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Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

In 2003, John Battelle opined that Google was essentially a “database of intentions“.

The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. … a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends… this artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture.

That phrase made it into his book “The Search” and quickly became a popular way to demonstrate how enormously important and powerful Google might eventually become.

This last Saturday, the New York Times ran a piece on a possible new monetization idea that Twitter was considering: to “offer shopping advice and easy purchasing”. People already solicit their Twitter followers’ opinions, and it is also already possible to identify real-time trends related to a particular product, company or event. Put those together, and you get an extremely powerful (and, the founder hope, lucrative) tool.

Viewing this piece of news in the context of “database of intentions” you can see how the web has evolved since Battelle propounded that idea:

One, Twittter is now a database of actions, of people announcing by-the-second what they have tried, used, bought, rejected, liked and disliked. I see an attractive opportunity for an analytics firm to help companies make sense of what people are saying about them, what events caused this conversation, and the results of a company’s actions/response on the conversation and subsequent sales/signups.

Two, it is still a database of intentions, but at dizzying, real-time speeds. From the New York Times article:

“Commerce-based search businesses monetize extremely well, and if someone says, ‘What treadmill should I buy?’ you as the treadmill company want to be there,”

While it’s certain that companies can use these intentions to snap up customers before competitors, it’s unclear as yet how companies will be able to scale and respond if and when Twitter achieves Google’s adoptions levels. There is definitely an opportunity for another business here.

At an engagement ceremony I attended this October, every one of the guests was a photographer, clicking away at this, that or the other all the time. Not only have you seen this; over the past couple of years you’ve clicked your way through a few ceremonies/parties/gatherings too.

Except that things have changed somewhat: in 2006, your fellow shutterbugs probably used point-and-shoot digital cameras. Chances are they were using their mobile phones at that last ceremony. Chances are that you were too.

No surprise; consider this. The current installed base of mobile phone cameras is 1.9 billion, up from nearly zero 5 years ago. In contrast, the camera industry only ships 100 million (one-tenth of a billion) devices a year.

Whatever happened to the standalone camera industry? And how long, you might also ask, before they fade into oblivion?

I think the answer to the first, discussed in this post, is that the camera industry stopped innovating.

For years, the Megapixel ruled. Consumers bought a new digital camera based solely on “how many MP it had”, fed by copious advertising  by manufacturers promoting this very lust. So, roughly, 3 Megapixels in 2002 went to 5 in 2004 to 7 in 2006 to 8 now (perhaps even 10) – and stopped.

At some point – perhaps a couple of years ago – folks began to realize that the pictures they were clicking with their existing digital camera were good enough. When they wanted an upgrade and looked around, all they saw were more Megapixels. Clearly, no one was listening to them. Camera manufacturers – Sony, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus and others – probably thought they didn’t have to. Even if existing owners didn’t upgrade, there were so many first-time camera buyers out there. You didn’t have to own a larger slide of the pie if the pie itself was expanding.

This is where the camera manufacturers made their big mistake. At that very time, mobile phone manufacturers were busy embedding tiny 1 and 2 megapixels cameras into their devices. Millions of would-be-first-time-digital-camera buyers bought Rs. 9000 phones and suddenly found themselves with a ready digital camera. The photos were grainy and often out-of-focus, but hey – the camera now fit into their pocket, and was always with them to capture moments with friends, on the bus, in the train, on the street, at home, at outings, gatherings, ceremonies, parties, everywhere. Suddenly, the lure of the Megapixel didn’t hold sway at all. What mattered was that this little camera was always there. It also helped that the same block of plastic was, often, a music player, video player and recorder, radio and, occasionally, Internet browser.

Guts.

By this time, the camera manufacturers had had their first “uh-oh” moment, as sales of phone-enabled cameras shot through the roof. They scrambled back to appeal to their base of existing owners, attempting to sell them on something other than MP. So you began to hear noises about everything ranging from image stabilization to multiple face-recognition.

