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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.

It’s expensive:
I use the Airtel GPRS service very heavily. Because in Pune, it’s unlimited (in terms of volume and time) as long as I pay Rs. 150 per month. I use it for checking email, catching up on blogs, and using it as a Bluetooth modem for my Thinkpad so I can dial into my corporate network. It’s cheap, I’m connected, and I’m happy.

However, I’ve learnt that almost all other GPRS plans (even Airtel in other locations) charge based on volume, typically a paisa per kilobyte. That works out to Rs. 10 per MB. And I think that’s prohibitively expensive, something like twice the average broadband tariffs. Besides, the speeds aren’t anywhere like broadband, in fact far closer to the dialup speeds circa 1998. In addition, the mobile phone doesn’t offer you the user interface that a PC can, so what would compel a user to sign up for a scheme like this?

This is the same problem that’s hampering the widespread adoption of broadband in India. I had referred to this once before , and I have personally seen plenty of families I know, who haven’t signed up for broadband because it’s “expensive”, or won’t fit into their exact usage pattern. The same is set to happen with the mobile date market in India.

We need to remember that the mobile phone is to India what the PC is to the United States – the most widely used medium for data access. There is a tremendous market for mobile data services. We need to stop thinking according to the scarcity mentality – that is, to try to extract the maximum revenue from a small market, and begin to take bold steps to expand the market. There is huge opportunity in the latter.

Best phone for the Indian Market?
Smartphones such as the Nokia 6600 are cheap today, and will be real cheap in the near future. I am of the firm opinion that it’s going to be this model that can be a game-changer as regards hardware. Once this piece reaches Rs. 5000, once there is a critial mass of people using it, mobile data usage will explode. This phone can do most things that a rich data experience needs – for connectivity, we need Bluetooth, USB – this phone has it. RealPlayer for videos, an MP3 player, FM radio (although I think this isn’t stereo output), decent amount of storage, document viewers, Java – the works. It even has a camera, but this is  exceptionally poor and isn’t any real use. But a little amount of tweaking can make this a dream phone. It could be the iPod of the masses, the Simputer of the masses, and the PC of the masses too.

Mobile Applications:
What kind of applications would people use? For one, we need a kickass web browser for the mobile phone platform. I’d expected the Open Source Community to put together a mobile Firefox for at least the Blackberry or an O2 or a Treo (since that would probably be easier – more computing power, more disk space, more memory) than a Nokia, but then Opera beat everyone to it with the Opera Mini. That simple application has the potential of being a total game-changer. It runs on any phone that can run Java apps – any phone! Also a similar Java-based, small footprint Instant Messaging application – something like Migg33. Another thing would be a service like iTunes. We have a Jurassic version of that with Airtel’s Easy Music service. But that requires you to walk into an Airtel outlet. What we need is true download-via-GPRS, just like iTunes. With more and more phones having lots of storage, a file management application that lets you use your phone as a portable drive would be real cool. Again, it needs to be Java-based so that the interface would be the same no matter what phone it was installed on.

So it’s clear that we have the building blocks in place. But for the market to really take off, it needs a big gamble from a player who’s willing to change the rules of the game by making sustained investments for some amount of time. That is what Reliance did in the early 2000s, and today it can afford a 40 paise per minute tarriff within the Reliance network. Right now I would think only Reliance and Bharti are in a position to make that kind of investment.

Now that the suspense is over, I can take the wraps off my eight-month-long quest for the IIMs, and announce that I have indeed made it to IIM Kozhikode! Yes, dear reader, the geek is now off to B-school. The “How” and “Why” will follow in two posts soon enough.

For now, here’s an edited version of the GD/PI description I wrote a friend the day after the interview on February 23rd, at Dadar’s Catering College.

The moment I reached the venue, there were a number of other people there, so I simply launched into the group and made friends with most of them – couple were from IMS Pune – so we got along damn well, before too much time we were cracking dumb jokes, doing “de taali” and stuff even before the registration started. Yes. Good start.

Registration: We were divided into three groups of about 9 each, our degree certi and admit card were checked, and led into the GD halls. BTW, here’s where I learnt that you need a work-ex certificate or your first and last salary slips, of which I had neither, so I had to hop around to Dadar the next day once more with them.

