just look and wish we in India’d pull up our socks and get that kind of (or even better) infrastructure here. Anyways, I’ll leave wishful thinking for another day, and list what I’ve been reading:

Om Malik: How South Korea got its Broadband Mojo
Om Malik: 200 KBPS is Not Broadband
Om Malik: Broadband? What broadband?
ZDNet: Broadband: Lessons from South Korea
Wired: The Bandwidth Capital of the World
San Francisco Chronicle: The future is South Korea
CNet: South Korea’s house of the future
Emergic.org: Venture Capital in South Korea
The Standard: Online Social Network Scores Hit in South Korea
Newsofttechnology: South Korea Pushes Mobile Broadband