But the mobile phone industry wasn’t idle either. While the first generation of mobile phone cameras were dreadful, the second wasn’t. Mobile phones that cost around Rs. 15000 to Rs. 20000 – the price range of a good point-and-shoot digital camera – were now sporting 5 megapixel cameras (more than what consumers wanted), advanced lens technology (for instance, the Carl-Zeiss lenses in the top-end Nokia Nseries cameras), great flash (the Xenon flash in the Nokia N82) and customizable settings on par with their standalone counterparts. In other words, phone cameras were as good as standalone digital point-and-shoot cameras. The choice for buyers was now between i.) their existing camera plus a few incremental features, and ii.) their existing camera +  music + web + maps + video + kitchen sink. Making that choice was easy.

The female of the species is deadlier than the male. Unquestionably.

Next – what the camera industry can do to stay relevant in the coming years.

In my previous post, I looked at how a social network “picks up” an application and “spreads” it to reach the audience that would be interested in using it. And I said that was because social networks make it easy to propagate information, but primarily because people with similar interests have numerous ways of “hooking up” – either via communities or interacting on these in-network applications.

That last point makes social networks a lot of like the communities of old – BBNs, chat rooms, IRC, forums. But since they’re the *new* craze, well, they’ve got to be different somehow. How?

One, profiles. Even as a new member of a group, find out a lot about the people you’re interacting with by looking at their profile pages – where they’re from, who they know, what they do, how they look like, what they like, what they’re up to lately, and a dozen other things. Because of this, interactions on social networks become richer sooner.

Two, you can, with a single profile page, be a member of multiple communities/groups/hangout spots. You don’t have to replicate your profile. With Facebook’s “mini-feed” (a summary of what your friends have been up to recently on FB), you can discover people who share several interests/lifestyle attributes with you. Also, because you *can’t* make different profiles for different communities, you’re the ‘real you’ throughout. Interactions are therefore more genuine, more real, and perhaps more trustworthy.

Three, marketers can build up impressively detailed profiles of users individually (via their communities and behavior), and communities themselves (via profiles of their users in aggregate). That enables far better, more granular targeting of ads than would be possible on forums, benefiting both users and advertisers.

Four, applications! Interactions between members are no longer limited to text-based discussions about action that happens elsewhere. Forum-like conversation and the actual application exist side-by-side.

Five (and this is mostly because of FB), communities are no longer silos but are deeply influenced by (and in turn influence) the rest of the Internet. For instance, the Digg.com application shows your friends your five most recently Dugg stories. Think of the added (and focused) traffic to Facebook from Digg and then from Facebook to Digg.

Social networks need to open their walled gardens to the rest of the Internet, instead of attempting to monetize only interactions within. As we’ve seen above, those very interactions will become richer as data flows into the network from outside (of course, at the cost of profile data flowing outwards in the short term). I think a network’s success will now depend on how much it is willing to open itself up.

Bob Cringely contends that the battle for search is over, with Google emerging the clear winner. With Google Universal Search, Google has put so much distance between itself and numbers two and three, that the incremental return on additional investment into search by either Yahoo! or Microsoft will be negative. Both firms will be better off putting their money in other lines of business.Why has GUS ended the search wars? Apart from standard Web Search, Google’s also ruled vertical search – maps, books, images, and video. (The only exception was news, where Y! did a better job.) So if Y! and MS were to follow suit with their own integrated searches, the top video (or book) results would be on Google’s properties. In fact, the better they made their searches, the more traffic they’d drive to YouTube or books.google.com! Not only does Google do the best job with vertical search, today it also owns the properties where this vertical content resides!

So where does that leave Microsoft? Simple. Microsoft should get out of search. And out of online advertising altogether.

Surprised? Read on.

Microsoft is a company that, after having led consumer computing for a generation, is now finding itself playing follow-the-leader. Over the last few years, its strategy has been plainly, reactive. Its Live initiative (Windows Live Search, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Office Live) was a poor attempt to match Google’s online portfolio, pitting application service against application service. But it didn’t work out. Today, the Live initiative is an acknowledged damp squib.