GD: There were two guys in my Panel (Panel 2) – one who looked tough, mean, wore an IIMK T-shirt, whom I’ll call “Bhai”, and the other was the typical “straight-out-of-Kerala” smooth-talking Mallu, whom I’ll call “Smooth”. B and S organised us according to our TR numbers in a semicircle. The topic was given to us on a slip of paper, we had a minute to think, and 10 mins to talk. The topic was a pseudo-extract from a newspaper titled the New Indian Express, calling upon the UPA Government to ban strikes in the wake of the AAI strike. Bore topic! Now the good thing was that because we had become such good friends just a few minutes ago, it was difficult to have an acrimonious GD – and I think by now most people have realized that a fishmarket is not in anyone’s interest. So it was pretty well conducted, I started, led the discussion – the only negative point was that once, when someone went on a tangent, I told him so, and led the topic back on track – that could be seen as either positive or negative. On the whole from my POV, the GD went off damn well.

Interview – I was 4th in my panel. The same two guys, Bhai and Smooth, conducted the PI. Typical interview for all three panels lasted for between 12 and 15 minutes. Most freshers were being quizzed on academics, and work ex guys on technical questions related to their jobs. Not encouraging. I had not read up on any subject at all, and didn’t know much about my project to carry myself through an interview. Every interview started with “So, XXX, introduce yourself”. To which the only reply I had prepared was “Sir, I’m born and brought up in Mumbai. So are my parents. I studied also in Mumbai. I hope now to study in Kerala. <Hopeful grin>”.

When I went in, Smooth took over and asked me “So, Rahul, do you blog?” Wow! That was the absolute *best* start that I could have ever expected. What followed was a wonderful discussion of IBM’s blogging policy, the blogosphere inside IBM, how we can use blogs as a PR weapon against MS, Sun, Novell – and I took them through Robert Scoble of MS, Nat Friedman of Novell, Bryan Cantrill of Sun, then the Gaurav Sabnis-Rashmi Bansal-IIPM controversy, my own Businessworld article concerns, linking blogging v/s strikes as a way of registering protest, and finally Smooth asked “So after this interview, if I wrote nasty things about you and this interview on my blog, could you sue me?” So I said sure, of course, I could sue you for libel… but I would much rather use my blog to counter you and say nasty things about you too! So all three of us had a hearty laugh at that! In fact, everyone before me was saying that Bhai was rude, curt,  but with me both were very jovial and casual – it was more of a “mil baithenge teen yaar – Bhai, Smooth aur Rahul”. Really.

Then Bhai took me through IBM’s ISL and Global Services difference, asked me if I was good at Maths – to which I said an emphatic No. Then we went through a discussion of continuous functions, defined functions, maxima, minima – which I handled well. Then a discussion of distance between 2 points in an n-dimensional space. Rather than give formulae and stuff (which I was shaky at), I explained the concept rather well, and they nodded in approval multiple times. There was just a little hitch where I mistook a continuous function for a defined function (or the other way round). So Smooth asked me if they selected me, would I accept being put through a Mathematics Preparatory Course? So I said “After all this mess, I can hardly say no!” Again laughter all round, and Bhai said “No no, don’t worry!”.

Finally they looked at my certis, and said “Ok, Rahul! Do you have any questions for us?” So I asked them how IIMK was attempting to distinguish itself from the rest of the IIMs – because, I said, “We tend to stay in the shadow of the big 3” (Note the “we”!). So he talked about K’s attempts to build a brand, and said that age was the one factor why we were still counted as *inferior*. I mentioned that my call letter had “IIMK – The Second Generation IIM” written on it. Bhai roared with laughter and actually said this: “Bullshit! Those are the stupid policies of the Government of India! Not us! They put that on the envelope! Who can tell those people what makes sense and what does not! We have better things to say!” So there ended the interview – on a very casual, friendly note!! :-)

The folks outside asked me if anything was wrong – because the interview had lasted for about 35 minutes, as opposed to 12-15 minutes on an average.

Hmm – in retrospect – nothing was wrong, for the result on 12th April confirmed what I’d been expecting all along – I’m off to IIMK!!

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.”

Paul Graham has an interesting tip for startups: target smaller companies with inexpensive, simple products. In other words, “Cheap Eats Better”.

“Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it’s easier to sell to them. It’s worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can’t outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.

They’re the more strategically valuable part of the market anyway. In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.”

The other day I was on the Intercity Express back home to Thane (Hurray for Fridays!). Window Seat, as always, so I can watch the delightful sights of Lonavala and Khandala and exercise my memory cells trying to recall the stations from Pune to Thane in order. A window seat also means two things, bad and good – one, you smell like the Indian Railways – the odour only a long-distance traveller by Indian Railways will be familiar with, and two, you are oblivious to the chaos around you inside the compartment. Perhaps I will write about that too, sometime.