Why? Because the New Web is not central to Microsoft’s business model. It never has been. In the mid-to-late nineties, when it “woke up to the Internet”, it reacted. And made Internet Explorer integral to Windows 98, added TCP/IP support and made it easy to connect to the Internet (it also bought Hotmail, launched the MSN portal and tried to play ISP). These didn’t seem to me, either then or now, to be part of a concerted strategy to leverage the opportunity the Internet presented. Cut to today. With Ray Ozzie’s “leaked” memo in 2005, the company once again found itself waking up to the New Web. Once again we find a set of ad hoc tactics that don’t collectively define a web strategy. It seemed crazy that a person with the sagacity and vision of Ozzie would talk drivel like “online advertising is the next big revenue opportunity, and therefore we must move everything – Windows, Office, Mail – online, and make money out of ads”. It is almost as if with each generation, the Web is being retrofitted into Microsoft’s business strategy.

In contrast, Google is a company that has been built from the ground up to leverage the “Internet opportunity”. The firm realised that first public, then private data would find its way to the web. It first created tools so that it would have access to all of this data (either by crawling or by hosting this content). Simultaneously, it created applications that people could use to access the information they needed from this data. And it monetized this access.

Microsoft is a desktop applications company. From 1975 to 2007, repeat, it has been a desktop applications company. Further, though it may have had a profound effect on consumer computing, its revenue has come from enterprise customers. Finally, its largest selling products are not its search service, or its MSN portal, or Hotmail, or Messenger. Its largest selling products are its Windows Operating System and Office Application Suite. The mandarins at Microsoft have to consider these facts before running around like confused chicken.

The Enterprise does not “get” the Internet. It gets the network, or, more precisely, the intranet, but it does not get the Internet. There’s just too much data that needs to be kept within the walls of the organization. Two paragraphs ago, I said that Google’s essence is to have access to data, either by crawling or hosting. No large firm is willing, either now or in the forseeable future, to let that happen. This Enterprise market has been growing for two decades now, will continue growing. This is where Microsoft faces virtually no competition from the likes of Google.

How can Microsoft enter a new phase as an enterprise software company? How can it create better applications using the Network? That’s another Tomorrow Today in itself, coming up soon after this series is done.

And Yahoo! ? The Google of the late nineties is foundering. Brad Garlinghouse’s “Peanut Butter” memo seems to have done little more than cause a rearrangement on the company’s board, but I don’t see a strategy shift in the least.

Yahoo should also get out of the search and Pay-per-click advertising space.

What is Yahoo! as a company? As Terry Semel himself stated several months ago, Yahoo! is primarily a media company that is technology-heavy. An online media company, to be precise. Now think of the online advertising world in terms of the Long Tail. Yahoo’s customers were in the “head” of the Long Tail graph – a few thousand advertisers, but each one worth big bucks. Google instead targets the “long tail” with its AdWords model. In fact, AdWords is not effective for large advertisers, but then it was never intended to be.

Yahoo! needs to realise that there is much more to the online marketing world than simply advertising, especially when compared to the sophisticated offline marketing campaigns that professional marketing and PR firms run. Yahoo! would do well to induct that kind of talent onto its rolls. I’m thinking an acquisition of a respected marketing/advertising agency. Being able to use more media like video, audio, images and maps willl increase the richness of future campaigns, With regard to video, having traffic driven to Google’s properties (YouTube) won’t seem so bad once the videos on that website have been created by Yahoo! (PR videos, video ads, videos with embedded ads, the works!)

Online PR, viral and buzz marketing, social network marketing and affiliate marketing are areas that are currently a fishmarket of small fragmented firms, none of whom have the scale or the expertise to cater to truly large clients. They’d be cannon fodder should Yahoo! choose to muscle into these spaces.

Finally, mobile is one area where I believe Yahoo! already has a lead over Google. Its widget-oriented OneSearch service proves that the mandarins at Yahoo! have the right idea. The company recognises that the mobile web is different. Although more intent-based than the PC Web, mobile web is subscription-driven instead of search-driven. OneSearch is a large step down that road. Mobile online communities could be a massive revenue-earner. Google has Orkut and Dodgeball in its armory but isn’t doing a thing with them. Will Yahoo! grab this opportunity instead?

In summary, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have forgotten their company DNA in their zeal to show Wall Street that they’re wise to every Google trick. They don’t have to be. In fact, as we’ve seen in this rather detailed Tomorrow Today, they’re three very different companies operating in three different spaces, playing to their different strengths. The sooner Redmond and Sunnyvale realise this, the sooner they’ll be able to drag these companies out of the morass they’re sliding into.

Tomorrow we’ll wind up by examining what GUS means for Google itself, and where the company could go from here.

About a week ago, Google took the lid off a project that had been brewing for several months. The company calls it Universal Search. In a nutshell, it “will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.”

For ordinary web searchers, the change is hardly noticeable. In fact, a lot of ordinary surfers I’ve spoken to since Google Universal Search (GUS) went live have given me the “Duh” reaction. And therein lies the genius of this innovation. This subtle, almost invisible new search is a disruptive innovation; affecting the entire SEO industry, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google itself.

This week’s Tomorrow Today is a four-part series where we’ll examine just how GUS has changed the rules of the game for all stakeholders.

Part 1: What people are saying about GUS
Part 2: What it means for SEO
Part 3: What it means for Microsoft and Yahoo
Part 4: What it means for Google and the future.

Part 1: What people are saying about GUS

Google’s had plenty of “vertical”searches in the past – its bread-and-butter web search, image search, blog search, local search, video search, even book, map, news and email search. Google Universal search unifies these previously siloed searches. Now, a search for a term will return a list of results that span all of the above. The most dramatic change as of now seems to be the video search integration. As an example, the results to the search request ”I have a dream” will include an actual video showing Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 speech along with the usual assortment of Web links (Associated Press). Now you begin to get understand how significant this little change is, and begin to think up of other scenarios. Imagine a search for “apple store”. This could lead to (apart from normal web results), a map of Apple stores throughout the state where you’re located, new results about apple stores, images of the glass Apple Store in Soho, and so on.

The real technical smarts with converting siloed searches into GUS have to do with “finding the best answer across multiple content types“. How do you rank an image search result in comparison to a web search, or a video search result? Previously, comparing a news result for a search term with a maps result for the same term, and ranking them relative to each other was like comparing apples and oranges. No longer.

Danny Sullivan demonstrates how news, maps and book results now form part of the standard search results set. Admittedly, these results did show up on the first page of the Web search results, but they were placed separately, out of the top 10 search results. That, ironically, reduced their relevance. Consequently they were hardly clicked on.

Tomorrow we’ll see what this means for Seach Engine Optimization firms who, for good reason, are quite shaken up by this new development.

There was a time when Google released its Desktop Search application (since renamed Google Desktop), and the Google Talk client more or less together. Back then, I wondered why Google was going down the path of Windows desktop applications – wasn’t the Web the Future, according to them? I did think that their strategy implementation was faltering just a bit.

In any case, this month we’ve seen an example of what the next generation of web applications is going to look like. Google Talk is no longer an “application”, but a Flash “gadget” that can live anywhere on the web – be it on your personalized Google homepage, or your blog, or your Firefox sidebar. Well, a web-based chat application is rather stale – computer science undergrads routinely write applications like these as part of their network programming course. But the Talk Gadget’s different – in two significant ways:

One, it’s got about all the functionality of a desktop application. Because it’s Flash-based (as opposed to HTML/AJAX), it’s able to incorporate features like tabbed chats, Flickr/Picasa slideshows, or embedded YouTube videos.

Two, it can be “deployed” anywhere on the web, as I mentioned earlier. This has far-reaching consequences for web application developers; the Talk Gadget represents the beginning of the era of full-featured application components, an era where you no longer have to download/launch/upgrade applications, or even live with browser-based implementations. We’ve set foot into the realm of “instant launch”. Take a look at the Google Talk page if you don’t get what I just said. The big blue button no longer says “Download Google Talk” – just “Launch Google Talk”.

I guess we can see where we’re going – “launch Word/Excel/PowerPoint” anytime, anywhere, for starters. Componentization of full-featured applications like this could lead to completely new ways of looking at existing web applications. Take Blogger. Today, the publisher and the reader have very different interfaces to the blog – the publisher uses the Blogger interface to compose, manage and publish posts, and the user views the *.blogspot.com pages. With Word processor integration, we could have a collapsible compose window right at the top, viewable only by the publisher. He/she could compose/manage posts right from the existing *.blogspot.com page. And what is a comments system but a multi-way chat? Enter the embedded Google Talk Gadget. Adding images is no longer cumbersome – simply drag and drop from your desktop (or browser window) into the compose area, and it’s automatically uploaded or linked. Let your imagination loose for email and scheduling applications too. Now embed AdSense into these components, and you can see where the money’s coming from.