But that evening, one voice pierced my bubble of solitude – a loud, know-it-all, too-clear voice. You know, the kind with a bloated sense of self-esteem. I couldn’t see, but the disembodied voice matched the stereotype of a 20-to-24-year-old male. He was lecturing a family who (by a terrible error in judgement) had asked him his opinion of doing Engineering from Mumbai University. Presumably Munna/Chutki had just finished 12th and was thinking of an engineering education.

“… yes yes, Vivekanand is good, but only for Computers and IT – don’t even touch the other courses… Somaiya? Hmm – ok-ok, maybe the Computers course is passable. But the college infrastructure is very bad, I tell you! So don’t take chances, because infrastructure tells you so much about the quality of the faculty and the esteem that students hold it in!” As a Somaiya alumnus, my first instinct was to locate this individual and splatter my veg cutlet on his face. But veg cutlet is one of Indian Railways’ few redeeming features, so I kept myself in check and listened to more pearls of wisdom that filled the compartment.

“… Engineering is no joke! You must be very clear about what you want from life! Don’t take up Mechanical when your inner self is an Electronics Engineer! Ask yourself a dozen times about your real goal in life! Engineering will give you deep a technical background….”

“Eh, what?” I asked myself. I replayed the conversations I had heard for so many weeks in the monsoon of 2000, Admission Time for me. Exchanged between anxious parents, students, sagacious seniors, wily officials, these snippets of conversations testify admission-time is a mad mad world.

“Vivekanand IT course is HOT this year!”

“There is a trend for electronics over the past year!”

“Keep at least three backup colleges!”

“SP College gives full marks for practicals – always! ‘Go’ for such colleges.”

“College is always more important than the course!”

“Course is always more important than the college!”

“College and course – both are equally important!”

“There is a rumor that Datta Meghe will ‘become’ A-grade institution! Take it aankh-band-karke!”

“Take any college you get now! Thursday the courts will decide to have another fresh round most probably; you will get into Thadomal Mechanical then!”

“Me? I’m applying for both Engineering and Medical. Whichever declares results first, I will take!”

I’d love to hear other gems that you’ve come across, dear reader-from-Mumbai-U. But you get the idea. This is the kind of rational thinking and deliberation that goes on among the student community and their parents during admission. And I wonder if the tens of thousands of engineering students of Mumbai U will find out what they want to do in life until they’re 30, have a family, kids, a sucky job, loans, insurance premia and bills to pay. Maybe realization will strike in a local train with five shoes on your shoes, in an overcrowded BEST bus under someone’s underarm, or at home staring at one of those bills I talked about, wherever you may be, but not before 30. So how the hell are you going to find out what engineer my “inner self” is at 17?

Mumbai U engineering is an underworld in itself. There are “tips and tricks” to survive. There are “means” to get ahead. There are “things” that can happen that are beyond your control. There are “people” to know. Every student who goes to the US for Graduate School, invariably shoots off multiple emails in his/her first month, about how “different” and “sahi” and “great” the “education system” is there, that “Rahul, you cannot even imagine”, and that “Rahul, you should have been here, yaar!” (Referring to the time I gave up three top-20 Univ M.S./Ph.D admits and chose to stay in India).

They’re right, after all. There is no “external examiner” who comes to conduct your vivas at the end of the semester seeking bloody revenge, because your professor went to the other college and failed a dozen students for the heck of it. Or a semester paper where 60% of the questions may be “out of syllabus”. Or a student may fail in all subjects for two, three successive semsters and still make it to the next year. Or assignments are routinely written by one student and replicated, xerox-like, by the other 100 students: 12 assignments each for 6 subjects each twice a year each for 4 years. Or a senior may graduate and return a month later to teach the final year students, one year his/her junior. Or professors insist on students writing the entire program code (often spanning hundreds of lines) *by hand* in their journals. Or…. I wonder if a group of brave students with photographic memories could come together and write a book like “Inside Mumbai University BE – The Real Story” or similar. Pulitzer and Nobel guaranteed. The list of atrocities committed in Mumbai U are among the worst kept secrets in the city – everyone knows about it, no one talks about it.

You’d expect people who’ve had an education like this to be hopelessly maladjusted towards life post-Engineering. How could such dunderheads ever have any hint of technical knowledge? How could they ever compete and become a success in Corporate India? Why wouldn’t half of them join the actual Mumbai underworld in sheer frustration?

But you know the truth? Mumbai U ranks just behind the IITs and in front of a few NITs in terms of perceived value in India (of course, great emphasis on “perceived”). Mumbai U Engineering grads have gone on to become undisputed successes in Industry – and the West. They’ve managed admission to the best US schools, have studied at the IIMs, risen up to high positions, managerial and technical, in large organizations, have founded startups and made tons of money. How?! What have they learnt from their Engineering days? What gives them a shot at survival, much less an edge over others?