Finally, the most promising platform to deliver these applications seems to be Flash. Suddenly, Adobe has been given a new lease of life. Will Google risk building its future application services on a platform owned by another company? And where does Adobe go from here? (Think Apollo.) That’s fodder for another post!

One of the more interesting applications of Google Trends is to compare the search volumes of two or more search terms over the past several months (or years). So we were winding down work yesterday at Convonix, and fooling around with Google trends, when, on a whim, I compared “valentine” and “lingerie”. And well – there is a correlation. See for yourself.

Yahoo’s been quietly putting into place a set of very high-quality tools and services for mobile phones. From the time it launched Yahoo! Go last year, the company’s been working feverishly at plugging its diverse services (mail, search, instant messaging, news, photos, finance, entertainment) into the mobile platform (or the other way round).

Well, you could say, so has Google. Not quite. Yahoo has understood (much better than Google) that the mobile usage paradigm is different from the PC. That is, users access information differently on mobile devices, even if it is the same information that they access from the PC. Nowhere is this more evident than its recently-launched oneSearch service. (Read this article on searchenginejournal.com for more.) In fact, Yahoo’s been bold enough to present a comparison of its mobile implementation of services with Google’s. And even with the liberal marketing hype, the difference does show through. Finally, Yahoo!’s managed to get Motorola and Cingular on board to advertise their phones’ compatibility with Yahoo! Go (Y! did say a couple of years ago that it was essentially a media company that also did technology!) In comparison, all Google’s done is slap a mobile interface to its mail, search and RSS reader services. That simply won’t work. Again, I recommend you read the article I’ve linked to above for understanding how Yahoo! views mobile search differently.

However, regardless of how Google responds and who wins the battle for mobile content in the US, the stakes are tiny when compared to those halfway around the world. India and China (am I tired of hearing that near-hypenation or what!) keep adding mobile connections at a pace that leaves the US and Europe flabbergasted. India is already the fastest-growing mobile market, and has the lowest mobile tariffs in the world. These two economies are where the real action is, where the real bucks are to be made.They are also by far the most challenging markets – diverse, fragmented, cost-concious, notoriously low-tech, unswayed by hype, and where organized business is almost nonexistent (in India, a mere 8% of the workforce is in the “organized sector”). A mobile user in Bareilly, Utttar Pradesh, for instance, wouldn’t bother about Yahoo! Go – or even Yahoo! mobile web, since he’s/she’s using a black-and-white, text-display-only, Rs. 1500 ($34) mobile phone that can do barely more than send/receive calls and messages and sound alarms. But the same user is passionate about being “connected”, carries the mobile phone everywhere and uses text messaging heavily. And there are more users like him/her in Indian and China than there are people in North America and the EU combined. How do you build winning propositions for them? Something more than ringtones and wallpapers, ideas so disgustingly obsolete now?

Yahoo! India and Google’s India operations need to get into the average Indian mobile user’s mind to glean what his/her purchase intentions currently are, how these goods and services are advertised to him/her today, and how a mobile phone (an always-on, truly personal device) could both change his/her needs, and serve his/her current needs better. Results are likely to be different across Tier 1 and Tier 2/3 cities. Serving the former will be easy – this market is very much like the tried-tested-trusted US market. The latter is where the real volumes are, the real revenue is, but it’s going to take some big risky initiatives to tap into.

Peter Daboll, “Chief of Insights” (wow!) at Yahoo!, contends that page views as a measure of website performance are outdated. Daboll’s argument is that with Ajax, Flash and embedded video, traditional methods are no longer accurate indicators. While he’s right on that count, his call for “visits a day” as an alternative measure doesn’t quite measure up. Consider this:

Institutions of Higher Education in the USA really do seem to “get” Private Equity. Over the past two weeks, I’ve come across two examples of just how well Universities are leveraging private equity. Both these examples are with different ends in mind.

The University Venture Fund :

This one impressed me just with the design of its web site, but the concept is simply mind-blowing. Consider this – there are plenty of student-run venture funds in Universities across the US – most being funded by donations or the school’s own endowments. The University of Utah’s different. It remains the only (as of the time of this writing) student-run venture fund to raise money publicly. What makes things more dramatic is that these funds are invested in startups, and middle-stage firms, rather than publicly traded stocks. According to Businesswire, “students research live VC projects, and make investment choices”. The fund functions just the way a professional fund would be expected to – investors expect the kinds of return on their money that top-notch funds would offer, and in the same time-frame.

And by the looks of it, this initiative’s proving to be quite a success – in January last year, it raised $5 million in funding (including from heavyweights like UBS Bank and Morgan Stanley Bank). I think this beats all other methods of “teaching” entrepreneurship hands down. As the dean of the University’s school of business says, “Entrepreneurship is difficult (I’d say impossible – Rahul) to teach in a classroom, so a venture capital fund like UVF is an exceptional forum to help bridge the gap between classroom and real-life business,”. I’m sure the University’s built deep relationships with both the venture cap firms that mentor and advise students, as well as investors themselves.

The incentives are right in place, and it’s a win-win situation for all entities involved. The students get the learning (not to be confused with education) of a lifetime, the University’s earning a nice IRR, the venture caps are getting the best minds to advise them on their investments, and are getting future top-notch employees on a platter, and finally, the investors are getting market-rate, or better, rate-of-returns.

College Hedge Funds [via Paul Kedrosky ]:
Purdue University’s investing its endowments, again, in private equity and venture capital. While it isn’t clear whether or not students are involved here, but here money isn’t being raised publicly – these are the endowments and donations the U receives. The Chronicle has a detailed piece on this trend, taking Purdue as an example (registration required for article). As Paul summarizes, Purdue’s gone from 0% (1999) to 22% (2005) and aims at 39% (2011). Also interesting is the comment on Paul’s post. Investments in PE/VC funds attract “the best managerial talent far into the future, and the pay for performance model gives incentive to keep assets under management at a workable level.” In contrast, “the mutual fund asset-gathering strategy…. grow the pile as big as you can and collect a fixed fee… invites timidity, groupthink, and elephantiasis”.

It’s about time that the “entrepreneurship clubs” at our IIMs and the ISB move out of their shell, move beyond organizing business plan competitions and seminars, and get their hands dirty on work that requires real committment and provides real learning and networking.

… with every passing day! Today we aren’t just storing data online, but are now using applications that run straight off the web to work with that data. At this stage in the evolution of web applications, we’ve done a very good data to store and manipulate textual data online. There’s very little of that kind of stuff on my hard disk any more. Consider this:

I’m typing this post in my Gmail “compose” window, since I can post to Blogspot using a secret email address (Blogger drives this weblog). To take quick notes, jot down ideas, I use Google Notebook. To write longer documents, more elaborate posts, papers, articles and the like, I turn to Writely. My email (my rahul@rahulgaitonde.org account is now hosted by Google at www.google.com/hosted) is now online. It used to be a POP3 account, and I used to download mail to my Thinkpad and use Thunderbird, but no longer. My address book is, of course, stored online too. My bookmarks are no longer a long list in Firefox. Instead, I use del.icio.us.

I am now at a point where for most of my day-to-day work, the computer I use does not matter. At home, I can use the Thinkcenter, my Thinkpad, I can walk across the street to the Internet Cafe, or for that matter the access terminals at most International Airports, and continue from where I left off. The same applications, the same data. We can now see the ultimate goal in the distance – making Data independent of Device!

What’s next? There are two imperatives: 1.) Better tools for storing and working with other multimedia – pictures, videos, music, and such. 2.) Providing mobile interfaces to each of these appliations.

I’m now migrating all the pictures in the “My Pictures” folder to Flickr. However, Flickr, although very good, doesn’t quite match up to the simple, humble Windows Explorer for managing pictures, so forget about competing with applications like Picasa. There are elementary things we’ve learnt to do, such as pre-fetching pictures in a slideshow, and smooth Flash interface (Flickr), but we still need improvement. Managing bandwidth effectively, for instance. The same goes for managing videos with YouTube. We’re still one or two evolutionary stages away on that front.