Maybe the entire environment in Mumbai University is the World in miniature. Think about it: in the World, people with positions of great responsibility are more often than not stupid. (The Dilbert principle – people are moved to the position where they can cause least damage). That how things are in MU. It’s the people who’re able to manipulate these unfortunately powerful gentlemen, who “get ahead”.

Get maximum work done in minimum time. Results matter, no matter how you get them. That’s Corporate India/West for you. Is it any different from the mass copying for assignments? Every student joins multiple classes for every subject, and turns that subject into a well-rehearsed, highly-optimized play of questions and answers. What does that teach us? Playing the “system” so well, even the “system” cannot beat us. Ditto for Life.

We don’t have the kind of lab equipment that the IITs have. The majority of the staff would fail an intelligence test that the cockroach behind my washbasin could pass. (btw, cockroaches are supposed to be very smart, so it isn’t as sarcastic as you think). We have a syllabus that is changed every five years (or is it ten?). This, even for a fast-changing domain like Computer Science. We learn to put up with this. Those of us who eventually garner technical knowledge, do it on our own, without having things spoonfed to us via a textbook, or even being motivated via a splendid set of lectures from an inspired teacher.

Here’s a joke from the Readers’ Digest from years ago: What is the essential difference between a scientist and an engineer? The scientist was to know How Things Work; the engineer just wants to get the Damn Thing to Work! And that’s what we do, par excellence.

Because MU imitates life, there is no real line that divides the “World” and “College”, in that there is no sense of college being a “protected” environment. DJ from Rang De Basanti said, “College ke andar hum zindagi ko nachaate hain , aur college ke bahar zindagi humko nachaati hai”. Nah. Not true for us MU-ites. Hamara Zindagi se mukabla college mein hi shuru hota hai.

Flip side? Zero Innovation potential. The chances of a Mumbai U passout coming out with a pathbreaking product, process, startup or the like, is very low when you compare him/her with an IITian. Beat the system, get ahead is the mantra we’ve been programmed with. The vast majority of jobs demand just that. That’s where MU-ites score.

And that’s why the gentleman in the Intercity Express got it all wrong!

[via Rajesh Jain]

• Web 2.0 is people, collaboration, creating together.
• Business Model change is more important than technology change.
• The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.
• Give up control, gain value.
• Start small, grow bottom up.
• The question is not what new programs can do for us, but now that we’re enabled, what do we do together, better.

I thought I could pick out two or three of the most important points from this list, but each one seems as important as the other. Each is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for succeeding in leveraging the power of the Internet to do business. If pressed to pick the most important one, it would have to be

• The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.

I wrote about this a long time back (Feb 2005), in “ Hula and the future of software“. I hadn’t even heard of the term Web 2.0 back then, but the paradigm was clear. I was talking about Novell’s new business model, after the acquisition of Ximian and SUSE. The challenge, as I said back then, was to gain acceptance from the wide user community Out There, but the application itself must be usable by organizations too. Software applications can no longer be classified into verticals like B2B, B2C, C2C (or P2P). The Internet just throws these paradigms out the window. To quote from my year-old article,

“…the company needs to build great, industry-strength products that large corporates will use, and will be willing to pay for support. But on the other, these products also need to be “cool” enough, “sexy” enough, for the average nerd to download, try out, and muck about with.”

Joe Shaw, the jolly hacker from Novell and chief maintainer of Beagle, is having problems with Bloglines. Joe, I think you need Google Reader. It’s got everything that you want:

• Web based – I read blogs from at least two different computers, so my subscriptions and read counts need to carry from one to another.
• Two paned – I really, really like the two paned system Bloglines uses. You have feeds and groups of feeds on the left, you click one, and your unread ones load in the right. The pervasive three paned view is just retarded: way too many clicks and far too little information, and a one paned view (like Planet) is just too much information due to the number of blogs I subscribe to.
• Ability to mark items as unread – Bloglines has this nice “Keep new” checkbox in each item that allows me to come back to an article later. Particularly nice for all those Boing Boing NSFW items.

Google Reader is web-based, two-paned, and can mark items as Unread. Besides, Bloglines’ primitive web interface doesn’t even compare with Google Reader’s AJAX-ed smoothness. It handles Atom, RSS, and Feedburner-style syndications. Can import/export from/to OPML, so migrating from Bloglines is going to be a non-issue.

I’ve tried out Bloglines, Google Reader and Thunderbird’s built-in RSS reader, but Google Reader really beats the lot.