As far as music goes, we have most of the infrastructure in place. But we’ve got to think beyond simply translating the local HDD paradigm into an online thing. Most efforts today are about providing online space (in addition to eliminating duplicates), and then streaming to a player. Bob Cringely had examined a few applications late last year, but all of them are based on the old paradigm. Why buy a CD, rip, upload, and then stream back?

These are some problems we’ve got to solve for any medium richer than text. But we’re getting there, we’re getting there!

Here’s a report on CNN Money, on the way Bill Gates deals with information. The article does provide a rare glimpse into Gates’ office, but you come away with the feeling that this kind of article ought to have appeared on a technology website, like ZDNet, maybe – and ought to have been more in-depth. Can someone out there do an interview with Gates on this specific topic – Personal Information Management?

There are multiple issues about today’s increasingly high-tech workstyle that come forth in this piece by Gates. I’m going to go through a few of them here:

Desktop v/s Laptop v/s Mobile:
Gates works on a desktop PC, using a massive display spread across 3 21″ LCD monitors. What struck me was not the awesome display (I have experienced the joy of working with a 21″ LCD display before I switched to a ThinkPad), but the fact that for a person who travels a lot, and works from multiple locations, he uses a PC! I’d think his chief workstation would be a laptop. I couldn’t imagine life without a laptop now – I am so used to being able to access my documents whether I’m at work, home, at a conference, or at a speaking engagement. Gates says that “when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.” Well, I want to know more about this synchronization solution he’s using. I’d find it pretty difficult to sync all of my stuff on my Thinkpad to a PC, or the other way round – there’s just too many different types of things.

What’s interesting is that there’s nothing in there about mobile tools. Does Gates not use any? After all, the mobile world is now high on MS’ agenda. I would think that a touch-screen mobile device would be ideal for his meetings. I was speaking to a CEO of a technology company a few months ago, and he described how people used to walk into meetings these days without a laptop, TabletPC, or even a notebook. Then they’d whip out their Nokia smartphone and a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from their pocket, and type away!

I would think that Gates, who’s always championed the idea of “eating your own dog food” (witness how they migrated to Windows Server 2003 across MS internally even before the actual product launch), would use one of those Palm Treos that now run Windows Mobile 5.0:

Desktop Search:
“Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search”. Windows Desktop Search is probably (I hope!) what he uses, and although I don’t find it as snappy as Google Desktop Search, I can imagine what a huge productivity enhancer it can be for Gates. No filing, no browsing. As I had said previously, I do not use the Windows Start Menu anymore. I simply type the name of the application I want to in the Google Desktop search window, and click on it from the results list. Way faster.

The challenge for Gates is now to make Search the new paradigm for managing personal and public document repositories.

The Paperless Office:
The paperless office is now pretty much a reality with most tech companies now – we at IBM have digitzed almost all of our internal processes. There are a few instances where transactions are performed online but need to be printed out for approval – those are being addressed as you read this post. But the overall statement is true – it’s been a long time since the average technologist used a paper and a pen.

In his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, Gates has covered the Paperless Office over an entire chapter. He points out that the only paper forms that remain at MS are the ones that deal with the Government. I’m certain that the situation is more acute here in India, where there’s no sustained, pan-department, nation-wide drive to cut down on paper. (Recall the ubiquitious sarkaari “file”!) That is where the most innovative minds must focus.

Sharepoint and Wikis:
Gates talks about collaboration using Sharepoint: “…SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.” We at IBM use Wikis extensively. I haven’t had a chance to look at and evaluate Sharepoint, but Wikis do the same job with aplomb. Wikis are very scalable – two people working on an idea can use a wiki just as well as a multi-site, enterprise-level software development team with a staff of over a hundred – and very usable – no knowledge of HTML needed.

So we’re finally moving away from moulding our collaboration practices to fit in with existing tools, to building tools that are more suitable for efficient collaboration. For years, teams used email as a form of communication between teams, cc’ing everyone on the team to make sure everyone had the entire context. This is hugely inefficient! Think of the immense duplication of information – text, context, attachments. And speaking of context, it’s extrememly difficult to follow the flow of information by looking at multiple emails bottom-up. Wikis solve these problems with one stroke. The only shortcoming of a Wiki today is that representing tabular data is a bit of a pain.

Finally…
Finally, Gates talks about the “digital whiteboard” in a few MS offices, which takes a snapshot of the board and all its contents as an image. Hmm. We at IBM simply whip out our mobile cameras and take a photograph of the whiteboard! This remninds me of the story of NASA spending a lot of money on developing a pen that would work in Zero-gravity conditions, only to find that the Russians were doing fine with a pencil

What’s the best mobile browser out there? On my Nokia 6670, I’ve tried NetFront 3.2, Opera for mobile (the 15-day trial). Both of these run neck-to-neck in terms to overall experience. There are a few features NetFront has that Opera doesn’t, and vice versa. But I wasn’t happy with either of them – the speed, the rendering, the fonts (awful for both) – mobile browsing wasn’t quite there yet, I thought.

Enter Opera Mini. In a single stroke, Opera has managed to eliminate most, if not all, of the problems that plagued the other browser offerings out there. Opera Mini is a Java application, so advantage number one is that it’ll run on any phone that can run Java apps – so it doesn’t have to be a Nokia smartphone running Symbian Series60, or the high-end Sony Ericsson or Motorola ones. Repeat – it is not a native Symbian or Windows Mobile or Palm application; it’s a Java app.

There are two version of this phone – for low and high memory phones. So for those of you with, for instance, a Nokia 6610 (amazing phone, wish I owned one), you can try the low-memory version. The high-memory version will run on the Nokia 6600, 6630, 6670, 6680, 7710, nGage, and I guess the N-series. See the beauty? Even the Nokia 6610 can have a full-featured browser now! All you need is Java and a GPRS/3G connection.

That’s the Basic (MIDP 1)-type browser.

And that’s the Advanced (MIDP 2) browser.
The installation is dead-simple: it’s a direct download from www.opera.com/mini, no licence agreements, no filling out forms or anything. Click, download, install – right from your existing browser. Or of course, you could download it on your PC/laptop and copy it to your phone via Infrared/Bluetooth/plain old USB. At 100KB, it’s one of the smallest applications I’ve come across. And for a browser, that is stupendous.

And the browsing experience is something else! Opera Mini renders its own fonts, and it does a very good job of that. The default font is very very readable, and there’s also a small font option that packs much more onto one screen, while still keeping things very clear. The sheer quality of the fonts hits you. Those with small screens (low memory phones) will love the small font option. The home page has an address bar, a Google search box, a list of configurable bookmarks, and a short history. Cool!

Before I get any further, here’s a quickie on how Opera Mini works – your requests go via an Opera server, which does the page retrieval on your behalf, parses the page, makes it phone-friendly and passes it back to the phone, taking a huge rendering load off the tiny mobile browser. It also handles the available network bandwidth quite well ( Russell Beattie thinks that it does a very good job of overcoming “network latency”), so your GPRS connection does feel very fast and responsive.

Flip side/annoyances? Sure. Since it isn’t a native application, there’s a confirmation box that pops up on my Nokia phone, asking if I want to allow the application to connect to the Internet, every time I click on a link. I’m used to it now, but it’s annoying nevertheless. Then again, being a Java application means that if you leave it in memory for a couple of days, it’ll eat up almost all your phone RAM – so that means exiting and restarting the browser. Also, no downloads. Shocking, but true! You can’t use Opera Mini to download anything to your hard disk, so you’ll have to use NetFront for that.

I’ve become a huge fan! I use this browser on the train shuttling between Mumbai and Pune, on the bus to-and-fro work – I’ve even begun checking and replying to my email first thing in the morning, before I’ve even read the morning paper. Oh, and if my newspaper walla plays truant, I end up reading the paper on Opera Mini too! Go get it!

(Doesn’t it sound like one of those TeleBrand ads you see too often lately?!)

If anyone needed a reminder that blogs have caught on only recently, take a look at this: